Contents - Macmillan International Higher Education

Contents

Contributors xiii

Preface to the Revised Edition xviii

Introduction to the First Edition xx

Writers of Gothic

AINSWORTH, W. HARRISON R. A. Gilbert 1

BECKFORD, WILLIAM Michael Franklin 2

BIERCE, AMBROSE Allan Lloyd Smith 5

BLACKWOOD, ALGERNON Thomas Willard 7

THE BRONTËS Elizabeth Imlay 9

BROWN, CHARLES BROCKDEN T. J. Lustig 12

BULWER LYTTON, EDWARD Helen Small 15

CARTER, ANGELA Elaine Jordan 17

COLLINS, (WILLIAM) WILKIE Andrew Smith 20

DACRE, CHARLOTTE Marie Mulvey-Roberts 21

DICKENS, CHARLES Benjamin F. Fisher 22

DOYLE, ARTHUR CONAN Clive Bloom 23

DU MAURIER, DAPHNE Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik 26

GOETHE, J. W. von Eric Hadley Denton 27

HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL Robert Miles 30

HILL, SUSAN Val Scullion 34

HOFFMANN, E. T. A. Hans-Ulrich Mohr 36

HOGG, JAMES Douglas S. Mack 38

IRVING, WASHINGTON Allan Lloyd Smith 40

JACKSON, SHIRLEY Jodey Castricano 41

vii

JACOBS, W. W. John Cloy 43

JAMES, HENRY T. J. Lustig 44

JAMES, MONTAGUE RHODES William Hughes 47

KING, STEPHEN David Punter 49

LE FANU, J. SHERIDAN W. J. McCormack 51

LEE, TANITH Nick Freeman 53

LEWIS, MATTHEW Nicola Trott 54

LOVECRAFT, H. P. Clive Bloom 57

MACHEN, ARTHUR R. A. Gilbert 59

MATURIN, CHARLES ROBERT Cécile Malet-Dagréou 60

MELVILLE, HERMAN A. Robert Lee 63

ONIONS, OLIVER Rachel Jackson 66

POE, EDGAR ALLAN Benjamin F. Fisher 67

POLIDORI, JOHN Marie Mulvey-Roberts 75

RADCLIFFE, ANN Robert Miles 76

RICE, ANNE Marie Mulvey-Roberts 83

SADE, MARQUIS DE E. J. Clery 85

SHELLEY, MARY Marie Mulvey-Roberts 86

SHELLEY, P. B. Nicola Trott 92

STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS Jerrold E. Hogle 93

STOKER, BRAM William Hughes 96

WALPOLE, HORACE E. J. Clery 100

WILDE, OSCAR Neil Sammells 103

Gothic Terms, Themes, Concepts and Contexts

THE ABJECT Colette Conroy 106

BLUEBOOKS AND CHAPBOOKS Franz J. Potter 106

CABBALISM Thomas Willard 107

viii Contents

COLONIAL GOTHIC Alexandra Warwick 108

COMIC GOTHIC Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik 109

CONTEMPORARY GOTHIC Ann B. Tracy 109

COUNTERFEIT Jerrold E. Hogle 111

CYBERPUNK Iain Hamilton Grant 112

DEATH Elisabeth Bronfen 113

THE DEMONIC Helen Stoddart 116

DOPPELGÄNGER Antonio Ballesteros González 119

THE FANTASTIC Neil Cornwell 119

FEMALE GOTHIC Alison Milbank 120

GHOST STORIES R. A. Gilbert 124

GOLEM Madge Dresser 125

GOTH, GOTHIC U. A. Fanthorpe 126

GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE see GOTHIC REVIVAL 127

GOTHIC ART Graham Ovenden 127

GOTHIC BODY Steven Bruhm 128

GOTHIC IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Charles Butler and 129Hallie O’Donovan

GOTHIC COMICS see GOTHIC GRAPHIC NOVEL AND COMICS 131

GOTHIC DRAMA Jeffrey N. Cox 131

GOTHIC FAIRY-TALE Lucie Armitt 135

GOTHIC FILM Ian Conrich 136

GOTHIC GRAPHIC NOVEL AND COMICS Anna Powell 141

GOTHIC LANGUAGE John Charles Smith 142

GOTHIC MANSERVANT Janet Todd 143

GOTHIC MEDICINE William Hughes 144

GOTHIC MUSIC Diane Mason 145

GOTHIC NOVEL Victor Sage 146

GOTHIC PARODY Darryl Jones 154

Contents ix

GOTHIC PHOTOGRAPHY Philip Stokes 155

GOTHIC REVIVAL Victor Sage 156

GOTHIC ROMANCE Ann. B. Tracy 169

GOTHIC SCIENCE FICTION David Seed 173

GRAPHIC NOVEL see GOTHIC GRAPHIC NOVEL AND COMICS 174

GRAVEYARD SCHOOL Steve Clark 174

THE GROTESQUE Neil Cornwell 175

HERMETISM Thomas Willard 175

HERO-VILLAIN Helen Stoddart 176

HEROINE Avril Horner 180

HISTORICO-GOTHIC Mary Waldron 184

HORROR Fred Botting 184

ILLUMINATI NOVELS Pascal Nicklas 192

IMAGINATION Philip W. Martin 193

JACOBEAN TRAGEDY Charles Butler 197

THE LAMIA Philip W. Martin 198

LYCANTHROPY Tina Rath 198

MADNESS Helen Small 199

MAGICAL REALISM Amaryll Beatrice Ghanady 204

MONSTROSITY Fred Botting 204

NECROMANCY Carolyn D. Williams 205

NEW GOTHIC see CONTEMPORARY GOTHIC 206

NIGHTMARE Philip W. Martin 206

NORTHANGER NOVELS Mary Waldron 207

OCCULTISM Thomas Willard 208

ORIENTALISM Michael Franklin 211

PARANOID GOTHIC David Punter 214

PENNY DREADFULS R. A. Gilbert 215

THE PHANTOM Allan Lloyd Smith 216

POLITICO-GOTHIC Mary Waldron 217

x Contents

POPULAR HORROR FICTION Richard Kerridge 218

PORPHYRIA Tina Rath 218

POSTCOLONIAL GOTHIC Ken Gelder 219

ROMAN NOIR Terry Hale 220

ROMANTICISM Philip W. Martin 226

ROSICRUCIAN FICTION Marie Mulvey-Roberts 230

SADO-MASOCHISM Elisabeth Bronfen 231

SCHAUERROMAN Marie Mulvey-Roberts 232

SENSATION FICTION Sally Ledger 233

SENSIBILITY Janet Todd 233

SPIRITUALISM Sally Ledger 234

STURM UND DRANG Marie Mulvey-Roberts 235

THE SUBLIME Alison Milbank 235

THE SUPERNATURAL Clive Bloom 241

TERROR David Punter 243

TRANSGRESSION Avril Horner 249

THE UNCANNY see UNHEIMLICH 250

UNHEIMLICH (THE UNCANNY) Avril Horner 250

URBAN GOTHIC Alexandra Warwick 251

VAMPIRE William Hughes 252

WANDERING JEW Hans-Ulrich Mohr 257

WEREWOLF see LYCANTHROPY 259

WITCHES AND WITCHCRAFT Faye Ringel 259

WIZARDS Faye Ringel 261

ZERRISSENHEIT Christoph Houswitschka 263

Gothic Locations

AFRICAN-AMERICAN GOTHIC Carol Margaret Davison 266

AMERICAN GOTHIC Allan Lloyd Smith 267

Contents xi

ANGLO-CARIBBEAN GOTHIC Carol Margaret Davison 276

AUSTRALIAN GOTHIC Gerry Turcotte 277

COLONIAL GOTHIC Alexandra Warwick 287

ENGLISH-CANADIAN GOTHIC Gerry Turcotte 288

FRÉNÉTIQUE SCHOOL Terry Hale 292

GERMAN GOTHIC Hans-Ulrich Mohr 298

IRISH GOTHIC W. J. McCormack 303

JAPANESE GOTHIC Eimi Ozawa 305

POSTCOLONIAL GOTHIC Ken Gelder 306

ROMAN NOIR Terry Hale 307

RUSSIAN GOTHIC Neil Cornwell 313

SAN FRANCISCO GOTHIC William Veeder 318

SCOTTISH GOTHIC Douglas S. Mack 319

SOUTHERN GOTHIC A. Robert Lee 321

WELSH GOTHIC Sion Eirian 324

Selected Further Reading 325

Websites on the Gothic 333

Gothic Film – A Select Filmography 334Ian Conrich

Index 339

xii Contents

Writers of Gothic

Ainsworth, William Harrison (1805–82)

Ainsworth made his first venture into sensational fiction with ‘The Testof Affection’ (European Magazine, 1822), a tale that relies heavily onartificial ‘SUPERNATURAL’ devices in the ANN RADCLIFFE mode forits effect. It was followed by ‘The Spectre Bride’ (Arliss’s Pocket Magazine,1822) and his early Gothic tales were collected in his first book, theanonymous December Tales (1823). All of this youthful work – which dis-plays more enthusiasm than polish – was produced while Ainsworthwas living in Manchester, where he had been born in 1805.

After he moved to London in 1824 to complete his legal training,Ainsworth took up a career in periodical publishing, although his finestwork as an editor – with Bentley’s Miscellany, Ainsworth’s Magazine, andThe New Monthly Magazine – belongs to the 1840s, by which time he hadestablished himself as a successful popular novelist. Between 1834 andhis death in 1882 he published thirty-nine novels, but while his earlierworks were immensely successful he outlived his popularity and thelater titles were failures.

Rookwood, his first independent novel, published anonymously in 1834,was, in his own words, ‘a story in the bygone style of Mrs. Radcliffe’. Itcontains the standard stock-in-trade of such stories: gloomy settings,dismal vaults, and skeleton hands, with a decaying manor house and anEnglish highwayman in place of the Radcliffean castle and Italianbrigand – all of them used to great effect. His second novel of highway-men, Jack Sheppard (1839), was more realist than Romantic in nature andwas condemned for its idealisation of crime. With The Miser’s Daughter(1842), in which the influence of Mrs Radcliffe can clearly be seen, he re-turned to the Gothic fold.

In 1848 Ainsworth published his most enduring novel, and the onlyone which is overtly supernatural in content, but The Lancashire Witches isin no sense a true Gothic novel. It does contain WITCHES and demonsbut its success comes by way of the author’s portrayal of regional charac-ter and local topography. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s Ainsworthmaintained a steady output of sound, stirring historical novels, but whilesupernatural episodes occasionally crept in, the Romantic elementsfaded away and with them his claim to be a writer of the Gothic.

R. A. GILBERT

1

Beckford, William (1760–1844)

On 29 September 1760, at Fonthill Splendens, William Beckford was bornwith a silver sugar-spoon in his mouth. His father was a womanisingalderman of the same name, twice Lord Mayor of London, and friend ofJohn Wilkes, who, with a ferocious glare worthy of Vathek, had reducedGeorge III to a stony silence while he delivered an impromptu speech onthe curtailment of freedom. Clearly the son, inheriting at the age of tenthe Wiltshire estate of 5,000 acres and an immense fortune from Jamaicansugar plantations, had a lot to live up to. And living it up in virtuallyOriental luxury became the pattern for the young Beckford, who gave aslittle thought as his father to the curtailment of freedom of his 1,000 WestIndian slaves. Sweet are the uses of others’ adversity, but all was nothedonism for England’s wealthiest son; at five he was receiving musiclessons from the nine-year-old Mozart, in his early teens he learned theprinciples of architecture from Sir William Chambers, and the appre-ciation of landscape painting from the watercolourist Alexander Cozens,rumoured to be the natural son of Peter the Great, and Mephistophelesto Beckford’s Faust.

Before Beckford was twenty he revealed his precocious talent for satirein Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780), in which inventedlandscape painters discovered new potentialities in the sublime and thepicturesque as they vied with established artists such as Sucrewasser and Soorcrout. But his Grand Tour had not only led to a meeting inProtestant Geneva with Paul-Henri Mallet, the author of Northern Antiq-uities and champion of Gothic style, it had culminated in Venice wherehe had touched the fragrant hem of the gorgeous East and commun-icated with bona fide Orientals. Upon his return he employed a Maho-metan tutor named Zemir with whom he translated Arabic tales (TheStory of Al Raoui was later published in 1799) and Wortley Montagu’smanuscripts, surrounded by the illuminated Oriental texts and spicederotica of the magnificent library at Fonthill.

It was his extravagant coming-of-age and parties of 1781 which,according to Beckford, inspired the composition of Vathek. With state-of-the-art technical and theatrical effects courtesy of the celebrated deLoutherbourg and his newly-invented Eidophusikon, rockets, bonfires,parades and pageants, visions were conjured in Splendens Park worthyof the Giaour himself. Meanwhile the young and beautiful ‘immured’themselves in the marbled Egyptian Hall, wandering hand-in-handthrough labyrinthine vaulted galleries perfumed ‘by the vapour of woodaloes ascending in wreaths from cassolettes placed low on the silkencarpets in porcelain salvers of the richest japan’. In an exquisite deliriumof intense seductiveness Nouronihar (Louisa, the wife of his cousin PeterBeckford) and Gulchenrouz (young William ‘Kitty’ Courtenay) vied for

2 Writers of Gothic

his attentions, and in order that ‘every sense might in turn receive itsblandishments’, tables of delightful viands and fragrant flowers myster-iously glided forth on concealed mechanisms.

But this was Wiltshire not Samarah and Beckford took little care toconceal his feelings for the pretty young son of Viscount Courtenay,commissioning Romney to paint the boy’s portrait. Beckford was deca-dently dedicating himself to the creation of a public image which was tobecome almost inseparable from his literary achievement; Beckfordismin many respects anticipated Byronism. Both were equally fascinated byOriental androgyny and Greek love, ‘smitten with unhallowed thirst /Of nameless crime’ (suppressed stanza, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I). TheBegum, as Beckford disrespectfully termed his mother (her Methodiststrictures were to be cruelly parodied in the obscene rites and obsessivechastity of Carathis), intervened, proposing a dynastic union with LadyMargaret Gordon, daughter of the Earl of Aboyne, and the marriage wascelebrated in May 1783. The following year, however, Beckford was dis-covered in the boy’s bedroom in Powderham Castle. The scandal dashedBeckford’s hopes of a peerage, driving him and his wife to the Continent.

The millionaire eccentric transformed his exotic reading into sensualreality and back again into literature. Fonthill had proved a forcing-house of Oriental Gothic and Beckford was no amateur when it came tothe East; he had devoured all the central texts. From Galland’s Mille et un e nuits and Petis de la Croix’s Thousand and One Days, Beckford gra-duated to d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque Orientale (1697), Sale’s 1734 transla-tion of the Qu’ran, Chardin’s Travels into Persia and the East Indies (1686),the translations and original poems of Sir William Jones, erudite worksby Picart, Le Bruin, and many others.

Vathek offered decadence with endnotes and the result smelt not somuch of the lamp as of blood sacrifice and smoking rhino horn. Beckfordwas re-creating his own Orient out of authentic materials to accommo-date Gothic extremes of sensibility. This longing to extend the bound-aries of intellect, feeling and egotism distinguished Vathek from theEnlightenment rationalism of the contemporary Oriental tale, simultane-ously anticipating and stimulating the vibrant and elaborately annotatedverse romances of the Romantics. A landmark in the history of Europeanliterary ORIENTALISM, the work was composed over as much as ayear and not in a single sitting of three days and two nights, as heRomantically claimed in the Memoirs. Beckford had intended the firstedition to be in its original French, with the present text serving as theframe for three episodes: the histories of Vathek’s fellow-prisoners in theHalls of Eblis. Samuel Henley blatantly disregarded his friend’s instruc-tions, prematurely releasing his English translation as The History ofCaliph Vathek, an Arabian Tale, from an Unpublished Manuscript (1786)without even an authorial ascription. This betrayal, following all too

Beckford, William (1760–1844) 3

close on his bereavement – in May Margaret had died of puerperal feverafter the birth of their second daughter – left Beckford embittered: in angry haste he established his authorship and published the Frenchtext in both Lausanne and Paris early in 1787, The Episodes not seeingpublication until 1912.

Beckford sought consolation in a visit to Portugal, finding atmosphericseclusion in the Gothic grandeur of a monastery and in the magnificenceof a Moorish place near Cintra. Soon, however, his private Journal (notpublished until 1954) was intimately recording his sexual infatuation forwell-born Portuguese youths and his desparate attempts to gain an audi-ence with Queen Maria. He was also accumulating material for the suavetravel books of his comparatively respectable old age. Italy: with Sketchesof Spain and Portugal (1834) and Recollections of an Excursion to theMonasteries of Alcobaça and Batalha (1835) feature brilliant impressionisticsketches with an emphasis on the Romantic subjectivity of the accom-plished and cynical cosmopolite. His earlier Dreams, Waking Thoughts,and Incidents from Various Parts of Europe (which Beckford suppressedupon publication in 1783 except for six copies) mingled aesthetic solip-sism, wish-fulfillment, restless ennui and sardonic irony so that we canalmost believe that we are following the Caliph’s omnipotent eye/Iacross the Continent.

On his return to Fonthill in 1796, furious at his former friend Pitt’srejection of a diplomatic mission from the Regent of Portugal, Beckforddirected his satire against a ministry which had suspended HabeasCorpus. His Modern Novel Writing; or, The Elegant Enthusiast (1796) andAzemia (1797), each published under a female sobriquet, burlesqued thesentimental novel and parodied the Gothic for its increasingly anti-democratic connotations. Beckford didn’t need the Establishment or thebeau monde; indulging his obsession with verticality he would elevatehimself. ‘Some people drink to forget their unhappiness,’ he wrote. ‘I donot drink, I build.’ He was determined to shock, to amaze, and to dwellwith his Swiss dwarf Perro in his towering folly. With the help not ofMahomet, but of that fashionable architectural apostle of the neo-Gothic,James Wyatt, and gangs of builders often working day and night,Beckford realised one of the most magnificent and potent symbols of theGOTHIC REVIVAL. Turner painted at least seven watercolours ofFonthill Abbey, but the three-hundred-foot tower had been jerry-built –of Scotch fir cased with stone, according to Cobbett – and a May gale of1800 blew it down. Cobbett also deplored the overweening arrogance ofBeckford’s Gothic genealogical aspirations – the Abbey’s heraldic motifsreflecting the claim of a hereditary link with Edward III: ‘Was there evervanity and impudence equal to these! The negro-driver brag of his highblood!’ The tower was speedily re-erected for Nelson’s visit, but Hazlitt

4 Writers of Gothic

was unimpressed, describing Fonthill as ‘a desert of magnificence, aglittering waste of laborious idleness, a cathedral turned into a toyshop’.One is reminded of the shifting but essentially consumerist message onthe magic sabre: ‘We were made where everything is well made: we arethe least of the wonders of a place where all is wonderful, and deservingthe sight of the first potentate on earth.’ For all Vathek’s vaunted andFaustian pursuit of occult, esoteric, and recondite knowledge and power,his lust for the throne of the pre-Adamite kings, both the Caliph and hiscreator are diverted by trivia – slippers with springs, automatic knives –or obsessed with the gigantic and the miniature – the binaries of themegalomaniac toymaker.

Beckford demolished the superb Palladian Splendens in 1807, with theuncharacteristic gusto of a Philistine. Sugar prices collapsed and so didthe rebuilt Fonthill Abbey tower in 1825, but by then Beckford had soldup, moved to Bath, and was busily erecting the Lansdown Tower in anoriginal but basically Neoclassical style. There was a strong vein of self-gratification about his tower-building, hand on heart it was more funthan being MP for Wells or representing the rotten borough of Hindon,and something in Beckford envied Gulchenrouz’s eternal childhood inthe perpendicular inviolability of the roc’s nest.

Bath’s legendary recluse died prosaically of a fever on 2 May 1844,having been caught in the rain; he lies buried in the shadow of his Towerin a pink granite tomb of his own unostentatious design.

MICHAEL FRANKLIN

Bierce, Ambrose (1842–1914)

A mordant satirist, Ambrose Bierce wrote elegant short stories about warand the follies of human misperception. His importance as an AmericanGothicist rests not in The Devil’s Dictionary, a collection of icy aphorisms,but in his series of GHOST STORIES, collected in Can Such Things Be?(1893). A characteristic entry from the Dictionary would be ‘Discussion, n.A method of confirming others in their errors’, and most of Bierce’sstories circle around the issue of misperception to the point of fatal error.In a typical tale of war, ‘One of the Missing’, Jerome Searing dies of aheart attack, having determined to outface his own rifle, which is aimedat his head while he is trapped in a ruined building. The rifle is alreadydischarged, of course. In the ghost stories, similarly, the protagonists fallvictim to their own failures of apprehension, having run up against areality that exceeds their imagination.

Bierce, Ambrose (1842–1914) 5

Like William James, who wrote in the same period of the flow of con-sciousness, Bierce implies that it is not so much the truth of events thatmatters, but how they are perceived, and the difference that they maketo the perceiver. Even quite absurd superstitious beliefs may have devas-tating effects, and prove to be true – in a sense. The best exampleperhaps is ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser’. Frayser takes the wrong roadin the woods, and wakes from a dreamless sleep to utter the meaninglessname of ‘Catherine Larue’. Next he dreams of a walk along an evil road,marked by pools and splashes of blood. He dreams that he writes agrave-yard poem, like one of his maternal great-grandfather’s, and thendreams of his own strangulation, at the hands of his mother. Frayser’smangled body – and the poem – are discovered the next day on thegrave of Catherine Larue. A comic detective duo in the final section ofthe story claim that Frayser’s mother had married one Larue (laterPardee, or Branscom – with an echo perhaps of Poe’s ‘Murders in theRue [Larue] Morgue’), a maniac who then killed his wife, and may havekilled Frayser too. The explanation is ludicrous, and merely sends thereader back to look for a deeper internal logic in the story. But here the incestuous attachment between Halpin and his mother proves to beanother red herring, along with her premonitory dream of his strangula-tion. There may be a deeper logic here, to do with excess, incest and theuncanniness of writing (Frayser dips his twig in the pool of blood towrite his dream poem), but it is mocked by the ending, in which only alaugh (of the maniac, or of the author) is heard. Can such things be,indeed?

In ‘The Moonlit Road’ Bierce uses three distinct narrators: a son, his father, and the ghost of his murdered mother. The son walks withhis father after the murder one night on a moonlit road, he turns to lookat a light in a house, and when he turns back his father has disappeared.He is unable to make sense of either event, and thereafter lives a life of baffled self-pity. The father’s narrative reveals that it was he who mur-dered his wife, in a jealous fit after thinking she had been unfaithful. Herghost then appeared to him that night on the road, eyes fixed on his‘with an infinite gravity which is not reproach, nor hate, nor menace, nor anything less terrible than recognition’. The Biercean irony thenemerges in the testimony of the ghost, who had not known who killedher and who approaches her husband in the loving hope that he will be able to see her, ‘smiling and consciously beautiful’. He, of course, sees only the face of death and the strangulation marks he left on her throat. The dead, it seems, are as ignorant and helpless as the living, equally ‘mad malign inhabitants’ of ‘the Valley of the Shadow’.Such narrative complexities and black comedy resemble the stories of Jorge Luis Borges (which name Brigid Brophy has suggested is actu-

6 Writers of Gothic

ally the nom de plume of Bierce, who mysteriously disappeared in Mexico in 1914).

ALLAN LLOYD SMITH

Blackwood, Algernon (1869–1951)

Algernon Blackwood won fame as a teller of supernatural tales. Borninto an evangelical Victorian family, he lived to tell tales on British radioand television, but wrote mainly during the first two decades of thetwentieth century. Tales like ‘The Willows’, set on a waterway nearVienna, and ‘The Wendigo’, set in northern Ontario, show his ability to create the ‘picture of a mood’ that made him a special favourite of H. P. LOVECRAFT.

Blackwood began reading Eastern and Theosophical literature in the1880s, and developed a strong dislike for Western scientific thinking. Heleft Edinburgh University after a term and spent a decade at various jobsin North America before returning to England in 1899. His beautifullywritten account of this period, Episodes before Thirty (1923), might becalled ‘Down and Out in Toronto and New York’.

On returning to England, Blackwood joined the Order of the GoldenDawn and began to write the sort of tales that he had told for amuse-ment. His first book of stories, The Empty House (1906), belonged to thegenre of the Victorian ghost story. However, his first commercial success,John Silence, Physician Extraordinary (1908), was a series of loosely con-nected tales about a psychic Sherlock Holmes who applied his esotericstudies (closely recalling Golden Dawn doctrines) to cases of hauntingsand other spiritual phenomena. With The Human Chord (1910),Blackwood worked cabbalism as taught in the Golden Dawn into a taleabout an attempt to change the earth’s vibrations and bring humanityonto a new scale, a cautionary tale, nevertheless, and one that seems tohave influenced Charles Williams in All Hallows’ Eve.

Commercial success allowed Blackwood to travel and write. Out ofhis travels to the Caucasus, he wrote his fullest statement of a panthe-istic world-view, The Centaur (1911), which tells the story of a solitaryauthor probing the ‘extensions of the personality’. Like much else thathe wrote, the book builds on nineteenth-century ideas, especially inGerman Romanticism, but anticipates twentieth-century concerns. Onecharacter studies the ‘Self’ that can be found beyond all personality‘types’ and moves from there to the ‘collective consciousness of theentire Universe’. The novel is an uncanny and as yet unrecognised antic-

Blackwood, Algernon (1869–1951) 7

ipation of Jungian psychology, written at a time when Blackwood wasliving in Switzerland.

The Great War had its toll on Blackwood, and he nearly stoppedwriting after the Armistice. His last novel, The Garden of Survival (1918),is the story of a British civil servant who finds ‘the Thrill’ only when hegoes to Africa as a colonial administrator; only then is he able to comeinto contact with the beauty and goodness of his dead wife. As in novelslike The Wave: An Egyptian Aftermath (1916) and Julius Le Vallon: AnEpisode (1916), the lovers are soul mates from an earlier life, ‘washeddown the ages by the waves of our own act’. Back in England, the narra-tor hears the jungle rather than the garden, and he is drawn eventually tothe eternal garden state.

After the Great War, Blackwood turned to experimental theatre withthe ‘reincarnation play’ Karma (1918), and to children’s fiction withDudley & Gilderoy: A Nonsense (1929) and The Fruit Stoners (1934). Most ofhis Strange Stories (1929) and other late collections were taken fromearlier publications.

Blackwood dabbles in occultism of every stamp. To be sure, his DrSilence thinks ‘occultism’ a ‘dreadful word’, but Silence uses ‘spiritualalchemy’ to ‘transmute evil forces by raising them into higher channels’.He wards off witches and resists the powers of ancient amulets. His isdeep enough ‘magic’ to ‘know that thought is dynamic and may call into existence forms and pictures that may well exist for hundreds ofyears’. He is adept at ‘thought-reading’ and very well read, drawingupon the French magus Eliphas Lévi as well as The Egyptian Book of the Dead.

Like the protagonist of The Centaur, Blackwood wrote tales abouthimself, thinly concealed, and preferred the dramas of heightenedmental states to the convolutions of human actions. His long story ‘TheWillows’ is a simple tale of a night’s camping among the rushes of aDanube tributary. Aside from a few disconcerting details in the river andon an island, the important events are mental, concerning the camper’sperceptions of a strangely threatening force on the islands, a force associ-ated with the rustling and perhaps on-rushing willows.

Some of the John Silence tales are regularly reprinted – for example,‘Secret Worship’, based on his experience returning to his Germanboarding school. But it remains a question whether Blackwood wouldseem ‘politically incorrect’ ninety years later: a classist, sexist, and racist.Silence can afford servants and can serve the poor gratis; he undoes the workings of depraved women and North Americans with traces of ‘savage’ or ‘Red Indian’ blood. Perhaps a future age will recognisethat Blackwood pointed his barbs at the Victorian legacy more than any-thing, at the rational and rationalising clergyman, the money-grubbing

8 Writers of Gothic

merchant, the treasure-grabbing explorer, the jewel-loving sister, whoseinsensitivities help create the problems that Silence undertakes to solve.

THOMAS WILLARD

The Brontës

Anne Brontë (1820–49)Branwell Brontë (1817–48)Charlotte Brontë (1816–55)Emily Brontë (1818–48)

Although the chief works of Anne, Charlotte and Emily Brontë werepublished after the Gothic heyday, the prolific period of their Juvenilia (c 1826–43) was contemporaneous with novels by MARY SHELLEY,Scott and EDWARD BULWER LYTTON. Their surviving early writings,to which their brother Branwell contributed, show the influence of theirwide and precocious reading, which included Blackwood’s and Fraser’smagazines. These printed a variety of thrilling tales and poems, and regularly surveyed the British and European literary scene. They also retailed what might be called ‘horror folklore’: stories of hauntings, andunexplained phenomena.

Gothic elements in the Juvenilia are represented by neurotic aristo-crats, such as Branwell’s Earl of Northangerland, a character prone tobreak out into sadism and violence. Charlotte’s tales of their imaginarycountry, Angria, favoured high-born women in physical or moraldanger, or bent on revenge, but the figure which gained ascendancy wasthe Duke of Zamorna, Byronic and Satanic: ‘Impetuous sin, stormypride, diving and soaring enthusiasm, war and poetry are kindling theirfires in all his veins, and his wild blood boils from his heart …’ (from APeep into a Picture Book, 1834). At school she once told a story to herfriends which hypnotised herself: ‘She brought together all the horrorsher imagination could create, from surging seas, raging breakers, tower-ing castle walls, high precipices, invisible chasms and dangers … then asubdued cry of pain came from Charlotte herself, with a terrifiedcommand to others to call for help’ (Reminiscences of Charlotte Brontë byEllen Nussey, 1871). Her creations were so real to her that at times sheliterally saw them with, as she put it, ‘irksome and alarming distinct-ness’, and her early twenties found her still partly in thrall to her ownimagination.

The Brontës 9

As she matured, Charlotte made an effort to suppress this lurid innerworld, which threatened to possess her by spectral intrusion; but her at-tempts to cut it out from her realistic novel The Professor (eventually pub-lished in 1857) resulted in its rejection by publishers because it lacked‘the wild, the wonderful and thrilling’. She therefore re-incorporated itdeliberately into Jane Eyre (1847). In this novel the hero, Rochester, livesunder the curse of a mad and murderous wife, concealed in an upperstory of his mansion. The book’s sense of mysterious danger, reinforcedby the use of dreams, visions and psychic phenomena, contributed to itsextraordinary success, which persists to this day. Queen Victoria wrote‘Began reading Jane Eyre to my dear Albert. We remained up reading inJane Eyre till 1–

2past 11 – quite creepy from the awful account of what hap-

pened the night before the marriage’ ( Journal of our Life in the Highlands,1848–61, published 1868).

Emily, too, had inhabited a strange childhood realm called Gondal. InWuthering Heights (1847), she exploited the wildness, gloom and other-worldiness which had characterised her earlier Gondal poems, such as‘The Visionary’. Her power and eloquence rendered some scenes in thenovel more ‘horrid’ than contemporary readers could stomach, and re-viewers largely failed at first to recognise her genius. One wrote ‘It is acompound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors.’ In this book,however, the Gothic mode explodes into genuine greatness, and todayEmily stands in the highest critical regard. Some modern readers stillfind the work unbearably disturbing.

Emily makes use, in her text, of the Gothic elements of buildings,rooms and enclosures, some of which literally become prisons, but sheexpands their use in complex structures of containment and escape,which mirror states of psychological stress and release in the characters.The development of personality in her heroine, Catherine, also goes farbeyond that of her predecessors. Sandy McMillen Conger calls Catherinethe ‘First Gothic heroine to acknowledge the dark side of her soul’. Shebreaks the usual Gothic mould, with a marriage which ‘does not settleconflicts, but exacerbates them. She is not simply placed between twolovers – she feels divided between two lovers.’ Catherine admits that herextra-marital love is a sublime, transcendent passion, while her maritallove is spiritually impotent. Somewhat more conventionally, she pays forthis admission with her life.

HORACE WALPOLE said that in The Castle of Otranto he had at-tempted to ‘juxtapose naturalism with romantic elements’. It can be saidthat the Brontës far surpassed him in this ambition. The melodrama ofJane Eyre is counterpointed by scenes of piercing realism, such as those atLowood School, where the helpless girls are subjected to sadistic attacksby the headmaster. This was based on Charlotte’s actual nightmarish

10 Writers of Gothic

experience at the Clergy Daughters’ School. Jane Eyre herself, far frombeing romantically beautiful, is ‘poor and obscure, and small and plain’.There seems, too, to be an absolute reality about the passage when shewanders starving on a moor. The fantasy world of Wuthering Heights isdescribed through the prosaic eyes of Nelly the servant, which serves toground it in believable narrative.

Consequent upon this technique, throughout the Brontë novels thereruns an irony which enriches rather than subverts their emotionalpower, and enables responses at various different levels in the reader.Thus, the image of the ghostly nun in Charlotte’s Villette (1853), despiteultimately being exploded as a hoax, contributes to the book’s theme ofemotional and sexual frustration. In Anne’s study of degeneracy, TheTenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), irony clarifies the moral danger threateninga heroine trapped in marriage to a weak man who hates her.

Brontë Gothicism far transcends the mere attempt to excite: it inducesa genuine sense of suffering. Well-worn motifs are infused with psycho-logical depth and freshness. The madwoman in Jane Eyre is a profoundlysuggestive type of the irrational. She has been seen by feminists as theepitome of female rage born of sexual repression, particularly in relationto her confinement within a secret room. The demonic behaviour ofCathy’s lover Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights is shown to evolve from hishistory of deprivation. Both these books have been, and still are, continu-ally subject to critical attention.

None of these novels can be categorised simply as ‘Gothic’. Forexample, the influence of Classical learning, of fairy-tale, and of Judeo-Christian religion are just as much contributors to the intriguing com-plexities of Jane Eyre, while the tight pattern of vengeful and tragicrelationships in Wuthering Heights may be compared to structures inJacobean drama.

Branwell Brontë, though achieving almost no published work in hislifetime, became a kind of Gothic apparition in reality. He has beencalled ‘the only Brontë to die of love’. Disappointed in his passion for amarried woman, he succumbed to his inner world, and his drunken,opium-drugged figure was described by a friend: ‘a mass of redunkempt uncut hair, wildly floating round a great gaunt forehead; thecheeks yellow and hollow, the mouth fallen, the thin lips not tremblingbut shaking, the sunken eyes, once small now glaring with the light ofmadness–’.

This identification with Romantic otherness was echoed by MrsGaskell in her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). The seemingly alien land-scapes and communities of the Yorkshire moors where the Brontës lived,the gloomy-looking parsonage house overlooking the graveyard atHaworth, the tuberculosis which afflicted and destroyed the brother and

The Brontës 11

sisters one after another, were reported by her to the cultured world,which, ever since, has found in the family an endlessly fascinatingenigma. The Brontës’ personal history has acquired almost legendarystatus, while in their work the Gothic tradition is seen at its most endur-ingly effective.

ELIZABETH IMLAY

Brown, Charles Brockden (1771–1810)

The reputation of the American Charles Brockden Brown as a Gothicwriter rests on Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), Ormond; or, The Secret Witness (1799), Edgar Huntly; or, The Memoirs of a Sleepwalker(1799) and Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799, 1800). Theseworks are remarkable for their intensity and the breadth of their intellec-tual engagements. Influenced as much by Locke, Hume and Burke as by Paine, Godwin and Wollstonecraft, Brown’s writing shows theproductive tension of his commitments to the Enlightenment and ROMANTICISM.

Like HORACE WALPOLE and ANN RADCLIFFE, Brown’s worksoften seem radically to undercut the conservatism of their avowed moralpurpose. His novels tend towards closure yet their final chapters seemperfunctory and unsatisfactory. The problematic and contradictorynature of Brown’s work has been attributed to its formal incoherence.Yet improvised plots and extravagant coincidences are not simply theproduct of Brown’s hasty and careless methods of composition. The verymultiplications and repetitions in his work point towards his drivingconcerns. Brown’s most characteristically Gothic writing suspends anysingle commitment in favour of experiments in choice and possibility. Inthe work produced before and after his major phase this fruitfully ex-ploratory quality is less evident. There is, in fact, a distinct shift from thecomparatively radical positions adopted until approximately 1798 to theincreasingly conservative ones espoused after about 1801. In Alcuin: ADialogue on the Rights of Women (1798), Brown implicitly criticised theAmerican Constitution by countenancing arguments for the equality ofwomen. By 1803, however, he was a staunch supporter of the sameConstitution. As magazine editor Brown attempted to remain aloof fromparty politics. As a political pamphleteer, however, he became increas-ingly disillusioned with Jefferson’s foreign policy, pleading alongsideHamilton’s Federalists in 1803 for the immediate and forceful seizure ofLouisiana and later for repeal of the 1807 Embargo Act.


In its fascination with law, property and power, Brown’s Gothicwriting is rooted in a wider national debate. Gothic literature is often as concerned with the political and economic issues of its day as withthe past and the ‘interior’ realm of psychology and imagination.Nevertheless, Brown’s work is unusual in its geographical and historicalspecificity. America in the immediate pre- and post-Revolutionaryperiod is always his subject.

The United States was uniquely founded on Enlightenment principlesof reason and progress. It is, perhaps, the thoroughgoing demonstrationof the fragility of optimistic rationalism that makes Brown’s Americantales distinctively Gothic. For Brown the grounds of human decisions are inevitably imperfect, the effects of human actions are always un-predictable, and moral behaviour usually conceals selfish motives.Brown is a rationalist with little faith in the power of reason, a followerof Locke without his predecessor’s belief in progress. Brown’s darkestinsights spring from Lockean psychology. His is a world where sensoryevidence is misleading and inferences from such evidence are frequentlymistaken, a world in which optimistic rationalism becomes disturbinglyirrational. Brown’s novels show good producing evil and the rationalgiving rise to the irrational.

In Edgar Huntly, Clithero kills the villainous Wiatte in self-defence.Rather than removing evil, however, Clithero succeeds only in reinforc-ing it. The instrument of Wiatte’s destruction becomes the tool of his revenge and the hero of the early narrative becomes the villain of its later sections: heroes and villains, in fact, are ultimately inseparable(see HERO-VILLAIN). Circuitries of physical resemblance link ‘good’and ‘bad’ characters so that any stable moral spectrum dissolves.Brown’s characters begin to look like the projections of each other’s fears, desires and possible identities. Edgar Huntly resembles Clithero in numerous ways and Arthur Mervyn repeats or anticipates the actions of Welbeck. Indeed, Mervyn adopts new identities with all the virtuosity of Brown’s impostors. He is as fascinated by power and as prone to the impulsive overriding of the barriers governing con-ventional social forms and private property as Brown’s most sinistercharacters.

Change and transition are the most characteristic experiences inBrown. An almost Spenserian sense of mutability and transformation forgood or ill marks virtually every page of his work. At a political level, ofcourse, Brown’s subject is the national transformation wrought by theAmerican Revolution. At the level of plot, Brown deals with the vicissi-tudes of fortune and class status experienced by his central characters.But the notion of transformation is also articulated by Brown’s interest in extreme or unusual states of mind and body: madness, fanaticism,

Brown, Charles Brockden, (1771–1810) 13

clairvoyance, somnambulism, ventriloquism, spontaneous combustionand epidemic disease.

For Brown it was only generally the case that absolute honesty was amoral imperative: there were occasions when lying could promote thegood. This argument leads to a corrosive perception of the nature andethical status of representation. Brown’s villains are often described asactors but his use of the theatrical metaphor is so pervasive (the world isa stage and so is the mind) that it cannot successfully circumscribe vil-lainy. Quite the reverse. The artifice associated with villainy becomesubiquitous: in order to unmask deceit one must practise it oneself. It is asif the existence of lies causes Brown to lose faith in the truth that liesmimic. The appearance of truthfulness thus becomes an ominous token,not of genuine honesty, but of imposture. The fact that Brown’s villainsare often also described as authors suggests his eventually self-cancellingsuspicion of literature.

Brown’s fiction is as ambivalent about the aesthetic as it is about thepolitical. Both Arthur Mervyn and Edgar Huntly argue that writing pro-motes peace and order but their pens seem mostly to evoke violence anddisorder. Writing here is (failed) therapy and disease, poison and (in-effective) cure. In the ‘Advertisement’ to Skywalk (his first novel, com-pleted in 1797 – now lost) Brown maintains that fiction is rational andmoral whilst simultaneously proclaiming his intention to ‘enchain the at-tention and ravish the souls’ of his readers. The Preface to Edgar Huntlyavoids subverting its own raison d’être by devoting itself to contemporaryAmerican scenes instead of ‘puerile superstitions and exploded manners,Gothic castles and chimeras’. It is a familiar Gothic trope: fiction de-nouncing fiction, romance disavowing romance. But Brown’s decision,announced in a letter of 1800, to substitute in Clara Howard and Jane Talbot‘moral causes and daily incidents’ for the ‘prodigious or the singular’ isfatal: his final two novels, both published in 1801, are generally seen ashis least satisfactory. Abandoning fiction in favour of magazine editingand political pamphleteering, Brown’s last remarks on literature in an1807 issue of the Literary Magazine and American Register dismiss not onlythe props of traditional Gothic but fiction itself. ‘Wild narratives of theimagination’ are now completely divorced from ‘real life’.

Brown’s disillusion with the morality and practicalities of a literary career in America foreshadows WASHINGTON IRVING andNATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. He made significant contributions to theILLUMINATI NOVEL. He democratically transformed the figure of theGOTHIC MANSERVANT. His interest in crime prefigured EDGARALLAN POE’s tales of detection, as did his fascination with the idea ofpremature burial. Brown’s sense of the mutual interdependence of goodand evil underlies much of Hawthorne’s work. His depictions of the


unreliability of sensory evidence are not surpassed until HERMANMELVILLE’s ‘Benito Cereno’. His sophisticated treatment of doublinganticipates later Gothic writing (see DOPPELGÄNGER; MARYSHELLEY; E. T. A. HOFFMANN). Brown’s use of ambiguity and multi-ple explanation for apparently supernatural events is found again inHawthorne and the literature of THE FANTASTIC. His often subtle useof first-person narration anticipates the work of HENRY JAMES, espe-cially ‘The Turn of the Screw’. But Brown’s Gothic cannot ultimately beconfined to a nineteenth-century provenance. In his ability to analyseand conjure up paranoia and in his sense for the utopian and dystopianpossibilities of the American experience, Wieland is as close to ThomasPynchon’s Vineland (1990) as the similarity of titles suggests.

T. J. LUSTIG

Bulwer Lytton, Edward (1803–73)

Novelist, Member of Parliament (1831–41 and 1852–66), and Secretaryfor the Colonies (1858–9), his name should be given as ‘Bulwer’ forworks written before 1843, and thereafter as ‘Bulwer Lytton’ (the hyphenis often incorrectly included). Credited with having revived the GOTHICNOVEL at a low point in its fortunes, he is nevertheless difficult tocharacterise simply in relation to the Gothic tradition as it was estab-lished in the eighteenth century. His own preference for the term ‘meta-physical novel’ is indicative of his primary interest in those areas ofpsychology and philosophy which escaped realist representation: super-naturalism, mysticism, and the occult. Disdainful of literature whichdealt in ‘the mere portraiture of outward society’, he cultivated a mixedmode of storytelling which melded the Gothic with romance, Romantictragedy, adventure-narrative, and criminal confession.

Bulwer’s first published novel, Falkland (1827), incorporated elementsof Gothic terror, but his first significant effort in the genre is to be foundin the 1828 best-seller Pelham – a novel, ostensibly, of the ‘silver-fork’ or‘society’ school, which gradually transmutes itself into Gothic detectivefiction. Instability of genre is Bulwer Lytton’s hallmark, and – like earlierpractitioners of the Gothic (ANN RADCLIFFE most obviously) – he de-lights in the frisson which can be created when seemingly mild, domesticnarratives are turned into occasions for horror. He cultivated the ‘grandstyle’ (his protagonists and villains almost always regard themselves asfigures of tragic stature), but he also helped to lead the Gothic away fromthe Radcliffean sublime to focus upon the darker aspects of ordinary life.

Bulwer Lytton, Edward (1803–73) 15

His fiction from Pelham onwards brought Gothic terror out of the past,and out of Central Europe, into the streets of crime-ridden 1820s and1830s London. In that respect he is the direct precursor of later nine-teenth-century exponents of sensation fiction, including CHARLESDICKENS, WILKIE COLLINS, and J. SHERIDAN LE FANU.

The eager reception of Pelham was followed by even more extravagantsuccess with Eugene Aram (1832) and – more moderately – Godolphin(1833), all of which exploited the same model of ‘domesticated Gothic’. Itwas not, however, a guaranteed formula, as the disastrous reception ofLucretia; or, The Children of Night (1846) proved. A dark tale of corrup-tion, greed, bigamy, and murder which ends with its vicious anti-heroinea raving maniac, confined in a Gothic madhouse, Lucretia alienated evendevoted readers of Bulwer Lytton’s most successful ‘Newgate fiction’,Paul Clifford (1830). It marked the end of this phase in his experimen-tation with the Gothic, although the same principle of generic cross-breeding can be observed in his treatment of the theme whichincreasingly dominated his fiction from the late 1830s: the occult.

Bulwer Lytton’s fictional explorations of OCCULTISM and THESUPERNATURAL constitute his most innovative engagements with theGothic. In Ernest Maltravers (1837) and its sequel Alice; or, The Mysteries(1838), jointly subtitled Eleusiniana, he created a protagonist of Byronicstature and Coleridgean philosophical ambition: a reclusive and world-weary student of astrology and metaphysics, whose desire to achieve amystic union of the actual and the ideal is at last satisfied in his love foran uneducated peasant girl. The same themes are reworked to morepowerful effect in Zanoni (1842), a novel which developed out of anearlier, fragmentary tale Zicci (1832). Indebted to the Faust myth and,more immediately, to Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, Zanoni isthe story of a heroic mystic who possesses the secret of immortality butwho, after centuries on earth, sacrifices his powers for love of a beautifuland virtuous Italian opera singer. The late work A Strange Story (1862)again involves a Faustian magus, but unlike the earlier novels, it concen-trates on the corruption of the human spirit by material ambition. Thenovel’s anti-hero, Margrave, abuses his knowledge of the occult in anattempt to force a young doctor to help him find the elixir of life, andeventually pays for his sins with death and damnation. Ambitious andoriginal though these works are, they are arguably less effective thanBulwer Lytton’s shorter supernatural fiction from this period, particu-larly the 1859 ghost story ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’ – once much-anthologised but now unjustly neglected (see GHOST STORIES).

All Bulwer Lytton’s writing about the occult is informed by his know-ledge of ROSICRUCIAN lore (his grandson and biographer, the 2nd Earlof Lytton, records that Bulwer Lytton was a Brother of the Rosy Cross


and, from 1866, Honorary Grand Patron of the Order). Only recently haswork on his fiction begun to take that context seriously, and to considerits role in his remaking of the Gothic tradition. The primary interest ofhis work for connoisseurs of the Gothic lies in its recasting of the tradi-tional subject matter of the genre – Faustian hubris, predatory sexualdesire, supernatural forces, madness, revenge – in terms which madethem more immediately relevant to the concerns of early Victorianreaders. At their best, his novels are highly effective in dramatising thefraught relationship between nineteenth-century materialism and ideal-ism, utilitarianism and mysticism. The Gothic provided him with a pow-erful means of expressing the often irreconcilable tensions between thoseterms. It also enabled him to experiment more boldly with the limits ofthe novel form than any other writer of the 1820s and 1830s, and it estab-lished him as early Victorian England’s undisputed literary master of thepsychology of fear.

HELEN SMALL

Carter, Angela (1940–92)

The Gothic tradition according to Angela Carter is nothing sacred but‘deals entirely with the profane. Its great themes are incest and cannibal-ism. … It retains a singular moral function – that of provoking unease’(Afterword to Fireworks, 1974; this, as well as the subtitle ‘Nine ProfanePieces’, disappeared from later editions). The relation of Carter’s work toGothic is an uneasy one. In a 1987 interview she said that she wroteHeroes and Villains [1969] as an exercise in Gothic because reviews of herprevious fictions called them Gothic, and she didn’t think they were(Stephens, Antithesis). One of its epigraphs is from Leslie Fiedler’s Loveand Death in the American Novel: ‘The Gothic mode is essentially a form ofparody, a way of assailing clichés by exaggerating them to the limit ofgrotesqueness.’ Here she may be recognising what her work shares withthe form so defined, but Gothic is just one of the anti-realistic resourcesshe used in her parodic picaresques. They belong on both sides of theboundary between Enlightened reason and the imaginary, across whichGothic is supposed to work: they are rationally critical by fantasticmeans, but don’t lose the magic of storytelling.

Carter linked her kind of Gothic to tales by EDGAR ALLAN POE and E. T. A. HOFFMANN, not the short story or realist novel – to abstrac-tions that interpret rather than ‘log’ everyday experience: ‘Cruel tales,tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly

Carter, Angela (1940–92) 17

with the imagery of the unconscious – mirrors; the externalized self;forsaken castles; haunted forests; forbidden sexual objects … a system ofimagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience’(Afterword, Fireworks). Mirrors, mimicry, doubles, figure in severalFireworks stories: these, and other elements she describes, appear in herlonger and shorter fictions. Sub-literary forms – dreams, pornography,ballads, films – have relations with high literature in her work, and alsowith the cultural analysis of contemporary life which she made in heressays for New Society: ‘We live in Gothic times’ (Afterword, Fireworks).She wanted to write-into-being new ways of living and relating, beyondthose natural-ised and institutionalised, but also to write stories whichthe Last Person could enjoy as the last candles guttered. ‘Don’t fear toomuch; don’t hope too much.’

A short list of Gothic elements in Carter’s fictions:

● Death and the Maiden: Carter’s first novel, Shadow Dance (1966), hasa slashing, joking, villain-hero, Honeybuzzard, and an equally per-verse victim-heroine, Ghislaine (her name suggests ‘grisly’, ‘ghastly’and ‘slain’, as well as Coleridge’s medieval ‘Christabel’ andGeraldine). These sadomasochistic 1960s figures are reworked inmuch of the erotic violence of Carter’s fiction, from Buzz, Lee andAnnabel in Love (1971), to the Marquis and his bride in the title storyof The Bloody Chamber (1979), to Mignon in Nights at the Circus (1984).Sadism, masochism, and their reversals, are factors in Gothic: Carter isalso interested in how this structure can be dislocated. Her exercise incultural history, The Sadeian Woman (1979), remembers the Gothic andthe modern qualities of Sade’s writing.

● Haunting: ‘The Mansion of Midnight’, in The Infernal Desire Machinesof Doctor Hoffman (1972), with its sleep-walking romantic woman, is ascenario of critical-Gothic, like the vampire ‘Lady of the House ofLove’ in The Bloody Chamber. Bygone cultural representations haunt allof Carter’s writing, in the interests of exorcism more than nostalgia.Awakeness – being in suspense, anxious, uncertain, preternaturallyalert – is a complementary factor linking Carter’s writing to theEnlightenment and to Gothic fiction.

● Ruins: The old house where Marianne lives with the Barbarians inHeroes and Villains is burned as they leave: ‘The lines of blackenedstatues stretched their arms forth, as if attempting to flee the firewhich nevertheless engulfed them.’ The more or less grandiose homes


of previous times are frequently burned up (The Magic Toyshop, Nightsat the Circus, Wise Children, 1991), or a landslide engulfs the lastresting-place (‘The Acrobats of Desire’, in The Infernal Desire Machinesof Doctor Hoffmann).

● Travelling heroinism: Ellen Moers coined this term for female Gothicadventures in strange territories. Carter’s heroines are typically ‘on theroad’ – Marianne in Heroes and Villains, ‘Eve on the run again’, in ThePassion of New Eve (1977), Fevvers in Nights at the Circus. An associatedelement is:

● Entrapment and escape: The threat of pursuit, and of incarceration(in prisons, brothels, domesticity, or someone else’s fantasy; see Nightsat the Circus, or Heroes and Villains) are constant features of Carter’sstories. Also associated are:

● Boundaries: The safety of limits and the terror of being limited. Thegenre itself can be reassuring: ‘you know where you are, and you knowexactly what stands for what’. ‘Unease’ may be contained, or ‘whereyou are and what stands for what’ can be unsettled, precisely becausethe appropriate Gothic frame is generically known. A further asso-ciation would be with Kafkaesque social and psychic anxieties, such as:

● Inside/outside: One example is the frightener frightened. BarbarianJewel wakes screaming in the night when he dreams that he is nomore than the externalised fears of more civilised folk (Heroes andVillains). There are many versions of inside/outside anxiety, aboutpsycho-sexual and social spaces. A parallel to Jewel would be thepuppet-master patriarch Uncle Philip in The Magic Toyshop: his régimeis transgressive, and is transgressed, by incest before the finalconflagration. Both could be analogies for Carter’s enthralled andmocking relation to modern Gothic.

● Over-the-top writing: In the Afterword to Fireworks Carter describesthe Gothic style as ‘ornate, unnatural’, upsetting to belief in the worldas fact, and this kind of style is endemic/epidemic in her writing.Landscape, atmosphere, event, are evocatively and influentiallyhyper-real in Ann Radcliffe’s style, and Angela Carter does this sort ofthing too. Only, Radcliffe calms it all down to a rational conclusion,while Carter also has a stake in the ultimate transgressions ofMATTHEW LEWIS.

ELAINE JORDAN

Carter, Angela (1940–92) 19

Collins, (William) Wilkie (1824–1889)

Wilkie Collins was born in London in January 1824. His father, WilliamCollins, was a landscape artist and a member of the Royal Acadamy, andhis younger brother, Charles (Charlie), was a minor artist and novelistwho married CHARLES DICKENS’s daughter Kate. Collins workedclosely with Dickens, for whom he wrote many tales for publication inHousehold Words and All The Year Round and with whom he collaboratedon The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices (1857). Collins’ early short storiesinclude his Gothic-inflected tale of attempted murder, ‘A TerriblyStrange Bed’ (1852). The tale was subsequently published in the collec-tion After Dark (1856), which included other short stories which have amarked Gothic influence such as ‘Sister Rose’, ‘The Lady of GlenwithGrange’, ‘The Yellow Mask’ and ‘Gabriel’s Marriage’. Such tales indicatethat Collins was more interested in exploring human dramas rather thansupernatural visitations and they are characterised by themes of insanity,mistaken identity and dispossession; themes which later played a keyrole in his major sensation fictions. Although Dickens published many of his tales, he turned down ‘Mad Monkton’ fearing that its theme ofhereditary insanity might upset the sensitivities of his readership.

‘Evil’ in Collins’ writings has a peculiarly stage-managed feel to itwhich indicates an influence from popular stage melodrama (whichCollins also wrote). Revealingly in the ‘Dedication’ to Basil (1852), Collinsstates that his literary ambitions were to unite elements of the stage andthe novel because ‘one is drama narrated, as the other is a drama acted’.The link between his fiction and the melodrama grounds his fiction in a theatrical tradition which also incorporated elements of the femaleGothic. The Woman in White (1860), for example, can be read as a rework-ing of an earlier stage and Radcliffean female Gothic tradition, mademanifest in the novel’s representation of domestic incarceration, insanityand troubled identities, all of which are focused through an explicit crit-ique of conventional gender scripts. The sensation novel of the 1860s andafter, although rooted in an earlier Gothic tradition, relied on images of criminality as the source of its Gothic imagery. The solving of suchcrimes ostensibly suggests the restitution of order above any threatenedGothic subversion. However, the radicalism of Collins’ writings can befound in his challenge to prevailing ideas of gender and the law and thisis a theme addressed in novels such as The Dead Secret (1857), No Name(1862) and The Law and the Lady (1875). A novel such as The Moonstone(1868) can also be read for how its debate about Empire is refractedthrough a Gothic Orientalism.

Although Collins wrote some occasional ghost stories such as ‘BlowUp With the Brig!’ (1859), ‘John Jago’s Ghost’ (1874) and ‘Miss Jeromette


and the Clergyman’ (1887), he was less interested in ghosts than in thesecret, hidden and so ‘spectral’ nature of his protagonists’ pasts and anx-ieties (John Jago in ‘John Jago’s Ghost’ is not even dead). His novella TheHaunted Hotel (1878), likewise, uses supernatural elements only as theyhelp to unfold the drama of the central criminal plot and its brevityserves to unwittingly reveal Collins’ indebtedness to the structure of thefive-act play.

ANDREW SMITH

Dacre, Charlotte (1782?–1825)

When Charlotte Dacre’s most well known novel Zofloya or The Moor wasfirst published in 1806, a reviewer for the Literary Journal (1806) accusedthe author of ‘being afflicted with the dismal malady of maggots in the brain’. Seen as a Gothic potboiler, this extravagant rendition of thedemonic sublime inspired both Byron and P. B. Shelley, who modelledhis early novella Zastrozzi (1810) on Zofloya. As a schoolboy, Shelley hadbeen devoted to the poetry of Rosa Matilda (Dacre’s pseudonym, allud-ing to MATTHEW LEWIS’s femme fatale in The Monk (1796)), whichhad been influenced by the Della Cruscan school of sentimental poetry.In Hannah More’s novel Caelebs in Search of a Wife, (1809), the Evangelisthero eliminates a prospective bride because she prefers reading RosaMatilda to Virgil.

Dacre was born Charlotte King. Her sister, Sophia, was another novel-ist, with whom she published a book of poems called Trifles of Heliconin 1798. Apart from Zofloya, deplored as an ‘odious and indecent per-formance’ by a contemporary reviewer in Monthly Literary Recreations(1806), Dacre wrote three other novels: the more restrained The Libertine(1807), the epistolary The Passions (1811), whose heroine is anotherGothic villain, and Confessions of the Nun of St Omer (1805), which is dedi-cated to Lewis. The moral tone of this novel pivots on how a girl can be an easy prey to seduction if she does not have proper guidance as achild. This Wollstonecraftian notion is picked up in Zofloya. Laurina, themother of the heroine Victoria di Loredani, is seduced by Ardolph, a lib-ertine, who is intent upon destroying her happy family life. The sexualcorruption of the mother begets the criminal daughter. In her revision ofGothic stereotyping, Dacre portrays her heroine destroying a femalerival, a feminine ideal of sentimental Gothic, by stabbing her repeatedlyand then throwing her off a cliff, sadistically watching her ‘fairy form’

Dacre, Charlotte (1782?–1825) 21

bounce down the mountain. Dacre subverts both the libertine and senti-mental Gothic in this hybrid of Radcliffean FEMALE GOTHIC and themale Gothic of Matthew Lewis. Her heroine Victoria transgresses theboundaries of both class and race through her sexual desires for herservant, the Moor, Zofloya. He is eventually revealed as Satan (see THEDEMONIC), after having been Victoria’s accomplice in helping her toslowly poison her husband.

Dacre’s husband, Nicholas Byrne, was also murdered. He was fatallystabbed in 1833 by a figure in a crape mask, who was never identified.Details of the crime, which took place eight years after his wife’s death,were concealed for the next forty years. Dacre died after a long illness on7 November 1825, though, as Paul Baines has pointed out, her age atdeath remains undetermined since the year of her birth has beenshrouded in mystery.

MARIE MULVEY-ROBERTS

Dickens, Charles (1812–70)

Early and late, Dickens’s fiction is studded with Gothicism, much like aChristmas pudding comes replete with plums. Dickens’s handling of theGothic tradition, whence his fiction sprang, shows an increasing sophisti-cation from the fairly straight terror-tale interpolated stories in ThePickwick Papers (1837) on to the far more subtle renderings in The Mysteryof Edwin Drood (1870). Dickens’s earliest Gothic ventures entailed muchof a recognisably Gothic atmosphere and Gothic character types. ‘AMadman’s Manuscript’ in Pickwick, entails a crazed narrator, his in-nocent wife, sold to him by her money-hungry family, a stereotypical‘haunted castle’ abode, murder, and motifs of concealment linked withfamily secrets, which were so recurrent in antecedent Gothic works.Although some have read these interpolated tales as conscious gambitsto appeal to the mass market, others have interpreted them as barome-ters of the dark irrational side of life that will intrude itself into far morehumorous or cheerful aspects. Such elements were to constitute import-ant parts of his novels thereafter. Oliver Twist (1837–8), Bleak House(1852–3), The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and other novels contain recognis-ably Gothic hallmarks in their sensationalised matters of family secretsand conflicts, frequently combined with folklore of the supernatural,often vampirism, or Arabian Nights features (such as brutality, violence,murder, supernaturalism) with deft artistry.


Many of Dickens’s characters are presented amid circumstances thatrecall the literal live burials in earlier Gothic fiction. For instance, oldArthur Gride in Nicholas Nickleby (1838–9) would in effect entomb hishoped-for young bride within his own warped sexuality and otherselfish desires. Mr Tulkinghorn, one of the more subtly renderedvampire figures, would consign Lady Dedlock to a living death by ex-posing her past, and the Smallweeds number among other characterswho function in kinds of live burials in Bleak House. Miss Havisham inGreat Expectations (1860–1) is doubtless Dickens’s best-known victim ofpremature burial, to which she has volunteered herself after being jiltedby her anticipated husband, but she stands as a mirror figure to whatPip might potentially have become, had his lesson in the school of hardknocks not stimulated different outlets for his self-centred impulses.Maybe the most impressive Gothic figure in Dickens is John Jasper, inThe Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens’s final, and uncompleted, novel,who has murderous intentions toward his nephew, Edwin Drood,because of the elder man’s lust for attractive Rosa Bud. Jasper’s tactics ofpursuit seem, to Rosa, to partake of supernatural powers. His abilities asa mesmerist, his traits of animal magnetism, and his overall aura of evilstamp him as a descendant of many older Gothic villains.

Although others have long been credited with creating the psycho-logical novel, Dickens’s fiction indicates that, had he lived some yearslonger, he might have won yet another accolade for himself as a psycho-logical novelist. The ever-increasing probings into the interiors of hischaracters, repeatedly associated in some way with his legacies fromGothic tradition, support this thesis. His terrifying characters becomemore frightening over the course of his literary career because theyevince, more and more, characteristics that might be part of any ordinaryhuman being’s psychological makeup. There is a drift from sensational-ising to centring upon emotional sensations. Perhaps the outburst ofEugene Wrayburn, in Our Mutual Friend (1865), concerning obscure, butunsettling events, ‘Mysteries of Udolpho!’ carries a freight of subtext thatshould not be ignored.

BENJAMIN F. FISHER

Doyle, Arthur Conan (1859–1930)

Arthur Conan Doyle was the son of Charles and Mary Doyle and was born in Edinburgh on 22 May 1859. Both families could trace theirancestors back to the Middle Ages, Mary claiming descent from the

Doyle, Arthur Conan (1859–1930) 23

Plantagenet kings and Charles from origins in France, and both sideswere ardent Catholics, the Doyles being dispossessed of their lands inIreland because of their faith. Arthur’s grandfather was the highly tal-ented artist HB whose political lampoons graced the Regency, and all hissons seemed to possess considerable artistic gifts, Richard Doyle creatingMr Punch. Charles Doyle was unable to make a living at art and becamean official of the Scottish Office of Works. He was also prone to epilepsyand alcoholism.

The young Conan Doyle finished his schooling at a Jesuit school inAustria and then went to Edinburgh University where he graduated in1881 and signed on as a ship’s surgeon on voyages to the Arctic andAfrica. On his return he practised as a doctor in Plymouth and Southseawhere the first Sherlock Holmes story was written.

Success as a writer came late and Doyle left medicine in his thirties.Doyle was a prodigious author, partly at least as the child of an age dom-inated by an obsession with print and the means of communicating tothe vast literate public of the late nineteenth century through inexpensivenovels and hugely popular magazines such as the Strand, each issue ofwhich contained complete short stories. From 1888 to his death in 1930Doyle produced novels, short stories, plays, poetry, two histories, booksof autobiography, and ten works on spiritualism. On top of this he wrotecampaigning pamphlets, dictated correspondence and managed hisvarious business enterprises including his spiritualist bookshop inWestminster.

Of Doyle’s vast output what remains proves less in quality than mightbe expected. The many works on spiritualism are rarely taken intoaccount by serious scholars or readers and are usually dealt with inembarrassed tones by biographies and ignored by literary critics as in-tractable. At best they merely confirm the prejudices of certain spiritualistdevotees. The science fiction tales, which include The Lost World, are nowseen as amusing curiosities, enjoyable in themselves but perhaps lackingthe darkly logical predictions of H. G. Wells. Doyle’s forays into thesupernatural tale are effective in their way but seem to lack the obsessivequality of those of HENRY JAMES, nor do they sustain the atmosphereof the work of M. R. JAMES. The histories that Doyle produced of theBoer War and the Great War were soon overtaken both by events and by the accumulations of later historians, their impartiality as historiestainted by an overly deferrential attitude towards the British cause and(despite his distrust of the old boy network) a willingness to accept thegenerals’ line.

As with his work on recent world events, so too Doyle’s advocacy of justice (especially his sustained campaigns on behalf of Sir RogerCasement and on behalf of George Edalji and Oscar Slater – both wrong-


fully imprisoned) was undertaken under the pressure of immediate ne-cessity. This leaves what Doyle considered his masterworks, Micah Clarke(1889), The White Company (1891) and Sir Nigel (1906), which belong to agenre outdated as serious fiction even when they were written andwhich can be regarded as enjoyable only in terms of the limitations theylabour under as minor romances rather than the status that Doyleclaimed for them as works of epic seriousness.

It is upon the much more than merely literary reputation of the sixtystories of Sherlock Holmes and Dr John H. Watson that Doyle’s reputa-tion rests. Produced between 1888 and 1927, the tales were publishedeither as complete short stories or as two-part novels, mostly in the pagesof the Strand in Britain and a variety of magazines in America, includingHarper’s, the American Magazine, Liberty and others. The stories were thenanthologised following the usual practice of the age and can be listedalongside the four novels as: A Study in Scarlet (1887); The Sign of Four(1890); The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892); The Memoirs of SherlockHolmes (1894); The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902); The Return of SherlockHolmes (1905); The Valley of Fear (1915); His Last Bow (1917); and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927).

There are very large numbers of books on Doyle and his work, includ-ing biographies by Hesketh Pearson, John Dickson Carr, Julian Symonsand Pierre Nordon; Michael Hardwick has produced an excellent seriesof guides to the complete Holmes oeuvre; R[ichard] L[ancelyn] Greenhas edited a collection of newspaper letters which all discuss the greatdetective; the ‘posthumous’ messages of Doyle are preserved by theWhite Eagle Lodge; numerous films have used the Holmes stories astheir basis, of which the series starring Basil Rathbone is the most re-membered, and of the television adaptations Jeremy Brett’s portrayal iscurrently the definitive.

Added to this there are so many versions of these tales (including a growing number of works by other writers who have borrowedcharacters from or enlarged upon Doyle’s original conception) thatenthusiasts talk of ‘Sherlockiana’ to describe the vast literature, bothserious and ephemeral, that has come into being. It almost goes withoutsaying that there are Sherlock Holmes societies in both the UnitedKingdom and the United States as well as affiliated organisationsthroughout the world.

Doyle as a man was peculiarly of his age, an enthusiastic imperialistbut also able to admire Britain’s enemies such as the Boers; a Unionist by nature and an anti-suffragette, Doyle was an advocate of divorcereform and put aside any racial prejudice to defend the rights of anIndian and a Jew. As a passionate sportsman Doyle played cricket for Middlesex (twice against W. G. Grace), boxed in his youth, played

Doyle, Arthur Conan (1859–1930) 25

football into his forties and was a champion billiards player. A far-seeing man, he realised the dangers from submarine warfare, advocatedbody armour for troops in the trenches and began the first home guardunit. In his artistic inclinations Doyle was less than admiring of modern-ism and yet T. S. Eliot was one of his readers, going so far as to incor-porate parts of ‘The Musgrave Ritual’ into his play Murder in theCathedral.

Julian Symons comments that, ‘in his work and in his personality he isthe ideal representative of the Victorian era to which he belonged’.

CLIVE BLOOM

Du Maurier, Daphne (1907–1989)

Daphne du Maurier was born in London into an artistic family and diedin Cornwall, where she had lived for sixty years. Her father, Gerald duMaurier, was a famous actor-manager and her grandfather, George duMaurier, had been a Punch cartoonist and the author of Trilby (1894), fea-turing the sinister Svengali. Daphne was the middle of three daughtersand grew up thinking of her creative imagination as ‘the boy in the box’and of her desire to escape the domestic lot of most women as transgres-sive. Married to Major Tommy ‘Boy’ Browning for many years andmother of three children, she also had several intense friendships withboth men and women. Her best works demonstrate how Gothic writingcan be inflected by both personal and broader cultural values and anxi-eties. During her long writing career she produced twelve novels, fiveworks of autobiography and family history, several collections of shortstories, one play and two books about Cornwall. A best-selling authorduring her own life-time, du Maurier was for many years regarded as alightweight middlebrow novelist. Her most famous novels, whichinclude Jamaica Inn (1936), Rebecca (1938) and My Cousin Rachel (1951),were marketed mainly as women’s romantic fiction and have never beenout of print.

More recently, critics have recognised du Maurier’s consummate skillin portraying the uncanny and have claimed her as an important Gothicauthor who wrote in the tradition of the BRONTËS, SHERIDAN LEFANU and ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. Many of her works probethe darker side of the imagination in her textual construction of bothCornwall and her own life. In Jamaica Inn, for example, Cornwall


becomes a Gothic landscape in which the familiar Gothic plot of the be-sieged heroine becomes a vehicle for the author to explore the limits offreedom. Generations of readers have been fascinated by the tale of theinsecure second wife of Maxim de Winter and her ‘hauntings’ by the in-delible traces of his glamorous dead first wife, Rebecca. Several criticshave read the novel as an exploration of the split subjectivity inherent inbecoming a woman, particularly one who rejects a conventional femalerole for that of author. Indeed, running through Rebecca is the indeliblepower of writing, insistently symbolised by the continuing reappearanceof Rebecca’s handwriting. Manderley and Cornwall are powerful andcomplex symbols in the novel, functioning both as ‘real’ places and asthe stuff of dreams. Hence, perhaps, the enduring resonance of theopening sentence: ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’

Du Maurier was also a gifted writer of short stories, her most famousbeing ‘The Birds’ (1952) and ‘Don’t Look Now’ (1971), both of whichwere made into films, by Hitchcock and Nicholas Roeg respectively. ‘TheBirds’ explores how the meek can suddenly turn upon the world withterrifying and uncanny force. ‘Don’t Look Now’, set in a labyrinth ofVenetian alleys and canals, probes fears connected with loss; loss of achild; loss of youth and loss of creativity. The most chilling of all herstories, it provides a glimpse into du Maurier’s own anxieties in the laterstages of her writing career and, in the spirit of the best Gothic narra-tives, also exposes the limitations of the ‘rational’ world.

AVRIL HORNER AND SUE ZLOSNIK

Goethe, J. W. von (1749–1832)

English Romantics and American Gothics might be forgiven for homony-mous confusion of Goethe with Gothic (G*th*): Goethe’s mentor, Herder,once angered Goethe by playfully rhyming the etymology of his namewith gods (Götter), GOTHS (Gothen), and excrement (Kote). More thanmost writers, Goethe wrote in tonalities, Classicism being his major key,Gothic one of his minor ones. In fact, the older Goethe was famous forreferring to Classicism as healthy, Romanticism as pathological. Never-theless, in the English-speaking world, Goethe’s reception has beenlargely Romantic, and three works – Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (TheSorrows of Young Werther (1774), Faust (1808, 1832), and the ballad DieBraut von Corinth (1797) – have proved crucial to the Gothic agenda.Based on the Greek legend of Lamia, The Bride of Corinth re-introduced

Goethe, J. W. von (1749–1832) 27

the female vampire into modern European literature. Werther, the title hero of the monster’s favourite book, is himself a psychologicalFrankenstein. In his alchemical, supernatural, and otherwise illicitattempts at transcendence, Faust is the archetypal figure of ‘DarkRomanticism’; the diabolical Faustian bargain – the ‘choice to bedamned’ (Leslie Fiedler) – is at the enstaked heart of the Gothic plot.

As the chief proponent of the 1770s literary movement STURM UNDDRANG (Storm and Stress), the young Goethe anticipated many of thefeatures to be later associated with the Gothic and Romantic. Throughouthis nature poetry, he externalised landscapes of the imagination. In ZumSchäkespearsTag (Shakespeare: A Tribute, 1771), he responded enthusi-astically to Shakespeare’s titanism and waved good-bye to the classicalconventions of the theatre. In Von deutscher Baukunst (On GermanArchitecture, 1772), he analysed Gothic architecture while climbing theStrasburg minster tower (despite his fear of heights). In his blockbustertragedy Götz von Berlichingen (1773), he nostalgically explored the demiseof a medieval world, while unleashing, down through Walter Scott, amania for knightly sagas. His musical Claudine von Villa Bella (1775) setthe stage for a robber and bandit mystique that persisted from Schiller’sThe Robbers (1781) to Bizet’s opera Carmen. After 1775, Goethe settled intoan extraordinarily long existence as a cultural icon at Weimar, where avisit or audience became a literary rite of passage for a steady stream ofwriters such as MATTHEW LEWIS.

Goethe’s best-selling novel The Sorrows of Young Werther appeared in1774 and made both author and character world-famous. Seeing no wayout of a love triangle, Werther commits a well-staged suicide, choosing,in effect, the infinity of death over the limitedness of life. Not just thegraveyard atmospherics, two other features ooze Gothicness. In thecourse of the novel, nature becomes a destructive, life-devouringmonster: ‘My heart is wasted by the thought of that destructive powerthat lies latent in every part of universal Nature … The universe to me isan all-consuming, devouring monster.’ And the novel is the missing linkin a remarkable example of Gothic intertextuality. In his reading,Werther turns from Homer to Ossian – which Goethe himself translated,not yet realising the extent of James Macpherson’s Neo-Gaelic, Neo-Gothic forgeries. In fact, a reading of that translation substitutes forclimax in the relationship between Werther and Lotte: ‘They felt theirown fate in the misfortunes of Ossian’s heroes – felt this together, andmerged their tears.’ Mary Shelley’s monster shares their empathicmethodology of reading, yet it awakens in the monster a self-awarenessof his own lack of identity, origin, and future: ‘But I thought Werter [sic]himself a more divine being than I had ever beheld or imagined … My


person was hideous, and my stature gigantic: what did this mean? Whowas I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? … I learned from Werter’s imaginations despondency and gloom.’Werther’s personality defines for the monster the Gothic psyche ofdespair.

Many of Goethe’s ballads are ghost stories, the most famous of which,Erlkönig (The Elf-King, 1782), was set to pathos-intensive music bySchubert. Set against a stormy nightscape and on horseback, the balladdepicts the conversations between a fevered child, his desperate father,and the seductive invitations of death in the guise of the elf-king. Thehaunting ballad ends with the child dead in his father’s arms (one of a wombful of dead babies in Goethe’s works). In his journals, Goethe referred to the Braut von Corinth (1797) as his ‘vampire poem’. Indeed, it is one of the seminal poetic manifestations of the VAMPIRE after the re-emergence of the figure from Eastern Europe (Serbia) after 1732. Adead sister returns from the grave to prevent her promised bridegroomfrom marrying her younger, living sister (Herder’s synopsis: ‘A paganpriapises to warm life the cold corpse of the ghost of his Christian bride’).Emphatic in its blood-sucking, the ballad is original in its explicitly erotictreatment of the vampire attack (necrophilia) and its threat of a spread ofthis plague unless the corpse is burnt:

Aus dem Grab werd’ ich ausgetrieben,Noch zu suchen das vermißte Gut,Noch den schon verlornen Mann zu lieben,Und zu saugen seines Herzens Blut.Ist’s um den geschehen,Muß nach andern gehn,Und das junge Volk erliegt der Wut!

From my grave betimes I have been driven,I seek the good I lost, none shall me thwartI seek his love to whom my troth was given,And I have sucked the lifeblood from his heart.If he dies, I willFind me others stillWith my fury tear young folk apart.

(tr. Christopher Middleton)

The ballad is expressly Gothic, too, in its setting in a world still in tran-sition between pagan and Christian conceptions of the supernatural. Ithas been widely attacked as blasphemous, and just as widely imitated,notably in Coleridge’s Christabel and Keats’s own Lamia.

Goethe, J. W. von (1749–1832) 29

No matter how it is read, Goethe’s Faust (Part I: 1790/1808; Part II:1832) has proved his most influential work, and it suffices to list its mostcogent Gothic features. Faust’s ‘Gothic’ study and laboratory is thesetting for heretical and alchemical experiments that include the conjur-ing of spirits (the Earth spirit) and the production of artificial life in theform of a homunculus. With his own blood, Faust seals a pact with thedevil, Mephistopheles, who leads him on a supernatural journey fromwitch’s kitchen to witches’ Sabbath. In one diabolical version that Goethehimself ultimately censored, this Walpurgisnacht includes the appearanceof Satan himself, the anointing of a goat’s anus with a procession ofkisses, and a ‘sexual orgy’. Even uncensored, Faust (and the company of spirits he keeps) is the most profound study of THE DEMONIC inWestern literature. Harold Bloom has called it ‘the most grotesquemasterpiece of Western poetry … a vast, cosmological satyr-play’; healso refers specifically to Faust II as ‘the grandest monster movie everdirected at us …, where Mephistopheles becomes the most imaginativeof all vampires’. The classical Walpurgisnacht depicts an imaginary land-scape in which Goethe’s imagination runs wild; he focuses not on theGreek gods, but on a pantheon of Greek monsters: the witch Erichtho,sphinxes, sirens, griffins, giant ants, lamiae, and the phorcyads (primevalwitches who share one eye and one tooth) among them. Even Mephistohas his problems with Goethe’s Southern Gothic: ‘I have no troublehandling Northern witches, / but these strange phantoms leave meflabberghasted.’ There is no telling what might have happened ifFrankenstein’s monster had read not Werther, but Faust. While great portions of Goethe’s oeuvre and reception are classical, organic, andscientific, his imagination is Gothic writ large.

ERIC HADLEY DENTON

Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804–64)

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts. TheHathornes (Nathaniel added the ‘w’) were an old New England family,two of whom were magistrates involved in some of the sorrier episodessurrounding witch hunting and the violent suppression of the Quakers.Hawthorne spent a solitary, bookish childhood with his sister andwidowed mother before going to college at Bowdoin, Brunswick. Aftercollege Hawthorne returned to Salem where he lived with his motheruntil 1840, when he married Sophia Peabody. Although Hawthorne con-


nived in the portrait of himself as an isolated artist suffering twelve yearsin his mother’s attic, it was more than a period of lonely creativity.Hawthorne travelled widely through his native New England, research-ing into the local lore that would enrich his fiction. Apart from 1853–7,when Hawthorne was consul for Liverpool, and then travelling inEurope, the Hawthornes remained in New England.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was, with EDGAR ALLAN POE, a leadingAmerican Gothic writer of the mid-nineteenth century. But unlike Poe,Hawthorne did not write full-blooded stories in which most – if not all –the leading Gothic features might be found. As Hawthorne himself putit, he was, above all else, a writer of romances, by which he meant thetradition of marvellous, fantastic tales, as opposed to the modern ‘novel’with its realistic depictions of contemporary manners. As a writer of ro-mances Hawthorne naturally found the Gothic indispensable, but he also drew upon other genres and styles. Hawthorne eschewed overttechniques of horror and terror in favour of a more ironic mode.Nevertheless, his persistent quest to represent ‘picturesque and gloomywrongs’ meant that a Gothic tone pervades his oeuvre.

In contriving his own brand of Gothic romance Hawthorne drew uponBritish, German, as well as American sources. Sir Walter Scott’s historicalfiction was enormously influential, as to a lesser extent was Byron, butHawthorne also found the dark allegories of Edmund Spenser’s TheFaerie Queene a constant source of inspiration. John Bunyan’s religiousallegory Pilgrim’s Progress was also important. Two American writerswere crucially significant in Hawthorne’s development. CHARLESBROCKDEN BROWN’s novels – in turn influenced by WilliamGodwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) – not only demonstrated that one couldsuccessfully set Gothic romances in America, but provided a fictionalidiom for the Calvinist legacy both writers shared. WASHINGTONIRVING was even more influential. The faddish success in England of The Sketch Book, published in serial form in 1819–20, inspired allAmerican writers. More particularly, the two most famous tales from theSketch Book – ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ and ‘Rip Van Winkle’ – pro-vided Hawthorne with a narrative style he was later to perfect.

After leaving Bowdoin College, Hawthorne served a long apprentice-ship during which he was – in his own words – ‘the obscurest man ofletters in America’. At this point there was no reciprocal copyright agree-ment between the US and Britain. Predictably, American publishers pre-ferred English authors, who they could freely reproduce, to Americanones they had to pay. Unknown novelists especially found it difficult to find their way into print. For twelve years Hawthorne published talesand sketches in the magazines before a publisher undertook to produce a selection as a book: Twice-Told Tales (1837). Even then the enterprise was

Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804–64) 31

underwritten by a friend of Hawthorne’s without his knowledge. Thesuccess of the first collection led to two more: Mosses from an Old Manse(1846) and The Snow-Image and other Twice-Told Tales (1851). But it wasonly after his political appointment to the post of Surveyor of the Port ofSalem that Hawthorne found the means (his sacking gave him the leisure)to support the writing of a full-length romance: The Scarlet Letter (1850).

It was in the early tales that Hawthorne particularly applied thelessons of Irving’s Sketch Book. As in Irving’s stories, one finds a founda-tion of American lore, an easy, parabolic style, an urbane surface con-cealing psychological depths, plus a teasing, ironic approach to thesupernatural. Hawthorne’s brand of psychological Gothic is particularlyevident in the American tales ‘Young Goodman Brown’ and ‘MyKinsman, Major Molyneux’. Both stories are rites of passage in which ayoung man moves tragi-comically into adulthood. Both draw upon theancient tradition of midnight saturnalia: in the first story, the ‘hero’attends a witch’s Sabbath, while in the second, a country youth on hisfirst visit to town stumbles into a mob in the process of tarring and feath-ering Major Molyneux, the uncle the youth seeks in order to advance hisfortune. The stories are explorations into the guilty psyches of appar-ently naive and innocent young men, but they are also subtle allegoriesof America’s own, troubled, revolutionary ‘coming of age’. ‘The Artist ofthe Beautiful’, ‘The Birthmark’, and ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ are Gothictales in the medico-scientific tradition. These stories show, not just anEnglish, but a Germanic influence, with E. T. A. HOFFMANN the singlemost important source. Hawthorne was a great local historian; many ofhis tales employ supernatural and/or violent episodes from the NewEngland past (including, obliquely, his own family’s), sometimes nar-rated in a gloomy, sometimes a sportive, manner, but generally within aGothic mode.

The Scarlet Letter secured Hawthorne’s growing fame. Allegedly basedon a manuscript left by a Surveyor Pue, and discovered by Hawthorneduring his stint at the Salem custom-house, the story re-visits an earlyepisode from the history of Puritan settlement in the New World. HesterPrynne has just given birth to her daughter Pearl, even though RogerChillingworth, her husband, has been absent for some years. Hester isarraigned for adultery, and is forced to wear the letter A, all the whilesilently and guiltily surveyed by her adulterous partner, the Rev. ArthurDimmesdale. The narrative focuses exclusively on the consequent suffer-ing, endurance, and potential redemption of the central characters. Atfirst glance the story may appear only obliquely Gothic. The supernat-ural is continually explained away as the product of superstitious hallu-cination or religious fervour. There is no central, imprisoning structure –no ‘castle’ nor a sense of the central characters being entrapped by a


feudal past. But the romance adapts the genre to its New World setting,and in a sense the Puritans are revealed as internalising these thingswithin themselves. The reformed, ‘modern’, Calvinist theology theyoptimistically bring to the New World eventually proves to be, in itself, aMedieval prison; the bars are the superstitious ones of fanatical faithrather than mouldering stones. The romance deals specifically with theconsequence of a rigid patriarchy; the meddling, proto-scientificChillingworth is a clear instance of the Faustian/Gothic villain; while theframing narrative – with its pretence of a discovered manuscript – takesus immediately back to the preface of the first GOTHIC NOVEL,HORACE WALPOLE’s The Castle of Otranto (1764).

Hawthorne’s next romance, The House of the Seven Gables (1851), ismore obviously Gothic in theme and imagery, although perhaps less soin tone. It is, as HERMAN MELVILLE appreciatively put it, ‘dreamy’. Inmany respects The House of the Seven Gables is an American version of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. The theme is the same (‘the sins of the fathers’), as is the central object of contention (the ancestral house) as well as the catalyst (an ancient act of usurpation). Gothic motifsabound: a witch’s curse; a mystic picture; as well as Mesmerism,Hawthorne’s up-to-date version of mental invasion. The Gothic hasalways been concerned with the integrity of the body, and by extension,the mind; with the primitive fear of either finding ourselves cut off fromothers (live burial) or having others transgress our personal space,mental or physical. For Hawthorne, this potent nexus of fears, with itsovertones of sado-masochism, was most vividly incarnated in the mid-nineteenth-century rage for mesmerism, the hallucinatory practicesmade popular by Franz Anton Mesmer. The hero of the romance,Holgrave, is an artist/writer figure as well as a mesmerist. He is, it turnsout, a benevolent mesmerist; but the linkage of the two things, invadingand commandeering another’s mind, and art itself, remained forHawthorne a site mustering his intense ambivalence towards his ownprofession. Within many of his texts, it is often the only real point ofGothic HORROR.

The Blithedale Romance followed in 1852. The book is based onHawthorne’s experience years earlier as a member of Brook Farm, an ex-periment in socialist, communitarian living. It appears to be a sly roman-à-clef. Zenobia, the main character, bears a few obvious resemblances toMargaret Fuller, a real-life socialist feminist who was unhappy in herlove life and died by drowning (Zenobia’s story in a nutshell). Whether aroman-à-clef or not, the present-day setting of the narrative drags againstHawthorne’s natural instinct for the Gothic; even so, the Gothic doescrop up, especially in the book’s inset tales, in its interest in crime and re-demption, and in the reworked theme of mesmerism.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804–64) 33

Hawthorne’s final, completed romance, The Marble Faun, appeared in1860. As a reward for writing the presidential campaign biography of hisold school friend Franklin Pierce, Hawthorne was made Americanconsul for Liverpool, at the time a lucrative position. The Marble Faunrepresents Hawthorne’s experience of Europe, but especially of Italy,where he had travelled, and where the romance is set. It is the darkest,and most Gothic, of Hawthorne’s works. This is especially true ofMiriam and Donatello, the European relationship Hawthorne opposes tothe Americans Kenyon and Hilda. The donnée of the narrative is themost frankly supernatural of Hawthorne’s givens: Count Donatello, aninnocent young ‘man’ bearing an uncanny resemblance to the ‘faun’ ofPraxiteles, is transformed into someone fully human through the ex-perience of sin, guilt, and sacrifice. Set in Rome, the romance features a claustrophobic Gothic topography of crumbling palazzos, crypts andcatacombs, while the central study of the Jewish Miriam and ItalianDonatello represents Hawthorne’s frankest depiction of the murky tur-bulence of sexual desire.

During his last years Hawthorne lost his artistic direction, possiblyowing to the oppressive calamity of the American Civil War, whichdarkened his final creative endeavours. He left behind him the drafts ofseveral romances he was unable to finish, the plot lines obsessively dis-appearing into a labyrinth of Gothic motifs: magical elixirs, eternal life,demonic bargains, and bloody footprints being among the more overt.CHARLES MATURIN’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and WilliamGodwin’s St Leon (1799) appeared especially to haunt Hawthorne’s lastefforts. He died in 1864.

ROBERT MILES

Hill, Susan (1942–)

Susan Hill’s Gothic novel, The Woman in Black (1983), has commandedhigh sales since its publication. It was immediately made into a televi-sion film in 1983, with screenplay by Nigel Kneale, writer of the terrify-ing Quatermass series. Dramatised as a stage play by Stephen Mallatratt,it has offered spine-chilling performances in London’s West End since1989. The novel and these adaptations testify to the capacity of Hill’s useof Gothic to delve into primeval human fear. The ghost of the woman in


black, once Jennet Humphrye, a stigmatised, unmarried mother, hasterrified the inhabitants of a small coastal village in East Anglia for morethan sixty years. The disfigurement of her face, wasted by disease evenbefore she died, alongside her power to cross boundaries of time andborders of the solid, physical world are frightening enough. Yet absolutefear of her in the local community stems from the death of a child follow-ing her every appearance. By assembling old legal documents andletters, the narrator, Arthur Kipps, unearths the story of how JennetHumphrye was forced to give up her illegitimate son for adoption andwatched him drown in a pony-trap accident. Uncannily, the site of great-est psychic disturbance in the novel is the child’s bedroom, locked andthen rendered unlocked for Kipps to find its deadly secrets. A caringmother while alive, Jennet Humphrye’s ghost becomes a monstrousvirago who steals other people’s children because she has lost her own.Hill creates extreme disturbance in this novel by mixing horror, hauntingand death with everyday domestic detail.

When first published The Woman in Black was judged as atypical of Hill’searlier novels and short stories. Its hallucinatory vividness may be partiallyowing to the personal strain of writing it in seven weeks while she wastrying to become pregnant after a miscarriage, an outpouring which shedescribes movingly in her autobiographical book, Family (1989). However,a retrospective view reveals nascent Gothic motifs even in her first phase ofpredominantly realist writing from 1963–74. Characters such as IsabelLavender in Gentleman and Ladies (1968) who isolates herself in an attic,leaving her sister to die; Duncan Pike in ‘The Albatross’ (1971), whomurders his mother; and Hooper in I’m the King of the Castle (1970), whobullies a weaker boy to the point of suicide by drowning, indicate Hill’spreoccupation with the dark underside of family and the familiar. Repul-sion against hair, fur and feather recurs throughout her work, while a senseof menacing location arises from grotesque comparisons with aging flesh,rotten teeth and swollen body parts. This is particularly prominent in TheBird of Night (1972) – a telling study of schizophrenia. In similar vein, Hill’sghost story, The Mist in the Mirror (1992), focuses on the entrapment, abuseand murder of a small boy whose ghost haunts the narrator. It revisits thehidden secrets of family and ancestors in distinctively gloomy and enclosedGothic settings. In the last decade Hill’s novels have shifted into the genreof contemporary crime fiction. She describes The Pure in Heart (2004) as con-centrating on ‘what happens when a child vanishes [goes missing]’, ratherthan on who committed the crime (Telegraph, 18 June 2005). Even here then,readers can detect psychological resonances from the Gothic, and hence acontinuity with the rest of her fiction-writing which has spanned more thanforty years.

VAL SCULLION

Hill, Susan (1942–) 35

Hoffmann, E. T. A. (1776–1822)

E. T. A. Hoffmann is surely one of the most authentic, imaginative andmulti-faceted artists of the Romantic Age. The meaning of the term‘Romantic’ is ‘romance-like’, ‘phantasmic’. Thus ‘Romanticism’ puts astrong emphasis on the imaginative in art. The scope of such an art isdefined by means of a reflection on the possibilities of art, in terms ofgenres, media and modes of expression. Music is considered the highestform of artistic experience and knowledge. The aesthetics of theRomantic Age may be described as the aesthetic of the ‘Picturesque andSublime’. It carries to full bloom a discussion which had been going onduring the eighteenth century and which had probably received itsstrongest impulse through Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry intothe Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). The Sublimemay briefly be characterised as the experience of transcendence in empir-ical, aesthetic (natural) landscape and history. In this sense, Hoffmannhas proved himself not only highly creative and original as a writer ofliterature and essays but also an excellent draughtsman and caricaturistas well as an outstanding musician and composer. Furthermore, he haswritten texts which provide deep insights into the aesthetics and into thereciprocal dependencies between music, literature and the graphic arts.

Hoffmann was born on 24 January 1776 in Königsberg, the capital ofEastern Prussia, and given the first names Ernst Theodor Wilhelm.Hoffmann studied law, like his father and uncles, but he also appreciatedthe inspiration provided by the local cultural scene. However, no directlinks are known with Immanuel Kant who taught philosophy at the uni-versity. After his exams Hoffmann became a civil servant at several lawcourts in those provinces of Poland which had been annexed by Prussiain the previous decades. Later (1816) he became a judge at the SuperiorCourt of Justice for Berlin. His artistic outlook and abilities made it fre-quently difficult for him to succumb to the dryness of his job and thephilistine and reactionary attitudes of his principals. There were severalcases where he had sided openly with progressive democrats who wereon trial.

After the defeat of Prussia by Napoleon and the subsequent collapse ofthe State, Hoffmann worked as musical director in the North Bavariantown of Bamberg and later in Dresden, Saxony (1808–13). His credentialsfor these positions were his work as a music instructor and the publica-tion of several compositions. In 1810 he composed a Miserere in B flatminor for soli, chorus, organ and orchestra for Archduke Ferdinand ofAustria, and on the title page of this score he named himself for the firsttime Ernst Theodor Amadeus, in veneration of Mozart’s genius. BesidesMozart he admired Gluck, Haydn and Beethoven. Gluck’s impression on


him is testified by a tale entitled ‘Ritter Gluck’ and his differentiatedunderstanding of Beethoven, especially of his fifth Symphony, is ex-pressed in the essay ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental-Musik’ (1813). In 1813 and1814 he composed a fairy-tale style opera, Undine, which in 1816 wassuccessfully performed in one of Berlin’s leading theatres. Its scenerywas designed by the famous architect Karl Ludwig Schinkel, and KarlMaria von Weber (the famous composer of the Freischütz) considered itone of the most ingenious pieces of their time. The opera continued to beperformed for a year until the Schauspielhaus burnt down and the set andcostumes were lost.

The appointment to the Superior Court secured Hoffmann a decentlifestyle for the first time. Meanwhile he had also become a widely readwriter. Since his time in Dresden he had written a series of phantasticand grotesque tales, on which his reputation still rests. His basic theme isthe complex and mysterious relationship between the worlds of theimaginative and the real. In 1814–15 he had published his tales as‘Phantasie stücke in Callots Manier’, i.e. he had classified them as bizarrefacets of rococo or as ‘capriccios’. In his collection Kreisleriana (1810ff),which centres around Kreisler, a musical director under the threat ofmadness, however, he expresses a radical view of the artist’s existence.The artist is a person who is able to read the hieroglyphics of nature andthus has access to mysterious and transcendental sources of knowledge.According to Hoffmann, the artist is driven by an infinite yearning forTHE SUBLIME. This sets him apart from the real world. Art transcendsthe dimension of the pragmatic. It participates in a Beyond in anelevated, spiritual as well as in an abysmal, demonic sense. In the cycleof narratives and essays entitled Die Serapionsbrüder (1818–21) Hoffmanndefines his literary programme as the ‘serapiontic principle’. It is his aimto translate his fantastic inner world into images as concrete and real aspossible.

Hoffmann’s final years (he died on 25 June 1822) were characterised byrecurring spells of chronic illness (rheumatic fever, polyneuritis) and ofquarrels with his superiors who were trying to suppress the incipient de-mocratic movement in Germany. His fantastic tale ‘Meister Floh’, whichpoked fun at these measures by even quoting from law court files, wasconfiscated and he was severely reprimanded. With his relegation fromoffice still imminent, Hoffmann died aged 46. Hoffmann’s reputationpersists to the present day. Outstanding tributes to his genius were paidthrough Jacques Offenbach’s opera Hoffmanns Erzählungen (Paris, 1881;Les Contes de Hoffmann – The Tales of Hoffmann, through Poe’s andBaudelaire’s expressed admiration and, recently, through AngelaCarter’s postmodern fantasy novel The Infernal Desire Machines of DoctorHoffmann (1972).

Hoffman, E. T. A. (1776–1822) 37

H.’s masterworks are

● The two novels Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815–16; i.e. ‘The Devil’s Elixirs’;this novel was inspired by M. G. Lewis’s The Monk, which earlier haddrawn heavily on German folklore and German Gothic novels), andLebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr nebst Fragmentarischer Biographie desKapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler in Zufälligen Makulaturblättern (1819–21;‘Views and Opinions of Murr, the Tomcat’).

● The fantastic tales ‘Ritter Gluck’ (1809), ‘Der Goldene Topf’ (1814), ‘DerSandmann’ (1916), ‘Nussknacker und Mausekönig’ (1816), ‘Rat Krespel’(1818), ‘Klein Zaches Genannt Zinnober’ (1819), ‘Das Fräulein vonScuderi’ (1819; a prototype of the detective story), ‘Meister Floh’(1822).

● The two collections (cycles) of narratives entitled Nachtstücke (2 vols,1816/17), and Die Serapionsbrüder (4 vols, 1818–21).

HANS-ULRICH MOHR

Hogg, James (1770–1835)

James Hogg was regarded by his contemporaries as one of the leadingwriters of the day, but the nature of his fame was influenced by the factthat, as a young man, he had been a self-educated shepherd. The thirdedition (1814) of The Queen’s Wake contains an ‘Advertisement’ whichassures the reader that this poem ‘is really and truly the production ofJames Hogg, a common Shepherd, bred among the mountains of EttrickForest, who went to service when only seven years of age; and since thatperiod has never received any education whatever’. This is an accuratebut incomplete account of the situation. Hogg did indeed grow up in aremote sheep-farming community where oral traditions remainedstrong, and his formal education did indeed cease when he was seven.Nevertheless, as a young adult he took full advantage of the excellentopportunities for intellectual development that came his way; and by thetime he was writing his major works Hogg was a well-read man, athome not only in his native sheep-farming community in the ScottishBorders, but also in the literary and scientific circles of Edinburgh.

The book now generally regarded as Hogg’s masterpiece is The PrivateMemoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). Early reviewers,reflecting the general view of Hogg’s background and personality, saw it as ‘an incongruous mixture of the strongest powers with the strongestabsurdities’. In the 1940s, however, André Gide generated new interest


in Hogg’s novel when he wrote enthusiastically about its richly complexportrayal of the Devil; and since the 1940s The Justified Sinner has come to be regarded as one of the major Gothic Novels. In recent years, otherworks by Hogg have also attracted growing interest. In short, Hogg is a writer whose true stature was not recognised in his own lifetimebecause his social origins led to his being smothered in genteel con-descension; and whose significance was not recognised thereafter,because of a lack of adequate editions. However, he now appears to betaking his place as one of the major Gothic writers; and the Stirling/SouthCarolina Edition of his complete works is being published by theEdinburgh University Press.

Although Hogg was regarded by his contemporaries as a man of pow-erful and original talent, it was felt that his lack of education caused hiswork to be marred by frequent failures in discretion, in expression, andin knowledge of the world. Worst of all was his lack of what was called‘delicacy’, a failing which caused him to deal in his writings with sub-jects (such as prostitution) which were felt to be unsuitable for mentionin polite literature: it will be remembered that in the Justified Sinner, forexample, young George Colwan is killed as a result of a dispute in abrothel; and in addition the experiences of the prostitute Bell Calvertfigure prominently in that novel.

One of Hogg’s major novels, The Three Perils of Woman (1822), was feltto be particularly outrageous in its subject matter; and this text remainedout of print from the late 1820s until its re-publication in theStirling/South Carolina Edition in 1995. However, some recent criticshave placed The Three Perils of Woman on a level with the Justified Sinner.Littered with corpses that have a startling tendency to reanimate, TheThree Perils of Woman certainly has strong Gothic elements; but parody,and a concern with the nature of communication through language, alsofigure strongly in its rich brew.

The Three Perils of Man (1823), Hogg’s remarkable version of a me-dieval romance, offers much Gothic diablerie at Aikwood, the castle ofthe wizard Michael Scott. Overflowing with vivacity and told con brio,The Three Perils of Man is increasingly coming to be seen as a highlysophisticated piece of narrative artfulness.

Some of Hogg’s short stories draw on the folk traditions available tohim as a child in Ettrick Forest in the Scottish Borders; for example, thehaunting ‘Mary Burnet’ is one of his explorations of traditions of THESUPERNATURAL, while his interest in dreams emerges in stories like‘George Dobson’s Expedition to Hell’. Another strand in Hogg’s writingis represented by ‘Strange Letter of a Lunatic’ and ‘The Brownie of theBlack Haggs’, stories which reflect an abiding interest in abnormal psy-chology, and in the ways in which the mind reacts to extreme stress. One

Hogg, James (1770–1835) 39

of Hogg’s friends was Dr Andrew Duncan, who founded the EdinburghAsylum in 1813, having been shocked by conditions in the old CityBedlam. Hogg’s short stories originally appeared in periodicals such asBlackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Fraser’s Magazine; some of the best ofthem were included in The Shepherd’s Calendar (1829), a collection re-published in the Stirling/South Carolina Edition in 1995.

DOUGLAS S. MACK

Irving, Washington (1783–1859)

Washington Irving grew up in a recently divided New York City, occu-pied by the British during the American War of Independence, and nec-essarily preoccupied by the violent divisions of loyalty such a warentails. He was named after George Washington by his nationalisticparents. His interest in the conflict is suggested by ‘Rip Van Winkle’(1819–20), which may well be a disguised exploration of the Loyalistcause in the much disputed New York hinterland. Rip is of Dutch ances-try, and many of the old Dutch villages sided with the crown during theconflict. Afterwards, of course, they had very good reason for obscuringor mystifying their experience.

The first truly international American writer, Irving naturalised manyEuropean folktales, mostly from Germany and Spain, to create hislegends of America. His style was polished and urbane, a version ofGoldsmith and Addison or Steele. The themes were borrowed, perhaps,but it has to be said that they have proved among the most enduring ofAmerican legends. ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ (1819–20) along with‘Rip Van Winkle’ seems to have expressed something important aboutthe new American experience.

Irving’s Gothicism was essentially comic, as in ‘Sleepy Hollow’, whereIchabod Crane is frightened by late-night ghostly tales so that his rival,Brom Bones, can terrify him with a pumpkin that appears to be a severedhead. Most of the collections – The Sketch Book (1820), Bracebridge Hall(1822), and Tales of a Traveller (1824) – are weakened by what now seemsa merely imitative urbanity, but they were immensely popular and con-tained the occasional Gothic gem, like ‘The Adventure of the GermanStudent’. Told by ‘a nervous gentleman’ in Tales of a Traveller, the story isof a young German studying in Paris during the Terror of the FrenchRevolution. At the foot of the scaffold he meets a beautiful youngwoman of whom he has mysteriously been dreaming, in simple clotheswith a black neckband decorated with diamonds as her only ornament.


Wolfgang brings her to his lodgings where they swear undying love andas radical freethinkers agree to dispense with the empty formality of amarriage ceremony. In the morning he leaves to find a more suitableapartment, then returns to find her lying dead across the bed. The policeare summoned, but to Wolfgang’s eager query reply simply that indeedthey know her, for the girl ‘was guillotined yesterday’. The broad blackneckband loosened, her head rolls on the floor. Irving’s narrator assertsthat the story is undoubtedly true, since he had it from the studenthimself in a madhouse in Paris. Irving is ironic about his protagonist’simmersion in studies of German visionary philosophy, describing himas ‘a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel house of decayed literature’,and is similarly dry about his – and the beautiful lover’s – subscription to‘the liberal doctrines of the day’. His story very precisely anticipatesPoe’s ‘Ligeia’ in the description of the girl and also of Wolfgang’s ornateancient chamber as well as his reclusive disposition. But Irving’s tale hasconsiderably more political resonance in its graphic representation of therevenant as a phantom of the excesses of the Revolution, a victim implic-itly of her own and Wolfgang’s values, including freedom of speculationand the rejection of tradition. Irving can thus be seen to be operating asan agent of the contemporary active ‘forgetting’ of the AmericanRevolution in the face of the political and social dangers posed by itsEuropean successor.

Irving, like many early nineteenth-century Americans, was influencedby the popular Scottish Common-Sense philosophy, which paid carefulattention to the effects of the interpretation of sensory impressions inthought. As a result, his stories generally locate Gothic experiences insome misapprehension by an observer, and move rapidly towards theexplanation of such errors. This provided him with a comic structure,while perhaps also reducing his range of Gothic effects. But his observ-ation of the interplay between character and misinterpretation in storieslike ‘Dolph Heyliger’ and ‘The Spectre Bridegroom’ or ‘Wolfert Webber’made him an effective and influential satirist.

ALLAN LLOYD SMITH

Jackson, Shirley (1919–1965)

Although best known in college and university textbooks for her much-anthologized short story ‘The Lottery’ (1948), which was first publishedin the New Yorker and which not only generated the largest volume ofmail ever received by the magazine but also resulted in hundreds of

Jackson, Shirley (1919–1965) 41

cancelled subscriptions, Shirley Jackson earned her current reputation asa Gothic writer with the publication of her novel, The Haunting of HillHouse (1959). Later abbreviated as The Haunting, apparently to accom-modate the 1999 remake by Director Jan de Bont of Robert Wise’s 1963black and white film The Haunting (MGM) starring Julie Harris and ClareBloom, Jackson’s novel about a malign house traces the experience ofEleanor Vance, a 32-year-old woman who, having cared for her invalidmother until her death, finds herself part of a team of paranormal inves-tigators lead by one Dr Montague, an anthropologist who is also ascholar of the occult. At Hill House, which has an unsavoury reputation,the investigators – but especially Eleanor – begin to experience variousforms of haunting and it is never clear if the haunting is ‘real’ or if, in thetradition of HENRY JAMES’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), it is a productof the characters’ minds.

As a Gothic novelist, Jackson was concerned with perceptions ofreality and once said in an interview about The Haunting of Hill Housethat ‘No one can get into a novel about a haunted house without hittingthe subject of reality head-on.’ Earlier, Jackson discovered the strangetruth behind this remark when she was doing research on hauntedhouses and came across a story of a house that had, in fact, been built byher great grandfather. Before her untimely death at age 48 from heartfailure during an afternoon nap, Jackson’s forte as a writer was in ex-ploring the realm of psychological distortion, madness, hypocrisy, neu-rosis and evil in communities as well as individuals. She conducted thisexploration successively in works such as The Road Through the Wall(1948), a look at evil in suburbia, written partly, Jackson said, to get backat her parents; Hangasman (1951), a second novel that explored her owntroubled adolescence and followed a brilliant young woman from herparent’s home to college where she descends into schizophrenia; TheBird’s Nest (1954), based on an actual case of multiple personality dis-order, a topic which was interesting to Jackson as she thought of herselfas containing many different personalities; and, finally, We Have AlwaysLived in the Castle (1962), a novel written during a period when Jacksonsuffered from agoraphobia and psychosis and which explores the rela-tionship of two disturbed sisters, one fearful and unable to leave thehouse and the other who might well have murdered the rest of thefamily for the sake of her sister.

Brought up by a suburban mother who was highly critical of herdaughter’s appearance throughout her life, Jackson was frequently ha-rassed by Geraldine Jackson for being overweight, even obese. In fact,the tensions between mother and daughter were never resolved and it’sbeen noted by critics that Jackson’s fiction frequently focuses on youngwomen who are ‘anxious’ or ‘imperiled’ and whose mother is invasively


present – even when deceased – in the daughter’s life. Jackson’s finalnovel, Come Along With Me, was unfinished at the time of her death andwas later released by her husband, American literary critic, StanleyEdgar Hymen. That story, too, features a woman of Jackson’s ageengaged in paranormal research. In 1996, a box containing unpublishedstories was found in a shed behind Jackson’s house and these were col-lected and published as Just an Ordinary Day.

It is known that during her life, Jackson suffered from depression andanxiety. In her writing, she says she was compelled to use ‘fear’ and tocomprehend it because she herself experienced it frequently and at firsthand. In this regard, what she says of her last novel enables us to appre-ciate the uncanny turns that characterise her writing about all matterspsychological: Castle, she asserts, ‘is not about two women … it is aboutmy being afraid and afraid to say so, so much afraid that a name in abook can turn me inside out.’ Despite her fears, it remains clear that onething Jackson could be sure of is the fact that her writing would continueto be instrumental in giving voice to the twentieth-century Gothic.

JODEY CASTRICANO

Jacobs, W. W. (1863–1943)

Although best-known during his lifetime as a humorist, WilliamWymark Jacobs is remembered today almost solely on the strength ofthe macabre story ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ (The Lady of the Barge, 1902). Foryears this much-anthologised tale was a staple in secondary school text-books, presented as a near-perfect example of the short-story form. Itsstrong Gothic elements, such as stormy weather, an Eastern talisman,and a remote rural setting, along with its tight construction and effectivedénouement, make ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ one of the finest specimens ofthe horror story in any language.

Employment of the paw as an Indian charm introduces kismet in thisyarn, which is a spinoff of the folk tale of the three wishes. When theWhites, the English family involved in the tale, tamper with preordainedevents by utilising the talisman, they pay dearly for their presumption.Their first wish, for money, is fulfilled by their son’s employer as com-pensation for young White’s death. The second and third are used inbringing him back to life and restoring his decomposing body to thegrave. Jacobs masterfully changes the mood of the story from one ofgood-natured derision by the Whites regarding the paw to that of

Jacobs, W. W. (1863–1943) 43

ghastly terror when they realise the extent of their error in meddlingwith occult matters.

As a member of the coterie of writers known as the New Humorists(who primarily produced comic sketches for periodicals destined formiddle-class readers), Jacobs saw little market for his eerie material,which some critics feel is superior to his humorous work. Besides ‘TheMonkey’s Paw’, the writer early on evidenced a penchant for THESUPERNATURAL. His novella The Skipper’s Wooing (1897) included ahorror story as filler, ‘The Brown Man’s Servant’. This terrifying tale usessuch Gothic devices as a mouldy old house, an exotic Burmese villain, anda trained cobra. The piece has been compared to CONAN DOYLE’s ‘TheSpeckled Band’, although its component of suspense is more effective.

Jacobs’s extraordinary craftsmanship is nowhere more evident than in his supernatural fiction. ‘The Three Sisters’ (Night Watches, 1914), alesser-known tale, shows the author at his finest. Complete with a de-caying family mansion, a deranged sibling, and the suggested ghost ofan elder sister, the story builds to a shocking close worthy of the pen ofPoe. Other fine terror tales include ‘Jerry Bundler’ (Light Freights, 1901),‘The Interruption’ (Sea Urchins, 1898), and ‘In the Library’ (The Lady ofthe Barge, 1902). Several of his stories with Gothic trappings, including‘The Monkey’s Paw’, were adapted for the stage as short plays – notably‘Jerry Bundler’ and ‘In the Library’.

Unfortunately no volume of Jacobs’s macabre material has yet ap-peared; these tales remain scattered throughout his short fiction collec-tions and in various anthologies. Jacobs was especially skilful atsuggesting supernatural themes which were explainable by psycholo-gical or natural phenomena. His fascination with crime (especiallymurder) adds a marked Gothic element to some of his mystery tales,such as ‘The Well’ (The Lady of the Barge, 1902) and ‘The Toll-House’(Sailors’ Knots, 1909). Despite his limited output of serious fiction, Jacobsoccupies a niche in the horror genre which cannot be ignored.

JOHN CLOY

James, Henry (1843–1916)

The American writer Henry James is conventionally described as a psy-chological realist and certainly his great subject – the interplay ofEuropean and American manners – as well as his devotion to formalcoherence and point of view, would not usually be the hallmarks of aGothic writer. James wrote numerous ghostly or uncanny tales including


‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1898), probably his single most important con-tribution to Gothic literature. But there is no necessary incompatibilitybetween realism and the ghost story (see GHOST STORIES): the earlyJames took his cue from Balzac and Mérimée as much as from POE andHAWTHORNE.

Nevertheless, it would be difficult to describe James as a doctrinairerealist. In transformed ways, the Gothic played a central role throughouthis work. Indeed, James’s whole career can be seen as an attempt to ne-gotiate the competing claims of the Gothic and the realistic, the romanceand the novel. It was, as he put it in his 1907 Preface to The American(1875–6), those writers who committed themselves both to the ‘air ofromance’ and the ‘element of reality’ who possessed the ‘largest re-sponding imagination’. James had no unilateral attachment to romancebut there is a paradoxical sense in which this in itself places him withinthe tradition of GOTHIC ROMANCE. Departing from Richardsoniannovelistic conventions, WALPOLE’s Preface to the first edition of TheCastle of Otranto (1764) had advocated combining preternatural eventswith a comparatively naturalistic treatment of character. James’s han-dling of oppositions was immeasurably more dynamic. But Walpole’saesthetics of combination resurfaced in James’s idea (put forward in an1865 review) that ‘a good ghost-story must be connected at a hundredpoints with the common objects of life’.

In Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler argued thatJames’s Europe was a reinvention of the Gothic castle. From ‘TravellingCompanions’ (1870) to ‘Daisy Miller’ (serialised in 1878 and published inbook form in 1879) and beyond, James’s European settings are certainlythe precondition for a subjective adventure which is fundamentallyGothic in nature. Some would say that James’s peculiar brand of latenineteenth-century Gothicism is, because psychological or metaphorical,marginal to his work. But in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) James’s mani-pulation of Gothic conventions is in many ways the key to the text. Hisprotagonist, Isabel Archer, naively sees Europe through the lens of the Gothic novel and this attitude is initially ironised. Yet, as so often in Gothic literature, the criticism of previous Gothic models sets thescene for a reintroduction of the Gothic. Isabel’s problem is not that she has read too many romances but that she has not read them wellenough. Unlike Emily St Aubert in RADCLIFFE’s The Mysteries ofUdolpho (1794), Isabel has a terror of knowledge. It is her very resist-ance to lifting the Gothic veil, opening the secret door, which lands her in the dungeon of her marriage to Gilbert Osmond. Literal horror is superseded by metaphysical horror, but James shows that a de-literalisedGothic is by no means a misleading guide to reality. Whereas Emily St Aubert eventually puts the spectres to flight, Isabel’s experience

James, Henry (1843–1916) 45

enables her to see the ghost of her cousin in the final pages of the novel.

James’s revision of the Gothic, therefore, by no means signals his aban-donment of the mode. It is true that his early studies of the double self –‘A Passionate Pilgrim’ (1875) and ‘Benvolio’ (1875) – were not resumeduntil ‘The Private Life’ (1892), ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ (1903), ‘The JollyCorner’ (1908) and The Sense of the Past (1917). A similar lapse affected hisinvestigations of spiritual and sexual vampirism. The subject of ‘TheStory of a Year’ (1865), ‘Poor Richard’ (1867), ‘A Most ExtraordinaryCase’ (1868), ‘The Romance of Certain Old Clothes’ (1868), ‘De Grey: ARomance’ (1869) and ‘Longstaff’s Marriage’ (1878) was not again to becentral to James’s work until The Sacred Fount (1901). And James wroteno ghost stories after ‘The Ghostly Rental’ (1876) until ‘Sir EdmundOrme’ (1891), ‘Owen Wingrave’ (1892), ‘The Way it Came’ (1896), ‘TheReal Right Thing’ (1899) and ‘The Third Person’ (1900). But The Portrait ofa Lady shows that James had not renounced the Gothic even in his mostdevotedly naturalistic phase. In ‘The Author of “Beltraffio”’ (1884) and‘The Aspern Papers’ (1888) he continued to explore a Gothic terrainwhich found increasing critical endorsement in his essays on WilliamDean Howells (1886) and ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1888).

No discussion of James as a Gothic writer would be complete withoutmention of ‘The Turn of the Screw’, a superbly ambiguous novella andone of the classic first-person narratives. James described the tale as atrap for the seasoned reader, and it is certainly true that much of the sub-sequent (and prolific) criticism has, in its attempt to define James’s narra-tor, a governess, as either a madwoman in the attic or an angel in thehouse, tended to replicate an ideological polarisation which James ishimself problematising. As with The Portrait of a Lady, it is possible that amore fruitful reading of the text emerges from a consideration of its re-handling of the Gothic. The governess sees Bly, the country house towhich she has been sent to take charge of two young children, as a ‘castleof romance’. In many ways she wants to re-enact the trajectories of previ-ous Gothic texts such as The Mysteries of Udolpho and Jane Eyre. Thisdesire is consistently defeated by the narrative, and ultimately the gov-erness seems less like Emily St Aubert than Radcliffe’s superstitiousmaid, Annette, more like the tyrannical Mrs Reed in Charlotte Brontë’snovel than Jane Eyre herself. As a whole, James’s narrative refuses thekinds of closure (the rational explanation of apparently supernaturalevents, the promotion of the heroine to secure social standing throughmarriage) associated with early Gothic fiction.

If the closure of classic Gothic does not entirely eradicate its opening ofradical uncertainties it remains true that the genre possesses a deep needfor law. But James’s refusal of such closure should not necessarily be


taken as an acceptance of the instabilities which Gothic opens up. The useof framed narratives in many of his uncanny tales can be seen as a formalattempt to contain the Gothic. James saw the romance form as danger-ously explosive and strove always to pit such centrifugal forces againstthe centripetal exigencies of the real. Yet he was never a simple realist. Inthe Preface to The American he wrote that ‘an infallible sign of the roman-tic’ lay in the ‘rank vegetation’ of power, for good or evil. Power for Jameswas always closely associated with imaginative freedom and there is astrong sense throughout his work that those characters who seek powerare implicitly seeking authorial status. Since James believed that theauthor was the ultimate ghost, the unrepresentable source and not therepresentable subject of fiction, his need to curtail his characters’ questsfor power (often through the use of admonitory spectral presences) waspart of a commitment to representation rather than a narrow realism.Indeed, to the extent that James consistently tried to maintain his own au-thorial power at its fullest extent he was inevitably, as the Preface to TheAmerican clearly implies, perpetuating the play of romance. For this extra-ordinarily subtle thinker, the enclosure and revision of the Gothic wasitself a distinctively Gothic strategy.

T. J. LUSTIG

James, Montague Rhodes (1862–1936)

During his lifetime, Montague Rhodes James enjoyed a formidable repu-tation as a Biblical scholar, translator, bibliographer, and intellectualmentor, being successively Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and ofits sister foundation at Eton. His literary reputation today, however, restsprimarily upon his authorship of a corpus of short fiction, publishedduring his lifetime as Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More GhostStories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), A Warning tothe Curious (1925), Wailing Well (1928), and the encyclopaedic CollectedGhost Stories of M. R. James (1931).

James’s tales construct an almost idyllic late-Victorian and Edwardianworld bounded on the one hand by the academic companionship of theCollege Combination Room, the library, or the cathedral close, and onthe other by the country houses, seaside inns, and decaying continentalabbeys frequented by scholar-gentlemen during the long vacation. Intothese privileged and normally placid spaces, THE UNCANNY, thatwhich is inimicable either to Anglican restraint or indeed to philosoph-ical reasoning, is released by actions or articles seemingly innocuous in

James, Montague Rhodes (1862–1936) 47

themselves – the removal of a wooden post from the ground, the casualblowing of an ancient whistle, the possession of a book or a collection ofmanuscripts. The gentlemen scholars, choristers, librarians and upper-middle-class families implicated in these occult dramas find, in the main,their former reliance on materialism somewhat shaken, their scepticismtowards practices which might be deemed either superstitious orRitualistic far-less binding than before their experience. The easy-goingobservance which popularly characterised Anglican practice then as nowis called, abruptly, into question throughout these works.

For all its publication in both periodical and volume form, James’s shortfiction is essentially the product of an oral tradition which grew out of thecomfortable, gentleman’s club-like tenor of late-Victorian Cambridge. As amember of various inter-collegiate dining and discussion groups, Jameswas encouraged to contribute not only discursive papers but originalfiction also. The author maintained the oral component of these meetingsin the circle which he subsequently gathered around himself at King’s, agroup whose composition varied across the years, but which met almostritualistically in James’s chambers after Chapel every Christmas Eve, inorder to read aloud ghost stories by candlelight.

Of those present, several became published authors of supernaturalfiction, often utilising the scholarly or gentlemanly apparatus characteris-tic of James’s writings. Arthur Benson, who contributed ‘The House atTrehele’ to the gathering on Christmas Eve 1903, for example, publishedtwo volumes of supernatural fiction, The Hill of Trouble (1903) and TheIsles of Sunset (1904), during his lifetime. ‘The House at Trehele’ was pub-lished posthumously as Basil Netherby in 1927. Another member of thecircle, Edmund Gill Swain, who was a Chaplain at King’s between 1892and 1905, published a collection of nine ghost stories under the title ofThe Stoneground Ghost Tales in 1912, a volume which he dedicated to M. R. James as ‘the indulgent parent of such tastes as these pages indi-cate’. Finally, A. N. L. Munby, sometime Librarian at King’s, publishedThe Alabaster Hand (1949), a collection of fourteen ghost stories, againdedicated to James.

James was, in addition to his fictional activities, a minor theoretician ofoccult writing, initially in his short prefaces to the two volumes of‘Antiquarian’ ghost stories, and subsequently in three articles publishedbetween 1929 and 1931 in The Touchstone, The Bookman and The EveningNews. Perhaps more significantly, James assisted in the revival of thewritings of J. SHERIDAN LE FANU through an anthology, MadamCrowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery, which he edited, and prefaced,in 1923.

WILLIAM HUGHES


King, Stephen (1947–)

Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine. In his youth he wrote andpublished a variety of short horror stories, but his first novel was Carrie(1974). Since then he has published a huge list of works, of which I willhere only mention a few of the best known: The Shining (1977), made intoa celebrated film starring Jack Nicholson; Christine and Pet Sematary (both1983); Misery (1987); Needful Things (1991); Dolores Claiborne (1993); RoseMadder (1995); The Green Mile (1996); Bag of Bones (1998); Dreamcatcher(2001) and From a Buick 8 (2002). At the time of writing, his latest novel isCell (2006).

King is often, and with complete justification, referred to as a horrorwriter, but his claim to fame spreads rather more broadly than this.Indeed, there are those who say that, as critics continue the endless (andperhaps pointless) search for the Great American Novel, King hasalready written it, many times over. We can take Needful Things as anexample. Here the plot concerns a small town in the United States andthe arrival there of a mysterious shopkeeper. He appears to stock, or tobe able to find, anything that anybody in the town wants; but as the bookgoes on, apparently innocent desires turn darker and darker as thedesires of the townsfolk increasingly turn to those things which willavenge past wrongs, real or imagined. By the end of the book, the shop-keeper (who is of course a diabolic figure) needs to stock only one item:guns.

This, one might say, is one version of the story of the USA writ large.Another version of that story emerges in Bag of Bones. Here a remotelocale in the backwoods is haunted by memories of the past, at first in-comprehensible, which refuse to go away. As the story develops, itbecomes obvious that what the place is haunted by is the ineradicable re-membrance of a murder motivated by racial prejudice and sexual jeal-ousy, and the collusion of the community in committing the violence inthe first place and then in covering it up. As in virtually all of King’sfiction, the ghosts and demons that appear are reminders, perhaps ingeneral of man’s inhumanity to man, but also more specifically of theearlier violences which have occurred in the development of Americansociety and the American psyche.

This is not to say that King is an inhumane writer; on the contrary,much of the attraction of his fiction springs from the deeply emotional – and occasionally, it has to be said, sentimental – affection which he evidently feels for many of his characters, who are unwittingly caughtup in the reverberations of events over which they have no control. Inbooks like Insomnia (1994) and many others, the reader is deeply drawninto the lives of people who are trying to behave decently even while all

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around them, sometimes literally, things are going to hell. Small-townUSA is, for King, a site of love as much as it is a site of hate, and indeedthe two are inextricably entwined.

And amid this, there is the plight of the writer to be considered.Several of King’s protagonists or narrators are themselves writers.Perhaps the outstanding version of this is to be found in Misery, in whichan injured writer finds himself at the mercy of a demented nurse whodemands that he completes a further book about a previous heroine ofhis, the mysteriously named Misery Chastain. In order to force him to doso, she keeps him prisoner and subjects him to various torments and tor-tures, keeping him locked into a situation of terror from which no escapeseems possible.

Pet Sematary (the misspelling is due to the youth of one of the charac-ters) is perhaps more conventionally Gothic in its theme, although itrenders that theme with extraordinary power. The protagonist’s pet catdies; he (or rather his son) wishes for the animal’s reincarnation; and hiswish is granted, but of course the thing that returns from beyond thegrave is a ghastly travesty of the living animal. Subsequently, his sonalso dies and, consumed by grief, he longs for the boy to come back. Andcome back he does; but in the terrifying form of one who has been longdead and who now wishes only for revenge on the living.

In a story like this one can grasp one of the key factors of the power ofKing’s fiction, which is that it deals intensely in mourning, in the com-plexity of relationships which characterise the connection between theliving and the dead. In the memory of small-town USA, nothing evergoes away; old bitternesses remain vivid and real, old grudges continueto fester and re-engender their shapes in the present. King himself mightnot speak or write too much about Freud; but there is no doubt thatcertain formations of the unconscious, which he jocularly refers to as thework of the ‘boys in the boiler-room’, haunt his work.

But perhaps his best-known novel, if only because of its filmic incar-nation, remains The Shining. Here another writer, with a bad case ofwriter’s block, takes a winter job as caretaker of a hotel, which is emptyfor the season. He takes his family with him; what he also takes with him is his alcoholism, and the isolation of the location together with theghosts of his own past gradually escalate his situation into a full-blownmurderous psychosis. Perhaps this is also due to various episodes ofviolence in the past history of the hotel itself; in the end there is no wayof separating the mind of the writer from the ‘mind’ of the hotel itself.

This also strikes at the heart of another of King’s key themes, which isthe power of addiction. One might say that in King’s work two incom-patible realms interlock: the realm of moral order, and the other realm ofaddictive drives – it is clearly no accident that King himself has suffered


from various addictions in the course of his life. Sympathy for the helplessness of the addict is crossed with an awareness that it may be through addiction that the darkest of forces find a way into the apparently normal fabric of human life.

What also drives King’s fiction is constant awareness of the crucialdrivers of the psyche of everyday US life. To take one apposite example,there is a whole series of books – Carrie, Christine, From a Buick 8 – wherethe ‘key character’, in a sense, is not human but a car. Here we can sensethe absolute involvement of US culture – and perhaps more particularlyteenage culture – with cars: cars, in a sense, permit freedom but they alsoembody danger, and worse they may also carry the memories of pastcrimes and a trace of the addictive necessity to repeat them.

What King may have written over the course of this long trajectory – which shows no sign of abating – may not have been the AmericanDream, but it is certainly a uniquely American nightmare. Yet within thisthere is also a frequent longing for justice, for the shames and brokenpromises of the past to be laid to rest. In Rose Madder, for example – oneof the most optimistic of the novels – the heroine, on the run from herpsychotically violent policeman husband, is supernaturally saved whileher husband meets a truly horrible fate. At the heart of King’s fiction,alongside the fascination with horror and the gruesome, is a truly liberalmessage which is in constant tension with the conservative lives hedepicts, and it is this tension, which is ultimately political, that gives hiswork its resilience, its sense of a wider meaning and, in the end, acurious but undeniable grandeur.

DAVID PUNTER

Le Fanu, J. Sheridan (1814–73)

Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was born in Dublin to parents of mixedorigins. His father, a cleric of the established Church of Ireland, was thedirect descendant of French Protestant refugees (Huguenots), though hispaternal grandmother (a sister of the dramatist R. B. Sheridan) came froma background until recently Gaelic-speaking and Catholic. The novelist’smother had been a youthful admirer of the revolutionary Lord EdwardFitzgerald, and despite a streak of irrepressible conformism, sympathyfor outdated radicalisms can be traced in her (Dobbin) family inheritance.None of Le Fanu’s immediate forebears were owners of land on anyscale; they were middle-class folk who acquired a secondary affiliation to

Le Fanu, J. Sheridan (1814–73) 51

pomp and circumstance through the holy orders of the state Church.These background details are of some importance in considering theproposition that Le Fanu’s meta-narrative is the guilty confession of acallous and glutted ascendancy.

The turbulence attending Daniel O’Connell’s campaign for CatholicEmancipation in the 1820s, followed by a rural ‘tithe war’ in the 1830s,sapped the limited material reserves of the family, who had been, sinceJanuary 1826, residing in the disturbed county of Limerick. Sheridan LeFanu studied at Trinity College Dublin between 1832 and 1836 withoutdistinguishing himself academically. He subsequently read for the bar,but practised little as a barrister. His business interests were centred onthe Dublin newspaper world. From the literary point of view, his owner-ship (1861–9) of the Dublin University Magazine (founded 1833) remainsthe most important of these involvements as he therein published muchof the fiction for which he is remembered.

It is not easy to classify Le Fanu as a Gothic writer, without recourse tonumerous derogations from the usual understanding of the term. Forexample, his novels from Wylder’s Hand (1864) onwards were set in con-temporary, mid-Victorian England; it makes more sense to read them ascontributions to the ‘sensational’ school of WILKIE COLLINS andCharles Reade (see SENSATION FICTION) than as the legacy ofMATURIN’s Irish Gothic. Nevertheless, the best of his 1860s novels –The House by the Churchyard (1863), Wylder’s Hand and Uncle Silas (both1864) – manage by one means or another to preserve an eighteenth-century Irish ambience in relation to which Gothic themes and tropes areclearly discernible. Moreover, the novel form did not account for all of LeFanu’s writing in the 1860s and early 1870s; on the contrary some of hismost striking work is to be found in short stories, notably those collectedas Chronicles of Golden Friars (1871) and In a Glass Darkly (1872). Finally, ithas to be recognised that the author of Uncle Silas really had two careersas a writer of fiction.

The first, in the years between 1838 and 1848 principally, was given over to Irish historical fiction of the kind prompted by WalterScott’s example. Here the short story predominated, especially in the work posthumously collected as The Purcell Papers (1880). A SUPER-NATURAL element is related consistently to the intrusion of Con-tin-ental (usually French) influences in Irish households, a practice which uncannily relates the democratic–rationalistic legacy of the French Revolution to metaphysical agency. The exceptional story is‘Schalcken the Painter’ (1839), which touches on the relationship between a Dutch artist and the triumph of Prince William of Orange (as King William III) in battles fought mainly in Ireland. One or two uncollected stories – ‘Borrhomeo the Astrologer’ (1861–2) and


‘The Botheration of Tim Farmiloe’ (same year) – sustain this high Gothicnote.

The second phase sees Le Fanu as a moderately successful novelist,whose real interests appear to be channelled into the conte or longer tale.‘Carmilla’ (1871–2) is outstanding in drawing in a subtler kind of sexualpreoccupation than is usual in the nineteenth-century versions ofGothicism. This story appears in In a Glass Darkly (1872), a collectionwhich impacts on later forms of popular fiction by introducing the foren-sic sleuth (in this case, Dr Hesselius, but cf. Carnaki the Ghost Finder by W. H. Hodgson, and of course, SHERLOCK HOLMES).

The truth is that Le Fanu is more important as an influence whichaffects highly diverse later developments – in BRAM STOKER, W. B.Yeats, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, etc. – than as the author of a sub-stantial body of achieved work. His life illuminates Victorian Ireland inways which have not yet been fully explored.

W. J. MCCORMACK

Lee, Tanith (1947–)

Although her literary career began as long ago as 1968, when her ninety-word short story, ‘Eustace’, appeared in Herbert van Thal’s Ninth PanBook of Horror Stories, Tanith Lee remains a well-kept secret as far asacademia is concerned. While her near contemporary Angela Carter(1940–1992) has inspired a thriving critical industry, Lee, with whosefiction she has much in common, has been largely ignored, despite hersustained commercial success in Britain and the United States.

Much of Lee’s prolific output is fantasy of one form or another, thoughshe has also written science fiction and horror. However, she is so impa-tient with generic constraints that few of her novels fit securely withineven these broad categories, and many contain significant Gothic ele-ments.

Lee’s first novel, The Dragon Hoard (1971) was a comic fantasy for chil-dren, but showed how she was already interested in manipulating con-ventions from myth and fairy tale. Her short stories such as Red as Blood:Tales from the Sisters Grimmer (1983), Forests of the Night (1989) andNightshades: Thirteen Journeys into Shadow (1993) delight in reworkingthese genres – Snow White becomes a vampire, for instance – oftendenying her characters any providential rescue from their predicaments.Lee’s vampires are often portrayed with sympathy and erotic charm (e.g.The Castle of Dark [1982], The Blood of Roses [1990]), though she is not

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afraid to unleash sexual horror in her Blood Opera sequence (1992–94) andelsewhere.

The Lee bestiary ranges from gorgons (The Gorgon and Other BeastlyTales, [1985]) to werewolves (Lycanthia, [1981], Heart-Beast [1992]) andeven extends into Hindu theology (Elephantasm [1993]). Her work ishighly imaginative, witty, and often sexually disturbing. She has a weak-ness for purple prose and a tendency to over-extend her ideas in sequen-tial works, but remains innovative and entertaining.

NICK FREEMAN

Lewis, Matthew (1775–1818)

‘After Mrs RADCLIFFE,’ wrote Hazlitt, ‘Monk Lewis was the greatestmaster of the art of freezing the blood.’ Matthew Gregory Lewis acquiredhis sobriquet from his most famous work, The Monk, A Romance, whichwas written (by 23 September 1794) to alleviate the tedium of the BritishEmbassy at The Hague, where his father’s influence had gained him thepost of attaché. Lewis was just nineteen. Published anonymously byJoseph Bell, the first edition of The Monk came out in March 1796, waswidely devoured, and on the whole well received; the second, later in theyear, proudly announced both the author and his recent election toParliament on the title-page: ‘M. G. Lewis, M.P.’ The public outcry whichfollowed (in which Coleridge in the Critical Review played a role) ledeventually to the ‘considerable Alterations and Additions’ advertised inthe fourth edition, of 1798.

The Monk was completed ‘in the space of ten weeks’, Lewis boasted tohis mother; but it was to change the course of the GOTHIC NOVEL inEngland. Although, by Lewis’s own admission, it was The Mysteries ofUdolpho (1794) that ‘induced’ him to ‘go on with’ the work, The Monkoffers a far more unbuttoned version of Gothic than the mix of sentimen-tal romance and explained supernaturalism which had defined the genreunder Radcliffe. Lewis had the education conventional to his class, atWestminster and Christ Church, Oxford. Yet his one novel was anythingbut conventional. Incest and incestuous rape, murder, matricide andsororicide, all feature, together with a blasphemous identification of Satan and the Madonna, and of sexual temptation with religiousdevotion. Small wonder, perhaps, that De Sade took Lewis to heart (Idéesur les romans).


The Advertisement to The Monk claims a pan-European dimension for the novel, confessing a miscellany of French, Danish, and Spanishinfluences. Further sources were noted at the time, and have been un-covered since. But the culturally innovative link is with Germany (seeGERMAN GOTHIC). Indeed, one reviewer noted ‘Mr Lewis’s … Germanlust after marvellous narrative’. The Monk’s use of the legend of theBleeding Nun (a plot later adapted for the ballet and stage) was the fruit of a visit to Weimar in 1792, when he met Wieland and GOETHE.(Although Lewis translated Part One of Goethe’s Faust for Byron in 1817,the Monk’s Faustian pact – which occurs only towards the end of the novel– derives from French and English versions of a Persian tale, the SantonBarsisa.)

The Monk introduces English Gothic to the SCHAUERROMAN,marking a decisive turn from terror, as deployed by Burke and Radcliffe,to horror, provocative of disgust and fascination in equal measure.Lewis’s is a powerful representation of the demonic – indeed, theMonk’s seducer turns out to be a devil in disguise – but its interest lies inconflicting forces of excess and restraint, of the insatiability of the desir-ing self on the one hand, and the urge to institutional conformity andhypocrisy on the other.

The novel’s dramatic representation of psychic conflict – ‘Ambrosio’sbosom became the Theatre of a thousand contending passions’ – alsoowes much to Shakespeare. The figure of Angelo in Measure for Measure(excerpted for the epigraph to chapter 1) lends itself to a compelling studyin repression, and the transgressive potential of sex. From the openingscene in Milan, where the Abbot Ambrosio is observed by strangers tothe city, the effect is of being inexorably drawn in, and of being deniedany claim to the status of detached or dispassionate spectator.

This incitement to collusion in the contradictory movements of abhor-rence and desire is mirrored in the critical response. That the novel was a‘pernicious effusion of youthful intemperance’ ‘totally unfit for generalcirculation’ did not prevent its being read and imitated, even by the ‘fairsex’: in 1806, CHARLOTTE DACRE (Rosa Matilda) published Zofloya;or, The Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century. The Monk was also turnedinto a popular chapbook, Almagro and Claude; or, Monastic Murder;Exemplified by the Dreadful Doom of an Unfortunate Nun (1803).

After The Monk, Lewis’s writing went in two main directions: trans-lation (mostly from the German), and drama. The two often went hand-in-hand. The Bravo of Venice (1805), a rendering of J. H. D. Zschökke’snovel Abällino, der grosse Bandit, was in its sixth edition by 1809. Adaptedfor the stage as Rugantino, it had a run of 30 nights, and was beingperformed in the United States until 1826. In Coleridge’s view, The Bravoof Venice exhibits ‘low thieves’ Cunning’, and the ‘wonder of effects

Lewis, Matthew (1775–1818) 55

produced by supernatural power, without the means’. The plot followsthe adventures of one Count Rosalvo, who, banished and starving, seeksemployment as a hired assassin. Grotesquely disguised, he is a savagelysuccessful bravo, while in his second persona of handsome stranger, hewins the hand of the Doge’s niece (the twist being that, in order to do so,he is required to capture his own alias, the bandit Abällino).

Another German novel, translated as Feudal Tyrants; or, The Counts ofCarlsheim and Sargans (1806), links a convoluted plot of imprisonmentand escape to a series of memoirs. But Lewis’s principal concern was thedrama. His theatrical career began spectacularly a year after The Monk: tothe envy of Wordsworth, whose own play had just been turned down,The Castle Spectre opened at Drury Lane on 14 December 1797, and ranfor 48 nights. In its first three months, the play was said to have earned£18,000; and it was being staged in England and America until 1834.Although Coleridge found it ‘a mere patchwork of plagiarism’, The CastleSpectre is remarkable for its melodramatic use of Gothic tableaux, notablythe appearance, to music, of a bleeding female spectre at the end of thefourth Act.

Lewis was adept in the ‘Grand Romantic Melodrama’ the stage of hisday demanded. His efforts in this line began with Rugantino (CoventGarden, 18 October 1805), followed by The Wood Daemon (Drury Lane, 1 April 1807), a Faust-cum-fairy story and musical pageant, and Timourthe Tartar, a spectacular with live horses and a waterfall (Covent Garden,29 April 1811). Among his tragedies were Rolla; or, The Peruvian Hero(1799); a modest hit called Alfonso, King of Castile (Convent Garden, 15 January 1802); The Harper’s Daughter; or, Love and Ambition (1803),which was abridged from Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe, first translated byLewis as The Minister, in 1797; and Adelgitha; or, The Fruit of a Single Error(Drury Lane, 30 April 1807, already in four editions in book-form in1806). Lewis also tried his hand at farce (The Twins; or, Is It He, or HisBrother?, 1799; The Domestic Tyrant, 1809), and comedy (The East Indian,1799, a revision of the farcical Twins, and itself revised as comic opera in Rich and Poor, 1812). The Wood Daemon, the story of wicked CountHardyknute’s pact with the Daemon to sacrifice a child in return forwealth and youth, and of the child’s rescue, was revised as One O’Clock!or, The Knight and the Wood Daemon, A Grand Musical Romance (Lyceum, 1 August 1811).

The poetry which interspersed Lewis’s work was often singled out forpraise – by Coleridge and Hazlitt among others – and proved an excep-tion to the general revulsion at The Monk: ‘the beautiful ballad of Alonzoand Imogine … is universally acknowledged to be a master-piece of itskind’.8 A volume of ballads came out in 1808, and a collection of Lewis’sbest pieces in Poems (1812). Tales of Wonder (1801), a poorly received


venture in which Scott was a collaborator, contained eight poems ori-ginal to Lewis and several of his poetic translations; and four furthervolumes of translated fiction, and poems, were published as RomanticTales (1808).

Lewis’s father, with whom he quarrelled, was a deputy Secretary inthe War Office; his mother, whom he provided for, left the family for thechildren’s music master when Lewis was six. Fame gave Lewis an entréeto society, and brought him friendships with Scott (whom he met in1798) and Byron (in 1813, and again, with Shelley, in 1816) – though, inthe noble poet’s private view, ‘the worst parts of the Monk’ were ‘thephiltred ideas of a jaded voluptuary’ (Journal, 6 December 1813). On in-heriting his father’s fortune in 1812, Lewis showed a conscientiousnessthat belied his sensational reputation, twice visiting his Jamaican planta-tions to institute slave reforms (in 1815 and 1817), on the last occasioncontracting the yellow fever from which he died, during the returnvoyage, in 1818. A fine testament to this last phase of Lewis’s life is thehumane, humorous, and unmannered Journal of a West India Proprietor(published posthumously, 1834).

NICOLA TROTT

Lovecraft, H. P. (1890–1937)

H. P. Lovecraft lived and died in relative obscurity yet his widening reputation meant that by the latter half of the twentieth century he has been recognised as the most consistent and influential horror writersince Edgar Allan Poe. He was born on 20 August 1890, the son ofWinfield Scott Lovecraft and Sarah Susan (née Phillips) Lovecraft inProvidence, Rhode Island, descendant of recent British immigrants down on their luck on his father’s side and ‘New-England Yankee’ stock on his mother’s. This lineage helps account for an innate Anglo-philia, a conservative nature, some considerable distaste for non-Anglo-Saxons (yet he married a Jewish woman) and a demeanour andwriting style (especially in letters) which suggest an eighteenth-centuryTory gentleman (perhaps as compensation for his father being only asalesman).

Much of Lovecraft’s antiquarianism (he referred to New York as NewAmsterdam), traditionalism (as a young man he edited a paper calledThe Conservative), strange foibles (in later life he became obsessed withthe temperature) and total lack of artistic drive (he refused the editor-ship of Weird Tales) may be attributed to the convergence of early fearsabout insanity and a retreat from the demands of modernity. Like

Lovecraft, H. P. (1890–1937) 57

Edward Hopper, Lovecraft was essentially a product of, and yet alien-ated from, his own time.

Winfield Lovecraft died in a sanitorium from a progressive and insan-ity-inducing disease when his son was only eight. From this dateLovecraft seems to have suffered a series of nightmares, which formedthe basis for much of his fiction and which lasted until his own death.One such nightmare was the origin of the god Nyarlathotep, who com-bines a number of distorted features reminiscent of Lovecraft’s father in-cluding, significantly, the fact that the god is the imbecilic centre of theuniverse and lives amid the sound of endless drumming. The originalnightmare had Nyarlathotep not as a god but as an ‘itinerent showman’,a figure much more reminiscent of his father the travelling salesman (theslang term for which was drummer). In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, itis the father who puts the son in an asylum! The influence of his father’sillness on Lovecraft’s writing is still a matter of much debate.

Personal material of this type reminds us that Lovecraft’s art, with itsbizarre war between extraterrestrial gods, was also firmly anchored in the complex social and commercial milieu of the United States.Lovecraft’s work was entirely published in the popular pulp magazineswhich sprang up in the 1920s and flourished until the 1950s; his godsbearing many a resemblance to the titles and orders of the newly re-formed Ku Klux Klan; his degenerate acolytes arousing concerns overthe newer immigrants; his settings nostalgic for a more archaic andbucolic world in which money and technology had little consequence,the city was not yet a cesspool and Americans shared a common ‘Anglo-Saxon’ origin. This highly distorted populism also, nevertheless, in-cluded an awareness that the past was the source of a corruptioninherent to the first immigrants, and the stories gain their power fromthis unresolved ambivalence. Lovecraft’s personal neuroses (broughtabout by his own character traits and familial circumstances) accordedwell with the rapid modernising of America itself.

The current success of Lovecraft’s work may be due to the collapse in a belief in progress and technology and the substitution of interest in the occult, archaic and regressive, and the linking of these with an interest in a strange mixture of fringe ecology, New Age-ism and extra-terrestrialism (see SUPERNATURAL) – all areas Lovecraft himself wouldhave rejected as naive if taken seriously.

Since his death in 1937, Lovecraft’s reputation has steadily increasedas other writers have added their own contributions to the oeuvrethat he created. Whilst working for Weird Tales, Lovecraft had alreadybegun to co-operate with other writers in order to expand and givegreater depth to the central ‘mythic’ structure of his stories. Most notableamongst these early collaborators was the very young Robert Bloch.


Kept in print by August Derleth, who also sympathetically suppliedendings for the unfinished stories, Lovecraft’s bizarre and fascinatingcosmography has attracted a number of writers to use his pantheon ofhorrific entities as a basis for their own work. Amongst such writers canbe found Lin Carter, (J) Ramsey Campbell, Colin Wilson, Brian Lumley,James Wade and Gary Myers as well as film-makers such as RogerCorman and Sami and Ivan Rami (whose witty Evil Dead series filchedthe Necronomicon). Lovecraft’s influence has also been felt in the worldof role-play gaming, based around Cthulhu, but perhaps most unusuallyof all, occultists such as Kenneth Grant and Peter Redgrove have sug-gested that the Necronomicon is a ‘real’ book whose pages can only beread by illuminati.

Lovecraft’s work consists almost entirely of short stories, but onenovella, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, was published during his lifetime and another, The Lurker on the Threshold, was completed byAugust Derleth. Notable stories include ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, ‘TheDunwich Horror’, ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, ‘At the Mountains of Madness’, ‘Imprisoned with the Pharaohs’ (under the original byline of Harry Houdini) and ‘The Rats in the Wall’. George Hay has provided an excellent ‘edited edition’ of the Necronomicon (1978) and Lovecraft’s correspondence has been published. Lin Carter has pro-vided one of the first and best biographies/introductions to Lovecraft(1972).

CLIVE BLOOM

Machen, Arthur (1863–1947)

When it was published in John Lane’s ‘Keynotes’ series in 1894,Machen’s novella of corrupting evil, The Great God Pan, was widely con-demned as unwholesome and degenerate. Similar condemnation of TheThree Impostors in 1895 labelled Machen as a writer of decadent horror,albeit a horror gloomily redolent of the Gothic rather than the ghoststory (see GHOST STORIES).

But for all Machen’s use of the stock-in-trade of this improbablevariety of supernatural fiction – nameless horrors, irruptions of ancientevil, and degenerate human characters – his work succeeds, and sur-vives, largely because of his marvellous ability to evoke the spirit ofplace. In both his fiction and his lyrical essays he invests with a whollybelievable mystery not only his native Monmouthshire countryside, butalso the streets and byways of London. It was this facility as much as the

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content of his stories that brought the praise and imitation of suchwriters as H. P. LOVECRAFT.

Arthur Llewellyn Jones-Machen was born at Caerleon on 3 March1863. His lonely and introspective childhood was followed by unhappyearly years in London, where he settled in the 1880s, but counterbal-anced by his marriage to Amy Hogg and his friendship with the writeron occultism A. E. Waite. The 1890s proved to be his most productiveperiod, seeing the birth of his best translations as well as his hor-ror stories and the strange novel The Hill of Dreams, written 1896–7 andpublished serially in 1904, that is his masterpiece.

Desolated by the death of his wife in 1899, Machen left his writing forsome years and took up a new career as an actor, leading to a secondmarriage, to Dorothy Purefoy Hudleston, and to a family. His laterwriting brought him greater fame – his story of the ‘Angels of Mons’,The Bowmen (1915), caused a sensation when it appeared – although ithas less power and reflects his move to journalism. Towards the end ofhis life he returned to the themes of his early horror stories: The CosyRoom and Other Stories (1936) and The Children of the Pool (1936), but theold intensity had largely departed. Machen died on 15 December 1947,some months after his wife, but even after fifty years his powerfulinfluence on contemporary horror fiction remains.

R. A. GILBERT

Maturin, Charles Robert (1780–1824)

Born in Dublin (25 September 1780) of Huguenot descent, Charles RobertMaturin was brought up in comfortable and advantageous surroundings(his father worked for the Irish Post Office). In 1795 he entered TrinityCollege, from which he graduated in 1800 as a classical scholar. In 1803,fulfilling family wishes, he was ordained minister and appointed toLoughrea’s curacy. There, he met and married Henrietta Kingsberry. In1806, he was transferred to St Peter’s, Dublin, where he stayed until hisdeath. Although in an affluent neighbourhood, Maturin’s income wastoo small to support a growing family. He turned to writing, probablyhis true vocation, hoping it would provide much needed additionalearnings.

In 1807, Maturin published Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montoriounder the pseudonym of Dennis Jasper Murphy, at his own expense. Inspite of weaknesses, the novel already announced some of the majorthemes which Maturin would fully exploit later: human fears, guilt,


revenge, persecution, fanaticism, and what he called the ‘midnight dark-ness of the soul’. In Father Schemoli he introduced the double figure ofthe WANDERING JEW and Faust, later incarnated at their best inMelmoth.

The following year, Maturin published The Wild Irish Boy, under thesame conditions. Urged by financial difficulties, he had decided to writeabout Ireland, expecting his choice would satisfy the public’s taste. Yetthe novel was poorly received. Maturin later admitted not enjoyingwriting it. Moreover, his apparent fascination with sexual taboos as wellas with THE SUPERNATURAL, the irrational and the diabolic, was en-dangering his relationship with the Church and already compromisinghis chances of advancement.

In 1809, a charge of embezzlement was unjustly brought againstMaturin’s father, who lost his profitable position. Until he was provedinnocent and reappointed, the Maturin family was plunged into extremepoverty. This dramatic turn of events marked the intensification of inces-sant financial worries which were to haunt and torment Maturin for therest of his life. In 1810, all chances of escaping from ruin were obliter-ated: Maturin had provided security for a relative (his brother, mostlikely) whose debts were transferred to him. He declared: ‘the only realevil of life is coming fast on me – horrid actual want is staring me in theface’. Not surprisingly, the theme of poverty pervades all his works. TheWalbergs’ fate especially, in Melmoth the Wanderer, seems to echo, uncan-nily, that of the Maturins. To guarantee additional income, Maturinstarted tutoring and boarding students, but his role as a teacher neversatisfied him. He went back to writing.

The Milesian Chief, Maturin’s best novel so far, was published in 1812under the same pseudonym. It enabled him to exploit Ireland’s history,traditions and culture, and to explore the ‘obscure recesses of the humanheart’ – one of his favourite themes. His views of patriotism, war, reli-gion and love, as well as his ambivalent feelings towards his country,were divulged more openly too. In December, Maturin started a life-longcorrespondence with Sir Walter Scott, who had positively reviewed FatalRevenge, and became his literary adviser, encouraging friend and loyalconfidant.

In 1814, Maturin sent Scott the manuscript of a drama, Bertram; or, The Castle of St Adolbrand, which, after some revision, was referred toLord Byron. In May 1816, it was produced at Drury Lane, with EdmundKean in the leading role. Bertram’s success, both on stage and in print, was far beyond Maturin’s expectations. The character of Bertram(more strongly depicted in the text than on stage, to his disappointment)driven by uncontrollable passions and demonic forces towards revenge,self-destruction, murder, and driving his former love to MADNESS

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and DEATH thrilled audiences. Maturin had won his first literaryvictory: he consequently revealed the authorship of his previous works.Unfortunately, this further increased, irreparably, the conflict betweenhimself and the Church.

However, encouraged by such financial success, he wrote anotherdrama, keeping Edmund Kean in mind. Manuel, produced at Drury Lanein March 1817, failed miserably. Kean was blamed – he offered a verypoor performance indeed – but Maturin conceded it was a bad play. Thestrange, heterogeneous combination of theatrical genres, incredible im-probabilities in the plot, and the lack of a likable hero, contributed to itsdownfall. Once again, Maturin’s attempt to suit the public’s taste ratherthan following his own inclinations, had failed. Moreover, SamuelColeridge’s spiteful diatribe against Bertram, which he denounced for itssubversive, immoral and ‘Jacobinical’ tendencies, made life much harderfor Maturin the clergyman and writer. The money earned from the playhad dwindled away: it paid debts and was spent extravagantly – for awhile, Maturin indulged in dandyism, living above his means. By 1818,his financial situation was on the verge of collapse.

Women; or, Pour et Contre was published that same year. This uncon-ventional love story offered a good study of the psychological and phys-ical nature of amorous passion and of its destructive power. Maturin alsosuccessfully analysed Evangelicalism, its hypocrisy, and the unnecess-ary, devastating denial of one’s humanity. He wrote realistically andsensitively, displaying an insightful knowledge of human nature.

Not convinced that drama was not his medium, Maturin wroteFredolfo, produced at Covent Garden in 1819 and performed once. It washis final attempt as a playwright. Actors were dissatisfied, and so wasthe audience. The villain’s murderous violence and treachery infuriatedthem. Paradoxically, Fredolfo is better than Bertram owing to Maturin’sskilful portrait of the ‘wakeful demon’ in man. He demonstrates howthin the line between good and evil often is, and how repression easilyresults in cruelty, sadism, violence and death. Such an uncompromisingposition sparked the unfounded idea that Maturin was going insane – anidea somewhat reinforced by the publication of his masterpiece, in 1820.

Thanks to Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Maturin’s name has survivedas Melmoth joined the ranks of Byron’s Manfred, Goethe’s Faust,Milton’s Satan, and Molière’s Don Juan. Five tales, structured in achinese-box fashion, unfold the exceptional and supernatural destiny ofMelmoth the outcast, who is granted a 150 year life extension for sellinghis soul in exchange for knowledge forbidden to man. The novel com-bines Maturin’s favourite themes: religious persecution and fanaticism(his anti-Catholicism finds its best expression here), man’s evil and inhu-mane potential, madness, the corrupting and destructive nature of


society and the inevitable failure of love. It offers a wide variety of set-tings (Ireland, an Indian island, an English madhouse, a Spanishmonastery, the Inquisition’s headquarters) and memorable characters(Monçada, Stanton, Immalee, Walberg, Elinor). Written forcefully, convinc-ingly, with the full commitment of its author, Melmoth is an exceptionallycaptivating work.

In 1824, The Albigenses, a historical novel about the Catholic crusadesagainst the Albigenses in thirteenth-century France, was published.Maturin’s financial situation was worse than ever. His health declinedrapidly, owing to long hours of work and little sleep (he always wrote atnight). He died on 30 October 1824, an isolated, depressed and poverty-stricken man. He is remembered for an interesting book of Sermons andworks which offered the unique and dark vision of a cruel, inhumaneworld characterised by the disintegration of moral values, the perversionand sadism of religion, and the omnipotence of Evil.

CÉCILE MALET-DAGRÉOU

Melville, Herman (1819–91)

Melville’s more or less first-ever publication was nothing other than acanny piece of Gothic, the two-part ‘Fragments from a Writing Desk’published in the Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser for 4 and 18 May 1839. Juvenilia as it may be, its young swain’s pursuit of a beau-tiful, veiled deaf-mute treads a nice line between seriousness and spoof.Whichever the case, Melville shows an early familiarity with the legacyof ‘Monk’ LEWIS, HORACE WALPOLE and Mrs RADCLIFFE.

The literary career proper, however, took shape with Typee (1846), andits sequel Omoo (1847), South Seas romances which purported – not alittle disingenuously – to be the ‘unvarnished truth’ of Melville’s ownsea-wanderings in the Pacific. Adventureliness there is in profusion, butalso signs of a darker, altogether more concealed world, a ParadiseFlawed. Cannibalism hovers threateningly. Rites and sacrifices, even the tattooing, contribute to a kind of Marquesan/Tahitian Gothic. IsTommo/Typee, the narrator, bound for elysium or inferno, in heaven orhell? None of which did anything but further intrigue an early reader-ship quick to pronounce Melville the season’s hit in being the latestAmerican mariner-turned-writer.

Mardi (1849), his next ‘romance’, strikes a yet more consciously Gothicnote, the world as encyphered, mysterious, endemically and deeplyother. Begun as though again Pacific island-odyssey, it quickly becomes

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a kind of self-conscious (and so unleavened) Spenserian–metaphysicalallegory centred in the narrator’s quest for his white goddess Yillah, andfor her nemesis, the dark Queen Hautia. That it failed as much in sales asin imaginative design hardly surprises. The literariness intrudes, thephilosophy looks all too newly acquired. Almost inevitably his pub-lishers called him back to what Melville grumblingly designated his‘cakes and ale’ fiction. Yet the upshot, two narratives also drawn fromhis seafaring, once again was not to be without its own touches of Gothic.

Redburn (1849), based on his youthful crossing from New York toLiverpool and back at the age of nineteen, contains a gallery of horrors,from the sight of a sailor seized by delirium tremens (and to whose bunkthe neophyte hero is then assigned) to the mean, tubercular Jackson whotyrannises the crew and dies splattering his heart’s blood over them, andfrom a Liverpool dockside of paupery and starvation to an outbreak offever in steerage on the return journey. White-Jacket (1850), the world as imaged in the man-of-war Neversink, bound on a journey from Peruround Cape Horn to Rio and then to America, contains similar com-ponents: the caul-like jacket which nearly causes the narrator’s deathwhen he falls overboard, the flogging episodes, the gargoyle figure ofSurgeon Cadwallader Cuticle, and the closed ‘Articles of War’ commandof Captain Claret, a likely first silhouette of Ahab in Moby-Dick (1851).

But it was with his great centrepiece, his ‘hell-fired’ whale-hunt, thatMelville came to be thought a virtuoso of Gothicism. For Moby-Dickdeploys its own working components in the genre, an ever-elusive phan-tasmal whale (‘ubiquitous in time and place’), a Faustian New Englanderof a captain in Ahab, the Pequod as a world-ship as eclectic and polyglotas any, and Ishmael as the classic ‘isolato’ narrator. Each, too, is boundupon a journey which transposes the search for sperm-oil into a stilllarger quest for the vexing, endlessly cross-plied, ‘light’ of all truth. It is a quest that takes them through hell-fires (‘The Try-works’), sea-fury(‘The Three-Day Chase’), the Lear-like stomp and fury of Ahab (‘TheSymphony’) and the final, hubristic sinking of ship and crew with onlyIshmael to bear narrative witness (‘The Chase – Third Day’).

Ahab himself, over-reacher, revenger, manichean, might virtually bethe Gothic HERO/VILLAIN in propria persona. Hidden from view untilthe Pequod is out to sea, heard only through the ominous tap of his peg-leg, tortured by his sense of what the whale has done to him and what‘hidden’ powers it signifies, he believes the false prophesy of Fedallah,his secret Parsee, and dies roped and dragged to his death by the dreamof a victorious last confrontation. His affection for Pip, the black boydriven to near-madness by his fall overboard, his Shakespearean talk, hisnecromantic blessing of the harpoons, and his deafness to all appealfrom Starbuck and the other Mates, indeed all call up Lear. As his own


Old Testament name implies, and for all that he ‘has his humanities’,Ahab becomes the murderous idealist, a ruined and ruinous monarch.Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff notwithstanding, can nineteenth-centuryGothicism be said to have produced a fiercer incarnation?

Mid-way into writing, Moby-Dick Melville published his ‘Hawthorneand His Mosses’, ostensibly an encomium to the HAWTHORNE of‘Young Goodman Brown’ and the other New England tales of Mosses fromAn Old Manse (1846). But in seizing upon ‘those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality’ and the ‘blackness in Hawthorne’, he as much speaks of, and to, the dynamics of his own art. Not only was Moby-Dick so indicated but also Pierre (1852), which followed, a Gothic text indeed whose shift of scene from country to city and assiduously reflexivestory of the writer as ‘fool of truth’ suggests life to be a huis clos, a fatallabyrinth and incarceration. As Pierre Glendinning dies in his prison-cell,would-be redeemer of his own father’s fathering of an illegitimate daugh-ter, and with his intended wife and half-sister to hand, the scene calls up vintage Gothic horror – though, as always with Melville, with just asuspicion of hoax. The spirit of Mrs RADCLIFFE may so accompany thatof, say, a Thomas Love Peacock and the mock-Gothic of Nightmare Abbey(1818).

Melville’s stories, in turn, sardonic, often dazzlingly concentrated andelusive, work their own Gothic seam. Three from The Piazza Tales (1856)in particular signify: ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ (1853), with its portrait of life blanched and drained by Wall Street’s materialist ethos; ‘TheEncantadas’ (1854), based on Melville’s experience of the GalápagosIsles, as a larval, Dantean hell; and ‘Benito Cereno’ (1855) as a worldturned upside-down, a slave-ship whose black insurrectionists mimictheir own former enslavement and which probes the unconscionablestain of Empire as a power-system of human ownership and servitude.

With The Confidence-Man (1857), a Mississippi ship-of-fools ‘masquer-ade’ told as a dawn-to-midnight river sailing, Melville closed his publicstory-telling account. The novel’s ending, inside a cabin whose solarlamp is fading, also draws on a suitably Gothic impetus: the world as il-lusion, chimera, a dark-hued As You Like It of cynical plays and players.There remains other Melville, to be sure, notably the poetry of Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1865), which contains its own Gothic visionof America’s fratricide in pieces like ‘The Apparition’ and ‘Malvern Hill’,and Clarel (1876), a massive quest-for-faith verse epic whose Holy Landsetting and pilgrimage take on any amount of Gothic shadow.

But the ‘inside narrative’ which most has been given posthumous re-habilitation is Billy Budd, Sailor (1888–91). Its triangle of ‘phenomenal’men includes ‘welkin-eyed’ Billy, ‘starry’ Captain Edward Vere, and the‘surcharged’ John Claggart – a shipboard Judas or Iago whose naming of

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the foretopman as mutineer may indeed be due to ‘the mystery of iniq-uity’. In the setting aboard a British man-of-war during the NapoleonicWars, and in which Billy will go to his death as martyred innocence, themaster-at-arms in Melville’s novella offers a glimpse of his last Gothicfigure, no less than a villain fated to despoil Eden.

A. ROBERT LEE

Onions, Oliver (1873–1961)

George Oliver Onions, author of several novels, is best remembered for his contribution to the tradition of British ghost stories. AlthoughOnions’ shorter works are frequently anthologised as ghost stories, his manipulation of supernatural influences is more expansive than this generic category might suggest. Onions’ work represents a breakfrom the typically Gothic forms which haunt the nineteenth century, andredefines ghostliness as approximate to subjectivity. Ghosts are rarelyseen in Onions’ work, where they haunt, more insidiously, the senses ofsound and touch. It is this innovative movement away from the ghostlyOther towards the ghostly self upon which Onions’ definition as anauthor pivots. The ghost stories embrace influences from a wide his-torical parenthesis – originating in an Edwardianism still steeped in the Aesthetic excesses of the Fin-de-Siècle, as found in a work such as‘Benlian’ (1911), and progressing into the psychological complexity andsubjective crisis of Modernism – the First World War engendering ghostsof its own along the way as in, for example ‘The Rope in the Rafters’(1935) and ‘“John Gladwin Says …”’ (1929).

The themes of Onions’ stories are far reaching in reference, rangingfrom ancient mythologies to the trauma of artistic creation. However, the works share a common focus upon the haunting play of desire and its repeatedly fatal consequences. The ghostliness of sexual desire is the overtly coded metaphor in such works as ‘The Rosewood Door’(1929) and ‘The Painted Face’ (1929), whilst the autonomous desire of the work of art is the uncanny subject of ‘Hic Jacet’ (1911) and‘Resurrection in Bronze’(1935). It is in ‘The Beckoning Fair One’ (1911),Onions’ most celebrated ghost story, that these two axes collide in the form of an author haunted by a beguiling succubus, freely passingbetween the novel he is trying to write and the house he inhabits, as the scenes of haunting. This would seem to capture the central anxiety in Onions’ supernatural works – the dislocation between reality and


Art, the ghostly impasse of desire and the haunted condition of sub-jectivity.

RACHEL JACKSON

Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–49)

Although Poe has often been credited for it, he did not invent the Gothictale. Many of his first reviewers, moreover, lamented that he had takenup a passé mode when his fiction began to appear. Nevertheless, Poe’sname is inextricably entwined with literary Gothicism, and he did alterits courses. He spoke explicitly for himself, and implicitly for many othergood Gothic writers, when in the Preface to his first collection of shortstories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839–40), he countered thecharges of excessive ‘German’, or what we now call ‘Gothic’, elementsthat critics deplored in his fiction: ‘If in many of my productions terrorhas been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of thesoul, – that I have deduced this terror only from its legitimate sources,and urged it only to its legitimate results.’ In other words, Poe exploredterror where it originated and functioned: in the mind. His hauntedminds reveal far more art than do those in many another Gothic talewhere the mainstay is a thrill at sheer gut level.

Poe’s greatest love was poetry, a natural for one captivated mainly bythe Byron–Shelley spell, and secondarily by the verse of their con-temporaries whose pursuits tended toward Gothicism, witness WalterScott, whose earliest poems derive from German horror balladry, not to mention numerous lesser writers. Poe’s poetry early displayed hispredilections toward, and some sophisticated handling of, Gothic tropes.Tamerlane (1827) indicates his informed treatment of the prototypicalGothic hero. Tamerlane is blighted by thwarted love, and he con-sequently emerges as one motivated by fiery passions and tyrannicalconduct. Echoes of Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Byron’sManfred (1817) and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18), the Tamburlaineplays of several predecessors, including MATTHEW LEWIS, the Eblisepisode in WILLIAM BECKFORD’s Vathek (1786): all these and muchmore make Tamerlane a natural heir to their Gothicism. No matter thatPoe’s pagan Asiatic warlord’s making a dying confession to a Catholicpriest is anachronistic.

Poe’s Gothic art shows to far greater advantage in shorter poems:‘Bridal Ballad’, ‘The Coliseum’, ‘Sonnet – To Silence’, ‘Lenore’, ‘The Lake’,

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‘The Raven’, ‘Ulalume’, ‘Dream-Land’, and ‘Annabel Lee’ offer represen-tative examples. In such works, Poe, like many of the British Romanticswho immediately preceded him, transformed what had been essentiallydescriptive landscapes into a geography of the imagination, and those in-terior worlds were fraught with far more nightmares than comfortingdreams. ‘Dream-Land’ depicts experiences ‘Out of SPACE – out of TIME’,and thus it prepares for later works by Poe in which the perimeters ofhuman experience are often distorted, at once holding out effects ofGothic thrills for thrill’s sake and plausible psychological horrors. Thespeaker turns inward to a region of weird mindscapes when the ‘heart whose woes are legion’ threatens to overwhelm him. Within thisdream world, amidst vastnesses of flowing waters, great valleys, moun-tains constantly toppling, and fiery skies, supernatural visitants likeghouls and ‘ghosts’, ‘Sheeted Memories of the Past –’, help to enrich thefantasy.

Such later successes as ‘The Raven’, ‘Ulalume’, and ‘Annabel Lee’evolve from these and other earlier poems in theme and form. Poe re-peatedly stated that the most poetic of all themes was the death of abeautiful woman, and the trio named dramatise events inspired by deadyoung females. To some extent, these maidens are analogous to theghosts whose conduct influences the courses of the protagonists. ‘TheRaven’, in its insistent rhythms and rhymes, produces monotony deliber-ately calculated as enchantment for both protagonist and readers. For thespeaker, weary from poring over books of magic, such technique mayserve as the calling up, possibly inadvertently, of a haunting presencesymbolised by the bird. For readers, the technique offers hypnotic luresinto a world of nightmare fantasy. As the speaker drifts from a being in reasonable command of his emotional faculties ever further into anunsettling obsession that seems sure to destroy his rationality, renderedforcibly by means of the shadow enshrouding him as the poem con-cludes, the raven alters from a seemingly innocuous bird into a creaturefrom the netherworld – geographic and emotional – whose destructivepowers seem to multiply until he represents the very devil figure thatfolklore has long perceived in him. We might detect similarities betweenthe ‘drizzly November’ in the soul of HERMAN MELVILLE’s Ishmael,in Moby-Dick (1851), and the ‘drear December’ background for Poe’s pro-tagonist. Allusions to the beloved maiden Lenore, now dead, the sub-suming of intellectuality by non-rational forces, as the raven mounts thebust of Pallas, and the acceleration of darkness as the ‘radiant’ maidenfades and the raven takes over, combine with the notions earlier estab-lished – that the speaker tenants a chamber (his mind) that increasinglyhaunts him – to reinforce a drama of a disintegrating mind. The growingsense of that debilitating condition, set forth with an indirectness and


hesitancy, enhanced by the repetitions in rhyme and phrase, further en-ervates the speaker. Here indeed is a Gothic story in dramatic verse.

Likewise, the haunting episode in ‘Ulalume’ occurs fittingly onHalloween night, as the speaker and his Psyche, a counsellor connectedwith light (perhaps the glow of a mind formerly at ease), traverse a partlyfamiliar, partly strange, pathway. Ulalume and her lover have indeedbeen star-crossed, as is borne out by the astrological lore – of sexualityand war – that bodes ill for the living travellers as they wander throughinauspicious surroundings rife with hints of imminent eruption. In‘Ulalume’ we may be witnessing a debate between the male and femalesides of a self that has grown dangerously out of touch with reality. Themelancholy speaker and the ‘graveyard’ (see GRAVEYARD SCHOOL)aspects from earlier Gothicism gain a new life of artistic functionalism.‘Annabel Lee’ moves us from situations of death-in-life to what may beactual death. The demise of his beautiful young Annabel may be pre-sented in lilting tones in order to hint that that tragedy has deranged thespeaker, rather as the emotional destruction of Shakespeare’s Ophelialeads to her plaining song. We are left to wonder whether we have beenlistening to a necrophiliac or to an actual ghost.

Poe subsequently tried his hand at other literary forms, among themPolitian, a fragmentary verse drama. Several scenes appeared in theSouthern Literary Messenger during 1835–6, doubtless because of need foradditional copy, and Poe only grudgingly consented to reprint them inThe Raven and other Poems (1845) to fill out that book, as if he had becomeashamed of this early, fumbling work. Based on the famous Beauchamp-Sharp ‘Kentucky tragedy’ of 1825, a triangular affair of sensationalpsycho-sexual proportions that culminated in the murder of the seducer,suicide of the wronged woman, and execution of the murderer, herhusband, who recovered from attempted suicide to be hanged. Set insixteenth-century Rome, with characters whose classical names derivefrom Poe’s knowledge of ancient writings, Politian bears all the trappingsof the Gothic plays (see GOTHIC DRAMA) that proliferated during thewake of the GOTHIC NOVEL craze of the 1790s and continued to bepopular well into the nineteenth century. Politian is interesting as a liter-ary curiosity, but little more. Its characters and dialogue are wooden.

Short fiction allowed Poe his greatest successes, however, and fromfirst to last in that form his bonds with Gothicism are unmistakable. Poesought in fiction writing the financial security that his verse had notachieved. To meet the demands of the marketplace for fiction, he under-took a course of intensive independent study in the successful Gothicstory, so to speak, quickly mastered the rudiments of such marketablefare, and thereafter produced the works that have brought him lastingfame. Like many another young writer, in his exuberance over an


evident ability to fashion what he thought likely to sell, Poe soon turnedto mocking what writers of terror tales, himself included, turned out asstaple wares. His propensities for satirising and parodying Gothichorrors have contributed to continual divergences in critical opinions.

Poe’s work came to the notice of a group selected to judge a literarycontest sponsored by one of the mammoth weeklies in vogue during the1830s and 1840s, the Baltimore Saturday Visiter, in 1833. Poe’s tale ‘MS.found in a Bottle’, was awarded the prize for fiction, followed by public-ation in the Saturday Visiter in October 1833. That event brought abouthis friendship with John Pendleton Kennedy, a recognised man of lettersof the day, and Kennedy’s good offices led to Poe’s embarking on whatwould be the first of several editorial assignments that brought attentionto the periodicals for which he worked.

Simultaneous with these kinds of recognition, Poe revealed the schemefor what, had it appeared as he initially conceived it, would have been a highly sophisticated book, a frame-narrative centred in a pretentious lit-erary organisation, with much of its content connected to Gothic ele-ments. ‘Tales of the Folio Club’, the title generally used for this project,numbered as its members caricatures of renowned fiction writers, whowere to read tales that in many respects would have been comic take-offs from or ‘quizzes’ of their models. Sir Walter Scott, Horace Smith,Lady Morgan, N. P. Willis, and even Poe himself, figured in this augustgathering. Many of the tales incorporated humorous motifs of glut-tony and alcoholism, mirroring the proclivities of the Folio Club con-stituents themselves. Each club member would have presented a talefashioned in his own manner, followed by debate as to its merits, giveand take so constructed as to ridicule pomposity in contemporaneousliterary criticism. Finally, one disgusted participant was to have seizedthe manuscripts and hastened with them to a publisher in order to exposethe follies of the enterprise. Unfortunately, because of publishers’ reject-ions, this book never appeared; Poe dismantled it to sell individual storiesto gift books and magazines. Early reviewers divined comic impulses at work in the stories as they appeared singly, but without the Folio Club context such comic purposes were obscured, and so they haveremained.

‘MS. found in a Bottle’, for example, might well be a a supernaturalstory and a drunkard’s tall tale, as might ‘The Assignation’ (originallyentitled ‘The Visionary’), ‘Bon-Bon’, ‘Metzengerstein’, ‘Silence – A Fable’,and ‘Shadow – A Parable’. ‘Lionizing’ and ‘King Pest’ may in part mimethe disruption occasioned by the theft of the manuscripts. All are markedby what may seem like clumsy stylistics and particularly stilted dia-logue. If these were calculated as deliberate techniques involving intox-ication and gluttony, however, they allow us to apprehend a subtlety in


Poe’s fiction that had not been present, or that had not been so artisticallywrought, by many earlier Gothicists.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837–8), Poe’s novel written at thebehest of James Kirke Paulding, which has won increasing critical atten-tion and respect in the last forty years, is in all likelihood an outgrowthof the ‘Tales of the Folio Club’, with exaggerated horrors, violence and brutality, natural or supernatural (or apparently supernatural), expressed in rhetoric that resonates with the same indecisiveness, repetition, and tall-tale qualities found in the earlier drunkards’ tales, allrelated by the typical Poe narrator, a self-centred, emotionally over-wrought and anxiety-ridden character.

The shorter fiction, however, is usually cited for giving Poe repute asone who transformed shop-worn Gothic plots, settings and charactersinto the stuff of modern literature, most notably as it portrays the mindunder agonising pressures. The notion that one may easily distinguishone body or type of Poe’s fiction from another pales when we recall thatthe detective story as we now know it, as well as science fiction, are actu-ally results of Poe’s experimental Gothicism. ‘The Murders in the RueMorgue’ (1841), for example, stands as a work of ‘explained supernatu-ralism’ because its seemingly otherworldly atrocities prove to be theactivities of an orangutan. Likewise, the circumstances in ‘The Mysteryof Marie Roget’ and ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1845) could, with few alter-ations, be moved wholly into territories of the supernatural. Just so, asregards science fiction. Thus they typify the hoaxes which their authorwas wont to perpetrate upon his readers for purposes of testing theiralertness. The weird world of Roderick Usher and his odd tastes andpursuits have been discovered to originate in medical knowledge andterminology (‘Nervous Fever’, symptom by symptom) of Poe’s day. ‘TheSystem of Dr Tarr and Professor Fether’, as well, derives from scientificexplorations in treating insanity during Poe’s time, although its surfacedrift might readily lull us into suspecting that supernatural agenciesdictate the action. Kindred underpinnings enliven ‘The Masque of theRed Death’, explicable as plausibly in terms of Prospero’s illusory wishto evade realities that link life with time and death as it is a horrific talethat is only rhetorically above much other scary storytelling by Poe’scontemporaries.

The renowned tales about women – ‘Berenice’, ‘Morella’, ‘Ligeia’, and ‘Eleonora’, along with ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and ‘The Assignation’ – take us as certainly as does ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ into parables of unintegrated selves, as they do into claptraphaunted castles tenanted by perishing frail ones who are cardboardrather than fully realised characters. Poe subtly manipulates Gothic con-ventions in theme and form to symbolise the dangers that lurk when the


potentially creative, nurturing, and sexual female principle in the self isrepressed by the ill-informed, fearful, and thus destructively aggressive,male principle. Again Poe pushes close the borders of melodramaticsand psychological depths, but the palm must be given to the latter.Interestingly, that generally overlooked tale in such discussions, ‘TheAssignation’, is Poe’s first rendering in fiction of his death-of-a-beautiful-woman theme, well framed within implications regarding creativity (in art and human sexuality) rendered in a poetic prose that leads us toponder gender issues as much as the occurrences in the subsequent talesof this type have done for many readers. A supernatural aura seems to hover over this tale until its startling conclusion conveys anothermessage.

The other overlooked, or ignored, tale about women, ‘Eleonora’, sug-gests (because it was Poe’s last with this theme) that the narrator’ssecond love relationship brings about an integrated selfhood; thus thevisitation from Eleonora’s spirit is understandably beneficent, in contrastto the horrors occasioned by the ‘returns’ of the females or theirinfluences in the previous tales. We could also, in such contexts, preceivein the conclusion to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which breaks off as he comes upon a mysterious white, shrouded giant figure, the cul-mination of young Pym’s quest for selfhood and maturity. The whitefigure, that is, may symbolise a feminine presence essential to completethe development and maturity of the self.

One could continue to enumerate tales from the Poe canon that trans-fuse new vitality into Gothic veins: ‘The Black Cat’, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’,‘William Wilson’, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’,‘Hop-Frog’, ‘Mesmeric Revelation’, the apocalyptic colloquies, ‘SomeWords with a Mummy’, ‘The Premature Burial’. ‘The Sphinx’ – and manymore. Forbidding worlds and equally eerie inhabitants of such worlds arehaunting in their presences. In all of them we encounter kindred speechpatterns and singular actions among the characters. Haunted castles ofthe mind rather than antiquarian descriptions of architectural ruins cometo the fore. Not for idle purposes do the bridal chamber in ‘Ligeia’ and themansion in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ respectively resemble a coffinand a human head. Nor are the journeys in ‘William Wilson’, ‘The Pit andthe Pendulum’, or ‘The System of Dr Tarr and Professor Fether’ circular,and largely interior, as a consequence of any inartistic repetitiveness onPoe’s part.

Form and content coalesce beautifully in all of these tales, but ‘The Fallof the House of Usher’ stands out as Poe’s most significant creation inGothicism, and therefore it warrants extended consideration. The talemay profitably be read as the narrator’s journey into the depths of self; there he confronts horrors devolving from disparateness between


appearance and reality. The uninviting, vague country he has passedthrough en route to the House of Usher may be suggestive of his ownemotional uncertainties. He approaches the Usher mansion, representa-tive of his own head or mind, with much reluctance, as if he is afraid tostep inside himself. This hesitancy is emphasised by the halting, stum-bling prose in the opening paragraphs. Once he decides to enter thehouse, he leaves behind his horse, the servants, and the family physician,symbolic perhaps, respectively, of sexuality, everyday living, and a spiritof scientific rationalism.

In this interpretation, Roderick has indeed been a childhood com-panion, one whose own unstable identity, yet one so tightly knit to that ofhis twin, Madeline, symbolises the storyteller’s own condition. Instabilityis evident in matters related to physical and psychological aspects of life,and thus the ‘house’ of Usher offers us multiple significances. If theUshers’ own debilitated organic and mental health results from incest,Roderick’s repressed sexuality (manifest in the ‘illness’ of Madeline,which may point to thwarted sexual and other nurturing and creative im-pulses), or whatever else ‘bad blood’ may include, we need not doubt thatit frightens the narrator, who figuratively beholds the situation within hisown self in its female and male components in the Ushers and their house.The narrator has, of course, voluntarily entered this head–edifice, tosojourn for a time, and in so doing he shows his kinship with the all toocurious protagonists from previous Gothicism, who inevitably step intothe very places they should most likely avoid. Like the knight in‘Eldorado’, Poe’s most upbeat poem, this explorer seeks to know life’smysteries; unlike that traveller, however, this visitor to the House ofUsher finally flees in terror, without any trace of his once condescendingstance toward Roderick. He is given a lesson in the consequences of un-balancing the self, once again rendered in terms of gender upsets.

No wonder, then, that he had not known sooner about Madeline; hisand Roderick’s companionship had been that of adolescents. Even at thispoint, his reaction to her (and what she represents) is one of astonish-ment and anxiety, as if he cannot readily admit the female potential inhis own makeup. That Madeline should overcome her weaknesses inorder to return to Roderick, and that in such a return she may perform asa vampire figure, is a natural way of dramatising the evils of repression.Here, all femininity is subsumed because Roderick (and the narrator)fear this part of personality, and yet they are fascinated by it such that itis delineated in terms of a twin relationship. If the narrator finds in theUshers reflections of his own psycho-physical makeup, then Madeline’s‘malady’ is as undeniably as much of his own making as it is ofRoderick’s. That bonding shows in his reponses to Roderick’s artistic en-deavours and hypochondria; they repell him yet he toys with them. Thus


he is as responsible for the decay and downfall of the house-head asthey. He is left at the close of the tale suffering from the same ‘lights-out’symptoms as those that make ‘The Haunted Palace’, Roderick’s ownpoem, so appalling. Like Roderick, this character has succumbed to thefear of fear itself – and the fear originates in his own warped psyche.

We ought also never to pronounce exclusively on the comedy or sobrietyin these, or other Poe works, although zealots have argued for one oranother kind of interpretation as the more significant. ‘Ligeia’ and ‘The Fallof the House of Usher’ have been read as wholly serious fictions (variouslyinvolving autobiography, psychology, race, gender, and Marxism) and,with equal validity, as parodies of the excesses to which Gothicism is oftenprone, indicative of how easily the horrific may slip into the amusing.Keeping company with these works are ‘The Raven’, an early poem, ‘TheSleeper’, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (horrifying, yet not without sardonichumour), ‘The System of Dr Tarr and Professor Fether’ and ‘Silence – AFable’. All force us to consider carefully the possibilities for horror andhumour embedded within their frameworks. Terrors are there, whetherthose aroused by murder, violence, animal aspects of human nature, or just a sense that appearances are slipping away to leave us confronting unpleasant realities. Perhaps the concomitant comedy is suggestive of motivation toward laughter to forestall weeping at such recognitions, oftendencies to laugh, or to try to laugh, away our fears. Such tactics makesus leave many of Poe’s creative works with thoughts that we have beenwitnessing dramas of irreparably fragmented selves.

The close resemblances between Poe’s tales and poems remind us that in the former, as in the latter, he manifests a well-nigh Keatsian art inappealing to our sensory perceptions, inviting us to walk a tightropebetween external and emotional experiences. Not without forethought doesMr Blackwood in ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’ exhort the SignoraPsyche Zenobia, aspirant writer of popular fiction: ‘Sensations are the greatthings after all.’ Poe’s creative work merges sensations and things, makingcomprehensible the weight he so often gives to physical description as themeans of entrance into corridors of the mind or as symbols of those corri-dors. Poe also realised the virtues of keeping his Gothicism terse; by meansof that practice he created Gothicism that still carries an impact while thatfostered by scores of other Gothicists has faded, because length makes it boresome. As a precursor of writers from HERMAN MELVILLE,CHARLES DICKENS, HENRY JAMES, ARTHUR MACHEN, M. P. Shiel,Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, ANGELA CARTER,and STEPHEN KING, plus hosts of others who have turned out occult,crime, and science fiction, Poe is not to be ignored.

BENJAMIN F. FISHER


Polidori, John (1795–1821)

Byron’s physician, John Polidori, was the foster parent of the vampiretale in English, which had been fathered and then abandoned by Byron.He had also been present at the birth of two major Gothic icons:Frankenstein and the vampire. In 1816, Polidori accompanied Byron to Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland, against the wishes of his Italian English family. It was there that the famousghost-storytelling episode took place with fellow-guests, MARY and P. B. SHELLEY and Mary’s half-sister Claire Clairmont, who was preg-nant with Byron’s daughter, Allegra, whom he would also abandon. In her 1831 preface to Frankenstein (1818), Mary Shelley explains how a nightmare had unleashed her initial writing block. Hallucinations,sleep-walking and nightmares were the subject of Polidori’s recentlycompleted medical thesis. Might he have been a prototype for VictorFrankenstein as ‘the pale student of unhallowed arts’, in Mary Shelley’swaking dream? Polidori’s own contribution had concerned a skull-headed lady, whose disfigurement had been her punishment for peepingthrough a key-hole. Ironically John Murray, Byron’s publisher, had hiredhim as a kind of Peeping Tom by commissioning him to keep a diary ofhis travels with Byron. The Diary of John Polidori, edited by his nephew,William Michael Rossetti, did not appear until 1911.

An earlier fictional version is The Vampyre: a Tale by Lord Byron (1819),which was an adaptation of the fragment Byron had contributed to theghost-story-telling events at Villa Diodati. Byron denied his author-ship of the tale declaring: ‘I have a personal dislike to Vampires, and the little acquaintance I have with them would by no means induce me to reveal their secrets’. His original fragment was fictional auto-biography in that it concerned two men travelling to the Continent, ayounger narrator and an older man called Augustus Darvell, who diesafter begging his companion to keep his death a secret. On returning tohis native country, the narrator discovers a resurrected Darvell, makinglove to his former friend’s sister. Here lie the bare bones of ‘TheVampyre’.

The fragment was abandoned by Byron as an ‘uncongenial task’ andtaken up and fleshed out by Polidori, who rechristened the vampire LordRuthven. This was the name of a character modelled on Byron, takenfrom the novel Glenarvon (1816), written by his estranged mistressCaroline Lamb as an attack on her former lover. Polidori’s ‘TheVampyre’ tells the story of the mysterious Clarence de Ruthven, LordGlenarvon who, like Byron, was a seducer of women. One of these in-cludes a Lady Mercer, based on Caroline Lamb, who is mentioned at thebeginning of the story as fawning on Lord Ruthven. In this roman à clef,

Polidori, John (1795–1821) 75

Polidori himself is the model for the noble hero and narrator, Aubrey,who is portrayed as Ruthven’s victim. In 1818, Polidori’s acquaintancewith the world of Byronic privilege may have prompted him to write anessay criticising rank, wealth, power and fame.

The ambivalence of Polidori’s relationship with Byron spans outrightrejection to homo-eroticism and is mirrored by that of their fictionalcounterparts. Indeed, there is a camp quality in the very nickname ‘PollyDolly’ that Byron bestowed on Polidori. The rivalry between the twomen was intense. On one occasion, Polidori was so demolished by Byronboasting of his achievements that he rushed to his room and took a phialof poison from his medicine-chest. Only Byron’s intervention saved himfrom taking his life in a curious parallel of Ruthven saving Aubrey’s lifein The Vampyre. In his own life, Polidori followed some of Ruthven’sfootsteps. He gambled, got into debt and was imprisoned in Milan, onlyto be rescued by Byron. Eventually, Polidori had a carriage accident,which is likely to have caused brain damage. On returning to his father’shouse, following a disastrous run of gambling losses, he died after swal-lowing a tumbler of prussic acid.

Polidori had become progressively demented, like the fictionalAubrey, who goes mad and dies in the knowledge that his ‘sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!’. His novel Ernestus Berchtold, or,The Modern Oedipus (1819) is about the incest of the eponymous hero,who marries his sister. It never achieved the success of The Vampyre,which inspired a sequel, Lord Ruthwen, [sic] ou les Vampires (1820) byCyprien Bérard. In the same year, Charles Nodier wrote a play for the London stage, Le Vampire, which was translated into English byJames Robinson Planché as The Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles. Theliterary vampire can be traced via a male reproductive blood line fromLord Ruthven as the father of the English vampire, through Varney theVampire to Count Dracula.


Radcliffe, Ann (1764–1823)

Ann Radcliffe was born on 9 July 1764 in London, the only child ofWilliam Ward and Ann Oates. Her parents resided in the commercialdistrict of Holborn, and were involved in ‘trade’. In the 1780s the familymoved to Bath, where Ann met William Radcliffe, an Oxford graduate


and law student. They married in 1787, in Bath, but shortly afterwardsmoved to London where the couple resided until Ann’s death in 1823.

Ann Radcliffe’s literary career spanned eight short, but highly produc-tive, years. In 1789 she published The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne andin 1790 A Sicilian Romance, both respectfully, if moderately reviewed. TheRomance of the Forest, published in 1791, made her reputation. The £500she received for The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and the £800 for TheItalian (1797), made her one of the highest paid novelists of the decade. In addition to her five romances Ann Radcliffe produced, in 1795, atravel book describing a journey down the Rhine made with her husbandthe previous summer, during a lull in the fighting with France. Borderdifficulties meant the Radcliffes were unable to cross into Switzerland,their intended destination. A distant glimpse was all Radcliffe had of the Alpine sublimity which had figured so prominently in her novels. In compensation the Radcliffes toured the Lake District, in search ofdomestic sublimity, and this, too, is included in the travel book.

In 1797, at the age of only thirty-three, heralded as the unrivalled mis-tress of her own brand of romance, Ann Radcliffe suddenly stoppedpublishing. Radcliffe had always been reclusive; she now withdrew intoimpenetrable obscurity, only broken on her death by the posthumouspublication in 1826 of her final works, Gaston de Blondeville, a novel, andSt Alban’s Abbey, a metrical romance. Virtually all of the biographicalinformation we have comes from a single source, her husband William.He wrote a substantial entry on his wife for the Annual Biography andObituary for the Year 1824, and closely briefed Thomas Noon Talfourd,who appended a biographical memoir to Gaston de Blondeville.

In his Introduction to the novels of Ann Radcliffe (1824) Sir WalterScott advanced a position that was to become a commonplace of nineteenth-century Radcliffe criticism: ‘Mrs Radcliffe, as an author, hasthe most decided claim to take her place among the favoured few, whohave been distinguished as the founders of a class, or school.’ For muchof the twentieth century Radcliffe’s reputation has suffered from an inadequate appreciation of the justness of Scott’s judgement. And with-out a just understanding of Radcliffe’s achievement one cannot under-stand fully the history of the Gothic novel, for hers was a decisivecontribution.

Two prejudicial interpretations have especially distorted her reputa-tion. First, her use of the explained supernatural, where apparent mysteries are finally resolved into physical causes, has been taken asevidence of conservative, eighteenth-century rationalism. Early Gothicwriting has traditionally been seen as a form of dark Romanticism. Tojudge Radcliffe a conventional rationalist is therefore to see her, not as amember of the Gothic avant-garde, but as an anti-Gothic, anti-Romantic,

Radcliffe, Ann (1764–1823) 77

reactionary. In effect, this reading removes Radcliffe from the leadingedges of 1790s literary culture, and places her among the backwardlooking, trailing fringes.

Secondly, Radcliffe has been judged a timid female novelist. This prejudice is really a reworking of the first. What lies behind it is the assumption that the male Gothic (the line of writers stretching fromHORACE WALPOLE, WILLIAM BECKFORD, MATTHEW LEWIS,through CHARLES MATURIN and JAMES HOGG to the AmericansHERMAN MELVILLE and NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE) representsthe true Gothic strain. Male Gothic texts have been deemed more trans-gressive, and therefore more ‘Gothic’, for a variety of reasons: they donot explain the supernatural, which leaves their texts open-ended and irresolute; they are frank, rather than coy, about sexual violence; andthey frequently pit a rebellious subject against a meaningless and/or dia-bolical cosmos. Mrs Radcliffe, with her unscathed heroines, explainedmysteries, and behind-the-times Burkean terror, appeared to be doing no more than sprucing up the old-fashioned eighteenth-century senti-mental novel with genteel terror tactics, thus holding back, rather thanadvancing, Horace Walpole’s ‘experiment’.

But this, emphatically, was not how Radcliffe’s contemporaries saw it. Radcliffe’s models were fresh in readers’ minds. The reviews repeat-edly made mention of the ‘tradition’ in which Radcliffe was working:Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764); Clara Reeve’s The OldEnglish Baron (1778); Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783–5). William Hazlitt,reviewing the situation in 1818, explicitly contrasts Radcliffe with herGothic progenitors, concluding that her models were ‘dry’, ‘meagre’ or‘dismal’, and that only in her work did Walpole’s experiment come truly to life. To return to Scott’s terms, she was not re-cycling otherwriters’ props. On the contrary, she was the founder of her own schoolof fiction. As Scott elsewhere characterises her, she was ‘the first poetessof romantic fiction’. She was, as the general public had it, ‘the GreatEnchantress’.

There were a number of factors at work in twentieth-century mis-conceptions of Radcliffe. One was simple unfamiliarity with literaryhistory. Many of the ‘male Gothic’ works Radcliffe was judged againstappeared after her oeuvre was in the public domain. These writers may have reacted against her, but in many respects she made them poss-ible. Another factor was a common tendency in early twentieth-centurycriticism to approach literary texts as product rather than process, as finished artefacts to be synoptically reviewed, and analysed. Such an approach is bound to lead to a reading of Radcliffe where the mysteries are all explained, where one is left with prosaic, lifeless props, incapable of generating either effect or meaning. But that is


not how her public read her. Although some reviewers took her to task for overdoing the explained supernatural, others expressed their appreciation of her unrivalled mastery at generating surmise in her readers, at (as Coleridge put it) ‘escaping the guesses’ of herreaders. The suggestions that arise, in the process of reading, are as much a part of the thematic gestalt of a Radcliffe text as the finalexplanations.

The clearer picture we now have of Radcliffe’s achievement is mainlyowing to the pioneering work done by feminist critics. By stressing therival claims of the FEMALE GOTHIC they have counterbalanced the pre-judicial reading inherent in the privileging of the male Gothic, but morethan that they have re-taught us how to read Radcliffe. The basic premiseof the ‘female Gothic’ is that it encodes displaced expressions of femaleexperience. It is in the surmises and suggestions arising from apparentsupernatural events that these displaced expressions are to be found. Touncover the ‘female Gothic’ is to return to reading Radcliffe as process.

In its obituary notice, the Gentleman’s Magazine (very much a main-stream publication) proudly noted that Radcliffe’s novels had been translated into the main European languages, to England’s glory. Herinfluence has been incalculable, not only on the Gothic, but on the novelin general, and not only in Anglo-American culture, but far beyond. Asthe psychoanalytic critics Leona Sherman and Norman Holland influ-entially put it, ‘the image of the woman-plus-habitation and the plot ofmysterious sexual and supernatural threats in an atmosphere of dynasticmysteries within the habitation has changed little since the eighteenthcentury …’. Radcliffe was the primary architect of this enduring plot,and it reaches ‘down’ to Mills and Boon and Harlequin romance,through THE BRONTËS, and outwards to France, where her reputationhas been unswervingly high, and to Russia, where novelists such asDostoevsky freely acknowledged their debts. When Keats was prep-aring to write his Gothic tale ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (1820), he wrote thathe was going to draw upon ‘mother Radcliff’ [sic], where we should read‘mother’, not as a patronising epithet, but as ‘matrix’, the generic sourceall post-Radcliffean Gothicists drew upon.

Early Works

Although Radcliffe’s first two novels – The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayneand A Sicilian Romance – may be seen as ‘prentice work, they also reveal Radcliffe quickly discovering her true subject while forging herrecurring plot structures.

The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne features usurpation, a foundling,and providentially restored order. As such, its plot reaches back through


The Old English Baron to Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, and beyond that,to Shakespeare’s late romances. A two-fold conflict advances the plot.Malcolm, the wicked Baron of Dunbayne, has designs upon Mary of the Castle of Athlin, designs to which Mary and her brother Osbert are implacably opposed given that Malcolm has murdered their father.Meanwhile, Mary has fallen in love with Alleyn, an apparent peasant,an alliance Mary’s family find unthinkable, given their sense of feudalcaste. Malcolm is a usurper; the true heir to Dunbayne is in fact Alleyn,left as a foundling after Malcolm had murdered Alleyn’s father and in-carcerated his mother and sister. Malcolm is eventually vanquished; thetruth comes out; and the true social order is restored with Mary andAlleyn’s marriage. The Scottish setting, the medieval time frame, theprovidential intervention, and the focus on male protagonists, are all ele-ments destined to disappear from Radcliffe’s oeuvre (apart from theposthumous material). But there is also much that was to become famil-iar, such as the nature worship of the protagonists, a taste for the sublimeand the picturesque, and a disposition to melancholy, superstition and asense of the phantasmal nature of everyday life.

In her next novel, A Sicilian Romance, all the main features of theRadcliffe plot come sharply into focus. A young noble woman, Julia deMazzini, is imprisoned within the family castle by her father who hasarranged a marriage with a highly disagreeable, but rich duke, more his than his daughter’s age. Julia takes flight, has many adventures, is assisted on several occasions by her lover Hippolitus, before, throughsheer accident, discovering her mother who has been entombed in the bowels of the family palazzo by her father. Mazzini is poisoned byhis new, younger ‘wife’, after catching her in the act of infidelity; andwith his death the way is cleared for the heroine to marry Hippolitus, the man of her choice.

This simple plot description conceals a number of profound changes.First, Radcliffe has moved her historical setting forward, to the dawn of the Enlightenment, which affords a contrast between Mazzini’s old-fashioned feudal values, such as primogeniture and arranged marriages,and a younger generation conditioned by sensibility and romantic love. In A Sicilian Romance, dawn breaks upon a backward, feudal order;which is exactly how sympathisers with the French Revolution sawcontemporary events. Radicals contrasted a modern family unit, basedon love, choice and mutual respect, with a dysfunctional, feudal oneexclusively devoted to enhancing the patriarchal house. It was a contrastbetween an old and a new order, between the aristocracy and the mid-dle class; and according to radical rhetoric, the new would sweep the old away. A Sicilian Romance embodies this radical rhetoric, only dis-guised as the late sixteenth-century shift from the medieval to the


modern, from the repressive manners of the ancien régime to a new bour-geois sensibility.

Although Radcliffe’s romances move progressively forward in time,each one being set later in history, all implicitly contain this contrastbetween the feudal and the modern. A Sicilian Romance changes in other,equally significant ways. The central figure is now a heroine; and whileher lover endeavours to help her, he often proves ineffectual, or is missingduring key episodes, which provides the heroine with the opportunity totake the initiative in spite of her best efforts to obey decorum, and remainpassive. In The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne the heroine is ineffectuallyhelped by her mother while being persecuted by an older man who is theantithesis of her absent father. A Sicilian Romance rearranges these ele-ments, in that the heroine is now persecuted by the father, while themother is missing. This, too, is a structural change which recurs in the restof Radcliffe’s fiction, although the father figure usually turns out to be anuncle, or is only (as with Montoni in the Mysteries of Udolpho) a legal ratherthan a biological father. This change both sharpened the patriarchal over-tones of the medieval order Radcliffe’s heroines are in flight from, and introduced an element feminist critics especially have read as an essen-tial component of the female Gothic: a search for an absent mother (read figuratively as a quest for identity made problematic by a culturaleffacement of the maternal).

The Mature Romances

Although the structure of the Radcliffe plot was largely fixed in A SicilianRomance, Radcliffe’s subsequent romances introduced technical inno-vations which deepened and complicated her works. Her landscapedescriptions – so important to the emotional texture of her narrative – also grew more nuanced. This holds especially true of her deploy-ment of THE SUBLIME and picturesque, landscape modes crucial toRomantic poetics. In particular, though, her succeeding works witnessedalterations in her attitude towards sensibility, which can be read as a barometer registering the changes in political atmosphere which socharacterised the 1790s, as public sympathy towards the French Revo-lution broke into turbulence in consequence of the Terror. Where A Sicilian Romance sees sensibility as an unproblematic, and welcome,aspect of modern manners – as the natural index of the growth of civilsociety – her later romances are defensive and protective on the issue, especially given the tendency of conservative critics to add SENSIBILITY to the list of the causes of revolutionary violence.Radcliffe did not simply invent a Gothic formula, and then recycle it;


her work constantly changed, in response to its own internal dynamic,and to the rapidly changing literary and political scene.

The Romance of the Forest introduces several important technical fea-tures. The heroine, Adeline, relates her history to the wife of La Motte,her benefactor. The introduction of a first-person narrative deepensAdeline’s characterisation, for we are entitled to ask what Adeline’s styleof narration, with its idealisations and omissions, says about her. At a later point, Adeline, exploring behind an arras, encounters a secretpassage leading to a dungeon where she discovers a manuscriptapparently relating a tale of imprisonment and murder. It turns out thatthis is the narrative of her father, who has been murdered by her uncle,the very Marquis de Montalt presently planning (unwittingly) the inces-tuous rape of his niece. The document solves the mystery of Adeline’sidentity, while restoring her usurped property rights. As Adeline’sdiscovering of the manuscript is hedged round with the supernatural itremains open whether the manuscript actually exists, or is just fantasisedby Adeline. Indeed, the whole episode may be read figuratively as thescene of female writing, something done secretively (behind the arras),prone to creating idealising, escapist romance, but nevetheless pro-ductive of a narrative disclosing clues as to the heroine’s/writer’sidentity.

Thematically, The Romance of the Forest is significant for its introductionof La Luc, modelled on the Savoyard priest from Rousseau’s Emile. Asthe epitome of sensibility La Luc affirms Radcliffe’s liberal sympathies; atthe same time, his depiction is part of a larger project whereby Radcliffeendeavours to give her texts complexity by weaving into her narrativesallusions and references to contemporary aesthetic values, visual, literaryand philosophical. Radcliffe is not a naive writer, but one finely attunedto the aesthetic discourses of her time.

The device of the explained supernatural is given its fullest, most sophisticated expression in The Mysteries of Udolpho, Radcliffe’s mostfamous novel. Emily, the heroine, is taught by her father that true sens-ibility lies in resisting its excesses, such as supernatural terror. AlthoughEmily learns to rein in her sensibility, two linked episodes continually undermine her mental discipline: her recollection of the body glimpsedbehind the veil in Udolpho, and her father’s secret manuscript, into whichEmily has transgressively glanced. The final explanations reveal that the‘body’ is a waxen image and the manuscript horrors a reference to heraunt’s murder. Earlier, Emily had falsely surmised that the image was thecorpse of Laurentini, hidden behind the veil after Montoni had strippedher of her property. Although false, this surmise truly represents her situ-ation, that Montoni will discard her once he has acquired the titles to herlands. As such, Montoni is a nightmare version of the patriarchal order,


one in complete contrast to the benevolent world promised by her fatherwhere Romantic love finds a true basis in civil society. But this pillar ofbelief is also undermined when Emily’s feverish sensibility construes herfather’s manuscript as relating her own illegitimacy. The novel ends withEmily reassured as to her father’s probity and the possibility of a civil,patriarchal society. In the interim, the surmises arising from her super-stitious fears prompt a more balanced, complicated view.

In The Italian Radcliffe turned to the Inquisition as a means of intro-ducing new varieties of terror. With its robust Protestantism The Italianmay give the impression that Radcliffe had jumped on a xenophobic,nationalist bandwagon. But as always with Radcliffe, a closer lookreveals subtleties. In many respects the novel represents Radcliffe’s finalreassessment of sensibility, one undoubtedly prompted by MatthewLewis’s sensationalist, voyeuristic satire in The Monk (1796). A key ele-ment of sensibility was faith in the morally improving nature of scenes of‘virtue’ in distress – typically, a young woman on the verge of being out-raged. The problem with this, though, was that it represented the femalebody as a delectable object of the male gaze (the latent eroticism of whichDe Sade was more than happy to exploit). The Italian effectively turns thetables by subjecting the hero to the effeminising gaze of the patriarchalInquisition. Radcliffe’s earlier novels had embraced the early radicaltrust in sensibility as a means of revolutionising modern manners, thushastening the arrival of a truly civil society. Radcliffe did not turn herback on sensibility, but she did become more sensitive to aspects of powerembedded within sensible, aspects deftly explored in the last novel shepublished in her lifetime.

ROBERT MILES

Rice, Anne (1941– )

Christened Howard O’Brien after her father, who had been an un-successful writer, Anne Rice was brought up in the Irish Catholic quarterof New Orleans. As a cultural crossroads with its traditions of voodooand Creole Catholicism, it provided her with a Gothic cityscape thatbecame the template for her fictional vampire-ridden cities. Childhoodwalks in cemeteries, where bodies were buried in vaults and cryptsabove the ground, were to inspire Rice to re-create her own super-terranean inhabitants of a metropolis of death. Having been educated atthe Holy Name of Jesus Convent, she considered becoming a nun.Eventually, she decided to pursue her interest in the afterlife by choosing

Rice, Anne (1941–) 83

another form of the cloistered life, this time, as a writer of VAMPIREfiction.

By expanding upon a short story, Rice produced her most famousnovel so far, Interview with the Vampire (1976), which was turned into aHollywood block-buster in 1994. This was the first of The VampireChronicles, which was followed by The Vampire Lestat (1985), Queen of theDamned (1988), Tale of the Body Thief (1992) and Memnoch the Devil (1995).The main character, the vagabond vampire Lestat de Lioncourt, is basedon the poet Stan Rice, whom she married in 1961. Other novels dealingwith occult themes include The Witching Hour (1990), The Mummy (1989),Lasher (1994), Taltos: Lives of the Mayfair Witches (1994), Servant of the Bones(1996) and Violin (1997). Less supernatural and more sublunary depar-tures are The Feast of All Saints (1979), about the miscegenation of theNew Orleans gens de couleur libre, and Cry to Heaven (1982), which is con-cerned with the castrati of eighteenth-century Venice. These novels are apostcolonial foray into the exoticism of European decadence and degen-eracy, which contrasts with her fiction produced under the sobriquet ofAnne Rampling, through which Rice exploits the glossy and commer-cialised erotica of contemporary California. Using the cryptic nom deplume of A. N. Roquelaure, she has also produced a pornographic varia-tion of the fairy-tale ‘Sleeping Beauty’ in the sado-masochistic trilogy:The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983), Beauty’s Punishment (1984) andBeauty’s Release (1985).

What all Rice’s novels share is a preoccupation with eroticism andgender. Not only are her vampires androgynous beings, but her fascinationwith androgyny and homo-eroticism is evident from her preference forwriting from a male point of view. Having described herself as a ‘Gay manwriting in a woman’s body’, Rice claims that the child vampire Claudia inInterview with the Vampire ‘is the embodiment of [her] failure to deal withthe feminine. She [Claudia] is a woman trapped in a child’s body. She’s theperson robbed of power.’ Based upon her daughter Michelle, who died ofleukaemia, Claudia represents not only a literary necromancy, but is alsothe undead agency for the exorcism of her bereavement.

Vampirism is employed elsewhere as a metaphor for other threats tocorporeal integrity, such as AIDS and drug dependency. Rice’s mother,who died from an alcohol-related illness, once set her bed alight while ina drunken stupor. A fear of fire is endemic among many of Rice’svampire characters, for whom mirrors, garlic and crucifixes are passé.While these vampires continue to represent the proverbial outsider, theirauthor, on account of her modish popular success, has now been exiledfrom the cultish margins into the commercial mainstream.



Sade, Marquis de (1740–1814)

The Marquis de Sade is a marginal figure in the Gothic tradition. He isperhaps better seen as a joint-inheritor of the genre of sentimental anddidactic fiction that begins with Samuel Richardson, and as the most fe-rocious critic of its benevolist vision of human nature. He did, however,deliver himself of a famous judgement on eighteenth-century Gothicwriting, in a prefatory essay to the collection of stories Crimes de l’Amour,entitled ‘Idée sur le roman’ (translated as ‘Reflections on the Novel’):

This genre was the inevitable product of the revolutionary shocks withwhich the whole of Europe resounded. For those who were acquaintedwith all the ills that are brought upon men by the wicked, the novelwas becoming as difficult to write as it was monotonous to read; therewas nobody left who had not experienced more misfortunes in four or five years than could be depicted in a century by literature’s most gifted novelist. It was therefore necessary to call upon hell foraid in the creation of titles that could arouse interest, and to situate in the land of fantasies what was common knowledge, from mereobservation of the history of man in this iron age.

This was the most eloquent linking by a contemporary of the Gothicboom of the 1790s with the French Revolution, and historicist critics havenot failed to develop the insight when interpreting the novels of theperiod.

The same essay shows that by the late 1790s, Sade was an avid readerof the work of MATTHEW LEWIS and ANN RADCLIFFE. But while hepraises the ‘brilliant imagination’ of Radcliffe, he dislikes her device ofthe ‘explained supernatural’, and rates Lewis more highly. As a dog-matic atheist himself, Sade eschewed any hint of the metaphysical in hisown fiction. Where he does seem to subscribe to the conventions ofGothic writing is in his depiction of ‘virtue in distress’, constantly, not tosay monotonously, showing scenes of the persecution of helpless femalesand youths. The acts of rape, torture and mutilation to which his fictionalvictims are subjected in Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791) andThe 120 Days of Sodom (not published until 1904) go far beyond any-thing in the works of Lewis or the more sensational German novel-ists. However, even in this respect there is a vital difference in kind, for while in most Gothic fiction of the time, horror and suffering isultimately redeemed by a providential outcome, in the fiction of Sade it generally reinforces a materialist thesis propounded at length by the most villainous characters, that crimes are committed in accord-ance with natural laws. Sade has, of course, lent his name to the psycho-

Sade, Marquis de (1740–1814) 85

pathological condition of ‘sadism’, involving sexual pleasure derivedfrom cruelty. The term was first introduced in the Dictionnaire universal(1834), and became a scientific category in the writings of Krafft-Ebingand Freud.

The outline of Sade’s life is simply told. He was born into a position ofwealth and privilege, but after having made an advantageous marriage,he began to show signs of his sexual proclivities, and his strong-mindedmother-in-law arranged for his committal to prison by arbitrary lettre decachet in 1777. He was to remain in prison, with only brief respite, untilhis death, and it was there that he completed the majority of his literaryworks.

If the pattern of Sade’s career is relatively straightforward, the writingsand their posthumous reputation are paradoxical. The libertinism he ad-vocated is cognate with ‘liberty’, yet sexual freedom as he portrays it isinvariably decked out in the Gothic trappings of incarceration andtyranny. In the nineteenth century he remained a powerful undergroundinfluence, but in the twentieth century Sade has been openly champ-ioned first by the Surrealists and then by the intellectual avant-garde inFrance, including notably Georges Bataille and Roland Barthes. For post-structuralist theory, his work has represented the acme of transgressionin thought and language, and even the revelation of a ‘truth’ beyond thecontradictions of Western metaphysics. His literary influence has broad-ened as the works become more readily available: can any current writerin the Gothic mode avoid it? But a link with one of the best knownexponents of twentieth-century Gothic deserves special note. In 1979ANGELA CARTER published The Sadeian Woman, a polemical appro-priation of Sade to the cause of feminism, and in the same year broughtout The Bloody Chamber, her collection of dark fairy-tales, clearly writtenin dialogue with Sade.

E. J. CLERY

Shelley, Mary (1797–1851)

The dominant image of the Frankenstein monster is the clanking, boltedBoris Karloff, who is belied by the more naturalistic representation of thecreature in the frontispiece to the revised 1831 edition of Mary Shelley’snovel Frankenstein. The monstrous brood of her creation has found its way into cinema, popular fiction and critical theory by taking literallyher injunction in the 1831 Introduction to ‘go forth and prosper’. Theproliferation of the monstrous body is the anxiety that afflicts the mad


scientist hero, Victor Frankenstein. Not only does his career allegorise the way in which science may be taken over by its metaphors, it alsodemonstrates how men can lose control of the monsters that they them-selves create.

Shelley’s iconic status as a Gothic novelist rests primarily on her first novel Frankenstein, which was published anonymously in 1818. Con-temporary critical attention tended to focus on the author as a disciple of her father, William Godwin, who had also written a Gothic fiction, St Leon (1799), to whom the novel was dedicated. Once her identity wasknown, she attracted interest as the wife of PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY,whom she had married in 1816 and who provided her with a prototypefor her eponymous hero, Victor. Recently, there has been a shift towardsacknowledging Mary Shelley not only as the daughter of Mary Woll-stonecraft, but also, like her fictional monster, as more than the sum ofher parts. Now she is being recognised as a distinguished writer in herown right and not just as a creative conduit for these family relations.

Increasing attention is being given to Shelley’s writings other thanFrankenstein, which include five novels, one novella, two travelogues,more than two dozen short stories, two mythological dramas and aplethora of letters, essays, poems and reviews. Apart from the witch, Fiordi Mandragola, in her historical romance Valperga; or, The Life andAdventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823), the apocalyptic nightmarein the futuristic The Last Man (1826), the incest taboo explored in hernovella Matilda that was completed in 1819, and the essay ‘On Ghosts’(1824), a quintessence of Gothic material may be found in her shortstories. These include three stories published in The Keepsake; the alchem-ical ‘The Mortal Immortal: A Tale’ (1833), ‘The Evil Eye’ (1829) and‘Transformation’ (1830), which is an adaptation of Byron’s unfinishedpoetic drama, The Deformed Transformed (1824). The incomplete ‘Valerius;the Reanimated Roman’ of 1819 concerns the revival of an Ancient Romanwithout a soul, while ‘Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman’(1826) is a spoof about Godwin and suspended animation. Both areminor variations on Frankenstein. In this, her major novel, Mary Shelleycharts the destructive outcome of Victor’s creation of a monstrous beingfrom corpses in a calculated attempt to ‘speak to the mysterious fears ofour nature, and awaken thrilling horror – one to make the reader dreadto look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart’(Introduction, 1831).

The first three-volume edition was followed in 1823 by a two-volumereprint that had been arranged by Godwin. It appeared shortly afterRichard Brinsley Peake’s stage adaptation entitled Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, which Shelley had seen performed in August1823. For the third edition, of 1831, she made extensive revisions and

Shelley, Mary (1797–1851) 87

expanded the introduction. While it has been customary to regard thisfinal edition as the definitive text, some recent critics and editors, such asMarilyn Butler, favour the 1818 edition as the more radical and less senti-mental version. What is generally regarded as the greater determinism ofthe later edition has had the effect of exonerating Victor as a Romanticover-reacher.

Shelley’s remaining novels, Valperga, or The Life and Adventures ofCastruccio Castracani (1823), the historical The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck(1830), and the contemporary Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837), with theirfashionable settings, are case studies of well-meaning individuals, whoare overwhelmed by their own delusions or by the destructive ambitionof others for power. An early formative influence was the book thatGodwin wrote for Mary and her elder stepsister Fanny Imlay, which wasa Life of Lady Jane Grey (1806), whose obedience to her parents’ wishes ledher to the scaffold. Coincidentally, Fanny’s life also ended tragicallywhen, on 9 October 1816, she took an overdose of laudanum. LikeVictor’s creature, who is also on a trajectory of self-destruction, she hadfelt neglected by her family. Later that year, Percy’s first wife Harriet,who had been deserted by both lover and husband, committed suicideby drowning in the Serpentine. Her death facilitated the marriage ofPercy and Mary, who eloped to the Continent in 1814. They were accom-panied by Mary’s half-sister Jane (later ‘Claire’) Clairmont and recordedtheir journey in their History of Six Weeks’ Tour through a Part of France,Switzerland, Germany and Holland (1817).

Death, mutability and abandonment are the Gothic themes that per-meated not only Shelley’s life but also her fiction. Even her birth pre-cipitated the death of her mother approximately ten days after frompuerperal fever. Years later she would lie next to Wollstonecraft’s graveat St Pancras Churchyard reading her father’s Essay on Sepulchres (1809).Having presented her with this textual memento mori, it is appro-priate that Godwin elected to be buried next to Wollstonecraft. It was on this hallowed burial ground that Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and P. B. Shelley conducted their transgressive courtship.

Since P. B. Shelley’s boyhood interests had extended to carrying outnecromantic experiments in a graveyard and raising the devil in a chem-istry laboratory, it is not surprising to find Victor embracing a synthesisof magic and science. Neglecting domestic affections, most notably his family and fiancée, Elizabeth, his retreat into grisly researches is aDantesque descent into a hellish underworld of grave-robbing andcharnel houses. Body-snatching was rendered obsolete a year after thepublication of the third edition of Frankenstein by the 1832 Anatomy Act,which made available for dissection the unclaimed bodies of paupers.The topicality of this legislation may be why the blasphemy of Victor’s


nefarious activities has impacted less on the modern reader than onShelley’s contemporaries. The monstrosity of his creation is predicatedupon the dilemma that, despite the choicest parts having been selected,only a divinity can harmonise the whole. The way in which Victordeserts the creature he creates, who out of revenge seeks to destroy hiscreator, is evocative of both John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674), fromwhere the epigraph to the novel is taken, and Shelley’s own experiencesof paternal neglect. The way in which her Romantic scientist retreats tohis laboratory bears similarities with how P. B. Shelley sought the sol-itude of the Romantic poet and how Godwin withdrew from the familyby retiring to his study after his marriage to Mary Jane Clairmont in1801. Mary’s reputed dislike of her stepmother fanned her romantic and excessive attachment to her father, which found expression in hernovella Matilda. The plot, concerning the imagined incestuous rela-tionship between a father and daughter, was a subject that Godwinfound to be ‘disgusting and detestable’. Until 1959, Matilda remainedunpublished.

P. B. Shelley’s neglect of his paternal obligations exacerbated thedifficulties Shelley experienced with childbirth. In 1815, her prematurelyborn illegitimate daughter died after only 11 days of life. In 1816, shegave birth to William, probably named after her younger half-brother,who lived his short life nomadically, crossing Europe three times in a carriage. His untimely death, three years later, is foreshadowed inFrankenstein, when the creature murders Victor’s young brother William,and pins the blame on the family servant, Justine Moritz, who is wronglyexecuted for the crime. Shelley suffered another bereavement when her infant Clara Everina died a year after her birth in 1817. The onlysurviving child was Percy Florence, who was born in 1819.

According to some modern feminist psycho-biographical critics,Shelley projected herself as the progenitor of ‘monstrous’ births throughVictor and his monstrous creation. In her 1831 Introduction, she describes how in a waking dream the dead are brought back to life by a ‘pale student of unhallowed art’ (see NECROMANCY), while in herJournal entry for 19 March 1815 she records, ‘Dream that my little babycame to life again that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it beforethe fire, and it lived.’ The images of fire and reanimation are evocative ofFrankenstein’s subtitle, A Modern Prometheus, which refers to the legend of a transgressive mortal, who stole fire from heaven. Prometheus is ametonym for the spark of masculine creativity, and is also the begetter of a creation myth, whereby inanimate clay figures are revitalised. Theprofanity of Victor’s Prometheanism is represented by this act of solitarymale propagation, which produces the proverbial scientist’s brain child. Not only does Victor dispense with both a life-giving God and a

Shelley, Mary (1797–1851) 89

nurturing mother, but he also subjugates female nature through masculinist science.

As regards Shelley’s authorial creativity, the sense of her own birthbeing monstrous may have impelled her to expiate her matricidal guiltthrough the novel, at the same time, exorcising her own bereavement asa mother. Indeed the imagery of hideous procreation is spawned byWILLIAM BECKFORD in the note he wrote on the fly-leaf of his owncopy of the first edition, where he damns it as ‘perhaps, the foulestToadstool that has yet sprung up from the reeking dunghill of the pre-sent times’. A long time after its female authorship had been revealed,which accentuated the mixture of fear and loathing, astonishment andadmiration with which the novel was received, Mary had felt obliged toexplain in her 1831 Introduction, ‘How I, then a young girl, came to thinkof, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?’ (1831).

The idea may have taken root when, as a girl, she stayed in Dundeein Scotland for nearly two years with the family of the wealthy mer-chant William Baxter. The impetus for completing the novel is thoughtby Butler to have arisen from the interest of Shelley and her husband in current debates between the schools of vitalism and materialism as to the creation of life, experiments in galvanism on executed crim-inals and a general vogue for automata. A version of the genesis of thenovel that is more romanticised in every sense appears in the 1831Introduction. Here may be found the now familiar account of theghost-story-telling episode held in 1816 near Geneva, which took placebetween the Shelleys, Byron, and his physician, JOHN POLIDORI, atVilla Diodati on the shores of Lake Leman. The suggestion had origi-nated with Byron after he had read stories contained in theFantasmagoriana (1812), which had been translated from the German ofFriedrich Schulze and Johann Apel’s Gespensterbuch (1811–12) (seeGERMAN GOTHIC) into French. Even though an English translationentitled Tales of the Dead was published the following year, it was theFrench version that was circulated around the villa. Shelley extendedher ori-ginal ghost story, which is no longer extant, into a novel. Itsepistolary narrative frame consists of a series of letters sent by theArctic explorer Captain Robert Walton, to his sister Mrs MargaretWalton Saville, whose initials are shared by Mary WollstonecraftShelley. The narrative voice is later appropriated by Victor and then byhis creature, who remains nameless.

There are echoes of other voices in the text, such as John Milton, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and GOETHE. Aside from the polyphonic, the composition of Frankenstein incorporates a mon-strous patchwork of intertextuality. Victor’s scientific ingenuity with the decomposing parts of corpses is reflected in Mary Shelley’s literary


ingenuity in recomposing various corpora into the body of her ownmonstrous text. Other readings by critics see the novel as a chillingprotest against class oppression, an allegorical warning of the Terror ofthe French Revolution, a Malthusian dystopia born out of the fear of amonstrous growth in population; and Victor’s creation as a mirror-imageof colonisation, since, in wanting to shape the world anew, he plundersthe old. The fear of breeding a race of monsters leads him to destroy thefemale mate he has created for his creature by dismembering ‘the thing’he has put together. The perception of both creature and mate as sub-alterns, who are sub-human, is integral to the process of colonisation andthe concept of ‘thingification’. Once it was known that the author was a woman, the novel became a trope for the monstrosities produced bythe female imagination as a source of patriarchal anxiety. In the light of its overt pedagogic, epistemological and metaphysical concerns, P. B. Shelley as Mary’s ventriloquist is justified in declaring ‘I have notconsidered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors’(Preface, 1817).

Apart from functioning as a skull and cross-bones morality tale or as aforay into embryonic science fiction (see GOTHIC SCIENCE FICTION),which had been galvanised by contemporary scientific debates, Frank-enstein can also be read as Gothic travelogue. Travel-writing was a genreto which Shelley returned in Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842,and 1843 (1844), where she wrote about her travels with her son. Prior tothat, she had devoted herself to editing her husband’s poems, publishedin 1839, and his essays, letters, translations and fragments that appearedin 1839 but with 1840 written on the title-page.

The death of P. B. Shelley in 1822 and of Byron in 1824 had madethem, for Shelley, ‘the people of the grave – that miserable conclave to which the beings I best loved belonged’ ( Journal, 15 May 1824). Pre-mature death was a Romantic contagion that struck down so many in her circle. Identifying herself in her Journal as ‘The Last Man’, shedramatises this sense of desolation in her third novel. The bleak mirageof the extinction of the human race by an unrelenting epidemic of the plague, reduces The Last Man to a nadir of nihilism. What takes itbeyond Gothic terror is the way in which it challenges high Romanticideals. Inevitably this culminates in the terminal failure of art, which can no longer be redeemed by the imagination. In response to this pessimistic vision, many contemporary reviewers were scathing. TheWasp, for example, retitled the book The Last Woman, while the St JamesGazette exulted in its portrayal of the author as ‘The Last Woman’ havingno-one with whom to talk.

Before she died, in London, of a brain tumour at the age of 53, Shelleysignificantly chose to be buried with her parents at St Pancras. After

Shelley, Mary (1797–1851) 91

her death, her daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Shelley, decided to have her buried instead in the graveyard at St Peter’s Church in Bourne-mouth, near her son’s new family home, Boscombe Manor. As it tran-spired, this was a far-sighted decision, since the cemetery Shelley hadchosen was dug up in 1868 to make way for St Pancras Station, whichwas designed appropriately in the style of the Victorian GOTHICREVIVAL.

While Lady Shelley made sure that the bodies of Godwin andWollstonecraft were exhumed and then reburied in Bournemouth, sheleft the second Mrs Godwin unceremoniously behind. Unfortunately, therector of St Peter’s refused at first to bury the disinterred bodies, whichrepresented an unholy trinity of heretical authors. Encamped outside thelocked iron gates of the cemetery, Lady Shelley ensconced herself in hercarriage in front of the hearse and refused to budge until the rector re-lented. Wishing to avoid a scandal, he eventually permitted a grave-digger to lower the coffins into their grave. These sepulchral proceedingswere conducted with a Frankensteinian fervour, aptly marked by no reli-gious rites. For many devotees, there has been an omission that contin-ues to this day, which outweighs the absence of any funeral service. Eventhough Wollstonecraft was acknowledged on her gravestone as theauthor of the Vindication, there is no mention on the tombstone of MaryWollstonecraft Shelley that she had ever been the author of Frankenstein.For that recognition, one must step outside the boundaries of the conse-crated ground to the outside of the churchyard wall, where the plaqueproclaiming her authorship has been exiled.


Shelley, P. B. (1792–1822)

Percy Bysshe Shelley had early and abiding passions for alchemicalscience, ghost-raising, and horror-rituals. At preparatory school, he wasa devotee of the Minerva Press, and especially admired RADCLIFFE’sThe Italian, LEWIS’s The Monk, and Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, all of whichenter into the short Gothic fictions he published in his last term at Etonand first term at Oxford, Zastrozzi, a Romance (spring 1810) and St Irvyne;or, The Rosicrucian (December 1810 [1811 on title-page]).

Zastrozzi is a mock-Minerva novel, with stock Gothic names and char-acters (though the villainous Machiavel and suffering hero may be seen as each other’s antitype). The Critical Review for November 1810 judged it,in cliché gothic, as ‘one of the most savage and improbable demons that


ever issued from a diseased brain’. More perceptively, the Gentleman’sMagazine for September 1810 noticed that ‘the denouement … is con-ducted on the principles of moral justice’. With its epigraph from Milton,Zastrozzi shows already the themes of rebellion and revenge, and of a superior, humanitarian code, which run all the way to The Cenci (1819).

Early Gothic works include: a lost horror tale called The Nightmare,which Shelley wanted Fuseli to illustrate; The Wandering Jew, a versemelodrama co-written with his cousin Tom Medwin; the Chattertonian‘Ghasta; or, the Avenging Demon …’, one of the pieces in Original Poetryby Victor and Cazire (published anonymously with his sister, September1810, and hastily withdrawn for plagiarism of ‘Monk’ Lewis); St Irvyne,an unstable mix of alchemy, free love, and crimes of passion; and Zeinaband Kathema (1810–11), in imitation of Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer(1801).

Shelley’s manipulation of the Gothic ranges all the way from prankingand pastiche to the profoundest speculation. In this latter sense, Gothicor occult elements and episodes merge into his interminable questioningof secret sources and powers: the opening of Alastor, where the narrator‘makes “his bed/In charnels and on coffins … forcing some lone ghost …to render up the tale/Of what we are”’; or the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,where Platonism and Gothicism uncannily coincide (‘While yet a boy Isought for ghosts …’); or the Zoroastrian summonings of PrometheusUnbound and Hellas.

Peacock recorded Shelley’s deep responsiveness to the Gothic Americannovelist CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN, ‘remarkable for the way in which natural causes were made to produce supernatural effects’.Shelley cultivated a power of suggestion over others as well as himself, a power he designated as ‘natural magic’ (note to Hellas): most famously,there were the horror sessions with Jane Clairmont at Church Terrace in 1814; the ghost stories, partially recorded by Shelley, which were sparkedby Byron’s book of German Fantasmagoriana in 1816; and (another VillaDiodati episode) the recitation of Christabel which induced Shelley’s visionof a woman with eyes instead of nipples.

NICOLA TROTT

Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850–94)

Amid Stevenson’s many writings (from travel accounts and adventuresfor boys to historical novels and South-Sea allegories), there is a veryclear ‘Gothic period’: the early to middle 1880s. After his marriage

Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850–94) 93

to Fanny Osborne in San Francisco, Stevenson returned to his nativeScotland in 1881. There, during stays at Pitlochry and Braemar (Summer1881) and Bournemouth (1884–7), he wrote the tales ‘Thrawn Janet’ and‘The Body-Snatchers’ and the longer stories ‘Markheim’ and ‘Olalla’.These latter pieces were finished by late 1885, and that was the autumnin which, after a ‘fine bogey’ nightmare, he wrote the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, published as a ‘shilling shocker’ in January 1886 tobrisk sales in Britain and America and a spate of dramatic adaptationsstarting in 1887. True, the ‘Gothic’ elements of quasi-haunted old houses,ghostly figures of past or present guilts, and struggles between thepersonal regressions and class-conscious drives in the self do appearsporadically in other Stevenson works, some of them from the samedecade: Treasure Island (1883); Kidnapped (Summer 1886); The Master ofBallantrae (1889). But it is the five blatantly ‘horrific’ tales from 1881 to1886 that have become Stevenson’s genuinely ‘Gothic’ corpus and showthe unique contributions he made to this hybrid genre. These piecesreveal the ways he focused the Gothic form on the modern self tornbetween psychological and social forces pulling it towards the ancient,rural, superstitious past and the rapidly changing, more secular, increas-ingly urban present.

Stevenson’s interest in Gothic writing was probably spurred by Fanny’spenchant for ‘crawlers’, as well as a sense that they would sell nicely inshort fictional forms. Yet the Gothic’s roots were already entangled forStevenson with the ‘devil in disguise’ stories from the Covenanting tradi-tion of Scottish Presbyterianism (see SCOTTISH GOTHIC). These wereamong the tales first told to him by his staunch Covenanter nanny backin the upper middle-class Edinburgh house in which he was raised. Itmay have been the ‘respectable’ veneer and conventional Christianity ofhis family that Stevenson later found hypocritical after his bohemiancollege or tramp-artist years and his increasing religious scepticism. Yethe always retained, as W. E. Henley said, ‘something of the Shorter-Catechist’ that made him keep recalling the stark good-and-evil dualismsof folk characterisations and mixing them in with his complex portraitsof people who wrestled with conflicting moral positions, much as he did.

One result is ‘Thrawn Janet’, a flashback story told in Scotch dialect to explain the condition of a moorland minister who has become both a bible-beating scourge of sinners from the pulpit and a ‘scared’ and ‘uncertain’ person in private. The flashback seems to take the folk pos-ition that his one-time housekeeper Janet, nearly drowned by local womenfor suspected witchcraft, was possessed by the ‘black man’ in her twisted(‘thrawn’) condition after that assault on her – but her penultimate state,hung up by a nail in the minister’s haunted manse, perhaps by herself or


the ‘man’, leaves the reader and the preacher bedvilled as to whether her‘possession’ was socially or supernaturally imposed on her.

‘The Body-Snatchers’, in turn, is itself told mostly in flashback toaccount for a stormy encounter at a village tavern between a local drunk-ard, Fettes, and a well-dressed physician from the city, Wolfe Macfarlane.The narrator discovers that both were once students of, and theproviders of bodies for, the esteemed dissector ‘Mr K——’ of Edinburgh,for whom they gradually became accomplices in urban murder as well as country grave-robbing. Though written in some homage toFrankenstein (see MARY SHELLEY), this story is haunted most obviouslyby the actual ‘Burke and Hare’ scandal of 1828, where two Edinburgh‘resurrectionists’ were found to have murdered sixteen people for a Dr Robert Knox, who was, like Stevenson’s Macfarlane and K——, neverproven guilty himself. The most Gothic element of this story, though, isMacfarlane’s and Fettes’s final digging-up in a ‘rustic graveyard’ of ashrouded farm-woman’s body. As they drive off, this figure horrificallytransmutes itself into the reunited corpse of ‘Mr. Gray’, a mysterious,lower-class crony of Macfarlane’s in Edinburgh whom Macfarlane had killed and brought to Fettes and K——for dissection. Gray is anearly version of Hyde, an amorphous ‘small’ blend of the ‘pale and dark’and of ‘refinement’ and the ‘vulgar’. He has ‘remarkable control overMacfarlane’ and is thus his secret, unrespectable, class-shifting alter egowho must be eliminated to preserve Macfarlane’s pose of respectability,yet must haunt him and Fettes as the embodiment of their multifarious,suppressed, and money-hungry ‘night life’.

The fluidity of class-postures and states of being (the shades of gray)with which this figure threatens those closest to him becomes the basic‘spectral other’ in Stevenson’s other forays into the Gothic. After all, itcombines the ‘devil in disguise’ with Stevenson’s sense of the bourgeoisself as wafted between contrary cultural incentives towards ‘free move-ment’ and restraint. In ‘Markheim’, the title character kills and begins torob a pawnbroker only to be haunted at once by a ‘lump of terror’ whose‘outlines’ appear to ‘change and waver’ even as they show ‘a likeness tohimself’. Like much of the Strange Case of Dr Jekyull and Mr Hyde, thismoment echoes JAMES HOGG’s highly Scottish Private Memoirs andConfessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), most of all the shifting likeness/unlikeness of Gil-Martin, the hero’s natural/supernatural ‘other’.

The EDGAR ALLAN POE-ish narrator of ‘Olalla’, meanwhile, longresists his growing sense, reminiscent of ‘Ligeia’ and ‘The Fall of theHouse of Usher’, that the ravishingly beautiful woman he has found in aSpanish Gothic castle is the latest member of a werewolf- or vampire-likerace born from the degeneration of an inbred family back towards theconditions of the beasts. He feels the pull of this atavism precisely in the

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potentially shape-shifting beauty that seems to deny it and so plays outthe late nineteenth-century fear, post-Darwin and pre-Dracula (see BRAMSTOKER), of humankind as threatened by devolution in its evolution,whatever religious emblems we use to keep that de-formation at bay.

When the lawyer Utterson sees Stevenson’s Hyde as ‘troglodytic’ inThe Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, then, he is speaking to the deepfear of regression to a violent animality in us that soon appeared again inreactions to the ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders, so associated with the book, inthe London of 1888. But Utterson’s view, like that of all the interpreterswho try to explain and deny the shape-shifting main character through-out most of the book, is but one ‘pinning down’ among many that striveto arrest the greatest terror in that novella, the one that has been buildingin Stevenson’s Gothic since 1881: the haunting possibility, as Jekyllfinally confesses, that the supposedly coherent human being is a ‘polityof multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens’ looking back-wards and forwards for meaning. This polymorphous perversity issomething that a Covenanter’s or a bourgeois doctor’s concept of ‘blackand white’ may try to contain (as Jekyll does in splitting, then in killinghimself), but it will not be stilled completely, particularly not in the classand style-crossing, and thus URBAN GOTHIC, hybridity of Jekyll’sLondon home.

Ultimately, and at the climax of Stevenson’s ‘Gothic’ period, Hyde isnot a primitive beast but, as Utterson notes, ‘an impression of deformitywithout any nameable malformation’, mixing ‘timidity and boldness’. Inbeing the ‘othered’ de-formation of any of the forms possible for us orinside us, he points to the myriad differences from ourselves within our-selves, a particular kind of secret at the heart of the ‘respectable’ housesin the aging and class-climbing city. Stevenson’s Gothic thus gives us oneof the strongest representations we have of that horror in our modernbeing whereby our ‘identities’ are really based on a fluidity of potentialsthat we keep trying to, but cannot, beat down and deny.

JERROLD E. HOGLE

Stoker, Bram (1847–1912)

The reputation of Bram Stoker rests today almost exclusively upon hisauthorship of Dracula. In his lifetime, however, Stoker was better knownas the Anglo-Irish manager and biographer of the London actor Sir Henry Irving, than as the author of eleven novels, three volumes of


short stories, and a vast corpus of largely uncollected short and serialfiction, biography and criticism.

Of Stoker’s eleven novels only five – Dracula (1897), The Mystery of theSea (1902), The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), The Lady of the Shroud (1909) andThe Lair of the White Worm (1911) – may be regarded as unequivocallyGothic. However, two of the author’s collections of short stories – Underthe Sunset (1882), a collection of moral tales ostensibly for children, andthe posthumous Dracula’s Guest and other Weird Tales (1914) – draw per-ceptibly on Gothic motifs. The remaining novels, with much of the uncol-lected short fiction, can be classified essentially as romances, which at timesembody elements of the adventure story and the GOTHIC NOVEL. Thereis, however, a fairly consistent complex of themes and issues, most notablygender and race, which informs the full range of Stoker’s fiction, and whosediscourses may be traced throughout his writings. Stoker’s recension of theGothic is thus one in which the apparent preoccupations of a segment ofthe British middle classes are channelled through conventions such as the Gothic Hero and Heroine, the quest for treasure or for knowledge, andthe theme of abduction, in order to produce a series of tense fictionalscenarios in which the strength of one or more discourses may be bothfictionally tested and arguably verified.

Modern critical studies of Stoker’s writings have been largely psycho-biographical in approach, and have focused attention onto Dracula at theexpense of the author’s other works. In addition to this, Dracula – thecharacter – has become the epicentre of a modern cultural myth of whichDracula – the novel – is but a small component. Taken within its nineteenth-century context, however, Dracula provides a clear demonstration of howGothic motifs yield to contemporary discourses throughout the author’sfiction. Recent scholarship has associated the distinctive pallor, hairypalms and rank breath of the VAMPIRE with popular signifiers con-structing the masturbator in Victorian culture. Thus, the isolation and introspection of the Gothic HERO-VILLAIN have been reworked intothe signification of what was termed the ‘solitary vice’. This reworkingdisplaces somewhat the nature of the sexual threat traditionally posed bythe Gothic Hero. Dracula, like ANN RADCLIFFE’s Montoni, hoversmenacingly in the theoretical ground between seducer and rapist. Butthe consequence of his attack is arguably a debasement not of the indi-vidual but of the race. The popular eugenics of Victorian commentatorssuch as William Acton insist that the masturbator not only destroyshimself, but blights his descendants also. The signification of the indi-vidual thus begins to embody a whole series of related racial issues concerning not merely the potential decadence of the race from within,but also the eugenic risks apparently posed by other racial groups – inparticular those that come, like Dracula himself, from the East.

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This racial script may be seen, equally, to co-exist with the physio-logical and symbolic resonances of blood in Dracula. The text’s represent-ations of the secretion, depletion and transfer of blood participate in a metonymic complex in which the alleged racial qualities encoded inblood are enhanced, diluted, corrupted or transferred. These encodingsin turn map over further issues of gender and of class, although theselatter are often exposed more directly in Stoker’s other writings. Thecombination of Western racial bloods in Dracula, whether literally (as inthe various acts of transfusion), or figuratively (as in the alliance forgedaround Van Helsing’s leadership), thus conveys not just the apparentlyinevitable triumph of Western stock over less developed or ‘degenerate’opposition, but the superiority also of the moral, intellectual and emo-tional qualities culturally encoded in the blood signifier.

The theme of racial alliance is repeated in The Mystery of the Sea, although here an English hero is romantically partnered with an Americanheroine in opposition to a Spanish nobleman. Set against the backgroundof the Spanish–American War of 1898, the novel describes the search for a hoard of gold – treasure from the Spanish Armada of 1588 – con-cealed on the Scottish coast by an ancestor of the Spaniard. This latterdetail, in conjunction with the American heroine’s explicit familialdescent from Sir Francis Drake, allows a contemporary political conflictto be reconfigured as a matter of historical, racial and religious sig-nificance. The apparently straightforward pattern of oppositions betweenthe hero, Hunter, and Don Bernardino, the Spaniard, is, however, dis-turbed by the Gothic content of the narrative. Hunter possesses the giftof prophetic second sight. It is this faculty that permits him to perceivethe potential sexual dangers vested in a classic Gothic abduction plot involving the heroine, Marjory Anita Drake. In responding withoutreservation to Hunter’s plea for assistance, the Spaniard becomes accept-able within the complex of discourses that meet in the character of Hunter.The common standard of chivalrous masculinity that links the two charac-ters, it appears, is more powerful than personal, class or national interests.

The Jewel of Seven Stars is exceptional among Stoker’s Gothic novels inthat it contains no obvious racial script. The novel describes an attempt toresurrect the mummy of an Egyptian sorcerer-queen, Tera, at the turn ofthe twentieth century. Two versions of the work appeared in the author’slifetime. The first concludes with the deaths of all but the narrator, MalcomRoss, when the attempted resurrection is thwarted by a violent storm. Thesecond, published in 1912, structures the resurrection as a clear failure, andconcludes with a marriage between the narrator and the heroine, MargaretTrelawny. The plot lends itself immediately to the obvious Gothic themesof both blasphemy and the search for forbidden knowledge. However, the novel embodies also a subtle reworking of the DOPPELGÄNGER


motif through the Egyptian cosmology of the Ka or spiritual double, bymeans of which the narrative structures the possession of Margaret by thepersonality of her physical double, Queen Tera.

The Lady of the Shroud marks a return by the author, albeit with someirony, to the theme of vampirism. The novel describes the experiences of a British adventurer who inherits a Balkan castle in the early years ofthe twentieth century. The hero, Rupert Sent Leger, wins the trust of thelocal people, leading them finally to victory against a Turkish aggressor.The narrative concludes with a festival of Balkan solidarity, in which apolitical union is concluded between the various warring states, underthe benevolent eye of King Edward VII. Stoker skilfully combines thispolitical script with what appears to be a conventional vampire plot. Anumber of ironic references within Rupert’s narrative, however, suggestthat the alleged female vampire he encounters is in fact a living personfully cognizant of the signification of literary and mythical vampirism.The ‘vampire’ is finally revealed as the daughter of the hereditary rulerof the region, shortly before she is kidnapped by Turkish brigands.Rupert’s rescue of her concludes with the public recognition of the mar-riage contracted between them in secret some time earlier. Her name,Teuta, has an obvious racial signification.

Stoker’s final novel, The Lair of the White Worm, adapts the British folklegend of the Laidley Worm, constructing the White Worm of the title as a massive serpent capable of taking female form. The Worm is ultimatelydestroyed with explosives detonated by the Australian hero, Adam Salton.It has been suggested that the human personification of the Worm, LadyArabella March, represents an assertive and predatory womanhood unacceptable to late Victorian and Edwardian morality. Though LadyArabella, like Queen Tera, is physically destroyed, it is worth recalling the fate of several of Stoker’s non-supernatural heroines. Marjory AnitaDrake and Teuta are both assertive and self-confident: both are chastenedby a kidnap ordeal, after which they submit willingly to the traditionalfemale marital role of passive partner. It would seem that, if a universalstandard of masculinity is presumed in the behaviour of chivalrous malesof all classes, then there is a related standard of restraint and passivityembedded in the author’s fictionalisation of the female.

One biographer has suggested that Stoker’s later writings exhibit signsof sexual guilt, a consequence of the author having allegedly contractedsyphilis around the turn of the century. While this remains a temptinghypothesis for a critical establishment frequently preoccupied with sexualsymbolism, it must be stated that the death certificate – with its enig-matic conclusion, ‘exhaustion’ – is far from conclusive.

WILLIAM HUGHES

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Walpole, Horace (1717–97)

Horace Walpole is an important figure not only for Gothic fiction, butfor the eighteenth-century GOTHIC REVIVAL in all its aspects. He isbest known as the author of the first Gothic Novel, The Castle of Otranto(1764) and for his house at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, which was the most complete and authentic neo-Gothic structure existing at the time. But he was also responsible for the first Gothic drama, TheMysterious Mother (1768), and wrote a number of scholarly but readablebooks on the art, letters, architecture and history of the Middle Ages,that had a considerable impact on contemporary taste. What makesWalpole distinctive among the antiquarians of the day is the fact that he did not treat the relics of the past as objects of dry curiosity. His approach was always that of an amateur in the most passionate sense.And his elevated social standing helped to increase his influence withthe reading public.

He was born on 24 September 1717, the third son and sixth child of thepowerful Whig politician Sir Robert Walpole. In 1721 his father was ele-vated to the position of prime minister, and there he remained, indefiance of fierce opposition, for the next 21 years. Horace’s childhoodand youth was consequently passed in an atmosphere of public dignity.At Eton he was schooled in the Classics and made a number of life-longfriends. Among them was the future poet Thomas Gray, and it was withGray that Walpole journeyed on a Grand Tour culminating in Italy,where he dutifully admired the classical ruins and began to collectRoman coins. By the time he returned to England he had already beenelected an MP, representing Castle Rising near the family estate inNorfolk. Pale, slight, with a thin voice, he was not destined to cut muchof a figure in Parliament. While he maintained for many years a fascina-tion with political wheeling and dealing, and occasionally intervened indebates in an indirect way, he resolved to make his mark in other fields.

Letter-writing was the first focus for his energies. He had early felt asense of his talents in this direction, and for the rest of his life maintaineda copious correspondence with a select few, and occasional exchangeswith many others. He wrote with a view to posthumous publication, andmade sure that almost all his letters and most of his correspondents’were preserved. The monumental Yale edition of his correspondence,begun in 1937 and completed in 1983, runs to 48 large volumes. It is atreasure trove for any student of eighteenth-century Gothic; his exchangeswith his antiquarian friends the Reverend William Cole and WilliamMarshall deserve special attention.

Walpole’s conversion to Gothic seems to have been sudden. In thesummer of 1749 he made the first of many tours around the country,


visiting ruins, old churches and country houses and making detailedrecords of their structures and contents. In autumn of the same year heannounced to astonished friends his decision to reconstruct StrawberryHill in the Gothic style. At the time, Gothic was just one of a number ofexotic modes used for garden follies or indoor ornament, and Chinesewas more the fashion. But Walpole persisted, and went on altering andadding over the years until the original box was transformed into an irregular edifice double the size, featuring battlements, pinnacles,arched windows, a gallery, a cloister, and two imposing towers, all executed with an authenticity till then unknown, and before longStrawberry Hill was becoming a destination for day-trippers. Event-ually the stream of visitors grew so intrusive that Walpole laid downrules for entry, and prepared A Description of Strawberry Hill to serve asa guidebook.

His Gothic interests expanded into learned publications on earlyEnglish letters, painting and architecture, and a polemical essay indefence of Richard III. But he always insisted that his researches weremerely a pastime, and in 1757 established his own Strawberry Hill Pressas if to emphasise his amateur status.

As a young man Walpole had written some light poetry addressed tofriends, and a small selection was published at his Strawberry Hill Press.Later he wrote some short satires, which were produced as pamphlets.But nothing in his previous work anticipated his sole experiment in thenovel form, The Castle of Otranto. It is set in a Southern Italian principalityin the period of the Crusades, and concerns the fate of the family ofPrince Manfred, over whom hangs a prophecy that they will lose thecastle ‘whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it’. Themarriage ceremony of Manfred’s only son and heir unleashes a riot ofsupernatural occurrences. Young Conrad is crushed beneath a hugehelmet, servants are terrified by glimpses of gigantic limbs, a portraitcomes to life and a statue bleeds. Meanwhile Manfred grows in villainyas he attempts to restore his fortunes by divorcing his virtuous wifeHippolyta and marrying the bride intended for Conrad, and his daugh-ter Matilda falls in love with a handsome young peasant who bears amysterious resemblance to the last of the original line of princes. A taleof usurpation is eventually uncovered, Matilda is accidentally murderedby her father, Manfred and Hippolyta retire to convents, and the rightfulheir takes possession of his inheritance.

Extravagant though the plot summary sounds, the story is in fact de-livered in a light and often witty style, prompting some critics to inter-pret it as a burlesque. The novel was first published on Christmas Eve,1764, in an edition of 500 copies. Walpole was nervous about the recep-tion ‘of so wild a tale’, and presented it in the Preface as an antique work

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of Catholic propaganda, translated from Italian. But favourable reviewsand good sales encouraged him, in the second edition, of April 1765, to acknowledge it as a ‘new species of romance’ and offer it as a model for ‘men of brighter talents’. To this second edition he added the subtitle‘A Gothic Story’. Clara Reeve took up the challenge with The Old EnglishBaron (1778), and in 1781 a stage version by Robert Jephson entitled TheCount of Narbonne was produced with success, but it was not until the1790s that the Gothic Novel was properly launched. ANN RADCLIFFEand MATTHEW LEWIS were by this time more important influences,but in 1811 Walter Scott wrote a highly appreciative Introduction to anew edition of the novel, and it has retained a reputation as the foundingtext of the genre.

Encouraged by the outcome of his first Gothic experiment, in 1766Walpole began writing The Mysterious Mother, a tragic drama set in theperiod before the Reformation. But when it was eventually printed at the Strawberry Hill Press in 1768, only fifty copies were made, to becirculated among friends. The author’s reticence on this occasion wasapparently owing to the impropriety of the work. The primum mobileof the tragedy is incest. The widowed Countess of Narbonne has exiledher son Edmund for unknown reason, and leads a life of penitence for a crime which she refuses to confess to the sinister priest Benedict.Secretly Edmund returns, and with the connivance of the suspectingpriest, meets and weds Adeliza, the beautiful young ward of his motherwho is residing in a convent. It finally emerges that many years before,the Countess had received, on the same evening, news of her husband’sdeath and of her son’s liaison with a maidservant. She had disguisedherself as the servant and, overcome by his resemblance to his father,had given way to passion; Adeliza was the consequence of their union.The Countess, on discovering the marriage of her children, kills herself,Adeliza retires once more to a nunnery, and Edmund, desolate, returnsto the army.

The Mysterious Mother was the first of a genre of Gothic dramas, neitheras numerous nor as well known today as their novelistic counterparts. It includes A. McDonald’s Vimonda (1788), The Mysterious Marriage; or,The Hermitage of Rosalva (1798) by Harriet Lee, and Lewis’s The CastleSpectre (1798). But in this instance Walpole’s influence was limited byself-censorship. The play was never performed and had a clandestinereputation, attracting some praise and much opprobrium. Indeed, half a century later its aura was sufficiently sulphurous for Lord Byron toreprove its neglect and commend it as ‘a tragedy of the highest order,and not a puling love-play’ (Preface to Marino Faliero, 1821).

His final literary effort was Hieroglyphic Tales (1785), published atStrawberry Hill in an edition of just six copies, a collection of six whimsical


stories somewhat in the style of the Arabian Nights. Free invention could gono further. While they could not be classified as Gothic by their setting,themes or mood, they do rely on effects of exaggeration and disproportionas The Castle of Otranto had done, and in them Walpole’s taste for extremesituations is taken to ludicrous lengths. ‘The King and His ThreeDaughters’, for example, concerns a romance between the eldest princess,who ‘was extremely handsome, had a great deal of wit, and spoke Frenchto perfection’ but never existed, and the Prince of Quifferiquimini, ‘whowould have been the most accomplished hero of the age, if he had notbeen dead’ and sets a fashion for cadaverousness at court.

E. J. CLERY

Wilde, Oscar (1854–1900)

Wilde’s most characteristic mode is playful and anti-serious, what SusanSontag has described as ‘camp’, and nowhere is this better exemplifiedthan in his best known and most successful work, The Importance of BeingEarnest (1895). Nevertheless, the text which first made Wilde’s literaryreputation (during the late 1880s Wilde was famous simply for beingfamous), the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), is a sustained exer-cise in portentousness which combines the conventions of Gothic fictionwith melodrama and Wilde’s distinctive wit.

In effect, Dorian Gray is a late Victorian version of ‘CONTEMPORARYGOTHIC’. Wilde had already parodied the well-used devices of Gothicfiction in his comic short story ‘The Canterville Ghost’ (1891); in DorianGray, however, the super-sophisticated surfaces of life in the imperialmetropolis at the century’s end are interrogated by the Gothic narrative.Dorian enters into a Faustian bargain: as he remains perpetually young,so his portrait ages. Wilde delivers here his own idiosyncratic reworkingof the DOPPELGÄNGER motif and it is interesting to note that one of the literary analogues for the novel is EDGAR ALLAN POE’s story of‘doubling’, William Wilson. Dorian is Wilde’s version of the Gothic over-reacher exemplified by Drs Frankenstein and Jekyll (see MARYSHELLEY and ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON) and his fate is to fallprey to retributive justice as the past visits judgement on the present.(Dorian is pursued by a modern Fury in the shape of James Vane, anddies by his own hand.) In this respect, Wilde manipulates the narrativein much the same way as his fellow Irishman J. SHERIDAN LE FANUin his stories of the supernatural, one of which, ‘Strange Event in the Lifeof Schalken the Painter’, may well have had a formative influence on

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Wilde’s novel. The generally sensationalist atmosphere of the book ismaintained by Wilde’s lurid, and frequently overwritten, descriptions of Dorian’s mounting terror in front of his portrait, and of London (inparticular the East End and its denizens) as menacing and murderous.

In lectures, reviews and articles written during the 1880s Wildeoutlined an aesthetic theory which was fundamentally anti-naturalistic;it was also Janus-faced, anticipating in its awareness of the self-referentiality of language and art some of the central tenets of thecultural criticism of our own time, and simultaneously looking back toprogenitors such as Gautier, Baudelaire, Poe and Whistler. Wilde’s use ofthe Gothic in Dorian Gray is clearly part of his anti-naturalistic project,matching fictive practice to aesthetic theory: it sanctions Wilde’s desire towrite about ‘modern life’ (and modish notions of cultural and ethicaldecadence) without simply ‘mirroring’ it. (In the Preface to Dorian Grayhe claims that it is the spectator and not life that art really mirrors.)Indeed, the relationship between the portrait and its subject provides aGothic and supernatural twist to the central theoretical paradox inWilde’s essay ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1891): that art is more ‘life-like’ (theportrait is process, it grows old) than nature, ‘the real thing’ (Dorianseems to enjoy the immutable beauty of the art-object).

Wilde’s interest in, and manipulation of, THE SUPERNATURAL mayhave derived from the Irish oral story-telling tradition of which he was apart: many contemporaries noted the brilliance of his conversation,which sometimes improvised versions of what were to become his fairy-tales. On his release from prison in 1897, after two years of hard labour,Wilde fled England for Europe under the apparently unlikely alias ofSebastian Melmoth. This combined a reference to his favourite saint witha typically theatrical and paradoxical statement of both his exile and hisnational roots. CHARLES MATURIN was a distant relative of Wilde’sand by adopting the name of the wandering ‘hero’ of Maturin’s novel,thus casting himself to Gothic type, Wilde acknowledged both his out-cast status and, obliquely, his Irishness. His connection with the IRISHGOTHIC tradition is completed circumstantially: as a young man he hadcourted Florence Balcombe, who later married BRAM STOKER. It hasbeen suggested that the London prostitutes who danced in provocativecelebration at Wilde’s conviction provided Stoker with the inspirationfor his representation of female vampires.

Clearly, Wilde’s use of Gothic convention in Dorian Gray acquires aparticular frisson in the light of his own dangerous personal circum-stances: the thrills and terrors of the homosexual double life, which helikened to ‘feasting with panthers’, are both indulged and objectified – ineffect, aestheticised – by the Gothic manner as Wilde flirts with his readersand the possibility of confessional disclosure. (With Lord Henry Wotton


and Basil Hallward, the ‘artists’ who bring him to consciousness of hisbeauty, Dorian makes up a thinly concealed love-triangle.) Wilde’s pre-face to the novel, with its central contention that ethical judgementsshould not be applied to art-objects in general, and novels in particular,is in many ways an amoral corrective to the narrative trajectory of histale. Nevertheless, the punishment which Dorian incurs has an un-deniable prophetic piquancy for Wilde, who claimed that men pay fortheir mistakes, and then they pay again.

NEIL SAMMELLS

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abandonment 88Abbé Prévost 220–1, 307–9Abbotsford 161abject, the 106abnormal psychology 39, 42abolitionism 276Aborigines 285–6Abraham, Nicolas 216–17Absalom! Absalom! 274‘Acrobats of Desire, The’ 19addiction 50–1Addison, Joseph 195, 236aesthetics 104, 147African-American Gothic 266–7,

324Aiken, Joan 129Ainsworth, William Harrison 1Ainsworth’s Magazine 1The Albigenses 63Alcuin: A Dialogue on the Rights of

Women 12Aldiss, Brian 173Alice; or, The Mysteries 16alienation 251–2, 263–4All Hallows’ Eve 7allegory 64Allston, Washington 269–70‘Altar of the Dead’ 116alter ego 95, 119, 274ambivalence 177, 205American, The 45, 47American Gothic 140, 267–75, 334American Psycho 245androgyny 84Anecdotes of a Painting 158Anglo-Caribbean Gothic 276–7animality 190‘Annabel Lee’ 69anti-realism 17Antipodean Gothic film 334–5 see also

Australian Gothicanxiety 203apocalypse 239appearance 13, 95–6, 172–3Appell, J. W. 298–9Arabs 212Armitt, Lucy xiii, 135

architecture xviii, 156–7, 161, 164–6, 279,298

art 127–8Art Nouveau 168Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 12,

14, 269arts and crafts 167Asian Gothic film 335Asian horror films 141–2‘Assignation, The’ 72asylum fiction 201–2asylums 144, 199Atar-Gull 293Attack of the Leading Ladies 137Atwood, Margaret 288, 289–90Austen, Jane 195, 229Australia, imagined 277–8Australian Gothic 277–87authors, professional status 300Autobiography of My Mother, The 277Azemia 4

Bag of Bones 49Baillie, John 236Ballin, Rosetta 184Balzac, Honoré de 293Barthes, Roland 86Basil 20Bataille, Georges 86Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War 65Baudelaire, Charles 225, 312Baudrillard, Jean 112, 114Baynton, Barbara 282Bear 290Beckford, William 2–5, 116, 196, 213‘Beckoning Fair One, The’ 66–7Beckwith, Julia Catherine 289BeDevil 219, 286, 307‘Beethoven’s Instrumental-Musik’ 37Bellair, John 129Beloved 120, 267, 275‘Benito Cerena’ 272‘Benlian’ 66Benson, Arthur 48Benson, E. F. 190, 191–2Bentley’s Miscellany 1bereavement 4, 84, 89, 90

339

Index

Berenstein, Rhona, J. 137Bertram; or, The Castle of St Adolbrand 61Bestuzhev, Alexander 315–16Bettelheim, Bruno 135Bible, the 212Bierce, Ambrose 5–7, 272–3, 318, 322Billy Budd, Sailor 65–6Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary

Painters 2Bird of Night, The 35Bird, Robert Montgomery 270‘Birds, The’ 27Bird’s Nest, The 42bizarre 130black magic 260‘Black Town’ 286Blackwood, Algernon 7–9Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 320Blake, William 227, 264blasphemy 54, 98Blavatsky, Helen Petrovna 243Bleak House 22, 23Blithedale Romance, The 33blood 3–4, 6, 8, 9, 29–30, 34, 53–4, 64, 73,

76, 87, 98, 106, 125, 144, 171, 189, 194,208, 213, 216, 218, 224, 232, 252–5, 257,260, 293, 298, 311, 312, 324

Bloody Chamber, The 18Bloom, Clive xiii, 23–6, 57–9, 241–3bluebooks 106–7body 33, 106, 118, 128, 187‘Body Snatchers, The’ 95bodysnatching 88–9Bondwoman’s Narrative, The 266Borel, Pétrus 295–6Borges, Jorge Luis 6‘Borrhomeo the Astrologer’ 52borrowing 221, 278, 308‘Botheration of Tim Farmiloe, The’ 52Botting, Fred xiii, 178, 184–92, 204–5boundaries 19, 109, 188–9Bowen, Elizabeth 53, 304–5Bowmen, The 60Bracebridge Hall 40Brandner, Gary 110Bravo of Venice, The 55–6Bride of Corinth, The 27–8, 29Brite, Poppy Z. 257British Gothic film 335–6Broadbent, James 279Bronfen, Elisabeth xiii, 113–16, 231–2

Brontë, Anne 11Brontë, Branwell 11Brontë, Charlotte 9–10, 11, 108, 119,

182, 287Brontë, Emily 10, 119, 182Brontës, the 9–12, 150Brooke-Rose, C. 119Brophy, Brigid 6–7Brown, Charles Brockden 12–15, 31, 93,

267, 268–9‘Brownie of the Black Haggs, The’ 39‘Brown Man’s Servant, The’ 44Bruhm, Steven xiii, 128Büchner, K. G. 264buildings 10Bulgakov, Mikhail 317Bulwer Lytton, Edward 15–17bundesroman 300Bunn, Anna Maria 280Bürger, Gottfried 315Burke, Edmund 36, 147, 159, 184, 195–6,

236, 303Burns, Robert 319Butler, Charles xiii, 129–31, 197–8Butler, Marilyn 178Byrne, Nicholas 22Byron, George Gordon, Lord 75–6, 214,

229, 264–5Byronic Hero 176–7

cabbalism 7, 107–8‘camp’ 76, 103, 145, 148Can Such Things Be? 5‘Canterville Ghost, The’ 103capitalism 122Cappiello, Rosa 285Carey, Peter 284caricature 70, 169, 175, 194, 217Carleton, William 304‘Carmilla’ 53Carrie 49Carter, Angela xxii, xxiii, 17–19, 86, 154,

179–80, 183, 198Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The 58, 59Castille, Hyppolyte 293Castle of Otranto, The 10, 33, 45, 101, 109,

111, 127, 146, 180, 196, 199, 207Castle Spectre, The 56, 276Castle, Terry xxiCastles of Athlin and Dunbayne, The 79–80Castricano, Jodey xiii, 41–3

340 Index

Cat People 138cautionary tales 130celibacy 139Centaur, The 7, 8Chanady, Amaryll Beatrice xiii, 204chapbooks 106–7, 120characters 117, 146–7Chekhov, Anton 316childhood 130children’s literature 129–31China 212Chodorow, Nancy 122Chronicles of Golden Friars 52church building 160–1churches 164–6cinema 136–41, 153 see also filmCixous, Hélène 188Clairmont, Claire 75Clara Howard 14Clare! 65Clark, Steve xiii, 174–5Clarke, Marcus 281–2class, and the demonic 118classicism, Goethe 27Claudine von Villa Bella 28Clermont 186Clery, E. J. xiii, 85–6, 100–3Cleveland 221–2, 308–9Cloy, John xiii, 43–4Cobbett, William 4Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 55–6, 62, 196,

227–8Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James 47collective consciousness 7Collins, Wilkie (William) 16, 20–1,

114, 151colonial Gothic 108, 287–8colonialism 276, 278Come Along With Me 43comedy 74, 275comic Gothic 109 see also novelcomics 141–2Confessions of the Nun of St Omer 21Confidence Man, The 65Conger, Sandy McMillen 10Conjure Wife 109Conrad, Joseph 108, 248, 287Conrich, Ian xiii, 136–41Conroy xiii, 106contemporary Gothic 103, 109–11, 274Contested Castle, The 121

contradictions, hero-villain 177convictism 282Coraline 129Corman, Roger 139Cornwell, Neil xiii, 119–20, 175, 313–17Cottom, Daniel 181counterfeit 111–12Cox, Jeffrey N. xiii, 131–5Craft, Hannah 266Critique of Judgment 237Crowley, Aleister 243Curse of Frankenstein, The, film 138curses 154, 158, 260cyber-Gothic 268, 275, 290–1cyberpunk 112–13‘Cyborg Manifesto’ 112–13cyborgs 112–13

Dacre, Charlotte 21–2, 55, 120, 238Dadd, Richard 128Dahl, Roald 130‘Daisy Miller’ 45dangers, in contemporary Gothic 110–11After Dark 20d’Arlincourt, Vicomte 294, 295d’Arnaud, Baculard 221‘Das Fräulein von Scuderi’ 38Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic

in Victorian Fiction 122Davies, Robertson 291–2Davison, Carol Margaret xiii, 266–7,

276–7Dawson, Emma 272–3, 318DC Comics 141de Lisser, Herbert G. 276–7De Mille, James 290de Quincey, Thomas 228Dead Secret, The 20death 62, 88, 113–16, 187, 236death and the maiden 18death of a beautiful woman’, Poe 68, 69,

72, 271Death of Halpin Frayser, The 6debates, national 13decadence, Machen 59December Tales 1decomposition 187, 190–1degeneration 58–9, 95, 98, 152, 161, 172,

189–90, 252, 255, 277degradation 187dementia 76

Index 341

demonic 22, 30, 55, 116–18, 177–8, 241Dennis, John 236Denton, Eric Hadley xiii, 27–30‘Der Goldene Topf’ 38‘Der Sandmann’ 38‘Deserts, Ruins, Troubled Waters:

Female Dreams in Fiction and theDevelopment of the Gothic Novel’ 121

desire 66–7, 116Devil’s Directory, The 5Devil’s Elixirs, The 38Diary of John Polidori, The 75diaspora xxiiDickens, Charles 16, 20, 22–3, 125, 150,

247–8Didier, Béatrice 224Die Braut von Corinth 27–8, 29Die Elixiere des Teufels 38Die Leiden des jungen Werthers 27, 28–9,

235Die Ritter-, Räuber- und

Schauerromantik 298–9Die Serapionsbrüder 37, 38disease 14, 35, 58, 93, 140, 150, 218, 222,

229, 278, 285, 309doctors 144‘Don’t Look Now’ 27Doody, Margaret 121doppelgänger 98–9, 103, 119, 129, 150,

182, 188, 250, 265double self 46, 188

Dostoevsky, Fyodor 119, 313, 316double vision 289doubling 15, 246Doyle, Arthur Conan 23–6, 44, 243Dozois, Gardiner 112Dracula 97, 108, 113, 119, 152, 180, 189,

287in film 136

Dragon Hoard, The 53drama 102, 131–5

Australian Gothic 284Jacobean 132Poe, Edgar Allan 69political and social issues 133–4technology 133

dramatisations 133drame monacale 221‘Dream-Land’ 68dreams, Hogg 39

Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents from Various Parts of Europe 4

Dresser, Madge xiv, 125–6Du Bois, W. E. B. 266Du Maurier, Daphne 26–7dualism 118, 119, 314Dublin University Magazine 52Duchess of Malfi, The 197–8Dudley & Gilderoy: A Nonsense 8dvoemirie 314, 316

Eco, Umberto 210école frénétique 292–7Edgar Huntly; or, The Memoirs of a

Sleepwalker 12, 13, 14, 269Eirian, Sion xiv, 324Elements of Criticism 237‘Eleonora’ 72Eleusiniana 16Elf-King, The 29émigré fiction 317Empty House, The 7enclosure 121Engel, Maria 290English-Canadian Gothic 288–92Enlightenment 299entrapment and escape 19, 122Episodes, The 4Episodes before Thirty 7Erlkönig 29Ernest Maltravers 16Ernestus Berchtold, or, The Modern

Oedipus 76eroticism 2, 18, 29, 53, 76, 83, 84, 130, 183,

198, 206, 210, 251, 252–3, 256–7, 283,284, 306

Eugene Aram 16eugenics 97European Gothic, film 336–7‘Eustace’ 53evil 20, 117, 190, 200exile 179explained supernatural 77, 79, 82, 148,

202

‘Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The’ 114–15

Faerie Queen, The 31‘Fairy’ painters 128fairy tale 11, 37, 53, 84, 86, 130, 135, 152,

204, 290

342 Index

faith 113Falkland 15‘Fall of the House of Usher, The’ 72–4,

193–4, 321Family 35family 140–1, 172Family Secrets 217Fantastic, the 15, 113–14, 119–20Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a

Literary Genre, The 118fantasy 11, 37, 53, 68, 119–20, 124, 138,

141, 142, 152, 174, 180, 204, 247, 261,314, 317

Fanthorpe, U. A. xiv, 126–7Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio 60Faulkner, William 274–5, 322Faust 27, 30Faust II 30Faustian pact 28, 103, 272fear, and the sublime 236Felman, Shoshana 203female Gothic 22, 79, 110, 120–4, 135, 266

film 337see also novel

Female Gothic 120–1femininity 99, 181, 182feminism 133, 179, 201, 240feminist Gothic 284–5Ferguson Ellis, Kate 121–2, 181Feudal Tyrants; or, The Counts of Carlsheim

and Sargans 56‘Fiction Field of Australia, The’ 279–80fiction, Rosicrucian 230–1 see also novelFiedler, Leslie 45, 176, 180, 266Field, Barron 279film 136–41, 153

adaptations 136, 337–8American Gothic 334Antipodean Gothic 334–5Asian Gothic 335British Gothic 335–6classical Hollywood horrors 336European Gothic 336–7female Gothic 337horror parodies 138promotional material 137psychological thrillers 139, 140–1representations of terror 245women’s 137–8

Fin-de-Siècle 66, 120Fireworks 17, 18

First Gothics, The xxifirst-person narrative 15, 46, 82, 193Fisher, Benjamin F. xiv, 22–3, 67–74Fleenor, Juliann E. 120–1folklore 9, 22, 38, 68, 206, 253, 261, 300,

314, 323, 300Fonthill Abbey 4–5, 159–60forbidden knowledge 98, 107–8, 261–2Foster, James R. 220–1, 307–8Foucault’s Pendulum 210four elements 208four humours 208–9four-level world 209four qualities 208Four Zoas, The 264Fox family 242‘Fragments from a Writing Desk’ 63France 223–4Frank, Frederick S. xxiFrankenstein xx, 75, 86–91, 115, 117, 119,

124, 126, 144, 148, 175–6, 187–8, 194,205, 207, 229, 239, 265

in film 136–7Frankenstein Unbound 173Franklin, Michael xiv, 2–5, 211–14Frederic, Harold 273Fredolfo 62Freeman, Nick xiv, 53–4French Revolution 294French Romanticism 293, 297Freneau, Philip 268Frénétique School 292–7Freud, Sigmund 116, 128, 135, 153, 188,

231, 239–40, 250–1Friedrich, Caspar David 127–8Fruit Stoners, The 8Frye, Northrop 288Fuseli, Johann Heinrich 127–8, 206

Gaiman, Neil 129Garden of Survival, The 8Gaskell, Mrs 11Gaudí, Antonio 168Gebir 213Gelder, Ken xiv, 219–20, 306–7gender 120, 121

Collins, Wilkie 20conventions 180–1and the demonic 118and insanity 200Rice, Anne 84

Index 343

gender – continuedrole reversal 274Stoker, Bram 97, 98

Gentleman and Ladies 35‘George Dobson’s Expedition to Hell’ 39On German Architecture 28German expressionism 153German Gothic 232, 298–303, 320German Romanticism 7, 319–20ghost stories 124–5, 272–3

Bierce, Ambrose 5Bulwer Lytton, Edward 16Collins, Wilkie 20–1English-Canadian Gothic 291–2Goethe, J. W. von 29James, Henry 45, 46Onions, Oliver 66psychological 271

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary 47ghosts, in children’s literature 129Gibson, William 112, 275, 290–1Gilbert, R. A. xiv, 1, 59–60, 124–5, 215–16Gilbert, Sandra 122, 135Glass Darkly, In a 52, 53Goddu, Theresa 267Godolphin 16Godwin, William 87Goethe, J. W. von 27–30, 235, 299Golden Bowl, The 273–4Golem, the 107, 125–6, 129, 262González, Antonio Ballesteros xiv,

119Good Terrorist, The 248Goth, Gothic 126–7Gothic art 127–8Gothic, as threat to mental health 203Gothic body 128Gothic conventions 45Gothic devices 43, 44Gothic drama 69Gothic manservant 14‘Gothic Mirror, The’ 122Gothic novel 146–54

Bulwer Lytton 15Lewis, Matthew 54see also novel

‘Gothic Possibilities’ 122Gothic Revival, Beckford 4Gothic romance 45, 109Gothic story 147‘Gothic Sublimity’ 240

Gothick Taste in the Colony of New South Wales 279

Goths 142, 158gotisch 298Götz von Berlichingen 28Goya (Francisco Jose-Goya y

Lucietes) 127Grand Romantic Melodrama 56Grant, Iain Hamilton xiv, 112–13Graveyard School 174–5Great Expectations 23Great God Pan, The 59‘Great Law of Subordination’ 143grimoires 262grotesque 130, 140, 175Grounds of Criticism in Poetry,

The 236Guardian: A Tale by an Australian,

The 280–1Gubar, Susan 122, 135Guerrillas 277guilt, national 266

Hale, Terry xiv, 220–6, 292–7, 307–13

Hamel, the Obeah Man 276Hamlet 217Hammer 138–9Hangasman 42Haraway, Donna 112Hardy, Thomas 169Hartland, Reginald 296Haunted Hotel, The 21haunting 18, 216–17Haunting of Hill House, The 42, 109‘Hawthorne and his Mosses’ 65Hawthorne, Nathaniel 14, 30–4, 65, 268,

271–2Hazlitt, William 4–5, 78Hearn, Lafcadio 306Heart of Darkness 108, 287Heathcliff 178–9Hegel, Georg 264, 265Heine, Heinrich 264Henley, Samuel 3hermetism 175–6hero-villain 13, 64, 97, 150, 176–80Heroes and Villains 17, 18, 19heroines 81, 169–70, 172–3, 180–4‘Hic Jacet’ 66Hieroglyphic Tales 102–3

344 Index

High Romanticism 302Hill of Dreams, The 60Hill, Susan 34–5, 125Hinduism 213–14historical content 147historical romances 149historico-Gothic 184histories 24History of Six Weeks’ Tour through a

Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland 88

Hoffmann, E. T. A. 17, 32, 36–8, 119, 153,250, 302

Hogg, James 38–40, 95, 117, 119, 201,245–6, 320–1

Hogle, Jerrold xiv, 93–6, 111–12, 266Holland, Norman 122Holmes, Sherlock 25Holt, Victoria 109, 120, 173homo-eroticism 84homosexuality, Wilde 104Horner, Avril xiv, 26–7, 109, 180–4,

249–50, 251–1horror 128, 184–92, 237, 239, 243–4

in children’s literature 129feeling 185Hawthorne, Nathaniel 33Penny Dreadfuls 216Poe, Edgar Allan 74psychic 114settings 185Stevenson, Robert Louis 94and the uncanny 188–9see also novel

horror comics 109horror fiction, popular 218horror films 136–7, 138, 141, 336horror Gothic 110‘Horror-Horn, The’ 190House by the Churchyard, The 52House of Night, The 268House of the Seven Gables, The 33Houswitschka, Christoph xiv, 263–5‘How to Design a Haunted House’ 291–2‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’ 74Howells, W. D. 273Hughes, William xiv, 47–8, 96–9, 144–5,

252–7Human Chord, The 7human nature 189–90humour 74, 109

hypnotism 9, 68, 116, 130–1, 144, 255,262–3 see also mind control

hysteria 109

I Walked with a Zombie 138, 219, 277identity 182, 183ideology 122, 132, 134, 181, 223–4, 295–6Illuminati novels 14, 192–3 see also novelI’m the King of the Castle 35imagination 186–7, 193–7, 226, 227, 228Imlay, Elizabeth xiv, 9–12Imlay, Fanny 88Impressionism 128incarnation 246incest 73, 76, 87, 89, 102incredulity 113India 213–14individualism 258individuation 122Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffmann,

The 18, 19influence

Abbé Prévost 220–1, 307–8The Brontës 182–3Hoffmann, E. T. A. 320Lovecraft, H. P. 58–9Poe, Edgar Allan 74Polidori, John 76Radcliffe, Ann 79

influenceson Gothic 148on Russian Gothic 314–15

innocence 130insanity 199–203

and gender 200induced 200male 200, 201–2Maturin, Charles Robert 61Poe, Edgar Allan 68–9, 202

inside narrative 65–6inside/outside 19Insomnia 49–50intertextuality 28Interview with the Vampire 84, 275Irigaray, L. 123Irish Gothic 52, 104, 303–5irony 11Irving, Washington 14, 31, 40–1, 267,

271Island, The 285Island of Dr Moreau, The 108, 288

Index 345

Italian, The 83, 171–2, 185Italy: with Sketches of Spain and Portugal 4Itinerant House, The 273

Jack Sheppard 1Jackson, R. 119Jackson, Rachel xiv, 66–7Jackson, Rosemary 117Jackson, Shirley 41–3, 109Jacobean drama 132Jacobean tragedy 197–8, 274Jacobs, W. W. 43–4Jacobus, Mary 203Jamaica Inn 26–7James, Henry 15, 24, 44–7, 114, 116, 120,

125, 268, 273–4James, Montague Rhodes (M. R.) 24, 47–8,

125, 151, 245–6James, William 6Jane Eyre 10, 11, 108, 119, 171–2, 182, 287Jane Talbot 14Japanese Gothic 305–6Jean Sbogar 294–5Jephson, Robert 102Jewel of Seven Stars, The 98–9‘“John Gladwin says…”’ 66John Silence, Physician Extraordinary 7, 8Jolley, Elizabeth 284–5Jones, Darryl xiv, 154–5Jones, Inigo 157Jones, Sir William 213Jordan, Elaine xiv, 17–19journal, personal 4, 10, 29, 57, 89, 91,

169, 276Journals of a West Indian Proprietor 276Joyce, James 53Julius Le Vallon: An Episode 8Just an Ordinary Day 43

Kahane, Claire 122, 240Kaidan 305Kames, Lord 237Kant, Immanuel 237Karamzin, Nikolai 315Karma 8Kean, Edmund 62Keats, John 198Keeling, Thomas, H. 173Kefala, Antigone 285Kenneally, Thomas 283Kennedy, John Pendleton 70

Kerr, Joan 279Kerridge, Richard xv, 218Killen, Alice 223Kincaid, Jamaica 277King, Stephen 49–51, 110, 140, 218Kipling, Rudyard 108Kirkland Revels 173Kiwi Gothic 140‘Klein Zaches Genannt Zinnober’ 38knowledge 98, 107–8, 261–2Knox, Dr Robert 321Kogawa, Joy 290Krafft-Ebbing, Richard von 231Kristeva, Julia 106

La Peau de Chagrin 293‘Lady Eleanore’s Mantle’ 271‘Lady of the House of Love’ 18Lady of the Shroud, The 99Lair of the White Worm, The 99lamia, the 198Lancashire Witches, The 1Landor, Walter Savage 213landscape 2, 11, 19–20, 27, 36, 68, 81, 108,

124, 129, 140, 150, 171, 181, 193, 213,237, 239, 240, 269, 278–82, 285, 288–9,291, 299, 300, 322

of the imagination 28, 30, 68Lane Clifford, Lucy 129Last Man, The 91Law, the 20Law and the Lady, The 20Lawson, Henry 282Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, The 20Le Cimetière de la Madeleine 224–5,

311–12Le Fanu, Sheridan 16, 48, 51–3, 103, 121,

125, 151, 303–4Le Manoir Du Diable 136Le Solitaire 294Le Vampire 295Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr nebst

Fragmentarischer Biographie desKapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler inZufälligen Makulaturblättern 38

Lectures on Art 270Ledger, Sally xv, 233, 234Lee, A. Robert xv, 63–6, 321–4Lee, Harriet 222, 310Lee, Sophia 184, 220–1, 308–10Lee, Tanith 53–4

346 Index

Legend of the Wandering Jew 257–9‘Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The’ 40Leland, Thomas 184Lermontov, Mikhail 316Leroux, Gaston 152Les Mille et une nuits 211Lessing, Doris 248Levin, Ira 110Lewis, Matthew 19, 54–7, 110, 116, 121,

128, 133, 148, 180, 196–7, 204, 244, 258,265, 276

Lewton, Val 138Libertine, The 21libraries 120Lieber, Fritz 109Life and Loves of a She-Devil, The 183Life of Charlotte Brontë 11Life of Lady Jane Grey 88Light in August 274liminality 109, 115Linden Hills 267‘Lines Written above Tintern

Abbey’ 240Lippard, George 270Literary History of Canada, The 288Literary Women 121Little Dorrit 122live burials 23Lives of Girls and Women 288locations xix, 45, 47, 59, 137Longinus 235Longsword: William, Earl of Salisbury 184Lost World, The 24‘Lottery, The’ 41–2‘Louella Miller’ 273Love and Death in the American Novel 45,

266Lovecraft, H. P. 7, 57–9, 274Lucretia; or, The Children of Night 16Lurker on the Threshold, The 59Lustig, T. J. xv, 12–15, 44–7lycanthropy 197–9Lynch, David 139–40Lyrical Ballads 196, 227–8

Machen, Arthur 59–60, 190–1Mack, Douglas S. xv, 38–40, 319–21Mackenzie, Henry 320Macpherson, James 227, 319Madame Putiphar 296madhouses 144, 199

madness 199–203, 265American Gothic 271and evil 200and gender 200induced 200Maturin, Charles Robert 61New Gothic 202Poe, Edgar Allan 68–9, 202Russian Gothic 316see also mental health

Madwoman in the Attic, The 122magic, and science 261–2Magic Toyshop, The 19, 183magical realism 120, 130, 204, 219, 306male Gothic 78Malet-Dagréou, Cécile xv, 60–3malevolent strangers 140Mallet, Paul-Henri 2Manfred 229manservants 143‘Mansion of Midnight, The’ 18Manuel 62Marble Faun, The 34Mardi 63–4Marlinsky 315–16Marlowe, Christopher 117Martin, Philip W. xv, 193–7, 198, 206–7,

226–30marvelous, the 31, 55, 59, 113, 118, 173,

219, 220, 306, 307‘Mary Burnet’ 39masculine/masculinity 98, 99, 115, 180,

121, 143, 182, 183, 198, 218, 226, 290Mason, Diane xv, 145‘Masque of the Red Death, The’ 71Master and Margarita, The 317masturbation 97materialism 85, 127Matilda 89Matthias, T. J. 185–6Mattotti, Lorenzo 141Maturin, Charles Robert 60–3, 116, 121,

148–9, 199, 239, 246–7, 259, 303, 304McCammon, Robert 110McCormack, W. J. xv, 51–3, 303–5McCullers, Carson 323McGrath, Patrick 202medicine 144–5mediums 242–3‘Meister Floh’ 37, 38Méliès, George 136

Index 347

Mellor, Anne K. 181Melmoth the Wanderer 61, 62–3, 116, 148–9,

199, 225, 239, 246–7, 259, 265, 303, 304melodrama 133Melville, Herman 15, 63–6, 268, 272men 200, 201–2, 285mental health 203 see also madnessmesmerism 33 see also hypnotism; mind

controlmeta-fiction 155Micah Clarke 25migrations 278Milbank, Alison xv, 120–4, 235–40Miles, Robert xv, 30–4, 76–83Milesian Chief, The 61Milton, John 117, 123mind-control 130–1 see also hypnotismMinerva Press 147, 149, 303Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border 319‘Miserere in B flat minor for soli, chorus,

organ and orchestra’ 36Miser’s Daughter, The 1Misery 50Missionary, The 214Mist in the Mirror, The 35Mistress of Mellyn 109Moby-Dick 64–5, 68, 272Modern Novel Writing; or, The Elegant

Enthusiast 4Modernism 66, 168Moers, Ellen 19, 121Moffatt, Tracy 219, 286–7, 307Mohr, Hans-Ulrich xv, 36–8, 257–9,

298–303Monaldi 270Monk, A Romance, The 54, 116, 121, 204, 258Monk, Samuel 236‘Monkey’s Paw, The’ 43Mononoke 305monster movies 136–7monsters 54, 111, 204, 290–1monstrosity 204–5Moodie, Susanna 289‘Moonlit Road, The’ 6Moonstone, The 20Moore, Alan 141Moorhouse, Frank 283moral insanity 200More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary 47Morris, David 240Morris, William 167

Morrison, Toni 120, 267, 275Morrow, Bradford 202Morrow, W. C. 318Mosses from an Old Manse 32, 65‘MS. found in a Bottle’ 70Mulvey-Roberts, Marie xv, 21–2, 75–6,

83–4, 86–92, 230–1, 232–3, 235Munby, A. N. L. 48Munro, Alice 288‘Murders in the Rue Morgue, The’ 71Murphy, Dennis Jasper 60Murray, Margaret 261music 2, 28, 29, 36–7, 56, 57, 133, 145, 200,

234, 286, 318mutability 13, 88, 115My Cousin Rachel 26‘My Kinsman, Major Molyneux’ 32‘Mysteries of Marie Roget, The’ 71Mysteries of Udolpho, The 45–6, 54, 82–3,

169–70, 171, 188, 200Mysterious Mother, The 102, 132Mystery of Edwin Drood, The 22, 23Mystery of the Sea, The 98

Nachtstücke 38Naipaul, V. S. 277Napoleonic Empire, collapse 294Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The 71,

72, 322national guilt 266nature as monster 28

nature, veneration of 226Naylor, Gloria 267Neal, John 270Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black

Forest xx, 205–6necromancy 88, 129, 205–6, 262–3Needful Things 49‘Negotium Perambulans’ 191Neuromancer 112Neversink 64New Humorists 44New Monthly Magazine 1‘New Mother, The’ 129Nicholas Nickelby 23Nicklas, Pascal xv, 192–3Night Cries 286nightmare 206–7Nightmare Abbey 65, 120, 155, 194–5, 229–30Nights at the Circus 19‘Nine Profane Pieces’ 17

348 Index

No Name 20Nodier, Charles 292, 294Northanger Abbey xx, 110, 120, 121, 147,

154–5, 181–2, 194, 195, 206, 229, 262–3

Northanger novels 154, 207–8, 262novel 146–54

comic 6, 40–1, 53, 56, 70, 109, 129, 130,132,134, 150, 175, 201, 210, 271, 284,285, 323

detective fiction 6, 15, 25, 38, 71, 151,153, 251, 263, 270–1, 318

female Gothic 19–20, 22, 79, 81, 110,120–4, 134, 135, 169, 180–1, 266, 267,273, 277

Gothic 15, 33–5, 54, 69, 76–83, 97, 100,109, 116, 121, 125, 131, 143, 146–54,180–1, 184, 213, 215–16, 220, 223, 226, 229, 232–3, 236, 238, 240, 265, 296, 298, 302, 307, 310, 313

graphic 141–2historical 1, 13, 31, 52, 63, 66, 80, 87, 88,

93, 98, 110, 127, 148–9, 150, 152, 154,184, 192, 216, 217, 222, 261, 289, 294,298, 301–2, 304–5, 309, 310, 316, 317

horror 9–10, 15, 33, 35, 43, 44, 49–51,53–4, 55, 57, 59–60, 87, 92–3, 109, 110,119, 120, 129–30, 147, 150–1, 154, 170,184–92, 199–200, 202–3, 216, 218, 232,236–40, 243–5, 269, 273–4, 284, 293,296

Illuminati 14, 192–3, 269Romantic 15, 25, 31–4, 39, 45–7, 54–5,

63, 68, 76–81, 88–9, 90, 92, 97, 102–3,107, 117, 123, 169–73, 176–80, 181–3,193–4, 214–15, 226–8, 254–5, 264–5,269–72, 288, 290, 297, 302, 310,313–14

Rosicrucian 16–17, 92, 230–1, 262satirical 2, 4, 83, 130, 175, 194–5, 229,

267, 272, 301, 317science fiction 24, 53, 71, 74, 87, 91, 112,

129, 151, 153, 173–4, 204, 256, 262,274, 275, 317, 318

sensation 1, 16, 20, 22, 23, 52, 69, 74, 83,85, 104, 107, 151, 203, 233, 236, 240,267, 270, 282, 289

Novel of the White Powder, The 190–1Nowra, Louis 284‘Nussknacker und Mausekönig’ 38

Obasan 290Obeah 276–7Occult, the 241

occultism 8, 16, 208–10, 242, 243O’Connor, Flannery 323Odoevsky, Prince Vladimir 315O’Donovan, Hallie xv, 129–31Oedipal triangle 122–3Offenbach, Jacques 37‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You,

My Lad’ 246‘Olalla’ 95–6Old Curiosity Shop, The 247Oliver Twist 22Omoo 63‘On Reading the Controversy Between

Lord Byron and Mr Bowles’ 279‘On the Uncanny’ 239–40‘One of the Missing’ 5Onions, Oliver 66–7oppression 91, 121, 134, 222, 238, 267, 274,

290, 310Order of Illuminati 192Order of the Golden Dawn 7Orientalism 3, 211–14Ormond; or, The Secret Witness 12, 269Ostenso, Marta 290otherness 11, 108, 119, 178–9, 288Our Mutual Friend 23Ovenden, Graham xv, 127–8over-reaching 177Owenson, Sydney 214Oxford Movement 164Ozawa, Eimi xv, 305–6

pain 111, 127–8, 231–2‘Painted Face, The’ 66pantheism 7, 127–8Paradise 63Paradise Lost 117paranoid Gothic 214–15parody 17, 39, 70, 109, 138, 147, 154–5,

181, 194, 229–3, 232, 292, 316Passion of New Eve, The 19Passions, The 21pastiche 159pathology xxiiPaul Clifford 16Paulding, James Kirk 270Pauliska, ou la perversité moderne 224, 225,

311, 312

Index 349

Peacock, Thomas Love 194–5, 229–30Peake, Mervyn 200Peep into a Picture Book, A 9Pelham 15Penny Dreadfuls 149, 215–16Percy, Thomas 227periodicals 120Perkins Gilman, Charlotte 152, 183,

268, 273Pet Sematary 50Peter Pan 131phantasmagoria 275phantom, the 216–17Phantom of the Opera, The 152Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of

Our Ideas of the Sublime and theBeautiful, A 36, 195–6, 236, 303

photography 155–6Piazza Tales, The 65Pickwick Papers, The 22Picture of Dorian Gray, The 103–5, 119picturesque 2, 31, 36, 80, 81, 159–60, 222,

299, 301, 303, 310 Pierre 65, 272Pilgrim’s Progress 31plagues 144–5plot 129, 132, 170Poe, Edgar Allan 14, 17, 31, 67–74, 95, 114,

119, 150, 188, 193–4, 202, 267, 269–71,321–2

in film 136, 139poetry 56–7, 67–8, 227Polidori, John 75–6, 90, 110, 213, 229, 254,

255, 295Politian 69politico-Gothic 217Poltergeist 219Pope, Alexander 205, 212popular horror fiction 218porphyria 218–19Portrait of a Lady, The 45, 273possession 95, 99, 118, 218, 240, 274Post-Impressionism 128post-structuralism 203postcolonial Gothic 219–20, 306–7Potter, Franz J. xv, 106–7Powell, Anna xv, 141–2power 114–15

James, Henry 47Pratt, E. J. 289Praz, Mario 117

Pre-Raphaelitism 128Pre-Romanticism 299Presbyterianism 94Private Memoirs and Confessions of a

Justified Sinner, The 38–9, 117, 119,245–6, 320

procreation 90professions 144Professor, The 10Prometheus 89proscription 225, 312psychiatry 202psychic conflict 55psychic horror 114psychoanalysis 122, 202psychological distortion 42psychological Gothic 32psychological horror

in film 138Poe, Edgar Allan 68

psychological novels 23psychological thrillers, film 139, 140–1psychology 202, 268Psychopathia Sexualis 231Pugin, A. W. 161Pugin, E. W. 162–4Punter, David xvi, 49–51, 214–15,

243–9, 264Purcell Papers, The 52Pure in Heart, The 35‘Purloined Letter, The’ 71Pursuits of Literature, The 185Pushkin, Alexander 120, 316Pynchon, Thomas 15, 275

Queen of Spades, The 120Queen Victoria 10Queen’s Wake, The 38Quinn Yarbro, Chelsea 111Quintus Servington 280

race 97–8, 118Radcliffe, Ann 1, 12, 15, 19, 45, 76–83, 113,

120, 128, 132, 148, 169–70, 171, 181,185–6, 194, 200, 203, 237–8, 247–8

early works 79–81mature romances 81–3popularity in France 310portrayal of servants 143sublime 123–4

Radcliffean Gothic 109

350 Index

Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 91

Rand, Nicholas 217Rashkin, Esther 217‘Rat Krespel’ 38Rath, Tina xvi, 198–9, 218–19rationalism 13, 77–8, 271, 300Räuberroman 232, 300‘Raven, The’ 68Reade, Charles 201–2realism 10, 45, 47, 130, 182, 204, 233,

250, 273, 279, 283, 315, 316see also magical realism

reality 42, 66–7Rebecca 26, 27Recess, The 184, 220, 221–2, 308–10Recollections of an Excursion to the

Monasteries of Alcobac[,]a and Batalha 4Redburn 64Reeve, Clara 102, 120, 184, 226Reflections on the Revolution in

France 303regionality 267Regnault-Warin, J. F. 224–5, 311Reid, Thomas 237religion 11, 61, 63, 121, 152, 156, 158–9,

164, 171, 172, 182, 211, 213, 241–2, 252,253, 260, 261, 263, 300

Reliques of Ancient English Poetry 227Reminiscences of Charlotte Brontë 9‘Resurrection in Bronze’ 66revivals 156–69

age of Wyatt 158–60as contested site 156ecclesiology, Pugin and

Gilbert Scott 164–5Gothic, Art Nouveau and

Modernism 167–9Waverley phase to Pugin 160–4

Revolt of Islam, The 214Rhys, Jean 277Rice, Anne 83–4, 110, 154, 275Richardson, Major John 290Richardson, Samuel 226Rickman, Thomas 161Ringel, Faye xvi, 259–61, 261–3‘Rip Van Winkle’ 40‘Ritter Gluck’ 37, 38Road Through the Wall, The 42robber romance 232Roche, Maria Regina 186

roman à clef 33, 75–6roman noir 220–6, 307–13romance 169–73Romance of the Forest, The 82, 194romances 31, 63, 147, 149Romantic imagination 193, 194

see also novelRomanticism 12, 27, 36, 128, 174, 181,

226–30, 258, 269, 271, 279, 293, 297, 302

Rommel, Otto 300Rookwood 1‘Rope in the Rafters, The’ 66Rose Madder 51Rosemary’s Baby 110‘Rosewood Door, The’ 66Rosicrucian fiction 230–1 see also novelRosicrucianism 16–17Roughing it in the Bush 289Rugantino 56ruins 18Ruskin, William 166–8Russian Gothic 313–17

Sacontala 213–14Sade, Marquis de 85–6, 148Sadeian Woman, The 18sadism 9, 10, 18, 21, 62, 63, 86, 138, 154,

231–2, 273sado-masochism 231–2Sage, Victor xvi, 146–54, 156–69Saint-Cyr, Reveroni 224, 311Salem’s Lot 110San Fransisco Gothic 318–19Sanctuary 274Sammells, Neil xvi, 103–5‘Sand Man, The’ 250Satan 116, 238, 261–2Savery, Henry 280Scarlet Letter, The 32–3, 271–2scatology 283–4, 285‘Schalcken the Painter’ 52schauerroman 55, 232–3, 296–7, 298Schiller, Johann Christoph

Friedrich von 235, 299Schwind, Moritz von 128science 7, 30, 32–3, 38, 71, 73, 88, 90, 92,

107, 108, 112, 115, 118, 126, 144, 149,152, 153, 161, 164, 190, 202, 208–9, 213,215, 224, 242, 255, 261, 262, 263, 288,311, 321

Index 351

Scott, Gilbert 165–6Scott, Sir Walter 61, 67, 77, 78, 161–2, 319Scottish Gothic 94, 319–21Scullion, Val xvi, 34–5Secret Agent, The 248secularisation 117Seed, David xvi, 173–4self 7self-estrangement 263–5self-parody 109, 154sensation fiction 20, 52, 151, 233sensationalism, drama 134–5sensibility 3, 81, 82, 83, 181, 233–4sentimentalism 128serial novels 297servants 143, 262settings

Australian Gothic 282–3choice of 222colonial Gothic 108of dramas 132historical 309horror 185Irish Gothic 304–5Lovecraft, H. P. 58Maturin, Charles Robert 63Radcliffe, Ann 80, 81Romance 170–1

Seven Lamps of Architecture, The 166sexual difference 123sexual horror 54, 55sexual taboos 61sexuality 97, 150, 182, 189–90

in children’s literature 130–1and the demonic 118in drama 133perverse 151, 183, 231–2Poe, Edgar Allan 73of vampires 111and witches 260–1

Shadow Dance 18Shakesspeare: A Tribute 28Shelley, Harriet 88Shelley, Lady Jane 92Shelley, Mary 75, 86–92, 112, 115, 117,

119, 120, 123–4, 148, 194, 207, 229, 239Shelley, Percy Bysshe 21, 75, 87, 88, 92–3,

214, 258Sherman, Leona 122Shining, The 49, 50

film 140

Showalter, Elaine 179Sicilian Romance, A 80–1significant texts, German Gothic 301–2silencing 285Simms, William Gilmore 270Sinnett, Frederick 279–80Sir Nigel 25Sir Roger de Clarendon 184Sketch Book, The 31, 32, 40Skipper’s Wooing, The 44Skywalk 14slavery 266, 276–7Small, Helen W. xvi, 15–17, 199–203Smith, Allan Lloyd xvi, 5–7, 40–1, 216–17,

267–75Smith, Andrew xv, 20–1Smith, Charlotte 276Smith, John Charles xvi, 142–3Snow-Image and other Twice-Told Tales,

The 32social critique, sublime as 238–9sociopolitical context, and terror 244Son of Frankenstein 137‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The’ 262Sorrows of Young Werther, The 27, 28–9Southern Gothic 140, 275, 321–4Southey, Robert 213Southwell, Daniel 278Soviet Russia 317Spectator, The 195‘Spectre Bride, The’ 1Spielberg, Steven 219spiritual malaise 278spiritualism 24, 234, 237–8, 241–3,

260, 263St Ursula’s Convent; or, The Nun of Canada,

Containing Scenes from Real Life 289Statue Room, The 184stereotypes 132, 211–12, 259, 290Sterling, Bruce 112Stevenson, Fanny (née Osborne) 94Stevenson, Robert Louis 93–6, 119, 152,

207, 320–1Stewart, Mary 120Stine, R. L. 130Stoddart, Helen J. xvi, 116–18, 176–80Stoker, Bram 53, 96–9, 108, 113, 119, 150,

152, 180Stokes, Philip xvi, 155–6Stones of Venice, The 167‘Story of Henrietta, The’ 276

352 Index

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 94,95–6, 118–19, 152, 207

in film 136‘Strange Letter of a Lunatic’ 39Strange Manuscript Found in a

Copper Cylinder 290–1Strange Story, A 16Strange Things: The Malevolent North in

Canadian Literature 289strangers, malevolent 140Strawberry Hill 101, 159–60structuralism 118Sturm und Drang 28, 216, 235, 299subjectivity 66, 106sublime 36, 81, 122–3, 147, 159, 174, 184,

235–40sublime of nearness 122–3Sue, Eugène 293superego 106supernatural, the 44, 52, 104, 140, 181,

241–3, 245Bulwer Lytton, Edward 16Hogg, James 39Maturin, Charles Robert 61Penny Dreadfuls 216

supernatural devices 1, 21, 22supernatural elements 59supernatural, explained 77, 79, 82, 148supernatural fiction 48supernatural stories 24Surrealism 139–40, 153, 174–5, 296surveillance 181survival 115Survival: A Thematic Guide to

Canadian Literature 288Swain, Edmund Gill 48symbolism 4, 27, 68, 71, 72–3, 74, 98, 99,

111–12, 122, 123, 124, 126, 130, 146, 150, 182, 185, 190, 227, 249, 252, 266,316–17

sympathy, for monsters 111‘System of Dr Tarr and Professor

Fether, The’ 71

taboos, transgressing 121Tales of a Traveller 40–1Tales of Mystery and Imagination 193–4Tales of Terror 196–7‘Tales of the Folio Club’ 70Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque 67Tamerlane 67

techno-Gothic 268, 275technology, theatrical 133temptresses 260–1Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The 11terror 184–5, 200–1, 237, 243–9terror tales 44terror-writing 244‘Test of Affection, The’ 1textuality 245–6, 249Thalaba the Destroyer 213theatre 56, 61–2theatricality 20, 127, 150They Thirst 110Thin Ghost and Others, A 47Things as They Are; or, the Adventures

of Caleb Williams 238Thompson, Charles 286‘Thrawn Janet’ 94–5Three Imposters, The 59Three Perils of Man, The 39Three Perils of Woman, The 39‘Three Sisters, The’ 44Tieck, Ludwig 302timidity 77–8Timour the Tartar 56Todd, Janet xvi, 143, 233–4Todorov, Tzvetan 113–14, 118, 119Tolstoy, A. K. 316Torok, Maria 216–17Tourneur, Jacques 219, 277‘Toward a Female Sublime’ 122–3Tracy, Ann B. xvi, 109–11, 169–73tragedy, Jacobean 197–8transformation 13–14transgenerational haunting 216–17transgression 19, 86, 117, 121, 122,

159, 174, 205, 249–50, 257, 276–7, 285

translations 223–4, 310‘Travelling Companions’ 45travelling heroine 19travelogue 91Trifles of Helicon 21Trillion Year Spree 173Trott, Nicola xvi, 54–7, 92–3Turcotte, Gerry xvi, 277–87, 288–92Turgenev, Ivan 316‘Turn of the Screw, The’ 45, 46, 114, 120,

125, 274Turner, J. M. W. 4Twain, Mark 322

Index 353

Twice-Told Tales 31–2Typee 63tyranny 128

‘Ulalume’ 69unbewitchers 263‘“Uncanny”, The’ 250–1uncanny 47, 116, 118, 135, 153, 188–9,

239–40, 250–1, 278uncertainty 114Uncle Silas 52, 122Undine 37unease xxii, 17, 19, 117unheimlich 135, 188, 250–1unresolved fantastic 119–20urban Gothic 96, 140, 251–2, 268

Vampire Chronicles, The 84Vampire Lestat, The 110vampires 53–4, 97, 110, 113, 179, 189,

252–7in children’s literature 129, 130Goethe, J. W. von 28, 29Polidori, John 75

vampirism 46, 84, 99, 131‘Vampyre, The’ 75–6Vampyre: a Tale by Lord Byron, The 75,

110Varbeck 221Vathek 2, 3, 5, 116, 196, 213Veeder, William xvi, 318–19Vertigo Comics 141Views and Opinions of Murr, the Tomcat’ 38Villette 11, 182Vineland 15violence, sacrificial 113virtue in distress 85viruses 144–5Von deutscher Baukunst 28vulnerability, of heroine 180

Wacousta 290Wailing Well 47Waldron, Mary xvi, 184, 207–8, 217Walkers 110Walpole, Horace 10, 12, 45, 100–3, 109,

111, 124, 127, 132, 146, 157, 158–9, 180,196, 199, 207, 226

Walwicz, Ania 285wandering Jew 61, 257–9Warning to the Curious, The 47

Warwick, Alex xvii, 108, 251–2, 287–8Wave: An Egyptian Aftermath, The 8We Have Always Lived in the Castle 42Webster, John 197–8Weird Tales 58Weldon, Fay 183Wells, H. G. 108, 288Welsh-Gothic 324‘Wendigo, The’ 7werewolves, in children’s literature 129,

130Wharton, Edith 274White Company, The 25White Jacket 64White, Patrick 283–4White Witch of Rosehall, The 276–7wicca 261Wide Sargasso Sea 277Wieland; or, The Transformation 12, 15,

269Wild Geese 290Wild Irish Boy, The 61Wilde, Oscar 103–5, 119, 304‘Wildgoose Lodge’ 304Wilkins Freeman, Mary E. 273Willard, Thomas xvii, 7–9, 107–8, 175–6,

208–10William Wilson 119Williams, Carolyn D. xvii, 205–6Williams, Charles 7, 209–10Williams, Cynric 276‘Willows, The’ 7, 8Wings of a Dove, The 273Winter, Kari J. 266wise woman 261witch doctors 263witchcraft 109, 259–61, 272witches 1, 259–61witchfinders 263wizards 261–3Woman in Black, The 34–5, 125Woman in White, The 20, 151women

Australian Gothic 282, 284English-Canadian Gothic 290in film 137–8insanity 200–1objectification 183sexuality 189social attitudes 181, 268tales about 71–2

354 Index

Women; or, Pour et Contre 62Wood Daemon, The 56Wordsworth, William 240, 258–9Wright, Richard 267writers, as sublime 236–7Wuthering Heights 10, 11, 119, 182Wyatt, James 159–60Wylder’s Hand 52

Yaegar, Patricia 122, 123Yeats, W. B. 53, 304

Yellow Wallpaper, The 152, 183, 268, 273‘Young Goodman Brown’ 32

Zanoni 16Zastrozzi 92–3‘Zeinab and Kathema’ 214Zerrissenheit 263–5Zicci 16Zlosnik, Sue xvii, 26–7, 109Zofloya or The Moor 21–2, 238Zum Schäkespears Tag 28

Index 355

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