Holly ONeill

The skin, and the flesh, and the muscles, and the bones, and the firm structure of
the human body that I had thought to be unchangeable, and permanent as
adamant, began to melt and dissolve. (Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan)
Explore the body as a site of horror and/or fear in Victorian literature.

If the body can be regarded as a site of fear and horror in Victorian literature,
then it is with a consideration of Victorian Gothic literature that this idea must be
explored. As literary critic Robert Mighall stated: from the late eighteenth
century to the nineteenth century, the terrain of Gothic shifted from the fear of
corrupted aristocracy or clergy, represented by the haunted castle or abbey, to
the fear embodied by monstrous bodies.1 So then, Victorian Gothic saw the shift
from works such as Emily Brontes 1847 novel Wuthering Heights to those such
as Mary Shelleys Frankenstein (1818) where the monstrous body became
central. Furthermore, Mighall certifies that reading Gothic with nineteenthcentury ideologies of race suggests why this shift occurs2 and it is with this in
mind that I intend to explore Arthur Conan Doyles short stories Lot No. 249
(1892) and The Case of Lady Sannox (1893) alongside Rudyard Kiplings 1890
short horror story, The Mark of the Beast. My aim is to identify the different
types of monstrous bodies that a Victorian readership was presented with and
what these various forms can be seen to represent within a cultural context.
The fin de sicle of the Victorian period saw the height of the Gothic in
popular culture as readership increased due to spreading literacy, and mediums
such as the penny dreadfuls made the genre much more accessible to a wider

Mighall, Robert, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping Historys Nightmares (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), p.130.
2

ibid.

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audience. With now infamous tales such as Robert Louis Stevensons The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Bram Stokers 1897 novel
Dracula, popular fiction was unapologetically gothic and focused increasingly on
the body. It seemed that particularly the late Gothic fiction of the time
centralized around this idea. If it is true that the Gothic interrogates the central
category of thought identified by Foucault, the category of man, the
Enlightenment category that is narrowly defined as orderly, rational, healthy,
white and male3, then all three late Victorian Gothic tales provide at least one
form of this representation- that of the masculine Anglo-Saxon male. Written in
Lot No. 249, the character of Jephro Hastie could not tolerate departure from
what he looked upon as the model type of manliness4. It seems that both Conan
Doyle and Kipling provide their readers with such characters of typical English
manliness in their short horror stories. In Lot No. 249, speaking of the
characters of Abercrombie Smith and Jephro Hastie, no one could look at their
hard cut, alert faces without seeing that they were open air men- men whose
minds and tastes turned naturally to all that was manly and robust5. The
character of Douglas Smith in The Case of Lady Sannox and his bold, clear cut
face6 seems to directly reflect these other two men while Strickland in The Mark
of the Beast is described as a strong man7 also. That the typical English man is

Ruth Brenstock Anolik, Demons of the Body and the Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic
Literature, (North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc, 2010), p.2.
4 Arthur Conan Doyle, Lot No. 249, in Late Victorian Tales, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), p.113.
5 ibid, p.110.
6 Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case of Lady Sannox, in Late Victorian Tales, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), p. 143.
7 Rudyard Kipling, The Mark of the Beast, in Late Victorian Tales, (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), p.95.

Holly ONeill

central to all of these tales is unsurprising given that this was the time of the rise
of the private school boy ethos and boys own adventure tales.
After establishing what was deemed a typically English and masculine body,
we now have a model Victorian body type with which to compare and contrast
the other of the monstrous body. This idea is made especially explicit in Conan
Doyles Lot No. 249, in which the character of Bellingham is seen as repulsive
and unsurprisingly, has the opposite body type of the men that rally against him
in the story. Repeatedly described as flabby8, fat9, bloated10 and unhealthy11,
Bellingham would have been typically the opposite of the Victorian embodiment
of fear and horror: the average Victorian would have been surprised indeed by
the notion of an oversized villain who is notoriously un-jolly and un-genial.
(This) successfully plays into the cultural biases ofreaders to confound their
expectations and to providea truly sensational villain12. Perhaps the idea of an
obese villain is one that a modern day reader could relate much more to given
that in a twenty-first century context, obesity is generally frowned upon. Besides
the numerous references to his weight, Bellingham is also frequently likened to
various animals such as a toad13, swine14 and a bloated spider fresh from the
weaving of his poisonous web15. It is implied then, that the idea of a horrific and
terrifying body in Victorian literature is not only one that deviates from the
8

Conan Doyle, Lot No. 249, p.113.

ibid, p. 124.
10 ibid, p.138.
11 ibid, p. 124.
12 Wagner S, Tamara, Ominous Signs or False Clues? Difference and Deformity in Wilkie
Collinss Sensation Novels, in Demons of the Body and the Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic
Literature, ed. by Ruth Brenstock Anolik, (North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc. Publishers,
2010), p. 47.
13 Conan Doyle, Lot No. 249, p.112.
14 ibid.
15 ibid, p.131.
9

Holly ONeill

typical masculine physique of the English gentleman, but also goes hand in hand
with an animalistic one too- an idea that will be explored in further depth in the
discussion of The Mark of the Beast.
It is Bellingham that is in possession of the feared mummy of Lot No. 249, an
ancient object that seems to embody Steven Aratas idea of Reverse
Colonisation (1900). This phrase was coined in relation to Bram Stokers
Dracula and concerned the infiltration of the safe spaces of England by the
Eastern other: Dracula is an inversion of the European tourist and imperialist
that follows the lines of European conquest back to its source16. This reflects a
major Victorian preoccupation with colonial or imperial guilt- in Howard L.
Malchons words: the projection of racial anxieties onto the figure of the Gothic
other17. More widely, the reverse colonisation theory can be attributed to
artifacts that were bought into England that caused trouble such as those
exhibited in Victorian novels such as Wilkie Collinss 1868 The Moonstone.
Interestingly, it is an artifact such as this in The Case of Lady Sannox that
supposedly injures the Lady Sannox- the daggers of the Almohades18- although
this is only a vice on the part of Lord Sannox. A physical description of
Bellinghams mummy, (a horrid, black, withered thing19), further enhances the
idea of otherness that it seems to embody, emphasizing that the colour black is
something that makes it all the more repulsive and a site of horror and fear for
both the racist characters in the book and the racist Victorian reader. This
imperial other chases, and tries to murder, any enemy of Bellingham- a
16

Howard L. Malchon, Gothic Images of Race in 19th-century Britain, (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1996), p.130.
17 ibid.
18 Conan Doyle, The Case of Lady Sannox, p.144.
19 Conan Doyle, Lot No. 249, p.115.

Holly ONeill

metaphorical embodiment of the suppressed anxiety that the imperial other

would, ultimately, conquer the conquerors20. Just like Stokers vampires in
Dracula, the mummys repulsive physical appearance oversteps the boundaries
of life and death and is abject.
Rudyard Kiplings The Mark of the Beast also exhibits monstrous bodies in
the form of at least one supernatural being. The first case of a body that is the
site of fear and horror is the silver man who inhabits the temple of Hanuman.
This figure serves as a textbook example of Kelly Hurleys theory of the
abhuman. The abhuman subject is a not-quite-human subject, characterised by
its morphic variability, continually in danger of becoming not-itself, becoming
other21. Like Bellingham in Lot No. 249, the silver man is also represented as
animalistic- he sat mewingmaking the noise exactly like the mewing of an
otter22. This seems to link inextricably to the idea of degeneration that the
Victorians constructed- a reversion to an animalistic, savage self; the
embodiment of Freuds return of the repressed that reaffirms that everything is
uncanny which aught to have remained hidden but has come to light23.
This character is described as so foul a creature24 that had no face, because
he was a leper of some years standing, and his disease was heavy upon him25.
This diseased man would have stricken fear in the hearts of a Victorian audience
due to their major preoccupation with atavism and the degenerative discourse
20

ibid.
Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Sicle,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 168.
21

22

Kipling, The Mark of the Beast, p.86.

Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.2.
24 ibid, p. 93.
25 ibid, p.86.
23

Holly ONeill

theory that was a huge reaction at the time to Darwins ideas about the theory of
evolution. This was a very popular idea at the end of the nineteenth century and
always featured the white, Anglo-Saxon male at the centre of human
improvement. The idea occurred at the same time as the emergence of studies in
criminology and anthropology, which simultaneously encouraged the idea that
certain classes, criminals, lunatics and even the urban poor could be considered
as lower races. For social critic Max Nordau, it was morally dissolute artists
and writers that spread this idea of potential survivals from the past eras that
posed a threat to modernity, making Robert Mighalls assertion that the body
provides a site for ancestral return26 all the more immediate to a Victorian
readership. In the most extreme of cases, some Victorians believed that
degeneration could be transmitted- making the leper in The Mark of the Beast
all the more terrifying as he himself carries a contagious disease- a metaphor for
this supposed transmittable atavism.
This Victorian anxiety manifests itself when the silver man contaminates the
character of Fleete: (he) caught Fleete around the body and dropped his head on
Fleetes breast before we could wrench him away27. From this point in the
narration onwards, Fleete possesses the mark of the beast that was the perfect
double of the black rosettes- the five or six irregular blotches arranged in a
circle- on a leopards hide28. The implied emasculation of the colonial male
subject starts at his point in the narration. Due to the fact that Fleete tried to
impose a Christian framework on the Hindu deity of the Hanuman temple, this
26

Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University

Press1999), p. 153.
27
28

Kipling, The Mark of the Beast, p. 86.

ibid, p. 87.

Holly ONeill

mark could be read as the anti-Christs mark that was supposed to be made
physically manifest on the hand or the forehead of the sinner. Fleete then
proceeds to take on the qualities of the werewolf: Fleetewas on his hands and
knees under the orange bushes29. He is also described to eat his food like a
beast30. The animalistic qualities that both Bellingham and the silver man
possess are made the most explicit in the case of Fleete. In Italian Continental
philosopher Giorgio Agambens theory of The ban and the wolf, he states:
what had to remain in the collective unconscious as a monstrous hybrid of
human and animal, divided between the forest and the city the werewolf is,
therefore, in its origin the figure of the man who has been banned from the
city31. Therefore, Fleete in this state is representative of Julia Kristevas theories
of the abject that was inspired by Hurleys ideas about the abhuman.
According to Kristeva, the abject is that feeling of revulsion experienced when
we encounter something that challenges the distinction between subject and
object or self and other.32 The narrator of The Mark of the Beast reveals that
the human spirit must have been giving way all day and have died out with
twilight. We were dealing with a beast that had once been Fleete.33 It is only
when marked by the colonial other, the silver man, that Fleetes body becomes a
sight of fear and horror.

29

ibid, p.90.
ibid, p.88.
31 Blent Diken and Carsten Bagge Laustsen, The Culture Of Exception: Sociology Facing The
Camp, (Oxen: Routledge, 2005), p.24.
32 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, (Columbia: Columbia University Press,
1982), p.4.
30

33

Kipling, The Mark of the Beast, p.91.

Holly ONeill

The colonial other is perhaps made most explicit in Conan Doyles The Case
of Lady Sannox where a white British male is seen to take on the role of the
Eastern other and it is only after tricking his wifes lover that Lord Sannox
reveals his true identity. He is presented as Hamil Ali, Smyrna34, whose face
was swarthy and his hair and beard of the deepest black35. In this tale of horror,
elements of Eastern culture are used to conceal the evil deeds of the imperial
self. Lord Sannox assures Douglas Smith: you will forgive the yashmak, said
the Turk, You know our views about woman in the East36. The most horrific
body in this story is not that of the disguised Lord Sannox however, but that of
his disfigured wife. The representation of the typical English man, Douglas
Smith, dismembers what he thinks is an imperial other, the veiled figure of Lady
Sannox. What results is the terrifying metaphorical revenge of the eastern other
on its colonisers. That protruding upper lip and that slobber of blood37 of the
now monstrous body beggars the question: is this story really a warning from
Kipling about what English colonisers should really fear? As frightening bodies,
dead or alive, are encountered within seemingly secure domestic confines, they
create horror at home, often through corporeal deviations from the conventional
norms38. The suggestion is that the actual root cause of Victorian anxieties
about the Eastern other are located much closer to home- a fact that makes the

34

Conan Doyle, The Case of Lady Sannox, p.143.

ibid, p.144.
36 ibid, p.148.
37 ibid, p.149.
38 Wagner S, Tamara, Ominous Signs or False Clues? Difference and Deformity in Wilkie
Collinss Sensation Novels, in Demons of the Body and the Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic
Literature, ed. by Ruth Brenstock Anolik, (North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc. Publishers,
2010), p. 47.
35

Holly ONeill

body of the imperial other within England all the more terrifying in late Victorian
Gothic literature.
After exploring the idea of the body as a site of fear and horror in Victorian
literature, it would seem that during the late nineteenth century the idea of the
monstrous body was very common, especially within the Gothic genre. Used to
represent a mindas deformed as body39, socio-cultural contexts of the
Victorian period heightened the fear that was felt by the readership towards
these monstrous bodies. These disfigured and deviant characters represent
various Victorian anxieties- whether it is that of the imperial other returning to
revenge on the colonizer, or the threat to English masculinity, the nonnormative human, excluded from the category of the human, becomes the human
Other, as mysterious and unknownable, as inhuman as any ghost or monster
lurking in the darkness40 within the Gothic genre at this time.

Bibliography

Brenstock Anolik, Ruth, (eds.), Demons of the Body and the Mind: Essays on
Disability in Gothic Literature, (North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc.
Publishers, 2010).
Brenstock Anolik, Ruth and Douglas L. Howard, The Gothic Other: Racial and
Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination, (North Carolina: McFarland &
Company Inc. Publishers, 2004).

39
40

Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady, (London: Harper Collins, 1875), p.179.
ibid, p. 148.

Holly ONeill

10

Conan Doyle, Arthur, Lot No. 249, in Late Victorian Tales, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), pp. 109-140.
Conan Doyle, Arthur, The Case of Lady Sannox, in Late Victorian Tales, (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 141-150.
Diken, Blent and Carsten Bagge Laustsen, The Culture Of Exception: Sociology
Facing The Camp, (Oxen: Routledge, 2005).
Hurley, Kelly, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin
de Sicle, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Kipling, Rudyard, The Mark of the Beast, in Late Victorian Tales, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), pp. 84-95.
Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, (Columbia: Columbia
University Press, 1982).
Malchon, Howard L, Gothic Images of Race in 19th-century Britain, (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1996).
Mighall, Robert, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping Historys
Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Wagner S, Tamara, Ominous Signs or False Clues? Difference and Deformity in
Wilkie Collinss Sensation Novels, in Demons of the Body and the Mind: Essays on
Disability in Gothic Literature, ed. by Ruth Brenstock Anolik, (North Carolina:
McFarland & Company Inc. Publishers, 2010), p. 47.