GOTHIC

LITERATURE
A Gale Critical Companion
GALE CRITICAL COMPANION ADVISORY BOARD Barbara M. Bibel Mary Jane Marden
Librarian Collection Development Librarian
Oakland Public Library St. Petersburg College
Oakland, California Pinellas Park, Florida

James K. Bracken Heather Martin

Professor and Assistant Director Arts & Humanities Librarian
University Libraries University of Alabama, Sterne Library
Birmingham, Alabama
The Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio Susan Mikula
Director
Dr. Toby Burrows
Indiana Free Library
Principal Librarian Indiana, Pennsylvania
The Scholars’ Centre
University of Western Australia Library Thomas Nixon
Nedlands, Western Australia Humanities Reference Librarian
University of North Carolina, Davis Library
Celia C. Daniel Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Associate Librarian, Reference
Howard University Mark Schumacher
Washington, D.C. Jackson Library
University of North Carolina
David M. Durant Greensboro, North Carolina
Reference Librarian
Gwen Scott-Miller
Joyner Library
Assistant Director
East Carolina University Sno-Isle Regional Library System
Greenville, North Carolina Marysville, Washington
Nancy Guidry Donald Welsh
Librarian Head, Reference Services
Bakersfield Community College College of William and Mary, Swem Library
Bakersfield, California Williamsburg, Virginia
Foreword by Jerrold E. Hogle ............................ xiii On the Subject Of ѧ Samuel Taylor

CONTENTS
Coleridge (1772-1834) ............................. 48
Preface ............................................................. xix On the Subject Of ѧ Flannery O’Connor
(1925-1964) .............................................. 68
Acknowledgments .......................................... xxiii On the Subject Of ѧ Percy Bysshe Shelley
(1792-1822) .............................................. 76
Chronology of Key Events ............................. xxxiii On the Subject Of ѧ William Harrison
Ainsworth (1805-1882) ............................ 94

Society, Culture, and the Gothic

VOLUME 1 Introduction .................................................
Representative Works ...................................
107
109
Primary Sources ............................................ 110
Overviews ..................................................... 127
Gothic Literature: An Overview Race and the Gothic .................................... 180
Introduction ..................................................... 1 Women and the Gothic ............................... 210
Representative Works ....................................... 2 Further Reading ............................................ 228
Primary Sources ................................................ 4 Sidebars:
Overviews ....................................................... 16 On the Subject Of ѧ Clara Reeve
Origins of the Gothic ..................................... 40 (1729-1807) ............................................ 112
American Gothic ............................................ 57 On the Subject Of ѧ Sophia Lee
European Gothic ............................................ 74 (1750-1824) ............................................ 119
Further Reading ............................................ 104 On the Subject Of ѧ Christina Rossetti
Sidebars: (1830-1894) ............................................ 143
On the Subject Of ѧ John Aikin On the Subject Of ѧ Ray Bradbury
(1747-1822) and Anna Laetitia (Aikin) (1920-) .................................................... 172
Barbauld (1743-1825) ................................. 7 On the Subject Of ѧ Ambrose Bierce
On the Subject Of ѧ Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1842-1914) ............................................ 199
(1803-1873) .............................................. 15 On the Subject Of ѧ Charlotte Perkins
On the Subject Of ѧ Edmund Burke Gilman (1860-1935) and “The Yellow
(1729?-1797) ............................................. 30 Wallpaper” .............................................. 213

v
CONTENTS Gothic Themes, Settings, and Figures Overviews ..................................................... 480
Introduction ................................................. 231 Architecture .................................................. 486
Representative Works ................................... 233 Art ................................................................. 506
Primary Sources ............................................ 236 Further Reading ............................................ 525
Overviews ..................................................... 249 Sidebars:
Haunted Dwellings and the Supernatural ... 264 On the Subject Of ѧ Suger of St. Denis
Psychology and the Gothic ......................... 301 (1081-1151) ............................................ 478
Vampires ....................................................... 342 On the Subject Of ѧ William Blake
Further Reading ............................................ 385 (1757-1827) ............................................ 487
Sidebars: On the Subject Of ѧ Alexander Jackson
On the Subject Of ѧ George Gordon Davis (1803-1892) .................................. 491
Noel, Lord Byron (1788-1824) ............... 241 On the Subject Of ѧ L. N. Cottingham
On the Subject Of ѧ H. P. Lovecraft (1787-1847) ............................................ 497
(1890-1937) ............................................ 260 On the Subject Of ѧ Edward Gorey
On the Subject Of ѧ Friedrich von (1925-2000) ............................................ 510
Schiller (1759-1805) ............................... 275 On the Subject Of ѧ Washington Allston
On the Subject Of ѧ Ursula K. Le Guin (1779-1843) ............................................ 522
(1929-) .................................................... 291
On the Subject Of ѧ Sigmund Freud
(1856-1939) and “The Uncanny” .......... 308
On the Subject Of ѧ Elizabeth Bowen
(1899-1973) ............................................ 333 Author Index .................................................. 531
On the Subject Of ѧ John William
Polidori (1795-1821) .............................. 362 Title Index ...................................................... 535
On the Subject Of ѧ Thomas Lovell
Subject Index .................................................. 545
Beddoes (1803-1849) .............................. 377

Performing Arts and the Gothic

Introduction ................................................. 389
Representative Works ................................... 391 VOLUME 2
Primary Sources ............................................ 394
Drama ........................................................... 401
Film ............................................................... 415
Television ...................................................... 452 Margaret Atwood 1939-
Music ............................................................ 461 Canadian novelist, poet, short story writer,
Further Reading ............................................ 473 essayist, critic, and author of children’s books
Sidebars: Introduction ..................................................... 1
On the Subject Of ѧ James Boaden Principal Works ................................................ 3
(1762-1839) ............................................ 399 Primary Sources ................................................ 4
On the Subject Of ѧ Clive Barker General Commentary ...................................... 5
(1952-) .................................................... 411 Title Commentary .......................................... 17
On the Subject Of ѧ Boris Karloff Further Reading .............................................. 24
(1887-1969) and Frankenstein ................ 416 Sidebars:
On the Subject Of ѧ Bela Lugosi From the Author: An excerpt from
(1882-1956) and Dracula ........................ 425 Lady Oracle ................................................ 18
On the Subject Of ѧ Alfred Hitchcock
(1899-1980) ............................................ 436
On the Subject Of ѧ F. W. Murnau Jane Austen 1775-1817
(1888-1931) and Nosferatu ..................... 451
English novelist
On the Subject Of ѧ Shirley Jackson
Introduction ................................................... 25
(1919-1965) ............................................ 464
Principal Works .............................................. 27
Primary Sources .............................................. 27
Title Commentary .......................................... 31
Visual Arts and the Gothic Further Reading .............................................. 46
Introduction ................................................. 475 Sidebars:
Representative Works ................................... 476 About the Author: “Gothic Extravagance”
Primary Sources ............................................ 477 in Northanger Abbey .................................. 37

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Joanna Baillie 1762-1851 Further Reading ............................................ 150

CONTENTS
Scottish poet, playwright, editor, and critic Sidebars:
Introduction ................................................... 49 About the Author: H. F. Chorley’s
Principal Works .............................................. 50 negative response to Wuthering
Primary Sources .............................................. 51 Heights .................................................... 137
General Commentary .................................... 54 About the Author: Charlotte Brontë’s
Title Commentary .......................................... 61 Preface to the 1850 edition of
Further Reading .............................................. 76 Wuthering Heights ................................... 147
Sidebars:
About the Author: An excerpt from
a death notice in Harper’s New Monthly Charles Brockden Brown 1771-1810
Magazine ................................................... 55 American novelist, essayist, and short
About the Author: An early reviewer story writer
applauds Baillie’s talent ........................... 68 Introduction ................................................. 153
Principal Works ............................................ 155
Primary Sources ............................................ 155
William Beckford 1760-1844 General Commentary .................................. 156
Title Commentary ........................................ 162
English novelist and travel writer Further Reading ............................................ 177
Introduction ................................................... 79 Sidebars:
Principal Works .............................................. 81 About the Author: William Hazlitt
Primary Sources .............................................. 81 assesses Brown’s literary talent .............. 163
Title Commentary .......................................... 85 About the Author: John Keats on
Further Reading ............................................ 101 Wieland ................................................... 171
Sidebars:
From the Author: An excerpt from
“Nymph of the Fountain,” written
c. 1791 ...................................................... 84 Angela Carter 1940-1992
English novelist, short story writer, nonfiction
About the Author: An early review of
writer, scriptwriter, and author of children’s
Vathek ....................................................... 86
books
About the Author: Byron notes Vathek Introduction ................................................. 179
as a source for oriental elements in The Principal Works ............................................ 181
Giaour ....................................................... 95 Primary Sources ............................................ 181
General Commentary .................................. 182
Further Reading ............................................ 200
Charlotte Brontë 1816-1855 Sidebars:
About the Author: James Brockway on
English novelist and poet
Carter’s “Gothic Pyrotechnics” in
Introduction ................................................. 103
Fireworks ................................................. 191
Principal Works ............................................ 105
Primary Sources ............................................ 105
General Commentary .................................. 107
Title Commentary ........................................ 114 Wilkie Collins 1824-1889
Further Reading ............................................ 129 English novelist, short story writer, travel
Sidebars: writer, and playwright
About the Author: William Dean Introduction ................................................. 201
Howells lauds the title character of Principal Works ............................................ 202
Jane Eyre .................................................. 116 Primary Sources ............................................ 203
About the Author: Susan M. Waring General Commentary .................................. 205
praises Villette ......................................... 121 Title Commentary ........................................ 211
Further Reading ............................................ 228
Sidebars:
About the Author: Geraldine Jewsbury
Emily Brontë 1818-1848 on the beauty of The Moonstone ............ 207
English novelist and poet About the Author: T. S. Eliot on
Introduction ................................................. 131 Collins and Charles Dickens ................. 215
Principal Works ............................................ 133 About the Author: Charles Dickens
Primary Sources ............................................ 133 remarks to Wilkie Collins on Collins’s
Title Commentary ........................................ 135 talent ...................................................... 223

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CONTENTS Charles Dickens 1812-1870 William Godwin 1756-1836
English novelist, short story writer, English philosopher, novelist, essayist,
playwright, poet, and essayist historian, playwright, and biographer
Introduction ................................................. 229 Introduction ................................................. 321
Principal Works ............................................ 231 Principal Works ............................................ 323
Primary Sources ............................................ 231 Primary Sources ............................................ 324
General Commentary .................................. 234 Title Commentary ........................................ 327
Title Commentary ........................................ 242 Further Reading ............................................ 338
Sidebars:
Further Reading ............................................ 255
About the Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Sidebars:
reviews Godwin’s Lives of the
About the Author: Archibald C.
Necromancers ........................................... 328
Coolidge Jr. on Dickens’s childhood
From the Author: An excerpt from the
memories and the Gothic ...................... 237
Preface to Fleetwood ................................ 330
About the Author: Michael Hollington
on “Dickensian Gothic” ........................ 252

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

1749-1832
Isak Dinesen 1885-1962
German poet, novelist, playwright, short
Danish short story writer, autobiographer, story writer, essayist, critic, biographer,
novelist, playwright, and translator memoirist, and librettist
Introduction ................................................. 257 Introduction ................................................. 341
Principal Works ............................................ 259 Principal Works ............................................ 342
Primary Sources ............................................ 259 Primary Sources ............................................ 343
Title Commentary ........................................ 261 General Commentary .................................. 344
Further Reading ............................................ 278 Title Commentary ........................................ 349
Sidebars: Further Reading ............................................ 362
About the Author: John Updike on Sidebars:
Dinesen’s “Divine Swank” in Seven From the Author: Sir Walter Scott’s
Gothic Tales ............................................. 270 translation of Goethe’s “Der Erlkonig”
(“The Erl-King”) ..................................... 350

Daphne du Maurier 1907-1989

English novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804-1864
and editor American novelist, short story writer,
Introduction ................................................. 279 and essayist
Principal Works ............................................ 280 Introduction ................................................. 363
Primary Sources ............................................ 281 Principal Works ............................................ 365
Primary Sources ............................................ 366
Title Commentary ........................................ 282
General Commentary .................................. 368
Further Reading ............................................ 291
Title Commentary ........................................ 382
Sidebars:
Further Reading ............................................ 385
About the Author: Basil Davenport on
Sidebars:
Rebecca as a melodrama ......................... 285
About the Author: Edgar Allan Poe
reviews Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales ... 369
About the Author: Herman Melville
William Faulkner 1897-1962 reviews Mosses from an Old Manse ......... 380
American novelist, short story writer, poet,
screenwriter, and essayist
Introduction ................................................. 293 E. T. A. Hoffmann 1776-1822
Principal Works ............................................ 295 German short story writer, novella writer,
Primary Sources ............................................ 296 novelist, and music critic
General Commentary .................................. 297 Introduction ................................................. 387
Title Commentary ........................................ 306 Principal Works ............................................ 388
Further Reading ............................................ 319 Primary Sources ............................................ 389
Sidebars: General Commentary .................................. 391
About the Author: Max Putzel on Title Commentary ........................................ 401
Faulkner’s Gothic ................................... 304 Further Reading ............................................ 419

viii G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1
Sidebars: Principal Works ............................................ 482

CONTENTS
About the Author: Sir Walter Scott on Primary Sources ............................................ 483
Hoffmann’s talent and mental state ..... 392 General Commentary .................................. 485
About the Author: Palmer Cobb on Title Commentary ........................................ 494
Hoffmann’s genius ................................. 412 Further Reading ............................................ 504
Sidebars:
About the Author: Edwin F. Casebeer
James Hogg 1770-1835 on the influence of King’s life on his
Scottish poet, novelist, short story and works ...................................................... 492
song writer, journalist, editor, playwright,
and essayist
Introduction ................................................. 421
Principal Works ............................................ 423 Author Index .................................................. 511
Primary Sources ............................................ 424
General Commentary .................................. 425 Title Index ...................................................... 515
Title Commentary ........................................ 428
Further Reading ............................................ 438 Subject Index .................................................. 525
Sidebars:
About the Author: George Saintsbury
on The Private Memoirs and Confessions
of a Justified Sinner .................................. 430

VOLUME 3
Washington Irving 1783-1859
American short story writer, essayist,
historian, journalist, and biographer
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu 1814-1873
Introduction ................................................. 441
Principal Works ............................................ 443 Irish novelist, short story writer, poet,
Primary Sources ............................................ 444 journalist, and editor
General Commentary .................................. 446 Introduction ..................................................... 1
Title Commentary ........................................ 456 Principal Works ................................................ 3
Further Reading ............................................ 459 Primary Sources ................................................ 3
Sidebars: General Commentary ...................................... 5
About the Author: Donald A. Ringe on Title Commentary .......................................... 16
Irving’s Gothic ....................................... 450 Further Reading .............................................. 27
Sidebars:
About the Author: S. M. Ellis on
Le Fanu’s horror fiction ............................. 6
Henry James 1843-1916
About the Author: Edna Kenton on
American novelist, short story and
Le Fanu’s legacy ....................................... 22
novella writer, essayist, critic, biographer,
autobiographer, and playwright
Introduction ................................................. 461
Principal Works ............................................ 464 Matthew Gregory Lewis 1775-1818
Primary Sources ............................................ 465 English novelist, playwright, diarist, prose
General Commentary .................................. 466 writer, and poet
Title Commentary ........................................ 470 Introduction ................................................... 31
Further Reading ............................................ 478 Principal Works .............................................. 33
Sidebars: Primary Sources .............................................. 34
About the Author: Virginia Woolf on General Commentary .................................... 36
James’s ghost stories .............................. 471 Title Commentary .......................................... 46
Further Reading .............................................. 70
Sidebars:
Stephen King 1947- About the Author: Lord Byron on
American novelist, short story writer, “Monk” Lewis .......................................... 42
novella writer, scriptwriter, nonfiction writer, About the Author: Joseph James Irwin
autobiographer, and author of children’s books on Lewis’s mastery of horror and
Introduction ................................................. 481 terror ......................................................... 62

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CONTENTS Charles Robert Maturin 1780-1824 Further Reading ............................................ 185
Irish novelist and playwright Sidebars:
Introduction ................................................... 73 From the Author: Oates’s “Reflections
Principal Works .............................................. 74 on the Grotesque” ................................. 179
Primary Sources .............................................. 75
General Commentary .................................... 76
Title Commentary .......................................... 84 Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849
Further Reading ............................................ 104 American short story writer, poet, novelist,
Sidebars: essayist, editor, and critic
From the Author: An excerpt from Introduction ................................................. 187
Maturin’s Preface to Melmoth the Principal Works ............................................ 190
Wanderer ................................................... 85 Primary Sources ............................................ 190
About the Author: An excerpt from General Commentary .................................. 193
an early review of Melmoth the Title Commentary ........................................ 205
Wanderer ................................................... 98 Further Reading ............................................ 228
Sidebars:
About the Author: D. H. Lawrence on
the purpose of Poe’s tales ..................... 203
Herman Melville 1819-1891
About the Author: H. P. Lovecraft on
American novelist, short story writer, and poet Poe’s literary innovations ...................... 219
Introduction ................................................. 107
Principal Works ............................................ 109
Primary Sources ............................................ 110
General Commentary .................................. 111 Ann Radcliffe 1764-1823
Title Commentary ........................................ 118 English novelist, poet, and journal writer
Further Reading ............................................ 132 Introduction ................................................. 231
Sidebars: Principal Works ............................................ 233
About the Author: Jay MacPherson on Primary Sources ............................................ 233
General Commentary .................................. 238
Melville’s “The Bell Tower” and
Title Commentary ........................................ 245
Frankenstein ............................................ 111
Further Reading ............................................ 260
About the Author: Excerpt from an
Sidebars:
early review of Moby-Dick ...................... 125
About the Author: Sir Walter Scott on
Radcliffe’s talent ..................................... 238
About the Author: Edith Birkhead on
Toni Morrison 1931- Radcliffe and the Gothic ........................ 246
American novelist, essayist, playwright, critic, About the Author: Devendra P. Varma
author of children’s books, and editor on Radcliffe’s legacy ............................... 253
Introduction ................................................. 135
Principal Works ............................................ 136
Primary Sources ............................................ 137 Anne Rice 1941-
General Commentary .................................. 138 American novelist, short story writer, and
Title Commentary ........................................ 142 screenwriter
Further Reading ............................................ 160 Introduction ................................................. 263
Sidebars: Principal Works ............................................ 265
From the Author: An excerpt from the General Commentary .................................. 266
conclusion of Beloved ............................. 151 Title Commentary ........................................ 277
Further Reading ............................................ 286
Sidebars:
Joyce Carol Oates 1938- About the Author: Angela Carter on
Rice’s self-consciousness ........................ 267
American novelist, short story writer, essayist,
critic, playwright, author of children’s books, From the Author: Rice on her fears ......... 278
nonfiction writer, and poet
Introduction ................................................. 163
Principal Works ............................................ 165 Sir Walter Scott 1771-1832
Primary Sources ............................................ 167 Scottish novelist, poet, short story writer,
General Commentary .................................. 168 biographer, historian, critic, and editor
Title Commentary ........................................ 178 Introduction ................................................. 289

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Principal Works ............................................ 292 Sidebars:

CONTENTS
Primary Sources ............................................ 293 About the Author: Montague Summers
Title Commentary ........................................ 297 on the enduring nature of Dracula ........ 395
Further Reading ............................................ 317 About the Author: An excerpt from
Sidebars: an early review of Dracula ..................... 405
About the Author: William Hazlitt on
Scott’s achievements as a writer of
prose ....................................................... 298 Horace Walpole 1717-1797
About the Author: Maria Edgeworth, English novelist, biographer, memoirist,
in a letter to Sir Walter Scott, 1814 ....... 306 historian, essayist, playwright, and letter writer
Introduction ................................................. 429
Principal Works ............................................ 432
Primary Sources ............................................ 432
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 1797-1851
Title Commentary ........................................ 434
English novelist, editor, critic, short story Further Reading ............................................ 454
and travel writer Sidebars:
Introduction ................................................. 319 About the Author: Frederick S. Frank
Principal Works ............................................ 321 on The Mysterious Mother ....................... 434
Primary Sources ............................................ 321 About the Author: Sir Walter Scott
General Commentary .................................. 327 offers high praise for Walpole and The
Title Commentary ........................................ 335 Castle of Otranto ..................................... 435
Further Reading ............................................ 356 About the Author: H. P. Lovecraft on
Sidebars: Walpole’s influence on the Gothic ........ 443
About the Author: Marilyn Butler on
Shelley’s life and its impact on
Frankenstein ............................................ 328 Edith Wharton 1862-1937
About the Author: Ellen Moers on American short story writer, novelist, essayist,
motherhood, the Female Gothic, and and autobiographer
Frankenstein ............................................ 338 Introduction ................................................. 457
About the Author: Sir Walter Scott on Principal Works ............................................ 460
Frankenstein and the use of the Primary Sources ............................................ 460
supernatural in fiction ........................... 349 General Commentary .................................. 462
Further Reading ............................................ 485
Sidebars:
About the Author: Annette Zilversmit
Robert Louis Stevenson 1850-1894
on Wharton’s “Pomegranate Seed” ....... 467
Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet,
essayist, and playwright
Introduction ................................................. 359
Principal Works ............................................ 361 Oscar Wilde 1854-1900
Primary Sources ............................................ 362 Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist, essayist,
critic, poet, and short story writer
Title Commentary ........................................ 364
Introduction ................................................. 487
Further Reading ............................................ 382 Principal Works ............................................ 489
Sidebars: Primary Sources ............................................ 490
About the Author: John Addington General Commentary .................................. 493
Symonds on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ...... 365 Title Commentary ........................................ 502
From the Author: Stevenson’s dedication Further Reading ............................................ 517
in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ....................... 373 Sidebars:
About the Author: Julian Hawthorne
on The Picture of Dorian Gray ................. 503
Bram Stoker 1847-1912
Irish novelist, short story writer, and essayist
Introduction ................................................. 385
Author Index .................................................. 523
Principal Works ............................................ 387
Primary Sources ............................................ 387 Title Index ...................................................... 527
Title Commentary ........................................ 393
Further Reading ............................................ 427 Subject Index .................................................. 537

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1 xi
 These very useful Critical Companion volumes
offer a wide range of historical accounts about,
literary excerpts from, and critical interpretations
of a long-standing mode of fiction-making that
has come to be called “the Gothic.” Though this
label has most often been attached to “terrifying”
or “horrific” pieces of prose fiction ever since
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (the found-
ing text of this form, first published in 1764)
added the subtitle A Gothic Story to its Second Brit-
ish Edition of 1765, the hyperbolic and haunting
features of this highly popular, but often contro-
versial, mode have proliferated across the last two-
and-a-half centuries in an increasing array of
forms: novels, prose “romances,” plays, paintings,
operas, short stories, narrative and lyric poems,
“shilling shocker” tales, newspaper serials and
crime-reports, motion pictures, television shows,
comic books, “graphic” novels, and even video
games. That variety of presentation is what now
makes “the Gothic” the best phrase for describing
this ongoing phenomenon. It has proven to be a
set of transportable features more than it has been
a single genre. Its variations are not so much
similar in compositional form as they are inclined
to share certain settings, symbols, situations,
psychological states, and emotional effects on
readers or audiences, all of which appear at least
somewhat in The Castle of Otranto but have gone
on to vary greatly in their manifestations over
time. The incompatible generic ingredients of the
Gothic initially—Walpole saw it as a combination
FOREWORD
of the supernatural “ancient” and the more
realistic “modern” romance—have made it un-
stable from the start and so have led it to “expati-
ate” widely and wildly (Walpole’s own word in
his 1765 Preface) and hence to carry its volatile
inconsistency into every form it has assumed,
from its beginnings in mid-eighteenth century
England to its current profusion throughout the
Western world at the dawn of the twenty-first
century.
Yet what are the traits that hold “the Gothic”
together, if only just barely, as it spreads itself like
one of its specters or monstrosities across literary,
dramatic, and other audio-visual forms? As the
following essays and excerpts show, all truly
Gothic stories or stagings take place, at least part
of the time, in some sort of antiquated (sometimes
falsely antiquated) space, be it a castle, ruin,
crumbling abbey, graveyard, old manor house or
theater, haunted wilderness or neighborhood, cel-
lar or attic full of artifacts—or aging train station,
rusted manufacturing plant, or outdated space-
ship. This space, reminiscent of medieval “Gothic”
castles or churches but often existing long after
those in more modern recastings of their features,
threatens to overwhelm and engulf protagonists
(including readers or viewers) in the setting’s vast-
ness, darkness, and vaguely threatening, even ir-
rational, depths. That is usually because this space
is haunted or invaded by some form of ghost,
xiii
FOREWORD specter, or monster, a frightening crosser of the
supposed boundaries between life and death,
natural and supernatural, or “normal” and “abnor-
mal.” Usually this figure betokens some hidden
“primal crime” buried from sight ages ago or hav-
ing occurred in the recent past, the truth about
which at least seems to lie in the darkest depths,
or deepest darkness, of the antiquated space.
Gothic protagonists and their readers or viewers,
faced with this haunting in such a setting, are thus
pulled back and forth (like the Gothic as a mode)
between older and newer states of being, longing
to escape into the seeming safety of one or the
other but kept in a tug-of-war of terrifying sus-
pense between the powers of the past and the
present, darkness and daylight, insane incoher-
ence and rational order.
At the same time, the extreme fictionality of all
these elements is so emphasized in the melodra-
matic exaggeration of Gothic description and
characterizations that the threats in these situa-
tions are made to seem both imminent (about to
appear) and immanent (sequestered within) and
yet safely distant, at least for readers or audiences.
As in the “scary movies” of more recent times,
many of which employ or derive from the Gothic,
the spectators of such fictions can experience the
thrill of fear that the threats really arouse and at
the same time feel entirely safe from those threats
because it is all so obviously artificial and unlikely
to become real or lead to real consequences. Any
fiction that does not have all these basic features
to some extent is not really “Gothic” through and
through, although many adjacent fictions (such
as those of Charles Dickens or Herman Melville or
most films directed by Alfred Hitchcock or M.
Night Shyamalan) use pieces of the Gothic to
arouse some of the suggestions and effects associ-
ated with it.
Even when fictions are thoroughly Gothic,
however, as are the ones most emphasized in these
volumes, they can vary widely across a continuum
between terror and horror. Near the end of her life
and career, Ann Radcliffe, arguably the most
influential British author of Gothic romances in
the turbulent 1790s (including The Mysteries of
Udolpho and The Italian), composed a dialogue
“On the Supernatural in Poetry” that appeared
posthumously with her last novel, Gaston de
Blondeville, in 1826. There her fictional interlocu-
tors make a clear distinction between devices that
invoke “the terrible” (a suspenseful uncertainty
about hidden possibilities that could be violent or
repulsive or supernatural but rarely appear in such
extreme forms) and blatant descriptions that
xiv G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1
expose “the horrible” (the unambiguously violent,
deadly, grotesque, and even horrifically supernatu-
ral, so much so that the line between what is
“sanctioned” and “forbidden” has been crossed
without a doubt). Radcliffe herself, as her novels
show, clearly prefers the suggestiveness of terror,
to the point where her violence is more potential
than actual and the apparently supernatural is
always explained away, as is the case with many
of her successors in Gothic writing. She thereby
places herself and her imitators squarely in the
tradition of the “sublime” defined as the safely
fearful or awesome by Edmund Burke in his 1757
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas
of the Sublime and Beautiful.
Gothic “horror,” by contrast, became most
epitomized in Radcliffe’s time by Matthew Lewis’s
The Monk (1796), filled as it is, not just with a
vociferous anti-Catholicism that Radcliffe shares,
but with explicit sexual intercourse, incestuous
rape and murder, the brutal dismembering of a
tyrannical nun by a mob, and the physical ap-
pearance of Satan himself as homosexually seduc-
tive. The blatantly stagey hyperbole of Lewis’s
style makes all this less immediate than it might
otherwise be, but it also defines the “horrible”
extreme of the Gothic continuum that locates the
mere potentiality of “terror” at its opposite end. It
thus helps establish a polarity across which the
Gothic has played ever since, as it wafts between,
say, Daphne du Maurier’s Radcliffean Rebecca
(1938) and William Peter Blatty’s horrific The Exor-
cist (1971) and their ongoing imitators of both
types. The Gothic is set off from other forms of
fiction by its Walpolean features but also demar-
cated within itself by its leanings at times towards
“terrific” suspense, on the one hand, and graphic
“horror,” on the other. The two come together
mostly in extreme cases such as Stoker’s original
novel Dracula (1897), where suspenseful intima-
tions about the Count’s vampiric nature in “sub-
lime” Transylvania give way to his graphic gorg-
ing of himself with the blood of a married woman
before witnesses in Victorian London, after which
he breaks all “normal” gender boundaries by
drawing the same woman to his breast to suck up
his own already vampiric blood. It is this whole
range of Gothic possibilities that the following
excerpts and accounts explore, since this anamor-
phic (or self-distorting) and metamorphic (or
shape-shifting) form of fiction has been pulled
between these extremes, we now see, from its
earliest manifestations.
The tension between the terrifying and the
horrible in the Gothic, moreover, has developed
into another continuum of symbolic possibili-
ties—the “psychological” versus “ontological” or
supernatural Gothic—especially since 1800. If
Radcliffe’s heroines in the 1790s think themselves
into states of fear that are finally based on associa-
tions of ideas not corroborated by the outside
world, it is a small step from there to the projec-
tion of a whole state of mind into an external
space that is vast, dark, and threatening more
because of drives inside the observer than its own
separate features. Hence the tormenting Spirits
that rise in the Higher Alps at the bidding of the
title character in Lord Byron’s Gothic verse-drama
Manfred (1817) are, as he admits, “The mind, the
spirit, the Promethean spark, / The lightning of
my being” as much as anything else. At about the
same time, though, Dr. John Polidori, Byron’s
personal physician and occasional lover, forecasts
the late Victorian coming of Dracula with his
Byronic novella The Vampyre (1819), in which the
predatory Lord Ruthven seems threatening at first
only in the suspicious thoughts of the hero
(Aubrey) until the latter faces the horror that his
own sister “has glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE,”
which Ruthven turns out to have been for centu-
ries. In this latter case, Gothic monstrosity is
granted the ontological state of being quite
outside any observer, a distinct existence con-
firmed from multiple points of view, as in Stoker’s
Dracula. Throughout the nineteenth century, start-
ing with the Romantic era of Byron and Polidori,
the Gothic careens incessantly between the strictly
psychological, where ghosts or monsters are more
mental than physical, and the unabashedly super-
natural in which an other-worldly horror violently
invades the space of the self from outside its
boundaries. When both are involved, though, the
nineteenth century tilts more often towards root-
ing the supernatural in the psyche. That is cer-
tainly the case in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818), now the most famous Gothic tale in his-
tory, where the half-fantastic creature composed
from multiple carcasses is mostly an outsized
sewing-together of his creator’s most repressed,
libidinous, and boundary-crossing impulses.
As supernatural levels of being have become
increasingly doubted in the post-Renaissance
world of the West, the terrors or horrors generated
from within have become a staple of the Gothic
and projected onto its haunted settings, just as
much as older beliefs in seductive Satan-figures
have continued to be in the vein of The Monk, The
Exorcist, or Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles (1976-
2001). The most debated Gothic story in Western
history may be Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1
(1898), in which the highly repressed governess of
FOREWORD
two children in a castellated old estate-house is
convinced she sees the ghosts of her predecessor,
Miss Jessel, and Jessel’s lower-class lover, Peter
Quint, but may just as likely be projecting them
onto the estate-world she observes as she subli-
mates her own desires for an absentee Master far
above her in social station. Even today, as parts of
these volumes show, readers and viewers cannot
be sure when they begin Gothic tales or films—
though they often find out in “twist” endings (in
such pictures as The Sixth Sense and The Others)—
whether the haunting specters they see are the
delusions of characters or unambiguously other-
worldly, outside any psychological point of view.
We sometimes long for the comfort of supernatu-
ral visitations but fear how much this longing
comes from irrational psychic forces in ourselves
and others, and the Gothic plays on and explores
these apprehensions, as it has for over two hun-
dred years.
But this last point demands a fuller answer to
the most lingering question about the conflicted
oddity that is the Gothic as it multiplies into all
the forms explored in these volumes: Why do we
have this malleable symbolic mode in Anglo-
European Western culture and its former colonies,
and why does this anamorphic form, torn as it is
between extremes (supernatural/realistic, horrible/
terrifying, really frightening/merely fictional,
ontological/psychological, and others), persist
from The Castle of Otranto in the 1760s through
Frankenstein and Dracula to films, novels, and
video games of today, some of which keep repeat-
edly adapting some of those older stories for new
audiences? Numerous answers are offered in the
definitional and interpretive essays that follow, as
well as in some Gothic tales themselves, here
excerpted at their most indicative moments. But I
would like to begin the discussion by suggesting
the most overriding reasons why the Gothic has
arisen and why it persists as a cultural formation
clearly needed, as well as wanted, by Western read-
ers and audiences.
To begin with, “the Gothic” comes about at a
time in the West when the oldest structures of
Christian religiosity (including Roman Catholi-
cism) and social hierarchies seemingly predeter-
mined to the advantage of hereditary aristocrats
(symbolized by their castles or estate-houses) are
starting to fragment and decay, as in Walpole’s
principal Ghost (who appears initially in pieces),
even as these receding forms hang on as standard
grounds of being in the minds of many. At such a
time, the older symbols of power seem increas-
xv
FOREWORD ingly hollowed out, like the ruins of medieval
Gothic structures, while they also seem locations
that vaguely harbor historical foundations for hu-
man minds newly liberated by the rational and
scientific Enlightenment that is overthrowing the
older orders by degrees in the eighteenth century.
In this situation, while beliefs about the self-
determining (rather than strictly hereditary)
individual start to gain ascendancy and give
greater weight to personal psychology over prede-
termined roles, Westerners face an existential
anxiety about where they really come from and
the orders to which they belong when the best-
known external indicators of those groundings
are becoming empty repositories, realms filled up
with the nostalgic desires projected into them
more than the metaphysical and cultural certain-
ties once manifested by them.
As Leslie Fiedler has shown by exposing the
basis of the American Gothic in Love and Death in
the American Novel (1960), this uprooted, yet root-
seeking, condition for Westerners around 1765
makes them hover between longings for past
securities, though these are also seen as primitively
irrational and confining, and longings for rebel-
lion against those patriarchal schemes, which
simultaneously produce a sense of guilt about the
overthrow of those “fathers,” making that revolu-
tion a sort of “primal crime.” Guilt, after all, is
what Walpole’s Prince Manfred feels when he
finds that his own grandfather once murdered the
original founder of Otranto and usurped its
birthright from the latter’s heirs, the same way as
the rising middle class of the eighteenth century
(the main readership of the Gothic as time went
on) probably felt about gradually decimating the
very power-bases it now sought to occupy in place
of the aristocracy. In addition, Fiedler writes, this
sense of haunted guilt and uncertainties about
middle-class entitlement raised “the fear that in
destroying the old ego-ideals of Church and State,
the West has opened a way for the inruption of
darkness: for insanity and the disintegration of
the self.” The Gothic of Walpole and its accelera-
tion by the 1790s in Radcliffe and Lewis come
about, since fictions always respond to the needs
of their audiences, to address and symbolize this
cultural and psychological condition of early
capitalist and pre-industrial modernity. That is
why the early Gothic places both desires for lost
foundations and fears about the irrational dark-
ness lying outside the limits of newly enlightened
reason in the same antiquated spaces and their
mysterious depths, which Gothic characters from
Manfred to Lewis’s monk then seek to penetrate
xvi G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1
or recover and escape or destroy so as to construct
a sense of identity that is somehow both grounded
and self-determined. The Gothic is a powerful
symbolic indicator, then, of the social and psychic
contradictions out of which the modern Western
self emerged and keeps emerging, and we need
and want it, I would argue, to keep retelling that
story that is so basic to our modern sense of
ourselves.
The story has kept developing in the West,
however, and the Gothic has developed with it.
As the ideological belief in personal self-making
becomes even more accepted towards the end of
the eighteenth and the beginning of the nine-
teenth centuries, the individual mind comes to be
viewed as the dynamic, but also anxious, site of
its own “ghosts” and increasing depths. Ann Rad-
cliffe and many of her contemporaries accept the
basic premises of empirical psychology, which
claims (since John Locke in the 1690s, anyway)
that the human mind begins as a near-vacancy
and gradually accumulates and organizes the
memories it retains (hence the “ghosts”) of earlier
and more recent sense-perceptions. Adult observa-
tions in later life are therefore colored by the as-
sociations of previous, and now ghost-like, impres-
sions that are applied to the intake of newer
phenomena. Terry Castle can consequently see in
The Female Thermometer (1995) that the Rad-
cliffean Gothic turns landscapes as well as charac-
ters into “spectralized” thoughts within reflective
states of mind that make nature seem already
painted (and thus filtered by perceivers) and
people already colored by older sayings and texts
about their “types.” To observe at any moment in
the Gothic from the 1790s on is to call attention,
at least some of the time, to the lenses of percep-
tion and the gradually accumulated psychic layers
of associated memories that are projected onto
any object contemplated or produced by the
perceiving self. Ruins and old houses, as well as
Frankenstein-ian creatures, are now filled with
dark indications of deep past threats because the
mind transfers its own layers of developing percep-
tions, as well as middle-class guilt, into what it
sees and thus confronts its own “doubling” there,
its deepest internal memories reembodied in
perceptions of external depths now haunted by
mental ghosts. When Victor Frankenstein first sees
the face of his finished creature in Mary Shelley’s
Gothic book, he falls into a regressive dream in
which the mottled visage of his fabrication from
dead bodies becomes linked to his longing for his
own deceased mother, whose corpse he pre-
consciously has seen himself re-embracing while
he tries to make life out of death without the
biological involvement of a woman. By 1820 at
least, the Gothic has become the fictional locus
where outward quests for self-completion now are
seen as mainly inward probings through the
archaic layers of the self. Gothic “objects,” from
antiquated locations to other people to mere
things, have thus become manifestations of the
perceiver’s own growing depths of thought in
which the desire for pre-rational foundations is
actually pursuing “the mother” conceived of as
the initial interplay of self and other that produces
the confused beginnings, later repressed, of all
thought, sensation, and memory.
It is no wonder, then, that the Gothic comes
to be torn constantly between terror and horror,
on one level, and the psychological and the clearly
supernatural, on another. Terror offers the uneasy
comfort that what we fear, being mentally con-
structed for the most part, could be non-existent
in the end (as in Radcliffe’s conclusions), except
in our own minds. Such solipsism, however, can
also be seen as a myopic middle-class or even
aristocratic avoidance of the violent upheavals
and even greater displacements of older orders
brought on by the exploding mercantile and
industrial economies—and the racist imperialism
that went with them—in the nineteenth century.
Consequently, this era’s Gothic invasions of the
isolated psyche by “horror,” the external violence
and many forms of non-middle-class “ugliness”
that cannot be wished away as mere thought,
force this counter-awareness on audiences, albeit
through extreme fictionality, increasingly so in
the form of the vampire made prominent by Poli-
dori. By the time of the serialized Varney the Vam-
pire (1847), usually attributed to Thomas Peckett
Prest, and the many stagings of vampire plays in
Victorian England, France, and America, this
Gothic monster can symbolize many potential
invaders of middle-class security simultaneously,
from vengeful old aristocrats to foreign and racial
“others” to diseases of the blood made more
virulent by urban growth, foreign tourism, and
the expansion of prostitution. The nineteenth
century in the West, we can say, needs the Gothic
to carry out and fictively obscure the cultural
hesitation at the time between middle-class
withdrawal into increasing private spaces, includ-
ing sheer thought (which thereby confronts its
own deep irrationalities), and the need of the
same people to face the horrors of growing cities
and empires with their illnesses, “unclean” impov-
erished laborers, exploited women, and enslaved
“colored” races.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1
What the Gothic does in part, among its reac-
FOREWORD
tion to these changes, is to increase the struggle
between its psychological and supernatural ten-
dencies. First, it becomes the source of many
symbols for the concept of the “unconscious” that
Sigmund Freud, building on many others, brought
into wide prominence by the end of the nine-
teenth century and the early decades of the
twentieth. Especially insofar as the Gothic has
gradually become a realm of mental projection
and of the mind forced back to the beginnings
and hauntings of its own development, it has
provided the archaic depths, dim repositories,
memory-traces, accumulations of memories layer
upon layer, and primal states (including regres-
sions back to “mother” or sheer vacancy) from
which Freud and his contemporaries craft their
description of the unconscious and its sublima-
tion by pre-conscious and conscious levels of
thought. In the early twentieth century, the
Gothic therefore comes to be seen as primarily
psychological in the sense of psychoanalytic, as
long having manifested in its haunted spaces and
the mental quandaries of its characters the pro-
cesses of thought described by Freud, even though
it is more accurate to say that the Gothic first
helped make Freud’s schemes conceivable and
expressible. Back in Freud’s formative period,
though, the assertion of the human species’s long
physical evolution by Charles Darwin and others
from the 1850s on challenges the layerings of
personal consciousness with a biologically histori-
cal progression beyond, yet still working inside,
individual people. The Gothic reacts by reinvok-
ing its old invasions of supernatural, or at least
trans-individual, forces to show psychological
projections running up against pervasive external
drives that may really control the psyche after all.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde (1886) may seem to suggest a psycho-
logical bifurcation in the Victorian self, with Jekyll
as internalized superego and Hyde as raging libido,
but the Doctor’s attempts to control this internal
split finally cannot prevent the “troglodytic”
emergence of all that remains primitively devolved
in his superficially evolved condition. Even more
dramatically, Stoker’s Count Dracula arouses and
enacts unconscious libidinal desires by being a
devolved, “child-brain” force supernaturally driv-
ing across centuries that invades “civilized” Eng-
land with all the diseases and the racial and
animalistic “others” that the supposedly evolved
want to keep distant from themselves and cannot.
The Turn of the Screw plays out an undecidability
between the dominance of the psychological and
xvii
FOREWORD the power of the supernatural because the
nineteenth-century West in its final years needs
ways to articulate that it is frantically at odds with
itself over what to believe about the deepest
foundations of life.
The Gothic from its beginnings and as it
evolves with the cultural changes around it, in
other words, turns out to be the modern Western
world’s most striking, if most conflicted, symbolic
method for both confronting and disguising its
own unresolved struggles with incompatible
beliefs about what it means to be human. Wal-
pole’s Castle starts the tradition by leaving its read-
ers caught where most of them already were:
between longings for a fading hierarchical order
underwritten by supernatural assurances (“ancient
romance”) and desires for greater self-
determination based on free re-imaginings of
uprooted older perceptions (“modern romance”).
Radcliffe and Lewis, during the revolutionary
1790s, help readers confront and prevent cultural
dissolution by offering reassurances that spectral
perceptions of danger to the self can finally
control the terror those specters produce and
shocking revelations at the same time that current
upheavals are but symptoms of multiple irratio-
nalities that established religion and governments
have tried to repress only to force them towards
more extreme violence. Frankenstein offers a
condemnation and a celebration of the scientific
and industrial advances puzzled over by its read-
ers, along with symbols for the unsettled debate
over whether life is externally infused (by, say,
some ultimate Father) or internally generated
(primarily within the mother whom Victor both
remembers and tries to forget). Jekyll and Hyde and
Dracula both blame individual free will for invit-
ing its underlying depravities into consciousness
and point to attacks on the evolved Anglo race by
“devolved” levels of humanity from other times
and places. In extreme forms of expression that
allow us to perceive or avoid such levels in our
thinking, the Gothic holds up to us our conflicted
conservative and progressive tendencies in the full
cry of their unresolved tug-of-war in our culture
and in ourselves. Our hesitation between psycho-
logical and supernatural causes for events or
xviii G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1
between inherited and self-determined founda-
tions of identity or between feeling controlled by
our pasts and asserting our capacities to alter
ourselves decisively in the present: all these still-
active antinomies of modern existence are what
the Gothic is fundamentally generated to articu-
late and to obscure.
Over one hundred years after Stoker’s Dracula,
of course, the kinds of tendencies we are torn
between have changed somewhat, as the more
recent Gothic certainly shows. We both want to
transcend, even forget, and want to throw our-
selves fully into the past (or is it fully past?) condi-
tion of slavery and racism that haunts the history
of America in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Ab-
salom! (1936) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).
We want to preserve childhood innocence and see
it as really filled with dark drives to be conquered
and controlled in Stephen King’s The Shining
(1977) and Daniel Mann’s Willard (1982) as well
as The Exorcist and its “prequels” and sequels on
film. We paranoiacally want to find evidence of
old conspiracies that explain our current confu-
sions of values and see them as but the imagin-
ings of diseased nostalgic minds in the quite
Gothic X-Files television series (1993-2002) or the
four Alien films (1979-97) full of Gothic echoes.
Still, the Gothic, as the accounts and excerpts in
these volumes will reveal in fuller detail, remains
one of the key ways we come to terms, while also
avoiding direct confrontation, with the betwixt-
and-between, regressive-progressive, seemingly
predetermined-hopefully undetermined nature of
modern life. The Gothic is complex and tangled
in its proliferations, but fairly simple in its aims: it
allows us to play with our inexplicable and
haunted modern lives in some fictional safety
while concurrently helping us give shape and
form to the conflicted beings we really are. I
therefore invite our readers to enjoy and ponder
the following descents into the Gothic maelstrom
of pleasure and fear that reveals so much about
modern Western existence.
—Jerrold E. Hogle, Ph.D.
University of Arizona
The Gale Critical Companion Collection
In response to a growing demand for relevant
criticism and interpretation of perennial topics
and important literary movements throughout
history, the Gale Critical Companion Collection
(GCCC) was designed to meet the research needs
of upper high school and undergraduate students.
Each edition of GCCC focuses on a different liter-
ary movement or topic of broad interest to stu-
dents of literature, history, multicultural studies,
humanities, foreign language studies, and other
subject areas. Topics covered are based on feedback
from a standing advisory board consisting of refer-
ence librarians and subject specialists from public,
academic, and school library systems.
The GCCC is designed to complement Gale’s
existing Literary Criticism Series (LCS), which
includes such award-winning and distinguished
titles as Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism
(NCLC), Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism
(TCLC), and Contemporary Literary Criticism (CLC).
Like the LCS titles, the GCCC editions provide
selected reprinted essays that offer an inclusive
range of critical and scholarly response to authors
and topics widely studied in high school and
undergraduate classes; however, the GCCC also
includes primary source documents, chronologies,
sidebars, supplemental photographs, and other
material not included in the LCS products. The
graphic and supplemental material is designed to
extend the usefulness of the critical essays and
provide students with historical and cultural
PREFACE
context on a topic or author’s work. GCCC titles
will benefit larger institutions with ongoing
subscriptions to Gale’s LCS products as well as
smaller libraries and school systems with less
extensive reference collections. Each edition of
the GCCC is created as a stand-alone set provid-
ing a wealth of information on the topic or move-
ment. Importantly, the overlap between the
GCCC and LCS titles is 15% or less, ensuring that
LCS subscribers will not duplicate resources in
their collection.
Editions within the GCCC are either single-
volume or multi-volume sets, depending on the
nature and scope of the topic being covered. Topic
entries and author entries are treated separately,
with entries on related topics appearing first, fol-
lowed by author entries in an A-Z arrangement.
Each volume is approximately 500 pages in length
and includes approximately 50 images and side-
bar graphics. These sidebars include summaries of
important historical events, newspaper clippings,
brief biographies of important figures, complete
poems or passages of fiction written by the author,
descriptions of events in the related arts (music,
visual arts, and dance), and so on.
The reprinted essays in each GCCC edition
explicate the major themes and literary techniques
of the authors and literary works. It is important
to note that approximately 85% of the essays
reprinted in GCCC editions are full-text, meaning
xix
PREFACE that they are reprinted in their entirety, including
footnotes and lists of abbreviations. Essays are
selected based on their coverage of the seminal
works and themes of an author, and based on the
importance of those essays to an appreciation of
the author’s contribution to the movement and
to literature in general. Gale’s editors select those
essays of most value to upper high school and
undergraduate students, avoiding narrow and
highly pedantic interpretations of individual
works or of an author’s canon.
Scope of Gothic Literature
Gothic Literature, the fourth set in the Gale
Critical Companion Collection, consists of three
volumes. Each volume includes a detailed table of
contents, a foreword on the subject of Gothic
literature written by noted scholar Jerrold E.
Hogle, and a descriptive chronology of key events
throughout the history of the genre. The main-
body of volume 1 consists of entries on five topics
relevent to Gothic literature and art, including 1)
Gothic Literature: An Overview; 2) Society, Cul-
ture, and the Gothic; 3) Gothic Themes, Settings,
and Figures; 4) Performing Arts and The Gothic;
and 5) Visual Arts and the Gothic. Volumes 2 and
3 include entries on thirty-seven authors and liter-
ary figures associated with the genre, including
such notables as Matthew Gregory Lewis, Stephen
King, Edgar Allan Poe, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Woll-
stonecraft Shelley, and Bram Stoker, as well as
entries on individuals who have garnered less at-
tention, but whose contributions to the genre are
noteworthy, such as Joanna Baillie, Daphne du
Maurier, Washington Irving, Edith Wharton, and
Oscar Wilde.
Organization of Gothic Literature
A Gothic Literature topic entry consists of the
following elements:
• The Introduction defines the subject of the
entry and provides social and historical infor-
mation important to understanding the criti-
cism.
• The list of Representative Works identifies
writings and works by authors and figures as-
sociated with the subject. The list is divided
into alphabetical sections by name; works
listed under each name appear in chronologi-
cal order. The genre and publication date of
each work is given. Unless otherwise indicated,
plays are dated by first performance, not first
publication.
• Entries generally begin with a section of Pri-
mary Sources, which includes essays, speeches,
xx G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1
social history, newspaper accounts and other
materials that were produced during the time
covered.
• Reprinted Criticism in topic entries is arranged
thematically. Topic entries commonly begin
with general surveys of the subject or essays
providing historical or background informa-
tion, followed by essays that develop particular
aspects of the topic. For example, the Gothic
Themes, Settings, and Figures entry in volume
1 of Gothic Literature begins with a section
providing primary source material that dem-
onstrates gothic themes, settings, and figures.
This is followed by a section providing topic
overviews, and three other sections: Haunted
Dwellings and the Supernatural; Psychology
and the Gothic; and Vampires. Each section
has a separate title heading and is identified
with a page number in the table of contents.
The critic’s name and the date of composition
or publication of the critical work are given at
the beginning of each piece of criticism.
Unsigned criticism is preceded by the title of
the source in which it appeared. Footnotes are
reprinted at the end of each essay or excerpt.
In the case of excerpted criticism, only those
footnotes that pertain to the excerpted texts
are included.
• A complete Bibliographical Citation of the
original essay or book precedes each piece of
criticism.
• Critical essays are prefaced by brief Annota-
tions explicating each piece. Unless the de-
scriptor “excerpt” is used in the annotation,
the essay is being reprinted in its entirety.
• An annotated bibliography of Further Read-
ing appears at the end of each entry and sug-
gests resources for additional study. In some
cases, significant essays for which the editors
could not obtain reprint rights are included
here.
A Gothic Literature author entry consists of the
following elements:
• The Author Heading cites the name under
which the author most commonly wrote, fol-
lowed by birth and death dates. Also located
here are any name variations under which an
author wrote. If the author wrote consistently
under a pseudonym, the pseudonym will be
listed in the author heading and the author’s
actual name given in parenthesis on the first
line of the biographical and critical informa-
tion. Uncertain birth or death dates are indi-
cated by question marks.
 • A Portrait of the Author is included when
available.
• The Introduction contains background infor-
mation that introduces the reader to the
author that is the subject of the entry.
• The list of Principal Works is ordered chrono-
logically by date of first publication and lists
the most important works by the author. The
genre and publication date of each work is
given. Unless otherwise indicated, plays are
dated by first performance, not first publica-
tion.
• Author entries are arranged into three sections:
Primary Sources, General Commentary, and
Title Commentary. The Primary Sources sec-
tion includes letters, poems, short stories,
journal entries, and essays written by the
featured author. General Commentary in-
cludes overviews of the author’s career and
general studies; Title Commentary includes
in-depth analyses of seminal works by the
author. Within the Title Commentary section,
the reprinted criticism is further organized by
title, then by date of publication. The critic’s
name and the date of composition or publica-
tion of the critical work are given at the begin-
ning of each piece of criticism. Unsigned criti-
cism is preceded by the title of the source in
which it appeared All titles by the author
featured in the text are printed in boldface
type. However, not all boldfaced titles are
included in the author and subject indexes;
only substantial discussions of works are
indexed. Footnotes are reprinted at the end of
each essay or excerpt. In the case of excerpted
criticism, only those footnotes that pertain to
the excerpted texts are included.
• A complete Bibliographical Citation of the
original essay or book precedes each piece of
criticism.
• Critical essays are prefaced by brief Annota-
tions explicating each piece. Unless the de-
scriptor “excerpt” is used in the annotation,
the essay is being reprinted in its entirety.
• An annotated bibliography of Further Read-
ing appears at the end of each entry and sug-
gests resources for additional study. In some
cases, significant essays for which the editors
could not obtain reprint rights are included
here. A list of Other Sources from Thomson
Gale follows the Further Reading section and
provides references to other biographical and
critical sources on the author in series pub-
lished by Gale.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1
Indexes
PREFACE
The Author Index lists all of the authors
featured in the Gothic Literature set, with references
to the main author entries in volumes 2 and 3 as
well as commentary on the featured author in
other author entries and in the topic volumes.
Page references to substantial discussions of the
authors appear in boldface. Authors featured in
sidebars are indexed as well. The Author Index
also includes birth and death dates and cross refer-
ences between pseudonyms and actual names,
and cross references to other Gale series in which
the authors have appeared. A complete list of
these sources is found facing the first page of the
Author Index.
The Title Index alphabetically lists the titles
of works written by the authors featured in
volumes 2 and 3 and provides page numbers or
page ranges where commentary on these titles can
be found. Page references to substantial discus-
sions of the titles appear in boldface. English
translations of foreign titles and variations of titles
are cross-referenced to the title under which a
work was originally published. Titles of novels,
plays, nonfiction books, films, and poetry, short
story, or essay collections are printed in italics,
while individual poems, short stories, and essays
are printed in roman type within quotation
marks.
The Subject Index includes the authors and
titles that appear in the Author Index and the Title
Index as well as the names of other authors and
figures that are discussed in the set. The Subject
Index also lists hundreds of literary terms and top-
ics covered in the criticism. The index provides
page numbers or page ranges where subjects are
discussed and is fully cross referenced.
Citing Gothic Literature
When writing papers, students who quote
directly from the GL set may use the following
general format to footnote reprinted criticism. The
first example pertains to material drawn from
periodicals, the second to material reprinted from
books.
Markley, A. A. “The Godwinian Confessional Narra-
tive and Psychological Terror in Arthur Gordon Pym.”
The Edgar Allan Poe Review 4, no. 1 (spring 2003):
4-16; reprinted in Gothic Literature: A Gale Critical
Companion, vol. 3, ed. Jessica Bomarito (Farmington
Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2006), 29-42.
Mishra, Vijay. “Theorizing the (Gothic) Sublime,” in
The Gothic Sublime (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1994), 19-43; reprinted in Gothic Literature:
A Gale Critical Companion, vol. 1, ed. Jessica Bomarito
(Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2006), 211-
17.
xxi
PREFACE Gothic Literature Advisory Board
The members of the Gothic Literature Advisory
Board—reference librarians and subject specialists
from public, academic, and school library sys-
tems—offered a variety of informed perspectives
on both the presentation and content of the Gothic
Literature set. Advisory board members assessed
and defined such quality issues as the relevance,
currency, and usefulness of the author coverage,
critical content, and topics included in our prod-
uct; evaluated the layout, presentation, and
general quality of our product; provided feedback
on the criteria used for selecting authors and top-
ics covered in our product; identified any gaps in
our coverage of authors or topics, recommending
authors or topics for inclusion; and analyzed the
appropriateness of our content and presentation
for various user audiences, such as high school
xxii G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1
students, undergraduates, graduate students,
librarians, and educators. We wish to thank the
advisors for their advice during the development
of Gothic Literature
Suggestions are Welcome
Readers who wish to suggest new features, top-
ics, or authors to appear in future volumes of the
Gale Critical Companion Collection, or who have
other suggestions or comments are cordially
invited to call, write, or fax the Product Manager.
Product Manager, Gale Critical Companion
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The editors wish to thank the copyright holders
of the excerpted criticism included in this volume
and the permissions managers of many book and
magazine publishing companies for assisting us in
securing reproduction rights. We are also grateful
to the staffs of the Detroit Public Library, the
Library of Congress, the University of Detroit
Mercy Library, Wayne State University Purdy/
Kresge Library Complex, and the University of
Michigan Libraries for making their resources
available to us. Following is a list of the copyright
holders who have granted us permission to repro-
duce material in this edition of Gothic Literature.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright, but
if omissions have been made, please let us know.
Copyrighted material in Gothic
Literature was reproduced from the
following periodicals:
Americana: The Journal of American Popular
Culture (1900-present), v. 2, spring, 2003. Copy-
right © 2003 Americana: The Institute for the
Study of American Popular Culture. Reproduced
by permission.—American Transcendental Quar-
terly, v. 9, March 1, 1995; v. 1, 2001. Copyright ©
1995, 2001 by The University of Rhode Island.
Both reproduced by permission.—Arizona Quar-
terly, v. 34, 1978 for “The Gothic Formula of
‘Bartleby’” by Steven T. Ryan. Copyright © 1978
by Arizona Board of Regents, The University of
Arizona, Tucson, AZ. Reproduced by permission of
the publisher and author.—Bucknell Review, v.
XII, May, 1964. Reproduced by permission.—Col-
lege English, v. 27, March 1, 1966 for “Dr. Jekyll
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
and the Emergence of Mr. Hyde” by Masao Miy-
oshi. Republished in The Divided Self: A Perspec-
tive on the Literature of the Victorians, New York
University Press, 1969, University of London Press,
1969. Copyright © 1966 by the National Council
of Teachers of English. Reproduced by permission
of the publisher and author.—Comparative Lit-
erature Studies, v. 24, 1987. Copyright © 1987 by
The Pennsylvania State University. Reproduced by
permission of the publisher.—Costerus, v. I, 1972.
Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by
permission.—Critical Survey, v. 15, September,
2003. Copyright © 2003 by Critical Survey. Repub-
lished with permission of Critical Survey, con-
veyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.—
Dalhousie Review, v. 47, summer, 1967 for “Terror
Made Relevant: James’s Ghost Stories” by Ray-
mond Thorberg. Reproduced by permission of the
publisher and author.—Deutsche Vierteljahrss-
chrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesge-
schichte, March 1, 2001 for “The Gothic IMAGI-
NARY: Goethe in Strasbourg” by Kenneth S.
Calhoon. Reproduced by permission of the au-
thor.—Dickens Quarterly, September 1, 1989; v.
16, September 1, 1999. Copyright © 1989, 1999
by the Dickens Society. Both reproduced by per-
mission.—Dickens Studies Newsletter, v. VI,
September 1, 1975. Copyright © by the Dickens
Society. Reproduced by permission.—Dickensian,
September 1, 1977 for “The Fall of the House of
Clennam: Gothic Conventions in Little Dorrit” by
xxiii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS David Jarrett. Reproduced by permission of the
author.—The Edgar Allan Poe Review, v. IV,
spring, 2003 for “The Godwinian Confessional
Narrative and Psychological Terror in Arthur Gor-
don Pym” by A.A. Markley. Copyright © 2003 The
Pennsylvania State University. Reproduced by
permission of the publisher and author.—
Eighteenth-Century Fiction, v. 15, January 1,
2003. Copyright © 2003 Eighteenth-Century Fic-
tion, McMaster University. Reproduced by permis-
sion.—ELH, v. 48, autumn, 1981; v. 59, spring,
1992; v. 70, winter, 2003. Copyright © 1981, 1992,
2003 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All
reproduced by permission.—ESQ: A Journal of
the American Renaissance, v. 18, 1972 for “Poe
and the Gothic Tradition” by Maurice Lévy.
Translated by Richard Henry Haswell. Reproduced
by permission of the publisher and the transla-
tor.—European Romantic Review, v. 13, June 1,
2002 for “Interracial Sexual Desire in Charlotte
Dacre’s Zofloya” by Anne K. Mellor. Copyright ©
2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd. Reproduced by permis-
sion of the publisher and author. http://ww-
w.tandf.co.uk/journals—Faulkner Journal, v. II,
fall, 1986. Copyright © 1987 by Ohio Northern
University. Reproduced by permission.—German
Life and Letters, v. XVIII, 1964-1965. Copyright
© 1964-1965 Basil Blackwell Ltd. Reproduced by
permission of Blackwell Publishers.—Gothic. New
Series, v. I, 1986; 1987; v. II, 1987. Copyright ©
1986, 1987 by Gary William Crawford. All repro-
duced by permission of the author.—Journal of
Evolutionary Psychology, v. X, August 1, 1989.
Copyright © 1989 by the Institute for Evolution-
ary Psychology. Reproduced by permission.—
Journal of Popular Culture, v. 13, 1979; v. 26,
winter, 1992; v. 30, spring, 1997. Copyright ©
1979, 1992, 1997 Basil Blackwell Ltd. All repro-
duced by permission of Blackwell Publishers.—
Literature/Film Quarterly, v. 21, 1993. Copyright
© 1993 Salisbury State College. Reproduced by
permission.—Malahat Review, 1977 for “Atwood
Gothic” by Eli Mandel. Copyright © The Malahat
Review, 1977. All rights reserved. Reproduced by
permission of the Literary Estate of the author.—
Mississippi Quarterly, v. XLII, summer, 1989.
Copyright © 1989 by Mississippi State University.
Reproduced by permission.—Modern Fiction
Studies, v. XVII, summer, 1971; v. 46, fall, 2000.
Copyright © 1971, 2000 The Johns Hopkins
University Press. Both reproduced by permis-
sion.—Mosaic, v. 35, 2002; v. 35, March 1, 2002.
Copyright © Mosaic 2002. All acknowledgment of
previous publication is herewith made.—Narra-
tive, v. 12, January 1, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by
the Ohio State University. Reproduced by permis-
sion.—The Nation and The Athenaeum, v.
XXXIII, May 26, 1923. Copyright 1923 New
xxiv G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1
Statesman, Ltd. Reproduced by permission.—New
York Times Book Review, March 8, 1953 for “The
Macabre and the Unexpected” by John Barkham.
Copyright 1953, renewed 1981 by The New York
Times Company. Reproduced by permission of the
Literary Estate of John Barkham.—Papers on
Language and Literature, v. 20, winter, 1984; v.
37, winter, 2001. Copyright © 1984, 2001 by The
Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University at
Edwardsville. Both reproduced by permission.—
Princeton University Library Chronicle, v. XLIV,
spring, 1983 for “A Story Replete with Horror” by
Williston R. Benedict. Copyright © 1983 by
Princeton University Library. Reproduced by
permission of the author.—Prism(s): Essays in
Romanticism, v. 9, 2001. Copyright © 2001 by
the American Conference on Romanticism. Repro-
duced by permission.—Review of Contemporary
Fiction, fall, 1994. Copyright © 1994 The Review
of Contemporary Fiction. Reproduced by permis-
sion.—Review of English Studies, v. XIX, 1968.
Reproduced by permission of the publisher.—The
Saturday Review of Literature, v. XVIII, Septem-
ber 24, 1938 for “Sinister House,” by Basil Daven-
port. Copyright © 1938, renewed 1966 Saturday
Review Magazine, © 1979 General Media Interna-
tional, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the pub-
lisher.—Studies in American Fiction, v. 7, spring,
1979. Copyright © 1979 Northeastern University.
Reproduced by permission.—Studies in English
Literature 1500-1900, v. 39, autumn, 1999.
Copyright © 1999 The Johns Hopkins University
Press. Reproduced by permission.—Studies in the
Literary Imagination, v. VII, spring, 1974. Copy-
right © 1974 Department of English, Georgia State
University. Reproduced by permission.—Studies
in the Novel, v. IX, summer, 1977. Copyright ©
1977 by North Texas State University. Reproduced
by permission.—Studies in Romanticism, v. 40,
spring, 2001. Copyright 2001 by the Trustees of
Boston University. Reproduced by permission.—
Studies in Scottish Literature, v. XXVIII, 1993.
Copyright © G. Ross Roy 1993. Reproduced by
permission of the editor.—Studies in Short Fic-
tion, v. 21, fall, 1984. Copyright © 1984 by Stud-
ies in Short Fiction. Reproduced by permission.—
Studies in Weird Fiction, spring, 1990; winter,
1994; v. 24, winter, 1999. Copyright © 1990, 1994,
1999 Necronomicon Press. All reproduced by
permission of the author.—Studies on Voltaire
and the Eighteenth Century, Transactions of the
Eighth International Congress on the Enlighten-
ment III, v. 305, 1992 for “The Gothic Caleb Wil-
liams” by Betty Rizzo. Copyright © 1992 Univer-
sity of Oxford. Reproduced by permission of the
publisher and author.—Victorian Newsletter, fall,
2002 for “Who Is Heathcliff? The Shadow Knows”
by Marilyn Hume. Reproduced by permission of
the publisher and author.—West Virginia Univer-
sity Philological Papers, v. 42-43, 1997-1998.
Reproduced by permission.—Wordsworth Circle,
v. 31, summer, 2000; v. 34, spring, 2003. Copyright
© 2000, 2003 Marilyn Gaull. Both reproduced by
permission of the editor.
Copyrighted material in Gothic
Literature was reproduced from the
following books:
Andriano, Joseph. From Our Ladies of Darkness:
Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction.
The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.
Copyright © 1993 by The Pennsylvania State
University. Reproduced by permission of the
publisher.—Atwood, Margaret. From The Animals
in That Country. Atlantic-Little Brown Books,
1969. Copyright © 1968 by Oxford University
Press (Canadian Branch). All rights reserved.
Reproduced by permission of Houghton Mifflin
Company, in Canada by Oxford University
Press.—Auerbach, Nina. From Our Vampires, Our-
selves. University of Chicago Press, 1995. Copy-
right © 1995 by The University of Chicago. All
rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the
publisher and the author.—Baldick, Chris. From
an Introduction to Melmoth the Wanderer. Edited
by Douglas Grant. Oxford University Press, 1989.
© Oxford University Press 1968, Introduction and
Select Biography © Chris Beldick 1989. Repro-
duced by permission of Oxford University Press.—
Bayer-Berenbaum, Linda. From The Gothic Imagi-
nation: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art.
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982. Copy-
right © 1982 by Associated University Presses, Inc.
Reproduced by permission.—Bell, Michael Davitt.
From The Development of American Romance:
The Sacrifice of Relation. The University of
Chicago Press, 1980. Copyright © 1980 by The
University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Repro-
duced by permission.—Bleiler, E. F. From “Intro-
duction: William Beckford and Vathek,” in Three
Gothic Novels: The Castle of Otranto, Vathek,
The Vampyre. Edited by E.F. Bleiler. Dover Publi-
cations, 1966. Copyright © 1966 by Dover Publica-
tions, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Botting,
Fred. From Gothic. Routledge, 1996. Copyright ©
1996 Fred Botting. Reproduced by permission of
the publisher and author.—Botting, Fred. From
“Reflections of Excess: Frankenstein, the French
Revolution, and Monstrosity,” in Reflections of
Excess: Frankenstein, the French Revolution and
Monstrosity. Edited by Allison Yarrington and
Kelvin Everest. Routledge, 1993. Reproduced by
permission of Taylor & Francis, the editor, and
author.—Botting, Fred. From Gothic. Routledge,
1996. Copyright © 1996 by Fred Botting. All rights
reserved. Reproduced by permission of the pub-
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1
lisher and the author.—Brantly, Susan C. From
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Understanding Isak Dinesen. University of South
Carolina Press, 2002. Copyright © 2002 University
of South Carolina Press. Reproduced by permis-
sion.—Brennan, Matthew C. From The Gothic
Psyche: Disintegration and Growth in
Nineteenth-Century English Literature. Camden
House, 1997. Copyright © 1997 by the Editor and
Contributors. All rights reserved. Reproduced by
permission.—Brown, Jane K. and Marshall Brown.
From “Faust and the Gothic Novel,” in Interpret-
ing Goethe’s Faust Today. Edited by Jane K.
Brown, Meredith Lee, and Thomas P. Saine. Cam-
den House, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by Camden
House, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Bulwer-
Lytton, Edward George. From “Glenallan,” in
Gothic Tales of Terror. Volume One: Classic Hor-
ror Stories from Great Britain. Taplinger Publish-
ing Company, Inc., 1972. Copyright © 1972 selec-
tion and original material by Peter Haining.
Reproduced by permission of the editor.—Burns,
Sarah. From Painting the Dark Side: Art and the
Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
America. University of California Press, 2004.
Copyright © 2004 by The Regents of the Univer-
sity of California. Reproduced by permission.—
Casebeer, Edwin F. From “Stephen King’s Canon:
The Art of Balance,” in A Dark Night’s Dreaming:
Contemporary American Horror Fiction. Edited
by Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison.
University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Copy-
right © 1996 by the University of South Carolina.
Reproduced by permission.—Clery, E. J. From
“The Politics of the Gothic Heroine in the 1790s,”
in Reviewing Romanticism. Edited by Philip W.
Martin and Robin Jarvis. MacMillan Academic and
Professional Ltd., 1992. Editorial matter and selec-
tion Copyright © Philip W. Martin and Robin
Jarvis, 1992. Text Copyrights © Macmillan Aca-
demic and Professional Ltd, 1992. Reproduced
with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Clery, E.
J. From Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to
Mary Shelley. Northcote House Publishers, Ltd.,
2000, 2004. Copyright © 2000 and 2004 by E. J.
Clery. Reproduced by permission.—Clery, Emma.
From “Against Gothic,” in Gothick Origins and
Innovations. Edited by Allan Lloyd Smith and Vic-
tor Sage. Rodopi, 1994. Copyright © Editions Ro-
dopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.—Conger,
Syndy M. From “An Analysis of The Monk and Its
German Sources,” in Matthew G. Lewis, Charles
Robert Maturin and the Germans: An Interpre-
tive Study of the Influence of German Literature
on Two Gothic Novels. Edited by Dr. James Hogg.
Institut Fur Englische Sprache Und Literatur, 1977.
Copyright © 1976 by Syndy M. Conger. Repro-
duced by permission.—Conger, Syndy McMillen.
From “The Reconstruction of the Gothic Feminine
xxv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Ideal in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights,” in The
Female Gothic. Edited by Juliann E. Fleenor. Eden
Press, 1983. Copyright © 1983 Eden Press, Inc.
Reproduced by permission of the author.—
Davenport-Hines, Richard. From Gothic. North
Point Press, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Richard
Davenport-Hines. Reprinted by permission of
North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and
Giroux LLC. In the United Kingdom, Canada and
the British Commonwealth by the author.—Dine-
sen, Isak. From “The Monkey,” in Seven Gothic
Tales. Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, Inc., 1934;
The Modern Library 1939. Copyright © 1934 by
Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, Inc. Renewed
1961 by Isak Dinesen. Reproduced by permission
of the Rungstedlund Foundation. In the United
States by Random House, Inc.—du Maurier,
Daphne. From Rebecca. Doubleday & Company,
Inc., 1938. Copyright 1938 Doubleday, Doran and
Company, Inc. Renewed 1965 by Daphne du Mau-
rier Browning. Reproduced with permission of
Curtis Brown Ltd., London on behalf of The
Chichester Partnership.—Duthie, Peter. From
Plays on the Passions. Broadview Press, Ltd.,
2001. Copyright © 2001 Peter Duthie. All rights
reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Faulkner,
William. From “A Rose for Emily,” in Collected
Stories of William Faulkner. Vintage Interna-
tional, 1995. Copyright 1930, renewed 1958 by
William Faulkner. Used by permission of Random
House, Inc. In the United Kingdom by the Liter-
ary Estate of William Faulkner.—Fedorko, Kathy
A. From Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of
Edith Wharton. The University of Alabama Press,
1995. Copyright © 1995 The University of Ala-
bama Press. All rights reserved. Reproduced by
permission.—Fiedler, Leslie. From Love and Death
in the American Novel. Revised edition. Stein and
Day, 1966. Reproduced by permission of the Estate
of Leslie Fiedler.—Fisher, IV, Benjamin F. From
“Gothic Possibilities in Moby-Dick,” in Gothick
Origins and Innovations. Edited by Allan Lloyd
Smith and Victor Sage. Rodopi, 1994. Copyright
© Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by permis-
sion.—Frank, Frederick S. From “The Gothic
Vathek: The Problem of Genre Resolved,” in AMS
Studies in Eighteenth Century: Vathek and the
Escape from Time: Bicentenary Revaluations.
Edited by Kenneth W. Graham. AMS, 1990. Copy-
right © 1990 by AMS Press, Inc. Reproduced by
permission.—Freud, Sigmund. From The Un-
canny. Translated by David McLintock. Penguin,
2003. Translation and editorial matter Copyright
© 2003 by David McLintock. Reproduced by
permission of Penguin Books, Ltd. In the United
States and the Philippines by the Literary Estate of
David McLintock.—Frisch, Shelley L. From “Poet-
ics of the Uncanny: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Sand-
xxvi G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1
man,’” in The Scope of the Fantastic: Theory,
Technique, Major Authors. Edited by Robert A.
Collins and Howard D. Pearce. Greenwood Press,
1985. Copyright © 1985 by The Thomas Burnett
Swann Fund. All rights reserved. Reproduced by
permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.,
Westport, CT.—Gamer, Michael. From an Intro-
duction to The Castle of Otranto. Edited, with an
Introduction and Notes by Michael Gamer. Pen-
guin Books, 2001. Editorial matter copyright ©
Michael Gamer, 2001. Reproduced by permission
of the author.—Geary, Robert F. From “Carmilla
and the Gothic Legacy: Victorian Transformations
of Supernatural Horror,” in The Blood Is the Life:
Vampires in Literature. Edited by Leonard G. Hel-
dreth and Mary Pharr. Bowling Green State Uni-
versity Popular Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999
Bowling Green State University Press. Reproduced
by permission.—Goddu, Teresa A. From Gothic
America: Narrative, History, and the Nation.
Columbia University Press, 1997. Copyright ©
1997 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with
permission of the publisher.—Goethe, Johann
Wolfgang von. From Faust: Part One. Translated
by David Luke. Oxford University Press, 1987.
Copyright © 1987 by Oxford University Press.
Reproduced by permission of Oxford University
Press.—Graham, Kenneth W. From “Emily’s
Demon-Lover: The Gothic Revolution and The
Mysteries of Udolpho,” in Gothic Fictions:
Prohibition/Transgression. Edited by Kenneth W.
Graham. AMS Press, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by
AMS Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Grif-
fith, Clark. From “Poe and the Gothic,” in Papers
on Poe: Essays in Honor of John Ward Ostrom.
Edited by Richard P. Veler. Chantry Music Press,
Inc., 1972. Copyright © 1972 by Chantry Music
Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the Liter-
ary Estate of Clark Griffith.—Gross, Louis S. From
Redefining the American Gothic: From Wieland
to Day of the Dead. UMI Research Press, 1989.
Copyright © 1989 Louis Samuel Gross. All rights
reserved. Reproduced by permission of the au-
thor.—Hannaham, James. From “‘Bela Lugosi’s
Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Either’: Goth and
the Glorification of Suffering in Rock Music,” in
Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twen-
tieth Century Art. Edited by Christoph Grunen-
berg. MIT Press, 1997. Copyright © 1997 The
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Repro-
duced by permission of The MIT Press, Cambridge,
MA.—Haslam, Richard. From “Maturin and the
‘Calvinist Sublime,’” in Gothick Origins and In-
novations. Edited by Allan Lloyd Smith and Vic-
tor Sage. Rodopi, 1994. Copyright © Editions Ro-
dopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.—Heilman,
Robert B. From “Charlotte Brontë’s ‘New’ Gothic,”
in From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad: Essays
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Edited by Robert C. Rathburn and Martin Stein-
mann, Jr. University of Minnesota Press, 1958.
Copyright © 1958 by the University of Minnesota.
Renewed 1986 by Robert Charles Rathburn and
Martin Steinmann, Jr. All rights reserved. Repro-
duced by permission.—Heller, Tamar. From Dead
Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic.
Yale University Press, 1992. Copyright © 1992 by
Yale University. All rights reserved. Reproduced by
permission.—Hoeveler, Diane Long. From “Mary
Shelley and Gothic Feminism: The Case of ‘The
Mortal Immortal,’” in Iconoclastic Departures:
Mary Shelley after Frankenstein: Essays in Honor
of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley’s Birth. Edited
by Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and
Gregory O’Dea. Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Associated
University Presses, Inc. Reproduced by permis-
sion.—Hoffmann, E. T. A. From an Introduction
to The Best Tales of Hoffmann. Edited by E. F.
Bleiler. Dover Publications, Inc., 1967. Copyright
© 1967 by Dover Publications, Inc. All rights
reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Hoffmann,
E. T. A. From “The Sand-Man,” in The Best Tales
of Hoffmann. Edited and with an introduction by
E. F. Bleiler. Translated by J. T. Bealby. Dover
Publications, Inc., 1967. Copyright © 1967 by
Dover Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Repro-
duced by permission.—Hogle, Jerrold E. From
“Stoker’s Counterfeit Gothic: Dracula and Theatri-
cality at the Dawn of Simulation,” in Bram
Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis, and the Gothic.
Edited by William Hughes and Andrew Smith.
MacMillan Press Ltd., 1998. Selection and edito-
rial matter Copyright © William Hughes and
Andrew Smith, 1998. Text Copyright © Macmillan
Press Ltd., 1998. Reproduced with permission of
Palgrave Macmillan.—Horner, Sue and Zlosnik,
Avril. From “Daphne du Maurier and Gothic
Signatures: Rebecca as Vamp(ire),” in Body Mat-
ters: Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality. Edited
by Avril Horner and Angela Keane. Manchester
University Press, Manchester, UK, 2000. Copyright
© 2000 by Manchester University Press. Repro-
duced by permission of the publisher and au-
thors.—Howells, Coral Ann. From Margaret At-
wood. Macmillan Press Ltd., 1996. Copyright ©
1996 Coral Ann Howells. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Mac-
millan.—Ingebretsen, Edward J. From “Anne Rice:
Raising Holy Hell, Harlequin Style,” in The Gothic
World of Anne Rice. Edited by Gary Hoppenstand
and Ray B. Browne. Bowling Green State Univer-
sity Popular Press, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by
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Photographs and Illustrations in Gothic
Literature were received from the
following sources:
A Description of Strawberry Hill, by Horace Walpole,
frontispiece.—Abbotsford, home of Sir Walter
Scott, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—
Ainsworth, William Harrison, photograph. ©
Getty Images.—Allston, Washington, photograph.
The Library of Congress.—American Gothic, paint-
ing by Grant Wood, 1930, photograph. Photogra-
phy © The Art Institute of Chicago. Reproduced
by permission.—Atwood, Margaret, photograph
by Christopher Felver. Copyright © Christopher
Felver/Corbis.—Austen, Jane, engraving.—Baillie,
Joanna, photograph. © Hulton-Deutsch/Corbis.—
Balshazzar’s Feast, painting by Washington All-
ston, ca. 1817-1843. © The Detroit Institute of
Arts/Bridgeman Art Library.—Beckford, William,
photograph. © Michael Nicholson/Corbis.—Berg-
man, Ingrid and Heywood Morse in the 1959 film
xxx G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1
adaptation of Turn of the Screw by Henry James,
photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Bierce, Am-
brose, drawing by J. J. Newbegin, 1896.—Brad-
don, Mary Elizabeth, engraving. © Hulton Getty/
Liaison Agency.—Brontë, Charlotte, illustration.
International Portrait Gallery.—Brontë, Emily,
painting by Bramwell Brontë.—Brown, Charles
Brockden, print.—Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George,
photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Burke, Ed-
mund, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Capote,
Truman, photograph. © Hulton-Deutsch Collec-
tion/Corbis.—Carter, Angela, photograph. © Jerry
Bauer. Reproduced by permission.—Castle of
Otranto, by Horace Walpole, c. 1790, illustration.—
Castle of Wolfenbach; a German Story, by Eliza
Parsons, 1793, title page.—Christine, movie still,
photograph. The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by
permission.—Collins, William Wilkie, photo-
graph. The Library of Congress.—Cooper, Alice,
performing on the In Concert television show on
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Corbis.—Dickens, Charles, photograph. Hesketh
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mann.—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Spencer Tracy as
Dr. Jekyll, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—
Dracula, Helen Chandler, as Mina Seward, with
Bela Lugosi, as Count Dracula, photograph. The
Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—
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page.—du Maurier, Daphne, photograph. © Time
Life Pictures/Getty Images.—Faulkner, William,
photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Frankenstein,
by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1831, illustration.
Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced by permis-
sion.—Fall of the House of Usher, by Edgar Allan
Poe, illustration. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Gargoyle
of 15th Century Spanish Building, photograph. ©
Manuel Bellver/Corbis.—Gilman, Charlotte Per-
kins, c. 1890, photograph.—Godwin, William,
painting by James Northcote. From Vindication of
the Rights of Women, by William Godwin, 1802.—
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, illustra-
tion. © Corbis.—Hawthorne, Nathaniel, photo-
graph.—Hoffmann, E. T. A., photograph. Mary
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sion.—Hogg, James, photograph. © Rischgitz/
Getty Images.—Irving, Washington, photograph.
The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institu-
tion.—James, Henry, photograph.—Jane Eyre, Or-
son Welles as Edward Rochester, with Joan Fon-
taine as Jane Eyre, photograph. The Kobal
Collection. Reproduced by permission.—King,
Stephen, photograph. Corbis-Bettmann.—Le
Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, photograph.—Legend of
Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving, illustration.
© Bettmann/Corbis.—Lewis, Matthew Gregory,
photograph by H. W. Pickersgill.—Varney the
Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood, title page. © Getty
Images.—Lovecraft, H. P., photograph.—Lugosi,
Bela, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Maturin,
Charles Robert, photograph. © The Granger Col-
lection, New York.—Melville, Herman, photo-
graph. The Library of Congress.—Morrison, Toni,
photograph. Copyright © Nancy Kazerman/
ZUMA/Corbis.—Nave of Basilique de Saint-Denis,
June 19, 1996, photograph. © Robert Holmes/
Corbis.—Nightmare, painting by Henri Fuseli,
1791. Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced by
permission.—Nosferatu, Max Schreck (Count Or-
lok) standing on deck of ship, 1922, photograph.
© Bettmann/Corbis.—O’Connor, Flannery, photo-
graph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Oates, Joyce
Carol, photograph. © Nancy Kaszerman/Corbis.—
Peck, Gregory, photograph. The Kobal Collection.
Reproduced by permission.—Poe, Edgar Allan,
photograph.—Polidori, John William, painting by
F. G. Gainsford, c. 1816, photograph. © The
Granger Collection, New York.—Psycho, Norman
Bates (Anthony Perkins) approaching the motel,
photograph. © Underwood and Underwood/Cor-
bis.—Reeve, Clara, photograph. © Getty Images.—
Rice, Anne, photograph. © Mitchell Gerber/Cor-
bis.—Roettgen Pieta, wood carving, c. 1300,
photograph. © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.—
Schiller, Friedrich von, engraving. The German
Information Center.—Scott, Sir Walter, photo-
graph. The Library of Congress.—Shelley, Mary
Wollstonecraft, illustration.—Son of Frankenstein,
with Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, and Bela
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son, Robert Louis, engraving. The Library of
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Deutsch Collection/Corbis.—The Castle Spectre, by
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man, photograph. © A.I.P./The Kobal Collection.
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movie still. © MGM/The Kobal Collection. Repro-
duced by permission.—The Island of Dr. Moreau,
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1
poster. © A.I.P./The Kobal Collection. Reproduced
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
by permission.—The Italian; or, The Confessional of
the Black Penitents, by Ann Radcliffe, 1797 edition,
title page.—The Mysteries of Udolpho, frontispieces
by Ann Radcliffe.—The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym, written by Edgar Allan Poe, title page. Special
Collections Library, University of Michigan.
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Baron: A Gothic Story, by Clara Reeve, 1778, illustra-
tion.—The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times, by
Sophia Lee, 1786, title page.—The Shining, directed
by Stanley Kubrick, 1980, photograph. © Warner
Bros./The Kobal Collection.—The Sicilian Romance;
or, The Apparition of the Cliffs, an Opera, by Henry
Siddons, 1794, title page.—The Table of the Seven
Deadly Sins, painting by Hieronymous Bosch, c.
1480-1490, Northern Renaissance, photograph. ©
Archivo Iconografico, S.A./Corbis.—The Tempta-
tion of Ambrosio, from Matthew Gregory Lewis’s
The Monk, illustration.—The Woman in White, by
Wilkie Collins, title page. Special Collections
Library, University of Michigan. Reproduced by
permission.—Things as They Are; or, The Adventures
of Caleb Williams, by William Godwin, title
page.—Twin Peaks, scene from the television series
by David Lynch, 1990, photograph. © Corbis
Sygma.—Veidt, Conrad and Lil Dagover in the
1920 silent horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,
photograph. © John Springer/Corbis.—von Go-
ethe, Johann Wolfgang, photograph. © Bettmann/
Corbis.—Waddy, F., satirical caricature in “Once a
Week,” 1873. Mary Evans Picture Library. Repro-
duced by permission.—Walpole, Horace, photo-
graph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Wharton, Edith,
1905, photograph. The Library of Congress.—
Wieland; or, The Transformation, by Charles Brock-
den Brown, Philadelphia, David McKay, Publisher,
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Photo/Corbis.
xxxi
1081 1220

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

● Suger of Saint Denis is born in Saint Denis, ■ Construction of the Cathedral of Amiens in
France. France.
■ Master Elias of Dereham begins designing the
1127 Salisbury Cathedral in England.
■ Abbot Suger of Saint Denis begins redesigning
the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis in France.
1245
■ Construction of the current Westminster Ab-
1151
bey in London, England.
● Abbot Suger of Saint Denis dies on 13 January
in St. Denis, France.
C. 1329
C. 1163 ■ Andrea Pisano begins his bronze sculptures for
the Baptisery in Florence, Italy.
■ Construction of the current Cathedral of Notre
Dame de Paris in France.
1485
C. 1175 ■ Hieronymus Bosch completes the painting
■ Construction of the current Canterbury Cathe- Tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins.
dral in England.
C. 1600-01
C. 1194 ■ William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is staged.
■ Construction of the current Cathedral of Notre
Dame at Chartres (also known as Chartres
C. 1606
Cathedral) in France.
■ William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is staged.
C. 1211
■ Construction of the current Cathedral of Notre 1717
Dame de Rheims (also known as Rheims ● Horace Walpole is born on 24 September in
Cathedral) in France. London, England.

xxxiii
CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS 1727 1762
■ Daniel Defoe’s An Essay on the History and Real- ● James Boaden is born on 23 May at White
ity of Apparitions is published. Haven in Cumberland, England.
● Joanna Baillie is born on 11 September in
1729 Bothwell, Lanarkshire, Scotland.
● Edmund Burke is born on 12 January in Dub-
lin, Ireland. 1764
● Clara Reeve is born on 23 January in Ipswich, ● Ann Radcliffe is born on 9 July in London,
Suffolk, England. England.
■ Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is
1742 published.
■ Batty and Thomas Langley’s Ancient Architec-
ture Restored and Improved is published.
1770
● James Hogg is born in Ettrick, Selkirkshire,
1749 Scotland.
● Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is born on 28
August in Frankfurt, Germany.
1771
● Charles Brockden Brown is born on 17 Janu-
1750
ary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
● Sophia Lee is born in London, England.
● Sir Walter Scott is born on 15 August in Edin-
■ Horace Walpole and Richard Bentley begin burgh, Scotland.
designing Strawberry Hill, Walpole’s residence
in Twickenham, England.
1772
1753 ● Samuel Taylor Coleridge is born on 21 October
in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, England.
■ Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Ferdinand
Count Fathom is published.
1773
1756 ■ John Aikin and Anna Laetitia (Aikin) Bar-
bauld’s Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, by J. and
● William Godwin is born on 3 March in Wis-
A. L. Aikin is published.
beach, England.

1757 1775
● William Blake is born on 28 November in ● Matthew Gregory Lewis is born on 9 July in
London, England. London, England.

■ Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into
the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beauti-
ful is published.
1759
● Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller is
born on 10 November in Marbach, Germany.
● Jane Austen is born on 16 December in Steven-
ton, Hampshire, England.
1776
● Ernst Theodor Wilhelm (later E. T. A.) Hoff-
mann is born on 24 January in Königsberg,
Germany.

1760 1777
● William Beckford is born on 29 September in ■ Clara Reeve’s The Champion of Virtue. A Gothic
London, England. Story is published.

xxxiv G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1
1778 1791

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

■ Clara Reeve’s The Champion of Virtue is pub- ■ Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest is
lished as The Old English Baron. published.

1779 1792
● Washington Allston is born on 5 November in ● Percy Bysshe Shelley is born on 4 August in
South Carolina. Field Place, Sussex, England.
■ Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the
1780 Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and
Moral Subjects is published.
● Charles Robert Maturin is born on 25 Septem-
ber in Dublin, Ireland.
1793
1781 ■ Mrs. Eliza Parsons’s Castle of Wolfenbach; A Ger-
man Story is published.
■ Henry Fuseli completes the painting The Night-
mare.
1794
1783 ■ James Boaden’s Fontainville Forest is produced.

● Washington Irving is born on 3 April in New ■ J. C. Cross’s The Apparition is produced.

York City. ■ William Godwin’s Things As They Are; or, The
■ Sophia Lee’s The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times Adventures of Caleb Williams is published.
is published. ■ Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, A
Romance; Interspersed with some pieces of Poetry
is published.
1786
■ The unauthorized translation of William Beck- ■ Henry Siddons’s The Sicilian Romance; or, The
ford’s Vathek is published as An Arabian Tale. Apparition of the Cliff is produced.

1787 1795
● Lewis Nockalls Cottingham is born on 24 ● John William Polidori is born on 7 September
October at Laxfield, Suffolk, England. in England.

■ William Beckford’s Vathek is published.

1796
■ Marquis von Grosse’s Genius (Horrid Mysteries)
1788
is published.
● George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron is born on
22 January in London, England. ■ Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance
is published.

1789
1797
■ James Cobb’s The Haunted Tower is produced.
● Horace Walpole dies on 2 March in London,
■ George Colman the Younger’s The Battle of England.
Hexham is produced.
● Edmund Burke dies on 9 July in Beaconsfield,
Buckinghamshire, England.
1790 ● Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley) is
■ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust: Ein Frag- born on 30 August in London, England.
ment is published.
■ Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Castle Spectre: A
■ Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance is published. Drama is produced.

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1 xxxv
CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS 1798
■ Regina Maria Roche’s Children of the Abbey is
published.
■ The first volume of Joanna Baillie’s A Series of
Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate the
Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Be-
ing the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy is
published.
■ Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or, The
Transformation is published.
1799
■ Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly; or,
Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker and the first volume
of Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793
are published.
1800
■ Washington Allston completes the painting
Tragic Figure in Chains.
■ The second volume of Charles Brockden
Brown’s Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year
1793 is published.
1802
■ The second volume of Joanna Baillie’s A Series
of Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate
the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion
Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy is
published.
1803
● Edward Bulwer-Lytton (Edward George Earle
Lytton Bulwer) is born on 25 May in London,
England.
● Thomas Lovell Beddoes is born on 30 June in
Clifton, Shropshire, England.
● Alexander Jackson Davis is born on 24 July in
New York City.
1804
● Nathaniel Hawthorne is born on 4 July in
Salem, Massachusetts.
1805
● William Harrison Ainsworth is born on 4
February in Manchester, England.
● Friedrich von Schiller dies on 9 May in We-
imar, Germany.
xxxvi G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1
1806
■ Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, The Moor is
published.
1807
● Clara Reeve dies on 3 December in Ipswich,
Suffolk, England.
1808
■ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust—Der
Tragödie erster Teil (Faust: Part One) is published.
1809
● Edgar Allan Poe is born on 19 January in
Boston, Massachusetts.
1810
● Charles Brockden Brown dies on 22 February
in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
■ Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Zastrozzi, A Romance is
published.
1811
■ Percy Bysshe Shelley’s St. Irvyne; or, The Rosi-
crucian: A Romance is published.
1812
● Charles Dickens is born on 7 February in
Portsmouth, Hampshire, England.
■ The third volume of Joanna Baillie’s A Series of
Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate the
Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Be-
ing the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy is
published.
■ George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage: A Romaunt is published.
1813
■ George Gordon, Lord Byron’s The Giaour: A
Fragment of a Turkish Tale is published.
1814
● Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is born on 28 August
in Dublin, Ireland.
■ Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly; or, ’Tis Sixty Years
Since is published.
1816 1821

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

● Charlotte Brontë is born on 21 April in Thorn- ● John William Polidori commits suicide on 27
ton, Yorkshire, England. August in London, England.
■ George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s ■ Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English
Pilgrimage: Canto the Third is published. Opium Eater is published.

■ Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel: Kubla

Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep is published. 1822
■ Jane Scott’s The Old Oak Chest is produced. ● E. T. A. Hoffmann dies on 25 June in Berlin,
Germany.
● Percy Bysshe Shelley drowns on 8 July in the
1817
Gulf of Spezia near Lerici, Italy.
● Jane Austen dies on 18 July in Winchester,
Hampshire, England.
1823
■ Washington Allston begins the painting Bels-
hazzar’s Feast. ● Ann Radcliffe dies on 7 February in England.
■ Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, The
■ George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Manfred, A
Fate of Frankenstein is produced.
Dramatic Poem is published.
■ E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann” (“The
Sandman”) is published. 1824
■ William Wilkie Collins is born on 8 January in
London, England.
1818
● Sophia Lee dies on 13 March in Clifton, Eng-
● Matthew Gregory Lewis dies on 16 May dur- land.
ing a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean from
Jamaica to England. ● Lord Byron dies on 19 April in Cephalonia,
Greece.
● Emily Brontë is born on 30 July in Thornton,
Yorkshire, England. ● Charles Robert Maturin dies on 30 October in
Dublin, Ireland.
■ Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion
■ Catherine Gore’s The Bond, a Dramatic Poem is
is published.
produced.
■ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein; or,
■ James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confes-
The Modern Prometheus is published.
sions of a Justified Sinner is published.
■ Washington Irving’s Tales of a Traveller is
1819 published.
● Herman Melville is born on 1 August in New
York City.
1825
■ Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci is produced. ■ James Fenimore Cooper’s Lionel Lincoln; or, The
■ Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geof- Leaguer of Boston is published.
frey Crayon, Gent. is published.
■ John William Polidori’s The Vampyre; a Tale is 1826
published. ■ Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Glenallan is published.

1820 1827
■ John Keats’s Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. ● William Blake dies on 12 August in London,
Agnes, and Other Poems is published. England.
■ Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer ■ Thomas Moore’s The Epicurean. A Tale is
is published. published.

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1 xxxvii
CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS 1830 1842
● Christina Rossetti is born on 5 December in ■ Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni is published.
London, England. ● Ambrose Bierce is born on 24 June in Horse
Cave Creek, Meigs County, Ohio.
1832
● Johann Wolfgang von Goethe dies on 22 1843
March. ● Henry James is born on 15 April in New York
City.
● Sir Walter Scott dies on 21 September in Ab-
botsford, Scotland. ● Washington Allston dies on 9 July in Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts.
■ Architect Alexander Jackson Davis completes
■ A. W. N. Pugin’s Apology for the Revival of
Glen Ellen, the Baltimore, Maryland residence
Christian Architecture in England is published.
of Robert Gilmor III.

1844
1834
● William Beckford dies on 2 May in England.
● Samuel Taylor Coleridge dies on 25 July in
England.
1845
■ Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Fre-
1835
derick Douglass, an American Slave is published.
● James Hogg dies on 21 November in Scotland.
■ Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales by Edgar A. Poe and The
Raven and Other Poems are published.
1836
● William Godwin dies on 7 April in London, 1846
England. ■ Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Lucretia; or, The Chil-
■ Thomas Cole completes the painting Ruined dren of Night is published.
Tower. ■ Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Dvoinik: Prikliucheniia gos-
podina Goliadkina (The Double: A Poem of St.
Petersburg) is published.
1837
■ Charles Dickens’s Posthumous Papers of the Pick-
1847
wick Club is published under the pseudonym
Boz. ● L. N. Cottingham dies on 13 October in
London, England.
■ Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales is
published. ● Bram Stoker is born on 8 November in Clon-
tarf, Ireland.
■ Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. An Autobiography
1838 is published under the pseudonym Currer Bell.
■ Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist is published. ■ Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is published
■ Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gor- under the pseudonym Ellis Bell.
don Pym is published. ■ Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood, writ-
ten by either Thomas Peckett Prest or James
Malcolm Rymer, is published.
1839
● James Boaden dies on 16 February in England.
1848
● Emily Brontë dies on 19 December in
1840 Haworth, Yorkshire, England.
■ Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and ■ Charles Dickens’s The Haunted Man, and The
Arabesque is published. Ghost’s Bargain is published.

xxxviii G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1
1849 1857

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

● Thomas Lovell Beddoes commits suicide on ■ Wilkie Collins’s The Dead Secret is published.
26 January in Basel, Switzerland. ■ Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit is published.
● Edgar Allan Poe dies on 7 October in Balti- ■ G. W. M. Reynolds’s Wagner the Wehr-wolf is
more, Maryland. published.

1850 1859
● Robert Louis Stevenson is born on 13 Novem- ● Washington Irving dies on 28 November in
ber in Edinburgh, Scotland. Irvington, New York.

■ Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter: A Ro-

mance is published. 1860
● Charlotte Perkins Gilman is born on 3 July in
Hartford, Connecticut.
1851
■ Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White is pub-
● Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley dies on 1 Febru- lished.
ary in Bournemouth, England.
■ Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun; or,
● Joanna Baillie dies on 23 February in Hamp- The Romance of Monte Beni is published.
stead, England.
■ Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven 1861
Gables, a Romance is published. ■ Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave
■ Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is Girl, Written by Herself is published under the
published. pseudonym Linda Brent.

1852 1862
■ Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, ● Edith Wharton is born on 24 January in New
Life among the Lowly is published. York City.
■ Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story is
published.
1853
■ Charlotte Brontë’s Villette is published under 1864
the pseudonym Currer Bell.
● Nathaniel Hawthorne dies on 19 May in Ply-
■ Charles Dickens’s Bleak House is published. mouth, New Hampshire.
■ Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas: A Tale of
C. 1854 Bartram-Haugh is published.

● Oscar Wilde is born on 16 October in Dublin,

Ireland. 1870
● Charles Dickens dies on 9 June in Rochester,
Kent, England.
1855
● Charlotte Brontë dies on 31 March in 1872
Haworth, Yorkshire, England.
■ Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly is
published.
1856
● Sigismund Solomon Freud (later Sigmund 1873
Freud) is born on 6 May in Freiberg, Moravia, ● Edward Bulwer-Lytton dies on 18 January in
Czechoslovakia. Torquay, Devonshire, England.
■ Herman Melville’s The Piazza Tales is pub- ● Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu dies on 10 February
lished. in Dublin, Ireland.

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1 xxxix
CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS 1882 1894
● William Harrison Ainsworth dies on 3 Janu- ● Robert Louis Stevenson dies on 3 December in
ary. Apia, Samoa.
● Bela Lugosi is born Béla Ferenc Dezsö Blask¢ ● Christina Rossetti dies on 29 December in
on 20 October in Lugos, Hungary. London, England.
■ Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and The
1885 Inmost Light is published.
● Karen Christentze Dinesen, who later wrote
under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, is born
on 17 April near Copenhagen, Denmark. 1896
■ H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau: A
Possibility is published.
1886
■ Guy de Maupassant’s “La Horla” (“The Horla”)
is published Le Gil Blas. 1897
■ Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of ● William Faulkner is born on 25 September in
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is published. New Albany, Mississippi.
■ Bram Stoker’s Dracula is published.
1887
● William Henry Pratt (later Boris Karloff) is 1898
born on 23 November in London, England.
■ Henry James’s The Two Magics: The Turn of the
Screw, Covering End is published.
1888
● Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe (later F. W. Mur-
nau) is born on 28 December in Bielefeld,
1899
Westphalia, Germany. ● Elizabeth Bowen is born on 7 June in Dublin,
Ireland.

1889 ● Alfred Hitchcock is born on 13 August in

■ Wilkie Collins dies on 23 September in Lon- London, England.
don, England.
1900
1890 ● Oscar Wilde dies on 30 November in Paris,
● Howard Phillips Lovecraft is born on 20 France.
August in Providence, Rhode Island.
■ Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is 1904
published.
■ Arthur Machen’s “The Garden of Avallaunius”
is published.
1891
● Herman Melville dies on 28 September in New
1906
York City.
■ Algernon Blackwood’s The Empty House and
■ Oscar Wilde’s Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and
Other Ghosts is published.
Other Stories is published.

1892 1907
● Alexander Jackson Davis dies on 14 January in ● Daphne du Maurier is born on 12 May in
West Orange, New Jersey. London, England.
■ Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall- ■ George Sylvester Viereck’s The House of the
paper” is published. Vampire is published.

xl G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1
1908 1922

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

■ Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, produced by the Selig ■ Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, directed
Polyscope Company, is released. by F. W. Murnau, is released.

1909 1924
■ Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, produced by the Nord- ■ Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks), directed
isk Company, is released. by Paul Leni and Leo Birinsky, is released.

1910 1925
■ Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de L’Opéra (The ● Edward Gorey is born on 22 February in
Phantom of the Opera) is published. Chicago, Illinois.

■ Frankenstein, directed by J. Searle Dawley, is ● (Mary) Flannery O’Connor is born on 25

released. March in Savannah, Georgia.

1911 1927
■ Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome is published. ■ Algernon Blackwood’s The Dance of Death, and
Other Tales is published.

1912
1929
● Bram Stoker dies on 20 April in London, Eng-
● Ursula K. Le Guin is born on 21 October in
land.
Berkeley, California.

1914
1930
● Ambrose Bierce disappears c. 1 January in
■ William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and “A Rose
Mexico and is presumed dead.
for Emily” are published.

1916
1931
● Henry James dies on 28 February in London,
● Chloe Ardelia Wofford (later Toni Morrison) is
England.
born on 18 February in Lorain, Ohio.
● F. W. Murnau dies on 11 March in Santa
1919 Barbara, California.
● Shirley Jackson is born on 14 December in San ■ Dracula, directed by Tod Browning and star-
Francisco, California. ring Bela Lugosi in the title role, is released.
■ Sigmund Freud’s “Das Unheimlich” (“The ■ Frankenstein, directed by James Whale and star-
Uncanny”) is published. ring Boris Karloff as the monster, is released.
■ M, directed by Fritz Lang, is released.
1920 ■ William Faulkner’s Sanctuary is published.
● Ray Bradbury is born on 22 August in
Waukegan, Illinois.
1932
■ Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem:
■ Murders in the Rue Morgue, directed by Robert
How He Came into the World, directed by Carl
Florey, is released.
Boese and Paul Wegener, is released.
■ White Zombie, directed by Victor Halperin, is
■ Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (The Cabinet of
released.
Dr. Caligari), directed by Robert Wiene, is
released. ■ William Faulkner’s Light in August is published.

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1 xli
CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS 1933 1940
■ King Kong, directed by Merian C. Cooper, is ● Angela Carter is born on 7 May in London,
released. England.
■ The Invisible Man, directed by James Whale, is ■ Rebecca, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is re-
released. leased.
■ Island of Lost Souls, directed by Erle C. Kenton,
is released. 1941
● Howard Allen O’Brien (later Anne Rice) is born
1934 on 4 October in New Orleans, Louisiana.

■ Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales is published.

1943
1935 ■ I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, and
The Seventh Victim, all produced by Val Lew-
● Charlotte Perkins Gilman commits suicide on ton, are released.
17 August in Pasadena, California.
■ Bride of Frankenstein, directed by James Whale,
is released.
1945
■ The Body Snatcher, directed by Robert Wise, is
released.
1936
■ Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover, and Other
■ Walter de la Mare’s Ghost Stories is published. Stories is published.
■ William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is pub- ■ H. P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature
lished. is published.
■ H. P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Mad-
ness” is published.
1947
● Stephen King is born on 21 September in
1937 Portland, Maine.
● H. P. Lovecraft dies on 15 March in Providence,
Rhode Island.
1949
● Edith Wharton dies on 11 August in St. Brice- ■ Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery; or, The Adventures
sous-Foret, France. of James Harris is published.
■ Edith Wharton’s Ghosts is published.

1952
1938 ● Clive Barker is born on 5 October in Liverpool,
● Joyce Carol Oates is born on 16 June in Lock- England.
port, New York.
■ Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is published. 1955
■ Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to
1939 Find is published.

● Sigmund Freud dies on 23 September in Lon-

don, England. 1956
● Margaret Atwood is born on 18 November in ● Bela Lugosi dies on 16 August in Los Angeles,
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. California.
■ Son of Frankenstein, directed by Rowland V. Lee, ■ Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don
is released. Siegel, is released.

xlii G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1
1957 1968

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

■ The Curse of Frankenstein, directed by Terence ■ Margaret Atwood’s The Animals in That Country
Fisher, is released. is published.
■ Night of the Living Dead, directed by George A.
1959 Romero, is released.

■ Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is ■ Rosemary’s Baby, directed by Roman Polanski,
published. is released.

■ The Mummy, directed by Terence Fisher, is

released. 1969
■ The Twilight Zone is first televised. ● Boris Karloff dies on 2 February at Midhurst in
Sussex, England.
■ Led Zeppelin’s first two self-titled albums are
1960 released.
■ The Fall of the House of Usher, directed by Roger
Corman, is released.
1970
■ Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is re-
■ Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut album is
leased.
released.
■ Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is published.
1962
■ Night Gallery is first televised.
● William Faulkner dies on 6 July in Byhalia,
Mississippi.
1971
● Isak Dinesen dies on 7 September in Rungsted,
Denmark. ■ Richard Matheson’s Hell House is published.
■ Alice Cooper’s Killer is released.

1963 ■ Black Sabbath’s Paranoid is released.

■ Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is published.

1972
■ The Birds, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is
released. ■ Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing is published.

■ The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise, is ■ Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of
released. Doctor Hoffman is published.
■ Alice Cooper’s School’s Out is released.
1964
● Flannery O’Connor dies on 3 August in Milled- 1973
geville, Georgia. ● Elizabeth Bowen dies on 22 February in Lon-
don, England.
■ The Addams Family is first televised.
■ The Exorcist, directed by William Friedkin, is
■ The Munsters is first televised.
released.

1965 1974
● Shirley Jackson dies on 8 August in North Ben- ■ Angela Carter’s Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces is
nington, Vermont. published.
■ The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, directed by Tobe
1966 Hooper, is released.
■ Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention’s ■ Young Frankenstein, directed by Mel Brooks, is
Freak Out! is released. released.

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1 xliii
CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS 1975 1983
■ Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot is published. ■ Stephen King’s Pet Sematary is published.
■ They Came from Within, directed by David ■ New Order’s Power, Corruption, and Lies is
Cronenberg, is released. released.

1976
1984
■ Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle is published.
■ Joyce Carol Oates’s Mysteries of Winterthurn is
■ Carrie, directed by Brian De Palma, is released. published.
■ The Omen, directed by Richard Donner, is
released.
1986
■ Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire is pub-
lished. ■ Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart is published.
■ Siouxsie and the Banshees’s Tinderbox is re-
1977 leased.
■ Stephen King’s The Shining is published. ■ Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the
Opera is produced.
■ Joyce Carol Oates’s Night Side: Eighteen Tales is
published.
1987
1978 ■ Toni Morrison’s Beloved is published.
■ Dawn of the Dead, directed by George A.
■ The Smiths’s Louder than Bombs is released.
Romero, is released.

1979 1988
■ Bauhaus’s 12-inch single “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” ■ Toni Morrison is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for
is released. Fiction for Beloved.
■ Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other
Stories is published. 1989
■ Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures is released. ● Daphne du Maurier dies on 19 April in Corn-
■ ’Salem’s Lot, directed by Tobe Hooper, is wall, England.
televised.
■ Pet Sematary, directed by Mary Lambert, is
released.
1980
● Alfred Hitchcock dies on 29 April in Los 1990
Angeles, California.
■ Twin Peaks is first televised.
■ Joyce Carol Oates’s Bellefleur is published.
■ The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick, is
released. 1992
● Angela Carter dies on 16 February in London,
1981 England.
■ Stephen King’s Danse Macabre is published. ■ Bram Stoker’s Dracula, directed by Francis Ford
■ Siouxsie and the Banshees’s Juju is released. Coppola, is released.

1982 1993
■ Joyce Carol Oates’s A Bloodsmoor Romance is ■ Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride is pub-
published. lished.

xliv G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1
1994 2000

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

■ Joyce Carol Oates’s Haunted: Tales of the Gro- ● Edward Gorey dies on 15 April in Cape Cod,
tesque is published.
Massachusetts.
■ Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, directed by Ken-
neth Branagh, is released. ■ Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is pub-
lished.
1996
■ Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace is published.

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 1 xlv
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN
OVERVIEW
T he origins of Gothic literature can be traced to
various historical, cultural, and artistic prece-
dents. Figures found in ancient folklore, such as
the Demon Lover, the Cannibal Bridegroom, the
Devil, and assorted demons, later populated the
pages of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Gothic novels and dramas. In addition, many
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works are
believed to have served as precursors to the
development of the Gothic tradition in Romantic
literature. These works include plays by William
Shakespeare, such as Hamlet (c. 1600-01), and Mac-
beth (1606), which feature supernatural elements,
demons, and apparitions, and Daniel Defoe’s An
Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions
(1727), which was written to support religion and
discourage superstition by providing evidence of
the existence of good spirits, angels, and other
divine manifestations, and by ridiculing delusions
and naive credulity. However, while these ele-
ments were present in literature and folklore prior
to the mid-eighteenth century, when the Gothic
movement began, it was the political, social, and
theological landscape of eighteenth-century
Europe that served as an impetus for this move-
ment. Edmund Burke’s treatise A Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime
and Beautiful (1757) introduced the concept of
increasing appreciation for the nature of experi-
ences characterized by the “sublime” and “beauti-
ful” by depicting and then engaging (vicariously)
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
in experiences comprised of elements that are
contrary in nature, such as terror, death, and evil.
Writers composed Gothic narratives during this
period largely in response to anxiety over the
change in social and political structure brought
about by such events as the French Revolution,
the rise in secular-based government, and the
rapidly changing nature of the everyday world
brought about by scientific advances and indus-
trial development, in addition to an increasing
aesthetic demand for realism rather than folklore
and fantasy. The Gothic worlds depicted fears
about what might happen, what could go wrong,
and what could be lost by continuing along the
path of political, social, and theological change,
as well as reflecting the desire to return to the time
of fantasy and belief in supernatural intervention
that characterized the Middle Ages. In some cases
Gothic narratives were also used to depict horrors
that existed in the old social and political order—
the evils of an unequal, intolerant society. In
Gothic narratives writers were able to both express
the anxiety generated by this upheaval and, as
Burke suggested, increase society’s appreciation
and desire for change and progress.
It is Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of
Otranto (1764) that is generally acclaimed as the
original work of Gothic literature—despite the fact
that some of the Gothic trappings found in Wal-
pole’s work were present in works such as Tobias
Smollett’s The Adventures of Ferdinand Count
1
 Fathom (1753)—because in his narrative Walpole
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
brings together elements of the supernatural and
horrific, and models his ruined castle setting after
his real-life residence, Strawberry Hill, a modern
version of a medieval castle. The characters in the
novel try to succeed in the modern world and to
adhere to the optimism and forward-looking
agenda they have been asked to advance, but a
dark, ancient evil from the distant past dooms
them to failure. While the literary merits of Wal-
pole’s novel were challenged by many critics, the
work inspired the reading public and authors
alike, and works imitative of Otranto, written in
what became known as the Gothic style, became
extremely popular. Brother and sister John Aikin
and Anna Laetitia (Aikin) Barbauld, in their Miscel-
laneous Pieces in Prose (1773), represent the intel-
lectual and psychological mechanics of Gothic
literature, and offer “Sir Bertrand, A Fragment,” a
story written in Gothic style, to illustrate their as-
sertions. Ann Radcliffe, like Walpole, is considered
one of the founders of the Gothic genre. Radcliffe
began her career as a Gothic writer with the
publication of her well-received novel The Castles
of Athlin and Dunbayne in 1789, and quickly fol-
lowed up with the novels A Sicilian Romance and
The Romance of the Forest published in 1790 and
1791, respectively. Radcliffe’s 1794 novel, The
Mysteries of Udolpho is regarded by many as the
quintessential example of eighteenth-century fic-
tion at its finest, and it is for this work that she is
best known. Mrs. Eliza Parsons’s Castle of Wolfen-
bach (1793) is an example of the melodramatic
popular “shilling shocker,” or “penny dreadful”
type of Gothic fiction, a debased imitation of Rad-
cliffe’s style, characterized by gross excess and lack
of literary skill, that was parodied by Jane Austen
in Northanger Abbey (1818). Parsons was one of
many novelists, including Edward Bulwer-Lyt-
ton—held as an author of a more “elevated,” or
skilled example of the popular Gothic melo-
drama—who produced works of this kind. Other
works considered classic examples of the Gothic
novel are Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk
(1796), and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the
Wanderer (1820), both of which epitomize the
stock Gothic character of the outsider, or social
outcast, who must face the consequences of com-
mitting mortal sin.
The great Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shel-
ley, Lord Byron, John Keats, and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge also contributed to the Gothic tradition
in literature, and, according to critic Fred Botting,
produced “major innovations, or renovations of
the genre” that “drew it closer to aspects of
2 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Romanticism.” The Romantic writers, asserts Bot-
ting as well as other commentators, while utiliz-
ing the settings and devices developed by Wal-
pole, Radcliffe, and others, focused and expanded
upon the psychological, internal qualities of the
protagonists, and dealt with such themes as the
search for identity, desire versus duty, social
alienation, and the search for truth. William God-
win, and his daughter, Mary Shelley, are the
Romantic writers most closely associated with the
Gothic tradition. Godwin’s Things as They Are; or,
The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) utilizes
the Gothic tradition to indict political repression
and protest the tyrannical rule of the day, while
Shelley’s Gothic in Frankenstein (1818) urges
personal integrity and social responsibility in an
age of scientific progress, and represents the
anxiety produced by the disruption of the tradi-
tional, known natural world order.
While English writers are credited with found-
ing the Gothic novel, Scottish writers such as
James Hogg contributed heavily to the genre, and
many English-language works were influenced by
German literary traditions, particularly the works
of such writers as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Sir Walter Scott’s works
reflect a German sensibility, and works such as his
Waverly (1814)—as well as the works of others,
including Walpole, Radcliffe, Shelley, Maturin,
and Lewis—in turn inspired Charles Brockden
Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and James Fenimore
Cooper, some of the most notable authors who
developed what became the American Gothic
tradition in literature. In addition, the English
Gothic tradition influenced French authors,
including Gaston Leroux, and Russian authors,
including Fyodor Dostoevsky and Anton Chek-
hov. Since its inception, the Gothic genre in
literature has undergone numerous changes and
adaptations, but its essential role as a means of
depicting humanity’s deepest, darkest fears and
otherwise unspeakable evils—both real and imag-
ined—has endured.
REPRESENTATIVE WORKS
John Aikin and Anna Laetitia (Aikin)
Barbauld
Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, by J. and A. L. Aikin
(essays and fiction) 1773
Jane Austen
Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. 4 vols. (novels)
1818
Charles Brockden Brown E. T. A. Hoffmann

GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW

Wieland; or, The Transformation (novel) 1798 Die Elixiere des Teufels. 2 vols. [The Devil’s Elixir]
Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793. 2 vols. (novel) 1815-16
(novel) 1799-1800
James Hogg
Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. 3 vols. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified
(novel) 1799 Sinner (novel) 1824; republished as The Sui-
cide’s Grave, 1828
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Eugene Aram: A Tale. 3 vols. (novel) 1832 John Keats
The Last Days of Pompeii. 3 vols. (novel) 1834 Poems (poetry) 1817
Zanoni. 3 vols. (novel) 1842 Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other
Poems (poetry) 1820
Lucretia; or, The Children of Night. 3 vols. (novel)
1846
Gaston Leroux
Le Fantôme de l’Opéra [The Phantom of the Opera]
Edmund Burke (novel) 1910
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas
of the Sublime and Beautiful (essay) 1757 Matthew Gregory Lewis
The Monk: A Romance. 3 vols. (novel) 1796
George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. A Romaunt (poetry) 1812 Charles Robert Maturin
Manfred, A Dramatic Poem (play) 1817 Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio. 3 vols. [as
Dennis Jasper Murphy] (novel) 1807
Anton Chekhov The Milesian Chief: A Romance. 4 vols. [as Dennis
“Chernyi monakh” [“The Black Monk”] (short Jasper Murphy] (novel) 1812
story) 1894; published in the journal Artist
Bertram; or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand (play) 1816
Samuel Taylor Coleridge Melmoth the Wanderer. 4 vols. (novel) 1820
Christabel: Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep
(poetry) 1816 Mrs. Eliza Parsons
Castle of Wolfenbach; A German Story. 2 vols.
James Fenimore Cooper (novel) 1793
Lionel Lincoln; or, The Leaguer of Boston. 2 vols.
(novel) 1825 Edgar Allan Poe
Tamerlane and Other Poems. By a Bostonian (poetry)
Daniel Defoe 1827
An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,
(essay) 1727 North America: Comprising the Details of a
Mutiny, Famine, and Shipwreck, During a Voyage
Fyodor Dostoevsky to the South Seas; Resulting in Various Extraordi-
Dvoinik: Prikliucheniia gospodina Goliadkina [The nary Adventures and Discoveries in the Eighty-
Double: A Poem of St. Petersburg] (novel) 1846 fourth Parallel of Southern Latitude [published
Brat’ia Karamazovy [The Brothers Karamazov] anonymously] (novel) 1838
(novel) 1880 Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. 2 vols. (short
stories) 1840
William Godwin
Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Wil- The Raven, and Other Poems (poetry) 1845
liams. 3 vols. (novel) 1794 Tales by Edgar A. Poe (short stories) 1845

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Ann Radcliffe

Faust: Ein Fragment (poetry) 1790 The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne: A Highland
Faust—Der Tragödie erster Teil [Faust. Part I; pub- Story [published anonymously] (novel) 1789
lished in Faust: A Drama by Goethe and Schill- A Sicilian Romance. 2 vols. [published anony-
er’s “Song of the Bell”] (play) 1808 mously] (novel) 1790

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1 3
 The Romance of the Forest: Interspersed with Some Aikins provide a fragment of a Gothic story that can be

GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW

Pieces of Poetry. 3 vols. [published anony- read both for enjoyment and as a means of studying the
theory advanced in the preceding essay.
mously] (novel) 1791
The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance; Interspersed
with Some Pieces of Poetry. 4 vols. (novel) 1794 [“On the Pleasure Derived from Objects
of Terror”]
The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Peni-
That the exercise of our benevolent feelings,
tents. A Romance. 3 vols. (novel) 1797
as called forth by the view of human afflictions,
should be a source of pleasure, cannot appear
Sir Walter Scott wonderful to one who considers that relation
The Lay of the Last Minstrel (ballad) 1805
between the moral and natural system of man,
Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since. 3 vols. (novel) which has connected a degree of satisfaction with
1814 every action or emotion productive of the general
welfare. The painful sensation immediately aris-
William Shakespeare ing from a scene of misery, is so much softened
Hamlet (play) c. 1600-01 and alleviated by the reflex sense of self-
Macbeth (play) 1606 approbation attending virtuous sympathy, that
we find, on the whole, a very exquisite and refined
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley pleasure remaining, which makes us desirous of
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 3 vols. again being witnesses to such scenes, instead of
(novel) 1818; revised edition, 1831 flying from them with disgust and horror. It is
obvious how greatly such a provision must con-
Percy Bysshe Shelley duce to the ends of mutual support and assistance.
Zastrozzi, A Romance (novel) 1810 But the apparent delight with which we dwell
upon objects of pure terror, where our moral feel-
St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance [as “A
ings are not in the least concerned, and no pas-
Gentleman of the University of Oxford”]
sion seems to be excited but the depressing one of
(novel) 1811
fear, is a paradox of the heart, much more dif-
Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude, and Other Poems ficult of solution.
(poetry) 1816
The reality of this source of pleasure seems
evident from daily observation. The greediness
Tobias Smollett
with which the tales of ghosts and goblins, of
The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (novel)
murders, earthquakes, fires, shipwrecks, and all
1753
the most terrible disasters attending human life,
are devoured by every ear, must have been gener-
Bram Stoker
ally remarked. Tragedy, the most favourite work of
Dracula (novel) 1897
fiction, has taken a full share of those scenes; “it
has supt full with horrors”—and has, perhaps,
Horace Walpole
been more indebted to them for public admira-
The Castle of Otranto, A Story (novel) 1764
tion than to its tender and pathetic parts. The
ghost of Hamlet, Macbeth descending into the
witches’ cave, and the tent scene in Richard, com-
mand as forcibly the attention of our souls as the
PRIMARY SOURCES parting of Jaffeir and Belvidera, the fall of Wolsey,
or the death of Shore. The inspiration of terror was
JOHN AIKIN AND ANNA LAETITIA by the antient critics assigned as the peculiar
(AIKIN) BARBAULD (ESSAY DATE province of tragedy; and the Greek and Roman
1773) tragedians have introduced some extraordinary
SOURCE: Aikin, John and Anna Laetitia (Aikin) Bar-
personages for this purpose: not only the shades
bauld. “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Ter- of the dead, but the furies, and other fabulous
ror, with Sir Bertrand, A Fragment.” In Miscellaneous inhabitants of the infenal regions. Collins, in his
Pieces in Prose, by J. and A. L. Aikin, pp. 119-37. London: most poetical ode to Fear, has finely enforced this
J. Johnson, 1773.
idea.
In the following essay, the Aikins delineate their theory to
explain the psychological and intellectual processes Tho’ gentle Pity claim her mingled part,
involved in readers’ enjoyment of Gothic literature. The Yet all the thunders of the scene are thine.

4 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
 The old Gothic romance and the Eastern tale,
with their genii, giants, enchantments, and trans-
formations, however a refined critic may censure
them as absurd and extravagant, will ever retain a
most powerful influence on the mind, and inter-
est the reader independently of all peculiarity of
taste. Thus the great Milton, who had a strong
bias to these wildnesses of the imagination, has
with striking effect made the stories “of forests
and enchantments drear,” a favourite subject with
his Penseroso; and had undoubtedly their awaken-
ing images strong upon his mind when he breaks
out,
Call up him that left half-told
The story of Cambuscan bold; &c.
How are we then to account for the pleasure
derived from such objects? I have often been led
to imagine that there is a deception in these cases;
and that the avidity with which we attend is not
a proof of our receiving real pleasure. The pain of
suspense, and the irresistible desire of satisfying
curiosity, when once raised, will account for our
eagerness to go quite through an adventure,
though we suffer actual pain during the whole
course of it. We rather choose to suffer the smart
pang of a violent emotion than the uneasy crav-
ing of an unsatisfied desire. That this principle, in
many instances, may involuntarily carry us
through what we dislike, I am convinced from
experience. This is the impulse which renders the
poorest and most insipid narrative interesting
when once we get fairly into it; and I have fre-
quently felt it with regard to our modern novels,
which, if lying on my table, and taken up in an
idle hour, have led me through the most tedious
and disgusting pages, while, like Pistol eating his
leek, I have swallowed and execrated to the end.
And it will not only force us through dullness, but
through actual torture—through the relation of a
Damien’s execution, or an inquisitor’s act of faith.
When children, therefore, listen with pale and
mute attention to the frightful stories of appari-
tions, we are not, perhaps, to imagine that they
are in a state of enjoyment, any more than the
poor bird which is dropping into the mouth of
the rattlesnake—they are chained by the ears, and
fascinated by curiosity. This solution, however,
does not satisfy me with respect to the well-
wrought scenes of artificial terror which are
formed by a sublime and vigorous imagination.
Here, though we know before-hand what to
expect, we enter into them with eagerness, in
quest of a pleasure already experienced. This is
the pleasure constantly attached to the excitement
of surprise from new and wonderful objects. A
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
strange and unexpected event awakens the mind,
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
and keeps it on the stretch; and where the agency
of invisible beings is introduced, of “forms unseen,
and mightier far than we,” our imagination, dart-
ing forth, explores with rapture the new world
which is laid open to its view, and rejoices in the
expansion of its powers. Passion and fancy co-
operating elevate the soul to its highest pitch; and
the pain of terror is lost in amazement.
Hence, the more wild, fanciful, and extraordi-
nary are the circumstances of a scene of horror,
the more pleasure we receive from it; and where
they are too near common nature, though vio-
lently borne by curiosity through the adventure,
we cannot repeat it or reflect on it, without an
over-balance of pain. In the Arabian nights are
many most striking examples of the terrible joined
with the marvellous: the story of Aladdin and the
travels of Sinbad are particularly excellent. The
Castle of Otranto is a very spirited modern attempt
upon the same plan of mixed terror, adapted to
the model of Gothic romance. The best conceived,
and most strongly worked-up scene of mere
natural horror that I recollect, is in [Tobias] Smol-
lett’s Ferdinand count Fathom; where the hero,
entertained in a lone house in a forest, finds a
corpse just slaughtered in the room where he is
sent to sleep, and the door of which is locked
upon him. It may be amusing for the reader to
compare his feelings upon these, and from thence
form his opinion of the justness of my theory.
The following fragment, in which both these
manners are attempted to be in some degree
united, is offered to entertain a solitary winter’s
evening.
[“Sir Bertrand, A Fragment”]
After this adventure, Sir Bertrand turned his
steed towards the woods, hoping to cross these
dreary moors before the curfew. But ere he had
proceeded half his journey, he was bewildered by
the different tracks, and not being able, as far as
the eye could reach, to espy any object but the
brown heath surrounding him, he was at length
quite uncertain which way he should direct his
course. Night overtook him in this situation. It
was one of those nights when the moon gives a
faint glimmering of light through the thick black
clouds of a lowering sky. Now and then she sud-
denly emerged in full splendor from her veil; and
then instantly retired behind it, having just served
to give the forlorn Sir Bertrand a wide extended
prospect over the desolate waste. Hope and native
courage a while urged him to push forwards, but
at length the increasing darkness and fatigue of
5
 body and mind overcame him; he dreaded mov-
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
ing from the ground he stood on, for fear of
unknown pits and bogs, and alighting from his
horse in despair, he threw himself on the ground.
He had not long continued in that posture when
the sullen toll of a distant bell struck his ears—he
started up, and turning towards the sound dis-
cerned a dim twinkling light. Instantly he seized
his horse’s bridle, and with cautious steps ad-
vanced towards it. After a painful march he was
stopt by a moated ditch surrounding the place
from whence the light proceeded; and by a mo-
mentary glimpse of moon-light he had a full view
of a large antique mansion, with turrets at the
corners, and an ample porch in the centre. The
injuries of time were strongly marked on every
thing about it. The roof in various places was
fallen in, the battlements were half demolished,
and the windows broken and dismantled. A draw-
bridge, with a ruinous gate-way at each end, led
to the court before the building—He entered, and
instantly the light, which proceeded from a
window in one of the turrets, glided along and
vanished; at the same moment the moon sunk
beneath a black cloud, and the night was darker
than ever. All was silent—Sir Bertrand fastened his
steed under a shed, and approaching the house
traversed its whole front with light and slow
footsteps—All was still as death—He looked in at
the lower windows, but could not distinguish a
single object through the impenetrable gloom.
After a short parley with himself, he entered the
porch, and seizing a massy iron knocker at the
gate, lifted it up, and hesitating, at length struck a
loud stroke. The noise resounded through the
whole mansion with hollow echoes. All was still
again—He repeated the strokes more boldly and
louder—another interval of silence ensued—A
third time he knocked, and a third time all was
still. He then fell back to some distance that he
might discern whether any light could be seen in
the whole front—It again appeared in the same
place and quickly glided away as before—at the
same instant a deep sullen toll sounded from the
turret. Sir Bertrand’s heart made a fearful stop—He
was a while motionless; then terror impelled him
to make some hasty steps towards his steed—but
shame stopt his flight; and urged by honour, and
a resistless desire of finishing the adventure, he
returned to the porch; and working up his soul to
a full steadiness of resolution, he drew forth his
sword with one hand, and with the other lifted
up the latch of the gate. The heavy door, creaking
upon its hinges, reluctantly yielded to his
hand—he applied his shoulder to it and forced it
6 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
open—he quitted it and stept forward—the door
instantly shut with a thundering clap. Sir Ber-
trand’s blood was chilled—he turned back to find
the door, and it was long ere his trembling hands
could seize it—but his utmost strength could not
open it again. After several ineffectual attempts,
he looked behind him, and beheld, across a hall,
upon a large staircase, a pale bluish flame which
cast a dismal gleam of light around. He again sum-
moned forth his courage and advanced towards
it—It retired. He came to the foot of the stairs,
and after a moment’s deliberation ascended. He
went slowly up, the flame retiring before him, till
he came to a wide gallery—The flame proceeded
along it, and he followed in silent horror, treading
lightly, for the echoes of his footsteps startled him.
It led him to the foot of another staircase, and
then vanished—At the same instant another toll
sounded from the turret—Sir Bertrand felt it strike
upon his heart. He was now in total darkness, and
with his arms extended, began to ascend the
second stair-case. A dead cold hand met his left
hand and firmly grasped it, drawing him forcibly
forwards—he endeavoured to disengage himself,
but could not—he made a furious blow with his
sword, and instantly a loud shriek pierced his ears,
and the dead hand was left powerless in his—He
dropt it, and rushed forwards with a desperate va-
lour. The stairs were narrow and winding, and
interrupted by frequent breaches, and loose frag-
ments of stone. The stair-case grew narrower and
narower, and at length terminated in a low iron
grate. Sir Bertrand pushed it open—it led to an
intricate winding passage, just large enough to
admit a person upon his hands and knees. A faint
glimmering of light served to show the nature of
the place. Sir Bertrand entered—A deep hollow
groan resounded from a distance through the
vault—He went forwards, and proceeding beyond
the first turning, he discerned the same blue flame
which had before conducted him. He followed it.
The vault, at length, suddenly opened into a lofty
gallery, in the midst of which a figure appeared,
compleatly armed, thrusting forwards the bloody
stump of an arm, with a terrible frown and menac-
ing gesture, and brandishing a sword in his hand.
Sir Bertrand undauntedly sprung forwards; and
aiming a fierce blow at the figure, it instantly
vanished, letting fall a massy iron key. The flame
now rested upon a pair of ample folding doors at
the end of the gallery. Sir Bertrand went up to it,
and applied the key to a brazen lock—with dif-
ficulty he turned the bolt—instantly the doors
flew open, and discovered a large apartment, at
the end of which was a coffin rested upon a bier,
with a taper burning on each side of it. Along the

GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW

room on both sides were gigantic statues of black
marble, attired in the Moorish habits, and hold-
ing enormous sabres in their right hands. Each of
them reared his arm, and advanced one leg
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
forwards, as the knight entered; at the same mo-
JOHN AIKIN (1747-1822) AND ANNA LAETITIA
ment the lid of the coffin flew open, and the bell (AIKIN) BARBAULD (1743-1825)
tolled. The flame still glided forwards, and Sir Ber-
The brother and sister team of Dr. John Aikin
trand resolutely followed, till he arrived within six
and Anna Laetitita (Aikin) Barbauld produced
paces of the coffin. Suddenly, a lady in a shroud
the 1773 collection Miscellaneous Pieces in
and black veil rose up in it, and stretched out her
Prose, by J. and A. L. Aikin. Critical opinion
arms towards him—at the same time the statues
has been divided over which author wrote
clashed their sabres and advanced. Sir Bertrand
which piece in the collection; “On the Plea-
flew to the lady and clasped her in his arms—she
sure Derived from Objects of Terror, with Sir
threw up her veil and kissed his lips; and instantly
Bertrand, a Fragment,” an early and influen-
the whole building shook as with an earthquake,
tial exploration of the nature and effects of
and fell asunder with a horrible crash. Sir Bertrand
terror in Gothic literature, has been attributed
was thrown into a sudden trance, and on recover-
alternately to John and Anna. The essay of-
ing, found himself seated on a velvet sofa, in the
fers an expansion of ideas introduced in prior
most magnificent room he had ever seen, lighted
literary treatises on the use of terror and the
with innumerable tapers, in lustres of pure crystal.
sublime in literature: Edmund Burke’s A
A sumptuous banquet was set in the middle. The
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our
doors opening to soft music, a lady of incompa-
Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and
rable beauty, attired with amazing splendor en-
the anonymous ancient Greek text On the
tered, surrounded by a troop of gay nymphs more
Sublime. The story fragment “Sir Bertrand” is
fair than the Graces—She advanced to the knight,
a Gothic version of a chivalric tale, in which
and falling on her knees thanked him as her
the title character encounters and “rescues”
deliverer. The nymphs placed a garland of laurel
a female apparition trapped in a coffin inside
upon his head, and the lady led him by the hand
of a ruined mansion. The fragment follows
to the banquet, and sat beside him. The nymphs
“On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Ter-
placed themselves at the table, and a numerous
ror” and concisely illustrates the arguments
train of servants entering, served up the feast; deli-
offered in the essay, allowing the reader to
cious music playing all the time. Sir Bertrand
experience the phenomenon of a pleasurable
could not speak for astonishment—he could only
response to a terrifyingly horrific narrative.
return their honours by courteous looks and
gestures. After the banquet was finished, all retired
but the lady, who leading back the knight to the
sofa, addressed him in these words:———

the rain poured in torrents, and the distant

MRS. ELIZA PARSONS (NOVEL
DATE 1793)
SOURCE: Parsons, Mrs. Eliza. “Castle of Wolfenbach; a
German story.” In Castle of Wolfenbach; a German story.
In two volumes, pp. 1-9. London: Minerva Press, 1793.
Parsons is one of the “Northanger Novelists,” a group of
popular Gothic writers whose works Jane Austen is
believed to have parodied in Northanger Abbey. The fol-
lowing excerpt is from Parson’s best known novel.
The clock from the old castle had just gone
eight when the peaceful inhabitants of a neigh-
bouring cottage, on the skirts of the wood, were
about to seek that repose which labour had
rendered necessary, and minds blest with in-
nocence and tranquillity assured them the enjoy-
ment of. The evening was cold and tempestuous,
thunders rolled with tremendous noise round the
adjacent mountains, whilst the pale lightning
added horrors to the scene.
Pierre was already in bed, and Jaqueline
preparing to follow, when the trampling of horses
was heard, and immediately a loud knocking at
the door; they were both alarmed; Pierre listened,
Jaqueline trembled; the knocking was repeated
with more violence; the peasant threw on his
humble garment, and, advancing to the door,
demanded who was there? “Two travellers,
(answered a gentle voice) overtaken by the storm;
pray, friend, afford us shelter.” “O! (cried
Jaqueline) perhaps they may be robbers, and we
shall be murdered.” “Pho! simpleton, (said Pierre)
what can they expect to rob us of.” He opened

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1 7
 the door, and discovered a man supporting a lady
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
who appeared almost fainting. “Pray, friend, (said
the man) permit this lady to enter your cottage, I
fear she has suffered much from the storm.” “Poor
soul, I am sorry for her; enter and welcome,” (cried
Pierre.) Jaqueline placed her wooden arm-chair by
the chimney, ran for some wood, and kindled a
blaze in a moment, whilst Pierre put the horse
into a little out-house which held their firing and
his working implements, and returned with a
portmantua to the lady. They had only some
bread and milk to offer, but they made it warm,
and prevailed on their guest to take some. The
man, who appeared an attendant, did the same.
The lady soon got her clothes dry, but she wanted
rest, and they had no bed to offer. One single
room answered all their purposes of life; their
humble bed was on the floor, in a corner of it, but
though mean it was whole and clean. Jaqueline
entreated the lady to lie down; she refused for
some time, but growing faint from exhausted
spirits and fatigue, she was compelled to accept
the offer; the others sat silently round the fire:
but, alas! horror and affliction precluded sleep,
and the fair traveller, after laying about two hours,
returned again to the fire-side, weary and unre-
freshed. “Is there any house near this?”
(demanded she.) “No, madam, (replied Jaqueline)
there is no house, but there is a fine old castle just
by, where there is room enough, for only one old
man and his wife live in it, and, Lord help us, I
would not be in their place for all the fine things
there.” “Why so?” (said the lady.) “O! dear
madam, why it is haunted; there are bloody floors,
prison rooms, and scriptions, they say, on the
windows, to make a body’s hair stand on end.”
“And how far from your cottage is this castle?” “A
little step, madam, farther up the wood.” “And do
you think we could obtain entrance there?” “O,
Lord! yes, madam, and thank you too: why the
poor old souls rejoice to see a body call there now
and then; I go sometimes in the middle of the
day, but I take good care to keep from the fine
rooms and never to be out after dark.” “I wish,
(said the lady) it was possible to get there.” Pierre
instantly offered his service to conduct her as soon
as it was light, and notwithstanding some very
horrible stories recounted by Jaqueline, she deter-
mined to visit this proscribed place.
When the morning came, the inhabitants of
the cottage set out for the castle. The lady was so
much enfeebled, from fatigue and want of rest,
that she was obliged to be placed on the horse,
and they found it very difficult to lead him
through the thickets. They at length espied a fine
8 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
old building, with two wings, and a turret on the
top, where a large clock stood, a high wall sur-
rounded the house, a pair of great gates gave
entrance into a spacious court, surrounded with
flowering shrubs, which lay broken and neglected
on the ground, intermixed with the weeds which
were above a foot high in every part.
Whilst the lady’s attendant lifted her from the
horse, Pierre repaired to the kitchen door where
the old couple lived, which stood in one of the
wings, and knocking pretty loudly, the old woman
opened it, and, with a look of astonishment, fixed
her eyes on the lady and her servant. “Good
neighbour, (said Pierre) here is a great gentle-
woman cruel ill; she wants food and sleep, we
have brought her here, she is not afeared of your
ghosts, and so therefore you can give her a good
bed, I suppose.” “To be sure I can, (answered
Bertha, which was the woman’s name) to be sure
I can make a bed fit for the emperor, when the
linen is aired: walk in, madam; you look very
weak.” Indeed the want of rest the preceding night
had so much added to her former feeble state, that
it was with difficulty they conveyed her into the
kitchen. Bertha warmed a little wine, toasted a bit
of bread, and leaving Jaqueline to attend the lady,
she made a fire in a handsome bed-room that was
in that wing, took some fine linen out of a chest
and brought it down to air. “Dear, my lady, (cried
she) make yourself easy, I’ll take care of you, and
if you ar’nt afeared, you will have rooms for a
princess.” Pierre and Jaqueline being about to
return to their daily labour, found their kindness
amply rewarded by the generosity of the stranger,
who gave them money enough, they said, to serve
them for six months. With a thousand blessings
they retired, promising however to call daily on
the lady whilst she staid at the castle, though their
hearts misgave them that they should never see
her more, from their apprehensions of the ghosts
that inhabited the rooms above stairs. When the
apartment was arranged, the lady was assisted by
Bertha and laid comfortably to rest; she gave her
some money to procure food and necessaries, and
desired her servant might have a bed also. This
the good woman promised, and, wishing her a
good sleep, returned to the kitchen.
“God bless the poor lady, (said she) why she is
as weak as a child; sure you must have come a
great way from home.” “Yes (answered Albert, the
servant’s name), we have indeed, and my poor
lady is worn down by sorrow annd fatigue; I fear
she must rest some time before she can pursue her
journey.” “Well, (said Bertha) she may stay as long
as she likes here, no body will disturb her in the
day time, I am sure.” “And what will disturb her
at night?” (asked Albert.) “O, my good friend,
(answered she) no body will sleep in the rooms up
stairs; the gentlefolks who were in it last could
not rest, such strange noises, and groans, and
screams, and such like terrible things are head;
then at t’other end of the house the rooms are
never opened; they say bloody work has been car-
ried on there.” “How comes it, then, (said Albert)
that you and your husband have courage to live
here?” “Dear me, (replied she) why the ghosts
never come down stairs, and I take care never to
go up o’nights; so that if madam stays here I fear
she must sleep by day, or else have a ground room,
for they never comes down; they were some of
your high gentry, I warrant, who never went into
kitchens.” Albert smiled at the idea, but, resuming
his discourse, asked the woman to whom the
castle belonged? “To a great Baron, (said she) but I
forget his name,” “And how long have you lived
here?” “Many a long year, friend; we have a small
matter allowed us to live upon, a good garden that
gives us plenty of vegetables, for my husband, you
must know, is a bit of a gardener, and works in it
when he is able.” “And where is he now?” (said
Albert) “Gone to the village six leagues off to get a
little meat, bread and wine.” “What! does he
walk?” “Lord help him, poor foul, he walk! no,
bless your heart, he rides upon our faithful little
ass, and takes care never to overload her, as we
don’t want much meat, thank God. But where will
you like to sleep? (added she;) will you go up
stairs, or shall I bring some bedding in the next
room?” Albert hesitated, but, ashamed to have
less courage than his mistress, asked if there was
any room near the lady’s? “Aye, sure, (answered
Bertha) close to her there is one as good as hers.”
“Then I will sleep there” (said he.) His good host-
ess now nimbly as she could, bestired herself to
put his room in order, and was very careful not to
disturb the lady. Albert was soon accommodated
and retired to rest.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (STORY
DATE C. 1814)
SOURCE: Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “The Assassins.” In
Gothic Tales of Terror, Volume One: Classic Horror Stories
from Great Britain, edited by Peter Haining. 1972.
Reprint, pp. 308-26. Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books,
Inc., 1973.
The following excerpt is from a story written around 1814
but not published until after Shelley’s death.
Where all is thus calm, the slightest circum-
stance is recorded and remembered. Before the
sixth century had expired one incident occurred,
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
remarkable and strange. A young man, named Al-
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
bedir, wandering in the woods, was startled by the
screaming of a bird of prey, and, looking up, saw
blood fall, drop by drop, from among the inter-
twined boughs of a cedar. Having climbed the tree,
he beheld a terrible and dismaying spectacle. A
naked human body was impaled on the broken
branch. It was maimed and mangled horribly;
every limb bent and bruised into frightful distor-
tion, and exhibiting a breathing image of the most
sickening mockery of life. A monstrous snake had
scented its prey from among the mountains—and
above hovered a hungry vulture. From amidst this
mass of desolated humanity, two eyes, black and
inexpressibly brilliant, shone with an unearthly
lustre. Beneath the blood-stained eye-brows their
steady rays manifested the serenity of an immortal
power, the collected energy of a deathless mind,
spell-secured from dissolution. A bitter smile of
mingled abhorrence and scorn distorted his
wounded lip—he appeared calmly to observe and
measure all around—self-possession had not
deserted the shattered mass of life.
The youth approached the bough on which
the breathing corpse was hung. As he approached,
the serpent reluctantly unwreathed his glittering
coils, and crept towards his dark and loathsome
cave. The vulture, impatient of his meal, fled to
the mountain, that re-echoed with his hoarse
screams. The cedar branches creaked with their
agitating weight, faintly, as the dismal wind arose.
All else was deadly silent.
At length a voice issued from the mangled
man. It rattled in hoarse murmurs from his throat
and lungs—his words were the conclusion of some
strange mysterious soliloquy. They were broken,
and without apparent connection, completing
wide intervals of inexpressible conceptions.
‘The great tyrant is baffled, even in success.
Joy! joy! to his tortured foe! Triumph to the worm
whom he tramples under his feet! Ha! His suicidal
hand might dare as well abolish the mighty frame
of things! Delight and exultation sit before the
closed fates of death!—I fear not to dwell beneath
their black and ghastly shadow. Here thy power
may not avail! Thou createst—’tis mine to ruin
and destroy.—I was thy slave—I am thy equal, and
thy foe.—Thousands tremble before thy throne,
who, at my voice, shall dare to pluck the golden
crown from thine unholy head!’ He ceased. The
silence of noon swallowed up his words. Albedir
clung tighter to the tree—he dared not for dismay
remove his eyes. He remained mute in the pertur-
bation of deep and creeping horror.
9
 ‘Albedir!’ said the same voice, ‘Albedir! in the
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
name of God, approach. He that suffered me to
fall, watches thee;—the gentle and merciful spirits
of sweet human love, delight not in agony and
horror. For pity’s sake approach, in the name of
thy good God, approach, Albedir!’ The tones were
mild and clear as the responses of Aeolian music.
They floated to Albedir’s ear like the warm breath
of June that lingers in the lawny groves, subduing
all to softness. Tears of tender affection started
into his eyes. It was as the voice of a beloved
friend. The partner of his childhood, the brother
of his soul, seemed to call for aid, and pathetically
to remonstrate with delay. He resisted not the
magic impulse, but advanced towards the spot,
and tenderly attempted to remove the wounded
man. He cautiously descended the tree with his
wretched burthen, and deposited it on the ground.
A period of strange silence intervened. Awe
and cold horror were slowly proceeding to the
softer sensations of tumultuous pity, when again
he heard the silver modulations of the same
enchanting voice. ‘Weep not for me, Albedir!
What wretch so utterly lost, but might inhale
peace and renovation from this paradise! I am
wounded, and in pain; but having found a refuge
in this seclusion, and a friend in you, I am wor-
thier of envy than compassion. Bear me to your
cottage secretly: I would not disturb your gentle
partner by my appearance. She must love me
more dearly than a brother. I must be the playmate
of your children; already I regard them with a
father’s love. My arrival must not be regarded as a
thing of mystery and wonder. What, indeed, but
that men are prone to error and exaggeration, is
less inexplicable, than that a stranger, wandering
on Lebanon, fell from the rocks into the vale?
Albedir,’ he continued, and his deepening voice
assumed awful solemnity, ‘in return for the affec-
tion with which I cherish thee and thine, thou
owest this submission.’
Albedir implicitly submitted; not even a
thought had power to refuse its deference. He reas-
sumed his burthen, and proceeded towards the
cottage. He watched until Khaled should be
absent, and conveyed the stranger into an apart-
ment appropriated for the reception of those who
occasionally visited their habitation. He desired
that the door should be securely fastened, and
that he might not be visited until the morning of
the following day.
Albedir waited with impatience for the return
of Khaled. The unaccustomed weight of even so
transitory a secret, hung on his ingenuous and
unpractised nature, like a blighting, clinging curse.
10 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
The stranger’s accents had lulled him to a trance
of wild and delightful imagination. Hopes, so
visionary and aerial, that they had assumed no
denomination, had spread themselves over his
intellectual frame, and, phantoms as they were,
had modelled his being to their shape. Still his
mind was not exempt from the visitings of disqui-
etude and perturbation. It was a troubled stream
of thought, over whose fluctuating waves un-
searchable fate seemed to preside, guiding its
unforeseen alternations with an inexorable hand.
Albedir paced earnestly the garden of his cottage,
revolving every circumstance attendant on the
incident of the day. He re-imaged with intense
thought the minutest recollections of the scene.
In vain—he was the slave of suggestions not to be
controlled. Astonishment, horror, and awe—
tumultuous sympathy, and a mysterious elevation
of soul, hurried away all activity of judgment, and
overwhelmed, with stunning force, every attempt
at deliberation or inquiry.
His reveries were interrupted at length by the
return of Khaled. She entered the cottage, that
scene of undisturbed repose, in the confidence
that change might as soon overwhelm the eternal
world, as disturb this inviolable sanctuary. She
started to behold Albedir. Without preface or
remark, he recounted with eager haste the occur-
rences of the day. Khaled’s tranquil spirit could
hardly keep pace with the breathless rapidity of
his narration. She was bewildered with staggering
wonder even to hear his confused tones, and
behold his agitated countenance.
* * *
On the following morning Albedir arose at
sunrise, and visited the stranger. He found him
already risen, and employed in adorning the lat-
tice of his chamber with flowers from the garden.
There was something in his attitude and occupa-
tion singularly expressive of his entire familiarity
with the scene. Albedir’s habitation seemed to
have been his accustomed home. He addressed
his host in a tone of gay and affectionate welcome,
such as never fails to communicate by sympathy
the feelings from which it flows.
‘My friend,’ said he, ‘the balm of the dew of
our vale is sweet; or is this garden the favoured
spot where the winds conspire to scatter the best
odours they can find? Come, lend me your arm
awhile, I feel very weak.’ He motioned to walk
forth, but, as if unable to proceed, rested on the
seat beside the door. For a few moments they were
silent, if the interchange of cheerful and happy
looks is to be called silence. At last he observed a
spade that rested against the wall. ‘You have only
one spade, brother,’ said he; ‘you have only one, I
suppose, of any of the instruments of tillage. Your
garden ground, too, occupies a certain space
which it will be necessary to enlarge. This must be
quickly remedied. I cannot earn my supper of
tonight, nor of tomorrow; but thenceforward, I
do not mean to eat the bread of idleness. I know
that you would willingly perform the additional
labour which my nourishment would require; I
know, also, that you would feel a degree of plea-
sure in the fatigue arising from this employment,
but I shall contest with you such pleasures as
these, and such pleasures as these alone.’ His eyes
were somewhat wan, and the tone of his voice
languid as he spoke.
As they were thus engaged, Khaled came
towards them. The stranger beckoned to her to sit
beside him, and taking her hands within his own,
looked attentively on her mild countenance.
Khaled inquired if he had been refreshed by sleep.
He replied by a laugh of careless and inoffensive
glee; and placing one of her hands within Albe-
dir’s, said, ‘If this be sleep, here in this odorous
vale, where these sweet smiles encompass us, and
the voices of those who love are heard—if these
be the visions of sleep, sister, those who lie down
in misery shall arise lighter than the butterflies. I
came from amid the tumult of a world, how dif-
ferent from this! I am unexpectedly among you,
in the midst of a scene such as my imagination
never dared to promise. I must remain here—I
must not depart.’ Khaled, recovering from the
admiration and astonishment caused by the
stranger’s words and manner, assured him of the
happiness which she should feel in such an addi-
tion to her society. Albedir, too, who had been
more deeply impressed than Khaled by the event
of his arrival, earnestly re-assured him of the ar-
dour of the affection with which he had inspired
them. The stranger smiled gently to hear the unac-
customed fervour of sincerity which animated
their address, and was rising to retire, when
Khaled said, ‘You have not yet seen our children,
Maimuna and Abdallah. They are by the water-
side, playing with their favourite snake. We have
only to cross yonder little wood, and wind down
a patch cut in the rock that overhangs the lake,
and we shall find them beside a recess which the
shore makes there, and which a chasm, as it were
the rocks and woods, encloses. Do you think you
could walk there?’—‘To see your children, Khaled?
I think I could, with the assistance of Albedir’s
arm, and yours.’—So they went through the wood
of ancient cypress, intermingled with the bright-
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
ness of many-tinted blooms, which gleamed like
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
stars through its romantic glens. They crossed the
green meadow, and entered among the broken
chasms, beautiful as they were in their investiture
of odiferous shrubs. They came at last, after pursu-
ing a path which wound though the intricacies of
a little wilderness, to the borders of the lake. They
stood on the rock which overhung it, from which
there was a prospect of all the miracles of nature
and of art which encircled and adorned its shores.
The stranger gazed upon it with a countenance
unchanged by any emotion, but, as it were,
thoughtfully and contemplatingly. As he gazed,
Khaled ardently pressed his hand, and said, in a
low yet eager voice, ‘Look, look, lo there!’ He
turned towards her, but her eyes were not on him.
She looked below—her lips were parted by the
feelings which possessed her soul—her breath
came and went regularly but inaudibly. She leaned
over the precipice, and her dark hair hanging
beside her face, gave relief to its fine lineaments,
animated by such love as exceeds utterance. The
stranger followed her eyes, and saw that her
children were in the glen below; then raising his
eyes, exchanged with her affectionate looks of
congratulation and delight. The boy was appar-
ently eight years old, the girl about two years
younger. The beauty of their form and counte-
nance was something so divine and strange, as
overwhelmed the senses of the beholder like a
delightful dream, with insupportable ravishment.
They were arrayed in a loose robe of linen, through
which the exquisite proportions of their form ap-
peared. Unconscious that they were observed,
they did not relinquish the occupation in which
they were engaged. They had constructed a little
boat of the bark of trees, and had given it sails of
interwoven feathers, and launched it on the water.
They sat beside a white flat stone, on which a
small snake lay coiled, and when their work was
finished, they arose and called to the snake in
melodious tones, so that it understood their
language. For it unwreathed its shining circles and
crept to the boat, into which no sooner had it
entered, than the girl loosened the band which
held it to the shore, and it sailed away. Then they
ran round and round the little creek, clapping
their hands, and melodiously pouring out wild
sounds, which the snake seemed to answer by the
restless glancing of his neck. At last a breath of
wind came from the shore, and the boat changed
its course, and was about to leave the creek, which
the snake perceived and leaped into the water,
and came to the little children’s feet. The girl sang
to it, and it leaped into her bosom, and she
11
 crossed her fair hands over it, as if to cherish it
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
there. Then the boy answered with a song, and it
glided from beneath her hands and crept towards
him. While they were thus employed, Maimuna
looked up, and seeing her parents on the cliff, ran
to meet them up the steep path that wound round
it; and Abdallah, leaving his snake, followed joy-
fully.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
(NOVELLA DATE 1826)
SOURCE: Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. “Glenallan.” In
Gothic Tales of Terror, Volume One: Classic Horror Stories
from Great Britain, edited by Peter Haining. 1972.
Reprint, pp. 408-30. Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books,
Inc., 1973.
The following excerpt is from a novella written in 1826,
and is an example of Bulwer-Lytton’s early work.
I to the education of the son he had so dearly
I was born in the county of ———. After my
mother’s death my father, who deeply lamented
her loss, resolved to spend the remainder of his
life in Ireland. He was the representative, and,
with the exception of an only brother, the last of
a long line of ancestry; and, unlike most ancient
families still existing, the wealth of my father’s
family was equal to its antiquity. At an early
period of life he had established a high reputation
in that public career which is the proper sphere of
distinction to the rich and the highborn. Men of
eager minds, however, should not enter too soon
into the world. The more it charms them at first,
the more it wearies them at last; hope is chilled
by disappointment, magnanimity depressed by a
social perspective which artificially lessens even
great characters and objects, tedium succeeds to
energy, and delight is followed by disgust. At least
so thought, and so found, my father before he
was thirty; when, at the very zenith of his popular
esteem, he retired from public life, to one of his
estates in the West of England. It was there, at a
neighbouring gentleman’s, that he first saw and
loved my mother, and it was there that all the
patent softness of his nature was called forth.
Men of powerful passions who have passed
the spring-time of youth without the excitement
of that passion which is the most powerful of all,
feel love perhaps with greater tenderness and force
when at last it comes upon them. My father and
mother had been married for several years; their
happiness was only equalled by their affection,
and, if anything could weaken the warmth of the
thanksgiving my father daily offered to Heaven
for the blessings he enjoyed, it was the reflection
12
that there had been born no pledge to their at-
tachment, and no heir to the name and honours
of his forefathers. Justly proud of his descent from
some of the most illustrious warriors and states-
men of his country, such a reflection might well
cast a shade on the otherwise unbroken bright-
ness of his married life. At last, however, in the
eighth year of that life, my mother found herself
pregnant, and the measure of my father’s felicity
was complete, as the time of her confinement ap-
proached. But on the day when I came into this
world to continue the race of the Glenallans, my
mother left it, for ever. This stroke fell the heavier
on my father, because in the natural buoyancy of
his character, he had never contemplated the pos-
sibility of such a calamity. He left England for six
years, and travelled over the greater part of
Europe. At the end of that time he returned, with
the determination to withdraw himself completely
from society, and devote all his time and intellect
acquired. But as it was impossible for one so
distinguished to maintain in his own country the
rigid seclusion on which he was resolved, my
father decided to fix his future abode in Ireland,
upon the estate where his mother was born, and
which in her right he inherited.
Though so young at the time of our departure
from England, I can well remember many of the
incidents of the journey, and never can I forget
the evening when our travelling carriage stopped
before those moss-grown and gigantic ruins which
were the only remnants of the ancient power of
the Tyrones.
It needed but a slight portion of my father’s
wealth to repair the ravages made by time and
neglect in this ruined but still massive structure,
and my future home soon assumed a more lively
appearance. Although my father civilly but coldly
declined all intercourse with the neighbouring
gentry, the lower orders were always sure of find-
ing a warm hearth and a bounteous board in the
princely halls he had restored. His beneficence
secured to him the affection of his peasantry, even
amidst the perpetual disorders of one of the wild-
est parts of that unhappy country, and notwith-
standing the abhorrence with which the existing
Government was regarded by the surrounding
population. My father’s sole occupation was the
management of my education. It was both the
employment of his severer hours and the recre-
ation of his lighter moments. He was not satisfied
with making me a thorough classical scholar, but
was particularly anxious to give me a perfect
knowledge of the history and literature of my own
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
country; to enlarge my views by habitual medita-
tion; to make me familiar with the sciences of
philosophy and political economy; and, in short,
to bring me, as nearly as my abilities would
permit, upon a par with himself.
Perhaps in his ardour to make me great, he
forgot how necessary it was for my happiness to
make me amiable. He suffered me to pay too little
attention to the courtesies of society; and, think-
ing that it was impossible for a gentleman to be
anything but a gentleman, he remembered not
how many trifles, small in themselves but large in
the aggregate, were required to lay a just claim to
that distinction.
From the lessons of my father I used to turn
to my private and lonely amusements. I in some
degree inherited his aristocratic pride, and pre-
ferred even solitude to the intrusive familiarity of
the servants and dependents, who were accus-
tomed to join in the rural sports for which I felt
no inclination. It was in solitary wanderings over
wide and dreary plains, by rapid streams, amongst
the ruins of ancient power, beneath the lofty cliffs,
and beside the green and solemn waters of the
Atlantic, that my mind insensibly assumed its
habitual bias, and that my character was first co-
loured by the sombre hues which ever afterwards
imbued it. As there were none to associate with
me, my loneliness became my natural companion;
my father I seldom saw, except at meals and dur-
ing the time I was engaged with him in the stud-
ies he had appointed for me.
The effect of one great misfortune upon a
mind so powerful as his was indeed extraordinary.
Although during my mother’s life he had given
up all political activity, and lived in comparative
retirement, yet he was then proud of preserving
the ancient and splendid hospitality of the family,
and whilst his house was the magnificent resort of
all who were distinguished by their rank, their
talents or their virtues, I have been told by those
who then frequented it, that his own convivial
qualities, his wit, his urbanity, his graceful and
winning charm of manner were no less admired
by his friends than his intellectual powers were
respected by his rivals. But during the whole time
that I can remember him, his habits were so
reserved and unsocial that, but for his unbounded
benevolence, he might have passed for an inveter-
ate misanthropist. Although his love for me was
certainly the strongest feeling of his heart, yet he
never evinced it by an affectionate word or look.
His manner was uniformly cold, and somewhat
stern, but never harsh. From my earliest infancy I
never received from him an unkind word or a
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
reproach; nor did I ever receive from him a caress.
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
In his gifts to me he was liberal to profusion, and
as I grew up to manhood a separate suite of rooms
and servants were allotted to me, far more numer-
ous and splendid than those with which he
himself was contented.
The only servant I ever admitted to familiar
intercourse with me was an old man whose
character was of a kind to deepen the gloom of
those impressions I had already derived from
other sources. He was a sort of living chronicle of
horrors. He knew about every species of appari-
tion and every kind of supernatural being,
whether of Irish, English, or Scottish origin. The
wildest tales constructed by the luxuriant genius
of German romancers would have been tame in
comparison with those of old Phelim. But of all
the fictions he used to narrate, and I to revere as
sacred and incontrovertible truths, none delighted
me so much as those relating to my own ancestor,
Morshed Tyrone, a wizard of such awful power
that the spirits of earth, air, and ocean ministered
to him as his slaves, and the dead walked restless
rounds to perform his bidding. I can remember
well how the long winter evenings were spent, by
the flickering light of the turf fire, in descriptions
of the midnight orgies and revels, held perhaps in
the very room where Phelim and I were then sit-
ting. I can remember well the thrilling delight
with which I used to watch for the hour when I
laid aside what seemed to me the cold and airy
beauties of Virgil, or the dry and magisterial
philosophy of Seneca (the two books my father at
this time most wished me to study), that I might
listen to those terrific legends. Well, too, can I
remember the not all undelightful fear which
crept upon me when they were over, and I was
left to the dreary magnificence of my solitary
apartment.
As I grew up, so far from discarding or wear-
ing out these impressions, so inconsistent with
the ideas of the eighteenth century, they grew
with my growth, and strengthened with my
strength. In the old library I discovered many
treatises on the existence of witchcraft. Some of
them went so far as to hint at the means of acquir-
ing that dreadful art without the penalties which
superstition has attached to it; others were filled
with astrological speculations, and to these trea-
sures, which I carefully removed to my own
rooms, I was continually adding every work I
could procure upon the subject of my favourite
pursuits. Still as I read, the ardour of penetrating
further into the mysteries hidden from human
eyes so powerfully increased, that at last I used to
13

GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1803-1873.
steal forth on certain nights to the lonesome
abodes of the dead; and, amidst the corruption of
mortality and the horrors of the charnel, I have
sometimes watched till morning for the attain-
ment of frightful secrets from which my mind in
its ordinary healthful condition would have
shrunk with repugnance.
This unnatural state of mind, however, could
not last when nothing sustained it but the chime-
ras of a disordered imagination; and what perhaps
conduced more than anything else to restore me
to my senses was a long and violent illness, caused
by a severe cold caught in one of my midnight
expeditions. During several weeks I was confined
to my bed, and then the long dormant kindness
of my father’s nature seemed to revive. A mother’s
fondest care could not have surpassed the unceas-
ing vigilance, the anxious tenderness, with which
he watched and soothed me. He poured forth, for
my amusement, the varied stores of a mind rich
in the knowledge of men as well as books; and
the astonishing fund of information thus lavished
for my enjoyment made me conscious of my own
mental defects, and anxious to recover the time I
had squandered in eccentric reverie. As soon as I
was convalescent I fell into a more regular and
instructive course of reading: I discarded old
Phelim from my confidence, cleared my shelves
of their unhallowed lumber, and seemed in a fair
14 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
way to flow on with the rest of the world’s stream
in the calm current of ordinary life. Alas, it was
not to be!
I have been thus diffuse in the narrative of
my earliest years, because it is in that period of life
that the character is stamped. It is then we sow
the seeds we are to reap hereafter.
II
I had attained my eighteenth year, and was
beginning to think it time to mix somewhat more
with my equals, when my father sent for me one
morning at an hour which was not the usual time
for our daily meeting. Since my recovery he had
gradually relapsed into his former habits of
reserve, although when we were alone his manner
was warmer and his conversation more familiar. I
was somewhat surprised at the message, but more
surprised by the extraordinary agitation in which
I found him when I entered his study.
‘Redmond,’ said he, ‘I believe you have never
heard me mention my brother. Perhaps you did
not know that I had so near a relation. I have
learnt today that he is dead.’ Here my father
paused, evidently much affected, and I gained
time to recover from my surprise at hearing in the
same breath of the existence and death of so close
a connection.
‘In very early youth,’ continued my father, ‘an
unfortunate quarrel arose between us, partly
caused by my brother’s change of political party
for reasons which I thought either frivolous or
mercenary. The breach was widened, however, by
a very imprudent marriage on his part, at which
my family pride revolted; and he, disgusted at
what he deemed (not perhaps unjustly, as I have
since imagined) my heartless arrogance, resented
so warmly some expressions I had used in the first
moment of mortification that he forswore for ever
my friendship and alliance. Thus we parted, never
to meet again. He withdrew to France; and from
that time to this my information respecting him
has been slight and trivial. Today I received an of-
ficial letter informing me of his death and enclos-
ing one from himself, in which, after lamenting
our long separation, he recommends (and in terms
I dare not refuse to comply with) his only son to
my care and affection. I shall therefore write at
once to this young man, inviting him to Castle
Tyrone, and assuring him of my future solicitude.
I have sent for you, Redmond, to acquaint you
with this decision and to prepare you for a com-
panion about your own age, who will, I trust,
relieve the tedium you must often have felt in the
unbroken solitude of our lonely life here.’ With
these words my father dismissed me.
I will pass over my reflections and anticipa-
tions, my fears and hopes, in reference to the
prospect of this addition to our home life. During
the whole morning of the day when our guest was
expected, my father was in a state of silent agita-
tion, as unusual to him as it was surprising to me,
although I largely shared it. At length the carriage
was seen at a distance; it approached, and a young
man leapt lightly down from it. My father received
him with a warmth quite foreign to the usual
coldness of his manner, and entered into a long
conversation with him about his own father. Dur-
ing this conversation I employed myself in taking
a minute survey of my new acquaintance.
Ruthven Glenallan was in person small, but
the proportions of his figure were perfectly sym-
metrical. He could scarcely be called handsome,
but in his dark and dazzling eye, and in his bril-
liant smile, there was a power greater perhaps than
that of beauty. He had been brought up from
childhood in the most polished societies of Italy,
and the winning grace of Continental manners
was visible in all his gestures and expressions.
Except my father, I have never known any person
with such varied powers of conversation, or so
able to charm and dazzle without apparent effort.
Yet at times there was in his countenance a strange
and sinister expression, which assumed a more
suspicious appearance from the sudden and
sparkling smiles immediately succeeding it if he
thought himself observed. This peculiarity, how-
ever, I did not immediately perceive. For the next
week we were inseparable. We walked and talked
together, we accommodated our dissimilar habits
to each other’s inclinations, and we seemed to be
laying the foundation of a lasting intimacy. Little
as my father was accustomed to observe how
those around him passed their time, he was
evidently pleased with our friendship; and one
morning, when I went to ask his advice about a
course of reading on the commerce and politics of
America, he said to me: ‘I am much gratified by
the affection which you and Ruthven feel for each
other; the more so, as I am now convinced of
what I have always hoped, that you would be but
little affected by the loss of a part of that overflow-
ing wealth which will be yours when I am gone.
You are aware that a very small portion of my
estate is entailed, and I can therefore, without
injury to you, bequeath to Ruthven enough for
his future independence. Though his father’s
fortune was not large, his expenditure almost
rivalled that of the foreign princes with whom he
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON (1803-1873)
Bulwer-Lytton was a popular Victorian author,
renowned for his proficiency in several liter-
ary genres and his adaptability to diverse
themes and styles. His most successful early
work, the historical novel The Last Days of
Pompeii (1834), depicts the quasi-Gothic vil-
lain Arbaces, a lustful priest of Isis who
eventually kidnaps the heroine. In the occult
romance Zanoni (1842), the eponymous anti-
hero is a supernaturally gifted immortal who
vies with the artist Glyndon for the love of
the heroine while allowing his associate Mej-
nour to guide Glyndon towards occult en-
lightenment. Glyndon’s progress is inter-
rupted when reckless disobedience leads him
to an encounter with the fearsome Dweller
of the Threshold. Zanoni’s powers ebb away
as his commitment to the heroine grows, and
he loses her after his own fateful confronta-
tion with the same demon. Zanoni is ulti-
mately redeemed when he takes the heroine’s
place after she is condemned to death by
guillotine by the Revolutionary Tribunal in
Paris. In his novel A Strange Story (1862),
Bulwer-Lytton develops a dramatic conflict
between the representatives of two dia-
metrically opposed forces: Dr. Allen Fenwick
is a man of science, and thus a man of
reason, unable to believe in anything which
is not tangible; his alter ego, Margrave, is a
charming practitioner of the occult, deter-
mined to control powerful, unseen forces to
obtain a potion which will ensure him eternal
youth. He manages to persuade Dr. Fenwick
to help him achieve his goal, and in the
process is destroyed by the demonic forces
he sought to manipulate without any regard
to his soul. Fenwick’s fate is different, for he
emerges unscathed due to his acknowledge-
ment of the inexplicable. These characters
are symbolic of Bulwer-Lytton’s objections to
the theory of evolution; and, through
Fenwick’s acceptance of the existence of the
unknown, the author asserts his own faith in
Christianity. Although Bulwer-Lytton’s literary
subjects brought him great popularity, critics
were largely unsympathetic, and his reputa-
tion declined rapidly after his death.
15
 associated, and at his death little or nothing could
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
be saved from the wreck of his fortune. The least I
can do, therefore, to compensate for any fault I
have committed towards my brother will be to
give to his son a small moiety from the superflu-
ous riches of my own.’ I need not say what was
my answer; it was, I hope, what it ought to have
been.
OVERVIEWS
EDITH BIRKHEAD (ESSAY DATE
1921)
SOURCE: Birkhead, Edith. “Introductory.” In The Tale
of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance, pp. 1-15. New
York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1921.
In the following essay, an introduction to her influential
study of Gothic literature, Birkhead traces the use of ter-
ror in literature, beginning in ancient times.
The history of the tale of terror is as old as the
history of man. Myths were created in the early
days of the race to account for sunrise and sunset,
storm-winds and thunder, the origin of the earth
and of mankind. The tales men told in the face of
these mysteries were naturally inspired by awe and
fear. The universal myth of a great flood is perhaps
the earliest tale of terror. During the excavation of
Nineveh in 1872, a Babylonian version of the
story, which forms part of the Gilgamesh epic,
was discovered in the library of King Ashurban-
ipal (668-626 B.C.); and there are records of a much
earlier version, belonging to the year 1966 B.C. The
story of the Flood, as related on the eleventh tablet
of the Gilgamesh epic, abounds in supernatural
terror. To seek the gift of immortality from his
ancestor, Ut-napishtim, the hero undertakes a
weary and perilous journey. He passes the moun-
tain guarded by a scorpion man and woman,
where the sun goes down; he traverses a dark and
dreadful road, where never man trod, and at last
crosses the waters of death. During the deluge,
which is predicted by his ancestor, the gods
themselves are stricken with fear: “No man beheld
his fellow, no more could men know each other.
In heaven the gods were afraid . . . They drew
back, they climbed up into the heaven of Anu.
The gods crouched like dogs, they cowered by the
walls.”1 Another episode in the same epic, when
Nergal, the god of the dead, brings before Gil-
gamesh an apparition of his friend, Eabani, recalls
the impressive scene, when the witch of Endor
summons the spirit of Samuel before Saul.
When legends began to grow up round the
names of traditional heroes, fierce encounters with
16 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
giants and monsters were invented to glorify their
strength and prowess. David, with a stone from
his sling, slew Goliath. The crafty Ulysses put out
the eye of Polyphemus. Grettir, according to the
Icelandic saga, overcame Glam, the malevolent,
death-dealing vampire who “went riding the
roofs.” Beowulf fearlessly descended into the
turbid mere to grapple with Grendel’s mother.
Folk-tales and ballads, in which incidents similar
to those in myths and heroic legends occur, are
often overshadowed by terror. Figures like the
Demon Lover, who bears off his mistress in the
fatal craft and sinks her in the sea, and the can-
nibal bridegroom, outwitted at last by the artful-
ness of one of his brides, appear in the folk-lore of
many lands. Through every century there glide
uneasy spirits, groaning for vengeance. Andrew
Lang2 mentions the existence of a papyrus frag-
ment, found attached to a wooden statuette, in
which an ancient Egyptian scribe addresses a let-
ter to the Khou, or spirit, of his dead wife, beseech-
ing her not to haunt him. One of the ancestors of
the savage were-wolf, who figures in Marryat’s
Phantom Ship, may perhaps be discovered in Petro-
nius’ Supper of Trimalchio. The descent of Bram
Stoker’s infamous vampire Dracula may be traced
back through centuries of legend. Hobgoblins,
demons, and witches mingle grotesquely with the
throng of beautiful princesses, queens in glittering
raiment, fairies and elves. Without these ugly
figures, folk-tales would soon lose their power to
charm. All tale tellers know that fear is a potent
spell. The curiosity which drove Bluebeard’s wife
to explore the hidden chamber lures us on to
know the worst, and as we listen to horrid stories,
we snatch a fearful joy. Human nature desires not
only to be amused and entertained, but moved to
pity and fear. All can sympathise with the youth,
who could not shudder and who would fain
acquire the gift.
From English literature we gain no more than
brief, tantalising glimpses of the vast treasury of
folk-tales and ballads that existed before literature
became an art and that lived on side by side with
it, vitalising and enriching it continually. Yet here
and there we catch sudden gleams like the frag-
ment in King Lear:
Childe Roland to the dark tower came.
His word was still Fie, Foh and Fum,
I smell the blood of a British man.
or Benedick’s quotation from the Robber Bride-
groom:
It is not so, it was not so, but, indeed, God forbid
that it should be so,
 which hint at the existence of a hoard as pre-
cious and inexhaustible as that of the Nibelungs.
The chord of terror is touched in the eerie visit of
the three dead sailor sons “in earthly flesh and
blood” to the wife of Usher’s well, Sweet William’s
Ghost, the rescue of Tam Lin on Halloween, when
Fairyland pays a tiend to Hell, the return of clerk
Saunders to his mistress, True Thomas’s ride to
Fairyland, when:
For forty days and forty nights,
He wade through red blood to the knee,
And he saw neither sun nor moon,
But heard the roaring of the sea.
The mediaeval romances of chivalry, which
embody stories handed down by oral tradition,
are set in an atmosphere of supernatural wonder
and enchantment. In Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, Sir
Lancelot goes by night into the Chapel Perilous,
wherein there is only a dim light burning, and
steals from the corpse a sword and a piece of silk
to heal the wounds of a dying knight. Sir Galahad
sees a fiend leap out of a tomb amid a cloud of
smoke; Gawaine’s ghost, with those of the knights
and ladies for whom he has done battle in life, ap-
pears to warn the king not to begin the fight
against Modred on a certain day. In the romance
of Sir Amadas, the ghost of a merchant, whose
corpse the knight had duteously redeemed from
the hands of creditors, succours him at need. The
shadow of terror lurks even amid the beauty of
Spenser’s fairyland. In the windings of its forests
we come upon dark caves, mysterious castles and
huts, from which there start fearsome creatures
like Despair or the giant Orgoglio, hideous hags
like Occasion, wicked witches and enchanters or
frightful beings like the ghostly Maleger, who wore
as his helmet a dead man’s skull and rode upon a
tiger swift as the wind. The Elizabethan dramatists
were fascinated by the terrors of the invisible
world. Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, round whose name
are clustered legends centuries old concerning
bargains between man and the devil, the appari-
tions and witches in Macbeth, the dead hand, the
corpse-like images, the masque of madmen, the
tomb-maker and the passing-bell in Webster’s
sombre tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, prove trium-
phantly the dramatic possibilities of terror. As a
foil to his Masque of Queens (1609) Ben Jonson
introduced twelve loathly witches with Até as
their leader, and embellished his description of
their profane rites, with details culled from James
I.’s treatise on Demonology and from learned
ancient authorities. In The Pilgrim’s Progress,
Despair, who “had as many lives as a cat,” his wife
Diffidence at Doubting Castle, and Maul and Slay-
good are the ogres of popular story, whose ac-
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
quaintance Bunyan had made in chapbooks dur-
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
ing his ungodly youth. Hobgoblins, devils and
fiends, “sturdy rogues” like the three brothers
Faintheart, Mistrust and Guilt, who set upon
Littlefaith in Dead Man’s Lane, lend the excite-
ment of terror to Christian’s journey to the
Celestial City. The widespread belief in witches
and spirits to which Browne and Burton and
many others bear witness in the seventeenth
century, lived on in the eighteenth century,
although the attitude of the “polite” in the age of
reason was ostensibly incredulous and superior. A
scene in one of the Spectator essays illustrates
pleasantly the state of popular opinion. Addison,
lodging with a good-natured widow in London,
returns home one day to find a group of girls sit-
ting by candlelight, telling one another ghost-
stories. At his entry they are abashed, but, on the
widow’s assuring them that it is only the “gentle-
man,” they resume, while Addison, pretending to
be absorbed in his book at the far end of the table,
covertly listens to their tales of “ghosts that, pale
as ashes, had stood at the feet of the bed or walked
over a churchyard by moonlight; and others, who
had been conjured into the Red Sea for disturbing
people’s rest.”3 In another essay Addison shows
that he is strongly inclined to believe in the exist-
ence of spirits, though he repudiates the ridiculous
superstitions which prevailed in his day;4 and Sir
Roger de Coverley frankly confesses his belief in
witches. Defoe, in the preface to his Essay on the
History and Reality of Apparitions (1727) states
uncompromisingly: “I must tell you, good people,
he that is not able to see the devil, in whatever
shape he is pleased to appear in, he is not really
qualified to live in this world, no, not in the qual-
ity of a common inhabitant.” Epworth Rectory,
the home of John Wesley’s father, was haunted in
1716-17 by a persevering ghost called Old Jeffrey,
whose exploits are recorded with a gravity and
circumstantial exactitude that remind us of De-
foe’s narrative concerning the ghostly Mrs. Veal in
her “scoured” silk. John Wesley declares stoutly
that he is convinced of the literal truth of the story
of one Elizabeth Hobson, who professed to have
been visited on several occasions by supernatural
beings. He upholds too the authenticity of the
notorious Drummer of Tedworth, whose escapades
are described in chapbooks and in Glanvill’s Sad-
ducismus Triumphatus (1666), a book in which he
was keenly interested. In his journal (May 25th,
1768) he remarks:
It is true that the English in general, and indeed
most of the men of learning in Europe, have given
up all accounts of witches and apparitions, as mere
old wives’ fables. I am sorry for it; and I willingly
17
 take this opportunity of entering my solemn
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
protest against this violent compliment which so
many that believe the Bible pay to those who do
not believe it.
The Cock Lane ghost gained very general
credit, and was considered by Mrs. Nickleby a
personage of some importance, when she boasted
to Miss La Creevy that her great-grandfather went
to school with him—or her grandmother with the
Thirsty Woman of Tutbury. The appearance of
Lord Lyttleton’s ghost in 1779 was described by
Dr. Johnson, who was also disposed to believe in
the Cock Lane ghost, as the most extraordinary
thing that had happened in his day.5 There is
abundant evidence that the people of the eigh-
teenth century were extremely credulous, yet, in
literature, there is a tendency to look askance at
the supernatural as at something wild and bar-
baric. Such ghosts as presume to steal into poetry
are amazingly tame, and even elegant, in their
speech and deportment. In Mallet’s William and
Margaret (1759), which was founded on a scrap of
an old ballad out of The Knight of the Burning Pestle,
Margaret’s wraith rebukes her false lover in a long
and dignified oration. But spirits were shy of ap-
pearing in an age when they were more likely to
be received with banter than with dread. Dr.
Johnson expresses the attitude of his age when, in
referring to Gray’s poem, The Bard, he remarks:
“To select a singular event and swell it to a giant’s
bulk by fabulous appendages of spectres and
predictions has little difficulty, for he that forsakes
the probable may always find the marvellous. And
it has little use; we are affected only as we believe;
we are improved only as we find something to be
imitated or declined.” (1780.)
The dictum that we are affected only as we
believe is open to grave doubt. We are often
thrown into a state of trepidation simply through
the power of the imagination. We are wise after
the event, like Partridge at the play:
No, no, sir; ghosts don’t appear in such dresses as
that neither . . . And if it was really a ghost, it
could do one no harm at such a distance, and in
so much company; and yet, if I was frightened, I
am not the only person.6
The supernatural which persisted always in
legends handed down from one generation to
another on the lips of living people, had not lost
its power to thrill and alarm, and gradually
worked its way back into literature. Although Gray
and Collins do not venture far beyond the bounds
of the natural, they were in sympathy with the
popular feelings of superstitious terror, and rea-
lised how effective they would be in poetry. Col-
18
lins, in his Ode on the Superstitions of the Scottish
Highlands, adjures Home, the author of Douglas,
to sing:
how, framing hideous spells,
In Sky’s lone isle, the gifted wizard-seer
Lodged in the wintry cave with Fate’s fell spear
Or in the depths of Uist’s dark forests dwells,
How they whose sight such dreary dreams
engross
With their own vision oft astonished droop
When o’er the wintry strath or quaggy moss
They see the gliding ghosts unbodied troop.
Burns, in the foreword to Halloween (1785),
writes in the “enlightened” spirit of the eighteenth
century, but in the poem itself throws himself
whole-heartedly into the hopes and fears that
agitate the lovers. He owed much to an old
woman who lived in his home in infancy:
She had . . . the largest collection in the country
of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fair-
ies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies,
elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions,
cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons and
other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of
poetry, but had so strong an effect on my imagina-
tion, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I
sometimes keep a sharp look-out in suspicious
places; it often takes an effort of philosophy to
shake off these idle terrors.7
Tam o’ Shanter, written for Captain Grose, was
perhaps based on a Scottish legend, learnt at the
inglenook in childhood, from this old wife, or
perhaps
By some auld houlet-haunted biggin
Or kirk deserted by its riggin,
from Captain Grose himself, who made to
quake:
Ilk ghaist that haunts auld ha’ or chamer,
Ye gipsy-gang that deal in glamor,
And you, deep-read in hell’s black grammar,
Warlocks and witches.
In it Burns reveals with lively reality the ter-
rors that assail the reveller on his homeward way
through the storm:
Past the birks and meikle stane
Where drunken Charlie brak’s neck-bane;
And through the whins, and by the cairn
Where hunters fand the murdered bairn
And near the thorn, aboon the well
Where Mungo’s mither hanged hersell.
For sheer terror the wild, fantastic witch-
dance, seen through a Gothic window in the ruins
of Kirk-Alloway, with the light of humour
strangely glinting through, has hardly been
surpassed. The Ballad-collections, beginning with
Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765),
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
brought poets back to the original sources of ter-
ror in popular tradition, and helped to revive the
latent feelings of awe, wonder and fear. In Col-
eridge’s Ancient Mariner the skeleton-ship with its
ghastly crew—the spectre-woman and her death-
mate—the sensations of the mariner, alone on a
wide, wide sea, seize on our imagination with ir-
resistible power. The very substance of the poem
is woven of the supernatural. The dream imagery
is thrown into relief by occasional touches of real-
ity—the lighthouse, the church on the cliff, the
glimpses of the wedding, the quiet song of the
hidden brook in the leafy month of June. We, like
the mariner, after loneliness so awful that
God himself
Scarce seemèd there to be,
welcome the firm earth beneath our feet, and
the homely sound of the vesper bell. In Christabel
we float dreamily through scenes as unearthly and
ephemeral as the misty moonlight, and the words
in which Coleridge conjures up his vision fall into
music of magic beauty. The opening of the poem
creates a sense of foreboding, and the horror of
the serpent-maiden is subtly suggested through
her effect on Christabel. Coleridge hints at the ter-
rible with artistic reticence. In Kubla Khan the
chasm is:
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover.
The poetry of Keats is often mysterious and
suggestive of terror. The description of the Gothic
hall in The Eve of St. Agnes:
In all the house was heard no human sound;
A chain-drooped lamp was flickering by each
door;
The arras, rich with horseman, hawk and hound,
Fluttered in the besieging wind’s uproar;
And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor;
the serpent-maiden, Lamia, who
Seemed at once some penanced lady elf,
Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self;
the grim story in Isabella of Lorenzo’s ghost,
who
Moaned a ghostly undersong
Like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briers along.
all lead us over the borderland. In a rejected
stanza of the Ode on Melancholy, he abandons the
horrible:
Though you should build a bark of dead men’s
bones
And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast,
Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans
To fill it out, blood-stained and aghast;
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Although your rudder be a dragon’s tail
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
Long severed, yet still hard with agony,
Your cordage, large uprootings from the skull
Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail
To find the Melancholy—
Keats’s melancholy is not to be found amid
images of horror:
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die,
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu.
In La Belle Dame sans Merci he conveys with
delicate touch the memory of the vision which
haunts the knight, alone and palely loitering. We
see it through his eyes:
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all:
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!’
I saw their starv’d lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.
From effects so exquisitely wrought as these it
seems almost profane to turn to the crude at-
tempts of such poets as “Monk” Lewis or Southey
to sound the note of terror. Yet they too, in their
fashion, played a part in the “Renascence of
Wonder.” Coleridge, fascinated by the spirit of
“gramarye” in Bürger’s Lenore, etherealised and
refined it. Scott and Lewis gloried in the gruesome
details and spirited rhythm of the ballad, and in
their supernatural poems wish to startle and ter-
rify, not to awe, their readers. Those who revel in
phosphorescent lights and in the rattle of the
skeleton are apt to o’erleap themselves; and Scott’s
Glenfinlas, Lewis’s Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imo-
gene and Southey’s Old Woman of Berkeley fall into
the category of the grotesque. Hogg intentionally
mingles the comic and the terrible in his poem,
The Witch of Fife, but his prose-stories reveal his
power of creating an atmosphere of diablerie,
undisturbed by intrusive mockery. In the poem
Kilmeny, he handles an uncanny theme with
dreamy beauty.
From the earliest times to the present day,
writers of fiction have realised the force of super-
natural terror. In the Babylonica of Iamblichus, the
lovers evade their pursuers by passing as spectres;
the scene of the romance is laid in tombs, caverns,
and robbers’ dens, a setting remarkably like that
of Gothic story. Into the English novel of the first
half of the eighteenth century, however, the ghost
dares not venture. The innate desire for the
marvellous was met at this period not by the
novel, but by oral tradition and by such works as
Galland’s translation of The Arabian Nights, the
19
 Countess D’Aulnoy’s collection of fairy-tales, Per-
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
rault’s Contes de ma Mère Oie. Chapbooks setting
forth mediaeval legends of “The Wandering Jew,”
the “Demon Frigate,” or “Dr. Faustus,” and inter-
spersed with anecdotes of freaks, monsters and
murderers, satisfied the craving for excitement
among humbler readers.8 Smollett, who, in his
Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom (1753),
seems to have been experimenting with new
devices for keeping alive the interest of a picar-
esque novel, anticipates the methods of Mrs. Radc-
liffe. Although he sedulously avoids introducing
the supernatural, he hovers perilously on the
threshold. The publication of The Castle of Otranto
in 1764 was not so wild an adventure as Walpole
would have his readers believe. The age was ripe
for the reception of the marvellous.
The supernatural had, as we have seen, begun
to find its way back into poetry, in the work of
Gray and Collins. In Macpherson’s Ossian, which
was received with acclamation in 1760-3, the
mountains, heaths and lakes are haunted by
shadowy, superstitious fears. Dim-seen ghosts wail
over the wastes. There is abundant evidence that
“authentic” stories of ghostly appearances were
heard with respect. Those who eagerly explored
Walpole’s Gothic castle and who took pleasure in
Miss Reeve’s well-trained ghost, had previously
enjoyed the thrill of chimney-corner legends. The
idea of the gigantic apparition was derived, no
doubt, from the old legend of the figure seen by
Wallace on the field of battle. The limbs, strewn
carelessly about the staircase and the gallery of
the castle, belong to a giant, very like those who
are worsted by the heroes of popular story. God-
win, in an unusual flight of fancy, amused himself
by tracing a certain similitude between Caleb Wil-
liams and Bluebeard, between Cloudesley and The
Babes in the Wood,9 and planned a story, on the
analogy of the Sleeping Beauty, in which the hero
was to have the faculty of unexpectedly falling
asleep for twenty, thirty, or a hundred years.1 0
Mrs. Radcliffe, who, so far as we may judge,
did not draw her characters from the creatures of
flesh and blood around her, seems to have adopted
some of the familiar figures of old story. Emily’s
guardian, Montoni, in The Mysteries of Udolpho,
like the unscrupulous uncle in Godwin’s Cloudes-
ley, may well have been descended from the
wicked uncle of the folk tale. The cruel stepmother
is disguised as a haughty, scheming marchioness
in The Sicilian Romance. The ogre drops his club,
assumes a veneer of polite refinement and relies
on the more gentlemanlike method of the dagger
and stiletto for gaining his ends. The banditti and
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robbers who infest the countryside in Gothic fic-
tion are time-honoured figures. Travellers in Thes-
saly in Apuleius’ Golden Ass, like the fugitives in
Shelley’s Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, find themselves
in robbers’ caves. The Gothic castle, suddenly
encountered in a dark forest, is boldly transported
from fairyland and set down in Italy, Sicily or
Spain. The chamber of horrors, with its alarming
array of scalps or skeletons, is civilised beyond
recognition and becomes the deserted wing of an
abbey, concealing nothing worse than one dis-
carded wife, emaciated and dispirited, but still
alive. The ghost-story, which Ludovico reads in
the haunted chamber of Udolpho, is described by
Mrs. Radcliffe as a Provençal tale, but is in reality
common to the folklore of all countries. The rest-
less ghost, who yearns for the burial of his corpse,
is as ubiquitous as the Wandering Jew. In the Iliad
he appears as the shade of Patroclus, pleading with
Achilles for his funeral rites. According to a letter
of the younger Pliny,1 1 he haunts a house in
Athens, clanking his chains. He is found in every
land, in every age. His feminine counterpart
presented herself to Dickens’ nurse requiring her
bones, which were under a glass-case, to be
“interred with every undertaking solemnity up to
twenty-four pound ten, in another particular
place.”1 2 Melmoth the Wanderer, when he be-
comes the wooer of Immalee, seems almost like a
reincarnation of the Demon Lover. The wander-
ing ball of fire that illuminates the dusky recesses
of so many Gothic abbeys is but another manifes-
tation of the Fate-Moon, which shines, forebod-
ing death, after Thorgunna’s funeral, in the
Icelandic saga. The witchcraft and demonology
that attracted Scott and “Monk” Lewis, may be
traced far beyond Sinclair’s Satan’s Invisible World
Discovered (1685), Bovet’s Pandemonium or the
Devil’s Cloyster Opened (1683), or Reginald Scot’s
Discovery of Witchcraft (1584) to Ulysses’ invoca-
tion of the spirits of the dead,1 3 to the idylls of
Theocritus and to the Hebrew narrative of Saul’s
visit to the Cave of Endor. There are incidents in
The Golden Ass as “horrid” as any of those devised
by the writers of Gothic romance. It would,
indeed, be no easy task to fashion scenes more
terrifying than the mutilation of Socrates in The
Golden Ass, by the witch, who tears out his heart
and stops the wound with a sponge which falls
out when he stoops to drink at a river, or than the
strange apparition of a ragged, old woman who
vanishes after leading the way to the room, where
the baker’s corpse hangs behind the door. Though
the title assumes a special literary significance at
the close of the eighteenth century, the tale of ter-
ror appeals to deeply rooted instincts, and belongs,

GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW

therefore, to every age and clime.

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

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GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
EDMUND BURKE (1729?-1797)
Widely recognized as the founder of modern
Anglo-American conservatism, Burke is con-
sidered by many the most important and
influential English statesman and political
writer of the eighteenth century. In his
speeches and essays he addressed major is-
sues of his time, including the precepts of
the American and French revolutions, the
two-party political system, principles of
economic reform, and the rights of govern-
ment versus the rights of the individual.
Born in Dublin to middle-class parents of
different faiths—his father an Anglican at-
torney and his mother a staunch Roman
Catholic—Burke was a sickly child who spent
much of his boyhood reading and studying.
Although raised in his father’s faith, he
developed an early appreciation for the plight
of oppressed Irish Catholics. In his teens he
attended a Quaker boarding school in County
Kildare before entering Trinity College in
Dublin in 1744. After receiving his bachelor
of arts degree in 1748, Burke remained at
Trinity for some time to continue work on an
independent study of human responses to
aesthetics, a field that had interested him
since his first reading of the anonymous first-
century Greek treatise On the Sublime. Revised
and expanded several years later and pub-
lished as A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin
of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1757), Burke’s study anticipated the
nineteenth-century Romantic interest in the
Gothic.
30
JOHN PAUL RIQUELME (ESSAY
DATE FALL 2000)
SOURCE: Riquelme, John Paul. “Toward a History of
Gothic and Modernism: Dark Modernity from Bram
Stoker to Samuel Beckett.” Modern Fiction Studies 46,
no. 3 (fall 2000): 585-605.
In the following essay, Riquelme examines the relation-
ship between the Gothic and Modernism in literature.
The Gothic Imaginary and Literary
Modernism
The Gothic imaginary in its diverse literary
embodiments has come to be understood as a
discourse that brings to the fore the dark side of
modernity (Botting 2). As narrative, it is the black
sheep of the Anglo-American novel, which has
generally been taken to concern marriage and the
contexts that make marriage possible.1 Although
Gothic narratives regularly focus on marriage or
on social and sexual relations between the sexes,
often those relations are threatened or abrogated,
as in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A
Gothic Story (1765) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein;
or, The Modern Prometheus (1818; revised 1831).
Gothic sexuality may also take a bizarre form, as
in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), a form that raises
anthropological issues in arresting ways. Some of
those issues were already present less insistently in
the earliest Gothic narratives, because the threat
to marriage, family, and home amounts to a threat
to the stability and the future of culture. That dark
threat comes from inside.
The historical origins of Gothic writing in the
eighteenth century are simultaneously political
and aesthetic. Rising along with the English novel
during the same decades that are the prelude to
Romanticism, the Gothic in its narrative form
engages issues of beauty, the character of the
sublime and the grotesque, the political dynamics
of British culture (especially with regard to the
kind of social change that comes to be represented
by the French Revolution), the quality of being
English (including the holding of anti-Catholic
religious attitudes), the structure of the economy
(especially concerning property in a market
economy and gift-exchange), and the place of
women in hierarchies of power. Stylistically, the
Gothic has always been excessive in its responses
to conventions that foster the order and clarity of
realistic representations, conventions that embody
a cultural insistence on containment. The es-
sentially anti-realistic character of Gothic writing
from the beginning creates in advance a compat-
ibility with modernist writing. That compatibility
begins to take a visible, merged form in the 1890s
in Britain. In the development of the Gothic after
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the French Revolution, the characteristics and is-
sues apparent in Gothic writing of the eighteenth
century carry forward into the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, but they are significantly
transformed, intensified, and disseminated by
interactions with national literatures and political
events outside England. Eventually they are af-
fected by the historical development of modernity
in wider than national arenas, including colonial
and postcolonial situations.
The influence of Edgar Allan Poe, for example,
on British and Irish writers, including Oscar Wilde,
is often mediated by his reception among the
French, who read him in Charles Baudelaire’s
translation. The anthropological perspectives that
Poe’s American stories sometimes evoke, which
emerge from a social situation involving slavery,
resonate for Irish writers and for others facing
racial, ethnic, class, and gender prejudice in
colonial and postcolonial contexts. Poe also af-
fects Samuel Beckett through Baudelaire in Beck-
ett’s concern in his late prose, especially Ill Seen Ill
Said (1981), with mal, or evil, which derives in
part from Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (1857).
Because Beckett’s postmodern sense of ill includes
an excessively minimal, apparently inept way of
writing, his response to historical evil in post-
Enlightenment, European culture after World War
II and the Holocaust combines with an aesthetics
that challenges expectations concerning beauty,
narrative structure, and realism. For Beckett, see-
ing, that is, recognizing, the ill around and within
us requires and enables a mode of saying, or writ-
ing, that reflects the illness rather than pretending
to be sane, undisturbed, and undisturbing. As does
Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Beckett invites
us to recognize our own faces in his portrayal of
ill. This is the kind of recognition that Gothic writ-
ing has frequently offered. Early in its history, the
Gothic is structurally and implicitly a negative
version of pastoral because of its turn to foreign
locales that are threatening and bizarre. It later
relocates the antipastoral setting and its implica-
tions much closer to home: on native soil, on
board ship, in the sanitarium, in the library, in
the house, in the bedroom, in the schoolroom, in
the mind, and in language.
Critics have yet to explore extensively the
ways in which elements of the Gothic tradition
have become disseminated in the writings of the
long twentieth century, from 1880 to the present.2
The lineaments of a yet-to-be-written history of
the modern Gothic begin to emerge in the essays
published in this issue. In choosing the rubric
Gothic and Modernism, I have linked the Gothic
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
with literary modernism, an influential body of
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
writing and writers generally associated with the
first half of the twentieth century whose limits
and defining character remain to be convincingly
described by critics of literature and culture. Trac-
ing the modern development of Gothic provides
new perspectives on literary modernism and on
our own modernity. In the long twentieth century,
the Gothic and Modernism influence each other
and share certain developments.
The origins of literary modernism lie in Britain
at the end of the nineteenth century, a time when
important Gothic writing was being published.
The development of Gothic writing as a discourse
of modernity that influences the formation of
literary modernism in 1890s Britain reaches a
crucial moment with the publication of three
seminal texts within a few years of each other:
Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Stoker’s
Dracula (1897), and Henry James’s The Turn of the
Screw (1898). Each draws in distinctive, transform-
ing ways on the tradition of Gothic writing that
stretches back, on the Irish side, through Sheridan
Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1872) to C. S. Maturin’s Mel-
moth the Wanderer (1820), and on the English side,
through Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case
of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), the work of the
Brontë sisters (1840s), and Shelley’s Frankenstein
to Gothic tales by Anne Radcliffe, Walpole, and
others in the eighteenth century. In addition, as I
have mentioned, the American Gothic of Poe in
French translation has its effect on writers and art-
ists of the 1890s and later in England and else-
where.
The Gothic influence on modernism and on
twentieth-century writing in English in general is
various and evident outside high cultural produc-
tion in detective fiction, horror stories, and sci-
ence fiction, as well as in other media, especially
film. The close relation of Gothic writing to some
popular cultural forms has contributed to the
comparatively dismissive attitude toward the
Gothic in academic studies of canonical literature.
Such skepticism has obscured the significance of
Gothic traditions for literary modernism. Among
modernist authors of high cultural standing, W. B.
Yeats and Joseph Conrad provide early examples
of writers who draw significantly on Gothic tradi-
tions and motifs, often in ways that set into play
exotic elements carrying orientalist implications
concerning identity, nation, empire, and anthro-
pological issues. But the exotic representations
need not be regarded as primarily orientalist in
character; that is, they participate in an exotic
cultural imaginary that, like the Gothic imaginary,
31
 is frequently a vehicle for staging and challenging
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
ideological thinking rather than a means of
furthering it.
Yeats’s theory of masks, of self and anti-self,
which he takes initially from Wilde, places the
double at the center of his writing and thinking.
Yeats’s image of the dancer, particularly as a ver-
sion of Salomé, is a development of Wilde’s exotic
Gothic drama that leads eventually to Yeats’s plays
for dancers, which fuse aspects of the Japanese
Noh theatre with Irish characters and include
spirits and ghosts.3 Yeats’s prophetic writings and
investigations into the occult also include Gothic
elements. Conrad’s writings, which concern
centrally the dark side of modernity, regularly
present aspects of the Gothic translated to loca-
tions in which agents of empire experience dis-
turbing encounters with nature and with indig-
enous peoples that challenge their sanity and their
ideas about civilization. Most obviously among
Conrad’s works, Heart of Darkness (1902) concerns
the dark double that is one truth about civiliza-
tion and modernity. In The Secret Sharer (1910),
the ship becomes a haunted space when it is
invaded by a ghost-like character who is eventu-
ally exorcised. The plot of Lord Jim (1900) turns
on an unidentified object or being that literally
goes bump in the night.
A similar collision causes a car accident in E.
M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924). That novel’s
narrative hinges on a mysterious experience
involving eerie echoes, the doubling of images in
mirror-like walls, and the threat of sexual viola-
tion across the races in the darkness of the Mara-
bar Caves. There are mad characters and haunted
spaces in Virginia Woolf’s narratives (Mrs. Dallo-
way [1925]; “A Haunted House” [1921]), and the
dead can sometimes continue to speak, including
a dead insect in “The Death of the Moth.” Toni
Morrison’s ghosts, as in Beloved (1987), invite
comparisons with earlier emanations in Gothic
writings. In a modernist transformation of the
works of Poe and other Gothic precursors, one of
William Faulkner’s most memorable novels, Ab-
salom! Absalom! (1936), concerns the fall of a
house. In The Waste Land (1922), T. S. Eliot alludes
memorably to Dracula in the figure of the bats
crawling upside-down down a wall (5.380-82).4 In
addition, by championing revenge tragedies as a
critic and drawing on them in his poetry, Eliot
established this unromantic dramatic form more
prominently in the canon of English literature.5
Filled as they are with anger, madness, and ven-
geance, revenge tragedies are central precursors
for Gothic narrative and poetry, to which they
32 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
bear evident kinship. Wilde understood the con-
nection when he wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray,
which includes a scene in which Lord Henry Wot-
ton compares Sybil Vane’s suicide by poison to “a
strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean trag-
edy, [. . .] a wonderful scene from Webster, or
Ford, or Cyril Tourneur” (255). In Thomas Hardy’s
poetry, the voice of the dead is heard, including
that of a dead woman who speaks as “Not Only I”
in the poem of that title, which anticipates Sea-
mus Heaney’s “The Bog Queen.”
The crossing of boundaries into darkness by
these authors and many others throughout the
twentieth century is frequent and emphatic. The
refusal of conventional limits and the critical
questioning of cultural attitudes often proceed
within a Gothic structuring of elements or with a
Gothic inflection. The transformations, adapta-
tions, and other prominent traces of the Gothic
in modern writing indicate the persistence of a
cluster of cultural anxieties to which Gothic writ-
ing and literary modernism, along with postcolo-
nial writing and some popular forms of expres-
sion, continue to respond. The dark side of the
discourse and experience of modernity is evident
in all these cultural forms.
The 1890s: Mona Lisa, Other Vampires,
and Dark Doubles
The history of Gothic writing since 1880
begins with Stevenson, Stoker, Wilde, James, and
Hardy, and it finds one of its concluding moments
after 1980 in the late prose of Beckett. Among the
major texts drawing on Gothic traditions pub-
lished in the 1890s, Stoker’s Dracula has captured
our collective attention most intensely and persis-
tently. Like the face of Mona Lisa, the vampire
has become a pervasive cultural icon in the past
hundred years. The representation of Mona Lisa
as an embodiment of the vampire occurs in Walter
Pater’s famous description of her in his essay on
Leonardo (1869) in Studies in the History of the
Renaissance (1873):
She is older than the rocks among which she sits;
like the vampire, she has been dead many times,
and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been
a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day
about her; and trafficked for strange webs with
Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother
of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother
of Mary; and all this has been to her but the sound
of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy
with which it has moulded the changing linea-
ments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.
(80)
 The passage is of note in the present context
because Yeats reprints a portion of it set up as free
verse as the first item in his The Oxford Book of
Modern Verse, 1892-1935, though the passage was
not originally published as verse and does not fall
within the chronological limits of the anthology.
Yeats’s modernist reinscription of Pater places the
vampire and the artist-scientist’s representation of
woman at the origins of a modern literary sensibil-
ity.
Dracula is a vividly memorable instance of the
modern Gothic, with its doublings and pairings
among the characters, its concern with property,
its use of sacramental elements from Catholicism,
its ambiguous representations of gender, its
antifeminist details, its shifts of locale to and from
England, and its jagged, stylistically mixed narra-
tion. For Pater, the vampire is Mona Lisa’s dark
double, one truth about her. Stoker carries the
connection forward when he names his primary
women characters Mina and Lucy, for Mina-Lucy
also find their counterpart in the vampire. Central
to Dracula’s modernity is the way it implicates
female characters, male vampire hunters, and
readers in the darkness that we might wish to as-
sign primarily to the nonhuman creature. Dracula
provides a model, replicated in later works, for the
emergence of hybridity as the character of the
future and of modern experience. In this regard,
the mixed blood of Mina Harker’s child at the
book’s end is comparable to the mixed character
of the foetus carried by Lilith Iyapo, the protago-
nist of Octavia Butler’s science fiction novel, Dawn
(1987), after her sexual encounters with an alien.
It is an open question whether the cultural anxi-
eties that underlie both Dracula and Dawn have
altered or abated significantly in the past hundred
years.
The doubling characteristic of Gothic writing
evokes the mixed, ambiguous, character of hu-
man experience, which holds the potential for
both destructive and creative transformation.6 In
Dracula and in Dawn, the doubling involves the
enigmatic duplication with a difference of human
reproduction that yields a creature who differs
from us but not entirely. We do and do not
recognize ourselves as we respond ambivalently to
the new hybrid emerging in the narratives of these
texts, a hybrid whose origin lies within us. As Lord
Henry says of the unspoken ambivalence roused
by Dorian Gray, he is “the type of what the age is
searching for, and what it is afraid it has found”
(384). Doubling of characters in various ways plays
an emphatic role in The Turn of the Screw, The
Picture of Dorian Gray, and works by Stoker prior to
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Dracula. As Joseph Valente argues in his essay,
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
“‘Double Born’: Bram Stoker and the Metrocolo-
nial Gothic,” doubling occurs in a repetitive,
insistent way in Stoker’s early story, “The Dualit-
ists; or the Death Doom of the Double Born”
(1887), which appeared a decade before Dracula.
Valente’s argument carries implications for Goth-
ic’s relation to modern literature, for he brings
together the Gothic and colonial writing as
distinguishable but related and sometimes concep-
tually overlapping discourses of modernity. Draw-
ing implicitly on postcolonial theoretical com-
mentaries about colonial situations and their
aftermath, Valente argues for a reading of Stoker’s
work in which the position of Ireland as a metro-
politan colony plays a key role in channeling the
Gothic toward modernism. Valente identifies an
extreme and revealing colonial situation, that of
the Anglo-Irish, in which Stoker is involved. The
already in-between character of the Anglo-Irish,
together with Stoker’s even more thoroughly
mixed heritage, contributes to Stoker’s finding
himself aligned with both conqueror and van-
quished, ruler and subjects in a way that enables
him to “devise a Gothic estate called the ’double
born’.”
In that modality of the Gothic, which depends
on an ambivalence of a structural kind, Stoker is
able to take advantage of Gothic’s potential for a
critique of ideology. He does so by harnessing its
characteristic doubling to a critical engagement
with binary opposites that support hierarchical
thinking. That engagement is not Stoker’s reflec-
tion and acceptance of ruling attitudes but a
modernist probing of them in which the potential
for delusion, destruction, and self-destruction
vividly emerge. Valente’s reading bears directly on
our understanding of Dracula as a book in which
Stoker reveals the destructive logic of identity
(including, by implication, identitarian politics7 )
and social hierarchy.8 Valente has focused on a
moment in which modernism begins to come into
being through the melding of Gothic with the
kind of anticolonial thinking that has become
familiar to us a century later in postcolonial
literature, theory, and history. The anthropologi-
cal issues concerning the character of the human
are as evident in this modernist form of the
Gothic, written in this case by an Irish colonial
author, as they are in postcolonial literature. Those
issues come forward most obviously in Stoker’s
short story when the events turn toward infanti-
cide and parricide. In this strange, blatantly
violent story, the dynamics of the double involve
the hybridity of colonial identity in representa-
33
 tions that expose the destructive character of
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
antagonistic oppositions. As is the case with all
the other modern Irish writers who present dou-
bling emphatically in their works, including
Wilde, Yeats, and James Joyce, Stoker’s sensibility
arises from a cultural situation characterized by
oppositions of a violent, destructive kind. Like
these other Irish writers, he presents at times the
destructive and self-destructive character of con-
flictual doubling, and at times the possibility of a
hybridity that might transform conflict into a
disquieting, risky merger, whose results are unpre-
dictable. The former comes through most strongly
in “The Dualitists,” while the latter emerges in
Mina Harker’s androgynous tendencies and in the
mixed character of her child.
In the first of the major texts of modern
Gothic to be published in the 1890s, The Picture of
Dorian Gray, Wilde, like Stoker, brings a critical
eye to bear on his society by means of the dou-
bling that often characterizes Gothic writing. Poe
influences both the doublings and the echoic
strategies of the novel. As I argue in the opening
essay of this issue, “Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetic
Gothic: Walter Pater, Dark Enlightenment, and
The Picture of Dorian Gray,” the novel’s complex
doublings and role shiftings blur distinctions
between good and bad. The blurring contributes
to engaging and implicating the reader in ways
that anticipate Dracula. Wilde’s novel is an impor-
tant precursor for later narratives of consumption
and violence, including American Psycho (1991),
whose central characters embody an ugliness hid-
ing deceptively beneath an attractive social veneer.
More explicitly than he does in Salomé, and in a
domestic rather than an exotic setting, Wilde
provides a Gothic rendering of Walter Pater’s
aestheticism in a work that fuses aesthetic issues
with political and moral concerns.9 In the case of
Dorian Gray, by embedding the myth of Echo and
Narcissus in the narrative, he produces an early
instance of “the mythical method,” a strategy that
Eliot identifies in later writings by Yeats and
Joyce.1 0 Wilde brings out the dark implications of
the pursuit of beauty as a narcissistic activity that
represents in his narrative the hypocritical tenden-
cies of British society at their worst. He takes an
important step into modernism when he gothi-
cizes the aesthetic and aestheticizes the Gothic.
The merger enables Wilde to distance himself
from Pater by writing a text that transforms
realistic writing in complexly echoic and mythic
ways in order to explore anthropological issues
and reveal delusive, self-destructive aspects of the
society the book addresses.
34 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Hardy will likely seem out of place in a discus-
sion of late Victorian and early modernist Gothic
that invokes centrally works by Wilde, Stoker, and
James, but he is not. In his introduction to The
Oxford Book of Modern Verse, Yeats tellingly associ-
ates Wilde with Hardy in comments on Wilde’s
“The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1898), implying
that both Hardy and Wilde react against Pater.
Wilde’s poem is itself a response to a Gothic
precursor, Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner.” Like many later modernist challenges to
Romantic tendencies, Wilde’s poem proceeds by
stressing material circumstances and by introduc-
ing literal counters for Romantic figures.
But the Gothic association of Hardy and Wilde
is based on more than their responses to Pater and
to Romanticism. In Hardy’s late fiction, Tess Dur-
beyfield is in some salient regards comparable to
Salomé, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) is nearly
contemporaneous with Wilde’s play. The novel
presents a temporally distant pastoral world
undergoing a modernization that had already
transformed it by the 1890s. Its story of a young
woman who suffers because of two modern men,
the narcissistic, deluded offspring of a mercantile
family and a religious family, contains Gothic ele-
ments that become increasingly insistent as the
narrative progresses.
But the Gothic association of Hardy and Wilde
is based on more than their responses to Pater and
to Romanticism. In Hardy’s late fiction, Tess Dur-
beyfield is in some salient regards comparable to
Salomé, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) is nearly
contemporaneous with Wilde’s play. The novel
presents a temporally distant pastoral world
undergoing a modernization that had already
transformed it by the 1890s. Its story of a young
woman who suffers because of two modern men,
the narcissistic, deluded offspring of a mercantile
family and a religious family, contains Gothic ele-
ments that become increasingly insistent as the
narrative progresses.
The threat to women and to marriage from
members of the aristocracy and religious orders so
frequent in earlier Gothic narratives (which
Herod’s and John the Baptist’s misogyny in
Salomé; repeats) takes modern form in Tess’s story,
while other Gothic elements remain more im-
mediately recognizable. The superstition of the
d’Urberville coach, the menacing portraits of
Tess’s female ancestors, the narrator’s suggestion
that her mailed and male ancestors committed
acts of violence against young women, and the
association she has with the tomb of her forebears
all anticipate the intensified Gothic aspect of her
story’s final chapters. In “Phase the Seventh,” her
husband returns virtually from the dead, her
estrangement from her body makes her, like the
vampirized Lucy Westenra, a kind of walking dead
person (“like a corpse” [367]), she murders her
lover in a rage, and she and her husband find their
way first to a deserted mansion and then to the
eerie, enigmatic, echoic space of Stonehenge,
where she sleeps on what may once have been a
sacrificial altar. Like Salomé, her exotic counter-
part, Tess is executed after taking revenge on a
man. Hardy, however, refuses the exotic as a
vehicle for his tale of violence against and by
women, choosing instead to merge Gothic ele-
ments with realistic ones in a tale of madness and
revenge. The merger brings the Gothic into a
modern embodiment by insisting that the truth
about social realities is carried in those Gothic ele-
ments and that the Gothic is inseparable from the
realistic. In Tess, the Gothic is not rendered as a
fantasy located in a safely distant country; rather,
it is incarnate in the English countryside, where it
resides and abides. Despite Tess’s execution, her
presence lingers in the shape of her younger sister.
Like the partly imaginary Wessex in relation to
the literal south of England, and like Tess Durbey-
field in relation to Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the
realistic story has a twin in its Gothic double. The
veneer of fantasy and a distance from historical
realities has become as thin and transparent in
Hardy’s representations of Wessex as it is in
Faulkner’s later tales of Yoknapatawpha County.
In its double character as a mingling of realistic
and antirealistic, Hardy’s narrative anticipates the
dual character of later modernist works influenced
by the Gothic, including those of Conrad and
Faulkner.
In “Oxford’s Ghosts: Jude the Obscure and the
End of the Gothic,” Patrick O’Malley makes clear
some of the transforming ways that Hardy re-
sponds to the Gothic tradition after Tess with the
publication of his other great novel of the 1890s,
Jude the Obscure. O’Malley brings out a salient
modernist use of tropes in Hardy’s writing when
he describes the literalizing of Gothic elements in
Jude. As in the fusing of the Gothic and the
realistic in Tess, in Jude two apparently different
universes are brought together in an ostensibly
realistic narrative. As in Dracula, the Gothic is here
and now in England in Hardy’s narrative. That is
so quite literally in the architecture that defines its
urban spaces, but as O’Malley points out it is also
present in the medievalism that Hardy calls up, a
medievalism that asks to be understood in direct
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relation to Catholicism. Hardy both responds to
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
the issues and traditions of Gothic writing and
brings the anti-Catholic aspects of the Gothic to
life by evoking in the narrative antagonistic
debates around Catholicism in nineteenth-century
England. The Catholic threat is alive in Hardy’s
England, and like Van Helsing in Dracula, Sue Bri-
dehead becomes associated with Catholic ritual.
This aligning of individuals and groups with
Catholicism in order to raise doubts about the
soundness of their beliefs and the moral justifica-
tion of their actions is typical of the Gothic. By
not displacing his narrative to a distant site, Hardy
participates in the domesticating of the Gothic
that is evident as well in The Picture of Dorian Gray
and Dracula. All these writers bring the Gothic
home. As O’Malley says explicitly, instead of be-
ing foreign, the Gothic has become all too famil-
iar: “The Gothic as a genre has collapsed into the
contemporary novel, because the Gothic, indeed,
has come home to England.”
By contrast with Jane Austen in Northanger Ab-
bey, who, in O’Malley’s formulation, “rejects
Gothic traditions concerning sexual and religious
deviance as foreign to English national identity,”
Hardy assimilates those characteristics into British
cultural inheritance. In particular, O’Malley
characterizes Jude as a “Radcliffean Gothic novel
gone wrong,” in which Sue Bridehead, like Mina
Harker in Dracula and Lilith Iyapo in Dawn, does
not ultimately resist sexual contact that is a kind
of horror. In his revision of Radcliffe, Hardy both
reverses the meaning of sexual deviance and
makes escape impossible. At the same time, the
difference between Catholic and Protestant is ef-
faced, as it also is in Dracula. The monster turns
out to be incarnated in a conventional figure of
authority. In other modern writing that emerges
from the Gothic, including the works of Stoker
and Conrad, it is often difficult to distinguish the
threat from those who oppose it or the criminals
from the police. In Jude, the threat is no literal
monster (as if a monster ever could be literal) but
an apparently ordinary schoolteacher. Phillotson’s
twisted manipulations and desires differ from the
overt violence of later novels, such as American
Psycho, but their toll on human life is palpable. As
O’Malley rightly asserts, “The Gothic has not only
entered England but it has also subsumed the
naturalized life of English citizens.” A central text
of the modern English novel has fused with a dark
Gothic double. The horror is now clearly part of
marriage itself.
35

GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
Gothic Popular Forms and Barely
Regulated Madness: Westerns, Detective
Fiction, Pornohorror
Escape is no more possible for Letty Mason,
the protagonist of Dorothy Scarborough’s anti-
Western, The Wind (1925), than it was for Sue Bri-
dehead in Jude the Obscure or will be for Lilith
Iyapo in Dawn. As in the major works of modern
Gothic published in the 1890s, in the anti-Western
that Susan Kollin describes in “Race, Labor, and
the Gothic Western: Dispelling Frontier Myths in
Dorothy Scarborough’s The Wind,” the potential
for a critique of ideology emerges from Gothic
elements. As it does in Stoker’s metrocolonial
Gothic writing, a colonial situation contributes to
the character of the anti-Western. Kollin sketches
a merger of Gothic and transformed colonial ele-
ments in which the British colonial adventure
story develops through the Western into an anti-
Western that includes prominent Gothic details.
The Gothic aspects bring out the negative side of
the ambivalence concerning the frontier already
present in the Western. In The Wind, the result is
a narrative in which Gothic elements in the
presentation of both nature and character have
the effect of challenging frontier myths, including
myths of nation building that depend on the in-
nocence of white females. Through doublings
characteristic of Gothic narrative, in this distinc-
tively American meshing of the Gothic, the
colonial, and the frontier, blurred distinctions of
race and class bring out the Western’s dark side.
As Kollin explains, in Scarborough’s narrative
concerning indigenous characters, females, and
property relations, the territorial conquest of
Empire is displaced to an American situation in
which the taking on of Gothic roles by indigenous
figures contributes not to the furthering of ideol-
ogy but to its dismantling.
In “‘I’m in the Business Too’: Gothic Chivalry,
Private Eyes, and Proxy Sex and Violence in
Chandler’s The Big Sleep,” Charles Rzepka also
explores a transformation of the Western, specifi-
cally in a work of American detective fiction in
which a cowboylike, knightly hero appears in a
Gothic urban adventure story. Citing both Joyce
Carol Oates’s and Leslie Fiedler’s complaints about
Raymond Chandler’s detective stories, Rzepka
establishes firmly the connection to the Gothic.
Fiedler sees in Chandler’s writing a descendant of
a male Gothic tradition that tends toward the
pornographic, while Oates calls his work an
example of a misogynistic “demonic anti-pastoral”
(34). That latter phrase could be applied to many
works of Gothic writing, since we enter not the
36 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Forest of Arden but the Castle of Otranto, or, in The
Big Sleep, the Sternwood mansion, where we
encounter madness, violence, or both. As is
regularly the case with the Gothic, Chandler’s
work raises issues about the defining limits of
civilization and of the human. The limits of the
human come up implicitly in various kinds of
figurative boundary crossings in Chandler’s novel,
especially ones involving insects and plants in
relation to human beings. The orchids in General
Sternwood’s hothouse have flesh that seems
nearly human, and he thinks of himself as a
spider.
Rzepka defends Chandler against some of the
criticisms leveled against his work by arguing that
he actualizes the potential for the critique of ideol-
ogy within the Gothic, specifically by providing a
vantage point for criticizing his own cultural
context that invites readers to recognize their
complicity. The disagreement among Chandler’s
readers points to an issue of general relevance: the
extent to which a work that includes violence and
prejudicial representations stages cultural tenden-
cies for us to recognize and judge rather than
simply affirms those tendencies and makes them
vicariously available. This issue regularly arises in
the response to Gothic texts. In Rzepka’s reading
of The Big Sleep, a doubling structure typical of
Gothic enables us to recognize how difficult it can
be to distinguish ostensibly good from ostensibly
bad. As a consequence, we recognize our own
complicity in the cultural attitudes that give rise
to the narrative’s events. Good and evil are set in
parallel in ways that make differentiating them
absolutely an impossibility. Eddie Mars, the crime
boss, is General Sternwood’s criminal counterpart,
and Mars’s occasional hitman, Canino, is Mar-
lowe’s double, whom Marlowe kills, as Canino
has killed others. We may well prefer Marlowe,
but he has killed. As with Tess’s murder of Alec
d’Urberville, which some readers applaud, and the
staking of Lucy Westenra in Dracula, Chandler’s
narrative invites us to condone an act of extreme
violence.
Readers will not, by contrast, accept the
violence against men and women that Patrick
Bateman perpetrates in the novel by Bret Easton
Ellis that Ruth Helyer writes about in “Parodied to
Death: The Postmodern Gothic of American Psy-
cho.” We resist the invitation to identify with Bate-
man, despite the first-person narration. Even
though we do not cheer Bateman, we do recognize
him as one of us. Rzepka points out that in the
wake of the economic transformations in the
United States at the end of the nineteenth century,
American detective fiction had home-grown
replacements for the foreign aristocratic villains of
early Gothic narratives. Instead of Radcliffe’s Mon-
toni, we have industrialists and other members of
an economic ruling class. In Ellis’s novel of
pornographic horror, the villain also comes from
within the culture. As the title indicates, he is an
American, specifically, part of the American elite,
someone with money who, like Lord Henry Wot-
ton or Dorian Gray in The Picture of Dorian Gray,
thinks he can do what he wants with impunity.
The details concerning conspicuous consumption
in both Wilde’s novel and Ellis’s create a clear con-
nection between them. Bateman is at one with
some of the defining aspects of his culture, includ-
ing the market economy. He works on Wall Street
and, like Dorian Gray, embodies the deluded, self-
serving ideal whose ugly truth is the hidden im-
age of the culture’s barely suppressed self-
knowledge. As Helyer points out, the monster
turns out to be the person next door.
Like Dracula, American Psycho is centrally
about sanity, including the extent to which the
feeling of being sane can be a self-congratulatory,
self-serving delusion. Many of the characters in
Stoker’s narrative keep journals in an endeavor to
record their experiences in a written form that
confirms that they remain in control of their
faculties and their actions. In the book’s final
chapter, Van Helsing congratulates himself on his
sanity, just before he violates the graves of three
female vampires and mutilates their bodies. In
both Dracula and American Psycho, the gruesome
killing of females appears to generate a feeling of
sanity and being under control for the male
perpetrator of the violence. The gory details of
American Psycho are an extreme development in
Gothic writing that suggests that madness is
always close at hand in Gothic narratives. D. W.
Harding argued persuasively that underlying the
apparently controlled, unruffled surface of lan-
guage and narrative in Jane Austen’s novels we
sense something that challenges and requires
control: hatred.1 1 By contrast with this “regulated
hatred,” the barely regulated turbulence underly-
ing Gothic narrative understood as a dark version
of the novel is not hatred but something more
extreme and more difficult to control: madness.
In American Psycho, the barely regulated mad-
ness of Gothic writing frequently loses its regu-
lated veneer. Bateman’s efforts to retain his sense
of his own sanity are themselves symptoms of
madness, though he does not recognize them for
what they are. Rather than keeping a journal, he
videotapes his own acts and watches them repeat-
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
edly. Repetitions suggest both loss of control, the
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
inability to stop imitating, stop repeating, stop
watching, but also an attempt to retain or gain
control, as with his repetitions while working out.
As Helyer suggests, Ellis uses imitation and repeti-
tion in a self-conscious appropriation of Gothic
elements that is also a postmodern process of
seemingly endless repetition. When Bateman
observes himself, he becomes his own double, the
observer of his representations of himself, as do
the vampire hunters who write in Dracula. He
shares with Dorian Gray the darkly narcissistic
desire to watch himself becoming something
bestial.
The excesses of American Psycho might appear
to put it in a class virtually by itself or to make it a
parody of horror narrative, like the movie Scream
(1996), in which the genre of the horror movie is
frequently called up through horror movies that
characters watch on television or talk about. But
the tendency toward excess is typical of the
Gothic, which regularly comes close to parody or
self-parody. The excessive, overtly artificial quality
of the Gothic, as in its counterpart, the pastoral,
enables us to recognize a staging of cultural
tendencies rather than a capitulation to them. In
the violence against women in American Psycho, as
in the antifeminist conversations in The Picture of
Dorian Gray, we recognize that prejudicial think-
ing and behavior are being put on display in ways
that we are more likely to judge than to accept.
The exaggerations are also part of American Psy-
cho’s postmodern character, which, as Helyer com-
ments, borders at times on the comical. But the
mutilation of women is not comical. It is tempt-
ing to claim that American Psycho goes further in
the graphic character of its violence against
women than any text normally considered as part
of the Gothic tradition. But it would be hard to
maintain persuasively that anything in Ellis’s
novel exceeds Dr. Seward’s gratuitously bloody
depiction in Dracula of the vampire hunters’ viola-
tion of Lucy Westenra’s corpse, whose heart they
stake before cutting off the head and stuffing its
mouth with garlic. Earlier still in the tradition of
the Gothic, Victor Frankenstein chops up the
female being that he is well on the way to creat-
ing. Though his act is not presented in vivid
detail, it need not be in order to have a strong ef-
fect.
By its emphasis on blood, Ellis’s novel does
seem to go even further than Dracula, in which,
according to the zoophagous Renfield, “the blood
is the life.” We encounter blood in American Psy-
cho in many scenes, along with other bodily fluids.
37
 Rather than only drinking blood and ingesting
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
insects and small animals, Bateman eats human
flesh, both raw and cooked. But the difference
merely raises more explicitly the issue of cannibal-
ism that is already evident in Stoker’s narrative.
Concerning this particular violation of cultural
imperatives, both books resemble Thomas Harris’s
The Silence of the Lambs (1988), whose central
character’s name, Hannibal Lector, suggests both
“cannibal” and “reader.” The fascination some
readers experience in response to books as extreme
as American Psycho may well depend on a felt con-
nection between those words.
The Gothic and Language: M. R. James
and Samuel Beckett
In the works of M. R. James, the beast also
turns out to be within and in close proximity to
readers, since James’s spooks often inhabit the
reading room. When the house of books turns out
to be haunted, how can the act of reading not
also be? In James’s stories, books can sometimes
kill. James may well have remembered that Dorian
Gray complains to Lord Henry Wotton that a book
Wotton had given him was poisonous and im-
plores him not to give the book to others. I have
grouped James with Beckett because of his con-
nection to the Irish Gothic and because his stories,
like Beckett’s style, locate the darkness within
language. Although English, James was strongly
influenced by Irish Gothic writing, which he knew
well.1 2 His edition of Sheridan Le Fanu’s stories,
Madam Crowl’s Ghost and other Tales of Mystery
(1923), revived interest in the Irish writer at the
same time that Eliot was writing about revenge
tragedy.
As Penny Fielding’s “Reading Rooms: M. R.
James and the Library of Modernism” makes clear,
the library is an institution devoted to collecting
and classification, as well as one that rests on the
importance of language, a defining aspect of the
human. Like the museum, the zoo, and the
encyclopedia, the library represents a categorizing
tendency within the Western conception of
knowledge that works to maintain sanity and
order, or an impression of sanity and order. Ac-
complishing its mission depends on registering
and cataloging by means of distinctions that, like
Cartesian coordinates, enable the creating of a
map-like coherence and intelligibility to help us
feel we know where we are and what we are. The
library functions in part to contain and control
what otherwise would be a chaotic, even mad,
jumble. Despite that mission, as Fielding indicates,
in James’s work there are dark forces and dark
38 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
corners even in this enlightening institution. It
seems that the mad double that the process of
containment is attempting to tame and suppress
is actually brought into being or inflamed by the
attempt. In that regard, it is worth recalling that
Dracula is a creature of the library. His books en-
able him to learn what he needs to know in order
to invade England successfully. Dracula’s library
functions as a colonial British library, established
by the English during imperial expansion for
educational purposes to teach indigenous peoples
how to think and behave in the English way. But
the resulting acts of mimicry to which such librar-
ies contribute can be a mask for subversion and
resistance.1 3 The library can be the location for
revolutionary activity. Karl Marx had a regular
spot in the Reading Room of the British Library,
where he worked on Capital. In short, the library’s
rationalized system of classification does not
guarantee the results produced by users of books,
results that the rational impulse may well not
recognize as orderly or sane.
The emphasis in twentieth-century thought
on language as the primary factor differentiating
humans from animals, culture from nature, arises
in part as a politically and intellectually resistant
response to Social Darwinism’s claim that culture
can be understood using evolutionary concepts
on analogy with nature. According to that empha-
sis, language makes us human and presumably
makes thought, including rationality, and civiliza-
tion possible. But language and the cultural
imperative to collect and to classify to which it is
tied in the library are unable to account for some
aspects of experience, including the threat that in
James’s stories lives in the midst of the institu-
tion. That threat, which is neither intelligible nor
eradicable, seems to live within language and
within the institutions of culture.
The suspicion that language contains or fosters
an uncontrollable, destructive excess emerges
from Beckett’s late writings as Graham Fraser reads
them in “‘No More Than Ghosts Make’: The
Hauntology and Gothic Minimalism of Beckett’s
Late Work.” As in M. R. James, in Beckett we
encounter a textualizing of the ghost and the
threat, a linking of ghost and threat to language.
In Beckett, however, the counterpart and response
to the threat of and in language is a spectralizing
of the text, whose substance is reduced to language
that is virtually disembodied. By eschewing real-
ism and attenuating representation, Beckett’s late
work engages us more on the level of the signifier
than as narrative. The Beckettian Gothic invites
us to know ourselves in its spectral qualities, but
not by holding a mirror up to a social situation
whose details we recognize as our own. This form
of the Gothic has been stripped bare, become the
ghost of itself in a minimalist art.
Fraser describes details that enable a reading
of Beckett’s late prose work, Ill Seen Ill Said, as “a
distilled, high modernist pastiche of the Gothic
novel,” whose features include a spectral woman
dressed in black and a ramshackle cabin that ap-
pears to be both animate and evil, observed by an
inquisitorial eye. But more important than the
details of narrative in this poststructural reading
of Beckett’s Gothic is the spectral doubling of
observing eye and character, whose blurred
boundaries point to the hauntology, or logic of
the specter, in Beckett’s writing. With this haunt-
ing double, the conceptual resemblance to Dracula
emerges, for the woman is neither conclusively
alive nor dead. Beckett’s style for incarnating his
postmodern version of the undead, in which the
boundary between the real and its opposite,
between the living and the dead, between the
actual and the imagined, becomes obscured, poses
a challenge for conceptions of language that insist
on referential, determinate meanings. When such
meanings are displaced by the echoing voices of
allusion and by the ghostly voices of their own
opposites, the classifying bases that underlie the
Cartesian illusions of the library and the unified,
sane, self-possessed self become unstable. The
language of Beckett’s late prose is a hybrid that,
by effacing distinctions between opposites, under-
mines the possibility of classification and hierar-
chy of the sort that the library’s system supports.
It is even difficult to classify Beckett’s own writing
with confidence using conventional categories of
literary genres and national language. Where in
the library or the bookstore do we put him: with
Irish authors? with French or Francophone au-
thors? with poets? with novelists? with dramatists?
Yeats turned Pater’s prose into verse by an edito-
rial act. Beckett’s style blurs the distinctions
between prose and poetry in advance of any edit-
ing or reading.
Beckett responds to the excessive desire to
know more, the desire that drives Victor Franken-
stein to generate his monstrous double and that
takes many readers to the library, with a ghostly
echo that refuses excess by providing the mini-
mum and “no more.” He avoids the trap of
projecting or attempting to become any ideal that
society thinks it wants by taking the Gothic as far
beyond the domain of the feasible as it has ever
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
gone and is likely ever to go. By refusing to
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
struggle against the ghost and the dark double,
since the struggle only generates or spreads the
darkness, Beckett comes as close as anyone could
in language to putting the specter within us to
rest in its unquiet grave.
Notes
1. Although the essays in this issue and my introduction
focus primarily on narrative, Gothic writing, a mode
that crosses the boundaries of literary genres, includes
both drama and poetry. For discussions of contempo-
rary examples of the Gothic in the visual arts as well
as literature, see Grunenberg.
2. The most ambitious attempt to provide an overview
of modern Gothic writing and discussions of indi-
vidual texts is David Punter’s The Modern Gothic.
Punter’s discussion of the relation of Gothic writing to
realism is particularly salutary; see 185-86. For discus-
sions of twentieth-century Gothic writing that deal
primarily with relations between Gothic and postmod-
ernism, see Sage and Smith.
3. Yeats discusses the Noh theatre in his introduction to
Pound and Fenollosa’s Certain Noble Plays of Japan.
4. The allusion is confirmed in a letter from the poet’s
wife, Valerie Eliot, published in the TLS (18 May 1973),
cited in Wolf 47.
5. Eliot included a number of his essays concerning
revenge tragedy in Selected Essays, New Edition (1950).
Many of the relevant essays are available in Eliot’s Es-
says on Elizabethan Drama. Even “Tradition and the
Individual Talent” (1919), probably the most widely
reprinted literary essay in English of the twentieth
century, cites a lengthy passage from The Revenger’s
Tragedy by Middleton (then attributed to Tourneur).
6. For a general commentary on the double in literature,
see Karl Miller’s Doubles.
7. In “Location and Home in Beckett, Bhabha, Fanon,
and Heidegger,” I discuss briefly the disagreement
within postcolonial theory concerning alternatives to
realism and identity politics as a repetition of disagree-
ments earlier in the twentieth-century about modern-
ism’s antirealistic character and its tendency to dis-
solve the self; see 543-44.
8. In fact, Valente intends his discussion of Stoker’s story
to provide an entrée for a commentary on Dracula,
which will be available in his forthcoming Unlocking
Dracula’s Crypt.
9. I discuss Wilde’s response to Pater in Salomé; in
“Shalom/Solomon/Salomé.”
10. Eliot uses the term in his review of Joyce’s Ulysses,
“Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” originally published in
The Dial (November, 1923).
11. See D. W. Harding, “Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of
the Work of Jane Austen.”
12. W. J. McCormack develops the notion of the “Irish
Gothic” in his introduction to the section of The Field
Day Anthology of Irish Writing, “Irish Gothic and After
(1820-1945).”
39
 13. Concerning the dynamics of an imitation that resists
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
and transforms its model, see Homi K. Bhabha’s “Of
mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial
discourse” in his The Location of Culture 85-92.
Works Cited
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Rout-
ledge, 1994.
Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 1996.
Eliot, T. S. Essays on Elizabethan Drama. 1956. New York:
Harcourt, 1960.
———. Selected Essays, New Edition. 1950. New York: Har-
court, 1965.
———. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth.” James Joyce: Two Decades
of Criticism. Ed. Seon Givens. New York: Vanguard,
1963. 198-202.
Grunenberg, Christoph, ed. GOTHIC: Transmutations of Hor-
ror in Late Twentieth Century Art. Cambridge: MIT P,
1997.
Harding, D. W. “Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work
of Jane Austen.” Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Es-
says. Ed. Ian Watt. Englewood Cliffs: Prenctice-Hall,
1963. 166-79.
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. 1891. Ed. John Paul
Riquelme. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998.
McCormack, W.J. “Irish Gothic and After (1820-1945).” The
Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Vol. II. Ed. Seamus
Deane. Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991. 831-54.
Miller, Karl. Doubles: Studies in Literary History. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1987.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “The Simple Art of Murder.” New York
Review of Books 21 Dec. 1995: 32-40.
Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. 1893.
4th ed. Ed. Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.
Rpt. of Studies in the History of the Renaissance. 1873.
Punter, David. The Modern Gothic. London: Longman, 1996.
Vol. 2 of The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fic-
tions from 1765 to the Present Day. London: Longman,
1996.
Riquelme, John Paul. “Location and Home in Beckett,
Bhabha, Fanon, and Heidegger.” The Centennial Review
42 (1998): 541-68.
———. “Shalom/Solomon/Salomé;: Modernism and Wilde’s
Aesthetic Politics.” The Centennial Review 39 (1995):
575-610.
Sage, Victor and Allan Lloyd Smith, eds. Modern Gothic: A
Reader. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1891. The Portable
Oscar Wilde. Ed. Richard Aldington. New York: Viking,
1965.
Wolf, Leonard, ed. The Essential Dracula. New York: Plume,
1993.
Yeats, William Butler. Introduction. The Classic Noh Theatre
of Japan. New York: New Directions, 1959. 151-63. Rpt.
of Certain Noble Plays of Japan. Ed. Ezra Pound and
Ernest Fenollosa. 1916.
40 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
ORIGINS OF THE GOTHIC
MONTAGUE SUMMERS (ESSAY
DATE 1938)
SOURCE: Summers, Montague. “The Romantic Feel-
ing.” In The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel.
1938. Reprint, pp. 17-59. New York: Russell & Russell,
1964.
In the following excerpt from his widely studied analysis
of Gothic literature, originally published in 1938, Sum-
mers surveys the evolution of Gothic art, architecture,
and literature through the eighteenth century.
The word “Gothic,” which was to play so
important a part in later days, and which now has
so very definite and particular a meaning
(especially in relation to literature) originally
conveyed the idea of barbarous, tramontane and
antique, and was merely a term of reproach and
contempt. From its application to architecture—
and Gothic building, as we shall see, was long
enough held in very low esteem—it came to con-
note almost anything mediæval, and could be
referred to almost any period until the middle, or
even the end, of the seventeenth century. In such
extension, of course, it comes loosely to signify
little more than old-fashioned, grannam and out-
of-date.1
In reference to architecture, the sovran disdain
with which Gothic was regarded is repeatedly
emphasized. John Evelyn, a virtuoso of the most
cultured talent, writing An Account of Architects &
Architecture, in A Parallel of Architecture Both Ancient
& Modern by Roland Freart Sr De Chambray, folio,
1664, in his Epistle Dedicatory instructs Sir John
Denham: “You will know, that all the mischiefs
and absurdities in our modern Structures proceed
chiefly from our busie and Gotic triflings in the
Composition of the Five Orders.” Gothic is unworthy
to be called an Order, those who envisaged it were
“low and reptile Souls” severely to be reprobated
on account of the “idle and impertinent Grotesks,
with which they have ever infected all our Modern
Architecture” (p. 3), and no words are bad enough
for those who dare “to Engotish (as one may say)
after their own capricious Humour” (p. 5). Evelyn
speaks of “Arched Doors or Windows” (p. 131), and
observes, “This Barbarity therefore we may look
upon as purely Gotique.”
The great Sir Christopher Wren in his ample
description of and notes upon S. Paul’s Cathedral,
printed in Parentalia, folio, 1750, 2 speaks of
abandoning “the Gothick Rudeness of the old
Design” for “a good Roman Manner.” His aim was
“a Cathedral-form . . . so rectified, as to reconcile,
as near as possible, the Gothick to a better Manner
of Architecture; with a Cupola, and above that,
instead of a Lantern, a lofty Spire, and large
Porticoes.” He remarks: “This we now call the
Gothick Manner of Architecture (so the Italians
called what was not after the Roman Style) tho’
the Goths were rather Destroyers than Builders; I
think it should with more reason be called the Sa-
racen style. . . . The Crusado gave us an Idea of
this Form.” In England, Salisbury is “one of the
best patterns of Gothick-building.” He again insists
“what we now vulgarly call the Gothick, ought
properly and truly to be named the Saracenick
Architecture refined by the Christians,” and devel-
oped from “Mosques, Caravansaras, and Sepul-
chres” built by Mohammedans.
Sir Christopher Wren quotes with warm ap-
proval Evelyn,3 and speaks of buildings demol-
ished by “the Goths, Vandals, and other barbarous
Nations . . . introducing in their stead, a certain
fantastical and licentious Manner of Building,
which we have since called Modern or Gothick.
Congestions of heavy, dark, melancholy and
monkish Piles, without any just Proportion, Use,
or Beauty, compared with the truly ancient . . . a
judicious Spectator is rather distracted or quite
confounded, than touched with that Admiration,
which results from the true and just Symmetry,
regular Proportion, Union, and Disposition.” In
final condemnation Wren sums up Gothic Cathe-
drals as “vast and gigantick Buildings indeed, but
not worthy the Name of Architecture.”
We are the less surprised then to find that the
Augustan Addison, who incidentally in his Re-
marks on Several Parts of Italy, etc. In the Years, 1701,
1702, 1703, never misses an opportunity of lewdly
aspersing the manners and impiously reviling the
religion of the country in which he was a stranger,
shook his head sadly enough when he saw the
Certosa4 of Pavia. He perforce allowed “the con-
vent of Carthusians” to be “very spacious and
beautiful,” yet added, “Their church is extremely
fine, and curiously adorned, but of a Gothic struc-
ture.”5 When he approaches Siena he is rabid with
resentment: “There is nothing in this city so
extraordinary as the Cathedral, which . . . can
only be looked upon as one of the master-pieces
of Gothic Architecture. When a man sees the
prodigious pains and expence, that our fore-
fathers have been at in these barbarous buildings,
one cannot but fancy to himself what miracles of
Architecture they would have left us, had they
been only instructed in the right way; for when
the devotion of those ages was much warmer than
that of the present, and the riches of the people
much more at the disposal of the Priests, there
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
was so much mony consumed on these Gothic
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
Cathedrals, as would have finished a greater
variety of noble buildings, than have been raised
either before or since that time.
One would wonder to see the vast labour that
has been laid out on this single Cathedral . . .
nothing in the world can make a prettier show to
those who prefer false beauties, and affected orna-
ments, to a noble and majestick simplicity.” And
this of the Duomo with its black and white che-
quered marbles, memorials of the Sorrowful and
Joyful Mysteries of Our Lady, whereby, as she told
S. Bridget, “her life was ever divided between grief
and happiness,” the Duomo with the Capella del
Voto, the bronze work of Beccafumi, Donatello’s
statue of S. John Baptist, Neroccio’s S. Catharine,
and the wonderful mosaics of that pavement!
The fact is that the antipathy of Wren and Ad-
dison to Gothic does not consist in any mere mat-
ter of taste or liking, but sets much deeper than
that; it is psychological. Wren, unconsciously
perhaps, betrays the secret when he speaks of
“monkish Piles” without any use. The Gothic
Cathedral was an aspiration towards God, a place
where the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Altar might
be ever offered to the Father. The Gothic Cathedral
was built for the Mass and on account of the Mass.
Minds of the type of Wren and Addison had no
conception of the Christian Sacrifice; what they
supposed the Catholic Faith to be they loathed.
Their churches were empty lecture-rooms, “lumi-
nous and disencumbered” to echo Addison’s ap-
proving phrase. Here was no priest, but a preacher
who should discourse lukewarm logic and moral
common-sense to his auditors. It was all very
didactic and very respectable, and it would be dif-
ficult to imagine anything more utterly lacking in
any sense of religion.
The classicists were wont to hold up Horace as
the supreme master and model, not Horace of the
Odes and Satires, not even a genuine Horace of
the De Arte Poetica, but a Horace who had been
tailored in the velvet court-coat and made to wear
the mighty periwig of the “regent of Parnassus,”
Nicolas Boileau Despréaux.
As we might expect, Boileau uses the word
gothique in sternest reprobation, as for example
when in his famous ninth Satire he lashes the
clerk who in the parterre for “quinze sous” can
Traiter de visigoths tous les vers de Corneille.
In England, too, the use of the word was soon
conveniently extended from its direct application
to architecture, and Dryden in his critical preface
41
 containing A Parallel betwixt Painting and Poetry, to
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
The Art of Painting, 4to, 1695, his English prose
translation of Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy’s Latin
poem De Arte Graphica,6 precisely says: “The Goth-
ique manner, and the barbarous ornaments,
which are to be avoided in a picture, are just the
same with those in an ill-ordered play. For ex-
ample, our English Tragi-comedy must be con-
fessed to be wholly Gothique, notwithstanding
the success which it has found upon our theatre.”
(How unjust Dryden is to his own genius here is
an inquiry we must waive as impertinent to our
matter.)7 Again, he defines: “All that has nothing
of the Ancient gust is call’d a barbarous or Goth-
ique manner.” Echoing these very words the
vaguely philosophical third Earl of Shaftesbury in
his Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions and
Times (1711) writes: “We are not so Barbarous or
Gothick as they pretend.” Bishop Burnet in his
History of his Own Time (published posthumously
1723-34) described the temper of Charles XII as
growing “daily more fierce and Gothick.”
“Ah Rustick, ruder than Gothick,” cries Mrs.
Millamant to the loutish Sir Wilfull in The Way of
the World, 1700; and well nigh half a century later
Mrs. Western rebuked her irate brother with “O!
more than Gothick ignorance!” Tom Jones, vii,
chapter 3. In 1773 Mrs. Hardcastle complains of
her good spouse’s “Gothic vivacity,” whilst a mod-
ish young lady in The Example; or, the History of
Lucy Cleveland (1778) deemed “husband” a “gothic
word.” In Miss Cuthbertson’s Rosabella; or, A
Mother’s Marriage, 5 volumes, 1817, Mrs. O’Dowd
with horror speaks of Rotherhithe whither she has
accompanied her husband, Captain O’Dowd, on
business as “Gothland” (Vol. III, p. 254), and in
the same novel we hear that the Marchioness of
Quizland cried shame on Lady Townhurst’s rustic-
ity, declaring “it was Gothic barbarity to patronize
children.” Even as late as 1841, in his novel The
Parish Clerk, J. T. Hewlett spoke of eating dinner
“at the gothic hour of one o’clock.” Very rarely
was there any adverse comment upon the ex-
tended use of the word ‘Gothic,’ although it is
true that a reviewer in the Gentleman’s Magazine,
July, 1778, takes exception to the description of
The Champion of Virtue (The Old English Baron) as a
Gothic story, since Englishmen of the days of King
Henry V and King Henry VI were certainly not
Goths.8 Wisely enough Clara Reeve ignored such
futile pedantry, and in good set terms made it
plain that her literary offspring was intended “to
unite the most attractive and interesting circum-
stances of the ancient Romance and modern
Novel,” and that it was “distinguished by the ap-
42 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
pellation of a Gothic story, being a picture of
Gothic times and manners.” In The Novice of Saint
Dominick, 4 volumes, 1806, by Miss Sydney Owen-
son (afterwards Lady Morgan), chapter V, the pi-
ous and learned lady Magdelaine de Montmorell
exclaims: “female sanctity is, I am afraid, a treasure
still rarer than female genius, to be found in this
Gothic age.”
The term ‘Gothic.’ so long slandered and
traduced, found at length a learned and powerful
defender in Bishop Richard Hurd of Worcester
(1720-1808),9 whose Letters on Chivalry and Ro-
mance, published anonymously in 1762, must be
accounted not only a work of paramount impor-
tance in the history of English romanticism, but
also regarded as among the finest critical essays of
our literature. Bishop Hurd was greatly influenced
by Joseph and Thomas Warton, yet he is some-
thing far more than the mere disciple of the two
brothers, for his pages in every period show a
forceful originality, conviction, and matured
reflection, whilst he goes much further than they
had ventured openly to advance.
The very first of the twelve Letters boldly
throws down the gauntlet with its opening words:
“The ages, we call barbarous, present us with
many a subject of curious speculation. What, for
instance, is more remarkable than the Gothic CHIV-
ALRY? or than the spirit of ROMANCE, which took its
rise from that singular institution?” A little later
in the same letter he observes: “The greatest
geniuses of our own and foreign countries, such
as Ariosto and Tasso in Italy, and Spenser and Mil-
ton in England, were seduced by these barbarities
of their forefathers; were even charmed by the
Gothic Romances. Was this caprice and absurdity
in them? Or, may there not be something in the
Gothic Romance peculiarly suited to the views of
a genius, and to the ends of poetry? And may not
the philosophic moderns have gone too far, in
their perpetual ridicule and contempt of it?” To
answer which questions he proposes as the Subject
and Plan to explain the rise, progress and genius
of Gothic Chivalry. “Reasons, for the decline and
rejection of the Gothic taste in later times must be
given.” In the third Letter Hurd notes the several
Characteristics of Chivalry; the passion for arms;
the spirit of enterprise; the honour of knighthood;
the rewards of valour; the splendour of equipages;
their romantic ideas of justice; their passion for
adventures; their eagerness to run to the succour
of the distressed; the pride they took in redressing
wrongs, and removing grievances; their courtesy,
affability, and that refined gallantry, which carried
the notions of chastity, the fairest and strongest
claim of the female sex, to so platonic an eleva-
tion; and above all, the “character of Religion.”
Every one of these characteristics, under a varied
form, but yet plain to distinguish, is to be found
in the Gothic Novel, the “character of Religion”
becoming an intense pre-occupation with the
cloister, abbots, monks, nuns, friars, convents,
priories and the anchoret’s retreat. The fourth Let-
ter draws some very striking parallels between the
old Romances and the poems of Homer, “circum-
stances of agreement between the heroic and gothic
manners,”1 0 and the author commences the fifth
Letter by emphasizing “that the resemblance
between the heroic and Gothic ages is very great.”
In the sixth Letter he justly remarks that “so far as
the heroic and Gothic manners are the same, the
pictures of each, if well taken, must be equally
entertaining. But I go further, and maintain that
the circumstances, in which they differ, are clearly
to the advantage of the Gothic designers.” Not a
few of his contemporaries must have been horri-
fied when they read these sentences, nor would
their amaze decrease, when, speaking of the man-
ners of the feudal age, he adds that as Homer was
a citizen of the world, could the poet have seen
the manners of the feudal age he would certainly
have preferred them to Grecian manners, “And
the grounds of this preference would, I suppose,
have been ‘The improved gallantry of the feudal
times; and the superior solemnity of their
superstitions.’” This last phrase is very significant,
and strikes the key-note of much that was to fol-
low in novel and romance. As to religious machin-
ery, “for the more solemn fancies of witchcraft and
incantation, the horrors of the Gothic were above
measure striking and terrible. The mummeries of
the pagan priests were childish, but the Gothic
Enchanters shook and alarmed all nature. We feel
this difference very sensibly in reading the antient
and modern poets. You would not compare the
Canidia of Horace with the Witches in Macbeth.
And what are Virgil’s myrtles dropping blood to
Tasso’s enchanted forest?” With a tribute of
enthusiastic praise to the “terrible sublime” of
Shakespeare, he continues: “I can’t but think that,
when Milton wanted to paint the horrors of that
night (one of the noblest parts in his Paradise
Regained) which the Devil himself is feigned to
conjure up in the wilderness, the Gothic language
and ideas helped him to work up his tempest with
such terror. . . . And without more words you
will readily apprehend that the fancies of our
modern bards are not only more gallant, but, on a
change of the scene, more sublime, more terrible,
more alarming, than those of the classic fablers.
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In a word, you will find that the manners they
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
paint, and the superstitions they adopt, are the
more poetical for being Gothic.”
The seventh Letter considers in some detail
the effect of the Gothic upon Spenser1 1 and Mil-
ton. No doubt each of these bards kindled his
poetic fire from classic lore, but when most
inflamed they are the more particularly rapt with
the Gothic fables of chivalry. With regard to
Shakespeare too, whose “genius kept no certain
rout, but rambled at hazard into all the regions of
human life and manners . . . one thing is clear,
that even he is greater when he uses Gothic man-
ners and machinery, than when he employs clas-
sical.” The eighth Letter entirely cuts the ground
from under the feet of Wren and Evelyn. “When
an architect examines a Gothic structure by Gre-
cian rules he finds nothing but deformity. But the
Gothic architecture had its own rules, by which
when it comes to be examined, it is seen to have
its merit, as well as the Grecian. The question is
not, which of the two is conducted in the simplest
or truest taste: but, whether there be not sense
and design in both, when scrutinized by the laws
on which each is projected.
The same observation holds of the two sorts
of poetry. Judge of the Faery Queen by the classic
models, and you are shocked with its disorder:
consider it with an eye to its Gothic original, and
you find it regular. The unity and simplicity of the
former are more complete: but the latter has that
sort of unity and simplicity, which results from its
nature.
The Faery Queen then, as a Gothic poem,
derives its METHOD, as well as the other characters
of its composition, from the established modes
and ideas of chivalry.
. . . So that if you will say anything against
the poet’s method, you must say that he should
not have chosen this subject. But this objection
arises from your classic ideas of Unity, which have
no place here; and are in every view foreign to the
purpose.” There is, in fact, not the classic Unity,
“which consists in the representation of one entire
action,” but “an Unity of another sort, an unity
resulting from the respect which a number of
related actions have to one common purpose. In
other words, It is an unity of design, and not of ac-
tion.”
The Gothic Novel,—The Romance of the Forest,
The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian, for example—
has this unity of design.
In the ninth Letter the author considers the
beauties of Tasso, which afford a fresh confirma-
43
 tion of the point upon which he principally
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
insists, The pre-eminence of the Gothic manners and
fictions, as adapted to the ends of poetry [and cer-
tainly romance] above the classic.
Bishop Hurd with urbanest satire just laughs
out of court my Lord Shaftesbury and his critical
cant upon the tritest theme—“it is not to be told
with what alacrity and self-complacency he flour-
ishes upon it” in his Soliloquy or Advice to an Author,
1710. “The Gothic manner, as he calls it,” is the
favourite object of my Lord’s raillery. This inge-
nious nobleman is so perfectly enamoured “of his
noble antients,” whose spirit and precepts he
misunderstands, that he will fight any man who
contends there may be other elegances and beau-
ties in literature besides those in the behalf of
which he jousts so slashingly.
The cold Boileau “happened to say something
of the clinquant of Tasso; and the magic of this
word, like the report of Astolfo’s horn in Ariosto,
overturned at once the solid and well-built reputa-
tion of the Italian poetry.”
This potent word occurs in the ninth of Boi-
leau’s satires, A Son Ésprit, where he attacks a
whole catalogue of poets, almost as long as
Homer’s list of ships, and unmercifully belabours
the courtier-wits:
Tous les jours, à la cour, un sot de qualité
Peut juger de travers avec impunité;
À Malherbe, à Racan, préférer Théophile,
Et le clinquant du Tasse, à tout l’or de Virgile.
You are, no doubt, a vastly superior critic,
Monsieur Nicolas Boileau Despréaux, but did it
never occur to you that a man may yield to none
in his devotion to Vergil, and yet may love and
admire Tasso also?
Yet “the clinquant of Tasso” became a sort of
watchword among the critickins. On a sudden
nothing was heard but this abracadabra, and the
respectable Mr. Addison, “who gave the law in
taste here, took it up and sent it about the king-
dom in his polite and popular essays.”
These considerations lead to some very
pointed remarks in regard to those who profess so
exactly to follow what they are pleased to call
nature: “But the source of bad criticism, as univer-
sally of bad philosophy, is the abuse of terms. A
poet, they say, must follow Nature; and by Nature
we are to suppose can only be meant the known
and experienced course of affairs in this world.
Whereas the poet has a world of his own, where
experience has less to do, than consistent imagina-
tion.
44
He has, besides, a supernatural world to range
in. He has Gods, and Faeries, and Witches at his
command: And,
———O! who can tell
The hidden pow’r of herbes, and might of magic
spell?
Spencer, B. i, C. 2
Thus in the poet’s world, all is marvellous and
extraordinary; yet not unnatural in one sense, as it
agrees to the conceptions that are readily enter-
tained of these magical and wonder-working
Natures.
This trite maxim of following Nature is further
mistaken in applying it indiscriminately to all
sorts of poetry.”
Sublime and creative poetry and romance may
be regarded as a species addressing itself solely or
principally to the Imagination. Therefore the poet
or romantic writer may say: “I leave to the realist,
to the classicist (so-called) the merit of being
always broad awake, always in their dull sober
senses; The divine dream (Homer’s “theios oneir-
os”),1 2 and mystic fancy are among the noblest of
my prerogatives.”
The cry of the Augustans was: Magic and
enchantment are senseless things. This crass
materialism is met by the simple truth that
witchcraft is a very real and terrible thing, for we
are wiser in this than they; that the supernatural
is all about and around us ever; that the veil
trembles and is very thin.
The concluding Letters sum up and emphasize
with a few general reflexions and particular ap-
plications Hurd’s views upon Gothic Romance.
One of the writer’s strongest arguments—
although never explicitly advanced as such—lies
in the fact that he on no occasion expresses
himself narrowly, as one who wishes entirely to
banish and disallow any school of poetry save the
chivalrous and romantic; he freely acknowledges
the legitimate claim and position of classical
poetry, he merely refuses to grant it a monopoly
and an exclusive tyranny of place and power. He
urges and insists that Gothic poetry shall be
judged by its own standards, by its own particular
claims, method, and end.
In the direct opposite to this catholic spirit
consists one of the many, perhaps the greatest of
the many, weaknesses of Addison and his follow-
ers. We may take Addison, as being the most
influential, to typify a school. Addison has the
hall-mark of the completest prig. He steadfastly
refuses to allow worth or beauty in poem or prose
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which he conceives as not conforming to the
stereotyped rules and prejudices that had become
in the world of letters a kind of canon law. Any
author who does not speak the polite and popular
cant is disbarred. This is the very essence of
egotistical Philistinism, and if it so ill befits a
writer such as Addison, who had parts, what are
we to think when we meet it in men of a much
lesser grade and narrower intellects such as Tho-
mas Babington Macaulay? It were superfluous to
dwell upon the point since this latter writer, both
as critic and historian, is now so badly blown
upon and generally discredited.
Gibbon has justly declared that he could men-
tion “few writers more deserving of the great
though prostituted name of the critic” than Ri-
chard Hurd, and to over-estimate the importance
of the Letters on Chivalry and Romance in the his-
tory of English letters is almost impossible. The
anonymous publication of the book did not burst
with a sudden resonance in literary circles and
compel clamant attention in every quarter, but its
influence very swiftly coursed and permeated the
channels of taste and thought. The change there-
after was immediate. There had, of course, already
been symptoms of a certain vacillation of fashion,
but this transition was incalculably accelerated by
the authoritative pronouncements and acknowl-
edged learning of so eminent a man as Hurd, for
the authorship of the Letters was no great secret.
Not merely did a few scholars, a few poets, a hand-
ful of critics echo his dicta and range themselves
beneath his banner, but a Gothic flavour rapidly
became fashionable with all classes of society.
Following closely in the footsteps of their
father, who died in 1745, and who is by no means
an unimportant name in the history of the revival
of romanticism, the Rev. Thomas Warton of Phi-
lander, an Imitation of Spencer, and the two Runic
Odes, the Warton brothers, Joseph and Thomas,
were already known as ardent romanticists, and as
early as 1746 Joseph in the Advertisement prefixed
to his Odes fairly challenged didactic poetry, and
declared his conviction that “the fashion of moral-
izing in verse has been carried too far,” asserting
that “he looks upon Invention and Imagination
to be the chief faculties of a Poet.”
It might be an exaggeration to say that Tho-
mas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry which
appeared in three volumes, February, 1765, was a
performance inspired by the Letters on Chivalry
and Romance, since early in 1761 he was in treaty
with Dodsley concerning the publication of a col-
lection of old ballads, but Hurd’s championship
of the Gothic immensely helped and encheered
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him, although the original Preface is apologetic to
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
the last degree, and as is well known he polished,
printed and pruned the ballads in a perfectly
preposterous fashion. The Reliques were not much
approved of by Hurd himself, and Percy found
little encouragement from many of the most
eminent literary men, but for all that the success
of his collections was overwhelming, and the read-
ing public vehemently applauded, whilst Walpole,
on February 5th, 1765, acknowledged “the flatter-
ing and agreeable present of the Reliques of Ancient
Poetry” in a letter1 3 of most cordial compliment,
requesting the honour of the editor’s acquain-
tance, and protesting, “If it should ever lie within
my slender power to assist your studies or inquir-
ies, I hope, Sir, you will command me. I love the
cause, I have a passion for antiquity . . .” A
second edition of the Reliques was called for in
1767; a third in 1775; but the fourth did not ap-
pear until 1794. The influence of the Reliques upon
the younger generation was openly acknowledged
by such men as Scott and Wordsworth. It should,
however, be remarked that Matthew Gregory
Lewis for his ballads, The Tales of Wonder, The Tales
of Terror, and others drew his inspiration from
contemporary Germany, from Bürger, Schiller, Go-
ethe, and from J. G. von Herder’s Stimmen der
Völker in Liedern.
Whatever we may think of Ossian to-day, and
myself I sometimes imagine that even the few of
us who yet linger to read with real enjoyment and
admiration Macpherson’s perfervid rhetoric and
lyrical flights are hardly able to judge his very
remarkable work with completest candour, there
can be no question that the Ossianic poems cre-
ated an ineffaceable impression upon the age. Nor
can a book be without deep significance which
was hailed with enthusiasm by Gray, David Hume,
John Home, and many another eminent name;
which gave Herder such extraordinary pleasure;
which strongly influenced Goethe and Schiller;
which was imitated by Coleridge and Byron;
which was praised and carefully studied by Cha-
teaubriand, “épicurien à l’imagination catholi-
que,” as Sainte-Beuve1 4 once named him.
Dr. Hugh Blair, in his essay A Critical Disserta-
tion on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal (1763),
defined Ossian’s two principal characteristics as
tenderness and sublimity. “The events recorded
are all serious and grave; the scenery throughout,
wild and romantic. The extended heath by the
seashore; the mountains shaded with mist; the
torrent rushing through a solitary valley; the scat-
tered oaks, and the tombs of warriors overgrown
with moss, all produce a solemn attention in the
45
 mind, and prepare it for great and extraordinary
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
events.” The same might be said of numberless
Gothic novels. Ossian’s address to the Sun, his la-
ment over the Desolation of Balclutha, the Songs
of Selma, and many passages more, are repeated
and but little varied again and again in romantic
fiction.
The spectres of Ossian which, Dr. Drake said,
seem to “rush upon the eye with all the stupen-
dous vigour of wild and momentary creation,”
have their ghostly progeny in the thousand
phantoms of a thousand Castles.
In that poignant scene in Mrs. Charlotte
Smith’s Emmeline; or, The Orphan of the Castle,
when Lady Adelina walking in the woods encoun-
ters Fitz-Edward, quite naturally comes the phrase:
“The wind blew chill and hollow among the half-
stripped trees, as they passed through the wood;
and the dead leaves rustled in the blast. ’Twas such
a night as Ossian might describe.”
There are even, one might truly say, many
Caledonian Gothic novels which show the influ-
ence of Ossian, another and entirely separate
thing from the imitation of Sir Walter Scott,
although some daring spirits essayed a commix-
ture of the two. Mrs. Radcliffe’s first book, The
Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, “A Highland
Story,” 1789; Horsley Curties’ The Scottish Legend,
or The Isle of St. Clothair, 1802; Mrs. Helme’s St.
Clair of the Isles: or, The Outlaws of Barra, “A Scot-
tish Tradition,” 1803; and William Child Green’s
The Prophecy of Duncannon, or, The Dwarf and the
Seer, “A Caledonian Legend,” 1824; all show a
certain indirect Ossianic influence, whilst Otho
and Rutha, 1781, is servilely imitative.
The impetus given to the Romantic Move-
ment by the two Wartons by Percy, and by Os-
sian, was very great, and had far-reaching conse-
quences, but it was Hurd’s Letters1 5 which not only
vindicated Gothicism but made the Gothic fash-
ionable. In 1749, as we have already seen, Squire
Western’s sister used the epithet “Gothick”1 6 as a
term of unqualified opprobrium and contempt;
seventeen years later, in 1766, the wealthy Mrs.
Heidelberg, “the very flower of delicacy and cream
of politeness,” invites Lord Ogleby to take a dish
of tea or “a sullabub warm from the cow” in her
“little Gothic dairy, fitted up entirely in my own
taste,” whilst the old city merchant, Sterling, who
apes luxury and courts the mode, builds a spire in
a field against a tree to terminate the prospect—
“One must always have a church, or an obelisk, or
something to terminate the prospect, you
know”—and spends one hundred and fifty pounds
46 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
to put his ruins in proper repair, so that “you
would think them ready to tumble on your head.”
The famous, but unfinished Sir Bertrand, which
so powerfully impressed Leigh Hunt, is too obvi-
ously inspired by The Castle of Otranto, and the
introductory essay On the Pleasure Derived from
Objects of Terror was certainly suggested by the
work of Bishop Hurd, as indeed were other dis-
courses in this kind such as On Romances, an Imita-
tion, and An Enquiry into those Kinds of Distress
which Excite Agreeable Sensations, appearing in the
same collection Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, by J.
and A. L. Aikin, 1773. Sir Bertrand has often been
ascribed to Anna Laetitia Aikin (who married in
1774 the Rev. Rochemont Barbauld), but Miss
Lucy Aikin in her Memoir prefixed to Mrs. Bar-
bauld’s Works, 1825, specifically gives the frag-
ment to Dr. Aikin, and the essay on pleasurable
terror to Miss Aikin. Walpole, it is true, in a letter
to Robert Jephson, January 27th, 1780, wrote of
The Castle of Otranto:1 7 “Miss Aikin flattered me
even by stooping to tread in my eccentric steps.
Her Fragment, though but a specimen, showed her
talent for imprinting terror”; but Miss Lucy’s
testimony is conclusive, and it is borne out by
Leigh Hunt who comments that John Aikin was
“a writer from whom this effusion was hardly to
have been looked for,” Book in a Corner, 1849; and
who was assuredly at no pains to advance his
authorship of Sir Bertrand.
Miss Aikin in her essay shrewdly observed the
positive pleasure which arises from curiosity.
Imagination thus stimulated “rejoices in the
expansion of its powers.” A supernatural terror is
on a higher psychological plane than terror
aroused by natural objects of repulsion. When
there is excess of pain scenes of terror drive “too
near our common nature”; it is far more agreeable
when the circumstances are “wild, fanciful and
extraordinary.” This is a true difference, and nicely
discerned. We do not, however, stay now to
consider this very vital point, since there will be
much more to say on the subject and more
pertinently when considering the work of Mrs.
Radcliffe.
John Aikin set out to combine both kinds of
terror in Sir Bertrand, which Walpole thought
“excellent,” but although it must remain a ques-
tion of opinion, I cannot persuade myself that the
Fragment achieves success. The commencement is
striking. A knight, as he wanders in darkness over
a desolate and dreary moor, hears the sullen toll-
ing of a bell, whose funeste curfew guides him by
the aid of a flickering light to “an antique man-
sion” with turrets at the coins. All is wrapped in
darkness. He enters to grasp a death-cold hand,
which he severs with one stroke of his sabre.
Mysterious armed figures menace him, and he sees
a hideous chevalier “thrusting forwards the bloody
stump of an arm.” Eventually he gains a far
chamber where a lady in a shroud and black veil
arises from a coffin. As he kisses her the horrid
enchantment dissolves, and he finds himself set
at a banquet in a splendid room, when the lady
thanks him as her deliverer. Here the fragment
ends. The opening is, as I have said, a powerful
piece of work and grue, but the story rapidly loses,
and the wakening kiss with its reminiscences of
La Belle au Bois Dormant is utterly incongruous,
bringing the whole structure to the ground. We
are not with Amadis and Esplandian now.
Notes
1. In the reign of Charles II the current phrase was “the
old Elizabeth way.” Thus Lady Dupe, in Dryden’s Sr
Martin Mar-all (acted 1667) describes old Moody as
one who “stands up for the old Elizabeth way in all
things.” In The Gentleman Dancing-Master (acted in
1672) Mrs. Flirt, arranging her ménage, is quick to tell
Monsieur: “Don’t you think we’ll take up with your
old Queen Elizabeth furniture as your Wives do.”
2. Parentalia, folio, 1750, pp. 282, 297, 304, 306, 308.
3. An Account of Architects and Architecture, folio, 1664,
p. 9.
4. Founded by Gian Galeazzo Visconti. The façade (1491)
is one of the world’s loveliest things. The interior
paintings are mostly by Borgognone, although there
are examples of the work of Perugino, Mantegna,
Pordenone, and other artists.
5. My quotations are from the edition in The Works of
the Honourable Joseph Addison, Esq., four volumes,
London, Tonson, 1721, Vol. II, p. 10; and Sienna, pp.
135-6.
6. Du Fresnoy, 1611-65. De Arte Graphica was published
posthumously at Paris three years after his death with
a French prose translation by De Piles.
7. Dryden even speaks of his own The Spanish Fryar as
“unnatural mingle,” although he acknowledges his
partiality to the play. Yet there can be a regular as well
as an irregular and unfitting alternation of gravity and
mirth, as Dryden shows us in his masterpiece of
drama, Don Sebastian. Here our pleasure during the
lighter episodes in no way encroaches upon our
concernment for the tragic scenes.
8. The Castle of Otranto might, of course, be criticized
along the same lines.
9. His editions of Horace, Ars Poetica, 1749, and Epistola
ad Augustum, 1751, were warmly praised by Warbur-
ton. In 1776 Hurd, then Bishop of Lichfield and
Coventry (translated to Worcester, 1781), was ap-
pointed preceptor to the Prince of Wales, and in 1783
he was offered the Primacy, which he declined.
10. Letters on Chivalry, 1762, p. 32. “Nay, could the very
castle of a Gothic giant be better described than in the
words of Homer:
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High walls and battlements the courts in-
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
close,
And the strong gates defy a host of foes.”
Od. B. xvii, ver. 318
Udolpho in the Odyssey!
It does not appear to me that Hurd owes anything to
Sainte-Palaye’s Mémoires sur l’ancienne Chevalerie, 2
vols., 1759, (Vol. III, 1781), although he may, of
course, have known the book.
11. The Spenserian revival in the eighteenth century,
important as it is in its influence upon Romanticism,
must barely be indicated in a brief word. It is interest-
ing to note that Oldham (1653-83) wrote a Satyr, “The
Person of Spencer is brought in, Dissuading the Author
from the Study of Poetry.” The Augustans hardly
understood “Old Spenser,” who, as Addison was
pleased to write, failed to “charm an understanding
age,” Account of the Greatest English Poets, 1694. Prior
thought that he had imitated the Spenserian stanza,
but he could not even make the colouring look like
Spenser’s. In 1713 Samuel Croxall published a politi-
cal satire as An Original Canto of Spencer, and in 1715
appeared an edition of Spenser edited by John Hughes,
who ventured to say that to compare The Fairie Queene
“with the novels of antiquity, would be like drawing a
parallel between the Roman and the Gothick architec-
ture.” Towards the middle of the eighteenth century,
however, many imitations of Spenser appeared, such,
for example, as the three poems of William Thompson,
who was a complete romanticist in spirit and form.
Richard Owen Cambridge (1717-1702) imitated
Spenser in his Archimage, as did Gilbert West in his On
the Abuse of Travelling, 1839, with which Gray was
“enraptured and enmarvailed.” William Shenstone
(1714-63) is deservedly famous for his “ludicrous
imitation” The School-Mistress (the final revision is
1742); and there were many other mock-Spenserian
poems, such as Christopher Pitt’s The Jordan, the
subject of which finds a parallel in Francesco Berni’s
capitolo In Lode dell’Orinale. In 1748 appeared James
Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence, in one passage of
which, Canto II, stanza 52, the poet speaks of “my
master Spenser.” Moses Mendez, a professed admirer
of Thomson, published The Seasons in 1751, and a few
years later The Squire of Dames, which latter in particu-
lar shows a close study and no tepid appreciation of
Spenser. In 1754 appeared that very important critical
study, Thomas Warton’s Observations on the Faery
Queene.
12. Iliad, II, 22. Leaf and some scholars read ‘oulos,’
‘baneful,’ Autenrieth-Keep. Pope translates, “the
flatt’ring Dream.”
13. Letters of Horace Walpole, Toynbee, 1904, Vol. VI, pp.
181-3
14. Chateaubriand et son groupe, t. I, p. 89.
15. Samuel Jackson Pratt (who wrote chiefly under the
name Courtney Melmoth) in his Family Secrets, Liter-
ary and Domestic, 5 vols., 1797, has a disquisition, The
use and abuse of the ancient romance, Chapter XLVI,
Vol. I, pp. 359-70 (see also the two following chapters),
which is of considerable interest, and in which the
very proper praise is significant.
16. It is worth noting that in Mrs. Behn’s The Emperor of
the Moon (acted in 1687), 4to, 1687, II, 3, some
splendid Masking Habits are described as “à la Gothic
and Uncommune.” A little later we have: “Enter Char-
mante and Cinthio, dress’d in their Gothic Habits.”
47
 17. Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. Toynbee, 1904, Vol. XI,
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
p. 113. Miss Aikin had visited Strawberry Hill on June
14th, 1774. “She desired to see the Castle of Otranto,”
and, says Walpole, “I let her see all the antiquities of
it.” On April 8th, 1778, Walpole, in a letter to Mason,
remarked, “Mrs. Barbut’s Fragment was excellent,” but,
as he was not even at the pains to learn the lady’s cor-
rect name, he is hardly to be relied upon as regards
the authorship. Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. Toynbee,
1904, Vol. IX, p. 217, where the footnote is slightly
inaccurate, Sir Bertrand not Don Bertrand.
48 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)
Widely considered one of the most significant
poets and critics in the English Romantic
movement, Coleridge is best known for the
poems “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,”
“Kubla Khan,” and “Christabel,” and one
volume of criticism, Biographia Literaria; or,
Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and
Opinions (1817). In 1796 Coleridge met the
poet William Wordsworth, with whom he had
corresponded casually for several years, and
in 1798 they collaborated on Lyrical Ballads, a
volume of poetry that was recognized in the
twentieth century as the first literary docu-
ment of English Romanticism. “The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner,” the tale of a seaman
who kills an albatross, intertwines reality and
fantasy as well as a variety of religious and
supernatural images to depict a moving
spiritual journey of doubt, renewal, and
eventual redemption. Coleridge’s “Kubla
Khan” was published with a note explaining
the strange circumstances of its composition:
Coleridge wrote that he fell asleep while read-
ing an account of how the Chinese emperor
Kubla Khan had ordered the building of a
palace within a walled garden. Three hours
later, Coleridge awoke and began to write
down the several hundred lines which he
claimed to have composed during his sleep.
However, he found that the rest of the poem
had disappeared from his mind. In a later
note appended to the text, he added that his
dream was induced by opium and that it was
“a sort of reverie.” Though Coleridge himself
dismissed “Kubla Khan” as a “psychological
experiment,” the poem is now considered a
forerunner of the work of the Symbolists and
Surrealists in its presentation of the uncon-
scious. In Coleridge’s other poetic fragment,
“Christabel,” he combined exotic images
with Gothic romance to create an atmo-
sphere of terror and to treat themes of evil
and guilt in a setting pervaded by supernatu-
ral elements. Most critics now contend that
Coleridge’s inability to sustain the poem’s
eerie mood prevented him from completing
it.
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 GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
AMERICAN GOTHIC
LOUIS S. GROSS (ESSAY DATE
1989)
SOURCE: Gross, Louis S. “The Pathology of History.”
In Redefining the American Gothic: From Wieland to Day
of the Dead, pp. 25-36. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Re-
search Press, 1989.
In the following essay, Gross illustrates the unique
character of American Gothic literature and differentiates
it from European Gothic literature.

Gothic narrative has always looked backward;

the past is its beginning and end. When Horace
Walpole erected his literary monument The Castle
of Otranto in 1764, he established the Gothic as a
genre dependent on notions of the European
past—very much part of the ideological temper of
his time. In that conflict between the self-creation
of what is called the Age of Reason and the old
“dark” days of superstition and corruption, the
Gothic chose the romance of the past. In Wal-
pole’s time, the word “Gothic” denoted the crude,
barbarous, and medieval, just those attributes
proper English folk attributed to old Catholic
Europe. Walpole embraced these disdainful labels
and, free from the prevailing aesthetic notions,

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1 57
 imagined a past fully to his liking. His estate,
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
Strawberry Hill, was a later attempt to objectify
that imaginative creation, but Otranto’s legacy has
been more far-reaching.
For bourgeois English readers of the Gothic,
the genre allowed a glimpse of the mystery and
corruption of the past fully congruent with their
political and religious biases. Because these tales
of oppression and terror are set in other places
and other times, English readers need not have
directly applied these fears to their own time, a
safety valve perhaps necessary in an England
uneasily viewing the revolutions in France and
America. In any case, the early Gothic novel
became associated with a distant historical setting
and an antiquarian sensibility.
Not surprisingly, America has not been an
emotionally resonant setting for English Gothi-
cism; the barbarity of America is not tempered by
a past redolent of sweet corruption. For the
American Gothicist, however, our past is the focus
of intense emotional reflection. While Gothic nar-
rative in America may be as formulaic as in
Europe, our approach to time and setting is strik-
ingly different. American gothicists do not remove
their characters to Italy, Spain, France, or the other
centers of English Gothic mystery; they shriek and
faint in familiar surroundings and near the read-
ers’ own time. Certain periods have a special at-
traction—the colonial and revolutionary—but the
escape to the past has not as far to go; history
constrains the American Gothic as much as it
feeds it. What this means for American Gothic
narrative is that we have a unique ability to review
our past within the Gothic mode. Our native
literature was formed at the time when the Gothic
romance tradition held readers in thrall, and un-
like English readers who turned the Gothic vision
outward to another people and another age, our
Gothic turns inward to illuminate its own people
and their age. American Gothic narrative, then, is
less romantic and more disturbing than its English
models.
Is the Gothic novel but a type of the historical
novel? George Lukacs dismisses the idea: “In the
most famous ‘historical novel’ of the eighteenth
century, Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, history is
likewise treated as mere costumery: it is only the
curiosities and oddities of the milieu that matter,
not the artistically faithful image of a concrete
historical epoch. What is lacking in the so-called
historical novel before Sir Walter Scott is precisely
the specifically historical, that is, derivation of the
individuality of characters from the historical
peculiarity of their age.”1 By such a definition, the
58 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
English Gothic novel is not so much historical as
scenic. And American Gothic narrative? Lukacs
discusses only one bona fide American historical
novelist—James Fenimore Cooper. He sees Coo-
per’s Leatherstocking Saga as a type of the Scott
novel: “Cooper portrays the enormous historical
tragedy of those early colonizers who emigrated
from England to preserve their freedom, but who
themselves destroy this freedom by their own
deeds in America.”2
Cooper’s designation as historical novelist is
supported by Robert Clark in History, Ideology and
Myth in American Fiction, 1832-52. Clark also
writes, “One of the principal reasons for offering a
novel as historical is to remove from fiction the
taint of the lie. The tendency to collapse history
into romance deprived the author of the ability to
claim that his fiction was above reproach because
true to the known record, . . . the American
novelist was not eager to call himself a romancer,
the more so since ‘the romance’ carried all the
pejorative significations of falseness and deceit
which the word has conveyed from Johnson’s day
to this.”3 For Clark, Cooper considered himself a
historian not a romancer. Yet we know from
Cooper’s own words that he considered America
“thin” in both historical and romantic substance.
Alan Holder writes, “Though he complained in
Notions of the Americans that there were ‘no annals
for the historian’ in our country, and ‘no obscure
functions for the writer of romance,’ he attempted
to create significant images of the American past.”4
He created the images by claiming the preroga-
tives of both the historian and romancer; the ele-
ments of the “known record” and the “deceit” of
the imaginative recreation merge in the act of
inscription so that the individual character’s
personal history becomes a metaphor for national
history.5 When the “deceitful” elements of the
plot are distinctly Gothic, one discovers a radi-
cally different way of reading a “historical” narra-
tive. Take the example of Cooper’s Lionel Lincoln
(1825).
Lionel Lincoln is one of the darkest portraits of
national identity ever painted, particularly strik-
ing as a work to commemorate the 50th an-
niversary of the Battles of Lexington, Concord,
and Bunker Hill. It was to be the first in a series of
stories on the Revolution.6 Cooper seems to have
been in financial and emotional distress at the
time of its inception: hounded by creditors, suffer-
ing from digestive disorders, recovering from an
attack of sunstroke, and mourning the recent
death of his son Fenimore. While these personal
sorrows are reflected in the work’s agonized father-
son relationship, Cooper also devised an intensely
researched historical background for the story, as-
serting that the battle scenes were “as faithfully
described as is possible to have been done by one
who was not an eyewitness of those important
events.”7 This documented history and its struggle
with Cooper’s overlay of Gothic plot and vision
give the novel a nightmarish, and wholly Ameri-
can, sense of dread.
As in the similarly uneasy preface to Brockden
Brown’s Wieland, the author of Lionel Lincoln
speaks in his preface of his calm and steady
character, his disdain for spookery: “He is indebted
to no garrulous tale-teller for beguiling the long
winter evenings; in ghosts he has no faith; he
never had a vision in his life, and he sleeps too
soundly to dream.”8 Yet tales, ghosts, visions, and
dreams are at the heart of his novel, and the
complacent author who wishes “to live in peace
and hopes to die in the fear of God” (LL, 211) is
also present in scenes of savagery and despair. The
double voice of the Gothicist who attempts to
distance himself from his vision is as much a
structural principle here as the disjunction be-
tween documented historical fact and the imagi-
native metaphors of familial and national identity
that give the work its uniquely Gothic view of his-
tory.
The novel tells the story of Lionel Lincoln, a
young American who has lived for many years in
England and who, in 1775, returns to his natal
town of Boston as a major in the British army.
The Boston to which he returns is in the first
stages of revolutionary insurrection. The young
man’s attempts to understand the land he has left
and his search for family ties are woven together
in a tapestry of forbidding gloom and violence.
The plot is structured around a series of op-
positions, the first of which involves Great Britain
and the American colony. The British are pre-
sented as wary soldiers, unable to fathom the
depth of the colonialist anger. Their first sight of
Boston shows “sullen ships” and the “broad, silky
folds of the flag of England” covering a mob of
Americans plotting violent revolution. From the
opening passages on, Cooper paints a picture of
political and moral instability, where the fear is
located in the very real possibility of violence and
destruction. This is the perception of the British
soldiers. The colonials also see a dark picture of
oppression and violence. Neither side is presented
as morally superior, nor is Cooper intent on giv-
ing the reader a civics lesson. These people are
determined adversaries in a deadly struggle. They
have a clear allegiance to a cause and therefore are
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not material for Gothic transformation. Instead,
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
they form the backdrop of reality upon which the
historical novel depends; the Gothic hero, Lionel
Lincoln, and the mystery surrounding him serve
the transforming needs of Gothic narrative.
While the political/historical dimension of
this novel is concerned with the conflict between
the mother country and her rebellious child, the
personal/historical dimension involves a young
man born in the uneasy state of national duality.
He describes himself as an American “by birth,
but an Englishman by habit and education” (LL,
213). His role in returning to Boston is as represen-
tative of the oppressor and defender of those
“habits” he has adopted. The people he meets may
be categorized by their response to the call for
revolution. Cooper presents a wide-ranging group
of Americans, some bent on freedom at any cost,
others desiring a more decorous appeal for justice,
still others content to remain British subjects. All
are involved in a momentous historical decision,
but it is only for Lionel Lincoln that personal and
national identity are at stake; he is the one for
whom this return signals a desire for understand-
ing how the past affects the present. In him, politi-
cal and familial identification are made to take
the same course, and it is through him that the
Gothic vision brings the narrative’s oppositions
together.
The Gothic components of this narrative are
dependent on the mysterious figure of a deranged
old man named Ralph, who haunts Lionel as
intensely as any ghost one might meet in this
genre. He first confronts Lionel on board the ship
bringing British soldiers to Boston, and is im-
mediately associated with the rebels’ hatred of
British occupation: “Will the day ever arrive, . . .
when those flags shall be lowered, never to rise
again in this hemisphere?” (LL, 213). Ralph also
introduces the theme of familial identity when he
castigates Lionel’s description of his English
“habits and education”: “Accursed be the habits,
and neglected the education, which would teach
a child to forget its parentage!” (LL, 213). These
two themes, the historical birth of a nation and
the birth of personal identity, surge through the
work, and it is Ralph’s haunting presence that
places Lionel Lincoln at the center of this move-
ment.
Lionel’s next meeting with Ralph is as eerie a
Gothic encounter as Cooper was to write. Lionel
is searching out the meeting places of the revolu-
tionaries and is led by the half-witted boy Job to
Beacon Hill:
59
 Job shook his head threateningly as he looked up
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
and said, “Don’t let Ralph hear you say anything
ag’in liberty!”
“Ralph, who is he lad? your genius! Where do you
keep the invisible, that there is danger of his
overhearing what I say?”
“He’s up there in the foot,” said Job, pointing
significantly toward the foot of the beacon, which
a dense volume of vapor was enwrapping, prob-
ably attracted by the tall post that supported the
grade.
Lionel gazed at the smoky column for a moment,
when the mists began to dissolve, and amid their
evolutions he beheld the dim figure of his aged
fellow-passenger. The old man was still clad in
gray, which harmonized so singularly with the
mists as to impart a look almost ethereal to his
wasted form.
(LL, 230-31)
Ralph’s speech in this scene also places him
directly in the tradition of Gothic seers: “Come
hither, Lionel Lincoln, to the foot of this beacon,
where you may gather warnings, which, if prop-
erly heeded, will guide you through many and
great dangers unharmed” (LL, 231). Lionel indeed
recognizes Ralph as almost “a being of another
world.” The warning Ralph gives is to avoid the
places where the revolutionaries meet; as a soldier
of His Majesty, Lionel is an enemy to the cause.
He also introduces the metaphor of the parent-
child relationship as a metaphor for the ruler and
the ruled in the following exchange with Ralph:
“We are the subjects of one king; children who
own a common parent.” “I will not reply that he
has proved himself an unnatural father,” said the
old man calmly” (LL, 231). Thus the twin themes
of national and familial identity are woven to-
gether for Lionel and the reader by the Gothic vi-
sion of the narrative.
Ralph’s haunting stature in this work is rein-
forced by his function as the voice of memory and
recollection: “Look at me, . . . I have seen most
of this flourishing country a wilderness; my recol-
lection goes back into those periods when the sav-
age, and the beast of the forest, contended with
our fathers for much of that soil which now sup-
ports its hundreds of thousands in plenty; and my
time is to be numbered, not in years but in ages.
For such a being, think you there can be yet many
months, or weeks, or even days in store?” (LL,
244). In remembering America’s past, he embod-
ies Lionel’s future national identity. Yet this voice
of American rebellion is unequivocally sinister and
frightening. For most of the plot Lionel and his
friends think Ralph a madman, a dangerous
lunatic. He is often glimpsed by the red glare of
60
the fires near the revolutionary camps and seems
to live for revenge against England that seems as
personal as it is political. In short, he is neither
heroic nor kind nor respectable, and this is the
character Cooper chooses as the leader of the
American struggle for independence. Much of the
criticism directed at the book by early critics
reveals the uneasiness with which Ralph was
viewed as a leader of the American Revolution.9
He is far from the idealized hero a country would
embrace.
Such criticism fails to consider the Gothic vi-
sion of the work. Ralph exists as a haunting figure
for Lionel; he is important to the text only as he
reflects the turmoil of America on the brink of
revolution. Lionel himself is the quintessential
Gothic hero: young, unruffled, rather complacent.
He is not unsympathetic to the plight of the
colonists, he is merely unable to comprehend the
desire for separation, perhaps because he has so
much attached himself to England and what it
represents. He has family in Boston, staunch loyal-
ists all, but does not concern himself with what
Ralph calls the “nightly convulsion” to come: “‘I
cannot admit the signs of the times to be quite so
portentous as your fears would make them,’ said
Lionel, smiling a little proudly” (LL, 244). It is
through this young man’s education into the
chaos of his world that the novel accomplishes
the integration of the Gothic and historical
modes.
The Boston to which Lionel returns is obvi-
ously an externalized city of night, illuminated by
revolutionaries carrying lamps to secret meetings
with the air of a witches’ sabbath about them. Like
his literary cousin Robin in Hawthorne’s “My
Kinsman, Major Molineux,” Lionel is a deeply
divided character, given to following the lead of
his companions. The reason for Ralph’s hold on
Lionel is just that sense of extreme suggestiveness
or instability that mark a Gothic protagonist. It is
through the blurring of distinctions between the
imaginary frightful and the actual frightful that
Lionel turns a personal identity crisis into a
national one.
The novel’s most famous scene is a perfect il-
lustration of Cooper’s blending of the Gothic and
historical modes. Late one evening Lionel, out on
patrol, finds himself at Cobb’s Hill, where the
English have stationed their cannons by a grave-
yard. Lionel moves through the mist-shrouded
area only to come upon Job:
“Job loves to come up among the graves, before
the cocks crow; they say the dead walk when liv-
ing men sleep.”
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 “And would you hold communion with the dead,
then?”
“Tis sinful to ask them many questions, and such
as you do not should be made in the Holy
Name, . . .”
“Hush!” said Lionel—what noise is that?”
. . . . .
“There’s no noise but the moaning of the wind in
the bay, or the sea tumbling on the beaches of the
islands.”
“Tis neither,” said Lionel; “I heard the low hum of
a hundred voices, or my ears have played me
falsely.”
“May the spirits speak to each other,” said the
lad—“they say their voices are like the rushing
winds.”
Lionel passed his hand over his brow, and endeav-
ored to recover the tone of his mind, which had
been strangely disordered by the solemn manner
of his companion, and walked slowly from the
spot, closely attended by the silent changeling.
(LL, 298)
In this remarkable passage, the distant hum of
warfare and the voices of the dead mingle in the
“disordered” imagination of a young soldier
revisiting the places of his youth. The concrete-
ness of the historical setting and the imaginative
evocation of fearful mystery are here drawn
together so that our perception of the past is
inextricably linked with our expectations of the
Gothic: in effect, the act of meditating on the past
becomes a Gothic exercise.
Another passage that illustrates Cooper’s
recasting of the historical novel occurs in chapter
15 of Lionel Lincoln. Here, Lionel, unable to shake
off the fear of his visit to Cobb’s Hill, has a
nightmare:
When the heavy sleep of morning fell upon his
senses, visions of the past and future mingled with
wild confusion in the dreams of the youthful
soldier. The form of his father stood before
him. . . . While his heart was warming at the
sight, the figure melted away, and was succeeded
by fantastic phantoms, which appeared to dance
among the graves on Cobb’s Hill, led along in
these gambols, which partook of the ghastly hor-
rors of the dead, by Job Pray, who glided among
the tombs like a being of another world. Sudden
and loud thunder then burst upon them, and the
shadows fled into their secret places, from whence
he could see . . . some glassy eyes and spectral
faces, peering out upon him, as if conscious of the
power they possessed to chill the blood of the liv-
ing. . . . Lionel arose from his bed, . . . in a vain
effort to shake off the images that had haunted
his slumbers.
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“Ha!” he muttered to himself, “I have been dream-
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
ing by halves—these are but the sounds of no
fancied tempest, but cannon, speaking most
plainly to the soldier!”
(LL, 299)
In this dream passage we see the way in which
the “real” place and circumstance of revolution-
ary Boston become a part of the “imaginative”
fears of Lionel Lincoln: the personal remembrance
of the father mingles with the dead on Cobb’s
Hill who scatter at the report of British cannon.
The weight of the past is an oppressive force
in Gothic narrative. Characters either are made to
suffer the results of old sins or curses (The Castle of
Otranto, Wieland, The House of the Seven Gables,
The Marble Faun, Poltergeist) or to replicate the lives
lived in some shadowy past (Dracula, The Turn of
the Screw, Vertigo, Psycho, Marnie, Salem’s Lot). In
either case, the people and events of the past cling
to the minds of these characters, enveloping them
in guilt and madness. Critics have long supposed
the Gothic to be a genre marked by Oedipal fears
stemming from the political and religious upheav-
als of the eighteenth century.1 0 The revolt against
God and King established by the American and
French revolutions triggered tremendous repres-
sive fears about the Father’s power, and the
exhilaration at overthrowing patriarchal figures
met with an equally intense sense of fear, shame,
and guilt at such revolt. This dual emotion of at-
traction and revulsion is a familiar one in the
Gothic novel where revolt, whether manifested as
a turning to evil or a straining of the limits of ac-
ceptable social structure, is punished swiftly, even
if such revolt is justifiable in moral terms.
This equivocal view regarding revolution and
revolutionary figures denies the possibility of read-
ing Gothic fiction as purely politically subversive.
Aside from the fact that the Gothic does not af-
firm anything and, therefore, does not posit social
change as the answer to social ills, its sense of suf-
fering and dissolution as punishment for demonic
transformation undercuts its prescience regarding
the causes of revolt. Much of European Gothic
narrative is set in the medieval period precisely
because it is perceived as a time of political and
religious oppression. The falsity of such a percep-
tion in historical terms has little to do with its
resonance in imaginative terms. Likewise, the
Victorian period has become synonymous with a
Gothic view because it is perceived as a period of
repression, guilt, and injustice. This view has
become so emotionally potent that modern
Gothic narratives use the Victorian setting as
shorthand representation for the Gothic vision:
61
 Sweeney Todd, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Mysteries
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
of Winterthurn, and The Elephant Man are only a
few. Cooper’s Ralph is, then, fulfilling a proper
Gothic function in this novel: the demonically
transformed man who haunts the narrative and is
marked by suffering and despair. That he seems to
be the figurehead of the Boston revolt is perfectly
in keeping with the Gothic’s exhilaration in and
fear of revolt.
Ralph not only externalizes the spirit of
revolution, he holds the key to the mystery of Li-
onel Lincoln’s past. Lionel has returned to Boston
filled with longing for the father who disappeared
many years before. No one will give him informa-
tion except to say that his father returned to Eng-
land and was not heard of again. Only Ralph takes
much interest in the young man, sinister though
much of it is. This interest is explained late in the
novel when Ralph is revealed as the father Lionel
has awaited.
Ralph’s unmasking reveals his lost years as
spent incarcerated in an English madhouse, put
there by the scheming family whose fortunes he
did not add to his. His escape from the asylum
enabled him to travel back to America. What is so
interesting about this typical Gothic plot device is
the equation Ralph makes between his imprison-
ment by English keepers and America’s “imprison-
ment” by Great Britain. Just as he has thrown off
the chains of bondage, so he exhorts the colonists
to do so. In other words, his patriotic stance is an
extension of his dementia, for the years of impris-
onment have robbed him of his reason. He also
manages to sway Lionel’s English convictions by
threatening to tell him all: “‘Thou shalt have all
thou askest, Lionel Lincoln, and more,’ returned
Ralph . . . ‘provided thou will swear eternal
hatred to that country and those laws, by which
an innocent and unoffending man can be leveled
with the beasts of the field, and be made to rave
even at his Maker, in the bitterness of his
sufferings.’ ‘More than that—ten thousand times
more than that, will I swear—I will league with
this rebellion—. . .’” (LL, 397).
This vow of hatred and revenge is Ralph’s
legacy to Lionel, and his gradual movement to a
double allegiance is halted only by the arrival of
his father’s keeper from England who promptly
engages the raving Lincoln in a fight during which
the old man again analogizes his imprisonment
with American rebellion: “‘Vengeance is holy!’
cried the maniac, bursting into a shout of horrid
laughter at his triumph, and shaking his gray locks
till they flowed in wild confusion around his glow-
ing eyeballs; ‘Urin and thrummin are the words of
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glory! Liberty is the shout! Die, damned dog! die
like the fiends in darkness, and leave freedom to
the air!’” (LL, 405). Ralph is stabbed by the jailor
and dies near the body of his bastard son Job, who
has been murdered by English soldiers.
Ralph Lincoln’s final moments are counter-
point to the continuing battle raging in the streets
of Boston, where the Americans are about to force
a British retreat. The mystery of Lionel’s identity
resolved, he immediately retreats from his sympa-
thetic position to the colonials and plans a return
home to the England that shaped him and impris-
oned his father. The final passages relate the thriv-
ing fortunes of Lionel and his wife in England
where, we are told, they lived in “sweetest con-
cord” till the “eruption of the French Revolution.”
As at the conclusion of Wieland, characters flee
America, scene of mysterious revelations and
upheavals, to take refuge in the bosom of the
mother country and to make reparation for hav-
ing doubted her.
While America is singularly lacking in the rich
supernatural beings of the European tradition—
werewolf, vampire, zombie—we do have the
complex figure of the Indian, once thought a race
of demons, and the haunting legacy of the Salem
witch trials. From Charles Brockden Brown and
Nathaniel Hawthorne to Arthur Miller, the blood
of witches has nurtured many an American tale of
terror. Of those narratives set in the Salem of that
time, Esther Forbes’s A Mirror for Witches (1928) is
perhaps the most extraordinary. The work is
presented as an account of the progress of a young
witch, told by a narrator living near the time of
the actual events. Less well known than Haw-
thorne’s explorations of this phenomenon,
Forbes’s novel is equally harrowing in its depic-
tion of colonial America, and subtle in exposing
the societal mechanism necessary to sustain an
ideology.
The work is given its unique style by the nar-
rative voice. The narrator is convinced that
witches did exist, and to support this begins his
chronicle with a list of examples “To Show Doll
Bilby not alone among Women in her preference
for Evil. The Cases of Ry, Goose, Leda, Danae, etc.,
cited.”1 1 The narrative voice is at once established
as an alien one, deliberately toying with the
reader’s associations with other witch chroniclers
like Cotton Mather by maintaining a believing
tone in the narrative that is often undercut by an
irony of the author’s making. While Esther Forbes
is certainly not supporting the belief in witches,
she is quite successful in creating a narrator who
does, and the subtle tension between the chroni-
cler and the imaginative artist is established early
in the text: “A few years later, Christie Goose, a
single woman of upwards forty years, suddenly
flew lunatic—and that upon the Lord’s Day. Then
she did confess that each night and every night,
the Devil, wickedly assuming the shape Mr. Oates,
God’s minister at Crumplehorn, Oxon., came to
her through the window. This fact amazed
Crumplehorn, for Goose was of all women most
pious, and had sat for years in humble prayerful-
ness at the feet of Mr. Oates. Some were astonished
that even a devil should find need for this same
Goose, who was of hideous aspect” (M, 28).
The sly hints of Forbes’s irony are seldom
though significantly felt through the narrative.
An “estimable church woman” falls from a ladder
and believes it is a trick of the devil. Why was she
on the ladder? She was spying on her serving girl
and a male servant in the hayloft. A villager
wishes to marry his son to a wealthy woman
thought by some to be a witch. The old man
ignores the dangers: “He cared more that his son
should have a great property in this world than
that his son should be saved for the next. He was
not an evil man, for he was a deacon in the
Church” (M, 16-17). These and other touches of
skepticism give the narrative a complexity that
disturbs as much as any of the terrors of the plot.
The conjunction of historical recreation and
modern nightmare prevents the reader from
emotionally dissociating himself from the text.
The participants in this historical pageant are
disaffected English men and women, many of
them religious outcasts seeking personal liberty in
the New Land. Throughout the text, Forbes indi-
cates the essentially alienated feelings of these
early Americans towards their new home, a land
full of unknown terror. They are still tied to the
folk traditions of their past, and ruled by a strong
sense of sin within the community. While a
number of these characters are stereotypically
dour, hypocritical Puritan types, others offer a
more “reasoned” and compassionate voice. Basi-
cally, the characters may be grouped by their reac-
tions to three symbols of mystery and power: the
forest, the Indian, and Doll Bilby.
The forest is a place of dark evil for the village,
and as the dwelling of the Indian, a habitation for
Satan and his followers:
To the west, beyond the rough pastures, and too
close for a wholesome peace of mind, was a forest
of a size and terror such as no Englishman could
conceive of unless he had actually seen it. It
stretched without break farther than man could
imagine, and the trees of it were greater than the
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masts of an admiral or the piers of a cathedral. Yet
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
it was always a green and gloomy night in this
forest, and over all was silence, unbreakable. Many
thought the tawny savages who lived within were
veritable devils, and that somewhere within this
vastness, Satan himself might be found.
(M, 19)
The few villagers who venture into this trans-
forming haunted spot are the object of social
ostracism: Goody Greene’s talents as an herbalist
gain her widespread enmity because she “associ-
ates herself with the heathen tawny savages and
thus learns arts—doubtless often evil arts—from
them” (M, 19). That Greene’s respect and affec-
tion for the Indians permits her these unusual
liberties, no one considers. Instead, she is reported
to the Church elders who tell her, “it is better for
a woman to keep her own house than to go
abroad through the woods alone and no one
knows on what errand” (M, 17).
The voice of reason in the novel belongs to
Zacharias Zelley, a middle-aged Englishman come
to Cowan Corners to preach the Gospel in a
nonconformist fashion. Zelley’s response to the
fear of the forest and its Indians is to offer his view
of God in the New World: “‘For,’ he said, ‘we left
the Devil behind in England. Seek God in the
heart of this majestic and awful forest—not the
Devil. . . . Let us leave him there in the Old Eng-
land, but in the New keep our eyes pure and open
against the coming of the Lord” (M, 8). As it turns
out, Zelley’s theology is no more able to protect
him from the terrors of the plot than the supersti-
tious folk he opposes. Greene and Zelley are
representative of the individual in conflict with
the group perception, and as such could either be
visionaries or outlaws. They are branded the lat-
ter, not only because they do not see the Devil’s
hoofprints under every leaf, but because of their
affection for Doll Bilby, the locus of demonic
transforming power in this text.
Doll is everything the Puritan fears: wild,
natural, uninhibited, sensual, and foreign. Alone
of the people in Cowan Corners, she is a European:
her parents were charged with witchcraft in their
native Brittany. Our introduction to her associates
her with social ostracism and religious intolerance.
As her parents burn at the stake, a compassionate
English tradesman carriers her in his arms to
comfort her. His decision to raise the child as his
own is met by a curse flung by the officiating
priest: “Take the child be gone. She was born of a
witch-woman and will grow to witchcraft and do
much harm—but in England among the heretics.
Be gone.”1 2 The priest’s prediction does, in fact,
come true but more as an illustration of the ways
63
 in which ideology depends on the internalizing of
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
oppression than as prophecy.
The strangeness of Doll Bilby’s looks and
conduct make her an object of loathing for the
people of Cowan Corners. Forbes makes clear the
extent to which jealousy and sexual desire color
their reaction to Doll. Her wild black hair, shining
black eyes, and lithe shape draw both the wander-
ing eyes of the young men and the reproachful
ones of the young women. Doll’s stepmother’s
jealousy over Mr. Bilby’s love for Doll sets her
against the child from the start. Much of the
evidence against Doll comes from Hannah Bilby,
whose hysterical pregnancies and neurasthenia
are attributed to Doll’s malefic powers.
Her sexual attractiveness also contributes to
her legend. She is seen in the company of a large
black bull who roams the fields. This symbol of
desire especially haunts the dreams of Titus
Thumb, Doll’s suitor and enforced fiancé. His
desire for Doll is a horror to him, at once drawing
her to him and confirming his belief in her
demonic nature. Just as Hannah projects onto
Doll her jealousy and bitterness, so Titus makes
Doll a monster of sinful lust. In fact, for much of
the text Doll is only a receptacle for the fears and
desires of the villagers. The title, A Mirror for
Witches, while ostensibly referring to the glass into
which Doll is seen staring, actually refers to Doll
as a mirror-image of those good citizens of Cowan
Corners whose sacrificial offering she becomes.
Doll is also associated with the forest and the
Indian, first by her friendship with Goody Greene
and, secondly, by her habit of taking solitary walks
through the forest. Her relationship with Greene
is the first major sign that she is submitting to the
group perception of herself. She hopes that Greene
will tell her tales of witchcraft and evil, so she
might know how a witch acts. She frequents the
forest hoping to meet the Devil and hear his will
for her. Doll’s pathetic attempts to play what she
comes to believe is her role only serve to convince
the village that she is indeed a witch. One of the
tropes of Gothic narrative that Forbes exploits
here is the suffocating inability to be seen as the
victim when it is against the wishes of the charac-
ters representing authority (for example, the
police chief in Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm
Street [1985] who will not believe his daughter’s
terror at being chased by “the boogeyman”). Her
delight in the mystery and dark beauty of the for-
est—just those qualities that make it stand out
against the drab village—lead her to the narrative’s
central incident, Doll’s vision in the forest (M, 63).
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Much of Doll’s confusion about her witch
nature revolves around why she receives no sign
from Satan marking her his own, another mirror
inversion of the believer’s anguish at the silence
of God. Late in the narrative, Doll, bereft of the
one kind face she knows, that of her dead father,
spends the night deep in the forest. Here she has
a vision which the narrator acknowledges alter-
nates between wakefulness and sleep and is,
therefore, of ambiguous nature. The vision in-
cludes manifestations of supernatural folklore,
friends, goblins, vampires and the like but also
images of Doll’s past. She awakens from this vi-
sion fully accepting her demonism: “She called
upon her Father in Hell, thanking him that he
had made manifest to her visible proof of his
greatness. . . . She called upon all that vast host
of evil things, blessed them, and promised to serve
them” (M, 9). At this point, Doll has no alterna-
tive but to live out the fearful prophecy of the
priest at Mont Höel and her role in the drama of
life in Cowan Corners.
While the bleakness of Doll’s tale is unspar-
ingly presented, the text does posit one faint
glimpse of light in the picture: the possibility of
love to alter circumstances. The one road of escape
from the horrors of Mont Höel is that of simple
affection, and in this particular text, love for the
Other. Jared Bilby’s love for Doll gives her, and
the reader, practically the only glimpse of sustain-
ing affection in Cowan Corners. Bilby finds Doll a
wild, frightened little creature, scorned by all, but
his kindness transforms her: “The captain coaxed
and petted her, urged her to eat, and quieted her
with his hands. So by love he restored her to
humanity” (M, 12). In the Bilby home, where she
is treated to blows and neglect, Mr. Bilby alone
dares to kiss “a wide hobgoblin mouth which
many a Christian would fear to kiss” (M, 72). This
last hope of escape from the horror of cruelty and
ignorance is given a particular voice by Zacharias
Zelley: “In his praying Mr. Zelley (so it was
observed) twice asked with particular passion that
the old hatreds, the old jealousies, and the old,
cruel superstitions might be left behind, and that
in the new land, the spirit of man might break
forth as a chick breaks the egg” (M, 19). With the
death of Mr. Bilby, however, such hope disappears.
Ironically, it is Bilby’s sudden death that provides
the charge upon which Doll is tried for witchcraft.
The pathetically weak hope of redeeming love
is also evident in Doll’s relations with two other
kindly characters, Goody Greene and Mr. Zelley.
Greene is another outsider, a strange old woman
whose cordial relations with the Indian marks her
as evil: “The Indians venerated her, calling her
‘White Mother’ and ‘Moon-Woman.’ She went
even into the great forest with more safety than
any man. She was loving towards these peoples
and had much traffic with them, . . .” (M, 51).
Doll is responsible for even greater hostility to
Greene from the villagers; the old woman’s kind-
ness does not exempt her from the Salem hang-
ings. Zacharias Zelley is a more complex character;
he is the narrative’s Gothic protagonist, the man
utterly transformed by his brush with the Other.
Apart from his significance as the voice of belief
in a new order, Zelley is revealed as a “good” man
by a number of small details, the most telling of
which is his response to the Quakers.
In the passage describing Doll’s trial, the nar-
rator shows us the Meeting House, the com-
munity’s center of justice and righteousness, the
holy place set against the evil forest:
By the windows and doores of the Meeting House
were nailed the grim and grinning heads of
wolves, freshly slain. In the stocks before the Meet-
ing House were two Quaker women, the one in
an extremity of despair and cold (for there was
some ice on the ground) and the other brazen,
screaming out profanities and laughing in her
disgrace. Upon the roof-walk paced back and forth
Captain Buzzey of the train-band troop, beating
his drum in great long rolls, summoning all to
come and worship.
(M, 52-53)
One of Forbes’s slyest touches, this passage
indicates the intolerance and ferocity of the
Cowan Corners society. Zelley’s humanity is set
against this cruelty.
Instead of listening to the discussions in the noon-
house, he went out of doors and stood before the
evil women in the stocks, exhorting them in the
name of Christ Jesus to repent and be forgiven.
Theodate Gookin, a stout child, mocked them and
pelted them with small apples. This action of the
child enraged Mr. Zelley more than had the foul
blasphemies of the Quakers. He roughly ordered
Theodate to lay off his warm overcoat. This he
spread kindly over the back of the most insuffer-
able of the blasphemers. By which act of charity,
he stilled her lying tongue. . . .
(M, 145-46)
Zelley’s charity does not save him. The kind
man is destroyed by his association with Doll, first
by her hysterical assertions of her witch power
and second, by the knowledge that the town now
suspects him of evildoing; later in the text we are
told that Zelley was tried in the Salem witch-
hunts. The paralyzing realization of his helpless-
ness leaves him doubting everything he has lived
for and the God he has worshipped.
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For Doll herself, love is a fierce determination
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
to force Satan to reveal himself. When she comes
upon an escaped convict in the forest, she takes
him for her Master, and surrenders herself to him.
By this time convinced of her demonic nature,
she awaits the birth of her demon-child and the
replication of her own childhood. She had em-
braced her role with passionate engagement and
“wanted no other God than Lucifer and no
Heaven, . . . Hell was her true home—her Para-
dise.”1 3 Guarded by the only villager to risk it, a
fiercely ugly old vagabond of indeterminate
gender, Doll dies in a visionary ecstasy of welcom-
ing demons. The child is born dead.
The triumph of Forbes’s novel is its relentless
revelation of the construction and defense of
ideology by terror. This glimpse into the American
past is as historically “correct” as one might expect
from a member of the Antiquarian society, a
woman deemed “a novelist who wrote like a
historian and a historian who wrote like a novel-
ist.”1 4 What she has given us is a text set in the
period which, for Americans, fulfills the emotional
function of the Middle Ages for British Gothicists,
a time perceived as defined by darkness and moral
corruption. A Mirror for Witches is certainly a
historical novel of the kind Lukacs discusses—its
characters are what they are in response to their
time—but what the novel most impresses upon us
is the implication of our Puritan ideology for the
Other—in this work for women, people of color,
aliens, sexual marginals, and nonconformists of
all kinds. In revealing a fierce terrorism at the
heart of America’s founding ideology, Forbes
makes history itself the bearer of sickness that she
obviously means us to relate to our own time. In
this, she continues the vision of Lionel Lincoln and
other American Gothic narratives that see history
as a long nightmare from which we wake only fit-
fully and tremble.
Notes
1. George Lukacs, The Historical Novel (Lincoln and
London: The University of Nebraska Press, repr. 1983),
p. 19.
2. The Historical Novel, p. 65.
3. Robert Clark, History, Ideology and Myth in American
Fiction, 1823-52 (London: The Macmillan Press, Ltd.,
1984), p. 48.
4. Alan Holder, The Imagined Past: Portrayals of Our His-
tory in Modern American Literature (Lewisburg: Bucknell
University Press, 1980), p. 13.
5. The Leatherstocking Saga is an example of the
technique in which the journey of Natty Bumpo is a
metaphorical reflection of America’s development.
65
 6. Background on the composition of Lionel Lincoln from
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
“Historical Introduction” to the edition of the novel
published in 1984 by the State University of New York,
Albany Press, pp. xv-xl.
7. “Historical Introduction,” p. 211.
8. James Fenimore Cooper, Lionel Lincoln (New York:
Peter Fenelon Collier, Publisher, 1893), p. 210. All
subsequent text references, designated by LL, are to
this edition.
9. See pp. xxiv-xxv of “Historical Introduction” for criti-
cal commentary by Cooper’s contemporaries. We must
also remember that Cooper was, in political terms, an
ardent supporter of Jeffersonian democracy—at least
in his waking hours. What we find in Lionel Lincoln is
the nightmare equivalent of the Jeffersonian dream.
10. See Devendra Varma’s The Gothic Flame (New York:
Russell and Russell, 1966) and David Punter’s The
Literature of Terror (London: Longman Group, Ltd.,
1980) for discussion of this theme.
11. Esther Forbes, A Mirror for Witches (New York: Dell
Publishing Co., Inc., 1969), p. 5. All subsequent text
references, designated by M, are to this edition.
12. Forbes’s writing in this passage is obviously a homage
to Hawthorne and “Young Goodman Brown,” though
that earlier story is less concerned with a political view
of history than a glimpse of the terrors of radical
subjectivity.
13. American Women Writers, ed. Lina Mainiero (New York:
Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1968), v. 2, p. 63.
14. [Obituary, New York Times, August 13, 1967, p. 80.]
ERIC SAVOY (ESSAY DATE 1998)
SOURCE: Savoy, Eric. “The Face of the Tenant: A
Theory of American Gothic.” In American Gothic: New
Interventions in a National Narrative, edited by Robert K.
Martin and Eric Savoy, pp. 3-19. Iowa City: University
of Iowa Press, 1998.
In the following essay, Savoy discusses various literary
theories and analyses of the Gothic in American literature.
“Think of him,” she said, placing a finger against
the front-view portrait of the blond young man.
“Think of those eyes. Coming toward you.” Then
she pushed the pictures back into their envelope.
“I wish you hadn’t shown me.”
Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
A “theory” of gothic cultural production in
the United States is necessarily invested in a poet-
ics of terror—a tropics, a recurring turn of lan-
guage. If such generally structuring turns are most
strikingly conceptualized in particular moments,
then this brief excerpt from Capote’s work sug-
gests the multiple, inevitable, and even casual
ways in which narrative might take a decidedly
gothic turn. These chilling words are spoken by
Marie Dewey—the wife of Alvin Dewey, an agent
of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation—late in
1959 as she studies the photographs of two men
66 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
who, without apparent motive, murdered a farm
family “on the high wheat plains of western
Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call
‘out there’” (3). While the photographs give a face,
a human agency, to a crime whose horror lies in
its absence of meaning and its distance from the
rationally explicable, her discourse betrays the
desire to situate the static image of the face in a
narrative, a desire from which she immediately
recoils. What is most striking in Marie Dewey’s
language—what is most suggestive of the gothic
turn—is her syntax of reiterated imperative.
“Think of . . .” insists upon both the imaginative
reconstruction of a historical event—a moment
just prior to violent annihilation—and what
might be called “being out there,” an intuitive,
visceral knowledge of terrible affect that ap-
proaches the experiential. In the queerly hybrid
“nonfiction novel” that Capote attempted in the
writing of In Cold Blood, Marie Dewey’s brief ap-
pearance signifies both the act of reading
“America” and the writerly turn toward the
fascination of the fearful, a fascination that, she
implies, ought not to be indulged but inexorably is.
Her fleeting comments suggest that the gothic
tendency in American culture is organized around
the imperative to repetition, the return of what is
unsuccessfully repressed, and, moreover, that this
return is realized in a syntax, a grammar, a tropic
field. Once instigated, Marie Dewey’s impulse to
narrate the body that violates and the violated
body can only escalate in the structure of haunt-
ing textual return: the photograph of Richard
Hickock’s face, especially his eyes, gives her what
might be colloquially called a “turn,” which is
turned into a narrative obligation, which subse-
quently recurs in the rumor that Hickock be-
queathed his eyes “‘to an eye doctor. Soon as they
cut him down, this doctor’s gonna yank out his
eyes and stick them in somebody else’s head’”
(338). This final gothic turn provides a composi-
tional vanishing point in which there is no
vanishing; horrific history acquires a body, a face,
a figure that recedes into futurity. The failure of
repression and forgetting—a failure upon which
the entire tradition of the gothic in America is
predicated—will be complete in those conscious
eyes. Such a return is not merely monstrous and
unthinkable, it is uncanny. And the writing of the
uncanny is the field—or, more precisely, the mul-
tivalent tendency—of American gothic, an imagi-
native requirement by which, as Leslie Fiedler
pointed out, “the past, even dead, especially dead,
could continue to work harm” (131).
 In the thirty years since the publication of Love
and Death in the American Novel, Fiedler’s geneal-
ogy of American gothic has remained vitally sug-
gestive; indeed, his broad connections between
historiography and psychoanalysis have shaped
the parameters of subsequent conceptualization.
He insists on the absolute centrality of the gothic
in American literature, for “until the gothic had
been discovered, the serious American novel could
not begin; and as long as that novel lasts, the
gothic cannot die” (143), while gesturing toward
its essentially paradoxical status in “America,” that
eighteenth-century construction “pledged to be
done with ghosts and shadows, committed to live
a life of yea-saying in a sunlit, neoclassical world”
(144). Influenced by his argument that “the whole
tradition of the gothic is a pathological symptom
rather than a proper literary movement” (135),
much post-Fiedlerian analysis has been preoc-
cupied with accounting for the role of the gothic
as a negation of the Enlightenment’s national nar-
ratives. Maggie Kilgour and Anne Williams, whose
work in British contexts is often applicable to
American ones, understand both the binary logics
that have required a darkness as the Enlighten-
ment’s Other and the interlinearity of gothic
cultural production and the rise of psychoanalysis.
Williams argues, via Foucault, that “Enlighten-
ment thought characteristically ordered and
organized by creating institutions to enforce
distinctions between society and its other. . . .
Like the haunted Gothic castle, the Freudian
discourse of self creates the haunted, dark, myste-
rious space even as it attempts to organize and
control it” (248). Kilgour’s declaration that “psy-
choanalysis is a late gothic story” (221) surveys
the cultural matrix that enabled the narrativiza-
tion of irrepressible Otherness.
In the American scene, it may be that broad
generalizations about the gothic—overshadowed
as they are by the genealogical tracing of British
and continental influences—have reached a limit
of conceptual or explanatory usefulness, and
further particularization is urgently required. Louis
S. Gross is surely right to read the gothic as a
“demonic history text” (2) in Redefining the Ameri-
can Gothic and to grasp its “common thread” as
“the singularity and monstrosity of the Other:
what the dominant culture cannot incorporate
within itself, it must project outward onto this
hated/desired figure” (90). However, this observa-
tion raises the question of how the project of nar-
rating “Otherness”—which indeed is a “domi-
nant” cultural mode—embodies a “figure” that it
“cannot incorporate within itself.” I suggest that
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the difficult task of such incorporation—of gestur-
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
ing toward that which resists an explicit lexicon—
has situated American gothic continuously in a
tropic field that approaches allegory: the gothic is
most powerful, and most distinctly American,
when it strains toward allegorical translucency.
Given the thinness, the blankness of the American
historical past and much of the American land-
scape, allegory—which is not, properly speaking,
a “figure” but which is supremely conducive to
the ghostly figures that we commonly associate
with gothic, particularly prosopopoeia—provided
a tropic of shadow, a kind of Hawthornian “neu-
tral territory” in which the actual is imbued with
the darkly hypothetical, a discursive field of return
and reiteration. It is, of course, the lesson of
Melville that nothing is so terrible as nothingness
itself, the absence of a coherently meaningful
symbolic: it is precisely the semantic impoverish-
ment of allegory, the haunting consequences of
its refusal of transparency, that impelled American
gothic’s narrativization of Otherness toward its
insubstantial shadows, and vice versa.
Like allegory, the gothic is a fluid tendency
rather than a discrete literary “mode,” an impulse
rather than a literary artifact. Such thinking seems
to prompt Anne Williams’s refusal to consider the
gothic—“a ‘something’ that goes beyond the
merely literary”—as simply a genre, a tradition, or
a set of conventions; rather, in asking “what noun
would ‘Gothic’ appropriately modify,” she sug-
gests the term “complex,” which denotes “an
intersection of grammar, architecture and psycho-
analysis” (23-24). A model of gothic “complexity”
that tends toward allegory—and I shall have more
to say about the particular figures that are gener-
ated by allegory—is a useful corollary to theories
of the historiographical orientation of gothic nar-
rative.
“American gothic” does not exist apart from
its specific regional manifestations; the burden of
a scarifying past is more typical of New England
and southern gothic than, for example, that of
the prairies, yet common to all is a narrative site
that tends to be an epistemological frontier in
which the spatial division between the known and
the unknown, the self and the Other, assumes
temporal dimensions. The gothic cannot function
without a proximity of Otherness imagined as its
imminent return; consequently, allegory’s rhetoric
of temporality—its gesturing toward what cannot
be explicitly recovered—aspires to a narrative of
the return of the Other’s plenitude on a frontier
67

GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
FLANNERY O’CONNOR (1925-1964)
O’Connor is considered one of the foremost
short story writers in American literature. She
was an anomaly among post-World War II
authors—a Roman Catholic from the Bible-
belt South whose stated purpose was to
reveal the mystery of God’s grace in everyday
life. O’Connor chose to depict salvation
through shocking, often violent action upon
characters who are spiritually or physically
grotesque. In her fiction O’Connor frequently
criticizes the materialism and spiritual apathy
of contemporary society, faulting modern
rationalism for its negation of the need for
religious faith and redemption. Employing
scenes and characters from her native south-
ern environment, she depicts the violent and
often bizarre religiosity of Protestant funda-
mentalists as a manifestation of spiritual life
struggling to exist in a nonspiritual world.
The protagonists of both of O’Connor’s
novels—Hazel Motes in Wise Blood (1952)
and Francis Marion Tarwater in The Violent
Bear It Away (1960)—experience intense
spiritual conflict. Often considered “Christ-
haunted” characters, they are tormented by
visions of God and the devil and by the
temptation to deny the reality of their revela-
tions. Critics have described O’Connor’s
protagonists as grotesque in personality,
inclined to violence, and isolated and frus-
trated by their spiritual struggle. Reflecting
the religious themes of her novels, a recur-
rent motif in O’Connor’s thirty-one short
stories is that of divine grace descending in
an often bizarre or violent manner upon a
spiritually deficient main character. She often
depicts a rural domestic situation suddenly
invaded by a criminal or perverse outsider—a
distorted Christ figure who redeems a pro-
tagonist afflicted with pride, intellectualism,
or materialism. In one of O’Connor’s best-
known stories, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
(1955), a smugly self-complacent grand-
mother is shocked into spiritual awareness by
a murderer who kills first her family and then
her. While sometimes faulted for gratuitous
use of the grotesque, O’Connor is almost
universally admired, if not fully understood.
68
in which “geography” supplements the impos-
sibilities of language, of both national and per-
sonal historiography.
According to David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders,
and Joanne B. Karpinski, “gothicism must abide
on a frontier—whether physical or psychical”;
despite the specific locatability of frontiers in vari-
ous cultural moments, American gothic historiog-
raphy generally “derives from [a] conflict between
the inscripted history of civilization and the his-
tory of the other, somehow immanent in the
landscape of the frontier” (17, my emphasis). A
symbolic Otherness that is “somehow immanent,”
that must be figured forth in narrative, suggests
the resonance between gothic historiography and
the haunting insubstantialities of allegorical trope.
Also conducive to the allegorical corollary—a
mode of narrative that is organized around semi-
otic gaps or “rifts”—is their model of the histori-
cal matrix that is inhabited by the gothic. “Gothi-
cism results,” they argue,
when the epic moment passes, and a particular rift
in history develops and widens into a dark chasm
that separates now from what has been. The his-
tory that suffers this rift is the inscripted past, the
literal re-presentation to ourselves of a [hi]story
that integrates people, events, and places, and
makes of the world and its landscape a locale . . .
whose experience is comfortable, confident,
coherent and known. This inscripted history is
privileged; it functions as the logocentric
past. . . . When we become aware of breaks in
the logocentric history, of gaps in the authorized
text of the past, the inscriptions of another his-
tory break through into meaning.
(16)
This model suggests that logocentric historiog-
raphy is an essentially nostalgic mode, if nostalgia
is understood as a will to sustained cultural coher-
ence, a desire for the seamless authenticity of
national narrative; the fracturing of this mode by
the irruption of “another history” is explained by
Mogen, Sanders, and Karpinski as an ever-
widening “dark chasm,” a spatial or structural
metaphor that, once again, evokes an allegorical
temporality. This chasm is opened by the strate-
gies of gothic signification, for it is not simply the
case that a horrific “alternate” history emerges as
a cohesive or fully explanatory corrective that is
superimposed upon nostalgic history. Rather, it ir-
rupts by fits and starts in a semiotic that is
fragmentary, one that is more suggestive than
conclusive. As such, the gothic “turn” toward
compelling but unthematizable narrative might
be conceptualized as the emergence of the Laca-
nian Real, which, according to Judith Butler, “is
that which resists and compels symbolization”
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GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW

of gothic and allegorical image manifest what
Anne Williams describes as “a pattern of anxiety
about the Symbolic” and reveal “the fragility of
our usual systems of making sense of the world,”
for “an extraordinary number of Gothic conven-
tions . . . imply disorder in the relations of signi-
fiers and signifieds” (70-71).
While gothic narrative emphatically refuses
nostalgia, it seems to be the case that nostalgic
representations of “America” veer toward the
gothic with remarkable frequency; invariably as-
sociated with self-consciously “late” cultural
production, this turn problematizes nostalgia’s
simplicity by invoking a darker register that, ironi-
cally, emerges as the very consequence of nostalgic
modes of knowing. A prototype might be Henry
James’s return to America at the turn of the
century: his late writing explores the contrast
between sunny myths of return and the pull
toward a tropics of devastation and the attractive
threat of a hypothetical, unlived American life.
Such contrasts recur but in very different terrains:
in the spring of 1996, the highly popular film
Twister locates the terrible in the vertical that
descends from the sky upon the horizontal stretch
of America from Iowa to Oklahoma, geographi-
cally contiguous with the mythic “West” that, ac-
Flannery O’Connor, 1925-1964.
cording to Jonathan Raban, is a “bleak and
haunted landscape” that “looks like a landscape
in an allegory” (81). While its primary nostalgic gothic sublime; the tornado itself veers toward al-
referent is The Wizard of Oz, the narrative turns legory, a personification of the qualities of Nichol-
and twists in its uneven course toward gothic son’s performance which David Thomson de-
historicity. scribes as “the wicked naughty boy, the thwarted
In one spectacular sequence, a tornado spirals genius, the monster of his own loneliness. No one
through the face of a cinematic screen at the else could have been so daring and yet so delicate”
Galaxy Drive-In, upon which is projected the most (546). Yet, such a maneuver is not entirely new; it
memorable scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film represents a further development of what Fiedler
of Steven King’s novel The Shining. In a perfect called “the grafting of Jamesian sensibility onto
moment of ironic congruence, the tornado de- the Southern gothic stem” (476). Such are the
stroys the image of Jack Nicholson axing through strange, defamiliarizing uses of the gothic in a late
a door, behind which Shelley Duvall cowers in culture that wants nostalgia simultaneously to
terror. The point of this intertextual strategy is have a playful edge and to approach the unthink-
thoroughly allegorical; while it is in keeping with able.
a long tradition in American gothic of attributing If allegory is the strangest house of fiction,
terrible violence to the muteness of landscape, it haunted by a referentiality that struggles to return
“explains” this terror by juxtaposing nature—liter- in a narrative mode that is committed to repress
ally—against cinematic culture, against what it is what it is compelled to shadow forth (for al-
not, in an escalating spiral of signification that legory’s suspension between avowal and disavowal
laminates the Symbolic into a coherent order even must somehow fail to repress if it is going to
as it blows it apart. Twister’s framing of the “work”), then it is not surprising that the house is
cinematic screen—the cultural face fleetingly the most persistent site, object, structural ana-
inhabited by Nicholson and then imploded— logue, and trope of American gothic’s allegorical
mediates an exchange of attribute between hu- turn. Consider a partial catalog of American gothic
man and natural agency in an aesthetics of the houses: Poe’s House of Usher, Hawthorne’s Cus-

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GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
Truman Capote, 1924-1984.
tom House, James’s house on the “jolly corner,”
Sutpen’s Hundred, Stephen King’s Castle Rock,
and Capote’s Kansan farmhouse are structures
whose solid actuality dissolves as they accom-
modate (and bring to spectacular figure) a psychic
imperative—the impossibility of forgetting. In ac-
counting for this imperative, Freud reveals the
gothic origins of his conceptual lexicon by bring-
ing forward the gothic’s major architectural
metaphor; to illustrate his theory of the uncanny
(das Unheimliche) as “something repressed which
recurs”—resonant with “Shelling’s definition of
the uncanny as something which ought to have
remained hidden but has come to light”—he
points out that some languages “can only render
the German expression “an ‘unheimlich house’ by
‘a haunted house’” and suggests that “this example
[is] perhaps the most striking of all, of something
uncanny” (“The Uncanny” 241).
Freud’s illustration seems to confirm the
participation of psychoanalysis in gothic episte-
mology and narrative structures; he asserts that
“psychoanalysis, which is concerned with laying
bare these hidden forces, has itself become un-
canny to many people” (“The Uncanny” 243).
What is the status, the discursive materialization,
of such “hidden forces” in narrative? Can language
ever “lay bare” the Other? The entire tradition of
the gothic suggests that a “haunting” return
requires a poetics of the ephemeral and the
70 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
indistinct. Crucially important for this project of
conceptualizing the gothic as a tropic field is the
narrowing focus of Freud’s translation across
languages and cultures, the figurative turn toward
a spatialized, “architectural” psyche in the slide of
signifiers from unheimlich to “uncanny” and its
gothic equivalent, “haunted.” If the Freudian text,
and its translation, might be understood as al-
legorizing the uncanny in its figurative turns, then it
does so under the auspices of the gothic’s ten-
dency to generate an allegorical sign—a human
agency, a prosopopoeia—that returns the repressed
Other to the vitally performative.
The psychic “house” turns toward the gothic
only when it is “haunted” by the return of the
repressed, a return that impels spectacular figures.
More specifically, prosopopoeia may be conceptu-
alized as the master trope of gothic’s allegorical
turn, because prosopopoeia—the act of personify-
ing, of giving face to an abstract, disembodied
Other in order to return it to narrative—disturbs
logocentric order, the common reality of things.
Paul de Man observes not only that “prosopopoeia
is hallucinatory,” because “to make the invisible
visible is uncanny” (49), but also that such un-
canny trope generates epistemological incoher-
ence: “it is impossible to say whether prosopo-
poeia is plausible because of the empirical
existence of dreams and hallucinations or whether
one believes that such a thing as dreams and hal-
lucinations exists because language permits the
figure of prosopopoeia. The question ‘Was it a vi-
sion or a waking dream?’ is destined to remain
unanswered. Prosopopoeia undoes the distinction
between reference and signification upon which
all semiotic systems . . . depend” (49-50). This
theory can be broadly extended to the gothic’s al-
legorical turn, which, in complicating the “distinc-
tion between reference and signification,” veers
away from the clarity of denotation toward the
ghostly realm of connotation: accordingly, the
gothic registers a trauma in the strategies of
representation as it brings forward a traumatic his-
tory toward which it gestures but can never finally
refer.
Paradoxically, the various kinds of trauma
represented by the gothic—the proximity of
Otherness which occasions allegorical approxima-
tion—constitute both a return and a loss, and the
gothic might be broadly conceptualized as a
cultural ritual of inscribing the loss of coherent
ego formation, the negation of national imaginary,
and the fragmentation of linguistic accountability.
For the uncanniness of the gothic is simulta-
neously terrible and melancholy, and the conjunc-
tion of fear and sorrow is powerfully annihilating
of the ego’s investment in things as they comfort-
ably “are.” This conjoined gothic affect is to be
located not exclusively in the irruption of the id
or in Lacan’s revision of the death drive that posits
the id’s overwhelming of the ego but perhaps
more immediately in the agency of the super-ego.
This is suggested by a striking repetition in Freud’s
diverse writings that move toward the conceptual-
ization of the super-ego. In his 1919 essay on “The
Uncanny,” he takes up the gothic figure of the
double, which he seems to understand as an alle-
gorization of the splitting of the ego: while the
double originates in primary narcissism, its Other-
ness becomes “the uncanny harbinger of death”
in later stages. “A special agency is slowly formed
there, which is able to stand over against the rest
of the ego, which has the function of observing
and criticising the self.” This “special agency” is
arguably the site of the uncanny return of the
repressed both in psychosis and in the paranoid
gothic, for “in the pathological cases of being
watched, this mental agency becomes isolated,
dissociated from the ego . . . able to treat the rest
of the ego like an object” (“The Uncanny” 235).
The superegotistical double emerges into dis-
course, into narrative, through allegorical personi-
fication, a turn that entails both the loss of a
coherent self and the fracturing of a transparent,
clearly referential lexicon of the self, a turn that
marks loss as terrible. Previously, in his 1917 essay
on “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud explained
that melancholia arises from the traumatic loss
not of an object but in regard to the ego, and he
did so in virtually the same language. The “melan-
cholic’s disorder,” he argues, manifests when “one
part of the ego sets itself over against the other,
judges it critically, and, as it were, takes it as its
object” (“Mourning” 256). If gothic trauma can
be understood as the imminence of the ego’s
violation, as something to be scared of, then such
possibility is signifiable only through the tropic
turn toward the hypothetical face of the Other, a
face that haunts the house of the psyche and its
allegorical narrativization.
The doubleness of American gothic’s allegori-
cal impulse—which represents “trauma” in a
traumatized discourse that splits the sign from the
referent—appears early in the tradition, most
remarkably in Poe’s architecture of remembering
and return, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Poe’s
“house” might be called a master text for the
subsequent history of American gothic, both in its
sense of what might accrue as “story” and its
indirect strategies of narration, the complex that
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Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes as “the difficulty
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
the story has in getting itself told” (14). The
content of Gothic story remains radically inacces-
sible: the occasion of the Ushers’ melancholia
inheres in the strange relation between Roderick
Usher and his sister, Madeline, a historical dimen-
sion that lies in the realm of the proscribed and
the unspeakable and as such is not subject to
recovery. Consequently, the narrative must gesture
toward the absent explanatory core of the story
by organizing a tension between two allegorical
currents. The first represents what might be called
the volition toward repression: Madeline must die,
and her body must be interred in the deepest
recess of the house. The second represents the
return of the repressed secret, the rise of the Real,
the irruption of history in Madeline’s ascent as
revenant, uncannily anticipated by, or predicated
upon, the act of reading an old romance.
In the work of conceptualizing a poetics of
American gothic, the narrative trajectory of Poe’s
“House” is less important than the allegorical
signs it generates, the most striking of which oc-
curs in the final moment of Madeline’s interment,
when the narrator allows himself to gaze upon
her face:
we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of
the coffin, and looked upon the face of the tenant.
A striking similitude between the brother and
sister now first arrested my attention; and Usher,
divining, perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out
some few words from which I learned that the
deceased and himself had been twins, and that
sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always
existed between them. Our glances, however,
rested not long upon the dead—for we could not
regard her unawed.
(329, my emphasis)
This passage sustains and is organized around
a complex resistance between its literal level—the
gaze upon the face of the dead—and its allegoriza-
tion of this gaze as an act of intuitive, incomplete
historical reconstruction. As a sign, the counte-
nance of Madeline Usher remains stubbornly
mute in its somatic materiality, yet Poe’s “gothic”
emerges precisely as such only when this sign
turns faintly toward prosopopoeia and generates
the narrator’s allegory of reading, a moment in
which Poe’s writing performatively gestures to-
ward the reading of the gothic text by hermeneu-
tic energy in the text. I regard this passage as typi-
cal of how American gothic requires a discursive
matrix of preterition: an unspeakable, irrecover-
able historical preterite is marked, and its conse-
quences brought forward to the present, only in a
species of circumlocution. Thus, Madeline’s face
71
 becomes the text of the double, the twin, the
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
Other, inscribed with the faint traces of an illeg-
ible history of “sympathies of a scarcely intelligible
nature.” Poe anticipates the fullness of prosopo-
poeia, Madeline’s return as revenant, in the
metaphor of tenancy, of a house within the House
of Usher: Madeline is not completely consigned
to the realm of the dead, nor is her historical
significance; a mere “tenant” of the coffin, she
will return to consciousness. Perhaps it is a critical
inevitability to read an allegorical sign allegori-
cally, that is, to situate it as a suggestive trope in
an explanatory narrative of one’s own; I argue that
the entire tradition of American gothic can be
conceptualized as the attempt to invoke “the face
of the tenant”—the specter of Otherness that
haunts the house of national narrative—in a trop-
ics that locates the traumatic return of the histori-
cal preterite in an allegorically preterited mode, a
double talk that gazes in terror at what it is
compelled to bring forward but cannot explain,
that writes what it cannot read. Such a model
might go far in expanding the American grain of
the gothic that Donald A. Ringe sees as fully real-
ized in Poe’s refusal to “vacillate . . . between the
rationally explained and the frankly supernatural”
and his assumption of “a position that can best be
called noncommittal” (151). If American gothic
flourished in the noncommittal strategies of the
allegorical, then the overarching tendency of the
gothic has been toward a suspension between the
immediacy of terrible affect and its linguistic and
epistemological unaccountability.
The prevailing tendency of critical discourse
to explain gothic’s allegorical strategies by a rever-
sion to allegory itself suggests the tenacious power
that gothic tropologies and epistemologies con-
tinue to exercise. In particular, the architectural
metaphor of the haunted house is frequently
transferred from its gothic origin—where, as I
have suggested, it functions simultaneously as site
and structure of narrative, as the vehicle for
representing the return of the repressed Other and
the prosopopoeial mode of its signification—to
deconstructive and queer theoretical projects.
Here, the “house” denotes both the text that is
inhabited by the specters of referentiality and the
subject who is haunted by the repudiated Other.
It is not surprising that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s
model of homosexuality’s closet and its epistemo-
logical rigors emerged from her work in The Coher-
ence of Gothic Conventions (1980), where she locates
the gothic convention’s requirement that the “self
is spatialized”: at issue within this architectural
model is self-knowledge, which is urgently com-
72 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
pelled even as it is preterited. In the turn toward
personification allegory, “it is the position of the
self to be massively blocked off from something
to which it ought normally to have access. . . .
The inside life and the outside life have to con-
tinue separately, becoming counterparts rather
than partners [which creates] a doubleness where
singleness should be” (12-13). She compares the
occluded knowledges of gothic narrative to “the
Watergate transcripts. The story does get through,
but in a muffled form, with a distorted time sense,
and accompanied by a kind of despair about any
direct use of language” (15).
Sedgwick’s model of the psychically spatial-
ized self is predicated upon the social construc-
tion of “normative” and “Other,” and the func-
tion of the gothic is to trouble “the stable
crystalline relation . . . that enforces boundaries
with a proscriptive energy” (38). The gothic
disrupts the regulatory relations of proscription by
returning the “blocked off” Other from the tempo-
ral field of the preterite to signification: in this
sense, the gothic might seem to arise when the
will to preterition fails. Yet, while preterition
resembles a discursive tactic of repression, the two
are not identical; more accurately, the “muffled
form” of the gothic is constituted by the double
impulses of preterition, which, as a particular
manifestation of allegory, articulates indirectly
what it cannot obliterate. Suspended between a
knowledge that is blocked and a knowledge that
is repudiated, preterition tracks and mobilizes,
marks the course while it serves as a discursive
recourse, of “return” across violated boundary. As
both “form” and “content” of narrative, it figures
the uncanny while it uncannily figures, which
might explain why the gothic houses the Freud-
ian “uncanny” in the several senses connoted by
the adjective “queer,” an adjective that strains
toward prosopopoeial nomination.
Predictably, the recent queer theoretical pro-
ject conceptualizes the interplay between repres-
sion and preterition by redeploying the allegorical
tropes of the gothic, in particular by personifying
the haunting “Other.” Diana Fuss broadly surveys
the domain of queer critique through a revisionist
cartography of the unstable borders between
heterosexuality and homosexuality: “[e]ach is
haunted by the other, but . . . it is the other who
comes to stand in metonymically for the very oc-
currence of haunting and ghostly visitations.”
Current work in the field of gender and sexuality,
she observes, reveals “a certain preoccupation with
the figure of the homosexual as specter and
phantom, as spirit and revenant, as abject and un-
dead.” Thus, she concludes in a statement that

GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW

marks the convergence of the queer and the tropic
field of the gothic, “homosexual production
emerges . . . as a kind of ghost-writing, a writing
which is at once a recognition and a refusal” (3-
4). It is ironic, perhaps, that the current academy—
driven by the imperative to illuminate the margins
of America’s national narratives, to bring the oc-
cluded and excluded others of sexual, gendered,
and racialized difference to presence—performs its
revisionist work in the conventional house of the
gothic’s allegorical structuration, epistemology,
and tropic discourse. However, these cultural and
discursive returns indicate not a failure of the criti-
cal imagination but rather the revolutionary
potential of American gothic, its long history of
accommodating new interventions.
This introductory overview of the representa-
tional strategies of the gothic—and their persis-
tence in American cultural work of various kinds—
concludes in Iowa, where this collection of essays
originates. Much of the preceding argument about
the gothic’s straining toward allegory, its historio-
graphical matrix of prosopopoeial return that at-
tempts to invoke “the face of the tenant,” is sug-
gested by Grant Wood’s 1930 painting, American
Gothic, the national icon under which this text is “are permanently armed against any conclusive
produced. In keeping with the general refusal to speculation as to what they stand for. . . . The
interrogate the national symbolic, Grant Wood’s spectator therefore confronts interminably the
art was dismissed as simplistic, as merely regional, quiescent couple that haunts the national imagi-
as naively realistic, until a major retrospective of nation” (85).
his work in 1983-84 shifted the current of recep- American Gothic achieves, among other things,
tion. A subsequent flurry of commentary re- an allegorization of American gothic: like all al-
sponded to Wood’s implication that the Midwest, legories, its silence inheres in the gap between
in the words of Donald B. Kuspit, “is fertile with signification and reference, but, more particularly,
more than neat rows of wheat and corn” (139): this allegory sustains a paradoxically illuminating
Thomas Lawson detects “an edge of unsettled- silence in the space between the planes of compo-
ness” in Wood’s career that bespeaks “a claustro- sition, between foreground and background,
phobia of the spirit among the rolling fields” (77), between the couple’s performance of preterition
while Kuspit sees Wood as a painter of “an inward and the historical preterite that resides in the
strangeness” whose enduring subject is “a power- “Carpenter Gothic” house. Wood’s subject is less
ful psychological undertow . . . under the veneer the stubborn hardness of a mythic prairie charac-
of Social Realism” and whose mode is a “tempta- ter than what Fiedler calls “the pastness of the
tion by allegory” (141). The doubleness of allegory past” (137), the inexplicable, melancholy continu-
is suggested, too, by Karal Ann Marling’s opinion ity between historical suffering and the visible
that American Gothic inflects nostalgia through textures of the present. According to Wanda M.
irony to frame a “tension between modernism and Corn, Grant Wood intended American Gothic to be
tradition, between corrosive self-knowledge and primarily a study in vertical composition: the
delusional retrospection” (97). Representational architecture of Carpenter Gothic “appealed to
“tensions,” like an inconclusive or incomplete Wood because of its . . . emphatic design—
turn toward allegory that fails fully to achieve its particularly the verticals . . . and the Gothic
semiotic, are critical models that are solicited by window, prominently placed in the gable. With
the liminal, the indirect, the shadow of significa- his fondness for repeating geometries, Wood im-
tion that is cast by American Gothic. As James M. mediately envisioned a long-faced and lean
Dennis observes, the figures in Grant’s painting couple, ‘American Gothic people,’ he called them,

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1 73
 to complement the house and echo its predomi-
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
nantly vertical lines” (129).
I would argue, however, that the energy of the
painting is divided between its upward reach—the
vanishing point above the gothic arch and the
gable peak—and its inward reach that laminates
the silent couple to the supplementary resonance
of the house across a supremely suggestive narra-
tive gap. If this painting strains toward allegory,
then it does so by invoking the historical preterite
that resides in that house and haunts the national
couple, a preterite that, typically, is preterited. As
such, the house allegorizes historical conscious-
ness itself, subject to the imminent irruption, the
proximate quality, of the not-forgotten. Grant
Wood’s American Gothic suggests the regional
precision, the very specificity, of the gothic’s recur-
ring manifestations: it belongs to what Jonathan
Raban calls “that sad and unlamented West where
bitterness and fury were the natural offspring of
impossibly great expectations” (62); like all gothic,
it haltingly brings forward the underside, the
Otherness, of the narratives of national self-
construction. The sign of the house yearns not for
reconciliation with the past but for inhabitation
by the past, the ghosts of return, as it strains
toward prosopopoeia. It leaves us more or less in
Capote’s “out there,” attending to the “whisper of
wind voices in the wind-bent wheat” (343).
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of
“Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.
Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple
Murder and Its Consequences. New York: Random House,
1965.
Corn, Wanda M. Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision. New
Haven: Yale UP, 1983.
de Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1986.
Dennis, James M. Grant Wood: A Study of American Art and
Culture. 2nd ed. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1986.
Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New
York: Doubleday, 1960, rpt. 1992.
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” On Meta-
psychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, vol. 11 of The
Penguin Freud Library. Trans. James Strachey et al. New
York: Penguin, 1984, 245-268.
———. “The Uncanny.” The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17. Trans.
James Strachey et al. London: Hogarth Press, 1955, rpt.
1991, 219-252.
Fuss, Diana. “Introduction: Inside/Out.” Inside/Out: Lesbian
Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Rout-
ledge, 1991.
Gross, Louis S. Redefining the American Gothic. Ann Arbor:
UMI Research P, 1989.
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Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. London: Rout-
ledge, 1995.
Kuspit, Donald B. “Grant Wood: Pathos of the Plain.” Art in
America 72.3 (March 1984): 138-143.
Lawson, Thomas. “Grant Wood: Whitney Museum of
American Art.” Artforum 22.3 (November 1983): 77.
Marling, Karal Ann. “Don’t Knock Wood.” Art News 82.7
(September 1983): 94-99.
Mogen, David, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski,
eds. Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in
American Literature. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP,
1993.
Poe, Edgar Allan. Poetry and Tales. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New
York: Library of America, 1984.
Raban, Jonathan. “The Unlamented West.” New Yorker, May
20, 1996, 60-81.
Ringe, Donald A. American Gothic: Imagination and Reason in
Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Lexington: UP of Kentucky,
1982.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions.
New York: Arno, 1980.
Thomson, David. A Biographical Dictionary of Film. Rev. ed.
London: André Deutsch, 1994.
Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1995.
EUROPEAN GOTHIC
RONALD PAULSON (ESSAY DATE
AUTUMN 1981)
SOURCE: Paulson, Ronald. “Gothic Fiction and the
French Revolution.” ELH 48, no. 3 (autumn 1981): 532-
54.
In the following essay, Paulson examines the Gothic
novel’s connection to the French Revolution in terms of
the treatment of rebellion and sexuality in such works as
The Monk, Northanger Abbey, and Frankenstein.
In Chapter 5, Volume II, of Jane Austen’s
Northanger Abbey Henry Tilney regales Catherine
Morland with his version of the Gothic fantasy
she loves to read. When she arrives at Northanger
Abbey, he says, she will be taken by the house-
keeper “along many gloomy passages, into an
apartment never used since some cousin or kin
died in it about twenty years before.”1 She will
discover that the door has no lock, and shortly (a
couple of nights later) there will be a violent
storm. “Peals of thunder so loud as to seem to
shake the edifice to its foundation will roll around
the neighbouring mountains—and during the
frightful gusts of wind which accompany it, you
will probably think you discern (for your lamp is
now extinguished) one part of the hanging more
violently agitated than the rest.” These details are
punctuated by “Will not your heart sink within
you?” The next step is to lift the tapestry, try the
door found behind it, and proceed into “a small
vaulted room.” The walk through several such
chambers reveals a dagger, some drops of blood,
torture instruments, and an old cabinet in a secret
drawer of which is found a roll of paper: “you seize
it—it contains many sheets of manuscript—you
hasten with the precious treasure into your own
chamber, but scarcely have you been able to
decipher ‘Oh! thou—whomsoever thou mayst be,
into whose hands these memoirs of the wretched
Matilda may fall’—when your lamp suddenly
expires in the socket, and leaves you in total
darkness.”
Certain elements of Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic are
here, including the passivity of the sensitive
heroine, the labyrinthine passages and chambers
through which she wanders, the violent storm,
and the perusal of written documents that record
experiences with which she never herself makes
contact. Elsewhere in Northanger Abbey, the Gothic
fiction is reflected in vocabulary—in, for example,
Isabella’s “amazing” or “inconceivable, incredible,
impossible!” or Catherine’s remark, “Udolpho [is]
the nicest book in the world,” to which Henry
replies, “The nicest;—by which I suppose you
mean the neatest. That must depend upon the
binding” (p. 107). The adjective is just another
sort of exaggeration, another expression of a point
of view, a way of looking at the world as if it were
a book.
Henry Tilney himself, we have learned in an
earlier chapter (I, Chap. XIV), is a reader of his-
tory (“Yes, I am fond of history,” he says). Cathe-
rine reads history only “as a duty, but it tells me
nothing that does not either vex or weary me” (p.
108), whereas from Gothic novels she presumably
gains comfort. Henry, however, has his own
Quixotic version of sensibility: he is a student of
the Picturesque, believing that a “beautiful” sky
does not signify good weather but a drawable
picture. He instructs Catherine in these mysteries
until she views “the country with the eyes of
persons accustomed to drawing”—and at length
“voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath, as
unworthy to make part of a landscape” (pp. 110-11).
At this point in the conversation, Tilney
moves from the subject of the Picturesque to
politics, “and from politics, it was an easy step to
silence.” It is in this context—of the Gothic, his-
tory, the Picturesque, and politics—that Catherine
remarks, “I have heard that something very shock-
ing indeed, will soon come out of London. . . .
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more horrible than any thing we have met with
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
yet”—by which of course she means the publica-
tion of a new Gothic novel. Miss Tilney, however,
thinks she means a riot. It is left to Henry to
explain the discrepancy between a new publica-
tion “in three duodecimo volumes, two hundred
and seventy-six pages in each, with a frontispiece
to the first,” and (in a fantasy parallel to the
Gothic fantasy I have quoted above) “a mob of
three thousand men assembling in St. George’s
Fields; the Bank attacked, the Tower threatened,
the streets of London flowing with blood, a
detachment of the 12th Light Dragoons . . .” and
so on (pp. 112-113). This was written in 1797 or
1798 when Austen if not Tilney was thinking of
history: the Gordon Riots of 1780 and the French
Revolution of 1789.2
In the context of Northanger Abbey the irony is
that the exaggeration of the sign falls short of the
grim reality. But precisely what reality? The lies of
the Thorpes and the fantasy of General Tilney as
wife-murderer generated by the Gothic-infatuated
Catherine turn out to signify, but not something
close to the sign, not a Gothic but rather a worse,
because more banal, more historical evil—one
perhaps like the French Revolution itself: General
Tilney’s abrupt dismissal of Catherine because he
thinks she will interfere with his dynastic plans
for Henry.3
In Northanger Abbey there is posited something
we might call the real, or the thing itself, and then
something else we can call the word, and Austen
shows that they can only come together in formal-
ized, conventionalized ways.4 We notice the dif-
ference between the Gothic fiction and history,
but also the similarity. General Tilney is indeed
the reality beneath Manfred, Montoni, and the
other Gothic villains: a man concerned with
property, heirs, and wealth; a man who tries
unscrupulously to preserve his family and fortune
against the incursions of a penniless outsider, who
in fact does disrupt it. In the real world, the Gothic
casts up (or is bettered by) the reality of a General
Tilney or a French Revolution in which, in Burke’s
terms, penniless parvenues infiltrate the aristo-
cratic family—or the royal family itself, ultimately
breaking through its doors into the bedroom of
the queen—and ravish the wife-mother-daughter.5
The principal elements are the same: the Gothic
only supplies the metaphors and the gushing
response of the safely distant spectator, who hears
the storm (remembering perhaps the metaphors
of natural upheaval—hurricanes and erupting
volcanoes—that were immediately applied to the
75

GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822)
Known as a major English Romantic poet,
Shelley lived a brief but colorful life. Before
the age of twenty Shelley had published two
wildly improbable Gothic novels, Zastrozzi
(1810) and St. Irvyne (1811), and two collec-
tions of verse. Original Poetry by Victor and
Cazire (1810), written with his sister, contin-
ued in the Gothic mode. In what is usually
regarded as his masterpiece, the verse drama
Prometheus Unbound (1819), Shelley com-
bines myth, political allegory, psychology,
and theology to transform the Aeschylean
myth of Prometheus the fire-giver into an al-
legory on the origins of evil and the possibil-
ity of regenerating nature and humanity
through love. The verse drama The Cenci
(1819) is based on the history of a sixteenth-
century Italian noble family, and depicts the
evil Count Cenci’s rape of his daughter, Beat-
rice, who determines to murder him, seeing
no other means of escape from continued
violation, and is executed for parricide.
Although Shelley hoped for a popular success
on the English stage, his controversial treat-
ment of the subject of incest outraged critics,
preventing the play from being produced. In
1814 Shelley, who was married, fell in love
and eloped with Mary Godwin, the sixteen-
year-old daughter of the radical English
philosopher William Godwin and author and
reformer Mary Wollstonecraft. He continued
to provide for his first wife and their two
children, but lived with Mary. In the summer
of 1816, Shelley met Lord Byron, with whom
he developed an enduring friendship that
proved an important influence on the works
of both men. In the fall of that same year,
following his first wife’s suicide, Shelley legal-
ized his relationship with Mary. In 1822 Shel-
ley and his companion, Edward Williams,
drowned when their boat capsized in a squall
off the coast of Lerici, Italy. Shelley’s body
was cremated on the beach in a ceremony
conducted by his friends Byron, Leigh Hunt,
and Edward John Trelawny. His ashes, except
for his heart, which Byron plucked from the
fire, were buried in the Protestant cemetery
in Rome.
76
Revolution), notices the bloody daggers and racks,
and reads—or starts to, until her candle is extin-
guished—a letter from an actual participant.
The Gothic did in fact serve as a metaphor
with which some contemporaries in England tried
to come to terms with what was happening across
the Channel in the 1790s. The first Revolutionary
emblem was the castle-prison, the Bastille and its
destruction by an angry mob, which was fitted by
Englishmen into the model of the Gordon Riots
of nine years before. But if one way of dealing
with the Revolution (in its earliest stages) was to
see the castle-prison through the eyes of a sensi-
tive young girl who responds to terror in the form
of forced marriage and stolen property, another
was to see it through the case history of her
threatening oppressor, Horace Walpole’s Manfred
or M.G. Lewis’ Ambrosio—the less comforting
reality Austen was heralding in the historical
phenomena of London riots. In Lewis’ The Monk
(1795) the two striking phenomena dramatized
are first the explosion—the bursting out of his
bonds—of a repressed monk imprisoned from
earliest childhood in a monastery, with the havoc
wreaked by his self-liberation (assisted by demonic
forces) on his own family who were responsible
for his being immured; and second, the blood-
thirsty mob that lynches—literally grinds into a
bloody pulp—the wicked prioress who has mur-
dered those of her nuns who succumbed to sexual
temptation. Both are cases of justification followed
by horrible excess: Ambrosio deserves to break out
and the mob is justified in punishing the evil
prioress, but Ambrosio’s liberty leads him to the
shattering of his vow of celibacy, to repression,
murder, and rape not unlike the compulsion
against which he was reacting; and the mob not
only destroys the prioress but (recalling the mas-
sacres of September 1792) the whole community
and the convent itself:
The incensed Populace, confounding the innocent
with the guilty, had resolved to sacrifice all the
Nuns of that order to their rage, and not to leave
one stone of the building upon another. . . . They
battered the walls, threw lighted torches in at the
windows, and swore that by break of day not a
Nun of St. Clare’s order should be left alive. . . .
The Rioters poured into the interior part of the
Building, where they exercised their vengeance
upon every thing which found itself in their pas-
sage. They broke the furniture into pieces, tore
down the pictures, destroyed the reliques, and in
their hatred of her Servant forgot all respect to the
Saint. Some employed themselves in searching out
the Nuns, Others in pulling down parts of the
Convent, and Others again in setting fire to the
pictures and furniture, which it contained. These
Latter produced the most decisive desolation:
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 Indeed the consequences of their action were
more sudden, than themselves had expected or
wished. The Flames rising from the burning piles
caught part of the Building, which being old and
dry, the conflagration spread with rapidity from
room to room. The Walls were soon shaken by
the devouring element: The Columns gave way:
The Roofs came tumbling down upon the Rioters,
and crushed many of them beneath their weight.
Nothing was to be heard but shrieks and groans;
the Convent was wrapped in flames, and the
whole presented a scene of devastation and hor-
ror.6
The end, of course, as it appeared to English-
men in 1794—remembering Thomas Paine’s
words (“From a small spark, kindled in America, a
flame has arisen, not to be extinguished”)7 and
the imagery of light and fire associated with the
Revolution—was the destruction of the revolu-
tionaries themselves in the general collapse.
I. Rebel/Tyrant
I do not mean to suggest that Ann Radcliffe or
Monk Lewis was producing propaganda either for
or against the French Revolution. Lewis’ treatment
of the lynching scene, for example, is far removed
from the morally clear-cut renderings of anti-
clericalism exemplified by the drames monacals
popular in the theaters of Revolutionary Paris. In
one of these plays—de Menuel’s Les Victimes
cloîtrées of 1791, which Lewis saw, admired, and
translated—the wretched prisoners held in the
dungeons below a convent are finally rescued by a
Republican mayor brandishing the tricouleur. Lewis
exploits the dramatic resonances of the Revolu-
tion and its anti-clericalism, but simultaneously
portrays the rioting mob as blood-thirsty, com-
pletely out of control, animal-like in its ferocity.
The convent of St. Clare represents corruption,
superstition, and repression, but its overthrowers,
no more admirable than the tyrants, are capable
of the same atrocities or worse. In the same way,
many observers (conservative and otherwise) by
1793 saw the brutally oppressed masses of France
usurping the tyrannical roles of their erstwhile op-
pressors.8
In his critical essay “Idée sur les romans”
(1800) the Marquis de Sade, who considered The
Monk superior to all other works of its kind, as-
serted that the bloody upheavals of the French
Revolution had rendered everyday reality so hor-
rific that contemporary writers necessarily had to
invoke the supernatural and demonic realms for
material which could still shock or startle their
readers. I do not think there is any doubt that the
popularity of Gothic fiction in the 1790s and well
into the nineteenth century was due in part to
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the widespread anxieties and fears in Europe
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
aroused by the turmoil in France finding a kind of
sublimation or catharsis in tales of darkness,
confusion, blood, and horror.
The Gothic, however, had existed from the
1760s onward, and we are talking about a particu-
lar development in the 1790s, a particular plot
which was either at hand for writers to use in the
light of the French Revolution, or was in some
sense projected by the Revolution and borrowed
by writers who may or may not have wished to
express anything specifically about the troubles in
France. As a descendent of Walpole’s Manfred, for
example, Ambrosio has to be seen as a conflation
of rebelling son and tyrant father. Manfred was
the servant who murdered his master in order to
usurp the family castle—or the castle of his father
or older brother, in later versions of the story—
and then sacrificed his own children to retain his
property. But Ambrosio is notably unconcerned
with property—only with liberty of a sexual sort.
This is why he is sympathetic in a way that Man-
fred is not, even given Walpole’s assurances that
Manfred is otherwise a great soul. Ambrosio’s story
is of his insane, uncontrolled rush into freedom
and, incidentally, of its consequences, which
include repression of other people’s liberty for the
end of self-gratification. In short, The Monk is
about the act of liberation, whereas The Castle of
Otranto was about a man’s attempt to hold to-
gether his crumbling estate and cheat others of
their rightful inheritance. One is a fable of revolu-
tion, the other of the ancien régime.
The earlier phase produced fictions that con-
tinued to be copied throughout the period of the
Revolution. Not long after the notorious Septem-
ber Massacres, the Monthly Review attacked a
Gothic novel called The Castle of St. Vallery in the
following terms:
Of all the resources of invention, this, perhaps, is
the most puerile, as it is certainly among the most
unphilosophical. It contributes to keep alive that
superstition which debilitates the mind, that
ignorance which propagates terror, and that dread
of invisible agency which makes inquiry criminal.9
The critic sees the Gothic practiced in this
novel as the representation of tyranny which was
a central contribution of the pre-1789 genre, and
so an example of everything the French Enlighten-
ment and Revolution was seeking to correct. He
detects nothing of either the analysis of unre-
strained energy that appears in some of Radcliffe’s
work of the 1790s or the representation of the
energy of revolution itself in The Monk. Many such
writers simply ignored the fact of the French
77
 Revolution. As John Garrett writes of one of these,
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
Mary Meeke, her “conservatism was based on a
belief that the 1789 revolution was some sort of
aberration of history,” and so she continued to
portray France of the ancien régime as if nothing
had happened.1 0
Other writers were concerned about the signifi-
cance of the events in France. But the castle as
prison was already implicit in The Castle of Otranto
and Radcliffe’s Castles of Athlin and Dynbayne
(1789), and it may have been only this image and
this frame of mind that made the Fall of the
Bastille an automatic image of revolution for
French as well as English writers. By the time The
Mysteries of Udolpho appeared (1794), the castle,
prison, tyrant, and sensitive young girl could no
longer be presented naively; they had all been
sophisticated by the events in France.
At this point another strand of novel, the
novel of reform (the so-called “Jacobin” novel),
joins the Gothic in the representation of tyranny
and revolution. The Gothic tended to be the form
adopted by those who were either against or
merely intrigued by the Revolution, or by prob-
lems of freedom and compulsion. The reformers
Godwin, Holcroft, Bage, and Inchbald are for the
Revolution; they call their works “Things as they
Are,” “Man as he Is” or “Man as he is Not”; they
avoid the Gothic and theatrical trappings Burke
associated with the Revolution; they have a
sometimes dismaying singleness of purpose and
go straight to the contemporary Englishman, the
General Tilney, illustrating Arthur Young’s insis-
tence that “The true judgment to be formed of
the French revolution, must surely be gained,
from an attentive consideration of the evils of the
old government.”1 1 This was, of course, what the
English Jacobins usually represented in their
novels, tracts, and poems, for their real subject
was not France but forms of compulsion in Eng-
land.
Gothic and Jacobin novels had a similar
ancestry in Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa; both
show the family as a compulsive force on the
children, in particular on the marriageable daugh-
ter or the young wife. The distinction is rather
between a novel about the tyranny seen from the
point of view of the helpless (most helpless
because female) individual, and a novel about the
rebel. William Godwin’s Things as They Are: or the
Adventures of Caleb Williams appeared just a year
before The Monk, combining the two fictions in a
more schematic, more coherent form. The rela-
tionship between Falkland and Caleb is the same
explored by Inchbald and Holcroft between
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society the cruel hunter and the suffering indi-
vidual, its victim. But by the time Godwin was
writing, the French Terror had cast its shadow on
libertarian dreams, and his work reflects that
constant potential for simple inversion of the
persecutor-persecuted relationship which events
in Paris had so terribly exemplified.
In his initial, discursive response to the Revo-
lution, Political Justice (1793), Godwin argued that
“the great cause of humanity” is hindered by both
the ancient tradition of Burkean thought (in his
Reflections on the Revolution in France of 1790) and
by the “friends of innovation.” He focuses on the
second, bringing to bear Burke’s own argument
that “to dragoon men into the adoption of what
we think right is an intolerable tyranny”: the
French have shown that to overthrow tyranny is
to have to become greater tyrants themselves.1 2
Godwin’s own point is that the orderly process of
growing philosophical awareness—a passive pro-
cess—was dangerously interrupted by the Revolu-
tion, and perhaps directed into the wrong chan-
nels. His second point is that “Coercion first
annihilates the understanding of the subject upon
whom it is exercised, and then of him who
employs it.” For Caleb Williams, in his way,
becomes as much a persecutor (and ultimately a
murderer) as his master—and is eventually
brought to commit similar crimes through an
equally obsessive concern to protect the “honour”
he no longer possesses.
The potentially invertible relationship in Caleb
Williams is between two wholly isolated beings
who play out their equally agonizing parts in a
series of physical and psychological hunts and
flights, wherein they repeatedly exchange the
roles of persecutor and victim, hunter and hunted.
Their final miserable realization of the simultane-
ity of both roles in their natures (each having
previously viewed only the other as the real
persecutor) results in the climactic moment in the
novel when Falkland collapses into Caleb’s arms
and confesses to the murder of Tyrrel—and when
Caleb realizes that his own awakened sense of
guilt and responsibility must deny him the pos-
sibility of ever receiving any happiness from his
long-desired liberty.
Both The Monk and Caleb Williams offer em-
bryonic versions of the titanic Romantic hero who
comes into being with the blurring of the old
black-white morality of earlier Gothic fiction.1 3
This figure is in part characterized, as was the
French Revolution, by the appalling ease with
which his nature could be inverted, either by as-
suming the vices of the tyrant he has overthrown,
or by a simple shift of moral perspective. Ambro-
sio seen from one point of view is the cruel
hypocrite, matricide, and incestuous rapist, who
lets no barrier stand between him and the fulfill-
ment of his lust; but from another he is the help-
less, passive victim of his repressive environment
and of Satanic persecution, rendered vulnerable
by his miseducation, seduced by a demon, tricked
into ravishing his own sister, driven to sell his
soul when an earthly reprieve is at hand, and
finally betrayed and destroyed by the Arch-Fiend.
II. Crowd and Cabal
Some of the ambivalent feelings we have
registered to Ambrosio, Caleb, and the crowd that
destroys the prioress and her convent can be
sensed in the meditations of a first-hand witness
to the early stages of the Revolution. Arthur Young
argues that release—the violent, destructive explo-
sion of release Lewis depicts in Ambrosio—was a
consequence of oppression, signifying only in
relation to that original oppression. He asks
whether it is “really the people to whom we are to
impute” the excesses they are committing:
—Or to their oppressors who had kept them so
long in a state of bondage? He who chooses to be
served by slaves, and by ill-treated slaves, must
know that he holds both his property and life by
a tenure far different from those who prefer the
service of well treated freemen; and he who dines
to the music of groaning sufferers, must not, in
the moment of insurrection, complain that his
daughters are ravished, and then destroyed; and
that his sons throats are cut.1 4
The fact that neither Lewis nor Godwin
stresses the cruelty of the masters of Ambrosio
and Caleb does not alter the general point that
the revolt is understood only in terms of the op-
pression against which it acts. As to the crowd,
which does react against specific and monstrous
cruelty on the part of the prioress (who, after all,
is a minor character in the novel), Young admon-
ishes: “Let it be remembered that the populace in
no country ever use power with moderation;
excess is inherent in their aggregate constitution
. . .” (p. 516).
From the Fall of the Bastille to the September
Massacres, and to the levée en masse and Napo-
leon’s armies, this crowd is in many ways the
central phenomenon of the Revolution. The
crowd, with the related terms “natural sover-
eignty” and “General Will” (or Burke’s “swinish
multitude”), was among the most ambiguous
concepts to arise from the Revolution. Ambrosio,
it should be recalled, was at the very outset
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presented as a spell-binding orator, the master of
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
the crowd that later proves beyond mastering. The
crowd, the mobile vulgus, was an image that was
ready to hand in the literature of conservative
Anglo-Catholic royalists like Dryden and Swift,
but materialized by the Gordon Riots and the
actual events in France. With this past history,
and with its own development in France, the
crowd merged with the conflicting or overlapping
fictions of, on the one hand, the cabal or small
secret society that governs the crowd and deter-
mines events, or, on the other, the single great
man who expresses in himself the General Will.
The disturbances in Ireland, for example, the
Times of 22 February 1793 reported, “arise from
the pure wantonness of a set of desperadoes called
Defenders . . . encouraged and abetted by a secret
junto, that like the French Jacobins, wish to throw
all government into confusion. . . .” The largest
such fiction was the one woven by the Abbé Au-
gustin de Barruel, who argued that the illuminati
masterminded the whole Revolution. As J. M.
Roberts has written in his Mythology of the Secret
Societies:
Educated and conservative men raised in the tradi-
tion of Christianity, with its stress on individual
responsibility and the independence of the will,
found conspiracy theories plausible as an explana-
tion of such changes: it must have come about,
they thought, because somebody planned it so.1 5
Such myths as plots of the Freemasons, philos-
ophes, and illuminati were “an attempt to impose
some sort of order on the bewildering variety of
changes which suddenly showered upon Europe
with the Revolution and its aftermath.” The as-
sumption of individual agency (as opposed to the
more popular modern explanation of social and
economic determinism) is evident not only in the
allegorizations of revolution as the actions of a
single man—an Ambrosio—but also in the com-
forting retreat to Satanic responsibility in the Mil-
tonic fictions of rebellion in heaven and in the
Garden of Eden—in Rosario-Matilda, the Devil
who in fact determines all the events that Ambro-
sio seemed responsible for.
The crowd could thus mean either complete
uncontrol of unruly passions or the carrying out
of the designs of a single man or a very small
group of schemers—or even diabolic possession or
inspiration. The historical villain (as in many of
the theories Barruel collects) is the Duc d’Orléans
type (Philippe Egalité), the cadet who wants power
himself and therefore topples the rightful older
brother or cousin by masterminding a plot that
moves the crowd (Satan in heaven, jealous of the
79
 raising of his “brother” Christ, or Schedoni in Rad-
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
cliffe’s The Italian), and is himself swept away by
the tempest he has unleashed. The force then
becomes the Jacobin Club or a Robespierre, who
eventually loses his own head, and ultimately a
Napoleon.
General Tilney (or Montoni or Schedoni) and
the rioters are, of course, polarities: one concerned
with the preservation and the other with the
destruction of property, but both with its ap-
propriation. Tilney is the malign individual, the
Radcliffe villain; the rioters, something she only
hints at in the vague figures of the sexually
threatening soldiers of Montoni whom Emily fears
(in this sense related to Burke’s mob that threatens
Marie Antoinette), are mere misdirected action,
chance, the natural force of a crowd—in some
ways even more terrifying to contemplate. Both,
however, were historical phenomena, not exactly
unthinkable before 1789, but largely Gothic
fantasies or satiric exaggerations. Taken together,
however, they represent the two chief explana-
tions offered for the phenomenon of the Revolu-
tion by conservative theorists, the spokesmen of
counter-revolution.
The sense of unresolved mystery that was one
aspect of the Gothic fiction of Walpole, Clara
Reeve, and Radcliffe also fitted the way many
contemporaries “read” the Revolution. The feeling
the reader has in Gothic fiction is of never know-
ing exactly where he is, where he is going, or what
is happening. This is a feeling which corresponds
to the puzzlement of the protagonist too, whether
a passive Emily or an active plotter like Ambrosio.
The Gothic describes a situation in which no one
can understand or fathom anyone else’s motives
or actions. The narrative structure the Gothic
inherited, and carried to its greatest degree of
subtlety in Radcliffe’s novels (and of formal in-
novation in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer and
Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner), was one
involving a theme of communication, the unre-
solved difficulty of understanding actions; this
was expressed in the aposiopesis of Sterne’s and
Mackenzie’s novels, in the authentic manuscript
lost in gun-wadding or hair curlers, the resort to
typographical excesses, and the alternative ac-
counts that leave the reader as uncertain of the
responsibility for the protagonist’s actions as the
protagonist himself. This is, of course, also a
feature of the sublime style, “where half is left out
to be supplied by the hearer”—and so a logical
and syntactical obscurity joins revolution and sub-
limity.1 6
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Behind all of this obscurity, however, is the
elaborate plot, masterminded but slipping out of
control, which involves the overthrow of a prop-
erty owner. When the Revolution itself came, and
as it progressed, it was precisely this inability to
make out the events on a day-to-day basis, but
with the suspicion of personal skulduggery be-
neath each new changing-hands of property, that
made the Gothic novel a roughly equivalent nar-
rative form. But this is not to say that the Revolu-
tion produced no plot structures of its own. There
was a discernible scenario that began with the Fall
of the Bastille and progressed to the march on and
back from Versailles, the flight to Varennes, the
September Massacres, the Terror, Thermidore, Bru-
maire, and so on. Even Waterloo was followed, for
Englishmen, by Peterloo, an ironic, domestic
extension. Depending on what stage one looked
back from, he had a different structure, though it
was increasingly colored on the dark side by the
Terror, by the further disillusionment of the Direc-
tory, and by the threat to national security of the
Empire.
Behind all of this was a new sense of history,
of what could or should happen in history, and
what history was in fact about. From being about
the kings, it became, in certain ways, about larger
groups of subjects and their attempts to come to
terms with, or create a new order from, the
disorder consequent upon the overthrow of the
old established order. The process was one of
evolution or revolution, probably of both, involv-
ing circular motion but in a spiral that was either
ascending or descending, as Caleb overthrows
while at the same time becoming Falkland, as Orc
overthrows and then becomes Urizen, and so on.
The standard features that emerged were the rebel-
lion itself with the enormous possibilities and
hopes it opened up; this was followed by a stage
of delusion, dangerous and unforeseen conse-
quences, and disillusionment.1 7
III. Sentimental Response and Sexual
Energy
It is difficult not to agree with Nelson Smith
that in many ways Emily St. Aubert is used by Rad-
cliffe in precisely the critical way Jane Austen uses
Catherine Morland.1 8 The (remote) potential of
Ambrosio in Emily is broached at the beginning
in M. St. Aubert’s death-bed warning to her, “do
not indulge in the pride of fine feeling” or “ill-
governed sensibility,” which is dangerous to its
possessor and to others as well; and it is material-
ized at the end in the nun Agnes’ expostulation to
Emily based on her own slip from sentiment into
sexual passion. In general, however, Radcliffe
contrasts Emily’s gentle sentiments in Udolpho
with the “fierce and terrible passions . . . which
so often agitated the inhabitants of this edifice,”
“those mysterious workings, that rouse the ele-
ments of man’s nature into tempest.” Emily’s, she
assures us,
was a silent anguish, weeping, yet enduring; not
the wild energy of passion, inflaming imagination,
bearing down the barriers of reason and living in a
world of its own.1 9
The terms I have emphasized are precisely
those applied by contemporaries like Burke to the
Revolution. The deeply intuitive feelings of Emily
are the quiet English virtues of the spectator of
sublime overthrow across the Channel; the “wild
energy” of Montoni is what Burke associates with
the French rabble. Both derive from the sentimen-
tal novel, but one is the delicate sensibility of a
Toby Shandy or a Harley, the friendship and
compassion that can join parental duty, justice,
and prudence; the other is the dangerous love of a
Clarissa, even the benevolence of a Charles Sur-
face, and the “Jacobin” view that “It is the quality
of feeling that sanctifies the marriage; not, as the
anti-Jacobins were to have it, the other way
around.”2 0
Emily is therefore, as Mary Poovey has argued,
the susceptible young spectator who might be
seduced by the real center of energy into becom-
ing another Agnes; and this center of energy,
Montoni, is based on a need to dominate that
draws on the conventions of both Gothic and
revolutionary mythology.2 1 There is, in short, a
distinction between misperception—believing a
General Tilney to be a Montoni, or (to take Blake’s
contemporary case, in “The Tyger”) a lamb to be a
tiger, a gallant French Revolution to be a blood-
thirsty uprising or vice versa—and exploitation
either of the sensitive soul by others or of others
by the sensitive soul expanded until out of control.
Emily is obviously the former, but this is because
she never allows herself to slip completely out of
control, and because Radcliffe has already given
us this rebel figure in the male villain, whose mo-
tives are unrelievedly bad.
If Radcliffe produces a fiction about a specta-
tor of revolutionary activity who can be confused
by her experience, whose response though virtu-
ous is both ambivalent and liable to the tempta-
tion to misperceive, then Lewis’ Monk reproduces
the exhilarating but ultimately depressing experi-
ence of the revolutionary himself.
I have already rehearsed the trajectory of Am-
brosio’s explosion of energy. Although this pact
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with the Devil introduces the Faustus story, it is
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
significant that Ambrosio does not want the intel-
lectual, spiritual, or specifically political power we
associate with the Enlightenment. He wants only
sexual power. The world of the Enlightenment no
longer represented intellectual knowledge; the
Revolution had, in Burke’s and Lewis’ terms,
exposed the reality under Enlightenment to be
unrestrained sexual “knowledge.” Faustus’ Me-
phistopheles becomes Ambrosio’s Matilda. It is
Ambrosio’s desire for her that drags him into the
world of Lucifer, and his lust for Antonia that
draws him further into the Satanic power. At the
same time, Raymond’s violent love for Agnes
permits the supernatural to penetrate the human
world, for it is as he waits to elope with her and
consummate his desire that the Bleeding Nun ap-
pears to him in her place. In The Monk it is the
unleashing of repressed sexual desires that shat-
ters the barrier between the natural and supernatu-
ral worlds.
Caleb Williams is also a Faustus figure, who
describes his “crime” or “offence” as a “a mistaken
thirst of knowledge.”2 2 Although he is, unlike Am-
brosio, in pursuit of an intellectual goal—
knowledge of his master’s crime—he describes his
obsessive quest in sexual terms. Such words as
“pleasures,” “pains,” “perpetual stimulus,” “insa-
tiable desire,” “satisfaction,” and “gratification”—
all directed to the subject of his quest—have
sexual resonances. When he realizes that Falkland
is the murderer, he says “My blood boiled within
me”—as we are told that Ambrosio’s “blood boiled
in his veins” when he looked upon Rosario-
Matilda’s bosom. “I was conscious to a kind of
rapture for which I could not account,” Caleb goes
on. “I was solemn, yet full of rapid emotion, burn-
ing with indignation and energy.” Based on God-
win’s brilliant insight into the nature of the
servant-master relationship for both parties,
Caleb’s almost sexual curiosity releases all the
darker potentialities of Falkland’s inner self, and
lays Caleb open to inhuman pursuit and persecu-
tion, as well as to the corruption of his own
nature.
Man searches for body equivalents for any
important, unexplained phenomenon, from
unordered nature to economics to revolutions.
But there is probably some connection between
love and revolution in the political experience
itself—or at least in the mind (or vocabulary) of
the person who writes about revolution, who is
imaginatively recreating the experience. “Revolu-
tion is the sex of politics,” as H. L. Mencken said.
But if at the outset the most common metaphor
81
 was of sexual release—whether spring’s bursting
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
buds (in Paine’s Rights of Man) or Blake’s Orc
breaking his chains and raping his tyrant-captor’s
daughter—by the end it had become images of
parturition, of giving birth to creatures like Victor
Frankenstein’s, regarded as (depending on the
point of view) a victim or a monster.
IV. The Retrospect of Frankenstein
The plot of The Monk can be seen as a version
of the revolutionary scenario as far as the Terror;
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818, the year in
which Northanger Abbey was finally published) was
to some extent a retrospect on the whole process
through Waterloo, with the Enlightenment-
created monster leaving behind its wake of terror
and destruction across France and Europe, partly
because it had been disowned and misunderstood
and partly because it was created unnaturally by
reason rather than love in the instinctive relation-
ships of the Burkean family.
One aspect of Shelley’s fable we can see by
recalling her remarks, on her elopement journey
across France in July 1814, on the swath of
devastation cut across France by the Russian
troops following Napoleon’s retreat from Mos-
cow.2 3 The Cossack terror was in some sense the
final consequence of Napoleon’s—ultimately the
French Revolution’s, or the French ancien ré-
gime’s—Frankenstein monster. In this crescendo
of destruction can be read an allegory of the
French Revolution, the attempt to recreate man
and the disillusionment and terror that followed,
not ending until Waterloo in 1815, the year
between the Shelleys’ two trips to Switzerland.2 4
We also know that Mary Shelley read in 1815
the Abbé Barruel’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire
du jacobinisme (1797-98) as well as her mother
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of
the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution
(1794). In the first of these, Barruel uncovered
sources of the Revolution in the occult practices
of the Freemasons, the illuminati, and the Albig-
ensians, Manicheans, and Assassins. 2 5 Victor
Frankenstein initially apprentices himself spiritu-
ally to Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and
Paracelsus, and he goes off to college at Ingolds-
tadt. Munich or Heidelberg would have been
closer to his home in Geneva, but Ingoldstadt (as
Shelley knew from the Histoire du jacobinisme) was
where Adam Weishaupt, the symbolic arch-demon
of revolutionary thought, founded the Bavarian il-
luminati in 1776, and from this secret society sup-
posedly grew the French Revolution. The il-
luminati were sworn to further knowledge for the
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betterment of mankind, no matter what the cost
or the means. The words of M. Waldman to Vic-
tor could have been Weishaupt’s own: “These
[Agrippa and Paracelsus] were men to whose
indefatigable zeal modern philosophers were
indebted for most of the foundations of their
knowledge. . . . The labours of men of genius,
however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in
ultimately turning to the solid advantage of man-
kind.”2 6
We can feel the pervasive influence of Barruel,
who saw the essence of the illuminati and of the
Revolution he believed they propagated to be
atheism, universal anarchy, and the destruction of
property.2 7 The three elements of the Frankenstein
syndrome are the aim to replace God the creator
with man, to destroy the family and its ties, and
to destroy property and human life. Barruel of-
fered an extremely symbolic explanation (down
to the detection of the Masonic triangle in the
guillotine blade, invented by Dr. Guillotine, a
Freemason), one that could be called Gothic in its
bias toward historical explanations and extreme
causality, on devious and secret plotting, and on
pseudo-science and occult philosophy.
The reading of her mother’s book on “the
Origin and Progress” of the Revolution was for
Mary Shelley a way of connecting the personal
and the public reality of history with Barruel’s
Gothic fictions of origins. Mary Wollstonecraft,
writing about this “revolution, the most important
that has ever been recorded in the annals of man,”
made it very clear that its cruelties were the
consequence of the ancien régime. From the court’s
imprisonment of representatives to the assembly,
the troops’ crushing public demonstrations, and
the king’s substituting retaliation for justice, she
says,
we may date the commencement of those butch-
eries, which have brought on that devoted country
so many dreadful calamities, by teaching the
people to avenge themselves with blood!2 8
The origin of the Revolutionary bloodbath
was in the cruelty of the tyrant himself, much as
Arthur Young and Godwin had asserted. Percy
Shelley offered the same explanation in his preface
to The Revolt of Islam (1817-18): “Can he who the
day before was a trampled slave suddenly become
liberal-minded, forbearing, and independent?”
And he wrote in his review of Frankenstein:
Treat a person ill, and he will become wicked.
Requite affection with scorn:—let one being be
selected, for whatever cause, as the refuse of his
 kind—divide him, a social being, from society, and
you impose upon him the irresistible obligations—
malevolence and selfishness.2 9
If these texts were the ambience, the immedi-
ate experience behind Mary Shelley’s writing was
the trauma of her giving birth to a dead child in
February or March 1815 and the memory of her
own birth, which had killed her mother nearly
twenty years before in 1797.3 0 Birth trauma is one
of the central concerns of Frankenstein, as it was
metaphorically of Wollstonecraft’s history of the
“Origin and Progress” of the Revolution, and in
Mary Shelley the points of view of the parent and
child merged.
Private and public life first joined in Mary
Wollstonecraft’s love affair with Gilbert Imlay (as
it had also in Wordsworth’s with Annette Vallon),
their idyll in Paris during the Revolution, and his
betrayal of her at the same time the Revolution
itself betrayed her. The result was the common-
place similitude between revolution and sexual
love. Wollstonecraft’s recovery was through her
relationship with Godwin, and this time the
offspring was Mary Shelley—in whose birth (the
symbolic joining of these two revolutionary
spirits) the mother died, leaving Mary with the
trauma of seeming rejection by the mother-
creator, as well as by the father who held her
responsible for the death of his beloved wife. At
the age of four she was further rejected by her
father when he took Mary Jane Clairmont as his
second wife.3 1 Now to the guilt of having killed
her mother was added the birth and death of her
own first child, and the birth in January 1816 of
her second (who survived until 1819), not long
before the trip to Switzerland, and at a time when
she was seeing the French Revolution in its final
stage: political reaction following the rejected and
rejecting Revolution.
The construction of the monster, as of the
makeshift, nonorganic family, is the final aspect
of the Frankenstein plot. Burke’s conception of the
state as organic and of the Revolution as a family
convulsed was joined by Mary Shelley with the
fact of her own “family,” the haphazard one in
which she grew up with other children of differ-
ent mothers and with a stepmother.3 2 This cre-
ation of a family of children by some method
other than natural, organic procreation within a
single love relationship is projected onto the
Frankenstein family, a family assembled by the
additive process of adoptions and the like, and so
to Victor’s own creation of a child without parents
or sexual love. The autochthonous family, made
up of bits and pieces, a substitute for organic
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growth, begins with Victor’s father and leads to
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
his own putting together of his creature from a
variety of different bodies. The construction of
the “child” is then followed by its rejection by its
“father”; and then by the creature’s desire for a
proper mate in order to carry on its own line, the
“father’s” refusal, and the creature-son’s systematic
destruction of the father’s whole family—includ-
ing his bride (who would have been the mother
had there been one).
The conventional tyrannical family (Turkish
in this case) is contrasted with the new rational
family Frankenstein projects:
A new species would bless me as its creator and
source; many happy and excellent natures would
owe their being to me. No father could claim the
gratitude of his child so completely as I should
deserve their’s.
(p. 49)
Frankenstein predictably sees himself as the
father who “deserves” the gratitude of his children
more “completely” than any other, and in saying
so becomes the tyrant himself. As an allegory of
the French Revolution, his experiment corre-
sponds to the possibility of ignoring the paternal
(and maternal) power by constructing one’s own
offspring out of sheer reason, but it shows that
the creator is still only a “father” and his creation
another “son” locked in the same love-tyranny
relationship Mary’s own father had described so
strikingly in Caleb Williams (another book Mary
had reread as she undertook her novel).
We have by now distinguished two phases of
the Revolution, one seen from the point of view
of a lover, and the other from the point of view of
the child of the union. These are not as distinct as
they might at first appear. The first is an Oedipus,
or, in Blake’s terms, the Orc who becomes a rival
to his father; and the second is Electra or Polyne-
ices, the child of the incestuous union, the off-
spring of the Revolution. It is precisely this
juxtaposition (or conflation) of points of view,
including the parallel one of the author (expressed
again, looking back from the Preface of 1831,
when she says, “And now, once again, I bid my
hideous progeny go forth and prosper”), that
distinguishes Frankenstein as a fictional work.
The description of the creator and his creature
looking at each other in turn (pp. 52, 53), and
thereafter reporting the same scenes from their
respective viewpoints, inevitably evokes the pas-
sage in Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757) in
which, as an example of how the sublime oper-
ates, Milton’s Satan and Death are described as if
facing each other, each seeing the other from his
83
 own point of view, as mutual challengers.3 3 There
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
is, of course, no mother in the case of Franken-
stein’s creature, and so no Sin of the Satan-Sin-
Death paradigm, because Victor thinks he can cre-
ate out of himself alone (as Satan originally did
Sin). But the mutually destructive conflict proves
to be over the creature’s mate, and the victim is
Victor’s own mate. As in Burke’s example, Sin is
the invisible third party standing between the
father and son.
The world seen by creator and creature is
constructed of the most familiar image patterns of
the Revolution, beginning with Barruel’s illumi-
nati. The word illuminé; was, of course, radically
ambiguous, “used by people in diametrically op-
posed ways” as reason and as revelation, as right
and as wrong, as royal authority and as human
liberty.3 4 When Victor reads Cornelius Agrippa, he
finds that a “new light seemed to dawn upon my
mind” (p. 32), and this is the familiar illumina-
tion which (in terms similar to Paine’s) becomes
fire in the thunderstorm that first suggests the idea
of how to galvanize inert matter into life:
on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from
an old and beautiful oak, which stood about
twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the
dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared,
and nothing remained but a blasted stump. When
we visited it the next morning, we found the tree
shattered in a singular manner. It was not splin-
tered by the shock, but entirely reduced to thin
ribbands of wood. I never beheld any thing so ut-
terly destroyed.
(p. 35)
This description of lightning-electricity as
both life-giving and utterly destructive, aimed at
“an old and beautiful oak,” is a final echo of the
vocabulary in which Shelley’s mother and her op-
ponents (in particular Burke with his British oak)
had described the Revolution. The effect is that of
the crowd’s vengeance in The Monk, but the im-
age leads into the Promethean associations of light
and fire, benevolence and destruction. (Napoleon
was associated with Prometheus by Byron and by
his own propaganda machine.)
The creature is born into light, so strong that
“I was obliged to shut my eyes” (p. 97), and dark-
ness and light alternate as he closes and opens his
eyes. While light allows him to move about and
“wander on at liberty,” it leads him to seek relief
in its opposite: “The light became more and more
oppressive to me; and, the heat wearying me as I
walked, I sought a place where I could receive
shade” (p. 98). His enlightenment-oriented master,
we recall, was given to remarking that “Darkness
had no effect upon my fancy” (p. 47).
84
As the creature’s eyes become “accustomed to
the light” so that he can now “perceive objects in
their right forms,” he comes upon light in its next
higher incarnation, fire:
I . . . was overcome with delight at the warmth I
experienced from it. In my joy I thrust my hand
into the live embers, but quickly drew it out again
with a cry of pain. How strange, I thought, that
the same cause should produce such opposite ef-
fects.
(p. 99)
Frankenstein’s monster runs the gamut of the
associations of birth, springtime, and the heat that
becomes destructive fire, found in so many of the
writings of the Revolution. His birth is described
as a kind of emergence into spring, and his
progress is to the beautiful spot of the cottagers,
from winter to spring (p. 111), followed by the
disastrous confrontation and dispersal of himself
and the foster-family he had tried to join. Victor
describes his own breakdown following the “birth”
of the monster, and then his recovery, in terms of
the seasons:
I perceived that the fallen leaves had disappeared,
and that the young buds were shooting forth from
the trees that shaded my window. It was a divine
spring; and the season contributed greatly to my
convalescence. I felt also sentiments of joy and af-
fection revive in my bosom. . . .
(p. 57)
The irony is that Victor fails to recognize the
connection between his production of the mon-
ster and this rebirth and the conventional imagery
going back to Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft of
the Revolution seen from a positive point of view
as the beautiful. Victor sees it instead as the ter-
rible, the sublime, the threatening, and the
tragedy of his reaction is that, like Burke, he turns
the creature into the sublime destructive force he
reads into his aesthetic response to it—when his
response presumably should rather have been that
of a sensitive parent. What is needed is the beauti-
ful love of a mother, not the sublime fear of a
father.
The warmth of spring ends, however, as
destructive and then self-destructive fire. The
creature tells us that he is going to end his life on
a funeral pyre at the North Pole:
Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall
ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in
the agony of the torturing flames. The light of
that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will
be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will
sleep in peace. . . .
(p. 221)
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 And having said this, he makes off on his ice
raft, and the novel ends: “He was soon borne away
by the waves, and lost in darkness and dis-
tance”—a final sublime object.
It seems not possible to write about the Revo-
lution and avoid the aesthetic categories first
introduced by Burke in his Reflections. Victor has
made the creature out of beautiful features, but
the scale is too large and the juxtapositions ugly—
and the whole inspires terror. Thus, as Victor says
when he sees the creature for the first time instilled
with life: “the beauty of the dream vanished, and
breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (p.
53). And the beautiful cottage, its surrounding
scenery, “the perfect forms of my cottagers” (as
the creature says), and Safie with her “counte-
nance of angelic beauty and expression” (pp. 109,
112), are set against the looming presence of the
monster which destroys the locus amoenus and
disperses this, another family.
Mary Shelley is summing up all we have seen
about the Gothic as a fiction in which to describe
the French Revolution. The positive representa-
tions of the Revolution tended to stop—insofar as
they remained positive and did not move on to
the next phase of response—at the burst of sexual
energy, which was creation. Beyond that, Paine,
Price, Blake, and others suggested a vaguely
pastoral life, an ideal of a Golden Age of leisure
defended by Godwin and predictably attacked by
Malthus, Crabbe, and Burke. The negative, dark
side of the Revolution thus not unnaturally
tended to fall into the fiction of the Gothic; and
this suited Burke’s way of thinking in his Reflec-
tions, for precisely what was being destroyed was
the beautiful, passive, feminine, chivalric, pastoral
world that is embodied in the maiden fleeing
down dimly lit, tortuous corridors, followed by
the active, masculine, sublimely aggressive force
of the French revolutionaries who threatened the
queen and abducted, humiliated, and overthrew
her husband, the father of his people, the king.
Notes
1. The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman (London,
1923), V, 158-60. Page numbers cited in the text refer
to this edition.
2. Part of the context of the passage is the sort of
response a revolutionary sympathizer like Richard
Brinsley Sheridan made to the rumors being bandied
about. He tells his fellow Members of Parliament with
mock seriousness “that there was a plan for taking the
Tower by the French; after which, the whole of our
constitution was to be overturned, and the Royal Fam-
ily were to be murdered. At the head of this plot was
to be placed that most execrable character, Ma-
rat. . . .” There were also to be attempts to poison the
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New River (which supplied London with its water).
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
But the insurrection in fact comes down to the plant-
ing of a Liberty Tree by some schoolboys:“Birnam
Wood coming to Dunsinane,” as Sheridan concludes
(Speeches, 1816, III, 89-91).
3. As John K. Mathison put it: “From the gothic novels,
Catherine had come to believe in the possibility of
cruelty, violence, and crime that her sheltered life had
shown no signs of” (“Northanger Abbey and Jane Aus-
ten’s Conception of the Value of Fiction,” ELH, 24
[1957], 149). See also Marily Butler, Jane Austen and the
War of Ideas (Oxford, 1975), for an interesting account
of the background of Austen’s novels in anti-Jacobin
fiction.
4. At one point Henry tells Catherine, “I consider a
country-dance as an emblem of marriage,” and fills in
the analogies. “But they are such very different
things!—” says Catherine, the reader of Gothic ro-
mances (p. 76). Tilney extends the comparison to
other details, and we remember that his view is
through most of the novel normative of the real as
opposed to Gothic fictions. “[B]ut still they are so very
different,” Catherine, however, responds again; and
indeed they are. Both Henry and Catherine are right.
They are talking about the relation of the sign or the
representation to reality—which finds a particularly
interesting case in the French Revolution.
5. See Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790);
and Paulson, “Burke’s Sublime and the Representation
of Revolution,” in Culture and Politics from Puritanism
to the Enlightenment, ed. Perez Zagorin (Berkeley and
Los Angeles, 1980), pp. 241-70.
6. The Monk, ed. Howard Anderson (London, 1973), pp.
357-58.
7. Rights of Man, Pt. II (1792; rpt. London, 1969), p. 232.
On the imagery of light, to which we shall return, see
Paulson, “Turner’s Graffiti: The Sun and its Glosses,”
in Images of Romanticism, ed. Karl Kroeber and Wil-
liam Walling (New Haven, 1978), pp. 171-83.
8. The caricaturist James Gillray presents equally undif-
ferentiated images (as to good and evil) of Louis XVI
and the canaille who abuse him (French Democrats
surprising the Royal Family, 27 June 1792).
9. Quoted by Robert D. Mayo in his Introduction to
George Moore’s Grasville Abbey (1797; Arno Press ed.,
1974), p. x.
10. Introduction to Count St. Blancard by Mary Meeke
(1795; Arno Press ed., 1977), p. xv.
11. Travels during the Years 1787, 1788, and 1789 (Dublin,
1793), II, 517. For the Jacobin novel, see Butler, pp.
29-87; Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel 1780-1805
(Oxford, 1976); and Paulson’s review of Kelly in Blake:
An Illustrated Quarterly, 11 (1978), 293-97.
12. Political Justice, ed. Isaac Kramnick (London, 1978),
pp. 262, 639; see also pp. 639-41.
13. See Robert C. Hume, “Gothic Versus Romantic: A
Revaluation of the Gothic Novel,” PMLA, 84 (1969),
282-90.
14. Young, Travels, II, 515, 516.
15. Mythology of the Secret Societies (London, 1972), p. 10
(on Barruel in general, see pp. 188-202); and Barruel,
Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme (1797-98;
English eds. also published in 1797-98).
85
 16. Abraham Cowley, quoted by Martin Price, “The
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
Sublime Poem: Pictures and Powers,” Yale Review, 58
(1969), 206.
17. A related, more specific progression, which was one
way of reading the events, began with moderate lead-
ers who had intended no violence or mass upheaval
but were swept away by the movement they un-
leashed. The “moderates,” by upsetting the existing
order, released other forces of society: in Paris, the
mob, the Jacobin clubs, and the politicians who
wanted equality of taxes and representation; in the
country, the naturally conservative peasants who rose
in agrarian revolt.
18. Nelson C. Smith, “Sense, Sensibility and Ann Radc-
liffe,” SEL, 12 (1973), 577-90. See also Mary Poovey,
“Ideology in The Mysteries of Udolpho,” Criticism, 21
(1979), 307-30.
19. The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (London,
1966), p. 329.
20. Butler, p. 28. Sheridan’s indulgence toward Charles
Surface in School for Scandal was attacked by Henry
Mackenzie in Anecdotes and Egotisms, ed. H. W. Thomp-
son (London, 1927), p. 204, and by the anti-Jacobins
Robert Bisset (Douglas, or the Highlander [1801], III,
111-14) and Charles Lucas (The Infernal Quixote [1801],
I, 252).
21. Poovey, passim.
22. Caleb Williams, ed. David McCracken (London, 1970),
p. 133.
23. History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a Part of France,
Switzerland, Germany, and Holland (1817), pp. 19-24.
24. We should also recall Mary Shelley’s account of her
visit to Versailles, and of seeing a particular boar hunt
illustrated in a book in the royal library, and of read-
ing into it the origin of a chain of events that had
only now come to an end in the prostration of France
(Mary Shelley’s Journal, ed. Frederick L. Jones [Norman,
OK, 1947], I, 63).
25. Tracing the Assassins through Gibbon and his sources,
Mary then read Louis Maimbourg’s History of Dualism.
She seems to have been interested in 1815 and 1816
in the relationship of Enlightenment thought to the
interest in occultism and psychic phenomena that im-
mediately preceded the Revolution (Mary Shelley’s Jour-
nal, I, 19).
26. Frankenstein, ed. James Rieger (New York, 1974), pp.
42-43. Page numbers cited in the text refer to this edi-
tion, which is based on the first edition of 1818.
27. Roberts, Mythology of the Secret Societies, p. 196. See
also Clarke Garrett, “Joseph Priestley, the Millenium,
and the French Revolution,” Journal of the History of
Ideas, 34 (1973), 51-66.
28. Historical and Moral View, pp. 56-57.
29. The Complete Poetical Works of Shelley, ed. Thomas
Hutchinson (Oxford, 1904), p. 36; Shelley’s Prose, ed.
D. L. Clark (Albuquerque, 1966), pp. 307-8.
30. See Ellen Moers, Literary Women: The Great Writers
(New York, 1976), pp. 91-100; Mary Shelley’s Journal, I,
40-41; and her letter to T. J. Hogg, 6 March 1815, in
Shelley and his Circle, ed. K. N. Cameron and D. H. Re-
iman (Cambridge, MA, 1970), III, 453.
86 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
31. She later recalled the “excessive and romantic attach-
ment to my father,” which she said the second Mrs.
Goodwin “had discovered” (The Letters of Mary W. Shel-
ley, ed. Frederick L. Jones [Norman, OK, 1944], II, 88).
32. Godwin’s second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, was a
widow with two children of her own. Additional
members of the “family” were Fanny Imlay (Mary
Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate child by Gilbert Imlay)
and William, the child of Godwin’s second marriage.
33. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, Pt. II, Sect. III-IV, ed. J. T.
Boulton (London, 1958), pp. 58-64.
34. Roberts, p. 134.
ALISON MILBANK (ESSAY DATE
1994)
SOURCE: Milbank, Alison. “From the Sublime to the
Uncanny: Victorian Gothic and Sensation Fiction.” In
Gothick Origins and Innovations, edited by Allan Lloyd
Smith and Victor Sage, pp. 169-79. Atlanta: Rodopi,
1994.
In the following essay, Milbank explores the development
of Gothic fiction in the Victorian period through analyses
of “sensation fiction” and through the use of feminist
literary theory.
This paper begins by tracing an extremely
schematic double genealogy for gothic writing of
the Victorian period in texts from the late eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries, then
focuses on the tales and novels of Wilkie Collins
and Sheridan Le Fanu. To illuminate the various
binary oppositions by which the paper is struc-
tured, I shall employ concepts of the sublime,
especially as found in Freud, and also in the work
of the feminist philosopher and psychoanalyst,
Luce Irigaray. My primary concern is with the
production of sexual difference in gothic writing.
One can discern two contrasting strands of
Gothic in the 1790’s and beyond. First, the
‘female’ Gothic, which takes the subjectivity of
the endangered, aristocratic heroine as its herme-
neutic, and charts her incarceration in castle or
convent. Her body is threatened with violation
and death, but she resists, succeeds in escaping
the tyrant’s power, and is finally revealed as the
true heir. Ann Radcliffe is the exemplar of this
tradition, and authors of both sexes in the ranks
of the Minerva Press imitate her romances. Even
Maturin tries his hand at the form, but without
the same emphasis on feminine expression.
Secondly, the ‘male’ Gothic delineates ingress
rather than egress, especially entrance into private
domestic space, such as the woman’s bedroom,
the convent and the female body by a transgres-
sive masculine protagonist like Ambrosio in Mat-
thew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), who contemplates
copulation in a convent mortuary, or the resource-
ful debauchees of de Sade’s One Hundred and
Twenty Days of Sodom, who set out to break every
sexual taboo. In their different ways, Maturin,
Hogg and Godwin continue this emphasis on the
guilty transgressor. Horace Walpole, author of the
earlier tale, The Castle of Otranto (1764) and the
drama, The Mysterious Mother (1768), can be seen
as engenderer of both ‘female’ and ‘male’ forms,
which co-exist in often uneasy relation in his
work. But as Manfred’s daughter, Matilda, in
Otranto, dies at her father’s hand, sacrificed to his
passion for Isabella, so the ‘female’ elements of his
work are subsumed by his greater interest in the
range and extremity of masculine passion.
The next binary opposition which is to be
brought into play is taken from Sigmund Freud. It
is noticeable, both before and after David Morris’s
influential article on gothic sublimity, how fre-
quently Freud’s essay, ‘On the Uncanny’, with its
elegant presentation of the return of repressed
material as an uncanny, literally ‘unhomely’
experience is invoked by commentators on the
Gothic.1 As Freud emphasises, the uncanny can
only be felt when that which has been repressed
is allowed to surface, and to be represented.2 If
incest, for example, a common trope of the
Gothic, is presented in the desire of Manfred in
Otranto, or the unfortunate result of Ambrosio’s
rape of Antonia in The Monk, then it cannot, as
David Morris argues in his article, be sublime,
since the sublime is precisely the point at which
representation fails. The sublime is that which
cannot be represented. Indeed, the uncanny in a
text acts often to turn what might be sublime back
into the beautiful.3
However, at the same time that Freud was
completing his modernist uncanny essay, he was
also embarking on a rather more postmodern
work, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in which
the death instincts are introduced as in agonistic
struggle with those of eros, and resistance to sym-
bolisation produces a sublime.4 Now if the use of
the uncanny can be said to characterise the ‘male’
Gothic’s supernatural incursions, its transgressions
and forced repetitions by means of which the
tabooed is brought into representation, then
‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ more closely
interacts with what I have described as ‘female’
Gothic, with its structure of sexual antagonism,
its presentation of gaps in consciousness, its death
fears and its delight in the sublime as that which
‘subjects’ the human being. In Lewis’s The Monk,
in Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), and in Mel-
moth the Wanderer (1820), there is indeed a sub-
lime, which is located in the ambitious reach of
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the hero or anti-hero; in Ambrosio’s oratory, Mel-
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
moth’s agonies, Falkland’s superhuman stature.
Theirs is the sublime described by Longinus and
the civic humanists, but it is a sublime that has
come adrift from its audience, so that it no longer
overcomes its hearers to empower them, but
merely dominates them.5 Rather it is an anti-
sublime and a parody. In Radcliffe by contrast, the
sublime is often a shared, equalising experience,
as when Adeline and the la Lucs gaze upon the
Alps in The Romance of the Forest (1791), or Emily,
St Aubert and Valancourt behold the Pyrenees.
Even Elena, viewing the landscape from the
confinement of an Apennine convent in The Ital-
ian (1797) can invoke an absent community of
taste by sublime response. For this aesthetic is not
merely a matter of individual emotion, but of
universal claim.6
It is in this context that one can begin to make
distinctions in the area of Victorian Gothic. It is, I
believe, the ‘male’ Gothic and the mock-sublime,
infused with such democratic materials as trial ac-
counts, police reports and popular ballads, that
finds its articulation in the ‘sensation’ fiction of
the mid-nineteenth century by writers such as
Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade and Mary Braddon.
These novels combine extreme situations with
detailed contemporary settings. They set in train
excessive emotions and perverse mental states,
which are expressed primarily in action, as the
protagonists pit themselves against social conven-
tion and legal process. Whereas the male protago-
nist of the earlier form was justified to some extent
by the excess of his passions, or the lack of free
range for his abilities, so these later, often female
characters are shown to be excluded from social
presence and positioning as women by unjust
laws and social hypocrisy. They become house-
breakers, forcing ingress to gain control by mar-
riage to a powerful man, and the taboos they
break are those of sexual conduct and private
morality, and the laws concerned with these, such
as bigamy. They are also not above a little burglary,
blackmail, and forgery. Predicated upon the
production of bodily effect, of sensations, the
novels depend upon the devices of the uncanny—
doubles, disguises, repetitions and horror. This last
effect, unlike terror, is the dread of understanding
what one fears; it is the fear of knowledge, rather
than ignorance. In contrast to the works of less
‘pure’ sensationalists, such as Dickens, whose
pages have more than their fair share of death
scenes, the sensation novel avoids death, or, as in
the case of Lady Audley’s husband thrown by her
down a well, involves deaths that turn out not to
87
 be fatal. Even in Collins’s The Woman in White
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
(1860), the villains do not, after all, need to
murder their destined victim, Anne Catherick,
since she dies naturally. Instead, the typical sensa-
tion ‘murder’ is that of Fosco: ‘With my vast
resources in chemistry, I might have taken Lady
Glyde’s life. At immense personal sacrifice, I fol-
lowed the dictates of my own ingenuity, my own
humanity, my own caution—and took her identity
instead.’7
The form’s playfulness with identities, as-
sumed and denied, and the deliberate act of
transgression performed by its heroines, has given
it a privileged status in some feminist criticism.
Magdalen Vanstone, the ambiguous heroine of
Collins’s No Name (1862), is the paradigm of
liberal feminist virtue because she ‘acts for herself
. . . using men to her advantage rather than
subordinating herself to them. Though her con-
scious goal is to regain the name and inheritance
unjustly taken from her, she is more profoundly
rebelling against the fragility and emptiness of
conventional feminine identity’.8 This verdict is
shared by a number of writers on Collins. The plot
of No Name is engendered by the lately discovered
illegitimacy of two orphans, one of whom,
Magdalen Vanstone, becomes an actress to gain
money to mount an amatory assault in disguise
on the cousin who inherited her name and for-
tune. After his death she disguises herself again, as
a housemaid, to gain access to a family trust, only
to be discovered, fall ill in East London, and be
rescued by an admirer, Captain Kirke, who mar-
ries her.
The ‘sensations’ of the narrative lie in the
dizzy rapidity of plot and counter-plot of oppos-
ing groups, as the heroine’s shady uncle works to
deceive Noel Vanstone’s watchful housekeeper,
and effect an elopement. Magdalen acts passively,
as her uncle instructs her: she is far from the
independent heroine of feminist criticism; rather,
she is the source of the uncanny in the novel. This
is first located in her facial features, with their op-
posing characteristics that defy union: the eyes
‘incomprehensively and discordantly light’, the
firm chin showing stability contrasted to a giddy
mobility of expression. The dislocation of the
parts of her body fetishises it, making it an erotic
focus by its very contradictions, which is a tech-
nique Collins uses for Marian Halcombe in The
Woman in White, and the siren Lydia Gwilt in Ar-
madale (1866).
This uncanniness is shown in a second way in
Magdalen’s lack of name or identity which causes
her to assume her various roles. First, she becomes
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an actress not on the public stage with a company
but rather in a semi-private setting in which she
gives a series of ‘At Home’s. She acts her former
self, as a young lady entertaining her family and
friends with songs and monologues. Her second
role is as vamp, and her third, as housemaid,
exposes her to mild sexual liberties by her em-
ployer and fellow servant. It completes her objec-
tification. To much recent criticism this role-
playing de-stabilises assured categories of
womanhood. But the novel’s ending suggests
quite another purpose is thereby served. Magdalen
questions Kirke about his response to reading her
account of her adventures: ‘Say what you think of
me with your own lips.’9 He does not reply with
words of admiration, but bends down to close her
lips with a kiss, thus assuring her of her sexual if
not her moral perfection. Rather the two are
revealed as one and the same. What the transgres-
sions of the sensation heroine so often produce is
a demystification of the feminine other, whose
public antics only serve to render her the more
nubile. In the case of Magdalen Vanstone, her es-
saying of the roles of actress, vamp and maid
prepares her perfectly for marriage, in which they
will be ‘privatised’. No longer uncanny, now that
she has been re-assimilated by a name, she is
revealed as the beautiful, the formed, in contrast
to the Unform of Kant’s version of the sublime.
Time and again in Collins’s work, rising to an
apogee in The New Magdalen’s marriage of the
prostitute and the clergyman, the uncanny,
displaced woman (or jewel, in The Moonstone), is
restored to patriarchal ordering, and her errancy is
but a necessary stage in the construction of her
value on the sexual market.
In The Woman in White, Collins’s most tradi-
tional gothic tale, one seems to be closer to the
Radcliffean tradition, but there is present the same
uncanniness applied to the female characters,
especially to Laura Fairlie, whose face evokes a
sense of something lacking to the narrator. This is
a classic case of repression, since it is her resem-
blance to her illegitimate half-sister, Anne Cather-
ick, herself a blank ‘woman in white’, that causes
the effect. The transgressive act of adultery has
made two daughters where there should have
been but one. The novel’s villain, Count Fosco,
plays indeed with the term, ‘the sublime’, which
he constantly applies to Marian Halcombe, but its
use serves to undercut her authority, especially
when one finds an invocation to ‘the sublime
Marian’ in Fosco’s intervention in Marian’s own
diary, at the point when she has lost control of
the plot, and of her own narrative. Fosco com-
mends his wife for sublimity precisely because of
her subjection to him.1 0 Both the use of the
uncanny and the mock-sublime presage the phal-
locentric closure of the novel, when Laura’s lack,
after she has lost name, position and character is
filled by her low-born lover’s recreation of her,
while she lives under his protection. Both heroines
are displaced on the novel’s last page by the new
male ‘Heir of Limmeridge’.
The ‘female’ Gothic does, however, find a
voice in Victorian fiction, notably in Charlotte
Brontë’s fiction, in which entry into the gothic
plot of enclosure creates a self of value, and in
Dickens’s excursions into gothic terrain in Esther
Summerson’s narrative in Bleak House (1852-3),
and his re-writing of The Mysteries of Udolpho in
Little Dorrit (1855-7). But the most Radcliffean
writer then active was undoubtedly J. Sheridan Le
Fanu, editor of the Dublin University Magazine. His
shorter fiction, mainly concerned with the super-
natural, consists of exercises in an extreme ver-
sion of ‘male’ Gothic, in which a guilty man’s
secrets are disclosed by ghostly invasion, and his
self-narrative deconstructed into damnation.
However, just as Freud’s work on the uncanny
leads to what I should describe as a sublime—
something ‘beyond the pleasure principle—so Le
Fanu’s uncanny, supernatural tales give way to
longer fictions mainly concerned with the escape
of the aristocratic heroine of virtue from imprison-
ment in the time-locked great house, and from
the burden of inherited guilt. In Wylder’s Hand
(1864), the union of ‘male’ and ‘female’ forms is
attempted, leading to a bizarre ending (for a
Victorian novel) in which the two heroines,
romantically unattached, are glimpsed by the nar-
rator adrift on the Venetian Lido, still wedded to
their family loyalties as the doge is to the sea, but
exiled from their own house because of their
awareness of its guilty history. They escape the
narrator’s comprehension, and remain unassimi-
lated by his text. The Rose and the Key (1871) goes
further in its denunciation of the evils of the
present as well as a past social system. Maud Ver-
non sets off innocently, like Maturin’s Stanton,
for a country house visit, only gradually to realise
that her genteel, though eccentric, companions
are lunatics, and that her mother has had her
made an inmate in an asylum. Le Fanu so develops
this theme about the relative normality and
domesticity of the place as to suggest that the
social order itself is a Foucaldian prison, and
Maud’s eventual release has, perforce, an apocalyp-
tic quality.
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However, it is in Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
Haugh (1864) that Le Fanu’s work most closely
follows Radcliffe, to whose heroine, Adeline de
Montalt, his heroine compares herself. It also
contains his most extended version of the sublime
in its apocalyptic form. In Uncle Silas, the young
heiress, Maud Ruthyn, moves on her father’s
death from one isolated great house to another,
even more isolated, and indeed, ruinous mansion,
and the care of her uncle who had once been
suspected of a bookmaker’s death, so lives retired.
The murder is proved by a later replication, when
Silas’s son enters Maud’s room to kill her by
means of the same window machinery. Her ma-
lign governess accidentally murdered in her stead,
Maud flees death and the house for freedom.
Unlike the sensation novels of Collins and
Braddon, Le Fanu’s novel, which he entitled a
‘tragic romance’, is obsessed with the idea of
death, which is the frame of the heroine’s specula-
tion. Elizabeth Bowen has therefore described
Maud Ruthyn as death’s self-chosen bride. The
two brothers Ruthyn have mortuary associations,
and Silas once appears like a corpse, leading a
recent television adaptor of the novel to associate
Maud’s death fears with repressed incestuous
desires. This would be a reading of Uncle Silas in
terms of the uncanny. But Maud’s father’s Swe-
denborgian friend tries to lead the young child
Maud’s gaze beyond the frame of death, and its
house, the tomb. He leads the motherless girl to a
high wall, then behind it, to see the scene of
bucolic felicity it hides. Next he takes her to her
mother’s mausoleum, and asks her what she sees:
‘Oh that—that place where poor mama is?’
‘Yes, a stone wall with pillars, too high for either
you or me to see over. . . . But Swedenborg sees
beyond it, over and through it, and has told me
all that concerns us to know. He says your mama
is not there.’
‘She is taken away!’ I cried, starting up, and with
streaming eyes, gazing on the building which, tho’
I stamped my foot in my distraction, I was afraid
to approach.
‘Oh is mama taken away? Where is she? Where
have they brought her to?’1 1
Like Mary Magdalene at the tomb of Christ,
the child can only imagine a materialistic explana-
tion of an empty tomb. Her thoughts refuse to
move beyond the fact of death, and the return of
the ghost, to the sublime vision. Death for Maud
is uncanny, and this uncanniness and fear of the
supernatural precludes her understanding of the
material threats which actually face her. Similarly,
this passage with its use of a wall to image death,
89
 suggests that the house itself is a barrier to percep-
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
tion. It is, after all, the balustrade of Knowl that
provides the Swedenborgian with his first analogy.
At Bartram-Haugh, whenever Maud tries to look
out beyond the house through the window her
breath mists the glass, and she sees nothing.
In Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, the
death instincts and repetition are in some way
directly related, as movement occurs only to re-
establish an original stability.1 2 Similarly, Le Fanu’s
protagonist moves house only to repeat the forms
and situation of her earlier residence. She also
reinforces the sense of repetition by her frequent
attempts to show resemblances between her father
and her uncle. This fact runs counter to a conven-
tional Freudian reading of the novel purely in
terms of the projection of repressed characteristics
of Austin Ruthyn, and in terms of incest and the
uncanny.1 3 For Maud, as Dr Bryerly and Cousin
Monica Knollys try to indicate, Silas is uncanny, a
riddle, a Rembrandt portrait only partially emerg-
ing from shadow, because Maud refuses to allow
his malign character and to separate him from her
father, and the latter’s system of values. Far from
creating a victimised self as part of a paranoid
fantasy, as W. J. McCormack claims, Maud’s
belated realisation of her intended murder is
necessary in order for her to achieve any action,
to move out of her frozen stasis.
There is another repetitious journey, as Maud
is taken, as she believes, to France, but in fact in a
circle back to Bartram-Haugh, and close confine-
ment while her death is prepared. This final series
of repetitions is what enables her to cease viewing
death as uncanny, and to face its reality. She
confronts her uncle: ‘I think I must have looked
like a phantom newly risen from the grave.
‘What’s that? Where do you come from?’ ‘Death!
Death!’ was my whispered reply, as I froze with
terror where I stood.’1 4 Maud becomes herself a
representation of death, the final taboo, and it is
this assumption of uncanny status that enables
her to move beyond the uncanny perspective. For
as the false window of her prison opens, and the
murderer enters, Maud truly looks on death, but
also beyond it. In the Pauline language that Le
Fanu uses elsewhere, she moves from seeing ‘in a
glass darkly’, to vision ‘face to face’. This direct
sight is, in St Paul, only possible out of this world,
in the world to come, at the eschaton.
But this novel has another revelation to make,
as well as a spiritual one. Maud’s escape from the
great house is an escape from death, but also from
the confinement of the house and its patriarchal
authority, which is revealed as murderous. House
90 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
and tomb are indeed revealed as one and the
same. With the patriarchal house goes also its
uncanny aesthetic, to which Maud had been
equally in thrall, and the death/pleasure/repetition
nexus of her earlier fears. In the 1947 film version
of the novel, Lord Ilbury, Maud’s suitor, is allowed
to carry her away to safety. The account of her
flight in the novel itself is quite different. There, it
is her devoted friend Meg, the keeper’s daughter,
who at risk to her own life manages the escape.
Maud’s haven is not her lover’s arms but the
house of her elderly cousin Monica, a woman. In
the paeon of praise in the book’s conclusion, only
one man’s name, that of Dr Bryerly, is included in
a female pantheon of cousins, friends and ser-
vants. The members of this list are both the
recipients of the heroine’s affection and also the
first-fruits of a world outside the collapsed culture
of the great house. (For in Le Fanu the woman
escapes not from private house to the public
domain like a sensation protagonist, but from a
ruined feudal social order.)
Freud ends Civilisation and its Discontents with
a hope that the other of the two ‘Heavenly Pow-
ers’, eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert
himself in the struggle with his equally immortal
adversary’.1 5 It is Eros which alone opposes stasis
and death in Freud, and it is love alone, Maud
Ruthyn notes in her narrative, that can, as St Paul
says, be eternal when hope and faith ‘vanish into
sight’. At the end of Uncle Silas it is women’s love
for each other that can resist the deathly power of
patriarchal control and point to a new order, a
new heaven and earth, an eschatological sublime.
It is a sublime because, despite the paradisal
landscape of the novel’s conclusion, it is incom-
plete, unrepresentable except in the language of
the Book of Revelation. As Jean-Francois Lyotard,
speaking for Kant, says of the concept: ‘this feel-
ing demands, and in a sense promises community.
But this community is yet to be. It is not
realized.’1 6
In her Ethique de la difference sexuelle, Luce
Irigaray posits a new model of rapport between
the sexes, not to be achieved through the female
sublime and the awareness, as one finds in Lacan,
of the unrepresentable supplementary nature of
female jouissance.1 7 In Lacan, woman is the lack
of a lack, and continually uncanny, just as she is
continually desirable. She appears sublimely other
because of her repression of her castration. The
Ethique gestures towards a female transcendent,
what Irigaray terms, eschatologically, a parousie,
but I do not believe that this is the opening of the
sublime, for this transcendent is to be represent-
able in language.1 8 Rather, in her turn to Des-
cartes’s siting of the origin of the passions in
admiration, in wonder, is located Irigaray’s human
sublime. She suggests the original admiration or
wonder that the sight of the other’s difference
evokes is the point of the possibility of a new ethi-
cal and sexual relation between them.1 9 The sexes
are not in themselves sublime, indeed, they are all
too representable, but the point of difference
between them is illimitable.
This is the point at which Irigaray’s work can
bear upon ‘female’ Gothic, both Radcliffean and
Victorian. By excessive emphasis on feminine
integrity and on sexual difference, both of which
are asserted (and constructed) at the moment of
threat, the ‘female’ Gothic is engendered. And in
Irigaray and ‘female’ Gothic alike, the ‘gap’ is what
is brought into representation. Through the
representation of this sublime difference, and
through the new family experience of mothering
which usually follows the heroine’s escape from
the tyrant, she is able, to use Irigaray’s phrase, to
be ‘reborn in her desire’ as a woman, and to
consider entering upon an equalised sexual rela-
tion.2 0
Irigaray has been accused of feminine es-
sentialism, which is unfair for a number of rea-
sons, not least her assertion that we have no idea
in what the feminine might consist. 2 1 Most
importantly, Irigaray seeks the feminine not in
some abject pre-Oedipal maternal wholeness but
in language. The feminine needs to be represented,
to be symbolised. It is sexual difference itself at
which one wonders, not just the female sublime.
This too is a project on which the ‘female’ Gothic
can be said to have embarked. In her early novel
of 1790, A Sicilian Romance, Radcliffe’s heroine,
Julia, in escaping from her father’s plans for a
forced marriage penetrates a series of caves where
she finds her mother. She had believed that her
mother died many years before, but she was, in
reality, locked by her cruel husband in the vaults
under the house so that he could make another
marriage. Julia does not remain in maternal
nostalgia for oneness but releases her mother into
social presence and speech, and thereby herself
into sexual fulfilment. Caroline Helstone in
Brontë’s Shirley similarly finds a silent and self-
punishing mother whom she leads into public ac-
knowledgement, while Maud Ruthyn’s mother is
allowed to flee the tomb for the ascent of fantastic
mountains, ‘peopled with human beings trans-
lated into the same image, beauty and splen-
dour’.2 2
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I have tried to suggest that the ‘female’ Gothic
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
has a Utopian project, one based on an awareness
of the sublime as an empowering aesthetic, which
yet allows full place to a sense of loss and rupture,
and to the subjected nature of the human. The
Slovenian Lacanian, Slavoj Zizek regards the un-
symbolisable Real of the Lacanian sublime as itself
a trauma, an antagonism, that produces a tragic
subject.2 3 But the ‘female’ gothic tradition places a
positive ethical and erotic value on that very
antagonism, so that we may less tragically repeat
the Lacanian mantra: ‘ne pas ceder sur son desir’.
Notes
1. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition,
ed. James Stratchey and Anna Freud, Vol. XVII 1917-
1919 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), pp. 217-56.
Employers of the uncanny concept in Victorian
Gothic criticism include Albert Hutter, ‘Dreams,
Transformations, and Literature: The Implications of
Detective Fiction’, Victorian Studies, 19, no.2
(December 1975), pp. 181-209; Peter Brooks, Reading
For the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York:
Columbia, 1984), especially the chapter on Great Expec-
tations; Patrick Brantlinger, ‘What is “Sensational”
about the Sensation Novel?’, Nineteenth Century Fic-
tion, 37, no.1 (June, 1982), pp. 1-28; and Diane Sadoff,
‘Locus Suspectus: Narrative, Castration and the
Uncanny’, Dickens Studies Annual, 13 (1984), 207-30.
David B. Morris’s article, ‘Gothic Sublimity’ is to be
found in the special issue on the sublime of New Liter-
ary History, 16, no.2 (Winter, 1985), pp. 299-320.
2. Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, Ibid, p. 249.
3. Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our
Idea of the Sublime and the Beautiful is often accused by
modern commentators of precisely this move. See
Francis Ferguson, ‘The Sublime of Edmund Burke’,
Glyph 8 (1981), pp. 62-78.
4. ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, vol XVIII (1921-1922), pp.
3-64.
5. The author of Longinus’s On the Sublime states that
the orator’s words ‘exercise an irresistible power of
mastery and get the upper hand with every member
of the audience’, p. 107 in Classical Literary Criticism,
tr. T. S. Dorsh (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1974).
6. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, ‘Complexity and the
Sublime’ in ICA Documents 4: Postmodernism (London:
Free Press, 1989), p. 23, on the Kantian sublime in this
respect.
7. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, ed Harvey Suck-
smith, (Oxford, 1980), p. 581.
8. Richard Barickman, Susan MacDonald and Myra Stark,
Corrupt Relations: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins
and the Victorian Sexual System (New York: Columbia
1982), p. 121. Nina Auerbach’s Woman and Demon:
The Life of a Victorian Myth (New York: Columbia,
1979) and Sue Lonoff’s Wilkie Collins and His Victorian
readers: A Study in the Rhetoric of Authorship (New York:
AMS, 1985) share this view of Magdalen Vanstone.
9. No Name, (New York: Dover, 1978), p. 609.
91
 10. The Woman in White, p. 267 and p. 562.
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW 11. Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh, ed W. J. McCor-
mack (Oxford, 1981), p. 13.
12. ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p. 36.
13. See W. J. McCormack, Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian
Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980).
14. Uncle Silas, p. 410.
15. Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, Complete Psycho-
logical Works, Vol 21, p. 145. ‘But who can forsee with
what successs and what result?’ was added in 1931,
with reference to the rise of Hitler.
16. Lyotard, ‘Complexity and the Sublime’, p. 23.
17. Luce Irigaray, Ethique de la difference sexuelle (Paris:
1984).
18. Ibid, p. 139.
19. Ibid, pp. 75-77, especially p. 77: “Un exces resiste: son
existence et son devenir comme lieu qui permet
l’alliance et/par la resistance a l’assimilation ou la
reduction au meme.”
20. Ibid., p. 141.
21. On Irigary and essentialism see Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques
Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge,
1990), and Margaret Whitford, Philosophy in the Femi-
nine (London: Routledge, 1991).
22. Uncle Silas, p. 410.
23. Slavoj Zizeck, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London:
Verso, 1989), p. 3. Zizeck’s is, of course, an Hegelian
reading of Lacan in terms of Hegel’s own reading of
tragedy.
DEIDRE LYNCH (ESSAY DATE
SPRING 2001)
SOURCE: Lynch, Deidre. “Gothic Libraries and Na-
tional Subjects.” Studies in Romanticism 40, no. 1 (spring
2001): 29-48.
In the following essay, Lynch analyzes the role of librar-
ies in revealing expressions of national identity within
the Gothic tradition.
This domain of phantasms is no longer the night,
the sleep of reason, or the uncertain void that
stands before desire, but, on the contrary, wakeful-
ness, untiring attention, zealous erudition. . . .
Henceforth, the visionary experience arises from
the black and white surface of printed signs, from
the closed and dusty volume that opens with a
flight of forgotten words. . . . The imaginary now
resides between the book and the lamp.
—Michel Foucault, “Fantasia of the Library”
In a Gothic novel, to enter the chambers a
household sets aside for its reading and writing is
to be recruited into a genealogical plot. The secret
cabinets of Gothic libraries house memorials and
legacies. To visit them is to stumble on wills made
by dead fathers; long lost certificates of marriage;
musty manuscripts; even, as in The Mysteries of
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Udolpho, the miniature-portrait of an unknown
lady, concealed within a bag of coins—raw materi-
als, all, for narratives of reproduction and succes-
sion. Walter Scott, not just an aficionado of old
spectre-stocked mansions, but also romanticism’s
most indefatigable bibliographer, can be counted
on to comply with a basic rule of this literature:
while surrounded by books, ink, and paper the
protagonists of Gothic fiction embark on their
projects of memory and mourning. These projects
establish the terms on which the generations will
be linked and on which the living will relate to
the family dead.
And when Gothic protagonists use the Gothic
library as they are meant to, when they read, they
are haunted. One site in which Ann Radcliffe’s
Emily St. Aubert remembers the dead and, seeing
spectres, receives assurance that the dead remem-
ber her, is the library of La Vallée. Re-entering it
after an absence from home, Emily finds her way
to the armchair in which her father had been ac-
customed to read and sees a book lying open as
he had left it. “She immediately recollected that
St. Aubert, on the evening before his [final]
departure from the chateau, had read to her some
passages from this, her favourite author. The
circumstance now affected her extremely; she
looked at the page, wept, and looked again. To
her the book appeared sacred and invaluable, and
she would not have . . . closed the page . . . for
the treasures of the Indies.”1 The passage presages
a pattern in the scenes that follow, in this novel
and those of Radcliffe’s many romantic-era imita-
tors: a pattern in which the supernatural will, to
paraphrase Foucault, reside between the book and
the lamp. Later, for instance, Emily’s manservant
Ludovico will use a book picked up “in an obscure
corner of the Marquis’ library” to kill time as he
stands watch in a room rumoured to be haunted
(551). It is, or so it appears, his very act of reading
that raises the chateau’s ghosts: the narrator
implies that once Ludovico ceases to regard the
characters on the printed page, he instead sees the
space before him filled by the spectral shape of
the dead. The audience invited to put themselves
in Ludovico’s place are reminded of how as read-
ers they also are enlisted in a process characterized
by periodic disappearances and apparitions, a
process in which, time and again, the book as
object, the thing of paper that one grasps in one’s
hands, will, as one is engrossed by one’s reading,
cease to be a material reality, while the ideas this
book “contains” will begin “to exist” and to be
embodied in their turn.
 Alerted to the uncanny aspects that attend on
this everyday phenomenology, readers of Gothic
fictions learn to associate the textual and the
spectral. What Radcliffe’s reference in the earlier
passage of Udolpho to “the treasures of the Indies”
suggests as well is another point crucial to my
argument: that the page the character regards in
these episodes of phantasmagoria can be a legacy.
Within these narratives, so often geared to rese-
curing the line of succession and the transmission
of property, even the time of reading is given the
reader by the dead. Literature is a family trust.
This leads me to the second way I have to
identify the Gothic libraries at issue in my essay—
and leads me, too, to the terms in which this
rereading of the Gothic might also reopen the
question of Scott’s role in instituting the discipline
of literary studies and with it the category of
“English Literature,” which he helps equip with a
canon, history, and tradition. (This is a question
often engaged of late, but in work that tends to
underestimate Scott’s debt to the female practitio-
ners of the Gothic and to overlook the emotional
baggage—the melancholy, trepidation, and even
aggressivity—that freights the project of canon
formation almost as much as it freights the ghost-
seeing that this “English Literature” depicts and
abets.)2 As writing erected “within the archive,”3
Gothic fictions themselves do the cultural work of
a library, the institution dubbed the national
library in particular. Gothic fictions make us
contemplate not only family origins but also liter-
ary sources—and, crucially, make us contemplate
them in tandem. It is, of course, a critical com-
monplace that, in its obsessing over the secrets of
the child bed, the Gothic gives voice to the
culture’s anxieties about procreation, about the
slippage between kinship arrangements and
individuals’ sexual desires. My aim here, while
preserving the feminism that informs that scholar-
ship, is to relocate the base from which we inves-
tigate that anxiety over reproduction. What if the
home base for our discussions of Gothic conven-
tion were not the bedroom but rather the library?
To answer this question, I’ll be aligning the Gothic
with other (often North Briton-monopolized)
institutions of national cultural formation (the
ballad collection, the anthology, “lives” of the
poets and the novelists)—those projects of literary
revivalism that so often proved irresistible for
Scott, who frequently seems to have dreamt of
single-handedly reissuing “English” in its entirety.4
The Gothic novelists conceive of themselves
as the target market for enterprises of this kind,
and they advertise their bibliophilia. Scarcely
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canonical themselves, they are among the period’s
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
chief exemplars of canon-love. Their texts are
remarkable accordingly for the density of their in-
tertextual allusions. The Castle of Wolfenbach, in
Eliza Parsons’ 1793 Minerva Press novel of that
name, is typical of its domiciliar kind in being
endowed to excess, as a neighbor complains, with
“‘bloody floors, prison rooms, and [in]scriptions,
they say, on the windows to make a body’s hair
stand on end.’”5 We know that, with its endow-
ment of “[in]scriptions,” the typical Gothic text
resembles that house. It is crowded with quota-
tions and epigraphs from Shakespeare and Milton
and the graveyard poets. This writing self-
consciously offers itself to British readers as the
site where they may claim their ancestral birth-
right.
The books-within-books I called attention to
earlier are the conventional media of that self-
consciousness, of the interrogation of literary read-
ing that is a central drama for the Gothic.6 And
we know—because it is as if these novelists all did
business with the same props department, because
horror movies have likewise made the Gothic
library a standard element in their mise-en-
scène—how any one of these books should look.
Its dilapidated state, quaint woodcuts, and mildew
will announce the fact that it has survived genera-
tions of readers, a longevity that casts into relief
the truncated life expectancy accorded mere
humans. My hope in this essay is that by tracing
to its eighteenth-century origin this conventional
source of Gothic suspense—the moment when the
protagonist pries up the cover of the old book and
begins to read—I will be able to demonstrate how
this figure of reading (which is also a figure of
what it means to probate one’s cultural
“inheritance”) functioned in the program the first
Gothic novels pursued both self-consciously and
equivocally via their modelling of canon-love:
that of addressing their audience as a nation.
This reconstruction will involve me in a
dispute with recent accounts of the geopolitics of
the Gothic and attempts to specify the real object
of the terror this tradition mobilizes. Cannon
Schmitt and Judith Halberstam agree on how best
to name that terror. They call it xenophobia.
Schmitt, for instance, proposes that even or
especially when set in foreign parts—the Black
Forest or Catholic Italy—the Gothic functions as a
“mechanism of Englishness, a technology of
national subject-formation that works to confirm
identification between English readers and
‘English’ characters and characteristics.”7 In this
account of the novels’ Continental settings,
93

GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH (1805-1882)
Ainsworth was a Victorian novelist who
helped popularize historical and criminal fic-
tion in the nineteenth century. The wide-
spread appeal of his early works gave
Ainsworth celebrity status and immediate
entrance into social and literary circles; his
friendships with numerous authors and art-
ists, including Charles Lamb and Charles
Dickens, as well as his lavish dinners and
weekend retreats, established him as the
most noted literary host of his time.
With few exceptions, Ainsworth’s novels
readily fall into two categories: the Newgate
novels, notable for their criminal heroes, and
the historical romances, characterized by
Ainsworth’s unusual mix of antiquarian detail
and improbable, dramatic action. Rookwood
(1834), a Newgate novel, features among its
subplots the career of Dick Turpin and is the
work which brought to final formulation the
legend of that notorious highwayman. The
supernatural aspects of the novel are focused
on the curse which afflicts the family of the
novel’s eponymous hero and the ominous
signs which embody its threats and visita-
tions. Windsor Castle (1843) is a tale of the
court of Henry VIII, which includes the fates
of the much-married king’s first three wives.
A Gothic element is added by means of the
symbolic figure of Herne the Hunter, who has
become the Devil’s instrument as a result of
a pact made in the distant past. In Ainsworth’s
incomplete Gothic novel Auriol; or, The Elixer
of Life (1865), written in imitation of Charles
Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, the
hero is gifted with eternal youth by the elixir
of life discovered by his grandfather, but in
order to maintain his unnatural perfection,
he must offer sacrifices to the Devil at ten-
year intervals under the tutelage of the vil-
lainous Rougemont.
Though Ainsworth is not ranked as a first-
rate author by modern scholars, his works
and the early critical reactions to them are
valued as evidence of the social and literary
climate during his era.
94
nationality requires a foil to set it off. The Gothic
makes itself useful, accordingly, by purveying a
mode of distinguishing us from them. It seems
pertinent, however, that these exotic Continental
settings also invite writers like Radcliffe to use
them in fantasies about romances’ power to
establish communal systems of belief. Indeed, the
distinctive feature that links the Gothic’s array of
alien nations is the capacity that each has to be
internally self-identical, that each has to be a na-
tion. Italy, hence, is the site where a “taste for clas-
sic story [descends] to the peasants of the coun-
try,” as Radcliffe’s Emily discovers (421). And
romance—“inventions which had captivated the
. . . imagination in every rank of society in a
former age” (552)—operate there as the media of
cultural integration: “they sung of the wars of the
Moors against Charlemagne and then of the woes
of Orlando: afterwards the measure changed, and
the melancholy sweetness of Petrarch succeeded”
(177). Because, in Italy, literary history is, literally,
in the very air a Gothic heroine breathes, floating
on the breath of the “people,” such encounters
with romance’s ubiquity suggest for me a dynamic
of projection: one in which Italians figure not so
much as demonized outsiders to “Englishness”
but rather as exemplars of the unified interpretive
community that a nation sufficiently enamoured
of “English Literature” might be. So, although in
this essay I’ll be following recent scholarship in
associating the Gothic with the advent of a new
and specifically cultural nationalism, my intent
here is not to demonstrate, as it does, the ef-
ficiency with which the Gothic machinery terror-
izes its protagonists and readers into a more secure
because more xenophobic national identity. My
attention to what happens with reading, quota-
tion, and structures of address in this fiction has
left me unconvinced that the Gothic simply gives
form to what terrifies the national community. In
my account, the Gothic also gives form to that
which terrifies in the idea of a national community,
of a literary nation especially, and that which
mystifies as well.
As archives conserving the national subject’s
literary legacy, Gothic fictions reinstate those
premises about the temporality, the locality, and
the commonness of culture that underwrite the
very concept of a national literature. I’m going to
argue that it’s equally the case that, in this guise,
these fictions literalize those premises and thereby
make them strange. Radcliffe and her Minerva
Press imitators/rivals—women such as Eliza Par-
sons and Eleanor Sleath—have an investment in
reproducing and transmitting the nation’s literary
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legacy. There is no disputing this. Nonetheless,

GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW

the plots of inheritance that originate in their
Gothic libraries can uncannily defamiliarize the
idioms of filiation and consanguinity that were
deployed as the writer’s nationality and voice
came to be reconceptualized as bequests from the
dead.
The canon love that these women stage is, I
want to stress, a more Gothic event, more pres-
sured by occult influences (unconscious desire,
secret guilt) than the happy, hygienic (and
voluntarist) affair we customarily have in mind
when espousing our “love of literature.” For this
reason, an account of the eerie literal-mindedness
with which they render the nation as a dead poets’
society may also enrich recent discussions of how
“Celtic cultural workers represented the ‘ghosts in
the machine’ of English print culture”—not just
by revivifying that dead metaphor, but also by il-
luminating the affective elements of fantasy and
wish within that cultural work. And, conversely,
the (feminine) devotion the Radcliffean Gothic
brings to the task of collecting and preserving liter-
ary remnants appears less pious when evaluated Caricature of William Harrison Ainsworth, c. 1855.
in conjunction with the hard-headed opportun-
ism these discussions ascribe to those Scottish
professors, antiquaries, and (not least) historical (and especially “invading” Scots’) rights to publish
novelists, who, less colonial subjects than savvy Thomson’s Seasons be postponed for eternity, the
“colonizer[s] of ‘English,’” devised through their Lords’ rhetoric in effect declared classic Literature
invention of the English literary tradition a new a national property. Henceforth, British literature
“technology of access to the imperial clerisy.”8 “belonged to the British people.”1 0 The decision,
Hazlitt accused the Waverley Novels of necro- which scholars have described as one that ef-
mantically administering “charms and philtres to fectively institutes the idea of the public domain,
our love of legitimacy.”9 But what the Wizard of clarified that copyright should not in the long
the North seems to have learned by heeding the term impose limits on what Justice Yates called
ghostly voices in, and of, the Gothic is that being “this gift”: “books are by the author’s publication
haunted is a compromise formation: the canon- of them irrevocably given to the public.”1 1 The
love that is staged within the haunted Gothic canon—now understood as, in effect, a national
library is, like the forms of national-cultural al- trust fund, as the epitome of the gift that keeps
legiance it underwrites, an ambivalent affair. giving—was the Briton’s birthright.
Let me turn now to those ghostly voices that “Shall we not endeavor to secure to future
haunt the scene of Gothic reading. In the second generations, entire and unchanged, their birth-
half of the eighteenth century, Britons developed right in Milton, in Addison, and Swift?” asked
new ways of canonizing writing and of harnessing Thomas Sheridan at the time when the first salvos
texts to the myths of racial purity and continu- in the literary property debate were being fired.1 2
ous, unitary identity that underpin modern The endeavor Sheridan promoted was buttressed
nation-states. Trevor Ross’s account of the debate by the growing prominence in criticism of histori-
leading to the 1774 decision in the copyright case cist approaches. Criticism’s discussions of the
of Donaldson v. Becket suggests one way the con- tradition had formerly been devoted to prizing
sumption of literature was reconceived in this poems for how they encouraged additional poet-
period. It was revalued for how it enabled citizens izing. The function of criticism, that is, was to
to probate their common cultural inheritance. facilitate ongoing cultural production. Once
When the House of Lords refused to grant the reoriented, however, criticism was in the eigh-
London booksellers a perpetual term of copyright, teenth century harnessed to a new desire to look
resisting the booksellers’ demand that all others’ backward: to see texts as means of linking the

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GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
Title page of Eliza Parsons’s Castle of Wolfenbach: A
German Story, 1793.
present generation to the generations preceding
it. To this end, source studies (which cast the
author under investigation as some one’s poster-
ity in his turn) became standard parts of the liter-
ary critic’s arsenal. That the business of the critic
was redefined along these lines intimates how the
critic’s object had also altered. In the mid-century
a transvaluation of literary antiquity brought
about a state of affairs in which it really was the
case that the best poet was a dead poet: a spectral-
ization of “English” I’ll engage shortly. Mid-
eighteenth-century commentators abandoned the
progressive framework that they had worked
within hitherto and that associated the writing of
England’s past with an irredeemable linguistic
unruliness and obscurity. In its place, we have
something like Samuel Johnson’s test of time—his
proposal that the only reliable way to appraise the
author is to ascertain whether, “outliving his
century,” he can retain the fidelity of multiple
generations of readers. Such an arrangement ef-
fectually forestalls any claim writing by the living
might make to value.1 3
96
Poetic succession ceased in the later eigh-
teenth century to be merely “a trope of legitima-
tion among poets themselves,” becoming instead,
as Ian Duncan writes, “the property of an expand-
ing reading public.”1 4 As Duncan implies, there
was nothing new about the practice of invoking a
metaphor of “legitimacy” to authorize a work of
literature. Yet in the later-eighteenth-century
context, some old family trees of literary history
became newly important. To think about that
significance, and to shift our attention from the
ways in which the relation of reader to book
altered in the mid-century to the ways in which
the relation of book to book was transformed as
well, we might juxtapose a pair of Gothic librar-
ies: the first, the setting for the opening chapter of
Charlotte Smith’s 1788 Emmeline, or, the Orphan of
the Castle; the second, the “Green Chamber” of
Scott’s 1816 The Antiquary.
Having delivered proof after proof of its
heroine’s “natural good breeding,” Smith’s novel
concludes, as we expect it will, with the discovery
of Emmeline’s legitimacy and her restoration to
the estate that is her birthright. It begins cor-
respondingly, with a parable of canon formation
that evidences how the metaphorics of literary
legitimacy and the literary legacy had been revivi-
fied. It seems utterly appropriate that when we
first glimpse Emmeline, our foundling heroine
should be exploring the castle’s ruined library,
where books “of all ages” are likewise to be found.
There she salvages those works not yet injured by
time. They are, of course, (no surprises here
either): “Spencer and Milton, two or three volumes
of the Spectator, and [sic] old edition of Shake-
speare, and an odd volume or two of Pope.” She
cleans off the dust and removes them to the room
which the village carpenter has equipped with a
shelf, “on which, with great pride of heart, she
placed her new acquisitions.” Emmeline has
reconstituted the line of literary succession, and
her canon-making prefigures the manner in which
Smith throughout the novel will align questions
of pedigree, the disposition of property, and
nationality. (Ultimately, this heroine’s discovery
of the documents certifying her parents’ marriage,
in a chest that, among other “silent memorials of
the dead,” also houses “several pieces of poetry,”
will save her from the marriage to a foreigner and
the expatriation that her plotting persecutors have
arranged for her.)1 5
Its most notable furnishing an ancient tapestry
to which a modern hand has added a border
embroidered with Chaucerian verses, the Green
Chamber in The Antiquary enables a plot twist that
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attests at once to Scott’s determination to make
haunting something like a family affair and to a
parallel determination to make literature some-
thing like a family heirloom. When Scott’s found-
ling hero Lovel, in numerous respects a Gothic
heroine manquée, enters the room with his host,
the eponymous antiquary, neither is in the frame
of mind requisite for the ghostseeing that is de
rigeur for the chamber’s inmates; both characters
are instead indulging a lovelorn melancholy that
Scott represents through a quotation from the
Lyrical Ballads (“The Fountain”). For Lovel, how-
ever, this deficit in what Scott (describing the
reader of the Gothic) elsewhere calls “that secret
and reserved feeling of love for the marvellous
and supernatural” proves temporary.1 6 As, respec-
tively, modern and bygone specimens of the
vernacular tradition, the quotations that are
juxtaposed here to provide the episode with its
mottoes bear witness to Wordsworth’s and Chau-
cer’s kinship as national poets.1 7 In comparable
fashion, the episode also drops a hint about the
foundling’s filiation; for, by the end of the chapter,
the Oldbucks’ family ghost, “Aldobrand Olden-
buck,” has appeared in the young man’s dream,
with book in hand, exactly as he has appeared in
the Green Chamber on previous occasions.1 8 And
this mark of favor from Monkbarns’ most perma-
nent resident, its ancestral dead, is extended—as
Scott intimates via the conclusion that discloses
Lovel’s parentage which proves his legitimacy and
makes his fortune—because Lovel virtually is fam-
ily. The first love of Lovel’s long dead mother,
readers learn in the novel’s last pages, was the
present representative of the Oldbuck family, the
eponymous antiquary himself. The idea of ap-
pending Chaucerian verses to the Green Cham-
ber’s tapestry was her own home-making, histori-
cizing touch.
Lovel in these pages is also restored to the real
estate of his biological father, but within Scott’s
novel that restoration is made to appear a mere
copy of the earlier reunion of one “kindred spirit”
to the other that occurs when Lovel and Oldbuck
bond over old books, a bond that rewrites geneal-
ogy, virtually, as surrogacy. Scott arranges for fic-
tions and the fictitious (dreams and poems and
the idea of a fellowship founded on shared con-
sumer preference) to make common cause with
sacralized notions of pedigree, patrimony, and
home(land).1 9
Comparable alliances organized the discipline
of English Literature at its inception. In fact, those
fantastically parthenogenic genealogies that
remain the stock in trade of our curricula, and
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make it seem as if Chaucer begat Shakespeare, who
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
begat Milton, and so forth, could accommodate
with particular ease the narratives that the period
devised to intensify the identity politics of a new
age of nations. For, in some measure, it was by be-
ing placed within the discourse of family—being
accommodated to the fiction of patrilineal succes-
sion—that the work of literature became national.
This is not surprising. After all, the genealogical
metaphor that renders the history of writing as a
tradition, and remakes the history of writers as a
history of an uninterrupted family line, also
underpins Edmund Burke’s conception of nation-
ality as a matter of inbred filial sentiments and of
“the nation as self-inheriting, continuously be-
queathing . . . national character to itself.”2 0 In
his 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France
Burke defined the nation as a concentrically
ordered web of kinship relations: “To be attached
to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we
belong to . . . is the first principle . . . of public
affections.” The central claim of his Reflections is
that “It has been the uniform policy of our
constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an
entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefa-
thers, and to be transmitted to our posterity.”2 1
The new idea of a literary tradition seems to
promise something similar to what Burke wants
for the nation and what he finds when he consid-
ers the entailed estate, property that cannot be
alienated from a particular kin group. Like the
entailed estate, the literary legacy promises a
subordination of alterity to unity, an elision of
past and present, and progress without change.
Cultural nationalism demands that literature
reproduce nationality. An episode in the reception
history of Ossian’s (or James Macpherson’s) Fin-
gal, which shows how the idea of cultural tradi-
tion was freighted with anxieties of its own, also
shows how such a demand could rest on reproduc-
tive politics of the most familiar, familial kind.
Macpherson, of course, was accused of having
been over-zealous in his efforts to fill in the blanks
in the literary family tree. In 1786 James Boswell
used tellingly anxious terms when he contem-
plated the possibility that, in Ossian, Macpherson
might have invented rather than recovered a new
forefather. Defenders of Macpherson’s honesty
and Fingal’s authenticity had previously conceded
that some passages in that epic might indeed have
originated not with Ossian but with his editor and
translator. At the same time, those defenders had
declined to distinguish the emendations from
those passages that were authentic Ossianic cre-
ations. Their equivocation disgusted Boswell. One
97
 source of this disgust is registered when, express-
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
ing it, Boswell shifts the topic from an illegitimate
text to illicit sex: “Antiquaries and admirers of
[Fingal] may complain, that they are in a situation
similar to that of the unhappy gentleman whose
wife informed him, on her death-bed, that one of
their reputed children was not his; and, when he
eagerly begged her to declare which of them it
was, she answered, ‘That you shall never know,’
and expired, leaving him in irremediable doubt as
to them all.”2 2
The ingredients of a Gothic novel are as-
sembled in Boswell’s anecdote. Boswell gives us a
dead mother, he gives us a deathbed revelation of
child bed secrets, and he gives us an illegitimate
child who from this moment forward must feel,
as the Radcliffean heroine does, that “there was a
mystery in her birth dishonorable to her parents”
(Udolpho 650). Worried about being cheated of his
cultural birthright as a British reader, Boswell
seems almost to contemplate his own retroactive
bastardizing. That the worries of this nationalist
reader should converge with the genealogical
crises of all the possibly illegitimate children
populating the Gothic makes sense—at least so
I’ve been attempting to demonstrate. Boswell’s
contemporaries—to recapitulate—saw the literary
canon reconstituted as a category that comprised
old works only. They witnessed the resurrection of
much old literature, valued as the nation’s lines of
communication with its dead, dead with the
animating power to bring Britain to life and to
imaginary community. A new, historicizing focus
on writing’s life in time at once exemplified and
contributed to the new urgency about reproduc-
ing old works, and to legitimate themselves, new
texts began then to display their elegiac relation
to works from the past. And henceforth the most
legitimate reading was that which proved one’s
continuing, filial attachment to those who had
gone before.
When writing and reading English Literature
become (to borrow Esther Schor’s punning phrase)
ways of “bearing the dead,” of embracing the
pleasures and burdens of living with the past, do
we not encounter something like a wish to be
haunted? Romantic-period culture makes ghosts
and authors interchangeable—the morning after a
night spent in a haunted mansion one character
in Scott’s Woodstock (1826) tells another that
“Chaucer” is not (as his less literate companion
infers from the name) a spectral “‘huntsman,’”
but “‘one of those wonderful fellows . . . who live
after they are buried and whose words haunt our
ears after their bones are long mouldered in the
98 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
dust.’” And within that culture’s dramas of canon-
love it remains uncertain whether such a recast-
ing of authorship is meant principally to empower
the author, emancipating him from mortality, or
rather to enthrall the reader. “Why should Milton
and Shakespeare . . . die?” asked William Godwin
in his 1809 Essay on Sepulchres, his scheme for
marking the graves of heroes and poets and
through these commemorative arrangements
enabling a more thorough-going remembering of
the nation’s dead. “Perhaps yet they shall not
wholly die . . . some spirit shall escape from [Mil-
ton’s] ashes, and whisper to me things unfelt be-
fore.”2 3 There is something scary about the man-
ner in which death here seems to breach the
boundary between writer and reader: Godwin’s
reference to a whisper brings a dead John Milton
up close. Are the tutelary spirits of “English
Literature” friendly ghosts? Canon formation,
Joseph Roach has written, using terms that sug-
gest that our cherishing of dead poets might in
fact be meant to disarm them, “serves the func-
tion that ‘ancestor worship’ once did.” “The
English classics help control the dead to serve the
interests of the living.”2 4
I don’t wish to overlook how, as Boswell’s
analogy testifies, communications controlling the
dead could also serve as mandates for the control
of female bodies. And at the close of this essay I
shall return briefly to that perennial topic of the
female Gothic, the gender injustice implicit in the
idea of a cultural patrimony. First, let me discuss
in more specific terms how Gothic conventions
provided writers and readers with the means of
accommodating the transformation of canonical
literature that I’ve been reconstructing. If a figure
like Chaucer had, at the start of the eighteenth
century, been condescended to for belonging to
“the infancy of English poetry,” his imperfections
written off with a reference to the primitive time
in which he lived and the observation that “we
must be children before we grow into men,” the
supernatural communications with the canon that
organize Gothic fictions indicate how the order of
generations was later to be transposed.2 5 Follow-
ing that reversal the works inside the tradition
were endowed with the mysterious authority that
parents exert within the oedipal household, the
authority of those who pre-exist us.
The Gothic is where the nationalized literary
tradition writes a story about itself. Gothic authors
take dictation from tradition. As showcases for
quotations from the classics, as well as for lyric
poems their protagonists compose extemporane-
ously, these books must have seemed like antholo-
gies to their first readers. Gothic authors also
literalize the terms in which cultural nationalism
reimagines the reader as a national subject. Thus
within a novel like Eliza Parsons’ The Mysterious
Warning (1796), texts literally represent legacies,
bequests from the dead. Reading here is situated
in a strange time of posthumousness. Death in
Parsons’ novel is the precondition for the delivery
of the packet that contains the sinning wife’s
confession. Fatalities are the pretexts that send
Parsons’ protagonist into the libraries of dilapi-
dated castles, where he is wont to discover manu-
scripts—on one occasion, he finds with a guilty
thrill, a manuscript that is addressed to him (to
“The stranger, who calls himself Ferdinand”).2 6
These are manuscripts we read too, over Ferdi-
nand’s shoulder as it were. In effect, death pub-
lishes the text that allows the novel’s readers to
keep reading. In this time-frame made strange by
what we might call the eerie “every-when-ness” of
written language, reading represents an elegiac
activity—or séance—by definition.2 7 The very
form of the Gothic novel can, furthermore, seem
a parable of its age’s literary revivalism. As they
enclose stories within stories and mobilize the
convention of frame and embedded tales, Gothic
texts appear as scaled-down simulations of that
literary tradition that was itself being reconceptu-
alized in terms of seriality, sequels, and resurrec-
tions.
The Gothic text’s epigraphs and the fragments
of quoted poetry that interrupt its descriptions
also help to make it the print equivalent of the
soundscapes Scott loves—those ancient mansions,
described in his essay on Walpole, whose halls
“echo to the sounds of remote generations.” The
voices of the remote generations of those ances-
tors the anthologists called “The British Poets” are
to be found at the outermost levels of the Gothic
and the Waverley novel alike. They are displayed
in the books’ chapter headings. But poetry also
finds its home in the interior confines of the
character’s subjectivity—in lyric poems, spontane-
ously composed by the heroine or hero, that docu-
ment inner selves. Some of the most haunting ef-
fects of Gothic fiction arise when this distinction
between outside and inside is collapsed, haunt-
ingly.2 8 Shakespeare has the first word in Eleanor
Sleath’s novel The Nocturnal Minstrel (1810)—a
quotation from Twelfth Night gives Sleath her
epigraph for chapter 1. “That strain again!—it had
a dying fall; Oh, it came o’er my ear like the sweet
South.”2 9 Yet beyond representing the antique
authority who legitimates the novel’s literariness,
the dead bard resurrected so as to give cultural
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capital to the living, Shakespeare also seems, a
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
haunting presence, to have stolen into the charac-
ters’ reveries. When we move past that initial
chapter heading in Sleath’s novel, the heroine’s
first words seem to respond to the question the
epigraph poses tacitly—“what music is that?” And
yet this question is one the character cannot ever
consciously have heard. Her words feel like the
result of subliminal suggestion. The subject on
which the Baroness Fitzwalter speaks is the myste-
rious music that has been heard in the neighbor-
hood of her castle, the musician, like the echo,
eluding efforts of location. Ultimately the noctur-
nal minstrel will be discovered—he is the Baron-
ess’ husband, falsely reported dead months before
the novel’s opening. The web of associations at
work here links a character’s mournful fidelity to
her beloved with something we would like to
think of as more impersonal, the reader’s fidelity
to Shakespeare. It links both modes of feeling to
the phantasmatic, for, as one might expect, the
eerie possibility the novel flirts with is that the
music has no earthly point of origin, that the
nocturnal minstrel is a ghost. It’s as if the Shake-
spearean words that supply the epigraph raise the
spectre. It’s as if they are the spectre.3 0
The land is full of noises. The murmurings of
the dead poets are in the air. In an Enquirer essay
of 1797 William Godwin chose strangely spooky
terms to write of the national literature’s secret
ministry. “I cannot tell what I should have been,
if Shakespear or Milton had not written. The poor-
est peasant in the remotest corner of England, is
probably a different man from what he would
have been but for these authors.” The influence
that the national poets exert on the individual in
modern times, Godwin goes on to explain, is so
far-reaching as to affect even those who have
never heard Shakespeare’s or Milton’s names: the
inspiration “passes from man to man, till it influ-
ences the whole mass.”3 1 The account of the
origins of collective life evoked by Godwin’s
exercise in literary appreciation has its scary
aspects: there is not much in the way of public
spirit, or social contract, or even agency here.
Instead there is a kind of fetishism that makes
books into the actors and authors of collective life.
The national subject Godwin portrays does not
exactly take possession of his birthright. Instead,
this national subject is possessed in turn. He is
ghost-written by Tradition. Eliciting our paranoia,
Godwin makes a statement about literary works’s
spectral influence across time and space that we
re-encounter in the echo chambers of a Gothic
novel, transposed to a still more eerie register.
99
 So far, my description of the conventions
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
shared by the practitioners of the Radcliffean
Gothic and the Author of “Waverley” has empha-
sized the literal terms in which these writers keep
faith with the ideas of literary tradition and
national culture devised by their contemporaries.
I’ve emphasized how they set their characters
loose in poetry’s echo chamber; how they portray
texts as legacies and readers as mourners. I’ve also
suggested that this literalism can have the ironic
effect of rendering their contemporaries’ national
subjects unfamiliar and uncanny. This effect
becomes apparent if we consider the Gothic
convention of attributing a malign power to
pieces of writing. Gothic narratives practice their
own brand of fetishism as they endow writing per
se with value and power, doing so at some cost to
the ideal of an autonomous self. For frequently in
these narratives, it is the chance finding of a book
or a poem that inaugurates plot. It is texts that
monopolize the supernatural power to begin: that
text can be a lyric poem that (like an apparition)
looms out of nowhere and thwarts readers’ efforts
to reconnect it to an origin or author. Think of
the sonnet that Emily discovers penciled on the
wall of the fishing house at the start of The Myster-
ies of Udolpho (7), and whose discovery appears to
be mortal to Emily’s parents, who sicken and die
soon after. Or that text can be a book that has
been ejected outside the edifice of linear history,
like the volume that somehow falls into the hands
of Victor Frankenstein and recreates him as that
anachronistic creature, a living “disciple of Paracel-
sus” in this “enlightened and scientific” eigh-
teenth century.3 2 Yet in representing the disrup-
tive power of these texts the Gothic is also
registering some of the new literary history’s prize
tenets. Under the new arrangements, what makes
a work of literature literary is that it aspires to de-
contextualization. Its value no longer measured
solely by its effects in its own time, the classic is
supposed both to document and to escape its
cultural context, much as Milton’s and Shake-
speare’s works do when, “whispering things un-
felt before,” these living-dead poets proleptically
script the feelings Godwin will feel next.
In a letter she wrote as Godwin’s Essay on
Sepulchres was going to press, Mary Lamb specu-
lated about the motives propelling Godwin in his
desire to raise monuments to “the former and
future great men.” The cultural nationalism that
comes to fore when Godwin imagines a whole na-
tion deriving their identities from the dead poets
and allied to one another through their canon-
loving comes in Lamb’s account to seem a feeling
100 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
rooted in Godwin’s fear of the consequences that
follow from the formation of other sorts of col-
lectivities, who have other definitions of their
common birthright. Lamb clarifies, that is, how
Godwin’s project allows him to cope with revolu-
tionary times and does so as she describes, sneer-
ingly, his scheme: “This wooden slab & white
cross to be perpetuated to the end of time. To
survive the fall of empire & the destruction of cit-
ies by means of a map, which was, in case of an
insurrection among the people . . . to be carefully
preserved; & then, when things got again into
their usual order, the white-cross-wooden-slab-
makers were to go to work again and set them in
their former places.”3 3
I referred earlier to the fetishism that the
Gothic practices in making books the origin of
plot. Godwin’s claim, in the Enquirer essay, that
Shakespeare and Milton touch “us all” enshrines
(as does the rhetoric of the pamphleteers who
declared their works the “property” of the nation)
another almost supernatural notion of the canoni-
cal text. This supernaturalism, familiar to us (the
basis of our discipline), portrays the classic as a
perennially renewable and indeed magically
unlimited resource. This canonical text cannot be
exhausted by consumption (even by the conspicu-
ous consumption we might associate with the
profligate quotation practices of a Radcliffe or a
Scott). It instead represents a resource that perpetu-
ally reproduces itself so as to meet an ever-
escalating level of demand. It is in part in this fe-
tishized guise that it functions for romantic
nationalism as the image of a transhistorical
cultural continuity, as well as of cultural unity.
Engaging the strangely fearful modes of canon-
loving at work within the Gothic library seems to
me a good way to become alerted to the mystifica-
tions at work in that nationalist idea of a cultural
capital given to all. A visit to a Gothic library can
alert us to how the charismatic idea of the canon
as common property (an idea that has force, perhaps,
by virtue of being propped on our infantile
memories of boundless, unconditional love)
obscures people’s dependence on finite resources
whose distribution is far from equitable. In these
Gothic novels—where the ruined library of the
castle can seem like an unenclosed commons—
the book can seem to evade the ties to particular
persons that constitute a system of private prop-
erty. It blurs the distinctions between the meum
and the tuum.
In fact, books tend, as I’ve noted, simply to
fall into the hands of Gothic characters—out of
the blue, as gifts from heaven. For both Gothic
gentry and Gothic servants, castles may be
counted on to contain spaces where one might
“chance” to find an “ancient legend”; “an obscure
corner,” where a book may have “fallen.” No one
exhibits much compunction about appropriating
these volumes. Books are there for the finding. (In
this respect, too, books seem magical: dissociated
utterly from the human labors that normally are
involved in their making.) Etiquette permits
Gothic characters to act as if it were certain that
there would always be reading matter enough to
go around. When Eliza Parsons’ Matilda returns
from her foray into the haunted chambers of the
Castle of Wolfenbach, which turn out to be the
dwelling place of the lady of the castle, whom the
world has long believed to be dead, the aged
housekeeper asks her what she has seen. Her
answer delivers only part of the truth: “‘An excel-
lent library . . .’ replied Matilda . . . ‘I intend to
sit there very often and shall borrow some books’”
(1: 15). It is also a maxim of the Gothic that lov-
ers should be expected to make themselves free
with the books of those they love: we are to expect
conduct like that of Udolpho’s Valancourt, who
without her sayso leaves a volume of Petrarch for
Emily to find in her private library and pockets
another book in exchange. We might align the
commonness that these novels ascribe to books
with the manner in which they likewise arrange
for their castles and abbeys to have a strangely
skewed relation to the institution of private
property. It is this relation that makes these
edifices suitable haunts—or squats—for smugglers,
for banditti and, above all, for those figures who
in the Gothic epitomize dispossession—all those
mothers who, having produced heirs for their
husbands and so outlived their usefulness are
fated to live on in these ruins in a ghostly man-
ner, one that actualizes the civil death legally
required of female Britons.
Nonetheless, a castle in the Rhineland isn’t
Crusoe’s desert island: it isn’t a terra nullius, any
more than it is an unenclosed common. In fact,
there is a striking contradiction between, on the
one hand, the suspension of the rights of owner-
ship that enables those buildings and books to be
used in the ways I’ve delineated and, on the other
hand, the zeal that the conclusions to these novels
bring to the task of restoring property rights and
securing legacies for their protagonists. In some
ways, the book culture portrayed in this fiction
literalizes (as does the fiction’s proclivity for quot-
ing the classics) that notion of the canonical text
as a common, “national” property and as an
infinitely renewable resource that transcends its
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grounding in material finitude. In an essay in eco-
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
criticism entitled “Reading Habits,” Marlon Ross
writes of how idealizing accounts of our “primary
sources” and their availability in “the public
domain” operate to distract us from the fact that
the resources for literacy as such—education, the
money to buy books, the paper and ink and time
it takes to write them—are unevenly distributed
across and within cultures: “To become a member
of the reading public . . . is to become free to
consume reading materials as though there were
no limit to the materials consumed. This concept
of the reading public would make it more ap-
propriate to be dubbed the reading private. . . .
The materials and labor silently consumed in the
reading act were once common property, and the
moment of private consumption can never restore
these common properties to their former public
condition.”3 4
Ross’s observations underline the tensions
mobilized when cultural nationalism invokes a
nation of readers, or when, in particular, Godwin
in his Essay on Sepulchres envisions a populace
united by its mourning for bards who are no
more. The discrepancy between nationalism’s
tropes of a common cultural heritage and the
harsh realities of an inequitable distribution of
property is the reason that we can imagine how,
in addition to responding to the prospect of “an
insurrection among the people,” Godwin’s de-
scription of the loving fellowship produced by our
mass séance with Shakespeare’s and Milton’s
ghosts might in fact contribute to such insurrec-
tion. The stories of reading recounted in the
Gothic novel, however, actually document that
discrepancy, doing so in measure as they alter-
nately suspend and enforce the rules of owner-
ship. The glimpses those stories offer of a different
moral economy suggest that the Gothic authors
are in fact hyper-conscious of just who benefits
and who is excluded when the dead poets endow
the living and when the national literature is
rendered a family trust. And so these architects of
Gothic libraries illuminate the social production
of the categories of the literary and the traditional.
If canon-love in the main is a dark romantic
affair involving self-estrangement, captivation,
and subjection, it is still important to acknowledge
the psychic utility that attaches to this concep-
tion of literary reading as gothic: how a portrait of
a haunted reader might, for instance, compensate
for the aggression involved in so strenuously
insisting in the first place on authors’ death, on
their spectral insubstantiality. When these English-
women writing at the turn of the nineteenth
101
 century quote (or appropriate?) the words of the
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
father-ghosts of the English canon they can, in
short, look both reverential and self-serving. Their
seemingly faithful inscriptions of the national
canon, in addition to being considered as the
testimonies with which they probate their cultural
legacy, might as appropriately be seen as greedy
raids on an empowering system. In this context,
the canon appears both a “museum of wonderful
relics” and “a store of commodities to trade in.”3 5
Walter Scott’s descriptions of the uses to which he
puts his literary legacies mediate, of course,
between these options. It’s characteristic of a Wa-
verley novel to take magically acquired “crocks of
gold, secret fountains and hidden treasures . . .
unpredictable and limitless fortunes” and set such
windfalls of romance against the humdrum book-
keeping required of the novelist who pursues “the
business of fiction according to a trademan’s
code.”3 6
From the practitioners of the Radcliffean
Gothic Scott learned what it meant to inherit
one’s nationality and language from a dead poets’
society. He learned that such possessions are also
signs of possession.3 7 But it is worth emphasizing
that—given the legitimist protocols of the literary
legacy—no woman’s writing career could assume
the shape that Scott’s did: a process in which the
raw materials of tradition were converted into
writing, that writing was exchanged for money,
and that money was converted back into the trap-
pings of tradition.3 8 Scott could envision himself
in the posthumous terms that Woodstock conjures
with when its Roundheads and Cavaliers marvel
over how Shakespeare’s and Chaucer’s words
“‘haunt our ears’” (in fact, the book’s allusions to
the living-dead “conjurers” do double duty as an
insider’s joke about the Wizard of the North
[237]). For, as Lockhart insisted, his father-in-law
was “the founder of the Abbotsford Museum”;
and, building that Gothic library, he could already
imagine the future in which “his children’s
children should thank the founder.”3 9
Beyond recovering the traces of their ambiva-
lent engagement with the emergence of a love-
able literary nation, I want to note in concluding
how, as commentaries on this notion of the
library as a birthright, Gothic writings might il-
luminate later developments in literary studies
and the history of literary pedagogy especially. In
1924, in the tellingly-titled English for the English,
a phrase whose tautology I’ve tried to problema-
tize, one founder of the English education move-
ment, George Sampson, argued for the curricular
centrality of literary appreciation by issuing the
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following warning: “Deny to working class chil-
dren any common share in the immaterial and
presently they will grow into the men who will
demand, with menaces, a communism of the ma-
terial.”4 0 In a double guise—as a site of possession
in the supernatural sense, but also, as Sampson
suggests despite himself, as a site that keeps alive
a record of disinheritance and dispossession—in
its guise as, in short, the literature classroom, the
Gothic library haunts our practice still.
Notes
1. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy
Dobrée (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1966) 104. Subsequent
references to Udolpho are to this edition and appear
parenthetically in the text.
2. Fiona Robertson’s Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and
the Authorities of Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994) is
the exception. Robertson’s emphasis is on Scott’s
engagement with both the narrative structure of
Gothic fictions and the skeptical attitude toward
historiographical legitimacy that this structure ex-
presses. But, as I aim to show, Scott also recognizes in
the Gothic a way of discussing canonical legitimacy.
3. Foucault, “Fantasia of the Library,” in Language,
Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard,
trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1977) 92.
4. One scheme, undertaken with James Ballantyne’s
blessing, would have involved a one-hundred-volume
reissue of “The British Poets” and an output of a new
magna opera of novelists and dramatists to match. See
John Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott: A Critical
Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) 128-29.
5. Eliza Parsons, The Castle of Wolfenbach (London: Folio,
1968) 1: 3. Subsequent references are to this edition
and appear parenthetically in the text.
6. Garrett Stewart makes a similar observation about the
Gothic fiction of the late nineteenth century: see Dear
Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century
British Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996),
ch. 13.
7. Cannon Schmitt, Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century
Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (Philadelphia: U
of Pennsylvania P, 1997) 39; Judith Halberstam, Skin
Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters
(Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1995).
8. Janet Sorensen, The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-
Century British Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2000) 112; Ian Duncan, “North Britain, Inc.,” Victorian
Literature and Culture 23 (1995): 346. See also Robert
Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Claren-
don, 1992) and Crawford’s edited anthology The Scot-
tish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge UP, 1999).
9. William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age: or Contemporary
Portraits (London: Henry Colburn, 1825) 151.
10. Trevor Ross, “Copyright and the Invention of Tradi-
tion,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 26 (1992): 24. Samuel
Johnson describes the trade in reprints carried out by
Alexander Donaldson, the Edinburgh bookseller, as
 “an invasion of what [the Booksellers of London] had
ever considered to be secure”: see James Boswell, Life
of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman, rev. ed. (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1970) 310.
11. Cited in Ross, “Copyright” 7. Ross quotes Yates’s dis-
senting opinion in Millar v. Taylor (1769), upheld
when this decision by the Court of King’s Bench was
overturned by the House of Lords in the case of
Donaldson v. Becket.
12. Thomas Sheridan, British Education, cited in John Guil-
lory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon
Formation (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993) 101.
13. See Jonathan Kramnick’s discussion of Johnson’s
Preface to Shakespeare: Making the English Canon: Print-
Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) 198-210, and Trevor
Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon, from the
Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century (Montreal
and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1998). As Kramnick
notes, because eighteenth-century canon-making took
shape as a turn to antiquity it also effectually took
shape as a turn away from a body of works significantly
less “restricted in the gender and social class of the
author.” Following John Guillory, Kramnick insists
that it is reductive to see canon formation as entailing
an expulsion, i.e., of women writers, but he concedes
that “[f]or many [eighteenth-century] critics, this
restriction was precisely the point” (Making the English
Canon 9).
14. Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of
the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992) 4.
15. Charlotte Smith, Emmeline, or, The Orphan of the Castle
(London: Pandora, 1988) 6-7, 384.
16. The quotation is from Scott’s account of the sensa-
tions produced in the reader by The Castle of Otranto:
the hypothetical reader Scott conjures here is a new
version of the ghost-seeing Lovel. See “Horace Wal-
pole,” Ballantyne’s Novelists’ Library, vol. 5 (1832),
anthologized in Ioan Williams, ed., Sir Walter Scott on
Novelists and Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1968) 87.
17. In fact, as David Hewitt notes in his new edition of
The Antiquary, that section of the verses embroidered
on the tapestry which is known as “The Floure and
the Leafe” is no longer attributed to Chaucer, but
instead to an anonymous (and possibly female) poet
of his era. See his “Explanatory Notes,” in Walter Scott,
The Antiquary, ed. David Hewitt, intro. David Punter
(London: Penguin, 1998) 389.
18. On the earlier occasion that we hear about, the ghost
led the town clerk, who had been assigned the Green
Chamber for his sleeping quarters, to the cabinet that
concealed the original deed to the property of
Monkbarns. The ghost’s guidance enabled the Old-
buck descendants to win their lawsuit and ensured
that his estate remained family property.
19. I am indebted here to Yoon Sun Lee’s rereading of The
Antiquary and her insight into the fraught relation
between a conservative narrative of national history
that emphasizes “the transmission of priceless lega-
cies,” and an antiquarianism that was situated in
scandalous proximity to a marketplace in which
everything had a price: see “A Divided Inheritance:
Scott’s Antiquarian Novel and the British Nation,”
ELH 64.2 (1997): 537-67; I quote 539.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
20. I quote Lee’s gloss on Burke in “A Divided Inherit-
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
ance” 539. See also my “Domesticating Fictions and
Nationalizing Women: Edmund Burke, Property, and
the Reproduction of Englishness,” in Romanticism,
Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834, ed. Alan Rich-
ardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1996) 40-71.
21. Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise
O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) 136, 119.
22. James Boswell, A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with
Samuel Johnson, L. L. D., ed. Peter Levi
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) 400-401.
23. Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of
Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1994); Walter Scott, Woodstock; or, The
Cavalier: A Tale of the Year 1651 (New York: D. Apple-
ton, 1877) 237; William Godwin, Essay on Sepulchres
(London: W. Miller, 1809) 76. Subsequent references
to Woodstock appear parenthetically in the text.
24. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Perfor-
mance (New York: Columbia UP, 1996) 77.
25. Dryden, Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700),
cited in Kramnick 18.
26. Eliza Parsons, The Mysterious Warning: A German Tale
(London: Lane, 1792) 1: 261.
27. See Karen Swann, “The Strange Time of Reading,”
European Romantic Review 9.2 (1998): 275-82; Hillel
Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses,
Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone, 1996) 279.
28. Scott, “Horace Walpole” 88. On epigraphs, quotations,
and poetizing in the Gothic, see Gary Kelly, English
Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789-1830 (London:
Longman, 1989) 54-55; cf. Mary A. Favret, “Telling
Tales about Genre: Poetry in the Romantic Novel,”
Studies in the Novel 26.3 (1994): 281-300.
29. Eleanor Sleath, The Nocturnal Minstrel, or, The Spirit of
the Wood (New York: Arno, 1972) 1: 1.
30. It is no accident, either, that this ghost’s First Folio
has a place of pride in the haunted chambers of Wood-
stock; what this way of furnishing his haunted man-
sion suggests is that, as much as his female predeces-
sors, Scott is well aware of the traditional identification
of Shakespeare with the role of Hamlet’s Ghost.
31. William Godwin, “Of Choice in Reading,” in The En-
quirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature
(rpt; New York: August M. Kelley, 1965) 140.
32. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus,
ed. Maurice Hindle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992)
45.
33. Mary and Charles Lamb: Poems, Letters, and Remains,
ed. W. Carew Hazlitt (London: Chatto and Windus,
1874) 76; my emphasis.
34. “Reading Habits: Scenes of Romantic Miseducation
and the Challenge of Ecoliteracy,” in Lessons of Roman-
ticism, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner
(Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1998) 145.
35. I am tweaking here an opposition that Ian Duncan
sets out in order to distinguish Adam Smith’s function-
alist understanding of literary discourse—one that ap-
prehends the belles lettres as a “resource for improve-
ment”—from Johnson’s self-consciously nostalgic
103
 orientation toward the classics: see “Adam Smith, Sam-
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
uel Johnson, and the institutions of English,” in The
Scottish Invention of English Literature 42.
36. Kathryn Sutherland, “Fictional Economies: Adam
Smith, Walter Scott and the Nineteenth-Century
Novel,” ELH 54 (1987): 100.
37. I draw here on Marjorie Levinson’s description of John
Keats’s relation to the canon: see Keats’s Life of Allegory
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) 19.
38. This description of Scott’s career is Kathryn Suther-
land’s: see “Fictional Economies” 106.
39. J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, 7
vols. (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell; London: John Mur-
ray, 1837) 4: 12; 2: 359.
40. Quoted in James Donald, “Beyond Our Ken: English,
Englishness, and the National Curriculum,” in Dia-
logue and Difference: English in the Nineties (London:
Routledge, 1989) 15.
FURTHER READING
Bibliography
Frank, Frederick S. Gothic Fiction: A Master List of Twentieth
Century Criticism and Research. Westport, Conn.: Meck-
ler Corp., 1988, 193 p.
Full-length bibliography of twentieth-century criticism on
Gothic fiction.
Criticism
Anderson, Howard. “Gothic Heroes.” In The English Hero,
1660-1800, edited by Robert Folkenflik, pp. 205-21.
East Brunswick, N.J.: University of Delaware Press and
Associated University Press, 1982.
Analyzes and compares the depiction of heroes in several
Gothic novels, including The Mysteries of Udolpho,
The Italian, The Castle of Otranto, and The Monk.
Avsey, Ignat. “The Gothic in Dostoevskii and Gogol: The
British Connection.” In The Gothic-Fantastic in
Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature, edited by Neil
Cornwell, pp. 211-34. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999.
Delineates the Gothic in works by Fyodor Dostoevsky and
Nikolai Gogol and illustrates how these Russian authors
were influenced by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of
Otranto.
Beers, Henry A. “The Gothic Revival.” In A History of English
Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 221-64.
London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd.,
1899.
A seminal work that traces the impetus for and the
development of the Gothic Revival in eighteenth-century
England.
Brantlinger, Patrick. “Gothic Toxins: The Castle of Otranto,
The Monk, and Caleb Williams.” In The Reading Lesson:
The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British
Fiction, pp. 25-48. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1998.
Illustrates the ways in which the novels of Horace Wal-
pole, William Godwin, and Matthew Gregory Lewis were
viewed as a threat to morality and intellect by English
society in the period following the French Revolution.
104 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Brown, Marshall. “A Philosophical View of the Gothic
Novel.” Studies in Romanticism 26, no. 2 (summer
1987): 275-301.
Studies Immanuel Kant’s influence on the development of
the Gothic novel, particularly in terms of the role of
reason.
———. “From the Transcendental to the Supernatural: Kant
and the Doctors.” Bucknell Review 39, no. 2 (1996): 151-
69.
Examines Immanuel Kant’s treatment of self-
consciousness in his writings and how this relates to the
treatment of the self and other in the Gothic novel.
Carson, James P. “Enlightenment, Popular Culture, and
Gothic Fiction.” In The Cambridge Companion to the
Eighteenth-Century Novel, edited by John Richetti, pp.
255-76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Delineates the Gothic novel’s relationship to popular
culture.
Clarke, George Elliott. “Racing Shelley; or, Reading The Cenci
as a Gothic Slave Narrative.” European Romantic Review
11, no. 2 (spring 2000): 168-85.
Analyzes Shelley’s The Cenci in terms of the author’s
use of Gothic conventions and the work’s relationship to
the slave narrative.
Clemens, Valdine. “Precedents for ‘Gothic’ Fear: Medieval
Life, Jacobean Drama, and Eighteenth-Century At-
titudes.” In The Return of the Repressed: Gothic Horror
from The Castle of Otranto to Alien, pp. 15-28. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1999.
Depicts the political, social, intellectual, and artistic
traditions that preceded the rise in popularity of Gothic
novels in England.
De Bruyn, Frans. “Edmund Burke’s Gothic Romance: The
Portrayal of Warren Hastings in Burke’s Writings and
Speeches on India.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature
and the Arts 29, no. 4 (fall 1987): 415-38.
Compares Edmund Burke’s treatment of history—
particularly his treatment of the figure of Warren Hast-
ings—to the Gothic tradition and to the works of Jane
Austen.
Donaldson, Susan V. “Making a Spectacle: Welty, Faulkner,
and Southern Gothic.” Mississippi Quarterly 50, no. 4
(fall 1997): 567-83.
Compares the portraits of women created by William
Faulkner and Eudora Welty, noting that while Faulkner
imposes cultural ideas of femininity on his Southern
characters, Welty creates characters who resist placement
in traditional roles and themes.
Ellis, Markman. The History of Gothic Fiction. Edinburgh: Ed-
inburgh University Press Ltd., 2000, 261 p.
Discusses the main topics and themes in Gothic literature
and traces the development of the genre from the late
eighteenth century to the twentieth century.
Gamer, Michael. “Confounding Present with Past: Romanti-
cism, Lyrical Ballads, and Gothic Romance.” Poetica: An
International Journal of Linguistic-Literary Studies 39-40
(1994): 111-38.
Explores the literary and historical relationship of Wil-
liam Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical
Ballads to the Gothic romance.
———. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and
Canon Formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000, 255 p.
Examines the relationship of gothicism in the eighteenth
century to the classification of the cultural status and
genre of literary works.
Goh, Robbie B. H. “(M)Othering the Nation: Guilt, Sexual-
ity and the Commercial State in Coleridge’s Gothic
Poetry.” Journal of Narrative Theory 33, no. 3 (fall 2003):
270-91.
Studies how Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s treatment of
sexuality in his Gothic poetry provides commentary on
social and political issues of his time, particularly
displacement and economic challenges.
Hadley, Michael. The Undiscovered Genre: a Search for the Ger-
man Gothic Novel. Berne, Germany: Peter Lang, 1977,
155 p.
Investigates the origins and existence of the German
Gothic novel, or Schauerroman, and the Germanic
sources for the English Gothic novel.
Haggerty, George E. “The Gothic Novel, 1764-1824.” In The
Columbia History of the British Novel, edited by John
Richetti, pp. 200-46. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994.
Offers a literary and historical overview of the develop-
ment of the Gothic novel in England.
Hennessy, Brendan. The Gothic Novel. Harlow: Longman for
the British Council, 1978, 60 p.
A critical overview of Gothic novels. Includes a bibliogra-
phy.
Hogle, Jerrold E. “The Gothic Ghost as Counterfeit and Its
Haunting of Romanticism: The Case of ‘Frost at
Midnight.’” European Romantic Review 9, no. 2 (spring
1998): 283-92.
Examines Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s use of the ghost and
Gothic conventions in “Frost at Midnight,” and how this
relates to the Romantic literary tradition.
———. The Undergrounds of The Phantom of the Opera:
Sublimation and the Gothic in Leroux’s Novel and its
Progeny, pp. 2-62. New York: Palgrave, 2002.
Analyzes the various versions of The Phantom of the
Opera, and illustrates how each adaptation of the work
represents the cultural beliefs and norms of the society
and era during which it is created.
Holbrook, William C. “The Adjective ‘Gothique’ in the
Eighteenth Century.” Modern Language Notes 56, no. 7
(November 1941): 498-503.
Detailed analysis of the cultural and linguistic traditions
that led to the origination of the adjective “gothique” in
eighteenth-century France.
Horner, Avril, ed. European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, 1760-
1960. Manchester, England: Manchester University
Press, 2002, 260 p.
Collection of critical essays that illustrate the French,
German, Russian, and Spanish influences on the develop-
ment of the Gothic novel.
Hume, Robert D. “Gothic versus Romantic: A Re-valuation
of the Gothic Novel.” PMLA 84, no. 2 (March 1969):
282-90.
A seminal essay that defines the nature of the Gothic
novel, contrasting it with works in the Romantic tradi-
tion.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Komaromi, Ann. “Unknown Force: Gothic Realism in Chek-
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
hov’s ‘The Black Monk.’” In The Gothic-Fantastic in
Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature, edited by Neil
Cornwell, pp. 257-75. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999.
Analyzes the gothicism in Anton Chekhov’s short story
“Chernyi monakh” (“The Black Monk”).
MacAndrew, Elizabeth. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1979, 289 p.
Full-length study of major themes and figures in
nineteenth-century English Gothic fiction.
Madoff, Mark. “The Useful Myth of Gothic Ancestry.” Stud-
ies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 9 (1979): 337-50.
Surveys the use of Gothic themes and figures in
eighteenth-century English fiction.
Malin, Irving. “American Gothic Images.” Mosaic 6, no. 3
(1973): 145-71.
Traces the use of “the castle, the voyage, and the
masquerade” in American literature.
McIntyre, Clara. “Were the Gothic Novels Gothic?” PMLA
36, no. 4 (December 1921): 644-67.
Examines the classification of works of literature as
Gothic.
Miles, Robert. Gothic Writing 1750-1820: A Genealogy.
London: Routledge, 1993, 258 p.
Provides historical and social context surrounding
eighteenth-century Gothic literature.
Mudge, Bradford K. “‘Excited by Trick’: Coleridge and the
Gothic Imagination.” Wordsworth Circle 22, no. 3
(summer 1991): 179-84.
Explores the influence of the Gothic novel evidenced in
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry.
———. “The Man with Two Brains: Gothic Novels, Popular
Culture, Literary History.” PMLA 107, no. 1 (January
1992): 92-104.
Discusses the Gothic novel’s place in literary history and
its role in shaping popular culture.
Oates, Joyce Carol. Introduction to American Gothic Tales,
edited by Joyce Carol Oates, pp. 1-9. New York: Plume,
1996.
Surveys the American landscape, beginning in Colonial
times, the role that this landscape played in the develop-
ment of American Gothic literature, and the places of the
various works she has collected in the volume within the
American Gothic tradition.
Perry, J. Douglas. “Gothic as Vortex: The Form of Horror in
Capote, Faulkner, and Styron.” Modern Fiction Studies
19 (1973): 153-67.
Proposes that in addition to the commonality of themes
and images, American Gothic fiction also uses traditional
structures and techniques to create a concentric series of
events, drawing the reader into an intense interaction
between human communities that exist inside and
outside the novel.
Peterfreund, Stuart. “Keats’s Debt to Maturin.” Wordsworth
Circle 13, no. 1 (winter 1982): 45-49.
Studies the sources of the Gothic conventions in Keats’
“The Eve of St. Agnes” in Charles Robert Maturin’s Man-
uel.
105
 Platzner, Robert L., and Robert D. Hume. “‘Gothic versus
GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW
Romantic’: A Rejoinder.” PMLA 86, no. 2 (March 1971):
266-74.
Scholarly exchange of analysis and ideas originally of-
fered by Hume in his 1969 PMLA article, “Gothic versus
Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel.”
Punter, David. “Ossian, Blake and the Questionable Source.”
In Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in
the Gothic Tradition, edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani,
Peter Davidson, and Jane Stevenson, pp. 25-41. Athens:
Rodopi, 1995.
Studies the gothicism of Blake’s poem “Ossian,” and the
sources for the poem in the Ossian Poems of James
Macpherson.
———. “Modern Perceptions of the Barbaric: Mervyn Peake,
‘Isak Dinesen,’ John Hawkes, Joyce Carol Oates, James
Purdy, William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Bal-
lard, Robert Coover, Angela Carter.” In The Literature of
Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the
Present Day, Vol. 2, pp. 119-44. Essex, England: Long-
man, 1996.
Surveys the use of what Punter terms “the barbaric” in
the works of several modern authors of Gothic and horror
fiction.
Roberts, Marie. Gothic Immortals: The Fiction of the Brother-
hood of the Rosy Cross. London: Routledge, 1990, 239 p.
Traces the connection between “Rosicrucian authors”—
William Godwin, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Charles Robert Maturin, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton—
and the secret society known as The Brotherhood of the
Rosy Cross.
Sabor, Peter. “Medieval Revival and the Gothic.” In Cam-
bridge History of Literary Criticism, IV: The Eighteenth
Century, edited by H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson, pp.
470-88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Discusses the criticism of works in the medieval revival
tradition, including Gothic fiction.
Schleifer, Ronald. “Rural Gothic: The Sublime Rhetoric of
Flannery O’Connor.” In Frontier Gothic: Terror and
Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature, edited by
David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpin-
ski, pp. 175-86. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 1993.
Maintains that O’Connor effectively uses the backdrop of
the rural South and combines it with elements of the
supernatural to present a world of powerful possibilities
in her fiction.
Shelden, Pamela J., and Kurt Paul. “Daylight Nightmares.”
Gothic 1, no. 1 (June 1979): 1-6.
106 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Contrasts the German and American expression of the
Romantic tradition in Gothic literature.
Smith, R. J. The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British
Thought, 1688-1863. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987, 231 p.
Considers the various returns to medieval aesthetic dur-
ing periods of great change in Europe between the
seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
Thompson, G. Richard. “Introduction: Gothic Fiction of
the Romantic Age: Context and Mode.” In Romantic
Gothic Tales, 1790-1840, pp. 1-54. New York: Harper &
Row, 1979.
Investigates the political and social context surrounding
Gothic literature during the Romantic age, as well as the
conventions utilized in the literature of this period.
Tompkins, J. M. S. “The Gothic Romance.” In The Popular
Novel in England, 1770-1800, pp. 243-95. London:
Constable, 1932.
Study of the Gothic novel’s themes, techniques, and
conventions, focusing on Ann Radcliffe’s novels.
Trott, Nicola. “Wordsworth’s Gothic Quandary.” Charles
Lamb Bulletin 110 (April 2000): 45-59.
Interprets the association between Gothic fiction and
Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads.
Varma, Devendra P. The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the
Gothic Novel in England: Its Origins, Efflorescence,
Disintegration, and Residuary Influences, pp. 1-22.
London: Arthur Barker, 1957.
A comprehensive study of the Gothic novel in England.
Wiesenfarth, Joseph. Gothic Manners and the Classic English
Novel. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988,
235 p.
Explores the connection of the Gothic novel to the English
novel of manners by applying the theories of Mikhail Ba-
khtin.
Wilczynski, Marke. “From Edwards to Slosson: Typology,
Nature, and the New England Domestic Gothic.” Stu-
dia Anglica Posnaniensia: An International Review of
English Studies, no. 36 (2001): 303-09.
Examines the use of Gothic conventions in the works of
nineteenth-century New England authors, such as in the
short stories of Annie Trumbull Slosson.
Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995, 311 p.
Surveys the Gothic in English and Irish literature.
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND
THE GOTHIC
T he Gothic tradition originated in response to
a period of rapid and far-reaching societal,
cultural, and theological change in eighteenth-
century Europe. Works written in this tradition
are inherently linked to the social context in
which they were created, and a great deal of criti-
cal commentary focuses on the representation of
societal and cultural fear in the face of the dissolu-
tion of tradition, gender roles, oppression, and
race in Gothic literature. As scholars have il-
lustrated, people in nineteenth-century Europe
and America believed strongly in physiognomy,
the theory that physical appearance and “blood”
determined and reflected a person’s character. The
representation of villains and monsters in Gothic
literature demonstrates this adherence to physiog-
nomy, as these characters possess physical traits
associated with evil—dark eyes, heavy eyebrows,
and dark complexions. The racist implications of
this belief in the biological determination of
character are apparent, and have been examined
by several scholars.
In his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of
Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Ed-
mund Burke challenges the ways in which other
philosophers and aestheticians use the terms
“sublime” and “beautiful,” contending that the
words are often employed inaccurately and exclu-
sively. He sets out to distinguish the two terms
and define them in light of the basis of their
psychological origins. The discussion covers three
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
aspects: individual passions, the essences that
inspire emotion in an individual, and the rules of
nature that govern the first two aspects. This ap-
proach is unique in relation to other aesthetic
theories because it allows for psychological and
physiological justifications for the aesthetic experi-
ence. In the first part of the essay, Burke explores
and defines the sublime. He considers the origins
of the sublime in the feeling of delight, which he
maintains is based on the removal of pain or
danger. It is a visceral response to the basic need
for self-preservation and is characterized by such
feelings as awe, surprise, and relief tinged with
horror. In fact, the essence of the sublime is the
feeling of horror; in this, his theory is unique in
aesthetic study. Burke asserts that in order to
inspire the sublime, one must be confronted with
terrifying ideas. The human response is generated
by the following fear-inspiring principles: vast-
ness, difficulty, power, darkness, vacuity, obscurity,
silence, solitude, infinity, massive solidity, and
magnificence. This unique conception of the
sublime is influenced by and has influenced
Gothic literature, especially the novels and stories
that contain such settings as the dark, mysterious
graveyard, the haunted castle, and the lone house
on the hill. Images like these have held a strong
fascination for readers throughout the ages. Burke
contends that nature images—such as the incom-
parable vastness of the ocean or the infinite dark-
ness of a dense forest—inspire the highest and
107
 most intense feelings of the sublime. Many critics
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
praised Burke’s ideas regarding the sublime and
lauded his imaginative and innovative approach.
In the 1890s, as noted by critic David Punter, the
Decadent and the Gothic merged in four works—
Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The
Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), H. G. Wells’s The
Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), and Bram Stoker’s
Dracula (1897)—which, Punter asserts, “are all
concerned in one way or another with the prob-
lem of degeneration, and thus of the essence of
the human.” Gothic literature has also been used
to portray experiences of class and national
identity, such as the difficulties faced by the Irish
in English society. Commentator Raphael Ingel-
bien has offered a psychological approach to the
study of the use of the Gothic in representing
Anglo-Irish identity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and
in works by Elizabeth Bowen.
Recent scholarship has focused on the rela-
tionship between race and the Gothic, tracing the
depiction of the African American experience as
well as of white anxiety and fears surrounding the
black presence in society and desire to maintain
the status quo of whites in control and blacks in
servitude. Toni Morrison, who employs the Gothic
to depict the horrors of slavery in her Pulitzer
Prize-winning novel Beloved (1987), discusses in
Playing in the Dark (1992) how the image of
“impenetrable whiteness” is used in works of
Gothic fiction—notably in works by Edgar Allan
Poe—to assuage white Americans’ anxieties about
black Americans, and to reinforce the institution
of slavery by portraying “black or Africanist people
who are dead, impotent, or under complete
control.” Morrison also links the portrayal of
blackness in literature to writers’ investigations
“of the self-contradictory features of the self.” In
her analysis of the connection between the Gothic
and the African American experience—particularly
in such works as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the
Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Frederick Douglass’s
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)—,
Teresa A. Goddu asserts that “a focus on slavery,
America’s most glaring cultural contradiction,
shows how it produced gothic narratives during
the antebellum period and how these narratives
reproduced the scene of slavery.” Teresa Derrick-
son illustrates that even authors whose works and
personal actions espouse racial equality participate
in the discourse of racism by examining Louisa
May Alcott’s sensationalist Gothic story “Taming
a Tartar” (1867). Derrickson maintains that “trac-
108 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
ing the careful way in which the ‘monstrous’
nemesis of the narrative’s triumphant protagonist
embodies nineteenth-century fears of racial degra-
dation . . . underscores the infiltrating power of
the Gothic impetus.” Anne K. Mellor has exam-
ined Charlotte Dacre’s novel Zofloya; or, The Moor
(1806), in which Dacre depicts a sexual relation-
ship between a black man and a white woman, to
illustrate how “the Gothic has long enabled both
its practitioners and its readers to explore subjec-
tive desires and identities that are otherwise
repressed, denied, or forbidden by the culture at
large.”
Commentary on the relationship between
women and the Gothic focuses on works of
Gothic literature by women authors as well as on
the depiction of women in Gothic literature writ-
ten by men. In the mid-1800s, women had few
rights and were expected to be subservient to men.
Not only were women denied the vote, they were
denied the right to own property. Cultural expec-
tations required that women refrain from express-
ing themselves openly in the presence of men.
Rather they were expected to be pure, pleasant,
and supportive of men at all times. But, as reflected
by the controversial Gothic novels, these rigid
roles were changing. Feminist critics point out the
unusual prevalence of strong female characters in
Gothic novels, and the way their independent and
often sexual behavior was harshly criticized by
contemporaries of the novels. Modern critics also
point out the way in which female sexuality was
often used to denote strength, rebelliousness, and
evil. Appearing as nefarious seductresses, female
characters were often demons or villains who were
punished or made to see the error of their ways at
the story’s end. Feminist critics also claim that
while women in earlier novels had been portrayed
as victims waiting to be rescued, in Gothic novels
the roles were often reversed and the male charac-
ters were victimized. Other scholars see the valida-
tion of marriage as a common theme of Gothic
novels and still others argue that the genre al-
lowed women readers of the mid-1800s to enjoy
independence vicariously through the actions of
the female characters. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein;
or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) has received
particular attention from feminist critics, as the
novel offers common themes in the female Gothic
tradition: fear and anxiety surrounding the birth
process, female sexuality, and women’s bodies. In
the twentieth century, the works of many women
writers—including Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting
of Hill House (1959), Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar
(1963), and Diane Johnson’s The Shadow Knows
(1974)—were examined from a feminist, Gothic Elizabeth Bowen

SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC

theoretical perspective for their modernized Bowen’s Court (nonfiction) 1942
adaptation of the traditional Gothic that conveys The Demon Lover, and Other Stories (short stories)
the unique and often publicly unspoken, or even 1945
socially taboo, psychological and social realities of
twentieth-century women. Modern women au- Edmund Burke
thors employ horror and the Gothic to convey A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas
the horror of being perceived as freakish by society of the Sublime and Beautiful (essay) 1757
for engaging in and espousing artistic and voca-
Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the
tional pursuits considered outside of the tradi-
Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Rela-
tional—and, thus, approved—women’s realm, or
tive to that Event (essay) 1790
for choosing to delay or avoid pregnancy, mar-
riage, or motherhood. These narratives relate the
unique and deeply rooted fear and anxiety experi-
Charlotte Dacre
Zofloya; or, The Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth
enced by women who are afraid simultaneously
Century. 3 vols. (novel) 1806
of being trapped in stifling, repressive roles and of
being rejected or isolated for challenging these
Frederick Douglass
prescribed roles. The work most frequently held as
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an
an example of female Gothic is Charlotte Perkins
American Slave (autobiography) 1845
Gilman’s novella “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892).
The novella, a fictionalized account of Gilman’s
William Faulkner
real-life experience with the “rest cure,” a com-
Absalom, Absalom! (novel) 1936
monly prescribed treatment for depression, horri-
fied readers and critics when it was published, “A Rose for Emily” (short story) 1930; published
largely because the female protagonist’s terror and in the journal Forum
eventual madness were chillingly true to life and
offered a harsh indictment of a widely-held belief Charlotte Perkins Gilman
that women who found motherhood and domes- “The Yellow Wallpaper” (novella) 1892; published
tic duties unfulfilling or even confining were in the journal New England Magazine; pub-
mentally ill. Subsequent critical analyses of the lished in book form as The Yellow Wallpaper,
work have focused upon Gilman’s use of horror 1899
and Gothic elements to convey the desperation
experienced by women who were both physically James Hogg
imprisoned and deprived of intellectual freedom The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified
and expression. Sinner (novel) 1824; republished as The Sui-
cide’s Grave, 1828

Shirley Jackson
The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris (short
REPRESENTATIVE WORKS stories) 1949
The Haunting of Hill House (novel) 1959
Louisa May Alcott
“Taming a Tartar” (short story) 1867; published
serially in the journal Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Harriet Jacobs
Newspaper Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
[as Linda Brent] (autobiography) 1861
Jane Austen
Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. 4 vols. (novels) Diane Johnson
1818 The Shadow Knows (novel) 1974
The Shining [with Stanley Kubrick; based on the
William Beckford novel by Stephen King] (screenplay) 1980
*Vathek (novel) 1787
Sophia Lee
Ambrose Bierce The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times. 3 vols. (novel)
Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (short stories) 1891 1783

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1 109
 Arthur Machen
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (short
stories) 1894
The Three Impostors (short stories) 1895
†The Hill of Dreams (novel) 1907
Charles Robert Maturin
Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale. 4 vols. (novel) 1820
Carson McCullers
The Member of the Wedding (novel) 1946
Herman Melville
Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (novel) 1852
Toni Morrison
Beloved (novel) 1987
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagi-
nation (criticism) 1992
Joyce Carol Oates
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Stories
of Young America (short stories) 1974
Flannery O’Connor
‡“A Temple of the Holy Ghost” (short story) 1955
Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar (novel) 1963
Edgar Allan Poe
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,
North America: Comprising the Details of a
Mutiny, Famine, and Shipwreck, During a Voyage
to the South Seas; Resulting in Various Extraordi-
nary Adventures and Discoveries in the Eighty-
fourth Parallel of Southern Latitude [published
anonymously] (novel) 1838
#“William Wilson” (short story) 1840
Ann Radcliffe
The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance; Interspersed
with Some Pieces of Poetry. 4 vols. (novel) 1794
Clara Reeve
The Champion of Virtue. A Gothic Story (novel)
1777; republished as The Old English Baron,
1778
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 3 vols.
(novel) 1818; revised edition, 1831
Robert Louis Stevenson
New Arabian Nights. 2 vols. (short stories) 1882
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (novella)
1886
110 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Bram Stoker
Dracula (novel) 1897
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly. 2 vols.
(novel) 1852
H. G. Wells
The Island of Doctor Moreau: A Possibility (novel)
1896
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray (novel) 1890; first
published in the journal Lippincott’s Monthly
Magazine; revised edition, 1891
The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and Other Poems [as
C.3.3.] (poetry) 1898
Mary Wollstonecraft
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures
on Political and Moral Subjects (essay) 1792
Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman: A Posthumous
Fragment (unfinished novel) 1799
* The unauthorized translation of Vathek was published
as An Arabian Tale, 1786.
† This work was first published serially in Horlick’s Maga-
zine as “The Garden of Avallaunius” in 1904.
‡ This story was published in the collection A Good Man
Is Hard to Find, 1955.
# This story was published in the collection Tales of the
Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840.
PRIMARY SOURCES
EDMUND BURKE (ESSAY DATE
1757)
SOURCE: Burke, Edmund. “Part II: Sections I and II,
and Part IV: Sections V, VI, VIII, and IX.” In A Philo-
sophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime
and Beautiful. 1757. Fourth edition, pp. 79-131, 197-
254. Dublin: Sarah Cotter, 1766.
In the following excerpt from an essay first published in
1757, Burke explains his theory of the connection
between the sublime, pain, and terror.
Part II.
SECT. I.
Of the passion caused by the Sublime.
The passion caused by the great and sublime
in nature, when those causes operate most power-
fully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that
state of the soul, in which all its motions are
suspended, with some degree of horror. In this
case the mind is so entirely filled with its object,
that it cannot entertain any other, nor, by conse-
quence, reason on that object which employs it.
Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that
far from being produced by them, it anticipates
our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible
force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of
the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior ef-
fects are admiration, reverence and respect.
SECT. II.
Terror.
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all
its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. For, fear
being an apprehension of pain or death, it oper-
ates in a manner that resembles actual pain.
Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight,
is sublime too, whether this cause of terror, be
endued with greatness of dimensions or not; for it
is impossible to look on any thing as trifling, or
contemptible, that may be dangerous. There are
many animals, who though far from being large,
are yet capable of raising ideas of the sublime,
because they are considered as objects of terror. As
serpents and poisonous animals of almost all
kinds. And to things of great dimensions, if we
annex an adventitious idea of terror, they become
without comparison greater. A level plain of a vast
extent on land, is certainly no mean idea; the
prospect of such a plain may be as extensive as a
prospect of the ocean; but can it ever fill the mind
with any thing so great as the ocean itself? This is
owing to several causes, but it is owing to none
more than this, that this ocean is an object of no
small terror. Indeed terror is in all cases whatso-
ever, either more openly or latently the ruling
principle of the sublime. Several languages bear a
strong testimony to the affinity of these ideas.
They frequently use the same word, to signify
indifferently the modes of astonishment or admi-
ration and those of terror. ⍜␣µ⌸␱␵ is in Greek,
either fear or wonder; ␦⑀␫␯␱␵ is terrible or respect-
able; ␣␫␦⑀␻, to reverence or to fear. Vereor in Latin,
is what ␣␫␦⑀␻ is in Greek. The Romans used the
verb stupeo, a term which strongly marks the state
of an astonished mind, to express the effect either
of simple fear, or of astonishment; the word atto-
nitus, (thunder-struck) is equally expressive of the
alliance of these ideas; and do not the French eton-
nement, and the English astonishment and amaze-
ment point out as clearly the kindred emotions
which attend fear and wonder? They who have a
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
more general knowledge of languages, could
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
produce, I make no doubt, many other and
equally striking examples.
. . . . .
Part IV.
SECT. V.
How the Sublime is produced.
Having considered terror as producing an un-
natural tension and certain violent emotions of
the nerves; it easily follows, from what we have
just said, that whatever is fitted to produce such a
tension, must be productive of a passion similar
to terror, and consequently must be a source of
the sublime, though it should have no idea of
danger connected with it. So that little remains
towards shewing the cause of the sublime, but to
shew that the instances we have given of it in the
second part, relate to such things as are fitted by
nature to produce this sort of tension, either by
the primary operation of the mind or the body.
With regard to such things as affect by the associ-
ated idea of danger, there can be no doubt but
that they produce terror, and act by some modifi-
cation of that passion; and that terror, when suf-
ficiently violent, raises the emotions of the body
just mentioned, can as little be doubted. But if the
sublime is built on terror, or some passion like it,
which has pain for its object; it is previously
proper to enquire how any species of delight can
be derived from a cause so apparently contrary to
it. I say, delight, because, as I have often remarked,
it is very evidently different in its cause, and in its
own nature, from actual and positive pleasure.
SECT. VI.
How pain can be a cause of delight.
Providence has so ordered it that a state of
rest and inaction, however it may flatter our
indolence, should be productive of many inconve-
niencies; that it should generate such disorders, as
may force us to have recourse to some labour, as a
thing absolutely requisite to make us pass our lives
with tolerable satisfaction; for the nature of rest is
to suffer all the parts of our bodies to fall into a
relaxation, that not only disables the members
from performing their sunctions, but takes away
the vigorous tone of fibre which is requisite for
carrying on the natural and necessary secretions.
At the same time, that in this languid inactive
state, the nerves are more liable to the most hor-
rid convulsions, than when they are sufficiently
111

SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
CLARA REEVE (1729-1807)
Although primarily a novelist who wrote in
the eighteenth-century tradition of sentimen-
tal fiction, Reeve is remembered almost
exclusively for her Gothic romance The Old
English Baron (1778). Writing in response to
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto
(1764), Reeve sought to compose a similar
story avoiding what she considered Walpole’s
flawed narrative conception. Whereas Wal-
pole conceived his novel as an entertainment
with an abundant display of supernaturalism,
Reeve’s narrative is distinguished by her
didactic theme and moderate use of super-
natural elements. Immensely popular during
the eighteenth century, The Old English Baron
remains important for its role in the develop-
ment of the Gothic genre. Reeve’s cautious
approach to writing Gothic fiction anticipated
the later, more critically acclaimed novels of
Ann Radcliffe, whose characters inhabit a
world in which realistic detail joins success-
fully with improbable occurrences. Reeve
combined literary gothicism with the didactic
concerns characteristic of sentimental fiction.
The oldest daughter in a family of eight
children, Reeve was born in Ipswich, Suffolk.
Her father was a clergyman in the Anglican
church, and biographers speculate that his
influence on Reeve’s early development
substantially contributed to the socially
conservative, moralistic nature of her works.
Educated at home under her father’s tutelage,
she displayed a special interest in history and
biography. After her father died in 1755,
Reeve moved to Colchester with her mother
and two of her sisters. It was here that she
wrote her first book, Original Poems on Several
Occasions, which was published in 1769. This
collection of poetry received little notice, and
it was not until the private publication of The
Champion of Virtue: A Gothic Story in 1777
that her work gained recognition. On the
advice of her friend Martha Bridgen, the
daughter of novelist Samuel Richardson,
Reeve revised this novel and published it in
1778 as The Old English Baron. While Walpole
himself disparaged the work, it was an im-
mediate popular and critical success.
112
braced and strengthened. Melancholy, dejection,
despair, and often, self-murder, is the consequence
of the gloomy view we take of things in this
relaxed state of body. The best remedy for all these
evils is exercise or labour; and labour is a surmount-
ing of difficulties, an exertion of the contracting
power of the muscles; and as such resembles pain,
which consists in tension or contraction, in every
thing but degree. Labour is not only requisite to
preserve the coarser organs in a state fit for their
functions, but it is equally necessary to these finer
and more delicate organs, on which, and by
which, the imagination, and perhaps the other
mental powers act. Since it is probable, that not
only the inferior parts of the soul, as the passions
are called, but the understanding itself makes use
of some fine corporeal instruments in its opera-
tion; though what they are, and where they are,
may be somewhat hard to settle: but that it does
make use of such, appears from hence; that a long
exercise of the mental powers induces a remark-
able lastitude of the whole body; and on the other
hand, that great bodily labour, or pain, weakens,
and sometimes actually destroys the mental facul-
ties. Now, as a due exercise is essential to the
coarse muscular parts of the constitution, and that
without this rouzing they would become languid,
and diseased, the very same rule holds with regard
to those finer parts we have mentioned; to have
them in proper order, they must be shaken and
worked to a proper degree.
. . . . .
SECT. VIII.
Why things, not dangerous, produce a passion like
Terror.
A Mode of terror, or of pain, is always the
cause of the sublime. For terror, or associated
danger, the foregoing explication is, I believe, suf-
ficient. It will require somewhat more trouble to
shew that such examples, as I have given of the
sublime in the second part, are capable of produc-
ing a mode of pain, and of being thus allied to
terror, and to be accounted for on the same
principles. And first of such objects as are great in
their dimensions. I speak of visual objects.
SECT. IX.
Why visual objects of great dimensions are
Sublime.
Vision is performed by having a picture
formed by the rays of light which are reflected
from the object, painted in one piece, instanta-
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neously, on the retina, or last nervous part of the

SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC

eye. Or, according to others, there is but one point
of any object painted on the eye in such a man-
ner as to be perceived at once; but by moving the
eye, we gather up with great celerity, the several
parts of the object, so as to form one uniform
piece. If the former opinion be allowed, it will be
considered, that though all the light reflected from
a large body should strike the eye in one instant;
yet we must suppose that the body itself is formed
of a vast number of distinct points, every one of
which, or the ray from every one, makes an
impression on the retina. So that, though the im-
age of one point should cause but a small tension
of this membrane, another, and another, and
another stroke, must in their progress cause a very
great one, until it arrives at last to the highest
degree; and the whole capacity of the eye, vibrat-
ing in all its parts must approach near to the
nature of what causes pain, and consequently
must produce an idea of the sublime. Again, if we Clara Reeve, 1729-1807.
take it, that one point only of an object is distin-
guishable at once; the matter will amount nearly
to the same thing, or rather it will make the origin conference with you, upon certain points that will
of the sublime from greatness of dimension yet elucidate the design, and perhaps induce you to
clearer. For if but one point is observed at once, form a favourable, as well as a right judgment of
the eye must traverse the vast space of such bod- the work.
ies with great quickness, and consequently the Pray did you ever read a book called, The
fine nerves and muscles destined to the motion of Castle of Otranto? if you have, you will willingly
that part must be very much strained; and their enter with me into a review of it.—but perhaps
great sensibility must make them highly affected you have not read it? however you have heard
by this straining. Besides, it signifies just nothing that it is an attempt to blend together, the most
to the effect produced, whether a body has its attractive and interesting circumstances of the
parts connected and makes its impression at once; ancient romance and modern Novel; but possibly
or making but one impression of a point at a time, you may not know so much, still you have read
it causes a succession of the same; or others, so some ancient Romance, or some modern Novel, it
quickly, as to make them seem united; as is will be strange if you have not in this age!
evident from the common effect of whirling about
But suppose you should dislike or despise
a lighted torch or piece of wood; which if done
them both? ’tis no matter! I shall catch you some
with celerity, seems a circle of fire.
way or other.
You delight in the fables of the ancients, the
CLARA REEVE (ESSAY DATE 1777) old poets, or story-tellers.
SOURCE: Reeve, Clara. “Address to the Reader.” In The Or, you are pleased with the wonderful adven-
Champion of Virtue. A Gothic Story. By the Editor of The
tures of modern travellers, such as Gaudentio di
Phoenix. A Translation of Barclay’s Argenis, pp. i-vii.
Colchester, 1777. Lucca, or Robinson Crusoe.
In the following excerpt from an introduction to her novel, Or, if you are unacquainted with any of the
which was published in 1778 as The Old English Baron, books already mentioned, I would venture a good
Reeve urges her readers to appreciate her novel as part of
wager that you have read the Pilgrim’s Progress.
a Gothic literary tradition, and declares that every reader
will find something in her work to enjoy. You smile! but I mean nothing ludicrous, the
Pilgrim’s Progress is a work of genius, and as such I
Address to the Reader. respect it.—is it possible that a book merely fanati-
Reader, before you enter upon the history cal, should have run through fifty-four editions?
before you, permit the Author to hold a short you may safely conclude it has merit of a higher

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1 113
 kind, that enables it to blunt the shafts of ridicule,
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
and to stand its ground, notwithstanding the
variations of times and tastes, and the refinements
of literature and language.
But what (say you) is all this to the purpose?
patience a moment, and I will come directly to
the point.—if you have read any fictitious or fabu-
lous story, it will answer my intention, which is to
assert, that all readers, of all times and countries
have delighted in stories of these kinds; and that
those who affect to despise them under one form,
will receive and embrace them in another.
History represents human nature as it is.—
alas! too often a melancholy retrospect.—romance
displays only the amiable side of the picture; it
shows the pleasing features, and throws a veil over
the blemishes: mankind are naturally pleased with
what gratifies their vanity, and vanity like all other
passions of the human heart, may be rendered
subservient to good and useful purposes.
I confess that it may be abused, and become
an instrument to corrupt the manners and morals
of mankind; so may poetry, so may plays, so may
every kind of composition; but that will prove
nothing more than the old saying lately revived’—
“that every earthly thing has two handles.”
The business of romance is first to excite the
attention, and secondly to direct it to some use-
ful, or at least innocent end. Happy the writer who
attains both these points, like Richardson! and
not unfortunate, or undeserving of praise, he who
gains only the latter, and furnishes out of it an
entertainment for the reader!
Having, in some degree, opened my design, I
beg leave to conduct my reader back again, till he
comes within view of the castle of Otranto; a work
which has already been observed, is an attempt to
unite the various merits and graces of the ancient
romance and modern Novel.—to attain this end,
there is required a sufficient degree of the marvel-
lous to excite the attention.—enough of the man-
ners of real life, to give an air of probability to the
work;—and enough of the pathetic to engage the
heart in its behalf.
The book before us is excellent in the two last
points, but has a redundancy in the first; the
opening excites the attention very strongly; the
conduct of the story is artful and judicious; the
characters are admirably drawn and supported;
the diction polished and elegant; yet with all these
brilliant advantages, it palls upon the mind,
though it does not upon the ear, and the reason is
114 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
obvious; the machinery is so violent, that it
destroys the effect it is intended to excite. Had the
story been kept within the utmost verge of prob-
ability, the effect had been preserved, without los-
ing the least circumstance that excites or detains
the attention.
For instance, we can conceive and allow of
the appearance of a ghost, we can even dispense
with an enchanted sword and helmet, but then
they must keep within certain limits of credibility,
a sword so large as to require an hundred men to
lift it, a helmet that by its own weight forces a
passage through a court-yard into an arched vault,
big enough for a man to go through; a picture
that walks out of its frame; a skeleton ghost in a
hermit’s cowl: when your expectation is wound
up to the highest pitch, these circumstances take
it down with a witness, destroy the work of
imagination, and instead of attention, excite
laughter. I was both surprised and vexed to find
the enchantment dissolved, that I wished might
continue to the end of the book, and several oth-
ers of its readers have confessed the same disap-
pointment to me; the beauties are so numerous,
that we cannot bear the defects, but want it to be
perfect in all respects.
In the course of my observations upon this
singular book, it seemed to me that it was possible
to compose a work upon the same plan, wherein
these defects might be avoided, and the keeping as
in painting might be preserved.
But then, said I, it might happen to the writer
as it has to the imitators of Shakespeare, the uni-
ties may be preserved, but the spirit may evaporate;
in short it will be safest to let it alone.
During these reflections, it occured to my
remembrance, that a certain friend of mine was in
possession of a manuscript in the old English
language, containing a story that answered in
almost every point to the plan above-mentioned;
and if it were modernised, might afford entertain-
ment to those who delight in stories of this kind.
Accordingly (with my friend’s permission) I
transcribed, or rather translated a few sheets of
it.—I read it to a circle of friends of approved judg-
ment, they gave me the warmest encouragement
to proceed, and even made me promise to finish
it.
Here it is, therefore, at your service; if you are
pleased, I am satisfied; I will venture to assure you
that it shall not leave you worse than it finds you
in any respect. If you despise the work it will go to

Illustration from The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story,
1778.
sleep quietly with many of its contemporaries,
and the ghost of it will not disturb your repose.
I am, with profound Respect,
Reader, your most obedient Servant,
The EDITOR.
SOPHIA LEE (NOVEL DATE 1786)
SOURCE: Lee, Sophia. An excerpt from The Recess; Or,
A Tale of Other Times. By the Author of the Chapter of
Accidents. Vol. 1, pp. 1-10. Dublin, 1786.
The following excerpt is from the beginning of Lee’s
highly popular novel.
After a long and painful journey through life,
with a heart exhausted by afflictions, and eyes
which can no longer supply tears to lament them,
I turn my every thought toward that grave on the
verge of which I hover. Oh! why then, too gener-
ous friend, require me to live over my misfortunes?
Such has been the peculiarity of my fate, that
though tortured with the possession and the loss
of every tye and hope that exalts or endears
humanity, let but this feeble frame be covered
with the dust from which it sprung, and no trace
of my ever having existed would remain, except
in the wounded consciences of those who marked
me out a solitary victim to the crimes of my
progenitors: For surely I could never merit by my
own misery of living as I have done—of dying as I
must do.
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Alas! your partial affection demands a memo-
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
rial which calls back to being all the sad images
buried in my bosom, and opens anew every vein
of my heart. Yet consummate misery has a moral
use, and if ever these sheets reach the publick, let
the repiner at little evils learn to be juster to his
God and himself, by unavoidable comparison. But
am I not assuming an insolent consequence in
thus admonishing? Alas, it is the dear-bought
privilege of the unfortunate to be tedious!
My life commenced with an incident so ex-
traordinary as the following facts alone could
incline any one to credit. As soon as capable of
reflection, I found myself and a sister of my own
age, in an apartment with a lady, and a maid older
than herself.—Every day furnished us with what-
ever was necessary for subsistence or improve-
ment, supplied as it seemed by some invisible
hand; for I rarely missed either of the few who
commonly surrounded me. This Recess could not
be called a cave, because it was composed of vari-
ous rooms; and the stones were obviously united
by labor; yet every room was distinct, and divided
from the rest by a vaulted passage with many
stairs, while our light proceeded from small case-
ments of painted glass, so infinitely above our
reach that we could never seek a world beyond;
and so dim, that the beams of the sun were almost
a new object to us when we quitted this retire-
ment. These remarks occurred as our minds
unfolded; for at first we were content, through
habit and ignorance, nor once bestowed a thought
on surrounding objects. The lady I have men-
tioned called us her children, and caressed us both
with parental fondness.—Blest with every gentle
charm, it is not wonderful she fully possessed the
affections of those who had no one else to idolize.
Every moment we met in a larger room than the
rest, where a very venerable man performed mass,
and concluded with a discourse calculated to
endear retirement. From him we learnt there was
a terrible large place called the world, where a few
haughty individuals commanded miserable mil-
lions, whom a few artful ones made so; that
Providence had graciously rescued us from both,
nor could we ever be sufficiently grateful. Young
hearts teem with unformed ideas, and are but too
susceptible of elevated and enthusiastic impres-
sions. Time gave this man insensibly an influence
over us, as a superior being, to which his appear-
ance greatly contributed. Imagine a tall and robust
figure habited in black, and marked by a com-
manding austerity of manners.—His features bore
the traces of many sorrows, and a kind of early
old age, which interested every observer. The fire
115
 and nobility of his eye, the gracefulness of his
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
decay, and the heart-affecting solemnity of his
voice,
While on his reverend temples grew
The blossoms of the grave,
gave an authority almost irresistible to Father
Anthony, as we called him from hearing our
mamma, to whom we understood he was brother.
He usually partook our dinner, and from that time
’till the next morning vanished, for we knew not
how or where he went. The interval we passed in
little useful works, or in conversation with our
mamma, whose only employment was that of
forming our minds, for the world we were taught
to dread.—She was our world, and all the tender
affections, of which I have since proved my heart
so full, centered in her, and my sister. Time and
sorrow had given a wan delicacy to features
exquisitely regular, while the soft symmetry of her
person united every common idea of beauty and
elegance to a feminine helplessness, which is,
when unaffected, the most interesting of all
charms. Her temper was equal, and her under-
standing enriched by a most extensive knowledge,
to which she was every day adding by perpetual
study. Inclined strongly by nature to serious reflec-
tion, and all her favourite employments, I used to
pass those hours at her side Ellinor devoted to her
play-things, or to Alice, whose memory was
overcharged with those marvellous tales children
always delight in. As our ideas every day ex-
panded, we thought more and more concerning
our origin, and our imprisonment. We knew
Father Anthony constantly disappeared, but how
or where was a secret beyond our comprehension;
for in all our researches we never found a door
except those common to the family, and which
shut us from the world. Ellinor, whose lively
imagination readily imbibed the romantic and
extravagant, conjectured we were in the power of
some giant; nay, such was her disgust to Father
Anthony, that she sometimes apprehended he was
a magician, and would one day or other devour
us. I had a very different idea; and fancied our
retreat a hollowed circle to seclude us from the
wicked, while Father Anthony was our guardian
genius. Frequently we by agreement interrogated
Alice, who though fond to the common degree of
an old nurse of both, but more especially Ellen,
resisted those little arts nature herself inspires. Our
mamma we now and then ventured to sound, but
her gravity always disconcerted us, and we re-
treated from a vain attempt.
She once absented herself fourteen days, and
left us to our own conjectures, in a spot truly
116
chearless. Part of the time we spent in searching
once more for a door, and the rest in childish
lamentations for her loss; which Alice still assured
us would be but a temporary one. Inflexible in the
discharge of her duty, she still persisted in locking
our apartment every day after dinner, at which
time all who had occasion, doubtless, passed in
and out of the Recess.
Being deprived of my customary resource,
books, to amuse a part of our melancholy leisure,
we mutually agreed to invent tales from the many
whole-length pictures, which ornamented the best
room, and to take them as they came alternately.
Ellinor readily invented a ludicrous story upon
the portrait of an old man, which made us both
laugh heartily. I turned my eyes to consider what
I should say about the next; they rested on the
figure of a man of noble mien, his dress I then
knew no name for, but have since found to be ar-
mour; a page held his helmet, and his hair, of a
pale brown, fell over his shoulders. He was sur-
rounded with many emblems of martial merit,
and his eyes, which seemed bent on me, were full
of a tender sweetness. A sentiment of veneration,
mingled with a surprising softness, pierced my
soul at once; my tongue faltered with a nameless
idea, and I rested my head against the shoulder of
my sister. That dear girl turned to me with quick-
ness, and the beam of her eye was like that of the
picture. I surveyed her over and over, and found
in every feature the strongest resemblance; when
she frowned, she had all his dignity; when she
smiled, all his sweetness. An awe, I could not
conquer, made me unable to form any tale on that
subject, and I directed my attention toward the
next. It represented a lady in the flower of youth,
dressed in mourning, and seeming in every feature
to be marked by sorrow; a black veil half shaded a
coronet she wept over. If the last picture awakened
veneration, this seemed to call forth a thousand
melting sensations; the tears rushed involuntary
into our eyes, and, clasping, we wept upon the
bosoms of each other. “Ah! who can these be?
cried we both together. Why do our hearts thus
throb before inanimate canvas? surely every thing
we behold is but part of one great mystery; when,
will the day come, destined to clear it up?” We
walked arm in arm round, and moralized on every
portrait, but none interested us like these; we were
never weary of surveying or talking about them; a
young heart is frequently engrossed by a favorite
idea, amid all the glare of the great world; nor is it
then wonderful ours were thus possessed when
entombed alive in such a narrow boundary. I
knew not why, but we lived in the presence of
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these pictures as if they understood us, and
blushed when we were guilty of the slightest folly.
The moment our mamma returned, we flew
into her arms, and interrupted her tender carasses
with importunate enquiries concerning these
favorite pictures. She regarded us with astonish-
ment—her eyes filled with tears, and she bade us
leave her to recover herself alone. Shortly after she
summoned Alice, and held with her a conversa-
tion which restored her tranquillity; but she care-
fully avoided our enquiries, endeavouring to
diversify our hours by music, drawing, poetry,
geography, and every ornamental branch of
education. Whenever we verged toward an hint
about the retreat—“wait, my dear girls, she would
say, the appointed hour—alas, one may follow it,
when you will wish yourselves still unin-
formed.”—Impressed with an undesinable melan-
choly, our years passed on ’till womanhood ap-
proached.
Pardon me if I linger over these scenes; I have
but few such to relate, and they are all of my life
upon which my heart dares to pause. How are we
born to invent our own miseries! We start forward
from the goal of youth, fearless and impatient,
nor know the heights and depths through which
we must labour; oppressed in turn by every ele-
ment, and often overwhelmed with that most
insupportable of all burthens, our own dissatisfied
souls. How have I wept the moment I quitted the
Recess—a moment I then lived but in hope of! To
be always erring, is the weakness of humanity,
and to be always repenting, its punishment.—
Alas! could we learn wisdom without experience,
mankind would perhaps be too happy.
Father Anthony in time ingratiated himself
with us, by his continual remonstrances against
our being shut up in a place which bounded our
ideas so much that he despaired of making us
comprehend half of what he taught us. We sec-
onded his advice with endless entreaties. Our
mamma, who was persuasion itself in her own
person, was not proof against it in that of another.
“Alas, my children, would she often say, by what
fatality do you so passionately desire to leave a
home you will hereafter remember with a pleasure
full of regret? In vain you would return to it—you
will lose a taste for the tranquil enjoyments this
solitude offers, without perhaps finding any to
supply them. Yet far be the selfish weakness from
my heart of punishing you, even for your welfare.
You shall see this admired world. May it ever
please you as it will at first sight!”
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We embraced her with youthful transport, and
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
then each other—“We shall go at last, exclaimed
both together, we shall see many more like our-
selves!”
“What say you, children? cried she; ah! you
will see few indeed like yourselves.”
The next day was appointed for our enfran-
chisement. We packed and unpacked our little lug-
gage fifty times over for mere employment ’till
the appointed hour came; when we were sum-
moned to the chamber of our only friend, who
was walking about apparently agitated with a
secret.
“Are you grieved, mamma, cried I, that we are
going to be happy?”
“Ah, no Matilda! I am grieved, because I think
you are just ceasing to be so. In this peaceful
solitude I could supply to you every lost relation—
the adopted children of my heart, I stood between
you and a fate at once distinguished, obscure and
affecting.—Alas, why do you wrest yourselves and
your secret from me? Why do you oblige me to
tell you, you must never more call me any thing
but Mrs. Marlow?”
“Never more call you mamma! sighed I, inco-
herently, who then are our parents?”
“You have no father, he who gave you a being
sleeps in the bosom of God.
“Our mother———”
“Lives—but not for you—enquire no farther;
let this specimen of knowledge teach you to fear
it.—When the time requires it, I shall disclose your
whole story;—weep no more, my lovely, my af-
fecting girls; I have lost but a name: for my nature
is unalterable. All who will see us know I never
was married, which absolutely compelled me to
this discovery. But I dare believe they will rely on
my rectitude, and welcome you by whatever name
I shall give you. Reasons you will hereafter know,
induce me always to conceal a retreat, where alone
I could have hid you, and both must, ere we leave
it, solemnly promise never to disclose the secret.”
Chilled with this solemn preparation, our
desire of liberty vanished; we felt like links struck
from the chain of creation; and still with restless
imaginations explored the remainder of a mystery
which we wept by anticipation. “She lives, but
not for you!” were words whose sound vibrated to
my heart, while pleasure danced around me, and
the doubt attending the future, often robbed the
present of enjoyment.
After we had made at her knees the strict
promise required, she muffled our faces, and tak-
117
 ing my hand, as Alice did my sister’s, led us
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
through many cold passages for some minutes;
when unbinding our eyes, we found ourselves in
a noble cloister. We flew into the garden it bor-
dered, and how strong was the impression of the
scene before us! from the mansion, which stood
on a hill, spread a rich and fertile valley, mingled
with thickets, half seen or clustered hamlets, while
through the living landscape flowed a clear river,
———and to the main
The liquid serpent drew his silver train.

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 SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
SOPHIA LEE (1750-1824)
[Lee]’s most significant work, The Recess
[(1783),] appeared in one volume three years
after the publication of [her play] The Chapter
of Accidents [(1780)]. Its reception was so
encouraging that Sophia produced two ad-
ditional volumes in 1785. . . . The tale traces
the vicissitudes of Matilda and Ellinor, daugh-
ters of Mary Queen of Scots by the Duke of
Norfolk, who, under threat of persecution by
Elizabeth, are reared in the subterranean
vaults of an abandoned abbey so that, in their
father’s words, they may “never . . . know
the Court of Elizabeth, but innocently and
happily . . . die in the desart where they
bloomed.” The central importance of the
recess, or refuge, in the tale reflects the most
complex exploration of a theme that was to
interest Lee throughout her writing career:
that of retreat. . . . Throughout the novel,
Lee’s passionate attention to the “exquisite
distress” of the tormented sisters announces
her conviction of the relationship (explored
in detail by later Gothicists like Radcliffe) of
mental suffering and refinement, of anguish
and the sublime.

The critical response to The Recess was

immediate and vigorous. Readers were ar-
rested by the new combination of history and
romance. . . . The Recess, in effect, reintro-
duced the genre of the English historical
romance, which had lain dormant since
Thomas Leland’s Longsword of 1762, and in
so doing not only stimulated the composi-
tion of a host of novels along similar lines but
helped to form public taste for the more
popular and radical genre that was to capti-
vate English readers in the last decade of the
eighteenth century: the Gothic.

SOURCE: Napier, Elizabeth R. “Sophia Lee.” In

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 39: Brit-
ish Novelists, 1660-1800, edited by Martin C.
Battestin, pp. 301-06. Farmington Hills, Mich.:
The Gale Group, 1985.

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SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC

Title page of The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times, 1786.

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 OVERVIEWS

SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC

KATHLEEN L. SPENCER (ESSAY
DATE SPRING 1992)
SOURCE: Spencer, Kathleen L. “Purity and Danger:
Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian
Degeneracy Crisis.” ELH 59, no. 1 (spring 1992): 197-
225.
In the following essay, Spencer investigates Dracula
within the social contexts of late Victorianism, discussing
the novel in terms of British imperialism, contemporane-
ous theories of cultural degeneracy, and the New Woman
movement of the time.
I believe that ideas about separating, purifying,
demarcating and punishing transgressions have as
their main function to impose system on an inher-
ently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating
the difference between within and without, above
and below, male and female, with and against,
that a semblance of order is created.
—Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger1
The construction of categories defining what is
appropriate sexual behavior (“normal”/
“abnormal”), or what constitutes the essential
gender being (“male”/“female”); or where we are
placed along a continuum of sexual possibilities
(“heterosexual,” “homosexual,” “paedophile,”
“transvestite” or whatever); this endeavor is no
neutral, scientific discovery of what was already
there. Social institutions which embody these
definitions (religion, the law, medicine, the educa-
tional system, psychiatry, social welfare, even
architecture) are constitutive of the sexual lives of
individuals. Struggles around sexuality are, therefore,
struggles over meanings—over what is appropriate
or not appropriate—meanings which call on the
resources of the body and the flux of desire, but
are not dictated by them.
—Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and its Discontents
(emphasis added)2

Interpreting Dracula’s sexual substrata has

become something of a cottage industry of late,
so much so that one more reading of the text’s
unconscious may seem a bit pointless. Yet there is
something curious going on here: despite certain
disagreements as to what kind of sexuality is
present in the novel, almost all readings presume
a given sexuality that is repressed and displaced
throughout the text, which it is the critical task to
uncover and articulate. In other words, despite lo-
cal disagreements, all of these readings approach
the text from a fairly orthodox version of depth
psychology.3 While this focus has certainly been
productive, there are other questions about the
text that cannot be answered by focusing on the
unconscious sexuality of the author, or a character,
or even, as in Freudian/Marxist readings, on the
class system.
What I propose is a different kind of historical
reading of Dracula to supplement the previous ap-

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 proaches; my concern is less with Stoker’s posi-
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
tion as a representative late-Victorian man than
with the novel as a representative late-Victorian
text. For Dracula is not an isolated phenomenon,
but is part of a literary/cultural discourse com-
prised not only of other tales about vampires, but
of other fantastic novels and stories that also focus
on sexual dynamics, whether covertly or overtly.4
Whatever it is that Dracula is saying about sex,
then, it is saying not in isolation but as part of a
dialogue.
The first step in this broader historical explica-
tion of Stoker’s novel is to identify its literary
context: the “romance revival” of the 1880s and
1890s—more explicitly, that species of romance
called “the fantastic.” Having located the text
generically, we can then clarify its cultural con-
text—the late-Victorian world of imperialism and
degeneracy theories, purity crusades and the New
Woman, materialist medicine and its opponents
(continental psychology on the one hand, Spiritu-
alism and assorted occultisms on the other). To il-
luminate this social context I will read the novel
against models of cultures in crisis drawn from
René Girard and anthropologist Mary Douglas.
Finally I will consider the relationship between
Dracula’s genre, its historical context, and its
popularity, to see what light this analysis can shed
on a larger question—why the fantastic as a genre
should have flourished so dramatically in this
period of cultural transformation.
I: The Fantastic
Like “romance” itself, “the fantastic” is a
much-disputed term. While some theorists use
“fantasy” and “the fantastic” interchangeably,
others see them as referring to two quite different
kinds of stories, and still others see the fantastic
not as a genre at all but as an element that can
appear in many kinds of tales (as the term “gothic”
can be applied either to a specific fictional configu-
ration common at the end of the eighteenth
century, or to a literary mode which can appear in
works of any period).
The most famous definition of the term “fan-
tastic” is Tzvetan Todorov’s, but what seems to
me the most functional, precise explanation of
the fantastic is that proposed by the Polish semi-
otician Andrzej Zgorzelski. For Zgorzelski, the
fantastic as a genre is signaled by “the breaching
of the internal laws which are initially assumed in
the text to govern the fictional world.” The open-
ing of the text indicates that the fictive world is
based on a “mimetic world model,” a model that
is violently breached by the entrance of the
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fantastic element and changed into a different
world, one in which the fantastic element does
not violate the laws of reality. A fantastic text,
then, builds its fictional world as “a textual confron-
tation of two models of reality.”5
Two elements are essential for the characteris-
tic frisson of the fantastic: first, the impossible
event must genuinely be happening (not a dream,
a hallucination, a mistake, or a deliberate trick);
and second, the tone of the narrative emphasizes
initial disbelief, and (usually) horror. The charac-
ters react with fear and revulsion at encountering
what is not only unexpected, but unnatural ac-
cording to the laws of the world they inhabit, and
readers usually respond with the same feelings,
not only because we identify with the characters,
but because the world the characters initially
inhabit is our own world. Further, the narrative
voice insistently emphasizes violation and trans-
gression, the logical contradiction between the
impossibility of the occurrence and its actuality.
For example, when Dracula appears in Picadilly at
high noon, the characters react initially with
disbelief and a kind of horrified vertigo at discov-
ering that the monstrous is real and walking the
streets of their ordinary modern city.
Defined in this way, the fantastic as a genre is
relatively modern. The low mimetic (to use
Northrop Frye’s familiar term) must be a well-
established fictional convention before we can
conventionalize its violation, a condition that
does not obtain till the mid-eighteenth century.
Before the convention of realism became the
norm—in the medieval quest narrative or Renais-
sance romance, for example—the intrusion of the
supernatural or monstrous did not create an
experience of the fantastic for either the characters
or the readers. A questing knight may be seriously
dismayed to discover a dragon or a magician in
his path, but the mere existence of the supernatu-
ral does not force him to rethink reality, because it
does not violate the laws of nature. For Prince
Hamlet, seeing his father’s ghost is certainly
alarming; but it is the ghost’s message, not its pres-
ence, which so distresses him. The serious ques-
tion for Hamlet is not whether the ghost is real
but whether it is “honest”—genuinely his father’s
spirit or a demon sent to tempt him to regicide.
Modern readers of these texts need not believe
in the actual existence of dragons or ghosts to
recognize that the text treats these occurrences as
natural. The conventions of fictional realism do
not apply, any more than they apply to modern
fantasy or science fiction, whose readers learn to
respond without astonishment to the presence of
wizards or of faster-than-light space vessels. But a
wizard or faster-than-light ship introduced into a
text whose opening pages signal a contemporary
realistic setting would produce reactions from the
characters, the narrator, and the readers that
would signal the presence of the fantastic.
In light of this requirement, I would argue
that the Gothic tales of the late eighteenth century
are the first fantastic fictions, Horace Walpole and
Anne Radcliffe among the first writers to experi-
ment with the emotional possibilities (for both
characters and readers) of violating the laws of
nature. Since such violations are radically new,
the earliest writers tend to soften the effects a bit.
In the first place, Gothic fictions are traditionally
distanced somewhat from the world of their audi-
ence, set back in time and “away” in space—
preferably in Spain or Italy during the Inquisi-
tion—making the stories more plausible (to an
English audience) by the superstitiousness of their
settings, and at the same time lessening the
intensity of the fear, for the readers if not the
characters. As another softening device, some of
the early Gothic writers, notably Radcliffe, tidy
away the fantastic by giving us rational explana-
tions for the apparent supernatural events—
though not till the end of the novel, so we have
plenty of time to experience the fantastic frisson
first. However, this tidying strategy was soon
abandoned. While second-generation Gothic writ-
ers like Monk Lewis and Charles Maturin still set
their novels in Inquisition Europe, they appar-
ently felt less need to reassure their readers at the
end that the ordinary rational laws of reality
governed the world inside the text as well as
outside.
But the fantastic that develops at the end of
the nineteenth century (exclusive of the ghost
story, a popular but traditional form) is identifi-
ably different from the Gothic of one hundred
years before. First and most important, the new
authors insist on the modernity of the setting—
not on the distance between the world of the text
and the world of the reader, but on their identity.
A modern setting means, most profoundly, an
urban setting, as by the end of the nineteenth
century well over half the population of the Brit-
ish Isles lived in cities. To be modern also means
that science is the metaphor that rules human
interactions with the universe, so the new fantastic
adopts the discourse of empiricism even to de-
scribe and manipulate supernatural phenomena.
These characteristics of the modern fantastic,
as distinct from the earlier variety, suggest we need
a new term to refer to it; and I would argue that
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“Urban Gothic” is particularly appropriate for the
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
new type, acknowledging the eighteenth-century
ancestry while identifying the major modifica-
tions that have been made to adapt the fantastic
to the needs of a new era.
The change from Gothic to Urban Gothic al-
lows writers to call on the powers of what Henry
James, in a review of the sensation novels of Mary
Elizabeth Braddon, called “those most mysterious
of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own
doors.” As James observed, the innovation of
bringing the terror next door gave an entirely new
direction to horror literature. The new strategy
was fatal to the authority of Mrs. Radcliffe and her
everlasting castle in the Apennines. What are the
Apennines to us, or we to the Apennines? Instead
of the terrors of “Udolpho”, we were treated to
the terrors of the cheerful country house and the
busy London lodgings. And there is no doubt that
these were infinitely more terrible.
In 1865, James was moderately scornful of the
supernatural as a fictional device, remarking in
this same review that “a good ghost-story, to be
half as terrible as a good murder-story, must be
connected at a hundred points with the common
objects of life.”6 But twenty-five years later he
himself found uses for the supernatural by follow-
ing his own advice and connecting it “at a hun-
dred points to the common objects of life”—and
so did his “fellow” (if we can so call them) romanc-
ers. In short, James, along with many of his
contemporaries, explored the Urban Gothic.
II: The Romance Revival
But the Urban Gothic was only part, if a
crucial part, of a larger literary movement of the
last two decades of the century: the romance
revival. “Romance” is another of those protean
literary terms whose meaning varies with the
frame of reference, but in the context of the 1880s,
the term has a fairly stable meaning. The “ro-
mance revival” began as a reaction against the
“high realism” of the 1870s, which was, in its
turn, a reaction against the “sensation novels” of
the 1860s. The theorists of high realism rejected
the sensation novel’s emphasis on plot, arguing
that it demanded less of readers than novels that
required them to interpret the subtleties of hu-
man motives. In addition, it was believed, too
strong an emphasis on plot would interfere with
the “naturalness” of characters.
By the 1880s, these novels of “character
analysis” themselves came under attack. First, be-
ing limited to and by “gross” reality, the novels
(their critics argued) were dull and trivial. Second,
129
 these novelists had chosen to adopt the “heart-
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
less” methods of science (“vivisection” is a com-
mon metaphor), treating their characters with no
sympathy or decorum, dissecting them in public.
Then, when “high realism” transposes into natu-
ralism, new grounds for rejection appear. For one
thing, naturalist novels persistently tried to
introduce moral, middle-class readers to the kinds
of persons—prostitutes, criminals, beggars, and
other “undeserving” or unappealing poor
people—whom they had no desire to meet. For
another, realism, especially when pushed to the
extremes of naturalist determinism, allowed no
room for the higher workings of Providence, no
room for the reward of the virtuous and the
punishment of the guilty. Finally, since natural-
ism was identified in the minds of English readers
with Zola, James, and Howells, it became for some
readers and critics a patriotic duty to resist “foreign
influences,” and to call for a healthy English fic-
tion.7
The result was a resurgence of interest in bold,
high-stakes adventure, larger-(and simpler-) than-
life characters, exotic locales and incidents,
idealistic quests, world-class criminals, disguises
and escapes, rescues and disasters. Anthony Hope
Hawkins, author (as Anthony Hope) of one of the
best-known romances of the period, The Prisoner
of Zenda (1893), exclaimed that in romance,
Emotion must be taken at high pitch. It must be
strong, simple, confident; otherwise it lacks the
quality needed for romance. . . . romance be-
comes an expression of some of the deepest
instincts of humanity.
It has no monopoly of this expression, but it is its
privilege to render it in a singularly clear, distinct,
and pure form; it can give to love an ideal object,
to ambition a boundless field, to courage a high
occasion; and these great emotions, revelling in
their freedom, exhibit themselves in their glory.
Thus in its most worthy forms, in the hands of its
masters, it can not only delight men, but can
touch them to the very heart. It shows them what
they would be if they could, if time and fate and
circumstances did not bind, what in a sense they
all are, and what their acts would show them to
be if an opportunity offered. So they dream and
are happier, and at least none the worse for their
dreams.8
Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, H.
Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, and (in his
early works) H. G. Wells are the best-known figures
of this new movement, along with Arthur Ma-
chen, Algernon Blackwood, and Andrew Lang,
several of whom also wrote manifestos for the
critical journals in favor of romance.9 In addition
to these relatively familiar names, a whole army
130
of romancers, once popular but now practically
unread and in many cases entirely forgotten,
produced large quantities of this fiction to supply
the new markets.1 0
But if the revived romance of the 1880s takes
its declared form from an ancient tradition, the
new romancers (like the authors of the Urban
Gothic) draw on contemporary interests for their
characters, settings, and themes: the exotic reaches
of the empire—Africa, Egypt, India, Australia—as
well as such regions as China, the South Pacific,
and South and Central America; dead civilizations
of the ancient past (Egyptian, Peruvian, Celtic,
Neanderthal), their tales enlivened by informa-
tion culled from the newest archaeological reports;
lost races inside volcanoes, at the bottom of the
sea, in the polar regions, on other planets, in the
future; the thrilling possibilities of modern tech-
nology (electrically-induced immortality or eternal
youth; brain transplants; memory recordings; time
travel); or the beliefs and rituals of that other
revival of the 1880s, the occult revival
(Spiritualism, Theosophy, the Society for Psychical
Research, and the magicians of the Order of the
Golden Dawn).1 1
III: Purity and Danger
Thus not only the Urban Gothic but the
romance revival as a whole transforms a tradi-
tional literary genre by an infusion of modern
perspectives. But the Urban Gothic and the ro-
mance share another crucial characteristic beyond
their common reliance on contemporary adven-
ture and exoticism: a concern for purity, for the
reduction of ambiguity and the preservation of
boundaries. Both attempt to reduce anxiety by
stabilizing certain key distinctions, which seemed,
in the last decades of the nineteenth century, to
be eroding: between male and female, natural and
unnatural, civilized and degenerate, human and
nonhuman. At issue, finally, underneath all these
distinctions, is the ground of individual identity,
the ultimate distinction between self and other.
Where once a complex web of traditional roles
and relationships grounded individual identity, in
the new capitalist world of the cash-nexus, An-
thony Giddens observes, the bulwarks of identity
were reduced essentially to two: the arena of
intimate relationships (that is, the family, personal
and highly sexualized), and the arena of “mass
ritual,” of sporting events and political ceremo-
nies, especially the fervent impersonal group
identity we call nationalism. “In such conditions
of social life,” writes Giddens, “the ontological
security of the individual in day-to-day life is more
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fragile than in societies dominated by tradition
and the meshings of kinship across space and
time.”1 2
Instead of being broadly supported by a web
of interlocking kinship links, work groups, cer-
emonial societies, traditions, routines, and even
the continuities of place and seasonal cycle,
identity for the ordinary middle-class Briton now
hung delicately on two slender threads at the
extreme margins of scale, the intimate and the
national. So it is hardly surprising that many
people grew anxious to preserve the clarity and
purity of the distinctions that supported this
system.
However, even at this time of their heightened
significance, these very distinctions came under
attack. Darwinian evolutionary theory blurred the
boundaries between human and animal in not
one but two ways: by the famous argument that
humans and apes had a common ancester, but
also by the implied hierarchy at the end of The
Descent of Man which leads from the ape-like
ancestor through primitive peoples to civilized
Europeans. The imputed inferiority of the lower
races, as George Stocking points out, “although
still in the first instance cultural, was now in most
cases at least implicitly organic as well.”1 3 Thus
the boundary between human and ape became a
matter of scientific doctrine, but (as Wells’s The
Island of Dr. Moreau pointed out) an ambiguous
one: what was actually a philosophic and political
debate was concealed under the language of sci-
ence. Yet since “scientific” language could not
hope to stabilize a fundamentally unscientific
boundary, the issue continued unresolved.
Nor was this boundary a matter of abstract
speculation for civilized Europeans; for if humans
could evolve, it was thought they could also de-
volve or degenerate, both as nations and as
individuals. At what point in a downward slide
did a human being cross over the line into ani-
mality? Lombroso addressed this question with
his new “science” of criminal anthropology,
which purported to demonstrate through elabo-
rate measurements and charts of facial angles that
habitual criminals were throwbacks to primitive
ancestors, with more of the ape than the human
about them. Fear of such national “degeneracy”
was further highlighted for Britons by the Boer
War of 1899-1902, first by the series of unprec-
edented defeats handed the greatest army in the
world by a handful of Dutch farmers, and second
by the recruiting campaign that discovered the
physical inadequacies of the men from London’s
East-End slums, who were alarmingly undersized,
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frail, and sickly.1 4 Such concerns underlay the
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
tremendous public anxiety at the end of the
century about the condition of the British Empire
and the warnings that, like its Roman predecessor,
it could fall, and for what were popularly perceived
as the same reasons—moral decadence leading to
racial degeneration.
Another crucial distinction under attack was
that between male and female. By all the superfi-
cial criteria of appearance, behavior, and legal
status, Victorian men and women must have
seemed almost like two different, though symbi-
otically related, species. It has been argued that
never in western society have gender roles been
more rigid or more distinct (at least in the middle
classes) than in the late nineteenth century.
Victorian science, especially Victorian medicine,
lent the weight of its prestige to the position that
the physical distinctions between women and
men were absolute, and absolutely determinate.
In their very nature and essence, said the doctors,
women were unlike men; and this difference
explained their limitations—physical, moral, and
intellectual—and justified their legal and social
disabilities.1 5
It was woman’s special nature that fitted her
for the task she had been assigned by Victorian
society. In her guises of maiden, wife, and above
all mother, Woman (with a capital) had been ap-
pointed the guardian of moral virtue; the home,
Woman’s realm, became both a refuge from the
hard necessities of the utilitarian business world
and the temple of a new religion that served to
supplement or substitute for the weakening
Christian orthodoxy—the religion of romantic
love as the source of salvation, and of the family
as a haven for all the human warmth, grace and
affection that had been banished from the father’s
daily life in the world. Woman, as the Angel in
the House, was to save Man from his own baser
instincts and lead him toward heaven.
Jenni Calder’s study of the Victorian home
further clarifies the significance of this domestic
religion. While Victorians genuinely desired to
make the world a better place, Calder argues, the
social problems facing them were so massive and
so intractable that they usually had to settle for
making the home, as the only part of the world
responsive to their actions, a better place instead.
Thus “the angel in the house was at the root of
multitudes of Victorian assumptions and ideas,
and Victorian rationalizations and ideals.”1 6
But this position did not go unchallenged.
Throughout the century, women argued for re-
131
 forms of marriage and divorce laws, and in particu-
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
lar for the right of married women to own prop-
erty in their own names. The kind of resistance
they faced is revealed most potently in the com-
ments of Lord St. Leonards, who argued against
the passage of the Married Women’s Property Bill
of 1857 on the grounds that it would “place the
whole marriage law . . . on a different footing
and give a wife all the distinct rights of citizen-
ship,” an argument that indicates that for this
distinguished jurist and former Lord Chancellor
the categories of “wife” and “citizen” were mutu-
ally exclusive.1 7 A few men joined the fray on the
distaff side, most notably John Stuart Mill, who
argued against such logic in The Subjection of
Women in 1869 and even tried to get women the
vote, on the grounds that only if they could vote
for their representatives would Parliament take
their needs seriously; but considerable discussion
produced little substantive action.
The debate grew even more heated in the last
few decades of the century when the New Woman
arrived on the scene, wanting higher education,
striving to enter the learned professions, and ever
more frequently working outside the home for
money (that is, middle-class women began to do
so, for of course lower-class women had long been
so employed). And some of the most radical New
Women even argued that they were entitled to
the same freedom of sexual expression as men. In
short, more and more women insisted on leaving
the house of which they had been appointed
angel, the house that, if a refuge for men, became
for many middle-class wives and daughters a more
or less pleasant prison. But in the eyes of most
Victorian men, for women to deny their tradi-
tional role was to deny their womanhood, to chal-
lenge the distinctions between women and men
upon which the family—and therefore society—
depended.
Nor was the New Woman the only source of
threat to gender categories. Homosexuality was
brought into the consciousness of a horrified
public, first by the Cleveland Street scandal in
1889, which revealed a homosexual brothel cater-
ing to the upper classes (including the Prince of
Wales’s closest friend and, by rumor, the Prince’s
eldest son as well).1 8 More dramatic still was the
infamous Wilde trial in 1895, which made “homo-
sexuality” both as an ontological state and as a
chosen lifestyle available to ordinary middle-class
imaginations for the first time.1 9 To late Victorians,
if the New Woman’s desire to achieve higher
status by “becoming” a man was at least under-
standable, though outrageous, what could be said
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about men who deliberately refused to be men?
Such depravity challenged not just the distinction
between male and female but that between natural
and unnatural as well.2 0
The debates about sex and sex roles in the
nineteenth century, argues Ludmilla Jordanova,
“hinged precisely on the ways in which sexual
boundaries might become blurred. It is as if the
social order depended on clarity with respect to
certain distinctions whose symbolic meanings
spread far beyond their explicit context.”2 1 In this
perception she is quite right: anthropologists tell
us that social order depends precisely on the clar-
ity of such distinctions. But anthropologists can
tell us more: they can help us see the dynamics at
work in late Victorian England in a larger social
context—the context of a culture in crisis.
Mary Douglas’s work on pollution fears and
witchcraft societies is surprisingly appropriate
here.2 2 All cultures that explain evil as a product
of witchcraft—from certain African tribes to Salem
Village in the seventeenth century—share certain
characteristics, she notes. Most importantly, there
is strong pressure on group members to conform,
but the classification system of the society is
somehow ineffective in structuring reality: it is
too narrow and rigid to deal with the variety of
actual experience, or it is inconsistent, or has gaps,
or is in competition with another system of clas-
sification that weakens the effectiveness of both.
In such a society, the universe is dualistic:
what is inside is good, what is outside is bad. The
group boundary is therefore both a source of magi-
cal danger and the main definer of rights: you are
either a member or a stranger. Evil is a foreign
danger introduced by foreign agents in disguise,
but abetted by deviant members of the group who
must be identified and expelled for allowing the
outside evil to infiltrate. Since not only the society
itself but the entire cosmos is endangered by the
vile, irrational behavior of these human agents of
evil, a witchcraft society is preoccupied with ritu-
als of cleansing, the expulsion of spies or witches,
and the redrawing of boundaries to mark the pure
(inside) and the evil (outside).
Though the late Victorians did not explicitly
attribute evil to witches, they manifested the same
fears of pollution from outsiders, the same suspi-
cion of deviants as traitors, and the same exagger-
ated estimation of what was at stake—in short,
the same social dynamics as more traditional
witchcraft societies. The pressures on middle-class
Victorians to conform were intense (and too well
known to need documentation), while the model
to which they were required to conform was los-
ing its clarity. The old consensus on the central
distinctions of their society—on which distinc-
tions were indeed central, and on how those
distinctions were to be defined and maintained—
was breaking down. In the last twenty years of the
century, an intense debate developed between
those who sought to shore up the old crumbling
distinctions and those demanding change—
nontraditional women, homosexuals, socialists,
some artists and intellectuals, a few scientists,
working-class men who had acquired some educa-
tion. One side strove to widen or redefine cultural
boundaries, to let some of the “outside” in, while
the other fought desperately to maintain the
“purity” of the inside by expelling as traitors those
who breached the boundaries.
Douglas mentions one other key factor in a
witchcraft society that the Victorians also shared:
the leadership of the group is precarious or under
dispute, and the roles within the group ambigu-
ous or undefined. Because no one person or fac-
tion has sufficient authority to stabilize the situa-
tion, the struggle for leadership prompts what we
might call “purity competitions”: who is most
vigilant at ferreting out enemies, especially those
disguised enemies lurking within the society itself?
In other words, the struggle for power and stabil-
ity under these social conditions leads inevitably
to scapegoat rituals.2 3
The struggle for leadership of a divided and
confused people also characterized late Victorian
society. For the Victorians, neither traditionalist
nor “rebel” forces could take complete command:
the traditionalists had the numbers and most of
the worldly power, but the rebels tended to be
educated and articulate, many were influential,
and all had ready access to a public forum in the
wide-open periodical market of the 1880s and
’90s. As a result, they could make their voices
heard in disproportion to their numbers and of-
ficial positions. The battle produced numerous
cries of “seize the witch!”—directed both at groups
(Jews, Germans, Slavs, Orientals, birth control
advocates, promiscuous women, decadent French
authors [especially Zola], homosexuals) and at
individuals—most spectacularly, though by no
means solely, Oscar Wilde.
And here is where we reconnect the social and
the literary. The romance, I would argue, and in
particular the Urban Gothic, not only in its
characteristic subject matter but more importantly
in its very form, is the perfect literary reflection of
the cultural crisis Britain experienced between
1880 and 1914. In such an atmosphere, the
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modern fantastic became a potent vehicle for
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
social drama—potent because the images of the
fantastic are always drawn from our dreams and
nightmares. The fantastic as a genre is based on
violations of reality, which means it is fundamen-
tally concerned with defining reality; and the
nature of reality is exactly the question at issue in
late-nineteenth-century England. Finally, since at
the end of a fantastic tale the violating element is
characteristically expelled and the mimetic world,
the status quo, is reestablished, the fantastic
proved ideal for symbolically reaffirming the
traditional model of reality.
As Northrop Frye told us long ago, the ro-
mance is traditionally a psychomachia, a struggle
between the forces of good and evil in which evil
is defeated, and the modern romance (as Hope’s
quotation suggests, with its emphasis on clarity
and purity and “great emotions in their glory”)
retains this pattern. The Urban Gothic extends
the tradition in a peculiarly modern way by defin-
ing the enemy as not only evil but unnatural: she/
he/it has no right to exist at all. In the very form
of both the romance and the Urban Gothic, then,
we find repeated the contemporary drive to purify
the inside and expel the foreign pollution: at the
heart of both lies the scapegoat ritual.
And this finally brings us to Dracula, a classic
example of the conservative fantastic: in the end
Dracula is killed, the alien element expelled and
the ordinary world restored. But what exactly is
being expelled? In particular, how would Stoker’s
original audience have read this novel? In the
cultural context of 1897, what threat did Dracula
represent that needed so desperately and at such
cost to be driven out? How was the culture being
instructed to protect itself, and from what?
Another way to put the question is this: who
is the scapegoat in Dracula, and to what end is
that scapegoat sacrificed?
IV: Ritual Victims in Dracula
As René Girard tells us in Violence and the
Sacred, what all sacrificial victims have in com-
mon is that they must recognizably belong to the
community, but must at the same time be some-
how marginal, incapable of fully participating in
the social bond—slaves, criminals, the mad, the
deformed. They are enough of the community to
substitute for it, but between them and the com-
munity “a crucial social link is missing, so they
can be exposed to violence without fear of reprisal.
Their death does not automatically entail an act
133
 of vengeance.” As a result, sacrificing them will
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
end communal violence rather than prolonging
it.2 4
In Dracula, I argue, Lucy Westenra fills the
category and the social function of the surrogate
victim who is sacrificed to restore a lost order. On
the surface, it would seem that Lucy belongs to
the class Victorians would find least sacrificeable
rather than most—a young, beautiful, virtuous
girl—and that, in any case, she is a victim not of
her own community but of a monstrous outsider.
However, we are given numerous indications that
Lucy, for all her sweetness, purity, and beauty, is a
marginal figure. In the first place, her social con-
nections are alarmingly tenuous: her father is
dead, and she has no brothers or other family to
protect her except her mother, who is herself very
weak both psychologically and physically (and in
fact predeceases her daughter). There is no one to
protect Lucy from attack, or to revenge her death
at the hands of her own community.
More crucially, Lucy’s character is “flawed” in
a way that makes her fatally vulnerable to the
vampire. She is a woman whose sexuality is under
very imperfect control. She is loved devotedly by
three different young men, which in itself is not a
fault, but her reaction to this situation reveals a
problem. When she writes to Mina about her
suitors, she can’t help gloating about “THREE
proposals in one day.”2 5 Worse, although she says
she is greatly in love with Arthur, she also feels
very badly about turning down those two splendid
fellows, John Seward and Quincey Morris, and
bursts out, “Why can’t they let a girl marry three
men, or as many as want her, and save all this
trouble?” Immediately afterward she admits that
“this is heresy, and I must not say it” (59); but
even so, we sense that she means what she says:
she really would like to marry all of them.
And, according to the novel’s own semiotics,
she gets her wish. At her funeral Arthur declares
that, because he has given Lucy his blood, he feels
that she is his true wife in the sight of God. Under
the circumstances, his friends naturally refrain
from telling him about the transfusions Lucy had
received from her other two lovers and Dr. Van
Helsing; but later, alone with Seward, Van Helsing
bursts out in uncontrollable laughter thinking of
it. True, as Seward observes, the thought is very
comforting for Arthur. But if Arthur is right in his
belief, Van Helsing points out, what about the
other three donors? “Then this so sweet maid is a
polyandrist” (176).
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Nor is this desire to marry all three of her
suitors the only sign of Lucy’s suspect character.
She is a sleepwalker, a habit traditionally associ-
ated with sexual looseness. She is therefore doubly
vulnerable to Dracula’s approach; in the symbol-
system of the novel, she has signaled her sexual
receptivity. It cannot be an accident that on the
night of the storm, when Dracula’s ship lands,
Lucy indulges again in sleepwalking, leaving the
house dressed only in her nightgown. Consider-
ing the armor-like characteristics of the ordinary
Victorian woman’s daytime clothing—the heavily-
boned corsets, the immense weight of petticoats,
the endless layers of cloth—Lucy in her nightdress
might as well be naked. Worse yet, she goes to the
old cemetery, alone, and to the grave of a suicide
(the only spot of unsanctified ground in the
churchyard). The traditional equation of sexuality
and death could hardly be clearer, nor her invita-
tion of Dracula more explicit.
What makes Lucy’s sexuality threatening to
the community—sufficiently threatening that she
becomes an appropriate surrogate victim—is that
she will not limit herself to one man. While she
does officially choose one of her three suitors, her
choice is insufficiently absolute to control the
competition among the three for her possession.
Stoker downplays the competition by making the
men such good friends and such decent, self-
controlled characters that the threat of disorder is
concealed, but nonetheless that competition
remains as a source of potential violence.
But in order to function as a surrogate victim
who can purge the community of its universal
violence, something further is required: Lucy has
to take on the aspect of the monstrous. In one
light, Lucy functions as the monstrous double of
Mina, the virtuous wife; seen another way, she
functions as her own monstrous double, for there
are two aspects to her personality whose separa-
tion becomes increasingly marked throughout her
transformation into a vampire. She is both the
image of purity, sweetness, and beauty—the
traditional blond angel in the house—and the
creature of sexual appetites, the sleep-walker who
accedes to violent penetration by the vampire.
Her saving grace, according to Van Helsing, is that
she yielded to Dracula only during a trance—that
is, when her conscious personality was not in
command—so her unconscious personality alone
has become vampiric.2 6 During her last hours, she
manifests both sides of her personality in alterna-
tion, sometimes the sweet pure Lucy they all love,
and sometimes the wanton, voluptuous creature
with cruel mouth and hard eyes. When she is
awake and thus “herself,” she clutches the garlic
flowers to her; but in her sleep, she thrusts away
that protection, embracing her monstrous fate.
Since she dies in her sleep, her future as one of
the Un-Dead is inescapable.
As a vampire she is even more beautiful than
in life, but no longer the Lucy they had known.
“The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heart-
less cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wanton-
ness. . . . Lucy’s eyes [have become] unclean and
full of hell-fire, instead of the pure, gentle orbs we
knew”; they blaze with “unholy light” and she is
as “callous as a devil” (211). Again and again,
Seward uses the words “wanton” and “volup-
tuous” to describe Un-Dead Lucy’s smile, her tones
“diabolically sweet”—until she is thwarted, at
which point she becomes overtly monstrous, her
eyes throwing out “sparks of hell-fire,” the brows
“wrinkled as though the folds of the flesh were
the coils of Medusa’s snakes” (212). These same
images are repeated when the four men, Dr. Van
Helsing and Lucy’s three suitors, return the next
day to free Lucy’s soul, to save her by killing her.
“She seemed like a nightmare of Lucy as she lay
there; the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, volup-
tuous mouth—which it made one shudder to
see—the whole carnal and unspirited appearance,
seeming like a devilish mockery of Lucy’s sweet
purity” (214).
But the rite of sacrifice, an act of terrible
violence, restores both Lucy and the community
she had threatened. As Stoker describes it, the final
killing of Lucy is quite clearly both a religious act
and a communal one. The setting is a solitary
tomb lit only by candles. Arthur drives the stake
through Lucy’s heart, as the one with the best
right to so violate her offending body and release
the innocent soul, and he is supported in his work
by the priestly figure of Dr. Van Helsing and by
his two closest friends, Lucy’s other lovers, who
read the prayer for the dead as he strikes home.
The thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous,
bloodcurdling screech came from the opened red
lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in
wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed
together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was
smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur never
faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his un-
trembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and
deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood
from the pierced heart welled and spurted up
around it. His face was set, and high duty seemed
to shine through it; the sight of it gave us courage
so that our voices seemed to ring through the little
vault. . . .
There, in the coffin lay no longer the foul Thing
that we had so dreaded and grown to hate that
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the work of her destruction was yielded as a
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
privilege to the one best entitled to it, but Lucy as
we had seen her in life, with her face of unequalled
sweetness and purity.
(216)2 7
In death Lucy becomes again the angel she
had been in life; she also becomes a bond between
her three rivals, where in life she could only have
been a source of division. Despite their personal
grief, it is for them an ideal solution to the
problem she represented. In sacrificing Lucy, the
four men purge not only their fear of female
sexuality generally, of which she is the monstrous
expression, but also—and more importantly—
their fear of their own sexuality and their capacity
for sexually-prompted violence against each other.
The scene in the tomb exemplifies a key ele-
ment of the sacrificial rite, “the atmosphere of ter-
ror and hallucination that accompanies the
primordial religious experience.”2 8 The violent
hysteria, the decisive act of violence perceived as
religious experience, the succeeding calm and the
atmosphere of holy mystery covering the partici-
pants, all function to fuse the men into a closed
and harmonious community. Although Lucy is
no longer available to any of the men as a bulwark
of his personal identity, her death serves to
reinforce their common bond, their dedication to
each other and to a sense of shared interest, thus
bolstering that other pole of Victorian identity
that Giddens defines as nationalism.
But Lucy is not the only scapegoat in the
novel. Count Dracula himself is also sacrificed for
the common good. Like all sacrificial victims, he
must be both connected and marginal. His links
to the community are literally blood ties—the
blood of Jonathan, Lucy, and Mina. Further, he
resembles his enemies in several important ways:
he is (or was once) human, he is European, he is
extremely intelligent and has a most powerful
will. But his roots are in Eastern Europe—Slavic,
Catholic, peasant, and superstitious where Eng-
land is Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, industrial, and
rationalist. Further, unlike Arthur, the bourgeois
aristocrat, Dracula belongs to a much older, more
feudal sort of aristocracy, one that was was going
out of favor in England. 2 9 In fact, the most
unmistakable sign of his allegiance to that older
pattern may be his sexuality, which partakes of
the ancient droit du seigneur. “Your girls that you
all love are mine already,” he gloats (306), taunt-
ing his opponents; and throughout the novel he
lets his appetites run rampant, voracious and (as
Freud says of the child’s sexuality) polymor-
phously perverse—a most appropriate phrase,
135
 since the narrative repeatedly emphasizes Dracu-
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
la’s “child brain” (335), as opposed to the adult
brains of his enemies. Even Mina has, we are told,
a man’s brain to go with her woman’s heart (234).
But we know that civilized adult men control
their appetites; his failure to do so marks the
crucial distinction between Dracula and his op-
ponents: he is degenerate, “a criminal and of
criminal type” according to the theories of Lom-
broso and Nordau, which means he has an “imper-
fectly formed mind” (342).3 0 Consequently he can
only work on one project at a time, and in emer-
gencies must fall back on habit—which is why,
closely pursued, he can do nothing but flee to his
castle, while his opponents are able to innovate
strategies for his defeat. As criminal and degener-
ate, Dracula is by definition selfish, evil, solitary;
despite his pride in his descent from Attila and in
his people’s valiant struggles against the Turk, as a
vampire he has no true “national” identity, no
“community” to belong to. Even the three vam-
pire women at the castle who could conceivably
function as a family for him, if not a nation, do
not appear to do so. By contrast the “band of
brothers” is selfless, good, and unified into a com-
munity both by their shared sacrifice of Lucy and
their shared devotion to Mina. It is, as Van Hels-
ing tells them, one of their great advantages over
Dracula—the “power of combination,” along with
the “sources of science” and “devotion in a cause”
(238).
However, despite all these differences, the
truth gradually emerges: the Count represents
precisely those dark secret drives that the men
most fear in themselves, which are most destruc-
tive to both poles of identity—the intimate self of
the family man, threatened by unrestrained sexual
appetites, and the communal self of the nation,
undermined by violent internal competition more
than by external invasion. Representing a real
aspect of his enemies, but one that they con-
sciously wish to reject, Dracula has both the neces-
sary connections to the community and the
necessary separation from it to fulfill the scape-
goat’s purgative function.
And like Lucy’s sacrifice, the scene of Dracu-
la’s death contains all the elements of the primor-
dial religious experience. The atmosphere is ter-
rifying and hallucinatory: the two parties
desperately racing the sun, each fighting for life—
Dracula to reach his castle, the band of heroes to
catch the vampire before sunset restores his deadly
power; the Count’s glaring eyes and “horrible
vindictive look” as he lies helpless in his coffin,
and his triumphant expression as he sees the sun
136 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
setting and anticipates his revenge. Like the earlier
sacrifice, this act is communal: two of the young
men together pry off the lid of the coffin with
their knives and strike simultaneously, one slash-
ing the Count’s throat, the other plunging a knife
into his heart—all described in words that inten-
sify the terror of the moment (“sweep,” “flash,”
“shriek,” “shear,” “plunge” [377]).
“It was like a miracle,” cries Mina in relief;
but, as the Count’s body crumbles into dust before
their eyes, she adds, “Even in that moment of final
dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace,
such as I never could have imagined might have
rested there” (377). As at the moment of Lucy’s
death, the sacrificial victim is pictured as at peace,
almost grateful to die for the greater good of the
community. And indeed, there may be a reason
for both Lucy’s and Dracula’s curious passivity at
the moment of death. Mary Douglas remarks in
Purity and Danger that “if a person has no place in
the social system and is therefore a marginal be-
ing, all precaution against danger must come from
others. He cannot help his abnormal situation.”
But to say that he cannot help his situation is to
suggest that he would like to help it, that he does
not want to be a danger to others.
However we read this reaction, the atmo-
sphere of the scene changes dramatically at the
moment of the vampire’s death: Castle Dracula is
suddenly seen standing out against the sunset sky
as we have never seen it before, every stone blaz-
ing in the light. The violence and horror is suc-
ceeded by holy awe and peace, which is capped
when Quincey Morris sees Mina’s forehead now
clear of its shameful scar, and vows with his last
breath that this outcome is worth dying for. It is
the ultimate confirmation that the community
has been saved.
V: What is Lost: What is Saved
But it has been a near thing, and the cost high:
Lucy is lost to them (though her soul was saved),
Quincey is dead, and both Jonathan and Mina
suffer severely before Dracula is defeated. Stoker’s
novel, then, reveals two complementary perspec-
tives on its subject. If Lucy and Dracula demon-
strate the terrifying powers of degeneracy, so
threatening that they must at all costs be expelled
from the community and from life itself,
Jonathan’s and Mina’s experiences exemplify the
difficulties and the rewards of resistance.
According to Victorian sexology, in Dracula’s
castle Jonathan is a man at risk: he is engaged to
Mina, but they are not yet married, so that his
sexual fantasies are inflamed but not yet lawfully
satisfied. Further, he is far from home and isolated
from other living human beings. For the Victori-
ans, solitude greatly increased sexual danger: the
solitude of privacy allowed one to indulge in
masturbation, while the different solitude of
anonymity left one free to indulge in the kinds of
sexual experiences one would, as member of a
family, have been ashamed to admit desiring.3 1
Jonathan is both alone and anonymous. Con-
fronted with the three mysterious and beautiful
women in the moonlit room, he admits, “I felt in
my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would
kiss me with those red lips” (37). The scene that
follows, when he very nearly (and disastrously)
gets his wish, is recorded with incandescent detail:
The girl went on her knees and bent over me,
simply gloating. There was a deliberate volup-
tuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive,
and as she arched her neck she actually licked her
lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight
the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on
the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth.
Lower and lower went her head as the lips went
below the range of my mouth and seemed to
fasten on my throat. . . . I could feel the soft,
shivering touch of the lips on the super-sensitive
skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp
teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed
my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited—waited
with beating heart.
(38)
The erotic charge of the scene is quite remark-
able, as is Jonathan’s fascinated passivity in sur-
rendering to his sexual fantasies, even while
admitting the wickedness of what he desires.
What we see and he does not, at this moment, is
that he is risking not the “little death” of orgasm,
but the real thing. Ironically, Jonathan is saved
from the women not by his own virtue, but by
Count Dracula’s opportune arrival. However, he is
rescued from the evils of feminine sexuality only
to be plunged into the horrors of homosexual pas-
sions. “How dare you cast eyes on him when I
had forbidden it?” Dracula furiously asks his hand-
maids. “This man belongs to me!” The women
answer, with a laugh of “ribald coquetry,” “You
yourself never loved; you never love!” The Count
looks at Jonathan’s face “attentively,” and says in
a soft whisper, “Yes, I too can love” (39). As
Dracula approaches him, Jonathan conveniently
sinks into unconsciousness—into the same state
in which Lucy had yielded to the vampire’s
blandishments. If we had had any doubts about
the equation of violence and sex in the novel, this
scene would dispel them: Dracula’s own language
conflates erotic desire and feeding; the mouth
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both kisses and consumes, the same organ gratify-
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
ing two distinct hungers.
The encounter seems to “cure” Jonathan of
his sexual desires (desires he will later pay for in
the brain fever which sends him to his wedding
an invalid). The text attributes his reaction to the
fact that he now understands who, or rather, what
the fatally beautiful creatures are, and thus sees
them with horror rather than his earlier guilty
fascination. “I am alone in the castle with those
awful women. Faugh! Mina is a woman, and there
is nought in common. They are devils of the Pit!”
(53). His beloved, he insists, though a woman, has
nothing in common with these creatures. He
means, of course, that she does not have their evil
capabilities—but neither, we notice, does she have
their voluptuousness. He never records any erotic
reaction to Mina at all, let alone one of this fever-
ish intensity. In fact, since their marriage begins
with her nursing him through his illness, Mina’s
relationship to her husband always seems more
maternal than wifely. But in late-Victorian theory,
that is as it should be. Marriage is designed to
tame the sexual impulses of husbands; and as for
wives, as Krafft-Ebing remarks, “Woman, if physi-
cally and mentally normal, and properly educated,
has but little sensual desire. If it were otherwise,
marriage and family life would be empty words.”3 2
Victorian sexual theory also helps us to under-
stand the difference between Lucy and Mina, to
explain why Mina takes longer to succumb to the
vampire count, and why she is able to resist more
effectively than her friend. In the first place, while
Lucy satisfies her own unconscious desires in
yielding to Dracula, Mina’s vulnerability results as
much from the failures of others as her own weak-
ness. It is no action of Mina’s that allows the
count access to her bedroom, but Renfield’s
betrayal in giving his master the necessary permis-
sion to enter the house. Further, her husband and
her friends, who should be protecting her, instead
become so obsessed with the fight against
Dracula—a fight from which they deliberately,
and with the best motives, exclude her—that they
leave her too much alone. Solitude is a danger to
her as it was to Jonathan; and while Mina has
presumably had little personal experience of
sexual desire, she has, we must remember, read
Jonathan’s journal in the process of transcribing
it. That means she has read his description of his
adventure with the three female vampires. Her
own husband, then, in another sort of betrayal,
has exposed Mina to his sexual fantasies.
Thus isolated and exposed, Mina’s experience
of marital sex, such as it has been, gives her no
137
 protection against the count’s powers of sexual
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
fascination. When she recognizes him in her
bedroom, she is appalled but paralyzed, unable to
respond or cry out as he bares her throat to refresh
himself. Such paralysis is bad enough, but worse,
to her bewilderment she discovers that, “strangely
enough, I did not want to hinder him. I suppose
it is a part of the horrible curse that such is [sic],
when his touch is on his victim” (287). Dracula
has drained not only her blood, but also her will
to resist. He is, in sexual terms, more seducer than
rapist. For a modern reader, this might lessen the
crime, but for Victorians seduction would have
been infinitely worse. In Victorian theory, it is
sexual desire rather than sexual activity that is the
true source of danger; and as Mina herself makes
clear, she experiences desire under Dracula’s at-
tentions.
This explains why Mina’s forehead is scarred
by the Host, why she herself suffers such (to us
disproportionate) agonies of guilt and self-
revulsion. But once she is no longer isolated, once
she is included in the community of her husband
and their friends, she is able to resist desire, to
exert her will against Dracula to help defeat him.
Thus when he dies, the shameful scar disappears
from her forehead. With help, Mina has con-
quered temptation and the dangers of degeneracy.
It is this effort of will, the effort to conquer her
own sexual imagination, that makes her worthy
of the sacrifices of the others—that makes her
worthy, in the end, of salvation.
What, then, has been achieved? By the end of
the novel Lucy is dead, Quincey Morris is dead,
Mina and Jonathan have both come close to
death—or worse, to the death-in-life of the degen-
eracy which vampirism represents; but they have,
after all, repented and are now stronger than ever.
Dracula has been killed, and England and the
world preserved. The fantastic element has been
expelled, and we return to the safe, ordinary real-
ity of the opening.
In fact, the novel ends quite abruptly, barely a
full page after Dracula’s death. In a brief note we
are told that Mina and Jonathan have a son, that
Seward and Gadalming are happily married
(Lucy’s role filled by other women), and that Van
Helsing is now incorporated into the extended
family. We also learn that the story we have just
been told is, despite its elaborate detail and
fundamentally documentary nature, unsupported
by any original documents—nothing exists but
Mina’s typescript, which is hardly proof of the
remarkable narrative we have just read. Thus we,
the fictive audience, are left to accept or reject
138 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
based purely on the internal evidence, and—since
the danger is safely past—need not react at all if
we choose.3 3
VI: Dracula and the Urban Gothic
But if comparatively little has happened in
the world of the fictive audience, in the world of
the actual audience Stoker’s novel has accom-
plished a good deal. With Dracula’s death, the
“natural” superiority of Englishmen over the
“lesser” races has been once again convincingly
portrayed. More importantly, a number of pro-
foundly disruptive elements have been symboli-
cally expelled from society and the crumbling
boundaries between certain key categories reaf-
firmed: between life and death, civilization and
degeneracy, human and non-human, desire and
loathing—all of which boundaries Dracula had
blurred or violated. The even more fundamental
boundary between self and other, which Dracula’s
ability to override his victims’ willpower so terrify-
ingly challenges, is seen once again triumphant in
Mina’s recovered purity and self-control.
In Sexuality and Its Discontents, Jeffrey Weeks
connects the development of sociology with the
simultaneous development of sexology. As these
two new disciplines struggled to define the “laws”
of behavior in their respective realms, he argues, a
powerful interdependency sprang up between
them. At the same time as sexuality was being
constituted as a key area of social relations, where
it helped to define personal identity, sex as what
Freud would soon call a “drive” came to be
perceived as “a force outside, and set against
society,” as “part of the eternal battle of individual
and society.”3 4 Thus sex is paradoxically seen as
both social and anti-social; it helps to define
individual identity while at the same time threat-
ening the collective. No wonder, then, that sex is
such an explosive issue for the late Victorians, for
whom these two poles of identity had become so
crucial and so fragile. (It may also help to explain
why sex is still an explosive issue for us, their
grandchildren, a hundred years later—apparently
so different from them, but living in a society
which, like theirs, balances precariously on the
same two poles.)
The sex/society formulation, Weeks continues,
“evokes and replays all the other great distinc-
tions which attempt to explain the boundaries of
animality and humanity”—like nature/culture,
freedom/regulation—the “two rival absolutes.”3 5
As we have already seen, these are some of the
central categories at play in Dracula. The outcome
of the novel suggests Stoker was arguing that the
solution to the late Victorian crisis lay in privileg-
ing society over sex, that in order to preserve the
nation it was necessary to sacrifice some degree of
personal freedom. That would explain the novel’s
insistent pattern of the many against the one, the
community against the scapegoat; it might also
help explain the novel’s popularity at a time of
imperialist fervor concealing deep anxieties about
the future of the empire.
And it is the generic conventions of the
fantastic that have made this resolution possible,
by creating an imaginative way simultaneously to
affirm and deny the reality of chosen cultural ele-
ments. The fantastic allows writers and readers to
take those aspects of their own culture that are
most emotionally charged, most disruptive, and
identify them as monstrous—that is, as violations
not just of human law but of the very nature of
reality—so that society can be symbolically purged
of its pollution.
However, Dracula is not merely fantastic; it is
an example of the Urban Gothic, that modern ver-
sion of the fantastic marked by its dependence on
empiricism and the discourse of science. The dif-
ference can be seen most clearly by comparing
Dracula to its immediate predecessor and reputed
inspiration, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871). Le
Fanu’s story of a female (and lesbian) vampire is,
in fact, quite powerful and subtle, but the tale is
set in a remote country house in eighteenth-
century Transylvania, whereas Stoker goes out of
his way repeatedly to emphasize the modernity of
his setting. For example (more or less at random):
Van Helsing observes, “A year ago which of us
would have received [i.e., believed] such a pos-
sibility, in the midst of our scientific, sceptical,
matter-of-fact nineteenth century?” (266); or
again, in “this enlightened age, when men believe
not even what they see, the doubting of wise men
would be [Dracula’s] greatest strength” (321). In
addition to such references, which could easily be
multiplied, the band of heroes relies readily and
matter-of-factly on modern technology like blood
transfusions, typewriters, telegraphs, and Dr.
Seward’s “phonograph diary” (219).
But these are mere decorations on the surface
of the text. More important, the approach of the
characters to their tasks in each tale shows the
same contrast. Carmilla is tracked to her lair and
killed by reference to the past—her own history,
and the traditional religious knowledge of the
community, while Dracula is identified and de-
feated by painstaking investigation of his present
actions. Dr. Van Helsing’s knowledge of vampire
lore eventually becomes essential, but it is of no
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use until Dracula can be conclusively identified as
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
a vampire. Thus the most crucial event in Dracula
occurs when Mina types up all the documents of
the case (Jonathan’s diary, Seward’s records, her
own correspondence with Lucy, newspaper clip-
pings, even telegrams) and assembles them in
chronological order—the order in which we read
them. Only with chronology does narrative
emerge; only then does a collection of data turn
into a hypothesis. And, as in science, hypothesis
is a necessary prelude to action. In other words,
while Carmilla resembles a traditional ghost story,
Dracula is constructed like that other form which
comes into its own in the 1890s, the detective
story.3 6
The implications of this difference are crucial.
The ghost story, like the eighteenth-century
Gothic to which it is closely related, usually finds
its methods in the shared knowledge of the com-
munity, whether this means traditional religious
approaches to the supernatural or the ancient
remedies of the folk. In either case, the necessary
knowledge is both implicit and communal. In the
modern world, and therefore in the Urban Gothic,
there is no implicit knowledge: everything must
be tested and proved. A method for dealing with
the supernatural must be created, drawing on the
most powerful and prestigious tools at their
disposal: the methods of science, shaped by a
secular world view—paradoxically, the very world
view that was initially overthrown by the fantastic
intrusion.3 7
How are we to read this paradox, so central to
the Urban Gothic? Is the primary effect to invali-
date the supernatural, seeing it as an alien intruder
in the modern world? Is it, on the contrary, to af-
firm the reality of the supernatural in the very act
of expelling it? Or is it to demonstrate the efficacy
of the scientific method in addressing any kind of
crisis? I would argue instead that the central ap-
peal of fantastic literature is that, like the violent
scapegoat rituals it mimics, it allows its writers
and readers simultaneously to acknowledge and
deny those aspects of themselves and their world
that they find most troubling—to see them both
as part of the community and as available for
sacrifice.
Douglas observes that one of the sources of
ritual pollution is “the interplay of form and
formlessness. Pollution dangers strike when form
has been attacked.”3 8 Dracula is a perfect example
of the “formless” attacking form (he is, after all, a
shape-changer); but at the same time, our cultural
experience of the novel suggests that, in creating
139
 his vampire count, Stoker has given to formless-
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
ness itself a form of continuing potency.
Notes
Some of the research for this essay was done
during an NEH Summer Seminar for College
Teachers on “British Literature and Culture 1840-
1900” given at Brown University in 1989. I am
grateful to the NEH, to the seminar’s directors,
Profs. Roger Henkle (English) and L. Perry Curtis
(History), and to my colleagues in the seminar for
their advice and support.
1. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of
Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger,
1966), 4.
2. Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings,
Myths, and Modern Sexualities (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1985), 178.
3. The most common positions are that Dracula is either
about male sexuality threatening passive female in-
nocence, or about the need to control rampant female
sexuality. But it has also been argued that the novel is
about covert homoerotic desire displaced onto
women, and even that all the sex in the book is sado-
masochistic. For a convenient collection of the best
recent criticism of Dracula, see Margaret L. Carter, The
Vampire and the Critics (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press,
1988). For some non-psychological readings of the
novel, see Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The
Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1982), and Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy:
Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking
Penguin, 1990).
4. For example: Rosa Campbell Praed, Affinities: A
Romance of Today (1885); Rider Haggard, She (1887);
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Parasite (1894); Richard
Marsh, The Beetle (1897); Somerset Maugham, The Ma-
gician (1907); Algernon Blackwood, “The Camp of the
Dog” in John Silence, Physician Extraordinaire (1908);
Sax Rohmer, The Brood of the Witch-Queen (1918); Jessie
Kerruish, The Undying Monster (1922).
5. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach
to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cor-
nell Univ. Press, 1975); Andrzej Zgorzelski, “Is Science
Fiction a Genre of Fantastic Literature?” Science-Fiction
Studies 6 (1979): 289 (emphasis in original). Todorov
defines the fantastic in relation to two other genres,
the “uncanny” and the “marvellous.” In a realistic
world—that is, a textual world modeled on the world
we inhabit—an event occurs that appears to violate
the laws of this world. The character who experiences
this seemingly abnormal event (and, more impor-
tantly, the reader of the text) must choose between
two explanations: either the event is a product of illu-
sion, or imagination, or deliberate deception—in
which case the familiar laws remain intact (and the
text is an example of the uncanny); or else the event
has genuinely occurred, is a part of reality, in which
case the laws must be modified to allow for the exist-
ence of, say, ghosts or the Devil. In that case, the text
belongs to the category of the marvellous. If, on the
other hand, it is impossible for character or reader to
decide whether or not the event is genuine, the text
is, by Todorov’s definition, fantastic. “The fantastic is
140 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
that hesitation experienced by a person who knows
only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently
supernatural event” (25; emphasis added). The problem
with Todorov’s definition is that most texts do actu-
ally commit themselves about the event; thus very
few texts that we normally think of as fantastic end
up qualifying as such by Todorov’s definition. For a
more extended discussion of Zgorzelski’s definition
and its implications, see Kathleen L. Spencer, “Natural-
izing the Fantastic: Narrative Technique in the Novels
of Charles Williams,” Extrapolation 28 (1987): 62-74.
6. Henry James, “Miss Braddon,” The Nation, 9 Nov.
1865, 593-94; reprinted in Notes and Reviews
(Cambridge: Dunster House, 1921), 110. Jane Austen
makes a similar point in Northanger Abbey, contrasting
the imaginary horrors in the Gothic novels her
heroine is so fond of reading with the more mundane
but very real cruelties she finds practiced in her own
modern, ordinary England.
7. For a fuller discussion of this material, see George Ken-
neth Graham, English Criticism of the Novel 1865-1900
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 51-109. For a more tradi-
tional (that is, judgmental) treatment of the romance-
realism debate see Lionel Stevenson, The English Novel:
A Panorama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960) and
John Halperin, “The Theory of the Novel: A Critical
Introduction” in The Theory of the Novel: New Essays,
ed. John Halperin (London, New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1974), 3-22. For the patriotic argument for
rejecting naturalism, see William C. Frierson, “The
English Controversy Over Realism in Fiction 1885-
1895,” PMLA 43 (1928): 533-50.
8. Cited in Sir Charles Mallett, Anthony Hope and His
Books (London: Hutchinson, 1935), 114.
9. See, for example: R. L. Stevenson, “A Gossip on
Romance,” Longman’s Magazine 1 (November 1882):
69-79; Stevenson, “A Humble Remonstrance,” Long-
man’s Magazine 5 (December 1884): 139-47; H. Rider
Haggard, “About Fiction,” Contemporary Review 51
(February 1887): 172-80; Andrew Lang, “Realism and
Romance,” Contemporary Review 52 (1887): 683-93;
George Saintsbury, “The Present State of the Novel.I,”
Fornightly Review, n.s., 48 (September 1887): 410-17;
“The Present State of the Novel.II,” Fortnightly Review,
n.s., 49 (January 1888): 112-23; and Hall Caine, “The
New Watchwords of Fiction,” Contemporary Review 57
(April 1890): 479-88.
10. For example, Marie Corelli, George Griffith, Guy
Boothby, William Le Queux, Sax Rohmer.
11. For a fuller discussion of the late Victorian fascination
with the far reaches of empire, see Patrick Brantlinger,
Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1839-
1914 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988). Though the
futuristic plot settings of some of these novels may
make them sound very much like science fiction, they
do not as a rule qualify as such by any reasonably
rigorous criteria, not even the novels set on other
planets. Their generic affiliations are rather with the
imaginary voyage and the utopia, which are quite dif-
ferent traditions. For a survey of these texts and an
alternate view of their genre, see Darko Suvin, Victorian
Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourses of Knowledge
and Power (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983). For a brief
description of the occult revival, see Kathleen L.
Spencer, “The Urban Gothic In British Fantastic Fic-
tion 1880-1930” (Ph.D. diss., University of California,
Los Angeles, 1987), 34-98. For more detail, see John J.
 Cerullo, The Secularization of the Soul: Psychical Research
in Modern Britain (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study
of Human Issues, 1982); Frank Miller Turner, Between
Science and Religion (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,
1974); Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research
(New York: Schocken Books, 1968); and Ellic Howe,
Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of
a Magical Order 1887-1923 (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1972).
12. Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical
Materialism, Vol. I: Power, Property, and the State
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), 194.
13. George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution:
Essays in the History of Anthropology (London: Collier-
Macmillan, 1968), 121.
14. For a discussion of the East End and degeneracy, see
Gareth Steadman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the
Relationships Between Classes in Victorian Society
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 149.
15. For discussions of this point, see (for example) Mary
Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of
Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1988), and Elaine Showalter, The Female
Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture 1830-
1980, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin, 1987). While the
female role as constituted in theory was quite rigid, in
practice both working-class and aristocratic women
experienced some relaxation of its rigors, especially in
economic and (therefore?) in sexual activities: aristo-
crats, because of the traditional privileges of their class
and the sense that their lives are not bound by the
same rules as everyone else; and working-class women,
because they were needed in the paid work force by
both their families and their employers.
16. Jenni Calder, The Victorian and Edwardian Home
(London: Batsford, 1977), 132.
17. 3 Hansard, CXLV, 800. Quoted by Lee Holcombe,
“Victorian Wives and Property: Reform of the Married
Women’s Property Law, 1857-1882” in A Widening
Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women, ed. Martha
Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1977), 12.
Holcombe’s article as a whole (3-28) is an illuminating
and scholarly discussion of the struggle of Victorian
wives to reform property laws.
18. For detailed discussions of the Cleveland Street
brothel, see H. Montgomery Hyde, The Cleveland Street
Scandal (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghagan,
1976), and Colin Simpson et al., The Cleveland Street
Affair (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976).
19. For a discussion of the way the Wilde trial helped turn
“homosexual” from an adjective describing certain
kinds of behaviors into a noun indicating a kind of
person and the significance of this change for the
subsequent history of homosexuality, see Jeffrey
Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexual-
ity Since 1800 (London: Longman, 1981). To give one
small example of the trial’s effect on the general
cultural atmosphere (beyond the terror it struck in the
hearts of homosexuals): in the late 1880s and early
’90s, there had been an explosion of novels treating
sympathetically such previously untouchable subjects
as female sexuality, free love, and fallen women.
Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), for
example, was received not without controversy,
certainly, but with a good bit of support for Hardy’s
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sympathetic treatment of Tess. But Jude the Obscure,
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
published in 1896 after Wilde’s public disgrace, was
greeted with such a firestorm of disapproval that
Hardy swore off writing fiction forever (for this argu-
ment, see Eric Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalenes: The
Origins and Development of Victorian Sexual Attitudes,
[London: Heinemann, 1976]). Dracula, published in
1897, reached the public at the height of this anti-
sexual hysteria; it should not surprise us to find reflec-
tions of this mood in such a popular text—meaning
both one that was addressed to a less sophisticated
audience and one that was very widely read at the
time.
20. In this same decade, the “unnaturalness” of homo-
sexuality was also being challenged by Havelock Ellis,
along with several prominent apologists like Edward
Carpenter and John Addington Symonds who in the
1890s published books arguing that homosexuals were
not “failed” or “unnatural” men or women but were
instead members of a third or “intermediate” sex (Ellis,
who was married to a lesbian, was the first to write
sympathetically about lesbianism). In the early edi-
tions of Psychopathia Sexualis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing
argued that all homosexual behavior was degenerate,
but after the turn of the century he softens this judg-
ment, concluding that some homosexuals indeed
seemed to be “born” not “made,”—in his words,
“congenital.” See, for example, the lengthy discussion
of “Homosexual Feeling as an Abnormal Congenital
Manifestation” (356-90). He explores the available
explanations of “sexual inversion” from the traditional
“vice” to the more “scientific” cause, excessive and/or
early masturbation, and finally concludes that in some
cases an explanation based on physiological factors—
something in the structure of the brain, something
therefore not subject to the will of the “invert”—rather
than the old medico-moral explanation of “willful
indulgence in depravity,” is the only logical conclu-
sion. He does not altogether abandon degeneracy as
an explanation even in these cases, arguing that “In
fact, in all cases of sexual inversion, a taint of a
hereditary character may be established”; but he admits
that “What causes produce this factor of taint and its
activity is a question which cannot be well answered
by science in its present stage” (370; emphasis added).
By allowing for the possibility of inherited tendencies
to degeneracy, Krafft-Ebing simultaneously takes back
and lets stand his uneasy conclusion that some
homosexuals do not seem to be morally responsible
for their sexual orientation. (Richard von Krafft-Ebing,
Psychopathia Sexualis: A Medico-Forensic Study, Latin
trans. Harry E. Wedeck [New York: G. P. Putnam’s
Sons, 1965]. This edition, with an introduction by
Ernest Van Den Haag, is described as “The first
unexpurgated edition, with the Latin texts translated
into English for the first time” by Dr. Wedeck, but
does not specify who translated the German parts of
the text. I suspect this edition is based on the transla-
tion of the 12th German edition by F. J. Rebman
published in 1934 by the Physicians and Surgeons
Book Company, but cannot verify my suspicion at
this time.)
21. Ludmilla Jordanova, “Natural Facts: An Historical
Perspective on Science and Reality” in Nature, Culture,
and Gender, ed. Carol MacCormack and Marilyn
Strathern (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980),
44.
141
 22. The following discussion is drawn primarily from
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
Mary Douglas’s Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmol-
ogy (New York: Random House, 1972).
23. For other examples of modern “witchcraft” societies,
consider Nazi Germany and McCarthy-era America.
Indeed, the current struggle between social liberals
and religious fundamentalists over issues like abortion
and pornography manifests many of the same dynam-
ics.
24. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick
Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977),
13. Interestingly enough, despite the fact that in many
cultures women are not afforded full status, they are
seldom chosen as surrogate victims. Girard speculates
that because a married woman retains ties with her
parents’ social group as well as her husband’s, to
sacrifice her would be to run the risk of one group or
the other interpreting the sacrifice as “an act of
murder committing it to a reciprocal act of revenge,”
and so not ending the communal violence, but
increasing it (13).
25. Bram Stoker, Dracula (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
1983), 59. All further citations will be to this text.
Showalter in Sexual Anarchy (note 3), which I did not
see until after this essay was submitted, makes the
same essential point about Lucy.
26. Simon Williams, analyzing Charles Nodier’s play, Vam-
pire (1820), part of the response to Polidori’s The
Vampyre (1819), finds a very similar pattern. “Sexual
desire is exhibited as supernatural possession that
causes the heroine to wander deliriously in caverns
and shady places in search of her demon lover. But
once she returns to consciousness, she is totally
unaware of the dark forces that have briefly taken over
her body” (“Theatre and Degeneration: Subversion
and Sexuality,” in Degeneration: The Dark Side of
Progress, ed. J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gil-
man [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985], 246).
The terms “conscious” and “unconscious” may seem
anachronistic, but the English had casually accepted
the idea of an unconscious mind by the latter part of
the nineteenth century; the idea is expounded in a
number of different places in the last two decades. It
was not the concept of the unconscious that made
Freud so shocking, but his notion of what kinds of
material the unconscious contained. As Nina Auer-
bach (note 3) points out, Stoker might well have
known of Freud by the time he wrote Dracula, since F.
W. Myers had presented a lecture to the Society for
Psychical Research on Freud and Breuer’s work with
hysterics in 1893; and in the novel itself Dr. Seward
mentions Charcot, Freud’s teacher (22-23).
27. Most critics discuss this scene as symbolic of sexual
intercourse and orgasm, even going so far in one case
as to liken it to the “painful deflowering of a virgin,
which Lucy still is” (C. F. Bentley, “The Monster in the
Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,”
Literature and Psychology 22 [1972]: 31). While I
recognize the elements of the scene that make it pos-
sible to draw the parallel, what most strikes me in the
description (and, I suspect, most women readers) is
the violence—which is, because of the religious
overtones of the scene, weirdly impersonal. Indeed, it
is rather alarming to me to think that this scene can
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be read so easily, and apparently without qualms or
qualifiers, as an image of sexual intercourse. What
does such a reading suggest about our culture’s confu-
sion of sex and violence?
28. Girard (note 24), 161.
29. This popular disapproval of the aristocracy became
particularly apparent after the publication of Sir Fran-
cis Galton’s Hereditary Genius in 1869, which attacked
both inherited wealth and the titled nobility.
30. For a detailed discussion of Dracula as Lombroso’s
“criminal man,” see Ernest Fontana, “Lombroso’s
Criminal Man and Stoker’s Dracula,” in Carter (note
3), 159-66. For a more thorough examination of the
place of degeneracy theory in late Victorian thinking,
see Chamberlin and Gilman (note 26).
31. Douglas (note 1), 97. Richard Sennett and Michael
Foucault, “Sexuality and Solitude,” in Humanities in
Review 1, ed. Sennett et al. (New York: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1982), 4.
32. Krafft-Ebing (note 20), 42. Not all Victorian doctors
agreed with this, but it does seem to have been a
majority opinion, expressed categorically, publically,
and often. Poovey in Uneven Developments (note 15)
offers the clearest explanation of the thinking behind
what now seems a ludicrous position. Victorian doc-
tors knew so little about female physiology, she
observes, that the only model they had for sexual
response was the familiar male tumescence/ejaculation
sequence. Failing to find this sequence in women,
they concluded that women normally did not experi-
ence orgasm. Of course, this does not explain Krafft-
Ebing’s value judgment about the incompatibility of
female sexual desire with marriage and family life;
that, after all, is a matter of culture, not science.
Nonetheless, Poovey’s observation does give us a
welcome alternative to the reductive explanation of
“sexism” as to how otherwise intelligent men could
arrive at such absurd conclusions.
33. This detail is characteristic of fantastic texts, that
finally we are left with just the testament itself, and
no “external” proofs.
34. Weeks (note 2), 81.
35. Weeks, 97.
36. Rather than pointing to Carmilla, I think that Stoker’s
most important literary source is Polidori’s The
Vampyre (1819), or more likely (since Stoker was a
theatrical man) one of its many dramatic redactions.
Polidori’s text creates a modern fantastic effect, deriv-
ing its potency from the device of bringing his
nobleman/vampire into the city of London—seventy-
five years before Stoker does the same thing.
37. One way to distinguish between the traditional ghost
story and the Urban Gothic is that the ghost story,
although genuinely fantastic, is much closer in tone
to the original Gothic. In addition, ghosts generally
have quite a limited repertory of objects, motives, and
behaviors: to get revenge, to make restitution, to fin-
ish an important task left incomplete at death, to warn
the living (generally family members or descendants),
 or to reenact endlessly the crucial event of their lives

SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC

(as in Yeats’ “Purgatory”). In the Urban Gothic, the
supernatural powers have a much broader scope for
action.

38. Douglas (note 1), 104.

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI (1830-1894)
Poet Rossetti was the niece of John Polidori,
author of The Vampyre (1819), a tale that is
believed to have influenced Rossetti’s well-
known Goblin Market and Other Poems
(1862). Rossetti had plans to write a biogra-
phy of Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe, whom
she greatly admired, but was forced to
abandon the project due to a lack of avail-
able information. “Goblin Market” relates the
adventures of two sisters, Laura and Lizzie.
The two are taunted by goblin merchants to
buy luscious and tantalizing fruits. Though
Lizzie is able to resist their coaxing, Laura
succumbs. The narrator details Laura’s in-
creasing apathy and Lizzie’s efforts to save
her sister. The poem has been variously
interpreted as a moral fable for children, an
erotic lesbian fantasy, an experiment in meter
and rhyme, and a feminist reinterpretation of
Christian mythology. Two other well-known
poems in the same volume, “After Death”
and “Remember,” meditations on death and
the afterlife, have also been interpreted by
some feminists as subversive texts despite
their seemingly complaisant surfaces. Much
contemporary criticism has focused on “Gob-
lin Market,” especially its eroticism and the
exploration of the relationship between the
two sisters in the story. Critics have noted the
supernatural and macabre elements and pres-
ence of such creatures as goblins, serpents,
and lizards in Rossetti’s poetry, and have as-
serted that the imagery and language of
economics and commerce in “Goblin Market”
comments on the role of women and their
literature within the Victorian economy.

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Edmund Burke, 1749-1797.

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SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
DAVID PUNTER (ESSAY DATE
1996)
SOURCE: Punter, David. “Gothic and Decadence:
Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Bram
Stoker, Arthur Machen.” In The Literature of Terror: A
History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day,
Vol. 2, pp. 1-26. Essex, England: Longman, 1996.
In the following essay, Punter illustrates how works of
Gothic literature by Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde,
H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, and Arthur Machen exemplify
Decadence, and asserts that each of these works question
the extent to which a civilization can change, or “de-
cline,” and still retain its national and cultural identity.
What is remarkable about the ‘decadent
Gothic’ of the 1890s is that out of a cross-genre
with only doubtfully auspicious antecedents
should have proceeded, in the space of eleven
years, four of the most potent of modern literary
myths, those articulated in Robert Louis Steven-
son’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s
Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), H. G. Wells’s Island
of Dr Moreau (1896) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula
(1897). Here again we have a burst of symbolic
energy as powerful as that of the original Gothic:
alongside Frankenstein’s monster, the Wandering
Jew and the Byronic vampire we can set the Dop-
pelganger, the mask of innocence, the maker of
human beings and the new, improved vampire of
Dracula. As we look at these books, we shall see
certain interconnections—at any rate in terms of
theme, even where authorial stances may be quite
different—but one thing can be said at the outset
which underlines the meaning of decadence in
connection with these texts, and that is that they
are all concerned in one way or another with the
problem of degeneration, and thus of the essence
of the human. They each pose, from very differ-
ent angles, the same question, which can readily
be seen as a question appropriate to an age of
imperial decline: how much, they ask, can one
lose—individually, socially, nationally—and still
remain a ‘man’? One could put the question much
more brutally: to what extent can one be ‘infected’
and still remain British?
The text in which these questions are least on
the surface is also the earliest of them, Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde, which needs no introduction as the
best-known Doppelganger story of them all. It fol-
lows on from an easily identifiable Gothic tradi-
tion, including James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justi-
fied Sinner (1824) and Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘William
Wilson’ (1839), both of which influenced Steven-
son, yet it has captured the popular imagination
more strongly than any of the others, feasibly
partly because of its ‘contemporary’, metropolitan
setting and detective-story trappings, but feasibly
158 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
also because of a stranger phenomenon, its obvi-
ous connection with actual late Victorian fears
about similarly untraceable murders, centred on
the archetype of Jack the Ripper. It is interesting
in passing to note that, while Jekyll and Hyde itself
is not in any overt way concerned with the Gothic
problem of the aristocracy, popular imagination
nevertheless has had its way by tying the text in
with this body of semi-legendary history which
unmistakably is aristocracy-oriented: the one
thing nobody ever seems to have thought about
Jack the Ripper was that, when unmasked, he
might be someone working class or unknown.
Jekyll and Hyde is, from one aspect, the record
of a split personality, and the nature of the split is
in its general outline one now familiar to a post-
Freudian age, although one which Stevenson
outlines with particular sensitivity: ‘the worst of
my faults’, says Jekyll, describing his youth,
was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such
as has made the happiness of many, but such as I
found it hard to reconcile with my imperious
desire to carry my head high, and wear a more
than commonly grave countenance before the
public. Hence it came about that I concealed my
pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflec-
tion, and began to look round me, and take stock
of my progress and position in the world, I stood
already committed to a profound duplicity of life.
Many a man would have even blazoned such ir-
regularities as I was guilty of; but from the high
views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid
them with an almost morbid sense of shame. It
was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspira-
tions, than any particular degradation in my
faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a
deeper trench than in the majority of men,
severed in me those provinces of good and ill
which divide and compound man’s dual nature.1
This is a very rich passage. One must, of
course, be careful not to interpret it as the narra-
tive voice, since it is part of Jekyll’s own state-
ment, and Jekyll is certainly remarkably pompous
and possibly a self-deceiver. However, Jekyll’s view
seems to be that the split in his being has derived
much less from the presence within his psyche of
an uncontrollable, passionate self than from the
force with which that self has been repressed ac-
cording to the dictates of social convention. The
original tendency of Jekyll’s alter ego, so he claims,
was by no means towards the vicious, but rather
towards the ‘loose’, a neutral desire for certain
kinds of personal freedom which has been re-
pressed by the ‘imperious’ need not only to
conform to, but also to stand as a public example
of, strict virtue. Jekyll’s problem, surely, is largely
put as a social one, and one can interpret it in two
connected ways: literally, as the problem of a
member of a ‘respectable’, professional upper
middle class, who is supposed to ‘body forth’
social virtue in his person and to eschew any be-
haviour, however harmless, which might tend to
degrade that stance, and also metaphorically as
the problem of a member of a ‘master-race’. Jeky-
ll’s difficulties are those of the benevolent imperi-
alist: they are not at all to do with the political
problem of sanctioning brute force, but with the
maintenance of dignity under adverse circum-
stances. It is strongly suggested that Hyde’s behav-
iour is an urban version of ‘going native’. The
particular difficulties encountered by English
imperialism in its decline were conditioned by the
nature of the supremacy which had been asserted:
not a simple racial supremacy, but one constantly
seen as founded on moral superiority. If an empire
based on a morality declines, what are the implica-
tions for the particular morality concerned? It is
precisely Jekyll’s ‘high views’ which produce
morbidity in his relations with his own desires.
Thus, of course, the name of his alter ego: it is the
degree to which the doctor takes seriously his
public responsibilities which determines the
‘hidden-ness’ of his desire for pleasure. Since the
public man must be seen to be blameless, he must
‘hide’ his private nature, even to the extent of
denying it be any part of himself. And although
this is in one sense a problem locatable within a
particular historical development, we can also
sense in it echoes of older Gothic problems: it is,
Jekyll claims, his ‘aspirations’ which render him
particularly liable to psychic fragmentation, just
as the younger Wringhim’s aspirations towards
total purity caused his breakdown.
But Jekyll’s aspirations are of two kinds: they
are moral and social aspirations, but they are also
scientific aspirations, as in the case of Franken-
stein. The great strength of Jekyll and Hyde lies in
its attempt to connect the two more clearly even
than Mary Shelley had done, and to show that
Jekyll’s familiar desire to ‘make another man’
stems from problems in the organisation of his
own personality. Like Frankenstein (1818) and The
Island of Dr Moreau, Jekyll and Hyde relies upon
and even exploits public anxieties about scientific
progress and about the direction of this progress if
undertaken in the absence of moral guidance, but
this aspect seems to be largely metaphorical. The
scientific emphasis is very perfunctory; Jekyll
himself slides over it, suggesting that details would
only bore. What he does not slide over is his series
of attempts to comprehend the precise nature of
the relation between himself and Hyde, which
Stevenson carefully avoids describing merely as a
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relation of opposites. Hyde is not Jekyll’s opposite,
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
but something within him: the fact that he is
smaller than the doctor, a ‘dwarf’, demonstrates
that he is only a part whereas Jekyll is a complex
whole, and this is underlined in one of Steven-
son’s more startling insights: ‘Jekyll had more
than a father’s interest; Hyde had more than a
son’s indifference’ (Works, IV, 75). This, of course,
was precisely the aspect of relationship which
Mary Shelley suppressed in connection with
Frankenstein and his monster, probably because
such ‘unnatural’ creativity seemed too close to a
parody of the divine. Stevenson admits to Hyde’s
status as a parodic ‘son of God’, but only at the
expense of certain other authorial repressions,
principally sexual. Not only does the relation
between Jekyll and Hyde exclude women, the
whole tale moves—like Dorian Gray and Dr
Moreau—in a world substantially composed of
leisured bachelors, and even when Stevenson
ostensibly tries to portray Hyde’s tendency to-
wards sexual excess and deviance, which could
hardly not be at the root of Jekyll’s fastidious
disgust, he can get almost nothing on paper.
Most of Hyde’s nastiness is withheld: Steven-
son deals with it merely in generalities, and
whether this is because of Jekyll’s revulsion or of a
poverty in Stevenson’s ability to imagine the sexu-
ally criminal remains obscure: ‘into the details of
the infamy at which I thus connived (for even
now I can scarce grant that I committed it)’, Jekyll
says, ‘I have no design of entering; I mean but to
point out the warnings and the successive steps
with which my chastisement approached’ (Works,
IV, 72). He does then proceed, however, to allude
to one incident, which we have already been told
about, when Hyde has been seen to meet a child
at a street corner, and to have ‘trampled calmly
over the child’s body and left her screaming on
the ground’. ‘It sounds nothing to hear’, says En-
field, who is telling Utterson the story, ‘but it was
hellish to see’ (Works, IV, 6). He is right: it does
sound nothing to hear, and it is not even very
easy to imagine. It lingers in the memory, but only
because of its strangeness, which may have been
Stevenson’s purpose. It is, of course, symbolic: it is
designed to show the inhumanity of Hyde where
a more purposive crime would not. Hyde is
described here as a kind of Juggernaut, and it is
his ‘thing-ness’ which finally appals Jekyll: ‘this
was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit
seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amor-
phous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was
dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices
of life’ (Works, IV, 83).
159
 Again, there is a problem here, a further
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
reticulation of the Doppelganger structure, about
the relation between Stevenson and Jekyll. It is
reasonable that Jekyll should not want, or be able,
to acknowledge Hyde as in any way human, and
indeed that onlookers like Enfield should hold
whatever opinion they please, but Stevenson
himself appears to stop short of certain realisa-
tions. If it is indeed repression which has produced
the Hyde personality, further denial of Hyde’s
claims can only result in an ascending scale of
violence. And this, of course, is exactly what hap-
pens, but Stevenson shows no clear signs of know-
ing why. Jekyll’s later attempts at repression
compound Hyde’s fury: ‘my devil had been long
caged, he came out roaring’ (Works, IV, 76). There
is an underlying pessimism in the book which
results from Stevenson’s difficulty in seeing any
alternative structure for the psyche: once the beast
is loose, it can resolve itself only in death. Jekyll
rather feebly suggests at one point that, if he had
been in a different frame of mind when he first
took the drug, the second self thus released might
have been very different: the prospect of an
alternative Hyde, constructed of sweetness and
light, is attractive but perhaps somewhat unrealis-
tic.
Julia Briggs’s work suggests that the issue of
the relations between the human and the bestial
which occurs in Stevenson, Wells, Stoker and later
in such writers as Forster and Lawrence springs
largely from the attempt to deal with Darwinian
revelations about the nature of evolution.2 Thus
Jekyll’s transformation is a change of state of the
most extreme kind: when he takes the drug, ‘the
most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the
bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit
that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or
death’ (Works, IV, 68). This is the reversion of the
species, the ever-present threat that, if evolution is
a ladder, it may be possible to start moving down
it. Not surprisingly, this threat cannot be named
in the text: Jekyll says that he has brought on
himself ‘a punishment and a danger that I cannot
name’ (Works, IV, 37), and Hyde is constantly
spoken of as possessing unexpressed deformities.
As in much Gothic, there is a dialectical interplay
here between the unspeakable and the methods
of verification evidenced in the complexity of nar-
rative structure, but post-Darwinian fears have
given a new twist to the concept of degeneration.
Early in the story, Utterson suggests that some-
thing unspoken from the past may be coming to
claim Jekyll:
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He was wild when he was young; a long while
ago, to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no
statute of limitations. Ah, it must be that; the
ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some con-
cealed disgrace; punishment coming, pede claudo,
years after memory has forgotten and self-love
condoned the fault.
(Works, IV, 19)
But in the context of the tale, Utterson is,
despite the encouraging pun in his name, an old-
fashioned moralist, and his attempt to impose a
conventional ‘sins of the fathers’ explanation fails.
If Hyde represents a ‘ghost’ and a ‘cancer’, it is a
general one: the absence of just limitations goes
farther than Utterson cares to think. The human
being may be the product of a primal miscegena-
tion, a fundamentally unstable blending, which
scientific or psychological accident may be able to
part.
And this problem of the double self is, of
course, also central to The Picture of Dorian Gray,
the record, as Wilde puts it in Radcliffean terms,
of the ‘terrible pleasure’ of ‘a double life’. The
gilded Dorian
used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those
who conceive the Ego in man as a thing simple,
permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To him,
man was a being with myriad lives and myriad
sensations, a complex multiform creature that
bore within itself strange legacies of thought and
passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with
the monstrous maladies of the dead.3
A casual wish on Dorian’s part severs the links,
and he becomes free to live a life of vice and self-
indulgence without losing his looks or his youth,
while his portrait records his depravity in terms of
physical decay.
The problem of distinguishing narrator from
character is very great in Wilde, particularly
because of his aphoristic habits: it is not easy to
know what to make of the multiple resonances of
Dorian’s opinion that
It was the passions about whose origin we de-
ceived ourselves that tyrannised most strongly
over us. Our weakest motives were those of whose
nature we were conscious. It often happened that
when we thought we were experimenting on oth-
ers we were really experimenting on ourselves.
(Dorian, p. 59)
Here, as elsewhere, Dorian Gray incorporates
the problems of the 1890s in a jewelled nutshell.
We have a burgeoning awareness of the existence
of the unconscious, of that fountain from which
spring desires and needs a thousand times stronger
than those to which we can admit; a sense of the
dire situations which result from the liberation of
those passions; and the complicated metaphor of
experimentation, which runs through all four of
these texts. In Dorian Gray, it is perfectly clear that
one cannot restrict the concept of experimenta-
tion to science: Dr Jekyll and Dr Moreau experi-
ment on malleable flesh, Sir Henry Wotton and
Dorian—in different ways, but there are Doppel-
ganger complexities here too—artificially mould
the mind.
Artifice is perhaps the key term: how much, if
at all, do scientific and psychological discoveries
help us to mould ourselves, and are the possible
shapes into which they can project human life
necessarily at all desirable. It is characteristic of
Wilde’s late romanticism that the means of moul-
ding should be not science but the art of painting,
but the tenor of the metaphor is the same: is there
anything we can do with this knowledge, on the
one hand of our myriad-mindedness and on the
other of our proximity to the beasts, which will
be other than harmful?
The answer of the 1890s was unanimous: No.
This is more surprising in Wilde than in the other
writers, because it places limits of a severe kind on
his apparent decadence: Dorian Gray encourages
no faith in artifice, either artifice on others or the
self-artifice which is supposed to be the crux of
decadence. Wilde’s fear of decay is even more
vividly expressed than those of Stevenson or
Wells: Dorian throws a pall over his picture,
to hide something that had a corruption of its
own, worse than the corruption of death itself—
something that would breed horrors and yet
would never die. What the worm was to the
corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on
the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat
away its grace. They would defile it, and make it
shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It
would be always alive.
(Dorian, p. 119)
Wilde has no doubt that Dorian’s repressed
desires are as horrible as Jekyll’s, not only morally
horrible but also inelegant; the much-vaunted
divorce between moral and aesthetic categories is
simply not there in Dorian Gray, which is structur-
ally a simple morality tale, more so even than Jekyll
and Hyde, and certainly more so than Dracula. Like
Stevenson, Wilde is locked in the realisation that
repression gets you both ways: Sir Henry advocates
liberation, claiming that if we repress our desires
‘we degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by
the memory of the passions of which we were too
much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that
we had not the courage to yield to’ (Dorian, p. 23).
Dorian does his slightly insipid best to avoid this
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fate, but ends up in exactly the same state. Sir
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
Henry’s anthropological speculations have a lot to
be said for them:
The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival
in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are
punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we
strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons
us. . . . The only way to get rid of a temptation is
to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick
with longing for the things it has forbidden to
itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have
made monstrous and unlawful.
(Dorian, p. 18)
So far so good: ‘sooner’, perhaps, ‘murder an
infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires’.4
But Dorian cannot escape doom that way, and
possibly Wilde’s reasoning is similar to Steven-
son’s: both Dorian and Hyde ‘go native’, they
both renounce the repressive morality of the
dominant culture, but all they achieve is an as-
similation to the apparently even worse ‘morality’
of the lower classes. Wilde’s version of the London
environment is again Stevenson’s, and again lifted
out of Dickens but shorn of even the severely
truncated sympathy we find in Oliver Twist (1838):
Dorian remembers
wandering through dimly-lit streets, past gaunt
black-shadowed archways and evil-looking houses.
Women with hoarse voices and harsh laughter
had called after him. Drunkards had reeled by
cursing, and chattering to themselves like mon-
strous apes. He had seen grotesque children
huddled upon doorsteps, and heard shrieks and
oaths from gloomy courts.
(Dorian, p. 88)
There are two possible but contradictory
conclusions one might draw from this nexus of
urban visions: on the one hand, that Dickens,
Stevenson, Wilde were themselves too deeply
imbued with middle-class morality to grant any
validity to alternative kinds of life, on the other
that they had seen too clearly the depredations
which that morality had wrought upon its under-
dogs to grant any credence to the survival of
lower-class integrity. It has been said that deca-
dence is fundamentally a middle-class attitude,
and this is borne out by Dorian Gray. There is, says
Basil Hallward, the artist, ‘a fatality about all
physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of
fatality that seems to dog through history the
faltering steps of kings’ (Dorian, p. 3). But, elegant
though this thought may be, it does not support
the conclusions of the story: Schedoni, in Ann
Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), could indeed claim
kudos from such a fatality, as could any Byronic
hero, but Dorian is not of the same stature at all.
His crimes and his feelings are alike petty and
161
 dilettante, and his doom evokes neither compas-
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
sion nor the more elevated sympathies of tragedy.
Again, Wilde tries to fuse psychological specula-
tion with characteristics taken from the older
Gothic, but does not convince us of the grandeur
of necessity:
There are moments, psychologists tell us, when
the passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin,
so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the
body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be
instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at
such moments lose the freedom of their will. They
move to their terrible end as automatons move.
(Dorian, p. 190)
This reminds us less of the fate of the tragic
hero than of the indulgent self-assessment of
Count Fosco in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in
White (1860), but Fosco has a saving irony absent
from Dorian Gray: he is also considerably more ef-
fective, in almost any terms, than any of Wilde’s
characters.
As the core Gothic theme of Jekyll and Hyde is
the Doppelganger, the core theme of Dorian Gray is
the quest for immortality, accompanied with ap-
propriate speculations on the relations between
art and life and between beauty and vice. A
significant twist in Wilde’s dealings with these
themes, however, is that his protagonist is hardly
a hero but rather a hero-worshipper, whose own
hero, Sir Henry, is really rather unconnected with
the doom which afflicts Dorian. The vitality, the
fire, the primitive barbaric energy of the Gothic
hero are absent. Wilde himself talks about the
continuing power of Gothic images to affect the
psyche:
There are few of us who have not sometimes
wakened before dawn, either after one of those
dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured
of death, or one of those nights of horror and mis-
shapen joy, when through the chambers of the
brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality
itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in
all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its
enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy,
especially the art of those whose minds have been
troubled with the malady of reverie.
(Dorian, p. 131)
But his attempts to reinvoke this condition
are tired, perhaps with the natural fatigue of ac-
complished paradox, perhaps because of the lack
of bite in the social fears on which he plays.
Dorian chooses to ape an aristocratic life-style, but
he is not an aristocrat, at least not in any of the
more worrying senses. It is, finally, unclear how
much seriousness Wilde invests in this matter of
style. When Lytton Strachey says of Horace Wal-
162
pole that ‘he liked Gothic architecture, not because
he thought it beautiful, but because he found it
queer’,5 the sensibility sounds very much like Wil-
de’s, and the embarrassment one feels at Castle of
Otranto (1764) is similar to that in Dorian Gray.
Who is being made fun of in a passage like this:
From the corner of the divan of Persian saddlebags
on which he was lying, smoking, as was his
custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wot-
ton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet
and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum,
whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to
bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs;
and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds
in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains
that were stretched in front of the huge window,
producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect,
and making him think of those pallid jade-faced
painters of Tokio who, through the medium of an
art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey
the sense of swiftness and motion.
(Dorian, p. 1)
Most probably the target is the reader: in any
case, the primary effect of Dorian Gray is surely,
unlike that of Jekyll and Hyde, cathartic. Where
Jekyll and Hyde raises issues and does not resolve
them, thus remaining to haunt the mind, Dorian
Gray wraps up issues in a way that purges them of
real importance. Dorian is not at root a figure
whose fate affects the rest of us.
In terms of this schema, Wells’s The Island of
Dr Moreau is definitely more closely related to Jekyll
and Hyde, and of course even more so to Franken-
stein, another text which owes a large part of its
continuing popularity precisely to its failure to
establish a coherent pattern out of its intellectual
elements. Since it is perhaps rather less well
known than Jekyll and Hyde or Dorian Gray, it may
be as well to give a brief account of the plot. It is
the first-person narrative of Edward Prendick,
introduced by his nephew, who confirms the
minimal points that his uncle has been ship-
wrecked and rescued, with an interval of almost a
year between, but states that his uncle’s version of
the intervening time has never been accepted.
Prendick’s own account, thus introduced, tells
how he was rescued from a ship’s boat by a strange
craft equipped with a drunken captain, a collec-
tion of animals, and a man named Montgomery,
an outcast ex-medical student who appears to be
in charge. Due to an altercation with the captain,
Prendick is put off with the others at their island
destination, and there encounters Moreau himself.
He is surprised by many features of the island,
which, he is assured, is a kind of biological
research station, but particularly by its other
inhabitants, some of whom appear to be men,
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Poster advertising the 1977 film adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau.
although of no race he has ever encountered, oth-
ers to be somehow between men and animals. He
is also disturbed by screams of pain heard during
the nights, and eventually forms the conclusion
that Moreau, whose name he has now remem-
bered as that of an exiled vivisectionist, is reduc-
ing men to an animal state by surgery, for dire
purposes of his own. An explanation follows, in
which Prendick is humiliated to find that Moreau
is doing exactly the reverse and trying to form a
man from the beasts, with varying success. The
mixed crop of failures which inevitably accures
lives in a village of hovels on the island, restrained
from violence by laws which Moreau has im-
planted in them, but these start to become inef-
fective and the beast-men return to the beast, kill-
ing Moreau and Montgomery on the way.
Prendick manages to survive amid the wreckage
of the island society, and is eventually rescued.
On the surface, this is another fable about the
dangers of scientific progress unrestrained by
moral compunction: we are clearly meant to be
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SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
appalled both by the pain caused to the animals
and by the condition to which many of them are
reduced.
Had Moreau had any intelligible object I could
have sympathised at least a little with him. I am
not so squeamish about pain as that. I could have
forgiven him a little even had his motive been
hate. But he was so irresponsible, so utterly care-
less.6
But Prendick’s attitude is by no means consis-
tent, which renders many of the scientific points
ambiguous. Writing, we must remember, after his
return to civilisation, he comments on the mo-
ment when he remembers where he had previ-
ously heard Moreau’s name, and adds that when
his experiments became known
the doctor was simply howled out of the country.
It may be he deserved to be, but I still [sic] think
the tepid support of his fellow investigators, and
his desertion by the great body of scientific work-
ers, was a shameful thing.
(Moreau, p. 38)
163
 The principal problem, however, concerns the
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
status of pain in the story. At one level, Moreau
appears to be practising an extreme form of
surgery with variable results, but at another he
seems to be performing a less clearly scientific
kind of operation, in which the important feature
of the ‘humanising’ process is the actual experi-
ence of pain for its own sake. ‘Each time I dip a
living creature into a bath of burning pain’, says
Moreau, ‘I say, This time I will burn out all the
animal, this time I will make a rational creature of
my own’ (Moreau, p. 84). Human rationality, for
Moreau, seems to be largely dependent on tran-
scending pain: ‘the store men and women set on
pleasure and pain . . . is the mark of the beast
upon them, the mark of the beast from which
they came. Pain! Pain and pleasure—they are for
us, only so long as we wriggle in the dust . . .’
(Moreau, p. 81). Yet it is by the threat of further
pain that Moreau keeps control over the beast-
men: presumably this is supposed to be a mark of
their inadequacy, yet Moreau implants fear of pain
in them as a substitute for a moral law.
The purely scientific point is thus confused
with a set of moral arguments about the differ-
ence between man and beast, as it is in Franken-
stein; and similarly Prendick’s objections to
Moreau’s procedures are considerably vitiated by
his admiration for Moreau himself, grudging as it
is. In the discussion where Moreau reveals his true
aims, Prendick says that he found himself ‘hot
with shame at our mutual positions’ (Moreau,
p. 76). Like previous hero/villains, Moreau exer-
cises an enormous power over his fellow men.
When Prendick first ventures on a journey to
discover the island’s secrets, Moreau catches him:
‘he lifted me as though I was a little child’ (Moreau,
p. 56), says Prendick, and when Moreau dies,
Montgomery collapses completely and returns to
drink: ‘he had been strangely under the influence
of Moreau’s personality. I do not think it had ever
occurred to him that Moreau could die’ (Moreau,
p. 115). Moreau is described, oddly, as having an
exceptional, perhaps god-like, serenity, evidenced
precisely in the absence of motive by which Pren-
dick is fascinated: ‘you cannot imagine’, says
Moreau to Prendick, rightly, ‘the strange colour-
less delight of these intellectual desires’ (Moreau,
p. 81).
Thus far, the ambiguity of the text is a com-
mon Gothic ambiguity, in which the seeker after
forbidden knowledge is condemned while being
simultaneously surrounded by a halo of admira-
tion. With very pleasing irony Wells portrays
Montgomery after Moreau’s death venting his
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spite and fear on the puritanical Prendick: ‘You
logic-chopping, chalky-faced saint of an atheist,
drink’, he shouts, ‘you’re the beast. He takes his
liquor like a Christian’ (Moreau, p. 116). Certainly
we are left feeling that there is a genuine vision at
the root of Moreau’s behaviour, even if through
rejection it has turned obsessional, and it is also
very difficult to answer the questions which the
text raises about the happiness of the beast-men
in the way Wells appears to want them answered:
how does one determine whether a half-man is
more or less happy or pained than the beast from
which he came?
But Moreau is not only a Faustian seeker: he is
also a more contemporary symbol. At one point
Moreau, Montgomery and Prendick go forth to
reassert their control over the beast-men, who
come out of the jungle towards them:
As soon as they had approached within a distance
of perhaps thirty yards they halted, and bowing
on knees and elbows, began flinging the white
dust upon their heads. Imagine the scene if you
can. We three blue-clad men, with our misshapen
black-faced attendant, standing in a wide expanse
of sunlit yellow dust under the blazing blue sky,
and surrounded by this circle of crouching and
gesticulating monstrosities, some almost human,
save in their subtle expression and gestures, some
like cripples, some so strangely distorted as to
resemble nothing but the denizens of our wildest
dreams.
(Moreau, p. 98)
This is the Gothic vision of empire on which
the book is founded. The ‘black-faced’ attendant
is, of course, literally black-faced because he is
himself a beast-man, but the play on black and
white is nonetheless sustained throughout.
Moreau himself is both white-haired and white-
faced; Prendick, as we have seen, is ‘chalky’; it is
‘white dust’ with which the dark-skinned beast-
men cover themselves as a sign of submission.
Moreau, whose island is, significantly, marked on
maps as ‘Noble’s Isle’, is the white ‘aristocrat’ who
presides over a colonial society in which the fears
of reversion which we have already seen in Jekyll
and Hyde and in Dorian Gray are ever-present, both
in the beast-men and in the ‘white trash’ Mont-
gomery. His attempts to prevent this reversion are
unsuccessful but ultimately heroic, for he dies,
surely, in the attempt to purify the race.
None of this, of course, is to think of Wells as
a racist: far from it. The point is that The Island of
Dr Moreau represents a confluence of, first, old
Gothic themes of aspiration and dominance;
second, the fears about human status and dignity
generated by Darwin; and third, as a natural
metaphorical accompaniment, images of white
imperialism in its decline. But just as in Dorian
Gray, the strands do not hold together: like Sir
Henry Wotton, Moreau has considerable insight
into the operations of repressive ideology, but his
advocacy of alternatives is condemned by the text.
‘Very much’, says Moreau, ‘of what we call moral
education is . . . an artificial modification and
perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into
courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality
into religious emotion’ (Moreau, p. 79). But Wells
fails to keep this suggestion, with its Freudian and
Darwinian connotations, firmly in mind, and
describes Moreau’s process of humanisation in
two rather different ways. The first beast-man
Moreau makes is said to have begun his new life
‘with a clean sheet, mentally; had no memories
left in his mind of what he had been’ (Moreau,
p. 82). Yet Moreau is also said not to be experi-
menting with freedom from conditioning, but
rather to be forming beast-men who will be obedi-
ent to his own moral and social ideas:
they had certain Fixed Ideas implanted by Moreau
in their minds, which absolutely bounded their
imaginations. They were really hypnotised, had
been told certain things were impossible, and
certain things were not to be done, and these
prohibitions were woven into the texture of their
minds beyond any possibility of disobedience or
dispute.
(Moreau, pp. 87-8)
As Frankensteinian creator, Moreau wants to
form a free being, free from the natural constraints
of pain and pleasure; as imperialist, he wants to
form a slave, and the best kind of slave, of course,
does not know that he or she is one.
The arguments are partly difficult to sort out
because Moreau is not himself particularly con-
cerned with the little society of rejects which he is
producing; as far as he is concerned they are
merely signs of failure. It is Montgomery who
takes an interest in them. The society which thus
accidentally emerges is one which repeats many
features of ordinary human societies: an interest-
ing and resonant one is that ‘the females were less
numerous than the males, and liable to much fur-
tive persecution in spite of the monogamy which
the Law enjoined’ (Moreau, p. 89). More impor-
tant, their ‘human-ness’ does not stick: they retain
‘the unmistakable mark of the beast’; ‘the stub-
born beast flesh grows, day by day, back again’
(Moreau, pp. 46, 83). At a very basic level, the mes-
sage is a simple and conservative one: do not
interfere in the natural order. What is left doubt-
ful, however, is whether such interference is
wrong on moral grounds, or merely impossible to
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achieve fully, and also to what extent the experi-
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
ence of pain is an essential part of Moreau’s
process. Answers to the two hypothetical ques-
tions which one would like to ask—what Prendick
or Wells would think if Moreau were successful,
and what the situation would be given the benefits
of anaesthesia—cannot be extrapolated from the
text.
If this makes for a somewhat confused work,
it also makes for a rich one. The story has strong
elements in it of Defoe and more particularly
Swift. The language used by and to the beast-men
is oddly biblical, which reinforces the image of a
perverted island paradise, and the ending, with
Prendick returning to civilisation only to find that
he keeps regarding his fellow men as themselves
bearing the mark of the beast, is identical to the
ending of Gulliver’s Travels. The Island of Dr Moreau
brings the reader face to face with a problem
which had accompanied Gothic visions since the
time of William Godwin and Mary Shelley, but
which had been given an extra twist by Darwin:
where do we locate the blame for terrors which
are the effect of social conditioning? It could
simply be said that Moreau’s ends do not justify
his means, but Prendick at least seems to feel
rather doubtful about this, and there are strong
hints that the kinds of pressure under which the
beast-men live are not really all that different from
ordinary social pressures. Moreau’s island is partly
a microcosm, partly a polemical distortion: its ter-
rifying effect derives partly from Wells’s handling
of conventional adventure-story techniques, but
more from the sense of vertigo with which we ap-
prehend the relation between the beast-men and
ourselves.
Fundamentally, all three of these works are
concerned with the problem of the liberation of
repressed desires. The discoveries of Darwin
combined with psychological developments to
produce, first, a revelation that the personality
contains depths which do not appear on the
surface of everyday intercourse, and second, a fear
that the Other thus postulated may relate to the
bestial level which evidences human continuity
with the animal world. In the light of this double
supposition, experiments of the kind made delib-
erately by Jekyll and Moreau and accidentally by
Dorian Gray become fraught with more terror
than a similar experiment implied in Frankenstein,
because experimentation is coming to be seen as
tinkering with the self. Thus the ‘double self’
which had been hypothesised by Hogg and others
received a basis in scientific speculation, and the
whole question of man’s relations to the beasts
165
 came to be examined—and mythologised—anew.
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
But a myth supposes two moments in time: the
moment of origin, creation, differentiation which
needs explanation, and the contemporary mo-
ment in terms of which communicable myth
must be cast. Thus Stevenson, Wilde and Wells
found themselves necessarily assimilating the
intellectual problems of their age to the actual
social structures within and about which they
wrote. In the case of Stevenson, the problem of
the beast within becomes cast in terms of the dif-
ficulties of professional, public, respectable life:
the doctor, of course, is the symbol of the union
between scientific exploration and respectability.
In the case of Wilde, the whole issue is cast archai-
cally in the old Gothic categories of aristocratic
life-style and its relation to primal cruelty. In The
Island of Dr Moreau, as befits the work of a writer
more politically concerned than Stevenson or
Wilde, the question of reversion is linked to a
series of agonising speculations on the inner
significance of empire, with its attendant insis-
tence on the preservation of both class and racial
integrity.
The whole complex of problems received by
far its most significant treatment, however, in
Bram Stoker’s greatly underrated Dracula, which is
not only a well-written and formally inventive
sensation novel but also one of the most impor-
tant expressions of the social and psychological
dilemmas of the late nineteenth century. For obvi-
ous reasons, the intellectual content of Dracula
has not been taken seriously; yet it deserves to be,
less because of any distinction in Stoker’s own at-
titudes and perceptions than as a powerful record
of social pressures and anxieties. It has always
been a difficult book to place, largely because if
one accepts the conventional view of the expiry
of Gothic before the middle of the nineteenth
century Dracula becomes a kind of sport; but in
fact it belongs securely with Jekyll and Hyde, Dorian
Gray and The Island of Dr Moreau, while transcend-
ing all of them in its development of a symbolic
structure in which to carry and deal with contra-
dictions. The use of the term ‘myth’ to describe a
work of written literature is open to abuse, but if
there is any modern work which fits the term
adequately, it is Dracula, if on the grounds of
reception alone.
At the heart of Dracula (if the pun may be
forgiven) is blood. The vampire thrives on the
blood of others, and the whole effort of Van Hels-
ing and his colleagues is to fight this one-way flow
of blood, by transfusion and any other possible
means. ‘The vampire live on’, says Van Helsing in
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his broken English, ‘and cannot die by mere pass-
ing of the time; he can flourish when that he can
fatten on the blood of the living. Even more, we
have seen amongst us that he can even grow
younger; that his vital faculties grow strenuous,
and seem as though they refresh themselves when
his special pabulum is plenty. But he cannot flour-
ish without this diet; he eat not as others.’7 Here,
as elsewhere in Dracula, is a religious inversion,
brought out the more strongly by the biblical tone
of Van Helsing’s discourse: the blood is the life.
Stoker is well aware of the rich possibilities for
ambiguity and bitter humour in this central motif.
When Van Helsing recounts the ship’s captain’s
response to his vampire passenger, there is a
vertiginous interplay of conventional swear-words
and deeper ironic significance: Dracula
give much talk to captain as to how and where
his box is to be place; but the captain like it not
and swear at him in many tongues, and tell him
that if he like he can come and see where it shall
be. But he say ‘no’; that he come not yet, for that
he have much to do. Whereupon the captain tell
him that he had better be quick [sic]—with
blood—for that his ship will leave the place—of
blood—before the turn of the tide—with blood.
(Dracula, pp. 322-3)
But the blood which gives Dracula his life is,
as usual in vampire legendry, not merely literal.
Dracula the individual needs blood, but Dracula is
not merely an individual; he is, as he tells Harker,
a dynasty, a ‘house’, the proud descendant and
bearer of a long aristocratic tradition. He recites to
Harker a catalogue of the gallant feats of his ances-
tors, ending thus:
when, after the battle of Mohács, we threw off the
Hungarian yoke, we of the Dracula blood were
amongst their leaders, for our spirit would not
brook that we were not free. Ah, young sir, the
Szekelys—and the Dracula as their heart’s blood,
their brains, and their swords—can boast a record
that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and
the Romanoffs can never reach. The warlike days
are over. Blood is too precious a thing in these
days of dishonourable peace; and the glories of
the great races are as a tale that is told.
(Dracula, pp. 38-9)
The long historical progression of the bour-
geoisie’s attempts to understand the significance
of noble ‘blood’ reaches a point of apotheosis in
Dracula, for Dracula is the final aristocrat; he has
rarefied his needs, and the needs of his house and
line, to the point where he has no longer any need
of any exchange-system or life-support except
blood. All other material connections with the
‘dishonourable’ bourgeois world have been sev-
ered: the aristocrat has paid the tragic price of
social supersession, yet his doom perforce involves
others. Cheated of his right of actual dominion,
his power is exerted in mere survival: his relation-
ship to the world is the culmination of tyranny,
yet it is justified in that it is not his own survival
that he seeks but the survival of the house, and
thus, of course, the survival of the dead. Stoker
brings out the ambiguity in the legends very well
when Dracula tells Harker his history:
In his speaking of things and people, and espe-
cially of battles, he spoke as if he had been present
at them all. This he afterwards explained by say-
ing that to a ‘boyar’ the pride of his house and
name is his own pride, that their glory is his glory,
that their fate is his fate. Whenever he spoke of
his house he always said, ‘we’, and spoke almost
in the plural, like a king speaking.
(Dracula, p. 37)
It is impossible to tell whether what is at stake
is Dracula’s personal longevity or his total identifi-
cation with his line.
And if one looks again at the old legends
themselves, what emerges as very obvious is that
they were partly invented to explain the problem
of the connection between aristocracy and im-
mortality. To the peasantry of central Europe, it
may well have seemed that the feudal lord was
immortal: the actual inhabitant of the castle upon
the mountain might change, but that might not
even be known. What would have been known
was that there was always a lord; that by some
possibly miraculous means life and title persisted,
at the expense, of course, of peasant blood, in the
literal sense of blood shed in battle and in cruelty.
Dracula can no longer survive on blood of this
kind; he needs alternative sources of nourishment
to suit his socially attenuated existence. The
dominion of the sword is replaced by the more
naked yet more subtle dominion of the tooth; as
the nobleman’s real powers disappear, he becomes
invested with semi-supernatural abilities, exercised
by night rather than in the broad day of legend-
ary feudal conflict.
But thus far Dracula is merely another variant
on the vampire legendry which we have already
seen in John Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ (1819),
another modification of pre-bourgeois fears of
tyrannical violence imaged in terms of the primal
fear of blood-sucking. What makes Dracula distinc-
tive is Stoker’s location of this set of symbols
within late Victorian society. Over against the
‘house’ which Dracula represents Stoker places the
bourgeois family, seen around the moment of
maximum bonding, on the eve of marriage.
Dracula is a dramatised conflict of social forces
and attitudes: opposite the strength of the vampire
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we are shown the strength of bourgeois marital
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
relations and sentimental love, as in Mina’s letter
to Lucy after her marriage to Harker.
Well, my dear, what could I say? I could only tell
him that I was the happiest woman in all the wide
world, and that I had nothing to give him except
myself, my life, and my trust, and that with these
went my love and duty for all the days of my life.
And, my dear, when he kissed me, and drew me
to him with his poor weak hands, it was like a
very solemn pledge between us . . .
Lucy dear, do you know why I tell you all this? It
is not only because it is all sweet to me, but
because you have been, and are, very dear to me.
It was my privilege to be your friend and guide
when you came from the schoolroom to prepare
for the world of life. I want you to see now, and
with the eyes of a very happy wife, whither duty
has led me; so that in your own married life you
too may be all happy as I am.
(Dracula, p. 115)
The list of structural oppositions is long.
Dracula stands for lineage, the principal group of
characters for family; Dracula for the wildness of
night, they for the security of day; Dracula for
unintelligible and bitter passion, they for the
sweet and reasonable emotions; Dracula for the
physical and erotic, they for repressed and ethe-
realised love. And at the kernel of this structure is
embedded the further opposition between Dracula
and his arch-enemy Van Helsing, who is imported
to put a stiffening of science and reason into the
‘team’:
He is seemingly arbitrary man, but this because he
knows what he is talking about better than any
one else. He is a philosopher and a metaphysi-
cian, and one of the most advanced scientists of
his day; and he has, I believe, an absolutely open
mind. This, with an iron nerve, a temper of the
ice-brook, an indomitable resolution, self-
command, and toleration exalted from virtues to
blessings, and the kindliest and truest heart that
beats—these form his equipment for the noble
work that he is doing for mankind—work both in
theory and practice, for his views are as wide as
his all-embracing sympathy.
(Dracula, p. 121)
Van Helsing is a superman, and therefore
combines in himself a number of contradictory
qualities, but the emphasis in his character is on
order, neatness, reserve, in Freudian terms on
those aspects of the ego which serve the purpose
of quashing the tendency towards chaos and
libidinal fulfilment which would otherwise disrupt
social and psychological organisation. Dracula’s is
the passion which never dies, the endless desire of
the unconscious for gratification, which has to be
repressed—particularly on the eve of marriage, of
167
 course—in order to maintain stable ideology. He
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
is ‘undead’ because desire never dies; gratification
merely moves desire on to further objects. There
is, for Dracula as for the unconscious, no final
satisfaction, for his very nature is desire.
Towards these structures the text manifests a
socially revealing ambivalence. One of the aspects
of decadence was the supremacy of the moment
of attraction in the continual dialectic of attrac-
tion and repulsion which characterised the rela-
tion between the dominant middle class and its
‘un-dead’ predecessor. From the bourgeois point
of view, Dracula is, like Schedoni, Frankenstein
and Dorian Gray, a manic individualist; from his
own point of view, which is not absent in the text,
he is the bearer of the promise of true union,
union which transcends death. From the bour-
geois point of view, Dracula stands for sexual
perversion and sadism; but we also know that
what his victims experience at the moment of
consummation is joy, unhealthy perhaps but of a
power unknown in conventional relationships.
Dracula exists and exerts power through right im-
memorial; Van Helsing and his associates defeat
him in the appropriate fashion, through hard
work and diligent application, the weapons of a
class which derives its existence from labour. Lest
some of this seem fanciful, we can cite some of
Stoker’s dream symbolism:
I didn’t quite dream; but it all seemed to be real. I
only wanted to be here in this spot—I don’t know
why, for I was afraid of something—I don’t know
what. I remember, though I suppose I was asleep,
passing through the streets and over the bridge. A
fish leaped as I went by, and I leaned over to look
at it, and I heard a lot of dogs howling—the whole
town seemed as if it must be full of dogs all howl-
ing at once—as I went up the steps. Then I had a
vague memory of something long and dark with
red eyes, just as we saw in the sunset, and some-
thing very sweet and very bitter all around me at
once; and then I seemed sinking into deep green
water, and there was a singing in my ears, as I have
heard there is to drowning men; and then every-
thing seemed passing away from me; my soul
seemed to go out from my body and float about
the air. I seem to remember that once the West
Lighthouse was right under me, and then there
was a sort of agonising feeling, as if I were in an
earthquake, and I came back and found you shak-
ing my body. I saw you do it before I felt you.
(Dracula, p. 108)
This reads almost like a case study in emo-
tional ambivalence. Beginning by establishing
that there is a difficulty in assessing Dracula’s real-
ity vis-à-vis the world’s, Lucy then goes on to
demonstrate that Dracula represents the ‘un-
168
known’, that which is not available to conscious-
ness, and to illustrate this with a succession of im-
ages of the unconscious: the leaping fish, emerging
from psychic depths like Coleridge’s fountain, the
howling dogs, symbol of yearning and wordless
need, and the ‘something long and dark with red
eyes’, which is Dracula but also prefigures the
phallic connotations of the lighthouse. She sinks
into the primal fluid of the unconscious, assailed
by sensations which she can only describe as
contradictory, ‘sweet’ and ‘bitter’, and her soul
and body separate as she abandons responsibility
for her situation. Dracula, the unconscious, takes
the sins of the world on his shoulders because his
existence, and the acquiescence of his victims,
demonstrate the limitations of the moral will.
Lucy, of course, can only experience the consum-
mation of the lighthouse and the earthquake
while in this trance-like state, and then translates
her experience back into ‘safe’ terms, ‘you shaking
my body’. She sees Mina before she feels her
because she is sinking into the liberation which
her conventional self denies: every time Dracula
strikes it becomes harder for his victim to return
to normality.
The myth in Dracula, more clearly even than
in other versions of the vampire legends, is an
inversion of Christianity, and particularly of
Pauline Christianity, in that Dracula promises—
and gives—the real resurrection of the body, but
disunited from soul. Stoker’s attitude to this is of
course shocked, but then Stoker appears from the
text to be almost traumatised by a specific sexual
fear, a fear of the so-called ‘New Woman’ and the
reversal of sexual roles which her emergence
implies. Mina is afraid that ‘some of the “New
Women” writers will some day start an idea that
men and women should be allowed to see each
other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I
suppose the New Woman won’t condescend in
future to accept; she will do the proposing herself.
And a nice job she will make of it, too! There’s
some consolation in that’ (Dracula, p. 100).
Behind the smugness lies disturbance; it is ironic,
but with an irony familiar in the Gothic from Rad-
cliffe on, that precisely the authorial conservatism
of Dracula makes its rendition of the threats to
comfortable Victorian sexual and familial life
pointed and perceptive. A crucial scene occurs
when Arthur visits Lucy, who is failing fast. When
he first sees her, she ‘looked her best, with all the
soft lines matching the angelic beauty of her eyes’.
But as she sinks into sleep, this model of feminin-
ity and passivity begins to change:
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 Her breathing grew stertorous, the mouth opened,
and the pale gums, drawn back, made the teeth
look longer and sharper than ever. In a sort of
sleep-waking, vague, unconscious way she opened
her eyes, which were now dull and hard at once,
and said in a soft, voluptuous voice, such as I had
never heard from her lips:
‘Arthur! Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come!
Kiss me!’
(Dracula pp. 167-8)
Upon which Van Helsing, whose role is to
protect against this kind of overt passion and
reversal of roles, comes between them. And this
scene is prefigured by the ‘key-note’ scene where
Harker is menaced in Dracula’s castle by the three
female vampires:
All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like
pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips.
There was something about them that made me
uneasy, some longing and at the same time some
deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning
desire that they would kiss me with those red lips.
It is not good to note this down; lest some day it
should meet Mina’s eyes and cause her pain; but
it is the truth.
(Dracula, p. 46)
It is hard to summarise Dracula, for it is such a
wide-ranging book, but in general it is fair to say
that its power derives from its dealings with taboo.
Where taboo sets up certain bounding lines and
divisions which enable society to function without
disruption, Dracula blurs those lines. He blurs the
line between man and beast, thus echoing the
fears of degeneracy in Stevenson, Wilde and Wells;
he blurs the line between man and God by daring
to partake of immortal life and by practising a cor-
rupt but superhuman form of love; and he blurs
the line between man and woman by demonstrat-
ing the existence of female passion. In his figure
are delineated so many primitive fears: he is a
shape-changer, a merger of species, the harbinger
of ethnic collapse. His ‘disciple’ Renfield regards
him as a god; and his satanic aspects are all the
more interesting if we remember that his real-life
ancestor gained his reputation for cruelty because
of his assiduity in defending the Christian faith
against the marauding Turk.
Where Moreau constitutes an ambiguous and
accidental threat to empire from without, destroy-
ing genetic and racial barriers which are essential
to smooth government, Dracula threatens it from
within, attacking the whole concept of morality
by preying upon and liberating aspects of the
personality which are not under moral control,
and colonising on his own behalf by infection in
a savage and quite unintentional parody of impe-
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rialism. The ironic refrain of Wilde’s Ballad of Read-
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
ing Gaol (1898), the perception that you always
kill the thing you love, that only love allows the
proximity which can lead to real damage, is given
a savage new twist by Stoker, in whose text one
can see the traces of the illimitable desire which
turns love into possession and demands incorpo-
ration of the love-object. Dracula is the logical
culmination of the Victorian and Gothic hero, the
hero in whom power and attraction are bent to
the service of Thanatos, and for whom the price
of immortality is the death of the soul.
Before turning from the problematic of deca-
dence to other forms of Gothic which continued
to exist in late nineteenth-century and early
twentieth-century fiction, there is one other writer
whose work, beginning in the 1890s and continu-
ing through to the 1920s, merits some comment:
Arthur Machen. Machen’s books have never
received much attention, a fact about which he
grew increasingly bitter, yet they are the best in
the rather sickly field of genre work which took
up Darwinian anxieties as a basis for terror. In
1894, Machen published a novella called The Great
God Pan, in which yet another doctor performs on
a young girl an operation which is designed to
open her ‘inner eye’ to the continuing diabolical
existence of the Great God; the operation drives
her mad, after which her child, born of her union
with Pan, proceeds to confront a series of other
people with visions of the horror which underlies
the quiet surface of life. It is, as Machen says, ‘an
old story, an old mystery played in our day, and
in dim London streets instead of amidst the
vineyards and the olive gardens’.8 The old story is
the story of Moreau and Dracula, the story of the
breaking of taboo boundaries and the dreadful
consequences which result: Pan is a ‘presence, that
was neither man nor beast, neither the living nor
the dead, but all things mingled, the form of all
things but devoid of all form’ (Pan, p. 20), and
when the hell-child finally dies she goes through
the stages of the reversion of the species to the
‘primal slime’:
I saw the form waver from sex to sex, dividing
itself from itself, and then again reunited. Then I
saw the body descend to the beasts whence it
ascended, and that which was on the heights go
down to the depths, even to the abyss of all be-
ing.
(Pan, p. 109)
The paradox of The Great God Pan is that the
visitation which liberates the human being from
the repression of false assumptions also destroys
the barriers which retain human individuation:
169
 the liberation of desire returns man to a primal as-
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
sociation with the beast and destroys the soul:
I knew I had looked into the eyes of a lost soul
. . . the man’s outward form remained, but all
hell was within it. Furious lust, and hate that was
like fire, and the loss of all hope, and horror that
seemed to shriek aloud in the night, though his
teeth were shut; and the utter blackness of despair.
(Pan, p. 91)
This is a lurid version of the process which
converted Jekyll into Hyde; and it happens, as one
might expect, almost exclusively to aristocrats.
The Three Impostors (1895) is a rather more
complex book and an interesting example of a
text composed of a series of interlocking stories,
all of which are lies. It is indebted to Stevenson’s
New Arabian Nights (1882), and moves through a
range of settings which bear comparison with Co-
nan Doyle’s. The stories vary in terms of the order
of interpretation which they advance, but the
most significant of them are committed, like The
Great God Pan, to asseting a pseudo-‘natural’
explanation for apparently supernatural events.
Professor Gregg, another unfortunate seeker after
forbidden knowledge, is convinced that the hor-
ror stories of folk legendry mask facts which are
amenable to scientific discovery: he rejects ‘the
supernatural hypothesis of the Middle Ages’, say-
ing that ‘invention, no doubt, and the Gothic
fancy of old days, had done much in the way of
exaggeration and distortion’, and advances a dif-
ferent hypothesis: ‘what if the obscure and hor-
rible race of the hills still survived, still remained
haunting wild places and barren hills, and now
and then repeating the evil of Gothic legend,
unchanged and unchangeable as the Turanian
Shelta, or the Basques of Spain?’9 Here Machen’s
Celtic sensibility verges on a theory of history ac-
cording to racial conspiracy; it is perhaps not
surprising that he felt attracted towards Fascism.1 0
In one sense at least, The Three Impostors might
be described as a truly decadent book, in that its
content turns back upon itself and is used as the
excuse for a series of ironic arguments about the
nature of fiction. Its protagonists are involved in
pondering the strangeness of the real, while
continually being subjected to unsolicited stories
which do nothing whatever to help the problem,
since their tellers cannot be trusted. Machen’s
continual theme is ‘the awful transmutation of
the hills’ (Impostors, p. 119): the possibility that
the merest sideslip of vision might offer us a world
which is wholly other, and show us the real and
awful faces of the demons who manipulate evolu-
tion to serve their own ends.
170
This transmutation is also the theme of Ma-
chen’s most impressive work, The Hill of Dreams
(1907), which has been described as the most
decadent book in the English language. Its deca-
dence is not formal but thematic, the closest con-
nection being to Swinburne. The hero, Lucian
Taylor, finds the world resistant both to his desires
and to his attempts to write a novel, and enters
into a dark bath of pain and sacrifice in which he
revolves an endless obsession with the single mo-
ment of dubious love which he has experienced;
but what is distinctive is that Machen manages to
describe algolagnic indulgence without losing his
sense of the irony which results from Lucian’s
conflict with the real world:
Never did he fail to wake at the appointed hour, a
strong effort of will broke through all the heavi-
ness of sleep, and he would rise up, joyful though
weeping, and reverently set his thorny bed upon
the floor, offering his pain with his praise. When
he had whispered the last word, and had risen
from the ground, his body would be all freckled
with drops of blood; he used to view the marks
with pride. Here and there a spine would be left
deep in the flesh, and he would pull these out
roughly, tearing through the skin, On some nights
when he had pressed with more fervour on the
thorns his thighs would stream with blood, red
beads standing out on the flesh, and trickling
down to his feet. He had some difficulty in wash-
ing away the bloodstains so as not to leave any
traces to attract the attention of the servant; and
after a time he returned no more to his bed when
his duty had been accomplished. For a coverlet he
had a dark rug, a good deal worn, and in this he
would wrap his naked bleeding body, and lie
down on the hard floor, well content to add an
aching rest to the account of his pleasures. He was
covered with scars, and those that healed during
the day were torn open afresh at night; the pale
olive skin was red with the angry marks of blood,
and the graceful form of the young man appeared
like the body of a tortured martyr. He grew thin-
ner and thinner every day, for he ate but little; the
skin was stretched on the bones of his face, and
the black eyes burnt in dark purple hollows. His
relations noticed that he was not looking well.1 1
The Hill of Dreams is an over-lush book, and
the baroque quality of Machen’s prose sometimes
becomes absurd, yet it has a power which is partly
derived from his refusal to sever Lucian completely
from reality: where a Keatsian hero might be able
to retreat to a world of beauty, or a Swinburnian
one to a permanent semi-mystical indulgence in
pain, Lucian remains in contact with his environ-
ment, albeit transmuted by his special vision. His
apocalyptic view of London is comparable with
Baudelaire’s urban nightmares in intensity if not
in execution:
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 Voices, raucous, clamant, abominable, were
belched out of the blazing public-houses as the
doors swung to and fro, and above these doors
were hideous brassy lamps, very slowly swinging
in a violent blast of air, so that they might have
been infernal thuribles, censing the people. Some
man was calling his wares in one long continuous
shriek that never stopped or paused, and, as a
respond, a deeper, louder voice roared to him from
across the road. An Italian whirled the handle of
his piano-organ in a fury, and a ring of imps
danced mad figures around him, danced and flung
up their legs till the rags dropped from some of
them, and they still danced on. A flare of naphtha,
burning with a rushing noise, threw a light on
one point of the circle, and Lucian watched a lank
girl of fifteen as she came round and round to the
flash. She was quite drunk, and had kicked her
petticoats away, and the crowd howled laughter
and applause at her. Her black hair poured down
and leapt on her scarlet bodice; she sprang and
leapt round the ring, laughing in Bacchic frenzy,
and led the orgy to triumph.
(Hill of Dreams, pp. 203-4)
Machen takes to an extreme point tendencies
already existing within decadent Gothic: like
Dracula’s, Lucian’s is the desire which tends
towards death, but unlike Dracula Lucian does
not have the supernatural privilege of attaining
gratification, except in his final dream:
And presently the woman fled away from him,
and he pursued her. She fled away before him
through midnight country, and he followed after
her, chasing her from thicket to thicket, from val-
ley to valley. And at last he captured her and won
her with horrible caresses, and they went up to
celebrate and make the marriage of the Sabbath.
They were within the matted thicket, and they
writhed in flames, insatiable, forever. They were
tortured, and tortured one another, in the sight of
thousands who gathered thick about them; and
their desire rose up like a black smoke.
(Hill of Dreams, p. 266)
Machen provides an epilogue to English
decadence, in which beauty and death are repre-
sented as inextricably fused at the root of the mo-
ment of passion.
Notes
1. Robert Louis Stevenson, Works, ed. L. Osbourne and
Mrs R. L. Stevenson (30 vols, London, 1924-6), IV, 65.
2. See Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the
English Ghost Story (London, 1977), pp. 20-1, 79-81.
3. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Isobel Mur-
ray (London, 1974), p. 143.
4. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-
3), in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David
V. Erdman (New York, 1965), p. 37.
5. Lytton Strachey, Characters and Commentaries (London,
1933), p. 40.
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6. H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (London,
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
1973), p. 104.
7. Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York, 1965), p. 245.
8. Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan and The Inmost
Light (London, 1913), p. 101.
9. Machen, The Three Impostors, introd. Julian Symons
(London, 1964), pp. 110-12.
10. This is, of course, only one of many examples in the
Gothic—as in literature in general—of an oblique rela-
tion between a writer’s political tendency and the
political content of his writings; a simple point, but
one so far largely ignored in criticism of the genre.
11. Machen, The Hill of Dreams (New York, 1923), pp.
101-2.
RAPHAEL INGELBIEN (ESSAY DATE
WINTER 2003)
SOURCE: Ingelbien, Raphael. “Gothic Genealogies:
Dracula, Bowen’s Court, and Anglo-Irish Psychology.”
ELH 70, no. 4 (winter 2003): 1089-105.
In the following essay, Ingelbien offers a psychological
approach to a comparison of gothicism and Anglo-Irish
identity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the works of
Elizabeth Bowen.
Like all enduring literary myths, Dracula has
been amenable to many interpretations. Although
the aesthetic merits of Bram Stoker’s novel are still
contested, its popularity with critics of all persua-
sions has been rising steadily, as is confirmed by
the publication of two case studies editions in
recent years.1 But the reception of Dracula is
certainly not an object lesson in critical pluralism.
Not only can a variety of approaches lead to
conflicting readings; controversy also rages within
some of the critical paradigms that have been ap-
plied to Stoker’s text. Nowhere has this been as
obvious as in the attempts at locating Dracula in
its historical and national contexts. The novel has
long been a favorite of other kinds of criticism
(mostly psychoanalytic); interest in Stoker’s rela-
tion to Irish cultural politics is comparatively
recent. But any hopes that firm insights may be
gained from the long overdue historicist placing
of Dracula in its Irish context were soon dispelled,
as the ideological controversies inherent in Irish
studies were quickly imported into the novel’s
interpretation.
Who was Dracula? Besides being a Freudian
projection of sexual anxieties, a perverted arche-
type, or a fin-de-siècle fantasy, where might the
monster fit in what is also taken to be an allegory
of Ireland’s social, political, and cultural upheav-
als at the end of the nineteenth century? The
answers proposed so far look clearly incompatible.
For some, Count Dracula represents the Protestant
171

SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
RAY BRADBURY (1920-)
Known primarily for his science fiction novels
and short stories, Bradbury often uses a sense
of enchantment to weave traditional Gothic
horrors into the fabric of ordinary life and to
invest the most mundane situations with
eerie potential. Supernatural occurrences in
his stories are often matched by the experi-
ences of characters whose emotional re-
sponses lead them into the realm of the
uncanny. “The Lake” and “Reunion,” for
example, are both centered on the endur-
ance of love after death. In the former, a dead
playmate reawakens the affections of the man
who once loved her by leaving a sand castle
for him on the beach where she drowned
decades before. In the latter, an orphaned
boy achieves a similar rapport with his dead
family by recreating them in his imagination
from the smell and feel of their clothing and
other personal articles they used in life. In his
stories “The Jar” and “The Next in Line” Brad-
bury depicts deteriorating marriages escalat-
ing toward disaster, conveying an eerie
menace as events culminate around sym-
bols—a jar containing a freak-show attraction
in the former story and a catacomb filled with
mummies in the latter—that crystallize the
sense of dread. “Homecoming,” “Uncle Ei-
nar,” “The Traveller,” and “The April Witch”
are all tales in which Bradbury features an
extended family of vampires, werewolves and
other supernatural beings who live unobtru-
sively among humans and who express
emotional needs not unlike those of their
mortal neighbors. The children in Bradbury’s
stories are often genuine naïfs who access
the supernatural unself-consciously using
their as-yet unspoiled imaginations. In “The
Emissary” their wishes resurrect the dead and
games of make-believe defeat death alto-
gether in “Bang! You’re Dead” and “The
Ducker.” The lost innocence of Bradbury’s
adult characters, however, renders them
vulnerable to evil, death, and destruction. In
“The Screaming Woman” the loss of youthful
romance leads to death, and in Something
Wicked This Way Comes (1962) jaded, sinful
men and women are lured into bargains with
Satan by the promise of everlasting youth.
172
Ascendancy in terminal decline; he is a blood-
thirsty caricature of the aristocratic landlord, cling-
ing to feudal power in the face of reform and
about to be engulfed by the forces of modernity
and nationalist agitation. Stoker’s novel must then
be read as the indictment of a class incapable of
adapting to new realities. This interpretation has
chiefly been favored by critics whose sympathies
are recognizably (though not crudely) nationalist,
like Terry Eagleton and Seamus Deane. Their read-
ing tactics have been impugned by Bruce Stewart,
who considers alternative and supposedly closer
analyses of Dracula that put the monster in the
nationalist and/or Catholic middle-class camp:
Dracula and his faithful Szgany are cast as radical
Land Leaguers intent on political violence, or
exploitative Catholic entrepreneurs known as go-
mbeen men. Those revisionist views of the novel
are complemented by Michael Valdez Moses’s
interpretation, which draws attention to similari-
ties between Dracula and the ill-fated leader of the
Home Rule movement Charles Stewart Parnell.2
Stewart himself backs away from those neat inver-
sions of nationalist readings and ecumenically
warns against “privileging one side against the
other,” apparently setting the interests of cultural
peace above those of critical accuracy.3
Stoker’s own political sympathies, divided as
they were between his own Protestant background
and his alienation from its more conservative ele-
ments, do not allow biography to settle the
dispute. Even his background is somehow dis-
puted: although Stoker’s Protestant education
took him to the Anglo-Irish stronghold of Trinity
College, Dublin, some have speculated that his
mother’s Gaelic ancestry rather made him “Anglo-
Celtic,” and thus fundamentally ambivalent.4
Politically, Stoker seems to have developed from
early imperialist sympathies to the position of a
“philosophical Home Ruler,” while his journalism
reveals a political thinking dominated by a “com-
plex and fraught dialectic . . . between a frantic
endorsement of progress as a natural law of social
development, and its dark alternative, atavism,
barbarism, chaos.”5 The role of that dialectic in
his most famous novel is still open to conjecture.
Meanwhile, readings proliferate, the battle lines
are sharply drawn, and Dracula’s political identity
remains at stake.
This situation owes much to conflicts within
Irish studies, but it also results from an almost
exclusive—and, I suggest, deficient—focus on the
figure of Dracula as a monstrous, protean body.
Critical awareness of Dracula’s Irish contexts
developed simultancously with the growing influ-
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ence of New Historicism and its Foucauldian inter-
est in the body as a site of meaning. This means
that in many readings, Dracula is essentially a
bundle of somatic properties.6 He is largely defined
by his abnormal features, his bloodsucking, and
the various guises he assumes through his super-
natural transformations. To a certain extent,
Stoker’s Gothic sensationalism invites precisely
such a reading. Dracula can easily be made to
stand for the return of a repressed, forbidden
sensuality that threatens the bourgeois subjectivi-
ties of his victims. This is reinforced by the novel’s
narrative organization. Dracula is famously made
up of texts spoken or written by the vampire’s
victims and/or pursuers; its eponymous central
figure is denied an equal measure of narratorial
authority, which apparently relegates him beyond
the bounds of articulate subjectivity. An elusive,
fascinating cipher, Dracula then becomes a mere
body onto which various anxieties can be pro-
jected—whether it be by Freudian, New Historicist,
or other readers. Recent contextualizations draw
extensively on contemporary pictorial sources,
reminding us that Dracula appeared in a fin-de-
siècle context where caricatures reflected domi-
nant views on racial differences. Interesting
though they undeniably are, those visual docu-
ments clearly offer no way out of critical contro-
versy. John Paul Riquelme’s edition of Dracula
includes caricatures from nineteenth-century
periodicals, in which vampiric bats and other
monsters were made to represent the Land League,
British rule, or Parnell.7 Finally, the critical rhetoric
that is applied to the novel often underscores the
centrality of Dracula’s body and the wealth of
interpretations it encourages: in the words of a
recent commentator, Dracula is “an overdeter-
mined figure onto whom are cathected many of
the most formidable political and social issues of
nineteenth-century Ireland.”8 Our Dracula is a
walking infusion set; Stoker criticism is largely a
form of surgery on Gothic bodies.
Yet Stoker’s vampire is not simply a monstrous
body. Given the current emphasis on the body in
literature, one may easily forget that Dracula is
also a psychological subject, and that, although
he does not belong to the cast of primary narra-
tors, he also speaks at length. Jonathan Harker
devotes several pages of his journal to careful and
revealing descriptions of his host’s dwelling and
habits; he also gives the reader long, verbatim ac-
counts of Dracula’s garrulous conversation. Could
the Count’s personal effects, gestures, and words,
so often neglected in favour of his spectacular
monstrosity, contain clues about his identity?
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More specifically, could the psychology they
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
betray also help us locate Dracula in recognizable
Irish cultural formations?
An answer to those questions first suggested
itself to me by a reading of Elizabeth Bowen’s fam-
ily memoir Bowen’s Court, entitled after the Bo-
wens’ Big House in County Cork, and first pub-
lished in 1942.9 A classic example of Ascendancy
(auto)biography, written by a key figure of modern
Anglo-Irish literature, Bowen’s Court will here be
used as a text against which Harker’s portrayal of
Dracula in his journal can be read in illuminating
ways. My aim is not to suggest a firm intertextual
link between Dracula and Bowen’s Court. Bowen
was certainly attuned to the finer nuances of
Anglo-Irish Gothic, as her perceptive introduction
to Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas demonstrates.
She would most probably have been familiar with
Stoker’s fiction, although it apparently failed to
captivate her as did Le Fanu’s work. This can be
explained by her preferences among the different
strains that compete within the Anglo-Irish Gothic
tradition: Bowen’s own sense of the Gothic was
always closer to the psychological terror and the
neuroses that Le Fanu exploited than to the more
sensational paraphernalia on display in Dracula.1 0
This is partly because Bowen’s Gothic was only
one of the strategies that she used when exploring
Ascendancy anxieties from the inside of her own
society: in her writing, Gothic undertones often
coexist quite naturally with a quasi-Jamesian
observation of Anglo-Irish manners. This muted,
subtle form of the Gothic not only informs
supernatural elements in some of Bowen’s Irish
fictions but also pervades many a page of Bowen’s
Court. A comparison between Dracula and Bowen’s
Court will, therefore, bring out those elements of
psychological Gothic in Stoker’s novel that most
definitely call for an interpretation within an
Anglo-Irish cultural context—so far, those ele-
ments have received scant attention. This com-
parison should also be seen as a step towards refin-
ing our understanding of what can be meant by
Anglo-Irish Gothic.
Reading Dracula (1897) in the light of Bowen’s
Court (1942) may seem anachronistic. But Bowen’s
text is not only a mid-twentieth-century record of
Anglo-Irish tradition; it stands as one of the most
consummate expressions of that tradition. The
themes and strategies she uses in her chronicle
belong to that tradition as well. Bowen also makes
extensive use of documents produced throughout
her family’s history and manages to integrate
them smoothly into her own narrative. Further-
more, Bowen’s Court can be used as a gateway into
173
 a certain kind of Ascendancy biographical writing:
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
in what follows, references to Bowen’s memoir
will be accompanied by considerations of other
representative texts written by key Anglo-Irish
figures, like Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats, in the
decades that separate Dracula from Bowen’s Court.
The continuities between Harker’s journal and
those different texts are often striking, and they
suggest that Stoker was tapping into the same
psychological vein that Bowen later exploited in
her turn. The heuristic value of my comparison is
also based on a recognition of this fact: Bowen
speaks not only of her family and class; she speaks
also as a family and class. Moreover, as we will
see, she does so by using accents that uncannily
echo the rhetoric of Stoker’s Count.
It is clear that this comparison will lend sup-
port to analyses that identify Dracula as an
Ascendancy figure, and that it can, therefore, be
seen as a way of taking sides in the critical debate
sketched out above. Bringing Bowen into the
equation, however, will show that such a reading
need not be motivated by a contemporary nation-
alist agenda, or by a desire to play up Ascendancy
guilt through simplistic allegories (the fallacious
strategies of which Stewart accuses Eagleton and
Deane). If the characterization of Dracula can be
fruitfully compared to a family chronicle by one
of the Ascendancy’s most distinguished writers, it
would seem that both Stoker and Bowen were
indeed describing the same subject. Their attitudes
towards that subject obviously differed: as I will
argue, Stoker’s and Bowen’s portrayals were,
respectively, intended as a critique and an apol-
ogy. But their political differences do not detract
from the troubling resemblance between their
texts.
Another possible objection should be consid-
ered before we proceed with the comparison
proper. Can a reading that mainly focuses on
Harker’s early account of Dracula offer representa-
tive evidence about the Irish dimension of
Dracula? I would here counter that there is no
reason to assume that the novel as a whole pos-
sesses a single, comprehensive allegorical intent.
Allegories, whether political or psychological,
certainly seem to abound in the novel, but it is far
from certain that Dracula can function as one
extended, coherent allegory (whatever the nature
of that allegory is). In that sense, conflicting read-
ings may also result from a failure to recognize
that Stoker was ultimately after things other than
allegorical consistency—a desire for commercial
success played at least as large a part in the mak-
ing of the novel. Some parts of Dracula can thus
174 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
resist historicist readings in terms of Irish poli-
tics.1 1 But the early parts of Harker’s journal are
definitely a goldmine for critics who adopt that
approach. For one thing, Harker’s accounts of
Transylvania draw on a source which provides an
explicit link with Ireland: Stoker found inspira-
tion in Major E. C. Johnson’s On the Track of the
Crescent, where Transylvanian peasants were
repeatedly likened to Irish ones. Harker’s insis-
tence on the peasants’ superstition and devotional
fervor clearly reminds one of a Protestant’s at-
titude towards Irish Catholics—this is a link on
which most critics agree.1 2 Other elements of the
setting can also point to Ireland, although one
should be wary of reading Irish references into
every detail that lends itself to this strategy. Admit-
tedly, Dracula’s current status has much to do with
“critical plurality, a discursive pattern of multiple
signification and resignification that presents in
itself a marked parallel to the psychoanalytical
trope of overdetermination.”1 3 But overdetermi-
nation remains a cop-out if it allows different
interpretations to be juxtaposed without any
examination of the conflicts they generate. What
can be an Irish reference in Dracula can also be
part and parcel of the conventions of vampire
literature: to what extent can such an element
then be used in a historicist reading? To take but
one example: how justified is a critic in speculat-
ing that Dracula’s powers of seduction may be a
reference to Parnell, given that Dracula was hardly
the first womanizing vampire in literature?1 4 Hark-
er’s journal can confront the critic with similar
problems. On the other hand, Stoker may have
chosen to stress or adapt specific conventions of
vampiric writing, because they could then func-
tion within an Irish allegory. Stoker’s own addi-
tions to those conventions (sometimes based on
his research into Transylvanian folklore) are even
more likely to constitute references to Irish poli-
tics, although generalizations are clearly unwise. It
is mostly with such emphases, adaptations, or ad-
ditions that my comparison with Bowen’s Court
and other Ascendancy texts will be concerned.
On one level, Stoker’s view of Transylvania as
a land of superstition reflects what he found in
his reading of local sources, but those sources were
important to him partly because they facilitated a
parallel with Ireland. Among the superstitions to
which Stoker alludes are legends concerning hid-
den treasures. After his ceric coach journey to the
castle, Harker asks the Count “why the coachman
went to the places where we had seen the blue
flames. Was it indeed true that they showed where
gold was hidden?” (46). Stoker was here drawing
on an account of Transylvanian superstitions, ac-
cording to which “in the night preceding Easter
Sunday . . . hidden treasures are said to betray
their site by a glowing flame.”1 5 Dracula’s confir-
mation is almost a quotation from Stoker’s source;
the Count goes on to explain that the treasures
were buried during the numerous invasions to
which the region was subjected. Stoker was prob-
ably struck by the similarity between his source
and Irish tales of riches hurriedly hidden under-
ground in time of trouble. Bowen’s Court includes
such an episode: one of Bowen’s ancestors was
made privy to the whereabouts of gold and silver
buried near Kilbolane during the 1689 rebellion,
but failed to disclose the location before his death
(96-97). Buried treasures were part of Irish as well
as Transylvanian folklore; what makes Stoker’s ver-
sion interesting here is that only the Count
(disguised as a coachman) ventured near the blue
flames, in order to mark the place with a few
stones (38). Dracula here asserts his ownership,
secure in the knowledge that the peasants will
never dare to come near the place: “[Y]our aver-
age peasant is at heart a coward and a fool”; “[O]n
that night no man of this land will, if he can help
it, stir without his doors” (46, 47). On the whole,
Stoker sticks closely to his source (according to
which the night in question was eminently
dangerous), but his one transformation explicitly
sets Dracula apart from the local peasantry by giv-
ing him the knowledge possessed by dead Ascen-
dancy patriarchs. In Lady Gregory’s memoir Coole
(1931), a local legend also makes it clear that the
ghosts of the Ascendancy protect their buried
treasures:
I often heard that long ago in the garden at Coole,
at the cross, a man that was digging found a pot
of gold. But just as he had the cover took off, he
saw old Richard Gregory coming, and he covered
it up, and was never able again to find the spot
where it was.1 6
In Dracula, the Count grants that some peas-
ant might be bold enough to go treasure hunting
after the blue flames, but he then tells his guest:
“[E]ven if he did he would not know what to
do. . . . You would not, I dare be sworn, be able
to find these places again?” (47). Stoker’s adapta-
tion of Transylvanian folklore, here, seems meant
to bring out Dracula’s resemblance to an Ascen-
dancy landlord.
The association of Dracula with Ascendancy
habits, obsessions, and values is also invited by
descriptions of his castle. His deserted and
draughty dwelling calls to mind the condition of
an aristocracy which had already fallen on hard
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times by the 1890s, when Ascendancy land own-
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
ership and the income landlords could derive
from rents were being reduced by legal reforms.1 7
A closer look at Dracula’s behavior in and towards
his house will only reinforce this parallel. “Wel-
come to my house!”: Dracula’s twice repeated
words of greeting to Harker are remarkable for
their insistence on hospitality (41). Although
impoverished, this aristocrat still cultivates a
hospitality on which many Ascendancy families
(including the Bowens) continued to pride them-
selves. Harker is immediately asked to make
himself at home. This is a tall order in such gaunt
surroundings, but his task is made somewhat
casier by the Count’s library, filled as it is with
English books. Dracula himself is observed read-
ing “of all things, an English Bradshaw’s Guide”
(47), while his atlas lies “opened naturally at Eng-
land, as if that map had been used much” (48-49).
According to Eagleton, this exposes Dracula as an
Anglophile Ascendancy aristocrat, “given to por-
ing over maps of the metropolis,” and about to
become a long-term absentce through his move
to London.1 8 But Dracula’s library is also worth
exploring in more detail. Indeed, family libraries
often occupy a prominent place in Ascendancy
memoirs. Lady Gregory devotes the first twenty
pages of her short book Coole to “The Library.”
Books were almost human presences to her: “I
shall feel sorry to leave all these volumes among
which I have lived. They have felt the pressure of
my fingers. They have been my friends.”1 9 Dracula
uses similar terms when he refers to his library:
“‘These friends’—and he laid his hands on some
of the books—‘have been good friends to me’”
(45). Given the isolation of the Anglo-Irish Big
Houses, such intimacy is hardly surprising.
The contents of Dracula’s shelves are also tell-
ing, as is the very fact that Harker devotes a whole
paragraph to an enumeration of his host’s books.
These include
a vast number of English books, whole shelves full
of them, and bound volumes of magazines and
newspapers. A table in the centre was littered with
English magazines and newspapers, though none
of them of very recent date. The books were of
the most varied kind—history, geography, politics,
political economy, botany, geology, law—all relat-
ing to England and English life and customs and
manners. There were even such books of reference
as the London directory, the “Red” and “Blue”
books, Whitaker’s Almanack, the Army and Navy
Lists, and—it somehow gladdened my heart to see
it—the Law List.
(44)
Dracula’s interest in England is understand-
able enough, given his plan for a prolonged stay
175
 in London. But the diversity of the books is quite
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
remarkable in itself, and it clearly strikes Harker as
much as the fact that all the items are about Eng-
land. The celectic bric-à-brac on the Count’s
shelves appears more familiar when compared
with the somewhat frantic universalism of some
Big House libraries. These reflected their owners’
aspiration to a Classical ideal of humanist knowl-
edge as well as an attachment to English culture.
The library at Bowen’s Court was less exclusively
English and more literary than Dracula’s, but it
was equally varied. Bowen’s list of its contents is a
tribute to a certain cultural ideal, although one
suspects some tongue in check irony at the range
of interests represented:
The (now) more or less complete works of Pope,
Gay, Dryden, an eight-volume set of The Spectator,
The Guardian, Addison’s Poems, Young’s Works (the
Young of the Night Thoughts) dedicated to Mr. Vol-
taire, The Faerie Queene, written by Edmund Spenser,
with a Glossary explaining Old and Obscure Words,
Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son, translations of
Madame de Sévigné’s Letters and of Sully’s Memoirs,
Johnson’s Dictionary, A Description of England (in
eight volumes with plates of religious ruins and
notable country seats), A Tour Through France
(Anon.), Goldsmith’s Animated Nature, a Nouveau
Traité de Vénerie, Smollett’s History of England, Rob-
ertson’s History of Scotland, six volumes of Dodsley’s
Collections (Poems by Several Hands), Manners in
Portugal, Vertot’s Revolution in Sweden, Crevier’s Ro-
man Emperors, Memoirs of the Portuguese Inquisition,
with Reflections on Ancient and Modern Popery, Es-
sex’s Letters (from Ireland), Observations on the
Turks, Tissot on Health, a Life of Gustavus Adolphus,
Arthur Young’s Tour Through the North of England,
Collins’s Peerage (eight volumes, 1779), and a Peer-
age of Ireland (1768).
(BC, 192)
What is also typical of the Ascendancy is the
place of this humanist taste, within a cultural ideal
that included soldierly virtues as well as intel-
lectual ones. Over time, Bowen’s Court became a
repository of both. The library was an addition to
a family history that had started out with more
Philistine figures: the first Irish Bowens were
“temperamental fighters, malcontents, firebrands,
actuated by love of movement,” but with little
time for other pursuits (BC, 39); the synthesis was
achieved by later Bowens and, ultimately, through
Bowen’s all-embracing chronicle. That synthesis is
probably best known through Yeats’s poetic eulo-
gies of an Ascendancy of soldiers, scholars, and
horsemen—a retrospectively idealized mixture of
elements that may have coexisted in only a few
individuals. This appetite for fighting was, of
course, all the more remarkable in that it seemed
to transcend specific political interests or al-
legiances. Yeats’s ancestors, though not aristo-
176
cratic, were “soldiers that gave, whatever die was
cast”: Yeats himself was not always too sure about
whose side his forefathers fought on, but that
uncertainty was no obstacle to a celebration of
their military virtue. In Yeats’s version, the Ascen-
dancy, “Bound neither to Cause nor to State,” was
admirable in and for itself.2 0 Bowen’s ancestors
also belonged to the kind of “men of whom it is
hard to say whether their ideas breed their pas-
sions or their passions breed their ideas.” Henry
Bowen I thus switched sides during the Civil War
as a matter of course: “I doubt whether Henry Bo-
wen ever cared much for either King or Parlia-
ment: he may have hardly distinguished between
the two” (BC, 39).
Both Yeats’s and Bowen’s writings give con-
crete shape to this Anglo-Irish ideal of humanist
culture, military prowess, and political versatility
by collapsing several individuals into a collective,
transgenerational subject. To Stoker’s readers,
there is little new here. The strategy was already
evident in the long, trance-like monologues where
Dracula entertained Harker with a confused but
passionate account of his family’s history: “for in
our veins flows the blood of many races who
fought as the lion fights: for lordship” (52). It is
worth noting here that, by drawing on the bel-
licose figure of Vlad the Impaler, Stoker was add-
ing a new feature to the make-up of the vampire
of literary tradition.2 1 One reason for Stoker’s
interest in Vlad is that his qualities as a military
leader made him an appropriate source for the
portrayal of a certain type of Anglo-Irish aristocrat.
The crash course in Transylvanian history that
Harker receives from Dracula gives pride of place
to his ancestors’ heroism on the battlefield, but it
also leaves one with an extremely confused
picture of political changes. What is more, the
Count’s lengthy tale, filled though it is with the
distant sound of old battles, does not really make
riveting reading; nor does it prepare for subse-
quent developments in the plot of Dracula. If it
actually detracts from the narrative economy of
this novel of sensation, one may surmise that
Stoker included it because of the allegorical clues
it gave about Dracula’s identity. Dracula presents
his tribe (the Szekelys) as an independent minded
race of natural warriors, whose allegiances were as
shifting as those of Bowen’s or Yeats’s ancestors.
The Szekelys were eminently adaptable to circum-
stance: “When the Hungarian flood swept east-
ward, the Szekelys were claimed as kindred by the
victorious Magyars” (53); later though, “when
after the battle of Mohacs, we threw off the
Hungarian yoke, we of the Dracula blood were
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among their leaders, for our spirit would not
brook that we were not free” (54). Like the early
Bowens, the Szekelys were essentially lone opera-
tors, who laid themselves open to charges of pure
egoism and opportunism.2 2 Dracula’s rebuttal
justifies their attitude by stressing its strategic
value in Transylvanian society. Of an earlier
Dracula, he observes: “They said that he thought
only of himself. Bah! what good are peasants
without a leader?” (54). While the idea that peas-
ants need a leader may provide a connection with
the Land League in the eyes of some, the fact that
these words are spoken by a nostalgic aristocrat
means rather that Dracula is trying to justify
aristocratic leadership in a society that was both
rural and unstable. This justification, however, is
coupled with an admission that the old aristocratic
power and the virtues that sustained it have
passed: “[T]he warlike days are over . . . the glories
of the great races are as a tale that is told” (54).
The Count’s tales about his family’s past are
also remarkable for their narrative quirks. Harker’s
comments on the strange quality of those tales
deserve our attention here:
In his speaking of things and people, and espe-
cially of battles, he spoke as if he had been present
at them all. This he afterwards explained by say-
ing that to a boyar the pride of his house and name
are his own pride, that their glory is his glory, that
their fate is his fate. Whenever he spoke of his
house he always said “we,” like a king speaking.
(52)
Dracula is not being overly rhetorical here, of
course: as an almost timeless creature, he actually
is a collective, transhistorical subject, the living
(or undead) embodiment of several generations.
His systematic use of “we” eerily prefigures Bo-
wen’s own lapses into plural pronouns in Bowen’s
Court. Bowen’s family chronicle shows such a
degree of empathy that her identity as a narrator
repeatedly blends with that of her subjects. Like
Dracula, she can speak of “we” as if she and her
family were one timeless subject. This can happen
even when Bowen herself was clearly not involved
in the episodes that she is recounting. Bowen’s
use of the plural “we” becomes even more striking
when one remembers that Bowen’s Court was writ-
ten in the early 1940s, when Bowen was already
the last, childless representative of her line. Here
are some examples (all emphases are mine):
We north-east County Cork gentry began rather
roughly, as settlers.
(BC, 17)
The story [runs that] King William III . . . paid a
visit to the Bowens at Kilbolane . . . and presented
them with a communion set. The only com-
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munion plate now in our possession is, however,
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
Victorian style. But King William’s portrait, framed
to match Oliver Cromwell’s, hangs beside Crom-
well’s at the top of Bowen’s Court stairs. If he
never did stay with us, he no doubt wished that
he could.
(BC, 104-5)
I think the loss of the law suit—for we did lose it
in the end—determined and hardened [Henry
III’s] nature in many ways.
(BC, 152)
He did, it is true, lose our part of a mountain
(Quitrent) at cards . . . but it was his father, dear
Henry III, who bequeathed us our lasting embar-
rassments.
(BC, 205)
At other times, Bowen’s “we” seems to encom-
pass both her family and the class to which it
belonged. Her identification with the Ascendancy
is perhaps at its strongest and most eloquent in
passages that record periods of trouble or decay.
Her portrayal of George Bowen in the aftermath
of the 1798 rebellion is a case in point:
[Big George] epitomizes that rule by force of sheer
fantasy that had, in great or small ways, become
for his class the only possible one. From the big
lord to the small country gentleman we were,
about this time, being edged back upon a tract of
clouds and obsessions that could each, from its
nature, be only solitary.
(BC, 258, my emphasis)
In the following example, Bowen’s parentheti-
cal remark suggests that a sense of decline could
sometimes be almost too close for comfort:
Such a society had its roughnesses, but it had not
that vulgarity of assertion only necessary when
there is decline (that is why to detect a vulgarity,
in ourselves, in a friend or associate, worries us: it
is the morbid symptom we recognize).
(BC, 131, my emphasis)
In both Dracula and Bowen’s Court, the plural
“we” is used by a consciously aristocratic voice
that traces and identifies with a lineage which is
now under threat. If that “we” sounds assertive or
royal to Harker, as he listens to his host, it is
perhaps also—and ironically enough, for Bo-
wen—an elegiac symptom of decline.
By letting us hear Count Dracula’s tales of past
glory, Stoker well may have caught the essential
tone of the declining society of the Big House.
The very word “house” is used repeatedly (and
sometimes almost ambiguously) in the conversa-
tions between Dracula and Harker; its meaning
oscillates between “dwelling” and “family.”
Dracula insistently welcomes the young lawyer to
his “house” (twice on 41) and tells him that “to a
177
 boyar the pride of his house and name is his own
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
pride” (52, my emphasis); the “we” that intrigues
Harker is used when Dracula speaks “of his house”
(52). After hearing Harker’s description of the
house that the young clerk has bought for him in
London, Dracula expresses his satisfaction thus:
I am glad that it is old and big. I myself am of an
old family, and to live in a new house would kill
me. A house cannot be made habitable in one day;
and after all, how few days go to make up a
century . . . the walls of my castle are broken; the
shadows are many, and the wind breathes cold
through the broken battlements and casements. I
love the shade and the shadow, and would be
alone with my thoughts when I may.
(48)
Although Bowen’s Court was not as dilapi-
dated or melancholy, Bowen would certainly have
recognized this state of mind where individual,
family, and house merge into a composite, atem-
poral being. Bowen’s Court itself, in her memoir,
becomes precisely such an entity; her writing is
pervaded by an almost mystical sense of dwelling,
increased by the awareness that she is the last Bo-
wen to inherit the house. The personal and
cultural mystique that surrounded Big Houses
only intensified with the decline of the society
that owned them. W. J. McCormack has argued
that, although the Big House as a reality is as old
as the Ascendancy itself, the concept and name of
“Big House” emerged in Anglo-Irish literature only
when its referent was already in decline.2 3 The
date of that semantic shift remains to be investi-
gated, but one suspects that Dracula’s delight at
the prospect of staying in a “house” which is “old
and big” is a revealing choice of words. In that
respect, as in many others, Harker’s diary can be
read as a portrait of Big House society.2 4
If Stoker managed to convey the tone and
moods of an Anglo-Irish aristocracy in decline, his
association of that class with vampirism is, of
course, eminently critical; it is the gesture of a
modern, forward-looking Dublin Protestant, who
had little patience with the more conservative sec-
tions of Anglo-Ireland. By comparison, Bowen’s
family chronicle definitely reads like an apology,
although she does, at times, infuse her record with
admissions of failure and of historical injustice.2 5
Bowen can also pass a benign form of criticism on
the foibles and obsessions of her ancestors; when
this occurs, her portrayals tend to assume more
obviously Gothic features that would not have
been out of place in Dracula. Towards the end of
his life, John Bowen I thus withdrew into the kind
of isolation and behavior that befits the undead:
178
He took up his quarters in the small semi-ruinous
castle just across the Fahary stream. . . . Into this
dark doorway he turned at the close of the long
dusks. In these chambers he muttered and walked
at nights.
(BC, 75)
The daughter of a Catholic landlord who was
expropriated in favor of the Bowens is also de-
scribed in terms that could be applied to some of
Dracula’s victims, although Bowen’s descriptions
perhaps recall the ghost of Catherine Heathcliff in
Wuthering Heights more than the undead Lucy
Westenra roaming her Whitby churchyard:
Was Elizabeth Cushin, child of the dispossessed
Garrett, as lovely as she was unfortunate? Did she
walk like a living ghost the lands her father had
owned, and was John—in the wood, up the
stream, on the side of the mountain—constantly
meeting her?
(BC, 77)
These hints of a more sensational Gothic of
walking ghosts and crumbling castles remain few
and far between in Bowen’s Court. Stoker, on the
other hand, liberally uses such ingredients along-
side the more psychological Gothic that pervades
the characterization of Dracula in Harker’s journal.
The proliferation of Gothic horrors in Dracula
partly answers Stoker’s wish to debunk a class that
he could also portray with subtlety. Some of the
Gothic atrocities that Dracula’s castle conceals are
not just stage properties borrowed from European
horror fiction. Closed doors and lascivious female
vampires belong to that tradition, but one ele-
ment also points back to a famous, earlier critique
of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy written by a Dublin
Protestant. After his narrow escape from the bites
of Dracula’s women, Harker realizes with horror
that Dracula has stolen a child and fed him to his
aggressors. Later on, he observes a peasant woman
walking round the castle in her distress, looking
for her child. Childbiting vampires may not have
been a novelty in literature, but Jonathan Swift’s
“A Modest Proposal” surely looms large behind
this savage Gothic caricature of an aristocracy
literally feeding on the infants of a helpless
peasantry.
Stoker gave Count Dracula enough of a psy-
chology to paint him as an Anglo-Irish aristocrat
pining for the heyday of the Ascendancy and
expressing its values, moods, and isolation with
the subtle touches that one finds in Ascendancy
memoirs like Bowen’s. But his use of vampirism
constitutes a damning assessment that remains
closer to Swift’s sarcasm than to Bowen’s painstak-
ing and defensive introspection. In that sense, the
Gothic excess of Dracula both continues and sup-
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plants the muted, psychological Gothic that
Stoker’s characterization shares with Bowen’s
chronicle of Ascendancy life. However, political
differences between both authors should not
obscure their common use of tropes and rhetori-
cal strategies that belong to this second, recogniz-
able Anglo-Irish form of Gothic. I hope to have
shown that a proper understanding of that Gothic
vein, and of its links to Ascendancy psychology,
as well as an awareness of its presence in Stoker’s
novel, are essential to the placing of Dracula in
the mined context of Irish history.
Notes
1. See the Norton Critical Edition of Dracula, ed. Nina
Auerbach and David J. Skal (New York: Norton, 1997),
and Dracula, ed. John Paul Riquelme (Boston:
Bedford/St Martin’s, 2002). Riquelme’s edition hereaf-
ter cited parenthetically by page number.
2. For analyses of Dracula as an Ascendancy landlord,
see Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and
Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1997), 89-90, and Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff
and the Great Hunger (London: Verso, 1995), 215-16.
Bruce Stewart takes issue with them in “Bram Stoker’s
Dracula: Possessed by the Spirit of the Nation?,” Irish
University Review 29.2 (1999): 238-55. Stewart regrets
that “in Irish critical commentary on Dracula there are
current signs of more than an element of political
animus against the erstwhile ascendancy class in
Ireland” (255). The alternative, revisionist readings he
considers present Dracula as a Fenian leader, while the
Szganys are “patently his Land League henchmen”
(242-43). Like Stewart, Cannon Schmitt also aligns
Dracula with nationalist elements in “Mother Dracula:
Orientalism, Degeneration, and Anglo-Irish National
Subjectivity at the Fin de Siècle,” in Irishness and
(Post)modernism, ed. John S. Rickard (Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell Univ. Press, 1994), 25-43, esp. 34. Michael
Valdez Moses’s essay “Dracula, Parnell and the
Troubled Dreams of Nationhood,” appeared in Journal
X: A Journal in Culture and Criticism 2 (1997): 66-112.
3. Stewart, 243.
4. See Joseph Valente, “‘Double Born’: Bram Stoker and
the Metrocolonial Gothic,” Modern Fiction Studies 46
(2000): 632.
5. See Chris Morash, “‘Even Under Some Unnatural
Condition’: Bram Stoker and the Colonial Fantastic,”
in Literature and the Supernatural, ed. Brian Cosgrove
(Dublin: The Columba Press, 1995), 112, 100.
6. This is perhaps more true of American readings than
of Irish ones. The difference may reflect the closer
links between Irish literary criticism and traditional
history, or the fact that postcolonial theory has had a
bigger impact in Ireland than has New Historicism.
The latter has been more dominant among American
critics. Nevertheless, the tendency to rash allegorizing
that Stewart detects in Irish commentary on Stoker
can also derive from a narrow focus on Dracula’s
physical features.
7. See Dracula, ed. Riquelme, 370-71, 376-79.
8. Moses, “Dracula,” 69, my emphasis.
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9. Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen’s Court, ed. Hermione Lee
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
(London: Vintage, 1999). Hereafter cited parentheti-
cally by page number and abbreviated BC.
10. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas is ostensibly set in Der-
byshire, but Bowen observed that its focus on physical
isolation, inheritance, and supernatural oppression
was very much the product of Le Fanu’s Anglo-Irish
concerns. See “Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu,” in
The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Lee
(London: Vintage, 1999), 100-13. The concept of an
Anglo-Irish Gothic tradition that includes both Le
Fanu and Stoker is still disputed. Alison Millbank
likens Stoker to Le Fanu and other Irish Protestant
writers in “‘Powers Old and New’: Stoker’s Alliances
with Anglo-Irish Gothic,” in Bram Stoker: History,
Psychoanalysis and the Gothic, ed. William Hughes and
Andrew Smith (London: Macmillan, 1998), 12-28. W.
J. McCormack has tried to wrest Le Fanu from what
he regards as a “doubtful tradition” (Dissolute Charac-
ters: Irish Literary History through Balzac, Sheridan Le
Fanu, Yeats and Bowen [Manchester: Manchester Univ.
Press, 1993], 3). If Charles Maturin, Le Fanu, and
Stoker are regularly “invoked in the name of a more
substantial Irish gothic tradition,” McCormack argues
that “the description ‘gothic’ can be applied to [Le
Fanu’s] work only in a general and unsatisfactory
way.” McCormack’s championing of Le Fanu goes
together with an overt irritation at the Stoker’s
“unrelenting narration of supernatural and horrific
agencies” and Dracula’s tendency to “overkill.” See his
introductory essay, “Irish Gothic and After,” in vol. 2
of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, ed. Deane
(Derry, Ireland: Field Day Publications, 1992), 832
(“the description”), 842 (“unrelenting”; “overkill”).
11. Joseph Valente’s recent Dracula’s Crypt. Bram Stoker,
Irishness, and the Question of Blood (Urbana: Univ. of Il-
linois Press, 2002), is an often brilliant and thought-
provoking attempt at reading the whole novel in the
light of Stoker’s complex position as an “Anglo-Celtic”
writer. To engage with all of Valente’s points would be
beyond the scope of the present essay. Valente sees
Dracula as both landlord and nationalist agitator (55-
59)—in fact, he argues that Dracula’s fundamental
ambivalence stems from the fact that he is nothing
but a hallucinatory projection of the other characters’
racial anxieties. Tantalizing though it is, Valente’s
emphasis on Dracula’s ambivalence is not always justi-
fied (see note 22, below).
12. A relevant section from Major Johnson’s book is
reprinted in Riquelme’s edition, 383-85. See also
Christopher Frayling’s Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count
Dracula (London: Faber, 1991). Frayling notes
Johnson’s “many comparisons between Wallachian
peasants and ‘our friend Paddy’” (335). For a sum-
ming up of the current critical view of Stoker’s use of
Johnson, see Gregory Castle’s essay “Ambivalence and
Ascendancy in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” in Riquelme’s
edition, 527.
13. See Hughes’s and Smith’s introduction to Bram Stoker, 4.
14. Morash, 110.
15. See Frayling, 321.
16. Lady Gregory, Coole (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1931), 41.
17. “His decrepit castle, the lack of servants, the mingling
of fear and respect accorded to him by Catholic peas-
ants who seem to stand to him in a relation of
179
 subservience—all of this suggests the social milieu of
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
the Ascendancy Big House.” See Castle, 529. The
decline of the Ascendancy’s political and economic
power accelerated during the second half of the
nineteenth century; its landmarks were the disestab-
lishment of the Church of Ireland (1869) and the Land
Acts passed in the 1880s. See R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland
1600-1972 (London: Penguin, 1989), 396, 412-15.
18. Eagleton, 215.
19. Lady Gregory, 21.
20. W. B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London:
Everyman, 1990), 148, 244. The lines from “Responsi-
bilities,” about the ancestors who “withstood . . .
James and Irish when the Dutchman crossed” (148),
are the eventual result of a long revision: “[T]his pas-
sage had to be rewritten, for Yeats once thought
mistakenly that his Butler ancestors had fought on
the side of the Englishman James II, not the Dutch-
man William of Orange” (519).
21. “Dracula differs from the previous vampire Counts of
literature [in that] he is a military figure as well, who
periodically reminisces about his military successes in
the distant past, in campaigns to drive the Turks out
of his territory” (Frayling, 76).
22. Valente reads those shifting alliances as yet another
sign of Dracula’s fundamental ambivalence: “Just as
the Draculas seem to have allied themselves with all
manner of opposing parties in the Balkan wars, so
Dracula’s own subject position aligns him with vari-
ous constituencies in the debate and struggle over
Ireland” (59). However, the Szekelys’s political muta-
bility can also bring to mind the confused allegiances
of Ascendancy families, and the tone of Dracula’s tale
is definitely closer to Ascendancy nostalgia than to
nationalist rhetoric.
23. “The establishment of the Big House as a central trope
in modern Irish writing is closely linked to its elegiac
and compensatory qualities.” See McCormack, “Set-
ting and Ideology: with Reference to the Fiction of
Maria Edgeworth,” in Ancestral Voices: The Big House in
Anglo-Irish Literature, ed. Otto Rauchbauer (Hildesheim,
Germany: Olms, 1992), 51.
24. Big House society was not exclusively Protestant; some
old Catholic families also owned Big Houses. Although
they were long technically excluded from the Ascen-
dancy on religious grounds, the distinction between
those families and their Protestant counterparts
became increasingly blurred after Catholic emancipa-
tion and the disestablishment of the Church of
Ireland. By the time Dracula was written, Big House
Catholics were in many ways closer to the Protestant
aristocracy than to urban middle-class Protestants like
Stoker. This means that Dracula’s long-debated reli-
gious identity does not affect his status as a Big House
aristocrat. In the controversies surrounding the novel,
Dracula has been variously painted as a Catholic (see,
for instance, Schmitt, 34), and as an Irish Protestant
dabbling in the occult and drawn to the sacramental
side of Catholicism (see Castle, 533-34). The classic ac-
count of the Protestant Ascendancy’s fascination with
the occult is Foster’s “Protestant Magic: W. B. Yeats
and the Spell of Irish History,” in Yeats’s Political Identi-
ties, ed. Jonathan Allison (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michi-
gan Press, 1996), 83-105. Foster makes suggestive
remarks on Stoker but does not discuss Dracula at
length.
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25. Bowen wrote in her afterword: “[M]y family . . . drew
their power from a situation that shows an inherent
wrong (BC, 453).
RACE AND THE GOTHIC
TERESA A. GODDU (ESSAY DATE
1997)
SOURCE: Goddu, Teresa A. “Haunting Back: Harriet Ja-
cobs, African-American Narrative, and the Gothic.” In
Gothic America: Narrative, History, and the Nation, pp.
131-52. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
In the following essay, Goddu explores how the Gothic is
used in literature by African Americans—and by white
writers who write about the African American experi-
ence—to express the horrors of slavery and racism.
Early American writers, Henry James and
Nathaniel Hawthorne, complained bitterly about
the bleakness and flatness of the American scene.
But I think that if they were alive, they’d feel at
home in modern America. True, we have no great
church in America; our national traditions are still
of such a sort that we are not wont to brag of them
. . . we have no rich symbols, no colorful rituals.
But we do have in the Negro the embodiment of
a past tragic enough to appease the spiritual
hunger of even a James; and we do have in the
oppression of the Negro a shadow athwart our
national life dense and heavy enough to satisfy
even the gloomy broodings of a Hawthorne. And
if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent
horror; horror would invent him.
—Richard Wright, “How ‘Bigger’ was Born,”
Native Son
In this ending to the introduction to Native
Son, Richard Wright makes a powerful connection
between the African-American experience and the
gothic.1 The horror that Poe or Hawthorne had to
invent, Wright argues, is already embodied in
African-American history—in the haunting legacy
of slavery and in the heavy shadow of oppression.
For Wright, African-American history is not only
material for the gothic writer, but is also itself
coded in gothic terms.2 As Wright’s novel, Native
Son, shows, the African-American experience, writ-
ten as a realist text, resembles a gothic narrative.
Arguing that the gothic, as exemplified by an
author like Poe, does not invent horror but is
invented by it, Wright unveils the gothic as a
complex historical mode: history invents the
gothic, and in turn the gothic reinvents history.
By exploring Wright’s connection between
historical horror and the gothic, this chapter uses
the African-American gothic to revise readings of
the American gothic that have positioned the
genre—and, more broadly, the American literary
canon—as exempt from the forces of history. A
focus on slavery, America’s most glaring cultural
contradiction, shows how it produced gothic nar-
ratives during the antebellum period and how
these narratives reproduced the scene of slavery.3
The chapter examines two strategies by which the
gothic represents the unspeakable event of slavery.
First, by signifying the event of slavery through
narrative effects, the gothic both registers actual
events and turns them into fiction. Its conven-
tions can both rematerialize and dematerialize his-
tory: some gothic narratives insist upon the
actuality of slavery by refusing to collapse the
referent of the narrative with its effects; others
displace the event of slavery into fictional form in
order to contain its horrors. However, as this book
has shown, even in the act of displacement, traces
of the material remain to be read by those invested
in remembering the horrors of history. African-
American writers—particularly Harriet Jacobs, who
works within and against an antebellum discourse
that gothicizes slavery—recognize the uses and
dangers of the gothic as a mode that can remem-
ber and combat, but can also erase, the horrors of
a racial history. In looking at how particular gothic
fictions are produced in relation to the historical
institution of slavery and how the gothic mode
represents slavery’s unspeakable history, this
chapter explores the extent to which the gothic is
able to rematerialize the ghosts of America’s racial
history and enable African-American writers to
haunt back.
With this final chapter, then, Gothic America
comes full circle, returning to its founding image:
the caged slave in Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an
American Farmer. Instead of focusing on Farmer
James, who is struck mute by this encounter, or
on the stylistic evasions Crèvecoeur’s text per-
forms to contain and silence this horror, this
chapter focuses on the voices that emanate from
within stereotypes of the gothic and on how to
begin articulating the horror. No longer simply
the metaphor for dread, the “conveniently bound
and violently silenced” black bodies of the gothic
return in this chapter to reclaim and revise the
gothic mode (Morrison 1992:38). By locating the
strategies involved in unveiling slavery’s horrors,
this chapter listens to how the unspeakable is
spoken.
Spectacles of Horror: The Scene of
Slavery
Negro writing has instinctively adopted the
Gothic tradition of American literature and given
its more supernatural and surrealistic characteris-
tics a realistic basis, founded on actual lives often
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
lived in the Gothic manner, that is indeed terrify-
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
ing: the nightmare world of Poe or Hawthorne
has become the Monday morning of the Negro
author. . . .
—Theodore Gross, The Heroic Ideal in American
Literature
The scene of slavery was often represented as
gothic during the antebellum period in America.
From newspaper accounts of Nat Turner’s insur-
rection and antislavery writings to slave narratives
and literary works such as Lydia Maria Child’s
“Stand from Under!” (1829) and Melville’s Benito
Cereno (1855), the horrible reality of slavery was
depicted through gothic images and a romantic
rhetoric. Theodore Weld exemplifies how slavery
was easily read as a sensationalized spectacle dur-
ing the antebellum period when he states, “facts
and testimony as to the actual condition of the
Slaves” would “thrill the land with Horror” (Barnes
and Dumond 2:717). The gothic’s focus on the
terror of possession, the iconography of imprison-
ment, the fear of retribution, and the weight of
sin provided a useful vocabulary and register of
images by which to represent the scene of Ameri-
ca’s greatest guilt: slavery. According to Kari
Winter, the gothic’s structural alliance with slavery
is not coincidental.4 Many of the eighteenth-
century British male gothicists—such as Monk
Lewis and William Beckford—were either slaveo-
wners or proslavery; moreover, the rise of the
gothic novel in England at the end of the eigh-
teenth century occurred during the heightened
debate about abolition, a debate in which William
Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, both authors of
gothic novels, actively participated (Winter 3).
Like revolution—as Ronald Paulson has shown in
his study of the gothic and the French Revolu-
tion—and the new capitalistic structures that
emerged in the eighteenth century—as Andrea
Henderson argues—slavery was a significant part
of the historical context that produced the gothic
and against which it responded.5
For instance, slave uprisings in St. Domingue
at the end of the eighteenth century and in
America during the antebellum period, as epito-
mized by the figure of Nat Turner, were turned
into tales of gothic terror.6 Nat Turner and his
band were demonized by The Richmond Enquirer
(August 30, 1831) as “banditti” and “horrible . . .
monsters” (Tragle 43).7 Turning the event into an
ominous warning, The Liberator (September 3,
1831) states, “for ourselves, we are horror-struck
at the late tidings” and argues that “what was
poetry—imagination—in January, is now a bloody
reality” (Tragle 64, 63). Turner’s insurrection
181
 actualized the imagined terror of slave rebellion:
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
its bloody reality both fulfilled and generated a
gothic narrative of dread and retribution.
Recounting Turner’s reign of terror, The Consti-
tutional Whig (September 26, 1831) demonstrates
how the historical event of Turner’s uprising was
represented through gothic conventions:
In retracing on Tuesday morning the route pur-
sued by the banditti, consisting of a distance of 20
miles, my imagination was struck with more hor-
ror, than the most dreadful carnage in a field of
battle could have produced. The massacre before
me, being principally of helpless women and
children. . . . In future years, the bloody road,
will give rise to many a sorrowful legend; and the
trampling of hoofs, in fancy, visit many an excited
imagination.
(Tragle 96-97)
The bloody scene produces a gothic effect
when it strikes the viewer’s imagination; the event
“gives rise to” a narrative of terror and horror.
However, the event is also reinterpreted by that
gothic narrative. As symbolized by the bloody
road, it will be turned into a legend: Nat Turner
will haunt the imagination of future travelers
much like the Headless Horseman of Washington
Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Translat-
ing the event into a gothic symbol, turning it into
a legend, the passage reveals how the gothic can
dematerialize and displace the source of its effect
even while representing it. The present event is
constructed as both more “real” and “unreal” as it
is imaginatively experienced: the narrator’s imagi-
nation is struck by the full horror of the scene
even as the scene is displaced into the future and
translated into a legend to excite the future
viewer’s fancy. The gothic’s conventions, then,
gave whites responding to Turner’s rebellion a
discourse to symbolize and contain their terror.
Once subsumed into symbols, imagined instead
of experienced, the event could be read as an ef-
fect rather than as a reality.
This displacement of event by effect also tends
to relocate the horror of slavery from the slave’s
experience to the white viewer’s response. Antisla-
very and proslavery sympathizers alike deployed
the gothicized scene of slavery, the event, as the
conduit for a particular effect. In American Slavery
as It Is (1839), Theodore Weld uses the gothic
conventions of clanking chains and swooning
maidens to emphasize the horror of slavery. “We
repeat it, every man knows that slavery is a curse,”
he writes. “Whoever denies this, his lips libel his
heart. Try him; clank the chains in his ears, and
tell him they are for him. . . . then look at his
pale lips and trembling knees, and you have na-
182
ture’s testimony against slavery” (7). Asking the
viewer to imagine himself enslaved, responding to
this imagined scene, Weld turns slavery into an
effect. The clanking chains sound the warning of
retribution more than they symbolize actual
imprisonment. Nature’s testimony against slavery
is not the scene itself but the white viewer’s
response to it: pale lips and trembling knees.
Paradoxically, the gothic effect subsumes the
gothic event even as it testifies to its horrors.
Sarah Grimké’s account of her departure from
the South and slavery underscores the way white
abolitionists used the gothic’s narrative power to
subordinate the slave’s horror to the white viewer’s
response:
As I left my native state on account of slavery, and
deserted the home of my fathers to escape the
sound of the lash and the shrieks of tortured
victims, I would gladly bury in oblivion the recol-
lection of those scenes with which I have been
familiar; but this may not, cannot be; they come
over my memory like gory spectres, and implore
me with resistless power, in the name of a God of
mercy, in the name of a crucified Savior, in the
name of humanity; for the sake of the slaveholder,
as well as the slave, to bear witness to the horrors
of the southern prison house.
(Weld 22)
Grimké depicts herself as the innocent maiden
fleeing the scene of horror. She, not the slave, is
the tortured victim of the slavery system, a
displaced wanderer, haunted by bloody specters.
In identifying herself as the victim, Grimké
abstracts and co-opts the slave’s horror.8 By equat-
ing witnessing these scenes with experiencing
them, Grimké makes the effect coextensive with
the event, thereby establishing her authority. The
gory scenes implore her to speak; the shrieks of
the tortured victims are articulated through her.
Bearing witness to the horrors of the southern
prison house in the name of all its victims, slave-
holders as well as slaves, Grimké generalizes the
horror to everyone involved.
In the hands of antebellum white writers,
then, the gothic often enabled the representation
of slavery only to departicularize it. As Eric Sund-
quist argues, “the antislavery imagination, no less
than the proslavery, tended to collapse history
into timeless images of terror and damnation”
(1993:147). The gothic might offer useful meta-
phors for depicting the historical event of slavery,
but its narrative construction could also empty
slavery of history by turning it into a gothic trope.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s preface to Dred (1856)
articulates how easily literary discourse could
fictionalize the historical reality of slavery.
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Explaining why she has chosen as a subject “the
scenes and incidents of the slaveholding states,”
Stowe writes:
in a merely artistic point of view, there is no
ground, ancient or modern, whose vivid lights,
gloomy shadows and grotesque groupings, afford
to the novelist so wide a scope for the exercise of
his powers. In the near vicinity of modern civiliza-
tion of the most matter-of-fact kind, exist institu-
tions which carry us back to the twilight of the
feudal ages, with all their exciting possibilities of
incident.
(29)
Stowe locates slavery as a feudal institution,
displaced in time and space and hence offering
the romance writer wider scope for her fictional
powers. For Stowe, who can see it from a merely
artistic point of view, slavery is already a fictional-
ized scene, full of “exciting possibilities of inci-
dent.” Its actuality is once again imaginatively
subsumed by gothic conventions.
The problem of how literary narrative could
displace historical reality was especially troubling
for the author of the slave narrative. While slave
narratives use many fictional forms to structure
their events, the difficulty of negotiating the line
between fact and fiction is especially apparent in
their use of the gothic.9 The slave narrative’s
generic conventions seem to be in direct opposi-
tion to the gothic’s: its documentary form and
adherence to veracity announce a refusal of any
imaginative rendering. Although the slave narra-
tive might not incorporate the gothic’s typical
supernatural elements, it does, however, contain—
even in its factual form—many gothic characteris-
tics. With descriptions of slavery as a feudal
institution, horrifying scenes of torture and
entrapment, lascivious masters and innocent slave
girls, and curses on many generations, the slave
narrative reads like a gothic romance with a single,
crucial difference: the scenery is not staged but
real. The slave narrative’s representations have
historical referents that embody horror; however,
though recording a horror beyond the pale of
most gothic romances, the slave narrative could
be read within the gothic’s fictional conventions.
As Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner stated
of slave narratives, “Romance has no stories of
more thrilling interest than theirs” (qtd. in The
Liberator [October 22, 1852], 169). Or, as Angelina
Grimké wrote in a letter to Theodore Weld in
1838, “Many and many a tale of romantic horror
can the slaves tell” (Barnes and Dumond 2:523).
The realization that their factual narratives could
read like fiction caused many authors to insist on
the veracity of their tales. In My Bondage and My
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Freedom (1855), Frederick Douglass writes, “The
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
reader is, therefore, assured, with all due prompti-
tude, that his attention is not invited to a work of
ART, but to a work of FACTS—Facts, terrible and
almost incredible, it may be—yet FACTS, neverthe-
less” (3).1 0 In her “authentic narrative describing
the Horrors of slavery,” Harriet Jacobs, for ex-
ample, feels compelled to assure her readers that
her narrative is not fiction: “I am aware that some
of my adventures may seem incredible,” she
writes, “but they are, nevertheless, strictly true”
(1). 1 1 Jacobs’s opening disclaimer marks the
complex relationship between the romance and
the real in her text. Paradoxically, the horrifying
facts seem, as Lydia Maria Child states, “more
romantic than fiction” (3); overflowing the bound-
aries of the real, Jacobs’s factual narrative can read
like a gothic fiction. It is important to note the
slave narrative’s double bind: the difficulty of
representing a gothic history through gothic
conventions without collapsing the distinctions
between fact and fiction, event and effect. The
slave narrative must rewrite the conventions of
gothic fiction for its own factual ends.
Frederick Douglass’s gothic scene of slavery in
his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845),
Aunt Hester’s whipping, is one example of this
rewriting. Placed at the end of the Narrative’s first
chapter, the gothic scene serves as both the
reader’s and Douglass’s entrance through the
“blood-stained gate” of slavery (51). Douglass
gives northern antebellum readers a familiar
scene: the southern gothic spectacle of slavery.1 2
With its gothic villain, the slavemaster, and its in-
nocent maiden, his Aunt Hester, who “stood fair
for his infernal purpose,” the scene plays up but
also resists its gothic effects (52). It offers the
reader the villain and the maiden but transposes
their conventional associations: the black villain
is white and the virginal, innocent maiden is a
black slave. As the viewer of, rather than a partici-
pant in, this infernal scene, Douglass signifies
against white narratives of gothic spectatorship.
Framing the scene with his response to it, Dou-
glass both plays to northern readers’ sympathy
and critiques their voyeurism. Situated in Dou-
glass’s position as witness to this scene of brutal-
ity, the reader is asked to identify with Douglass’s
horror and against the iron-hearted slavemaster.
Douglass hopes that the scene will strike the
reader with the same “awful force” as it struck him
(51). By drawing a parallel between the way the
scene “strikes” the viewer and the blows Aunt Hes-
ter experiences from the slavemaster, the narrative
suggests the power of the gothic scene to relay the
183
 experience of horror. However, in identifying the
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
viewer with the victim and in depicting the viewer
as a passive and safely distant observer (the young
Douglass hiding in the closet), the scene also
reveals how the gothic spectacle can enable
identification without initiating a corresponding
action. The scene exposes not only the victimiza-
tion inherent in the white reader’s relationship to
slavery but also the voyeurism. Like the young
boy peeping out of the closet to witness the
sexualized spectacle of slavery, the white reader is
both repulsed and fascinated with its horrors. In
this way, Douglass also identifies the viewer with
the slavemaster and his “great pleasure” (51). The
scene, then, offers a typical gothic scenario only
to critique the white reader’s role in viewing it.
The scene further exposes the slave narrative’s
use and revision of the gothic by employing the
gothic to rematerialize history while resisting its
possible dematerializing effects. Following a
general description of his Aunt Hester’s whip-
pings, Douglass pauses to reflect upon the scene
before he describes the first time he witnessed this
event: “I was quite a child, but I well remember it.
I never shall forget it whilst I remember any
thing. . . . It was the blood-stained gate, the
entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I
was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle.
I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with
which I beheld it” (51). Here, Douglass captures
the difficulty of speaking the unspeakable: slavery
is at once unforgettable and indescribable. The
performative quality of Douglass’s simultaneous
insistence that he cannot capture his response to
the scene and attempts to do so shows that the
gothic provides tropes by which the unspoken can
be represented, if not fully spoken. In its pseudo-
documentary and excessively mediated form (a
manuscript that has been translated and passed to
the narrator through a number of sources), the
gothic claims historical veracity even as it points
to the limits of historical representation. Similarly,
Douglass recounts the scene of Aunt Hester’s
whipping while insisting that the scene of slavery
is ultimately unrepresentable. Douglass repeats it
two times, first as a general occurrence and then
as a particular event, the first time he witnessed it.
His twice-told tale, however, like his performative
gesture, signals the unrepresentability of the
scene: its excessiveness implies that it cannot be
fully captured. By insisting on the gothic’s resis-
tance to representation, Douglass negotiates the
uneasy relationship between his gothic tale and
his gothic history: he both represents his history
and insists that it defies narrative reconstruction.
184 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Douglass’s resistance to turning the event of
slavery into a narrative effect is also evident in the
way he represents Aunt Hester’s whipping. The
focus in the scene is as much on the “it,” the
spectacle of the whipping, as on the “I,” the nar-
rator who responds to it. Douglass’s insistence that
he cannot commit his feelings to paper is as much
an articulation of slavery’s unrepresentability as a
refusal to focus more on the response to the event
than on the event itself. Douglass uses the gothic
to translate Aunt Hester’s whippings into a symbol
of slavery—“a terrible spectacle”—but he also
refuses to abstract the horror by turning it into a
timeless trope of terror. Not only does he general-
ize his account of the whipping between two ver-
sions, but he also goes to great lengths in the
second recounting to particularize the scene, giv-
ing the context of the whipping and describing it
in a matter-of-fact tone. The frame, more than the
narrative, sensationalizes the scene. This tension
between the depiction of the actual event and the
gothicized effect of its narrative frame is also
evident in Douglass’s first description: “I have
often been awakened at the dawn of day by the
most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of
mine, whom he [the slavemaster] used to tie up to
a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was
literally covered with blood” (51). In this state-
ment, Douglass deploys the gothic with a twist:
instead of waking from the nightmare, he wakes to
it. Unveiling reality as the nightmare and empha-
sizing that Aunt Hester is “literally” covered with
blood, Douglass rewrites the gothic as actual hor-
ror instead of stage effect. Moreover, by describing
the event as occurring in the continuous
present—“I have often been awakened”—he re-
experiences the scene in the act of reimagining it,
making the event hauntingly present. When he
ends, “I had therefore been, until now, out of the
way of the bloody scenes that often occurred on
the plantation,” he suggests that the reader, like
himself, is awake to the nightmare of slavery: the
gothic effect does not dematerialize the event but
makes it ever-present (52, emphasis added). By
redeploying the gothic, Douglass is able to materi-
alize the scene and resist its representation as mere
effect.
Douglass’s use of the gothic, then, acknowl-
edges that the scene of slavery is conventionally
constructed but rewrites those conventions to his
own ends. By making the reader enter his narra-
tive of slavery through the conventions of the
gothic, Douglass discloses how the spectacle of
slavery is mediated and structured generically. The
event is accessible only as a narrated scene,
1constructed for the viewer.1 3 However, in using
gothic conventions, Douglass marks the differ-
ences as well as the similarities between gothic
narrative and gothic history. Gothic conventions
might usefully reproduce the scene of slavery, but
they also might dematerialize it. By allying the
gothic with reality and yet insisting that its effects
cannot fully capture the event, Douglass utilizes
the gothic’s narrative power to represent slavery
and to create a strong effect while insisting on the
difference between event and effect. Like other
African-American authors who employ the gothic
mode, Douglass must negotiate between its power
and its danger.
Douglass’s redeployment of the gothic exposes
it as a mode intimately connected to history.1 4
The gothic’s typical association with the “unreal”
and the sensational, however, has created a
resistance to examining African-American narra-
tives in relation to the gothic. Alice Walker, for
instance, dislikes the categorization of her work as
gothic since it “conjures up the supernatural” and
since she “feels what she writes has ‘something to
do with real life’” (263). Similarly, Toni Morrison
is reluctant to have her writing described as
gothic. She dislikes the term black magic used in
conjunction with her work since the “implication
[is] that there [is] no intelligence there” (C. Davis
145).1 5 The gothic’s apparent lack of connection
to reality and intellectual purpose has made it
troubling to use in conjunction with African-
American writers.1 6 However, instead of accepting
traditional readings of the gothic as unrealistic
and frivolous, thereby excluding African-American
narratives from this genre, we should use the
African-American gothic to revise our understand-
ing of the gothic as an historical mode. Re-viewing
the gothic through the lens of African-American
transpositions and recognizing that the gothic
itself is a dynamic and contradictory mode whose
tropes and conventions can be used for a variety
of ends makes visible the American gothic’s
relationship to history.
In order to examine how the African-American
gothic revises standard notions of the American
gothic tradition, I now examine the dialogue that
occurs between two texts: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Harriet Jacobs’s Inci-
dents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). The relation-
ship of influence and resistance between these
texts reveals how the African-American gothic is
working within and against a broader American
gothic tradition. My aim is not to subsume
African-American narratives under some reified
concept of the American tradition, but rather to
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show how the African-American gothic highlights
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
the historicity of the American gothic.1 7
Loopholes of Influence: Harriet Beecher
Stowe and Harriet Jacobs
Signifyin(g) functions as a metaphor for formal
revision, or intertextuality, within the Afro-
American literary tradition.
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl exemplifies
the slave narrative’s connection to the gothic
romance through its use of fictional conventions.
As late as the 1970s, Incidents’s authenticity
remained in doubt because of its perceived similar-
ity to the novel of seduction. In The Slave Com-
munity, for instance, John Blassingame discusses
Incidents as a fictional story, arguing that Jacobs’s
tale was too melodramatic to be considered an
authentic slave narrative. The debate over whether
Incidents was fact or fiction was not fully resolved
until Jean Fagan Yellin verified the narrative’s
authenticity in 1981.1 8 However, it is precisely Ja-
cobs’s use of fictional tropes to represent authentic
fact that fueled this confusion. On the one hand
she claims, “Reader, be assured this narrative is no
fiction”; on the other hand, in the act of claiming
her narrative’s authenticity she uses a trope from
the novel (1). While Incidents’s relationship to the
conventions of the sentimental novel has been
extensively explored, it has rarely been discussed
in terms of the gothic.1 9 Whether this is because
the gothic continues to be viewed as opposed to
the realist conventions of the slave narrative or
because the sentimental has become canonized as
the nineteenth-century woman’s genre is hard to
say; however, Jacobs’s refashioning of the gothic
mode calls for further examination.
The history of Jacobs’s relationship to Harriet
Beecher Stowe foregrounds Incidents’s connection
to the conventions of the gothic. Instead of writ-
ing her own story, Jacobs initially planned to
dictate her narrative to Stowe, who wanted to use
it for her Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853). Outraged
by Stowe’s subsequent treatment of her and her
daughter, Jacobs decided to write her story herself,
claiming that “it needed no romance” (Yellin
1985:266).2 0 Despite Jacobs’s claim, her story was
the perfect factual source for Stowe’s gothic
romance. Jacobs’s factual account of her seven-
year imprisonment in her grandmother’s garret,
written almost a decade after Key, echoes Stowe’s
fictional tale about Cassy haunting Legree’s attic.
This uncanny connection—fact mirroring fic-
tion—exemplifies the complex intersection be-
tween the romance and the real in both texts. If
185
 Stowe desired Jacobs’s factual history to authenti-
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
cate her fictional tale, Jacobs also revised Stowe’s
fictional story in her own factual account. Since
Jacobs refers in her penultimate chapter to Stowe’s
treatment of the Fugitive Slave Law in Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, it is evident that Jacobs was familiar with
Stowe’s novel (194). Moreover, Jacobs’s borrowing
of Cassy’s “loophole in the garret” to name her
own “loophole of retreat” suggests connections
between the two stories that have yet to be fully
explored (Stowe 597; Jacobs 114). 2 1 In both
instances, the gothic is the fictional mode by
which the factual horrors of slavery can be repre-
sented. However, understanding how Jacobs
revises Stowe’s loophole along with other gothic
conventions makes apparent the power and the
limitations of the gothic mode for African-
American authors.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a
fiction that claims the status of fact. Her subtitle
to The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin argues that her
fictional effects are grounded in actual events:
“Presenting the Original Facts and Documents
Upon Which the Story is Founded. Together with
Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of
the Work.” Moreover, Stowe claims that the novel
“more, perhaps, than any other work of fiction
that ever was written, has been a collection and
arrangement of real incidents, of actions really
performed, of words and expressions really ut-
tered, grouped together with reference to a general
result” (1). However, in defending Uncle Tom’s
Cabin as a true story, Stowe reveals a complicated
relationship between fictional effect and factual
event. Events may authenticate her effects, but
they remain subordinate. Uncle Tom’s Cabin
achieves its realist status primarily through its
impression on the reader and only secondarily
through its factual authentication. Stowe writes,
“the book had a purpose entirely transcending
the artistic one, and accordingly encounters at the
hands of the public demands not usually made
on fictitious works. It is treated as a reality—sifted,
tried and tested, as a reality; and therefore as a
reality it may be proper that it should be de-
fended” (1). Once treated as reality, the novel can
then be defended as such. The narrative effect not
only claims the status of event but supersedes it.
However, even as Stowe subsumes fact into fic-
tion, she recognizes the difference between the
two:
The writer acknowledges that the book is a very
inadequate representation of slavery; and it is so,
necessarily, for this reason—that slavery, in some
of its workings, is too dreadful for the purposes of
art. A work which should represent it strictly as it
186
is would be a work which could not be read; and
all works which ever mean to give pleasure must
draw a veil somewhere, or they cannot succeed.
(Key, I)
The scene of slavery exceeds the representa-
tion of art. By passing over what is too dreadful,
fiction makes the unreadable readable, paradoxi-
cally unveiling slavery yet concealing its worst
aspects. It is precisely this paradox—the need for
narrative to represent historical reality yet the
danger that fiction will be equated with fact—that
troubles Jacobs’s narrative. Stowe, who has differ-
ent goals, negotiates this paradox more easily. For
her, narrative effects can both be grounded in real-
ity and evade it.
Stowe’s use of the gothic in Uncle Tom’s Cabin
exemplifies this complicated relationship between
the event of slavery and its narrative effects. Stowe
employs the gothic to represent the southern
spectacle of slavery.2 2 In the last third of the novel,
as Tom travels down the blood-red river to Leg-
ree’s decaying mansion in a chapter titled “The
Middle Passage,” the gothic intrudes into the
sentimental in order to register the full horror of
slavery: Legree’s ruined plantation unveils what
lies just behind the seemingly enlightened edifice
of St. Clare’s home. On another level, Stowe’s
description shows just how easily slavery is
transcribed into gothic terms. Hell and the Inqui-
sition serve as apt metaphors for the horror
chamber of slavery where one can be “burned
alive . . . scalded, cut into inch-pieces, set up for
the dogs to tear, or hung up and whipped to
death” (512). Indeed, as Cassy tells Tom, slavery’s
everyday occurrences make a fine gothic tale: “I
could make any one’s hair rise, and their teeth
chatter, if I should only tell what I’ve seen and
been knowing to, here” (512). This section of the
novel shows how the event of slavery is structured
in gothic terms, and also demonstrates how gothic
stories are produced by history. The scene of actual
terror—a female slave imprisoned in the garret
and beaten to death—is turned into a ghost story
that then terrifies Legree: “it was said that oaths
and cursings, and the sound of violent blows, used
to ring through that old garret, and mingle with
wailings and groans of despair” (565). As the
transformation of event into legend makes clear,
gothic devices terrify because of their relation to
actuality. Legree’s superstition is not illusory; his
fright is grounded in reality.
The inclusion of Cassy’s gothic tale within the
novel’s already gothicized plot shows the gothic
operating on yet another level: it allows the
objects of torture and terror to haunt back. In
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order to escape the horrors of Legree’s house,
Cassy directs her own ghost story, reviving the
legend of the garret to enable her escape. Adding
some special effects—she inserts the neck of an
old bottle into the garret window to ensure the
proper shrieks, leaves ghost stories around for Leg-
ree to read, and finally turns herself into a ghost
with the requisite white sheet—Cassy uses the
gothic’s terror effects to free herself from the
imprisoning plot of slavery. The author of her own
“Authentic Ghost Story,” as Stowe’s chapter head-
ing informs us, Cassy appropriates the place of
terror and imprisonment, the “weird and ghostly”
garret—and turns it into a safe haven and the site
of her liberation (564). As the haunter, Cassy may
first roam the house freely and then escape it
altogether. The gothic serves as a means of resis-
tance in Cassy’s hands: by turning the horror of
her own history into the source of her power,
Cassy finds liberation in the very terror that has
imprisoned her.
However, although Cassy’s ghost story shows
that gothic effects are grounded in historical
events, Stowe’s narrative tends to dematerialize
those effects. Not only does her gothic tale demon-
ize Cassy, turning her into a stock character, partly
insane, with a supernatural laugh, but it also
reminds the reader that the horror is not true,
only a play. “At the time when all was matured
for action,” the narrator interrupts, “our readers
may, perhaps, like to look behind the scenes, and
see the final coup d’etat” (571). By introducing
Cassy’s machinations with this address to the
reader, the narrative unveils itself as a fiction. We
are not asked to identify with Legree and read
Cassy’s effects as true; rather, we are shown behind
the scenes to see the effect as merely that—an ef-
fect. Instead of being frightened by the ghost, we
are made privy to Cassy’s plan to “play ghost for
them” (574). Whereas Legree is terrified by Cassy’s
effects, the reader is amused. By parodying the
gothic, Stowe’s narrative undercuts its relation to
actual incidents: “Authorities were somewhat
divided,” Stowe writes at the beginning of chapter
XLII, “as to the outward form of the spirit, owing
to a custom quite prevalent among negroes,—and,
for aught we know, among whites, too,—of invari-
ably shutting the eyes, and covering up heads
under blankets, petticoats, or whatever else might
come in use for a shelter, on these occasions”
(594). Here, Stowe spoofs the gothic to play the
scene for laughs rather than fear. Blacks, and
perhaps whites, are made to appear stupidly
superstitious, a position the reader is implicitly
instructed to avoid. Asked not to take the white
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sheet too seriously, the reader is exempted from
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
the horrors of history. Cassy’s effects have power
over Legree, who sees them as true, but not over
the reader, who is reminded that they are a fic-
tion.
Stowe’s deployment of the gothic in Uncle
Tom’s Cabin demonstrates how the gothic can
resurrect or dematerialize history by turning it
into a fiction; the gothic might allow the objects
of terror to haunt back, but it also offers its viewer
an avenue of escape. This double-edged nature of
the gothic is precisely what Jacobs negotiates in
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. At the outset of
her narrative, Jacobs articulates the problem of
writing her life story: it is at once incredible and
indescribable.
I am aware that some of my adventures may seem
incredible; but they are, nevertheless, strictly true.
I have not exaggerated the wrongs inflicted by
Slavery; on the contrary, my descriptions fall far
short of the facts. I have concealed the names of
places, and given persons fictitious names. I had
no motive for secrecy on my own account, but I
deemed it kind and considerate towards others to
pursue this course.
(1)
This opening address to the reader signals the
intricate connections between fact and fiction in
Jacobs’s narrative. The facts of Jacobs’s history are
unspeakable, but once represented, even partially,
they resemble fiction. Paradoxically, her narrative
of slavery appears to be an effect even as it falls
short of capturing slavery’s grim reality. Caught
between exaggerated effect and unspeakable fact,
Jacobs’s narrative must negotiate the two poles
without collapsing them; her history must not be
subsumed by the fictional conventions she uses to
represent it. The canny revelation that she con-
cealed the true names of places and people in her
narrative suggests the narrative’s dual function:
like the author’s pseudonym, Linda Brent, her nar-
rative veils her history while appearing to unveil
it. By highlighting her narrative’s fictionality and
inadequacy as well as its truth, Jacobs signals the
way it both reveals and conceals her unspeakable
history.2 3
Lydia Maria Child seemingly disregards the
difficulty of Jacobs’s narrative position when she
writes: “This peculiar phase of Slavery has gener-
ally been kept veiled; but the public ought to be
made acquainted with its monstrous features, and
I willingly take the responsibility of presenting
them with the veil withdrawn. I do this for the
sake of my sisters in bondage, who are suffering
wrongs so foul, that our ears are too delicate to
listen to them” (4). Child assumes not only that
187
 withdrawing the veil is her responsibility but also
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
that it is simple, however indelicate. Yet her
metaphor of slavery as a monster reveals the veil
to be multilayered. Beneath it is another veil: a
metaphor of slavery rather than slavery itself.
Even uncovered, the event is transcribed as an-
other effect. In arguing that slavery’s wrongs are
too foul for listeners’ delicate ears, Child echoes
Stowe’s sentiments that slavery in all its dreadful-
ness is unreadable, or in this case unhearable.
Child’s paradoxical point—that slavery’s horrors
must be unveiled, yet once unveiled they might
be too foul to be heard—suggests the difficult
space within which Jacobs had to negotiate her
narrative.
Incidents, then, has to perform a play of veils.
Jacobs’s manipulation of the gothic’s conventions
is central to this performance. Like Stowe and
Douglass, Jacobs understands and exploits the
gothic’s conventionalized relationship to the
scene of slavery in the antebellum period; she
gothicizes slavery from the outset of her narrative
by describing it as a “deep, and dark, and foul . . .
pit of abominations” peopled by “fiends who bear
the shape of men” (2, 27). However, like Douglass,
she also resists the gothic’s romantic effects. In
chapter 9, “Sketches of Neighboring Slavehold-
ers,” Jacobs recounts a series of horrifying punish-
ments to reveal the “abominations of slavery”:
slaves are bludgeoned, flogged, and burned to
death (52). Like Stowe, she suggests how these
actual events produce gothic narratives. The slave-
master’s fear of retribution prompts his belief in
ghosts: “Murder was so common on his planta-
tion that he feared to be alone after nightfall,” she
says of Mr. Litch. “He might have believed in
ghosts” (47). However, Jacobs insists, unlike Stowe,
that the gothic’s effects are real: the bloodhounds
“literally tore the flesh from his bones,” she states
of one slave (47). The compilation of narratives in
this chapter, which resembles the narrative tech-
niques of antislavery tracts like Theodore Weld’s
American Slavery as It Is, produces a factual basis
for these incredible horrors. Piling narrative upon
narrative, Jacobs marshals a multitude of cases as
evidence of slavery’s real terrors, proving the
punishments to be a “general rule” rather than an
exaggerated exception (50). Repetition rather than
progression marks her narrative mode in this
chapter, and indeed, her entire narrative. For
instance, in comparing her easy fate in slavery to
that of others, she writes:
I was never cruelly over-worked; I was never lacer-
ated with the whip from head to foot; I was never
so beaten and bruised that I could not turn from
one side to the other; I never had my heel-strings
188
cut to prevent my running away; I was never
chained to a log and forced to drag it about, while
I toiled in the fields from morning till night; I was
never branded with hot iron, or torn by blood-
hounds.
(115)
The parallel construction of her sentences as
well as the proliferation of examples marks the
way repetition functions to substantiate a single
fact: slavery’s torture.
However, Jacobs’s use of repetition also points
to the inadequacy of narrative in reconstructing
reality. No matter how many examples she re-
counts, she says, “I could tell of more slaveholders
as cruel as those I have described” (49). Moreover,
at the end of her list of examples Jacobs writes,
“No pen can give an adequate description of the
all-pervading corruption produced by slavery”
(51). Claiming the factual nature of slavery’s
gothic horror even as she argues that an excess of
examples still falls short of the fact, Jacobs at once
narratively constructs the gothic event as actual
and insists that it exceeds such representation.
The narrative excess that the gothic event pro-
duces (in this case, the repetition) allows it to
remain uncontained. While Child edits the chap-
ter in order to contain its horrors and shield its
reader—“I put the savage cruelties into one chap-
ter, entitled ‘Neighboring Planters,’ in order that
those who shrink from ‘supping upon horrors’
might omit them, without interrupting the thread
of the story” (qtd. in Yellin 1987:xxii)—Jacobs
refuses to quarantine the gothic to this chapter or
to the South. Her use of repetition not only
weaves this thread of her story throughout her
narrative but also refuses her reader any escape
from history’s horrors. Stowe allows readers to
separate themselves from the frightening effects
of the gothic by showing them behind the scenes,
but Jacobs blocks the avenues of escape for her
northern reader. From the title-page epigraph
indicting the North for lack of effort in overthrow-
ing slavery and her imaginative projection of the
northern reader as a negro trader at the end of
chapter 9, to her conditional freedom at the end
of the narrative, Jacobs implicates the North in
the horrors that she presents and curtails her read-
ers’ ability to read her history as a romantic tale.
Although Jacobs licenses her reader to view
her narrative within certain gothic conventions—
she recounts a typical female gothic plot when
she portrays herself as an innocent maiden pur-
sued by a lascivious villain, the “vile monster”
Doctor Flint (27)—she also rewrites them, espe-
cially the gothic’s demonization and victimiza-
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tion of blacks.2 4 She might use Dr. Flint’s persecu-
tions to emphasize her extreme vulnerability, but
she also refuses to be imprisoned in the role of
victim: “My master met me at every turn, remind-
ing me that I belonged to him, and swearing by
heaven and earth that he would compel me to
submit to him. If I went out for a breath of fresh
air, after a day of unwearied toil, his footsteps
dogged me. If I knelt by my mother’s grave, his
dark shadow fell on me even there” (28). By locat-
ing the gothic’s evil blackness in Dr. Flint’s dark
shadow, Jacobs both emphasizes her persecution
and reverses the gothic’s usual demonization: the
master, not the black slave, is the source of horror
and dread. Unlike Stowe’s Cassy, who embodies
the demons of slavery—she tells Legree, “I’ve got
the devil in me” (525)—Jacobs refuses to become
a projection of the slavemaster’s villainy. By
presenting herself as the innocent maiden at-
tempting to flee the corruptions of slavery, Jacobs
both gains the sympathy of her reader and resists
being demonized.
While Jacobs exploits her position as the
victim of a gothic plot, she also insists on her abil-
ity to haunt back. She portrays herself as both the
victim of Dr. Flint’s deceptions and his competitor
in cunning: “Being surrounded by mysteries,
deceptions, and dangers,” Jacobs writes, slaves
“early learn to be suspicious and watchful, and
prematurely cautious and cunning” (155). Jacobs
might represent herself as the unsuspecting
maiden who, when Dr. Flint begins to people her
“young mind with unclean images,” lets his signs
“pass, as if [she] did not understand what he
meant,” but she is actually out-manipulating him
(27, 31). Refusing to react to his words, she evades
the actual terror in which those verbal deceptions
are meant to result—rape. By cloaking her strong
reading of events as a seeming nonreading, Jacobs
plays both helpless heroine and active combat-
ant.2 5
By emphasizing her role as the victim of
slavery’s imprisoning gothic plot even as she
manipulates that plot, Jacobs appeals to and resists
her readers’ conventional view of the slave as
victim of monstrous evils. For instance, when she
describes Dr. Flint’s plan to give her a home of her
own and “make a lady” of her, she rewrites his
sentimental story as a gothic plot: she “shudders”
as she listens to his plan, realizing that the
“secluded place” would imprison her in a “dreaded
fate,” a “living death” (53). By revealing the gothic
terror behind Dr. Flint’s sentimental smoke screen,
Jacobs justifies her sexual fall. Her gothic scene
not only underscores her role as helpless victim
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but also sets the stage for her resistance: “I was
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
determined that the master . . . should not . . .
succeed at last in trampling his victim under his
feet. I would do any thing, every thing, for the
sake of defeating him,” she writes (53). As the in-
nocent maiden unwillingly initiated into evil, the
victim “struggling alone in the powerful grasp of
the demon Slavery,” Jacobs mounts her defense
(54). If the gothic monster has her in his grasp,
then her manipulations of slavery’s evil plots are
justified. Asking the reader to pity her and pardon
her for taking Mr. Sands as a lover, she argues that
she saw no other “way of escaping the doom [she]
so much dreaded” (55).
Jacobs’s ultimate escape plan highlights her
revision of and resistance to the gothic’s conven-
tions. Over the “living death” that awaits her in
Dr. Flint’s secluded cottage, she chooses her own
place of live burial when she imprisons herself in
her grandmother’s garret (53). She describes her
garret in gothic terms: it is a “dungeon,” a torture
chamber, a prison, a grave (127). Indeed, her
“dismal hole” resembles the “deep, and dark, and
foul” pit of slavery (113, 2). Jacobs’s description
symbolizes slavery’s extreme entrapment: “The
garret was only nine feet long and seven wide.
The highest part was three feet high, and sloped
down abruptly to the loose board floor. There was
no admission for either light or air” (114). Jacobs’s
refusal to sensationalize her garret—she describes
it in a factual tone—reflects her general resistance
to the gothic’s dematerializing effects. She might
exploit gothic metaphors (for instance, she de-
scribes herself as a “poor captive in her dungeon”
[133]), but she insists that they be taken as truth.
Her address to the reader about her seven
years of imprisonment in the garret emphasizes
the truthfulness of her tale:
I hardly expect that the reader will credit me,
when I affirm that I lived in that little dismal hole,
almost deprived of light and air, and with no space
to move my limbs, for nearly seven years. But it is
a fact; and to me a sad one, even now; for my
body still suffers from the effects of that long
imprisonment, to say nothing of my soul. Mem-
bers of my family, now living in New York and
Boston, can testify to the truth of what I say.
(148)
The incredibleness of her revelation makes her
assume her reader’s disbelief, so Jacobs authenti-
cates her description of the extreme physical and
psychological conditions of her imprisonment
with the continued effects on her body and soul,
to which her family can bear witness. By present-
ing herself and her family as factual evidence, Ja-
cobs asserts her own materiality: she asks the
189
 reader to credit her story by crediting her as a
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
person rather than as a character. Moreover, in
insisting that her staged death is not a perfor-
mance from which she can walk away unscathed,
Jacobs points to the costs of her conjuring. Cassy
says to Tom, “I know no way but through the
grave,” but Jacobs signifies against Stowe by
actualizing that escape (562).
Thus, Jacobs refuses to dematerialize the
gothic event of slavery. Unlike Cassy, who can
walk away from slavery dressed in a white sheet,
Jacobs reminds the reader of the physical costs of
her disappearing act. After her first live burial
under the floorboards, she remarks, “the fright I
had undergone, the constrained posture, and the
dampness of the ground, made me ill for several
days” (110); later, in her garret, she describes be-
ing tortured by dripping turpentine, excessive
temperatures, and insects until her body becomes
so crippled that it makes escape impossible. Jacobs
also argues that the gothic’s ghostly effects are the
result of actual events. When she reappears in the
realm of the living, her friend Fanny declares,
“Linda, can this be you? or is it your ghost?” (156).
Figured as a specter returned from the dead, she
resembles a gothic effect. However, as Jacobs’s
earlier discussion of her brother’s figure suggests, a
ghostly appearance is one of the physical effects
of slavery: “long confinement had made his face
too pale, his form too thin”; he looks “like a
ghost” (23, 24). In Fanny and Brent’s exchange of
their tales of terror and suffering, Jacobs under-
scores the events behind all gothic effects. When
her son imagines her as the victim in a gothic
story, “O mother! you ain’t dead, are you? They
didn’t cut off your head at the plantation, did
they,” Jacobs demonstrates how the supernatural
is based in institutionalized threats of power (88).
Benny has not made up this terrifying story but
has learned it from his master’s threats: Dr. Flint
says to him, “Get out of the way, you little
damned rascal! If you don’t, I’ll cut off your head”
(116).
Jacobs refuses to spoof the gothic or under-
mine the reality behind its effects, and thus she
mounts an implicit critique of Stowe’s gothic
episode. Her garret stands in marked contrast to
Cassy’s “great, desolate space” (564). Cassy’s attic
serves as a new home, not a prison (she can roam
the house at night and walk around the attic dur-
ing the day, and she also reclaims the role of “true
womanhood” there, becoming mother to Emme-
line and making a home for them), but Jacobs’s
garret is both a safe haven and a grave. Cassy is in
“no danger” and can make any noise that she
190 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
pleases since “it will only add to the effect,” but
Jacobs states that she had to remain still and quiet
for fear of being caught (576). Jacobs might depict
herself as using her gothic location to combat
slavery’s terrors—with “spying eyes and ventrilo-
quist voice” she is able to out-manipulate Dr. Flint
by disappearing and by projecting herself, through
her letter-writing, up North—but she constantly
reminds the reader what this costs her (Andrews
1986:259). She remains the object of terror and
torture even as she haunts back.
Jacobs’s refusal to exploit Stowe’s story overtly
in this scene emphasizes her resistance to the
gothic’s fictionalizing conventions. Jacobs authen-
ticates her own incredible imprisonment with a
narrative of horrifying fact rather than a fictional
tale. Her description of her garret directly echoes
her previous tale of a runaway slave who is
punished by being whipped and then screwed
into a cotton gin: “He was then put into the cot-
ton gin, which was screwed down, only allowing
him room to turn on his side when he could not
lie on his back. . . . When the press was un-
screwed, the dead body was found partly eaten by
rats and vermin” (49). The cotton gin is like Ja-
cobs’s dark hole, where she can only sleep on one
side and has to endure rats and mice running over
her bed; both the gin and Jacobs’s grave represent
the torture chamber of slavery.2 6 Indeed, Jacobs’s
use of repetition places her garret in a long line of
imprisoning places—the cotton gin, the attic
storeroom in her friend’s house, the shallow grave
under the floorboards in her friend’s kitchen, the
Snaky Swamp—enabling her to verify and general-
ize her scene of suffering. The garret is not an
exceptional example of slavery’s horror but its
typical representative. As Deborah Garfield argues,
instead of letting Stowe narrow Jacobs’s experi-
ence to a single romantic event in Key, Jacobs
insists on a broader context for the gothic horrors
of slavery (284).
Just as Jacobs refuses to restrict the gothic hor-
rors of slavery to a single event or a single chapter
(as Child would do), so too does she argue that
they exceed the borders of the South. Through
repetition, Jacobs demonstrates that her life in the
North replicates her imprisonment and persecu-
tion in the gothic South.2 7 Instead of being a place
of freedom, the North “aped the customs of
slavery” (163).2 8 She describes it as a place of re-
imprisonment and persecution: not only is she
pursued by her “Old Enemy Again” but she
portrays herself as entrapped in another “reign of
terror,” this time in the form of the Fugitive Slave
Law (191). Upon arriving in the North, she claims
that she barely has time to find a home before Dr.
Flint comes looking for her: “Again I was to be
torn from a comfortable home, and all my plans
for the welfare of my children were to be frustrated
by that demon Slavery!” she exclaims (180).
Describing herself as constantly moving (she flees
her home four times to evade her persecutors) and
ever fearful (she never goes out “without trepida-
tion” since Mr. Dodge, Dr. Flint’s surrogate,
“might at that moment be waiting to pounce
upon [her] if [she] ventured out of doors” [195,
196]), Jacobs depicts herself in a reactive position.
No matter how many “double veils” and assumed
names she takes on, she can never disappear or
find a safe space (181). Dr. Flint’s renewed power
over her is marked as so omnipotent that it not
only extends upward from the South but also from
beyond the grave. Even after he dies, Jacobs is not
free from his curse, for his family, now destitute,
is even more eager to regain its “property.” Jacobs,
then, argues that the daylight world of the North
resembles the nightmare world of the South.
Portraying herself as a victim of the terrors of
the North, Jacobs exposes the North’s complicity
in the South’s gothic plots. The North obeys
southern laws when it buys people their freedom
and returns runaways: “when victims make their
escape from this wild beast of Slavery, northerners
consent to act the part of bloodhounds, and hunt
the poor fugitive back into his den” (35-36).
Moreover, she specifically indicts northern readers
for their voyeuristic pleasure in and appropriation
of the slave’s suffering. Jacobs might end the book
by presenting a portrait of the sympathetic north-
ern reader in the form of Mrs. Bruce, but she
begins the book by critiquing the voyeuristic
reader in the person of Mrs. Flint, whose “nerves
were so strong, that she could sit in her easy chair
and see a woman whipped, till the blood trickled
from every stroke of the lash” (12). Her opening
also insists that reading about gothic horror is dif-
ferent from experiencing it: “Only by experience
can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul
is that pit of abominations,” she states (2). When
at the end of her narrative Jacobs argues that she
is only as free from “the power of slaveholders as
are the white people of the north,” which is “not
saying a great deal,” she places the northern reader
in the position of southern terrorist or imprisoned
victim and allows no loophole out of the horrors
of the nation’s history (201). Returning to New
York from England, she writes that “from the
distance spectres seemed to rise up on the shores
of the United States. It is a sad feeling to be afraid
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of one’s native country” (186). For Jacobs, the
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
gothic shadows of slavery encompass the entire
nation.
Although Jacobs continues to be haunted by
her “mournful past” in the North, she is able to
haunt back by writing her narrative and by speak-
ing the unspeakable about slavery (161). Jacobs
describes it as the gothic horror that must be
unveiled: “the secrets of slavery are concealed like
those of the Inquisition” (35). Throughout her
narrative, Jacobs makes evident how a veil of
silence supports slavery: it serves as the slavemas-
ter’s single most important weapon in the battle
of appearances. Jacobs emphasizes this point in
chapter 9, “Sketches of Neighboring Slavehold-
ers.” The litany of terror and torture she recites
here depends on the fact that “Nothing was said”
(47); the cruelties pass “without comment” (46).
Silence fuels and secures slavery’s reign of terror.
Against the master’s powerful prohibition, Ja-
cobs insists on speaking the unspeakable. From
early on, she realizes the power of exposure.2 9
Even as a young girl, she understands that Dr.
Flint’s hesitancy in whipping her stems from a
fear that “the application of the lash might have
led to remarks that would have exposed him” (35).
Instead of exposing the marks on her flesh, as
many ex-slaves did, Jacobs reveals the horrors of
slavery through her pen: “Rise up, ye women that
are at ease!” the title page announces, “Hear my
voice, ye careless daughters! Give ear unto my
speech.” In doing this, she reverses the position of
terror. She is recording a litany of real-life hor-
rors—from scalding drops of fat falling on bare
skin and bloodhounds tearing the flesh from
runaways, to whipping posts surrounded by pools
of blood and slaves going insane—but in writing
these horrors, she reclaims them for her own
purpose: to haunt back by exposing the difference
between slavery’s appearance and its reality.
This rending of the veil, however, is not easy.
Like most gothic texts, Jacobs’s narrative encodes
the difficulty inherent in speaking the unspeak-
able. Her invocation to speech on her title page is
balanced in both the preface and the appendix of
her text with a desire for silence. Her text begins
with her stating that “it would have been more
pleasant to me to have been silent about my own
history” and ends with Post’s description of Ja-
cobs’ reluctance to tell her story (1). The narrative
frame both exhibits her resistance to exposing her
painful history as a sentimental stance and regis-
ters the very real difficulty of representing such
excessive horror and the pain involved in remem-
bering it.
191
 While the conclusion of Jacobs’s narrative ap-
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
pears to veil the horrors she has spent her narra-
tive revealing in the cloak of sentiment, it remains
haunted by her history: “it has been painful to
me, in many ways, to recall the dreary years I
passed in bondage. I would gladly forget them if I
could. Yet the retrospection is not altogether
without solace; for with those gloomy recollec-
tions come tender memories of my good old
grandmother, like light, fleecy clouds floating over
a dark and troubled sea” (201).3 0 The passage
registers Jacobs’s desire to alleviate the pain of her
horrific history with the healing salve of forgetful-
ness, but it also insists on the futility of this desire.
Haunted by the shadows of her past and the
continued oppression of her present, Jacobs can-
not completely exorcise the demons of slavery;
yet in bearing witness to them she haunts back.
Notes
1. Despite his historicizing of the African-American
gothic, Wright continues to reinforce an ahistorical
reading of Poe. My discussion of The Narrative of Arthur
Gordon Pym, which places race at the center of Poe’s
gothicism, shows how Poe dealt with the racial haunt-
ings of his own culture. Contrary to Wright’s state-
ment, Poe need not be resurrected to be imagined in
terms of race, for its horrors had already invented him.
2. Historical studies such as Trudier Harris’s Exorcising
Blackness, with its accounts of ritualized violence
against African Americans, or Neil McMillen’s Dark
Journey, with its description of “Negro Barbeques,”
reveal the horrors of African-American history. Mc-
Millen recounts a public burning where a crowd of a
thousand watched while whites tortured their black
victims, “chopp[ing] off their fingers and ears, one by
one, goug[ing] their eyes until they ‘hung by a shred
from the socket,’ and pulled ‘big pieces of raw, quiver-
ing flesh’ from their bodies with corkscrews” (234);
Trudier Harris gives similar accounts of lynching and
mob violence. In his introduction to American Slavery
as It Is, Theodore Weld also records a litany of real-life
horrors: “We will prove that the slaves in the United
States are treated with barbarous inhumanity . . . that
they are frequently flogged with terrible severity, have
red pepper rubbed into their lacerated flesh, and hot
brine, spirits of turpentine, & c, poured over the gashes
to increase the torture; that they are often stripped
naked, their backs and limbs cut with knives, bruised
and mangled by scores and hundreds of blows with
the paddle, and terribly torn by the claws of cats,
drawn over them by their tormentors. . . . All these
things and more, and worse, we shall prove” (9). See
Stephen Browne’s “‘Like Gory Spectres’: Representing
Evil in Theodore Weld’s American Slavery as It Is” for
an analysis of the modes of representation Weld uses
to prove these horrors.
3. Indeed, as Edmund Morgan has shown in American
Slavery, American Freedom, the marriage of slavery and
freedom is America’s central paradox: the rise of the
American republic and its requisite myths depended
on the terrifying realities of slavery (4).
192 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
4. Other critics have also noted connections between
slavery and the gothic. Robert Hemenway argues that
slavery is “an extreme form of Gothic entrapment”
(“Gothic Sociology,” 113) and Joseph Bodziock claims
that the slave narrative incorporates “the fundamental
forms and values of the European gothic” (“Richard
Wright and Afro-American Gothic,” 29). In Haiti, His-
tory, and the Gods, Joan Dayan insists on the integral
connection between the gothic and slavery. Reading
the Black Codes as a gothic text, Dayan argues that
the supernatural fictions of the Americas are rooted in
the natural histories of slavery (193).
5. See Paulson’s “Gothic Fiction and the French Revolu-
tion” and Henderson’s “An Embarrassing Subject:
Problems of Value and Identity in the Early Gothic
Novel.”
6. See Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations (145-47) for a
discussion of the gothic discourse used in response to
the revolution in St. Domingue.
7. The rhetoric of monstrosity that permeates descrip-
tions of Turner’s insurrection exemplifies Joan Day-
an’s theory that whites externalized images of their
own power—the “bodily tortures and incarnate ter-
rors necessary to sustain the institution of slavery”—by
projecting them onto their victims (Haiti, History, and
the Gods, 247).
8. The abolitionist’s identification with/as the victim of
slavery’s horrors is a common trope. See Nudelman
for a discussion of the abolitionist’s sympathetic
identification with the slave and their “tales of suffer-
ing witnessed rather than suffering endured” (“Harriet
Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffer-
ing,” 948). In American Slavery as It Is, C. C. Robin
gives the following testimony after recounting a whip-
ping scene:
The reader is moved; so am I: my agitated
hand refuses to trace the bloody picture, to
recount how many times the piercing cry of
pain has interrupted my silent occupations;
how many times I have shuddered at the
faces of those barbarous masters, where I saw
inscribed the number of victims sacrificed to
their ferocity.
(59)
The reader’s and writer’s pain and horror here sub-
sume the slave’s terror, which is further displaced
since it is visible only in the face of the master. By
rendering the slave as victim, this passage raises a cor-
responding problem: abolitionist discourse not only
appropriated the victim’s position but also tended to
picture the slave as the victim of the gothic prison of
slavery, thereby denying the slave agency or resistance.
9. The slave narrative’s fictional characteristics have been
examined by a number of critics, most notably Wil-
liam Andrews. No longer seen merely as transparent
transcriptions of history, slave narratives have come
to be read as sophisticated autobiographical acts. An-
drews argues that the genre is a “scene of a complex
discursive encounter” (To Tell a Free Story, 2); his “The
Novelization of Voice in Early African American Nar-
rative” examines the genre’s relation to fiction. Carla
Peterson also discusses the gradual shift from autobiog-
raphy to novel in nineteenth-century African-
American writing, arguing that the “autobiographical
narrative already contained within it subversive
fictional techniques” (“Capitalism, Black (Under)-
 Development, and the Production of the African-
American Novel in the 1850s,” 563). Also see Barbara
Foley (“History, Fiction, and the Ground Between”
and Telling the Truth) for an examination of the
representational strategies nineteenth-century African-
American authors used to authenticate their writing.
10. In “Letters to His old Master” in the appendix to My
Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass further emphasizes
that the gothic horrors of slavery are not imaginative
renderings but actual events:
The grim horrors of slavery rise in all their
ghastly terror before me; the wails of mil-
lions pierce my heart and chill my blood. I
remember the chain, the gag, the bloody
whip; the death-like gloom overshadowing
the broken spirit of the fettered bondman;
the appalling liability of his being torn away
from wife and children, and sold like a beast
in the market. Say not that this is a picture
of fancy. You well know that I wear stripes
on my back, inflicted by your direction. . . .
All this, and more, you remember, and know
to be perfectly true, not only of yourself, but
of nearly all the slaveholders around you.
(269)
I will discuss Douglass’s use of gothic conventions
while resisting their dematerializing effects at greater
length in the body of this chapter, but it is crucial to
note here how he refuses to reduce the gothic horrors
of slavery to fancy.
11. This need to argue that the incredible facts of slavery
are true also occurs in Weld’s American Slavery as It Is.
Weld presents his documentary evidence in order to
disprove the objection that “such cruelties are IN-
CREDIBLE” (121). Arguing that the evidence is not
the “exaggerations of fiction,” the text constantly
reiterates that its statements, “incredible as [they] may
seem” fall “short, very short of the truth” (61).
12. As many critics have noted, Douglass presents the
reader with another common trope of slavery in this
opening episode: the sexualized scene of whipping.
Ronald Walters’s “The Erotic South” and The Antisla-
very Appeal argue that the antebellum discourse that
gothicized slavery also eroticized it. Abolitionist
discourse, he claims, pictured the evils of slavery in
terms of corrupted femininity and the corrosive ef-
fects of unrestrained sexuality (The Antislavery Appeal,
111). Karen Halttunen takes this argument a step
further by showing how the whipping scene eroticizes
pain by turning the dreadful into the obscene, the
sympathetic spectator into a sadistic voyeur
(“Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in
Anglo-American Culture”). The sexual sensationalism
of this scene has been criticized by several feminist
critics including Franchot, “The Punishment of Es-
ther”; McDowell, “In the First Place”; and Foster, “‘In
Respect to Females.’”
13. Hortense Spillers argues that slavery is marked by its
narrativity: slavery “remains one of the most textual-
ized and discursive fields of practice that we could
posit as a structure for attention” (“Changing the Let-
ter,” 29).
14. As Gladys-Marie Fry shows in her study Night Riders in
Black Folk History, the gothic has long been allied with
reality in African-American history. During slavery
and Reconstruction, the supernatural was used by
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
whites as a form of psychological control of African
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
Americans. Whether it was a master designating
haunted places or the Ku Klux Klan riding as ghosts
through the night, the supernatural kept African
Americans literally and figuratively in their place.
African-American fear of the supernatural was based
less on a belief in the master’s stage effects than on
the institutionalized power that lay behind them
(McWhiney and Simkins, “The Ghostly Legend of the
Ku-Klux Klan”). As James Cameron points out in the
compelling account of his own near-lynching in his
memoir, A Time of Terror, African Americans grew up
knowing that the hair-raising accounts of terror they
heard were not figments of the imagination but daily
realities.
15. Many of the reviewers of Beloved also seem uneasy af-
filiating Toni Morrison with the gothic: “To outline
this story is to invite the very resistance I felt on first
reading it,” writes one reviewer. “A specter returned to
bedevil the living? A Gothic historical romance from
Toni Morrison?” (Clemons, “The Ghosts of Sixty Mil-
lion and More,” 74). Other reviewers use this seeming
disjunction between serious writer and melodramatic
form to attack Morrison. In his notorious review of
the novel, Stanley Crouch uses a gothic metaphor to
begin his assault: “the book’s beginning clanks out its
themes” (“Aunt Medea,” 42). Carol Iannone claims
Morrison’s use of the gothic marks her lack of serious-
ness: “The graphic descriptions of physical humilia-
tion begin to grow sensationalistic, and the gradual
unfolding of secret horror has an unmistakably Gothic
dimension which soon comes to seem merely lurid,
designed to arouse and entertain” (“Toni Morrison’s
Career,” 63). All of these examples reveal how gothic
has become a negative, demeaning term. Associated
with the sensational, the formulaic, and the popular,
the gothic is seen to lack seriousness of purpose and
connection to actual experience.
16. This is perhaps the reason for the scant attention given
to the African-American gothic within critical dis-
course. The work that has been done tends to focus
on individual authors. For discussions of the African-
American gothic, see Joseph Bodziock, “Richard
Wright and Afro-American Gothic”; Erik Curren,
“Turning the Tables on the White Savage” and “Should
Their Eyes Have Been Watching God?”; Louis Gross,
Redefining the American Gothic; Theodore Gross, The
Heroic Ideal in American Literature; Michel Fabré, “Black
Cat and White Cat”; Robert Hemenway, “Gothic
Sociology”; Keith Sandiford, “Gothic Intertextual
Constructions in Linden Hills”; Mary Sisney, “The
Power and Horror of Whiteness”; and Geraldine
Smith-Wright, “In Spite of the Klan.”
17. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy warns of the dangers inherent in
any project that attempts to reconstruct the interplay
of black and white literary traditions. Counseling
against any “easy resolution” or “short-term rapproche-
ment” between the traditions that glosses over the
“substantial drama of conflict in intercultural literary
engagements,” Rushdy argues that “we need to seek
out the deeper meanings of conflicts in literary his-
tory and not forget that it is the social order of our na-
tion, with its fundamental material inequities, that
defines and determines the sites of contestation where
those conflicts occur in our national literature”
(“Reading Black, White, and Gray in 1968,” 63).
193
 18. See Jean Fagan Yellin, “Written by Herself: Harriet Ja-
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
cobs’s Slave Narrative.” Yellin explains the confusion
over Incidents’s literary status as follows: “It is no ac-
cident that many critics mistook Jacobs’s narrative for
fiction. Its confessional account of sexual error and
guilt, like the passages in which Linda Brent presents
herself to be judged by her reader, link Incidents to a
popular genre, the seduction novel” (Introduction to
Incidents, xxix-xxx). The text’s relationship to fiction
continues to be clarified. Jacqueline Goldsby and P.
Gabrielle Foreman have both argued against reading
Jacobs’s text in a purely factual way. Goldsby states
that Incidents should be examined in terms of how “it
engages and resists the closure implied by historical
documentation” (“‘I Disguised My Hand’,” 15).
Concerned with how the “implicit demands for refer-
entiality” force critics to “interpret the principal script
as if [Jacobs] had not loaded it with narrative explo-
sions, with subversive scriptmines, so to speak,” Fore-
man critiques the “politics of transparency” that often
informs readings of black women’s sentimental writ-
ing (“Manifest in Signs,” 77).
19. Because of its “novelization of her autobiographical
voice,” as Claudia Tate describes it, Incidents is perhaps
the slave narrative most often examined in terms of
other literary traditions (Domestic Allegories of Political
Desire, 26). P. Gabrielle Foreman, for instance, argues
that Incidents “defies easy generic categorization” and
that it “blurs the parameters of fiction and slave narra-
tive” (“The Spoken and the Silenced,” 315). Incidents,
however, is usually discussed only in terms of the
sentimental tradition. Views on Incidents’s connection
to sentimentalism range from early studies like An-
nette Niemtzow’s, which argues that the “domestic
novel swallows Linda Brent’s voice” (“The Problematic
of Self in Autobiography,” 105), and Raymond He-
din’s, which claims that Jacobs does not act “against
the grain of sentimental fiction” (“Strategies of Form
in the American Slave Narrative,” 28), to more recent
perspectives—Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood;
Doherty, “Harriet Jacobs’ Narrative Strategies”;
Doriani, “Black Womanhood in Nineteenth-Century
America”; Nelson, The Word in Black and White; Nudel-
man, “Harriet Jacobs”; Sanchez-Eppler, Touching Lib-
erty; Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority; Tate,
Domestic Allegories of Political Desire; Walter, “Surviving
in the Garret”; Yellin, Introduction to Incidents; and
others—that argue that Jacobs appropriates, revises,
and elaborates the sentimental tradition. For an
extended discussion of the parallels between Incidents
and the gothic, see Kari Winter’s Subjects of Slavery,
Agents of Change.
20. See Yellin (Introduction to Incidents, xviii-xix) and He-
drick (Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life, 248-49) for a fuller
account of Jacobs’s relationship to Stowe.
21. Jacobs’s use of the term “loophole of retreat” has most
often been traced to William Cowper’s poem “The
Task” (see Yellin’s note to Jacobs’s chapter title in
Incidents, 277). I suggest that Jacobs is also referencing
Stowe in her title. In “Carnival Laughter,” Anne Brad-
ford Warner also points to the connections between
Stowe’s and Jacobs’s texts. She argues that Brent’s crip-
pling discomfort in her garret “cannot help but com-
ment on the gothic romance and trickery of Cassy’s
escape episode in Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (224). Warner
develops this connection further in her conference
paper “No Key to Cassy: Jacobs Revises Stowe.” While
our arguments intersect in illuminating ways, Warner
is concerned more with Jacobs’s discomfort with the
194 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
gothic mode and her resistance to the gothic’s erotici-
zation. Also see Phyllis Cole, “Stowe, Jacobs, Wilson,”
for a more general discussion of how Jacobs rewrites
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
22. See Karen Halttunen’s “Gothic Imagination and Social
Reform: The Haunted Houses of Lyman Beecher,
Henry Ward Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe” for a
study of the Stowe family’s use of the gothic in their
various social critiques; and Diane Roberts’s The Myth
of Aunt Jemima for a reading of Stowe’s use of the
gothic in the novel.
23. The dual movement of Jacobs’s narrative, what Carla
Peterson calls her “double discourse,” has been
discussed in a variety of ways (“Capitalism, Black
(Under)Development,” 565). See Braxton, “Harriet Ja-
cobs’ Incidents”; Burnham, “Loopholes of Resistance”;
and Foreman, “The Spoken and the Silenced” for read-
ings of how the text uses concealment and revelation.
24. The narrative follows a typical female gothic plot. Ja-
cobs, like so many earlier gothic and sentimental
heroines, traces her initiation into a world of evil to
the death of her mother. Only after the loss of this
“shield” does she become self-conscious of her posi-
tion as a slave: “When I was six years old, my mother
died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk
around me, that I was a slave” (6). Jacobs is left even
more vulnerable when at age twelve her mistress, who
was “almost like a mother to [her],” also dies, leaving
her without any protection from the sexual evils that
accompany slavery (7). Jacobs’s dual initiation into
the trials of slavery and maidenhood is made explicit
in her relationship to her new master, Doctor Flint.
Imprisoned in a plantation (read castle) that is cut off
from the laws of the outside world, she finds herself at
the mercy of a lascivious villain, her “persecutor,” Doc-
tor Flint (35). She is saved in part, as she later remarks,
by the proximity of the plantation to town and a sur-
rogate protector, her grandmother: “If I had been on a
remote plantation . . . I should not be a living woman
at this day” (35).
25. See Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in
African-American Narrative, for an extended discussion
of the power of passivity in Incidents.
26. Mary Titus has a wonderful reading of the cotton gin:
“The image encapsulates Jacobs’s argument, uniting
in a single horrific image the slave, the verminous
slaveholder who consumes him, and the central
machine of the cotton economy” (“‘This Poisonous
System’,” 203).
27. The clearest case of repetition is Jacobs’s description of
her daughter Ellen. Not only does Ellen relive Brent’s
plight when she has “vile language” poured into her
ears by Mr. Thorne, but also, unlike her mother, she is
defenseless against these words since she “scarcely
knew her letters” (179, 166). Ellen’s position empha-
sizes Brent’s own powerlessness in the North. Unlike
Stowe’s novel, which provides a happy ending for
Cassy when she is magically reunited with both of her
children, Jacobs’s text offers no such conclusion: Brent
does not recognize her daughter when they are first
reunited precisely because Ellen has deteriorated from
neglect. It is through her daughter-double—who is
more of a slave in the North, where her mother’s
protection is ineffectual, than she ever was in the
South, under her mother’s hidden protection—that
Jacobs marks the North as the South’s double (165).
 28. Jacobs was keenly aware of the North’s complicity
with slavery since her employer, Mr. Willis, was pro-
slavery. See Yellin (Introduction to Incidents, xviii) for
a discussion of Jacobs’s relationship to the Willises.
29. This is not to say that silence is not an equally power-
ful weapon. Turning the tables and adapting the slave
master’s tool, Jacobs, like many former slaves, used
silence to protect those who helped her and to keep
the master “in the dark.” See Valerie Smith, Self-
Discovery and Authority, and Braxton, “Harriet Jacobs’
Incidents” for further discussions of the gaps and
silences in Jacobs’s text.
30. It is important to note that Child sentimentalized Ja-
cob’s ending. As Bruce Mills points out in “Lydia Maria
Child and the Endings to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in
the Life of a Slave Girl,” Jacobs originally planned to
end her narrative with a discussion of John Brown,
which would have emphasized a gothic narrative of
violent retribution. However, Child counseled her to
end by focusing on her grandmother instead.
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TERESA DERRICKSON (ESSAY DATE
MARCH 2001)
SOURCE: Derrickson, Teresa. “Race and the Gothic
Monster: The Xenophobic Impulse of Louisa May Al-
cott’s ‘Taming a Tartar.’” American Transcendental Quar-
terly 15, no. 1 (March 2001): 43-58.
In the following essay, Derrickson examines Alcott’s
sensationalist short story “Taming a Tartar,” and asserts
that “[b]y tracing the careful way in which the
‘monstrous’ nemesis of the narrative’s triumphant
protagonist embodies nineteenth-century fears of racial
degradation, this essay opens up new meaning in Alcott’s
work and underscores the infiltrating power of the Gothic
impetus.”
In her study entitled Skin Shows: Gothic Horror
and the Technology of Monsters, Judith Halberstam
concludes her rereading of the Gothic monster by
implicating more than just the horror genre in
the veiled construction of social prejudice. Warn-
ing against the hegemonic impulse that runs deep
in areas we fail to consider, she writes, “the
violence of representation does not always lie in
bloody scenes of carnage or in images of monstros-
ity. [It] more often works through well-meaning
and sincere humanist texts that feel compelled to
make the human into some earnest composite of
white, bourgeois, Christian heterosexuality” (188).
Halberstam’s subtle injunction against a compla-
cent reading of seemingly “innocent” texts offers
a useful point of entry into a range of literary
works, including the quasi-Gothic tales of one
nineteenth-century writer whose social rhetoric
appears morally unassailable: Louisa May Alcott.
Hailed as the purveyor of “moral pap for the
young” (qtd. in Falcon v), this unassuming author
of Little Women seems a most unlikely dissemina-
197

SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
Ambrose Bierce, 1842-1914.
tor of harmful ideology. It is not just her renown
as a children’s writer that positions her as such,
but her personal politics as well. As Sarah Elbert
indicates in her introduction to a compilation of
Alcott’s stories, Alcott was not only a feminist at a
time when female passivity was the hallmark of
womanly virtue, but she was also a staunch
abolitionist and a vocal proponent of racial
integration. Her ethical resume and its prominent
inscription in her narrative fiction have thus
understandably discouraged critics from engaging
in a more rigorous analysis of her creative work.
The recent discovery of a collection of sensational
stories published anonymously and pseudony-
mously in two nineteenth-century periodicals has
done little to change that. Indeed, many of the
preliminary readings of these “lost” Gothic thrill-
ers have focused primarily on the stories’ subver-
sive potential, praising their explicit privileging of
female power and racial heterogeneity (Stern,
Double Life; Stern, Feminist Alcott; Keyser;
Klimasmith). The overall assessment of these
stories as “politically groundbreaking” is hardly
disputable. And yet as Halberstam suggests in the
passage quoted above, even the most unlikely nar-
ratives participate in discursive strategies of social
violence—including, above all, the Gothic genre.
Such an assertion begs a rereading of Alcott’s
sensational fiction, and thus it is with some
justification that I undertake to illuminate the
198 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
strains of “social violence” in one of Alcott’s newly
recovered tales, “Taming a Tartar.” Far from at-
tempting to rewrite the reputation of a well-
respected writer, my objective in this paper is to
offer a reading of this story that confirms the
cultural function of the Gothic as stipulated in
the work of Halberstam.1 By tracing the careful
way in which the “monstrous” nemesis of the nar-
rative’s triumphant protagonist embodies
nineteenth-century fears of racial degradation, this
essay opens up new meaning in Alcott’s work and
underscores the infiltrating power of the Gothic
impetus.
Judith Halberstam’s historical trajectory of the
Gothic influence in nineteenth and twentieth-
century narrative leads her to theorize counter
claims about the political underpinnings of this
trivial and “popular” genre. Not only does she
locate the Gothic as the nexus of all nineteenth-
century literature—thereby reversing historical
hierarchies that privilege the primacy of realism
(2)—but she does so by positing a fundamentally
different interpretation of the Gothic monster. For
Halberstam, monstrous beings serve to symbolize
cultural configurations, not psychic configurations
(116-17). Instead of mapping the latent psychol-
ogy of its presumed human antagonist, the Gothic
monster, according to Halberstam, embodies a
discourse of power and domination that under-
girds nineteenth-century attitudes towards varia-
tions of race, class, gender, and sexuality. This
discourse manifests itself in the presentation of
stigmatized flesh—the presentation of skin that
bears the odious markings of “aberrant” social
subjects. Vilified because of the skin they wear—
and given the skin they wear because they are to
be vilified—, these monsters thus constitute a
complex system of cultural coding, one in which
their bodies ultimately signify a fear of identities
whose “difference” proves imminently threaten-
ing:
Gothic fiction of the nineteenth century specifi-
cally used the body of the monster to produce
race, class, gender, and sexuality within narratives
about the relation between subjectivities and
certain bodies. . . . The monster functions as
monster . . . when it is able to condense as many
[of these] fear-producing traits as possible into one
body.
(6, 20)
While Halberstam illustrates this reading by
analyzing representations of “conventional”
Gothic monsters, she also allows for a more
dynamic concept of the monstrous by defining
monstrosity as something that disrupts conven-
tions of normalcy: “In its typical form, the Gothic
topos is the monstrous body a la Frankenstein,
Dracula, Dorian Gray, Jekyll/Hyde; in its generic
form, Gothic is the disruption of realism and of
all generic purity” (11, emphasis added). Halber-
stam’s emphasis on “generic purity” as the antith-
esis of the monstrous—that is, as the primary
quality against which all monsters take meaning—
leads her to rearticulate the nineteenth-century
Gothic monster as the objectified “other,” as the
opposite of that which is pure, privileged, and in
subject position:
Monsters and the Gothic fiction that creates them
are . . . narrative technologies that produce the
perfect figure for negative identity. Monsters have
to be everything the human is not and, in produc-
ing the negative of human, these novels make way
for the invention of human as white, male, middle
class, and heterosexual.
(27)
Halberstam’s broadened definition of the
Gothic monster as “impure” and “non-human”
allows us to situate the domestic tyrant of Alcott’s
“Taming a Tartar” within its meaningful param-
eters. Made terrible and menacing by the foreign
blood (read “non-European” and non-
“EuroAmerican”) that colors his veins, Alcott’s
antagonist assumes the skin of the nineteenth-
century Gothic monster, and in doing so both
stabilizes and disrupts the ideologies of race and
gender that undergird the text.
“Taming a Tartar” is the first person narrative
of a young British woman who quits her duties as
a teacher to serve as a companion to an ailing Rus-
sian princess. Despite the pleasantries of her new
employment, the protagonist, Sybil Varna, finds
herself confronting challenges of an unrelated
nature as she tries to determine how best to man-
age the notoriously explosive and tyrannical
disposition of the princess’s halfbrother, Alexis.
Through a series of violent domestic episodes, the
two characters become locked in a virtual battle of
the sexes, the strong-willed and virtuous Sybil vy-
ing for mastery over the family’s ruthless patriarch,
and vice versa. Determined to “tame” Alexis into
a gentle and civilized man, Sybil treats him with
brutal indifference, even when—and especially
when—events precipitate romantic feelings be-
tween the two. The story ends with the couple’s
happy nuptials, but not before Sybil claims vic-
tory in conquering her “brave barbarian.”
The most frequently cited reading of this
thriller seizes upon the unconventionally explicit
gender struggle between the two principal charac-
ters and concludes that the narrative’s political
rhetoric speaks predominantly of female self-
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
AMBROSE BIERCE (1842-1914)
Bierce’s literary reputation is based primarily
on his short stories about the Civil War and
the supernatural—a body of work that makes
up a relatively small part of his total output.
Often compared to the tales of Edgar Allan
Poe, these stories share an attraction to death
in its more bizarre forms, featuring depictions
of mental deterioration, uncanny, other-
worldly manifestations, and expressions of
the horror of existence in a meaningless
universe. Like Poe, Bierce professed to be
mainly concerned with the artistry of his
work, yet critics find him more intent on
conveying his misanthropy and pessimism. In
his lifetime Bierce was famous as a California
journalist dedicated to exposing the truth as
he understood it, irrespective of whose
reputations were harmed by his attacks.
Bierce’s major fiction was collected in
Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) and Can
Such Things Be? (1893). Many of these stories
are realistic depictions of the author’s experi-
ences in the Civil War, but critics and Bierce
himself noted that despite their realism his
stories often fail to supply sufficient verisimili-
tude. Bierce’s most striking fictional effects
depend on an adept manipulation of the
reader viewpoint: a bloody battlefield seen
through the eyes of a deaf child in “Chicka-
mauga,” the deceptive escape dreamed by a
man about to be hanged in “An Occurrence
at Owl Creek Bridge,” and the shifting per-
spectives of “The Death of Halpin Frayser.”
Bierce’s narratives are characterized by a
marked use of black humor, particularly in
the ironic and hideous deaths his protagonists
often suffer. The brutal satire Bierce employed
in his journalism appears as plain brutality in
his fiction, and critics have both condemned
and praised his imagination, along with
Poe’s, as among the most vicious and morbid
in American literature. Bierce’s bare, economi-
cal style of supernatural horror is usually
distinguished from the verbally lavish tales of
Poe, and few critics rank Bierce as the equal
of his predecessor.
199
 empowerment (Stern, Double Life; Stern, Feminist
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
Alcott). While this interpretation is certainly valid,
it in no way encompasses the full discursive
import of the story. The title of the work makes
this clear by subsuming issues of gender within is-
sues of race—it is notably a “Tartar” to be tamed,
not a man. We are thus made aware from the
onset that there is much more to this tale than
the exclusively feminist message critics have been
quick to trumpet. Halberstam’s theory of the
Gothic fills in much of what is unaccounted for
in these interpretive gaps by allowing us to trace
the racist discourse in this story and read such
discourse as a “technology” that fixes Alexis as the
monstrous Other.
Before examining how this occurs, it is worth
noting that Alcott indeed was writing during a
time when the word “race” had already come to
be constructed in its modern-day sense. As Colette
Guillaumin has explained, “race” was originally a
word used by the European aristocracy to refer to
members of a privileged family line, a meaning
that served an explicitly legal function and there-
fore was altogether devoid of genetic implications
(33-57). By the early nineteenth century, however,
the semantic field surrounding the word had
changed considerably, and race” came to take on
the biological assumptions that inform its mean-
ing today (Guillaumin 55). The United States was
not exempt from this new denotation. As Thomas
Gossett observes in his book entitled Race: The
History of an Idea in America, racist ideologies took
hold in nineteenthcentury America as anthropolo-
gists and other social scientists heightened their
search for measurable ways to classify peoples of
different colors and origins (54-83). Their “defini-
tive” conclusions made it appropriate and “natu-
ral” to associate behavioral characteristics with
subsets of the population who were either visibly
different from the white mainstream (e.g., “Ne-
gros” and “Indians”) or who hailed from different
socio-political regions of the world (e.g., the Ital-
ians were thought to constitute their own race, as
were the Germans and the French, etc.) (201). In
short, as Gossett observes, “nineteenth[-]century
[America] was obsessed with the idea that it was
race which explained the character of peoples”
(244).
Despite her strong personal convictions
against slavery and her “bold” fictional representa-
tions of interracial couples, Alcott herself certainly
would have been influenced by nineteenth-
century racial theories. Her own father, for ex-
ample, was a strong believer in the idea that
temperament and character were a function of
200 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
biology (Elbert xv-xvi). Alcott internalized this no-
tion at least in part, interpreting her own dark
complexion and dark features to signify that she
herself was naturally inferior to her fair-skinned,
younger sister, May (Elbert xvi). As Elbert con-
cludes from this behavior, Alcott was indeed a
product of her times in terms of how she concep-
tualized race: “Alcott’s notions of race were shaped
by daily family interactions as surely as they were
by the larger cultural discourses” (xvi).
These discourses surface immediately in Al-
cott’s “Taming a Tartar.” Within the first few pages
of the story, for example, we learn from Sybil’s
confidant that Russians “are but savages,” an
uncivilized people whose status as “barbarians”
cannot be changed by “all their money, splendor,
and the polish [of] Paris” (198). This characteriza-
tion applies even more so to Alexis, whose full-
blooded Russian make-up earns him a more
infamous description:
Paris is wild for him, as for some magnificent sav-
age beast. Madame la Comtesse Millefleur declared
that she never knew whether he would fall at her
feet, or annihilate her, so impetuous were his
moods. At one moment showing all the complai-
sance and elegance of a born Parisian, the next
terrifying the beholders by some outburst of sav-
age wrath, some betrayal of the Tartar blood that
is in him. Ah! it is incredible how such things
amaze one.
(199)
Several aspects of this passage are significant
in revealing the precise characterization of Alexis’
“monstrosity.” His depiction as a “savage beast,” a
“terrifying” creature given to “outbursts of savage
wrath” situates him well within the realm of both
the hostile and the “nonhuman,” which are
equated here as one. The reactions of the Parisian
onlookers confirm his status as such, betraying a
patronizing fascination for the marked strange-
ness of one so ostensibly unlike themselves. The
most significant aspect of this description, how-
ever, comes in the final claim of the narrative in
which the speaker instinctively pronounces Al-
exis’ behavior to be “some betrayal of the Tartar
blood that is in him.” In making such an asser-
tion, Sybil’s confidant parrots the racial prejudice
of her day, conflating the distinction between the
prince’s debased behavior and his race, and
thereby contributing to a more global discourse
that connects blood, depravity, and ethnic es-
sentialism with western racial domination.
Foucault’s theory of sexuality supports this
reading by indicating that blood defined the
battleground in which Victorian England carried
out and rendered justifiable its eugenic and
imperialist projects: “Beginning in the second half
of the nineteenth-century, the thematics of blood
was sometimes called on to lend its entire histori-
cal weight toward revitalizing the type of political
power that was exercised through the devices of
sexuality” (Foucault 149). Just as Foucault argues
in this passage that a “thematics of blood” was
invoked to justify technologies of sexuality and
the regimes of power they served, so too does Hal-
berstam argue that blood functioned as a rhetori-
cal device for reaffirming British “superiority”:
. . . [A]s the nation expanded to become an
empire, as Englishmen left the country to go to
the colonies, and as a flood of immigrants entered
England from Eastern Europe and Russia, national
identity came increasingly to depend upon race
rather than place. . . . As racethinking gave way
to full-fledged racism towards the turn of the
century, the body became the setting for a drama
of blood.
(80, 78)
This “drama of blood” plays itself out, Halber-
stam continues to argue, not only in historical ac-
counts, but in the narrative fiction of Victorian
literature as well, where the symbolics of blood
and the political rhetoric informing it become
fully inscribed in the Gothic text: “The reemer-
gence of Gothic monstrosity at the end of the
century coincides suggestively with the Gothic
interdisciplinary interest in the racial body;
indeed, by the turn of the century, the Gothic hor-
ror novel . . . became a privileged site in the
representations of potential dangers of racial
decline” (79). By linking Gothic monstrosity with
“racial bodies” and the “dangers of racial decline,”
Halberstam throws new light on the political
rhetoric of Alcott’s work and renders all the more
meaningful those passages that serve to under-
score Alexis’ monstrous difference.
That such difference is in fact inextricably
connected to race is made explicit not only in the
opening passages previously quoted, but in nu-
merous other places in the story as well. Indeed,
racial blood imbues this text, coloring its charac-
ters in ways that paint clear demarcations between
those of moral rectitude and those of moral
depravity, those intrinsically civil and those hope-
lessly rapacious. Such is the case with respect to
the two main characters in particular, whose
physical descriptions turn on a telling of blood
that instructs us not only in the respective natures
of their persons but also in how we are to respond
to them. Sybil’s self-description reads, in part,
“The long mirror showed me a slender, well-
molded figure, and a pale face—not beautiful, but
expressive, for the sharply cut, somewhat haughty
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features betrayed good blood, spirit and strength”
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
(200). In contrast, the prince bears a different
though somewhat parallel description:
The costume suited the face; swarthy, black-eyed,
scarlet-lipped, heavy-browed and beardless, except
a thick mustache. . . . A strange face, for even in
repose the indescribable difference of race was vis-
ible; the contour of the head, molding of features,
hue of hair and skin, even the attitude, all betrayed
a trace of the savage strength and spirit of one in
whose veins flowed the blood of men reared in
tents, and born to lead wild lives in a wild land.
(201)
Of particular note in these two portraits is the
collapsed distinction between inside and outside:
that which is beneath the surface of the skin ap-
pears visible on/in the skin itself so that blood
and skin become both signifiers and signifieds of
each other and racial identity is made manifest—
literally embodied—in each person. Sybil’s “good
blood,” for example, betrays her “pale face”—and
vice versa—in the same way that Alexis’ “swarthy”
face and “[dark] hue of hair and skin” betray his
own foreign heritage. That his race, however, is
inferior to hers is expressed in the phrase “good
blood,” a rhetorical strategy that connects Sybil’s
western-European descent with “goodness” and
racial superiority, and therefore, by contrast, Al-
exis’ eastern-European descent with the undesir-
able inverse.
Although not explicitly expressed in this pas-
sage, Alexis’ blood does indeed account for an
aspect that renders him monstrous. Alcott’s use of
the word “indescribable” in detailing his portrait
connects him to a legacy of Gothic antagonists
(e.g., Frankenstein, Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde)
whose monstrosity lies in their inscrutable physi-
cality and in their “terrible” race. Alexis is con-
structed as essentially threatening in other ways
as well, perhaps most succinctly through the
description of his sister, a woman whose gentle
and refined behavior contrasts so drastically with
the violent disposition of her brother that Ma-
dame Bayard is forced to explain, “[the princess] is
not of the same blood. She is a half-sister; her
mother was a Frenchwoman” (199). In this in-
stance, not only is blood again connected to
outward behavior (i.e., the princess’s controlled
countenance is accounted for by her French
heritage), but pure foreign blood is implicitly con-
nected to human degeneracy.
No other motif in the story constructs Alexis
as so monstrously “other” than this very sugges-
tion that he is inhuman. A series of figures in the
text defines him as such, including, perhaps most
powerfully, Sybil’s careful painting of his likeness,
201
 a painting that features his dress in painstaking
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
detail but exhibits a “blank spot where his . . .
face should have been” (220). Though we are told
that she will complete the picture in time, the
temporary omission of his head is nevertheless
visually symbolic of the human element that he is
so explicitly denied. Other places in the text
underscore this point. Madame Bayard’s initial
description of the prince, for example, details him
as a “magnificent savage beast” (199), a phrase
that places an emphasis on his distinctly animal-
like character. Her term is not only repeated
verbatim elsewhere in the story (212), but it is
also one that is widely expressed metaphorically
as well, such as in Sybil’s observation that Alexis
is a “handsome savage [that] chafe[s] and fret[s]
behind the bars of civilized society” (222) not un-
like a caged animal, and in the episode in which
the prince manhandles a pair of wild horses with
an ease that betrays his own bestial impulse (225).
Alexis’ explicit construction as animal-like
thus dominates the racial discourse that subtends
his monstrosity. Not unlike the fearful doubling
of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, Alcott’s Russian
prince plays host to a negative, animalistic identity
that erupts intermittently, exposing the feral
blood of his ancestry and thus giving reason for
his own truculence. The explosive scene in which
Sybil tries to prevent the prince from whipping
his dog illustrates this darker aspect:
The prince followed, whip in hand, evidently in
one of the fits of passion which terrified the
household. I had seen many demonstrations of
wrath, but never anything like that, for he seemed
literally beside himself. Pale as death, with eyes
full of savage fire, teeth set, and hair bristling like
that of an enraged animal, he stood fiercely glar-
ing at me. . . . I saw he was on the point of los-
ing all control of himself. . . .
(209)
In this passage, Alexis’ skin, eyes, teeth, and
hair betray his transformation into the Gothic
monster of so much Victorian fiction. Of particular
note here is the physical aspect of his altered state,
the fact that his madness marks itself upon the
body in a way that once again reinforces the con-
nection between “aberrant” race and spiritual
malevolence. Alcott later writes, for example, that
as Sybil tries to reason with him, “[the prince’s]
black brow lowered, and the thunderbolt veins on
his forehead darkened again with the angry blood,
not yet restored to quietude” (211). In this in-
stance, the reference to “angry blood” makes
explicit the cause of Alexis’ transformation and
therefore condemns him with the suggestion that
this “evil side” constitutes his natural essence, an
202
essence that can be temporarily controlled by
civilizing forces on the outside, but never fully
contained. The conclusion of the episode makes
this clear by indicating that the becalmed Alexis
has no memory of what has occurred. According
to the text, he “shiver[s] as if recovering from a
swoon” and then demands of Sybil, “Did I strike
you?” (210). His monstrous state is thus character-
ized by a complete loss of control, a complete
usurpation of his rational, human-like qualities.
The princess informs us of this fact of his nature
in a later passage in which she explains to Sybil,
“When in these mad fits he knows not what he
does; he killed a man once, a servant, who angered
him, struck him dead with a blow. He suffered
much remorse, and for a long time was an angel;
but the wild blood cannot be controlled, and he is
the victim of his passion” (213).
The assertion in this excerpt that “the wild
blood cannot be controlled” and that “he knows
not what he does” renders Alexis, much like his
British Gothic corollaries, a sympathetic but
ultimately unredeemable character. Such is the
paradox that governs his own construction as a
monster, for unlike his more infamous colleagues,
his foreign blood neither destroys him nor casts
him out of society. Instead, he is allowed to live,
but only after a series of choreographed incidents
in which he is wounded with a bullet and made
to spill his Tartar blood. Race thus never ceases to
be an issue in this monster’s fate, for at the same
time that Alexis is praised for a new moral forti-
tude emboldened by love, his body is figuratively
transformed through more brutal means, bleeding
him of the mark of race, the mark of biological
degeneracy that situated him as morally corrupt
to begin with. It is this corporeal reconfiguration
that qualifies as the most formidable prerequisite
in ultimately fashioning him as a “new being”
(245). Only in this “refined” condition is he able
to engage in a union with his English nemesis,
Sybil.
The text thus ends on a decidedly dubious
note. Alexis is saved, but only under conditions
that ultimately re-inscribe his Russian depravity. A
reading of this tale through Halberstam’s recon-
ceptualization of Gothic monstrosity thus compli-
cates the political meaning of the work. Just as
the text is ambiguous as to how race is finally
treated (is Alexis’ recuperation ultimately xeno-
phobic or not?), the text is equally indeterminate
as to its statement on women. A strictly feminist
interpretation of the story—particularly those of
the brand suggested in preliminary discussions of
Alcott’s sensational thrillers—becomes problem-
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atic not only because it fails to account for the
racial discourse that pervades the narrative, but
because it also fails to account for the possibility
that the same racial discourse might minimize the
subversive potential of the story’s otherwise
blatant critique of women’s role in Victorian
society.
In order to examine how this reading might
occur, it is necessary to reconsider the ways in
which this story operates as a tale of female
empowerment. One argument can be stated quite
succinctly by situating this text within Kate Ellis’s
subgenre of the female Gothic. According to Ellis,
women’s Gothic comprises a set of conventions
in which “the heroine exposes the villain’s usurpa-
tion [of the home] and thus reclaims an enclosed
space that should have been a refuge from evil
but has become the very opposite, a prison” (xiii).
That Alcott’s text dramatizes this very theme is
patently evident. Alexis’ despotic rule over the
home turns the domestic sphere into a place of
terror, a place that threatens the safety of women
not from without, but from within. Sybil’s ulti-
mate triumph over his tyranny not only disrupts
ideological conceptions of nineteenth-century
womanhood—indeed the last line of the story has
the protagonist asserting that she will “Not obey”
her new husband (252)—but it also situates this
text, as Ellis would argue, as a “site of female
resistance,” a site that subverts male power by
implicitly attacking the Victorian arrangement
whereby men seek to confine women to the sup-
posedly “safe haven” of the home (xvi).
Although this interpretation is certainly valid,
Alcott’s text can also be read from a different
perspective, one in which the narrative is viewed
not as a groundbreaking work at all, but as a story
that upholds the status quo, reinforcing
nineteenth-century power paradigms and the
ideologies on which they are based. Treating this
work as a discursive strategy that concentrates
western racism in the monstrous “other” allows
us to see this alternative meaning. In short, Sybil’s
attempts to subdue, control, and “tame” the wild
aspect of Alexis’ racial blood betray her collusion
in regimes of power that work to “subdue” her
own area of influence as well.
Ellis’s Contested Castle offers a point of entry
for this reading. In her study, Ellis argues that the
increased productivity of the industrial revolution
and the increased corruption of middle-class
morality it invariably gave rise to called for a new
definition of womanhood. This definition enacted
a type of “unsupervised control” over women by
restricting “the weaker sex” to spaces within the
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home and charging them with the responsibility
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
of serving as the moral and spiritual guardians of
a society on the edge of ruin (3-19). By fixing
women’s role as the nation’s spiritual redeemer,
nineteenth-century England solved one important
problem. As Ellis writes, “If women focus[ed] all
their attention on ameliorating the lot of those
with whom they are in contact, . . . then the
dangerous consequences of their freedom from
physical or gainful labor w[ould] not appear” (12-
13).
Sybil Varna performs this role precisely as it
has been scripted for her, concentrating her ef-
forts throughout the text on “ameliorating the
lot” of Alexis’ debased nature. No passage makes
this more explicit than Alexis’ own supplication
for moral guidance. Reacting to Sybil’s critique of
him as a “tyrant” and a “madman,” the prince
meekly pleads, “One dares to tell me [of my
faults], and I thank her. Will she then add to the
obligation by teaching me to cure them? . . .
Sybil, you can help me; you possess a courage and
power to tame my wild temper, my headstrong
will. In heaven’s name I ask you to do it, that I
may be worthy of a good woman’s love” (242).
This passage constructs Sybil as a paragon of
Victorian femininity. Not only does it infuse her
with the “power and courage” associated with
women’s moralizing function, but its explicit
invocation of “heaven” imbues such function
with divine sanction and makes Alexis’ “conver-
sion”—and thus Sybil’s own role as a moralizing
influence—all the more imperative.
That Sybil does in fact assume such a role is
reflected in two later incidents in which her
intervention in one of Alexis’ outbursts earns her
the following praise from the servant who was
spared: “[I]t is you I thank, good angel of the
house” (246). Alexis makes a similar comment
only pages later, addressing Sybil with the parting
words, “Always our good angel. Adieu, Sybil. I
submit” (250). Both references to Sybil as the
Victorian “angel of the house” make explicit her
interpolation in ideologies that construct her ac-
cording to the will of white patriarchy. Nina Auer-
bach’s discussion of the iconoclastic power of
“woman as angel” in Victorian society suggests
some of the strictures that her construction as
such imposes:
[T]he Victorian angel in the house seems a bizarre
object of worship, both in her virtuous femininity
and its inherent limitations—she can exist only
within families, when masculine angels can exist
elsewhere—and in the immobilization the phrase
suggests. In contrast to her swooping ancestors,
the angel in the house is a violent paradox with
203
 overtones of benediction and captivity. Angelic
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
motion had once known no boundaries; the
Victorian angel is defined by her boundaries.
(71-72)
Auerbach’s emphasis on the Victorian angel’s
sphere as one characterized by “limitation,” “im-
mobilization,” and “captivity” speaks powerfully
against a reading of this text that would attempt
to stabilize meaning in the seemingly subversive
potential of the story’s emboldened heroine. Hal-
berstam’s conception of Gothic monstrosity
makes this more explicit by recasting Alcott’s Rus-
sian prince not as a mere man of tyrannical
impulse, but as a racial body that concentrates
fears of foreign infiltration in the “wild blood” of
his “deviant” ancestry. By reading Alexis as the
embodiment of nineteenth-century xenophobic
discourse, we can in turn see Sybil’s role as the
conquering “angel of the house” in a completely
different light. Her efforts, for example, to see the
prince “thoroughly subdued” (244) cause us to
focus not on the power that this woman so
ostensibly commands, but on the machinery of
white male control that lurks visibly beneath her
moralizing influence. For if the impulse to civilize
is so inextricably connected to a symbolics of
blood, then the execution of that civilizing gesture
becomes an act of patriarchy, an act that reinstates
both the cage in which Alexis “chafes and frets”
as well as the “cage” in which the angel of the
house does the same. It is thus not without
considerable significance that the final scene of
the narrative has Sybil boasting to Alexis, “Come
with me to England, that I may show my country-
men the brave barbarian I have tamed” (252).
Sybil’s expressed desire to showcase her handiwork
to an audience that all but requisitioned it to
begin with could hardly be made more distinct,
nor could the corresponding suggestion that her
actions play right into the hands of the same men
who keep her appropriately “subdued” as well.
Sybil’s civilizing influence over Alexis thus
renders her an instrument of white male power—a
co-conspirator, if you will, of institutional forces
that subjugate women. Lora Romero confirms this
reading in her study on the politics of antebellum
domesticity, observing that “Although thinking of
women as the living gospel for men gives women
a certain authority, it also defines them in terms
of men’s needs . . . threaten[ing] to reduce
women to little more than vessels for male salva-
tion” (22). Sybil dutifully functions as this “vessel
for male salvation,” and yet her behavior as such
only complicates critical readings of Alcott’s story
as a feminist text; it does not dismiss them. Indeed
204
as Romero points out, nineteenth-century domes-
tic fiction rarely lends itself to a single statement
about the proper role of women in the home. On
the contrary, such works routinely express both a
genuine resistance to domestic ideologies at the
same time that they reinstate those ideologies
through other dynamics in the text (19-24).
Such is the case in Alcott’s story, for it is more
than evident that while Sybil may indeed reinforce
structures of power that ultimately fashion her as
a mere “vessel for male salvation,” she is also,
undeniably, an extremely strong female character,
one whose independence and whose considerable
command in controlling her own affairs pose a
challenge to patriarchal conceptions of woman-
hood. This fact is made evident through the strik-
ing juxtaposition that occurs between Sybil and
the only other principal female character in the
text: Alexis’ sister, the princess. The princess is
defined not only by her fragile constitution, but
also by her persistent dependence on others. Her
confinement within the home speaks convinc-
ingly of the impotence that characterizes her
pathetic existence. As Sybil herself comments
about the girl upon first meeting her, “[she] was
one of the clinging, confiding women who must
lean on some one[;] I soon felt that protective
fondness which one cannot help feeling for the
weak, the sick, and the unhappy” (206).
Sybil is the virtual antithesis of this portrait of
female passivity. Far from being “clingy” and
“weak,” Alcott’s protagonist is described to us as
“fond of experiences and adventures, self-reliant
and self-possessed” (199-200). Most notably,
however, Sybil commands a strength of character
that allows her to confront the abusive Alexis at
times when all others cower and capitulate. Such
a quality is by far the outstanding feature of her
person and one readily highlighted in several
places throughout the text. The much weaker
princess, for example, often enlists Sybil to fight
her battles with her brother for her, the younger
woman understanding that “[Sybil] can plead for
me as I cannot plead for myself” (208). Other
characters also depend on Sybil’s advocacy to
shield them from Alexis’ wrath. In a previously
noted incident, even the family dog, suffering the
blows of his master’s boot for disobeying a com-
mand, is rescued by Sybil’s assertive and timely
interference. In this specific case, however, Sybil is
not satisfied simply to interrupt the injustice she
sees, but instead, in an unusual act of female self-
assertion, she demands that Alexis not only cease
his brutal behavior but also yield his will to hers
by admitting his wrongdoing. As Sybil reveals to
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us, “I was bent on having my own way and mak-
ing him submit as a penance for his . . . menace.
Once conquer his will, in no matter how slight a
degree, and I had gained a power possessed by no
other person” (211).
As this passage suggests, Sybil is indeed unwill-
ing to assume the role of the “weaker” sex. On
the contrary, she admittedly seeks to usurp the
power of the master of the house and to “conquer
his will” for her own gain. This same motive is ap-
parent in a much later exchange between two
rivals, one in which Sybil demands to be allowed
to leave Alexis’ country estate and return to St.
Petersburg without him. As she so emphatically
demands, “I wish to be free. You have promised to
obey; yield your will to mine and let me go” (247).
Like the previous passage, the assertion in this
excerpt is a direct assault on the traditional
patriarchal arrangement of domestic power. Sybil
not only calls for a new kind of domesticity, one
in which she will be allowed to come and go as
she pleases (i.e., “to be free,” as she says), but she
also insists on a radically new relationship be-
tween herself and her male “superior,” demand-
ing that the latter obediently subordinate his own
interests to hers—his own interests, that is, to
those of a woman.
Both of these scenes thus express a new vision
for female selfhood. It is this vision and its
ultimate realization by the end of the story that
scholars have seized upon to characterize Alcott’s
work as progressively feminist. Halberstam’s
theory of the Gothic does not unsettle this read-
ing; however, it does complicate it in important
ways. Specifically, her argument that the Gothic
tradition is rooted in a discourse that asserts the
seeming primacy of white, European peoples
makes visible the politics of racism that underwrite
the kind of feminist power explicit in Alcott’s text.
The anti-patriarchal impulse of this story is
inextricably connected to—and in fact supported
by—its much more subtle yet equally significant
racist impulse. Again Romero offers support for
this reading, this time by observing that dynamics
of gender and dynamics of race can cross in ways
that produce unexpected results in terms of their
collective effect on dominant ways of thinking
(i.e., whether they subvert or reinforce that
thinking). Gender and race are, she maintains,
“competing and intersecting determinates of
ideological subscription/transcendence” (19).
The implications of this fact for Alcott’s work
is that the story’s feminist inclinations do not
preclude the possibility that the story might also
support less-than-progressive views on other is-
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sues—views, for example, that reinstate racial
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
stereotypes and racial bigotry. My argument here
is that this possibility approximates the micrody-
namics at play in Alcott’s work: that is, the
feminist discourse of Alcott’s “Taming a Tartar” is
deeply implicated in the racist discourse that
constructs Alexis as the depraved Other.
This complex intersection of competing inter-
ests is easily traced in scenes where Sybil asserts
her will over Alexis’. In all such incidents, the
struggle for power that occurs is explicitly written
as one that involves not only a woman pitted
against a man, but also a person of “good blood”
pitted against a person of “bad blood.” This latter
fact is significant, for Sybil’s triumph in these
scenes is one that necessarily reaffirms the notion
that Alexis is by nature—by virtue of his biology—
morally inferior. Such a result would not be the
outcome if the story did not make an issue of Al-
exis’ race in the way that it so carefully does. That
is, the form of racism associated with these scenes
does not precipitate from the mere fact that Sybil
is European while Alexis is not. Instead, it precipi-
tates from the text’s own rhetoric, which repeat-
edly reminds the reader that Alexis’ tyrannical
behavior is grounded in his racial makeup and
that Alexis’ reluctant but eventual submission is
an appropriate affirmation of Sybil’s inherently
superior “bloodline.” The gains Sybil realizes as a
woman are therefore achieved at the expense of
Alexis’ dignity as a human being: each gesture of
selfhood on her part serves to underscore or
remind us of the “inhuman” nature of his fiend-
ish character.
The eventual union of the two rivals does little
to change this dynamic, for even their courtship
is encoded with subtleties that reaffirm the racial
politics so apparent in the first part of the text. Of
particular note is the way in which Sybil repeat-
edly “apologizes” for her new affections for Alexis.
Rather than openly confessing that her feelings
for him are wellfounded and justifiable, Alcott’s
protagonist makes veiled excuses to the reader for
this unexpected preference, insinuating that her
partiality is either the product of a fluke, irrational
impulse that is undeniably negative in nature, or
that such partiality is not genuine at all and is
simply part of an act of charity that must be duti-
fully carried out. Sybil is “forced” to confess, for
example, that she misses the prince when he is
away (223, emphasis added). We are also informed
that her heart is “rebellious” for harboring presum-
ably unwelcome and impermissible feelings for
him (233). And finally, we learn that her eventual
marriage to him is not at all an act of deliberate
205
 choice, but a forced concession made to a dying
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
man: “While life and death still fought for [Al-
exis], I yielded to his prayer to become his
wife. . . . In my remorse I would have granted
anything . . .” (251).
What is significant about these instances is
that they effectively reinforce the social stigma as-
sociated with Alexis’ foreign heritage by suggest-
ing that no proper woman in her right mind
would marry a man of such dubious racial ancestry
without being coerced. And so while the final
pages of the story appear to deliver a surprising
reversal in terms of how we are to respond to Al-
exis as a character, the micropolitics of the text
would suggest something quite different. Halber-
stam’s theory of the Gothic ultimately allows us
to see this disparity. By reading the Gothic mon-
ster as a social construct that voices anxiety over
racial infiltration and racial “decline,” we are able
to unveil the racist ideologies that undergird the
systems of power operating in the work—systems
of power that vilify and dehumanize signs of
genetic and national difference, and systems of
power that work to assert a more meaningful role
for women within the home. The irony implicit
in this final reading is that Alcott does indeed go
out of her way to make a very specific statement
against racism in her work. The last page of her
story focuses not on the marriage of the two major
characters but on Sybil’s insistence that her new
husband free the serfs who labor “through force
[and] fear” on his property (252). This seemingly
trivial exchange says far more than it appears to
on the surface, for it functions as a clear indict-
ment of slavery, an indictment of an institution
that justifies itself on the false belief that peoples
of different colors and different geographic regions
are not only inferior to those of English descent,
but essentially subhuman as well. It is a troubling
testament to the power of nineteenth-century rac-
ist ideology that Alcott fails to see how carefully
she reinstates racist thinking on the one hand
while ostensibly repudiating it on the other. Part
of the function of the Gothic monster is that it
makes visible this incongruity and in doing so
belies interpretations of Alcott’s story that would
rest on the easy assumption that the work is a
simple tale of romance with little or no political
import.
Note
1. Certainly one might question why I have chosen to
read Alcott’s work through the lens of a theoretical
perspective associated with a British Gothic model as
opposed to an American Gothic model. First of all,
my reason for doing so is not to elide important dif-
206 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
ferences between British and American Gothic tradi-
tions, but rather to insist that there exists a racial
dimension to the American Gothic that has been
largely overlooked and merits closer attention. Halber-
stam’s theory—whether formulated for a British liter-
ary tradition or not—is particularly useful in awaken-
ing us to that notion. Second of all, it bears pointing
out that other theorists do indeed define the American
Gothic in terms of the same racial underpinnings Hal-
berstam’s theory seizes upon. Teresa Goddu makes the
assertion, for example, that the fundamental “dark-
ness” of the American Gothic genre is located in its
“racial roots”: “the American Gothic is haunted by
race,” she maintains (7). Eric Savoy repeats this argu-
ment in his own claim that the American Gothic
makes visible the vilified being that American domi-
nant culture cannot accept: “the entire tradition of
American Gothic can be conceptualized as the attempt
to invoke . . . the specter of Otherness that haunts
the house of national narrative” (14). Both Goddu
and Savoy make clear the fact that my use of Halber-
stam in reading an American text does not foist upon
that text an incommensurate theory, reading, or
model. On the contrary, it would appear as if Halber-
stam simply allows us to further explore that which
other scholars have already confirmed to be an
integral part of this American subgenre.
Works Cited
Alcott, Louisa May. “Taming a Tartar.” A Double Life: Newly
Discovered Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Madeleine
B. Stern. Boston: Little, 1988. 198-252.
Auerbach, Nina. Women and the Demon: The Life of a
Victorian Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.
Elbert, Sarah. Introduction. Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex,
and Slavery. By Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Sarah Elbert.
Boston: Northeastern UP, 1997. ix-lx.
Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and
the Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Urbana: U of Illinois
P, 1989.
Falcon, Jo. Introduction. A Modern Mephistopheles. By Louisa
May Alcott. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club,
1995. v-viii.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An
Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage,
1978.
Goddu, Teresa A. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Na-
tion. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.
Gossett, Thomas F. Race: The History of an Idea in America.
Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1963.
Guillaumin, Colette. Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology. New
York: Routledge, 1995.
Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the
Technology of Monsters. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.
Keyser, Elizabeth Lennox. Introduction. Whispers in the
Dark: The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Elizabeth
Lennox Keyser. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1993. xi-
xix.
Klimasmith, Betsy. “Slave, Master, Mistress, Slave: Genre
and Interracial Desire in Louisa May Alcott’s Fiction.”
ATQ (American Transcendental Quarterly) 11 (1997): 115-
35.
Romero, Lora. Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the
Antebellum United States. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.
Savoy, Eric. Introduction. American Gothic: New Interventions
in a National Narrative. Ed. Robert K. Martin and Eric
Savoy. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1998. 3-19.
Stern, Madeleine B. Introduction. A Double Life: Newly
Discovered Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. By Louisa May
Alcott. Ed. Madeleine B. Stern. Boston: Little, 1988.1-
28.
———. Introduction. The Feminist Alcott: Stories of a
Woman’s Power. By Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Madeleine
B. Stern. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1996. vii-xxiii.
ANNE K. MELLOR (ESSAY DATE
JUNE 2002)
SOURCE: Mellor, Anne K. “Interracial Sexual Desire in
Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya.” European Romantic Review
13, no. 2 (June 2002): 169-73.
In the following essay, Mellor demonstrates how Charlotte
Dacre’s use of Gothic conventions enabled her to il-
luminate the traditionally taboo sexual relationship
between a white woman and a black man in her novel
Zofloya.
The genre of the Gothic has long enabled both
its practitioners and its readers to explore subjec-
tive desires and identities that are otherwise
repressed, denied or forbidden by the culture at
large. As David Punter trenchantly characterized
the Gothic genre in The Literature of Terror, it is
centrally concerned with paranoia, the taboo, and
the barbaric, a barbaric that nonetheless returns as
the unheimlich, the uncanny, what is most familiar
yet most disturbing. The array of culturally re-
pressed subjectivities at the end of the eighteenth
century in England, at a time of lip-service to
Enlightenment rationality, of a political paranoia
fuelled by the Terror in France, and of the increas-
ing dominance of a bourgeois domesticity, is of
course enormous. Here I wish to think about the
way in which one Gothic novel enables us to
explore what was perhaps the most taboo of all
human sexual desires in Romantic-era England,
the passionate, even uncontrollable, sexual desire
of a beautiful white woman for the black male
body.
The widespread dissemination of abolitionist
poems, stories, tracts and autobiographies which
insisted not only upon universal human rights,
but upon the sympathetic brotherhood and sister-
hood of white and black peoples, raised the pos-
sibility of interracial sexual alliances and even
marriages. Most of the texts which overtly repre-
sented such interracial alliances confined them-
selves to legitimating a white male desire for the
black female body. They depended on the already
widespread cultural practice in the British West
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Indies of sexual liaisons between white male slave-
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
owners and their black female slaves. Several plays
performed on the London stage in the late eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth century rewrote this
cultural practice in the genre of romance, present-
ing positive portrayals of the love of a white man
for a black woman. In George Colman the Young-
er’s version of Inkle and Yarico performed in 1787,
for instance, the white English gentleman Inkle
finally forswears his inheritance in order to marry
the black African princess Yarico, while his white
man-servant Trudge also marries Yarico’s black
female attendant, Wowski.
A few plays and novels reversed this pattern
to legitimate the sexual desire of a black man for a
white woman. In James Powell’s comic panto-
mime, Furibond; or, Harlequin Negro, performed at
the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1807, the black
Harlequin finally manages to marry his beloved
Columbine, the white daughter of a Jamaican
planter. More radical was J. Ferriar’s revision of
Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko, titled The Prince of
Angola, performed in Manchester in 1788. Here
Oroonoko has already married the white daughter
of the European “stranger” who visited his father’s
court in Angola, taught him warfare, and died in
battle in his arms. As Oroonoko recalls his court-
ship of the white Imoinda, echoing Shakespeare’s
Othello,
. . . I presented her
With all the spoils of battle to atone
Her father’s ghost. But when I saw her face,
And heard her speak, I offer’d up myself
To be the sacrifice. She bow’d and blush’d;
I wonder’d and ador’d. The sacred power
That had subdued me, then inspir’d my tongue,
Inclin’d her heart, and all our talk was love.
I married her: And tho’ my country’s custom
Indulg’d the privilege of many wives,
I swore myself never to know but her.
She grew with child and I grew happier still.
(Ferriar 13-14)
In Maria Edgeworth’s novel Belinda, published
in 1801, the black freed slave Juba, a servant of
Belinda’s suitor, Mr. Vincent, marries the white
farmer’s daughter Lucy—although the public
dismay at this interracial marriage forced Edge-
worth in the third, 1810, edition of Belinda to
marry Lucy instead to her second love, the white
James Jackson (1801:243; 1810:234). And Olaudah
Equiano’s autobiography reminds us that a black
man could legitimately marry a white woman in
England—in April 1792, Gustavus Vassa married
the Englishwoman Susanah Cullen (Equiano 235,
305n674).
But all these texts focus on the sexual desires
of males, either of a white male for a black female
207
 or a black male for a white female. None tell the
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
story from the position of a female subjectivity.
More to the point, the very possibility that a white
female might sexually prefer the black male body
to the white male body was one that British
culture in the late eighteenth century either
denied or abhorred. Significantly, Edgeworth’s
Lucy has to overcome an initial fear of Juba’s black
face (1801: 244) before she can learn to love him.
And Ferriar’s white Imoinda has been raised since
infancy among the black peoples of Angola; she
had never seen a white man other than her father
when she married Oroonoko (Ferriar 13).
Far more characteristic of the public discourse
on interracial mating in the Romantic era was a
horrified disgust. Typical of this racial phobia is
Matthew Lewis’ poem “Isle of the Devils”, pub-
lished in his Journal of a West India Proprietor in
1834, in which he can imagine the desire of a
black man for a white woman only as a brutal
rape, a rape which twice impregnates the chaste
Irza and finally leads her to abandon her children,
however reluctantly in the case of her fair-skinned
(as opposed to her dark-skinned) son. More
vitriolic, and perhaps most indicative of the
culture’s racial paranoia concerning miscegena-
tion, or what they called assimilation, is Edward
Long’s outburst in his Candid Reflections . . . on
what is commonly called the Negroe-Cause, by a
Planter, published in 1772. Long first laments that
escaped male slaves in England frequently inter-
marry with white servant-women, “but when the
prospect of an easy subsistence fails, they make
no scruple to abandon their new wife and mulatto
progeny to the care of the parish, and betake
themselves to the colony, where they are sure, at
least, of not starving” (Long 48). But far worse, in
Long’s view, are the sexual desires of these
working-class white women. As he writes,
The lower class of women in England, are remark-
ably fond of the blacks, for reasons too brutal to
mention; they would connect themselves with
horses and asses, if the laws permitted them. By
these ladies they generally have a numerous
brood. Thus, in the course of a few generations
more, the English blood will become so contami-
nated with this mixture, and from the chances,
the ups and downs of life, this alloy may spread
so extensively, as even to reach the middle, and
then the higher orders of the people, till the whole
nation resembles the Portuguese and Moriscos in
complexion of skin and baseness of mind. This is
a venomous and dangerous ulcer, that threatens
to disperse its malignancy far and wide, until every
family catches infection from it.
(Long 48-9)
208
Long’s widely shared horror at the potentially
interracial desires of the English working classes
was powerfully evoked in Thomas Rowlandson’s
print in 1810, titled “Kitchen Stuff”. Here the lov-
ing embrace of the white servant-girl with a black
man is crudely paralleled by the white kitten that
playfully embraces a spotted, black-and-white dog,
thus suggesting that such an interracial embrace is
both brutally animalistic and a form of cross-
species mating. Moreover, this embrace is fuelled
by alcohol, by the “Black Jack” rum on the mantel-
piece and the “Cherry Bounce” liqueur in the cup
of the drunken cook.
In the context of this cultural paranoia con-
cerning interracial sexuality, it should not surprise
us that when a female writer wished to explore
the passionate desire of a white woman for a black
man, she felt constrained to frame her novel—as
many Gothic novels are framed—within a pat
Christian moral. In reading Charlotte Dacre’s Zof-
loya, or The Moor, published in 1806, however, we
should not take this moral over-seriously. Yes, Vic-
toria’s beloved Moor is—we finally learn—the
devil in disguise; yes, Victoria has been corrupted
from early adolescence by the bad example of her
mother’s adulterous elopement with a treacherous
suitor; yes, Dacre suggests, human nature is in-
nately evil and strong social restraints must be
placed on all human desires. At the level of this
framing moral narrative, Diane Hoeveler has cor-
rectly concluded in her Gothic Feminism that Zof-
loya is “racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic”
(Hoeveler 145), that Dacre condemns the excesses
of female sexual desire and overtly affirms instead
the ideals of bourgeois rationality and a maternal
ideology.
I would like to look at Zofloya somewhat dif-
ferently, focusing not on the framing moral of the
novel but rather on the textual representation of
Victoria’s desires as they develop during the novel.
First, let me give just the briefest of plot synopses
for those of you who have not yet read this
fascinating novel. Victoria de Loredani’s mother
elopes with her lover Count Ardolph when Victo-
ria is 15; her father is subsequently killed in a duel
with Ardolph. The beautiful, dark-haired Victo-
ria’s dawning sexuality is then aroused by the
older libertine, Count Berenza; her mother tries to
prevent this liaison by imprisoning Victoria with
her aunt; Victoria escapes to Berenza, initiates
their sexual affair, seduces him into marrying her,
only to discover that Berenza cannot sexually
satisfy her. She then becomes enamored of Beren-
za’s younger, more virile brother Henriquez, who
rejects her advances because he is engaged to the
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delicate, pale-skinned Lilla. At this point Hen-
riquez’ servant, Zofloya, a Moor, appears, first in
Victoria’s dream, then in fact, and offers her his
services in gaining Henriquez’ love. Victoria,
overcome with frustrated sexual passion, first
poisons her husband and then, when Henriquez
still rejects her, chains Lilla in a cave and drugs
Henriquez with a love-potion. but her longed-for
sexual consummation with Henriquez proves
disappointing. Henriquez commits suicide, Victo-
ria kills Lilla, and escapes with Zofloya to a cave of
bandits. When these bandits are surrounded by
the army, Victoria flees with the Moor’s help, only
to learn at last that he is the Devil; he hurls her to
her death from a cliff.
What I wish to focus on in this lurid tale is
Victoria’s sexuality.1 Aroused by the white male,
white female sexual desire in this novel is repeat-
edly frustrated by that white male, who proves
increasingly impotent as the novel unfolds. Count
de Loredani cannot satisfy his wife, who elopes.
Count Berenza, the vitiated libertine, cannot
arouse or gratify his wife, and visibly wastes away
before our eyes, poisoned by the lemonade he so
adoringly drinks from his wife’s cup. Henriquez is
besotted by the pale Lilla, but is unable to consum-
mate his sexual desire for her, impaling himself
instead on his own dagger. In the figural discourse
of this text, white male bodies literally become
smaller, weaker, less potent.
In contrast, the bodies of both Victoria and
Zofloya increase in size. Victoria, “above the
middle height”, “tall and graceful” as the antelope
(Dacre 96), looms over the wasted Berenza and
drugged, pale Henriquez. Zofloya, a man of excep-
tional intelligence, musical skill and education,
immediately attracts the erotic gaze of Victoria:
It occurred to her that the figure of the Moor pos-
sessed a grace and majesty which she had never
before remarked; his face too seemed animated
with charms till now unnoticed, and his very dress
to have acquired a more splendid, tasteful, and
elegant appearance.—True it was, that great was
the beauty of Zofloya, to a form the most attrac-
tive and symmetrical, though of superior height,
deriving every advantage too from the graceful
costume of his dress, was added a countenance,
spite of its colour, endowed with the finest pos-
sible expression. His eyes, brilliant and large,
sparkled with inexpressible fire; his nose and
mouth were elegantly formed, and when he
smiled, the assemblage of his features displayed a
beauty that delighted and surprised.
(153)
Tall, “majestic” and “solemnly beautiful” (158)
when he first appears, Zofloya becomes a “tower-
ing figure” (190), “so gigantic” that he seems
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“increased to a height scarcely human” (191). As
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
Zofloya’s size increases, so does Victoria’s sexual
desire for him. Initially Victoria sees Zofloya only
as her servant, the one who will carry out her wish
to eliminate her husband and to seduce the reject-
ing Henriquez. But as the novel progresses, Victo-
ria becomes more and more dependent on Zof-
loya, who repeatedly professes his own desire for
her, kneeling before her, kissing her hand, preserv-
ing her bloodied handkerchief next to his heart,
gently pressing her to his bosom, and insisting
that she belongs to him.
But it is Victoria’s growing sexual desire for
Zofloya that I wish to emphasize. At first the
“vain” Victoria is attracted only by Zofloya’s
desire—“she took pleasure in knowing that he
gazed upon her” (153). As the novel progresses,
she increasingly desires what he can do for her. As
he promises to help her consummate her desire
for Henriquez, she, “seizing his hand . . . pressed
it to her bosom” (159); in Zofloya’s presence, she
recognizes that “I remain unsatisfied” (172); when
she hears his flute-playing, she momentarily
forgets Henriquez—“sooner, yes sooner, would I
hear the footstep of Zofloya, or his sweet voice,
sweeter than all this music” and confesses to him
that “I desired your presence!” (181). After Hen-
riquez’ suicide, Victoria’s erotic attraction to Zof-
loya becomes ever more intense—“On him the
eyes of Victoria involuntarily fixed; dignity and
ineffable grace, were diffused over his whole
figure;—for the first time she felt towards him an
emotion of tenderness” (226). When he embraces
her, “Victoria felt reassured . . . such powerful
fascination dwelt around him that she felt inca-
pable of withdrawing from his arms; . . . no
sooner . . . did she behold that beautiful and
majestic visage, that towering and graceful form,
than all thought of his inferiority vanished, and
the ravished sense, spurning at the caluminous
idea, confessed him a being of a higher order”
(227). Having fled with Zofloya to the bandits’
cave, Victoria is overcome with passion for the
Moor:
Victoria’s proud, but now almost subjugated heart,
touched with the respectful attentions of the only
companion her vices and her crimes had left her,
extended to him, with softened looks her
hand.—He took it with tenderness, yet delicate
reserve, and raised it to his lips—his manner but
encreased to ardour the feelings of Victoria.
(231)
This love scene ends with Victoria’s passion-
ate declaration—“Zofloya!—I am thine ever”
(231). Even then her overwhelming sexual desire
remains unconsummated, hence all-consuming.
209
 Her death at the Moor’s hands thus becomes, in
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
the figuration of sexual desire that I have been
tracking in this novel, a Liebestod.
Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya thus constructs a
unique Gothic subjectivity as it powerfully repre-
sents a hitherto culturally outlawed sexual desire,
that of an empowered white woman for a black
man. It initiates a complicated dialogue with the
racist discourse of Edward Long, with those who
can conceptualize female interracial desire only as
degenerate, immoral or threatening. And it en-
abled Dacre’s female readers to explore a far wider
range of sexual options, a more aggressive libidinal
subjectivity, than did the other writing of her day.
Note
1. Victoria’s sexuality has previously been analyzed by
Adriana Craciun as a representation of nymphomania
(Dacre, Introduction 21-23) and by James Dunn as a
feminine appropriation of masculine sexual desire and
violence (Dunn, 313-14). Kim Ian Michasiw, who
perceptively locates the novel within the conventions
of a “transracial chivalric aristocracy of an earlier Ori-
entalism” (xxiii), also explores the role of sexuality
within the class and racial configurations of Zofloya.
Works Cited
Colman, George, the Younger. Inkle and Yarico. London: G.
G. J. and J. Robinson, 1787.
Dacre, Charlotte. Zofloya or, The Moor: a Romance of the
Fifteenth Century. Ed. with an Introduction by Adriana
Craciun. Peterborough, Canada: Broadview, 1997. All
citations in the text are from this edition.
Dunn, James. A. “Charlotte Dacre and the Feminization of
Violence.” Nineteenth Century Literature. 35, 1998. 307-
327.
Edgeworth, Maria. Belinda, 1st ed. 1801. Ed. with an
introduction by Eilean Ni Chilleanain. London: Every-
man, J. M. Dent, 1993.
———. Belinda, 3rd ed. 1810. Ed. Eva Figes. London: Pan-
dora, 1986.
Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of
Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, the African, Written
by Himself. Ed. with an introduction by Vincent Car-
retta. New York: Penguin, 1995.
Ferriar, J. The Prince of Angola, a Tragedy. Altered from the Play
of Oroonoko, and adapted to the Circumstances of the
Present Times. Manchester, 1788.
Hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic Feminism—The Professionaliza-
tion of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës.
University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State UP, 1998.
Lewis, Matthew. “The Isle of Devils, A Metrical Tale,” in
Journal of a West India Proprietor Kept during a Residence
in the Island of Jamaica (1834). Ed. with an introduc-
tion by Judith Terry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999, 160-83.
Long, Edward. Candid Reflections upon the Judgment lately
awarded by the Court of the King’s Bench in Westminster-
Hall, On what is commonly called the Negroe-Cause, By a
Planter. London: T. Lowndes, 1772.
210 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Michasiw, Kim Ian, Ed. with an introduction. Charlotte Da-
cre, Zofloya, or The Moor. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.
Powell, James (with G. Male). Furibond; or, Harlequin
Negro—A Grand Comic Pantomime. London: C.
Lowndes, 1807.
Punter, David. The Literature of Terror. London: Longman,
1980; 2nd ed., 1996.
WOMEN AND THE GOTHIC
ELAINE SHOWALTER (ESSAY DATE
1991)
SOURCE: Showalter, Elaine. “American Female
Gothic.” In Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in
American Women’s Writing, pp. 127-44. Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1991.
In the following essay, Showalter examines Gothic
literature by women within the context of American his-
tory and culture.
One of the earliest critical manifestations of
the change in consciousness that came out of the
women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s
was the theorization of the Female Gothic as a
genre that expressed women’s dark protests,
fantasies, and fear. The first great feminist theorist
of the genre was Ellen Moers, a brilliant and
pioneering critic who died of breast cancer in 1971
at the age of fifty. Her book, Literary Women: The
Great Writers (1975), was a highly personal, loosely
organized study of women writers across national
lines. The chapters on the Female Gothic were
particularly striking. Moers distinguished between
two types of female Gothic novel: Ann Radcliffe’s
origination in The Mysteries of Udolpho of a mode
in which ‘the central figure is a young woman
who is simultaneously persecuted victim and
courageous heroine,’ and Mary Shelley’s turn of
the genre in Frankenstein, a story with a heroine
but very powerfully a ‘birth myth,’ a tale of
hideous progeny both literary and physiological.
As Moers maintained, Frankenstein is ‘A woman’s
mythmaking on the subject of . . . what follows
birth: the trauma of the after-birth,’ fear and guilt,
anxiety and depression.1 No woman who has ever
read the book will forget Moers’s description of
the newborn infant, taken directly from Dr Spock:
A baby at birth is usually disappointing-looking to
a parent who hasn’t seen one before. His skin is
coated with wax . . . his face tends to be puffy
and lumpy, and there may be black and blue
marks . . . the head is misshapen . . . The baby’s
body is covered all over with fuzzy hair . . . and
some babies have black hair on the scalp which
may come far down on the forehead.
 Moers extended her theory of Female Gothic
to self-hatred and self-disgust directed towards the
female body, sexuality, and reproduction. The
Gothic, in her view, had to do with women’s
anxieties about birth and creativity, including the
anxiety of giving birth to stories in a process that
society could deem unnatural. Her ideas were
crucial to the work of such feminist critics as San-
dra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and to others who
looked at Mary Shelley as the paradigm of the
Gothic woman writer.
In the late 1970s Moers’s work was rethought
and revised by a number of psychoanalytically
oriented feminist critics influenced by object-
relations theory and especially the work of Nancy
Chodorow. They viewed the Female Gothic as a
confrontation not just with maternity, but with
the reproduction of mothering, and ‘the problem-
atics of femininity which the heroine must
confront.’2 In the Female Gothic, Claire Kahane
asserts, ‘the heroine is imprisoned not in a house
but in the female body, which is itself the maternal
legacy. The problematics of femininity is thus
reduced to the problematics of the female body,
perceived as antagonistic to the sense of self, as
therefore freakish.’3 The Gothic castle is, above
all, the house of the dead mother. The heroine
thinks that she is trapped in the haunted castle by
a sinister and seductive older man; but she is re-
ally on a quest to find the mother, who holds the
secrets of feminine existence:
Within an imprisoning structure, a protagonist,
typically a young woman whose mother has died,
is compelled to seek out the center of a mystery,
while vague and usually sexual threats to her
person from some powerful male figure hover on
the periphery of her consciousness. Following
clues that pull her onward and inward—blood-
stains, mysterious sounds—she penetrates the
obscure recesses of a vast labyrinthean space and
discovers a secret room sealed off by its associa-
tion with death. In this dark, secret center of the
Gothic structure, the boundaries of life and death
seem confused. Who died? Has there been a
murder? Or merely a disappearance?4
In the mid-1980s another group of feminist
critics influenced by poststructuralism and Laca-
nian psychoanalysis saw the Female Gothic as a
mode of writing corresponding to the feminine,
the romantic, the transgressive, and the revolu-
tionary. For them, its key texts were novels like
Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, in which the Gothic
erupted despite Brontë’s stated desire to express
herself in the bourgeois and patriarchal language
of reason. Reading the Female Gothic through
Freud’s Studies on Hysteria, ‘Dora,’ and ‘Das
Unheimliche,’ as well as through Lacan and
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Kristeva, critics equated the Gothic with the
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
feminine unconscious, and with the effort to
bring the body, the semiotic, the imaginary, or
the pre-Oedipal [M]Other Tongue into language.
Several of these critics systematized their read-
ings of Female Gothic under the rubric of hysteria.
In the preface to her book The Coherence of Gothic
Conventions, Eve Sedgwick calls ‘the heroine of the
Gothic a classic hysteric, its hero a classic
paranoid.’ The hysterical heroine graphically
expresses through her body what cannot be
spoken about the self or come into existence as
narrative. Similarly, when Mary Jacobus asks,
‘what is the literary status of that version of the
uncanny known to feminist critics as “female
Gothic,”’ she replies that the heroine is a hysteric
and the Female Gothic text is a hysterical narra-
tive.5
But ‘hysterical readings’ that dehistoricize the
Female Gothic make it a timeless universal mode,
one that threatens to reinstate the familiar duality
linking women with irrationality, the body, and
marginality, while men retain reason, the mind,
and authority. As Terry Eagleton remarks, ‘if
women speak the discourse of the body, the
unconscious, the dark underside of formal
speech—in a word, the Gothic—they merely
confirm their aberrant status.’6 And if ‘Gothic’
becomes the word that totalizes and encapsulates
these positions, it loses its capacity to mediate
between the uncanny and the unjust. Like other
genres, the Female Gothic takes on different
shapes and meanings within different historical
and national contexts. Borrowing many of its
conventions from the English and European tradi-
tions, it has become one of the most versatile and
powerful genres of American women’s writing,
with elements that have changed in relation to
changes in women’s roles and American culture.
We could trace a long history of American
Female Gothic. The popularity of the Gothic genre
in American fiction began within a decade of Ann
Radcliffe and Monk Lewis, and flourished in the
first years of the Republic, despite the difficulty of
finding appropriate equivalents of the ‘haunted
castle, the ruined abbey, the dungeons of the
Inquisition’ in rural Connecticut and Long Island.7
In the introduction to her book Woman’s Record
(1852), Sarah J. Hale explained the influences
which had led her to become ‘the Chronicler of
my own sex.’ ‘The first regular novel I read,’ she
recalled,
was ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho,’ when I was quite
a child. I name it on account of the influence it
exercised over my mind. I had remarked that of
211

SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1860-1935.
all the books I saw, few were written by Americans
and none by women. Here was a work, the most
fascinating I had ever read, always excepting ‘The
Pilgrim’s Progress,’ written by a woman! How
happy it made me! The wish to promote the
reputation of my own sex, and do something for
my own country, were among the earliest mental
emotions I can recollect.
For many nineteenth-century American
women readers and writers, the Gothic suggested
independence, adventure, narrative boldness, and
self-reliance. It allowed writers otherwise subject
to the narrative restrictions of gentility and
patriotism to find covert outlets for their sexuality
and to imagine exotic or European settings for
transgressive plots.
Yet for much of this century, when American
critics theorized about the American Gothic, lurid
women writers were not on their list. Most inter-
pretations of the Gothic saw it as a myth of male
power, arousing terror through incestuous or
Oedipal plots, whether ‘a helpless daughter con-
fronting the erotic power of a father or brother’;
or ‘the son’s rebellious confrontation with pater-
nal authority.’8 When Leslie Fiedler, for instance,
argued in Love and Death in the American Novel
(1960) that the Gothic was the ‘form that has been
most fruitful in the hands of our best writers,’ he
was not thinking of Louisa May Alcott, Harriet
212
Spofford, or Flannery O’Connor, but rather of Poe,
Brockden Brown, Melville, Twain, Hemingway,
and Faulkner. The essence of American literature,
Fiedler asserted, was ‘non-realistic, even anti-
realistic; long before symbolisme had been invented
in France and exported to America, there was a
full-fledged native tradition of symbolism.’ But
American women’s writing did not share this
symbolist essence. In fact, American Gothic could
not be written by women because it was a protest
against women, a flight from the domestic and
the feminine. Women stood for the dreary or
repellent ‘physical data of the actual world’ or ‘the
maternal blackness, imagined by the gothic writer
as a prison’ below the ‘crumbling shell of paternal
authority.’ In order to ‘avoid the facts of wooing,
marriage, and childbearing,’ then, American writ-
ers created a ‘nonrealistic and negative, sadistic
and melodramatic’ Gothic fiction, a literature of
‘darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and
affirmation.’9 Women could only be totemic
figures along the masculine Gothic trail, seductive
Dark Ladies or lachrymose Little Evas.
A story that challenged this narrative of
American Gothic was Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s
The Yellow Wallpaper. First published in the New
England Magazine in 1892, the story had dropped
out of the American literary canon. It was redis-
covered and reprinted in 1972 by the Feminist
Press, with an introduction by Elaine Hedges
which used the language of Kate Millett’s recently
published feminist best-seller to call it a narrative
of ‘sexual politics’ in which a woman rebels
against patriarchal power. Throughout the decade,
as Jean Kennard has explained, feminist critics
produced numerous readings of the story which
depended on new conventions and interpreta-
tions of such terms as patriarchy, madness, and
quest.1 0 Now considered ‘one of the most famous
feminist literary works,’1 1 it is also an American
classic. (The author is certainly not well known in
England, where a recent review called her ‘Char-
lotte Perkins Gilmore’).1 2 Yet paradoxically, when
‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ was adapted for Master-
piece Theater, a program that specializes in bring-
ing television versions of the English classics to
American audiences, it was set in Victorian Eng-
land. The story may have been too Gothic to seem
American.
Told in a series of brief paragraphs of one or
two sentences, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is a first-
person narrative of a woman who has been taken
by her physician husband to a secluded house in
the country—‘a colonial mansion, a hereditary
estate’—in order to cure a nervous illness, ‘a slight
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hysterical tendency,’ she has developed after the
birth of a son. The house is ‘quite alone, standing
well back from the road, quite three miles from
the village.’ On the extensive grounds, there are
‘hedges and walls and gates that lock,’ and at the
top of the house, a large room with barred win-
dows, rings on the walls, an iron bed nailed down
to the floor with a canvas mattress, and a gate bar-
ring the stairs. The floor is ‘gouged and splintered,’
the bedstead ‘gnawed,’ and the yellow wallpaper
ripped.
The narrator wants to write, and indeed
confides her story in secrecy to the ‘dead paper’ of
a journal which becomes the text. Her husband
and his sister think it is the writing that has made
her sick. But gradually the enforced passivity and
confinement breaks down her mind; she begins to
have crying spells, fatigue, and hallucinations in
which the ‘florid arabesque’ of the wallpaper
becomes a living paper, ‘budding and sprouting in
endless convolutions.’ Ultimately she sees a
woman creeping behind the pattern of the paper,
who becomes many women trapped and trying to
climb through. At the story’s end, the narrator is
completely mad. When her husband breaks into
the room where she has locked herself, she has
ripped off all the paper and is creeping around the
floor. ‘I’ve got out at last in spite of you,’ she tells
him, and when he faints in shock, she creeps over
his body.
Gilman gives the account of the breakdown
and treatment that motivated her to write the
story in her autobiography and also in an essay
called ‘Why I Wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper.”’ In
1887, after the birth of her daughter, Gilman
became severely depressed. Her husband at first
tried to cheer her up by hiring a maid and by read-
ing her Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth
Century; when neither remedy worked, he sent
her to Philadelphia for six weeks to take Dr Weir
Mitchell’s rest cure. A prominent and successful
nerve specialist, Mitchell had developed a therapy
for intellectual women, Edith Wharton among
them, that involved complete bed rest, no visi-
tors, no intellectual activity of any sort, including
reading, and a rich diet intended to produce a
weight gain of fifty to seventy pounds, a kind of
pseudo-pregnancy in which the symbolism of
biological creativity displaced artistic and intel-
lectual creativity. The body imagery of the rest
cure also implied the inverse relation of female
body and female mind; women who wished to
produce a large body of work had to starve them-
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SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860-1935)
AND “THE YELLOW WALLPAPER”
Gilman wrote only one work of horror fic-
tion, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), but it is
one of the lasting classics of the genre, and
has become part of the canon of feminist
literature. The novella is based upon Gilman’s
own experience with the “rest cure” devel-
oped by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell to treat the
mental illness known at the time as “neuras-
thenia”; Gilman was prescribed the treatment
for the postpartum depression she suffered
following the birth of her daughter. Mitchell’s
rest cure, prescribed primarily to women,
consisted of committing the patient to bed
for a period of months, during which time
the patient was fed only mild foods and
deprived of all mental, physical, and social
activity—reading, writing, and painting were
explicitly prohibited. Gilman once stated that
the rest cure nearly drove her insane; she
recovered after embarking upon a trip alone,
and decided to leave both her husband and
her daughter permanently.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is structured as a
series of secret diary entries by an unnamed
woman, a young wife and new mother
whose debilitating mental condition has
prevented her from caring for her infant. She
and her husband John, who is a doctor, have
rented a house in the country, in which she is
to take a rest cure. The narrator is confined
to an upstairs room with barred windows and
no furnishings except for a bed that is nailed
to the floor. The narrator describes the color
and pattern of the room’s garish yellow
wallpaper in an assortment of distasteful
ways, eventually becoming obsessed with the
wallpaper and imagining that a woman is
trapped behind it. The story ends with the
narrator creeping around the edges of the
room and tearing the wallpaper in ragged
sheets from the walls in an attempt to free
the woman she believes to be trapped behind
it. Her husband unlocks the door and wit-
nesses this activity. “I’ve got out at last,” she
explains to him, “And I’ve pulled off most of
the paper so you can’t put me back!” He
faints, and she continues to creep around the
room, crawling over her unconscious hus-
band.
213
 selves physically, and women who nurtured or
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
indulged their appetites would pay with artistic
sterility.1 3
Ordered never to ‘touch pen, brush, or pencil
as long as you live,’ Gilman came close to insan-
ity. She recovered only when she left her husband
and child for a short trip, an experience that made
her decide on a therapeutic divorce; ‘it seemed
plain that if I went crazy it would do my husband
no good and be a deadly injury to my child.’1 4
Casting Weir Mitchell’s advice to the winds, she
began to write again. Later she remarried, and had
a remarkable career as a feminist journalist and
activist.
Like Fuller’s work, Gilman’s Gothic had its
roots in the father’s library. Gilman’s father, a
distinguished librarian, had abandoned the family
when she was a year old. In her memory, the
father’s library stood not only for patriarchal
knowledge and language, but also the absence of
love and support. As she wrote in her autobiogra-
phy, ‘The word Father, in the sense of love, care,
one to go to in trouble, means nothing to me,
save indeed in advice about books and the care of
them—which seems more the librarian than the
father.’1 5 After her breakdown, tellingly, she found
herself unable to tolerate the paraphernalia and
spaces associated with her father; she could not
‘read a heavy book,’ or ‘look down an index,’ and
‘a library, which was once to me as a confectioner’s
shop to a child, became an appalling weariness
just to look at.’1 6 The father’s library could indeed
become the locus for both hysteria and rage. Gil-
man’s contemporary Alice James described her
fantasies of violence as she ‘used to sit immovable
reading in the library with waves of violent
inclination suddenly invading my muscles, taking
some one of their myriad forms such as throwing
myself out of the window, or knocking off the
head of the benignant pater as he sat with his
silver locks, writing at his table.’1 7
Gilman’s heroine too has violent fantasies
against men, but expresses her rage against herself
and against her child in the form of self-
destructive illness, suicidal feelings, and infanti-
cidal impulses. The realistic subtext of the story is
that the heroine’s husband and sister-in-law are
afraid that she may injure her baby or herself dur-
ing a postpartum psychosis. For this reason, they
are indeed keeping her under tacit surveillance.
The heroine wonders why the house has gone so
long unrented, and why they got it so cheaply;
but it seems clear that it is an abandoned private
mental hospital. The barred windows are not to
protect children, but to prevent inmates from
214 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
jumping out. The walls and the bed have been
gouged and gnawed by other prisoners. The
women she sees creeping in the hedges are per-
haps the ghosts of former patients. Some of these
ghosts are literary; ‘as readers versed in female
gothic,’ Mary Jacobus points out, ‘we know that
Bertha Mason haunts this text.’1 8
But more than women’s reading haunts The
Yellow Wallpaper. Psychosis, involving hallucina-
tions and delusions, can develop from postpartum
depressions marked by crying spells, confusion,
sleeplessness, and anxiety. Victorian doctors
already knew what recent studies have docu-
mented: that ‘it’s during a psychotic depression
that mothers are at a great risk of killing their
babies.’1 9 We learn about the heroine’s violent
feelings through the fantasies she projects on the
patterned yellow wallpaper in the room. Although
she claims to love her child and simply be tired of
caring for him, (‘Such a dear baby! And yet I can-
not be with him, it makes me so nervous’) her
perceptions of the wallpaper reveal images of
strangling: ‘There is a recurrent spot where the
pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous
eyes stare at you upside down.’ Berman suggests
that ‘the new mother’s description of the wallpa-
per evokes an image of an insatiable child who
seems to be crawling everywhere, even into the
nursery which remains her only sanctuary.’2 0 The
guilt engendered by these involuntary images,
while never conscious, forms her system of de-
fenses. She congratulates herself on the baby’s
‘fortunate escape’ from having to ‘occupy this
nursery with the horrid wallpaper’; and puts
herself in the child’s place: ‘I can stand it so much
easier than a baby, you see.’
Because the specter of infanticide is too ap-
palling to be faced, the heroine transforms her
violent wishes against the child to self-destructive
ones. Soon there is a woman crawling behind the
wallpaper,
and she is all the time trying to climb through.
But nobody could climb through that pattern—it
strangles so; I think that is why it has so many
heads. They get through, and then the pattern
strangles them off and turns them upside down,
and makes their eyes white! If those heads were
covered or taken off it would not be half so bad.
Childbirth becomes at once the tortuous
emergence of the self, and a fantasy of engulfment
by many-headed offspring, hungry and crying.
By the end of the story—the heroine’s last,
logically impossible journal entry, when she is
completely mad—her self-punishing suicidal urges
have come to the surface. She thinks about burn-
ing down the house, ‘to reach the smell’ of the
yellow wallpaper that torments her. She has found
a rope, useful only for hanging herself, and she
admits ‘I am getting angry enough to do some-
thing desperate. To jump out of the window
would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too
strong even to try.’ Instead she turns herself into
the infant, creeping around the room, even over
the body of her husband who has fainted at the
sight of what she has become.
Such a ‘thematic’ feminist reading of The Yel-
low Wallpaper cannot, as Mary Jacobus would
argue, ‘account for the . . . uncanny elements
present in the text.’2 1 But the scenario of confine-
ment and madness in Gilman’s Gothic corre-
sponds to the scripts of repression and incarcera-
tion typical of late nineteenth-century psychiatric
practice, and of late nineteenth-century American
Female Gothic plots.
In Literary Women, Ellen Moers suggested that
the keynote of the modern, post-war American
Female Gothic was its obsession with freaks. She
pointed to Southern Gothic writers such as Flan-
nery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, and Car-
son McCullers, whose adolescent heroines see the
discomforting changes in their bodies mirrored in
grotesques and freaks. In O’Connor’s story ‘A
Temple of the Holy Ghost,’ a hermaphrodite in a
blue dress tells the twelve-year-old heroine, ‘God
made me this way and if you laugh he may strike
you the same way.’ In McCullers’s Member of the
Wedding, the adolescent Frankie visits a circus
where she stands horrified before the booth of the
Half-Man, Half-Woman: ‘She was afraid of all the
Freaks, for it seemed to her that they had looked
at her in a secret way and tried to connect their
eyes with hers, as though to say: we know you.’
Katherine Anne Porter’s Miranda also goes to the
circus where a dwarf with ‘not-human golden
eyes’ grimaces at her ‘imitating her own face.’
Looking at freaks in the 1940s and 1950s
signified a woman artist’s determination to con-
front the forbidden without flinching, to activate
a powerful female gaze. Freaks and feminists were
weirdly bonded. Moers was particularly struck by
Diane Arbus’s photographs of urban outcasts—
drag queens, circus people, lunatics, nudists, and
giants. Starting out in 1950 as a fashion photogra-
pher for Glamour magazine, the well-bred Arbus
initially seemed like the ideal American girl. ‘Di-
ane fitted perfectly into the white-glove
syndrome,’ a colleague remembered. ‘I was aston-
ished when she surfaced with all those freak
pictures.’2 2 From the photographers Lisette Model
and Weegee, and the filmmaker Emile de Antonio,
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Arbus learned to photograph the forbidden: ‘the
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
androgynous, the crippled, the deformed, the
dead, the dying.’ As Model recalled, ‘she never
looked away, which took courage and
independence.’2 3 With her cameras as a shield, Ar-
bus entered an underworld, an urban space usu-
ally off-limits to women. 2 4 Her gothic quest
included following her subjects home; as she told
a reporter for Newsweek, ‘I love to go to people’s
houses—exploring—doing daring things I’ve not
done before—things I’d fantasized about as a
child. I love going into people’s houses—that’s
part of the thrill of seduction for woman—to see
how he lives.’2 5 In her celebrated photograph of
triplets, Arbus represented her own three faces in
the American culture of the 1950s: ‘Triplets
remind me of myself when I was an adolescent,’
she said. ‘Lined up in three images: daughter,
sister, bad girl, with secret lusting fantasies, each
one with a tiny difference.’2 6
These images were central to the plots of
American Female Gothic of the 1950s, in which
such writers as Jean Stafford and Shirley Jackson
were obsessed by the good girl/bad girl split. Ar-
bus, Plath, and Marilyn Monroe, who appeared to
Plath in a dream to give her ‘an expert manicure’
(perhaps to cure her of a man), and to promise
her ‘a new, flowering life,’ were all Gothic heroines
of a decade in which female artistic ambition as
well as sexuality were deviant.2 7 ‘Write laundry
lists,’ not poems, Adlai Stevenson had exhorted
Sylvia Plath’s graduation class of Smith in 1953,
as if in reference to the Gothic debunking of
Northanger Abbey.2 8
Women artists of the period attempted to
resolve their sense of freakishness by rejecting and
exorcising the Mother. In her journals in the late
1950s, Plath also jotted down numerous descrip-
tions of plots for Female Gothic stories, ‘an
analysis of the Dark Mother, the Mummy, Mother
of Shadows. An analysis of the Electra complex.’
The Bell Jar (1962) is set in several of the Women’s
Houses of the 1950s, suffocating equivalents of
the Gothic castle. Far from being idyllic female
communities of sisterly support, these are cloying
sickly spaces where women betray each other, as
the female body betrays: the Amazon Hotel, for
‘girls . . . with wealthy parents who wanted to be
sure their daughters would be living where men
couldn’t get at them and deceive them’; Ladies
Day magazine where Esther Greenwood gets food
poisoning; the suburban houses where she shares
a bedroom with her mother and thinks about
strangling her; the women’s dormitory at the
mental hospital that reminds her of college.
215
 Pregnant women especially seem like freaks to phobia is really only a metaphor for self-hatred.
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
Esther, whether the Catholic Dodo Conway with Since the daughter shares the maternal body, the
her six babies, and ‘grotesque protruding dead mother continues to haunt her. In Adrienne
stomach,’ or the anaesthetized woman whose Rich’s important book Of Woman Born: Mother-
delivery her boyfriend takes her to watch, with hood as Experience and Institution (1976), matro-
‘an enormous spider-fat stomach and two little phobia is interpreted as ‘a womanly splitting of
ugly spindly legs.’ Plath ‘equated maternal love the self, in the desire to become individuated and
with self-denial, self-sacrifice, and ultimately self- free. The mother stands for the victim in ourselves,
destruction; and it is no coincidence that [her] the unfree woman, the martyr.’ Rich insisted that
writings are filled with matricidal and infanticidal the split be healed in a genuine reunion not only
imagery.’2 9 Fear of childbirth and its restrictions is with the maternal principle, but with the real
a powerful weapon against female sexuality. ‘A mother. No feminist, she argued, can be truly at
man doesn’t have a worry in the world,’ Esther peace with herself until she has made her peace
tells her psychiatrist, ‘while I’ve got a baby hang- with her own mother and sisters.
ing over my head like a big stick to keep me in
Rich’s volumes of poems and essays called
line.’ Part of the fear is the appropriation of
upon the feminist ‘will to change,’ upon women’s
childbirth by a dehumanizing male medicine. The
decisions to use their anger, sexuality, and energy
woman in the delivery room is ‘on a drug that
to confront confining institutions and to assert
would make her forget she’s had any pain . . .
control of their lives. But these feminist fantasies
she was in a kind of twilight sleep.’ Esther thinks
of the liberated will characteristic of the late 1960s
‘it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would
came up against an external limit, as did the
invent.’ The drug is in fact nembutal, used by
utopian fantasies of other revolutionary move-
obstetricians in twilight sleep anaesthesia. While
ments in politics and civil rights. Despite the
the movement made the concept of painless
expansion of vocational and political opportuni-
childbirth more acceptable, ‘by encouraging
ties during the 1970s, women also became more
women to go to sleep during their deliveries, the
imprisoned and paralyzed by the fear of male
twilight sleep movement helped to distance
violence. Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will:
women from their bodies.’3 0 As Adrienne Rich
Men, Women, and Rape (1975) was a pivotal book
notes, ‘no more devastating image could be
of the decade, one which made a strong case for
invented for the bondage of woman: sheeted,
the politicization of rape as a feminist issue. As
supine, drugged, her wrists strapped down and
Brownmiller observed. ‘The ultimate effect of rape
her legs in stirrups, at the very moment when she
upon the woman’s mental and emotional health
is bringing new life into the world.’ 3 1 Plath
has been accomplished even without the act. For to
equates twilight sleep with electroshock treat-
accept a special burden of self-protection is to
ment, also a kind of birth process engineered by
reinforce the concept that women must live and
men.
move about in fear and can never expect to
The Bell Jar offers us several possible endings achieve the personal freedom, independence, and
to Esther Greenwood’s gothic quest. One is sexual self-assurance of men.’
freedom through birth control. When Esther gets
While contemporary American Female Gothic
her first diaphragm, it is like a ticket on the
has increasingly dealt with rape, assault, and
Underground Railroad: ‘I climbed up on the
murder, it has received far less attention from
examination table, thinking “I am climbing to
feminist critics than the narratives of maternity,
freedom.”’ Another is killing off the lesbian self
madness, or the grotesque. An early and influential
Plath associated with the ‘career woman’ in the
example of this genre was Joyce Carol Oates’s
suicide of Esther’s double Joan Gilling. It’s at
short story ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have
Joan’s funeral that Esther wonders ‘what I thought
You Been’ (1966). Dedicated to Bob Dylan, the
I was burying’ and hears the ‘old brag’ of her
story begins realistically. Fifteen-year-old Connie
heart: ‘I am I am I am.’ A third is the rhetorical
has a mind ‘all filled with trashy daydreams.’ She
murder of the Mother. ‘I hate her,’ she tells the
lies to her parents and spends her evenings flirt-
psychiatrist, who smiles ‘as if something had
ing with boys and being picked up at the mall or
pleased her very, very much.’ And guided ‘as by a
the drive-in restaurant. The title thus suggests the
magical thread’ she steps into the hospital board-
parent’s questions to the rebellious teenager. But
room to pass her final examination in sanity.
Connie is threatened and finally abducted by a
Hating one’s mother was the enlightenment mysterious man posing as a teenager in a gold
of the pre-feminist 1950s and 1960s. But matro- convertible who calls himself Arnold Friend. He

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looks like James Dean or Marlon Brando, with
‘shaggy black hair that looked crazy as a wig,’
sunglasses that are ‘metallic and mirrored every-
thing in miniature,’ and ‘tight faded blue jeans
stuffed into black scuffed boots.’ A. Friend speaks
to Connie with shocking directness:
I’m your lover, honey. You don’t know what that
is yet but you will . . . But look: it’s real nice and
you couldn’t ask for nobody better than me or
more polite. I’m always nice at first, the first time.
I’ll hold you so tight you won’t think you have to
try to get away or pretend anything because you’ll
know you can’t.
When he takes her away from her house in
his gold car, it is clear that she is going to her
death. By the story’s chilling end, they have
become mythic figures in a Female Gothic land-
scape of the True West:
My sweet little blue-eyed girl, he said in a half-
sung sigh that had nothing to do with her brown
eyes, but was taken up just the same by the vast
sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all
sides of him—so much land that Connie had
never seen before and did not recognize except to
know she was going to it.
Some have attributed such plots to the over-
heated and morbid imaginings of the author. In
an essay called ‘Why Is Your Writing So Violent?’
Joyce Carol Oates muses on the reason she is so
often asked why she doesn’t leave ‘war, rape,
murder and the more colorful minor crimes’ to
men, and focus her writing on ‘“domestic” and
“subjective” material, in the manner . . . of Jane
Austen or Virginia Woolf. The implication is that
if Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf had lived in
Detroit they might have been successful at “tran-
scending” their environment and writing novels
in which not a hint of “violence” could be
detected.’3 2 Oates has explained however that the
story came to her ‘more or less in a piece’ after
hearing Bob Dylan’s song ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby
Blue,’ and then reading about a killer in the
Southwest and thinking about ‘the old legends
and folk songs of Death and the Maiden.’3 3 Ac-
cording to Oates, Arnold Friend is ‘a fantastic
figure: he is Death, he is the elf-knight of the bal-
lads, he is the Imagination, he is a Dream, he is a
Lover, a Demon, and all that.’3 4
The plot is based on a real incident. In 1966
twenty-three-year-old Charles Howard Schmid of
Tucson, Arizona was charged with the murder of
three teenage girls and became the subject of a
feature story in Life called ‘The Pied Piper of
Tucson.’3 5 The article told how Schmid, or Smitty,
as he was called, had sought to ‘create an exalted,
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heroic image of himself.’ To the bored teenagers
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
in his crowd, he was a ‘folk hero . . . more
dramatic, more theatrical, more interesting than
anyone else in their lives.’ With a face that was
his own aesthetic creation, the hair dyed black,
heavy make-up, and a beauty mark on one cheek,
Smitty cruised Tucson in a gold convertible, look-
ing in all the teen hangouts for pretty girls. Brag-
ging about his sexual exploits, claiming to have
made vast amounts of money selling drugs,
Charles Schmid had assembled himself so con-
sciously from movies and popular culture that its
hard to say that he, rather than Arnold Friend, is
not the fictional character. Oates does not see the
Gothic as a revelation of female hysteria, but
rather as the indictment of an American social
disorder, the romanticization of the violent
psychopath and serial killer.
Yet there is also a muted maternal subtext in
the story. Connie lives restlessly inside ‘her dad-
dy’s house,’ the house of domesticity, of the
housewife married to her four walls. Connie’s
mother haunts the little house, always picking on
her pretty daughter, who wishes they both were
dead. What Connie’s mother calls her ‘trashy
daydreams’ are inarticulate longings for something
different, something more than having to be
‘sweet and pretty and give in.’ At the mall and the
roadhouse, she becomes another person, someone
who experiences sexual pleasures that are tender,
‘the way it was in movies and promised in songs.’
To experience sexual desire, for the American
maiden of 1966, is to risk pregnancy, maternity,
the destruction of one’s identity. It means becom-
ing the mother and therefore dead. But twenty
years later, in the film version of the story, Smooth
Talk (1986), Connie goes off with her demon lover
and comes home again, gentler, cured of her
restlessness and rage. For the American maiden of
the 1980s, sexual initiation is not fatal, but the
beginning of understanding and maternal kin-
ship.
The Shadow Knows (1974) by Diane Johnson is
both an artful and terrifying study of female
vulnerability, and a novel about race, sexuality,
and fear in 1970s America. Johnson has been
called a member of the ‘California Gothic’ School
of fiction;3 6 her fiction is an extended exploration
of American irrationality, danger, and the bizarre.
The Shadow Knows is narrated by ‘N. Hexam,’ a
thirty-four-year-old divorced mother of four, who
lives in a housing project in Sacramento, Califor-
nia. With her lives Ev, a black woman who cares
for the children while N. goes to graduate school
in structural linguistics. Pregnant by her married
217
 lover, N. has had an IUD put in to produce an
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
abortion. As she receives obscene phone calls, has
her door vandalized, and her tires slashed, N.
believes that someone is trying to kill her, and she
may be right. Anyone could do it: her ex-husband,
her best friend, her lover, his wife, the crazy
former maid Osella. While meditating on her
enemies, N. reflects on male hatred of women:
‘husbands killing wives—that’s an especially recur-
rent sort of murder . . . I don’t understand the
sources of male vanity and rage that turn them
into killers. Who suckles them on these bitter
poisons of expectation? Women, I know.’
Carrying the burden of guilt for her sexuality,
her infidelity, her intelligence, her love and resent-
ment for her children, N. feels that perhaps she
deserves to be punished. ‘If someone is trying to
kill you, do you perhaps deserve it?’ Her efforts at
abortion also torment her: ‘I have reason to
believe myself a murderess.’ She sees the mess
smeared on her front door by unknown vandals
as ‘fetal membranes and blood from inside me,’
the ‘murdered new life.’
The urban context of crime and racial tension
adds to the atmosphere of the novel. According to
Johnson, The Shadow Knows was ‘about race rela-
tions, the evil in human nature, and social fear.’3 7
Furthermore, ‘it was meant to be about persons
on the fringe; they happen to be women, and
what happens to them is meant to be particular
to America in the seventies.’3 8 The maid, Ev, who
lacks N.’s white-skin privilege, is a daily wrench-
ing reminder to her of the desperation of women’s
lives at the edges of the American dream. Ev’s lov-
ers ‘slash and beat . . . and steal from her.’ She
values herself so little that she often burns and
cuts herself, and is deeply scarred, like Queequeg
or ‘the vandalized statue of a great Nubian queen.’
Ev’s death—of acute pancreatitis? of murder?—
surprises no one, not even her grieving parents.
She has long been a victim.
At the gothic center of the book is the relation-
ship between N. and Osella, the enormously fat,
crazy, black ex-nursemaid. Osella makes threaten-
ing phone calls to N., accusing her of witchcraft
and promiscuity. Is she the mysterious vandal?
Suspecting Osella of the crime, N. goes to see her
perform at the Club Zanzibar, where she works as
a stripper:
She seemed to have been oiled, for she shone so;
one saw nothing but the gleaming immense
breasts lying across her huge belly, breasts astound-
ingly full and firm like zeppelins overhead. She
wore little trunks of purple satin and nothing else
but a gold armlet around the expanse of her up-
218
per arm—a brilliant stroke, a rather Egyptian,
goddess-like adornment calling to mind one of
those frightening and horrifying fertility goddesses
with swollen bodies and timeless eyes and the
same engulfing infinitely absorbing quality Osella
radiated now.
Osella is N.’s double and shadow; Kali, the
dark jungle queen, the mother-man-eater. While
N. is a thin little woman, Osella is immense, ‘a
sort of super-female.’ Her huge body exudes heat;
like other fat ladies and freaks in American Female
Gothic, she represents the terrifying essence of
female appetite and desire.3 9
Is N. a reliable narrator? Is anyone trying to
kill her or is she simply paranoid, racist, neurotic?
The threats may only be the projections of her
own violence and rage. N. describes the ‘ordinary
misery of mothers of small children’; the loneli-
ness and desperation; ‘you must carry them. Their
little arms are tightly around your throat, their
sticky little fingers are on your glasses.’ She has
fantasized killing her husband on a fishing trip: ‘It
simply occurred to her to push him in the river.’
Johnson’s title alludes to the popular American
radio show of the 1940s called The Shadow Knows,
about the detective Lamont Cranston, whose eerie
laugh accompanied the famous opening question;
‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?’
Read with the conventions of the detective story
it parodies, the novel suggests the Agatha Christie
device of the first-person killer.
Yet Johnson has told an interviewer that she
meant N. to be a ‘reliable narrator and the events
more or less real, and the fear certainly real.’4 0
While N. is not murdered, Ev apparently is; and at
the end of the novel N. is raped by a mysterious
assailant, an event Johnson presents as a fate bet-
ter than death, almost a relief. The rape is N.’s
punishment for breaking the rules, for protesting
and making trouble, for going to graduate school
instead of working for the telephone company.
Johnson has commented that ‘the rape scene was
meant to be a final symbol of ambiguity and
everybody’s complicity in evil. I wrote that last
scene lightly, before my consciousness was raised
about the political implications of rape.’4 1 Review-
ing Brownmiller’s book for the New York Review of
Books, Johnson realized that ‘from a woman’s
earliest days she is attended by injunctions about
strangers, and warnings about dark streets, locks,
escorts and provocative behavior. She internalizes
the lessons contained therein, that to break certain
rules is to invite or deserve rape.’4 2 In an interview
shortly afterwards, she admitted that a woman
who was raped would feel ‘angry, resentful, venge-
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ful, guilty—a whole bunch of things which N. in
The Shadow Knows doesn’t feel. And maybe now
that I’ve read Susan Brownmiller, I would not have
had the book end that way.’4 3
Some of this raised consciousness about wom-
en’s internalization of the responsibility for male
violence came out in 1980 when Johnson wrote
the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s film version
of The Shining, an American Male Gothic novel by
Stephen King, which portrays a woman who fears
that her husband may be trying to kill her from
the point of view of the husband. Jack Torrance,
the blocked writer who is the protagonist of The
Shining, has been beaten by his father as a child,
and remembers seeing his mother beaten as well.
In a pattern psychologists have established as
valid, he projects his rage onto his wife and child:
‘You have to kill her, Jacky, and him too. Because
a real artist must suffer. Because each man kills
the thing he loves. Because they’ll always be
conspiring against you, trying to hold you back
and drag you down.’
The collaboration of Johnson and Kubrick on
the script for The Shining is a fascinating instance
of the re-gendering of Gothic plots. Johnson and
Kubrick wrote together during an eleven-week
period in London. What initially struck Johnson
about King’s book was ‘the horror, of course—the
whole atmosphere of growing fear within the
domestic circle was the core.’ In the adaptation,
Kubrick wrote Jack’s lines, while Johnson wrote
those of the wife Wendy. But most of Wendy’s
lines ended up on the cutting-room floor. Johnson
comments, ‘I was interested to see that finally the
Wendy that came out on the screen was much
quieter than the Wendy I had written, who was
more like a female character in my novels, I sup-
pose, in that she had a lot to say.’4 4 Nevertheless,
aficionados of the slasher film were disappointed
in The Shining. They thought it had too much
psychological nuance and feminist perspective,
and too little blood. Stephen King himself did not
like the film. ‘Neither Stanley Kubrick nor his
screenwriter Diane Johnson had any knowledge
of the genre,’ he complained. ‘It was like they had
never seen a horror movie before.’4 5
Changing expectations of what horror means
in the horror movie will not happen overnight,
and the gender gap in American Gothic remains
enormous. Yet ironically, if the contemporary
Female Gothic has come increasingly to be per-
ceived as an American mode it is because its
concerns are now consistent with a larger change
in American fiction towards ‘violence-centered
plots’ and a Gothic revival representing ‘alterna-
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tive strategies for depicting an ever more terrify-
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
ing reality.’4 6 If American Psycho is the masculine
Gothic of the 1990s, Female Gothic looks more
and more like a realist mode.
Notes
1. Literary Women: The Great Writers (New York: Double-
day, 1976), 91-2, 93.
2. Claire Kahane, ‘The Gothic Mirror,’ in Shirley Nelson
Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether
(eds.), The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psycho-
analytic Interpretation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1985), 335.
3. Ibid. 343.
4. Ibid. 334.
5. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Meth-
uen, 1986), vi; Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman: Essays
in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986), 201.
6. Eagleton, Nationalism: Irony and Commitment (Belfast:
Field Day Theatre Company Limited, 1988), 13-14.
7. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel,
rev. edn. (New York: Stein and Day, 1975), 144.
8. Kahane, ‘The Gothic Mirror,’ 335-6.
9. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, 132.
10. See Jean E. Kennard, ‘Convention Coverage or How to
Read Your Own Life,’ New Literary History, 13 (Autumn
1981), 69-88.
11. Diane Price Herndl, ‘The Writing Cure: Charlotte Per-
kins Gilman, Anna O., and “Hysterical” Writing,’
NWSA Journal, 1 (1988), 68.
12. See Kate Ford, ‘Loss and Compensation,’ Times Literary
Supplement, 12-18 Jan. 1990, 46.
13. Thanks to Catherine Gallagher for this perception.
14. Mary A. Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a
Radical Feminist (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1980), 152.
15. Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New
York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1935), 5-6.
16. Ibid. 98, 100.
17. The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel (New York:
Dodd, Mead & Co., 1934), 149.
18. Reading Woman, 240.
19. Dr Paula Clayton, quoted in Daniel Goleman, ‘Wide
Beliefs on Depression in Women Contradicted,’ New
York Times, 9 Jan. 1990.
20. Jeffrey Berman, The Talking Cure: Literary Representa-
tions of Psychoanalysis (New York: New York University
Press, 1985), 54.
21. Jacobus, Reading Woman, 233.
22. Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 101.
23. Ibid. 132.
219
 24. Arbus’s use of the camera had precedent in the early
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
photography of Eudora Welty, and recent parallels in
the work of women film directors like Susan Seidel-
man. In the documentary Calling the Shots, shown on
British television in Spring 1990, Seidelman and other
women film-makers discussed the way that the camera
allowed them access to forbidden turf.
25. Bosworth, Diane Arbus, 158.
26. Ibid. 217.
27. The Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Ted Hughes and Frances
McCullough (New York: Dial Press, 1982), 319. An
unpublished paper by Jodi Hauptman, ‘Mirrors and
Pictures: A Comparison of The Bell Jar to the Photo-
graphs of Diane Arbus,’ written for my course on
‘American Women Writers’ in May 1985, explores
similar images of mirrors, shadows, and doubling in
Arbus and Plath.
28. Linda Huf, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman
(New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983), 128.
29. Berman, Talking Cure, 127.
30. Judith Walzer Leavitt, ‘Birthing and Anesthesia: The
Debate over Twilight Sleep,’ in Women and Health in
America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1984), 181.
31. Of Woman Born (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976),
170-1.
32. ‘Why Is Your Writing So Violent?’ New York Times Book
Review, 25 Mar. 1981, 10.
33. ‘Interview with Joyce Carol Oates,’ in John R. Knott,
Jr., and Christopher R. Keaske (eds.), Mirrors: An
Introduction to Literature, 2nd edn. (San Francisco: Can-
field Press, 1975), 18-19.
34. Ibid. 19.
35. See Dan Moser, ‘The Pied Piper of Tucson,’ Life, 4 Mar.
1966, 18-24. This source was identified by Tom Quirk,
‘A Source for “Where Are You Going, Where Have You
Been?”’ Studies in Short Fiction, 18 (Fall 1981), 413-19.
36. Larry McCaffery, Anything Can Happen: Interviews with
Contemporary American Novelists (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1983), 205.
37. Interview with Diane Johnson, in McCaffery, Anything
Can Happen, 202.
38. Janet Todd, ‘Diane Johnson,’ in Janet Todd (ed.),
Women Writers Talking (New York: Holmes and Meier,
1983), 125.
39. See e.g. Jean Stafford’s story, ‘The Echo and the
Nemesis,’ in Children are Bored on Sunday (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1953).
40. Todd, ‘Diane Johnson,’ 125.
41. McCaffery, Anything Can Happen, 213.
42. Diane Johnson, ‘The War between Men and Women,’
New York Review of Books, 11 Dec. 1975.
43. Constance Carey, interview with Diane Johnson, San
Francisco Review of Books, 1 (Jan. 1976), 17.
44. McCaffery, Anything Can Happen, 215.
45. Aljean Harmetz, ‘“Pet” Film Rights Sold,’ New York
Times, 8 June 1984.
220 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
46. Michiko Kakatuni, ‘Kill! Burn! Eviscerate! Bludgeon!
It’s Literary Again to Be Horrible,’ New York Times, 21
Nov. 1989.
E. J. CLERY (ESSAY DATE 1992)
SOURCE: Clery, E. J. “The Politics of the Gothic
Heroine in the 1790s.” In Reviewing Romanticism, edited
by Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis, pp. 69-85. New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
In the following essay, Clery outlines the utility of Gothic
fiction for readers in the 1790s, particularly in terms of
advancing a progressive, feminist perspective.
L’Histoire d’une femme est toujours un
Roman.
‘You must confess that novels are more true
than histories, because historians often contradict
each other, but novelists never do.’ The would-be
heroine of E. S. Barrett’s satire of romance fiction,
The Heroine, here goes on the attack against the
conventional depreciation of the ‘feminine’ novel
in favour of ‘masculine’ history (1814, 78). Gender
is at the heart of the matter when it is raised again
in Northanger Abbey, for history, Catherine Mor-
land observes, ‘tells me nothing that does not
either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and
kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the
men all so good for nothing, and hardly any
women at all, it is very dull. . . .’ (Austen, 1933,
108) Both of these satires set out to show, in comic
terms, what happens when an avid consumer of
‘horrid novels’ fulfils James Beattie’s gloomy
prognosis:
Romances are a dangerous recreation . . . and
tend to corrupt the heart, and stimulate the pas-
sions. A habit of reading them breeds a dislike to
history, and all the substantial parts of knowledge;
withdraws the attention from nature and truth;
and fills the mind with extravagant thoughts, and
too often with criminal propensities.
(573-4)
and comes to read her own ‘history’ as if it
were a sensational narrative.
Yet on the way to the satire’s final rationalist
confirmation of the divide between fact and fic-
tion a curious alchemy takes place. Common
sense, in temporarily assuming a fantastic disguise,
finds it cannot so easily shake it off again. Thus
Margaret Kirkham’s feminist reading of Northanger
Abbey discovers in it ‘a major criticism of the as-
sumptions associated with the schema of the
burlesque novel in which a heroine learns that
her romantic notions are all mistaken, and that
the world of the everyday is better ordered than
that of imagination.’ (Kirkham 89) Catherine’s
Gothic imaginings about General Tilney and his
late wife are partially borne out; for it emerges
that Mrs Tilney had been imprisoned by her mar-
riage, that unhappiness had contributed to her
death, and that the General, in accordance with
the laws of England and the customs of the time,
does wield near absolute power ‘as an irrational
tyrant’ in the family. We find the romance perspec-
tive, pace The Heroine’s Cherubina, may be ‘more
true’ than Henry Tilney’s reassuring, Whig vision
of historical progress (‘Does our education prepare
us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at
them?’). In attempting to cure it, by a dangerous
mingling, satire itself catches the infection of fic-
tion which Beattie feared.
The following essay will trace the disruptive
effect of satire’s ‘other’ to its source. In it I will try
to assess, in the light of historical experience, the
value of Gothic fiction for its readers in the
1790s—a period when novels with a Gothic theme
accounted for up to two-thirds of those published
in a year. To begin with, I want to propose the
paradox that it is in the narratives of this for the
most part ideologically conservative form of
popular fiction, in conjunction with contempo-
rary evidence for the response to them, that we
must look for signs of the development of a
feminist critical self-consciousness. In Vindication
of the Rights of Woman (1792) Mary Wollstonecraft
expresses an ambivalent opinion of the novel
form’s progressive potential. While restating the
rationalist valorisation of history over fiction, she
nevertheless insists that novel-reading is prefer-
able to leaving ‘a blank still a blank, because the
mind must receive a degree of enlargement and
obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its
thinking powers.’ (1985, 386) Six years later the
Prologue of her novel The Wrongs of Woman; or,
Maria (1798) requests the reader to consider the
narrative as a ‘history . . . of woman’. A conven-
tional historical account of ‘the partial laws and
customs of society’ has been rejected as inad-
equate.1 In spite of her disclaimer regarding the
use of ‘stage-effect’, she has recourse in her fiction
to the most melodramatic devices of the Gothic
mode involving imprisonment, sexual tyranny
and madness. In Gothic she finds the appropriate
discursive form for her social critique of the rape
of women’s humanity.
The change in sentiment that takes place
between the writing of these two works coincides
with the rise of the Gothic heroine. During the
same space of time Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries
of Udolpho (1794), apogee of Gothic fiction, had
appeared, and its success had resulted in a flood
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of imitations. On the basis of her enormous suc-
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
cess Radcliffe—identified by Michel Foucault as
‘initiator of a discursive practice’—put into circula-
tion the elements of a narrative-type structured
around the subjectivity of the heroine, and thus
distinct from the early romances of Horace Wal-
pole and Clara Reeve and the more sensational
strain of ‘Schauerroman’ available in translations
from the German and later popularised by ‘Monk’
Lewis. Instances of the heroine-centred narrative
will be read here as contributions to a ‘history of
woman’. Beginning with the making of the
heroine/female subject through her equivocal rela-
tions with the realm of property ownership and
economic agency, my narrative follows her to the
Gothic castle, a structure briefly lit up as a meta-
phor for woman’s ‘dematerialisation’ before the
law, and then on to her arrival at the ‘happy
ending’ and ultimate absorption into marriage.
1. The Heroine
Emily calmly said:
‘I am not so ignorant, signor, of the laws on this
subject, as to be misled by the assertion of any
person. The law, in the present instance, gives me
the estates in question, and my own hand shall
never betray my right.’
‘I have been mistaken in my opinion of you, it
appears,’ re-joined Montoni sternly. ‘You speak
boldly, and presumptuously, upon a subject which
you do not understand. For once, I am willing to
pardon the conceit of ignorance; the weakness of
your sex, too, from which, it seems, you are not
exempt, claims some allowance; but if you persist
in this strain—you have everything to fear from
my justice.’
‘From your justice, signor,’ rejoined Emily, ‘I have
nothing to fear—I have only to hope.’
Montoni looked at her with vexation, and seemed
considering what to say . . . ‘Your credulity can
punish only yourself; and I must pity the weak-
ness of mind which leads you to so much suffer-
ing as you are compelling me to prepare for you.’
‘You may find, perhaps, signor,’ said Emily with
mild dignity, ‘that the strength of my mind is
equal to the justice of my cause; and that I can
endure with fortitude, when it is in resistance to
oppression.’
‘You speak like a heroine,’ said Montoni contemp-
tuously; ‘we shall see whether you can suffer like
one.’
Emily was silent, and he left the room.
Recollecting that it was for Valancourt’s sake she
had thus resisted, she now smiled complacently
upon the threatened sufferings, and retired to the
spot which her aunt had pointed out as the reposi-
tory of the papers relative to the estates . . .
(Radcliffe 1970, 380-1)
221
 The story so far: After a blissful childhood
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
Emily St Aubert loses her mother and father in
quick succession. She is penniless and forced to go
and live with her vain and foolish aunt, a rich
widow. There she falls in love with and agrees to
marry Valancourt, whom she had first met on a
tour of the Pyrenees she made with her father.
The aunt after some opposition permits the mar-
riage and then vetoes it when she herself impul-
sively marries the mysterious and compelling
Signor Montoni. The household moves to Venice.
Emily is pressured to marry a man she dislikes but
before the ceremony there is an abrupt removal to
Montoni’s castle, Udolpho, in the Appenines. The
castle is full of long dark passages, nameless fears
and hints of ancestral wrongdoings. It emerges
that Montoni is the chief of a band of condottieri.
He has large gambling debts to pay off and threat-
ens his wife in order to make her sign over some
entailed estates to him. She refuses and he has her
imprisoned. She dies of unhappiness and neglect
and bequeaths the estates to her niece.
The confrontation between heroine and vil-
lain in The Mysteries takes place at the intersection
of economic structure and cultural norms. Emily’s
self-assertion in defence of her property rights is
countered by Montoni’s rehearsal of strictures on
feminine propriety. The excessive, romantic
nature of her resistance to authority is registered
in her naming as ‘heroine’;2 the predestined
failure of such a gesture is signified by her silence.
Emily’s brushes with the supernatural at Udol-
pho are later explained away (the ‘explained
supernatural’ is frequently used as a description of
the Radcliffean narrative-type) as the products of
an overstimulated imagination but they are
nevertheless the proper metaphor for her own
condition. Her determined relation to the eco-
nomic order—in this instance the system of
property relations organised by kinship—defines
the nature of the heroine’s social existence.3 She
is to serve as an instrument for the passage of
property, whether by cession to the superior claim
of a male relation or as the merchandise of a
profiteering marriage agreed between men; there-
fore her tormented consciousness, her sensibility,
her humanity, are alike excessive—ghostly emana-
tions. She experiences, as the effect of this socio-
economic positioning, the curious ambiguity of
existing simultaneously as both a thing and a
person, in a twilight zone of individuation.
At the same time her alienation from her own
will is imposed by the shadow of propriety, mak-
ing her response to economic oppression double:
libertarian in so far as she is a sensible individual;
222 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
calculating—on behalf of reputation—insofar as
she is a woman, constrained by gender. In the
event she is forced to sign away her property to
her wicked uncle not because of any inability to
suffer with fortitude, but because in a castle over-
run with drunken mercenaries and Venetian
courtesans she can no longer safeguard her privacy
or virtue without his protection. Sex intervenes,
marking the duplicity of women’s experience.
‘A man . . . secure in his own good conduct,
depends only on himself, and may brave the
public opinion; but a woman, in behaving well,
performs but half her duty; as what is thought of
her, is as important to her as what she really
is. . . . Opinion is the grave of virtue in a man;
but its throne among women.’ Wollstonecraft
quotes Rousseau (1985, 242). Romance fiction
revolves around this double standard, alternately
condoning and deprecating, pointing on the one
hand to the throne on which the heroine will be
installed at the end of her trials, and on the other
hand to the grave where one false step might,
however undeservedly, lead her. Romance recogn-
ises that the gentlewoman is bound by the meta-
physics of appearance, that her mind is of neces-
sity given over to superstition. In every work that
reflects on the condition of women the rule of
propriety exists as a ubiquitous invisible presence,
an imperative and a threat. A notable example is
Regina Maria Roche’s sentimental-Gothic The
Children of the Abbey (1796) in which a libertine
conspires to destroy the reputation of the heroine,
the cancelling of her good name being, not as in
Clarissa a mere by-product of seduction, but the
preliminary to it. These machinations prepare for
the nightmarish sequence in which Amanda suf-
fers a lightning fall through the levels of the
English class system until she lands half-dead in
the gutter.4
Emily, unprotected merchandise on the mar-
riage market, turns the tables by learning to treat
herself as a commodity. Pursuing the principle of
synecdoche, part for a whole, Emily’s humanity
and the sum total of her actions are absorbed by
her ‘virtue’, the need to preserve it and, what is
more difficult still, the need to maintain its
‘appearance’ while preserving it, in the cause of
her own economic viability: her ‘property’ in her
self. (Here ‘virtue’ assumes its alternative meaning
as the efficacy of things—as use-value, that gives a
basis for exchange-value.) This is the pragmatic
import of her father’s warning against over-
indulgent sensibility. By self-appraisal, the recogni-
tion of her exchange-value on the marriage
market, she must learn to subordinate her will to
the maintenance of herself as object. Of what use
is her inheritance if her body is devalued? Al-
though she needs a dowry to afford the husband,
the loss of respectability would debar her forever
from the happiness of secure social status. If Emily
emerges unscathed and triumphant, her exertions
have by the end of the narrative left her paler and
more pensive, as though, by her strict adherence
to it, the ideology of femininity had drained her
of lifeblood, vampire-like. She has finished her
task as entrepreneur of herself. She is in direct line
of succession to Pamela, another literary paragon
who turns propriety to profit, in effect managing
her virginity as if it were a business.
The Mysteries displays in the form of romance
the real contradictions and dangers which every
gentlewoman of the period potentially faced.5
Above all it actualises the fears of the woman of
the middle class, whose social standing was most
unstable, liable to upward and downward varia-
tion, and therefore particularly susceptible to the
taboos surrounding femininity. Mary Woll-
stonecraft recognised the critical potential in the
Radcliffean romance when she adopted its ‘system
of terror’ for her political fiction The Wrongs of
Woman, where she made explicit what was already
immanent in the form. It was not coincidental
that A Vindication of the Rights of Woman had been
addressed to middle-class women, later to become
the best readers of Gothic romance.6 What Woll-
stonecraft calls the natural state of middle-class
women, their ability to experience in a conscious
way the various demands made on the sex as
contradictory, that which in addition allowed
them to empathise with the sufferings of the
Gothic heroine, might also make them the bear-
ers of critique. To realise contradiction as critique
would be for the reader to become the heroine of
her own life and apply to her own circumstances
the lesson of how to ‘suffer like a heroine’. Such,
certainly, was the fear implicit in the satires and
condemnations of novel-reading women who
confused fact and fiction.
The space for critique opened within the new
economic order was linked to increased restric-
tions on women’s social praxis.7 The heroine of
romance follows the private lady into a negative,
occulted relation to the sphere of economic
agency. Forcibly absented from the scene of
production, the private lady continues to haunt
it, whether as casualty, or clandestine participant.
One legitimate role was that of consumer, whose
connection with the workshop, though causal,
could be veiled. But here the embattled, unpro-
tected Gothic heroine parts company with the
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lady; not for her the petty sovereignty of the
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
purse-strings. True to her vocation for suffering
she comes to illustrate the harshest effects of
unequal access to remunerative work. By the
1790s, although still caught up in the traditional
web of kinship, some heroines begin to react to
pressures from another quarter; those conditions
described by Mary Ann Radcliffe in The Female
Advocate (1799) when she deplores the erosion of
the ‘Rights of Women’ to an independent liveli-
hood.8 Monimia in Charlotte Smith’s The Old
Manor House does piecework for ‘a very consider-
able linen warehouse in the neighborhood.’ (1989,
494) Ellena in The Italian passes ‘whole days in
embroidering silks, which were disposed of to the
nuns of a neighboring convent, who sold them to
the Neapolitan ladies . . . at a very high
advantage’. (Radcliffe 1981, 9)
The gentlewoman/heroine as worker trans-
gresses the code of propriety, yet so long as she la-
bours in secrecy, remaining within the genteel
space defined by the magical walls of the home,
her character is preserved from the judgement of
the world. The appearance of gentility is precari-
ously upheld by the returns of honest labour, in
the knowledge that the fact of labour may destroy
what it was meant to save. The revelation of
transgression into the economic sphere would dis-
solve the layer which separates the world from
the home, making private woman irrevocably,
disreputably, public. When Ellena’s social status is
thrown in doubt, she, like the products of her la-
bour, is disposed of to a convent. The convent of
romance fiction, the insolvent heroine’s last
resort, approximates the symbolic extreme of the
brothel in a Protestant society, the ‘nunnery’ of
Anglo-Saxon slang.
Novel-writing was another means of support
for needy gentlewomen, though to my knowledge
no heroine makes use of it. Again a kind of
piecework permitting both physical seclusion
within the household and an anonymous, medi-
ated relationship to the marketplace, it offered
correspondingly meagre rewards. The late eigh-
teenth century was the great age of the nameless
‘Lady’, signatory of innumerable popular publica-
tions. It was not unusual for an author’s preface
to indicate financial hardship as the motive of
writing, making the purchase of novels a form of
charity, while the public recognition of financial
need sometimes excused the public advertisement
of a woman’s name—to an extent. Charlotte
Smith’s was one such case. She wrote for the sup-
port of herself and her children after leaving her
profligate husband, and subsequently won the
223
 sympathy and even friendship of some well-
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
connected readers. The novels, for which she
received £50 per volume, appeared with the
regularity of a production line. Her friend William
Cowper wrote of her ‘Chained to her desk like a
slave to his oar’; she herself valued them ‘no more
than a Grocer does figs’. (cit., Smith 1989, xii, x)
Moreover the price of her industry was the expo-
sure of her private life as spectacle. The reviewers
discussed her fiction as autobiography, identified
unflattering portraits of her husband and reproved
her for her disloyalty to the marriage vows. As we
will see, Ann Radcliffe, perhaps the most highly-
paid English novelist of the century (£500 for The
Mysteries, £800 for The Italian), was also punished
in the public imagination for her manifest suc-
cess.
From the literary sweatshop to the magical
legacies of the fictional happy ending: by the close
of The Mysteries Emily St Aubert has received not
one but two inheritances in sublime recognition
of her virtue, yet she receives them in the name of
another, ‘for Valancourt’s sake.’ In defending her
‘property in her own person’, there too her care
has amounted to a caretaker government, for it
was property safeguarded for another. On her wed-
ding day all property rights, including those to
her own person, will be given over to her husband;
English common law presides over the transac-
tion. The fate of the Gothic heroine, civil disem-
bodiment, was prefigured by the unhappy end of
Madame Montoni, conveyed in the premonitory
message of the Gothic castle.
2. The Castle
‘We inherit an old Gothic castle,’ wrote Sir
William Blackstone in Commentaries on the Laws of
England (1765), ‘erected in the days of chivalry,
but fitted up for a modern inhabitant. The moated
ramparts, the embattled towers, and the trophied
halls, are magnificent and venerable, but useless.
The inferior apartments, now converted into
rooms of convenience, are chearful and commo-
dius, though their approaches are winding and
difficult.’ (III, 268) The great legal authority of the
eighteenth century drew on a trope current in
both the aesthetic and political discourses of his
time in order to picture the historical range of his
field of enquiry. But there is nothing here of
Burke’s passionate evocation of feudalism as a
rebuke to the present in Reflections on the Revolu-
tion in France (1792). In these pre-revolutionary
days, it appeared that modernisation by a ‘series
of minute contrivances’, as opposed to full-scale
‘new-modelling’, could do no damage to the social
224 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
fabric. The old system of property laws—for this
was the immediate object of Blackstone’s re-
marks—could be comfortably fitted up to suit the
requirements of the now predominant ‘com-
mercial mode of property . . . to facilitate ex-
change and alienation’. (III, 268) The object of the
Commentaries as a whole was a complete review,
codification and vindication of the law as it
upheld the right of the newly-dominant capitalist
system of property relations in the interest of the
revised status quo. It was also intended to establish
the law’s disinterested and fully autonomous
functioning, and this was implemented at a
discursive level through the representation of the
law, in four volumes of print, as a unified and
functional whole, where, as in the renovated
Gothic castle, reason is superimposed on natural
evolution.
Blackstone’s Commentaries operate two distinct
strategies of rationalisation, each on the basis of a
different sense of the word ‘rationalise’. The first
is an attempt to codify the law as a rational system
governed by fixed and immutable principles,
extracting logic from its haphazard underwriting
of sectional interest, and enabling it to take its
place as a branch of the human sciences. The
second works to justify or legitimate the law by
identifying it with natural order, beyond the reach
of human criticism. The two ends appear at first
sight to be contradictory; another case posing the
eighteenth century riddle: can enlightenment and
theodicy be reconciled? Yet at an institutional
level their functions were complementary. Both
constituted the law as a closed system, self-
sufficient, impartial, abstracted from social rela-
tions. In such a way the law confirmed its partici-
pation in the general phenomenon of reification,
social manifestation of the economic order to
which it now devoted its services, the ‘essence of
commodity-structure’, as Lukács describes it. He
continues, ‘Its basis is that a relation between
people takes on the character of a thing and thus
acquires a “phantom-objectivity”, an autonomy
that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing
as to conceal every trace of its fundamental
nature: the relation between people.’ (Lukács 83).
Meanwhile, the contrivances of the law involve a
number of ‘fictions and circuities’, which, as Black-
stone admits, might ‘shock the student’.
One fiction that shocked the 1794 editor of
the Commentaries, as he confessed in a footnote,
was Blackstone’s boast that the legal provisions
for marriage showed how ‘great a favourite is the
female sex of the laws of England’. (I, 445) Else-
where, in a digression concerning laws dependent
on the ‘wisdom and will of the legislators’, Black-
stone had been more explicit about their func-
tion: ‘Thus our own common law has declared,
that the goods of the wife do instantly upon mar-
riage become the property and right of the hus-
band; and our statute law has declared all mo-
nopolies a public offence: yet that right, and this
offence, have no foundation in nature; but are
merely created by the law, for the purposes of civil
society.’ (I, 55) Workers’ monopolies remaining
from the medieval guild system were to be dis-
carded. But the doctrine of coverture was one of
those ancient feudal relics which were readily
integrated within the new structure of capitalism.9
Blackstone defined it like this: ‘By marriage, the
husband and wife are one person in law; that is,
the very being or legal existence of the woman is
suspended during the marriage, or at least is
incorporated and consolidated into that of the
husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover,
she performs every thing . . .’. (I, 441)
Among the real consequences of this principle
were the following: the husband took control of
the whole of his wife’s property, past, present and
future; he had sole rights over their children; a
married woman could not enter into any legal
agreement or lawsuit on her own behalf; she could
not bring proceedings against her husband in
common law; and, since her ‘very being’ was
suspended, she no longer held property in her
own person, Locke’s minimum condition for civil
rights. ‘My wife and I are one and I am he.’ The
husband was held to represent his wife’s interests
at every level. Marriage meant what has been
called ‘a kind of civil death’ for women (Davidoff
and Hall 200). The debate about marriage as an
institution in this period raised the same issues of
representation as elision—the legalised absorption
of one body by another—as contemporary debates
over the extension of male suffrage, the colonial
system and slavery. At precisely the time that co-
verture was found to be irreconcilable with the
liberal humanist ideals of reason and autonomy
of the individual it arrived at its moment of
maximum utility. The intensified ‘privatising’ of
middle- and upper-class women which took place
throughout the latter half of the eighteenth
century was underwritten by law. But the legal fic-
tions required to support legal objectivity on this
point were becoming increasingly transparent.
The doctrine of coverture formalised and
brought to completion the ongoing education in
supernatural non-being which we have already
noted in the history of the Gothic heroine. In the
legislation relating to married women it is no
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surprise to find the elements of a Gothic fiction.
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
In the first place, its foundation in doubt expressed
in the dictum ‘Maternity is a fact, paternity is a
matter of speculation.’ This single absence of proof
of paternity, jeopardising the legitimate transmis-
sion of property from generation to generation,
was the ultimate justification for all restraints
placed on women of the property-owning classes.
As Burke recognised, sublimity and violence are
native to obscurity. Thus, secondly, and in two
stages, we have: the civil death of the woman by
order of the law; and the haunting of the law by
the spectre of the woman as potential occlusion
of its working principle. In the latter half of the
eighteenth century, a period in which patrilineal
property laws were enforced with increasing strict-
ness, literary fictions by and about women bore
witness to the haunting of a coercive legal system.
They took as their subject matter the persistent
threats to the clarity of patrilineity—abduction,
rape, elopement, adultery, illegitimacy, incest—
aberrations generated by the very attempt to
enforce security of property through the male line.
‘Marriage has bastilled me for life.’ With these
words the heroine of The Wrongs of Woman radi-
calises a commonplace condition (154-5). The
conjunction marriage/Bastille defamiliarises the
private zone to which women are consigned by
law in a way more obliquely realised in Gothic
fiction. Like the castle of Udolpho, the private
lunatic asylum to which Wollstonecraft’s Maria is
consigned by her vicious husband is in ruins,
intended as optimistic evidence, maybe, of the
decadence of the institution they represent. Less
optimistic in tendency is the device of serial
autobiographies punctuating the main narrative,
a kaleidoscope of women’s lives which seem to
demonstrate only a universal misery—the tech-
nique again borrowed by Wollstonecraft from
romance fiction. In the works of Radcliffe and her
followers as in Wollstonecraft the heroine seems
to move through a bleak landscape littered with
the remains of destructive marriages; every casu-
alty she encounters is a ruin and a prophecy. Yet
the repetition implies a sort of collectivity, or the
potential for one. Out of Gothic dystopia Woll-
stonecraft attempted to formulate the utopian te-
los of her politics.
Radcliffean romance, the so-called ‘supernatu-
ral explained’, briefly unmasks the interested
nature of man-made laws. Their narratives per-
form a break-up of the reification of the law by
permitting a reflection on the illusory nature of its
‘phantom-objectivity’—and this through a literal-
minded representation of the law as haunted
225
 house. The metaphysical paraphernalia of an
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
‘objectivist’ system of justice is portrayed with
objectivity in the terrifying phantasmagoria of
Gothic fiction. For in this vision ‘justice’ is es-
tranged from itself, retranslated into an asym-
metric, repressive relation between people. In each
novel there is a confrontation, however brief, with
the unthinkable: a world of inescapable injustice;
a brush with the Sadeian universe where the pleas
of the victims are forever unheard and wrongdo-
ing forever unpunished, before the narrative
reverts to a properly providential dénouement.
How appropriate that the author who most vividly
communicated this transient terror should be sent
to end her life in a madhouse by the daydreams
of the British reading public.1 0
The castle of Udolpho would appear to serve
the function of an illumination, its darkness
representing for the heroine the truth of her
condition, a truth she can withstand only momen-
tarily, in the instant before she faints. But in the
overall scheme the castle provides only a theatri-
cal, metaphorical horror, structurally isolated from
the main body of narrative. The castle offers itself
as an approximate expression, a proxy, for those
quotidian horrors situated elsewhere, outside, in
the realm of the ‘real.’ Horror is detained in
quarantine, to guard against infection of the
daylight world to which the story, in accordance
with the therapeutics of romance, must return for
the happy ending.
3. The Happy Ending
What is the status of Gothic fiction’s revela-
tions? I have made a claim for the grounding of
horror in historical truth. That the condition of
women at this time was oppressive, and was
frequently experienced as such, is undeniable.
Romances both helped to produce and offered a
reflection upon this experience. They actively
implement the division of public and private
spheres by constituting their female readers as a
fragmented body, accomplishing a pleasurable
sequestration of the novel-reader in the realm of
private aesthetic consumption. The public voice
the novel form offered women writers was neces-
sarily inflected by the fact of trespass. I have sug-
gested that at the same time the romances allowed
a reflection on this very exclusion from civil
society and the violence it entailed.
Critique appears at a phantasmagoric level, at
the level of consciousness or imagination. But
within the illogic of the novel it must replace illu-
sion with illusion. Divorced from practical trans-
formation, cut off from the rationale of causality,
226 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
in the final analysis Gothic enlightenment en-
dorses the ideological patterns it has briefly
exposed. The irrational, feminine popular novel
can show the violence and irrationality of reason,
prising apart its contradictions; but the truth of a
novel is by definition fictional and its force
contained by the correlative ‘laws’ of narration.
The achievement of these novels was not to
represent the real condition of women in super-
natural trappings, but to intimate, through the
reader’s identification with the heroine, the
supernatural condition of women in the real
world. Implicitly, they tell of the fiction of reality
rather than reflecting reality in fiction. The impli-
cations of this inversion become evident when we
reconsider the main charge brought against
romances, namely, that female readers, by identifi-
cation with the romantic heroine, would be led to
confuse fact with fiction, recreating themselves
after her image, and learning to read their own
lives like a sensational narrative. Romances were
charged with cultivating in the reader a sense of
the supernaturalism of everyday life by the dis-
semination of impermissible thoughts, untenable
values, irrational models of behaviour.1 1
Read episodically, the fictions of Radcliffe and
her followers yield the suggestion that patriarchal
right is founded on force, not nature; that the
‘right’ of patriarchy is itself a fiction. But such a
reading is against the linear flow of the narrative
towards resolution and closure. For the signifi-
cance of the whole is subsumed in the final
tableau of idealised wedlock: a partnership freely
entered into by both parties and made equal by
the strength of mutual affection; a sacred union
of reason and sensibility.1 2 The threatening inde-
terminacy of past terrors is resolved in the light of
this final manifestation of providential order. The
previous melt-down of reification by fear is super-
seded by moral hypostasis: a concluding freeze-
frame.
Notes
1. Gary Kelly, editor of The Wrongs of Woman (1976),
suggests that the novel was the second volume
promised in the Vindication; the work which would
look closely at “the laws relative to women.”; 156 n1.
2. The ‘naming of the heroine’ occurs as a reflexive trope
in heroine-centred novels from Richardson onwards:
with ritual malice, an enemy jeeringly associates the
main female character with romance-reading, accus-
ing her of entertaining paranoid fantasies, of self-
dramatisation, in order to undermine her opposition
to (corrupt) authority. When the heroine is vindicated,
so too is the exemplary ‘truth’ of fiction.
3. Several recent interpretations of The Mysteries of Udol-
pho have alerted us to the importance of economic
 factors in the unravelling of its plot, pulling into focus
for the first time passages like that quoted above.
‘Money’, Mary Poovey states in ‘Ideology and the
Mysteries of Udolpho’, ‘lurks behind every turn of The
Mysteries plot.’ (1979, 323) In Literary Women, Ellen
Moers pioneered the view that property takes prece-
dence over ‘true love’ among the themes of what she
called the ‘Female Gothic’. (1978, 136) Janet Todd has
found in all of Radcliffe’s works an unstated equation
of sexual and financial threat ‘but it is not really an
equal association; perhaps it might better be said that
the economic is sexualised.’ (262) Each suggests that
fiction provided an apt if heightened representation
of the real condition of women: ‘Fear is an appropri-
ate response in a world where women have property
or at least the opportunity of transmitting it, but
where they have little power to control it.’ (Todd 262)
4. The same radical dualism—throne or grave—appeared
with exemplary force in Wollstonecraft’s own life-
story after the publication of William Godwin’s incau-
tious Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’
(1798). A champion of feminine propriety like the
Rev. R. Polewhele was able to write, ‘I cannot but
think, that the Hand of Providence is visible, in her
life, her death, and in the Memoirs themselves. As she
was given up to her “heart’s lusts,” and let “to follow
her own imagination,” that the fallacy of her doctrines
and the effects of an irreligious conduct might be
manifested to the world; and as she died a death that
strongly marked the distinction of the sexes, by point-
ing out the destiny of women, and the diseases to
which they are liable; so her husband was permitted,
in writing her Memoirs, to labour under a temporary
infatuation, that every incident might be seen without
a gloss—every fact exposed without an apology.’ (29-
30)
5. It is necessary to emphasise, in what might otherwise
appear a rather static outline of the condition of
women, that the boundaries between public and
private, visible and invisible, the proper and the
inadmissible, were undergoing major transition in this
period. The critical reflections under discussion here
were to some extent made possible by this process of
change, and the explicit negotiations it involved. For
more about the transformations in gender ideology,
and the effect on women of the property-owning
classes in particular, see Poovey (1984) Chapter 1 and
Davidoff and Hall (1987).
6. In The Discourse of the Sublime: History, Aesthetics and
the Subject Peter de Bolla provides a well-documented
account of the ‘feminization’ of reading practices in
the late of eighteenth century, with the rider that the
majority of novel-readers may have been men (237).
Statistics are difficult to come by in this area; they
would not in any case alter an interpretation based on
the novels’ own inscription of their readership, and
the prevalent stereotype of the female reader circulated
by journals and conduct books—added to the oblique
image found in the satires.
7. See note 5.
8. Mary Ann Radcliffe’s polemic centres on the peculiar
horrors of the plight of genteel women without
financial means or male protectors, subjected to ‘the
absolute necessity of bartering their virtue for bread.’
She criticises among other things the lack of useful
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education for women, their exclusion from profes-
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
sions and replacement in traditionally female trades
by ‘effeminate tradesmen’, and the abuses of ‘merce-
nary marriages’.
9. See Pateman (1988) on the survival of patriarchy in
what has traditionally been seen by historians as the
post-patriarchal ‘civil world of contract’ of the eigh-
teenth century and after.
10. The rumour that Ann Radcliffe had gone mad by ‘the
excessive use of her imagination in representing
extravagant and violent scenes’ was widely credited
(McIntyre, 1920, 19-20). It seemed to offer an explana-
tion for her prolonged silence after the publication of
The Italian. The Monthly Review circulated the story in
their issue of July 1826, but printed an apology and
correction after the posthumous appearance of Gaston
de Blondville (1826) complete with a doctor’s report
confirming her sanity at the time of death.
11. ‘We would admonish our young female readers not to
expect, as the reward of their virtues, those critical
and extraordinary coincidences which, against all the
laws of probability and calculations of chances, invari-
ably remove every obstacle that opposes the wishes of
their favourite heroines . . .’; a representative example
from a review of The Castle of Ollada in Critical Review.
S.2, 14 (July 1795), 113-14.
12. The truth-value of Emily’s disturbing adventures as
both subject and object resides precisely in that split
identity—an unhappy consciousness manacled to an
object of avaricious desire and economic exchange.
This truth-value is apparently cancelled by the novel’s
closure, when narrative and heroine disappear to-
gether in marriage. Yet it is worth noting that the wed-
ding as a form of closure would itself express a partial,
figurative truth for a society in which marriage was
the vanishing-point of women’s individual existence,
‘a kind of civil death’.
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Boorstin, Daniel J., The Mysterious Science of the Law. An Es-
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and women of the English middle class, 1780-1850
(London: Hutchison, 1987).
de Bolla, Peter, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in His-
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Kirkham, Margaret, Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction (New
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 McIntyre, Clara Francis, Ann Radcliffe in Relation to Her Time,
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Yale Studies in English, Vol. 62 (New Haven: Yale
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Moers, Ellen, Literary Women (London: Women’s Press,
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Poovey, Mary, ‘Ideology and The Mysteries of Udolpho’, Criti-
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———, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology and
Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley,
and Jane Austen (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1984).
Radcliffe, Ann, The Italian, Or The Confessional of the Black
Penitents, ed. Frederick Garber (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
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———, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).
Radcliffe, Mary Ann, The Female Advocate, Or An Attempt to
Recover the Rights of Women from Male Usurpation
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Todd, Janet, The Sign of Angelica: Women, Writing and Fic-
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FURTHER READING
Criticism
Andriano, Joseph. Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemon-
ology in Male Gothic Fiction. University Park: Pennsylva-
nia State University Press, 1993, 182 p.
Comprehensive analysis of the role of female demons in
works of Gothic fiction by male authors.
Brantlinger, Patrick. “Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Oc-
cult in the British Adventure Novel, 1880-1914.” In
Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-
1914, pp. 227-53. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1988.
Studies the significance of what Brantlinger classifies as
the “imperial Gothic,” which, he asserts, “combines the
seemingly scientific, progressive, often Darwinian ideol-
ogy of imperialism with an antithetical interest in the oc-
cult.”
Clery, E. J. Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley.
Plymouth, England: Northcote House in Association
with the British Council, 2000, 168 p.
228 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Book-length study that examines works by Clara Reeve,
Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Joanna Baillie, Charlotte Da-
cre, and Mary Shelley.
D’Haen, Theo. “Postmodern Gothic.” In Exhibited by
Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradi-
tion, pp. 283-94. Atlanta, Ga. and Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1995.
Argues that “the Gothic, as part of the fantastic, in post-
modernism fulfils a particular function, and the recogni-
tion of the role it plays has rather far reaching implica-
tions for the entire discussion on postmodernism.”
DeLamotte, Eugenia C. Perils of the Night: a Feminist Study of
Nineteenth-Century Gothic. Oxford, England: Oxford
University Press, 1990, 368 p.
Applies feminist theory to the analysis of nineteenth-
century Gothic literature.
Edmundson, Mark. “American Gothic.” In Nightmare on
Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of
Gothic, pp. 1-68. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1997.
Surveys the connections between the Gothic and sadomas-
ochism in modern American society, horror films, and
literature.
Goldner, Ellen J. “Other(ed) Ghosts: Gothicism and the
Bonds of Reason in Melville, Chesnutt, and Morrison.”
MELUS 24, no. 1 (1999): 59-83.
Evaluates works by Herman Melville, Charles Chesnutt,
and Toni Morrison that treat the subject of race, racism,
and slavery.
Haggerty, George E. “‘The End of History’: Identity and Dis-
solution in Apocalyptic Gothic.” Eighteenth Century 41,
no. 3 (fall 2000): 225-46.
Outlines millennialism in William Godwin’s Caleb Wil-
liams, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, and Robert Louis
Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde.
Heller, Tamar. “Reigns of Terror: The Politics of the Female
Gothic.” In Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female
Gothic, pp. 13-37. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1992.
Notes the various connections between Gothic literature
and opinions regarding the traditional roles of women in
the domestic sphere and in society.
Hendershot, Cyndy. The Animal Within: Masculinity and the
Gothic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998,
281 p.
Studies the treatment of masculinity in Gothic fiction
and film.
Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and
Degeneration at the fin de siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996, 203 p.
Full-length analysis of the influence of science on the
treatment of the human body and subjectivity in late-
nineteenth-century Gothic fiction.
Kollin, Susan. “Race, Labor, and the Gothic Western: Dispel-
ling Frontier Myths in Dorothy Scarborough’s The
Wind.” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 3 (fall 2000): 675-
94.
Discusses the treatment of race and sex roles, as well as
elements of both American Western fiction and Gothic
conventions in Scarborough’s novel, The Wind.
Malchow, H. L. Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century
Britain. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996,
335 p.
Interprets depictions of such stock Gothic characters as
monsters, half-breeds, cannibals, and vampires as reveal-
ing British attitudes toward people of other races and
cultures.
Michasiw, Kim Ian. “Charlotte Dacre’s Postcolonial Moor.”
In Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre, edited by
Andrew Smith and William Hughes, pp. 35-55. New
York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Postcolonialist reading of Zofloya, emphasizing Dacre’s
subversion of the traditional racial power structure.
Navarette, Susan J. The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de
Siècle Culture of Decadence. Lexington: University Press
of Kentucky, 1998, 314 p.
Delineates the connection between horror literature of the
late nineteenth century and the intellectual school of
thought and works comprising the “Decadent style.”
Person, Leland S. “Poe’s Philosophy of Amalgamation: Read-
ing Racism in the Tales.” In Romancing the Shadow: Poe
and Race, pp. 205-24. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001.
Highlights racism present in works by Edgar Allan Poe.
Reddy, Maureen T. “Female Sexuality in ‘The Poor Clare’:
The Demon in the House.” Studies in Short Fiction 21,
no. 3 (summer 1984): 259-65.
Discusses Elizabeth Gaskell’s treatment of sexuality,
women, and the double in her Gothic short story, “The
Poor Clare.”
Royster, Francesca T. “White-Limed Walls: Whiteness and
Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.”
Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 4 (winter 2000): 432-55.
Surveys the Gothic elements and Shakespeare’s treatment
of race in Titus Andronicus.
Schafer, Martin. “The Rise and Fall of Antiutopia: Utopia,
Gothic Romance, Dystopia.” Science-Fiction Studies, no.
6 (1979): 287-95.
Surveys the evolution of the Gothic romance from utopia
to dystopia.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “The Character in the Veil: Imagery
of the Surface in the Gothic Novel.” PMLA: Publications
of the Modern Language Association of America 96, no. 2
(March 1981): 255-70.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Studies Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC
The Italian and Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk,
asserting that “an analysis of the thematic attention to
surfaces changes the traditional view of the Gothic
contribution to characterization and figuration in fic-
tion.”
———. “Toward the Gothic: Terrorism and Homosexual
Panic.” In Between Men: English Literature and Male Ho-
mosocial Desire, pp. 83-96. New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1985.
Explores the significance of homosexuality to the Gothic
tradition.
Smith, Allan Lloyd. “Postmodernism/Gothicism.” In Modern
Gothic: A Reader, edited and with an introduction by
Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith, pp. 6-19. Manches-
ter: Manchester University Press, 1996.
Suggests “some rather more significant parallels” between
postmodernist and Gothic discourse, asserting that “[i]n
this dual focus some new perspectives can be offered on
both.”
Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes, eds. Empire and the
Gothic: The Politics of Genre. New York and Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, 248 p.
A collection of essays that study Gothic literature through
the lens of postcolonial literary theory.
Spencer, Kathleen. “Victorian Urban Gothic: The First
Modern Fantastic Literature.” In Intersections: Fantasy
and Science Fiction, edited by George E. Slusser and Eric
S. Rabkin, pp. 87-96. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1987.
Examines the treatment of the city in Victorian fantasy
novels and its connection to gothicism.
Winter, Kari J. Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women
and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790-
1865. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992, 172 p.
Full-length study of the treatment of the oppression of
women in Gothic fiction and slave narratives.
Wolstenholme, Susan. Gothic (Re)Visions: Writing Women as
Readers. Albany: State University of New York Press,
1993, 201 p.
Illustrates how Gothic fiction, perceived as a women’s
literary genre, provided women writers with an unprec-
edented opportunity to explore an expansive array of nar-
rative conventions, subjects, and perspectives.
229
GOTHIC THEMES,
SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
G othic literature has influenced and inspired
several subgenres of literature, including the
supernatural tale, the ghost story, horror fiction,
and vampire literature. Many critics have analyzed
the connections between these subgenres and the
Gothic tradition, as well as some of the most
widely-discussed themes, figures, and settings
found in Gothic literature and works in these vari-
ous subgenres.
While belief in the supernatural served as the
basis for the mythologies of early civilizations,
and afterward remained an enduring aspect of
world folklore, it was not until the nineteenth
century that a substantial body of works evolved
that focused upon the otherworldly as a source of
horror. Although Gothic novelists often included
supernatural incidents in their works, they also
pursued other concerns, particularly those related
to eighteenth-century morals and manners. Such
concerns precluded the single-minded focus and
inventiveness of their successors in portraying
weird and ghostly phenomena. The Gothic novel
was characterized by intricate but often loosely
constructed plots and subplots, stock characters
such as the naive young woman and the lascivi-
ous male villain, and a medieval setting, such as a
haunted, ruined castle. In contrast, nineteenth-
century supernatural fiction often takes the form
of the short story, which critics agree is better
suited to achieving the effect of horror, and
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
features more thoroughly developed characters
and contemporary settings.
The growth of popular magazines increased
the proliferation of supernatural tales, and “penny
dreadfuls” provided the working class with serial-
ized tales of the macabre, such as Varney the
Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood (1847), written by
either Thomas Peckett Prest or James Malcolm
Rymer. Alternatively, some critics assert that,
rather than serving as an escapist diversion from
rigid social norms, the ghost story, advancing the
idea that wrongdoers and eccentrics incur the
wrath of ghosts, defended the status quo by
discouraging rebellion against one’s position in
society. Nineteenth-century supernatural fiction
has also been viewed as a reaction against the
materialism and rationalist philosophy that ac-
companied the rapid social changes brought about
by the industrial revolution, during which an
older, more stable way of life, with its traditional
ways of thinking, was eclipsed by technological
progress and the routines of urban life. The
struggle between religion and science became an
important issue as new theories that challenged
traditional beliefs were advanced, most promi-
nently Charles Darwin’s speculations on human
evolution.
Although a few commentators have main-
tained that a literalistic belief in the supernatural
has always been, and will always be, a prerequisite
231
 for the creation and enjoyment of horror tales,
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
most critics propose special reasons to explain the
relatively recent phenomenon of supernatural fic-
tion as a literary form. Among these reasons, one
is most often given: the nineteenth century was
an age of scientific and technological advance-
ment that had distanced itself from many of the
superstitions of the past; as a consequence, it was
precisely these superstitions, exiled from the
progressive consciousness of the day, that emerged
in the works of literature. A corollary to this
theory states that because earlier societies assumed
the supernatural as part of the cosmic order, its
manifestations could not inflict that dread peculiar
to modern humanity. This explanation has been
most prominently articulated by Sigmund Freud
in his 1919 essay “Das Unheimlich” (“The
Uncanny”), and is based on the assumption that
beneath the surface of civilized skepticism survive
all the irrational beliefs of humanity’s past. Thus,
a common storyline in Gothic and horror fiction
involves an unbelieving protagonist to whom it is
proven—with unpleasant consequences—that
some aspect of the supernatural is true.
While supernatural fiction emerged as a dis-
tinct literary form in the Victorian era, it was also
during this period that the focus of the genre
began to shift away from confrontations with
ghostly phenomena toward character psychology.
Supernatural fiction had often addressed, albeit
unwittingly, the concerns of the inchoate field of
psychology by rendering unresolved inner conflict
in a symbolic manner that is exemplified in the
standard plot of a murderer haunted by the ghost
of his victim, which then represents the murderer’s
guilty conscience. Critics commonly read such
works as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and those in
Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and the Inmost
Light (1894) as allegories of humankind’s struggle
with instinctual needs and drives, laying bare the
dark side of the human soul. Many observers
maintain that supernatural fiction underwent a
significant change when Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
introduced, with his “Green Tea” (1869), the ap-
parition that may in fact be a product of the mind.
This type of story was later developed with great
success by Henry James in his novella The Turn of
the Screw (1898). Thus, the legacy of supernatural
fiction, somewhat paradoxically, has been a
tendency among modern fiction writers to favor
psychological horrors over those that have their
roots in the archaic and essentially pastoral lore
based on the existence of the supernatural.
232 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Despite all contentions that supernatural fic-
tion suffered a decline in the early decades of the
twentieth century, this literary genre has contin-
ued to flourish and grow in popularity, assisted by
television and movie adaptations and imitations.
Although some might contend that it has radi-
cally changed in quality and substance, becoming
merely a source of income for hack writers who
exploit the more sensationalistic aspects of the
form, horror fiction has always been allied to the
lower types of commercial literature, from the
“shilling shockers” of the Gothic period to the
mass-market “pageturners” of the present day.
Even those authors who are recognized as the
most profound and artistic practitioners of literary
supernaturalism, such as Edgar Allan Poe and H.
P. Lovecraft, are often criticized as hopelessly
vulgar and categorized far below the level of seri-
ous artists. At the same time, the highest examples
of the supernatural genre have endured for the
same reason as the more accepted classics of
literature—their power to express through the
medium of language some significant aspect of
human experience. In the perception of many
readers and critics, the works of such authors as
Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Walter
de la Mare do not “transcend” the essential traits
of supernatural fiction but rather bring them to
perfection. As Lovecraft stated in his 1945 study
Supernatural Horror in Literature: “The oldest and
strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the old-
est and strongest kind of fear is fear of the un-
known. These facts few psychologists will dispute,
and their admitted truth must establish for all
time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly
horrible tale as a literary form.”
The theme of the doppelgänger (the double, or
“second self”) is prominent in nineteenth-century
literature, from stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann in
Germany to works of Robert Louis Stevenson in
Great Britain, Edgar Allan Poe in the United States,
and countless others. Although stories as ancient
as the Greek myth of Narcissus feature characters’
fascination with their mirror images, and numer-
ous folk tales center on the mysterious relation
between a person and his or her shadow, the
double as a dominant element in an artistic work
was the creation of the German Romantics. Crit-
ics commonly note the appearance of the double
in such earlier works as Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe’s drama Faust (1808), presenting in Sie-
benkäs and his friend Leibgeber two intimately
connected figures who are clearly meant to be
taken as aspects of a single personality. Subse-
quently the German fantasist and musician Hoff-
mann imaginatively and forcefully exploited the
artistic potential of doubling in numerous short
stories, including “Der Sandmann” (1817; “The
Sandman”), and in the novel Die Elixiere des Teufels
(1815-16; The Devil’s Elixir), which explores the
power of demonic forces over a person’s existence.
Hoffmann conjured up the doppelgänger, or double:
a tangible and wholly independent embodiment
of sinister powers. Hoffmann’s doubles draw from
both human psychology and belief in the super-
natural, reflecting nineteenth-century interest in
scientific psychology but also retaining a link to
occult traditions. As writers strove to explain dual-
ity according to the laws of reason and common
sense, the double became an important metaphor
of humankind’s struggle to reconcile opposing in-
ner forces, such as destructiveness and creativity.
Moreover, as the consequences of the industrial
revolution became apparent, writers increasingly
began to express in their works the idea of the
divided self as a reaction to unnatural pressures
exerted on the individual by an alienating society.
Many works, such as Guy de Maupassant’s “Le
Horla” (1886), Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Dvoinik:
Prikliucheniia gospodina Goliadkina (1846; The
Double: A Poem of St. Petersburg), Poe’s “William
Wilson” (1840), and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of
Dorian Gray (1890), feature doubles.
While the vampire can be traced throughout
literary history and world folklore to antiquity,
vampirism as the focus of narrative and theme in
works of literature first became prominent in the
early nineteenth century. John William Polidori’s
novella The Vampyre, published in 1819, is gener-
ally considered to be the first work of vampire fic-
tion and introduced several traits of the literary
vampire, including a deathlike countenance and
hypnotic powers. This work sparked popular inter-
est, and a deluge of vampire stories followed, most
prominently Varney the Vampyre. Another influen-
tial work of vampire literature was Joseph Sheri-
dan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1871-72), which de-
picted a lesbian relationship between vampire and
victim, further expanding the conventions of
vampirism to include an ambiguous sexual attrac-
tion between predator and prey, the vampire’s
aversion to religious symbols, and aspects of
sadism. With the publication of Bram Stoker’s
Dracula in 1897, the popular conception of vam-
pires and their portrayal in literature became codi-
fied, resulting in the familiar stereotype of an
aristocratic bloodsucker who preys upon beautiful
young women. Stoker’s novel has been the focus
of diverse social, psychological, and historical
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
interpretations. Many critics, for example, have
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
asserted that the work is an admonition against
deviant sexual behavior, emphasizing the associa-
tion between vampires and the subversion of
Christian and Victorian morality. Although much
twentieth- and twenty-first-century vampire fic-
tion incorporates characteristics of the nineteenth-
century vampire, commentators have noted a
trend toward depictions of vampires as sympa-
thetic and morally ambiguous characters, such as
Louis in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire
(1976), which contrasts with the traditional image
of the vampire as threatening and thoroughly evil.
Both as character and as symbol, critics find that
the vampire in literature serves to reflect society’s
views on sexuality, death, religion, and the role of
women, and functions as a psychological meta-
phor for humanity’s most profound fears and
desires.
REPRESENTATIVE WORKS
Jane Austen
Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. 4 vols. (novels)
1818
Joanna Baillie
Orra: a Tragedy, in Five Acts (play) 1812
Clive Barker
The Damnation Game (novel) 1985
The Hellbound Heart (novella) 1986; published in
the collection Night Visions 3, edited by George
R. R. Martin; published separately, 1988
William Beckford
*Vathek (novel) 1787
Algernon Blackwood
The Empty House, and Other Ghosts (short stories)
1906
Ancient Sorceries, and Other Tales (short stories)
1927
The Dance of Death, and Other Tales (short stories)
1927
The Tales of Algernon Blackwood (short stories) 1938
Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights [as Ellis Bell] (novel) 1847
Charles Brockden Brown
Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. 3 vols.
(novel) 1799
233
 Edward Bulwer-Lytton William Godwin
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
Zanoni. 3 vols. (novel) 1842 Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Wil-
Lucretia; or, The Children of Night. 3 vols. (novel) liams. 3 vols. (novel) 1794
1846 St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century. 4 vols.
A Strange Story. 2 vols. (novel) 1862 (novel) 1799

George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale (poetry)
1813
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Canto the Third (poetry)
1816
Manfred, A Dramatic Poem (verse drama) 1817
Don Juan, Cantos I-XVI. 6 vols. (poetry) 1819-24
Suzy McKee Charnas
The Vampire Tapestry (novel) 1980
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Christabel: Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep
(poetry) 1816
Charlotte Dacre
Zofloya; or, The Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth
Century. 3 vols. (novel) 1806
Ellen Datlow
Blood is Not Enough: Seventeen Stories of Vampirism
(short stories) 1989
A Whisper of Blood (short stories) 1991
Walter de la Mare
Ghost Stories (short stories) 1936
Faust: Ein Fragment (play) 1790
Faust—Der Tragödie erster Teil [Faust. Part I.; pub-
lished in Faust: A Drama by Goethe and Schill-
er’s “Song of the Bell”] (play) 1808
Marquis von Grosse
Genius [Horrid Mysteries] (short stories) 1796
Nathaniel Hawthorne
“The Birthmark” (short story) 1843; published in
the journal Pioneer
The House of the Seven Gables, A Romance (novel)
1851
E. T. A. Hoffmann
Die Elixiere des Teufels. 2 vols. [published anony-
mously; The Devil’s Elixir] (novel) 1815-16
†“Der Sandmann” [“The Sandman”] (short story)
1817
James Hogg
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified
Sinner (novel) 1824; republished as The Sui-
cide’s Grave, 1828

Thomas De Quincey Washington Irving

Confessions of an English Opium Eater (novel) 1821; ‡“Adventure of the German Student” [as Geoffrey
published in two parts in London Magazine; Crayon] (short story) 1824
published in book form, 1822
Shirley Jackson
Charles Dickens
The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris (short
Bleak House (novel) 1853
stories) 1949
“The Signal-Man” (short story) 1866; published in
Mugby Junction The Haunting of Hill House (novel) 1959

Fyodor Dostoevsky Henry James

Dvoinik: Prikliucheniia gospodina Goliadkina [The The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering End
Double: A Poem of St. Petersburg] (novel) 1846 (novellas) 1898
Brat’ia Karamazovy [The Brothers Karamazov]
(novel) 1880
Stephen King
Carrie: A Novel of a Girl with a Frightening Power
Arthur Conan Doyle (novel) 1974
The Parasite (novel) 1894 ’Salem’s Lot (novel) 1975
The Mist (novella) 1980; published in the collec-
Sigmund Freud
“Das Unheimlich” [“The Uncanny”] 1919; pub- tion Dark Forces, edited by Kirby McCauley
lished in the journal Imago The Tommyknockers (novel) 1987

234 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Sophia Lee “The Gold Bug” (short story) 1843; published in

GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES

The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times. 3 vols. (novel) two installments in the journal Dollar Newspa-
1783 per
“A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (short story)
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu 1844; published in the journal Godey’s Lady’s
Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh. 3 vols. (novel)
Book
1864
The Raven, and Other Poems (poetry) 1845
“Green Tea” (short story) 1869; published in the
journal All the Year Round Tales by Edgar A. Poe (short stories) 1845

“Carmilla” (short story) 1871-72; published seri- John William Polidori

ally in the journal Dark Blue The Vampyre; a Tale (novella) 1819; published in
the journal New Monthly Magazine
Matthew Gregory Lewis
The Monk: A Romance. 3 vols. (novel) 1796 Thomas Peckett Prest or James Malcolm
The Captive: A Scene in a Private Mad-House (play) Rymer
1803 **Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood (novel)
1847
H. P. Lovecraft
#“At the Mountains of Madness” (short story) Ann Radcliffe
1936; published in the journal Astounding Sto- The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance; Interspersed
ries with Some Pieces of Poetry. 4 vols. (novel) 1794

Supernatural Horror in Literature (criticism) 1945 The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Peni-
tents. A Romance. 3 vols. (novel) 1797
Arthur Machen
The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (short Clara Reeve
The Champion of Virtue. A Gothic Story (novel)
stories) 1894
1777; republished as The Old English Baron,
Richard Matheson 1778
Hell House (novel) 1971
G. W. M. Reynolds
Faust: A Romance of the Second Empire (novel) 1847
Charles Robert Maturin
Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale. 4 vols. (novel) 1820 Wagner the Wehr-wolf (novel) 1857

Guy de Maupassant Anne Rice

㛳“Le Horla” [“The Horla”] (short story) 1886; Interview with the Vampire (novel) 1976
published in the journal Le Gil Blas; revised The Vampire Lestat (novel) 1985
version published in 1887
The Queen of the Damned (novel) 1988
Thomas Moore The Witching Hour (novel) 1990
The Epicurean. A Tale (novel) 1827 The Vampire Armand (novel) 1998
Blood Canticle (novel) 2003
Edgar Allan Poe
Tamerlane and Other Poems. By a Bostonian (poetry)
1827 Regina Maria Roche
Children of the Abbey (novel) 1798
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,
North America: Comprising the Details of a Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Mutiny, Famine, and Shipwreck, During a Voyage “Hand and Soul” (short story) 1850; published in
to the South Seas; Resulting in Various Extraordi- the journal the Germ
nary Adventures and Discoveries in the Eighty-
††“St. Agnes of Intercession” (unfinished short
fourth Parallel of Southern Latitude [published
story) c. 1850
anonymously] (novel) 1838
‡‡“The Portrait” (poem) 1869
§“William Wilson” (short story) 1840
“The Oval Portrait” (short story) 1842; published Sir Walter Scott
in the journal Graham’s Magazine Rokeby: A Poem (poetry) 1813

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1 235
 Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since. 3 vols. (novel) The Palace: A Historical Horror Novel (novel) 1979
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
1814 Blood Games: A Novel of Historical Horror (novel)
##The Keepsake for 1829 (short stories) 1828 1980
Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (nonfiction)
* The unauthorized translation of Vathek was published
1830
as An Arabian Tale, 1786.
† This story was included in the collection, Nachtstücke,
William Shakespeare herausgegeben von dem Verfasser der Fantasiestücke in Cal-
Hamlet (play) c. 1600-01 lots Manier, Vol. 1, published anonymously, 1817.
‡ This story was first published in the collection Tales of
a Traveller. 2 vols., in 1824.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley # This story was written in 1931, and was collected in At
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 3 vols. the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels in 1985.
(novel) 1818; revised edition, 1831 㛳 This story was first published in an earlier version as
“Lettre d’un fou” (“Letter from a Madman”) in 1885.
§ This story was published in the collection Tales of the
Percy Bysshe Shelley Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840.
Zastrozzi, A Romance (novel) 1810 ** Authorship of this novel has been alternately attributed
St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance [as “A to Thomas Peckett Prest and James Malcolm Rymer.
†† This unfinished story was begun in 1850 and was not
Gentleman of the University of Oxford”] published during Rossetti’s lifetime. It was included
(novel) 1811 in the collection The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
1911.
Dan Simmons ‡‡ This sonnet was published in the collection Poems,
1869.
Carrion Comfort (novel) 1989 ## This collection includes the short stories “My Aunt
Margaret’s Mirror,” “The Tapestried Chamber; or, The
Robert Louis Stevenson Lady in the Sacque,” and “The Laird’s Jock.”
Treasure Island (novel) 1883
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (novella)
1886
PRIMARY SOURCES
Bram Stoker
Dracula (novel) 1897 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
(POEM DATE 1809)
Dracula’s Guest, and Other Weird Stories (short SOURCE: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Three Graves:
stories) 1914 A Fragment of a Sexton’s Tale.” In Samuel Taylor Col-
eridge: Selected Poems, edited with an introduction and
Whitley Strieber notes by Richard Holmes, pp. 69-80. New York: Pen-
guin Group, 1994.
The Hunger (novel) 1981
The following poem was composed by Coleridge in 1797,
Communion: A True Story (nonfiction) 1987 and first published in the journal The Friend in 1809.
Coleridge explains in his preface that his own fragment
The Wild (novel) 1991 of this ballad is based upon a poem (which Coleridge
summarizes) written by William Wordsworth.
George Sylvester Viereck
The House of the Vampire (novel) 1907 “The Author has published the following
humble fragment, encouraged by the decisive
recommendation of more than one of our most
Horace Walpole
celebrated living Poets. The language was intended
The Castle of Otranto, A Story (novel) 1764
to be dramatic; that is, suited to the narrator; and
The Mysterious Mother. A Tragedy (play) 1768 the metre corresponds to the homeliness of the
diction. It is therefore presented as the fragment,
Oscar Wilde not of a Poem, but of a common Ballad-tale.
The Picture of Dorian Gray (novel) 1890; first Whether this is sufficient to justify the adoption
published in the journal Lippincott’s Monthly of such a style, in any metrical composition not
Magazine; revised edition, 1891 professedly ludicrous, the Author is himself in
some doubt. At all events, it is not presented as
C. Q. Yarbro poetry, and it is in no way connected with the
Hotel Transylvania: A Novel of Forbidden Love Author’s judgment concerning poetic diction. Its
(novel) 1978 merits, if any, are exclusively psychological. The

236 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
story which must be supposed to have been nar-
rated in the first and second parts is as follows:—
“Edward, a young farmer, meets at the house
of Ellen her bosom-friend Mary, and commences
an acquaintance, which ends in a mutual attach-
ment. With her consent, and by the advice of their
common friend Ellen, he announces his hopes
and intentions to Mary’s mother, a widow-woman
bordering on her fortieth year, and from constant
health, the possession of a competent property,
and from having had no other children but Mary
and another daughter (the father died in their
infancy), retaining for the greater part her personal
attractions and comeliness of appearance; but a
woman of low education and violent temper. The
answer which she at once returned to Edward’s
application was remarkable—‘Well, Edward! you
are a handsome young fellow, and you shall have
my daughter.’ From this time all their wooing
passed under the mother’s eye; and, in fine, she
became herself enamoured of her future son-in-
law, and practised every art, both of endearment
and of calumny, to transfer his affections from
her daughter to herself. (The outlines of the Tale
are positive facts, and of no very distant date,
though the author has purposely altered the
names and the scene of action, as well as invented
the characters of the parties and the detail of the
incidents.) Edward, however, though perplexed by
her strange detractions from her daughter’s good
qualities, yet in the innocence of his own heart
still mistook her increasing fondness for motherly
affection; she at length, overcome by her miser-
able passion, after much abuse of Mary’s temper
and moral tendencies, exclaimed with violent
emotion—‘O Edward! indeed, indeed, she is not
fit for you—she has not a heart to love you as you
deserve. It is I that love you! Marry me, Edward!
and I will this very day settle all my property on
you.’ The Lover’s eyes were now opened; and thus
taken by surprise, whether from the effect of the
horror which he felt, acting as it were hysterically
on his nervous system, or that at the first moment
he lost the sense of the guilt of the proposal in
the feeling of its strangeness and absurdity, he
flung her from him and burst into a fit of laughter.
Irritated by this almost to frenzy, the woman fell
on her knees, and in a loud voice that approached
to a scream, she prayed for a curse both on him
and on her own child. Mary happened to be in
the room directly above them, heard Edward’s
laugh, and her mother’s blasphemous prayer, and
fainted away. He, hearing the fall, ran upstairs,
and taking her in his arms, carried her off to
Ellen’s home; and after some fruitless attempts on
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her part toward a reconciliation with her mother,
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
she was married to him.—And here the third part
of the Tale begins.
“I was not led to choose this story from any
partiality to tragic, much less to monstrous events
(though at the time that I composed the verses,
somewhat more than twelve years ago, I was less
averse to such subjects than at present), but from
finding in it a striking proof of the possible effect
on the imagination, from an idea violently and
suddenly impressed on it. I had been reading
Bryan Edwards’s account of the effects of the Oby
witchcraft on the Negroes in the West Indies, and
Hearne’s deeply interesting anecdotes of similar
workings on the imagination of the Copper
Indians (those of my readers who have it in their
power will be well repaid for the trouble of refer-
ring to those works for the passages alluded to);
and I conceived the design of shewing that in-
stances of this kind are not peculiar to savage or
barbarous tribes, and of illustrating the mode in
which the mind is affected in these cases, and the
progress and symptoms of the morbid action on
the fancy from the beginning.
“The Tale is supposed to be narrated by an old
Sexton, in a country church-yard, to a traveller
whose curiosity had been awakened by the ap-
pearance of three graves, close by each other, to
two only of which there were grave-stones. On
the first of these was the name, and dates, as usual:
on the second, no name, but only a date, and the
words, ‘The Mercy of God is infinite.’”
Part III
The grapes upon the Vicar’s wall
Were ripe as ripe could be;
And yellow leaves in sun and wind
Were falling from the tree.
On the hedge-elms in the narrow lane
Still swung the spikes of corn:
Dear Lord! it seems but yesterday—
Young Edward’s marriage-morn.
Up through that wood behind the church,
There leads from Edward’s door
A mossy track, all over boughed,
For half a mile or more.
And from their house-door by that track
The bride and bridegroom went;
Sweet Mary, though she was not gay,
Seemed cheerful and content.
But when they to the church-yard came,
I’ve heard poor Mary say,
As soon as she stepped into the sun,
Her heart it died away.
237
 And when the Vicar join’d their hands, The mother walked into the church—

GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES

Her limbs did creep and freeze: To Ellen’s seat she went:
But when they prayed, she thought she saw Though Ellen always kept her church
Her mother on her knees. All church-days during Lent.

And o’er the church-path they returned— And gentle Ellen welcomed her
I saw poor Mary’s back, With courteous looks and mild:
Just as she stepped beneath the boughs Thought she, “What if her heart should melt,
Into the mossy track. And all be reconciled!”

Her feet upon the mossy track The day was scarcely like a day—
The married maiden set: The clouds were black outright:
That moment—I have heard her say— And many a night, with half a moon,
She wished she could forget. I’ve seen the church more light.

The shade o’er-flushed her limbs with heat— The wind was wild; against the glass
Then came a chill like death: The rain did beat and bicker;
And when the merry bells rang out, The church-tower swinging over head,
They seemed to stop her breath. You scarce could hear the Vicar!

Beneath the foulest mother’s curse And then and there the mother knelt,
No child could ever thrive: And audibly she cried—
A mother is a mother still, “Oh! may a clinging curse consume
The holiest thing alive. This woman by my side!

So five months passed: the mother still “O hear me, hear me, Lord in Heaven,
Would never heal the strife; Although you take my life—
But Edward was a loving man O curse this woman, at whose house
And Mary a fond wife. Young Edward woo’d his wife.

“My sister may not visit us, “By night and day, in bed and bower,
My mother says her nay: O let her curséd be!!!”
O Edward! you are all to me, So having prayed, steady and slow,
I wish for your sake I could be She rose up from her knee!
More lifesome and more gay. And left the church, nor e’er again
The church-door entered she.
“I’m dull and sad! indeed, indeed
I know I have no reason! I saw poor Ellen kneeling still,
Perhaps I am not well in health, So pale! I guessed not why:
And ’tis a gloomy season.” When she stood up, there plainly was
A trouble in her eye.
’Twas a drizzly time—no ice, no snow!
And on the few fine days And when the prayers were done, we all
She stirred not out, lest she might meet Came round and asked her why:
Her mother in the ways. Giddy she seemed, and sure, there was
A trouble in her eye.
But Ellen, spite of miry ways
And weather dark and dreary, But ere she from the church-door stepped
Trudged every day to Edward’s house, She smiled and told us why:
And made them all more cheery. “It was a wicked woman’s curse,”
Quoth she, “and what care I?”
Oh! Ellen was a faithful friend,
More dear than any sister! She smiled, and smiled, and passed it off
As cheerful too as singing lark; Ere from the door she stept—
And she ne’er left them till ’twas dark, But all agree it would have been
And then they always missed her. Much better had she wept.

And now Ash-Wednesday came—that day And if her heart was not at ease,
But few to church repair: This was her constant cry—
For on that day you know we read “It was a wicked woman’s curse—
The Commination prayer. God’s good, and what care I?”

Our late old Vicar, a kind man, There was a hurry in her looks,
Once, Sir, he said to me, Her struggles she redoubled:
He wished that service was clean out “It was a wicked woman’s curse,
Of our good Liturgy. And why should I be troubled?”

238 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
 These tears will come—I dandled her I’d rather dance upon ’em all

GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES

When ’twas the merest fairy— Than tread upon these three!
Good creature! and she hid it all:
She told it not to Mary. “Aye, Sexton! ’tis a touching tale.”
You, Sir! are but a lad;
But Mary heard the tale: her arms This month I’m in my seventieth year,
Round Ellen’s neck she threw; And still it makes me sad.
“O Ellen, Ellen, she cursed me,
And now she hath cursed you!” And Mary’s sister told it me,
For three good hours and more;
I saw young Edward by himself Though I had heard it, in the main,
Stalk fast adown the lee, From Edward’s self, before.
He snatched a stick from every fence,
A twig from every tree. Well! it passed off! the gentle Ellen
Did well nigh dote on Mary;
He snapped them still with hand or knee, And she went oftener than before,
And then away they flew! And Mary loved her more and more:
As if with his uneasy limbs She managed all the dairy.
He knew not what to do!
To market she on market-days,
You see, good sir! that single hill? To church on Sundays came;
His farm lies underneath: All seemed the same: all seemed so, Sir!
He heard it there, he heard it all, But all was not the same!
And only gnashed his teeth.
Had Ellen lost her mirth? Oh! no!
Now Ellen was a darling love But she was seldom cheerful;
In all his joys and cares: And Edward looked as if he thought
And Ellen’s name and Mary’s name That Ellen’s mirth was fearful.
Fast-linked they both together came,
Whene’er he said his prayers. When by herself, she to herself
Must sing some merry rhyme;
And in the moment of his prayers She could not now be glad for hours,
He loved them both alike: Yet silent all the time.
Yea, both sweet names with one sweet joy
Upon his heart did strike! And when she soothed her friend, through all
Her soothing words ’twas plain
He reach’d his home, and by his looks She had a sore grief of her own,
They saw his inward strife: A haunting in her brain.
And they clung round him with their arms,
Both Ellen and his wife. And oft she said, I’m not grown thin!
And then her wrist she spanned;
And Mary could not check her tears, And once when Mary was down-cast,
So on his breast she bowed; She took her by the hand,
Then frenzy melted into grief, And gazed upon her, and at first
And Edward wept aloud. She gently pressed her hand;

Dear Ellen did not weep at all, Then harder, till her grasp at length
But closelier did she cling, Did gripe like a convulsion!
And turned her face and looked as if “Alas!” said she, “we ne’er can be
She saw some frightful thing. Made happy by compulsion!”

And once her both arms suddenly

Part IV Round Mary’s neck she flung,
To see a man tread over graves And her heart panted, and she felt
I hold it no good mark; The words upon her tongue.
’Tis wicked in the sun and moon,
And bad luck in the dark! She felt them coming, but no power
Had she the words to smother;
You see that grave? The Lord he gives, And with a kind of shriek she cried,
The Lord, he takes away: “Oh Christ! you’re like your mother!”
O Sir! the child of my old age
Lies there as cold as clay. So gentle Ellen now no more
Could make this sad house cheery;
Except that grave, you scarce see one And Mary’s melancholy ways
That was not dug by me; Drove Edward wild and weary.

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 Lingering he raised his latch at eve,
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
Though tired in heart and limb:
He loved no other place, and yet
Home was no home to him.
One evening he took up a book,
And nothing in it read;
Then flung it down, and groaning cried,
“O! Heaven! that I were dead.”
Mary looked up into his face,
And nothing to him said;
She tried to smile, and on his arm
Mournfully leaned her head.
And he burst into tears, and fell
Upon his knees in prayer:
“Her heart is broke! O God! my grief,
It is too great to bear!”
’Twas such a foggy time as makes
Old sextons, Sir! like me,
Rest on their spades to cough; the spring
Was late uncommonly.
And then the hot days, all at once,
They came, we knew not how:
You looked about for shade, when scarce
A leaf was on a bough.
It happened then (’twas in the bower,
A furlong up the wood:
Perhaps you know the place, and yet
I scarce know how you should,)
No path leads thither, ’tis not nigh
To any pasture-plot;
But clustered near the chattering brook,
Lone hollies marked the spot.
Those hollies of themselves a shape
As of an arbour took,
A close, round arbour; and it stands
Not three strides from a brook.
Within this arbour, which was still
With scarlet berries hung,
Were these three friends, one Sunday morn,
Just as the first bell rung.
’Tis sweet to hear a brook, ’tis sweet
To hear the Sabbath-bell,
’Tis sweet to hear them both at once,
Deep in a woody dell.
His limbs along the moss, his head
Upon a mossy heap,
With shut-up senses, Edward lay:
That brook e’en on a working day
Might chatter one to sleep.
And he had passed a restless night,
And was not well in health;
The women sat down by his side,
And talked as ’twere by stealth.
240
“The Sun peeps through the close thick leaves,
See, dearest Ellen! see!
’Tis in the leaves, a little sun,
No bigger than your ee;
“A tiny sun, and it has got
A perfect glory too;
Ten thousand threads and hairs of light,
Make up a glory gay and bright
Round that small orb, so blue.”
And then they argued of those rays,
What colour they might be;
Says this, “They’re mostly green”; says that,
“They’re amber-like to me.”
So they sat chatting, while bad thoughts
Were troubling Edward’s rest;
But soon they heard his hard quick pants,
And the thumping in his breast.
“A mother too!” these self-same words
Did Edward mutter plain;
His face was drawn back on itself,
With horror and huge pain.
Both groaned at once, for both knew well
What thoughts were in his mind;
When he waked up, and stared like one
That hath been just struck blind.
He sat upright; and ere the dream
Had had time to depart,
“O God, forgive me!” (he exclaimed)
“I have torn out her heart.”
Then Ellen shrieked, and forthwith burst
Into ungentle laughter;
And Mary shivered, where she sat,
And never she smiled after.
GEORGE GORDON NOEL, LORD
BYRON (NOVEL FRAGMENT DATE
1819)
SOURCE: Byron, George Gordon Noel, Lord. “Frag-
ment of a Novel.” In Three Gothic Novels: The Castle of
Otranto, Vathek, The Vampyre, edited by E. F. Bleiler,
pp. 287-91. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1966.
The following novel fragment, written in 1816 but first
published as an appendix to Byron’s Mazeppa in 1819,
served as John Polidori’s inspiration and model for his
novella, The Vampyre. Byron composed the fragment
during the competition between Polidori, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, Mary Shelley, and himself, during which Mary
Shelley produced her 1818 novel, Frankenstein.
June 17, 1816
“In the year 17—, having for some time
determined on a journey through countries not
hitherto much frequented by travellers, I set out,
accompanied by a friend, whom I shall designate
by the name of Augustus Darvell. He was a few
years my elder, and a man of considerable fortune
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
and ancient family: advantages which an exten-
sive capacity prevented him alike from undervalu-
ing or overrating. Some peculiar circumstances in
his private history had rendered him to me an
object of attention, of interest, and even of regard,
which neither the reserve of his manners, nor oc-
casional indications of an inquietude at times
nearly approaching to alienation of mind, could
extinguish.
“I was yet young in life, which I had begun
early; but my intimacy with him was of a recent
date: we had been educated at the same schools
and university; but his progress through these had
preceded mine, and he had been deeply initiated
into what is called the world, while I was yet in
my novitiate. While thus engaged, I heard much
both of his past and present life; and, although in
these accounts there were many and irreconcil-
able contradictions, I could still gather from the
whole that he was a being of no common order,
and one who, whatever pains he might take to
avoid remark, would still be remarkable. I had
cultivated his acquaintance subsequently, and en-
deavoured to obtain his friendship, but this last
appeared to be unattainable; whatever affections
he might have possessed seemed now, some to
have been extinguished, and others to be concen-
tred: that his feelings were acute, I had sufficient
opportunities of observing; for, although he could
control, he could not altogether disguise them:
still he had a power of giving to one passion the
appearance of another, in such a manner that it
was difficult to define the nature of what was
working within him; and the expressions of his
features would vary so rapidly, though slightly,
that it was useless to trace them to their sources. It
was evident that he was a prey to some cureless
disquiet; but whether it arose from ambition, love,
remorse, grief, from one or all of these, or merely
from a morbid temperament akin to disease, I
could not discover: there were circumstances al-
leged which might have justified the application
to each of these causes; but, as I have before said,
these were so contradictory and contradicted, that
none could be fixed upon with accuracy. Where
there is mystery, it is generally supposed that there
must also be evil: I know not how this may be,
but in him there certainly was the one, though I
could not ascertain the extent of the other—and
felt loth, as far as regarded himself, to believe in
its existence. My advances were received with suf-
ficient coldness: but I was young, and not easily
discouraged, and at length succeeded in obtain-
ing, to a certain degree, that common-place
intercourse and moderate confidence of common
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GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
GEORGE GORDON NOEL, LORD BYRON
(1788-1824)
Despite Lord Byron’s enormous influence in
Europe—both Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
and Aleksander Pushkin considered him a
master poet—his work was not favorably
received in his native England until almost a
century after his death. Continued interest in
Byron’s work is as rooted in the examination
of his controversial personality and exploits
as in the literary merits of his work. Byron’s
most notable contribution to Romanticism is
the Byronic hero, a character type that was
influenced by the Gothic hero-villains in
novels by such authors as Horace Walpole,
Matthew Gregory Lewis, William Beckford,
and Mary Shelley. The Byronic hero has been
likened to Byron himself, and is a melancholy
man, often with a dark past, who eschews
societal and religious strictures and seeks
truth and happiness in an apparently mean-
ingless universe. The title character of Byron’s
first verse drama, Manfred (1817), is a quint-
essential Byronic hero: consumed by his own
sense of guilt for an incestuous relationship
with his sister, Astarte, he finally seeks peace
through his own death. The drama is set in
the Alps where Manfred lives in a Gothic
castle. Tortured by his guilt, Manfred invokes
six spirits associated with earth and the ele-
ments, and a seventh who determines
Manfred’s personal destiny. Byron composed
a novel fragment during the famous “ghost-
story sessions” in 1816 when Mary Shelley is
purported to have composed Frankenstein;
this novel fragment served as the inspiration
and impetus for John Polidori’s The Vampyre.
This novel fragment and the other works By-
ron composed between 1812 and 1818
(prior to the 1819 publication of Don Juan,
his most highly respected work) contain
many elements of the Gothic tradition,
including ruined settings, tortured characters,
and encounters with the supernatural. These
works include the three “Turkish tales”—The
Giaour (1813), The Bride of Abydos (1813),
and The Corsair—, Lara (1814), and the first
two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
(1812).
241
 and every-day concerns, created and cemented by
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
similarity of pursuit and frequency of meeting,
which is called intimacy, or friendship, according
to the ideas of him who uses those words to
express them.
“Darvell had already travelled extensively; and
to him I had applied for information with regard
to the conduct of my intended journey. It was my
secret wish that he might be prevailed on to ac-
company me; it was also a probable hope, founded
upon the shadowy restlessness which I observed
in him, and to which the animation which he ap-
peared to feel on such subjects, and his apparent
indifference to all by which he was more im-
mediately surrounded, gave fresh strength. This
wish I first hinted, and then expressed: his answer,
though I had partly expected it, gave me all the
pleasure of surprise—he consented; and, after the
requisite arrangement, we commenced our voy-
ages. After journeying through various countries
of the south of Europe, our attention was turned
towards the East, according to our original destina-
tion; and it was in my progress through these
regions that the incident occurred upon which
will turn what I may have to relate.
“The constitution of Darvell, which must from
his appearance have been in early life more than
usually robust, had been for some time gradually
giving away, without the intervention of any ap-
parent disease: he had neither cough nor hectic,
yet he became daily more enfeebled; his habits
were temperate, and he neither declined nor
complained of fatigue; yet he was evidently wast-
ing away: he became more and more silent and
sleepless, and at length so seriously altered, that
my alarm grew proportionate to what I conceived
to be his danger.
“We had determined, on our arrival at Smyrna,
on an excursion to the ruins of Ephesus and Sar-
dis, from which I endeavoured to dissuade him in
his present state of indisposition—but in vain:
there appeared to be an oppression on his mind,
and a solemnity in his manner, which ill cor-
responded with his eagerness to proceed on what
I regarded as a mere party of pleasure little suited
to a valetudinarian; but I opposed him no longer—
and in a few days we set off together, accompanied
only by a serrugee and a single janizary.
“We had passed halfway towards the remains
of Ephesus, leaving behind us the more fertile
environs of Smyrna, and were entering upon that
wild and tenantless tract through the marshes and
defiles which lead to the few huts yet lingering
over the broken columns of Diana—the roofless
242 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
walls of expelled Christianity, and the still more
recent but complete desolation of abandoned
mosques—when the sudden and rapid illness of
my companion obliged us to halt at a Turkish
cemetery, the turbaned tombstones of which were
the sole indication that human life had ever been
a sojourner in this wilderness. The only caravan-
sera we had seen was left some hours behind us,
not a vestige of a town or even cottage was within
sight or hope, and this ‘city of the dead’ appeared
to be the sole refuge of my unfortunate friend,
who seemed on the verge of becoming the last of
its inhabitants.
“In this situation, I looked round for a place
where he might most conveniently repose:—
contrary to the usual aspect of Mahometan burial-
grounds, the cypresses were in this few in number,
and these thinly scattered over its extent; the
tombstones were mostly fallen, and worn with
age:—upon one of the most considerable of these,
and beneath one of the most spreading trees,
Darvell supported himself, in a half-reclining
posture, with great difficulty. He asked for water. I
had some doubts of our being able to find any,
and prepared to go in search of it with hesitating
despondency: but he desired me to remain; and
turning to Suleiman, our janizary, who stood by
us smoking with great tranquillity, he said, ‘Sule-
iman, verbana su,’ (i.e. ‘bring some water,’) and
went on describing the spot where it was to be
found with great minuteness, at a small well for
camels, a few hundred yards to the right: the jan-
izary obeyed. I said to Darvell, ‘How did you know
this?’—He replied, ‘From our situation; you must
perceive that this place was once inhabited, and
could not have been so without springs: I have
also been here before.’
“‘You have been here before!—How came you
never to mention this to me? and what could you
be doing in a place where no one would remain a
moment longer than they could help it?’
“To this question I received no answer. In the
mean time Suleiman returned with the water,
leaving the serrugee and the horses at the foun-
tain. The quenching of his thirst had the appear-
ance of reviving him for a moment; and I con-
ceived hopes of his being able to proceed, or at
least to return, and I urged the attempt. He was
silent—and appeared to be collecting his spirits
for an effort to speak. He began—
“‘This is the end of my journey, and of my
life;—I came here to die; but I have a request to
make, a command—for such my last words must
be.—You will observe it?’
 “‘Most certainly; but I have better hopes.’
“‘I have no hopes, nor wishes, but this—
conceal my death from every human being.’
“‘I hope there will be no occasion; that you
will recover, and———’
“‘Peace!—it must be so: promise this.’
“‘I do.’
“‘Swear it, by all that———’ He here dictated
an oath of great solemnity.
“‘There is no occasion for this. I will observe
your request; and to doubt me is———’
“‘It cannot be helped,—you must swear.’
“I took the oath, it appeared to relieve him.
He removed a seal ring from his finger, on which
were some Arabic characters, and presented it to
me. He proceeded—
“‘On the ninth day of the month, at noon
precisely (what month you please, but this must
be the day), you must fling this ring into the salt
springs which run into the Bay of Eleusis; the day
after, at the same hour, you must repair to the
ruins of the temple of Ceres, and wait one hour.’
“‘Why?’
“‘You will see.’
“‘The ninth day of the month, you say?’
“‘The ninth.’
“As I observed that the present was the ninth
day of the month, his countenance changed, and
he paused. As he sat, evidently becoming more
feeble, a stork, with a snake in her beak, perched
upon a tombstone near us; and, without devour-
ing her prey, appeared to be steadfastly regarding
us. I know not what impelled me to drive it away,
but the attempt was useless; she made a few circles
in the air, and returned exactly to the same spot.
Darvell pointed to it, and smiled—he spoke—I
know not whether to himself or to me—but the
words were only, ‘’Tis well!’
“‘What is well? What do you mean?’
“‘No matter; you must bury me here this
evening, and exactly where that bird is now
perched. You know the rest of my injunctions.’
“He then proceeded to give me several direc-
tions as to the manner in which his death might
be best concealed. After these were finished, he
exclaimed, ‘You perceive that bird?’
“‘Certainly.’
“‘And the serpent writhing in her beak?’
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
“‘Doubtless: there is nothing uncommon in
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
it; it is her natural prey. But it is odd that she does
not devour it.’
“He smiled in a ghastly manner, and said
faintly, ‘It is not yet time!’ As he spoke, the stork
flew away. My eyes followed it for a moment—it
could hardly be longer than ten might be counted.
I felt Darvell’s weight, as it were, increase upon
my shoulder, and, turning to look upon his face,
perceived that he was dead!
“I was shocked with the sudden certainty
which could not be mistaken—his countenance
in a few minutes became nearly black. I should
have attributed so rapid a change to poison, had I
not been aware that he had no opportunity of
receiving it unperceived. The day was declining,
the body was rapidly altering, and nothing re-
mained but to fulfil his request. With the aid of
Suleiman’s ataghan and my own sabre, we
scooped a shallow grave upon the spot which
Darvell had indicated: the earth easily gave way,
having already received some Mahometan tenant.
We dug as deeply as the time permitted us, and
throwing the dry earth upon all that remained of
the singular being so lately departed, we cut a few
sods of greener turf from the less withered soil
around us, and laid them upon his sepulchre.
“Between astonishment and grief, I was tear-
less.”
JOHN WILLIAM POLIDORI
(NOVELLA DATE 1819)
SOURCE: Polidori, John William. The Vampyre: A Tale.
1819. Reprinted in The Vampyre and Other Tales of the
Macabre, edited with an introduction and notes by
Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick, pp. 265-83. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
The following excerpt is from Polidori’s novella, written
in 1816 and first published in 1819 in New Monthly
Magazine.
Next morning Aubrey set off upon his excur-
sion unattended; he was surprised to observe the
melancholy face of his host, and was concerned
to find that his words, mocking the belief of those
horrible fiends, had inspired them with such ter-
ror.—When he was about to depart, Ianthe came
to the side of his horse and earnestly begged of
him to return, ere night allowed the power of
these beings to be put in action—he promised. He
was, however, so occupied in his research that he
did not perceive that day-light would soon end,
and that in the horizon there was one of those
specks which in the warmer climates so rapidly
gather into a tremenduous mass and pour all their
243
 rage upon the devoted country.—He at last,
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
however, mounted his horse, determined to make
up by speed for his delay: but it was too late.
Twilight in these southern climates is almost
unknown; immediately the sun sets, night begins;
and ere he had advanced far, the power of the
storm was above—its echoing thunders had
scarcely an interval of rest—its thick heavy rain
forced its way through the canopying foliage,
whilst the blue forked lightning seemed to fall
and radiate at his very feet. Suddenly his horse
took fright, and he was carried with dreadful
rapidity through the entangled forest. The animal
at last, through fatigue, stopped, and he found, by
the glare of lightening, that he was in the neigh-
bourhood of a hovel that hardly lifted itself up
from the masses of dead leaves and brushwood
which surrounded it. Dismounting, he ap-
proached, hoping to find some one to guide him
to the town, or at least trusting to obtain shelter
from the pelting of the storm. As he approached,
the thunders, for a moment silent, allowed him to
hear the dreadful shrieks of a woman mingling
with the stifled exultant mockery of a laugh,
continued in one almost unbroken sound; he was
startled: but, roused by the thunder which again
rolled over his head, he with a sudden effort
forced open the door of the hut. He found himself
in utter darkness; the sound, however, guided
him. He was apparently unperceived; for though
he called, still the sounds continued, and no
notice was taken of him. He found himself in
contact with some one, whom he immediately
seized, when a voice cried ‘again baffled,’ to which
a loud laugh succeeded, and he felt himself
grappled by one whose strength seemed superhu-
man: determined to sell his life as dearly as he
could, he struggled: but it was in vain: he was
lifted from his feet and hurled with enormous
force against the ground:—his enemy threw
himself upon him, and kneeling upon his breast,
had placed his hands upon his throat, when the
glare of many torches penetrating through the
hole that gave light in the day, disturbed him—he
instantly rose and, leaving his prey, rushed
through the door, and in a moment the crashing
of the branches, as he broke through the wood,
was no longer heard.—The storm was now still;
and Aubrey, incapable of moving, was soon heard
by those without.—They entered; the light of their
torches fell upon the mud walls, and the thatch
loaded on every individual straw with heavy flakes
of soot. At the desire of Aubrey they searched for
her who had attracted him by her cries; he was
again left in darkness; but what was his horror,
244 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
when the light of the torches once more burst
upon him, to perceive the airy form of his fair
conductress brought in a lifeless corse. He shut his
eyes, hoping that it was but a vision arising from
his disturbed imagination; but he again saw the
same form, when he unclosed them, stretched by
his side. There was no colour upon her cheek, not
even upon her lip; yet there was a stillness about
her face that seemed almost as attaching as the
life that once dwelt there:—upon her neck and
breast was blood, and upon her throat were the
marks of teeth having opened the vein:—to this
the men pointed, crying, simultaneously struck
with horror, ‘a Vampyre, a Vampyre!’ A litter was
quickly formed, and Aubrey was laid by the side
of her who had lately been to him the object of so
many bright and fairy visions, now fallen with
the flower of life that had died within her. He
knew not what his thoughts were—his mind was
benumbed and seemed to shun reflection and take
refuge in vacancy—he held almost unconsciously
in his hand a naked dagger of a particular con-
struction, which had been found in the hut.—
They were soon met by different parties who had
been engaged in the search of her whom a mother
had soon missed.—Their lamentable cries, as they
approached the city, forewarned the parents of
some dreadful catastrophe.—To describe their grief
would be impossible; but when they ascertained
the cause of their child’s death they looked at
Aubrey and pointed to the corpse.—They were
inconsolable; both died broken-hearted.
Aubrey being put to bed was seized with a
most violent fever, and was often delirious; in
these intervals he would call upon Lord Ruthven
and upon Ianthe—by some unaccountable combi-
nation he seemed to beg of his former companion
to spare the being he loved.—At other times he
would imprecate maledictions upon his head, and
curse him as her destroyer. Lord Ruthven chanced
at this time to arrive at Athens, and, from what-
ever motive, upon hearing of the state of Aubrey,
immediately placed himself in the same house
and became his constant attendant. When the lat-
ter recovered from his delirium he was horrified
and startled at the sight of him whose image he
had now combined with that of a Vampyre; but
Lord Ruthven by his kind words, implying almost
repentance for the fault that had caused their
separation, and still more by the attention, anxi-
ety, and care which he showed, soon reconciled
him to his presence. His Lordship seemed quite
changed; he no longer appeared that apathetic be-
ing who had so astonished Aubrey; but as soon as
his convalescence began to be rapid, he again
gradually retired into the same state of mind, and
Aubrey perceived no difference from the former
man, except, that at times he was surprised to
meet his gaze fixed intently upon him with a
smile of malicious exultation playing upon his
lips; he knew not why, but this smile haunted
him. During the last stage of the invalid’s recovery,
Lord Ruthven was apparently engaged in watch-
ing the tideless waves raised by the cooling breeze,
or in marking the progress of those orbs, circling,
like our world, the moveless sun;—indeed he ap-
peared to wish to avoid the eyes of all.
Aubrey’s mind, by this shock, was much
weakened, and that elasticity of spirit which had
once so distinguished him now seemed to have
fled for ever.—He was now as much a lover of
solitude and silence as Lord Ruthven; but much as
he wished for solitude, his mind could not find it
in the neighbourhood of Athens; if he sought it
amidst the ruins he had formerly frequented, Ian-
the’s form stood by his side—if he sought it in the
woods, her light step would appear wandering
amidst the underwood, in quest of the modest
violet; then suddenly turning round would show,
to his wild imagination, her pale face and
wounded throat with a meek smile upon her lips.
He determined to fly scenes, every feature of
which created such bitter associations in his mind.
He proposed to Lord Ruthven, to whom he held
himself bound by the tender care he had taken of
him during his illness, that they should visit those
parts of Greece neither had yet seen. They trav-
elled in every direction, and sought every spot to
which a recollection could be attached; but
though they thus hastened from place to place
yet they seemed not to heed what they gazed
upon.—They heard much of robbers, but they
gradually began to slight these reports, which they
imagined were only the invention of individuals,
whose interest it was to excite the generosity of
those whom they defended from pretended dan-
gers. In consequence of thus neglecting the advice
of the inhabitants, on one occasion they travelled
with only a few guards, more to serve as guides
than as a defence.—Upon entering, however, a
narrow defile, at the bottom of which was the bed
of a torrent, with large masses of rock brought
down from the neighbouring precipices, they had
reason to repent their negligence—for, scarcely
were the whole of the party engaged in the nar-
row pass, when they were startled by the whistling
of bullets close to their heads, and by the echoed
report of several guns. In an instant their guards
had left them, and placing themselves behind
rocks had begun to fire in the direction whence
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
the report came. Lord Ruthven and Aubrey, imitat-
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
ing their example, retired for a moment behind a
sheltering turn of the defile; but ashamed of being
thus detained by a foe, who with insulting shouts
bade them advance, and being exposed to unre-
sisting slaughter, if any of the robbers should
climb above and take them in the rear, they
determined at once to rush forward in search of
the enemy.—Hardly had they lost the shelter of
the rock, when Lord Ruthven received a shot in
the shoulder that brought him to the ground.—
Aubrey hastened to his assistance, and no longer
heeding the contest or his own peril, was soon
surprised by seeing the robbers’ faces around him;
his guards having, upon Lord Ruthven’s being
wounded, immediately thrown up their arms and
surrendered.
By promises of great reward, Aubrey soon
induced them to convey his wounded friend to a
neighbouring cabin, and having agreed upon a
ransom he was no more disturbed by their pres-
ence, they being content to merely guard the
entrance till their comrade should return with the
promised sum for which he had an order.—Lord
Ruthven’s strength rapidly decreased; in two days
mortification ensued, and death seemed advanc-
ing with hasty steps.—His conduct and appear-
ance had not changed; he seemed as unconscious
of pain as he had been of the objects about him;
but towards the close of the last evening his mind
became apparently uneasy, and his eye often fixed
upon Aubrey, who was induced to offer his as-
sistance with more than usual earnestness—‘Assist
me! you may save me—you may do more than
that—I mean not my life, I heed the death of my
existence as little as that of the passing day; but
you may save my honour, your friend’s honour.’—
‘How, tell me how; I would do any thing,’ replied
Aubrey. ‘I need but little—my life ebbs apace—I
cannot explain the whole—but if you would
conceal all you know of me, my honour were free
from stain in the world’s mouth—and if my death
were unknown for some time in England—I—I—
but life.’—‘It shall not be known.’—‘Swear!’ cried
the dying man, raising himself with exultant
violence, ‘Swear by all your soul reveres, by all
your nature fears, swear that for a year and a day
you will not impart your knowledge of my crimes
or death to any living being in any way, whatever
may happen, or whatever you may see.’—His eyes
seemed bursting from their sockets: ‘I swear!’ said
Aubrey; he sunk laughing upon his pillow and
breathed no more.
Aubrey retired to rest, but did not sleep; the
many circumstances attending his acquaintance
245
 with this man rose upon his mind, and he knew
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
not why; when he remembered his oath a cold
shivering came over him, as if from the presenti-
ment of something horrible awaiting him. Rising
early in the morning he was about to enter the
hovel in which he had left the corpse, when a
robber met him, and informed him that it was no
longer there, having been conveyed by himself
and comrades, upon his retiring, to the pinnacle
of a neighbouring mount, according to a promise
they had given his lordship, that it should be
exposed to the first cold ray of the moon that rose
after his death. Aubrey was astonished, and taking
several of the men, determined to go and bury it
upon the spot where it lay. But, when he had
mounted to the summit he found no trace of
either the corpse or the clothes, though the rob-
bers swore they pointed out the identical rock on
which they had laid the body. For a time his mind
was bewildered in conjectures, but he at last
returned, convinced that they had buried the
corpse for the sake of the clothes.
Weary of a country in which he had met with
such terrible misfortunes, and in which all appar-
ently conspired to heighten that superstitious
melancholy that had seized upon his mind, he
resolved to leave it, and soon arrived at Smyrna.
While waiting for a vessel to convey him to
Otranto, or to Naples, he occupied himself in ar-
ranging those effects he had with him belonging
to Lord Ruthven. Amongst other things there was
a case containing several weapons of offence,
more or less adapted to ensure the death of the
victim. There were several daggers and ataghans.
Whilst turning them over, and examining their
curious forms, what was his surprise at finding a
sheath apparently ornamented in the same style
as the dagger discovered in the fatal hut; he shud-
dered; hastening to gain further proof, he found
the weapon, and his horror may be imagined
when he discovered that it fitted, though pecu-
liarly shaped, the sheath he held in his hand. His
eyes seemed to need no further certainty—they
seemed gazing to be bound to the dagger; yet still
he wished to disbelieve; but the particular form,
the same varying tints upon the haft and sheath
were alike in splendour on both, and left no room
for doubt; there were also drops of blood on each.
He left Smyrna, and on his way home, at
Rome, his first inquiries were concerning the lady
he had attempted to snatch from Lord Ruthven’s
seductive arts. Her parents were in distress, their
fortune ruined, and she had not been heard of
since the departure of his lordship. Aubrey’s mind
became almost broken under so many repeated
246 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
horrors; he was afraid that this lady had fallen a
victim to the destroyer of Ianthe. He became
morose and silent, and his only occupation
consisted in urging the speed of the postilions, as
if he were going to save the life of some one he
held dear. He arrived at Calais; a breeze, which
seemed obedient to his will, soon wafted him to
the English shores; and he hastened to the man-
sion of his fathers, and there, for a moment, ap-
peared to lose, in the embraces and caresses of his
sister, all memory of the past. If she before, by her
infantine caresses, had gained his affection, now
that the woman began to appear, she was still
more attaching as a companion.
Miss Aubrey had not that winning grace
which gains the gaze and applause of the drawing-
room assemblies. There was none of that light bril-
liancy which only exists in the heated atmosphere
of a crowded apartment. Her blue eye was never
lit up by the levity of the mind beneath. There
was a melancholy charm about it which did not
seem to arise from misfortune, but from some feel-
ing within, that appeared to indicate a soul
conscious of a brighter realm. Her step was not
that light footing, which strays where’er a but-
terfly or a colour may attract—it was sedate and
pensive. When alone, her face was never bright-
ened by the smile of joy; but when her brother
breathed to her his affection, and would in her
presence forget those griefs she knew destroyed
his rest, who would have exchanged her smile for
that of the voluptuary? It seemed as if those
eyes,—that face were then playing in the light of
their own native sphere. She was yet only eigh-
teen, and had not been presented to the world; it
having been thought by her guardians more fit
that her presentation should be delayed until her
brother’s return from the continent, when he
might be her protector. It was now, therefore,
resolved that the next drawing room, which was
fast approaching, should be the epoch of her entry
into the ‘busy scene’. Aubrey would rather have
remained in the mansion of his fathers, and fed
upon the melancholy which overpowered him.
He could not feel interest about the frivolities of
fashionable strangers, when his mind had been so
torn by the events he had witnessed; but he
determined to sacrifice his own comfort to the
protection of his sister. They soon arrived in town,
and prepared for the next day, which had been
announced as a drawing room.
The crowd was excessive—a drawing room
had not been held for a long time, and all who
were anxious to bask in the smile of royalty,
hastened thither. Aubrey was there with his sister.
While he was standing in a corner by himself,
heedless of all around him, engaged in the remem-
brance that the first time he had seen Lord Ruth-
ven was in that very place—he felt himself sud-
denly seized by the arm, and a voice he recognized
too well, sounded in his ear—‘Remember your
oath.’ He had hardly courage to turn, fearful of
seeing a spectre that would blast him, when he
perceived, at a little distance, the same figure
which had attracted his notice on this spot upon
his first entry into society. He gazed till his limbs
almost refusing to bear their weight, he was
obliged to take the arm of a friend, and forcing a
passage through the crowd, he threw himself into
his carriage, and was driven home. He paced the
room with hurried steps, and fixed his hands upon
his head, as if he were afraid his thoughts were
bursting from his brain. Lord Ruthven again
before him—circumstances started up in dreadful
array—the dagger—his oath.—He roused himself,
he could not believe it possible—the dead rise
again!—He thought his imagination had conjured
up the image his mind was resting upon. It was
impossible that it could be real—he determined,
therefore, to go again into society; for though he
attempted to ask concerning Lord Ruthven, the
name hung upon his lips, and he could not suc-
ceed in gaining information. He went a few nights
after with his sister to the assembly of a near rela-
tion. Leaving her under the protection of a ma-
tron, he retired into a recess, and there gave
himself up to his own devouring thoughts. Per-
ceiving, at last, that many were leaving, he roused
himself, and entering another room, found his
sister surrounded by several, apparently in earnest
conversation; he attempted to pass and get near
her, when one, whom he requested to move,
turned round, and revealed to him those features
he most abhorred. He sprung forward, seized his
sister’s arm, and, with hurried step, forced her
towards the street: at the door he found himself
impeded by the crowds of servants who were wait-
ing for their lords; and while he was engaged in
passing them, he again heard that voice whisper
close to him—‘Remember your oath!’—He did not
dare to turn, but, hurrying his sister, soon reached
home.
Aubrey became almost distracted. If before his
mind had been absorbed by one subject, how
much more completely was it engrossed, now that
the certainty of the monster’s living again pressed
upon his thoughts. His sister’s attentions were
now unheeded, and it was in vain that she in-
treated him to explain to her what had caused his
abrupt conduct. He only uttered a few words, and
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
those terrified her. The more he thought, the more
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
he was bewildered. His oath startled him;—was he
then to allow this monster to roam, bearing ruin
upon his breath, amidst all he held dear, and not
avert its progress? His very sister might have been
touched by him. But even if he were to break his
oath, and disclose his suspicions, who would
believe him? He thought of employing his own
hand to free the world from such a wretch; but
death, he remembered, had been already mocked.
For days he remained in this state; shut up in his
room, he saw no one, and ate only when his sister
came, who, with eyes streaming with tears, be-
sought him, for her sake, to support nature. At
last, no longer capable of bearing stillness and
solitude, he left his house, roamed from street to
street, anxious to fly that image which haunted
him. His dress became neglected, and he wan-
dered, as often exposed to the noon-day sun as to
the midnight damps. He was no longer to be
recognized; at first he returned with the evening
to the house; but at last he laid him down to rest
wherever fatigue overtook him. His sister, anxious
for his safety, employed people to follow him; but
they were soon distanced by him who fled from a
pursuer swifter than any—from thought. His
conduct, however, suddenly changed. Struck with
the idea that he left by his absence the whole of
his friends, with a fiend amongst them, of whose
presence they were unconscious, he determined
to enter again into society, and watch him closely,
anxious to forewarn, in spite of his oath, all whom
Lord Ruthven approached with intimacy. But
when he entered into a room, his haggard and
suspicious looks were so striking, his inward shud-
derings so visible, that his sister was at last obliged
to beg of him to abstain from seeking, for her sake,
a society which affected him so strongly. When,
however, remonstrance proved unavailing, the
guardians thought proper to interpose, and, fear-
ing that his mind was becoming alienated, they
thought it high time to resume again that trust
which had been before imposed upon them by
Aubrey’s parents.
Desirous of saving him from the injuries and
sufferings he had daily encountered in his wander-
ings, and of preventing him from exposing to the
general eye those marks of what they considered
folly, they engaged a physician to reside in the
house, and take constant care of him. He hardly
appeared to notice it, so completely was his mind
absorbed by one terrible subject. His incoherence
became at last so great, that he was confined to
his chamber. There he would often lie for days,
incapable of being roused. He had become emaci-
247
 ated, his eyes had attained a glassy lustre;—the
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
only sign of affection and recollection remaining
displayed itself upon the entry of his sister: then
he would sometimes start, and, seizing her hands,
with looks that severely afflicted her, he would
desire her not to touch him. ‘Oh, do not touch
him—if your love for me is aught, do not go near
him!’ When, however, she inquired to whom he
referred, his only answer was—‘True! true!’ and
again he sank into a state, whence not even she
could rouse him. This lasted many months: gradu-
ally, however, as the year was passing, his incoher-
ences became less frequent, and his mind threw
off a portion of its gloom, whilst his guardians
observed, that several times in the day he would
count upon his fingers a definite number, and
then smile.
The time had nearly elapsed, when, upon the
last day of the year, one of his guardians entering
his room, began to converse with his physician
upon the melancholy circumstance of Aubrey’s
being in so awful a situation when his sister was
going next day to be married. Instantly Aubrey’s
attention was attracted; he asked anxiously to
whom. Glad of this mark of returning intellect, of
which they feared he had been deprived, they
mentioned the name of the Earl of Marsden.
Thinking this was a young earl whom he had met
with in society, Aubrey seemed pleased, and
astonished them still more by his expressing his
intention to be present at the nuptials, and desir-
ing to see his sister. They answered not, but in a
few minutes his sister was with him. He was ap-
parently again capable of being affected by the
influence of her lovely smile; for he pressed her to
his breast, and kissed her cheek, wet with tears,
flowing at the thought of her brother’s being once
more alive to the feelings of affection. He began
to speak with all his wonted warmth, and to
congratulate her upon her marriage with a person
so distinguished for rank and every accomplish-
ment; when he suddenly perceived a locket upon
her breast; opening it, what was his surprise at
beholding the features of the monster who had so
long influenced his life. He seized the portrait in a
paroxysm of rage, and trampled it under foot.
Upon her asking him why he thus destroyed the
resemblance of her future husband, he looked as
if he did not understand her—then seizing her
hands, and gazing on her with a frantic expres-
sion of countenance, he bade her swear that she
would never wed this monster, for he———But
he could not advance—it seemed as if that voice
again bade him remember his oath—he turned
suddenly round, thinking Lord Ruthven was near
248 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
him, but saw no one. In the meantime the guard-
ians and physician, who had heard the whole,
and thought this was but a return of his disorder,
entered, and forcing him from Miss Aubrey,
desired her to leave him. He fell upon his knees to
them, he implored, he begged of them to delay
but for one day. They, attributing this to the insan-
ity they imagined had taken possession of his
mind, endeavoured to pacify him, and retired.
Lord Ruthven had called the morning after
the drawing room, and had been refused with
every one else. When he heard of Aubrey’s ill
health, he readily understood himself to be the
cause of it: but when he learned that he was
deemed insane, his exultation and pleasure could
hardly be concealed from those among whom he
had gained this information. He hastened to the
house of his former companion, and, by constant
attendance, and the pretence of great affection for
the brother and interest in his fate, he gradually
won the ear of Miss Aubrey. Who could resist his
power? His tongue had dangers and toils to
recount—could speak of himself as of an indi-
vidual having no sympathy with any being on
the crowded earth, save with her to whom he ad-
dressed himself;—could tell how, since he knew
her, his existence had begun to seem worthy of
preservation, if it were merely that he might listen
to her soothing accents;—in fine, he knew so well
how to use the serpent’s art, or such was the will
of fate, that he gained her affections. The title of
the elder branch falling at length to him, he
obtained an important embassy, which served as
an excuse for hastening the marriage, (in spite of
her brother’s deranged state,) which was to take
place the very day before his departure for the
continent.
Aubrey, when he was left by the physician and
his guardian, attempted to bribe the servants, but
in vain. He asked for pen and paper; it was given
him; he wrote a letter to his sister, conjuring her,
as she valued her own happiness, her own ho-
nour, and the honour of those now in the grave,
who once held her in their arms as their hope and
the hope of their house, to delay but for a few
hours, that marriage, on which he denounced the
most heavy curses. The servants promised they
would deliver it; but giving it to the physician, he
thought it better not to harass any more the mind
of Miss Aubrey by, what he considered, the rav-
ings of a maniac. Night passed on without rest to
the busy inmates of the house; and Aubrey heard,
with a horror that may more easily be conceived
than described, the notes of busy preparation.
Morning came, and the sound of carriages broke
upon his ear. Aubrey grew almost frantic. The

GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES

curiosity of the servants at last overcame their
vigilance, they gradually stole away, leaving him
in the custody of an helpless old woman. He
seized the opportunity, with one bound was out
of the room, and in a moment found himself in
the apartment where all were nearly assembled.
Lord Ruthven was the first to perceive him: he im-
mediately approached, and, taking his arm by
force, hurried him from the room, speechless with
rage. When on the staircase, Lord Ruthven whis-
pered in his ear—‘Remember your oath, and
know, if not my bride to day, your sister is disho-
noured. Women are frail!’ So saying, he pushed
him towards his attendants, who, roused by the
old woman, had come in search of him. Aubrey
could no longer support himself; his rage, not
finding vent, had broken a blood-vessel, and he
was conveyed to bed. This was not mentioned to
his sister, who was not present when he entered,
as the physician was afraid of agitating her. The
marriage was solemnized, and the bride and
bridegroom left London.
Aubrey’s weakness increased; the effusion of
blood produced symptoms of the near approach
of death. He desired his sister’s guardians might
be called, and when the midnight hour had
struck, he related composedly what the reader has
perused—he died immediately after.
The guardians hastened to protect Miss
Aubrey; but when they arrived, it was too late.
Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister
had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!

OVERVIEWS

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GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
H. P. LOVECRAFT (ESSAY DATE
1945)
SOURCE: Lovecraft, H. P. “The Aftermath of Gothic
Fiction.” In Supernatural Horror in Literature. 1945.
Reprint edition, edited by E. F. Bleiler, pp. 36-44. New
York: Dover, 1973.
In the following essay, first published in 1945, renowned
horror and science fiction writer Lovecraft surveys the
development of the Gothic in major and minor literary
works written during the late eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.
Meanwhile other hands had not been idle, so
that above the dreary plethora of trash like
Marquis von Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries (1796), Mrs.
Roche’s Children of the Abbey (1798), Mrs. Dacre’s
Zofloya; or, the Moor (1806), and the poet Shelley’s
schoolboy effusions Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvine
(1811) (both imitations of Zofloya) there arose
many memorable weird works both in English
and German. Classic in merit, and markedly dif-
ferent from its fellows because of its foundation in
the Oriental tale rather than the Walpolesque
Gothic novel, is the celebrated History of the Caliph
Vathek by the wealthy dilettante William Beck-
ford, first written in the French language but
published in an English translation before the ap-
pearance of the original. Eastern tales, introduced
to European literature early in the eighteenth
century through Galland’s French translation of
the inexhaustibly opulent Arabian Nights, had
become a reigning fashion; being used both for al-
legory and for amusement. The sly humour which
260 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
H. P. LOVECRAFT (1890-1937)
H. P. Lovecraft is widely considered the most
important literary supernaturalist of the
twentieth century and one of the greatest in
a tradition that originated with the Gothic
novelists of the eighteenth century and was
perpetuated throughout the nineteenth
century by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe,
Ambrose Bierce, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu,
and Arthur Machen. Like these literary fore-
bears, Lovecraft practiced an essentially
popular form of writing, the evolution of
which he traced in the critical history Super-
natural Horror in Literature (1945). Combin-
ing elements of the lowest pulp melodrama
with the highest imaginative artistry, Love-
craft’s “weird tales” have become classics of
an enduring branch of literature, and among
authorities in this province he is regarded as
a peer of his Gothic predecessors. Lovecraft’s
stories are commonly divided into three
types: those influenced by the Irish fantasist
Lord Dunsany, a diverse group of horror nar-
ratives set in New England, and tales sharing
a background of cosmic legendry usually
referred to as the “Cthulhu Mythos.” One of
the most important and controversial issues
in Lovecraft criticism is that regarding nomen-
clature for his Mythos stories. Various labels
have been employed, from the broad desig-
nations of “horror” and “Gothic” to more
discriminating terms such as “supernormal”
and “mechanistic supernatural.” At the
source of this diverse terminology is the fact
that, while these works clearly belong to the
tradition of Gothic literature, Lovecraft did
not make them dependent on the common
mythic conceits associated with this tradi-
tion—ghosts, vampires, witches, werewolves,
and other figures of folklore—and even when
they do appear in his work, these entities are
often modified to function against a new
mythical background, one whose symbolism
emphasizes the philosophical over the psy-
chological. The question of how to describe
tales whose effect derives from the violation
of the laws of nature rather than those of
personal or public morality was somewhat
resolved by Lovecraft himself when he ap-
plied the term “weird” to such works.
only the Eastern mind knows how to mix with

GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES

weirdness had captivated a sophisticated genera-
tion, till Bagdad and Damascus names became as
freely strewn through popular literature as dash-
ing Italian and Spanish ones were soon to be.
Beckford, well read in Eastern romance, caught
the atmosphere with unusual receptivity; and in
his fantastic volume reflected very potently the
haughty luxury, sly disillusion, bland cruelty,
urbane treachery, and shadowy spectral horror of
the Saracen spirit. His seasoning of the ridiculous
seldom mars the force of his sinister theme, and
the tale marches onward with a phantasmagoric
pomp in which the laughter is that of skeletons
feasting under arabesque domes. Vathek is a tale of
the grandson of the Caliph Haroun, who, tor-
mented by that ambition for super-terrestrial
power, pleasure and learning which animates the
average Gothic villain or Byronic hero (essentially
cognate types), is lured by an evil genius to seek
the subterranean throne of the mighty and fabu-
lous pre-Adamite sultans in the fiery halls of Eblis,
the Mahometan Devil. The descriptions of
Vathek’s palaces and diversions, of his scheming
H. P. Lovecraft, 1890-1937.
sorceress-mother Carathis and her witch-tower
with the fifty one-eyed negresses, of his pilgrim-
age to the haunted ruins of Istakhar (Persepolis) followed his famous but non-supernatural Caleb
and of the impish bride Nouronihar whom he Williams (1794) with the intendedly weird St. Leon
treacherously acquired on the way, of Istakhar’s (1799), in which the theme of the elixir of life, as
primordial towers and terraces in the burning developed by the imaginary secret order of “Rosi-
moonlight of the waste, and of the terrible Cyclo- crucians,” is handled with ingeniousness if not
pean halls of Eblis, where, lured by glittering with atmospheric convincingness. This element
promises, each victim is compelled to wander in of Rosicrucianism, fostered by a wave of popular
anguish for ever, his right hand upon his blaz- magical interest exemplified in the vogue of the
ingly ignited and eternally burning heart, are charlatan Cagliostro and the publication of Fran-
triumphs of weird colouring which raise the book cis Barrett’s The Magus (1801), a curious and
to a permanent place in English letters. No less compendious treatise on occult principles and
notable are the three Episodes of Vathek, intended ceremonies, of which a reprint was made as lately
for insertion in the tale as narratives of Vathek’s as 1896, figures in Bulwer-Lytton and in many
fellow-victims in Eblis’ infernal halls, which late Gothic novels, especially that remote and
remained unpublished throughout the author’s enfeebled posterity which straggled far down into
lifetime and were discovered as recently as 1909 the nineteenth century and was represented by
by the scholar Lewis Melville whilst collecting George W. M. Reynold’s Faust and Wagner the
material for his Life and Letters of William Beckford. Wehr-Wolf. Caleb Williams, though non-
Beckford, however, lacks the essential mysticism supernatural, has many authentic touches of ter-
which marks the acutest form of the weird; so that ror. It is the tale of a servant persecuted by a
his tales have a certain knowing Latin hardness master whom he has found guilty of murder, and
and clearness preclusive of sheer panic fright. displays an invention and skill which have kept it
But Beckford remained alone in his devotion alive in a fashion to this day. It was dramatized as
to the Orient. Other writers, closer to the Gothic The Iron Chest, and in that form was almost
tradition and to European life in general, were equally celebrated. Godwin, however, was too
content to follow more faithfully in the lead of much the conscious teacher and prosaic man of
Walpole. Among the countless producers of terror- thought to create a genuine weird masterpiece.
literature in these times may be mentioned the His daughter, the wife of Shelley, was much
Utopian economic theorist William Godwin, who more successful; and her inimitable Frankenstein;

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 or, the Modern Prometheus (1817) is one of the
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
horror-classics of all time. Composed in competi-
tion with her husband, Lord Byron, and Dr. John
William Polidori in an effort to prove supremacy
in horror-making, Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein was
the only one of the rival narratives to be brought
to an elaborate completion; and criticism has
failed to prove that the best parts are due to Shel-
ley rather than to her. The novel, somewhat
tinged but scarcely marred by moral didacticism,
tells of the artificial human being molded from
charnel fragments by Victor Frankenstein, a young
Swiss medical student. Created by its designer “in
the mad pride of intellectuality,” the monster pos-
sesses full intelligence but owns a hideously loath-
some form. It is rejected by mankind, becomes
embittered, and at length begins the successive
murder of all whom Frankenstein loves best,
friends and family. It demands that Frankenstein
create a wife for it; and when the student finally
refuses in horror lest the world be populated with
such monsters, it departs with a hideous threat
“to be with him on his wedding night.” Upon that
night the bride is strangled, and from that time
on Frankenstein hunts down the monster, even
into the wastes of the Arctic. In the end, whilst
seeking shelter on the ship of the man who tells
the story, Frankenstein himself is killed by the
shocking object of his search and creation of his
presumptuous pride. Some of the scenes in Fran-
kenstein are unforgettable, as when the newly
animated monster enters its creator’s room, parts
the curtains of his bed, and gazes at him in the
yellow moonlight with watery eyes—“if eyes they
may be called.” Mrs. Shelley wrote other novels,
including the fairly notable Last Man; but never
duplicated the success of her first effort. It has the
true touch of cosmic fear, no matter how much
the movement may lag in places. Dr. Polidori
developed his competing idea as a long short
story, The Vampyre; in which we behold a suave
villain of the true Gothic or Byronic type, and
encounter some excellent passages of stark fright,
including a terrible nocturnal experience in a
shunned Grecian wood.
In this same period Sir Walter Scott frequently
concerned himself with the weird, weaving it into
many of his novels and poems, and sometimes
producing such independent bits of narration as
The Tapestried Chamber or Wandering Willie’s Tale
in Redgauntlet, in the latter of which the force of
the spectral and the diabolic is enhanced by a
grotesque homeliness of speech and atmosphere.
In 1830 Scott published his Letters on Demonology
and Witchcraft, which still forms one of our best
262 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
compendia of European witch-lore. Washington
Irving is another famous figure not unconnected
with the weird; for though most of his ghosts are
too whimsical and humorous to form genuinely
spectral literature, a distinct inclination in this
direction is to be noted in many of his produc-
tions. The German Student in Tales of a Traveller
(1824) is a slyly concise and effective presentation
of the old legend of the dead bride, whilst woven
into the comic tissue of The Money Diggers in the
same volume is more than one hint of piratical
apparitions in the realms which Captain Kidd
once roamed. Thomas Moore also joined the ranks
of the macabre artists in the poem Alciphron,
which he later elaborated into the prose novel of
The Epicurean (1827). Though merely relating the
adventures of a young Athenian duped by the
artifice of cunning Egyptian priests, Moore man-
ages to infuse much genuine horror into his ac-
count of subterranean frights and wonders be-
neath the primordial temples of Memphis. De
Quincey more than once revels in grotesque and
arabesque terrors, though with a desultoriness and
learned pomp which deny him the rank of special-
ist.
This era likewise saw the rise of William Harri-
son Ainsworth, whose romantic novels teem with
the eerie and the gruesome. Capt. Marryat, besides
writing such short tales as The Werewolf, made a
memorable contribution in The Phantom Ship
(1839), founded on the legend of the Flying
Dutchman, whose spectral and accursed vessel
sails for ever near the Cape of Good Hope. Dick-
ens now rises with occasional weird bits like The
Signalman, a tale of ghastly warning conforming
to a very common pattern and touched with a
verisimilitude which allied it as much with the
coming psychological school as with the dying
Gothic school. At this time a wave of interest in
spiritualistic charlatanry, mediumism, Hindoo
theosophy, and such matters, much like that of
the present day, was flourishing; so that the
number of weird tales with a “psychic” or pseudo-
scientific basis became very considerable. For a
number of these the prolific and popular Edward
Bulwer-Lytton was responsible; and despite the
large doses of turgid rhetoric and empty romanti-
cism in his products, his success in the weaving of
a certain kind of bizarre charm cannot be denied.
The House and the Brain, which hints of Rosi-
crucianism and at a malign and deathless figure
perhaps suggested by Louis XV’s mysterious
courtier St. Germain, yet survives as one of the
best short haunted-house tales ever written. The
novel Zanoni (1842) contains similar elements
more elaborately handled, and introduces a vast
unknown sphere of being pressing on our own
world and guarded by a horrible “Dweller of the
Threshold” who haunts those who try to enter
and fail. Here we have a benign brotherhood kept
alive from age to age till finally reduced to a single
member, and as a hero an ancient Chaldaean
sorcerer surviving in the pristine bloom of youth
to perish on the guillotine of the French Revolu-
tion. Though full of the conventional spirit of
romance, marred by a ponderous network of
symbolic and didactic meanings, and left uncon-
vincing through lack of perfect atmospheric
realization of the situations hinging on the
spectral world, Zanoni is really an excellent perfor-
mance as a romantic novel; and can be read with
genuine interest by the not too sophisticated
reader. It is amusing to note that in describing an
attempted initiation into the ancient brotherhood
the author cannot escape using the stock Gothic
castle of Walpolian lineage.
In A Strange Story (1862) Bulwer-Lytton shows
a marked improvement in the creation of weird
images and moods. The novel, despite enormous
length, a highly artificial plot bolstered up by op-
portune coincidences, and an atmosphere of
homiletic pseudo-science designed to please the
matter-of-fact and purposeful Victorian reader, is
exceedingly effective as a narrative; evoking
instantaneous and unflagging interest, and fur-
nishing many potent—if somewhat melodra-
matic—tableaux and climaxes. Again we have the
mysterious user of life’s elixir in the person of the
soulless magician Margrave, whose dark exploits
stand out with dramatic vividness against the
modern background of a quiet English town and
of the Australian bush; and again we have shad-
owy intimations of a vast spectral world of the
unknown in the very air about us—this time
handled with much greater power and vitality
than in Zanoni. One of the two great incantation
passages, where the hero is driven by a luminous
evil spirit to rise at night in his sleep, take a
strange Egyptian wand, and evoke nameless pres-
ences in the haunted and mausoleum-facing
pavilion of a famous Renaissance alchemist, truly
stands among the major terror scenes of literature.
Just enough is suggested, and just little enough is
told. Unknown words are twice dictated to the
sleep-walker, and as he repeats them the ground
trembles, and all the dogs of the countryside begin
to bay at half-seen amorphous shadows that stalk
athwart the moonlight. When a third set of
unknown words is prompted, the sleep-walker’s
spirit suddenly rebels at uttering them, as if the
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soul could recognize ultimate abysmal horrors
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
concealed from the mind; and at last an appari-
tion of an absent sweetheart and good angel
breaks the malign spell. This fragment well il-
lustrates how far Lord Lytton was capable of
progressing beyond his usual pomp and stock
romance toward that crystalline essence of artistic
fear which belongs to the domain of poetry. In
describing certain details of incantations, Lytton
was greatly indebted to his amusingly serious oc-
cult studies, in the course of which he came in
touch with that odd French scholar and cabbalist
Alphonse Louis Constant (“Eliphas Levy”), who
claimed to possess the secrets of ancient magic,
and to have evoked the spectre of the old Grecian
wizard Apollonius of Tyana, who lived in Nero’s
times.
The romantic, semi-Gothic, quasi-moral tradi-
tion here represented was carried far down the
nineteenth century by such authors as Joseph
Sheridan LeFanu, Wilkie Collins, the late Sir H.
Rider Haggard (whose She is really remarkably
good), Sir A. Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Robert
Louis Stevenson—the latter of whom, despite an
atrocious tendency toward jaunty mannerisms,
created permanent classics in Markheim, The Body
Snatcher, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Indeed, we
may say that this school still survives; for to it
clearly belong such of our contemporary horror-
tales as specialise in events rather than atmo-
spheric details, address the intellect rather than
the impressionistic imagination, cultivate a lumi-
nous glamour rather than a malign tensity or
psychological verisimilitude, and take a definite
stand in sympathy with mankind and its welfare.
It has its undeniable strength, and because of its
“human element” commands a wider audience
than does the sheer artistic nightmare. If not quite
so potent as the latter, it is because a diluted
product can never achieve the intensity of a
concentrated essence.
Quite alone both as a novel and as a piece of
terror-literature stands the famous Wuthering
Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë, with its mad vista
of bleak, windswept Yorkshire moors and the
violent, distorted lives they foster. Though prima-
rily a tale of life, and of human passions in agony
and conflict, its epically cosmic setting affords
room for horror of the most spiritual sort. Heathc-
liff, the modified Byronic villain-hero, is a strange
dark waif found in the streets as a small child and
speaking only a strange gibberish till adopted by
the family he ultimately ruins. That he is in truth
a diabolic spirit rather than a human being is
more than once suggested, and the unreal is
263
 further approached in the experience of the visi-
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
tor who encounters a plaintive child-ghost at a
bough-brushed upper window. Between Heathcliff
and Catherine Earnshaw is a tie deeper and more
terrible than human love. After her death he twice
disturbs her grave, and is haunted by an impal-
pable presence which can be nothing less than
her spirit. The spirit enters his life more and more,
and at last he becomes confident of some im-
minent mystical reunion. He says he feels a
strange change approaching, and ceases to take
nourishment. At night he either walks abroad or
opens the casement by his bed. When he dies the
casement is still swinging open to the pouring
rain, and a queer smile pervades the stiffened face.
They bury him in a grave beside the mound he
has haunted for eighteen years, and small shep-
herd boys say that he yet walks with his Cathe-
rine in the churchyard and on the moor when it
rains. Their faces, too, are sometimes seen on rainy
nights behind that upper casement at Wuthering
Heights. Miss Brontë’s eerie terror is no mere
Gothic echo, but a tense expression of man’s
shuddering reaction to the unknown. In this
respect, Wuthering Heights becomes the symbol of
a literary transition, and marks the growth of a
new and sounder school.
HAUNTED DWELLINGS
AND THE SUPERNATURAL
S. T. JOSHI (ESSAY DATE WINTER
1994)
SOURCE: Joshi, S. T. “Shirley Jackson: Domestic Hor-
ror.” Studies in Weird Fiction 14 (winter 1994): 9-28.
In the following essay, Joshi surveys Jackson’s works, not-
ing the difficulties inherent in attempting to classify them
by genre, and discussing Jackson’s horrific inversion of
societal ideals of human relationships and homelife in
her works, particularly in The Haunting of Hill House.
Shirley Jackson (1916-1965)1 and Ramsey
Campbell are the two leading writers of weird fic-
tion since Lovecraft. In making this assertion I am
not merely bypassing other writers who, at least
in their own minds, aspire to that title—in particu-
lar the best-selling quartet of Stephen King, Peter
Straub, Anne Rice, and Clive Barker—but am mak-
ing the problematical assertion that Jackson is a
weird writer at all. It is true that only one of her
novels is avowedly supernatural—the masterful
Haunting of Hill House (1959)—while others are
weird only slightly or not at all; it is also true that
perhaps at most fifteen or twenty of her hundred-
264
odd short stories can be said to belong either to
the weird tale or to the mystery story or to science
fiction.2 Certainly there is nothing supernatural
about “The Lottery” (1948), whose impact rests
on the very possibility of its occurrence. But I wish
to place Jackson within the realm of weird fiction
not only for the nebulous reason that the whole
of her work has a pervasive atmosphere of the odd
about it, but, more importantly, because her entire
work is unified to such a degree that distinctions
about genre and classification become arbitrary
and meaningless. Like Arthur Machen, Shirley
Jackson developed a view of the world that in-
formed all her writing, whether supernatural or
not; but that world view is more akin to the cheer-
less and nihilistic misanthropy of Bierce than to
Machen’s harried anti-materialism. It is because
Shirley Jackson so keenly detected horror in the
everyday world, and wrote of it with rapier-sharp
prose, that she ranks as a twentieth-century Bierce.
Jackson’s world view does not extend into the
realm of metaphysics: it is not possible to deduce
from her work any coherent conception of the
nature of the universe. She is wholly and avow-
edly concerned with human relationships, and it
is from their complexities that both horror and
the supernatural emerge in her work. Both early
and late in her career Jackson was affirming that,
at least for her, the supernatural is a metaphor for
human beings’ relation to the world. Consider a
remark in 1948:
I have had for many years a consuming interest in
magic and the supernatural. I think this is because
I find there so convenient a shorthand statement
of the possibilities of human adjustment to what
seems to be at best an inhuman world. . . .
everything I write [involves] the sense which I feel,
of a human and not very rational order struggling
inadequately to keep in check forces of great
destruction, which may be the devil and may be
intellectual enlightenment.
(O 125)
In 1962 she wrote in a lecture:
Just remember that primarily, in the story and out
of it, you are living in a world of people. A story
must have characters in it; work with concrete
rather than abstract nouns, and always dress your
ideas immediately. Suppose you want to write a
story about what you might vaguely think of as
“magic.” You will be hopelessly lost, wandering
around formlessly in notions of magic and incan-
tations; you will never make any forward progress
at all until you turn your ideas, “magic,” into a
person, someone who wants to do or make or
change or act in some way. Once you have your
first character you will of course need another to
put into opposition, a person in some sense “anti-
magic”; when both are working at their separate
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 intentions, dragging in other characters as needed,
you are well into your story.
(“Notes for a Young Writer” [C 153-54])
It is entirely possible, then, that a proper start-
ingpoint for the study of Jackson’s fiction from a
weird perspective may not be her actual weird
work but those tales for which she gained an
entirely different following: her family chronicles
collected in Life among the Savages and Raising
Demons.
Domestic Fiction
The strain of autobiography that is so domi-
nant throughout Jackson’s work can be traced to
her very earliest writing. Her first professionally
published story, “My Life with R. H. Macy” (L),
appears to be a lightly fictionalised account of a
job she had as a saleswoman at Macy’s depart-
ment store. The stories she wrote about her family
date no earlier than 1948, several years after she
began her literary career; but they continued at a
fairly constant pace to the end of her life. Jackson
admitted to her parents that many of these stories
were potboilers:
They are written simply for money and the reason
they sound so bad is that those magazines won’t
buy good ones, but deliberately seek out bad stuff
because they say their audiences want it. I simply
figure that at a thousand bucks a story, I can’t af-
ford to try to change the state of popular fiction
today. . . . I won’t write love stories and junk
about gay young married couples, and they won’t
take ordinary children stories, and this sort of
thing is a compromise between their notions and
mine . . . and is unusual enough so that I am the
only person I know of who is doing it.
(O 145)
This dismissal of her domestic fiction may be
somewhat disingenuous: to be sure, they brought
in needed income ($1000 per story came in very
handy in supporting four children, as Hyman, a
university professor, never made much money of
his own from his literary criticism), but the zest,
vigour, and wit with which they are written testify
to their importance to Jackson. Even if many of
these tales are written with the sort of coy, innocu-
ous, and resolutely cheerful tone expected in fic-
tion for women’s magazines in the 1950s, they
nevertheless contain certain disturbing undercur-
rents that may subvert their surface hilarity.
James Egan, in a thoughtful essay that at-
tempts to reconcile Jackson’s domestic fiction and
her weird work, sees a twofold division of her
work, as “either the expression of an idyllic
domestic vision or the inversion of that vision
into the fantastic and Gothic” (Egan 15). I am
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fundamentally in agreement with this assessment,
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
but it may require a little more shading. Especially
when we examine the chronology of Jackson’s
short fiction, we will find that the domestic stories
themselves undergo a gradual modification—
brought on, perhaps, by her marital problems or
simply by the fact that her children grew up and
no longer exhibited that affinity to “magic” (O
209) which Jackson thought the very young
reveal—so that the later domestic fiction now and
then displays a brooding irony and even misan-
thropy that brings it surprisingly close in tone to
her other work. Although Jackson appears to pay
lip service to the conventions of middleclass life
in the 1950s, the vibrancy of her writing, the flaw-
lessly exact capturing of her children’s idiosyncra-
sies, and above all Jackson’s complete lack of
sentimentalism make these stories pungent and
vivid even today. I am not sufficiently interested
in their sociological implications, but I imagine
that much interesting work could be done on
gauging how exactly these tales do or do not
reflect the stereotypes of their class and time.
What I am interested in is the degree of their
veracity; that is, the extent to which they are
unvarnished or faithful transcriptions of actual
events in Jackson’s life and in the life of her fam-
ily. It is, of course, naive to imagine that any
autobiographical writing simply relates events as
they occurred; and Jackson’s remark that these
stories allowed her to see her children “through a
flattering veil of fiction” (O 119) may be all we
need to infer that her domestic fiction, no less
than her other work, is in some sense a creation
of the imagination. Egan’s reference to this work
as “idyllic” is correct insofar as Jackson systemati-
cally attempts to present what may in reality have
been highly traumatic events as the source of
harmless jest—her son being struck by a car, for
instance, in which he suffered a concussion and
some broken bones.
The importance of this domestic fiction—as
regards her other work, at any rate—rests in its
manipulation of very basic familial or personal
scenarios that would be utilised in her weird work
in perverted and twisted ways: things like riding a
bus, employing a maid, taking children shopping,
going on vacation, putting up guests, and, in
general, adhering—or seeming to adhere—to the
“proper conduct” expected of her as a middle-class
housewife. It is interesting that her function as a
writer is almost never mentioned in these works,
or if it is, it is to poke fun at it as an anomaly for a
wife with four children. “The Third Baby’s the
265
 Easiest” captures the idea perfectly, as Jackson
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
registers with a desk clerk at the hospital:
“Age?” she asked. “Sex? Occupation?”
“Writer,” I said.
“Housewife,” she said.
“Writer,” I said.
“I’ll just put down housewife,” she said.
(LS 426)
An earlier sketch, “Fame” (1948), amusingly
tells of a gossip columnist who phones Jackson
and is interested in everything about her except
the fact that her first novel is soon to be issued by
a major New York publisher.
It is important to note, however, that this
body of domestic fiction really does underggo
some significant changes over the years; it is in no
sense a monolithic block of determined cheer.
Some cracks begin to appear as early as “Lucky to
Get Away” (1953), in which Jackson emphatically
betrays a weariness with the unending round of
housework required of her as a mother, especially
one whose husband contributes nothing to the
household chores:
I got to feeling that I could not bear the sight of
the colored cereal bowls for one more morning,
could not empty one more ashtray, could not
brush one more head or bake one more potato or
let out one more dog or pick up one more jacket.
I snarled at the bright faces regarding me at the
breakfast table and I was strongly tempted to kick
the legs out from under the chair on which my
older son was teetering backward.
(LS 583)
The humour in this passage is, surely, a little
sardonic.
Three other pieces show that Jackson’s rela-
tionship with her husband might not have been
one of unending bliss. One of the many curious
things about these stories is the infrequency with
which her husband even appears: they are all
about herself and her children, and when her
husband does make an appearance it is almost
always as a clumsy buffoon (“The Life Romantic”,
“The Box”). In “Queen of the May” the tone
becomes a little more sinister: the jealousy Jackson
felt toward her husband (a known philanderer) is
much in evidence:
“Daddy is going to see a lot of girls,” Sally told
Barry. She turned to me. “Daddy likes to look at
girls, doesn’t he?”
There was a deep, enduring silence, until at last
my husband’s eye fell on Jannie. “And what did
you learn in school today?” he asked with wild
enthusiasm.
(RD 661-62)
266
Still odder and still more bitter is “One Last
Chance”, in which a husband announces some-
what sheepishly that an old flame of his will be
dropping by (in fact she cancels her plans and
never arrives), tactlessly and unintentionally sug-
gesting that this woman is much prettier and a
better cook than his wife. Finally, “On Being a
Faculty Wife” (1956) is astonishingly vicious in its
portrayal of callow young girls worshipping the
distinguished professor while his wife is brushed
aside as a useless (and unattractive) ornament.
Some of the later, uncollected domestic fic-
tion comes off sounding a little tired: Jackson
must have realised that her material was running
dry, especially as her children were growing up
into the less superficially “cute” stage of young
adulthood. Indeed, a late piece, “Karen’s Com-
plaint” (1959), is quite poignant in depicting
Jackson’s sense of loneliness and aimlessness as
her youngest child begins to go to school and she
faces the prospect of an empty house for the first
time in nearly two decades. However haphazardly
her household appeared to be run, she took
evident pride in providing a loving home for her
husband and children. It is exactly this sense of
togetherness and warmth that is obtrusively lack-
ing in her other fiction. Where the reality of her
own family lay, no one but she herself could have
answered: perhaps all the carefree and well-
adjusted children in her domestic fiction were
themselves imaginary—her greatest fantasy.
Domestic into Weird
The transformation of some incidents found
in the domestic fiction into something very differ-
ent and much more disturbing can occasionally
occur with scarcely an alteration save that of
context. The textbook example of this is the story
“Charles”. Here, of course, the transition has oc-
curred in the reverse direction, as the story was
first published in a magazine and gathered in The
Lottery before being reprinted in Life among the
Savages. In its earlier two contexts the story is
subtly menacing and rather grim: her son Laurie
(mentioned by name in all three versions), attend-
ing kindergarten, tells of a strange boy, Charles,
who is by turns extremely unruly and even evil
(”’Today Charles hit the teacher’ . . . ‘He kicked
the teacher’s friend’” [L 71-72]) and excessively
well-behaved. Later, when Jackson meets Laurie’s
teacher, she finds out that there is no Charles in
the class. I shall return to the implications of this
story later, but here I wish to note what a remark-
ably different atmosphere this story has when it is
buried in the genial confines of Life among the Sav-
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ages: there the whole tale comes off as simply
another prank by her cute but headstrong son,
whereas in the former instances one has the
strong sensation that her son may well have seri-
ous problems of adjustment.
Another means for effecting the transition
from domestic to weird, or vice versa, is omission.
A very peculiar tale, “The House”, was reprinted
in Life among the Savages—but not all of it. The
latter portion was excised, no doubt because it is
precisely here that the tale veers off into sugges-
tions of the supernatural. At the outset it is dif-
ficult to ascertain whether, in its magazine appear-
ance, this story is genuinely autobiographical,
since Jackson never refers to her husband or
children by name. In any case, the story concerns
her family moving into an old, somewhat ram-
shackle, and faintly sinister house in New Eng-
land (the precise location is never specified in the
original appearance). The narrative of fixing up
the house for habitation and moving in is told
with mild humour—certainly not with the overt
hilarity of pieces like “Look, Ma, We’re Moving!”
(1952) or “Worldly Goods”—but with an under-
current of the strange. The house seems almost
animate:
There was a door to an attic that preferred to stay
latched, and would latch itself no matter who was
inside; another door hung by custom slightly ajar,
although it would close good-humoredly for a
time when some special reason required it. We
had five attics, we discovered, built into one
another; one of them kept bats, and we shut that
one up; another one, light and cheerful in spite of
a small window, liked to be a place of traffic and
became a place to store things temporarily.3
The house controls its inhabitants, not the
inhabitants the house. It is on its sufferance that
they are there at all. All this may be only mildly
disturbing; but then an old lady comes to pay a
visit:
“It’s a lovely old house,” I said.
“Do you think so?” She turned quickly to look at
me. “Do you really think it’s a lovely old house?”
“We’re very happy here.” “I’m glad.” She folded
her hands and smiled again. “It’s always been such
a good house,” she said. “The old doctor always
used to say it was a good house.”
“The old doctor?”
“Doctor Ogilvie.”
“Doctor Ogilvie?”
“I see they kept the pillars, after all,” she said, nod-
ding. “We always thought they gave the house
character.”
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“There was a hornets’ nest in one,” I said weakly.
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
Doctor Ogilvie had built the house in 1816!4
The first passage I quoted above was included
in Life among the Savages, but again context robs it
of any undertones of the weird; and that reprint
breaks off the tale shortly thereafter. If anything,
this story could be a model of Jackson’s ability to
transform the events of her own life into weird
fiction.
Jackson’s work returns time and again to
certain fundamental domestic themes, sometimes
in an autobiographical manner, sometimes in a
mainstream manner, and sometimes in a weird
manner. I again emphasise that these distinctions
are arbitrary and nebulous; it takes only a small
touch to push a story from one of these groups to
another, and some stories remain resolutely averse
to clear categorisation.
Consider, for example, the number of stories
by Jackson involving the hiring of a maid. There
are at least four such tales, and they all play
startling variations of tone and mood upon this
one theme. Chronologically the first is “Tootie in
Peonage” (1942; C), one of Jackson’s earliest
stories. It tells of a young woman, Tootie Maple,
whom the narrator hires to help with the house-
work. It is an amusing tale of how Tootie has too
many other pressing things to do—painting her
toenails, finishing the latest issue of True Confes-
sions—to get down to her actual duties; but the
real object of satire is the housewife who hired
her, who lacks the strength of will either to order
Tootie to do her work or to fire her. The next maid
story, “Family Magician” (1949), is a rather odd
and benign weird tale about a maid, Mallie, who
appears to fulfil her household responsibilities
through magic. The tale is not of much note save
in being Jackson’s first avowedly supernatural
work. Then comes “Monday Morning”, incorpo-
rated in Life among the Savages and similar in tone
to “Tootie in Peonage”. In this explicitly autobio-
graphical and quite amusing story we read of the
maid Phoebe, who shows up more than an hour
late. Then we come to the extremely nasty
“Strangers in Town” (1959). The tale does not
focus upon the maid, named Mallie (as in “Family
Magician”), but it is clear that this maid too has
supernatural powers: she gathers an acorn, a
mushroom, and a scrap of grass and makes a stew
out of them.
The simple act of riding a bus or train and
travelling to a strange location—usually a big
city—has generated a number of Jackson’s most
powerful stories, whether weird or otherwise. We
have seen the innocuous version of this in chapter
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 4 of Raising Demons, in which Jackson relates tak-
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
ing her children to New York; other tales are much
more ominous. “The Tooth” (1949; L) is a queer
and meandering story of a young woman who
travels to New York to see a dentist; I confess to
being at a loss what point this story is trying to
make, but the atmosphere of shimmering, dream-
like fantasy that was to become a Jackson trade-
mark finds its first genuine embodiment here. “Pil-
lar of Salt” (1948; L) involves a nearly identical
scenario, although here a couple from New Hamp-
shire comes to New York for a vacation. The
emphasis is, inevitably, on the wife, whose ap-
preciation of the city oscillates between amaze-
ment and condescension (looking at a set of
miniature milk bottles being sold as toys, she
notes archly, “We get our milk from cows” [L
177]). Gradually the giganticism, pace, and imper-
sonality of the city overwhelm her, and her plight
is keenly encapsulated by her utter inability to
cross a busy street even when the light is with
her:
The minute the light changes, she told herself
firmly; there’s no sense. The light changed before
she was ready and in the minute before she col-
lected herself traffic turning the corner over-
whelmed her and she shrank back against the
curb. She looked longingly at the cigar store on
the opposite corner, with her apartment house
beyond; she wondered, How do people ever man-
age to get there, and knew that by wondering, by
admitting a doubt, she was lost.
(L 184)
“The Bus” (1965; C) finally takes this topos into
the realm of the supernatural. An old woman is
dropped off at the wrong stop late at night,
eventually catches a ride on a truck to some
dismal-looking roadhouse, and, as the atmosphere
becomes at once more menacing and more unreal,
the old woman imagines herself a child in her
room, looks in a closet, and finds her old doll
speaking to her: “‘Go away, old lady, go away, old
lady, go away’” (C 200). At this point the old
woman wakes up—it was all a dream and she is
still on the bus! Not content with this trite device,
Jackson gives it a further predictable twist by hav-
ing the old woman get off at the same wrong stop
as before.
Several other stories speak of the peculiar
vulnerability of people on vacation, away from
their friends and their familiar environment. “The
Summer People” (1949; C) is a mordant tale about
an elderly couple who decide to stay on in their
summer cottage past Labor Day, something they
have never done before. The dour countryfolk of
the region appear to resent this decision—
268
”’Nobody ever stayed at the lake past Labor Day
before’” (C 73)—and insidiously conspire against
them: the couple cannot get kerosene or ice, the
mail suddenly stops, the groceries can’t be deliv-
ered, and so on. This masterful story is worth
considering in several other respects, but the
gradual isolation of the couple, as one by one the
locals turn against them through sheer inaction,
is harrowing. There is, of course, nothing super-
natural about this tale, but a work like this makes
the strongest possible case for the inclusion of the
non-supernatural horror story as a genuine subset
of the weird tale.
“The Lovely Night” (1952; retitled “A Visit” in
C) introduces the supernatural in the subtlest way.
A college girl, Margaret, goes with her friend Carla
Rhodes to the latter’s palatial home, whose loca-
tion is never specified. Initially it all seems idyllic:
Carla stopped before the doorway and stood for a
minute, looking first behind her, at the vast reach-
ing gardens and the green lawn going down to
the river, and the soft hills beyond, and then at
the perfect grace of the house, showing so clearly
the long-boned structure within, the curving
staircases and the arched doorways and the tall
thin lines of steadying beams, all of it resting back
against the hills, and up, past rows of windows
and the flying lines of the roof, on, to the tower
. . .
(C 98)
The tale develops a powerful atmosphere of
weirdness through the deliberately artificial dia-
logue—it is as if all the characters know they are
in a work of fiction. Carla’s brother Paul arrives;
Margaret spends much time with him. She goes
up to the tower and has an enigmatic talk with
Carla’s grandmother. Throughout the story Mrs
Rhodes is weaving a tapestry of the house. This is
the end of the tale:
“You will not leave us before my brother comes
again?” Carla asked Margaret.
“I have only to put the figures into the fore-
ground,” Mrs. Rhodes said, hesitating on her way
to the drawing room. “I shall have you exactly if
you sit on the lawn near the river.”
“We shall be models of stillness,” said Carla,
laughing. “Margaret, will you come and sit beside
me on the lawn?”
(C 120)
What does this mean? What is the significance
of Paul’s remark that “’without this house I could
not exist’” (C 119)? Is this not a pun, meaning
that neither he nor the entire family can live
without (i.e. outside of) the house? And isn’t
Margaret now being woven into the fabric of the
house by way of the tapestry? This exquisite and
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haunting tale—a fantastically transmogrified ver-
sion of a visit Dylan Thomas paid to Jackson’s
home in Westport, Connecticut (O 151-52)—
exemplifies the “quiet weird tale” at its pinnacle.
And, of course, it embodies a theme that we can
already see is a dominant one in Jackson’s work
and perhaps also her life: the manner in which a
house can subsume its occupants.
Language, Truth, and Horror
Many of Jackson’s stories turn on the state-
ments uttered by her characters: is what they are
saying true? What if, Jackson asks in a number of
tales, there is some sort of insane conspiracy to
deceive a single individual? Such stories are almost
unclassifiable: we cannot know if the supernatural
actually comes into play because ambiguity is
maintained to the end as to the truth of the mat-
ter. Nevertheless, some of her most powerful tales
revolve around simple utterances by individual
characters, which, when taken together, poten-
tially suggest some horrific and irrational victimi-
sation of an individual who is frequently some-
what disturbed to begin with. The standard
distinction between what might be called interior
and exterior supernaturalism (i.e., that occurring
within the confines of an individual’s mind and
that occurring in the external world) seems to col-
lapse here, or even to fuse together: it is as if
Jackson is suggesting that the supernatural falls
specifically upon those individuals whose hold on
reality is itself shaky.
Jackson’s very first story, “Janice” (1938; C)
already starts the pattern. This mordant short-
short story is nothing more than a page of dia-
logue held by the title character, a college student,
with some of her friends: she is telling each of
them that she “nearly killed herself” (C 41) by
carbon monoxide poisoning. Is this actually the
case? Is it anything more than an attempt at self-
dramatisation? When the first-person narrator
suddenly obtrudes with the pointed query, “How
did it feel to be dying, Jan?”, Janice can only reply
with a meaningless and stereotypical remark:
“Gee, funny. All black” (C 42). It is the first of
many stories in which the veracity of characters’
utterances is subtly impugned without any con-
crete statement ever being made by the narrator
one way or the other.
“Charles” also fits this pattern, although at
the end we are clearly led to believe that “Charles”
is nothing more than a sort of fictitious dummy
to whom Laurie is attributing his own unruliness
in school: his teacher remarks, “We had a little
trouble adjusting, the first week or so . . . but now
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he’s a fine little helper. With occasional lapses, of
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
course” (L 74), which corresponds exactly to the
cycle of “Charles’s” good and bad moments in
school. Doubt still remains, however, whether
Laurie (or anyone) actually committed the acts he
fastens upon Charles: some may still be exagger-
ated or, indeed, entirely imaginary.
Several of Jackson’s best tales involve the har-
rowing question of a mad (because unmotivated,
wholly malicious, and, conceivably, supernaturally
inspired) conspiracy on the part of seemingly
unrelated individuals—perhaps the entire
world—to cause mental or emotional pain to
some hapless individual. It is here that the sugges-
tion of the veracity of the characters’ statements is
of the greatest importance, but it is also the most
hopelessly irresolvable. The effect is extremely un-
nerving.
The celebrated tale “The Daemon Lover”
(1949; L) is one of the best of this type. This story
inaugurates a curious thread in the stories in The
Lottery (and elsewhere) in which the figure of
James Harris, the Daemon Lover, flits in and out
of stories, seemingly at random. To my mind,
however, not much can be made of this: the name
Harris appears in several stories in the collection,
and sometimes it is specified as James or Jim Har-
ris; but I do not think that in the end it amounts
to much save a sort of in-joke that has no particu-
lar point. Jackson herself admitted to being
haunted by a daemon lover, from as early as her
college years, and she describes it in a sketch as
follows (she was in a noncapitalisation phase at
this point):
but all i remember is that i met him (somewhere
where was it in the darkness in the light was it
morning were there trees flowers had i been born)
and now when I think about him i only remember
that he was calling margaret, as in loneliness mar-
garet margaret, and then (did i speak to him did
he look at me did we smile had we known each
other once) i went away and left him (calling to
me after me) calling margaret margaret.
(O 49)
This is poignant enough, and the several
stories she wrote about a daemon lover all have
this same quality of bittersweet unreality; but the
interconnexions she attempts to forge by drop-
ping the name Harris in the Lottery collection do
not add up to a coherent whole.
But “The Daemon Lover” is an exquisite piece.
It introduces us to the most easily recognisable
character-type in all Jackson’s work: the lonely,
weak-willed, sensitive, overly imaginative, and
possibly psychotic young woman who usually
269
 ends her pitiable and meaningless existence in
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
madness or suicide. This figure recurs with such
obsessive frequency in her stories that one is
tempted to see in it Jackson’s imaginative view of
herself, however much or little it may have
coincided with the reality of her personality. In
“The Daemon Lover” we encounter such a figure
in Margaret, who awakes one morning in her
shabby one-room apartment awaiting the arrival
of James Harris, to whom she is to be married. We
are already a little uneasy, since we learn that she
has known Harris only for a month; and our fears
seem confirmed when he fails to show up at her
apartment at the appointed time. She begins to
look for him, reaching the building where he had
borrowed the apartment of a Mr and Mrs Royster
for the last month. Finding the Roysters, who
have just returned, she asks about James. Mrs
Royster’s reaction is not reassuring: “’O Lord . . .
What’d he do?’” (L 18). At least this appears to
confirm Harris’ existence, however tenuously. But
the Roysters do not really know him—he was a
friend of a friend. Margaret begins to ask the
neighbourhood shopowners whether they have
seen a man answering Harris’ description. No one
has. Finally she so pesters a news-agent that he
confesses to have seen him:
“Now I don’t know for sure, mind you, but there
might have been someone like your gentleman
friend coming by this morning.”
“About ten?”
“About ten,” the newsdealer agreed. “Tall fellow,
blue suit. I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”
“Which way did he go?” she said eagerly. “Up-
town?”
“Uptown,” the newsdealer said, nodding. “He
went uptown. That’s just exactly it. What can I do
for you, sir?”
(L 21)
This is the critical point of the story: is the
man admitting to having seen Harris only to get
rid of the pestiferous Margaret? Why does he agree
with such alacrity to having seen him at the time
and place she insists he must have seen him?
From this point the story devolves into either a
paranoid fantasy or an evil conspiracy, or perhaps
both: the florist admits that Harris bought flowers
(wouldn’t a man going to his wedding buy flow-
ers for his bride?); the shoe shine man admits he
shined Harris’ shoes (a natural thing for a bride-
groom to do), and he directs Margaret to a street
(not hers) where he says he saw Harris go; a boy
at the corner says he saw Harris go in a building
270
across the street. Margaret goes in and hears voices
behind a door. The tale ends inconclusively (as it
must) and agonisingly:
She knew there was someone inside the other
apartment, because she was sure she could hear
low voices and sometimes laughter. She came back
many times, every day for the first week. She came
on her way to work, in the mornings; in the
evenings, on her way to dinner alone, but no mat-
ter how often or how firmly she knocked, no one
ever came to the door.
(L 26)
Have all these people lied to her? If so, why?
Do they all hate her and wish to torture her
emotionally? Or are they simply cheerful sadists?
This is the most frightening prospect of the story,
more frightening than the prospect that Margaret
has imagined much of her relationship with Har-
ris: how can people be so irresponsibly evil?
“The Daemon Lover” has an atmosphere of
wistful pathos that somehow works in tandem
with the conte cruel horror of the tale; another
story, “The Renegade” (1948; L), is pure conte cruel.
A family from the city, the Walpoles, have moved
to a placid-seeming country town and seem to be
settling in nicely. Then Mrs Walpole receives a call
from a neighbour: the Walpoles’ dog has been kill-
ing this person’s chickens; something must be
done. Mrs Walpole cannot believe it of her gentle
pet. Soon the story is all over the town (the phone
is on a party line), and everyone has remedies for
stopping a dog from killing chickens. These
remedies become more and more hideous: you
can chain the dog; you can tie a dead chicken
around its neck until it rots, so that the dog hates
chicken; you can place it in a pen with some
chicks and a mother hen who is sure to scratch
the dog’s eyes out; or you could put around the
dog’s neck a collar that has spikes on the inside,
and when the dog approaches a chicken you pull
on a rope attached to the collar, and (as Mrs Wal-
pole’s own son notes with glee), “The spikes cut
her head off” (L 65). Which one is it to be?
In this tale it is a little clearer that the towns-
people have conspired to tease Mrs Walpole merci-
lessly, although other questions remain unclear:
did the dog actually kill chickens (it is true that
the dog comes into the house with blood on its
legs—but what does this mean? was the dog
somehow framed?), and why have the towns-
people ganged up on Mrs Walpole like this? As to
the latter, Mrs Walpole “wondered briefly if Mr.
White had maliciously blamed Lady because they
were city folk, and then thought, No, no man
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around here would bear false witness against a
dog” (L 61). What Jackson has done in this story,
and in others of this type, is to make us doubt
every single utterance made by every character in
the tale; at the same time, we are inexorably made
to think the worst of all the characters. In this
instance, the townspeople are either liars of sadists
or both; and the worst part of it is, of course, that
her own children are infected with this blood-lust
against a dog and happily imagine the many
tortures one could inflict upon it to cure it of this
reprehensible habit.
The odd story “The Intoxicated” (1949; L)
might perhaps be studied in this context. Here a
man who finds himself bored at a party wanders
into the kitchen, meeting the hostess’ daughter
Eileen, a girl of seventeen. She is writing a paper
about the future of the world; but she doesn’t
think the world has much of a future. Rather har-
rowingly, she chronicles the destruction of civili-
sation—or, at least, this phase of it:
“Somehow I think of the churches as going first,
before even the Empire State building. And then
all the big apartment houses by the river, slipping
down slowly into the water with the people inside.
And the schools, in the middle of Latin class
maybe, while we’re reading Caesar.” She brought
her eyes to his face, looking at him in numb
excitement. “Each time we begin a chapter in
Caesar, I wonder if this won’t be the one we never
finish. Maybe we in our Latin class will be the last
people who ever read Caesar.”
(L 11)
The worst thing about it is that she seems so
certain of it; and this raises the query: What if she
is right? This story somehow reminds me of
Margaret St Clair’s famous tale, “The Boy Who
Predicted Earthquakes”, although in that tale the
boy is undoubtedly clairvoyant and knows that
the world will end, whereas in “The Intoxicated”
we are left only with the unnerving thought that
the girl is either right (in which case the world
will end) or that she is wrong (in which case she
is insane) or that she is having a little fun (in
which case she is a sadist). None of these is very
reassuring. Here again Jackson is simply trying to
jolt us out of our conventional ways of thinking—
and a tiresome party is the perfect backdrop for
such an enterprise.
I might as well study Jackson’s one genuine
science fiction (or at least futuristic) story, “Bul-
letin” (1954), here, for it not only follows up on
the theme of “The Intoxicated” (the future of
civilisation) but indirectly exemplifies the same is-
sues of language, truth, and horror as the other
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stories I have been discussing. This very brief tale
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
is surprisingly difficult to interpret. Let us bypass
the very crude mechanics of the story: a clumsy
editor’s note informing us that certain documents
have come back in a time machine that was sent
into the early twenty-second century, although
the scientist who went in the machine did not
return. The first document we find is a fragment
of a newspaper dating from May 8, 2123; this
indicates little save that the people of that time
were given to pompous and empty circumlocu-
tion (hardly a unique trait!). A letter from a boy to
his parents has the spellings “haveing”, “cokies”
(for cookies), “loveing”, and the like, implying
either that the boy was illiterate (and perhaps, by
extension, the rest of the society?) or that these
spellings had by then become standard. The most
interesting and problematical document is a high-
school or college history exam. Here we find that
the twenty-second century has fallen into ir-
remediable confusion about the past, citing such
figures as “George Washingham”, “Sinclair (Joe)
Lewis”, and “Sergeant Cuff” (as if he were a real
individual). Then there are a series of statements
that one is to mark either true or false, and this is
where things get complicated. Take this statement:
“The aboriginal Americans lived above-ground
and drank water.” This is obviously true, but car-
ries the suggestion that the people of the twenty-
second century do not live above-ground or drink
water: in a single sentence an entire mode of
future existence is potently suggested. But consider
this statement: “The hero Jackie Robinson is
chiefly known for his voyage to obtain the golden
fleece.” The point is not whether this is true or
false; the point is: What if the people of the future
think it to be true? Given their other errors, this is
entirely conceivable. Even if the future society
knows this to be false, the very manner in which
the statement is framed suggests that Jackie Rob-
inson is now regarded as some sort of hero,
perhaps in some religious fashion. Other state-
ments carry similarly disturbing implications. But
the clincher is at the end. The final document is a
card giving someone’s weight (presumably the
scientist’s) and a meaningless machine-generated
fortune. But the editor of these documents pro-
fesses to find this silly thing “of great significance”.
And it suddenly becomes clear that the time
machine was not sent forward from our time into
the future but backward from an infinitely farther
future, in which people’s grasp of the events of
our time and before must be even poorer than the
271
 twenty-second century’s if they cannot correctly
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
identify an insignificant weight and fortune card.
Loneliness
Shirley Jackson once wrote that she took to
writing out of loneliness:
when i first used to write stories and hide them
away in my desk i used to think that no one had
ever been so lonely as i was and i used to write
about people all alone. once i started a novel . . .
but i never finished because i found out about
insanity about then and i used to write about
lunatics after that. i thought i was insane and i
would write about how the only sane people are
the ones who are condemned as mad and how
the whole world is cruel and foolish and afraid of
people who are different.
(O 40)
It is conceivable that this single utterance
encompasses nearly the whole of her fiction, and
loneliness may be the single most dominant
theme in her work. But note again what a contrast
the domestic fiction presents: in that body of work
she herself is not lonely because she has her lively
and energetic children (I have already noted how
infrequently her husband appears in these works);
and although she and her family may be isolated
from the rest of the community (as in reality they
were because of their intellectualism and, it must
be admitted, Jackson’s snobbishness [O 183-84]),
they still participate with gusto in such social ritu-
als as shopping, moving, celebrating Christmas,
and participating in sports. If the domestic fiction
therefore benignly papers over the true loneliness
of Jackson and her family, her other fiction scath-
ingly lays it bare with such force that the tales
become genuinely horrific.
Loneliness appears to be manifested in these
stories in two parallel ways, as in the domestic fic-
tion: 1) the loneliness of an individual within a
wider group (whether that be a family, a com-
munity, or the world); and 2) the loneliness of a
family within a wider group. In both categories
we find some of Jackson’s most memorable and
terrifying work.
We have already noted individual loneliness
in a number of tales—the partygoer in “The
Intoxicated”, Margaret in “The Daemon Lover”,
the niece in “The Little House”. The opening
paragraph of “The Intoxicated” encapsulates the
idea perfectly:
He was just tight enough and just familiar enough
with the house to be able to go out into the
kitchen alone, apparently to get ice, but actually
to sober up a little; he was not quite enough of a
friend of the family to pass out on the living-room
272
couch. He left the party behind without reluc-
tance, the group by the piano singing “Stardust,”
his hostess talking earnestly to a young man with
thin clean glasses and a sullen mouth; he walked
guardedly through the dining-room, where a little
group of four or five people sat on the stiff chairs
reasoning something out carefully among them-
selves . . .
(L 9)
By implication, the man’s loneliness is a
product both of his own volition (he does not
want to join the singers) and of rebuffs by others
(the hostess clearly does not wish to be interrupted
in her tête-à-tête with the young man; the people
in the dining room are discussing something
“among themselves”, leaving no room for anyone
else), and we will find this sort of dichotomy
frequently in Jackson. A surprising number of
individuals or families will withdraw themselves
from society, washing their hands of it entirely;
this tendency reaches its apex in We Have Always
Lived in the Castle (1962). But can we truly be
certain that this self-imposed hermitry is solely a
result of misanthropy? Might it perhaps not
conceal a longing for acceptance that has finally
turned to what Lovecraft called the “bitterness of
alienage”?
I am not at all certain that “The Lottery”
(1948; L) ought to be considered in this precise
context, but I may as well do so here as anywhere.
Whereas this tale seems generally to convey the
notion of a community that wilfully isolates an
individual within it, Jackson herself appears to
have had different ideas. Judy Oppenheimer
writes: “She always refused to answer the question
put to her by thousands of readers, ‘What is “The
Lottery” really about?’—but to a good friend she
confided very matter-of-factly that it had, of
course, been about the Jews” (O 72). Respectful as
I generally am to authors’ statements about their
own work, in this case I must frankly declare
Jackson to be mistaken. “The Lottery” cannot be
about anti-Semitism because of the fundamental
randomness of the procedure by which an indi-
vidual from the community is selected to die. In
any case, the community depicted in the story ap-
pears racially and culturally homogeneous, and
the individual chosen for death—Mrs Hutchin-
son—differs in no appreciable way from the other
citizens. Indeed, it is exactly this randomness that
is the source of horror in the story. Another com-
ment by Jackson seems a little more on target: “I
suppose I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal
rite in the present and in my own village, to shock
the readers with a graphic dramatization of the
pointless violence and general inhumanity of their
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own lives” (O 131). Even this I am not inclined to
accept wholly, and in fact Jackson’s best com-
mentary on her story may be a stray remark in
Hangsaman: “Another instance . . . of ritual gone
to seed” (H 62).
For ritual is at the heart of the story—a mean-
ingless, stupid ritual whose original rationale,
whatever it may have been, has now been entirely
forgotten. This is made clear by an elderly person’s
statement that the neighbouring town wants to
give up the lottery (the implication, obviously, is
that the lottery is a widespread if not universal
phenomenon):
Old Man Warner snorted. “Pack of crazy fools,”
he said. “Listening to the young folks, nothing’s
good enough for them. Next thing you know,
they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves,
nobody work any more, live that way for a while.
Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn
be heavy soon.’ First thing you know, we’d all be
eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There’s al-
ways been a lottery,” he added petulantly.
(L 215)
The lottery has become so inveterate that it
has given rise to an axiom. This axiom, “Lottery
in June, corn be heavy soon”, suggests that the
original purpose of the lottery was as a fertility
rite, something akin to what Thomas Tryon
described at the conclusion of Harvest Home
(1973); but the need for bountiful crops must have
long passed, and yet the lottery continues, much
as we might say “Bless you” when someone
sneezes, even though we have entirely forgotten
and perhaps would no longer even believe in what
the expression really means (one must be blessed
lest one expel one’s soul while sneezing). It is
“ritual gone to seed”. And it is the young people
of the neighbouring town who wish to give up
the lottery: they are less under the sway of mind-
less convention than the old people. Indeed,
when Old Man Warner remarks at the end, “It’s
not the way it used to be . . . People ain’t the way
they used to be” (L 218), he means that now some
people are actually taking pity on the victim or, at
least, are not taking pride in having the victim
chosen from one’s own family (the remark previ-
ous to his is: “A girl whispered, ‘I hope it’s not
Nancy’” [L 218]).
The artistry of “The Lottery” is indeed remark-
able, although there is some justice to some read-
ers’ complaints of authorial deceit. One reader
wrote to The New Yorker, “I resent being tricked
into reading perverted stories like ‘The Lottery’”
(C 231); however naive and conventional this
response may be, it underscores the fact that
Jackson goes out of her way to conceal the climax
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by a narrative tone that at the outset is placid,
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
benign, and innocuous almost to excess. Subtle
little points throughout the narrative cause un-
ease, however, in particular the matter of why the
family that has apparently won the first part of
the lottery (the family from whom the person is
to be killed is chosen first, then the individual
from that family) seems unhappy about being
chosen. If they have won a lottery, shouldn’t they
be pleased? And it is only one more of Jackson’s
perversions of domestic bliss that the children of
the town take the greatest glee in stoning the
victim to death.
I have stated that “The Lottery” is non-
supernatural, and of course the actual events are
indeed so; but in a strange way this tale may be
weird without being supernatural, by merely
postulating the existence of the lottery in this
town and in at least several others. There are, of
course, no lotteries of this sort and never have
been. In this sense the story embodies in the most
literal way a trait I have described in the weird
tale: the refashioning of reality. “The Lottery” is
clearly set in the present day and in a world we
are all seemingly familiar with; but the mere exist-
ence of the lottery, and the clear implication that
it has been in practice for decades or centuries,
depict Lovecraft’s “violation of natural law” in the
simple sense of portraying the real world as other
than we know it in this one regard.
I think that the central theme of The Haunting
of Hill House is also individual loneliness, although
it could be studied from a number of other
perspectives. The focus of this rich, complex,
poignant, and atmospheric work—at once the
greatest of Jackson’s novels and her greatest
contribution to weird fiction—is Eleanor Vance,
perhaps Jackson’s most delicately etched portrait
of the weak-willed, love-starved woman. Eleanor
has been chosen—along with Luke Sanderson and
Theodora (she claims to have no last name)—by
Dr John Montague, an avowed investigator of
“supernatural phenomena” (HH 5), to explore Hill
House because of her apparent sensitivity to the
weird or occult: when younger she had evidently
experienced some poltergeist phenomena. Her
previous life (she is thirty-two) has been wretched:
up to a few months before coming to Hill House
she had to take care of her sick mother, and she
now suffers guilt because she thinks she may have
contributed to her death by being negligent; she
does not get along with her married sister (indeed,
it is stated at the outset that she “hated” [HH 7]
her) and is forced covertly to take the car they
273

GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
Friedrich von Schiller, 1759-1805.
jointly own when the sister refuses to allow her to
use it to drive to Hill House.
I am at the moment not interested in many of
the supernatural phenomena recounted in the
novel; I here wish to clarify not merely Eleanor’s
loneliness (she admits this herself: “‘I am always
afraid of being alone’” [HH 113]) but her low
estimation of herself:
Eleanor found herself unexpectedly admiring her
own feet. Theodora dreamed over the fire just
beyond the tips of her toes, and Eleanor thought
with deep satisfaction that her feet were hand-
some in their red sandals; what a complete and
separate thing I am, she thought, going from my
red toes to the top of my head, individually an I,
possessed of attributes belonging only to me. I
have red shoes, she thought—that goes with be-
ing Eleanor; I dislike lobster and sleep on my left
side and crack my knuckles when I am nervous
and save buttons. I am holding a brandy glass
which is mine because I am here and I am using it
and I will have a place in this room. I have red
shoes and tomorrow I will wake up and I will still
be here.
(HH 59)
This is all a little harried: she is seizing upon
anything she can find to validate her existence.
Has Eleanor only really begun to live—to lead a
full, emotionally satisfying life—since coming to
Hill House? Such is surely the implication of the
following:
274
Suddenly, without reason, laughter trembled
inside Eleanor; she wanted to run to the head of
the table and hug the doctor, she wanted to reel,
chanting, across the stretches of the lawn, she
wanted to sing and to shout and to fling her arms
and move in great, emphatic, possessing circles
around the rooms of Hill House; I am here, I am
here, she thought. She shut her eyes quickly in
delight and then said demurely to the doctor,
“And what do we do today?”
(HH 100-101)
What this passage also suggests is her growing
identification with Hill House—she is possessing
it or it is possessing her. Early on the doctor says:
“‘Hill House has a reputation for insistent hospital-
ity; it seemingly dislikes letting its guests get
away’” (HH 48-49). Eleanor ominously echoes this
idea when she says, “‘I don’t think we could leave
now if we wanted to’” (HH 54).
The Shakespearean tag “Journeys end in lov-
ers meeting” glides through this novel like an
elusive ritornello, but what is its true implication?
If it is Eleanor’s journey that is at an end here (and
this is clearly the case, as at the beginning we
experience the long trip to Hill House through
her eyes), who is her lover? Is it Theodora, with
whom she becomes very close—to the point that
Theodora must wear Eleanor’s clothes when her
own are found covered with red paint like blood?
Is it Luke, who seems to be dallying with both
women? Or is it the house itself? Perhaps it is all
three. Toward the end it becomes clear that Luke,
finding Eleanor’s behaviour increasingly odd,
prefers the company of Theodora. Is Eleanor jeal-
ous of Theodora? Why else is she suddenly filled
with an “uncontrollable loathing” (HH 112) of
her?
It is here that some of the supernatural mani-
festations gain their importance. At one point the
guests find some crude writing on the wall: “HELP
ELEANOR COME HOME” (HH 103). The wording
is significant: it is not “Help Eleanor go home” or
“get home”; the implication is that Eleanor is
already home or on the way home (at Hill House),
and that some sort of spiritual transition must
take place so that she feels at home here. Other
weird events also seem to single out Eleanor, until
finally she appears to begin cracking under the
strain. One night she leaves her bedroom to
meander through the house; her absence is noted
by the others and they look for her, but she refuses
to reveal her whereabouts: “Eleanor clung to the
door and laughed until tears came into her eyes;
what fools they are, she thought; we trick them so
easily” (HH 163). Who is the “we” but she and
Hill House? Journeys end in lovers meeting. When
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the others persuade her to leave, she cries defi-
antly, “Hill House belongs to me” (HH 173), and
as she leaves the driveway she turns abruptly and
smashes her car into a tree, echoing the fate of
the last occupant of Hill House eighteen years
before, whose “horse bolted and crushed him
against the big tree” (HH 49). What life would
Eleanor have had if she had left? “‘It’s the only
time anything’s ever happened to me’” (HH 171).
At this point it is worth studying the general
supernaturalism of the novel. In a lecture written
a year prior to the publication of the novel,
“Experience and Fiction” (C), Jackson discusses
the research and composition of the novel at
length. I am not sure that this essay is of any
genuine help in elucidating the work, although it
contains some wry features, as when Jackson
comes down to her study one morning and finds
the words “DEAD DEAD” in her own handwriting
(C 213), which she takes as a sign that she was
destined to write a ghost story. In any case, we
learn both from this essay and from the facts of
her biography that Jackson had always had an
interest in the supernatural, and indeed both she
herself and her children made no secret of the
fact that she actually believed in the supernatural
(O 37, 125). She had an extensive collection of
books on witchcraft, and in preparation for her
novel she read much about hauntings, including
papers by the Society for Psychic Research. And
yet, I am forced to admit that the supernatural
manifestations in The Haunting of Hill House in
many cases seem random, unmotivated, and
unexplained. What is the significance of the cold
spot in the hallway? of the knocking heard inter-
mittently at night on people’s doors? of “some
animal like a dog” (HH 95) seen by Dr Montague?
It is all very well for the doctor to say that
“‘psychic phenomena are subject to laws of a very
particular sort’” (HH 48), but those laws are never
specified nor are the psychic events actually
experienced at Hill House ever plausibly ac-
counted for or harmonised within the overall
scheme of the novel. It appears that they are
meant merely to enhance the atmosphere of
weirdness as a backdrop to the story of Eleanor
Vance. I also think it was a mistake for Jackson to
introduce Montague’s obnoxious and overbearing
wife and her pompous and bumbling assistant
toward the end; considerable cheap satire is had
at their expense, but the atmosphere of the novel
is close to being shattered by their obtrusive pres-
ence. Nevertheless, The Haunting of Hill House
remains a masterwork in the field, if only for
exhibiting some of the most meticulous character
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GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER (1759-1805)
One of the preeminent German authors of
the nineteenth century, Schiller is esteemed
as an adept lyricist and theoretician whose
works are informed by his conviction that the
writer should strive not only to entertain, but
also to instruct and improve his audience. He
was an immensely popular poet during his
life, but is best remembered for his dramas.
Of these, his early plays reflect his affinity
with the Sturm und Drang movement, which
championed the passionate expression of
emotional and spiritual struggle, and empha-
size both his idealism and his concern for hu-
man freedom; his later plays are character-
ized by more realistic, moral, and Classical
subjects and forms. Schiller’s impact upon
the Gothic and Romantic traditions was the
immense popularity and influence of his
drama Die Räuber (1781; The Robbers) and
his novel fragment Der Geisterseher (1789;
The Ghost-Seer; or, The Apparitionist) upon
such writers as Mary and Percy Bysshe Shel-
ley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Wil-
liam Wordsworth, and John Keats.
Schiller completed The Robbers in 1781.
The play is an imaginative and often violent
glorification of a rebel who, along with a
band of thieves, attempts to overthrow a cor-
rupt political order. Unable to find a publisher,
Schiller printed the play anonymously at his
own expense, and it soon attracted the at-
tention of Wolfgang von Dalberg, director of
the Mannheim National Theater, who staged
it that same year. The Robbers was both
popular and controversial. Reviewers debated
the morality of its characters, and Schiller,
jailed for two weeks, was forbidden to publish
further due to the revolutionary fervor the
play allegedly inspired.
portrayal in weird fiction and for its overwhelm-
ing sense of inevitable doom.
A final contribution to the individual loneli-
ness theme is Jackson’s last published story, “The
Possibility of Evil” (1965). This story of an aristo-
275
 cratic old woman who writes anonymous poison
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
pen letters to other citizens so as to keep her town
“clean and sweet” is a trifle obvious, but is re-
deemed by its unrelenting viciousness. In the end
she is detected and someone repays her in kind
by destroying her cherished rose garden and writ-
ing an anonymous note: “LOOK OUT AT WHAT
USED TO BE YOUR ROSES.” Jackson’s biographer
Judy Oppenheimer believes, incredibly, that
Jackson identified with the old woman: “Shirley
wanted to see herself . . . as a proper lady, sure of
her place, who sent forth her terrible messages to
the world yet remained anonymously secure” (O
272). But surely we are meant to loathe the old
woman for her spitefulness and her injustice:
“Miss Strangeworth never concerned herself with
facts; her letters all dealt with the more negotiable
stuff of suspicion.” And the irony is a little heavy-
handed:
She had been writing her letters . . . for the past
year. She never got any answers, of course, because
she never signed her name. If she had been asked,
she would have said that her name, Adela Strange-
worth, a name honored in the town for so many
years, did not belong on such trash. The town
where she lived had to be kept clean and sweet,
but people everywhere were lustful and evil and
degraded, and needed to be watched; the world
was so large, and there was only one Miss Strange-
worth left in it.
The Bird’s Nest might be studied here, even
though I fear it is the least successful of Jackson’s
novels. This work might have been a powerful
vehicle for the study of loneliness and the con-
comitant desire to refashion oneself—for who can
be lonelier than a person with multiple personali-
ties?—but the execution is severely flawed. This
story of Elizabeth Richmond, who is diagnosed as
having four separate personalities—Elizabeth
(timid and colourless), Beth (sweet but fragile),
Betsy (childishly petulant and potentially violent),
and Bess (the most evil of all, a frightening
megalomaniac)—is marred by structural clumsi-
ness, poor writing, and a feeble conclusion.
Jackson makes several mistakes of judgment. Each
of the five long chapters is narrated from a differ-
ent point of view: the first chapter is omniscient,
the second and fourth from the perspective of the
psychiatrist brought in to treat Elizabeth, the third
(most interestingly) through Betsy’s eyes, and the
fifth from the point of view of Elizabeth’s Aunt
Morgen. The psychiatrist’s narrative tone—flip-
pant, pretentious, cheaply ironic—seriously im-
pedes the progress of the novel, which in any case
(as with all Jackson’s novels save the last two)
tends to meander and digress. In chapter 2 the
276
reproduction of the psychiatrist’s transcript of a
discussion with Elizabeth and her various person-
alities sounds excessively clinical, robbing the
scene of the emotive power it might have had if it
had been presented more novelistically. And the
lame conclusion, in which Elizabeth is magically
cured and her personalities integrated, is a woeful
anticlimax. Indeed, toward the end the atmo-
sphere changes almost in spite of Jackson’s wishes
from grim intensity to farce as we watch Eliza-
beth’s four personalities successively assert them-
selves and take four baths consecutively (B 335-
37). Eventually we are led to understand the origin
of the entire personality split: Elizabeth, jealous of
her mother’s lover (who hates her [B 236]), has
caused her mother’s death in an altercation and is
now suppressing the memory. Jackson may have
erred here also on the side of vagueness, as the
background is sketched hazily and fragmentarily,
so that the connexion between Elizabeth’s rela-
tionship with her mother and her split personal-
ity is never adequately clarified.
Jackson’s incomplete novel, Come Along with
Me (1965; C), is the most forthright example of a
character leaving the past behind. A middle-aged
woman whose husband has died decides to unbur-
den herself of all the impedimenta of her prior
existence and start afresh:
So that was how I started out. I’d thought about it
for a long time of course—not that I positively
expected I was going to have to bury Hughie, but
he had a good life—and everything went the way
I used to figure it would. I sold the house, I
auctioned off the furniture, I put all the paintings
and boxes in the barn, I erased my old name and
took my initials off everything, and I got on the
train and left.
(C 12)
She takes up a new name, Angela Motorman,
almost at random, and, in response to her landla-
dy’s query as to her occupation, she remarks: “‘I
dabble in the supernatural’” (C 18). What this
means, apparently, is that from the age of twelve
she has heard voices from the dead (C 24-26). The
fragment ends after Angela gives a rather inconclu-
sive and unsatisfying séance. I have no idea where
this novel was going to go—even what we have
seems a little disjointed and unfocused—or
whether the supernatural would actually have
come into play; but this novel might for once
have portrayed a strong, self-controlled figure
rather than the birdlike victims so characteristic
of Jackson’s other work.
The tales that focus on the loneliness or isola-
tion of a family within a community do not differ
appreciably in tone from those involving indi-
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vidual loneliness. It might be thought that these
tales would be tempered somewhat with hope, in
the sense that the family members at least have
themselves even if the rest of the world rejects
them, whereas the lonely individuals have no one
to turn to in their isolation; but in fact these tales
can be even grimmer than the others, and several
of them represent Jackson’s most pungent excur-
sions into satire and misanthropy. This is either
because the family unit cannot provide any
significant comfort to its members in the face of
the overwhelming hostility of the outside world,
or because the family itself is torn by tragedy and
in-fighting, so that individuals may feel an added
layer of loneliness—both within the family and
without.
Consider “The Renegade”. The horror of this
story lies not merely in the implication that an
entire community has, with gleeful vindictiveness,
turned against a household because of its sup-
posed chicken-killing dog, but that the family is
now being destroyed from within as the children
embrace the prospect of killing the dog:
Mrs. Walpole looked at them, at her two children
with their hard hands and their sunburned faces
laughing together, their dog with blood still on
her legs laughing with them. She went to the
kitchen doorway to look outside at the cool green
hills, the motion of the apple tree in the soft
afternoon breeze.
“Cut your head right off,” Jack was saying.
(L 65)
“Strangers in Town” (1959) is Jackson’s ven-
detta against the townsfolk who ostracised her
when she accused a favourite grade-school teacher
of beating her children (see O 213-15). This crude
and obvious story is fueled by nothing but hatred,
to the point that Jackson’s artistry completely
forsakes her. Told from the point of view of small-
minded neighbours who cannot tolerate a strange
family’s unconventional ways (they don’t seem to
do any cooking; they dance the night away), this
story is simply void of subtlety:
“Foreign ways!” I said. “You’re heathen, wicked
people, with your dancing and your maid, and
the sooner you leave this town, the better it’s go-
ing to be for you. Because I might as well tell
you”—and I shook my finger right at her—“that
certain people in this town aren’t going to put up
with your fancy ways much longer, and you
would be well advised—very well advised, I
say—to pack up your furniture and your curtains
and your maid and cat and get out of our town
before we put you out.”
“‘All She Said Was “Yes”’” (1962) is much
superior, speaking poignantly of a curious young
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girl whose parents have been killed in an auto ac-
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
cident. It bears relationships to “The Intoxicated”
in that it suggests that the girl is clairvoyant; and
like that story, it is told from the point of view of
an individual who fails to perceive the girl’s pow-
ers. This tale is also a little obvious (there is no
ambiguity, as in “The Intoxicated”, whether the
girl really can see into the future or not), and a
predictable ending does not help matters: the girl
tells her neighbour repeatedly not to go on a boat,
but the neighbour pays no attention and the story
concludes: “we’re all going to go on a cruise.” But
the delicate portrayal of the central figure—an
unattractive, tight-lipped, morose girl who knew
that her parents would die and is accordingly not
shocked but merely saddened and stupefied, and
now totally alone in the world—makes this one of
Jackson’s later triumphs.
The Sundial may be mentioned here, although
I wish to study it more extensively elsewhere. This
mad and disturbing tale of a large and wealthy
family convinced that the external world will
shortly come to an end, with only its house
preserved, displays at once the Halloran family’s
isolation from the world and the internal dissen-
sions that cause it to be a microcosm of the unruly
outside world they are purportedly leaving behind.
The Hallorans’ withdrawal from the world, even
before they take up their insane view of the
world’s imminent destruction, is entirely self-
generated:
The character of the house is perhaps of interest.
It stood upon a small rise in ground, and all the
land it surveyed belonged to the Halloran family.
The Halloran land was distinguished from the rest
of the world by a stone wall, which went com-
pletely around the estate, so that all inside the
wall was Halloran, all outside was not. The first
Mr. Halloran . . . was a man who, in the astonish-
ment of finding himself suddenly extremely
wealthy, could think of nothing better to do with
his money than set up his own world. His belief
about the house . . . was that it should contain
everything. The other world, the one the Hallo-
rans were leaving behind, was to be plundered
ruthlessly for objects of beauty to go in and
around Mr. Halloran’s house; infinite were the
delights to be prepared for its inhabitants.
(S 11)
But this isolation fails to weed out the dishar-
monies of the world, as we shall see elsewhere.
Much of the effectiveness of this book lies in how
Jackson totally ignores the outside world, as if it
has already ceased to exist. Everything is focused
on the house and its occupants; even when some
of those occupants have come from that outside
world, it is completely forgotten once they enter
277
 the house. Background information on the charac-
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
ters is deliberately lacking, as if they had no prior
existence before coming to the house. And in the
one instance where a character—Maryjane, the
daughter-in-law of the domineering Mrs Hallo-
ran—attempts to escape the house, the scene is
depicted in so bizarre a manner that we are
uncertain of its reality—and Maryjane, bootlessly
trying to flee to the nearby town on foot, finds
that she has unwittingly returned to the very
house she sought to leave. It is needless to remark
that Jackson wisely ends the novel without resolv-
ing the issue of whether the world will in fact end.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle is, of course,
Jackson’s grimmest and nastiest portrayal of fam-
ily isolation. The Blackwood family has been shat-
tered by tragedy: all but three members of the
household died by poisoning six years prior to the
novel’s opening, and one of the survivors, Con-
stance Blackwood, is blamed by the townspeople
for the murders even though she was tried and
found innocent. She now lives in her spectral
house with her younger cousin Mary Katherine
(called Merricat) and her uncle Julian, himself
crippled from the effects of the poison. Next to
the Hallorans in The Sundial, this is Jackson’s
weirdest family. Merricat is the focus of the tale:
she alone ventures to the town for groceries and
other household needs, enduring the taunts of
the townsfolk but in turn hating and despising
them. It is clear that we are meant to sympathise
wholeheartedly with the Blackwoods and to hate
the townspeople as they hate them, and as they
are hated in turn by them. But what are we to
make of the family’s snobbishness?
Anyone who came to see us, properly invited,
came up the main drive which led straight from
the gateposts on the highway up to our front door.
When I was small I used to lie in my bedroom at
the back of the house and imagine the driveway
and the path as a crossroad meeting before our
front door, and up and down the driveway went
the good people, the clean and rich ones dressed
in satin and lace, who came rightfully to visit, and
back and forth along the path, sneaking and weav-
ing and sidestepping servilely, went the people
from the village.
(W 27-28)
One might be inclined to say that Jackson is
introducing a significant ambiguity to suggest that
the Blackwoods and the townspeople are both
blameworthy for the ostracism they inflict upon
each other; but I do not believe this to be the case.
We have already seen that Jackson herself looked
down upon the townsfolk of Bennington, and her
views are identical to Merricat’s; she is clearly
portraying the attitude here as entirely admirable
278
(it in fact connects with what happens later in the
novel), and it is simply unfortunate that Jackson
could not predict the disapproval that later
generations would have of this sort of snobbish-
ness. In any case, the rest of the novel compels us
to find the townspeople wholly responsible for
the events that follow, in particular when the
townspeople, in a fit of irrational anger, destroy
much of the house while putting out a fire that
has started inside it. It is at this point that we learn
a truth that scarcely any reader could have failed
to guess, although Jackson evidently intends it as
a stunning surprise: Merricat was the poisoner of
her family.
The novel does not end here, however. In
what is both a horrific and a heart-rending twist
of Jackson’s domestic fiction, the two cousins
(Julian has now died) continue in their quiet defi-
ance of the townsfolk by trying to resume their
lives even when most of their property—furniture,
clothes, utensils, food, even much of the house
itself—is devastated. When Constance, success-
fully locating two teacups with their handles
intact, remarks, “We will take our meals like ladies
. . . using cups with handles” (W 144), we are
evidently to regard this as a reaffirmation of the
“good breeding” the women have received, a
wholly admirable attempt to preserve one’s dig-
nity in the face of disaster.
There is, of course, nothing supernatural
about We Have Always Lived in the Castle; if
anything, it is a mystery story, although the
mystery is not very cleverly executed and is by no
means the focus of the novel. By any normal
criteria it cannot be considered a weird tale, even
though it manipulates after a fashion the topos of
the haunted house, doing so from the unique
perspective of the inhabitants of the house rather
than of outsiders seeking to penetrate its myster-
ies. There is, however, a rather odd way in which
perhaps the weird does enter into this novel, and
it is this which I now wish to consider.
Misanthropy
“Nothing has the power to hurt which doesn’t
have the power to frighten” (O 42): this single ut-
terance by Shirley Jackson may be all the justifica-
tion we need to consider some of her darkest and
most vicious work, otherwise wholly non-
supernatural, as anomalous contributions to the
weird tale. Maurice Lévy remarked of Ambrose
Bierce that “One is almost tempted to believe that
one day he decided to instill fear into his contem-
poraries by hatred, to gain revenge on them”,5 and
Jackson seems very frequently inspired by the
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same motivation. Indeed, from this perspective it
is possible to consider a very wide array of works—
from Juvenal (notably the fifteenth satire, on can-
nibalism in Egypt) to Swift6 to Evelyn Waugh’s A
Handful of Dust (1934)7 —as quasi-weird, because
they are all driven by such daemonic misanthropy
that they not only hurt but frighten. Perhaps it is
this feature that will allow us to sneak in We Have
Always Lived in the Castle through the back door
of the weird.
It is interesting that The Sundial seems to have
been singled out by reviewers for its misanthropy.
Harvey Swados snorted: “While Miss Jackson is an
intelligent and clever writer, there rises from her
pages the cold fishy gleam of a calculated and
carefully expressed contempt for the human race”
(O 218). There are two problems with this utter-
ance: one, the whole of Jackson’s work is refresh-
ingly misanthropic; two, the assumption here (as
I have noted in connexion with Bierce) is that
there is something necessarily wrong with misan-
thropy. I do not know that Jackson anywhere of-
fers an explicit philosophical defence of misan-
thropy, but perhaps she need not have done so:
her work makes it obvious that she had little
patience for the stupid, the arrogant, the pomp-
ous, the complacently bourgeois, the narrow-
minded, and the spiteful—in other words, she
hates all those people whom there is every good
reason to hate. Since, therefore, I do not acknowl-
edge any prejudice against misanthropy, I can
only relish the exquisite nastiness with which
Jackson ordinarily displays it. Such a tale as
“Strangers in Town” is to be criticised not because
it is misanthropic but because in this instance
Jackson’s blind hatred has resulted in a failure of
that artistry and subtlety uniformly evident in the
rest of her work.
The celebrated (but uncollected) “One Ordi-
nary Day, with Peanuts” is worth discussing in
this context. This spectacularly nasty story has, in
its quiet way, some stupendous implications. A
man leaves home in the morning and seems
intent on accomplishing nothing but good: he
keeps an eye on a boy while his mother runs an
errand; he advises a man looking for an apartment
as to the availability of one he has just seen; he
actually gives a cab driver money and advice for
betting on horses. Most remarkably of all, he
intentionally stops a young man and a young
woman on the street, introduces them to each
other, and gives them money to take the day off
and have a good time. He is benevolence itself. He
comes home, meets his wife, and tells her how his
day went. She tells him about hers:
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“I had a little nap this afternoon, took it easy most
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
of the day. Went into a department store this
morning and accused the woman next to me of
shoplifting, and had the store detective pick her
up. Sent three dogs to the pound—you know, the
usual thing.”
They plan the next day:
“Fine,” said Mr. Johnson. “But you do look tired.
Want to change over tomorrow?”
“I would like to,” she said. “I could do with a
change.”
“Right,” said Mr. Johnson.
With such ease can people be sadistically
mean and superhumanly philanthropic in turn!
The one seems as good a way of passing the time
as the other. But the true message of the story,
beyond the implication that misanthropy and
benevolence can be sloughed off and put on like a
cloak, is the idea of manipulation: both misan-
thropy and benevolence involve a fascistic ma-
nipulation of human beings as if they were pup-
pets; and perhaps Jackson’s real misanthropy is
directed here not at the couple but at the spine-
less and stupid people who allow the couple to do
their dirty or good work with such insouciance.
Manipulation of this sort is what Mrs Orianna
Halloran attempts in The Sundial. There may
perhaps be some justification in singling out this
novel for its misanthropy, since here there are no
admirable or likeable characters at all, and each of
them is portrayed in the most vitriolic manner:
Mrs Halloran, domineering, arrogant, and pos-
sibly the murderer of her own son so that no one
can stand in the way of her control of the house-
hold; Mr Halloran, her husband, broken, feeble-
minded, lost in dreams of the past; Aunt Fanny,
flighty and confused but startlingly bucking Ori-
anna’s authority at unexpected moments; Mary-
jane, an airhead who only wants control of the
house and property for herself; Miss Ogilvie, an
utterly ineffectual longtime family retainer; Essex,
a sycophant who seeks only to forward his own
cause; Augusta Willow, a blowsy matron who
wants nothing more than to marry off her two
sullen daughters, Julia and Arabella; Gloria, a pos-
sibly disturbed young woman with apparently
precognitive powers; even little Fancy, Maryjane’s
young daughter, whose sweet exterior hides a lust
for power and control scarcely less intense than
that of Mrs Halloran.
This is the eccentric crowd Jackson gathers for
her pseudo-apocalyptic tale; and it can scarcely be
doubted that, if nothing else, it represents the
most extreme contrast possible with the love,
279
 warmth, and unity of Jackson’s own family as
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
recorded (with perhaps no little exaggeration) in
her domestic fiction. The ease with which every-
one is convinced—or claims to be convinced—of
Aunt Fanny’s notion that the world will end (she
claims to have heard it from the spirit of her dead
father) is certainly meant is a testament to human
stupidity. It is conceivable, however, that Mrs Hal-
loran only goes along with the idea as a means of
maintaining control of the household, since she
immediately begins laying down orders on prepar-
ing for the disaster and makes it abundantly clear
that she will be the queen of the new civilisation
that the family will have to found once all the
other people in the world are eliminated.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle is Jackson’s
most unrestrainedly misanthropic work. Here
hatred is everywhere: “The people of the village
have always hated us” (W 11); “I wished they were
dead” (W 15); “our father said they [the villagers]
were trash” (W 17). Let us hear what Merricat feels
for the townsfolk:
I wish you were all dead, I thought, and longed to
say it out loud. Constance said, “Never let them
see that you care,” and “If you pay any attention
they’ll only get worse,” and probably it was true,
but I wished they were dead. I would have liked
to come into the grocery some morning and see
them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying
there crying with the pain and dying. I would
then help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping
over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from
the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for
Mrs. Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry
when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they
would come true. “It’s wrong to hate them,” Con-
stance said, “it only weakens you,” but I hated
them anyway, and wondered why it had been
worth while creating them in the first place.
(W 15-16)
That last sentence rather reminds me of Lu-
cretius’ celebrated utterance against the argument
from design: Quidve mali fuerat nobis non esse cre-
atis? (“What harm would it have been had we
never been created?”) (De Rerum Natura 5.174). In
any case, I actually believe we are meant to agree
with Merricat’s sentiments here, outrageous as
they seem: note that when Constance chides her
for hating the townsfolk, it is not because such a
hatred is abstractly immoral but that “it only
weakens you”. Constance is recommending a sort
of bland indifference as an even purer form of
misanthropy than active hatred. The whole novel,
in any event, asks us to sympathise with the Black-
woods and not the townsfolk.
280
Houses
Anyone who has written works with such
titles as “The Lovely House”, “The House”, “Lou-
isa, Please Come Home”, “The Little House”,
“Home”, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have
Always Lived in the Castle must find great inspira-
tion from dwellings. These tales by no means
exhaust the catalogue of “house” stories in Jack-
son’s work, and we must add at least The Sundial
and, indeed, both volumes of domestic fiction to
the list.
Those domestic volumes are again the logical
starting-point for the analysis of the house theme
in Jackson. It is not simply that the house func-
tions benignly in these books whereas it is sinister,
evil, confining, and inhibiting in her other work;
the relation is again more complex than that.
Recall our discussion of “The House” (1952), the
quasi-supernatural tale whose first section alone
was included at the very beginning of Life among
the Savages. It is no surprise that the supernatural
component of the story would be excised in its
new setting; but the mere context has robbed the
house in the story of its subtly evil character. The
narrative of moving into this imposing but ram-
shackle house takes on a seriocomic quality, as in
the book Jackson’s children play a greater role,
dispersing the potentially chilling atmosphere
with their boisterous high spirits. The message is
clear: in the domestic fiction a house is not in
itself a cheering and heartwarming environment,
but becomes so through the love and closeness of
the family occupying it. It is exactly these emo-
tions that are lacking in Jackson’s other work,
whether it be in such a non-supernatural satire as
The Road through the Wall or in a quasi-
supernatural one as The Sundial. In both these
instances the house becomes cold and unwelcom-
ing only because the inhabitants themselves
exhibit these same feelings toward each other.
Even in those stories in which the house itself
remains relatively passive, the hostility of its oc-
cupants or of the outside community render the
house something akin to a prison. Neither “The
Summer People” nor “The Little House” focuses
upon the house as such; but in both tales it takes
on foreboding qualities. In the former the elderly
couple’s summer house becomes a virtual tomb
when the couple decides to extend its stay beyond
Labor Day. In the latter, the spitefulness of eldery
neighbours causes a perfectly innocuous house to
appear a death-trap to its new owner, who flees in
terror.
And yet, to Jackson’s mind—at once condi-
tioned to the domestic pieties of the 1950s and
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Movie still from The Haunting, the 1963 film adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.
rebelling against them—the house is an unavoid-
able fixture regardless of what dire qualities it takes
on. Even at the beginning of We Have Always Lived
in the Castle Constance is afraid of leaving the
house (W 29), although it has become, for all
practical purposes, a grave for her. Her life after
the poisoning of her family has been reduced to
its walls—with, perhaps, fleeting moments on the
grounds—but she regards it at least as a haven
against the scorn of the townspeople. And even
after much of the house is burned and rendered
uninhabitable, Constance and Merricat choose to
remain there, calmly and even whimsically re-
shaping their lives to within an even smaller
compass. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is
Jackson’s most searing parody of domesticity: all
the things that made the domestic stories so
wholesome and touching—love between the fam-
ily members; the antics of children; the comical
excess of furniture, toys, and food; the sense of
belonging to a community—have here been
perverted. And yet, Constance and Merricat seem
strangely content with their impoverished circum-
stances; and indeed, is it really so bad? They at
least have each other.
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GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
In The Sundial even this comfort is lacking.
Each member of this lunatic household clings,
like Constance and Merricat, to the belief that the
house alone will represent safety and sanctuary
even when the rest of the world is destroyed; but
amongst the occupants themselves there is no
harmony, only struggles for supremacy, covert af-
fairs, and bungled attempts to escape. Because the
outside world so rarely figures in this novel, the
house itself becomes the world—it is as if there re-
ally is nothing beyond it. Is Jackson saying that
the rest of the world functions as the Halloran
household does? Is there no harmony or love to
be found anywhere?
The Haunting of Hill House is, of course, Jack-
son’s most profound and searching treatment of
the house theme; its opening paragraph sets the
tone, and I cannot resist quoting it in spite of its
celebrity:
No live organism can continue for long to exist
sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even
larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to
dream: Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against
its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so
for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.
281
 Within, walls continued upright, bricks met
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly
shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and
stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there,
walked alone.
(HH 5)
I confess, however, to an uncertainty as to
what this is exactly supposed to mean. It is
interesting that here insanity is linked to the
perception of “absolute reality”: I am not so much
concerned with quoting T. S. Eliot (“Human kind
cannot bear very much reality”) as with ascertain-
ing the precise applicability of the remark. Hill
House is a place where the superficial masks and
deceptions of life are stripped off: it is where
Eleanor comes to terms with the wretchedness of
her prior life, sees through the sham of Luke’s and
Theodora’s arch lightheartedness, and realises that
she belongs here—because, in fact, she belongs
nowhere. A later passage might shed further light
on this enigmatic opening:
This house, which seemed somehow to have
formed itself, flying together into its own power-
ful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting
itself into its own construction of lines and angles,
reared its great head back against the sky without
concession to humanity. It was a house without
kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit
place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism
cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill
House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.
(HH 26)
Curiously, the remark that the house “was not
a fit place for . . . love” is perhaps contradicted by
the denouement, for in its twisted way Hill House
does love Eleanor—it wants her, it won’t let her
leave, it perhaps kills her when she tries to go
away.
But if whatever walks in Hill House walks
alone, are we not to see in this Jackson’s ultimate
metaphor for loneliness? A house should represent
safety, comfort, welcome; but in this house, as Dr
Montague notes, “‘the intention is, somehow, to
separate us’” (HH 96)—to render each person
alone and lonely. If Jackson sees togetherness as
the natural and desirable state for human beings,
then Hill House, which causes loneliness, is an
abomination and even a paradox; if it makes no
“concession to humanity”, then it has defied the
very beings who have created it and inverts the
purposes for which it was built.
Conclusion
What do we make of Shirley Jackson? Is she a
weird writer even in part? That second question I
am still unable to answer in any definitive way,
282
save to note the obvious supernaturalism in a
fairly representative core of her work. If The Haunt-
ing of Hill House is one of the greatest haunted
house novels ever written, if “The Lottery” is
among the cruellest non-supernatural horror
stories ever written, what do we do with some-
thing so nebulous as The Sundial or “The Lovely
House”? I hope, at any rate, to have suggested the
tightly knit unity of Jackson’s work, its constant
reworking of the interlocking themes of domestic-
ity and loneliness, love and hate, madness and
sanity, society and the individual; and I hope we
can now see how each of these threads is pursued
successively in tales that, from the point of view
of genre, might be termed supernatural, non-
supernatural, mainstream, or autobiographical. It
is true that Jackson, even in her avowedly super-
natural work, presents no coherent metaphysics:
her supernatural manifestations fail to suggest any
putative reordering of the cosmos. But if she lacks
the cosmic perspective of a Lovecraft, a Black-
wood, or a Dunsany (or, indeed, of a Ramsey
Campbell or T. E. D. Klein), if her focus is solely
on human characters and human relationships,
with even the supernatural phenomena subservi-
ent to or symbols for these relationships, then she
at least distinguishes herself by the intensity, ac-
curacy, and subtlety of her portrayal of human
concerns; as with Bierce, her pitiless and sardonic
exposing of human weakness makes her a horrific
satirist who does not require the supernatural to
arouse fear and horror. Her icy prose, clinical
detachment, and utterly refreshing glee at the
exhibition of human greed, misery, and evil ought
to give her a high rank in general literature; that
she chose to devote even a part of her talents to
the weird is something for which we ought all to
be grateful.
Notes
1. Jackson’s year of birth is usually given as 1919, a date
she herself gave in later years; but her biographer, Judy
Oppenheimer, has determined that Jackson was actu-
ally born on December 14, 1916, and that 1919 was
given as the year of her birth so that she could seem
to be younger than her husband, Stanley Edgar Hy-
man (see O 11, 88).
2. An excellent and comprehensive bibliography of
Jackson’s short work can be found in Joan Wylie Hall’s
recent volume, Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fic-
tion (1993). In my bibliography I include only impor-
tant uncollected items. For books, asterisks indicate
the edition cited in the text.
3. “The House”, Woman’s Day 15, No. 8 (May 1952):
116.
4. Ibid., p. 118.
5. Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic, tr. S. T. Joshi (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1988), p. 14.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
 6. See Dale J. Nelson, “Arthur Jermyn Was a Yahoo: Swift
and Modern Horror Fiction”, Studies in Weird Fiction
No. 7 (Spring 1990): 3-7.
7. A chapter from this novel, “Du côté de chez Todd”,
has frequently been included in horror anthologies
under the title “The Man Who Liked Dickens”. It is
one of the nastiest contes cruels ever written.
Bibliography
A. Primary
I. BOOKS
The Bird’s Nest. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1954. Rpt. The
Magic of Shirley Jackson. New York: Farrar, Straus & Gir-
oux, 1966, pp. 147-380. [B]
Come Along with Me. Ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman. New York:
Viking, 1968. Rpt. New York: Popular Library, n.d. [C]
Hangsaman. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1951. Rpt. New York:
Popular Library, 1976. [H]
The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Viking, 1959. Rpt.
New York: Popular Library, 1977. [HH]
Life among the Savages. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1953. Rpt.
The Magic of Shirley Jackson. New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1966, pp. 383-530. [LS]
The Lottery. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1949. Rpt. New York:
Popular Library, n.d. [L]
Raising Demons. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1957. Rpt. The
Magic of Shirley Jackson. New York: Farrar, Straus & Gir-
oux, 1966, pp. 531-753. [RD]
The Road through the Wall. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948.
The Sundial. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1958. Rpt. New York:
Ace, n.d. [S]
We Have Always Lived in the Castle. New York: Viking, 1962.
Rpt. New York: Popular Library, n.d. [W]
II. UNCOLLECTED SHORT STORIES AND
ARTICLES
“‘All She Said Was “Yes.”’” Vogue 140, No. 8 (1 November
1962): 142-43, 169, 171, 174-75.
“Behold the Child among His Newborn Blisses.” In Cross-
Section: A Collection of New American Writing, ed. Edwin
Seaver. New York: L. B. Fisher, 1944, pp. 292-98.
“The Birthday Party.” Vogue 141, No. 1 (1 January 1963):
118, 145-46, 149, 154. (Rev. version of “Pajama Party”.)
“Bulletin.” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 6, No. 3
(March 1953): 46-48. Rpt. The Best from Fantasy and Sci-
ence Fiction: Fourth Series, ed. Anthony Boucher. Garden
City, NY: Doubleday, 1955, pp. 182-85.
“Daughter, Come Home.” Charm 60, No. 3 (May 1944): 75,
94-95.
“Fame.” The Writer 61, No. 8 (August 1948): 265-66.
“Family Magician.” Woman’s Home Companion, September
1949, pp. 23, 92-93, 98, 100.
“A Great Voice Stilled.” Playboy 7, No. 3 (March 1960): 57-
58, 91.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
“Home.” Ladies’ Home Journal 82, No. 8 (August 1965): 64-
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
65, 116, 118.
“Journey with a Lady.” Harper’s 205, No. 1 (July 1952): 76-
81. Rpt. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine 31, No. 6 (June
1958) (as “This Is the Life”).
“Karen’s Complaint.” Good Housekeeping 149, No. 5
(November 1959): 38, 40, 42, 46.
“The Lost Kingdom of Oz.” Reporter 21, No. 10 (10 Decem-
ber 1959): 42-43.
“The Lovely Night.” Collier’s 125, No. 14 (8 April 1950): 15,
66-68.
“The Missing Girl.” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
13, No. 6 (December 1957): 42-52.
“The Omen.” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 14, No.
3 (March 1958): 118-30.
“On Being a Faculty Wife.” Mademoiselle 44, No. 2
(December 1956): 116-17, 135-36. In RD (in part).
“One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts.” Magazine of Fantasy and
Science Fiction 8, No. 1 (January 1955): 53-61. Rpt. The
Best American Short Stories 1956, ed. Martha Foley.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956, pp. 195-204.
“The Possibility of Evil.” Saturday Evening Post 238, No. 25
(18 December 1965): 61-64, 68-69.
“Root of Evil.” Fantastic 2, No. 2 (March-April 1953): 124-
29, 162. Rpt. Fantastic 18, No. 5 (June 1969): 123-27,
140.
“The Strangers.” Collier’s 129, No. 19 (10 May 1952): 24, 68-
71.
“Strangers in Town.” Saturday Evening Post 231, No. 48 (30
May 1959): 18, 76-77, 79.
“The Wishing Dime.” Good Housekeeping 129, No. 3
(September 1949): 35, 223-28.
B. Secondary
Egan, James. “Sanctuary: Shirley Jackson’s Domestic and
Fantastic Parables.” Studies in Weird Fiction No. 6 (Fall
1989): 15-24.
Friedman, Lenemaja. Shirley Jackson. Boston: Twayne, 1980.
Hall, Joan Wylie. Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction.
New York: Twayne, 1993.
Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jack-
son. New York: Putnam’s, 1988. [O]
Parks, John G. “Chambers of Yearning: Shirley Jackson’s
Use of the Gothic.” Twentieth Century Literature 30
(1984): 15-29.
DAVID A. OAKES (ESSAY DATE
WINTER 1999)
SOURCE: Oakes, David A. “Ghosts in the Machines:
The Haunted Castle in the Works of Stephen King and
Clive Barker.” Studies in Weird Fiction 24 (winter 1999):
25-33.
In the following essay, Oakes highlights the moderniza-
tion and transformation of the traditional Gothic setting
of the haunted castle in works by Stephen King and Clive
Barker.
283
 Imagine, for a moment, that you are sitting
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
down to read Stephen King’s disturbing short
novel, The Mist. However, instead of being a
frightening tale of a group of people trapped in a
grocery store by a sinister mist that hides fantastic
creatures, you find the novel to be a mildly amus-
ing diversion because it tells how the mist engulfs
and traps David Drayton and his friends in a
castle. Envision how strange King’s “Trucks”
would be if the truck stop being besieged by the
vehicles was a large castle. What if Clive Barker’s
“The Hellbound Heart” did not require the use of
a puzzle box to summon the Cenobites, but,
rather, demanded that the characters travel to the
ruins of an ancient fortress to summon these
strange entities? Or suppose that Arnie Cunning-
ham, in King’s Christine, purchased and decided
to repair a castle possessed by a ghost rather than
the cursed red-and-white Plymouth Fury? Al-
though the haunted castle was a crucial, even
indispensable, element of early works of Gothic
literature, the use of it in an unchanged form in
contemporary settings can considerably lessen the
impact of the tale or the fear generated by the
events of the story. Thus, in order for Gothic fic-
tion to remain an effective genre, the haunted
castle needs to evolve and change to continue to
be relevant to readers in different times and societ-
ies.
The genre of Gothic fiction is a literature of
destabilization in that it inspires its readers to ask
questions about themselves, their society, and the
cosmos surrounding them. Further, it serves as a
cultural artifact, reflecting the concerns and fears
not only of the time in which it is written, but
also of the time in which it is read. Gothic litera-
ture is defined not only by what effects it has on
readers, but also by a series of elements that ap-
pear time and again in works of this genre. The
most prominent and common element of Gothic
literature is the haunted castle and its later deriva-
tions. The haunted castle often serves as the center
of supernatural activity, acts as a symbol of the
past, and functions as the main source of danger
and suspense within a work of Gothic fiction. In
his 1927 study, The Haunted Castle, Eino Railo
notes that the castle serves as a “scene of innumer-
able horrors, capable of touching the imagination
each time we see it” (7). He believes that the
haunted castle
plays an exceedingly important part in [Gothic
fiction]; so important, indeed, that were it elimi-
nated the whole fabric of romance would be bereft
of its foundation and would lose its predominant
atmosphere.
(7)
284
The importance of this element comes, in
part, from the connection of the term “Gothic”
with architecture in the eighteenth century. Many
of the earliest works of Gothic literature, such as
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, are set in
the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, and therefore
utilize a castle as the setting for the events of the
story.
As cultural artifacts, many works of Gothic
fiction change the way in which the haunted
castle is presented in order to remain relevant to
their time and setting. Even in the earliest works
of Gothic literature, the haunted castle undergoes
changes and appears in different manifestations.
For example, Eino Railo notes that Clara Reeve in
The Old English Baron is the writer who, “for the
first time,” makes “deliberate use of an empty suite
of rooms [that is] supposed to be haunted” (8).
Another manifestation of the haunted castle ap-
pears in the form of “the old abbey and monas-
tery” as can be seen in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s
The Monk. Similarly, Charles Brockden Brown, the
first American Gothic writer, transforms the
haunted castle into a wilderness, a realm of spirits
and fantastic events, as he adapts the Gothic form
to an American setting. Other writers of the
nineteenth century, such as J. Sheridan LeFanu
and Ambrose Bierce, change the haunted castle
into a haunted house, in part, so their tales could
be placed in contemporary settings.
Furthermore, as Railo notes, as time passes the
haunted room becomes the laboratory of workers
of magic, of alchemists, the secret research room
of a modern scientist—becomes, in general, the
mysterious hidden chamber where the terrifying
element is housed. Each age fashions this centre
of suspense to conform with its own new experi-
ences and inventions, but for the reader aware of
its history it is an easy task to strip off the modern
equipment, when it stands confessed as merely a
new rendering of the old picture of the haunted
castle.
(171)
Thus, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the
haunted castle becomes the laboratory of an ambi-
tious scientist. This particular manifestation again
appears in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-
mark”. Further, the process continues in the
twentieth century with the haunted house of Shir-
ley Jackson’s 1959 tale, The Haunting of Hill House,
and the merging of the haunted house and labora-
tory in Richard Matheson’s 1971 novel, Hell House.
It manifests itself as a lost city in H. P. Lovecraft’s
1931 novel, At the Mountains of Madness. Although
its forms appear vastly different from those in the
eighteenth century, the haunted castle continues
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to serve as crucial tool in the process of destabiliza-
tion. Indeed, this element of Gothic fiction can
continue to be found in the works of such late
twentieth-century Gothic writers as Stephen King
and Clive Barker. The haunted castle appears in a
vast array of forms in King’s fiction: a red-and-
white 1958 Plymouth Fury in Christine, a grocery
store in The Mist, and a flying saucer in The
Tommyknockers. Clive Barker presents the haunted
castle as a man’s private hell in “Down, Satan!”, a
puzzle box in “The Hellbound Heart”, and as an
ancient wizard in The Damnation Game. These
manifestations play a vital role in laying the
foundation for creating fear in each tale. Moreover,
they not only demonstrate the genius of King and
Barker in adapting this element for a twentieth-
century setting, but also illustrate why Gothic
literature continues to exist as a unique and
identifiable genre.
Although the haunted castle has proven to be
a very adaptable element in the works of various
Gothic writers, it has often been limited in one
way—it remains at a fixed location, necessitating
the bringing of the characters to that particular
site. However, Stephen King removes this limita-
tion in Christine by presenting the haunted castle
in the form of a car. Indeed, the use of the Ply-
mouth Fury is particularly effective because it
invokes a cultural artifact by calling upon the
fascination many teenagers, especially males, feel
for cars:
Engines. That’s something else about being a
teenager. There are all these engines, and some-
how you end up with the ignition keys to some of
them and you start them up but you don’t know
what . . . they are or what they’re supposed to
do. There are clues, but that’s all. . . . They give
you the keys and some clues and they say, Start it
up, see what it will do, and sometimes what it
does is pull you along into a life that’s really good
and fulfilling, and sometimes what it does is pull
you right down the highway to hell and leave you
mangled and bleeding by the roadside.
(62)
Tony Magistrale observes in Landscape of Fear
that the car acts as “a great mirror of America
itself”, representing “prosperity” and “an infatua-
tion with . . . speed” (46). There are, however,
disturbing aspects to this fascination because this
haunted car also illustrates how this captivation
with an object can lead to disaster if it comes to
dominate a person’s life as it does the young Arnie
Cunningham.
Further, Christine functions as a symbol of
the past because the vehicle was first made in the
1950s, a time within American mythology that is
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often viewed as a golden age of prosperity when
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
things were simpler and less complicated. Indeed,
the car plays upon desires to return to a simpler
time, and demonstrates their dangers. It can
transport the people within its confines back to
the 1950s. Dennis Guilder experiences such a trip
on a ride with Arnie:
Arnie stopped at intersections where we should
have had the right-of-way; at others, where traffic
lights glowed red, he cruised Christine mildly
through without even slowing. On Main Street I
saw Shipstad’s Jewelry Store and the Strand The-
ater, both of them torn down in 1972 to make
way for the new Pennsylvania Merchants Bank.
The cars parked along the street—gathered here
and there in clumps where New Year’s Eve parties
were going on—all seemed to be pre-60s . . . or
pre-1958. Long portholed Buicks. A DeSoto Fire-
lite station wagon with a body-long blue inset that
looked like a check-mark. . . . Ramblers, Pack-
ards, a few bullet-nosed Studebakers, and once,
fantastical and new, an Edsel.
(417)
Roland D. LeBay views the 1950s as a golden
age, a time when he finds happiness in a new car
that fulfills his dreams. Passengers see visions of
the era LeBay loves, but it is one that has vanished
forever. The visions within Christine are illusions,
real only for Christine and LeBay. The haunted
car is a trap for Arnie, drawing him back to a time
that no longer exists, and removing him from the
present to live in an illusory world, one that will
not allow him to grow as a person and one that
essentially dooms him to destruction.
One of the most important aspects of Chris-
tine is its mobility. The Plymouth Fury becomes
the home of the ghost of its first owner, Roland D.
LeBay, after his death. It serves as the central locus
of the supernatural activity within the novel, and
this car also opens some unusual possibilities in
using the fantastic. An automobile is not limited
to one location, magnifying Christine’s threat
because it can attack people in remote locations
instead of waiting for individuals to enter its
domain like the ghost of Emeric Belasco in Mathe-
son’s Hell House. The car’s mobility proves to be
particularly disturbing, for it means that there are
no safe havens into which people can retreat to
escape the influence of the fantastic. In the case
where the haunted castle’s manifestation is at a
fixed location, the vast majority of the people usu-
ally enjoy a degree of safety if they do not venture
to that place. Yet, in Christine’s case, the car may
seek people out in their homes or in locations that
would ordinarily be considered secure. Moreover,
the vehicle’s ability to regenerate itself means that
it can take a tremendous amount of damage and
285
 still continue to run, allowing it to penetrate areas,
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
such as a brick house, that may seem inaccessible.
Another destabilizing aspect of Christine’s
mobility and regenerative abilities comes at the
end of the novel. King concludes with hints that
Christine appears to restore herself again after be-
ing smashed to pieces by a truck. Dennis Guilder
speculates that the haunted car has returned:
Of course it’s impossible, but it was all impossible
to start with.
I keep thinking of George LeBay in Ohio.
His sister in Colorado.
Leigh in New Mexico.
What if it’s started again?
What if it’s working its way east, finishing the job?
Saving me for last?
[LeBay’s] single-minded purpose.
His unending fury.
(503)
In these lines, King not only suggests that the
supernatural power of this haunted car cannot be
dispelled, but also, unlike a haunted castle or
house, this force can seek out and hunt down new
victims, meaning that there may be no escape
from Christine.
Stephen King’s The Mist presents another
variation on the haunted castle in that he presents
two different candidates for the manifestation of
this element within the tale. The creation of the
mist itself and its subsequent engulfing of towns
and cities transforms civilized areas into wilder-
ness. Any area within the confines of the mist
basically becomes a haunted wilderness, filled
with the unknown and danger. King demonstrates
this fact through the dire fates of those, such as
Brent Norton and The Flat-Earth Society, who
refuse to accept the reality of the mist and the
creature within it and foolishly choose to venture
forth into its confines:
And from out of the mist there came a high,
wavering scream. It was impossible to tell the sex
of the screamer. . . . The howl was abruptly cut
off. There was no sound at all for what seemed to
be forever. Then the old lady cried out—this time
there could be no doubt about who it was.
“Git it offa me!” she screamed. “Oh my Lord my
Lord get it—“Then her voice was cut off, too.
(101)
The dangerous creatures lurking within the
mist’s confines make venturing forth into its
confines an extremely dangerous proposition,
286
especially given the fact that humans are deprived
of their primary source of protection from dan-
ger—their vision.
Yet, although King surrounds the survivors
who are trapped in the grocery store with what
amounts to a haunted wilderness, he also makes
the supermarket into a haunted castle. When
confronted by the dangers within the mist, a large
number of people decide to wait within the
confines of the store because it provides the food
and drink they need to survive. This method of
survival, waiting for the danger to pass, while not
as foolhardy as the one chosen by Brent Norton,
is still presented as a hazardous choice. The people
trapped in the mist do not simply deal with small
creatures; they also face gargantuan beasts such as
the one David Drayton and his companions see as
they attempt to escape the confines of the mist:
It was six-legged, I know that . . . and clinging to
it were scores, hundreds, of those pinkish “bugs”
with the stalk-eyes. I don’t how big it actually was,
but it passed directly over us. One of its gray,
wrinkled legs smashed down right beside my
window, and Mrs. Reppler said later she could not
see the underside ofits body, although she craned
her neck up to look. She saw only two Cyclopean
legs going up and up into the mist like living tow-
ers until they were lost to sight.
(151)
Given the size of this creature and others like
it in the mist, the supermarket is only a temporary
safe haven. The novel rejects inaction; the people
who stay in the grocery store accept a new reality,
but still hide from the world rather than trying to
escape it. A refusal to struggle against the un-
known is a capitulation to fear. The people who
stay leave themselves at the mercy of the un-
known instead of taking control of their destiny,
and also almost turn themselves into living
ghosts, figments of a vanished society who will
simply wait to die. Indeed, as David Drayton and
his friends depart in his “Scout”, he drives past
the supermarket and sees “at each loophole there
were two or three pales face, staring out at us”
(147). There is good reason these faces are “pale”
for, in all probability, it will only be a matter of
time before they actually die, ending the living
death to which they have consigned themselves.
Within The Mist, the best option for surviving
the haunted castle and wilderness is to simply
escape them. The people in the grocery store live
in a haunted castle, becoming living ghosts who
desperately yearn to return to their familiar, lost
world. The mist transforms civilized areas into a
wilderness full of threatening predators. The only
hope for restoration is for individuals to confront
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their fears and journey into that wilderness in the
hope that they may somehow escape it. David
Drayton and his friends are the only ones who are
brave enough to make an effort to find the limits
of the mist. Indeed, even if they do not ultimately
escape the confines of the mist, a possibility which
each reader must determine since King makes the
ending ambiguous, they are still the only ones
who have a chance to survive.
Like H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the
Witch House” and Richard Matheson’s Hell House,
King’s The Tommyknockers is a variation on the
haunted house tale. King also follows their lead
by linking science, technology, and the supernatu-
ral in presenting his haunted house as a flying
saucer. However, whereas Lovecraft and Matheson
use science to explain the supernatural, King does
not; he simply uses a scientific and technological
environment as a setting for the supernatural. The
flying saucer has been buried near Haven for mil-
lions of years, and the aliens are dead:
They’re dead, Gard! Your Tommyknockers were
real enough, but they were mortal, and this ship
has been here for at least fifty million years. The
glacier broke around it! It covered it but it couldn’t
move it. Not even all those tons of ice could move
it. . . . They’re dead, Gard.
(191)
However, the ghosts of the aliens linger in
their vessel, waiting to possess new bodies. Jim
Gardener actually calls the ship “a haunted house
whose demons might still walk between the walls
and in the hollow places” (500).
This flying saucer represents the past because
it is millions of years old; but King reinforces the
idea by establishing a series of similarities between
the aliens and humanity. The parallels between
the races make the aliens a mirror of the worst
aspects of human civilization. One parallel
emerges from the capacity of both species for
violence. Many people, like Jim and Bobbi Ander-
son, assume an intelligent race of aliens will be
benevolent, but this idea soon falls apart:
Remember how we always assumed a technologically
advanced race of beings would be, if one made contact
with us? We thought they’d be smart like Mr. Wizard
and wise like Robert Young on Father Knows Best.
Well, here’s the truth, Bobbi. The ship crashed because
they were having a fight. . . .
Look, Bobbi. See how dark the claws are. That’s blood,
or whatever they had inside them. It’s on the claws
because they did most of the damage. The place sure
as shit didn’t look like the bridge of the starship
Enterprise before it crashed. Just before it hit, it prob-
ably looked more like a free-for-all cock-fight out
behind some redneck’s barn. This is progress, Bobbi?
(616-17)
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The discovery of these corpses reveals a race as
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
capable of extreme violence as humanity. King
presents a disillusioning vision that intelligent
races may not leave behind dark traits as they
become more advanced.
Indeed, this alien society shares one of hu-
manity’s most abhorrent and despicable institu-
tions—slavery. One room in the flying saucer is
“full of hammocks suspended in metal frames”
which contain the dead bodies of aliens
“CHAINED” inside them (619). The aliens keep
members of their own race as “galley slaves” to be
the “ship’s drive” (619). The novel reinforces the
bond between the aliens and humans by showing
how the people of Haven do not hesitate to use
slaves as well:
He [Jim] was unable to take his eyes from the left-
rear corner of the shed, where Ev Hillman, Anne
Anderson, and Bobbi’s good old beagle Peter had
somehow been hung up on posts in two old
galvanized steel shower cabinets with their doors
removed. They hung there like slabs of beef on
meathooks. But they were alive . . .
A thick black cord which looked like a high-
voltage line or a very big coaxial cable ran out of
the center of Anne Anderson’s forehead. A similar
cable ran out of the old man’s right eye. And the
entire top of the dog’s skull had been peeled away;
dozens of smaller cords ran out of Peter’s exposed
and pulsing brain.
(569)
Ev, Anne, and Peter are “living batteries” (575).
The use of slaves by the aliens and humanity is
disturbing because supposedly civilized and ad-
vanced societies use this barbaric institution, rais-
ing one of the most troubling and tragic periods
of the past. Furthermore, the flying saucer also
poses a threat to the future because if the aliens
succeed in completing their takeover of Haven,
the excavation of their ship, and, perhaps, the
conquest of the Earth, human society will change
into a civilization that is a reflection of the darkest
aspects of its past and present.
The haunted castle takes on many different
forms, such as a car or flying saucer, in Stephen
King’s works of Gothic fiction, but it takes on
some of its strangest and most imaginative mani-
festations in the works of Clive Barker. Barker
presents one unusual variation in his short story,
“Down, Satan!”, where he depicts a man who
constructs his own private hell. An important
aspect of Gregorius’ New Hell is the fact that it
does not appear to have a long history because it
is a new creation. Yet this building does come to
be endowed with a far longer history than many
of the haunted castles that appear in other works
287
 of Gothic fiction. The New Hell is based on one of
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
the oldest legends created by humanity. Many
ancient cultures, including the Greek and Roman
civilizations, have their own versions of Hell
where those who commit evil deeds are punished
for their sins. Indeed, in constructing his Hell,
Gregorius consults “the great libraries of the world
. . . for descriptions of hells both secular and
metaphysical” along with “museum vaults . . .
for forbidden images of martyrdom” (186). More-
over, “no stone was left unturned if it was sus-
pected something perverse was concealed be-
neath” (186-87). Gregorius’ New Hell, although a
product of human technology and twisted ingenu-
ity, embodies a long tradition of infernal images
and tortures. Furthermore, Gregorius specifically
desires to build a “modern inferno” that is “so
monstrous that the Tempter would be tempted,
and come to roost there like a cuckoo in a usurped
nest” (186). The New Hell also comes to be
embodied with a sense of antiquity because it has
been designed to attract the oldest source of evil
within the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
However, a far more disturbing possibility
emerges from the story than the New Hell serving
as the haunted castle, and attracting Satan to
establish a new, terrifying dominion on Earth.
Barker suggests that the true haunted castle may
be the twisted mind of Gregorius who envisions
this New Hell, and becomes its overlord after its
completion. After he has been left alone in New
Hell, Gregorius believes that he detects the pres-
ence of Satan in “noises” he hears “from the lower
depths” (188). Although he believes he hears these
sounds, he never discovers Satan, and Barker
presents the references to these noises in the
context of their being heard by Gregorius, raising
the possibility that he may be imagining it.
Indeed, when he is arrested, Gregorius himself,
along with a “few disciples whom he’d mustered
over the years”, is the actual master of New Hell,
seeing to it that “there was not a torture device in
the building they had not made thorough and
merciless use of” (190). Barker raises the disturb-
ing notion, as other writers of Gothic fiction such
as Edgar Allan Poe have done before, that the
ultimate haunted castle lies within the human
mind. The possibility exists that all the suffering
and evil that takes place in New Hell do not come
from Satan, but from the twisted mind of one
wealthy individual who possesses the wherewithal
to make his dark visions into a reality. Indeed,
perhaps the most frightening idea to emerge from
“Down, Satan!” is that humans no longer need
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the Devil because we have become as efficient and
as creative in the production of evil and suffering
as Lucifer himself.
One important aspect of the haunted car in
King’s Christine comes from mobility. Clive Barker
also presents two variations of the haunted castle
that can move from place to place in “The Hell-
bound Heart” and The Damnation Game. A small
puzzle box known as the Lemarchand Configura-
tion serves as the locus of supernatural activity
within “The Hellbound Heart”. One important
aspect of the Lemarchand Configuration is its
mobility, as it can be easily transported from one
user to another as well as to different locations,
enabling the Cenobites and the Order of the Gash
to claim new voyagers into the greater realms of
pleasure and pain. Indeed, just as Gregorius cre-
ates his own haunted castle, those who choose to
use the puzzle box often do so of their own free
will. For example, Frank undergoes extensive
preparation in summoning the Cenobites, includ-
ing having “a jug of his urine—the product of
seven days’ collection” on hand “should they
require some spontaneous gesture of self-
defilement” (187). Such preparations indicate that
Frank chooses to follow this path, leading to his
own destruction and eternal suffering for his
spirit. Thus, the Lemarchand Configuration not
only gives Barker the opportunity to present
strange entities from another realm, but also al-
lows him to comment again on the darkness that
lurks within human beings.
The Lemarchand Configuration, by virtue of
its mobility and its ability to summon the Ceno-
bites, also transforms the location where it is
opened into a manifestation of the haunted castle.
It changes the room and the house where Frank
summons them into the world into a haunted
realm filled with the horrors created by a group of
ancient entities who dwell in another dimension.
In fact, even after the Cenobites depart Frank’s
room, the taint of the ritual remains to bring
renewed suffering to others in the right circum-
stances. Barker describes such an occurrence after
Frank restores himself to a semblance of life when
his brother, Rory, bleeds in the room where the
summoner had been dragged to damnation:
He [Frank] had been lucky. Some prisoners had
departed from the world without leaving sufficient
sign of themselves from which, given an adequate
collision of circumstances, their bodies might be
remade. He had. Almost his last act, bar the shout-
ing, had been to empty his testicles onto the floor.
Dead sperm was a meager keepsake of his essential
self, but enough. When dear brother Rory (sweet
butter-fingered Rory) had let his chisel slip, there
 was something of Frank to profit from the pain.
He had found a fingerhold for himself, and a
glimpse of strength with which he might haul
himself to safety.
(220-21)
Summoners of the Cenobites, such as Frank,
condemn themselves to eternal suffering, but if
they manage to break free of this other dimen-
sion, they can bring pain and misery to innocent
people. After Frank returns, his lover, Julia, seeks
out victims for him to feast on in order to restore
his body. Rory becomes a unwitting victim, and
Frank’s niece, Kirsty, also almost becomes con-
sumed by her uncle’s efforts at restoration. Thus,
although summoners of the Cenobites may de-
serve their fate because they freely chose their
destiny, the potential is there for the taint of this
darkness to expand and claim innocent victims,
suggesting that seekers of new experiences must
be careful lest they bring harm to those who do
not deserve it.
The embodiment of the haunted castle in
Barker’s The Damnation Game, a centuries-old
wizard known as Mamoulian, shares many simi-
larities with the Lemarchand Configuration in
terms of those who seek him out. Those individu-
als who seek out Mamoulian, like those who sum-
mon the Cenobites, often do so of their own free
will, whether that emerge from a desire to explore
new areas of life or to engage in the ultimate game
of chance. Joseph Whitehead, the man who serves
as the focus of Mamoulian’s wrath within the
novel, seeks the wizard out for the ultimate game
of chance after the thief hears rumors about an
individual who “never lost a game, and who came
and went in this deceitful city like a creature who
was not, perhaps, even real” (6). And since
Mamoulian is a living entity, it is easier for him to
bring harm to innocents who happen to get in his
way in his quest for vengeance on Whitehead
than those who accidently stumble upon the
Cenobites.
Mamoulian, like the Lemarchand Configura-
tion, can also taint and transform the areas where
he dwells or travels, making them into centers of
supernatural power. Barker makes an important
observation when he notes that “most of” the
“miracles” caused by the immense powers of the
Last European “were slipped with such cunning
behind the facade of ordinary life that only the
sharpest-sighted, or those in search of the unlikely,
caught a glimpse of the Apocalypse showing its
splendors to a sun-bleached city” (277). He il-
lustrates the changes Mamoulian can make in an
environment when he describes Whitehead’s
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estate. Barker makes the house seem like a throw-
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
back to the Middle Ages because the menace of
Mamoulian drives Whitehead to adopt a siege
mentality and to protect himself with guard dogs,
video monitors, and electric fences “topped by
sharpened steel struts” and “crowned with spirals
of barbed wire” (65-66). In effect, even though
Mamoulian may not be physically present at
Whitehead’s estate, his threat haunts Whitehead
to such a degree that he changes what should be a
comfortable, palatial estate into a fortress where
he cowers behind multiple defenses, hiding from
the specter of his past.
Barker puts another interesting twist into the
character of Mamoulian: not only can the Last
European warp areas by virtue of his presence, but
he also serves as a location unto himself, as he
can bring individuals into a realm located within
him:
Finally, the thief understood. This place, which
he’d glimpsed in the sauna at the Sanctuary,
existed within the European. These ghosts were
creatures he’d devoured. Evangeline! Even she.
They waited, the tattered remains of them, in this
no-man’s-land between flesh and death, until
Mamoulian sickened of existence and lay down
and perished. Then they too, presumably, would
have their liberty. Until then their faces would
make that soundless O at him, a melancholy ap-
peal.
(406)
Mamoulian possesses the power to create a
world within himself where he can trap human
souls, reinforcing his role as the manifestation of
the haunted castle within the novel and the center
of the supernatural power and suspense in the
tale.
Stephen King and Clive Barker have both
made use of manifestations of the haunted castle
within their fiction. Their use of this element of
Gothic demonstrates the genre’s ability to adapt
itself to contemporary settings. Instead of an
ancient mouldering fortress, the haunted castle
appears as a car, a flying saucer, a puzzle box, and
even a human wizard. However, the importance
of the haunted castle does not simply emerge from
its versatility. It also comes from the important
role it can play in developing the overall themes
of a particular work of Gothic fiction. Stephen
King and Clive Barker make the haunted castle far
more than the locus of supernatural events or a
symbol of the past. King, for example, uses Chris-
tine, the haunted car, to comment on the obses-
sion people can develop for cars and the dangers
of becoming fixated with the past. In The Tommy-
knockers, the flying saucer serves as a reflection of
289
 the dark side of human society, and of the dangers
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
human society may face in the future if it should
follow this same path. Clive Barker’s New Hell in
“Down, Satan!” makes the disturbing suggestion
that the evil that lurks within humans may be
greater than the darkness of Satan. Similarly, the
Lemarchand Configuration of “The Hellbound
Heart” exposes the dangers to innocents that may
arise from those who recklessly seek to explore
the limits of human knowledge and endurance.
The appearance of the haunted castle within the
fiction of Stephen King and Clive Barker in a
multiplicity of different forms is a reflection of the
ability of writers of the Gothic genre to mould
and shape its elements to suit a constantly chang-
ing world. Indeed, this mutability demonstrates
that Gothic literature will continue to be a vibrant
and effective genre in the future.
Bibliography
Barker, Clive. The Damnation Game. New York: Charter,
1988.
———. “Down, Satan!” In The Inhuman Condition. New
York: Pocket, 1987. 183-91.
———. “The Hellbound Heart.” In Night Visions: The Hell-
bound Heart. New York: Berkley, 1988.
Birkhead, Edith. The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic
Romance. London: Constable & Company, Ltd, 1921.
Botting, Fred. Gothic. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Hume, Kathryn. Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in
Western Literature. New York: Methuen, 1984.
King, Stephen. Christine. New York: Signet, 1983.
———. The Mist. In Skeleton Crew. New York: Signet, 1986.
———. The Tommyknockers. New York: Signet, 1988.
MacAndrew, Elizabeth. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1979.
Magistrale, Tony. Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American
Gothic. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State
University Popular Press, 1988.
Railo, Eino. The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of
English Romanticism. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1927.
Varma, Devendra P. The Gothic Flame. London: Arthur
Barker, 1957.
ROBERT MIGHALL (ESSAY DATE
1999)
SOURCE: Mighall, Robert. “Haunted Houses I and II.”
In A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping
History’s Nightmares, pp. 78-129. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999.
In the following excerpt, Mighall studies how the “theme
of the ancestral curse was adapted by the Gothic fiction
of the nineteenth century” to explore the manifestation of
hereditary disease—a new topic in scientific literature of
the time—using the device of the haunted house.
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Those who have quitted the world, and those who
are not arrived at it, are as remote from each other
as the utmost stretch of mortal imagination can
conceive: What possible obligation, then, can ex-
ist between them; what rule or principle can be
laid down, that of two non-entities, the one out
of existence, and the other not in, and who can
never meet in this world, the one should control
the other to the end of time?
(Thomas Paine, Rights of Man)
‘Oh, Bertram-Haugh! how came you by those lofty
walls? Which of my ancestors had begirt me with
an impassable barrier in this horrible straight?’
(J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Uncle Silas, 1864)
The previous chapter examined the emergence
of an Urban Gothic in the first half of the nine-
teenth century, showing how many of the proper-
ties, effects, and rhetorical positions identified in
the eighteenth-century tradition were transported
and adapted to the representation of modern
urban spaces. This suggests continuity as well as
divergence, demonstrating the mobility of the
Gothic fictional mode. The present chapter will
continue with this emphasis on mobility, develop-
ment, and ‘transportation’, by exploring how
something that was largely excluded from both
the Radcliffian and the Reynoldsian traditions, a
Gothic located in the world inhabited by the
reader, was realized in works from the mid-
Victorian period. What these works have in com-
mon is their use of the idea of a family curse, an
explicit or implicit adherence to the moral em-
ployed by Horace Walpole in the first Gothic
novel, that the sins of the father will be visited
upon the children to the third and fourth genera-
tion. According to David Punter, this became
‘perhaps the most prevalent theme of Gothic
fiction’.1 How the theme of the ancestral curse
was adapted by the Gothic fiction of the nine-
teenth century is the subject of this chapter, which
explores the various media—supernatural, patho-
logical, and legalistic—that are used to convey
unwelcome legacies in Victorian Gothic fic-
tion. . . .
The [excerpted portion of this chapter from A
Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction] will identify
the key features of curse narratives and legatory
fictions, and show how these are adapted by writ-
ers around the mid-century to explore new do-
mains for malevolent legacy—principally in the
diseased bodies of descendants. It will show how
in works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Jane
Hooper, and Wilkie Collins, the supernatural
mechanisms and devices of earlier tales of family
curses are refigured through a materialist emphasis
on pathological function. In Hawthorne’s The
House of the Seven Gables (1851), Hooper’s The
House of Raby (1855), and Collins’s ‘Mad Monkton’
(1855), hereditary disease is the ghost that haunts
the present descendants of a House, an emphasis
that indicates the contemporaneity of these works,
appearing at a time when medical science was just
beginning to look to hereditary etiologies to
explain moral dysfunction. . . .
Haunted Houses I: Legends and Legacies
A cursed family inherits an unwelcome legacy.
History moves on, progress is made, enlighten-
ment replaces barbarism and superstition, but still
the curse—initiated by sacrilege, usurpation, or
some unspecified dark deed—inexorably visits its
punishment on successive generations. Curse nar-
ratives show how crimes belonging to the ances-
tral past can blight both the present and the
future. They often adapt the theme of generational
conflict which is central to early Gothic romances
such as Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Maturin’s
Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Both novels, which
have a common source in Diderot’s La Religieuse
(1770, English translation 1797), feature aristo-
cratic parents attempting to expiate their own sins
by dedicating their innocent offspring to religious
houses. The experiences of Lewis’s Agnes and Ma-
turin’s Monçada extend the parental persecution
plot of the Gothic, by using a legalistic mechanism
to bind the lives of the present generation to the
misguided customs of the past. Once this mecha-
nism is established, the parents need not actively
torment their children further (sadistic Superiors
are more than happy to act in loco parentis in this
respect), and need not even live beyond this bind-
ing contract to blight their children’s happiness.
Curse narratives develop this legatory plot by
locating the source of disorder in the more distant
past. Here it is often the great-grandfather or a
more distant ancestor still who torments his in-
nocent descendants, ‘haunting’ the present with
the consequences of his crimes. The individual’s
immediate parents may be as enlightened and af-
fectionate as the reader would wish, but are as
much victims of the ancestral past as their own
children.
‘Family Portraits’ (1812) by Jean Baptiste
Benoit Eyries is a typical curse narrative, and
which helps to identify the key properties that are
developed and adapted in the hands of Victorian
writers. Its plot is extremely tangled, involving
complex wills and curses which determine the
fortunes of two ancient families, the Meltheims
and the Wartbourgs. Whilst its immediate setting
is the end of the eighteenth century, the fortunes
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GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
URSULA K. LE GUIN (1929-)
Acclaimed for her contributions to fantasy,
science fiction, and children’s literature, Le
Guin is a highly respected author often
credited with expanding the scope of the
fantasy genre by combining conventional ele-
ments of science fiction with more traditional
literary techniques. She is known for creating
fictional worlds in works that express her
conviction that humans must live in balance
and harmony both with one another and
with their environment. Central to all of Le
Guin’s writing is the importance of individual
moral responsibility, played out by her char-
acters as they face difficult choices and
navigate conflicting demands that directly
impact the state of balance—or imbal-
ance—in their world. Le Guin’s works are
noted for their mythic creativity, elegant
prose style, complex characterization, vibrant
imagery, and for their feminist themes and
concerns. Recipient of numerous literary
awards, including multiple Nebula and Hugo
awards, Le Guin is best known for her novels,
including The Left Hand of Darkness (1969),
The Dispossessed (1974), and her Earthsea
cycle—A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The
Tombs of Atuan (1971), The Farthest Shore
(1972), and Tehanu (1990).
LeGuin’s short stories, including those
collected in The Birthday of the World and
Other Stories (2002) have been noted by crit-
ics as evocative of the Gothic tradition be-
cause of their use of the supernatural and
fantastic, their preoccupation with death, and
their revolutionary spirit.
of the present generation are rigidly determined
by the legacies of tenth-century progenitors.
The tale opens with a familiar situation. ‘Fer-
dinand . . . the last branch of the ancient family
of Meltheim’ is encouraged by his mother to
marry Clothilde de Hainthal.2 However, Ferdi-
nand, who ‘never thought of this union but with
regret’, has fallen in love with Emily, daughter of
Count Wartbourg and the sister of a schoolfriend;
but inevitably,
291
 His mother refused to consent to his marriage
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
with Emily: her husband having, she said, on his
death-bed, insisted on his wedding the baron of
Hainthal’s daughter, and that she should refuse
her consent to any other marriage. He had discov-
ered a family secret, which forced him perempto-
rily to press this point, on which depended his
son’s welfare, and the happiness of his family; she
had given her promise, and was obliged to main-
tain it, although much afflicted at being compelled
to act contrary to her son’s inclinations.
(40-1)
Thus despite the tale being set in the near
present, a tenth-century ‘family secret’ effects a
dramatic crux similar to those narratives situated
on the Gothic ‘cusp’—the ‘family’ threatens to
drag youth back into the past, into an arranged
marriage founded on the perpetuation of lineal
interests and decrees. A curse can bring the tenth
to the eighteenth or nineteenth century.
The family secret which imperils Ferdinand’s
romantic hopes turns out to be an elaborate curse
associated with portraits that have hung in the
ancestral gallery for generations. One dates from
the tenth century and has supernatural powers,
causing the death of Ferdinand’s sister by falling
on her. Behind the portrait is discovered a parch-
ment which identifies the subject as Bertha de
Hainthal, the distant ancestor of the young
woman Ferdinand’s parents wish him to marry.
Juliana’s death (like Walpole’s Conrad’s who
expired by similar means) is in fulfilment of part
of Bertha’s curse in expiation for her sins. These
involved her betrayal of her lover Ditmar de Wart-
bourg (an ancestor of Emily), by marrying Bruno
de Hainthal. To complicate matters further, Dit-
mar has hatched a few curses of his own and has
a similarly troublesome portrait which is instru-
mental in causing the death of all male members
bar one of his own family in each generation. Dit-
mar’s curse is in expiation for his murder of
Bertha’s husband and their male child. He walled
the former up in a tower on his estate. Ditmar’s
malevolent legacy involves not only the lineal
pruning of the ‘branches of his house, without be-
ing able to annihilate the trunk’ (38-9), but
stipulates that should the tower in which he
walled Bruno be pulled down then the male trunk
will also perish. This occurs when Emily’s brother,
who has learned of the curse, ‘sacrif[iced] himself
to release his house from the malediction that
hung over it’ (39). This event brings about the
opening of an old trunk containing the deeds of
the Wartbourg family. A number of old parch-
ments are read, and the outcome is that Ferdinand
is not only entitled to marry Emily (according to
the circumstances relating to his ancestry as
292
revealed in Ditmar’s will), but he also inherits the
Wartbourg estate on the death of the male heir.
Despite its baffling complexities and contriv-
ances, ‘Family Portraits’ is worth considering as it
assembles a number of conventions central to
curse narratives. Because they are aided by super-
natural means, the edicts of an ancestral curse are
generally inflexible and rigidly deterministic.3
Departing from the Radcliffian plot, the thought
of disobeying the family over the choice of spouse
is not considered. Happiness is secured only
because the children’s desires happen to comply
with the conditions of the will/curse. These curses,
in expiation for sins, involve generations of
casualties, and are only curtailed by the noble
sacrifice of the male heir who pulls down the
ancestral edifice symbolizing centuries of misery.
The curse formula involving ancestral iniquity
generally absolves the living protagonists from
agency or blame.
One further important convention of curse
narratives found in ‘Family Portraits’ is the ances-
tral portrait. The portrait of Ditmar enables Ferdi-
nand to identify the ghost which he witnesses car-
rying out the conditions of the curse, bestowing a
fatal kiss on the Count de Wartbourg’s youngest
sons. Thus when the source of disorder is from
the distant past a means of recognition is neces-
sary. The portrait of Bertha also serves to identify
the malevolent agent of the Meltheim’s ancestral
legacy, and the absurdly literal-minded fulfilment
of her prophecy—the portrait doing the deed
itself—implies the importance of this means to
identification. The portrait ‘represents’ Bertha
both in the mimetic and the legal sense. When it
is no longer the immediate parents who wield the
dead hand of the past, such devices serve to
remind by whose agency the past haunts the
present.4
A particularly striking and effective use of this
motif is found in what is perhaps the most famous
story of an ancestral curse, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Hawthorne’s
novel plays a key role in bringing the curse narra-
tive up to date and into the middle of the nine-
teenth century. Furthermore, its North American
setting helps draw attention to the mobility of the
Gothic mode, and the significant adaptations this
key Gothic theme of the ancestral curse under-
went in the nineteenth century (the significance
of the North American context will be discussed
shortly).
The House of the Seven Gables is haunted by
the past, by the dark deed upon which it was
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founded. Legend records how in the seventeenth
century Colonel Pyncheon’s acquisition of Mat-
thew Maule’s land, upon which he built his
dynastic edifice, was not unconnected with the
latter’s execution for witchcraft. At his death
Maule uttered a curse that God, in retribution for
his crimes, ‘will give [Pyncheon] blood to drink!’5
This is one of the few incidents in the legend
which is supported by ‘history, as well as fireside
tradition’ (8), and appears to have been fulfilled
when the old Colonel dies with a bloody mouth
on the very day the mansion is open to view.
Subsequent events appear to confirm that this
retribution has become hereditary—at least two
descendants die in identical circumstances. These
ancestral repetitions appear to endorse the
‘fireside’ traditions which keep the legend of
Maule’s curse alive.6 They also correspond with
the moral of the tale which is established in the
author’s ‘preface’ (which recalls Walpole’s own
from the Castle of Otranto): ‘the truth, namely, that
the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the
successive ones . . . [and] becomes a pure and
uncontrollable mischief’ (2).7 However, the super-
natural phenomena associated with this legend
are handled with extreme cautiousness. Almost all
references to the curse or to events which appear
to confirm its agency are qualified by being
designated ‘tradition’, ‘gossip’, ‘the popular
imagination’, ‘wild, chimney-corner legend[s]’, or
‘ancient superstitions’ (7, 20, 21, 197, 124). Even
these traditions and rumours are pronounced
‘doubtful’, ‘absurdities’, or ‘ridiculous’ (238, 189,
279). And yet despite this narratorial ‘distancing’
these legends are apparently confirmed by events.
If the Seven-Gabled mansion is not actually a
haunted house, it is a building haunted by its
‘House’, by its lineage. The House of the Seven
Gables is also the Pyncheon ‘House’—the lineage
which extends from the Old Colonel to the Pyn-
cheon of Today and his son, who reputedly gather
to haunt the house at midnight. According to
Lawrence Stone, ‘it was the relation of the indi-
vidual to his lineage which provided a man of the
upper classes in a traditional society with his
identity’. Stone defines lineage as ‘relations by
blood or marriage, dead, living, and yet to be
born, which collectively form a “house”’.8 A
‘House’ was therefore both the ancestral seat, and
the family associated with it who took and pre-
served its identity from its ancestors. An ancestral
portrait gallery makes this conflation between
architectural fabric and ‘blood’ visible. Its portraits
function rather like genealogical ‘growth rings’ for
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the mansion itself, testimony to the antiquity of
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
the house (building) and of the House (family).
Hawthorne’s tale of the ‘aristocratic’ Pyn-
cheons is partly a demystification of this relation-
ship, which it explores from a number of angles.
The Pyncheon mansion is often personified. The
narrator compares its front to ‘a human counte-
nance, bearing the traces of . . . the long lapse of
mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes, that
have passed within’ (5), and suggests that the
house itself was ‘like a great human heart, with a
life of its own, and full of rich and sombre
reminiscences’ (27). Both similes are encouraged
by an awareness of the building’s antiquity, that
generations have been born, lived, and died there:
‘the very timbers were oozy, as with the moisture
of a heart’ (27). In Clifford’s view, this architectural
absorption is far from beneficial; as he exclaims:
‘There is no such unwholesome atmosphere as
that of an old home, rendered poisonous by one’s
defunct forefathers and relatives!’ (261). As these
remarks suggest, the ‘unwholesome’ exchange
between house and lineage is reciprocal. Thus the
narrator remarks how Hepzibah ‘had dwelt too
much alone—too long in the Pyncheon-house—
until her very brain was impregnated with the dry-
rot of its timbers’ (59). If buildings can ‘ooze’ with
human memories it is only fair that long-dwelling
inhabitants should acquire architectural maladies.
The metaphorical conflation between build-
ing and lineage is explored further in an extended
conceit which compares Judge Jaffrey’s character
with ‘a tall and stately edifice’:
Behold, therefore, a palace! Its splendid halls and
suites of spacious apartments are floored with a
mosaic-work of costly marbles [etc] . . . With
what fairer and nobler emblem could any man
desire to shadow forth his character? Ah; but in
some low and obscure nook—some narrow closet
on the ground floor, shut, locked, and bolted, and
the key flung away—or beneath the marble pave-
ment, in a stagnant water-puddle, with the richest
pattern of mosaic-work above—may lie a corpse,
half-decayed, and still decaying, and diffusing its
death-scent all through the palace!
(229-30)
This is the corollary to the anthropomorphic
depiction of the Pyncheon house ‘oozing’ with its
inhabitants’ lineage. As this image indicates, the
Pyncheon House is founded on a crime; as Jaffrey
inherits his character from his ancestor so he
inherits the ‘death-scent’ of the Colonel’s original
crime. In other words, if Judge Jaffrey is a house,
he is a haunted one, haunted by the curse which
he perpetuates by his actions. As ‘the Pyncheon of
Today’ his body provides the site for the past to
293
 haunt the present. Once more, an ancestral
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
portrait serves an important function in this
respect. The portrait of the old Puritan Pyncheon,
which has hung in the room in which he died for
two centuries, is literally the focal point of the
tale. It conceals the lost deeds which encourage
the ‘Pyncheon of today’ in every generation to re-
enact his ancestor’s course of greed, treachery, and
single-minded ambition. The portrait of the old
Puritan allows successive generations to identify
the Pyncheon of Today. This physical recognition
enables the perpetuation of the legend of the
‘moral’ resemblance and the repetition of ancestral
crime. When Hepzibah is confronted by Judge Jaf-
frey who seeks to wrest from Clifford the secret of
‘untold wealth’, the narrator remarks: ‘Never did a
man show stronger proof of the lineage attributed
to him, than Judge Pyncheon, at this crisis, by his
unmistakable resemblance to the picture in the
inner room’ (232). Without the portrait to allow
for physical recognition such ‘genealogical’ memo-
ries would probably die out. Moral patterns are
suggested by the recurrence of physical traits. The
body and its reproduction in descent thus enables
the perpetuation of the legend of the curse. Judge
Pyncheon’s body provides the site for the crimes
and consequences of the ancestral past to visit the
present. Hawthorne thus focuses on the relation-
ship between House and house to suggest a new
site for ancestral haunting. A haunted body is a
diseased body, a house haunted by its lineage is
similarly diseased. 9 This is confirmed in the
conclusion when Holgrave diagnoses the ‘curse’
as hereditary apoplexy, observing how ‘This mode
of death has been an idiosyncrasy with his family,
for generations past . . . Old Maule’s prophecy
was probably founded on a knowledge of this
physical predisposition in the Pyncheon race’
(304). What looked like ‘witchcraft’ was really a
shrewd insight into an hereditary predisposition
to a pathological trait. This focus provides a
materialist alternative to the ‘wild, chimney-
corner legends’ which attribute the ancestral
repetitions to supernatural agents.
Although the present study is largely con-
cerned with British fiction, Hawthorne’s tale is
included here to demonstrate the mobility of the
Gothic, its ability to be transported from one
geopolitical environment to another. It can serve
as a test case for the historical and political
determinants informing the shift from an exotic
to a domestic Gothic fictional mode. Hawthorne
himself was acutely aware of the importance of
setting for Gothic fiction, or at least Gothic occur-
rences. As he asserts in the Preface to his later
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novel The Marble Faun (1861), which is set in the
traditional Gothic locality of Italy, ‘Romance and
poetry, like ivy, lichens and wall-flowers, need
Ruin to make them grow.’ And, as his readers
knew, there were no castle ruins, ‘no shadow, no
antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy
wrong’, in the ‘broad and simple daylight’ of
America.1 0 And yet Hawthorne’s own works belie
this (self-consciously ironic) statement. For shad-
ows, (relative) antiquity, and picturesque and
gloomy wrongs do cloud the broad daylight of
the New England location of the seven-gabled
mansion. The Pyncheon ‘House’ (lineage) carries
this heavy Gothic burden through the medium of
reproduction and pathology. When the body
serves as the locus for ancestral guilt, and when
the supernatural curse is adapted to more material
circumstances, then geopolitical and historical
context are potentially immaterial. The historical
and ideological determinants of this transporta-
tion, that which enabled a middle class ‘domestic’
Gothic, will now be considered.
One of the ways Hawthorne achieves this
transportation of the Gothic, from gloomy Europe
to sunny America, is his representation of the Pyn-
cheons’ ‘aristocratic’ pretensions, and the way this
is associated with the morbidity which really
distinguishes their lineage. For example, Hepzi-
bah’s pride in her family’s ‘aristocratic’ impractica-
bility, which she considers an ‘hereditary trait’, is
described by the narrator as ‘a morbid one, such
as is often generated in families that remain long
above the surface of society’ (77-8). Even the
‘aristocratic’ chickens which resemble their own-
ers so much, are a race in decline: ‘All of them
were pure specimens of a breed which had been
transmitted down as an heirloom in the Pyncheon
family . . . the hens . . . had a queer, rusty,
withered aspect, and a gouty kind of movement
. . . It was evident that the race had degenerated,
like many a noble race besides, in consequence of
too strict a watchfulness to keep it pure’ (88-9).
This passage underlines the theme of inheritance
which is central to the narrative, but it does this
by reducing it to a biological function. The hens
are anthropomorphized by the references to their
‘aristocratic lineage’ (90); but this also serves as a
reminder that aristocrats are animals and their
claims to distinction are as much biological as
ideological. ‘Blue Blood’ is a fiction which is
nonetheless premissed upon a function of repro-
duction (reproducing ancestral honour).1 1 The
example of the hens is extended to ‘many a noble
race besides’, further endorsing the association
between aristocratic ‘heirlooms’, nobility and
disease, which the text uses to shift the scene of
haunting from the supernatural to the somatic
sphere. However, whilst its principal function is to
comment on the decline of the Pyncheons, it
implies that their condition is not unusual, but is
actually a consequence of their caste mentality.
Through such emphases, Hawthorne makes a
political point, using physiology and pathology to
stigmatize the caste politics of the ‘nobility’.
Hawthorne’s representations concur with
contemporary comment on the problems of
heredity. For example, George Man Burrows’s
Commentaries on Insanity (1828) remarks how
‘Among the highest ranks, hereditary insanity is
more common than among the lower; for the
former most frequently contract marriage with
their own rank, or even with their own family’.1 2
An exclusive concern with caste inevitably in-
volves degrees of endogamy, and therefore, for
many observers, degeneration. The pride which
characterizes the villains of Gothic romance, and
which impels them to pursue their disastrous
dynastic campaigns, here points to a physiologi-
cal, or, what would later be termed, a ‘eugenic’
lesson. As Henry Belinaye observed in 1832: ‘The
marriages arranged among the higher classes, from
motives of convenience or family interest, are
seldom so prolific as those founded on mutual
choice.’1 3 The reason for this circumstance? For
Belinaye, successful reproduction requires mutual
affection. To demonstrate this he observes how
‘In vain the hated tyrants of Florence, the latter
Medici, had recourse to every method to perpetu-
ate their line; they have bequeathed to the world
nothing but a warning, and the remembrance of a
name’ (67). Like the Gothic novelist, the physiolo-
gist turns to the historical past for a dramatic
incident of domestic disorder. He equates the lack
of affection in marriage (a consequence of politic
alliances) with tyrannies worthy of Walpole’s
Manfred, and draws a ‘biological’ lesson from this
stock theme of the fall of a House. In this case it is
reproductive rather than poetic or divine retribu-
tion which effects this decline. Whilst Gothic
novelists stigmatize arranged marriages based on
aristocratic pride as unfeeling and unnatural, and
dramatize their effects on sensitive protagonists,
physicians are more concerned with the disastrous
biological consequences of such unions. When
medicine rediscovered heredity towards the
middle of the nineteenth century, it found in the
practices of the nobility conspicuous examples of
familial practices which institutionalized a regard
for lineage, transmission, and entailment. Add to
this the understanding that the mysteries of
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hereditary transmission are easier to detect in their
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
dysfunctional and pathological forms (pathology
serving a similar function to the ancestral portrait
in this respect), and the parallels between Gothic
and physiological discourse occurring here are
easier to account for.1 4 A family curse or ancestral
taint is the dark underside of the principle of
inheritance, both depict versions of what Michel
Foucault terms ‘alliance gone bad’. Foucault’s
work can help explain this historical concurrence.
Foucault’s La Volonté de savoir (1976) famously
charts what he calls the deployment of sexuality,
an historical circumstance which he attributes to
a bourgeois project to define its own ‘class body’,
in contradistinction to the practices of the nobil-
ity.1 5 This, as Robert Miles has suggested, can il-
luminate aspects of Gothic fiction, principally its
focus on family dynamics and generational con-
flicts. According to Miles, ‘there is a neat fit
between The History of Sexuality’s clash between
the deployments of “alliance” and “sexuality” and
Gothic writing’s typical conflict between the
father’s dynastic ambitions and the children’s
romantic love’.1 6 As seen in earlier examples,
Gothic fiction often dramatizes this conflict by
depicting what could be termed inverted ‘family
romances’, where children born to aristocratic
parents struggle to establish their domestic ar-
rangements on more democratic models, based
on ‘affection’ and natural relations. In Foucaul-
dian terms, this figures a conflict between the
older claims of ‘alliance’ and the interests of an
emergent concept which he identifies as
‘sexuality’. The fundamental difference between
the older, aristocratic model of ‘alliance’
(characterized by primogeniture, arranged mar-
riages, and the entailment of property) and the
model of sexuality (with its emphasis on romantic
love, choice, and familial affection), is that the
former looked to the past for validation, while the
latter staked its hopes on the future.
The foundation of the aristocratic model of al-
liance was the family. Through the practice of
primogeniture, the ancestry, status, and name of
the family or ‘House’ was perpetuated. According
to Foucault, it was also in and around the family
that ‘sexuality’ first became problematic. For him,
‘the family, the keystone of alliance, was the germ
of all the misfortunes of sex’ (Foucault, III).
Through the problematics of familial relations,
and by means of what Foucault characterizes as a
‘reflux movement’ (39), ‘normal’ sexuality was
defined. By recognizing the dangers inherent
within sexuality (the dangers of consanguinity, of
debilitating practices, and misdirected passions) a
295
 stable and well-regulated and productive sexuality
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
was imagined. As S. G. Howe remarked when he
surveyed the products of ancestral guilt in the
asylums of Massachusetts in 1848:
The moral to be drawn from the prevalent exist-
ence of idiocy in society, is, that a very large class
of persons ignore the conditions upon which
alone health and reason are given to men, and
consequently they sin in various ways . . . they
overlook the hereditary transmission of certain
morbid tendencies, or they pervert the natural ap-
petites of the body into lusts of divers kinds,—the
natural emotions of the mind into fearful pas-
sions, and thus bring down the awful conse-
quences of their own ignorance and sin upon the
heads of their unoffending children.1 7
Howe’s concern is with the correct deployment
of sexuality, with the appropriate regulation of
the body’s ‘natural’ impulses. In the violation of
these laws is witnessed the ‘perverted’ and degen-
erate form of the idiot, the outcome of dysfunc-
tional inheritance. Bourgeois sexuality challenges
aristocratic ‘alliance’, by appropriating the themes
and obsessions of the latter to identify the morbid
and dysfunctional operations of its own concerns.
In the individual failures of the bourgeoisie’s
(expansive) project are found its opposites: bodies
tied to the past and doomed to extinction. The
perverse or diseased bourgeois was figured as an
example of ‘alliance gone bad’ (Foucault, 109).
These dynamics can be identified in Gothic
curse narratives, which show the ‘House’ of the
aristocracy in ruins. What was implicit, metaphori-
cal, or merely suggested in Hawthorne’s House of
the Seven Gables—that hereditary illness can be
used as a modern version of the supernatural
curse—is made explicit in Jane Margaret Hooper’s
The House of Raby; Or, Our Lady of Darkness,
published in 1854. The narrative of Hooper’s
novel is dynastic and ‘generational’, following the
fortunes of two families across four generations.
The title refers to the Raby family, rather than its
ancestral seat which is called Carleton Castle. This
intense familial focus is reinforced in the titles
given to each book: Introductory; Marriage and
Birth; Parents and Children; The Last Generation
of a Noble House. As these titles suggest, the nar-
rative follows the decline of the House of Raby,
while the theme of heredity provides its structure,
dramatic, and moral conflict, and its suspense.
The tale is narrated in the present by Frank
Hastings, but incorporates epistolary material and
anecdotes from the late eighteenth century. The
lives of members of the noble Rabys and the
solidly middle-class Hastings are bound together
through at least three generations. Henry Hast-
296
ings, Frank’s grandfather was a schoolfriend of
Frederick, sixth earl of Carleton and later became
Rector on his friend’s estate. The earl falls in love
with Henry’s sister Margaret, but a parental
interdiction prevents the marriage. A familiar situ-
ation. However, in this case it is Margaret’s father,
the Reverend Hastings who opposes the match:
Against the young man himself they had nothing
to say; they believed him to be noble, amiable,
truthful, every way worthy to be Henry’s friend;
but against his marriage with one of their daugh-
ters they had two reasons to urge. First, they knew
a great deal of the viscount’s father, and firmly
believed him to be insane. His disease, they
expected, would show itself sooner or later in his
son; or, passing over him, would reappear in his
children.—Secondly, they believed that a marriage
in her own rank of life would be a happier one for
their daughter.1 8
Here we find a novel twist to the familiar
theme of domestic happiness thwarted by parental
prohibition. It is now the middleclass parent who
raises objections which implicitly equate class
identity with pathology. This reverses the earlier
pattern, implying that social ascent would mean
biological decline. Ancestry and family pride are
no longer the issue, it is the health of future
progeny which dictates bourgeois domestic policy.
This situation also adapts the situation of the curse
plot to new and overtly physiological uses. Freder-
ick’s father, like many a Gothic ancestor, has left a
malevolent legacy for his descendants. His
‘madness’, like Maule’s curse, is almost exclusively
the preserve of rumour, gossip, or folk memory. It
is largely a consequence of his behaviour, which
followed a suitably Gothic pattern:
Francis, fifth Earl of Carleton, was what all the
world called a very strange man—an oddity. Some
few who knew a little of his private life, said he
was the victim of an uncontrolled temper, a
domestic tyrant, a misanthrope, a miser . . . and
a few of the plain-speaking kind had been heard
to say, that the Earl of Carleton was madder than
many a man in Bedlam. He had had a gentle wife
whom he killed with terror; and he had often
frightened his child into fits . . . It would be a
useless and revolting task to give any further
particulars of the earl’s domestic conduct . . . [At
the death of his wife, he] shut up Carleton Castle
and went abroad, where he was occasionally heard
of by English travellers, as the hero of stories that
made their hair stand on end.
(i. 142-3)
The earl is cast in the Gothic mould of a Man-
fred or Mazzini, ‘killing’ his wife, tyrannizing and
terrifying his household, and indulging in un-
specified dark or immoral deeds: in short, exempli-
fying a ‘Gothic’ antithesis of a well-regulated
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domestic ideal. Whatever the truth of the situa-
tion, the wicked earl’s behaviour has left a legacy
of rumour and scandal which blights the happi-
ness of his son. However, what earlier took the
form of a supernatural curse is refigured in wholly
material terms: in this scientific and rational age,
the legacies of ancestral crime are carried in the
bodies of descendants. The curse haunting the
House of Raby is hereditary insanity.
Margaret regretfully abides by her father’s
decision, and the text endorses her act of renuncia-
tion. It is applauded as a noble and necessary
sacrifice for the greater good. Like curse narratives
which depict supernatural agents, The House of
Raby is somewhat pessimistic in its outlook.
Ancestral crimes demand expiation, and this
means innocent victims—those who inherit the
taint, and those who renounce domestic happi-
ness from a sense of duty. In a generational narra-
tive this pattern can repeat itself with relentless
determination.1 9 Margaret remains unmarried,
while Frederick eventually seeks solace in a mar-
riage of convenience with his cousin. This is ef-
fected by his aunt Lady Morton, who deliberately
ignores the rumours of insanity to secure for her
daughter ‘an earldom and forty thousand a year’
(i. 221). Aristocrats are less scrupulous than their
bourgeois counterparts about what would later be
termed ‘eugenic’ considerations. Practices associ-
ated with the nobility, what Foucault terms
‘alliance’, are thus implicitly associated with the
pathological mechanism which serves the func-
tion of a curse in this tale. The rumours of his
father’s insanity (combining Gothic cruelty with
the stereotypical aristocratic rakishness) compelled
the sensible bourgeois to prohibit a union with
the son. An aristocrat faced with the same situa-
tion pursues the traditional policies of her class
and thus perpetuates the curse of the past. By
transforming the Gothic curse into a pathological
function, The House of Raby, like the medical
discourse contemporary with it, depicts ‘alliance
gone bad’. Male twins are born of this union and
towards the end of his first year Arundel, the
second son, exhibits symptoms of the mental ill-
ness with which he is ‘cursed’ for the rest of his
life.
Margaret Hastings, having renounced domes-
tic happiness, devotes her time to the study of
insanity, and spends her life looking after the bril-
liant but unstable Arundel, the son of her former
lover. She reads up in Pinel and the German alien-
ists, and helps out at a local asylum. Her respon-
sible and useful work stands in marked contrast to
the selfish motives of the noble family which her
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own family supports through each generation.
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
The years pass and another Margaret Hastings is
born. She grows up in her aunt’s company, and
imbibes her namesake’s sense of duty, industry
and skill in caring for the afflicted. And like her
aunt she falls in love with a Raby, developing an
ill-fated passion for Arundel, who, notwithstand-
ing his taint, is a noble and progressive landowner
who devotes his energy and money to improving
the lot of the people on his estates. Like her
namesake, young Margaret suppresses her love
and devotes her life to a similar course of dutiful
renunciation. The love turns out to be reciprocal,
but both renounce its physical consummation,
and spend their days in a Platonic union. As Arun-
del declares:
I shall be the last of the Rabys. The old name had
better die. It stands for something that has passed
out of existence . . . If nobility obliges a man to
do anything—it obliges me to sacrifice my indi-
vidual feelings and affections for the good of the
community—and to accept the sacrifice . . . We
will have no child to ask us, ‘Why was I born to
this accursed inheritance? . . . Father! mother! I
do not thank you for a life like this! . . . I know
not what dreadful deeds I may commit when the
demon takes possession of me! Life like this is a
disgrace to earth!
(iii. 320-1)
With a pathological ‘curse’ the sacrifice de-
manded no longer involves the pulling down of
an ancestral tower and the release of a soul in tor-
ment (‘Family Portraits’), the ‘House’ which is
pulled down is the tainted lineage of the Raby
family itself. Like the tenth-century tower associ-
ated with the supernatural curse of the Wart-
bourgs, the ‘House’ of Raby ‘stands for something
that has passed out of existence’—the customs
and domestic policies of the aristocracy. As Arun-
del tells young Margaret: ‘In reality, my nature is
inferior to yours. I am precocious, irregular, incom-
plete,—diseased. You are neither before nor behind
your age—regular, complete—normal.—This is the
will of God!’ (iii. 22, original emphasis). Arundel
inherits the curse of ancestral crime, but is free
from the ideological principles from which such a
curse originates. His democratic and progressive
inclinations instil in him a sense of responsibility,
and thus he ends the curse. It is the body which
carries the curse, and therefore ‘exorcism’ is
achieved through reproductive renunciation. The
occasion for the above speech is Arundel’s resolu-
tion to adopt Frank Hastings, the narrator, as the
heir to the Raby estate. His decision to let the
name die is a self-consciously political one, found-
297
 ing a progressive dynasty free from the legacy of
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
the past. As Arundel declares, with the lapse of
the earldom:
The wealth of the Rabys will enrich other houses,
and there will be no more of our race . . . God’s
will be done . . . I look to you, my boy to found a
new race—better fitted to these later times than
our old one. . . .
May the house of Hastings excel in all honourable
things the house of Raby;—then will its last son
have succeeded in converting the evil of his own
lot into a blessing for the rest of the world.
(iii. 323-4)
The (biological) fall of one House means the
rise of ‘a new race—better fitted to these later
times’. The responsible, industrious, and healthy
Hastings are thus rewarded for their self-sacrificing
sense of duty. Twice the Hastings are tested and
twice they renounce immediate gratification of
desire for the greater good. If this is read in Fou-
cauldian terms, it displays a recognition of ‘the
menaces of heredity’, and the conversion of the
evil of a racism ‘organized for basically conserva-
tive ends’, to a ‘dynamic racism, a racism of
expansion’ (Foucault, 124, 125). In the fourth
generation a Hastings joins the Raby family, but
does so by overcoming ‘birth’, the problematic of
the narrative. The House of Raby presents a familiar
Gothic scenario of ancestral crime, expiation, and
renunciation. However, it uses this to focus upon
a (predominantly realist) drama of domestic
conflict which centres around issues of sexuality
(the basis of the two Margarets’ and Arundel’s
sacrifices), and shows how the legacies of the past
(‘alliance’ and ancestral pride), can survive to
blight the happiness of the present generation.
‘Sexuality’ is thus menaced by the spectre of its
antithesis, which survives in corrupted form as a
pathological pedigree.
As in The House of the Seven Gables, the ‘Gothic’
and supernatural aspects of the narrative are
lightly handled and largely figurative. They oper-
ate on the level of metaphor or analogy. For
example, Carleton Castle is twice compared to
Udolpho (i. 19; iii. 71), while Arundel’s taint is
invariably referred to as his ‘curse’. There is also
talk of a haunted east wing. Its ‘ghost’ is reputedly
Arundel’s grandmother, the wife of the wicked
earl who was imprisoned there for attempting to
escape his domestic tyranny. Her ghost haunts the
window from which she attempted to make her
escape. The events of this legend (which resembles
that of the ‘Ghost’s Walk’ in Dickens’s Bleak
House), are recounted by a suitably Gothic house-
keeper, Old Cuthbert who was in the old earl’s
service. The narration occurs when this wing is
298
opened up for the first time since the poor wom-
an’s death. Arundel’s mother and the younger
Margaret Hastings aged 10, explore the apartments
just as twilight descends. Unbeknown to them at
the outset, it is the anniversary of the countess’s
ill-fated attempt to escape. As Cuthbert narrates
the legend in the gathering gloom, Gothic expec-
tations are established. They are fulfilled when a
ghostly face appears at that very window. It turns
out to be Arundel who manifests his first major
outbreak of insanity in this incident. His pale
vacant face, which resembles his grandmother’s,
staring in at that window on that night under-
standably encourages the witnesses to imagine it
is the apparition. Until they discover their mistake
the narrative momentarily admits the possibility
of the supernatural. This conflation of the super-
natural with the pathological is significant. It
shows that the ‘curse’ which follows the wicked
deeds of the Gothic grandfather and which give
rise to the ghostly legend, now resides in the body
of his descendant which is ‘haunted’ by its legacy
in a pathological form. In this way, the pathologi-
cal appropriates the supernatural mechanism of
cursed inheritance, while paying a tribute to its
earlier discursive provenance in its allusions to
Gothic conventions.
The situation of the pathological being in-
serted into the space established by a supernatural
mechanism is a common feature of curse narra-
tives from the mid-nineteenth century. It is central
to Wilkie Collins’s tale ‘Mad Monkton’, first
published in 1855 as ‘The Monktons of Wincot
Abbey’. ‘Monkton’ involves both an ancient
legend about an old family, and a modern rational
discourse on the strain of madness which also
haunts the Monkton race. These two interpreta-
tions or authorities compete for hermeneutic
supremacy in the narrative. But whilst the modern
rational explanation appears to be triumphant,
the reader is perhaps left with some doubts.
It is commonly believed that Alfred Monkton,
the last of a great Catholic family, has inherited
the taint of insanity which had been in his family
for generations; the consequence of some ‘crime
committed in past times by two of the Monktons,
near relatives’.2 0 Monkton wishes to marry Miss
Elmslie, but her guardian refuses his consent on
the grounds of the Monkton family taint. When
the guardian dies, the lovers prepare for their
nuptials. Arrangements for the wedding are sus-
pended, however, by what appears to be an
outbreak of the Monkton madness. This takes a
most peculiar form, and is reported by the narra-
tor, Monkton’s only friend who is also the son of
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Miss Elmslie’s guardian. Monkton confides to the
narrator that he cannot marry until he has buried
his rakish uncle who died in a duel, but whose
body lies unburied somewhere near Rome.
Monkton is haunted by the ‘phantom’ of this
uncle, which reminds him of his duty and never
leaves his side. This duty actually conforms to an
ancient prophecy or curse associated with the
Monktons, that if one of their line remains
unburied, then the Monktons will die out with
that generation. Monkton believes in the proph-
ecy and its ghostly harbinger, and sets out to
restore his uncle’s body to its place in the
Monkton’s ancestral vault. He will not marry until
he has accomplished this.
Therefore, whilst it is no longer his ‘madness’
which acts as a bar to matrimony, the prophecy
which invokes another form of ancestral curse
works to the same effect. If its warnings are
ignored it will mean the end of the Monkton race.
A by now familiar situation: the present and
(reproductive) future is menaced by ancestral lega-
cies which imperil its domestic happiness. How-
ever in this case there is an alternative cause or
agent of this legacy. The supernatural and psychi-
atric are conjoined; it is the narrator’s task to
separate them. He is responsible for transforming
the supernatural into the pathological, Gothic
into Realism, and a legend into a ‘case’. As he
reasons
It was plain that the real hallucination in the case
now before me, lay in Monkton’s conviction of the
truth of the old prophecy, and in his idea that the
fancied apparition was a supernatural warning to
him to evade its denunciations. And it was equally
clear that both delusions had been produced, in
the first instance, by the lonely life he had led,
acting on a naturally excitable temperament,
which was rendered further liable to moral disease
by an hereditary taint of insanity.
(71, my emphasis)
In this way a pathological discourse on heredi-
tary insanity helps to explain why a ‘case’ believes
in an ancestral prophecy. It is this belief which
informs the narrator’s ‘diagnosis’ of Monkton.
Monkton’s belief in the legend which threatens
the end of his race, and thus his domestic happi-
ness, is used as evidence for, or a ‘symptom’ of,
hereditary insanity. Thus a supernatural curse
enables, but is at the same time conquered or
invalidated by, a clinical discourse which shares
its emphasis on ancestry, entailment, and the ef-
fects on future generations. But only one version
can be allowed authority in the text, as both can-
not be true. The two versions of the curse mecha-
nism face each other in epistemological combat.
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The outcome depends entirely on discursive or
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
generic criteria. Or, in other words, whether the
narrative is to function as a legend or a ‘case’.
A further complication is the narrator’s rash
promise to help Monkton find his uncle’s corpse.
This troubles the narrator, who is very much his
father’s son, sharing his sense of (eugenic) respon-
sibility: ‘Supposing that with my help he found
Mr Monkton’s body, and took it back with him to
England, was it right in me thus to lend myself to
promoting the marriage which would most likely
follow these events—a marriage which it might be
the duty of everyone to prevent at all hazards?’
(71). By going along with one form of ancestral
curse—the supernatural one—he is compelled to
ignore the claims of another—the belief that
Monkton’s acts are the consequence of his inher-
ited insanity. Thus whilst he supports the interests
of the latter—the now familiar duty of preventing
a union which would perpetuate this taint—he
finds himself furthering the cause of its antago-
nist—the project which validates the supernatural,
but which serves to confirm for the narrator the
tradition that the Monkton race is mad.
At first, the supernatural appears to be in the
ascendant. They discover the unburied corpse of
Stephen Monkton, and the prophecy appears to
be authenticated. Clearly troubled by these occur-
rences, the narrator refers to these ‘striking coinci-
dences which [appear] to attest’ the truth of the
prophecy (100). But fate is against the Monktons,
and the ship taking the uncle’s remains to his
ancestral vault goes down in a storm. Monkton
immediately contracts what is diagnosed as ‘brain
fever’, and settles into a decline. A physician who
attends him states that ‘He may get the better of
the fever, but he has a fixed idea, which never
leaves him night or day, which has unsettled his
reason, and which will end in killing him . . .’
(101). The supernatural prophecy thus becomes
an idée fixe, a concept so popular with nineteenth-
century alienists. Monkton’s fever proves fatal, ap-
pearing to confirm the prophecy. But the narra-
tive is reluctant to accept this interpretation, and
strives to allow the pathological explanation
precedence. Therefore, in the last stage of his ill-
ness Monkton loses all memory of the prophecy
and of the events in Italy. Pathology thus makes a
final bid for dominance over superstition, as
Monkton dies of a ‘fever’ rather than a ‘curse’. As
Monkton is the only person who believed in the
prophecy, his loss of memory enables this sup-
pression. This textual forgetting of the Gothic
‘ancestry’ of the medical model thus allows the
299
 latter to gain epistemological supremacy in the
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
narrative. The rationalistic explanation can only
function if the cultural memory of an ancestral
curse is wiped from the protagonist’s conscious-
ness and from the text. The tale ends with a visit
to the ancestral vault and its ominous empty
space: a troubling reminder of the ancient proph-
ecy which the modern discourse on pathological
taint has superseded only by appropriating its
logic and its consequences.
Both Hooper’s and Collins’s texts were men-
tioned in an article entitled ‘Hereditary Influence,
Animal and Human’ appearing in the Westminster
Review in 1856. The article, which was republished
the following year in the Journal of Psychological
Medicine and Mental Pathology, was by George
Henry Lewes, and took stock of the recent interest
in the question of heredity, while reviewing
important monographs on this subject. Lewes also
observed how the theme of ‘hereditary taint’ had
been recently handled in prose fiction. Among
the books he mentions are The House of Raby, Con-
stance Herbert, by Geraldine Jewsbury (1855)2 1 and
Collins’s ‘Monkton’. But Lewes takes these writers
to task, complaining that: ‘artists are not bound
to be physiologists, and are assuredly bad law giv-
ers in such cases. As artists, they employ their
permitted licence in simplifying the problem of
insanity to suit their stories . . .’. By implying that
‘the transmission of the malady is inevitable [they]
teach questionable doctrine, because they teach it
by means of fallacious facts’.2 2 For Lewes finds
many reasons to deny that an hereditary taint is
‘certain’ to be transmitted. This was the view of
most commentators on the question up until the
mid-century, who still stressed the ameliorative
benefits of a sound regimen to combat an heredi-
tary taint. Within a few years, however, the trend
in mental pathology would move towards a more
deterministic model, one which comes closer to
the novelist’s more dramatic emphasis. Indeed,
the same number of the Journal of Psychological
Medicine and Mental Pathology (1857), in which
Lewes’s article was reprinted includes Forbes Win-
slow’s abridgement of B. A. Morel’s Traite des
Dégénérescences (1857), the most influential work
in establishing a more pessimistic view of trans-
mission and decline.2 3 The following year, S. G.
Howe’s On the Causes of Idiocy appeared in a Brit-
ish imprint. And in 1860 Henry Maudsley pub-
lished his first major article on hereditary insan-
ity, appropriately enough on Edgar Allan Poe,
where he expounds for the first time the
(scientific) lesson that he would preach for the
next forty years: that ‘the sins of the fathers [are]
300 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
visited on the children unto the third and fourth
generation’.2 4 These influential writers, to varying
degrees, stress the accumulative effects of ancestral
vice or disease, and the stern law of their entail-
ment. If the Gothic fictions of Hooper, Jewsbury,
and Collins ‘transcend[ed] the limits of art’
(Lewes, 400) they also anticipated the current of
medical thought.
Notes
1. Punter, The Literature of Terror (London: Longman,
1980), 52.
2. Eyries, Tales of the Dead: The Ghost Stories of the Villa
Diodati, trans. Terry Hale (Chislehurst: Gothic Society,
1992), 20.
3. I have encountered only two tales of family curses in
which the conditions of the curse are not met to the
letter, Stephen Cullen’s The Castle of Inchvally (1796)
and Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles
(1902), and in both the supposed portents turn out to
be hoaxes.
4. For the reasons enumerated, ancestral portraits often
appear in tales involving family curses. In The Castle
of Otranto Manfred is haunted by the resemblance
between Theodore and his ancestor Alfonso; in Dick-
ens’s Bleak House (1853-4), which includes the curse of
the ‘Ghost’s Walk’, Guppy detects the resemblance
between Lady Dedlock and Esther Summerson when
he encounters her portrait. Ancestral portraits also
feature in late 19th-cent. works featuring family curses,
including Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Ollala’ (1885),
Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), chs. 34 and 35,
and Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles (1902).
How writers developed this theme in late-Victorian
Gothic will be discussed in the next chapter. On the
motif of the ‘haunted portrait’ see Theodore Zi-
olkowski, Disenchanted Images: A Literary Iconography
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); see also
Maria M. Tartat, ‘The Houses of Fiction: Toward a
Definition of the Uncanny’, Comparative Literature, 33
(1981), 167-82.
5. Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, ed. Milton
R. Stern (New York: Penguin, 1986), 8.
6. On Hawthorne’s Gothic ‘repetitions’ in this text see
Eugenia C. Delamotte, Perils of the Night: A Feminist
Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990), 113-14.
7. On how Hawthorne’s text compares with, and departs
from Otranto see Ronald T. Curran, ‘“Yankee Gothic”:
Hawthorne’s “Castle of Pyncheon”’, Studies in the
Novel, 8 (1976), 69-80; on Hawthorne and the Gothic
tradition see Jane Lundblad, Nathaniel Hawthorne and
the Tradition of Gothic Romance (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1946).
8. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-
1800 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 29, 28-9. See
also Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kin-
ship, Household and Sexuality, trans. Richard Southern
(1976; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),
1-33.
9. On Hawthorne’s combination of the Gothic and the
scientific in his depiction of the ‘atmosphere’ of the
House of the Seven Gables see Jonathan Arac, Com-
 missioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dick-
ens, Carlyle, Melville and Hawthorne (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979), 97-103.
10. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, ed. Richard H. Brodhead
(New York: Penguin, 1990), 3.
11. On this and other aspects of ‘Aristocratic Ideology’, its
tensions and erosion, and its relationship to the
emergence of the novel, see Michael McKeon, The
Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: John
Hopkins University Press, 1988), 131-75.
12. Burrows, Commentaries on the Causes, Forms, Symptoms,
and Treatment, Moral and Medical of Insanity (London:
Thomas and George Underwood, 1828), 104.
13. Belinaye, The Sources of Health and Disease in Com-
munities; or, Elementary Views of Hygiene (London:
Treuttel & Würtz & Richter, 1832), 66.
14. On how ‘Degeneration makes heredity visible’ see
Laura Otis, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the
Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 60.
15. Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert
Hurley originally as The History of Sexuality: An Introduc-
tion as vol i of his proposed four part study (1979;
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 124.
16. Miles, Gothic Writing 1750-1820: A Genealogy (London:
Routledge, 1993), 15.
17. Howe, ‘Supplement to Report on Idiocy’, Report Made
to the Legislature of Massachusetts, Upon Idiocy (Boston:
Collidge & Wiley, 1848), 56-7; republished as On the
Causes of Idiocy (Edinburgh: Maclachlan & Stewart,
1858).
18. [Hooper], The House of Raby: Or, Our Lady of Darkness,
3 vols. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1854), i. 145. The
novel was published anonymously, and reissued in
1874 in a slightly revised form in one volume under
Mrs Hooper’s name.
19. Compare with Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1848), and
Hardy’s The Well-Beloved (1892), other ‘generational’
narratives. On fiction as repetition in these and other
texts see J. Hillis Miller’s Fiction and Repetition: Seven
English Novels (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982).
20. Collins, ‘Mad Monkton’, in Mad Monkton and Other
Tales, ed. Norman Page (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1994), 39. On Collins and psychiatry see Jenny
Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of the Home: Wilkie
Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psy-
chology (London: Routledge, 1988).
21. Jewsbury’s novel shares similarities with both Hoop-
er’s and Collins’s. Like Raby it is ‘generational’, show-
ing how the ‘eugenic’ mistakes of one generation live
on into the next; like ‘Monkton’, an hereditary taint
of insanity is complicated by a pre-existing curse for
sacrilege. Geraldine Jewsbury, Constance Herbert, 3 vols.
(London: Hirst & Blackett, 1855).
22. Lewes, ‘Hereditary Influence, Animal and Human’,
Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology,
10 (1857), 384-402, 400.
23. On the importance of Morel’s work see Ruth Fried-
lander, ‘Benedict-Augustin Morel and the Develop-
ment of the Theory of Dégénérescence (the Introduc-
tion of Anthropology into Psychology)’, unpublished
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Ph.D. thesis (University of California at San Francisco,
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
1973); Ian Dowbiggin, ‘Degeneration and Hereditari-
anism in French Medicine 1840-90: Psychiatric Theory
as Ideological Adaption’, in William F. Bynum and
Roy Porter (eds.), The Anatomy of Madness, vol. i
(London: Routledge, 1988), 185-229; Otis, Organic
Memory, 49-53. For the best survey of degenerationist
thought see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A
European Disorder, c.1848-c.1918 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1989). For developments in
Victorian psychiatry and the emergence of ‘positivist’
and hereditarian emphases, see Vieda Skultans, Mad-
ness and Morals: Ideas on Insanity in the Nineteenth
Century (London: Routledge, 1975); Andrew Scull, The
Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in
Britain, 1700-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1993).
24. Maudsley, ‘Edgar Allan Poe’, Journal of Mental Science,
6 (1859-60), 328-69, 340. Maudsley’s article offers
intriguing possibilities for exploring the relationship
between fictional and medical discourses with regard
to the theme of hereditary taint. It is self-consciously
‘literary’, and evokes the authority of Nathaniel Haw-
thorne on how ‘The weaknesses and defects, the bad
passions, the mean tendencies, and the moral diseases
which lead to crime, are handed down from one
generation to another, by a far surer process of
transmission than human law has been able to
establish’, ibid. 341. However, Hawthorne’s narrator
from Seven Gables had only ‘implied’ this, whilst for
Maudsley it had become a fact.
PSYCHOLOGY AND THE
GOTHIC
SIGMUND FREUD (ESSAY DATE
1919)
SOURCE: Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In The
Uncanny, by Sigmund Freud, translated by David
McLintock, pp. 123-62. New York: Penguin, 2003.
In the following excerpt from an essay first published in
Imago in 1919 as “Das Unheimlich” and considered the
quintessential work on the subject of the uncanny, Freud
defines the uncanny, provides examples of how it is
exemplified in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story “The Sandman,”
and explains how the uncanny functions within the
context of human psychology.
II
If we now go on to review the persons and
things, the impressions, processes and situations
that can arouse an especially strong and distinct
sense of the uncanny in us, we must clearly
choose an appropriate example to start with. E.
Jentsch singles out, as an excellent case, ‘doubt as
to whether an apparently animate object really is
alive and, conversely, whether a lifeless object
might not perhaps be animate’. In this connec-
tion he refers to the impressions made on us by
waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls
301
 and automata. To these he adds the uncanny ef-
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
fect produced by epileptic fits and the manifesta-
tions of insanity, because these arouse in the
onlooker vague notions of automatic—mechani-
cal—processes that may lie hidden behind the
familiar image of a living person. Now, while not
wholly convinced by the author’s arguments, we
will take them as a starting point for our own
investigation, because he goes on to remind us of
one writer who was more successful than any
other at creating uncanny effects.
‘One of the surest devices for producing
slightly uncanny effects through story-telling,’
writes Jentsch, ‘is to leave the reader wondering
whether a particular figure is a real person or an
automaton, and to do so in such a way that his
attention is not focused directly on the uncer-
tainty, lest he should be prompted to examine and
settle the matter at once, for in this way, as we
have said, the special emotional effect can easily
be dissipated. E. T. A. Hoffmann often employed
this psychological manoeuvre with success in his
imaginative writings.’
This observation, which is undoubtedly cor-
rect, refers in particular to Hoffmann’s story ‘The
Sand-Man’, one of the ‘Night Pieces’ (vol. 3 of
Hoffmann’s Gesammelte Werke in Grisebach’s
edition), from which the doll Olimpia found her
way into the first act of Offenbach’s opera The
Tales of Hoffmann. I must say, however—and I
hope that most readers of the story will agree with
me—that the motif of the seemingly animate doll
Olimpia is by no means the only one responsible
for the incomparably uncanny effect of the story,
or even the one to which it is principally due. Nor
is this effect enhanced by the fact that the author
himself gives the Olimpia episode a slightly satiri-
cal twist using it to make fun of the young man’s
overvaluation of love. Rather, it is another motif
that is central to the tale, the one that gives it its
name and is repeatedly emphasized at crucial
points—the motif of the Sand-Man, who tears out
children’s eyes.
A student named Nathaniel, with whose
childhood memories this fantastic tale opens, is
unable, for all his present happiness, to banish
certain memories connected with the mysterious
and terrifying death of his much-loved father. On
certain evenings his mother would send the
children to bed early with the warning ‘The Sand-
Man is coming.’ And sure enough, on each such
occasion the boy would hear the heavy tread of a
visitor, with whom his father would then spend
the whole evening. It is true that, when asked
about the Sand-Man, the boy’s mother would
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deny that any such person existed, except as a
figure of speech, but a nursemaid was able to give
him more tangible information: ‘He is a bad man
who comes to children when they won’t go to
bed and throws a handful of sand in their eyes, so
that their eyes jump out of their heads, all bleed-
ing. He then throws their eyes in his bag and takes
them off to the half-moon as food for his children.
These children sit up there in their nest; they have
hooked beaks like owls, and use them to peck up
the eyes of the naughty little boys and girls.’
Although little Nathaniel was old and sensible
enough to dismiss such grisly details about the
Sand-Man, fear of this figure took root even in
him. He resolved to find out what the Sand-Man
looked like, and one evening, when another visita-
tion was due, he hid in his father’s study. He
recognized the visitor as a lawyer named Coppe-
lius, a repulsive person of whom the children were
afraid when he occasionally came to lunch. He
now identified Coppelius with the dreaded Sand-
Man. In the remainder of this scene the author
leaves us in doubt as to whether we are dealing
with the initial delirium of the panic-stricken boy
or an account of events that must be taken as real
within the world represented in the tale. The boy’s
father and the visitor busy themselves at a brazier
that emits glowing flames. Hearing Coppelius
shout ‘Eyes here! eyes here!’ the little eavesdrop-
per lets out a scream and reveals his presence.
Coppelius seizes him and is about to drop red-hot
grains of coal in his eyes and then throw these
into the brazier. The father begs him to spare his
son’s eyes. This experience ends with the boy fall-
ing into a deep swoon, followed by a long illness.
Whoever favours a rationalistic interpretation of
the Sand-Man is bound to ascribe the child’s
fantasy to the continuing influence of the nurse-
maid’s account. Instead of grains of sand, red-hot
grains of coal are to be thrown into the child’s
eyes, but in either case the purpose is to make
them jump out of his head. A year later, during
another visit by the Sand-Man, the father is killed
by an explosion in his study, and the lawyer Cop-
pelius disappears from the town without trace.
Later, as a student, Nathaniel thinks he recog-
nizes this fearful figure from his childhood in the
person of Giuseppe Coppola, an itinerant Italian
optician who hawks weather-glasses in the univer-
sity town. When Nathaniel declines to buy one,
Coppola says, ‘So, no weather-glass, no weather-
glass! I’ve got lovely eyes too, lovely eyes.’
Nathaniel is at first terrified, but his terror is al-
layed when the eyes he is offered turn out to be
harmless spectacles. He buys a pocket spyglass
from Coppola and uses it to look into the house
of Professor Spalanzani, on the other side of the
street, where he catches sight of Olimpia, the
professor’s beautiful, but strangely silent and
motionless daughter. He soon falls so madly in
love with her that he forgets his wise and level-
headed fiancée, Clara. But Olimpia is an automa-
ton, for which Spalanzini has made the clockwork
and in which Coppola—the Sand-Man—has set
the eyes. The student comes upon the two quar-
relling over their handiwork. The optician has car-
ried off the eyeless wooden doll; the mechanic,
Spalanzani, picks up Olimpia’s bleeding eyes from
the floor and throws them at Nathaniel, from
whom he says Coppola has stolen them. Nathaniel
is seized by a fresh access of madness. In his
delirium the memory of his father’s death is
compounded with this new impression: ‘Hurry—
hurry—hurry!—ring of fire—ring of fire! Spin
round, ring of fire—quick—quick! Wooden doll,
hurry, lovely wooden doll, spin round—’. Where-
upon he hurls himself at the professor, Olimpia’s
supposed father, and tries to strangle him.
Having recovered from a long, serious illness,
Nathaniel at last seems to be cured. He finds his
fiancée again and plans to marry her. One day
they are out walking in the town with her brother.
The tall tower of the town hall casts a huge
shadow over the market-place. Clara suggests that
they go up the tower together while her brother
remains below. At the top, her attention is drawn
to the curious sight of something moving along
the street. Nathaniel examines this through Cop-
pola’s spyglass, which he finds in his pocket.
Again he is seized by madness and, uttering the
words ‘Wooden doll, spin round’, he tries to cast
the girl down from the tower. Her brother, hear-
ing her screams, comes to her rescue and quickly
escorts her to the ground. Up above, the madman
runs around shouting out ‘Ring of fire, spin
round’—words whose origin is already familiar to
us. Conspicuous among the people gathering
below is the lawyer Coppelius, who has suddenly
reappeared. We may assume that it was the sight
of his approach that brought on Nathaniel’s fit of
madness. Some of the crowd want to go up the
tower and overpower the madman, but Coppelius
says laughingly: ‘Just wait. He’ll come down by
himself.’ Nathaniel suddenly stands still, catches
sight of Coppelius and, with a cry of ‘Yes! Lovely
eyes—lovely eyes’, throws himself over the para-
pet. Moments later he is lying on the pavement,
his head shattered, and the Sand-Man has van-
ished in the milling crowd.
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This brief summary will probably make it clear
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
beyond doubt that in Hoffmann’s tale the sense
of the uncanny attaches directly to the figure of
the Sand-Man, and therefore to the idea of being
robbed of one’s eyes—and that intellectual uncer-
tainty, as Jentsch understands it, has nothing to
do with this effect. Uncertainty as to whether an
object is animate or inanimate, which we were
bound to acknowledge in the case of the doll
Olimpia, is quite irrelevant in the case of this more
potent example of the uncanny. It is true that the
author initially creates a kind of uncertainty by
preventing us—certainly not unintentionally—
from guessing whether he is going to take us into
the real world or into some fantastic world of his
own choosing. He is of course entitled to do either,
and if he chooses, for instance, to set the action
in a world in which spirits, demons and ghosts
play a part, as Shakespeare does in Hamlet, Mac-
beth and Julius Caesar and, rather differently, in
The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we
must yield to his choice and treat his posited
world as if it were real for as long as we submit to
his spell. But in the course of Hoffmann’s tale this
uncertainty disappears; it becomes clear that the
author wants us too to look through the spectacles
or the spyglass of the demon optician, and even,
perhaps, that he has looked through such an
instrument himself. For, after all, the conclusion
of the tale makes it clear that the optician Cop-
pola really is the lawyer Coppelius1 and so also
the Sand-Man.
There is no longer any question of ‘intellectual
uncertainty’: we know now that what we are
presented with are not figments of a madman’s
imagination, behind which we, with our superior
rationality, can recognize the sober truth—yet this
clear knowledge in no way diminishes the impres-
sion of the uncanny. The notion of intellectual
uncertainty in no way helps us to understand this
uncanny effect.
On the other hand, psychoanalytic experience
reminds us that some children have a terrible fear
of damaging or losing their eyes. Many retain this
anxiety into adult life and fear no physical injury
so much as one to the eye. And there is a com-
mon saying that one will ‘guard something like
the apple of one’s eye’. The study of dreams,
fantasies and myths has taught us also that
anxiety about one’s eyes, the fear of going blind,
is quite often a substitute for the fear of castra-
tion. When the mythical criminal Oedipus blinds
himself, this is merely a mitigated form of the
penalty of castration, the only one that befits him
according to the lex talionis. Taking up a rationalis-
303
 tic stance, one may seek to reject the idea that the
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
fear of damaging the eyes can be traced back to
the fear of castration; one finds it understandable
that so precious an organ as the eye should be
guarded by a commensurate anxiety. Indeed, one
can go further and claim that no deeper mystery
and no other significance lie behind the fear of
castration. Yet this does not account for the
substitutive relation between the eye and the male
member that is manifested in dreams, fantasies
and myths; nor can it counter the impression that
a particularly strong and obscure emotion is
aroused by the threat of losing the sexual organ,
and that it is this emotion that first gives such
resonance to the idea of losing other organs. Any
remaining doubt vanishes once one has learnt the
details of the ‘castration complex’ from analyses
of neurotic patients and realized what an immense
part it plays in their mental life.
Moreover, I would not advise any opponent
of the psychoanalytic view to appeal to Hoff-
mann’s story of the Sand-Man in support of the
contention that fear for the eyes is something
independent of the castration complex. For why
is this fear for the eyes so closely linked here with
the death of the father? Why does the Sand-Man
always appear as a disruptor of love? He estranges
the unfortunate student from his fiancée, and
from her brother, his best friend; he destroys the
second object of his love, the beautiful doll Olim-
pia, and even drives him to suicide just when he
has won back his fiancée and the two are about to
be happily united. These and many other features
of the tale appear arbitrary and meaningless if one
rejects the relation between fear for the eyes and
fear of castration, but they become meaningful as
soon as the Sand-Man is replaced by the dreaded
father, at whose hands castration is expected.2
We would therefore venture to trace back the
uncanny element in the Sand-Man to the anxiety
caused by the infantile castration complex. Yet as
soon as we conceive the idea of ascribing the
emergence of the sense of the uncanny to an
infantile factor such as this, we cannot help trying
to derive other examples of the uncanny from the
same source. ‘The Sand-Man’ also contains the
motif of the apparently animate doll, which was
singled out by Jentsch. According to him we have
particularly favourable conditions for generating
feelings of the uncanny if intellectual uncertainty
is aroused as to whether something is animate or
inanimate, and whether the lifeless bears an exces-
sive likeness to the living. With dolls, of course,
we are not far from the world of childhood. We
recall that children, in their early games, make no
304 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
sharp distinction between the animate and the
inanimate, and that they are especially fond of
treating their dolls as if they were alive. Indeed,
one occasionally hears a woman patient tell how,
at the age of eight, she was still convinced that
her dolls were bound to come to life if she looked
at them in a certain way, as intently as possible.
Here too, then, the infantile factor is easily
demonstrated. But, oddly enough, ‘The Sand-Man’
involved the evocation of an old childhood fear,
whereas there is no question of fear in the case of
a living doll: children are not afraid of their dolls
coming to life—they may even want them to.
Here, then, the sense of the uncanny would derive
not from an infantile fear, but from an infantile
wish, or simply from an infantile belief. This
sounds like a contradiction, but possibly it is just
a complication, which may further our under-
standing later on.
E. T. A. Hoffmann is the unrivalled master of
the uncanny in literature. His novel Die Elexiere
des Teufels [The Elixirs of the Devil] presents a whole
complex of motifs to which one is tempted to
ascribe the uncanny effect of the story. The
content is too rich and intricate for us to venture
upon a summary. At the end of the book, when
the reader finally learns of the presuppositions,
hitherto withheld, which underlie the plot, this
leads not to his enlightenment, but to his utter
bewilderment. The author has piled up too much
homogeneous material, and this is detrimental,
not to the impression made by the whole, but to
its intelligibility. One must content oneself with
selecting the most prominent of those motifs that
produce an uncanny effect, and see whether they
too can reasonably be traced back to infantile
sources. They involve the idea of the ‘double’ (the
Doppelgänger), in all its nuances and manifesta-
tions—that is to say, the appearance of persons
who have to be regarded as identical because they
look alike. This relationship is intensified by the
spontaneous transmission of mental processes
from one of these persons to the other—what we
would call telepathy—so that the one becomes
co-owner of the other’s knowledge, emotions and
experience. Moreover, a person may identify
himself with another and so become unsure of his
true self; or he may substitute the other’s self for
his own. The self may thus be duplicated, divided
and interchanged. Finally there is the constant
recurrence of the same thing, the repetition of the
same facial features, the same characters, the same
destinies, the same misdeeds, even the same
names, through successive generations.
 The motif of the double has been treated in
detail in a study by O. Rank.3 This work explores
the connections that link the double with mirror-
images, shadows, guardian spirits, the doctrine of
the soul and the fear of death. It also throws a
good deal of light on the surprising evolution of
the motif itself. The double was originally an
insurance against the extinction of the self or, as
Rank puts it, ‘an energetic denial of the power of
death’, and it seems likely that the ‘immortal’ soul
was the first double of the body. The invention of
such doubling as a defence against annihilation
has a counterpart in the language of dreams,
which is fond of expressing the idea of castration
by duplicating or multiplying the genital symbol.
In the civilization of ancient Egypt, it became a
spur to artists to form images of the dead in
durable materials. But these ideas arose on the soil
of boundless self-love, the primordial narcissism
that dominates the mental life of both the child
and primitive man, and when this phase is sur-
mounted, the meaning of the ‘double’ changes:
having once been an assurance of immortality, it
becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.
The concept of the double need not disappear
along with this primitive narcissism: it may
acquire a new content from later stages in the
evolution of the ego. By slow degrees a special
authority takes shape within the ego; this author-
ity, which is able to confront the rest of the ego,
performs the function of self-observation and self-
criticism, exercises a kind of psychical censorship,
and so becomes what we know as the ‘conscience’.
In the pathological case of delusions of observa-
tion it becomes isolated, split off from the ego,
and discernible to the clinician. The existence of
such an authority, which can treat the rest of the
ego as an object—the fact that, in other words,
man is capable of self-observation—makes it pos-
sible to imbue the old idea of the double with a
new content and attribute a number of features to
it—above all, those which, in the light of self-
criticism, seem to belong to the old, superannu-
ated narcissism of primitive times.4
Yet it is not only this content—which is
objectionable to self-criticism—that can be em-
bodied in the figure of the double: in addition
there are all the possibilities which, had they been
realized, might have shaped our destiny, and to
which our imagination still clings, all the strivings
of the ego that were frustrated by adverse circum-
stances, all the suppressed acts of volition that
fostered the illusion of free will.5
However, after considering the manifest moti-
vation behind the figure of the double, we have
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to own that none of this helps us understand the
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
extraordinary degree of uncanniness that attaches
to it, and we may add, drawing upon our knowl-
edge of pathological mental processes, that none
of this content could explain the defensive urge
that ejects it from the ego as something alien. Its
uncanny quality can surely derive only from the
fact that the double is a creation that belongs to a
primitive phase in our mental development, a
phase that we have surmounted, in which it
admittedly had a more benign significance. The
double has become an object of terror, just as the
gods become demons after the collapse of their
cult—a theme that Heine treats in ‘Die Götter im
Exil’ [‘The Gods in Exile’].
The other disturbances of the ego that Hoff-
mann exploits in his writings are easy to judge in
accordance with the pattern set by the motif of
the double. They involve a harking back to single
phases in the evolution of the sense of self, a
regression to times when the ego had not yet
clearly set itself off against the world outside and
from others. I believe that these motifs are partly
responsible for the impression of the uncanny,
though it is not easy to isolate and specify the
share they have in it.
The factor of the repetition of the same thing
will perhaps not be acknowledged by everyone as
a source of the sense of the uncanny. According
to my own observations it undoubtedly evokes
such a feeling under particular conditions, and in
combination with particular circumstances—a
feeling, moreover, that recalls the helplessness we
experience in certain dream-states. Strolling one
hot summer afternoon through the empty and to
me unfamiliar streets of a small Italian town, I
found myself in a district about whose character I
could not long remain in doubt. Only heavily
made-up women were to be seen at the windows
of the little houses, and I hastily left the narrow
street at the next turning. However, after wander-
ing about for some time without asking the way, I
suddenly found myself back in the same street,
where my presence began to attract attention.
Once more I hurried away, only to return there
again by a different route. I was now seized by a
feeling that I can only describe as uncanny, and I
was glad to find my way back to the piazza that I
had recently left and refrain from any further voy-
ages of discovery. Other situations that share this
feature of the unintentional return with the one I
have just described, but differ from it in other
respects, may nevertheless produce the same feel-
ing of helplessness, the same sense of the uncanny.
One may, for instance, have lost one’s way in the
305
 woods, perhaps after being overtaken by fog, and,
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
despite all one’s efforts to find a marked or
familiar path, one comes back again and again to
the same spot, which one recognizes by a particu-
lar physical feature. Or one may be groping
around in the dark in an unfamiliar room, search-
ing for the door or the light-switch and repeatedly
colliding with the same piece of furniture—a situ-
ation that Mark Twain has transformed, admit-
tedly by means of grotesque exaggeration, into
something irresistibly comic.
In another set of experiences we have no dif-
ficulty in recognizing that it is only the factor of
unintended repetition that transforms what would
otherwise seem quite harmless into something
uncanny and forces us to entertain the idea of the
fateful and the inescapable, when we should
normally speak of ‘chance’. There is certainly
nothing remarkable, for instance, about deposit-
ing a garment in a cloakroom and being given a
ticket with a certain number on it—say 62—or
about finding that the cabin one has been al-
located bears this number. But the impression
changes if these two events, of no consequence in
themselves, come close together, so that one
encounters the number 62 several times in one
day, and if one then observes that everything
involving a number—addresses, hotel rooms,
railway carriages, etc.—invariably has the same
one, at least as part of the whole. We find this
‘uncanny’, and anyone who is not steeled against
the lure of superstition will be inclined to accord
a secret significance to the persistent recurrence of
this one number—to see it, for instance, as a
pointer to his allotted life-span. Or suppose one is
occupied with the writings of E[wald] Hering,6 the
great physiologist, and that within the space of a
few days one receives letters from two people
named Hering, posted in different countries,
although one has had no previous dealings with
anyone of that name. An ingenious scientist has
recently sought to show that such occurrences are
subject to certain laws—which would necessarily
remove the impression of the uncanny. I will not
venture to pronounce on whether he has suc-
ceeded.7
How the uncanny element in the recurrence
of the same thing can be derived from infantile
psychology is a question that I can only touch
upon here; I must therefore refer the reader to
another study, now awaiting publication, which
treats the subject in detail, but in a different
context. In the unconscious mind we can recog-
nize the dominance of a compulsion to repeat,
which proceeds from instinctual impulses. This
306 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
compulsion probably depends on the essential
nature of the drives themselves. It is strong
enough to override the pleasure principle and lend
a demonic character to certain aspects of mental
life; it is still clearly manifest in the impulses of
small children and dominates part of the course
taken by the psychoanalysis of victims of neurosis.
The foregoing discussions have all prepared us for
the fact that anything that can remind us of this
inner compulsion to repeat is perceived as un-
canny.
But now, I think, it is time to turn away from
these relationships, which are in any case difficult
to pass judgement on, and seek out unequivocal
cases of the uncanny, which may be expected,
once analysed, to determine the validity of our
hypothesis once and for all.
In Schiller’s poem Der Ring des Polykrates (‘The
Ring of Polykrates’) the guest turns away in horror
because he sees his friend’s every wish instantly
fulfilled and his every care at once removed by
fate. His host has become ‘uncanny’. The reason
he himself gives—that whoever is excessively
fortunate must fear the envy of the gods—still
seems obscure to us, its meaning being veiled in
mythology. So let us take an example from a much
simpler setting. In the case history of a patient
suffering from obsessional neurosis8 I recorded
that he had once visited a hydropathic institution
and found that his health improved greatly.
However, he was sensible enough to attribute this
improvement not to the healing properties of the
water, but to the location of his room, which was
next to the office of a very kind nurse. So, on
returning for a second visit, he asked for the same
room, only to be told that it was already occupied
by an old gentleman. Whereupon he gave vent to
his annoyance with the words, ‘Then he should
be struck dead!’ A fortnight later the old gentle-
man did suffer a stroke. My patient found this an
‘uncanny’ experience. The impression of the
uncanny would have been even stronger if a
much shorter interval had elapsed between his ut-
tering the words and the untoward event that fol-
lowed, or if he had been able to report numerous
similar experiences. In fact, he was never at a loss
for such corroboration. Indeed, not only this
patient, but every obsessional neurotic I have
studied, could tell similar stories about themselves.
They were not at all surprised when, perhaps after
a long interval, they ran into someone about
whom they had only just been thinking. They
would regularly get a letter by the morning post
from a friend of whom they had said, only the
night before, ‘He’s not been heard of for ages.’ In
particular, accidents and deaths rarely happened
without having flitted through their minds a short
while before. They would describe this phenom-
enon in the most modest terms, claiming to have
‘presentiments’ that ‘usually’ came true.
One of the uncanniest and most widespread
superstitions is fear of the ‘evil eye’, which has
been thoroughly investigated by the Hamburg
oculist S. Seligmann.9 It appears that the source of
this fear has never been in doubt. Anyone who
possesses something precious, but fragile, is afraid
of the envy of others, to the extent that he
projects on to them the envy he would have felt
in their place. Such emotions are betrayed by
looks,1 0 even if they are denied verbal expression,
and when a person is prominent owing to certain
striking characteristics, especially if these are of an
undesirable kind, people are ready to believe that
his envy will reach a particular intensity and then
convert this intensity into effective action. What
is feared is thus a covert intention to harm, and
on the strength of certain indications it is assumed
that this intention can command the necessary
force.
These last examples of the uncanny depend
on the principle that I have called ‘the omnipo-
tence of thoughts’, a term suggested to me by a
patient. We can no longer be in any doubt about
where we now stand. The analysis of cases of the
uncanny has led us back to the old animistic view
of the universe, a view characterized by the idea
that the world was peopled with human spirits,
by the narcissistic overrating of one’s own mental
processes, by the omnipotence of thoughts and
the technique of magic that relied on it, by the at-
tribution of carefully graded magical powers
(mana) to alien persons and things, and by all the
inventions with which the unbounded narcissism
of that period of development sought to defend
itself against the unmistakable sanctions of reality.
It appears that we have all, in the course of our
individual development, been through a phase
corresponding to the animistic phase in the
development of primitive peoples, that this phase
did not pass without leaving behind in us residual
traces that can still make themselves felt, and that
everything we now find ‘uncanny’ meets the
criterion that it is linked with these remnants of
animistic mental activity and prompts them to
express themselves.1 1
This is now an appropriate point at which to
introduce two observations in which I should like
to set down the essential content of this short
study. In the first place, if psychoanalytic theory is
right in asserting that every affect arising from an
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emotional impulse—of whatever kind—is con-
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
verted into fear by being repressed, it follows that
among those things that are felt to be frightening
there must be one group in which it can be shown
that the frightening element is something that
has been repressed and now returns. This species
of the frightening would then constitute the
uncanny, and it would be immaterial whether it
was itself originally frightening or arose from
another affect. In the second place, if this really is
the secret nature of the uncanny, we can under-
stand why German usage allows the familiar (das
Heimliche, the ‘homely’) to switch to its opposite,
the uncanny (das Unheimliche, the ‘unhomely’) (p.
134), for this uncanny element is actually nothing
new or strange, but something that was long
familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it
only through being repressed. The link with
repression now illuminates Schelling’s definition
of the uncanny as ‘something that should have
remained hidden and has come into the open’.
It now only remains for us to test the insight
we have arrived at by trying to explain some other
instances of the uncanny.
To many people the acme of the uncanny is
represented by anything to do with death, dead
bodies, revenants, spirits and ghosts. Indeed, we
have heard that in some modern languages the
German phrase ein unheimliches Haus [‘an uncanny
house’] can be rendered only by the periphrasis ‘a
haunted house’. We might in fact have begun our
investigation with this example of the uncanny—
perhaps the most potent—but we did not do so
because here the uncanny is too much mixed up
with the gruesome and partly overlaid by it. Yet in
hardly any other sphere has our thinking and feel-
ing changed so little since primitive times or the
old been so well preserved, under a thin veneer, as
in our relation to death. Two factors account for
this lack of movement: the strength of our original
emotional reactions and the uncertainty of our
scientific knowledge. Biology has so far been un-
able to decide whether death is the necessary fate
of every living creature or simply a regular, but
perhaps avoidable, contingency within life itself.
It is true that in textbooks on logic the statement
that ‘all men must die’ passes for an exemplary
general proposition, but it is obvious to no one;
our unconscious is still as unreceptive as ever to
the idea of our own mortality. Religions continue
to dispute the significance of the undeniable fact
of individual death and to posit an afterlife. The
state authorities think they cannot sustain moral
order among the living if they abandon the no-
tion that life on earth will be ‘corrected’ by a bet-
307

GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
SIGMUND FREUD (1856-1939) AND “THE
UNCANNY”
Freud is considered one of the most influential
and controversial thinkers of the twentieth
century for his development of the theories
and methodologies of psychoanalysis. Central
to his theory is the concept of the uncon-
scious, which he describes as a primitive
region of the psyche containing emotions,
memories, and drives that are hidden from
and repressed by the conscious mind. Freud’s
formulation of a method for retrieving and
analyzing repressed psychic material estab-
lished psychoanalysis as an indispensable
form of therapy in treating neurotic disorders,
many of which were first identified by Freud
and his followers. Freud has also exerted a
profound influence on the broader culture of
the twentieth century, inspiring artists, writ-
ers, critics, and filmmakers. Many of the
psychoanalytic terms that Freud coined, such
as “narcissism,” “repression,” and “transfer-
ence,” have entered the vernacular of several
languages. Despite the widespread applica-
tion of the principles of psychoanalysis in the
field of psychology, Freud’s writings continue
to ignite controversy in such diverse disci-
plines as feminist literary theory, linguistics,
and hermeneutics.
In his essay “The Uncanny” (1919)—first
published in Imago as “Das Unheimliche”—
Freud considers literature in a discussion of
the effects of the fantastic. He analyzes E. T.
A. Hoffman’s story “The Sandman” as a
means of elucidating the idea of the uncanny,
and particularly the theme of the doppel-
gänger, or double, as an aspect of the un-
canny in literature. Freud posits animism,
omnipotence of thought, regression, unin-
tended repetition, and childhood castration
anxieties as the psychological sources of the
sense of the unreal, and concludes with a
summary of the subjective experience of the
uncanny as a revisiting of childhood experi-
ences and associations, and the temporary
resurgence of primitive explanatory beliefs in
the face of the seemingly inexplicable.
308
ter life hereafter. Placards in our big cities advertise
lectures that are meant to instruct us in how to
make contact with the souls of the departed, and
there is no denying that some of the finest minds
and sharpest thinkers among our men of science
have concluded, especially towards the end of
their own lives, that there is ample opportunity
for such contact. Since nearly all of us still think
no differently from savages on this subject, it is
not surprising that the primitive fear of the dead
is still so potent in us and ready to manifest itself
if given any encouragement. Moreover, it is prob-
ably still informed by the old idea that whoever
dies becomes the enemy of the survivor, intent
upon carrying him off with him to share his new
existence. Given this unchanging attitude to
death, one might ask what has become of repres-
sion, which is necessary if the primitive is to
return as something uncanny. But it is there too:
so-called educated people have officially ceased to
believe that the dead can become visible as spirits,
such appearances being linked to remote condi-
tions that are seldom realized, and their emotional
attitude to the dead, once highly ambiguous and
ambivalent, has been toned down, in the higher
reaches of mental life, to an unambiguous feeling
of piety.1 2
Only a few remarks need now be added to
complete the picture, for, having considered
animism, magic, sorcery, the omnipotence of
thoughts, unintended repetition and the castra-
tion complex, we have covered virtually all the
factors that turn the frightening into the uncanny.
We can also call a living person uncanny, that
is to say, when we credit him with evil intent. But
this alone is not enough: it must be added that
this intent to harm us is realized with the help of
special powers. A good example of this is the get-
tatore,1 3 the uncanny figure of Romance supersti-
tion, whom Albrecht Schaeffer, in his novel Josef
Montfort, has turned into an attractive figure by
employing poetic intuition and profound psycho-
analytic understanding. Yet with these secret pow-
ers we are back once more in the realm of ani-
mism. In Goethe’s Faust, the pious Gretchen’s
intuition that Mephisto has such hidden powers
is what makes him seem so uncanny:
Sie fühlt, dass ich ganz sicher ein Genie,
Vielleicht wohl gar der Teufel bin.
[She feels that I am quite certainly a genius,
perhaps indeed the very Devil.]
The uncanny effect of epilepsy or madness has
the same origin. Here the layman sees a manifesta-
tion of forces that he did not suspect in a fellow
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human being, but whose stirrings he can dimly
perceive in remote corners of his own personality.
The Middle Ages attributed all these manifesta-
tions of sickness consistently, and psychologically
almost correctly, to the influence of demons.
Indeed, it would not surprise me to hear that
psychoanalysis, which seeks to uncover these
secret forces, had for this reason itself come to
seem uncanny to many people. In one case, when
I had succeeded—though not very quickly—in
restoring a girl to health after many years of sick-
ness, I heard this myself from the girl’s mother
long after her recovery.
Severed limbs, a severed head, a hand de-
tached from the arm (as in a fairy tale by Hauff),
feet that dance by themselves (as in the novel by
A. Schaeffer mentioned above)—all of these have
something highly uncanny about them, especially
when they are credited, as in the last instance,
with independent activity. We already know that
this species of the uncanny stems from its proxim-
ity to the castration complex. Some would award
the crown of the uncanny to the idea of being
buried alive, only apparently dead. However,
psychoanalysis has taught us that this terrifying
fantasy is merely a variant of another, which was
originally not at all frightening, but relied on a
certain lasciviousness; this was the fantasy of liv-
ing in the womb.
Let us add something of a general nature,
which is, strictly speaking, already contained in
what we have previously said about animism and
the superannuated workings of our mental ap-
paratus, but seems to call for special emphasis.
This is the fact that an uncanny effect often arises
when the boundary between fantasy and reality is
blurred, when we are faced with the reality of
something that we have until now considered
imaginary, when a symbol takes on the full func-
tion and significance of what it symbolizes, and
so forth. This is at the root of much that is
uncanny about magical practices. The infantile
element about this, which also dominates the
mental life of neurotics, is the excessive stress that
is laid on psychical reality, as opposed to material
reality—a feature that is close to the omnipotence
of thoughts. During the isolation of the Great War,
I came across a number of the English Strand
Magazine. In it, among a number of fairly point-
less contributions, I read a story about a young
couple who move into a furnished flat in which
there is a curiously shaped table with crocodiles
carved in the wood. Towards evening the flat is
regularly pervaded by an unbearable and highly
characteristic smell, and in the dark the tenants
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stumble over things and fancy they see something
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
undefinable gliding over the stairs. In short, one is
led to surmise that, owing to the presence of this
table, the house is haunted by ghostly crocodiles
or that the wooden monsters come to life in the
dark, or something of the sort. It was a quite naïve
story, but its effect was extraordinarily uncanny.
To conclude this collection of examples,
which is certainly not exhaustive, I will mention
an experience culled from psychoanalytic work,
which, unless it rests on pure coincidence, sup-
plies the most pleasing confirmation of our
conception of the uncanny. It often happens that
neurotic men state that to them there is some-
thing uncanny about the female genitals. But
what they find uncanny [‘unhomely’] is actually
the entrance to man’s old ‘home’, the place where
everyone once lived. A jocular saying has it that
‘love is a longing for home’, and if someone
dreams of a certain place or a certain landscape
and, while dreaming, thinks to himself, ‘I know
this place, I’ve been here before’, this place can be
interpreted as representing his mother’s genitals
or her womb. Here too, then, the uncanny [the
‘unhomely’] is what was once familiar [‘homely’,
‘homey’]. The negative prefix un- is the indicator
of repression.
Notes
1. On the derivation of the name, pointed out by Frau
Dr Rank: coppella ⫽ ‘assay-crucible’ (the chemical
operations during which the father meets his death);
coppo ⫽ ‘eye-socket’. [In the first edition of 1919 this
note occurs where it does now, but in subsequent Ger-
man editions (except the students’ edition) it appears,
no doubt erroneously, after the second mention of the
name Coppelius in the previous paragraph.]
2. In fact, the writer’s imaginative handling of his mate-
rial has not thrown the constituent elements into such
wild confusion that their original arrangement cannot
be reconstructed. In the story of Nathaniel’s child-
hood, his father and Coppelius represent the father-
imago, which, owing to its ambivalence, is split into
two opposing parts; the one threatens him with blind-
ing (castration), while the other, the good father, suc-
cessfully intercedes for his sight. The piece of the
complex that is most subject to repression, the death-
wish directed against the bad father, finds expression
in the death of the good father, for which Coppelius
bears the blame. In Nathaniel’s later life as a student,
this pair of fathers is represented by Professor Spalan-
zani and the optician Coppola. The professor himself
belongs to the father-series, while Coppola is seen as
identical with the lawyer Coppelius. They once
worked together at the mysterious brazier; now they
have collaborated in constructing the doll Olimpia;
the professor is also called her father. This twofold col-
laboration reveals them as two parts of the father-
imago, which means that both the mechanic and the
optician are the fathers not only of Olimpia, but of
Nathaniel too. In the frightening childhood scene
Coppelius, after refraining from blinding the boy, had
309
 proceeded, by way of experiment, to unscrew his arms
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
and legs—to work on him, in other words, as a
mechanic would work on a doll. This strange feature,
which falls quite outside anything we know about the
Sand-Man, brings a new equivalent of castration into
play; it also points to the inner identity of Coppelius
and his later counterpart, the mechanic Spalanzani,
and prepares us for the interpretation of Olimpia. This
automaton cannot be anything other than a material-
ization of Nathaniel’s feminine attitude to his father
in his early childhood. Her fathers, Spalanzani and
Coppola, are merely new versions—reincarnations—of
Nathaniel’s two fathers. Spalanzani’s otherwise incom-
prehensible statement that the optician had stolen
Nathaniel’s eyes (see above) in order to set them in
the doll becomes significant as evidence of the identity
of Olimpia and Nathaniel. Olimpia is, so to speak, a
complex that has been detached from Nathaniel and
now confronts him as a person; the control that this
complex exercises over him finds expression in his
senseless, compulsive love for Olimpia. We are justi-
fied in describing such love as narcissistic, and we
understand that whoever succumbs to it alienates
himself from his real love-object. Yet the psychologi-
cal truth that a young man who is fixated on his father
by the castration-complex becomes incapable of lov-
ing a woman is demonstrated by many analyses of
patients, the content of which, while less fantastic
than the story of the student Nathaniel, is scarcely
less sad.
E. T. A. Hoffmann was the child of an unhappy mar-
riage. When he was three, his father left his small fam-
ily and never lived with them again. The evidence
that Grisebach assembles in his biographical introduc-
tion to the works shows that the writer’s relation to
his father was always one of the sorest points in his
emotional life.
3. O. Rank, ‘Der Doppelgänger’, Imago III, 1914.
4. I believe that when poets complain that two souls
dwell in the human breast, and when popular psy-
chologists talk of the splitting of the human ego, what
they have in mind is the division under discussion,
belonging to ego-psychology, between the critical
authority and the rest of the ego, rather than the op-
position, discovered by psychoanalysis, between the
ego and whatever is unconscious and repressed. True,
the difference is blurred because the derivatives of
what has been repressed are foremost among the
things that are condemned by self-criticism.
5. In H. H. Ewers’ story Der Student von Prag [‘The Student
of Prague’], which supplies Rank with the starting
point for his study of the double, the hero promises
his beloved that he will not kill his opponent in a
duel, but on his way to the duelling-ground he meets
his double, who has already dispatched his rival.
6. [In the Gesammelte Werke this writer is wrongly given
the initial ‘H’.]
7. P. Kammerer, Das Gesetz der Serie (Vienna 1919).
8. ‘Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose’
[‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’] [II.B]
(Gesammelte Werke, vol. VII).
9. Der böse Blick und Verwandtes (2 vols, Berlin 1910/
1911).
10. [In German ‘the evil eye’ is der böse Blick, literally ‘the
evil look’.]
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11. On this topic see Freud’s study Totem und Tabu [‘Totem
and Taboo’] (1913) section III of which deals with
animism, magic and the omnipotence of thoughts.
Here the author remarks, ‘It seems that we ascribe the
character of the uncanny to those impressions that
tend to confirm the omnipotence of thoughts and
animistic thinking in general, though our judgement
has already turned away from such thinking.’
12. Cf. op. cit. on ‘taboo and ambivalence’.
13. [Literally the ‘thrower’ (of bad luck), or ‘the one who
casts’ (the evil eye).]
OTTO RANK (ESSAY DATE 1941)
SOURCE: Rank, Otto. “The Double as Immortal Self.”
In Beyond Psychology, by Otto Rank, pp. 62-101. New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1958.
In the following excerpt from an essay first published in
1941, Rank outlines the concept of the double as a
symbol of the supernatural, or “immortal,” self.
Our view of human behaviour as extending
beyond individual psychology to a broader con-
ception of personality indicates that civilized man
does not act only upon the rational guidance of
his intellectual ego nor is he driven blindly by the
mere elemental forces of his instinctual self.
Mankind’s civilization, and with it the various
types of personality representing and expressing
it, has emerged from the perpetual operation of a
third principle, which combines the rational and
irrational elements in a world-view based on the
conception of the supernatural. This not only
holds good for primitive group-life carried forward
on a magical world-view, but is still borne out in
our highly mechanized civilization by the vital
need for spiritual values. Man, no matter under
how primitive conditions, never did live on a
purely biological, that is, on a simple natural basis.
The most primitive people known to us show
strange and complicated modes of living which
become intelligible only from their supernatural
meaning.
Although this has been recognized by modern
anthropologists, most of them—not unlike the
psychologists—look down on this supernatural
world-view as an interesting relic of the primitive’s
belief in magic which we discarded long ago as
superstition. Sir James Frazer, in the last volume of
his encyclopedic history of magic, The Golden
Bough, considers it “a dark chronicle of human er-
ror and folly, of fruitless endeavor, wasted time
and blighted hopes.”1 Freud, for his part, in
comparing primitive superstition with neurotic
behaviour merely brought to light the survival of
irrational forces in modern man2 and thereby
proved the inadequacy of rational psychology to
explain primitive man’s world-view. It signifies
little when some advanced writers, in thrusting
aside those scientific classifications, seem ready to
admit that we ourselves are just as superstitious as
the primitive; in fact, are still primitive beneath
the surface. Such an admission smacks too much
of reform, hence, seems to have a frightening
rather than a liberating effect. The fear of this
“primitiveness” within ourselves is obviously the
result of an unsuccessful attempt to deny it. Be
that as it may, this primitivity, which we are able
to admit so readily, is to a large extent the product
of our own imagination. That is to say, what we
really have in common with our remote ancestors
is a spiritual, not a primitive self, and this we can-
not afford to admit because we pride ourselves on
living on a purely rational plane. In consequence,
we reject those irrational life forces as belonging
to our primitive past instead of recognizing them
in our present spiritual needs. In this sense is to
be understood my earlier conception of the
supernatural as the really human element, in
contradistinction to the biological life which is
natural (homo naturalis). My human interpreta-
tion conceives of the supernatural as basically
identical with what we call “culture,” which is
after all made up of things non-existent in nature.
I mean by that not only all spiritual values of
mankind, from the early soul belief to religion,
philosophy and its latest offspring psychology,
but also social institutions. These too were origi-
nally built up to maintain man’s supernatural
plan of living, that is, were meant to guarantee
his self-perpetuation as a social type.
Thus we distinguish in the development of
culture and the simultaneous creation of the
civilized self three layers: the supernatural, the
social and the psychological. The biological self of
natural procreation is denied from the beginning,
since it implies the acceptance of death. In this
sense, the earliest magical world-view was for
primitive man not a consoling illusion in his dif-
ficult struggle for biological survival but an assur-
ance of eternal survival for his self. This man-made
supernatural world-view forms the basis of culture,
since man had to support himself increasingly
with more and more concrete symbols of his need
for immortalization. The most powerful instru-
ment for the creation of his own cultural world
was religion as expressed in cult (“culture”), from
which spring the fine arts, as well as architecture,
drama and literature; in a word, the sum of what
survives the short span of one personal life-time.
Specialists in the fields of archeology, anthropol-
ogy and sociology are re-constructing from relics
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of bygone civilizations the characteristic patterns
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
of various culture periods. . . .
In order to show how culture develops, neither
geographically nor anthropologically but from
that inner spiritual need, we will confront in the
following pages the dynamic personality of mod-
ern man with its remotest but still living ancestor,
the spiritual self of primitive man. This primitive
material we are introducing not in an historical or
explanatory sense but merely as illustrative of
survivals in modern man, who, having created
civilization and with it an over-civilized ego,
disintegrates by splitting up the latter into two
opposing selves. Those two aspects of the self
which in modern man are opposing and fighting
each other provide, to be sure, the original raw
material for his personality makeup. Yet it makes
all the difference whether they are united in the
expression of a total personality or driven by
conflicting strivings between the two selves,
manifested as the antimony of acting or “think-
ing and feeling.” Such dichotomy of conflict,
interfering with full living and functioning, is not
to be confused with the basic dualism between
the natural and spiritual self which was dynami-
cally balanced in the magic world-view. The primi-
tive and modern material concerning the Double,
which we are confronting in this chapter, will
show how a positive evaluation of the Double as
the immortal soul leads to the building-up of the
prototype of personality from the self; whereas
the negative interpretation of the Double as a
symbol of death is symptomatic of the disintegra-
tion of the modern personality type. Such a
complete reversal, as is borne out by our juxtaposi-
tion of folk-loristic and literary tradition, betrays a
fundamental change in man’s attitude towards
life from a naïve belief in supernatural forces
which he was certain could be influenced by
magic to a “neurotic” fear of them, which he had
to rationalize psychologically.
As early as 1914, before the emotional shock
of the World War upset the foundations of an
over-rationalized civilization, I published an essay
on the literary motif of the Double,3 the structural
analysis of which laid bare the irrational roots of
human psychology in primitive magic. Such
development of a respectable science from earlier
superstitious beliefs cannot be surprising or
embarrassing when we remind ourselves that from
time immemorial man was forced to protect
himself against the unknown forces of nature by
pretending to be able to control them in one form
or another. Centuries before our Western science
of astronomy was established, the high priests of
311
 Oriental religion practised astrology in order to
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
foresee and thus direct the destiny of their people;
this very science, in fact, was made possible by an
objective observation of planets, which, in the
ancient civilizations of the East, emerged from
such subjective interpretation of the firmament.
Likewise, our science of chemistry was developed
from the mysterious experiments of medieval
alchemists, determined to outdo nature by produc-
ing gold, indeed, creating life itself in their
cauldrons. Whether or not these scientific children
of a later age are willing to acknowledge their
uneducated parents, we should not hesitate to
trace their ancestry and their heritage, especially
with such a problem child as we have found
psychology to be.
As a student, having fallen under the spell of
the new scientific psychology, I became aware in
its early days of the inadequacy of rational psy-
chology—even that of the unconscious—to ex-
plain the unchanging effect of an age-old theme
throughout the centuries. More than twenty-five
years ago, I happened to see a moving-picture
which revived the theme of the Double—famous
since the days of Greek mythology and drama—in
a more phantastic realism than has ever been pos-
sible on the stage. The popularity of this eternal
tragi-comedy of errors caused by man’s encounter
with his double has, however, as is the case with
many renowned literary motifs, been periodic. Just
as the subject of antagonism between brothers was
typical for the literary epoch at the end of the
eighteenth century, and the motif of incestuous
love between brother and sister characteristic for
the Elizabethan age, so it was in the era of Ger-
man Romanticism that the theme of the Double
was in vogue. The renewed interest shown then
in the old “Double” of stage-fame, whose humor-
ous entanglements with himself had become
subjected to a psychological scrutiny by introspec-
tive novelists, cannot be sufficiently accounted for
by their eccentric personalities alone. Similar cur-
rents in German philosophy at that time suggest
that a deeper reason is to be found in the mental-
ity of a whole period once more questioning the
identity of the Self. After Kant—“the Philosopher
of the Revolution”—had systematized the mental-
ity of the bourgeois type, the underlying principle
of self-determination was carried to its individual-
istic extreme by the romantic philosophers. Disap-
pointed at the actual results of the French Revolu-
tion, the romantics outdid Kant, who had taught
that the laws of nature had been legislated by the
mind. This idealistic conception they applied to
the whole pattern of historical development
312 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
which they conceived of as identical with the
growth of self-consciousness. Hence, the true
object of knowledge could only be self-knowledge.
On that basis they justified personal, class and
national aspirations as being evolved from the
development of the Self, construed by Fichte as
ethical, by Hegel, as logical and by Schelling as
aesthetical.
It is not surprising to find that this philosophic
self-centredness of the Romantic epoch appears
reflected in its contemporary literature. In fact we
find these romantic authors interpreting the
theme of the Double as a problem of the Self, that
is to say, they first looked at it from a psychologi-
cal point of view. Their choice of the subject of
dual personality for the probing into the depth of
the human Self, resulted undoubtedly from their
own inner split personality, characteristic of the
romantic type—hence the conflicting and frus-
trated emotions of the romantic, a paradoxical
type shaped by the repercussions of the French
Revolution and glorifying Napoleon, who
emerged victorious after it, as the ideal super-man.
Once more man had become aware of the ir-
rational forces within himself, the artistic expres-
sion of which he had to justify intellectually by
subscribing to a new philosophy of the Self.
While this preoccupation with the Self ac-
counts for the romantic’s obsession with the sub-
ject of the Double, the explanation for the typical
form in which this motif persistently appears from
Antiquity to the present day has to be derived—
beyond the psychology of the individual—from
ancient traditions and primitive folk beliefs. Since
the plot of the above-mentioned film, “The Stu-
dent of Prague,” drawn from the well-known
“Story of the Lost Reflection” by the famous
romanticist, E. T. A. Hoffman, combined practi-
cally all the old motifs inherent in the subject, I
choose to perform what might be called an au-
topsy on this generalized literary motif. The hero,
a reckless libertine, in one of his desperate moods
sells his own reflection to a human impersonation
of the Devil, only to realize too late the vital
importance of his seemingly useless image in the
mirror. This, to his bewilderment, takes on an
independent life of its own; it follows its former
owner, interfering with his social ambitions and
his amorous affairs until it becomes a real persecu-
tor driving its victim to suicide. The gruesome
death of the hero is brought about through his
final attempt to end this terrifying persecution by
killing his alter-ego, thereby destroying his own
self. Those phantastic happenings take on an
uncanny feature with the appearance of the
double—played in the film by the same actor as
the youthful image of the hero, who himself is ag-
ing and has adopted moral standards contrary to
those of his former self. The encounters of these
conflicting selves at crucial moments in the hero’s
life provide the necessary complications for a plot,
the moral of which seems to imply: a man’s past—
represented in the film by the hero’s own youth-
ful image—is so intimately bound to his vital be-
ing that misfortune befalls him if he tries to
detach himself too completely from it.
While some writers, like Robert Louis Steven-
son in his Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
dramatized this moral aspect of the subject in a
hero possessed by an evil self, others, like Dos-
toievski, in his early story “The Double” (1846)
elaborated its psychological intricacies to a point
reaching the clinical exactness of a study in para-
noic persecution and megalomania. In such
psychological and moralistic presentations of the
Double, their authors are dealing with illusions in
a more or less split personality, whereas in other
stories the double appears concretely personified
by an identical protagonist, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s
tale, “William Wilson,” where the hero’s namesake
acts as his guardian angel. In German romanti-
cism, however, this same motif, namely, two
figures appearing in identical form like twins has
been elaborated upon in a truly morbid fashion.
Jean Paul, the father of romantic fiction, especially,
dwells in his complicated plots on pathological
types whose identify becomes confused with that
of their doubles. In his most noted work, Titan, he
is said to have derided Fichte’s philosophy of the
Self by carrying his transcendental idealism ad ab-
surdum. One of the most pathological figures in
this novel cannot look at any part of his body
without being seized by the dread of his double, a
fact which drives him into such a rage that he
breaks all the mirrors reflecting his despised self;
no wonder he dies insane—with Fichte’s phrase of
identity on his lips.
Compared to such extravagancies in vogue
during the Romantic period, other presentations
in which the hero sells his reflection to the Devil
or loses his shadow, as in the famous story of Peter
Schlemihl (known to English readers from How-
itt’s translation), appear, despite the hero’s tragic
fate, naive, not to say, fairy-tale like. There seems
inherent in the subject itself a dual aspect which
permits its treatment in different forms, varying
from the naive comedy of errors enacted between
identical twins to the tragic, almost pathological
loss of one’s real self through a superimposed one.
Bearing in mind these duofold potentialities of
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our subject, we turn to the constant symbolism
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
which this theme—no matter how greatly elabo-
rated upon—has preserved throughout the ages:
namely, the presentation of the second self by
one’s own shadow or reflection. This motif I have
traced back, in my essay on the Double referred
to, to ancient traditions and folk beliefs which
may be considered man’s first conception of the
soul. Numerous superstitions regarding one’s
shadow or image still prevalent in all parts of our
civilized world correspond to widespread tabus of
primitives who see in this natural image of the
self the human soul. . . .
In confronting those ancient conceptions of
the dual soul with its modern manifestation in
the literature of the Double, we realize a decisive
change of emphasis, amounting to a moralistic
interpretation of the old soul belief. Originally
conceived of as a guardian angel, assuring im-
mortal survival to the self, the double eventually
appears as precisely the opposite, a reminder of
the individual’s mortality, indeed, the announcer
of death itself. Thus, from a symbol of eternal life
in the primitive, the double developed into an
omen of death in the self-conscious individual of
modern civilization. This revaluation, however, is
not merely due to the fact that death no longer
could be denied as the end of the individual exist-
ence but was prompted by the permeation of the
whole subject of immortality with the idea of evil.
For the double whom we meet after the comple-
tion of this developmental cycle appears as a
“bad,” threatening self and no longer as a consol-
ing one. This change was brought about by the
Christian doctrine of immortality as interpreted
by the church, which presumed the right to
bestow its immortality on the good ones and
exclude the bad ones. At a certain period during
the Middle Ages this fear of being doomed on
Judgment Day—that is, of not participating in the
eternal life of the good—became epidemic in the
cult of the Devil, who in essence is nothing but a
personification of the moralized double. His origin
in the old soul belief is still shown in numerous
stories where the hero sells his shadow or reflec-
tion to an impersonation of the Devil in order to
gain worldly pleasures. This common folk-belief
of a soulless Devil eager to secure a good man’s
immortal soul by seducing him to evil has been
immortalized in Goethe’s “Faust.” The artist took
the traditional folk-tale and lifted it from its
superstitious entanglements into a human struggle
for self-immortalization through work, that is, self-
realization.
313
 Similar revaluations in the history of famous
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
literary subjects4 point to a social function of the
artist who humanizes traditional folk-beliefs by
animating them with his own spiritual struggle
for immortality. What enables the creative writer
to express his inner dualism—Goethe through
Faust speaks directly of the two souls in his
bosom—without being too much thwarted by its
conflicting struggle, is not, as modern psychology
suggests, simply a matter of degree.5 Though both
the artist and the neurotic are beset by similar
conflicts, it does not mean much to explain the
one type by the other. The irrational forces which
are operating in both types are striving for some
kind of rationalized, that is, accepted form of
expression. The neurotic fails in that attempt
inasmuch as his productions remain irrational,
whereas the artist is able and permitted to present
his creation in an acceptable form justifying the
survival of the irrational in the midst of our over-
rationalized civilization. This cultural function,
which I have always considered the main distinc-
tion of the artist,6 is borne out in the treatment of
the Double-motif as it was developed in the works
of prominent authors. There can be no doubt that
it is the same exaggerated fear of death threaten-
ing the destruction of the Self which the artist has
in common with the neurotic. Yet the creative
type, in dealing with this fundamental problem of
the Self, achieves his personal justification by
performing his cultural function—to revive the
spiritual values of irrational forces for his genera-
tion and thus promote their continuity. Hence,
the astounding limitation of literary inventiveness
and the seeming monotony of ever-recurring
plots. We have to turn from the content of litera-
ture to its function in order to appreciate that the
artist’s imaginative faculty is shown not so much
in the invention of new motifs as in recapturing
the true spirit of popular tradition to which his ir-
rational self is sensitive.
It is for this reason that we find the most
popular stories of the Double based on current
folk-belief. At the same time, it is not surprising to
find pathological elements, such as the hero’s
persecution by his double, introduced by modern
authors whose creative sensibility responds like-
wise in morbid moods to the threat of irrational
elements. It is almost as if the primitive curse of
overstepping the tabus, which protected the
double, has struck the artist daring to gain im-
mortality by creating a profane image of his
spiritual self. Some of these authors while writing
their stories felt death, as it were, on their heels.
Stevenson was severely ill from a hemorrhage
314 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
when, in a dream, he conceived the essential
scenes of his Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
This first draft, however, he burned as unsatisfac-
tory and hastened to re-write the whole story, a
feat which he accomplished in three days, presum-
ably not to lose it again but actually for fear of his
failing health. “I drive on with Jekyll,” he wrote
in a letter, “bankruptcy at my heels.”7 Guy de
Maupassant wrote his gruesome account of a
spectre, “Le Horla,” seemingly at the beginning of
his fatal illness. The common assumption that the
author was already insane when he wrote this
story has recently been refuted by his former valet
Francois.8 Francois, who at the age of seventy-
eight still refers to his late master as “Monsieur,”
said that Maupassant was perfectly lucid at the
time he wrote the book, in August, 1887. When
he sent the novel to the publisher, he told Fran-
cois that before a week had elapsed all Paris would
be saying he was crazy. Actually, it was not until
1891, four years later, that Maupassant began to
feel insanity coming on; when he realized he
could no longer retain his right state of mind, he
attempted suicide by cutting his throat. This typi-
cal outcome of persecution by the double, al-
though precipitated by the author’s illness, was by
no means caused by it. Throughout his life Mau-
passant had been struggling against the “Intimate
Enemy,” which he had long recognized as a
double personality in himself. Like Poe and Hoff-
man, he also suffered from hallucinations which
he described in his work.
There exists one account of an actual experi-
ence of this sort which Maupassant had in 1889
and which he related that same evening to a
friend. He was sitting at his desk in his study, hav-
ing given strict orders that no one was to be
admitted. Suddenly he had the impression that
someone had opened the door. He turned around
and to his great astonishment saw his own self
enter and sit down in front of him, resting his
head on his hand. All that Maupassant wrote on
this occasion was dictated to him by his double.
Having finished, he rose and the phantom van-
ished. This account9 sounds like a scene from his
Le Horla which, however, must be considered an
intuition rather than a recording of another such
actual experience. Of Poe, it is well known that he
died at the early age of thirty-seven in a fit of
delirium tremens. His story, “William Wilson,” is
generally regarded as a confession, since it pictures
the fate of a man ruined by gambling and drink-
ing, who finally, despite the efforts of his better
self to save him, kills himself. Many years before
his end, Poe also suffered from various obsessions
and nameless apprehensions; he was troubled by
a persecution mania and had delusions of gran-
deur. In his recent book, Edgar Allan Poe; a Study in
Genius, 1 0 Joseph Wood Krutch considers the
famous stories and poems not as works of artifice
but as more or less disguised expressions of queer
realities in Poe’s life, particularly since it is known
that many of his ideas came to him in visions and
hallucinations.
Of all the authors who introspectively recog-
nized an early split in their personality, no one
probably was more driven by the fear of death
than was Dostoievski. While still a student at the
Polytechnic, he suffered from slight fits, probably
epileptic, and was afraid of being buried alive, as
was Poe, likewise a victim of epilepsy. In many
passages of his works, Dostoievski has described
his later “grand mal” in masterly fashion. Before
going into the aura, he was able to catch a glimpse
of the “happiness that could not be experienced
in ordinary life and of which no other man could
have an idea. . . . This sensation is so powerful,
so agreeable, that one would give ten years for a
few seconds of such felicity, and perhaps even
one’s life.” After each fit, however, he was terribly
depressed and felt himself a criminal. During the
last days of his life to Petrograd, he wrote: “I have
had an attack lasting ten days and for five days
since I have been prostrated. I am a lost man—my
reason has really suffered and that is the truth—I
know it. My nervous confusion has often brought
me near to madness.” He not only experienced
these states of unconsciousness frequently but
having been condemned to death as a revolution-
ist and graced only at the last minute, he actually
died, so to speak, a living death, described in The
Idiot. His feeling of being constantly persecuted by
death, which even seems to account for the
expressionism of his hectic style,1 1 cannot be
explained as the result of those abnormal experi-
ences alone, but is the most fundamental feature
of his personality make-up. According to Merejk-
ovsky, the theme of the Double was for Dos-
toievski his main personal problem: “Thus all his
tragic and struggling pairs of real people who ap-
pear to themselves as complete entities are pre-
sented as two halves of a third divided personal-
ity—halves which, like the doubles, seek
themselves and pursue themselves.” This is car-
ried out in the most grandiose manner in his last
and greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov, where
Smerjakov is pictured as the double of his brother
Ivan, the two not only usually appearing together
and discussing the same subjects but being insepa-
rably united by a favorite motif of Dostoievski’s,
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the idea of the potential criminal. This double
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
(says Ivan) “is only a personification of myself, in
fact only a part of myself . . . of my lowest and
stupidest thoughts and feelings.” In some of the
omitted passages of The Possessed, Stavrogin, still
trying to convince himself that his hallucination
of the double is subjective and not the Devil, says:
“I don’t believe in him, do not yet believe. I know
that this is only myself in different manifestations,
splitting myself and talking to myself. But he is
determined to become an independent Devil, so
that I have to believe in his existence.” In this last
work of Dostoievski, the hero Ivan propounds the
author’s moral philosophy in a poetic vision of
the Devil, who is presented as a creation of man
in his own image. Before Ivan becomes insane,
the Devil appears to him and declares himself his
double; Ivan, however, refuses to recognize the
reality of the apparition. “You are an illusion, a
malady, a deception, but I do not know how to
destroy you. You are an hallucination, you are
only a manifestation of myself, that is to say, of
my thoughts and of my most abominable
thoughts at that. All that has been long since
dead, all the opinions that I uttered long ago, you
bring up here as if they were new.”
Here we find ourselves again confronted with
the meaning of the double, as a representative of
the individual’s past. Originally, the double was
an identical self (shadow, reflection), promising
personal survival in the future; later, the double
retained together with the individual’s life his
personal past; ultimately, he became an opposing
self, appearing in the form of evil which represents
the perishable and mortal part of the personality
repudiated by the social self. Those three essential
stages in the development of the ideas on the
double we find epitomized in the successive treat-
ment of this theme in three of Dostoievski’s
masterpieces: his early story, “The Double,” his
most fascinating study, The Possessed, and his last
and maturest work, The Brothers Karamazov. Dos-
toievski himself has confessed that Goliadkin, the
paranoiac hero of his early novel, was the mouth-
piece of his own feelings. The author had planned
to rewrite this too-revealing account but evidently
felt compelled to treat the same subject in a more
objective manner. In this, his second story of a
double, called “The Youth,” the hero is definitely
characterized as a case of split personality who
describes himself in the following words: “You
know, I seem to duplicate myself, to divide myself
into two parts—actually double myself and I’m
terrified of this doubling. I feel as if my double
were standing next to me; one is oneself sober
315
 and sensible and the double absolutely wants to
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
do something silly, sometimes something very
funny; and then one suddenly realizes that one
actually wants to do this oneself. God knows why,
one wants it somehow involuntarily, one resists it
and yet one wants it with all one’s will power.”
Interestingly enough, Dostoievski closes his
description of Versilov’s split by a self-conscious
remark which indicates that the author has
familiarized himself with the current literature on
psychopathology: “What is the double really?” he
asks. “He is—at least according to a medical book
of an expert that I consulted lately on this sub-
ject—nothing but the first stage of insanity which
may end in disaster, a dualism between feeling
and willing.” Following the above-sketched devel-
opment of the idea of the double in three succes-
sive characters of Dostoievski’s main works,
Professor D. Tschizewskij, exiled in Prague after
the revolution, concludes in his philosophical
interpretation of The Double in Dostojevskij1 2 that
they represent the artist’s protest against
nineteenth-century rationalism, according to
which man only exists in the material world and
in a material sense. The double breaking through
as he does in Dostoievski’s characters is evidence
of the uncertainty an individual feels when
confronted with a more real existence opened up
in the face of unknown forces. The first witness,
Goliadkin, appears as a more passive victim of this
principle, in that the rational forces are crushing
him from without, whereas Stavrogin and his fully
developed successor, Ivan Karamazov, are con-
sumed by their rationalism from within.
This literary development of the Double-motif
shows how its moralistic revaluation of folk-
tradition is accompanied by an intellectual inter-
pretation in literature aimed to counteract its
threatening irrational power. In giving the main
folk-belief a tragic form, the artist not only
disposes of his irrational self in his work but at
the same time enables the public to detach itself
from both the writer and his creation. Such artistic
transformation of a primitive motif differs, how-
ever, from the historical detachment of scientific
classification in that it appears as a living expres-
sion of powerful personalities still under the spell
of those irrational forces. In giving them form,
that is, rational expression, the artist enables the
public to feel sufficiently removed from the ir-
rational elements to dare vicariously to participate
in them. This dual rôle of the public explains the
fascination great tragedies have for us, in that we
not only take part in the hero’s human suffering
but by the same token participate in the super-
316 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
human greatness for which he suffers. Our form
of tragedy as the offspring of early Greek cult and
ritual still performs the same spiritual function as
did those religious ceremonies: that of temporarily
uniting the “commoner” with irrational life-forces
from which the average man in his daily exist-
ence had to be protected by all sorts of strict tabus.
On certain festive occasions, however, when those
tabus were lifted, the priests and kings perma-
nently endowed with the sacred duty of preserv-
ing that essential life-force communicated it to
the people. It is from such seasonal renewal of the
irrational self in the spiritual ceremonies of magic
participation that culture developed. Culture is
derived from “cult,” not only linguistically but
also functionally, that is, as a continuous transla-
tion of supernatural conceptions into rational
terms. Culture, then, is conceived of here as an
expression of the irrational self seeking material
immortalization in lasting achievements. In this
sense, culture serves a dual function: it preserves
the old spiritual life-values in a more permanent
form, independent of the seasonal re-creation, and
at the same time provides a more direct and
permanent participation of the average group
member in the creation and maintenance of its
symbols.
Notes
1. Aftermath, The Macmillan Co., N. Y., 1937.
2. Totem and Tabu, Moffat Yard, N. Y., 1913.
3. “Der Doppelgaenger,” “Imago,” 1914. Reprinted, In-
ternationaler psychoanalytischer Verlag, Vienna, 1925.
French translation under the title, “Don Juan, Une
étude sur le Double,” Paris, 1932.
4. See my book, Don Juan, Une Étude sur le Double, Paris,
1932.
5. My differing viewpoint is fully documented in Art and
Artist, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., N. Y., 1932.
6. Der Kuenstler, Internationaler psychoanalytischer Ver-
lag, Wien, 1907.
7. Balfour, Sir Graham. The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson,
Charles Scribner’s Sons, N. Y., 1901.
8. In an interview with “Paris Soir,” July 3, 1933.
9. Quoted from Sollier, Les phénomènes d’Autoscopie, Paris,
1913.
10. Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., 1926.
11. “In these rapidly sketched, mobile, fluctuating descrip-
tions of Dostoievski’s, one feels the hurried impres-
sionism and abnormal clarity of a consciousness
already anticipating the approach of insensibility. In
his descriptions we find a completely unique form of
realism of an epileptic, and one who has suffered the
death sentence.” (Grossman, L., in his recent edition
of Dostoievski’s works in Russian.)
12. Reichenberg, 1933.
DAVID PUNTER (ESSAY DATE
1989)
SOURCE: Punter, David. “Narrative and Psychology in
Gothic Fiction.” In Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/
Transgression, edited and with an afterword by Ken-
neth W. Graham, pp. 1-27. New York: AMS, 1989.
In the following essay, Punter assesses Gothic fiction
within the context of the psychoanalytic theories of Mela-
nie Klein.
In this essay, I want to try to bring together
some of the crucial features of Gothic fiction with
one or two of the insights to be derived from
psychoanalysis, but psychoanalysis of a particular
kind: the school of psychoanalysis particularly as-
sociated with Melanie Klein, the so-called British
School, which is also sometimes referred to under
the heading of “object-relations psychology.” In
trying for this connection I am not simply practis-
ing an arbitrary yoking together of the heteroge-
neous. I believe that Kleinian psychoanalysis is
very important, for several reasons. Mainly, I take
it to be capable of generating accounts of what it
might mean to be human. What I mean by that is
that the Kleinian approach is one which does not
shirk the complexity of the connections between
thought and feeling; it does not shrink from own-
ing to the destructiveness which proves so fre-
quently disastrous to the best-intended schemes
of political and social progress; it attempts to
describe the growth of the individual in ways
which assume that, from the outset, the individual
lives and moves and has his or her being in a rec-
ognisably constituted social world.
It is, perhaps, highly polemical in these times
to say this; but I believe that, in these respects,
Kleinian analysis stands in stark contrast to the
more popular neo-Freudianism associated with
the name of Jacques Lacan. There are many things
one could say about this contrast, and what it
itself symbolises; but I believe it fair to say that
Lacanian conceptualisations rarely seek very much
purchase in experience.1 That is to say, Lacanian
thought tends towards becoming a peculiarly
cerebral and abstract affair; it deals, certainly with
intelligence, in structure and form, and offers
valuable insight into levels at which, indeed, the
unconscious may operate like a language; but it
appears to lack the more real sense of complexity
which emerges from the very best psychoanalyti-
cal writing—a complexity, that is, which is very
unlike the largely mechanical complexities of
Lacanian post-structuralism, and bears more rela-
tion to the ever-changing oscillations of feeling
and mood which actually comprise human experi-
ence.
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This absence in Lacanian thought would,
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
perhaps, not matter very much if it were not for
the fact that, after all, Lacanianism purports to be
a variant of psychoanalysis, and if there is one
thing of which psychoanalysts should be aware, it
is of the deep psychoses which frequently underlie
the excessively high valuation of mind. Sandor
Ferenczi, to name but one analyst who writes
about this, referred most individual and cultural
madness to an intense desire for rationality, which
itself masked a disgust for the body and for the
material world, a disgust which would need much
patient unravelling.2 Lacan, I believe, is caught in
precisely this trap. It is perhaps also worth under-
lining that this particular syndrome, the syn-
drome, we might call it, of the disembodied brain,
is undoubtedly connected with masculinity; that
is not to say that it is exclusively an illness of men,
but masculinity, the rejection of the body, and the
impulses of self-destruction and the destruction of
others are very closely tied together, in this culture
at least; and the directly phallic stance of Laca-
nian thought and writing is another vitiation of
its value, and one which is particularly surprising
when one considers that Lacan has been much
taken up by feminist thinkers and writers, whereas
Melanie Klein has not.3
I wish to explore four points. First, to address
briefly the general question, “What are we doing
when we psychoanalyse a text?” Secondly, to offer
one or two thoughts on psychoanalysis in general
in relation to Gothic fiction. Thirdly, to discuss
Klein’s work in general relation to the notions of
narrative and symbolism. And finally, to try to
draw these threads together by investigating
certain moments in Gothic fiction in the light of
Kleinian concepts, and seeing whether we can
make use of these concepts to elucidate some of
the problems of a particular genre of fiction.
So: what are we doing when we use psycho-
analysis in relation to literary texts? We need, I
think, to be clear that we are engaged in a very
different enterprise from anything we might
practise within a real relationship to other people.
According to Freud there are only three ways of
recovering and exploring unconscious material.
One is through dream; the second is through para-
praxes, slips of the tongue, behavioural eccentrici-
ties and so forth; and the third, which of course
bases itself largely on work with the first two, is in
the practice of analysis itself, through the use of
the principal tools of free association.
None of these methods for the recovery and
exploration of unconscious material is available in
the written text. The text may recount dreams,
317
 but it does not dream of itself. The nearest equiva-
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
lents it may have to parapraxes are printing er-
rors; these might indeed be interesting, but are
hardly likely to yield a rich crop of meaning. And
although we may put questions to the text, we
can expect no answers. Indeed, in our interroga-
tions of the text, the psychoanalytic situation is
reversed; it is the text which remains mute, while
we, the critics, conduct our more less impassioned
monologues and dialogues across its inert form.
So the text itself cannot be psychoanalysed;
and neither can its author, or at least, such a
process would have little relation to the central
tasks of criticism. I believe that the best we can
say is this: that we are making use of psychoana-
lytical concepts, and maybe also of a psychoana-
lytic stance, as tools with which to elucidate our
experience of the text.4 That may sound very
imprecise, but I suggest that it is not; that we need
to have the category of our own experience within
the definition for the sake of clarity, because
whatever our approach to literature is, it will
always be our own experience of the text which is
at stake. And, of course, there is no reason to sup-
pose that this experience need be pristine or
uninformed; clearly, whenever we approach a text
we bring with us all the baggage we have acquired
through previous cultural contacts, our knowledge
of the language, our various historical senses, our
aesthetic formation and so forth.
I say “to elucidate our experience of the text”;
but I would want to add a further point. Psycho-
analysis, essentially, is in the business of making
interpretations.5 Of course, within the process of
individual psychoanalysis, the status of those
interpretations, whether withheld or offered by
the analyst, is highly provisional; and, indeed,
this may also be the case with literary interpreta-
tion. But I would want to hold to the category
interpretation when trying to work with analytic
concepts; it is an interpretation which is the end-
point of our endeavours, and it is inevitable that
in putting forward an interpretation of a text we
are simultaneously putting forward an interpreta-
tion of ourselves, and also, in most cases, an
interpretation of a particular moment of contact
between the culture we inhabit and a different
one, a moment of contact within which whole
realms of human experience may be contained.
Turning now to the Gothic, it needs to be said
that Gothic fiction has proved a godsend to
psychoanalytically-minded critics; and it is not
hard to see why this should be so. Gothic fiction
deals intensely in symbolism, to the point of na-
ivety; it does not take much analytic skill to probe
318 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
the skeletons of Mysteries of Udolpho or the inner
significance of the portrait in Lewis’ The Monk.
One variant or another of described mental
abnormality occurs in all the relevant texts; it
would take a remarkable blindness to avoid notic-
ing the diagnoses of insanity, consequent fre-
quently upon the prohibitions of the law and the
disorienting effects of transgression, which are of-
fered on every page—although that is not at all
the same, of course, as taking those diagnoses at
their face value. For all that, there has not been a
satisfactory general study of the Gothic from a
psychoanalytic viewpoint; the kinds of point
mentioned above tend to emerge piecemeal in the
general run of Gothic criticism.6
It is not necessary to rehearse those obvious
points here, but I would like to add a few observa-
tions on matters which I take to be generally
relevant to a psychoanalytical interpretation of
the Gothic. First, I think it needs to be pointed
out that there is a type of historical continuity
between the forms of Gothic fiction and the forms
of psychoanalytical writing. To put it at its sim-
plest, quite a number of Gothic novels are really
structured like case histories. We might think
particularly of James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justi-
fied Sinner, with its doubled account of what we
could crudely refer to as a phenomenon of mas-
sive defensive splitting of the psyche; but the
structure is also clearly visible in many lesser-
known works. In Sophia Lee’s The Recess, for
instance, a very early Gothic novel, we are actu-
ally invited to adjudicate as readers between two
different diagnostic accounts, which in several
crucial respects flatly contradict each other.7
And this, of course, complicates the business
of critical interpretation by appearing to offer us a
further alternative. If it is technically impossible
to analyse the text or the presumed author,
perhaps after all it may be possible to analyse the
character or characters whose reality we are of-
fered for inspection. I think we have to be clear
that if we do this we are in fact participating in a
flow of fictions; which, in itself, may be a perfectly
worthwhile activity, but should not be confused
with the analysis of real people. In fact, it is odd
how quite sophisticated critics, who in other
respects are alert to the fictions of character, of the
ways in which the very notion of character needs
to be deconstructed so that one can see the bundle
of codes and categories out of which fictional
persons are built, nonetheless seem able to believe
that, for the specific purpose of discerning an
unconscious, we can take a “character” as in some
sense real. It appears to me, for instance, that Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose Between Men: English
Literature and Homosocial Desire contains some very
interesting thoughts on the Gothic, usually falls
into this trap despite the intensity of her engage-
ment with deconstructionist thinking.8
Of course, there are other connections. Freud
himself was a devotee of just that period and type
of German writing, epitomised in Goethe’s Sor-
rows of Young Werther, which proved inspirational
to the English Gothic novelists. This is important
because the great German romantics were them-
selves trying, for the most part, to diagnose a
cultural condition, a condition in which they
themselves participated. It could be said that this
kind of writing reached its finest, if most opaque,
flowering in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, where
the passing sicknesses of civilisation and of the
individual psyche are welded together in a single
prose account of a historical condition. The basis
of that condition, according to Hegel, can be sum-
marised as “alienation”; and it is worth noting
that among the many meanings of that tortured
and tortuous word is its application to conditions
of mental dislocation.9
In trying to draw psychoanalytic writing and
the Gothic novel together in this way, there are
several concepts we need to have in mind. The
first one is the pleasure of the text. Why do we
read Gothic novels? Why do we read Freud’s case
histories? In the latter case we may have a genuine
professional interest; but in the absence of that, I
suggest that the pleasures to be derived may not
be dissimilar. What we have in those writings are
two sets of depictions of psychotic states of mind;
the “dreadful pleasure” evoked by Gothic fiction,
whether it be Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho or
The Italian, or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is not
merely the terror of falling from high precipices
or of encountering the fearsome sight of the
monster playing Boris Karloff and hurling small
children around; it is also the terror that we may
be in danger of losing our minds, that the mad-
ness exemplified in the text may end up by
removing some of our own usual life coordinates
and leaving us adrift, the victims of a transgres-
sion which can no longer be healed. Certainly
Coleridge felt that danger as he read through and
reviewed some of the early Gothic texts;1 0 and yet
of course he was aware, as we need to be, that
with this terror there is also a considerable admix-
ture of pleasure, of several kinds: the rather
unpleasant pleasure which comes from viewing a
character in worse psychological shape than
oneself, but also the deeper pleasure of being able
to peer backwards through our own personal his-
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tory, because all psychotic states are simply
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
perpetuations of landscapes which we have all
inhabited at some stage in our early infancy. Mad-
ness is not something peculiar which grows on
people; it can more helpfully be defined as the
radically inappropriate persistence of visions of
the world which are perfectly natural in their
rightful place and time but which should have
faded long ago from the inner eye.
And obviously, in Freud too we can observe
these states and their operations in the world, and
measure our experience against these extreme ac-
counts of cultural dislocation. It may be useful at
this point to introduce Barthes’ term, the “enig-
matic code”: by which he simply means to identify
those parts of a text whose primary function is to
keep us persisting in our reading by focusing our
minds on unanswered questions.1 1 Obviously, the
detective story and the thriller are forms where
the preponderance of the enigmatic code as an or-
ganising textual principle is high; but it is high
too in Gothic, although perhaps of a different
order. We could take Frankenstein as an example.
In the classic detective story, the enigmatic
code hinges on the question of who committed
the crime. Often, of course, it is more sophisticated
than this: was a crime committed at all? or, will
X, who, we know, did not commit the crime,
manage to demonstrate his or her innocence? and
so on. The enigmatic code in Frankenstein is a great
deal more open-ended than that, and this may be
one important reason why the constructed myth
of Frankenstein has proved to have such extraordi-
nary longevity and power of adaptation: the ques-
tion itself is operative at two levels simultaneously,
the level of character interaction and the level of
world-historical consequence. We wonder, of
course, and increasingly as the novel continues,
what the outcome will be of the burgeoning
conflict between Frankenstein and his creation;
but we also are brought to wonder what the ef-
fects will be on the world in general of the exist-
ence and public performance of this non-human
creature, and of the transgression which has been
implicit in his creation. And this, I suspect, is
central to the enigmatic code of the Gothic;
because it deals in material which challenges the
boundaries of the “natural,” it is always difficult
to see what the implications might be of the
outcome of particular action for the world at large.
Whether or not Philip Marlow identifies the
murderer, the world as a whole will go on in very
much the same way as before; but if indeed it
should prove to be the case that the ghosts Emily
sees at Udolpho are real, then the impact of that
319
 tiny example of the supernatural would radically
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
undermine a great number of metaphysical and
political presumptions.
This facet of the enigmatic code is important
in terms of the Gothic’s purchase on our interest;
and again I would want to connect this with the
enigmatic code which operates in Freud’s case
histories. If indeed it is the case that people—and,
of course, at least in the emblematic case of Judge
Schreber, very important and public people—are
themselves the open recipients and bearers of a
version of being human which is not in general
accord with our conventional criteria, what does
this do for the ordinary consensus on which social
life and organisation are based?
This leads to a further point. In my opinion
psychoanalysis has been quite shy of moving into
the field of cultural diagnosis. Freud’s only signifi-
cant attempt in this direction, Civilisation and its
Discontents, was a late work, and it lacks very
much detail. However, the question needs to be
put: is psychoanalysis capable of proffering an
interpretation which transcends the individual?
Of course, in one vital sense all psychoanalytical
interpretation does precisely this; in that the
unconscious is not within the individual and
necessarily its contents have a strong relation to
the world of flow by which the individual psyche
is structured. However, the point of greater inter-
est is whether interpretation can find any purchase
on the societal world which lies between the
individual and the universe—and which in fact
structures the relations within which the indi-
vidual finds him or herself.
In other words, can psychoanalysis be of any
help in diagnosing an age, and thus, for instance,
a literary genre, considered as a historically
bounded set of attempts to structure and explicate
feeling? Theoretically, the answer should be yes;
despite a number of years of neglect and indeed
derision, the attempts of Herbert Marcuse, Nor-
man O. Brown and Wilhelm Reich to characterise
capitalism through the use of psychoanalytic
categories remain potent, even if they are by no
means perfect models.1 2 It is historically obvious
that the Gothic coincides with a specific stage of
the reorganisation of English society and
economy. We are accustomed to referring to this
massive reorganisation as “industrialisation”,
although that may not be the most useful descrip-
tive term. At all events, the years between 1760
and 1820 saw an enormous set of changes—at the
level, of course, of the social body, but also in
terms of individual experience, and in particular
320 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
in terms of how the individual might experience
expectancy and change.1 3
I assume, with Freud, that the experience of
change is fearful, and that we therefore make vari-
ous attempts to prohibit that experience. We
might then well expect to find that a fiction of
fear arises at a time when conventional social
norms and norms of legality are evaporating; and
I think we can go further than this. After all, the
emergence of Gothic is really quite an extraordi-
nary phenomenon; a new, and very large, audi-
ence for fiction which had been happily reading
Fielding and Smollett, with their emphasis on
London taverns and country retreats, suddenly
chose to start reading stories set in medieval Ital-
ian abbeys and mysterious Spanish courtyards.
Why? The answer presumably lies in the concept
of sublimation (a likelihood enhanced by the oc-
currence of the category of “sublimity” in the
discourse of the period). We can put it like this:
that when the prospect of uninvited change in
the external world becomes pressing, there arises
a need to safeguard the objects in one’s internal
world; and to contemplate whether they are
capable of survival within this soon-to-be-changed
scenario.
In Gothic fiction we see a prolonged contem-
plation of the objects in the internal world; and at
the same time a repeated vindication of the
individual’s ability to survive despite transgressive
threat to boundaries. Emily survives; many of the
crucial figures in Gothic mythology—like the
Wandering Jew and the Ancient Mariner—are
archetypal survivors; indeed often their narrative
functions seem to be simply to evidence the pos-
sibility of survival, albeit at a level which ap-
proaches the transcendental. And, of course, it is
not by accident that the notion of narrative
suspense really begins with the Gothic authors;
clearly the conditions of fear, threat and depen-
dency are precisely in the area where suspense
becomes a key datum of everyday experience.
We are now already verging on Kleinian
theory, with the mention of the “internal world”;
because it was a cardinal point of Klein’s version
of the psyche that individuals form internal
worlds, and that one of the problems of life
becomes the series of attempts to square the
contents of one’s internal world with the outer
world and the ways in which you might from time
to time experience it. Some brief introductory
remarks on Klein may be necessary. She was a
Freudian analyst. Her own analysis was carried
out by Ferenczi, briefly, and then by Karl Abra-
ham. In 1926, she left Germany for England,
where she lived for the rest of her life. While here,
she entertained a good many ideas which were
heterodox in terms of the psychoanalytic estab-
lishment, and it has since been said that she
founded, with the aid of her mentor Ernest Jones,
a British School of Psychoanalysis.1 4 The crucial
question for us, however, is: what were the differ-
ences between her theory and practice and those
of the psychoanalytical orthodoxy? And are these
ideas of any use when we come to consider liter-
ary phenomena?
We can summarise the distinctiveness of
Klein’s position very briefly. Firstly, her work is
distinguished by its attention to infancy and very
early mental states. Although it is a simplification,
I nonetheless think it fair to say that Klein rejected
Freud’s theory of the instincts; she was much
more interested in how very early experiences
shape the internal world of the child, and in
particular in how those experiences may have a
bearing on patterns of emotion—hate, envy, guilt,
reparation—which may continue to reverberate
through adult life. In her attention to the infant,
Klein’s emphasis was always on the crucial rela-
tion with the mother; in reality and in fantasy, as
actual nurturer and also as the fictive precursor of
the expected and hoped-for nurturing which
conditions much adult response. She was ab-
sorbed, to an even greater degree than Freud, by
the phenomena of the transference and the
counter-transference in analysis, and it is not hard
to see why. Her belief in the supreme importance
of early stages of infancy and her reference of
psychological problems to damage caused in early
infancy entailed a strong interest in the patterns
of early relationship which might be re-enacted in
the analytic situation; and clearly the fact that she
was a woman underlined the importance of work-
ing through feelings about motherhood and
nurturing which Freud had to a large extent
ignored, or at least relegated by his attention to
penis-envy and other allegedly gender-specific
formative experiences.
Klein’s interest in early infancy and in the
transference points to her main clinical work,
which was in the sphere of psychotic states of
mind; an unusual slant for a psychoanalyst of her
time, since the principal means of identifying
psychosis had been precisely as that order of
mental disturbance which analysis could not
reach. Finally, Klein did a great deal of work on
the inescapability of envy and destructiveness as
components of the infant experience which can-
not be expunged by later developments and
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which thus continue to operate within the con-
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
ventional interchange of relationships and social
existence.
Her work is referred to as “object-relations
psychology” because, in her analysis of infant
states, she supposes that our earliest experiences
are in relation to particular part-objects, and
principally the breast; and that later children start
to put those part-objects together as whole objects
and thus to be able to conceive of the totality of
the mother and then the father. It is the series of
relations between the infant and the part-objects,
and then the whole objects, which is crucial to
healthy development. If any of those objects
becomes damaged in the child’s internal world,
then that will be the basis of disturbance in later
life.1 5
It is in the relation between external and
internal objects that Klein believes the origin of
symbolism to lie. Freud considered that all inter-
est in the “world” was a displacement from an
interest in, or rather, curiosity about, one’s own
and one’s parents’ bodies. Klein agreed with that;
but she considered that the wish to possess or at-
tack the mother’s body is the fundamental episte-
mophilic relation to the world, and is thus imbued
with all the primary processes of guilt, transgres-
sion and reparation. All external objects are, ac-
cording to Klein, symbols of the child’s and the
parents’ bodies or parts of them; and the construc-
tion of a work of art is in part a symbolic exter-
nalisation of the inner world within which these
objects exist, and in part an attempt at reparation
for the past sins of which the still existing child in
the artist conceives him- or herself to be guilty.
Thus works of art frequently contain representa-
tions of damaged internal objects; and symbolism
is based in a wish to effect some connection
between the damage which exists within the in-
ner world and the objects in the world outside
which may in some way relate to our experience
of that damage.1 6
Art is the recovery and restoration of “dam-
aged and lost internal objects”. And this damage
occurs at a very early age; for Klein claims that the
origin of symbolism, being a displacement, is co-
terminous with the prevalance of sadism at a
particular point of the child’s development.
The child expects to find within the mother (a)
the father’s penis, (b) excrement, and (c) children,
and these things it equates with edible substances.
According to the child’s earliest phantasies (or
“sexual theories”) of parental coitus, the father’s
penis (or his whole body) becomes incorporated
in the mother during the act. Thus the child’s
sadistic attacks have for their object both father
321
 and mother, who are in phantasy bitten, torn, cut
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
or stamped to bits. The attacks give rise to anxiety
lest the subject should be punished by the united
parents, and this anxiety also becomes interna-
lised in consequence of the oral-sadistic introjec-
tion of the objects and is thus already directed
towards the early super-ego . . . it is the anxiety
arising in the phase that I have described which
sets going the mechanism of identification. Since
the child desires to destroy the organs (penis,
vagina, breasts) which stand for the objects, he
conceives a dread of the latter. This anxiety
contributes to make him equate the organs in
question with other things; owing to this equa-
tion these in their turn become objects of anxiety,
and so he is impelled constantly to make other
and new equations, which form the basis of his
interest in new objects and of symbolism. Thus,
not only does symbolism come to be the founda-
tion of all phantasy and sublimation but, more
than that, it is the basis of the subject’s relation to
the outside world and to reality in general.1 7
We can move directly from this assertion to
Gothic fiction; and, in particular, to the work
which has so often been taken as the originator of
the genre: Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto.
Castle of Otranto is a book which abounds in part-
objects; in separated fragments of the disunited
body. For the second edition of the novel, Wal-
pole added an epigraph: “vanae / fingentur spe-
cies, tamen ut pes, et caput uni / reddantur for-
mae.”1 8 This is a corruption of a text from Horace.
The original meaning was: “Idle fancies shall be
shaped [like a sick man’s dream] so that neither
head nor foot can be assigned to a single shape.”
Walpole’s version significantly, and, I believe,
unconsciously, reverses the impact of that text to
read that “nevertheless head and foot are assigned
to a single shape.” The reversal is vital; Walpole is
telling us that, in this new genre of supernatural
or improbable fiction, the bits and pieces of the
body which he is offering us have some ground-
ing in dream and sickness; and also that they need
to be taken as in some sense symptomatic of dam-
age experienced in the relationships between real
people.
Thus in Castle of Otranto we encounter, for
instance, the enormous casque, or helmet, which
is offered to us as a part of the body of a deceased
giant, who is, of course, the absent ancestor. When
our hero, Manfred, first encounters this object, we
have this description:
The first thing that struck Manfred’s eyes was a
group of his servants endeavouring to raise some-
thing that appeared to him a mountain of sable
plumes. He gazed without believing his sight.
What are ye doing? cried Manfred, wrathfully:
Where is my son? A volley of voices replied, Oh,
my lord! the prince! the prince! the helmet! the
322
helmet! Shocked with these lamentable sounds,
and dreading he knew not what, he advanced
hastily—But what a sight for a father’s eyes!—He
beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost
buried under an enormous helmet, an hundred
times more large than any casque ever made for
human being, and shaded with a proportionable
quantity of black feathers.
(pp. 16-17)
Such a passage as this, in one sense, merely
exemplifies the melodramatic quality of Walpole’s
book; and has also been seen as evidencing his
incompetence in the sustained evocation of fear.1 9
But there are other things to be said about it. We
might well suggest, according to Klein’s theories,
that this incidence of an accommodable part-
object, and especially in an incident which also
recounts the death of the child, relates closely to
that particularly problematic stage in which the
child has to learn to make the transition from
observing his parents as bundles of objects whose
relevance to him- or herself is defined merely in
terms of gratification, and to begin to take note of
the ways in which these bundles of more or less
gratifying physical objects appear, in disconcert-
ing ways, to possess a level of independence which
threatens the child’s own apprehension of the
purposes of the universe—which, until this stage,
have largely consisted of the gratification of the
child.
This scene from Walpole is expressionistically
emblematic of the process which Lacan, of course,
described as the “passing under the name of the
father”:2 0 the dead prince is that child who has
been called upon to take on the role of the
father—and in this case, with certain associated
feudal responsibilities and prohibitions—but has
been, rather directly, crushed by them. In Klein’s
terms, we would be able to add something to this
interpretation: that here we clearly have an
unhappy, or disastrous, accommodation with the
head, or penis—a failure of patriarchal descent
which is, in the end, what undermines Manfred
himself; and this connects in with the prohibited
theme of the story, which is incest.
Castle of Otranto is not much read these days;
but Frankenstein is, and there we can also discern
some major themes by thinking about the part-
objects. After all, what is the construction of the
monster if not an attempt to bring together the
parts of the inner world to form a whole which
can somehow achieve cogency and validation in
the outer realm? We need to remind ourselves of
several crucial features of Frankenstein. First,
Frankenstein’s own education is a peculiar one.
He says:
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 My temper was sometimes violent, and my pas-
sions vehement; but by some law in my tempera-
ture they were turned, not towards childish
pursuits, but to an eager desire to learn, and not
to learn all things indiscriminately. I confess that
neither the structure of languages, nor the code of
governments, nor the politics of various states,
possessed attractions for me. It was the secrets of
heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and
whether it was the outward substance of things,
or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious
soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries
were directed to the metaphysical, or, in its high-
est sense, the physical secrets of the world.2 1
The category which is omitted in Franken-
stein’s education is the category which embraces
encounters with the real world in its social organi-
sation. It is this category which seems to Franken-
stein to hold no interest; to supplant it he turns
to the two extremes, to the so-called “metaphysi-
cal” and to chronic introspection. In Kleinian
terms, we could speak of problems of introjection.
The young Frankenstein is given to us as a name
for a syndrome which abandons reality-testing,
for one reason or another, and which prefers to
work on a direct link between the inner world and
the untested fantasy. But this is a mask for destruc-
tiveness; that ignorance of the real world is also a
need to wish it away, to place it under prohibi-
tion, to deal only in the inner world and in the
gigantic shadows which that inner world throws
on the screen of experience if we choose to ignore
the checks and balances of external constraint.
It is thus not surprising that we find Franken-
stein describing his creation of the monster in
these terms: “I wished, as it were, to procrastinate
all that related to my feelings of affection until
the great object, which swallowed up every habit
of my nature, should be completed.” (p. 49) This
is in the context of a passage where Frankenstein
is saying that he wished to suspend every tie of af-
fection with real people, and principally with his
family, while he was engaged in his version of
creativity. I have no wish to pun on Mary Shel-
ley’s use of the term “object”; nevertheless what is
happening here is that we are being offered an ac-
count of what might happen when creativity is
practised in an arena where the internal world has
been fatally damaged. Clearly there is a sense in
which Frankenstein’s work is reparative, in the
sense in which Klein uses the word; a sense in
which Frankenstein’s effort to construct an object
for himself is itself connected with his own ap-
prehension of the failure of loved objects in his
own life.
It is here that Klein’s description of the transi-
tion from a world based on part-objects to a world
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where real relationships can be established, and
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
where one’s experiences of the unconditional love
of the mother can be continuously transformed
into further experiences of loving and being loved
that can at least appear to have independent and
volitional validity, is useful. Because Frankenstein
is stuck with the bits and pieces. It is clear—Mary
Shelley tells us so—that the inner world of the
story has become a charnel-house, a place where
all that exists are the fragments of the body which
cannot be connected together to comprise a
meaningful and functioning whole. This is not
only so if we fall into the fiction of considering
the enterprise from Frankenstein’s point of view;
the very structure of the novel itself, beginning as
it does with the series of letters, reinforces our
sense of being in a world where the fragments can-
not be made to coalesce.
And thus it is that Frankenstein embarks on
his great transgressive activity. If the outer world
is not experienced as real; if it is perceived as a
shadow form in which consequences cannot be
produced or expected, then the monstrous truly
appears in that one might try to set the internal
fragments themselves in some kind of order and
expect real life to result. The actual physical frag-
ments from which Frankenstein has assembled
his monster are themselves beautiful; and human.
Yet what is the outcome:
How can I describe my emotions at this catastro-
phe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such
infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form?
His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected
his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God!
His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of
muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a
lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly
whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a
more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that
seemed almost of the same colour as the dun
white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled
complexion and his straight black lips.
(p. 51)
It has never been easy to get a picture of this
monster; certainly little in it suggests the various
cinematic representations of the twentieth cen-
tury. Some parts, certainly, are good, others bad,
as one might expect; but it is the disunity of the
whole, the inability of these various parts to
cohere which is the main source of Frankenstein’s
dismay, and thus of the endless persecution to
which the monster is subjected throughout the
rest of the novel.
What we then need to say about Frankenstein
is that it confronts us with a scenario in which
the damaged inner world of which Klein speaks is
323
 incarnated; and the result of that incarnation is
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
the imposition of an endless destructiveness,
based in mutual envy.2 2 Crucially, the monster
envies Frankenstein his freedom of action, which
is intimately associated with his command of
language; what Frankenstein envies in his creation
is his apparent ability to give free vent to his
destructive and envious impulses. The landscape
here is one in which inner and outer worlds have
become fatally fragmented, and we can connect
this fragmentation with the phenomena of Gothic
in general; with, for instance, the extraordinary
paintings of the later, but undeniably Gothic, art-
ist John Martin, where the dislocation between
the puniness of the human figures and the gran-
deur of the destructive landscape is the very
incarnation of the landscape scenes we encounter
all the time in Radcliffe.
Both Otranto and Frankenstein confront us
with psychotic states. These are the landscapes of
childhood, where enormous monsters rush
around after us threatening to tear at our vitals,
while all the time we suspect that they are of our
own making. It is not enough to speak of instinct,
rather we are referred back in both cases to dif-
ficulties of parenting, of succession, of the hand-
ing down of behavioural patterns within the fam-
ily. For it is the collapse and ineffectiveness of the
family which is at stake in these texts, and in
almost all the other Gothic novels, with their
insistent harping on the state of being an orphan.
And it is now that we are in a position to
begin to ask the sociopsychological questions; for
it must not be forgotten that the main actual
experience of the industrial revolution was of a
massive and irremediable dislocation of family
life.2 3 But before embarking on this “metapsycho-
logical” project, there are one or two other points
worth mentioning. What happens in The Monk
and in other Gothic texts is that there is a total
absorption of an object; and this is a phenomenon
which Klein describes. In fact, Freud describes it
first, defining introjection as the sole condition
on which an object may be given up.2 4 In other
words it is only by tangling with and absorbing
an object that one may be allowed to develop to a
further stage in which the external occurrences of
that object may appear unnecessary. Klein adds to
this point: “If the object is introjected in a situa-
tion of emotional conflict it is more likely to be
introjected into the superego”.2 5 In other words,
the phenomenon of introjection happens all the
time; but if it happens at a time when the psyche
is peculiarly vulnerable then one of the possible
consequences is that the introjected object may
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take over one’s life, and effectively prevent the
possibility of reality-testing.
It is these conditions which, according to
Klein, produce the main defensive strategies; in
other words, when the introjection of the object
becomes too intense, phenomena occur within
the psyche which may prove unamenable to the
usual processes of social prohibition. Klein de-
scribes these processes under two main headings:
projective identification and splitting.2 6 Splitting
is only too obvious as the major motor principle
of the narrative of Frankenstein; projective identifi-
cation may well be the main process described by
the other main Gothic fictions, the intense identi-
fication with the hero and heroine despite a lack
of any obvious reason for their assumed su-
premacy. And it would be at that point that one
might begin to consider what the fundamental
principles are behind the ways in which narrative
itself functions: through a process of identifying
and destroying centres of consciousness, in other
words, through a process of making and destroy-
ing projective identifications.
The process of maturation as Klein describes it
is the evolution from the paranoid/schizoid posi-
tion to the manic-depressive position.2 7 In other
words one moves in infancy, or so it is hoped,
from a stance in which every phenomenon of the
outer world appears as persecutory and thus
threatens one with the splitting or disintegration
of the self, to a stance in which one might achieve
a reasonable oscillation between feelings of hope
and despair. This is, one should add, the best that
can be hoped for. I would suggest that Gothic fic-
tions for the most part deal in interruptions of
this maturing process: and that part of the evi-
dence for this has been the repeated critical at-
tempt to explore the categories of the “explained”
and “unexplained” supernatural. Presumably the
“explained” supernatural is that experience which
proves amenable to the categories one might use
in so-called adult life; while that which remains
unexplained adheres to the paranoid position, as I
have suggested in The Literature of Terror.2 8
Northanger Abbey and similar tales of recuperation
would thus serve as attempts to regain for adult-
hood what might be essentially the property of
childhood, as Austen more or less overtly says.
To add one or two further points: it is appar-
ent that the hero, so aptly named Wringhim, of
Confessions of a Justified Sinner is precisely a
representation of the mechanism of splitting
which takes place, according to Klein, when there
have been problems with the figuring in the
internal landscape of the mother or the father.
Equally, Klein talks about the damage which may
ensue from the child’s unestablished fantasies
about the presence of the father inside the mother;
much of the material about Schedoni in The Ital-
ian fits in with this analysis. Why, however, and
the question still remains with us, the Gothic?
Why then, and why like that?
I have already said that psychoanalytic schools
have been understandably wary of mounting
cultural explanations; but I would like to make a
suggestion. The infant, it is plain from Klein’s ac-
counts of her own analyses of children, is at all
times evolving symbolic systems in order to
prevent him- or herself from having to experience
loss. That resistance to loss may in some extreme
cases become a resistance to development or
change of any kinds, and some psychotic manifes-
tations like autism arise from this syndrome. The
issue is the prevention of whole objects, and the
fear is that those whole objects, if they were al-
lowed to appear, would reproduce the persecutory
valency which the infant has experienced in rela-
tion to the breast.2 9
I would suggest that this resistance is at stake
in Gothic fiction, and that this might condition
the narrative forms with which we try to deal in
the Gothic. The enigmatic codes permit of only
two alternatives, explanation or non-explanation;
in both cases there is a problem about how to do
justice to the unresolved complexities of adult
experience. And this, I would suggest, has to do
with fear of change; with a genre which is pecu-
liarly a set of narratives which emerge in a world
either where the questions which narrative might
pose are unanswerable, or where the answers
might be too fearful for the individual mind to
hold in the face of social change.
It seems to me, then, that the Kleinian con-
cepts are indeed capable of generating accounts of
history, although clearly historical process cannot
be mapped in a one-to-one way onto the develop-
ment of the psyche. But more importantly, I sug-
gest that Gothic fiction, because of its overt deal-
ing in symbols, becomes a special case in two
ways. On the one hand, we might say that this
expressionism renders its meanings particularly
available to analytic interpretation. But on the
other, one also needs to say that psychoanalysis
itself, and especially of the Kleinian kind, can
provide us with some thoughts about why this
type of fiction, with its emphases on familial
prohibition and transgressive wish-fulfilment,
arose when it did; about, in other words, the ways
in which external fears are linked in particular
ways with attempts to constitute and handle the
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internal world to which fiction so often gives ac-
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
cess, and about what those linkages might be for
Gothic fiction, arising as it does at a time when
traditional processes of maturation and shaping
for the family were being visibly threatened by a
set of feared changes the endpoint of which could
be seen but dimly if at all.
Notes
1. I am thinking of essays like, for instance, “The func-
tion and field of speech and language in psychoanaly-
sis,” in Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan
(London: Tavistock, 1977), pp. 30-113.
2. See, e.g., Sándor Ferenczi, Final Contributions to the
Problems and Methods of Psycho-analysis, ed. M. Balint
(London: Hogarth, 1955), p. 246.
3. One of the most suggestive attempts to relate Klein’s
work to the study of culture is Michael Rustin, “A
Socialist Consideration of Kleinian Psychoanalysis,”
New Left Review, No. 131 (1982), pp. 71-96.
4. For a description of psychoanalytic stance, as I mean
it here, see Edgar Levenson, The Fallacy of Understand-
ing (New York: Basic Books, 1972), pp. 211 ff.; but also
J. Krishnamurti, The Penguin Krishnamurti Reader
(Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1970), pp. 21 ff.
5. On interpretation, see particularly James Strachey,
“The Nature of the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanaly-
sis,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis (1969). For
these references and those in the previous note, I am
indebted to Barry Palmer, and to his unpublished
paper, “Interpretation and the Consultant Role.”
6. See, e.g., Elliott B. Gose, Imagination Indulged: The Ir-
rational in the Nineteenth Century Novel (Montreal and
London: McGill-Queens U.P., 1972), pp. 27 ff.; Eliza-
beth MacAndrew, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (New
York: Columbia U.P., 1979), pp. 241 ff..
7. See my Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions
from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longmans,
1980), pp. 56-59.
8. See Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Ho-
mosocial Desire (New York: Columbia U.P., 1985).
9. On alienation, it is particularly interesting to look at
Mitchell Franklin, “On Hegel’s Theory of Alienation
and its Historic Force,” Tulane Studies in Philosophy, IX
(1960).
10. See Coleridge, Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor
(London: Constable, 1936), pp. 355-382.
11. Or hermeneutic code; see Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans.
R. Miller (London: Cape, 1975), p. 19.
12. See particularly Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation: A
Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, Mass.: Beacon,
1966); Brown, Life Against Death: the Psychoanalytical
Meaning of History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1959); Reich, Sex-Pol: Essays 1929-1934, ed. L. Baxan-
dall (New York: Vintage, 1972).
13. The most illuminating perspectives on expectancy are
offered, I believe, by the group analysts. See, e.g., Wil-
fred Bion, Experiences in Groups, and Other Papers
(London: Tavistock, 1961), pp. 150-152.
14. The most useful book about Klein is Hanna Segal, Klein
(Brighton: Fontana, 1979).
325
 15. See particularly Klein, “On the Theory of Anxiety and
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
Guilt,” in Envy and Gratitude, and Other Works 1946-
1963 (London: Hogarth, 1975), pp. 25-42; and “A
Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-
Depressive States,” in Love, Guilt and Reparation, and
Other Works 1921-1945 (London: Hogarth, 1975), pp.
262-289.
16. See Klein, “Early Analysis,” in Love, Guilt and Repara-
tion, pp. 77-105; “On Observing the Behaviour of
Young Infants,” in Envy and Gratitude, pp. 94-121; and
“The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Devel-
opment of the Ego,” in Love, Guilt and Reparation, pp.
219-232.
17. “Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego,”
pp. 219-221.
18. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. W. S. Lewis
(London: Oxford U.P., 1969), pp. xii-xiii.
19. See, e.g., Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror: A Study of
the Gothic Romance (London: Russell and Russell,
1921), p. 19.
20. See Lacan, especially “On a question preliminary to
any treatment of psychosis,” in Ecrits, pp. 179-225.
21. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. R. E. Dowse and D. J.
Palmer (London: Dent, 1963), p. 28.
22. Cf. Klein, “Envy and Gratitude”, in Envy and Gratitude,
pp. 176-235.
23. See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in
England 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld, 1977); C. C.
Harris, The Family and Industrial Society (London: Allen
and Unwin, 1983).
24. See, e.g., Freud, “Psycho-analysis,” in The Standard Edi-
tion of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, ed. J. Strachey (24 vols., London: Hogarth, 1953-
74), XVIII, 245-246.
25. This quotation actually refers to a paper in which one
of Klein’s colleagues, Paula Heimann, is presenting
Kleinian views. See Heimann, “Certain Functions of
Introjection and Projection in Early Infancy,” in Devel-
opments in Psycho-Analysis, ed. J. Riviere (London: Hog-
arth, 1952) pp. 122-168.
26. These themes run throughout Klein’s work; but see,
e.g., “Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the
Emotional Life of the Infant,” in Envy and Gratitude,
pp. 61-93.
27. See Klein, “Contribution to the Psychogenesis of
Manic-Depressive States” and “Notes on Some Schiz-
oid Mechanisms,” in Envy and Gratitude, pp. 1-24.
28. See Literature of Terror, pp. 130-159.
29. See, e.g., “On the Theory of Anxiety and Guilt,” p. 34.
RONALD R. THOMAS (ESSAY DATE
1990)
SOURCE: Thomas, Ronald R. “Recovering Nightmares:
Nineteenth-Century Gothic.” In Dreams of Authority:
Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious, pp. 71-81. Ith-
aca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990.
In the following excerpt, Thomas focuses on the relation-
ship between dreams and Gothic literature, in terms of
psychology as well as narrative style.
326 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
It is within the experience of many medical
practitioners, that a patient, with strange and
unusual symptoms, has been more distressed in
mind, more wretched, from the fact of being
unintelligible to himself and others, than from
the pain or danger of the disease.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
The high esteem in which dream-life is held by
some schools of philosophy . . . is clearly an echo
of the divine nature of dreams which was undis-
puted in antiquity. . . . For attempts at giving a
psychological explanation have been inadequate
to cover the material collected, however decidedly
the sympathies of those of a scientific cast of mind
may incline against accepting any such beliefs.
—Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
The author of the first gothic novel in English
traced the origin of his story to the recovery and
writing down of a haunting dream that disturbed
his sleep: “I waked one morning in the beginning
of last June from a dream, of which all I could
recover was, that I thought myself in an ancient
castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like
mine with Gothic story) and that on the up-
permost bannister of a great staircase I saw a
gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat
down and began to write, without knowing in the
least what I intended to say or relate.”1 Here, at
the beginning point of English gothic fiction,
Horace Walpole joined the experience of dream-
ing with a question about authority. In recovering
his dream, Walpole represented himself as being
virtually compelled to write about something
outside of his own knowledge and intention, as if
he had been forced to write The Castle of Otranto
(1764) in the strange, gigantic hand of his dream.
Authors of many subsequent gothic tales at-
tributed their origins to dreams, often to empha-
size a failure on the part of even the writers to
understand and control the forces that drove their
narratives. The stories frequently contain dreams
as well, most often nightmarish dreams of de-
monic possession.2 Matthew Lewis’s Monk (1796),
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), James Hogg’s
Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
(1824), and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wan-
derer (1820) all contain dreams of this kind, and
the dreamer is invariably someone who suffers
from a state of illness or divided personality that
he or she can explain only as a form of supernatu-
ral possession.
These characteristics of the gothic novel make
it an appropriate place for Freud to put into
practice his project of replacing a divine interpre-
tation of dreams with a scientific one. In fact, in
Delusion and Dream Freud gave an elaborate
analysis of the dreams in an early twentieth-
century gothic novel, Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva.
Even though Gradiva, like most gothic fiction,
contains many reports of ghostly visitations, Freud
did not regard it as a ghost story at all. He called
the novel nothing less than “an entirely correct
study in psychiatry, by which we may measure
our understanding of psychic life, a story of ill-
ness and cure which seems designed for the
inculcation of certain fundamental teachings of
medical psychology” (Delusion and Dream, 64).
Freud marveled that the author had somehow
“acquired the same knowledge as the physician,”
or at least “behave[d] as if he possessed it” (77).
He particularly admired the remarkable ways in
which Jensen seemed to anticipate the talking
cure by treating the protagonist’s speech and his
dreams as symptoms of a delusion, by tracing
these symptoms back to their origins, and by ef-
fecting a “concurrence of explanation and cure”
in the articulation of those origins (110-14). Freud
could only conclude that “science leaves a gap
which we find filled” by this “story of illness and
cure”—the same gap Freud himself sought to fill
with his theories of dream interpretation (75).
Several other nineteenth-century gothic nov-
els also anticipated the claims of psychoanalysis,
especially the concern with replacing supernatural
explanations for delusional formations such as
dreams with scientific—even medical—explana-
tions. Although the dreamers of these novels may
not always be “cured” by their explanations, they
consistently call attention to the symptomatic
aspects of the words they use to describe their
dreams. Like Jensen’s Gradiva, these novels expose
a gap in scientific knowledge which needed to be
filled by a language that would enable the dream-
er’s recovery, and they go some distance in help-
ing to fill that gap as well.
The importance that Freud placed upon at-
tributing dreams to the psychic health of the
dreamer rather than to some divine intervention
is evident in the very beginning of The Interpreta-
tion of Dreams, where he lines up the forces
engaged in the nineteenth-century debate over
the significance of dream experience. In reviewing
the current literature on the subject, Freud con-
cluded that the two basic theories then prevailing
were not new but already established in the
ancient world. On one side were positivists who,
like Aristotle, maintained that dreams “do not rise
from supernatural manifestations but follow the
laws of the human spirit.” On the other side were
idealists of various kinds who, like Plato, thought
of the dream “not as a product of the dreaming
mind but as something introduced by a divine
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agency; and already,” Freud goes on to say, “the
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
two opposing currents, which we shall find influ-
encing dream life at every point in history, were
making themselves felt” (2-3). These same cur-
rents also made themselves felt in the gothic fic-
tion of the nineteenth century. Frankenstein,
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and Wuther-
ing Heights, and the dreams in them present
themselves through both story and discourse as
neurotic symptoms, as attempts at “recovery”
centered in the conflict between supernatural and
psychological explanations for the uncanny
experience of dreaming. At stake for the gothic
hero or heroine in this conflict is the recognition
of the powerful influence of irrational impulses
on behavior and the need to take control over
those impulses. The very rise of the gothic novel
as a genre may be read as an attempt to recover or
reconstruct an account of psychic life in the face
of supernatural accounts whose inadequacy was
becoming more and more apparent. Even more to
the point, these texts expose how supernatural
explanations of such events often mask a repressed
pathological struggle rooted very firmly in the
powers of this world.
The extensive theoretical writing on dreams
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
was generally directed against supernatural expla-
nations for psychic disturbances. Characteristi-
cally, the scholarship took one of two courses:
dream theory either deferred to an idealism that
tried to rationalize the supernatural element of
dreams by attributing them to something like a
world soul or collective unconscious, or it sought
to explain dreams as purely physiological phe-
nomena that did not reveal anything profoundly
important about the dreamer.3 As the most sys-
tematic and comprehensive theory of dreams in
the period, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams offered
a third course. For Freud, dreams were neither the
manifestations of possession by some spiritual
power nor the result of normal somatic processes
during sleep. Rather, dreams were to be regarded
as symptoms of a neurosis in the dreamer, evi-
dence of a psychic wound or illness. But in regard-
ing the dream as a symptom Freud did not think
of it as a “pathological product”; on the contrary,
he saw the dream, like any other delusion forma-
tion, as “an attempt at recovery, a process of recon-
struction.”4
The common association of physical and
psychic illnesses with the dreams and dreamers of
gothic fiction suggests some continuity with
Freud’s description of the dream as a symptom.
The rise of gothic fiction during the latter part of
327
 the eighteenth century and its flowering during
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
the nineteenth may in fact be read as a symptom
on a cultural scale, an expression of a desire for a
vocabulary by which to name and control psychic
forces in terms of pathology rather than theology.
Freud himself offers a direct point of contact
between the two discourses not only in his com-
mentary on Gradiva but also in his remarkable es-
say “A Neurosis of Demoniacal Possession in the
Seventeenth Century.” There Freud analyzes a case
of alleged demonic possession which had been
recorded in a form strikingly like that of a gothic
novel. As is true of such gothic tales as Franken-
stein, Melmoth, Justified Sinner, Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde, and Dracula, for example, the material for
this case consists of several documents written in
the first person. A series of captioned drawings by
the “patient” (who in this instance is a painter)
depict his signing of a pact with the devil and his
redemption at the shrine of the Holy Mother.
Those drawings are combined with a description
of the case by a “reverend compiler” (who also
includes some lines in verse which contain infor-
mation about his own life), a deposition by an ab-
bot testifying to the authenticity of the docu-
ments, and finally the diary of the patient, which
chronicles his possession and exorcism. Freud
takes particular interest in the complex textual is-
sues of the case—the contradictions between the
pictures and the painter’s verbal accounts of them,
the inconsistencies within the diary itself, the
variations in wording of the patient’s two written
pacts with the devil, the compiler’s attempts at
textual reconciliation, and so on. The function of
Freud’s analysis is to add still another text of
reconciliation or reconstruction, a “final” attempt
to piece together the inconsistencies by substitut-
ing a story of neurosis for one of possession.
Freud clearly took up the case in order to
demonstrate how phenomena perceived in medi-
eval times as demonic dreams, visions, and pos-
sessions could be explained in terms of repressed
impulses and psychic forces. “We merely eliminate
the projection of these mental entities into the
external world,” he says; “instead, we regard them
as having arisen in the patient’s internal life,
where they have their abode.”5 But Freud’s analy-
sis does much more. His translation of the incident
from a theological into a medical vocabulary
dramatizes exactly what is dramatized in the
dreams of many gothic texts: fundamentally,
dreams and visions are sites of interpretive power
where dreamers are actually attempting to resist
or surrender to the notion that an authority from
the outside is governing their lives. Furthermore,
328 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
these struggles for authority take place on the level
of language—in the giving or witholding of a
dream account. In both cases, dreams and visions
must be seen as symptoms that serve as attempts
at recovery, and thus are actions taken by the
dreamer, not actions taking him or her over from
the outside. Like the case Freud analyzes here,
gothic fiction commonly evidences this assertion
of authority in the production of the texts them-
selves—in the writing of pacts in blood, in the
retraction of those pacts through confession and
exorcism, in the revision of inconsistencies to
preserve the authority of the church, and most
important, in the patient’s composition of a diary
that seeks to bring together the fragmented pieces
of a life threatened by a divine or demonic usurpa-
tion.
This particular case has a special fascination
and significance for Freud since he is able to trace
the patient’s morbid anxiety to the recent death
of his father and the paralyzing melancholia that
resulted from this loss of parental authority. Not
only does this scenario follow the pattern of
Freud’s own experience in writing The Interpreta-
tion of Dreams, but it corresponds to the set of
forces commonly operating in the gothic novel as
well—problems of inheritance, incest, parricide,
entombment, ghostly hauntings from the past,
and so on. In Freud’s view, this patient never fully
recovered from his neurosis because he never
recognized his visions as symptoms of this anxiety.
Rather, he merely substituted one form of “posses-
sion” for another, replacing his father’s authority
first with that of the devil, then with that of the
church. “He wanted all along simply to make his
life secure. He tried first to achieve this with the
help of the devil at the cost of his salvation; and
when this failed and had to be given up, he tried
to achieve it with the help of the clergy at the
cost of his freedom and most of the possibilities
of enjoyment in life” (104). This failed self-
recognition in the desperate attempt to find the
“security” of some transcendent authority is the
fate of many gothic dreamers as well, and it
reflects a larger crisis of authority in the nine-
teenth century—a crisis of which the rise of the
gothic novel is itself a symptom.
The acceptance of a secular interpretation of
dreams as originating in the individual psyche
demands that the dreamer be the source of the
significance as well as the haunting images of the
dream. Any authority the dream might have for
the dreamer is based upon her or his own recogni-
tion of it as a self-portrayal, rather than a revela-
tion from the divine world. If, as T. S. Eliot
claimed, one consequence of this assumption is
that the “quality of our dreams suffers,” another
consequence is that the quality of the dreamer’s
account of the dreams becomes that much more
important.6 In many gothic texts, acts of self-
representation are presented as acts of self-
discovery and healing, and acts of secrecy or
repression are part of a pattern of illness and
psychic disturbance. When the narrator of Justi-
fied Sinner complains of having “such dreams that
they will not bear repetition,” for example, he
either fails to understand that his refusal to repeat
his dreams keeps him “troubled” and “enchained”
by them, or he admits that he wants to maintain
his illusions about himself by censoring the
thoughts that are behind the dreams.7 Stories like
this narrator’s consistently dramatize how dreams
take shape and reveal themselves as symptoms
only when they are put into words and connected
with the dreamer’s waking life.
This conflict between the “two opposing cur-
rents” of dream interpretation divided Freud from
Jung more subtly than from his other opponents.
Though Jung shared Freud’s conviction that the
dream was essentially a self-portrayal by the
dreamer, he maintained that dreams had a higher,
objective value as well. Jung’s interest in symbol
and archetype led him to conceive of the dream
as transcending the personal ego and participat-
ing in a historical pattern external and inexpli-
cable to the self. For Jung, the symbolic content
of the dream had its own value and meaning,
which could not be imposed by the individual
dreamer. Ultimately, that symbolic significance
was inexpressible in words: “A symbol does not
define or explain,” he said; “it points beyond itself
to a meaning that is darkly divined yet still
beyond our grasp, and cannot be adequately
expressed in the familiar words of our language.”8
Jung’s use of theological language is significant
here, and this kind of statement fundamentally
distinguishes him from Freud, who argued that
dreams are nothing more than our symptomati-
cally disguised desires, which we can understand
and control only when we translate them into the
“familiar words of our language.”
Jung’s views represented a compromise be-
tween the traditional religious belief that dreams
have their origins and significance in a realm
“higher” than the dreamer and the more scientific
and biological orientation of Freud, who related
them to the personal life history of the dreamer.
But as Freud indicated, what he regarded as an
entirely “pre-scientific” viewpoint was not without
its adherents in the nineteenth century, not only
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the “pietistic and mystical writers” of the period
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
but a number of “clear-headed men” as well: “It
would be a mistake to suppose that the theory of
the supernatural origin of dreams is without its
supporters in our own day,” Freud cautioned in
The Interpretation of Dreams. “One comes across
clear-headed men, without any extravagant ideas,
who seek to support their religious faith in the
existence and activity of superhuman spiritual
forces precisely by the inexplicable nature of the
phenomena of dreaming” (4). In this latter cat-
egory Freud placed P. Haffner, Friedrich Schelling,
and Johann Fichte, who saw dreams either as
representative of some “complementary” reality,
as “divine in nature,” or simply as separate in
important ways from waking life. Freud consis-
tently made it a point to associate such views with
the demands of religious faith and to oppose them
to a truly “scientific” attitude of mind. While such
claims may have overstated the case, these think-
ers did consider dreams to be part of some com-
plex of forces outside the spheres of rational and
empirical inquiry, forces that we conventionally
align with the gothic and romantic strain of
nineteenth-century literature.
But the role of the dream in gothic fiction is
much more complicated than that. The gothic use
of dreams may be more properly understood as
expressing the uneasy tension in the period
between scientific and religious explanations of
dream experience. The dreamers in these stories
tend to be wounded figures suffering from some
physical and psychological disturbance and some
visionary experience that they commonly explain
in terms of the supernatural. Those explanations,
however, usually contend in the text with a desire
for a more “psychological” explanation that con-
nects the dream to some undisclosed repressed
material, some traumatic experience, or some
crisis in authority experienced by the dreamer.
The conflict between these two viewpoints be-
comes apparent when the dreamer chooses either
to convert the dream event into the common
words of our language or to submit it to the
uncommon language of the divine.
One of the more dramatic fictional examples
of this situation occurs in Sheridan LeFanu’s Car-
milla (1870). The narrative begins with a terrifying
dream experience recounted by the young woman
who narrates the story. In her dream she is visited
by a female figure who first comforts and caresses
her until the dreamer feels a terrible pain in her
breasts. Then the dream figure disappears beneath
the bed. The narrator, Laura, initially dreams this
dream as a child, and it provokes a nervous
329
 disorder from which she never entirely recovers.
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
The dreams continue, and they develop into a
series of voices that haunt the narrator in her
dreams; one of these she recognizes as the voice
of her mother mysteriously warning her to avoid
her “assassin” (308). The warning seems not only
to refer to the father in the tale but also to
reinforce the sense that these dreams are efforts
toward recovery and self-preservation on the part
of the dreamer. She is told by various authorities
that these dreams are either visitations of evil
spirits, the product of a fever in the body, or
finally, the haunting of a vampire. Eventually, her
father destroys this monster and presumably
solves the mystery, appropriately, in an old Gothic
church.
But since the destruction of the supposed
vampire does not cure the narrator’s illness or al-
leviate her recurring dreams, this supernatural
explanation is called into doubt. That the trauma
of the childhood dream had obliterated Laura’s
memory of everything that preceded it strongly
suggests that the dream serves as an agency of
repression for her and her father as well.9 Her
dreams are also continually associated with the
loss of her dead mother (whom Laura cannot
remember), with the awakening of her own
sexuality, and with the domination of her life by
her father. Together with the father’s repeated at-
tempts to dismiss the significance of the dreams
and to obscure crucial events in Laura’s past, these
details indicate that her dreams may screen the
memory of a childhood seduction or primal scene.
But these “symptoms” are never fully understood
in Carmilla because they are never allowed to be
expressed. Rather, they remain unrecovered, unin-
terpreted memories for the patient, who is still
plagued by her dreams, her illness, and her
overbearing father at the end of the story.
Like William Godwin’s Adventures of Caleb Wil-
liams or like Melmoth, Justified Sinner, Frankenstein,
Wuthering Heights, and many other gothic tales,
Carmilla represents a narrator’s attempt to recover
from a disordered state—a condition that not only
is often physically debilitating but proves to be
psychologically crippling as well. This disability
almost invariably takes the form of a loss of
personal control, a usurpation, a denial, or a will-
ing abandonment of personal authority over and
responsibility for one’s actions. States of dream,
trance, madness, and possession provide the ap-
propriate psychological conditions to investigate
(or explain away) this problem. Typically, this
project takes place in complex, embedded narra-
tives that serve both to suggest the buried psycho-
330 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
logical origins of dreamlike materials and to
designate the dynamics of the telling as essential
to understanding the meaning of the condition.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), for example, repre-
sents a further development of the plot and
structure of a typical gothic text such as Carmilla.
Count Dracula’s victims can never clearly distin-
guish their own dreams from the vampire’s noc-
turnal visitations. The dreamers embed their
dreams in a strange legend composed of their own
diaries, journals, case histories, letters, medical
reports, telegrams, newspaper stories, and the
transcripts of phonograph recordings made by a
doctor about his patients, all of which are em-
ployed to project the dreamers’ fears and desires
onto an exotic, monstrous ghoul as an alternative
to accepting them as symptoms of their own
psychic disturbances.
These gothic novels anticipate many of the
features of Freud’s speaking cure and his emphasis
on rendering an account of the images of our
dreams in the familiar words of our language. But
by also continuing to evoke the atmosphere and
rationale of the supernatural in these tales—even
if sometimes discrediting supernatural explana-
tions as strategies of denial or repression—gothic
fiction reenacted the debate that raged in England
throughout the nineteenth century over the
source and significance of dreams. Fashionable
groups of secular and religious spiritualists argued
that dreams were miraculous events that permit-
ted communication with a divine realm, while
positivist theorists maintained that dreams were
explainable phenomena governed by natural
law.1 0 The scientific community in England was
most deeply influenced by the theories of the
rationalists of the previous century, who based
their description of dreams on the laws of associa-
tion, the effects on the mind of recent sense
impressions and ideas, and the state of the body
during sleep. This positivistic tradition was carried
forward into the nineteenth century by such
theorists as Dugald Stewart (Elements of the Philoso-
phy of the Human Mind, 1814) and Robert Macnish
(The Philosophy of Sleep, 1838), and later others in
England, including F. W. H. Myers and James Sully,
who began to look more seriously at the psycho-
logical significance of dreams and to suggest the
importance of what Freud would later identify as
the unconscious.
Myers is a particularly interesting figure for
the period, since he founded the Society for Psy-
chical Research in order to oppose the tide of
positivist thought in England and on the Conti-
nent. He maintained that positivist explanations
of strange psychic events such as dreams and
schizophrenia were often reductive and tended to
minimize, manipulate, or ignore evidence that
was contrary to their theories. His organization
collected thousands of case studies and first-
person reports of mysterious dreams, visions,
telepathy, sleepwalking, and related occurrences,
concluding that this sort of experience proved the
immortality of the human soul. In his influential
book Human Personality (1903), Myers cogently
expressed the characteristic double vision of the
scientific and literary communities in the nine-
teenth century: “The permanent result of a dream,
I say, is sometimes such as to show that the dream
has not been a mere superficial confusion of past
waking experiences, but has had an unexplained
potency of its own,—drawn like the potency of
hypnotic suggestion, from some depth in our be-
ing which the waking self cannot reach.”1 1 In a
gesture typical of nineteenth-century ambivalence
on the subject, Meyers simultaneously emphasizes
the importance of explaining the hidden logic of
the dream and the impossibility of doing so,
comparing the dream logic to the mysterious
“potency” of hypnotic suggestion. Like Jung, he
forges a fragile compromise between the dictates
of science and those of religion. The gothic novel
of the period poses the issue more decisively: the
dreams and their recollections are the sites of a
struggle to gain authority over the self through
language. At stake is a necessary choice between
conceiving of the psyche as a supernatural soul
facing damnation or redemption, on the one
hand, and a medical subject capable of illness or
recovery, on the other. Despite certain equivoca-
tions, however, figures like Myers and Sully
anticipate the claims of psychoanalytic theory
more faithfully when they trace dreams back to
both immediate and distant memories and find
them to be inextricably associated with current
wakeful thoughts. These considerations also paral-
lel the gothic preoccupation with the problems
entailed in remembering and representing dream
experience and in distinguishing it from waking
life. Eventually, Freud would respond to this
confusion raised independently by scientists such
as Sully and Myers and novelists such as Mary
Shelley and Emily Brontë. The realization that
conscious thoughts “will be apt to be uncon-
sciously read back into the dream” and become
part of the dreamer’s memory of the dream is
transformed by Freud into a form of confusion
which contributes to, rather than detracts from,
understanding the significance of a dream.1 2 For
him, the language of disguise becomes the lan-
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
guage of revelation, at once a symptom of psychic
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
distress and a sign of psychic recovery.
The dream accounts that permeate Franken-
stein, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and
Wuthering Heights anticipate this interpretive turn.
They are all told by a narrator recovering from
some illness or disabling event, and they all
express a profound psychological conflict. Not
only do these three texts offer a representative
range of gothic conventions, they also foreground
an essential characteristic of the genre: the narra-
tives exist primarily as symptoms of an attempt to
recover from a disordered state of mind which is
most dramatically manifested in the narrator’s
dreams. 1 3 Frankenstein began as the “waking
dream” of Mary Shelley, which she proceeded to
turn into a “ghost story” for her husband and
friends during a holiday in Switzerland. But most
of the text itself takes the form of a deathbed nar-
rative told by an ailing scientist trying to explain
away his own obsessive dream as a form of de-
monic possession. Thomas DeQuincey’s Confes-
sions of an English Opium-Eater recounts its nar-
rator’s recovery from a paralyzing illness and
addiction to opium, and it is written to “display
the marvelous agency” of the dreams associated
with that illness as well as to recover the dreamer’s
health (114). The Confessions demands attention
not only because of its importance for the medi-
cal literature on dreams in the period but also
because of its thematic and formal affinities with
the gothic and autobiographical novel.1 4 Finally,
the uncanny, disturbing events of Wuthering
Heights can be said to grow out of the bewildering
nightmares of its narrator who is stricken ill at the
beginning of the tale and is nursed back to health
during the course of it. His dreams seem mysteri-
ously and irresistibly to connect him to the other
dreams and dreamers in the story and to compel
him to question his own authority over his experi-
ence, just as they do.
In each of these cases, the giving of the dream
account is not only a part of the recovery from an
illness but also a literal act of authorship—the
production of a text. Beneath the manifest plots
of these novels, then, is another plot—a plot of
“recovery” or “reconstruction” that determines
the narrative structure of the texts and reveals the
attitudes that the narrators take toward the materi-
als they dream and write about. These plots take a
different form in each of the books, reflecting
fundamentally different responses to the crisis of
personal authority which haunted the period. But
of central concern to all of them is the attempt to
discover an appropriate language with which to
331
 represent and master the unsettling experience of
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
their dreams. As Freud said of Gradiva, these gothic
novels were all “working over the same material”
that he would theorize about. They were merely
using “a different method” to express it (Delusion
and Dream, 117).
Notes
1. Letter of Horace Walpole to the Reverend William
Cole, 9 March 1765, quoted in the Introductory Essay
of Three Gothic Novels, ed. Mario Praz (1968), p. 17.
2. A number of studies of the gothic novel have empha-
sized its nightmarish quality. See Elizabeth MacAn-
drew, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (1979); Judith Wilt,
Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot and Lawrence (1980);
and William Patrick Day, In the Circles of Fear and
Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy (1985). For a more
specific consideration of the dreams of female charac-
ters in eighteenth-century fiction, see Margaret Anne
Doody, “Deserts, Ruins, and Troubled Waters: Female
Dreams in Fiction and Development of the Gothic
Novel,” Genre 10 (Winter 1977): 529-72.
3. See Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Uncon-
scious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry
(1970). Ellenberger speaks of the two basic theoretical
dispositions toward the mind during sleep as “open”
theories (which regarded the dreaming mind as in
communication with some mysterious other realm,
whether it was a previous life, a disincarnated spirit,
or simply some transcendent reality) and “closed”
theories (which explained the dream material as
composed of forgotten memories or sense
impressions). He identified four approaches to the
function of dreams at the turn of the century which
grew out of these two positions: (1) a conservative
function (to preserve traces of the past lost to con-
scious memory); (2) a dissolutive function (to aid in
the transformation of once-conscious acts into uncon-
scious, habitual acts); (3) a creative function (to
produce lucid expressions of “higher” truths unavail-
able to the conscious mind); and (4) a mythopoetic
function (to create cultural myth—often associated
with the activity of mediums and somnambulism).
See especially pp. 145-70 and 311-21.
4. Sigmund Freud, “On the Mechanism of Paranoia,” SE
12:71.
5. Freud, “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neuro-
sis,” SE 19:72, hereafter cited in the text.
6. T. S. Eliot, “Dante,” Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot (1960),
p. 204.
7. James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a
Justified Sinner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981),
p. 214.
8. C. G. Jung, “Spirit and Life,” The Collected Works of C.
G. Jung, ed. Sir Robert Read, Michael Fordham, Ger-
hard Adler, William McGuire, trans. R. F. C. Hull, vol.
8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (1953),
p. 336. For a fuller discussion of the relation between
Freud’s and Jung’s theories on dreams, see Liliane Frey-
Rohn, From Jung to Freud: A Comparative Study of the
Psychology of the Unconscious, trans. Fred E. Engreen
and Evelyn K. Engreen (1976).
332 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
9. On repression in Carmilla, see also Day, pp. 88-89; and
William Veeder, “‘Carmilla’: The Arts of Repression,”
Texas Studies in Literature and Language 22 (Summer
1980): 197-223.
10. For treatments of the relation of morals to dream
theory in England, see Bernard, “Dickens and Victo-
rian Dream Theory”; and Werner Wolff, The Dream—
Mirror of Conscience: The History of Dream Interpretation
from 2000 B.C. and a New Theory of Dream Synthesis
(1952).
11. Frederick W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its
Survival of Bodily Death (1954), 1:126.
12. F. W. H. Myers, Edmund Gurney, and Frank Podmore,
Phantasms of the Living, quoted in The World of Dreams,
ed. Ralph L. Woods (1947), pp. 278-79.
13. For a more general treatment of the importance of
acts of writing in the gothic conception of character,
see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic
Conventions (1986), chaps. 3 and 4.
14. In the introductory essay to the Penguin edition of
DeQuincey’s Confessions (1978), Alethea Hayter claims
that with this book DeQuincey “brought to the art of
prose autobiography something entirely new, and his
influence has been felt by every self-conscious English
writer, whether of reminiscences or of autobiographi-
cal novels, ever since” (p. 24).
FREDERICK BURWICK (ESSAY
DATE SPRING 2003)
SOURCE: Burwick, Frederick. “Romantic Supernatural-
ism: The Case Study as Gothic Tale.” Wordsworth Circle
34, no. 2 (spring 2003): 73-81.
In the following essay, Burwick traces the use of Gothic
literature as a means of discussing abnormal psychology
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The Romantic period witnessed advances in
rational and empirical modes of intellectual
inquiry and, paradoxically, an increased interest
in the supernatural. Ghosts were perceived as
mental apparitions, illusions, and hallucinations
and as supernatural phenomena bonded to a
particular place, as by a curse of vengeance or
retribution, because their bodies had met death
under peculiar circumstances. What was wanted,
then, was a supernaturalism informed by a prob-
ing of its very possibility.
Ann Radcliffe owed her success in The Myster-
ies of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797) to her
powerful conjuration of an exterior environ-
ment—a lonely castle, a wild and rugged land-
scape—charged with menacing gloom, and to her
attentive tracking of the mental and emotional
responses of her characters, their fears and fore-
bodings. Rather than introducing an actual ghost
or demon, Radcliffe revealed how the deep-seated
dread of the supernatural was aroused and stirred
into frantic alarm. Her strategy, of course, was not
the only one; evil spirits and supernatural beings
are prominent in the literature. The case that I
would make, however, is that the supernatural
provided occasion to examine the terra incognita
of the mind, the unarticulated doubts, desires,
fears, and longings that lurk beneath conscious-
ness.
Prior to aberrational psychology, skeptics
pronounced a person crazy because they claimed
to see ghosts. With the beginning of the nine-
teenth century, however, an entire profession had
emerged specializing in the pathology of appari-
tions. In this inquiry into the nature of Romantic
Supernaturalism, I refer to some of the basic
categories of mental aberration introduced by the
physicians. Rather than trying to adhere to their
categories, however, I shall attempt to distinguish
between the hallucinations of the sane and the
hallucinations of the insane. This division is as
unstable as its subjects. Both in the literary
examples and in the medical “case studies,” the
sane tend to become insane if they persist too long
in their hallucinations. And many of the insane
become adept in disguising their delusions and
acting sane. The boundaries between sane and
insane are as indeterminate in medical practice as
they are in literature.
Among the effects of the rise of aberrational
psychology, was that medical doctors begin to ap-
pear as characters in the Gothic novel. But to say
that art imitates life is to tell but part of the story.
Life and art, like two mirrors placed opposite one
another, create an infinite regression of art imitat-
ing life imitating art. The books on mental pathol-
ogy published in this era present their empirical
evidence in the form of “case studies.” Not chal-
lenging the factual validity of this peculiar genre,
I would like to point out that the medical authors
in addition to recording their clinical observa-
tions, and citing pertinent medical sources, typi-
cally displayed their literary learning with refer-
ences to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Milton’s Satan,
and various lore from Burton’s Anatomy of Melan-
choly or Darwin’s Zoonomia. The physicians who
write these “case studies” are conscious of literary
parallels and have their own sense of dramatic ef-
fect in describing a patient’s delusions. But for the
most remarkable interweaving of art and life, it is
the patient who is the true shuttle in the loom.
In his Inquiries concerning the Intellectual Powers
(1830), Dr. Abercrombie reports the case of a
patient who is visited by a spectral apparition, yet
on all occasions knows the ghostly visitor to be
his own hallucination. That conscious and ratio-
nal awareness may accompany hallucination, Ab-
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GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
ELIZABETH BOWEN (1899-1973)
Noted for her subtle, evocative novels and
short stories, Bowen has been compared to
such novelists of sensibility as Jane Austen,
Henry James, and Virginia Woolf. She is
perhaps best known for her novel The Death
of the Heart (1938), and critics point to that
phrase as an apt summation of Bowen’s
recurrent theme: the inevitable disillusion-
ment inherent in human relationships, par-
ticularly as innocent characters make the
painful passage to experience. Critics praise
Bowen for her descriptive, finely pitched
style, and they often compare her with
Katherine Mansfield for her extreme sensitiv-
ity to perceptions of light, atmosphere, color,
and sound. Like Mansfield, Bowen is consid-
ered expert at presenting the emotional
dynamics of a situation and then swiftly il-
luminating their significance, particularly
within the prescribed bounds of the short
story. While Bowen is generally acclaimed as
both a novelist and short fiction writer, some
critics deem her stories superior to her novels.
Bowen’s experiences living and working as
an air-raid warden in the besieged city dur-
ing World War II inspired what many critics
consider her finest short story collection, The
Demon Lover (1945), which explores war’s
insidious effects on the human psyche. In the
stories, composed between spring 1941 and
late 1944, Bowen introduced to her short fic-
tion a hallucinatory tone and supernatural
themes in order to convey war’s effect on the
human mind. In “The Mysterious Kor,” which
is often cited among Bowen’s greatest stories,
wartime London becomes a mysterious, ter-
rifying nether-city by the light of a transfor-
mative moon. In “The Demon Lover” Mrs.
Drover becomes dislocated in time, slipping
from World War II back to World War I, where
she waits feverishly for the arrival of her long-
dead fiancé. In this, as in other stories in The
Demon Lover, Bowen employs a disturbing
ambiguity, preventing the reader from know-
ing whether stories depict supernatural
states, or illusions created by the characters’
neurotic and overburdened psyches.
333
 ercrombie points out, demonstrates that the
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
disturbance of the visual senses need not affect
the rational capacities. As it happened, Dr. Aber-
crombie was also the personal physician and
friend of Sir Walter Scott. In his Letters on Demonol-
ogy and Witchcraft (1830), Scott, too, had written
on spectral illusions. He promptly inquired about
Abercrombie’s patient. The patient may be aware
of the hallucination, but was he aware that he
was hallucinating someone else’s hallucination?
Dr. Abercrombie’s patient had apparently taken a
cue from a character in Le Sage’s Gil Blas. In the
Twelfth and final book of the novel, Duke
D’Olivarez, suffering from progressive physical
decline, confesses the cause to Gil Blas:
I am the prey of a morbid melancholy which eats
inwardly into my vitals: a spectre haunts me every
moment, arrayed in the most terrific form of
preternatural horror. In vain have I argued with
myself that it is a vision of the brain, an unreal
mockery: its continual presentments blast my
sight, and unseat my reason. Though my under-
standing teaches me, that in looking on this
spectre I stare at vacancy, my spirits are too weak
to derive comfort from the conviction. Thus much
have you extorted from me: now judge whether
the cause of my melancholy is fit to be divulged.1
Duke D’Olivarez, Scott explains in the Letters
on Demonology was “haunted by an apparition, to
the actual existence of which he gave no credit,
but died, nevertheless, because he was overcome
and heart-broken by its imaginary presence” (28,
54-55). Dr. Abercrombie’s patient seemed to have
experienced in his hallucinations the very symp-
toms about which he had read in Le Sage.
This strange case soon becomes even stranger.
Dr. Abercrombie’s wife is infected with the very
same disease, although not from reading Gil Blas.
She had read her husband’s book, and read, too,
the works that he had cited. Among these was Dr.
Samuel Hibbert’s Sketches of the Philosophy of Ap-
paritions (1824). Like Dr. Abercrombie, Dr. Hibbert
was also a leading physician in Edinburgh, and
had gained considerable acclaim for his investiga-
tion of spectral illusions. Shortly after reading this
work, Mrs. Abercrombie began to see various
phantom figures posing in her sitting room and
bed chamber. Dr. Abercrombie consulted with
another Scottish associate, Sir David Brewster, the
leading scientist in optical phenomena. Concur-
ring that these bizarre optical manifestations,
stimulated by reading books, must be attributed
to a “morbidly sensitive imagination,” Brewster
published an account of the woman’s experience
in his Letters on Natural Magic (1832)which were
his reply to Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witch-
334
craft (42-3; 49). To protect her identity, her name
was not mentioned, and Dr. Abercrombie’s “Ac-
count of a remarkable case of Spectral Illusion,”
appeared anonymously in Brewster’s Edinburgh
Journal of Science. Here is his description of an
episode on December 30, 1829:
at about 4 o’clock P.M. Mrs. ——— came down
the stairs into the drawing-room, which she had
quitted a few minutes before, and on entering the
room, saw me, as she supposed, standing with my
back to the fire. She addressed me, asking how it
was I had returned so soon. (I had left the house
for a walk half an hour before.) She said I looked
fixedly at her with a serious and thoughtful
expression of countenance, but did not speak. She
supposed I was busied in thought, and sat down
in an arm-chair next to the fire, and close within
a couple of feet at most of the figure she still saw
standing before her. As, however, the eyes still
continued to be fixed on her, after a few minutes
she said ‘Why don’t you speak ———?’ The figure
upon this moved of towards the window at the
further end of the room, the eyes still gazing on
her, and passed so very close to her in doing so,
that she was struck by the circumstances of hear-
ing no step nor sound, no feeling her clothes
brushed against, nor even any agitation in the air.
The idea then arose for the first time into her
mind, that it was no reality, but a spectral illusion.
(II [oct-apr, 1830] 319-321)
A month later, Mrs. Abercrombie’s visions
took a morbid turn. The spectral illusions of her
husband were no doubt disconcerting, but scarcely
alarming. Then, late one evening, as she was “sit-
ting before the dressing-glass . . . she was sud-
denly startled by seeing in the mirror the figure of
a near relative, . . . over her left shoulder; his eyes
meeting her’s in the glass.” This apparition was all
the more frightening, because it “was enveloped
in grave-clothes closely pinned, as is usual with
corpses, round the head and under the chin.” See-
ing a figure in a shroud, Dr. Abercrombie notes, is
“nearer to the ordinary stories of supernatural
visitation.” Certainly it was near, too, to Scott’s
tale, “Aunt Margaret’s Mirror.” Acknowledging the
superstitious lore of the wraith, Dr. Abercrombie
closes this article by stating that if “the apparition
coincided with illness or death, as had no doubt
frequently happened in other instances, our
philosophy would have had to stand a severe
trial.” This is a peculiar admission for the man of
science. He readily admits that the coincidence of
death and a wraith-like apparition of the dying
person had “no doubt frequently happened in
other instances” (319-321). One more coincidence
would presumably not present a “severe trial,” un-
less that coincidence was his own wife’s spectral
illusion.
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 My first response to the doctor’s account of
his wife’s visions was that he had failed to see the
obvious. With her husband devoting so much of
his time to research on the pathology of hallucina-
tions, she had devised a strategy for commanding
his attention. And obviously it worked, for she
was already the subject of two his articles in Brew-
ster’s Edinburgh Journal of Science. But then I
thought of Coleridge’s comment on Hamlet’s
feigning madness: “O that subtle trick to pretend
to be acting only when we are very near being what
we act” (Lectures 1808-1809: On Literature, I:441).
Dr. Abercrombie’s third article reports that his wife
continues to see spirits of the dead: at 2:00 a.m.
on October 5, 1831, the doctor is awakened by his
wife who has seen the doctor’s “deceased mother
draw aside the bed-curtains and appear between
them.” A few days later, on October 11, she is
seated with guests in the drawing-room when a
deceased friend enters and takes a seat. She is less
anxious about experiencing yet another spectral
illusion, than she is about what the guests might
think: “lest they should be astonished or alarmed
at her staring in the way she was conscious of do-
ing, at vacancy, and should fancy her intellect
disordered.” Fortunately, Mrs. Abercrombie knew
a way out of this predicament, for she was well
read in the literature of spectral illusions. She
recalled reading of a similar incident in Scott’s Let-
ters on Demonology and Witchcraft. Scott told of
Captain C., who retired to the west of England.
Because his health was failing, a local clergyman
visited him regularly. On this occasion, several
hours after the clergyman departed, the Captain
was preparing to retire, when he was astonished
to see the priest once again in his room, but refus-
ing to answer the Captain’s questions. Suspecting
that this was not the clergyman at all, the Captain
“followed it round the bed, when it seemed to
sink down on an elbow-chair . . . To ascertain
positively the nature of the apparition, the soldier
himself sate down on the same chair, ascertaining
thus, beyond question, that the whole was illu-
sion.” According to Scott, the Captain’s only
remaining concern was whether the clergyman
had died about the same time (35-36). Mrs. Aber-
crombie had already had that concern when she
was visited by a relative wearing a shroud. Now
her only challenge was to summon “the force and
resolution necessary to enable her to cross the
space . . . and seat herself in the chair which ap-
peared occupied by the figure.” If Scott’s ghost
stories were in part the cause of her hallucinations,
in this instance at least they were also the means
of abjuration.
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Although she managed to muster admirable
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
courage in dealing with these visitations, they
continued to plague her. Two weeks later, on
October 26, she watched from the window as a
carriage drew up to the house. When “it arrived
within a few yards of the window, she saw the
figures of the postillions and the persons inside
take the ghastly appearance of skeletons, and
other hideous figures.” On December 3, she was
again visited by a figure dressed in a shroud—this
time the phantom was her husband’s brother. Dr.
Abercrombie summarizes his case study by noting
that “these successive delusions” have an “extraor-
dinary resemblance . . . to the usual circum-
stances of the ghost stories we have all heard
repeated, with more or less authority for them,
from our cradles upwards.” Mrs. Abercrombie, the
doctor insists, was in no way dwelling on the im-
ages that arose before her eyes: “Consequently the
imagination, memory, and other faculties of the
mind seem to be wholly unconcerned in the sug-
gestion or production of the spectral forms.” (261-
63).
That is a dubious conclusion, for Dr. Aber-
crombie himself has documented that she had
been reading Hibbert’s Philosophy of Spectral Illu-
sions, Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft,
and his own Inquiries concerning the Intellectual
Powers.
An interesting aspect of Mrs. Abercrombie’s
case is that she was not reading the Gothic tales
that deliberately indulge the aesthetics of fright.
Instead, she was reading works, even Scott’s, that
attempted to provide an objective explanation of
spectral phenomena. Mrs. Abercrombie’s symp-
toms are part of a prevailing preoccupation of the
medical literature. For a person to have an hal-
lucination, knowing at once that it is only an hal-
lucination, has a richer significance than I have
yet acknowledged. My earliest example is from
LeSage’s Gil Blas. Another interesting version is
from a true master of ghost stories, Sheridan
LeFanu.
In the Dr. Hesselius stories from In a Glass
Darkly (1872), the man of medical science, the
expert in the mental pathology, has been fully
absorbed into the narrative structure. He is no
longer an intermittent figure, called upon in mo-
ments of crisis. The medical “case study” is now
the fictive genre. Dr. Martin Hesselius, author of
Essays on Metaphysical Medicine, is the narrator and
commentator. The “case study” most resembling
Mrs. Abercrombie’s is the one Le Fanu has titled
“Green Tea.” The Reverend Mr. Jennings fre-
quently drinks green tea. If vice it is, it is his sole
335
 vice. He is a kind and good man, free from any
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
crime that would haunt him with remorse. Never-
theless, he is a haunted man, relentlessly haunted;
not by guilt and self-recriminations that typically
persecute the villain of the Gothic tale, but by a
monkey, an hallucinatory monkey. Dr. Hesselius
is the dispassionate observer and recorder to
whom Jennings has come in torment, desperate
for some cure or relief from his hallucinations. For
four years he has been writing a study of religious
metaphysics of the ancients. It is a labour that he
loves, and he works happily for long hours, drink-
ing a strong green tea as a stimulant. He is not in
his study, but riding on an omnibus, when he first
sees a small, black monkey with red glowing eyes.
He dispels the possibility that the monkey might
be real by poking at it: his umbrella passes right
through the phantom animal. To Jennings’s hor-
ror the animal becomes his companion. Dr. Hes-
selius documents the progression of Jennings’s
hallucination. At first, because he knows that it is
not real, he thinks the monkey is merely the
symptom of some disorder of the eye. The con-
stant presence, however, soon becomes a persecu-
tion, and Jennings begins to believe the monkey
is a demon. In the final stage, he hears it telepathi-
cally in his head, urging him to commit evil acts
and to destory himself. He has already reached
this frantic state of torment when he turns to Dr.
Hesselius. The doctor tells him that he has treated
many similar cases and that he can be confident
of a cure. Should the monkey again appear, Jen-
nings is to summon the doctor. The monkey, of
course, returns, but the doctor is unavailable. Hes-
selius arrives later at Jennings’ quarters to find the
minister has slit his throat.
Le Fanu gives many hints, but no satisfactory
explanation, why Jennings might be the victim of
such hallucinatory self-persecution. As in the case
of Abercrombie’s patient, who had read Gil Blas,
and Abercrombie’s wife, who had read Hibbert,
and Scott, and her own husband’s book, Jennings
too was guilty of reading in the lore of spectral il-
lusions. Much of his reading, of course, was in the
metaphysics of antiquity. In order to understand
his monkey delusion, he had turned to Emanuel
Swedenborg’s Arcana Celestia. Unlike the Duke
D’Olivarez, or Mrs. Abercrombie, or up to this mo-
ment, Jennings himself, Swedenborg truly be-
lieved in the supernatural origin of his appari-
tions. He believed that good and evil spirits
inhabit the world and manifest themselves to
certain individuals. Through a kind of mental
symbiosis, these spirits reside in the thoughts of
the person with whom they associate. In the
336 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
visual and auditory perceptions of their host, they
take the form that corresponds to the elements in
that individual’s character that initially attracted
the spirits. Thus they may represent a lust hidden
in the dark side of consciousness. The monkey
might be a manifestation of repressed desire. But
Le Fanu gives no hint what that desire might be.
From first to last, Jennings’s only excesses have
been green tea and metaphysics. Abstaining from
tea, however, does nothing the retard the visual
intrusions of the monkey, who sits on his book in
the pulpit, so that Jennings cannot read to his
congregation, and soon disrupts his prayers. If this
is indeed a psychological projection of Jennings’s
guilt, that guilt can only be devoting himself so
ardently to “pagan” metaphysics. Dr Hesselius
regrets, upon discovering Jennings’s corpse, not
that the man is dead, but that he, Dr Hesselius,
has not be able to record yet another success
among his many cases. The Doctor is convinced
that a dietary cure would have put an end to
spectral illusions, some fluid to counteract the
damage wrought by the green tea. Dr. Hesselius’s
pronouncements on the physiological rather than
psychological or supernatural causes for Jennings’s
torment and suicide are uncontested at the end of
this “case study,” which is to appear, as translated
and edited by a younger doctor, in an entire
volume of Hesselius’s “case studies.”
Le Fanu’s Dr. Hesselius stories are among the
obvious examples of the interweavings of Gothic
tales and the medical accounts of mental pathol-
ogy, and the “case study” of Rev. Jennings follows
directly in that tradition of self-aware hallucina-
tion that was observed in the confession of Duke
D’Olivarez. But the prominent example was the
case of Friedrich Nicolai (1733-1811), bookdealer,
friend of the playwright and critic, Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), and founding edi-
tor of the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek (1765-
1805), a journal dedicated to literary reviews.
Throughout the year 1791, Nicolai suffered a series
of hallucinations, fully aware that his spectral illu-
sions were not real. Scott notes that this case was
discussed by “the learned and acute Dr. Ferriar of
Manchester,” in An Essay towards a Theory of Ap-
paritions (1813), as well as by Dr. Hibbert in
Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions (1824).
Nicolai recorded the changes in his physical and
mental condition, and described each of his visual
illusions—delivered as a paper read to the Royal
Society of Berlin in 1799. An English translation,
“A Memoir on the Appearance of Spectres or
Phantoms occasioned by Disease, with Psychologi-
cal Remarks,” was published in William Nichol-
son’s Journal of Natural Philosophy in 1803. Nicolai
stressed in his paper the important evidence for
the interdependency of mind and body, and for
the effects of a nervous indisposition on the
organs of sense. Neglect of his scheduled bleeding
to relieve a congestion in the head, compounded
by death in the family and difficulties in business,
had aggravated his condition. In February, the hal-
lucinations commenced. While he realized that
the phantasmata were the production of his own
mind, he found that he could exercise no con-
scious control over their coming or going, their
shape or their actions: “these visions in my case
were not the consequence of any known law of
reason, of the imagination, or of the otherwise
usual association of ideas” (Nicholson’s Journal
. . . , VI [1803] 167)
Scott summarizes the case in the Letters on
Demonology:
These phantoms afforded nothing unpleasant to
the imagination of the visionary either in sight or
expression, and the patient was possessed of too
much firmness to be otherwise affected by their
presence than with a species of curiosity, as he
remained convinced from the beginning to the
end of the disorder, that these singular effects were
merely symptoms of the state of his health, and
did not in any other respect regard them as a
subject of apprehension. After a certain time, and
some use of medicine, the phantoms became less
distinct in their outline, less vivid in their colour-
ing, faded, as it were, on the eye of the patient,
and at length totally disappeared.
(20-22)
Scott goes on to cite Dr. Hibbert’s conclusions
concerning the Nicolai case. Hibbert argues that
several very different physical conditions are
capable of eliciting optical spectres.
The visitation of spectral phenomena is . . . a
frequent hectic symptom—often an associate of
febrile and inflammatory disorders-frequently ac-
companying inflammation of the brain-a con-
comitant also of highly excited nervous irritabil-
ity—equally connected with hypochondria—and
finally united in some cases with gout, and in oth-
ers with the effects of excitation produced by
several gases. In all these cases there seems to be a
morbid degree of sensibility, with which this
symptom is ready to ally itself, and which, though
inaccurate as a medical definition, may be held
sufficiently descriptive of one character of the vari-
ous kinds of disorder with which this painful
symptom may be found allied.
(22-23)
Scott also mentions various forms of intoxica-
tion—from distilled spirits, opium, or nitrous
oxide—which may also generate visual illusions.
He may have recalled the little book by Humphry
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Davy, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical,
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
Concerning Nitrous Oxide (1800), which included
personal accounts by Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Robert Southey, and Peter Mark Roget on the ef-
fects of inhaling the gas. Scott testifies that “Very
frequent use of the nitrous oxide which affects
the senses so strongly, and produces a short but
singular state of ecstasy, would probably be found
to occasion this species of disorder” (20). Optical
spectres, then, may result from physical disorders
as well as mental disorders, and they may also be
solicited by the use of opium and other drugs.
As has already occurred to the Coleridgeans in
the audience, optical spectres were not infrequent
in Coleridge’s experience: the opening in the wall
that he observed in his room in Bristol, the ap-
parition of the Captain that he saw at his fire-side
in Malta, the luminescent letters that he inscribed
on his thigh while lying in bed, the adulterous
nighttime wanderings of Wordsworth that he
thought he witnessed at an inn on their way to
Coleorton. Scott recalls, too, Coleridge’s reply to
“a lady who asked him if he believed in ghosts:—
‘No, madam; I have seen too many myself’” (34).
While such symptoms may seem trivial and
whimsical, Scott argues that the imagination has
the power “to kill the body, even when its fantastic
terrors cannot overcome the intellect” (26-32).
The mind, conscious of its own hallucinations,
may be relieved from the horror of thinking that
nightmare images are real, but that awareness can-
not dispel the torment of knowing it has no
control over their presence.
From Kant’s Versuch über die Krankheiten des
Köpfes (1764) Coleridge adapted his categories of
madness as a disease of the will, of reason, of the
feelings, and of the sensory organs. Coleridge’s
refers to these categories in a lecture on Don Quix-
ote (March, 1819): “1 Hypochondriasis, or out of
his senses—2. Derangement of the Understanding,
or out of his Wits—3 & Loss of Reason—4.
Frenzy—or derangement of the Sensations—” (On
Literature, 2:156-66; 414-20). Following this
scheme, Coleridge can diagnose Don Quixote as
having lost his wits, not his reason.
Authors of the Gothic tales were aware of
contemporary accounts of debility and derange-
ment. Successful in its run at Drury Lane and
much maligned in the critique by Coleridge,
Robert Maturin’s Bertram (1816) is a remarkable
study in the gradual mental deterioration of its
heroine, Imogine. Nor is it easy for the audience
to put all the blame on her own intemperate
desires. Self-centered violence and lust for revenge
are impelling motives for her lover, Bertram. The
337
 moments of kindness that he shows are too little
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
and too late. Too little, for example, when he
kisses rather than kills, as he had planned, Imog-
ine’s child. Too late, when he feels pangs of
remorse at the cave where Imogine has fled in her
madness and where her child lies dead.
Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(1797) also enjoyed a successful run at Drury Lane
with John Philip Kemble as the hero, Percy, Barry-
more as the villain, Osmond, and Dorothy Jordan
as the entrapped heroine, Angela. But in Lewis’s
drama, it is not the victimized woman who is
driven mad; rather it is the villain himself who is
vanquished by his own paranoid fears. Osmond’s
lust for Angela is driven more by jealous rivalry
and possessive greed than it is by sexual desire.
With Angela and her father, Reginald, trapped in
the dungeon, Osmond lifted his arm to stab his
brother, just as he had ten years earlier; and just
as happened ten years earlier, Evelina, Reginald’s
wife and Angela’s mother, threw herself between
her husband and Osmond’s dagger. Ten years
earlier she was killed by her brother-in-law. In a
repetition of that very scene, Osmond is distraught
by the appearance of the ghost, and Angela uses
that moment of distraction to plunge a dagger
into his chest. “The great run which this piece
had,” observed a critic, “is a striking proof that
success is a very uncertain criterion of merit—the
plot is rendered contemptible by the introduction
of the Ghost.”2 But the fault cannot be the Ghost,
per se. One would presumably not argue that Mac-
beth is rendered contemptible by the appearance
of the Ghost of Banquo (III.iv), or Hamlet by the
appearance of the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father (I.iv
and v), or Julius Caesar by the appearance of the
Ghost of Caesar in Brutus’s tent (IV.iii). The critic’s
complaint probably rests on the conviction that
an optical spectre on this occasion, seen by Os-
mond alone, would have been more effective than
an actress draped in a white shroud.
Although there was a degree of conformity
among the opinions of the medical doctors who
were attempting to ascertain the causes of a
patient’s visitations from spirits or demons, there
was much less conformity in the actual diagnosis.
The disparities, as seen in retrospect two centuries
later, are astonishing. Speculative anatomy seemed
to gain a professional following right along side
clinical studies. The nervous system and the brain
according to Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Caspar
Spurzheim coexisted with Matthew Baillie’s physi-
ological investigation of the nervous system and
Johann Christian Reil’s mapping of the ganglia
and the cerebral system. The disparities are even
338
more remarkable when one looks at the investiga-
tion of apparitions: Gotthelf Heinrich Schubert’s
theory in the Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Natur-
wissenschaft (1808) seems as lunatic as the phe-
nomena it describes. But how scientific were the
scientific treatises on apparitions? Scott readily
acknowledged the vast difference between his Let-
ters on Demonology and Witchcraft and Hibbert’s
Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions which was
subtitled An Attempt to Trace Such Illusions To Their
Physical Causes. The difference, Scott asserted, was
not only that “Dr. Hibbert . . . has most inge-
niously, as well as philosophically, handled this
subject,” but also that he “has treated it . . . in a
medical point of view, with science to which we
make no pretence, and a precision of detail to
which our superficial investigation affords us no
room for extending ourselves” (22). Hibbert’s most
important predecessor in Britain was John Ferriar,
in An Essay towards a Theory of Apparitions (1813).
Among Hibbert’s immediate successors were John
Abercrombie, in Inquiries concerning the Intellectual
Powers (1830) and Walter Cooper Dendy, On the
Phenomena of Dreams and other Transient Illusions
(1832). But the topic of illusions and apparitions
was also commonly addressed in the major works
on mental pathology, as in Philippe Pinel’s A
Treatise on Insanity, translated from the French in
1809, or John Haslam’s Observations on Insanity,
first published in 1798 with an enlarged second
edition in 1809.
Dr. Haslam was also the author of Illustrations
of madness: exhibiting a singular case of insanity and
a no less remarkable difference in medical opinion:
developing the nature of the assailment, and the man-
ner of working events; with a description of the tortures
experienced by bomb-bursting, lobster-cracking, and
lengthening of the brain (1810). The book is espe-
cially relevant to this study for three reasons: 1) it
delineates the conditions of complex mental illu-
sions; 2) it provides an extensive “case study” of
the hallucinations of Haslam’s patient, James Tilly
Matthews; 3) it demonstrates the disparity in
medical judgment. The “case study” of Matthews
reads more like science fiction than medical
observation. It is a story of conspiracy theory and
mind control. Near the London Wall was the hid-
den establishment of a group of persons skilled in
Pneumatic Chemistry. There they have con-
structed a large device, an Air Loom, capable of
sending waves of magnetic energy that the com-
press the air and can be focused on an individual.
Matthews has discovered that he is their experi-
mental target. The team is headed by Bill, the
King, who “actuated Rhynwick Williams to the
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
commission of his monstrous practices” and “also
took Hadfield in tow, by means of magnetic
impregnations, and compelled him to fire his
Pistol at his Majesty in the Theatre.”3 Other
members of the team are Jack, the Schoolmaster,
who serves as shorthand record-keeper; Sir Archy
(who may be a woman in man’s apparel) who is
the “liar of the gang” and uses the Air Loom to
disseminate a protective cover of propaganda and
to communicate with the targets by “brain-
sayings”; the Middleman, manufacturer and
operator of the Air Loom; Augusta, either friendly
and cajoling, or spiteful and malignant; she influ-
ences female targets with her “brain-sayings”;
Charlotte, victimized by the gang, perhaps kept in
chains, almost naked, poorly fed; the Glove
Woman, who wears cotton gloves and a fawn-
colored Norwich gown. Matthews describes the
various assaults on his mind and body delivered
through the Air Loom, as well as how the Air
Loom can also, across a vast distance, impregnate
its target with various chemicals.
As happened in many cases, it was debated
whether this patient was sane or insane. Matthews
managed a successful business as tea-broker in
Leadenhall Street, became an advocate of republi-
can France, and was imprisoned during one of his
visits to Paris. After his return, he worried that
those who had tortured him in prison would track
him down. The decision whether a patient should
be placed in an asylum, was a decision that was
fraught with a potential for abuse. Haslam had no
hesitation in confining Matthews to Bethlem
Hospital in January, 1797, and transferring him to
the incurable ward one year later. In the mean-
time, a legal process was raised by his family
demanding his release. Haslam responded that
Matthews’s “insanity was most evident, yet his
relatives did not possess the faculty of perceiving
his disorder.” Ten years later, with Matthews’s still
in confinement, Dr. Henry Clutterbuck and Dr
George Burkback submitted affidavits that they
had interviewed Matthews and found him per-
fectly sane. Haslam prevailed in the proceedings
and Matthews remained in the hospital. Haslam
responded to the debate over Matthews’s possible
sanity by describing the cycle of “lucid intervals”
and “relapses,” and the consequent difficulty for a
physician not familiar with the case to reach a
proper diagnosis.4
In the concluding section of his Observations
on Maniacal Disorders (1792), Dr. William Pargeter
quoted recent newspaper accounts on the wide-
spread abuse of mad-houses. From an article dated
September, 1791:
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Notwithstanding the recent regulations, there are
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
many madhouses in the neighbourhood of the
metropolis, which demand a very serious enquiry,
The masters of these receptacles of misery, on the
days that they expect visitors, get their sane
patients out of the way; or, if that cannot be done,
give them large doses of stupefying liquor, or
narcotic draughts, that drown their faculties, and
render them incapable of giving a coherent an-
swer. A very strict eye should be kept on these ga-
olers of the mind; for if they do not find a patient
mad, their oppressive tyranny soon makes them
so.
(126; the “recent regulations” refer to the
Madhouse Act of 1774 and subsequent controls
in response to legal actions against abuses)
From another article dated December, 1791:
Private mad-houses are become so general at
present, and their prostitution of justice so openly
carried on, that any man may have his wife, or
father, or brother confined for life at a stipulated
price! The wretched victims are concealed from
the inspecting doctors, unless it can be contrived
that they are stupefied with drugs, or made mad
with strong liquors, against the hour of visiting.
(Pargeter, 126-27)
No wonder that the mad-house soon became
a more lurid setting than a castle dungeon for the
atrocities of the depraved Gothic villain.5 No
wonder that driving a helpless victim to insanity
was adopted as a Gothic plot. But it is equally
compelling as a modern film plot: Gaslight (1944),
a psychological suspense thriller, with Charles
Boyer as the villainous Gregory Anton, Ingrid
Bergman as Paula Alquist, who becomes his wife
and victim, and Joseph Cotton as Brian Cameron
of Scotland Yard. Adapted from Patrick Hamilton’s
long-running play, Angel Street, the plot is about a
ruthless jewel-thief, who ten years earlier mur-
dered Paula’s aunt in attempt to steal her jewels.
Knowing that the jewels are still hidden in the
house, Gregory waits ten years until he can marry
the niece who has inherited the house. After
systematically and methodically tormenting her
in order to drive her insane, he intends then to
have her committed to an insane asylum, and live
with the wealth and luxury of the recovered jewels
and his wife’s inheritance. The title is derived from
the frequent dimming and flickering of the gas-
lights, a key factor in driving the wife crazy. The
plan almost succeeds, when the detective of
Scotland Yard intervenes, rescues the wife, and ar-
rests the husband.
The plot of Gaslight is the same as Joanna
Baillie’s Orra: the mental stability of the female
protagonist is undermined by deliberate abuse
perpetrated by her male “protector.” In depicting
a female character victimized by madness, Baillie
339
 is concerned in revealing her plight as caused
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
more by the ruthless abuse of male authority, than
by inherent fragility of mind. To be sure, Orra has
the love and loyalty of Theobald, but the machi-
nations of Rudigere, the “gaoler of the mind,” suc-
ceed in secluding her from his intervention. As
heiress to the fiefdom of her deceased father, she
lives as a ward to her uncle, Hughobert, who seeks
to marry her to his son, and thus unite the two
branches of the Aldenberg estates. Orra, however,
recognizes the selfish motives and steadfastly
rejects the suit of her cousin. With her insistence
that drama should address the power of emotions
to dictate behavior and compel the overwrought
individual to acts of irrational excess, Joanna
Baillie enters into the very same province of aber-
rational psychology that her brother, Matthew
Baillie, had begun to explore in his 1794 lectures
on the “Anatomy of the Nervous System” and the
“Physiology of the Nervous System.” Matthew
Baillie conceded that no simple discrimination of
mind and brain, of psychological and physiologi-
cal causes, was possible, but he also observed that
the persistence of a psychological state frequently
altered the physiological condition. 6 Joanna
Baillie, too, sought to ground her analysis of
behavior on empirical observation, and to identify
the symptoms which foreshadow an impending
emotional crisis: “the restless eye, the muttering
lip, the half-checked exclamation and the hasty
start.” Because actions in a state of excitement
may override volition and even conscious aware-
ness, they can be studied only in the observation
of others. At the time when Orra was published in
Plays of the Passions, volume three (1812), Mat-
thew Baillie had already commenced his service as
physician to the deranged George III
(“Autobiography,” 59-60).
An independent woman, Orra struggles
against male domination. With sarcasm, she
scorns the attempts to usurp her “lands and
rights” through marriage:
And so, since fate has made me, woe the day!
That poor and good-for-nothing, helpless being,
Woman yclept, I must consign myself
With all my lands and rights into the hands
Of some proud man, and say, ‘Take all, I pray,
And do me in return the grace and favour
To be my master.’
(II.i.1-7)
In spite of her assertiveness, Orra, no less than
other characters in Baillie’s Plays of the Passions,
has a mental weakness. As Brewster said of Mrs.
Abercrombie, she possesses a “morbidly sensitive
imagination.” Readily captivated by ghost stories,
340
her superstitious imagination cannot resist their
horrid delights. She confesses her fascination with
tales of terror:
when the cold-blood shoots through every
vein:
When every hair’s-pit on my shrunken skin
A knotted knoll becomes, and mine ears
Strange inward sounds awake, and to mine eyes
Rush stranger tears, there is a joy in fear.
(II.i.170-174)
Aware of her susceptibility to superstitious
lore, Rudigere plots to possess her. He convinces
Hughobert that his hopes to marry her to his son,
Glottenbal, will be soon be blighted because she
has taken a fancy for Theobald of Falkenstein,
who lingers about the castle seeking opportunities
to meet with Orra. He convinces Hughobert to
present Orra with the ultimatum to accept Glot-
tenbal as her husband. If she refuses, she must be
sent to the family’s long-vacant, half-ruined castle
in the Black Forest until she reconsiders. Rudigere
offers his service to act as her protector during her
banishment to the Black Forest, a banishment, he
predicts, that will be short-lived because she will
promptly repent her stubbornness and eagerly
return to marry Glottenbal.
Catherina, who attends Orra on this journey,
has been blackmailed into obedience to Rudigere
for some impropriety which he threatens to
expose. Thus Orra, once she has arrived in the
isolated castle, has no companion to help her
avoid Rudigere’s sexual advances. Unable to assail
her dignity and integrity, he seeks to undermine
her courage by arousing her superstitious fear. He
tries to convince her that he, too, dreads the
spectre that haunts the place. He longs for her
companionship to dispel the gloom:
To hear thy voice, makes ev’n this place of hor-
rors,—
Where, as ’tis said, the spectre of a chief,
Slain by our common grandsire, haunts the
night,
A paradise—a place where I could live
In penury and gloom, and be most blessed.
Ah! Orra! if there’s misery in thraldom,
Pity a wretch who breathes but in thy favour:
Who, till he look’d upon that beauteous face,
Was free and happy.—Pity me or kill me!
(III.i.83-89)
By exacerbating her fears, he thinks to make
her so terrified that she will shrink from being left
alone and choose to spend the night in his
chamber.
The gothic romance, as critics have often
observed, uses the conventions of super-natural-
ism as a disguise for an exposition of sexual exploi-
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
tation.7 Baillie assembles the conventions: the
wicked villain, the maiden in distress, the gothic
castle, the rumors of a ghost. But she resorts to no
supernatural disguise. Nor is the advent of Orra’s
madness a substitute for supernaturalism. Rudig-
ere’s threat of sexual assault combines with the
“real agony of fear” to drive Orra over the brink
into madness. Finding no escape left to her, she is
plunged into insanity. Theobald arrives to rescue
her—but too late. In Act V, Baillie reveals the
devastating affliction. The cause, as surmised by
those who see her, was some seizure of the brain:8
not her mind?—Oh direst wreck of all!
That noble mind!—But ’tis some passing seizure,
Some powerful movement of a transient nature;
It is not madness?
(V.ii.33-36)
But Orra responds not to attempts to release
her from her delusions. She sees herself captive in
a borderland where the spirits of the dead inter-
mingle with the living. She rejects the friends who
arrive from her uncle’s court. Neither the stringen-
cies of a moral cure nor the sympathetic ministra-
tions9 of Theobald’s loving kindness are capable
of dispelling her madness: “Her mind within itself
holds a dark world / Of dismal phantasies and hor-
rid forms!” The uncle who had abused his respon-
sibility as her guardian is compelled to listen to,
and share, her vision of her avenging father who
comes with hordes of the dead to wreak his
retribution. With “all the wild strength of frantic
horror,” she takes hold of Hughobert and
Theobald and, as the curtain drops, pulls them
back with her into the dark recesses of the stage.
Haslam, in his Observations on Madness, argued
that distinction that the between self-awareness
and self-delusion in the experience of ocular
spectres was irrelevant to the medical diagnosis of
madness. Mania, for Haslam the condition of
“false perceptions,” is not in itself a factor in mad-
ness. In his judgment, the subject only becomes
mad when mania is accompanied by melancholia,
which he defines as the intensity of idea. In its
usual definition, mania itself involves precisely
that intensity. Haslam redefined terms in order to
establish a bipolar scheme in which a patient is
said to vacillate between mania and melancholia,
between “lucid intervals” and “relapse.” During
the manic phase a mad person is capable of dis-
sembling sanity and stifling or masking the
disorder (41, 45-57). This argument, as in Mat-
thews’s case, defends the physician’s discernment
of madness, in spite of the patient’s appearance of
sanity and the diagnosis of other physicians
unfamiliar with the cycles of the patient’s behav-
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
ior. It is, for the very reasons that Pargeter pointed
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
out in his Observations on Maniacal Disorders,
potentially dangerous as a means of confining the
sane in mad-houses. It also provides an apt
psychological construct for the fictional character
who can mask his obsession well enough to woo
the bride whom he intends to destroy.
Imogine, Orra, and other mad heroines in the
Gothic tales played out fears and desires that read-
ers recognized. The madness of Ambrosio or Os-
mond was driven by a perversity or cruelty per-
ceived to lurk in men who were authoritarian
“gaolors of the mind,” yet counted themselves
normal and sane. In the Biographia, Coleridge
insisted that “German tragedy” was a misnomer
for such plays as Bertram, which he saw as Jaco-
binical through and through (ed. Engell and Bate,
CW, II:221). The Gothic tale became an effective
venue for examining current issues of domestic
and urban violence, as well as challenges to
religious and political authority. Character and
situation in the Gothic tales paralleled the very
concerns with aberrant behavior in contemporary
medical works on apparitions and delusions. As
Dr. Abercrombie acknowledged, the “case study”
of the physician may seem a mirror image of the
Gothic tale. Indeed, it could become such a perfect
mirror image that, as in the Dr. Hesselius tales, it
could pop right through to the other side, like Al-
ice through the looking-glass.
Notes
1. Alain-René Le Sage (1668-1747), The Adventures of Gil
Blas, of Santillane (1715-1735), translated in 1749 by
Tobias Smollett (1721-1771), 4 vols. In 2 (Lions: Cor-
mon and Blanc, 1815), vol. 4, Book the Twelfth, ch.
11, pp. 271-272.
2. J. Genest, English Stage from the Restoration to 1830, 10
vols. (Bath: H. E. Carrington, 1830), VII, 332-33.
3. Rhynwick Williams, the “London Monster,” was a
forerunner of Jack the Ripper, who murdered women
on the streets of London; he was captured and con-
victed in 1791, although there were doubts whether
he was actually the one guilty of the crimes; James
Hadfield was tried for shooting at his Majesty George
III. at Drury Lane Theatre, on May 15, 1800.
4. Roy Porter, as editor of a reprint of Haslam’s Illustra-
tions of Madness, reports that “Matthews’s fate
became a cause célèbre; . . . the institution came under
the scathing scrutiny of the House of ⫽ Commons
committee investigating madhouses in 1815.” After
being incarcerated by Dr Haslam for twenty years, an
order for Matthews’s release from Bethlem hospital
was given in 1816. Porter, Introduction, p. 15.
5. See also: Samuel Bruckshaw, One More Proof of the Ini-
guitous Abuse of Private Madhouses (London, 1794); Wil-
liam Belcher, Address to Humanity, Containing a Letter
to Dr. Munro, a Receipt to Make a Lunatic, and Seize his
Estates, and a Sketch of a True Smiling Hyena (London,
341
 1796); James Parkinson, Mad-Houses; Observations on by Disease, with Psychological Remarks,” in William

GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES

the Act for Regulation of Mad-Houses (London: Sher- Nicholson’s Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry,
wood, Neeley and Jones, 1811). and the Arts, VI (1803), 161-179; Pargeter, William.
Observations on Maniacal Disorders. 1792; Pinel, Phil-
6. Matthew Baillie, Gulstonian Lectures (read before the ippe. A Treatise on Insanity, trans. D.D. Davis. 1809;
Royal College of Physicians, May 1794), Lectures and Traité Médico-Philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale ou la
Observations on Medicine, p. 123-124. manie. 1st ed. 1801; Schubert, Gotthelf Heinrich. An-
7. A major work delineating sado-masochistic motifs, sichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft. 1808;
Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (1951), has been fol- Swedenborg, Emanuel. Arcana Celestia, quae in scriptura
lowed by a vast number of studies on sexual desecra- sacra seu verbo Domini, sunt, detecta: hic primum quae in
tion in Gothic fiction. William Patrick Day, In the Genesi. Una cum mirabilibus, quae visa sunt in mundo
Circles of Fear and Desire. A Study of Gothic Fantasy spirituum et in coelo angelorum. 1749; trans. Arcana co-
(1985), for example, states that “the specific material elestia: or Heavenly mysteries, contained in the Sacred
that made it [the Gothic] so compelling for contempo- Scriptures, or Word of the Lord, manifested and laid open;
rary readers” was the concern with “masculine and beginning with the book of Genesis. Interspersed with rela-
feminine identity” and problems challenging “con- tions of wonderful things seen in the world of spirits and
ventional concepts of identity and family that domi- the heaven of angels. 1803.
nated nineteenth-century middle-class life,” p. 5.
8. In his account of “Complaints of the Head,” Lectures
and Observations on Medicine (1825), pp. 165-171, Mat-
thew Baillie reviews the possibility that severe emo-
tional shock as well as physical trauma may cause VAMPIRES
apoplectic or epileptic seizures. On “The Causes of
Madness,” Treatise on Madness (1757), William Battie
had earlier declared that “the fixed muscular marks of
passion discover indeed in their operation that the
turbulent storms of joy or anger, which in conse-
quence of pressure upon the nerves, are as much the
remoter causes of Madness, and indeed sooner or later
are as destructive to every animal power.”
9. Vieda Skultans, Madness and Morals, pp. 9-20, 98-139,
and Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions, pp.
56-87, William Bynum, “Rationales for Therapy in
British Psychiatry, 1780-1835,” in Mad-houses, Mad-
Doctors, and Madmen, ed. Andrew Scull, pp. 35-57,
survey major approaches to the treatment of the mad:
moral management (imposing strict regimen of work
and obedience), physical restraint (chains, braces,
strait jackets); hydrotherapy (immersion, showers,
wet-wraps); and domestication (recreating household
routine and social interaction).

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Abercrombie, John. Inquiries concerning the Intellectual Pow-
ers. 1830; Baillie, Matthew. Gulstonian Lectures (read
before the Royal College of Physicians, May 1794),
Lectures and Observations on Medicine, pp. 123-140;
Baillie, Matthew Morbid Anatomy (2nd ed. 1797);
Dendy, Walter Cooper. On the phenomena of dreams and
other transient illusions., 1832; Ferriar, John. An essay
towards a theory of apparitions. 1813; Haslam, John.
Observations on insanity: with practical remarks on the
disease, and an account of the morbid appearances on dis-
section. 1798; 2d ed. 1809; Haslam, John. Illustrations of
madness: exhibiting a singular case of insanity and a no
less remarkable difference in medical opinion: developing
the nature of the assailment, and the manner of working
events; with a description of the tortures experienced by
bomb-bursting, lobster-cracking, and lengthening of the
brain. 1810. Facsimile reprint, with Introduction by
Roy Porter, 1988; Hibbert, Samuel. Sketches of the
Philosophy of Apparitions; Or, An Attempt to Trace Such Il-
lusions To Their Physical Causes. 1824; Kant, Immanuel.
Versuch über die Krankheiten des Köpfes (1764), in Werke,
ed. Wilhelm Weischedel. 1966. I:.887-901; Nicolai,
Friedrich. presented to the Royal Society of Berlin on
February 28, 1799. An English translation, “A Memoir
on the Appearance of Spectres or Phantoms occasioned

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John William Polidori, 1798-1832.

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Title page of Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood.

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Mary Elizabeth Braddon, 1837-1915.

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ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ

JOHN WILLIAM POLIDORI (1795-1821)
Author of The Vampyre (1819), the first
published vampire novel in English, Polidori
is best remembered for his association with
more famous literary figures. The Vampyre
was initially misattributed to Byron; although
Polidori borrowed some plot elements from
an abandoned narrative fragment by Byron,
his novel is an original composition, establish-
ing many of the literary conventions of the
vampire theme that were followed by subse-
quent nineteenth-century authors. A private
physician to Lord Byron, Polidori traveled
with the author through France, Belgium,
Germany, and Switzerland, where they en-
countered the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe
Shelley and his future wife, Mary Woll-
stonecraft Godwin (later Shelley). Byron and
Polidori leased a villa on Lake Geneva; Shelley
and Godwin took lodgings nearby and were
frequent visitors. Although scholars dispute
the account of a rainy night and “ghost-story-
writing competition” giving rise to Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein and Polidori’s Vampyre,
most concur that both works were conceived
and started at the villa during the summer of
1816. The Vampyre may owe its existence in
part to Byron: some commentators, citing
Byron’s 1816 novel fragment that relates an
encounter with the undead, speculate that
the novel was first accepted for publication
because Byron was thought to be the author.
Nevertheless, Polidori’s novel is acknowl-
edged as containing original elements that
significantly influenced subsequent genre fic-
tion. In particular, Polidori shifted focus from
a passive, suffering protagonist to the com-
pelling, dynamic figure of the vampire him-
self. Further, Polidori may have been the first
author in any language to cast the bestial
vampire of legend into the form most familiar
to modern readers: a sophisticated nobleman
who exerts a sexual fascination over both
male and female victims. Polidori remains a
marginal literary figure, overshadowed by his
renowned associates, while The Vampyre has
been characterized as a pivotal work of
supernatural fiction.

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ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES (1803-1849)
A poet of great promise who failed to live up
to the expectations of his literary peers, Bed-
does is remembered today as an important
figure in the Elizabethan literary revival of the
nineteenth century, as an author of Gothic
verse, and for his dark and troubled life,
which ended in suicide when he was forty-
five. Critics have asserted that Beddoes
deserves to be better known and have re-
garded him as the literary heir to William
Shakespeare and the best of the Romantic
poets, including his idol Percy Bysshe Shelley.
After publishing a volume of poetry and his
acclaimed verse drama The Brides’ Tragedy
(1822) by age nineteen, Beddoes did not
publish anything of consequence for the rest
of his life. At twenty-three he exiled himself
from England, studying and living in Europe
and working intermittently at his ambitious
verse drama Death’s Jest-Book (1850), which
he revised until his death. During his life he
was regarded first as a prodigy and then an
eccentric. After Beddoes’s death Victorian
poets Robert Browning and Alfred, Lord Ten-
nyson expressed admiration for his poetry.
Scholarly interest in Beddoes began in the
1920s, and since then critics have examined
in detail his interest in death, horror, and the
Gothic; his treatment of themes such as mar-
riage and the limits of art; his grim humor;
his lyrical ear; and his fascination with words.
He is admired for his genuine—albeit dark
and disturbing—vision and presents themes
and ideas that are otherwise absent in the
more conventional works of late Romantic
and early Victorian England.

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FURTHER READING
Bibliography
Carter, Margaret L. The Vampire in Literature: A Critical Bibli-
ography. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1989,
135 p.
Full-length bibliography of criticism on literature with
vampire themes or characters.
Criticism
Anderson, James. “New Wave Vampires.” Studies in Weird
Fiction 20 (winter 1997): 18-21.
Surveys the process of the modernization of themes and
figures in vampire fiction.
Auerbach, Nina. “The Power of Hunger: Demonism and
Maggie Tulliver.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30, no. 2
(September 1975): 150-71.
Examines George Eliot’s treatment of Maggie Tulliver as
a demon in The Mill on the Floss.
Barfoot, C. C. “The Gist of the Gothic in English Fiction; or,
Gothic and the Invasion of Boundaries.” In Exhibited
by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic
Tradition, edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Peter David-
son, and Jane Stevenson, pp. 159-72. Atlanta, Ga. and
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995.
Compares the treatment of ghosts and boundaries in
works by Charles Dickens and Jane Austen.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Bernstein, Susan. “It Walks: The Ambulatory Uncanny.”
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
Modern Language Notes 118, no. 5 (December 2003):
1111-139.
Regarding the theory of Samuel Weber on the uncanny,
Bernstein asserts: “I would like to follow Weber’s lead in
continuing to read the uncanny and outline some of its
peculiar textual features.” Compares works by Edgar Al-
lan Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann, and theories of Sigmund
Freud and Martin Heidegger.
Bowen, Elizabeth. Introduction to The Second Ghost Book,
by Lady Cynthia Asquith, n. p. London: J. Barrie, 1952.
Contrasts ghost stories of the 1950s with their counter-
parts of the Victorian and Edwardian periods.
Brantlinger, Patrick. “The Gothic Origins of Science Fic-
tion.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 14 (fall 1980): 30-43.
Explores how “the conventions of science fiction derive
from the conventions of fantasy and romance, and
especially from those of the Gothic romance,” to demon-
strate “why it has been difficult—maybe impossible—for
science fiction to become a ‘realism of the future.’”
Briggs, Julia. Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English
Ghost Story. London: Faber, 1977, 238 p.
Well-regarded and comprehensive book-length study on
the history of the ghost story in England from the
nineteenth century through the early twentieth century.
Carlson, M. M. “What Stoker Saw: An Introduction to the
History of the Literary Vampire.” Folklore Forum 10, no.
2 (fall 1977): 26-32.
Discusses several influential works of vampire fiction and
distinguishes between the literary vampire and its
folkloric prototype.
Castle, Terry. Introduction to The Female Thermometer:
Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Un-
canny, pp. 3-20. Cambridge: Oxford University Press,
1995.
Offers a cultural-historical approach to studying the treat-
ment of the uncanny in eighteenth-century literature.
Clery, E. J. “Laying the Ground for Gothic: The Passage of
the Supernatural from Truth to Spectacle.” In Exhibited
by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic
Tradition, edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Peter David-
son, and Jane Stevenson, pp. 65-74. Atlanta, Ga. and
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995.
Uses works of Samuel Johnson and Horace Walpole to il-
lustrate her assertion that they represent “alternative
mental paradigms, distinct epistemological fields, posit-
ing two discrete objects: a ‘real supernatural’ and an
‘aesthetic supernatural.’”
———. Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995, 222 p.
Delineates the Enlightenment and its influence on the
treatment of the supernatural in eighteenth-century fic-
tion.
Day, William Patrick. In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study
of Gothic Fantasy. Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press, 1985, 208 p.
Influential, full-length study of Gothic fantasy literature
and film.
Del Principe, David. “Misbegotten, Unbegotten, Forgotten:
Vampires and Monsters in the Works of Ugo Tarchetti,
385
 Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and the Gothic Tradition.”
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
Forum Italicum 29, no. 1 (spring 1995): 3-25.
Relates Ugo Tarchetti’s Fosca to the Gothic tradition by
comparing it to Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stoker’s
Dracula and by illustrating how it “deftly recreates the
vampire myth.”
Engel, Leonard. “The Role of the Enclosure in the English
and American Gothic Romance.” Essays in Arts and Sci-
ences 11 (September 1982): 59-68.
Studies the treatment of enclosure in works by Horace
Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, and the influence of this
treatment on the works of Charles Brockden Brown.
Fisher, Benjamin Franklin, IV. “Charles Lamb and Super-
naturalism.” Charles Lamb Bulletin 69 (January 1990):
145-53.
Surveys Lamb’s use of the supernatural in his works.
Gelder, Ken. Reading the Vampire. London: Routledge, 1994,
161 p.
Full-length study of vampires in literature from the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Gordon, Jan, and Veronica Hollinger, eds. Blood Read: The
Vampire As Metaphor in Contemporary Culture. Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, 264 p.
Full-length examination of the vampire in twentieth-
century art, society, and culture.
Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the
Technology of Monsters. Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1995, 215 p.
Full-length study of the monster in Gothic and horror
literature and film.
Hearn, Lafcadio. “The Value of the Supernatural in Fiction.”
In Talks to Writers, edited by John Erskine, pp. 130-49.
New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1920.
Observes the modern vitality of supernatural fiction,
discusses its origins and function, and examines the
relationship between dreams and supernatural stories.
Howells, Coral Ann. Love, Mystery, and Misery: Feeling in
Gothic Fiction. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities
Press, 1978, 199 p.
Focuses on the techniques used by Gothic novelists to
suggest emotional states.
Kullmann, Thomas. “Nature and Psychology in Melmoth the
Wanderer and Wuthering Heights.” In Exhibited by
Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradi-
tion, edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Peter Davidson,
and Jane Stevenson, pp. 99-106. Atlanta, Ga. and Am-
sterdam: Rodopi, 1995.
Assesses the treatment of nature and the psyche in
Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer and
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
Lewis, Paul. “Beyond Mystery: Emergence from Delusion as
a Pattern in Gothic Fiction.” Gothic 2 (1980): 7-13.
Considers the processes of recovering from a delusion as a
Gothic narrative pattern in the works of Horace Walpole,
Charles Brockden Brown, Herman Melville, and Henry
James.
———. “Mysterious Laughter: Humor and Fear in Gothic
Fiction.” Genre 14 (1981): 309-27.
386 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Applies the incongruity theory of Mary K. Rothbart to the
treatment of mystery in Gothic narratives and its relation
to humor and fear.
Lydenburg, Robin. “Freud’s Uncanny Narratives.” PMLA:
Publications of the Modern Language Association of
America 112, no. 5 (October 1997): 1072-86.
Investigates “Freud’s potential usefulness to contemporary
theories of narrative” and “the importance of his work to
an understanding of the more general relation between
literature and psychoanalysis.”
Madoff, Mark. “The Useful Myth of Gothic Ancestry.” Stud-
ies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, no. 8 (1979): 337-50.
Surveys the origins of common themes and figures in
Gothic literature.
Magistrale, Tony, and Michael A. Morrison, eds. A Dark
Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996,
141 p.
Includes survey essays on film and horror literature from
1980-1999, as well as essays on the works of horror writ-
ers Thomas Harris, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter
Straub, William Peter Blatty, and Whitley Strieber.
Mahoney, Dennis F. “Double into Doppelgänger: The
Genesis of the Doppelgänger-Motif in the Novels of
Jean Paul and E. T. A. Hoffmann.” Journal of Evolution-
ary Psychology 4, nos. 1-2 (April 1983): 54-63.
Regards the relationship of the double to the self in Jean
Paul’s Siebenkäs and Titan and Hoffmann’s Die
Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixir).
McGuire, Karen. “The Artist as Demon in Mary Shelley,
Stevenson, Walpole, Stoker, and King.” Gothic New
Series 1 (1986): 1-5.
Explores the similarities and differences of Shelley, Steven-
son, Walpole, Stoker, and King’s use of “deformed
monsters, ghosts, vampires, and haunted houses as
metaphors for the creative process.”
Mosig, Dirk W. “Lovecraft: The Dissonance Factor in
Imaginative Literature.” Gothic 1, no. 1 (June 1979):
20-26.
“[A]ttempts to apply [Leon Festinger’s cognitive] dis-
sonance theory in the field of literature,” and asserts that
“the theory provides an ideal framework to explicate the
reasons for the disturbing emotional impact achieved by
certain works of imaginative literature, especially the
stories and novels of Howard Phillips Lovecraft.”
Parks, John G. “Chambers of Yearning: Shirley Jackson’s
Use of the Gothic.” Twentieth Century Literature 30, no.
1 (spring 1984): 15-29.
Examines Shirley Jackson’s use of Gothic conventions in
her treatment of madness and victimization.
Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fic-
tions from 1765 to the Present Day. Essex, England: Long-
man, 1980, 449 p.
Comprehensive book-length study of Gothic literature
from 1765 through the late 1970s.
———. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions
from 1765 to the Present Day, Volume. 2: The Modern
Gothic. Essex, England: Longman, 1996, 234 p.
Revised second edition of his comprehensive, book-length
study of Gothic literature from 1765 through the 1990s.
Roberts, Bette B. “Varney, the Vampire, Or, Rather, Varney,
the Victim.” Gothic New Series 2 (1987): 1-5.
Asserts that the title character in Varney, the Vampire
“appears to be the embodiment of evil yet instills no fear
or dread in the reader.”
Rubenstein, Roberta. “House Mothers and Haunted Daugh-
ters: Shirley Jackson and Female Gothic.” Tulsa Studies
in Women’s Literature 15, no. 2 (fall 1996): 309-31.
Feminist and psychoanalytic approach to Jackson’s treat-
ment of mother-daughter relations in her works.
Skrip, Jack. “I Drink, Therefore I Am: Introspection in the
Contemporary Vampire Novel.” Studies in Weird Fiction
14 (winter 1994): 3-7.
Outlines the treatment of introspective vampires in Anne
Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, Peter Tonkin’s The
Journal of Edwin Underhill, and John Skipp and Craig
Spector’s The Light at the End.
Smith, Andrew. Gothic Radicalism: Literature, Philosophy, and
Psychoanalysis in the Nineteenth Century. New York:
Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press, 2000, 188 p.
Maintains that Gothic literature by such writers as Mary
Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and
Bram Stoker challenged leading nineteenth-century beliefs
regarding the nature of the sublime and of Sigmund
Freud’s psychoanalysis.
Spooner, Catherine. “Cosmo-Gothic: The Double and the
Single Woman.” Women: A Cultural Review 12, no. 3
(winter 2001): 292-305.
Studies the treatment of the double and female subjectiv-
ity in works by contemporary women writers and com-
pares this to the treatment of the same subjects in Gothic
fiction.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Thompson, G. Richard. “The Apparition of This World:
GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES
Transcendentalism and the American ‘Ghost Story.’”
In Bridges to Fantasy, edited by George Edgar Slusser,
Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert E. Scholes, pp. 90-107. Car-
bondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982.
Studies the treatment of the supernatural in literature
and its association with Transcendentalism.
Twitchell, James B. Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern
Horror. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, 353 p.
Examines nineteenth- and twentieth-century Gothic nar-
ratives from a psychological perspective, explaining why
certain images and stories resonate with audiences.
Varnado, S. L. Haunted Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fic-
tion. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987,
160 p.
Full-length study of supernatural fiction in light of
theologian Rudolph Otto’s concept of the “numinous”
and examination of works by various authors as they
relate to this concept.
Wain, Marianne. “The Double in Romantic Narrative: A
Preliminary Study.” The Germanic Review 36, no. 4
(December 1961): 257-68.
Focuses on the role of the double in Romantic literature,
suggesting that while writers used the theme of the split
ego to illustrate a general malaise, they also searched for
remedies.
Woolf, Virginia. “The Supernatural in Fiction.” In Collected
Essays. Vol. 1, pp. 293-96. New York: Harcourt Brace Jo-
vanovich, Inc., 1967.
Analyzes the purpose and experience of reading supernatu-
ral fiction, focusing on Sir Walter Scott’s “Wandering
Willie’s Tale” and Henry James’s Turn of the Screw as
examples of the supernatural and the psychological ghost
story.
387
PERFORMING ARTS AND
THE GOTHIC
T he English Gothic drama, like the Gothic
novel, was characterized by a reliance on
supernatural elements and dramatic spectacles of
suffering. Generally confined to a brief period in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
Gothic plays were condemned by critics as atheis-
tic and unenlightened, but were tremendously
popular with audiences seeking the escapism the
works provided. Romantic poets and dramatists
ridiculed Gothic productions as superstitious, and
the stereotypical ghostly figure slowly rising
through a trap door on the stage became synony-
mous with Gothic excess, often eliciting more
laughter than terror.
Critics point to a number of factors that
converged in the late eighteenth century to
produce the sudden success of the English Gothic
drama. These include domestic civil unrest in Eng-
land, revolutionary events in America and France,
and changes in theatrical aesthetics. According to
Jeffrey N. Cox (see Further Reading), although
Gothic plays appeared as early as the 1770s and
continued far into the nineteenth century, the
form’s popularity peaked around two important
political events: the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and
the fall of Napoleon in 1815. Contemporary com-
mentary posits a connection between the new
form of drama and innovations in the political
arena, between the real horrors of revolution and
the staged horrors of the Gothic drama. Diane
Long Hoeveler suggests that the plays convey an
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
anarchic message to the English monarchy to
reform or risk revolution. According to Hoeveler,
the dramas “attempt to mediate between classes,
races, and genders that were at odds over the
shape and power structure of the evolving bour-
geois society.”
Another factor that encouraged the rise of the
Gothic genre was the expansion during the 1790s
of two important London theaters—Drury Lane
(capacity: 3,600) and Covent Garden (capacity:
3,013)—whose cavernous size dictated that visual
spectacle on a grand scale would play better than
subtlety and nuance, particularly since dialogue
could barely be heard by many in the audience.
Increased competition from the numerous new
theaters in the area added to the pressure on
theatrical producers to stage the spectacular and
the unexpected in order to draw substantial audi-
ences. The period also saw advances in staging
techniques, lighting, and special effects that made
possible some of the ghostly apparitions associ-
ated with the Gothic.
Gothic dramas were typically set in dungeons
or castles, ruined churches or cemeteries, dense
forests, steep mountainsides, or other forbidding
natural landscapes. Their dramatic situations were
usually projected far into the past for the purpose
of deflecting criticism by contemporary reviewers
who found the Gothic reliance on ghosts and
specters to be out of step with the post-
389
 Enlightenment age. By placing the action safely
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
back in medieval times, playwrights attempted to
make the characters’ belief in superstition and the
supernatural seem more plausible. Gothic themes
involved terror, jealousy, violence, death, abduc-
tions, seduction of virtuous young women in the
sentimental novel tradition, and revelations of
crimes and punishments. Progression from enclo-
sure or imprisonment to freedom characterized
many Gothic texts, as did the influence of the past
on present (and future) characters and events.
Stylistic devices at the staging level included
ghosts and visions appearing behind gauzy screens
or rising out of trap doors in the floor of the stage,
disembodied voices, and clanking armor. Because
the presence of ghosts on the stage drew so much
ridicule from critics, Gothic playwrights often
defended their inclusion in the drama by invok-
ing Shakespeare’s use of ghosts in Macbeth (1606)
and Hamlet (c. 1600-01), or by insisting that the
supernatural elements were the product of a
character’s imagination or an elaborate hoax
played on one character by another.
Romantic writers, sensitive to what they
perceived as the lowbrow nature of Gothic theater,
often distanced themselves from the genre by
publishing their works anonymously or by writ-
ing “closet dramas,” those plays intended to be
read rather than staged. Despite the stigma,
though, a significant number of authors associ-
ated with the Romantic school produced dramas
that drew on the Gothic tradition: Samuel Taylor
Coleridge’s Remorse (1813); Lord Byron’s Manfred
(1817) and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819)
are among them. Playwrights such as Joanna
Baillie struggled to maintain their legitimacy as
playwrights while competing with the popularity
of Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(1797) or George Colman the Younger’s Blue-Beard
(1798).
The contemporary version of the eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century Gothic drama is the hor-
ror film, which often adapts works of Gothic fic-
tion entirely and relies upon the stock elements of
the Gothic to evoke fear, dread, and suspense.
Beginning in the early part of the twentieth
century, film directors adapted Gothic fiction for
the screen. An early notable film in this genre is
Nosferatu (1922), a vampire film that offered an
unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula
(1897). The silent film, which was directed by F.
W. Murnau, has achieved notoriety not only as
one of the earliest horror films and as an example
of German Expressionism, but because it
prompted a lawsuit by Stoker’s widow, who suc-
390 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
cessfully sued the film’s production company for
copyright infringement. As was the case with
Gothic literature, horror films began in Europe
with such silent films as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1908) and Robert Wiene’s Das Kabinett des Doktor
Caligari (1920; The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), and
were adopted and modified by American directors
beginning in the 1930s, with such films as Dracula
(1931), James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), and
King Kong (1933). The enormously popular horror
films of the 1930s gave way in the 1940s and
1950s to science fiction films centered on alien
invasions or human travels into space. The horror
film regained popularity in the late 1950s with
Hammer Studios releases such as The Curse of
Frankenstein (1957) and The Mummy (1959), both
directed by Terence Fisher, and in the 1960s, with
such films as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Psy-
cho not only sparked a resurgence in interest in
the horror film, it set a standard for artistic
achievement in the genre that since has been only
occasionally matched, in films such as Roman Po-
lanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) or Stanley Ku-
brick’s The Shining (1980). The vast majority of
horror films are panned by critics and range in
popularity from cult films—including Tobe
Hooper and Kim Henkel’s Texas Chainsaw Mas-
sacre (1974) and George Romero’s Dawn of the
Dead (1978) and Night of the Living Dead (1968)—
viewed repeatedly by die-hard horror fans, to such
box office record breakers as Stephen King’s Carrie
(1976), or the various Roger Corman adaptations
of Edgar Allan Poe’s works, including The Fall of
the House of Usher (1960) and The Masque of the
Red Death (1964). As Stephen King has asserted,
“the artistic value the horror movie most fre-
quently offers is its ability to form a liaison
between our fantasy fears and our real fears.” In
this respect, and in many others (including its
popular appeal and almost universal critical
dismissal), the modern horror film bears a strong
resemblance to the Gothic drama. The numerous
subgenres and classifications of horror films have
been examined by such commentators as S. S.
Prawer, Robin Wood, and King.
The presence of the Gothic and horror in
television has not matched that of film or litera-
ture, but can be found in such works as King’s
teleplay ’Salem’s Lot (1979), the Rod Serling series
The Twilight Zone (1959-64) and Night Gallery
(1970-73), and in such comic spoofs on horror as
The Addams Family (1964-66) and The Munsters
(1964-66). The comic expression and reception of
such stock Gothic trappings as monsters and
ruined mansions is common in horror films and
television. As Wood has noted, “many people who
go regularly to horror films profess to ridicule
them and go in order to laugh.” Critics Fred Bot-
ting (see Further Reading) and Lenora Ledwon
have examined David Lynch’s television series
Twin Peaks (1990-91) in relation to the Gothic
tradition. Ledwon uses Twin Peaks to illustrate her
concept of “Television Gothic,” and maintains
that “its very fluidity and resistance to boundaries
make the Gothic a particularly apt genre for televi-
sion. . . . Twin Peaks taps into this Gothic resis-
tance, creating a Television Gothic characterized
by a polysemous mingling of ‘authentic’ represen-
tations which constantly forces the viewer into an
uneasy oscillation between ways of understand-
ing.”
Some of the more innovative and controver-
sial early rock bands also tapped into the Gothic
as a mode of communication and entertainment.
“It is a long way from the 1764 appearance of
Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto to the 1968 Led
Zeppelin I,” asserts Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds, “but
the monstrous subgenre behavior of the latter . . .
surprisingly resembles the former, both formally
and historically.” Hinds goes on to correlate the
subversive nature of Gothic fiction with that of
heavy metal music and concludes that both “are
peculiar in their purposeful deformity and evoca-
tion of the Satanic.” Heavy metal music, per-
formed by such bands as Led Zeppelin and Black
Sabbath during the late 1960s and early 1970s,
ushered in a subgenre of rock music that recalled
the rebellion and culturally subversive nature of
earlier rock music with a dark, violent, perverse,
and overtly sexual approach. The music of these
groups was excessive and designed to shock and
evoke strong responses in both its proponents and
its detractors. During the 1970s Alice Cooper,
described by James Hannaham as an “iconoclastic,
gender-bending social misfit,” became the first
performer to embody the grotesque in rock music,
to take “counterculture to its illogical extreme,”
according to Hannaham. This grotesque figure
became more common in the Gothic subculture
(known as “Goth”) that grew out of punk rock
during the late 1970s. Hannaham asserts that
punk and Goth music were one and the same,
until Siouxsie and the Banshees—led by Siouxsie
Sioux, who pioneered the combination of deathly
pale skin, a bird’s nest of tangled black hair, dark
black eye makeup, and smeared bright-red lipstick
that became what Hannaham called “a trademark
of 80s ‘new wave’”—deliberately moved away
from the punk rock trend of deriding anyone or
anything considered conformist or part of the
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establishment and began instead to address emo-
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
tional pain, mental illness, fear, and isolation.
Goth musicians such as Joy Division, Morrissey,
and The Smiths use haunting melodies and imag-
ery in much the same manner as Gothic novelists
and playwrights to express the deep-seated and—
most importantly, to the Goth subculture—
genuine agony of both performer and fans. Han-
naham explains that “Goths, by turning death,
madness and violence into archetypes, de-
personalize their connection to horrific events.
They position themselves as reporters or tour
guides to the macabre, rarely its victims.”
REPRESENTATIVE WORKS
Robert Aldrich
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? [director] (film)
1962
Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte [director] (film)
1964
Joanna Baillie
*A Series of Plays: In Which it is Attempted to
Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each
Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a
Comedy. 3 vols. (plays) 1798, 1802, and 1812
Rayner (play) 1804
Bauhaus
“Bela Lugosi’s Dead” [12-inch single] (album) 1979
Black Sabbath
Black Sabbath (album) 1970
Paranoid (album) 1971
Blue Oyster Cult
Agents of Fortune (album) 1976
James Boaden
Fontainville Forest [adaptor; from the novel The
Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliffe] (play)
1794
The Italian Monk [adaptor; from the novel The Ital-
ian by Ann Radcliffe] (play) 1797
Aurelio and Miranda (play) 1798
The Cambrio-Britons (play) 1798
Carl Boese and Paul Wegener
Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam [The Golem: How
He Came into the World; directors] (film) 1920
391
 Kenneth Branagh
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [director; adapted from
the novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometh-
eus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley] (film)
1994
Mel Brooks
Young Frankenstein [director; and screenwriter with
Gene Wilder] (film) 1974
Tod Browning
Dracula [director] (film) 1931
George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron
Manfred, A Dramatic Poem (play) 1817
John Carpenter
Christine [director; adapted from the novel by
Stephen King] (film) 1983
James Cobb
The Haunted Tower (play) 1789
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Remorse: A Tragedy, In Five Acts (play) 1813
George Colman the Younger
The Battle of Hexham (play) 1789
The Iron Chest (play) 1796
Blue-Beard; or, Female Curiosity (play) 1798
Feudal Times; or, The Banquet Gallery (play) 1799
Alice Cooper
Killer (album) 1971
School’s Out (album) 1972
Merian C. Cooper
King Kong [director] 1933
Francis Ford Coppola
Bram Stoker’s Dracula [director; adapted from the
novel by Bram Stoker] (film) 1992
Roger Corman
The Fall of the House of Usher [director; adapted
from the story by Edgar Allan Poe] (film) 1960
The Pit and the Pendulum [director; adapted from
the story by Edgar Allan Poe] (film) 1961
The Premature Burial [director; adapted from the
story by Edgar Allan Poe] (film) 1962
The Raven [director; adapted from the poem by
Edgar Allan Poe] (film) 1963
The Masque of the Red Death [director; adapted
from the short story by Edgar Allan Poe] (film)
1964
392 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
David Cronenberg
They Came from Within (film) 1975
The Brood (film) 1979
J. C. Cross
The Apparition (play) 1794
Julia of Louvain; or, Monkish Cruelty (play) 1797
J. Searle Dawley
Frankenstein [director; adapted from the novel by
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley] (film) 1910
Brian De Palma
Carrie [director; adapted by Stephen King and
Lawrence D. Cohen from the novel by
Stephen King] (film) 1976
Richard Donner
The Omen [director] (film) 1976
Gordon Douglas
Them [director] (film) 1954
Terence Fisher
The Curse of Frankenstein [director] (film) 1957
The Mummy [director] (film) 1959
Robert Florey
Murders in the Rue Morgue [director and adaptor;
from the short story by Edgar Allan Poe] (film)
1932
William Friedkin
The Exorcist [director; adapted from the novel by
William Peter Blatty] (film) 1973
Catherine Gore
The Bond, a Dramatic Poem (play) 1824
Ed Haas
The Munsters [developer; with Norm Liebmann]
(television series) 1964-66
Victor Halperin
White Zombie [director] (film) 1932
Alfred Hitchcock
Rebecca [director; adapted from the novel by
Daphne du Maurier] (film) 1940
Psycho [director; adapted from the novel by Robert
Bloch] (film) 1960
The Birds [director; adapted from the short story
by Daphne du Maurier] (film) 1963
Tobe Hooper Matthew Gregory Lewis

PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [director; and screen-
writer with Kim Henkel] (film) 1974
’Salem’s Lot [director; adapted by Stephen King
and Paul Monash from the novel by Stephen
King] (television movie) 1979
The Castle Spectre: A Drama. In Five Acts (play) 1797
Adelmorn, the Outlaw: A Romantic Drama, In Three
Acts (play) 1801
Alfonso, King of Castille: A Tragedy, In Five Acts
(play) 1802

Jethro Tull The Captive: A Scene in a Private Mad-House (play)

Songs from the Wood (album) 1977 1803

Joy Division Val Lewton

Cat People [producer] (film) 1942
Unknown Pleasures (album) 1979
I Walked with A Zombie [producer] (film) 1943
Closer (album) 1980
The Leopard Man [producer] (film) 1943
Erle C. Kenton The Seventh Victim [producer] (film) 1943
Island of Lost Souls [director; adapted from the
novel The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells] David Lynch
(film) 1933 Twin Peaks [director; and writer with Mark Frost]
(television series) 1990-91
Stanley Kramer
On the Beach [director; adapted from the novel by Charles Robert Maturin
Nevil Shute] (film) 1959 Bertram; or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand (play) 1816

Stanley Kubrick F. W. Murnau

2001: A Space Odyssey [director; and screenwriter Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens [director]
with Arthur C. Clarke] (film) 1968 (film) 1922

The Shining [director; and adaptor with Diane New Order

Johnson from the novel by Stephen King] Power, Corruption, and Lies (album) 1983
(film) 1980
Nordisk Company
Mary Lambert Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [producers; adapted from
Pet Sematary [director; adapted by Stephen King the novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and
from his novel] (film) 1989 Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson] (film)
1909
Sidney Lanfield The Necklace of the Dead [producers] (film) 1910
The Addams Family [director; with others]
(television series) 1964-66 Ghosts of the Vault [producers] (film) 1911

Richard Brinsley Peake

Fritz Lang Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein (play) 1823
M [director] (film) 1931
Roman Polanski
Led Zeppelin Repulsion [director; and screenwriter, with Gérard
Led Zeppelin I (album) 1969 Brach and David Stone] (film) 1965
Led Zeppelin II (album) 1969 The Fearless Vampire Killers [director; and screen-
Led Zeppelin III (album) 1970 writer, with Brach] (film) 1967
Led Zeppelin IV (album) 1971 Rosemary’s Baby [director; and adaptor, with Ira
Levin; from Levin’s novel] (film) 1968
The Song Remains the Same (album) 1976
Michael Powell
Rowland V. Lee Peeping Tom (film) 1960
Son of Frankenstein [director] (film) 1939
George A. Romero
Paul Leni Night of the Living Dead [director; and screenwriter,
Das Wachsfigurenkabinett [Waxworks; director, with with John A. Russo] (film) 1968
Leo Birinsky] (film) 1924 Dawn of the Dead [director and screenwriter] (film)
The Cat and the Canary [director] (film) 1927 1978

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 Jane Scott The Phantom of the Opera [composer and screen-
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
The Old Oak Chest (play) 1816 writer; and adaptor with Joel Schumacher
from the novel Le Fantôme de l’Opéra by Gas-
Sir Walter Scott ton Leroux] (film) 2004
The House of Aspen (play) 1799
The Doom of Devorgoil (play) 1830 James Whale
Frankenstein [director] (film) 1931
Selig Polyscope Company The Invisible Man [director] (film) 1933
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [producers; adapted from
Bride of Frankenstein [director] (film) 1935
the novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson] (film) Robert Wiene
1908 Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari [The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari; director] (film) 1920
Rod Serling
The Twilight Zone [creator] (television series) Robert Wise
1959-64 The Body Snatcher [director; adapted from the short
Night Gallery [with others; writer] (television series) story by Robert Louis Stevenson] (film) 1945
1970-73 The Haunting [director; adapted from the novel
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson]
William Shakespeare (film) 1963
Hamlet (play) c. 1600-01
Macbeth (play) 1606 Frank Zappa
Freak Out! [with The Mothers of Invention]
Percy Bysshe Shelley (album) 1966
The Cenci: A Tragedy, in Five Acts (play) 1819 Uncle Meat (album) 1969
Burnt Weeny Sandwich [with The Mothers of Inven-
Henry Siddons
The Sicilian Romance; or, The Apparition of the Cliff tion] (album) 1970
[adaptor; from the novel A Sicilian Romance by Weasels Ripped My Flesh [with The Mothers of
Ann Radcliffe] (play) 1794 Invention] (album) 1970
A Tale of Terror (play) 1803
* The first volume was published anonymously in 1798,
with the author identifying herself for the second and
Don Siegel third volumes, in 1802 and 1812, respectively. Volume
Invasion of the Body Snatchers [director; adapted 1 includes De Monfort, Basil, and The Tryal. Volume 3
from the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack includes Orra: A Tragedy, in Five Acts.
Finney] (film) 1956

Siouxsie and the Banshees

Juju (album) 1981 PRIMARY SOURCES
Tinderbox (album) 1986
JAMES BOADEN (PLAY DATE 1794)
The Smiths SOURCE: Boaden, James. “Act 1.” In Fontainville Forest,
a Play, in Five acts, (Founded on The Romance of the
Louder than Bombs (album) 1987 Forest,) as Performed at the Theatre-Royal Covent-Garden,
pp. 1-10. London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1794.
Bram Stoker The following excerpt comprises the first act of Boaden’s
Dracula (novel) 1897 popular dramatization of Ann Radcliffe’s 1791 novel
The Romance of the Forest.
Horace Walpole
The Castle of Otranto, A Story (novel) 1764 Scene.—A Gothic Hall of an Abbey, the
The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (play) 1768 whole much dilapidated.

Andrew Lloyd Webber ENTER MADAME LAMOTTE, FOLLOWED BY

The Phantom of the Opera [composer; and adaptor PETER.
with Richard Stilgoe and Charles Hart from MADAME.
the novel Le Fantôme de l’Opéra by Gaston Le- Seek not to fill me with these terrors, Peter:
roux] (stage musical) 1986 Here are no signs of any late inhabitants,

394 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
 The fugitive fears nothing but discovery. MADAME.

PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

While we are safe from all pursuit, no vain Lady, take my arm to assist you.
Or superstitious fancies shall disturb me.
ADELINE.
PETER. Gratefully.—I was born to trouble
This is a horrid place, I scarce dare others.
crawl
LAMOTTE.
Through its low grates and narrow passages;
And the wind’s gust that whistles in the tur- Her spirits are violently agitated;
rets, But kindness will restore her mind its tone.
Is as the groan of some one near his end.
MADAME.
Heaven send my Master back! On my old
Scarce did I ever see a face so beau-
knees
teous!
I begg’d him not explore that dismal wood;
He comforted me then, but scorn’d my fears. LAMOTTE.

MADAME.
The remark is womanish; I never
knew
Woud’st have us perish here for want?
Distress more poignant—the best reason, wife,
Have comfort,
To give our kind assistance and our love.
Nor let thy Mistress teach thee fortitude.
Bear her in gently—so, now close the doors.
PETER.
[Exeunt Madame, Adeline, and Peter.
Nay, dearest Madam, do not think your
MANET LAMOTTE.
old,
But faithful, servant backward to defend you! LAMOTTE.
From an attack but mortal, against odds Misfortunes thicken on me; sorely
Chearful I’d risk this crazy tenement; pinch’d
But here my fear is not of human harm. By poverty already, I have brought
Another now, to drain away our life-means.
MADAME.
Never admitted to my confidence,
May there no greater danger press
My wife suspects not our decaying store.—
than your’s,
I have reach’d that climax of our wretched
The place will then yield us the needful
being,
shelter,
When the heart builds no more on heavenly
Your master will be safe, and I be happy.
aid.
But night is far advanc’d—his absence pains
Despair has laid his callous hand upon me,
me.
And fitted me for deeds, from which I once
PETER.
Had shrunk with horror—I have no resource
But robbery—The degradation! What!
He went at dusk; by the same token
To nourish guilty life turn common stabber!
then
Lurk in a hedge, and like an adder sting
The owl shriek’d from the porch—He started
The unguarded passenger! Well, and what
back;
then?
But recollected, smote his forehead, and
There’s courage in this theft comparatively—
advanc’d;
The sharper, routed from the loaded dice,
He struck into the left hand dingle soon:
With which he damns fame, fortune, honour,
I clos’d the Abbey gate, which grated sadly.
man,
MADAME.
Rises in morals when he takes the road.
Hark! his signal! How! a stranger
ENTER MADAME.
with him!
[A knocking against the pannel. MADAME.
Lamotte! He seems disturb’d! My
ENTER LAMOTTE SUPPORTING ADELINE. dearest life!
LAMOTTE. LAMOTTE.
Receive this fair unfortunate with O, is it you? Reflection on the past
kindness. So busied me, I heard not your approach.
How she was forc’d to share our wretched How fares the stranger?
fate,
You’ll know anon! Peter, go make a fire; MADAME.
The rain has drench’d our garments through Sunk to startled sleep,
the In broken sentences she prays for mercy.
leaves. I listen’d while she shriek’d, “Save me! That
Prepare the supper; our new guest must need ruffian!
Refreshment. “My father, fly me not!—If I must die,

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1 395
 “Do you dispatch me;—send away that vil-
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
lain.”
LAMOTTE.
’Tis horrible and strange! Her father,
then,
It was, who forc’d her on me—Listen where.
The evening being calm, I took my walk
To ruminate at full—wrapt up in thought,
Night stole upon me—Through the pathless
wild
No signs could I discover that might lead
My erring steps back to this Abbey’s towers—
The storm came sudden on, a little while
The shading trees protected me—At length,
A distant taper threw its trembling light
Across the alley where I stood; I ran,
So guided, till I reach’d a paltry cottage.
MADAME.
’Twas rash and unadvis’d to venture
thus.
LAMOTTE.
I knock’d aloud for shelter; from
within
One ask’d with surly voice my name and
business.
I said, a traveller, missing of the road,
And drench’d with rain, begg’d house-room
for
a while.
The man within replied—“Welcome, come
in.”
I enter’d and advanc’d, when he, in haste,
Clapt to the door and lockt it—Stay, he cried,
I shall return anon! Then from above
Shrieks issued in a female voice—
At length the crazy stairs
Creak’d to the tread of feet, and ent’ring
fierce,
A ruffian by the hair dragg’d in a lady;
She seem’d expiring. Stern he bad me swear
To take her from his sight, and ne’er return;
For, if I did, my life should be the forfeit.
I promis’d what he claim’d, and then I told
him,
If he would bring us to Fontainville Abbey,
I knew the way from thence—He hid our
eyes,
And led us to this gate.
MADAME.
Why should a father thus drive out
his child
To want and wretchedness, or why believe
She will not name him in recover’d reason,
And make the law her refuge? By her dress
She seems to have been taken from some
convent,
A holy sister, but not yet profess’d.
LAMOTTE.
Of this no more; inscrutable to us
The mystery; with her returning sense
We may know all that now perplexes us.
Certain he look’d as little like her father,
396
As his deeds spoke him—But this well I know,
There is a state of mind, when anguish keen
For vices past, works on the heart of man,
And wrings it sore, till rising desperation
Bemonsters quite his nature—then, he spurns
The ties of blood, cancels all obligation
In which his Maker bound him to his kind,
And is the image of the fiend that tempts
him.
MADAME.
Heaven ever shield our hearts from
such despair!
And yet, Lamotte, I own you wound my soul.
Dark looks, that seek the memory’s inward
scrolls,
While the whole outward sense is lost, oft
mark
Your self-reproach—If I, by chance, arouse
And chace you from your mood, your temper
flames
In causeless anger, which you check with
shame,
And wrap you straight in silence.
LAMOTTE.
O, Hortensia,
I have not liv’d a life can brook distress;
He who is clear within may smile at storms,
And dread no reckoning shou’d they chance
to
whelm him:
My crimes press heavy on me: strong
compunction,
For miseries entail’d beyond myself,
Is festering here, and when I look on you,
Outcast for my offences, moody madness
Weighs on my brain, and tells my shuddering
soul,
That I am only mark’d out for perdition.
But see, an angel comes, to whisper peace,
And soothe me with one act of kindness
render’d!
ENTER ADELINE.
ADELINE.
My honour’d Sir and Madam, I thus
press
From short repose, by anguish forc’d upon
me,
To pay the thanks your generous pity claims;
For which my heart, in endless gratitude,
Shall daily heave to heav’n, and blessing beg
Upon your heads more bounteous than my
own.
LAMOTTE.
Fair Saint, a common benefit like this
Your grateful mind o’erpays. My lovely
daugh-
ter,
Chance throws you on a rude and churlish
soil,
That cannot yield much medicinal balm,
To heal the wound a parent’s hand has dealt
you.
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 MADAME. Ha! what art thou?

PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

But be of comfort, Lady; as we are, [Lamotte rushes in, wild and dishevell’d.
We live to serve you, while ourselves are safe.
LAMOTTE.
At some fit season of recover’d spirits,
We shall request the story from your lips, A wretch, a very wretch,
Of what thus orphans you. Mad with despair, and fell from biting
poverty.
ADELINE. Give me the means of life, or take thy death.
With willingness,
MARQUIS.
As far as I have knowledge; but my tale
Is easy told, nor do I know myself, Thou’st caught me unawares, I’m in
Why thus I fell under a father’s hate. thy power.

LAMOTTE.
LAMOTTE.
Off, off your jewels! Come, your
Of that anon! Now our refreshment
calls. purse—dispatch!
Please you to enter. Stir not! your life will answer! Followers!
Surprised! Then only speed can save me.
ADELINE. [Runs off.
I have but slender wish
RE-ENTER ATTENDANTS.
For aught, save rest.—The conflict I have
pass’d 1ST ATTENDANT.
Beats at my heart, and fevers every sense. How’s this, my Lord, you look
This friendly solitude, your generous pains, aghast with fear?
Will lull the throbbing smart of my affliction, What wretch was that who fled at our ap-
And give me power to obey you. proach?
LAMOTTE. MARQUIS.
Ever yours. [Exeunt. A robber: Somewhere in these forest
caves
Most probably he lurks: Command my train,
Scene—Without the Abbey. That there they make strict search to-morrow
early.
ENTER FROM THE GATES. (MORNING DAWNS.)
1ST ATTENDANT.
LAMOTTE. Will you know the villain’s face
Thus, like the savage lion from his again, my Lord?
lair,
MARQUIS.
I wake to prowl for prey. My busy brain
Riots in varied schemes of wickedness, Certain! He look’d not like a com-
And drives me from my bed, before the bird, mon ruffian,
Whose comfort springs from the return of One shrunk from splendour rather—hunted
day. hard
Light shews me no relief! The morn is fresh; By justice he had fled, and doom’d to wrest
And hark! the distant hills ring with the His chance support from the lone passenger,
sound Whom, otherways, he harms not—for my life,
Of the glad horn! The hunters are abroad: Unlike our robbers, he attempted not.
I’ll dog their chace, and haply seize my prey, 2D ATTENDANT.
Man, the destroyer, Man, and force the aid, He shall be found, my Lord, e’re
That misery expects not from his pity. [Exit. morrow night,
If here he lurk.—Shall we support you hence?
Scene—A Wood. MARQUIS.
Alarm has quite enfeebled me—Lead
MARQUIS AND TWO ATTENDANTS. on—
Give up the chace to-day.
MARQUIS.
The chace fatigues—I’ll rest myself ATTENDANTS.
awhile— This way, my Lord. [Exeunt.
You to your sport again.—Anon, I’ll join you.
[Exeunt Attendants.
Scene.—Another part of the Wood.
If we could trust to our presentiments,
I had not ventur’d on the chace to-day. ENTER LAMOTTE.
A tremulous reluctance to the last
Flutter’d about my heart, and now I feel LAMOTTE.
As if some dreadful certainty of evil Despair has lent me wings! I’ve burst
Had led me on to meet impending fate. my way

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 Through brake and briar!—Terror has steel’d
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
my
frame!—
I’scap’d unhurt.—Unhurt! O memory,
I’m all one wound, while I yet live to think!
O dearly purchas’d wealth, won by the loss
Of future peace! Up, damning baubles, up!
Close to the heart, which you have wrung
from
comfort!
Hence, Monster, hence, nor blot the beaute-
ous
day!
Hail, cavern’d glooms, to your deep shade I
fly,
Darkness myself, to give you living horror.
[Exit.
End of the First Act.
HENRY SIDDONS (OPERA DATE
1794)
SOURCE: Siddons, Henry. “Prologue and Act 1, Scene
1.” In The Sicilian Romance, or, The Apparition of the
Cliffs, An Opera, by Henry Siddons: As Performed with
Universal Applause at the Theatre Royal, Covent-Garden,
pp. 9-12. London: J. Barker, 1794.
The following excerpt comprises Act I, scene 1, of Sid-
dons’s operatic adaptation of Ann Radcliffe’s 1790 novel
A Sicilian Romance.
A Wood, and a Tower of the Castle,
with the Door. The Lights down, and
the Moon shining.
ENTER LINDOR AND MARTIN, DISGUISED AS
PILGRIMS.
AIR—Lindor.
Borne on hope’s deluding gale,
Yon tall turrets I explore;
Trembling fears and doubts assail,
As I tread the dang’rous shore.
Thus the sea-boy on the mast,
When he hears the howling storms,
Hopes to reach the strand at last,
Where fond love and friendship warms.
Martin! Martin!
MARTIN. Here, Sir.
LINDOR. Where are you?
MARTIN. Here, Sir, against my will.
LINDOR. Well, thank heaven, we are at last at the
castle of Otrano, the spot that contains
my dear Alinda.
MARTIN. St. James be prais’d! The fear of ghosts,
and the cries of hunger have kept a
continual grumbling in my poor stom-
398 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
ach—But now we are here, there is one
little trifling circumstance to be dis-
cussed.
LINDOR. What’s that?
MARTIN. Only, how we are to get in, Sir.
LINDOR. You know my Alinda arrived here last
night, and is to be immediately married
to the young Marquis of Otranto.
MARTIN. He’s a bold man—Why, he buried his other
wife but four months ago—Zooks! he’d
make a fine soldier—He’d face the devil
for money.
LINDOR. Yes, as he never saw her, his motive must
be sordid—I must contrive some means
to carry her off—See the morning
breaks—Knock, Martin.
[Martin makes a thundering noise at
the gate. D’ye mean to knock down the gate?
Why d’ye knock so loud?
MARTIN. Right, Sir—all right. [Raps.
GERBIN. [Within.] Who’s there?
MARTIN. [Through the key-hole.] Come, and see.
GERBIN. Don’t know you.
MARTIN. How the devil should you? Enter GERBIN.
GERBIN. What’s your business?
MARTIN. We’ve no business, fellow; we’re two
gentlemen.
LINDOR. Peace! We are two weary Pilgrims, my good
friend, driven here by distress—For the
love of Heaven, afford us a few hours
shelter, from the rain.
GERBIN. Why, master, I don’t like to drive the
unfortunate from my gate—but my
young marquis is very strict—I can give
you an apartment, indeed, in a tower
over the rocks; but then, it’s rather
inconvenient.
MARTIN. Why, pray?
GERBIN. Why, a very strange apparition has been
often seen to enter it, since our poor
mistress died.
MARTIN. An ap—ap—pa——O, no—very much
obliged to you, but we’d rather not go
in—Now, I think on’t, too, this place
will be so purely comfortable—so cool,
and airy, and so———
LINDOR. I’m fix’d. Lead the way.
MARTIN. I can’t, upon my soul, Sir.
LINDOR. Obey, scoundrel!
MARTIN. Well, if I must———Oh dear, I shall have
my body snapt up by a blue devil, or
this pretty person of mine whisk’d away
in a flash of fire—Well, Sir, I’m go———
Oh, dear! [Exeunt.
STEPHEN KING (ESSAY DATE 1982)
SOURCE: King, Stephen. “The Modern American Hor-
ror Movie—Text and Subtext.” In Stephen King’s Danse
Macabre, pp. 129-99. New York: Everest House, 1982.
In the following excerpt from his book-length analysis of
Gothic and horror in film and literature, King discusses
various artistic, social, and cultural aspects of American
horror movies.

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
JAMES BOADEN (1762-1839)
Boaden’s second play, Fontainville Forest, was
first produced on 25 March 1794 at the
Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. The story is
derived from Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Ro-
mance of the Forest (1791), but Boaden
simplifies it, focusing on the central incidents
which transpire “in an Abbey chiefly, and the
adjacent parts of the Forest.” Among the
significant changes is a more sympathetic
role for the character of Lamotte. Although
he robs the marquis of Montault and is
initially prepared to sacrifice Adeline to the
marquis’ lust, he is forced to it by necessity,
and in a soliloquy castigates himself. We
observe him distraught and torn by his
struggles with his conscience, angry with his
wife, Hortensia, and impatient with his son,
Louis, who replaces Radcliffe’s Theodore as
the hero of the tale. . . .
Aurelio and Miranda was first acted at the
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on 29 December
1798, with music by Michael Kelly. Based on
Lewis’s notorious novel The Monk, this play
greatly simplifies the plot and significantly
alters the characterization. The play was
originally called The Monk, but the title and
the names of the principal characters are
Right now you could be thinking to yourself:
this guy must have one hell of a nerve if he thinks
he’s gonna cover all the horror movies released
between 1950 and 1980—everything from The
Exorcist to the less-than-immortal The Navy vs. the
Night Monsters—in a single chapter.
Well, actually it’s going to be two chapters,
and no, I don’t expect to be able to cover them
all, as much as I would like to; but yes, I must
have some kind of nerve to be tackling the subject
at all. Luckily for me, there are several fairly
traditional ways of handling the subject so that at
least an illusion of order and coherence emerges.
The path I’ve chosen is that of the horror movie
as text and subtext.
The place to start, I think, would be a swift
recap of those points already made on the subject
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PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
changed in the manuscript, presumably
because the Examiner of Plays objected. . . .
The public and the critics continued to
reprehend the choice of subject, while simul-
taneously they were disappointed with the
altered ending. . . . The violence and incest
of Lewis’s tale is omitted, and the play moves
from the temptations of Aurelio by Miranda’s
beauty to the contrived and incredible con-
clusion. The monk’s lust for his sister, Anto-
nia, so prominent a feature of the novel, is
omitted, as is the death of Agnes’s child in
the vaults beneath the convent, with all the
repellent details of its putrefaction. The audi-
ence, anticipating the Gothic horrors of
Boaden’s source, led to expect them from
the initial presentation in the first three acts,
were simply disappointed in the denoue-
ment. . . .
James Boaden’s achievements form a
significant contribution to our knowledge
and understanding of the theater in this
period. . . . Boaden’s plays are keenly at-
tuned to the taste of the day, and he broke
new ground in his exploitation of Gothic
themes and melodramatic devices.
SOURCE: Maynard, Temple J. “James Boaden.” In
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 89:
Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Dramatists,
Third Series, edited by Paula R. Backscheider,
pp. 25-37. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale
Group, 1989.
of the horror movie as art. If we say “art” is any
piece of creative work from which an audience
receives more than it gives (a liberal definition of
art, sure, but in this field it doesn’t pay to be too
picky), then I believe that the artistic value the
horror movie most frequently offers is its ability
to form a liaison between our fantasy fears and
our real fears. I’ve said and will reemphasize here
that few horror movies are conceived with “art”
in mind; most are conceived only with “profit” in
mind. The art is not consciously created but rather
thrown off, as an atomic pile throws off radiation.
I do not contend by saying the above that
every exploitation horror flick is “art,” however.
You could walk down Forty-second Street in Times
Square on any given afternoon or evening and
discover films with names like The Bloody Mutila-
tors, The Female Butcher, or The Ghastly Ones—a
399
 1972 film we are treated to the charming sight of
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
a woman being cut open with a two-handed
bucksaw; the camera lingers as her intestines spew
out onto the floor. These are squalid little films
with no whiff of art in them, and only the most
decadent filmgoer would try to argue otherwise.
They are the staged equivalent of those 8- and 16-
millimeter “snuff” movies which have reputedly
oozed out of South America from time to time.
Another point worth mentioning is the great
risk a filmmaker takes when he/she decides to
make a horror picture. In other creative fields, the
only risk is failure—we can say, for instance, that
the Mike Nichols film of The Day of the Dolphin
“fails,” but there is no public outcry, no mothers
picketing the movie theaters. But when a horror
movie fails, it often falls into painful absurdity or
squalid porno-violence.
There are films which skate right up to the
border where “art” ceases to exist in any form and
exploitation begins, and these films are often the
field’s most striking successes. The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre is one of these; in the hands of Tobe
Hooper, the film satisfies that definition of art
which I have offered, and I would happily testify
to its redeeming social merit in any court in the
country. I would not do so for The Ghastly Ones.
The difference is more than the difference between
a chainsaw and a bucksaw; the difference is
something like seventy million light-years. Hooper
works in Chainsaw Massacre, in his own queerly
apt way, with taste and conscience. The Ghastly
Ones is the work of morons with cameras.1
So, if I’m going to keep this discussion in
order, I’ll keep coming back to the concept of
value—of art, of social merit. If horror movies
have redeeming social merit, it is because of that
ability to form liaisons between the real and
unreal—to provide subtexts. And because of their
mass appeal, these subtexts are often culture-wide.
In many cases—particularly in the fifties and
then again in the early seventies—the fears ex-
pressed are sociopolitical in nature, a fact that
gives such disparate pictures as Don Siegel’s Inva-
sion of the Body Snatchers and William Friedkin’s
The Exorcist a crazily convincing documentary feel.
When the horror movies wear their various socio-
political hats—the B-picture as tabloid editorial—
they often serve as an extraordinarily accurate
barometer of those things which trouble the
night-thoughts of a whole society.
But horror movies don’t always wear a hat
which identifies them as disguised comments on
the social or political scene (as Cronenberg’s The
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Brood comments on the disintegration of the
generational family or as his They Came from
Within treats of the more cannibalistic side-effects
of Erica Jong’s “zipless fuck”). More often the hor-
ror movie points even further inward, looking for
those deep-seated personal fears—those pressure
points—we all must cope with. This adds an ele-
ment of universality to the proceedings, and may
produce an even truer sort of art. It also explains,
I think, why The Exorcist (a social horror film if
there ever was one) did only so-so business when
it was released in West Germany, a country which
had an entirely different set of social fears at the
time (they were a lot more worried about bomb-
throwing radicals than about foul-talking young
people), and why Dawn of the Dead went through
the roof there.
This second sort of horror film has more in
common with the Brothers Grimm than with the
op-ed page in a tabloid paper. It is the B-picture as
fairy tale. This sort of picture doesn’t want to score
political points but to scare the hell out of us by
crossing certain taboo lines. So if my idea about
art is correct (it giveth more than it receiveth),
this sort of film is of value to the audience by help-
ing it to better understand what those taboos and
fears are, and why it feels so uneasy about them.
A good example of this second type of horror
picture is RKO’s The Body Snatcher (1945), liberally
adapted—and that’s putting it kindly—from a
Robert Louis Stevenson story and starring Karloff
and Lugosi. And by the way, the picture was
produced by our friend Val Lewton.
As an example of the art, The Body Snatcher is
one of the forties’ best. And as an example of this
second artistic “purpose”—that of breaking tab-
bos—it positively shines.
I think we’d all agree that one of the great
fears which all of us must deal with on a purely
personal level is the fear of dying; without good
old death to fall back on, the horror movies would
be in bad shape. A corollary to this is that there
are “good” deaths and “bad” deaths; most of us
would like to die peacefully in our beds at age
eighty (preferably after a good meal, a bottle of re-
ally fine vino, and a really super lay), but very few
of us are interested in finding out how it might
feel to get slowly crushed under an automobile lift
while crankcase oil drips slowly onto our fore-
heads.
Lots of horror films derive their best effects
from this fear of the bad death (as in The Abomi-
nable Dr. Phibes, where Phibes dispatches his
victims one at a time using the Twelve Plagues of
Egypt, slightly updated, a gimmick worthy of the
Batman comics during their palmiest days). Who
can forget the lethal binoculars in Horrors of the
Black Museum, for instance? They came equipped
with spring-loaded six-inch prongs, so that when
the victim put them to her eyes and then at-
tempted to adjust the field of focus . . .
Others derive their horror simply from the fact
of death itself, and the decay which follows death.
In a society where such a great store is placed in
the fragile commodities of youth, health, and
beauty (and the latter, it seems to me, is very often
defined in terms of the former two), death and
decay become inevitably horrible, and inevitably
taboo. If you don’t think so, ask yourself why the
second grade doesn’t get to tour the local mortu-
ary along with the police department, the fire
department, and the nearest McDonalds—one can
imagine, or I can in my more morbid moments,
the mortuary and McDonalds combined; the
highlights of the tour, of course, would be a view-
ing of the McCorpse.
No, the funeral parlor is taboo. Morticians are
modern priests, working their arcane magic of
cosmetics and preservation in rooms that are
clearly marked “off limits.” Who washes the
corpse’s hair? Are the fingernails and toenails of
the dear departed clipped one final time? Is it true
that the dead are enconffined sans shoes? Who
dresses them for their final star turn in the mortu-
ary viewing room? How is a bullet hole plugged
and concealed? How are strangulation bruises hid-
den?
The answers to all these questions are avail-
able, but they are not common knowledge. And if
you try to make the answers part of your store of
knowledge, people are going to think you a bit
peculiar. I know; in the process of researching a
forthcoming novel about a father who tries to
bring his son back from the dead, I collected a
stack of funeral literature a foot high—and any
number of peculiar glances from folks who won-
dered why I was reading The Funeral: Vestige or
Value?
But this is not to say that people don’t have a
certain occasional interest in what lies behind the
locked door in the basement of the mortuary, or
what may transpire in the local graveyard after
the mourners have left . . . or at the dark of the
moon. The Body Snatcher is not really a tale of the
supernatural, nor was it pitched that way to its
audience; it was pitched as a film (as was that
notorious sixties documentary Mondo Cane) that
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would take us “beyond the pale,” over that line
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
which marks the edge of taboo ground.
“Cemeteries raided, children slain for bodies
to dissect!” the movie poster drooled. “Unthink-
able realities and unbelievable FACTS of the dark
days of early surgical research EXPOSED in THE MOST
DARING SHRIEK-AND-SHUDDER SHOCK SENSATION EVER BROUGHT
TO THE SCREEN!” (All of this printed on a leaning
tombstone.)
But the poster does not stop there; it goes on
very specifically to mark out the exact location of
the taboo line and to suggest that not everyone
may be adventurous enough to transgress this
forbidden ground: “If You Can ‘Take It’ See GRAVES
RAIDED! COFFINS ROBBED! CORPSES CARVED! MIDNIGHT
MURDER! BODY BLACKMAIL! STALKING GHOULS! MAD RE-
VENGE! MACABRE MYSTERY! And Don’t Say We Didn’t
Warn You!”
All of it has sort of a pleasant, alliterative ring,
doesn’t it?
Note
1. One success in skating over this thin ice does not
necessarily guarantee that the filmmaker will be able
to repeat such a success; while his innate talent saves
Hooper’s second film, Eaten Alive, from descending to
The Bloody Mutilators category, it is still a disappoint-
ment. The only director I can think of who has
explored this gray land between art and porno-
exhibitionism successfully—even brilliantly—again
and again with never a misstep is the Canadian film-
maker David Cronenberg.
DRAMA
PAUL RANGER (ESSAY DATE 1991)
SOURCE: Ranger, Paul. “The Gothic Spirit.” In Terror
and Pity Reign in Every Breast: Gothic Drama in the
London Patent Theatres, 1750-1820, pp. 98-103. London:
The Society for Theatre Research, 1991.
In the following essay, Ranger details the various motifs,
settings, stock characters, narrative devices, and themes
of Gothic drama.
Neither eighteenth-century playwrights, nor
members of their audiences, used the term ‘a
gothic drama’. It was a label applied by literary
critics only with hindsight to certain types of play.
Instead, words suggesting the form rather than
the content described the work. Thus the St
James’s Chronicle referred to The Castle Spectre
(Matthew Gregory Lewis, 1797) as ‘a drama of a
mingled nature, Operatic, Comical and Tragical’
and at greater length the Morning Chronicle defined
George Colman the Younger’s play, Feudal Times
401
 (1799), as ‘an exhibition of music and dialogue,
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
pantomime and dancing, painting and machinery,
antique dresses and armour, thunder and light-
ning, fire and water . . .’1 Yet in spite of this
variety of form, there was an homogeneity about
the content that prompts one to question why
certain scenes or stock devices repeatedly ap-
peared. An establishment of the common ground
held by a multiplicity of plays categorised as
‘gothic’ would eventually be a help in arriving at
an understanding of this term.
In the prologue to The Castle Spectre Lewis sug-
gested a starting point for this exploration. He
used the figure of Romance to introduce his listen-
ers to a number of specific locations which he
would deem to be gothic:
She loathes the sun, or blazing taper’s light;
The moon-beam’d landscape and tempestuous
night
Alone she loves; and oft, with glimmering lamp,
Near graves new-open’d, or midst dungeons
damp,
Drear forests, ruin’d aisles, and haunted towers,
Forlorn she roves, and raves away the hours!2
In his list of church-yards, dungeons, forests,
ruined churches, castles—all locations frequently
used by the gothic playwright—Lewis was harking
back to Samuel Johnson’s dictionary definition of
the word ‘Romantick’:’wild . . . improbable; false
. . .; fanciful; full of wild scenery’.3 Lewis wrote
an epilogue to Thomas Holcroft’s play, Knave or
Not (1798) in which he added to the list of loca-
tions some of the other appurtenances of the
gothic:
Give us Lightning and Thunder, Flames, Daggers
and Rage;
With events that ne’er happened, except on the
Stage;
When your Spectre departs, through a trapdoor
ingulph her,
Burn under her nose, too, some brimstone and
sulpher.
Miles Peter Andrews, in his preface to the
publication of the songs in The Enchanted Castle
(1786), listed other elements he had detected in
similar entertainments:
The Clank of Chains, the Whistling of Hollow
Winds, the Clapping of Doors, Gigantic Forms,
and visionary Gleams of Light . . .4
Not all playwrights banished these listings to
prologues and epilogues. The gothic motifs were
so integral to the plot that the audience’s atten-
tion was drawn to them in the course of the ac-
tion as John O’Keeffe did in The Castle of Andalu-
sia (1782): standing in the moonlight outside the
402
castle of the title, Don Caesar, the leader of the
banditti, sang of the baying wolf, the midnight
hour, shrieking females and maurauding brigands.
To modern readers it appears that playwrights
were setting out markers surrounding the gothic
territory in which the action was to be placed.5
Eighteenth-century novelists had fused loca-
tion and action more securely for the lengthier
form in which they worked. Unencumbered by
the necessity to compress a story into the couple
of hours allowed to the playwright, writers took
the opportunity to present themes of darkness in
an expanded and integrated fashion. Many would
nominate Horace Walpole’s romance, The Castle
of Otranto, as the seminal gothic novel.6 On the
banks of the Thames at Twickenham Walpole had
created a miniature gothic castle, a fantasy which
served as the backdrop of his own self-conscious
existence. At first no more than a cottage, ‘the
prettiest bauble’ said Walpole, his domain eventu-
ally boasted a library, the Round Tower, the Hol-
bein Bedroom and the Great Cloister, whilst still
retaining the bijou quality of the original build-
ing. Within, a warm darkness pervaded which
Walpole termed ‘gloomth’.7 Here Walpole wrote
his chivalric romance, a tale of strange, supernatu-
ral events. But whereas the details of his real castle,
Strawberry Hill, were neat and contained, Otranto
was conceived on a vast scale, the stage for co-
lourful processions and tournaments. Both castles
were alike in their enveloping gloom (‘Take away
that light,’ shouted Manfred, demonstrating the
villain’s hatred of the clear light of day); alike,
too, in their respective owners’ love of the odd
and the incongruous, and in the impression given
that both buildings were likely environments in
which to await supernatural visitants.8 Walpole’s
own phobias were writ large in Otranto so that
they might terrify the reader,—the giant feathers
on the expanding helmet which killed the young
Conrad for example.
Terror was an important constituent in the
gothic novel. The literary landscape which the es-
sayists John Aikin and Anna Barbauld viewed was
one strewn with such catastrophes as murders,
shipwrecks, fires and earthquakes, all events with
which the gothic playwrights were familiar. A
‘gothic fragment’ by the two writers was set in the
ruins of a ‘large antique mansion’ on which a
storm beat while hollow groans resounded in the
subterranean vault. The effect of these circum-
stances was, claimed the authors, to elevate ‘the
soul to its highest pitch’, again as much an aim of
the playwright as the novelist.9 With such works
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in mind, George Colman light-heartedly summed
up the constituents of the gothic novel:
A novel, now, is nothing more
Than an old castle and a creaking door:
A distant hovel—
Clanking of chains—a gallery—a light—
Old armour—and a phantom all in white—
And there’s a novel.1 0
The writer who fashioned similar settings and
circumstances into lengthy, involved works of art
was Ann Radcliffe. For her the landscape was of
paramount importance; through it her heroines
were perpetually journeying from one great house
to another. Although her settings were less overtly
horrific than the Aikin-Barbauld scenery, Radcliffe
supplied for dramatists many a castle in ruins, un-
derrun by secret passages, rotting in a wild,
brigand-infested landscape:
This was a scene as Salvator would have chosen,
had he then existed, for his canvas; St Aubert,
impressed by the romantic character of the place,
almost expected to see banditti start from behind
some projecting rock, and he kept his hand upon
the arms with which he always travelled.’1 1
No wonder that her novels found adaptors
prepared to transmute them to the stage.
All of the gothic plays were set in the past, the
past of an indeterminate, quasi-mediaeval Europe.
Precision may have seemed pedantic. Walpole,
after the publication of The Castle of Otranto, wrote
to William Cole that his mind was filled with
‘Gothic story’ and the preface to the first edition
stated that the action took place between the first
and the last of the Crusades; in other words,
between 1095 and 1243, a leeway of over one
hundred and fifty years.1 2 Clara Reeve, who, after
Walpole, wrote a similar tale of chivalry in which
a process of rationalisation was applied to super-
natural events, forebore to make a precise state-
ment about the period of her work, instead refer-
ring to it as a ‘picture of Gothic times and
manners’.1 3 The term was used as an indication of
atmosphere, rather than as a reference to given
dates. When gothic works were staged this vague-
ness was an occasion of difficulty for the scene
and costume designers, as well as leaving the audi-
ence with the impression that it was suspended in
an indeterminate time-scale. A writer in the Criti-
cal Review, after seeing Andrew MacDonald’s play,
Vimonda (1787), summed up this feeling of disori-
entation:
Events are supposed to have taken place in the
days of chivalry: a word with which we constantly
connect the idea of something wild and extrava-
gant.1 4
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Many spectators, however, simply accepted
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
the vagueness. After the first night of The Haunted
Tower (James Cobb, 1789) the Prompter reported
that history had ‘nothing to do with the ground-
work of this Opera’.1 5 That admission made, there
was no further reference to infelicities in the
presentation of the past, for the interest of the
audience lay in the characters and situations. The
activities of these characters reflected not the ac-
tions of folk in mediaeval moralities and myster-
ies so much as the deeds of the dark characters of
Jacobean and Caroline tragedy. Indeed, the later
plays of Shakespeare and the blood-suffused
dramas of Thomas Otway were highly popular in
the latter part of the eighteenth century and their
atmosphere seeped into the gothic.
Not until the stage management of John
Philip Kemble, with his antiquarian interest
demanding correct and detailed settings, aided by
his scene designer, William Capon, was the visual
element of the gothic drama presented with
historical accuracy. Capon scrupulously kept draw-
ing books of London’s mediaeval and Tudor build-
ings which served as the basis for the scenes he
painted in his large studio.1 6 Viewing the progress,
in addition to Kemble, would be men such as
James Boaden, the editor of the Oracle, and Sir
Joshua Reynolds who commended, wrote Boaden,
‘the accuracy and bold execution’ of these ‘scenes
of past ages’.1 7 The result of this accurate visual
portrayal should have been to root the plays in an
historical truth, but this eluded most of the audi-
ence. Applause was for the spectacular nature of
Capon’s settings, not their veracity.
More attention was, however, paid to an ac-
curacy in the representation of the geographical
settings for the concept of place is more tangible
than that of time. Thomas Gray was but one of
many writers who kept careful notes of tours,
whether to the Lake District or further afield.1 8
The upkeep of a travel diary with its detailed
descriptions of scenes and the accounts of the
author’s response provided an important literary
souvenir. These diaries were far from private: each
traveller aimed to publish his thoughts, giving to
library shelves such works as the Revd William
Gilpin’s various sets of observations made whilst
in the highlands of Scotland, Richard Warner’s
prose account of his ramble through Wales and
William Sotheby’s verse compilation on the sights
of the principality. Farther from home the Revd
William Coxe kept an account of his travels in the
Alps and Ann Radcliffe commented on her visit to
403
 Holland and Germany. This established habit of
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
travellers putting pen to paper prompted Joseph
Cradock to remark:
As every one who has either traversed a steep
mountain, or crossed a small channel, must write
his Tour, it would be almost unpardonable in Me
to be totally silent, who have visited the most
uninhabitable regions of North Wales . . .1 9
Both playwrights and novelists made reference
to this literary corpus which tended to improve
the accuracy of scenic descriptions. Mrs Radcliffe’s
Emily journeyed from one castle to another in
The Mysteries of Udolpho surveying and responding
to the wild scenery of her travels. Conversations,
too, were full of the talk of scenery: as Valancourt
conversed with Emily ‘there was often a tremulous
tenderness in his voice, and sometimes he expati-
ated on [the scenes] with all the fire of genius’.2 0
Even when Emily reached her several destinations
she would stand by the open casement gazing at
the ‘wild grandeur of the scene, closed nearly on
all sides by alpine steeps, whose tops, peering over
each other, faded from the eye in misty hues
. . .’2 1 Nevertheless, the landscape did not exist in
its own right but as part of the heroine’s conscious-
ness. Aesthetically it upheld her, although its
benignity was sometimes at variance with the
roughness of the terrain.
Gothic romances served as a source for play-
wrights and the detailed visual backgrounds were
helpful in creating settings in the text. They were
equally helpful to the scene designer in his at-
tempts to provide a setting for the play. James
Boaden, for instance, took another of Radcliffe’s
novels, The Italian, which he used as the basis for
his play, The Italian Monk (1797). The descriptions
of the lush Italian countryside found their echo in
the dialogue. But they were doubly used, for Gaet-
ano Marinari, the Haymarket’s scene painter, was
in a position to use both the playwright’s stage-
directions, as well as the novelist’s accounts of
prospects and architecture, in creating the settings
for the play.2 2
Painters travelled, as well as writers, recording
in water-colour scenes which later were to be
worked into easel paintings. The notes made on
one of Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s tours
of the county of Derby were used as a series of
scenes for an entertainment at Drury Lane entitled
The Wonders of Derbyshire (1779), in which such
concrete images as a view of Matlock, Chatsworth
House and Gardens and the caverns of Castleton
anchored the entertainment in a factual depiction
of specific locations.2 3 The sketch-books of another
scene painter, Michael ‘Angelo’ Rooker, reveal his
404
detailed interest in such subjects as castles, the
ruins of abbeys at Netley, Llanthony and Glaston-
bury and a variety of townscapes. It was this keen
observation which gained commendation for his
stage depictions of such locations as St James’s
Park, Portsmouth illuminated for victory celebra-
tions and the view of London from Highgate
Ponds.2 4 Designers tended to resort to clichés in
their over-easy presentation of castle and convent
interiors. Then the audience found the stock
scenes or rapid knock-ups unconvincing. On the
other hand, specific townscapes were a challenge
to which designers rose with aplomb. The por-
trayal of the Grand Square in Moscow in Frederick
Reynolds’s play, The Exile (1808), was greeted with
acclaim by the critic in the European Magazine and
it had earlier praised extravagantly the view of
Orleans seen at dawn in Valentine and Orson
(Thomas Dibdin, 1804).2 5
In some respects the work of the stage designer
was comparable with that of the garden designer
in the eighteenth century for both attempted to
create a scene which would induce in the specta-
tor an emotional response. The visitor to the
theatre had merely to sit and watch the progres-
sion of the scenes but the visitor to the garden
was responsible for his own progression from one
setting to another. In this he was guided by a
circuit walk from which vistas opened before him;
he also entered a series of enclosed spaces, each
designed to elicit an emotional response: a pros-
pect might arouse in him feelings of cheerfulness
and alternatively the cool darkness of a cypress
grove would fill him with quiet melancholy. This
changing pattern of emotion was described in Ri-
chard Graves’s novel The Spiritual Quixote in the
commentary on Mr Rivers’s garden. It was
laid out in a romantic taste with a proper mixture
of the allegro and the penseroso, the cheerful and
the gloomy: tufts of roses, jasmines and the most
fragrant flowering shrubs, with a serpentine walk
of cypresses and laurels, here and there an urn,
with suitable inscriptions, and terminated by a
rough arch of rock work that covered a dripping
fountain, were its principal beauties.2 6
In the garden of fiction the novelist created
the responses. The factual garden could drawn
responses just as surely, as is evident from Hum-
phrey Repton’s selection of adjectives in his ac-
count of a visit to Downton Castle, Richard Payne
Knight’s estate in Herefordshire:
A narrow, wild and natural path sometimes creeps
under the beetling rock, close by the margin of a
mountain stream. It sometimes ascends to an aw-
ful precipice, from whence the foaming waters are
heard roaring in the dark abyss below, or seen
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 wildly dashing against its opposite banks; while in
other places, the course of the river being impeded
by natural ledges of rock, the vale presents a calm,
glassy mirror, that reflects the surrounding foli-
age.2 7
Repton contrasted awe and calmness, each
induced by a separate prospect. Melancholy was
envisaged as the heart’s cleanser and frequent op-
portunities were given to savour it in Alexander
Pope’s garden at Twickenham, which contained a
gloomy grotto, dusky groves and, as a climax at
the end of a grove of cypresses, the tomb of the
poet’s mother.2 8 This stress gave truth to Walpole’s
dictum that it was ‘always comic to set aside a
quarter of one’s garden to be melancholy in’.2 9
Sheer terror could also be encountered in these
garden scenes. On a visit to China, Sir William
Chambers noted an oriental gothic garden:
Their scenes of terror are composed of gloomy
woods, deep valleys inaccessible to the sun,
impending barren rocks, dark caverns, and im-
petuous cataracts rushing down the mountains
from all parts . . . Bats, owls, vultures, and every
bird of prey flutter in the groves; wolves, tigers
and jackals howl in the forests . . .3 0
He went on to tell of the inscribed stones set
up in the garden which recorded barbarous acts
perpetrated by brigands on the land over which
the visitor passed. Chambers used the term ‘scene’
in describing these prospects.3 1 In this he was not
alone. Thomas Whatley, gazing at one of the views
at Hagley in Worcestershire, commended it as a
‘perfect opera scene’ and Repton contrasted the
scene which the theatre-goer viewed with that of
the garden visitor noting that the artist’s use of
perspective gave value to the theatrical scene, a
technique of which the garden design was de-
prived.3 2 Whether the scene was in the garden or
the theatre it was designed to induce an emotional
response in the beholder. Mention has already
been made of those features in a garden which
produced a feeling of melancholy. Other scenes
would produce different responses: wild crags and
a cascade of water could strike terror, a fear that
the place was the lair of the banditti and yet, on
the other hand, an open prospect of hills and
clumped trees could impart serenity.3 3 Some of
the responses were, of course, conventionalised
but playwrights nevertheless made use of emo-
tional settings in order to hint at the action which
was to follow allowing the mood of the scene to
be anticipated in advance.
A formal appreciation of landscape painting, a
privilege which educated members of the audi-
ence enjoyed, helped to foster discernment in
viewing scenery. The eighteenth-century’s most
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highly collectable painters were three artists active
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
in the previous century, the Neapolitan, Salvator
Rosa, and two French painters, Claude Lorraine
and Nicolas Poussin.
Whate’er Lorraine light-touched with soft’ning
hue,
Or savage Rosa dashed, or learned Poussin drew
. . .
wrote James Thomson in The Castle of Indo-
lence. All three men influenced landscape design
and thereby, indirectly, stage design. The paint-
ings of Claude gave one a long vista of receding
planes, as if the scene was composed of wings and
back-drop. In the distance mountains and wild
forests were just discernible and as the planes
advanced to the foreground one was conscious of
the force of natural elements: the gushing river,
the waterfall, wild trees twisted into a series of
frames to surround the prospect, all contrasted
with the order of classical buildings, quays and
the commerce of mankind. We have already
noticed the awe with which eighteenth-century
travellers viewed the natural setting. This was sug-
gested in the landscapes of Claude but in those of
Rosa it was more than suggested—it was exagger-
ated. For Rosa the natural scene was untamed and
the hastily applied impasto on his canvas revealed
his own response to the landscape. His scenes
were dark but camp fires or the full moon high-
lighted the brigands and uncouth shepherds who
inhabited the wild hills of his fevered imagina-
tion.
The landscapes of the gothic dramas became
conventionalised; castles were always ruinous,
forests set in deep gloom and the seashore lashed
by the storm-driven waves. Their stock nature
enabled the theatre-goer to recognise the gothic
quality of a play and it was only to be expected
that stock characters would perform within these
locations.
Visitors to the playhouse could expect to see
the clearly delineated stock characters of the
romantic hero and heroine; the villain, a personi-
fication of relentless greed or self-devouring
jealousy and the divided hero, a man at odds with
himself who, through some insidious fault,
crumbled before the spectators’ eyes. In contrast
to these major characters, lighter entertainment
was provided by a bevy of humorous domestics or
rustics whose lives were lived on a different
emotional plane than that of the intense and pas-
sionate breathings of their superiors.
The conventional quality of each role allowed
actors to specialise and for each type certain quali-
ties were needed. A singing voice was a requisite
405
 for the part of the youthful hero. A sturdy figure
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
and a bass voice through which a range of dis-
turbed passions could be expressed was the es-
sential physical apparatus of the older tragic hero.
Alexander Rae failed vocally in the role of Ordonio
(Remorse, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1813) for, in
spite of his expressive face and intellectual clarity,
he suffered from an ‘effeminacy of tone . . . that
[did] away with the impression of manly energy
. . .’3 4 Many popular light actresses took on the
role of the younger heroine. When Mentevole
(Julia, Robert Jephson, 1787), looking at a cameo
of his sweetheart, rehearsed her virtues he was
describing not one but a hundred heroines:
O what a slender form is here! her polish’d front,
Blue slender veins, winding their silken maze,
Through flesh of living snow. Young Hebe’s hue,
Blushing ambrosial health. Her plenteous tresses,
Luxuriant beauty! Those bewitching eyes,
That shot their soft contagion to my soul. . . .
(3.1)
The sameness of the heroine’s role posed a
problem for actresses, as Mrs Lister discovered
while taking the part of Barbara in a revival of The
Iron Chest (George Colman the Younger, 1796):
. . . [she] sung her airs in her old way, which is
assuredly very pleasing, but her compass is so nar-
row that she may be said to have a cuckoo voice—
hear her once, and you have heard all that she
can do.3 5
The villain brought dynamism and vitality to
the play. William Barrymore, in spite of his ‘la-
boured enunciation’ was judged by Thomas Dut-
ton to be ‘the best stage tyrant the theatre can
boast’.3 6 It would be possible to multiply instances
of this type-casting but these few examples give
an indication of the expectations the performer
hoped to match.
The stock characters worked their way through
repetitions of stock situations and devices.
Strangely the audience seemed not to tire of these
but found interest in the differing circumstances
of each usage. Mention is made here of a few of
the more common devices of the gothic stage.
Mistaken identity was a convention which al-
lowed a spate of horrors to be unleashed in the
last act of the piece. The ending of Hannah Cow-
ley’s Albina (1779) was typical. With the darkness
of night shrouding the characters, Edward mistook
Editha for Albina and, whilst he embraced her,
Gondibert, making the same misassumption,
plunged his dagger into Editha’s back. Rapidly
avenging her death, Edward attempted to stab
Gondibert who snatched the dagger from him and
with it procured his own demise. The speed and
406
complexity of the action, the gloom of the stage
and the intensity of feeling produced a horrific
but satisfying ending to the play.
Disguise was another theme which ran
through many a gothic drama. It was a device
which worked only within the framework of the
stage, for characters were not permitted to ques-
tion the identity of the disguised person, an ac-
cepted convention reliant on the eighteenth-
century love of masquerading as a person other
than oneself, whether at a masked ball or at the
private theatricals which were so popular a feature
of great houses or even at a fantasy such as the
rituals Sir Francis Dashwood and his companions
indulged in as the ‘Monks of Medmenham’, a vil-
lage near Henley-on-Thames.3 7 Disguise offered a
character an extra dimension within which to
operate. It also infused the situation within which
the disguised person operated with overtones of
irony, strengthening the link between the per-
former and his audience as a bond of complicity
was formed between them. For example, the
central character of The Carmelite (Richard Cum-
berland, 1784), Lord St Valori, disguised through
much of the play as the friar of the title, was able
to move outside the main action and comment
on it: the plot then revolved around the awaited
reunion of Lady St Valori with her husband. In
the early scenes of the play clues were planted
which hinted at the troubled past of the friar. St
Valori’s disclosure of his true self was incidental
but most of the disclosures made by disguised
characters were a flamboyance, bringing the play
to a climactic ending. In The House of Morville
(John Lake, 1812) Sir Thomas attended Hugh’s
trial masked and disguised; both were thrown off
with electric effect at the apex of the crisis. Rod-
mond the villain stood ‘terror struck’ and the
presiding judge showed ‘an expression of
astonishment’. ‘Oh, Heav’n’ cried the prisoner, ‘it
is my father’ (5.6). Here the device of the disclo-
sure of identity was interwoven with another, the
discovery of a long-lost relative.
The facility with which one recognised one’s
kindred, for ‘relationship like murder, will out’
(3.1), was parodied by Richard Sheridan in The
Critic (1779): his strictures, however, did not
inhibit the gothic dramatists. The speed with
which recognition was achieved in The Castle of
Andalusia was as rapid as in Sheridan’s burlesque.
With a rush the banditti, headed by Caesar their
leader, entered the hall of Scipio’s castle. From
Scipio the briefest of questions—‘Where’s now my
son, Don Caesar?’—instantly elicited a revelation.
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Follies of the preceding years were washed away
in a couple of sentences, lacking in intensity and
pathos:
DON CAESAR:
My father! (Kneels to Don Scipio).
DON SCIPIO:
How, my Son, Don Caesar!
DON CAESAR:
Yes, sir: drove to desperation by—
My follies were my own—but my vices—
DON SCIPIO:
Were the consequences of my rigour.—
My child! Let these tears wash away the
remembrance.
(3.4)
Little more than a frivolous explanation of
the cause of the rift was given. Other causes of the
separation of relatives were varied, ranging from
the prosaic to the fantastic—the Empress of Greece
(Valentine and Orson) in flight from her husband
gave birth to twins in a wood, one of whom was
carried away by a bear. It was however rare for the
cause itself to influence to any degree the structure
of the plot.
As well as these situations, several stage prop-
erties were used with a measure of repetition and
incidents were created around them; the principal
properties were the intercepted letter and the phial
of poison. Some letters were forgeries as lacking in
credibility as the conventional disguise: ‘Then this
unravels all’ (2.2) cried the Doge in The Venetian
Outlaw (Robert William Elliston, 1805) on reading
that Vivaldi had been falsely implicated in deal-
ings with the banditti. Plans of escape could also
be outlined in letters. The flight of Agnes (Aurelio
and Miranda, James Boaden, 1798) from the
convent was thwarted when Aurelio discovered a
missive outlining the details. Similarly Bireno (The
Law of Lombardy, Robert Jephson, 1797) gained
written information of a plan to rescue the Prin-
cess of Lombardy which offered the recipient an
opportunity to share his strategy with the audi-
ence:
Confusion! Rescue her! Come back, Ascanio!
Fly to St Mark’s, collect the cohort there;
Go, place them instantly around the prison!
Bid them disarm the guard that holds that place;
And, on their lives, drive back the populace.
(5.1)
In each of these plays the letters were more
than conveyances of information; they instigated
further action and became an integral part of the
plot structure.
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The phial of poison was a suspense mecha-
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
nism. John Kerr used it to effect in his play The
Wandering Boys (1814). Roland determined on the
use of a slow poison for the two sons of the Count
de Croissy which he would administer by inviting
them to take some refreshment. The Count,
disguised as a servant of Roland’s, brought in vari-
ous comestibles whilst keeping an eye on the
bottle of poisoned wine that his master had
introduced onto the table. Throughout the meal—
lengthy for a stage repast—the audience was able
to watch with growing suspense the Count
adroitly switch the bottles and so poison Roland.
The extraordinary length of time the drug took to
become effective, for poison used as a means of
resolving the action on stage usually worked with
a degree of speed, was a cause of renewed suspense
and it was not until two further scenes had passed
that the Count opportunely told Roland, still not
suffering from the effects of the draught, that it
was he, not the boys who had been poisoned: ‘He
who composed the hellish drug best knows how
long or short his time of lingering, or what may
be his torments’ (2.3). Audiences demanded final-
ity from the poison. This was lacking in The In-
quisitor (Thomas Holcroft, 1798) when the Patri-
arch, like a deus ex machina, descended to the
dungeon in time to prevent the young lovers
incarcerated there from taking poison. This incon-
clusive use was condemned in the epilogue:
. . . if sad Melpomene must have rotation,
Let her dagger be sharp, and her poison-bowl
brimful,
As Cowslip’s, who brings Rusty-fusty one, cream-
ful:
Let Juliet quite stabb’d be, and Romeo quite
poison’d;
And let not, by signal of moon just horizon’d,
A Patriarch pop in, ’tween the cup and the lip so,
Nor the Hero and Heroine dally and sip so!
Recurrent devices such as these were a further
means of recognising the gothic qualities of a play;
they added to its atmosphere and occasionally
became telling symbols, capable of arousing terror
and pity in the audience.
So far we have looked at various motifs in the
plays, the setting of the play within its time and
place, and the stock characters and devices. Our
purpose has been to discover the common ground
on which the dramas were constructed. Before we
can begin to answer the question ‘What consti-
tutes a gothic drama?’ we must be aware of one
important formative influence on the plays: the
ideas of the German romantic playwrights
Friedrich von Schiller and August von Kotzebue.3 8
The remarks of reviewers of Charles Robert Ma-
407
 turin’s play Bertram (1816) highlighted objections
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
to the German school. The British Review attacked
the tone of the play:
Rotten principles and a bastard sort of sentiment,
such, in short, as have been imported into this
country from German moralists and poets, form
the interest of this stormy and extravagant compo-
sition.3 9
The Monthly Review was more specific in its
objections. The author was charged with sapping
‘the foundation of moral principle by exciting
undue compassion for worthless characters, or
unjust admiration of fierce and unchristian
qualities’.4 0 A romantic presentation of low-life or
roguery together with criticism of the ruling
classes was to some a cause of outrage. John Lar-
pent, the Lord Chamberlain’s Reader of Plays
refused to grant a licence for Joseph Holman’s
direct translation of Schiller’s banditti drama Die
Räuber in the belief that the text offered an im-
moral glorification of brigandage. Holman was
left to recast the subject matter, converting the
banditti into Knights Templars, and to reissue the
piece as The Red Cross Knights (1799).4 1 Spotting
Germanic themes became a game for critics,—one
played by the Monthly Mirror in reviewing Lewis’s
play The Castle Spectre:
Mr Lewis’s intimacy with German literature is
strongly proclaimed . . . the dream of Osmond, his
Atheism, Reginald’s sixteen years immurement,
(derived, probably, from The Robbers) and the
frequent appeals to Heaven, with a levity unusual
to our stage, are all German.4 2
The dark side of human nature, its greed, lust
and power, its attempts to over-reach, its suspected
godlessness, when openly acknowledged by play-
wrights caused distress; more than that, its exem-
plification became a direct target for the Tory
publication, the Anti-Jacobin Review.
It is difficult to define the nature of gothic
drama. The gothic was not a movement in the
sense that it was built on clearly formulated
principles. Instead, it can be thought of as an
artistic climate assimilated by practitioners of a
range of the creative arts. Its early manifestations
were seen in such fantasies as the gothic temple
which closed the canal vista at Shotover Park
outside Oxford and in the delightful circuit walk
and mystery ponds William Kent designed at
Rousham House near Bicester.4 3 It found expres-
sion in the interior design of houses which were
improved to contain a gothic library and chapel,
as at Milton Manor in Oxfordshire.4 4 The sad
reflections of John Dyer on human mutability in
‘Grongar Hill’ were an early manifestation of the
408
gothic spirit in words, later developed by novelists
who, in the expansiveness of their romances, were
able to draw out a multiplicity of dark themes. It
was to the novel that Bertrand Evans in his own
work on the text of the gothic dramas turned in
attempting to formulate a definition:
A Gothic play . . . is one marked by features
which have long served to identify a Gothic
novel.4 5
There was a danger that the formulary would
become imprisoned in its own cross-references.
However, Evans went on to list some of the
characteristics which have been considered in this
chapter:
These features include specialized settings, ma-
chinery, character types, themes, plots, and
techniques selected and combined to serve a
primary purpose of exploiting mystery, gloom and
terror.
Why exploit ‘mystery, gloom and terror’?
Whilst evenings of mystery, and even of terror,
may be acceptable in the theatre, we might now
think that there is slight hope that evenings of
gloom will draw large audiences. Eighteenth-
century taste would deny that assertion. In 1763
James Macpherson published translations purport-
ing to be of the Gaelic poet Ossian’s work, which
was immediately admired for its wild spirit. Profes-
sor Hugh Blair, lecturing on this newly discovered
poet, selected that paraphernalia in his works
which appealed to readers—the darkness, hoary
mountains, solitary lakes, old forests.4 6 These
were, he said, ‘ideas of a solemn and awful kind,
and even bordering on the terrible’; the effect of
the motifs was to raise the reader out of himself to
the sublime; in some measure they recreated the
effect that the actual phenomena exerted on
travellers in their original experience. A fellow
professor, James Beattie, looking at objects more
terrifying than those Blair contemplated—vast
caverns, overhanging precipices and stormy seas—
realised that even aesthetic horror could, in turn,
lead beholders to the sublime.4 7 It was in this spirit
that the ‘mystery, gloom and terror’ of the gothic
dramas were acceptable in the theatre.4 8
A succinct definition of the gothic drama,
then, is difficult to devise. In this chapter, how-
ever, we have seen that it was a reflection of the
dark and wild side of human nature, mirrored in
an equally violent natural world or in architectural
settings which, in their ruinous state, spoke of hu-
man mortality. Although the gothic stage repre-
sented the psyche of eighteenth-century man—
his innermost fears and longings—the presenta-
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tions were of plays set in an undefined and
romantically conceived mediaeval past. The plays
were subject to Germanic influences which que-
ried the traditional eighteenth-century concepts
of social hierarchy, sympathy and respectability.
Finally, we have been aware that the playwright’s
expression of the gothic was not an isolated art
form: it was expressed through the visual and
plastic arts as well as in verse and prose. The gothic
was a spirit, moving where it would. Although it
was a dark spirit, it was capable of illuminating
some of the submerged recesses of human person-
ality.
Notes
1. St James’ Chronicle, 16-19 December 1797; Morning
Chronicle, 21 January 1797.
2. Monthly Mirror, IV (December 1797), 357.
3. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language
(1775).
4. Miles Peter Andrews, The Songs, Recitatives, Airs, Duets,
Trios and Choruses introduced into the Pantomime
Entertainment of ‘The Enchanted Castle’; (1786), p. iv.
5. An extended discussion on the gothic territory may
be found in: David Jarett, ‘“Gothic” as a term in Liter-
ary Criticism in the Eighteenth Century’, unpublished
thesis, University of Oxford, 1968; Alfred Longueil,
‘The Word “Gothic” in Eighteenth Century Criticism’,
Modern Language Notes, XXXVIII (1923), 453-60; Dev-
endra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (1957).
6. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764), ed. Wil-
marth Sheldon Lewis (1969). An evaluation of his
contribution to the gothic genre is to be found in
Varma, Gothic Flame, pp. 44-65.
7. Horace Walpole, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s
Correspondence, ed. Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis (1937-
80), X, 307.
8. Walpole, Otranto, ed. Lewis, p.22. Warren Hunting
Smith contrasted the two buildings in ‘Strawberry Hill
and Otranto’, The Times Literary Supplement, 23 May
1936. Walpole’s eclectic taste and scholarship are
explored in: Charles Locke Eastlake, A History of the
Gothic Revival (1872), pp. 44-51.
9. John Aikin and Anna Letitia Barbauld, Miscellaneous
Pieces in Prose (1792), p. 121 and pp. 127 ff.
10. S. M. Ellis, The Life of Michael Kelly (1930), p. 254.
11. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), ed.
Bonamy Dobrée (Oxford, 1980), p. 30; see also pp. 78,
102, 227, 230, 302, 358 and 631.
12. Horace Walpole, Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. Mrs
Paget Toynbee (Oxford, 1903-05), VI, 195; Walpole,
Otranto, ed. Lewis, p. 3.
13. Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron (1777), Preface to
the Second Edition (1778), ed. James Trainer (1967),
p. 3.
14. Critical Review, LXVI (1788), 359. A detailed and disap-
proving analysis of Vimonda is to be found in: Willard
Thorp, ‘The Stage Adventures of Some Gothic Novels’,
Papers of the Modern Language Association, XVIII (1928),
479-80.
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15. Prompter, 27 November 1789.
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
16. William Capon’s notebooks are in the collection of
Robert K. Sturtz, New York.
17. James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble
(1825), II, 101.
18. Thomas Gray, Mr Gray’s Journal (1775).
19. Joseph Cradock, An Account of Some of the Most
Romantic Parts of North Wales (1777), p. 1.
20. Radcliffe, Udolpho, ed. Dobrée, p. 105.
21. ibid., p. 241.
22. The influence of the gothic novel on the drama is
discussed further in: Michael Booth, English Plays of
the Nineteenth Century (Oxford 1969), I, 24.
23. Ralph G. Allen, ‘The Wonders of Derbyshire: A Spectacu-
lar Eighteenth Century Travelogue’, Theatre Survey, II
(1961), 54-66.
24. Sybil Rosenfeld and Edward Croft Murray, ‘A Checklist
of Scene Painters working in Great Britain and Ireland
in the Eighteenth-Century’, Theatre Notebook, XIX
(1965), 144-5; Patrick Conner Michael Angelo Rooker
(1984), pp. 49-93 and 122-37.
25. European Magazine, LIV (1808), 391 and XLV (1804),
297.
26. Richard Graves, The Spiritual Quixote (1773), ed. Clar-
ence Tracey (1967), p. 186.
27. Humphrey Repton, Sketches and Hints (1794), p. 103.
28. Pope’s villa at Cross Deep, Twickenham, was demol-
ished in the 1820s by Sophia Howe, ‘Queen of the
Goths’, but the mutilated grotto remains.
29. Horace Walpole, On Modern Gardening (1762-71), ed.
Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis (New York, 1931), p. 60.
30. William Chambers, A Dissertation on Oriental Garden-
ing (Dublin. 1773), p. 27.
31. Chambers, Oriental Gardening, p. 28.
32. Whatley’s remark is cited in: Lawrence Fleming and
Alan Gore, The English Garden (1979), p. 109; and Rep-
ton’s in Peter Bicknell, Beauty, Horror and Immensity,
Fitzwilliam Museum Exhibition Catalogue
(Cambridge, 1981), p. 43.
33. The sentimental garden is discussed in Fleming and
Gore’s book (see note 32), pp. 85-180.
34. Theatrical Inquisitor, II (1813), 64.
35. Monthly Mirror, XVI (1809), 117.
36. The Times, 25 June 1798; Thomas Dutton, Dramatic
Censor, I (1800-01), 46.
37. The private theatre in the eighteenth century is
described in: Sybil Rosenfeld, Temples of Thespis (1978).
38. This subject is fully explored in: F. W. Stokoe, German
Influence in the English Romantic Period (Cambridge,
1926), pp. 19-34.
39. British Review, VIII (1816), 70. Informative biographi-
cal details of Charles Maturin are to be found in: Sam-
uel Smiles, Memoirs and Correspondence of the Late John
Murray (1891), pp. 288-303.
409
 40. Monthly Review, LXXX (1816), 179. Further informa-
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
tion on the reception of the play is given in: Niilo Id-
man, Charles Robert Maturin, His Life and Works (1923),
pp. 102-25.
41. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C.: letter of
Joseph Holman to John Larpent, W. b. 67 (63-63v);
Joseph Holman, The Red Cross Knights (1799), pp. i-iv;
L. W. Conolly, The Censorship of English Drama (San
Marino, 1976), pp. 98-101.
42. Monthly Mirror, IV (1797), 356.
43. Kenneth Woodbridge, ‘William Kent’s Gardening’,
Apollo, C (1974), pp. 286-9; Margaret Jourdain, The
Work of William Kent (1984), p. 80. The gothic temple
at Shotover is possibly by William Townsend, see: Jen-
nifer Sherwood and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of
England: Oxfordshire (1974, rep. 1975), p. 765.
44. Stephen Wright was the architect; wood-carving by a
London craftsman, Richard Lawrence; see: Suzanne
Mockler, Milton Manor, Oxfordshire (n.d.).
45. Bertrand Evans, Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1947), p. 5.
46. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1787),
I, 48-9.
47. Cited in: Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime. A Study of
Critical Theories in Eighteenth Century England
(Michigan, 1960), p. 129.
48. The theme of the beholder’s response to the sublime
is explored also in: Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque
(1967) and in Bicknell, Beauty, Horror and Immensity.
DIANE LONG HOEVELER (ESSAY
DATE SUMMER 2000)
SOURCE: Hoeveler, Diane Long. “Gothic Drama as
Nationalistic Catharsis.” Wordsworth Circle 31, no. 3
(summer 2000): 169-72.
In the following essay, Hoeveler examines the social and
political implications of the popularity of Gothic drama.
In Spectacular Politics (1993), Paula Backsheider
suggested that gothic drama is “the earliest ex-
ample of . . . mass culture . . . an artistic configu-
ration that becomes formulaic and has mass ap-
peal, that engages the attention of a very large,
very diverse audience, and that stands up to
repetition, not only of new examples of the type
but production of individual plays” (150). But
what is repeated in the gothic drama, and how
were those repetitions—often excessive, hyper-
bolic, blatantly fantastical—manipulated so that
the genre gained mass appeal? This essay examines
the social and political ideologies that are explicit
in the major gothic dramatic adaptations of the
most popular gothic novels of the period: Lewis’s
Castle Spectre, a loose adaptation of Walpole’s
Castle of Otranto; Siddons’ Sicilian Romance, an
adaptation of Radcliffe’s novel of the same title;
and Boaden’s Fountainville Forest, another adapta-
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tion based on Radcliffe. The essay will conclude
by focusing on perhaps the least familiar of Boad-
en’s gothic dramas, his Cambrio-Britons, a drama
that, like Wordsworth’s The Borderers (1796; 1842),
is complicitous in constructing the new British
nationalistic character that Burke was codifying in
his prose.
Curiously, all of these works use a ghost, a
female ghost who in three of them embodies both
a socially conservative message and a direct politi-
cal warning to the protagonists of the drama, and,
by extension, to the audience. Examining these
dramas not simply as inferior adaptations in-
tended for a mass audience, one sees that each
participates in the ongoing national debate about
the proper role of the monarchy, the threat of
violent revolution, the shock of sudden class
transformation, the anxiety of changing gender
roles within the family structure, and, finally, the
construction of a newly nationalistic British
empire that sought to justify its absorption of
Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.
As Jeffrey Cox has pointed out in relation to
Romantic drama and the French Revolution,
when history itself becomes theatrical, theater
responds by “translating the representation of
revolt from history to myth” (241). Is gothic
drama, as Peter Brooks observed about melodrama,
essentially conservative, a means of reinstating
social and political order (15), or can it be under-
stood as a species of what Hayden White has
called “anarchistic,” calling for a dissolution of
contemporary institutions in order to reclaim a
more humane community that existed sometime
in the past (24-5)? Each of these dramas is not
simply politically conservative, as has often been
argued, but rather constructs a distant past that
the play reshapes as redeemable through the
elimination of corrupt aristocrats. Each play
presents a political and social warning to the
monarchy: reform or be overthrown by violence,
which constitutes an anarchist message. Under
the spectre of the French Revolution these works
introduce middle-class characters who embody
the best of what Britain must become if it is to
avoid the violent and chaotic fate of France. The
dramas attempt to mediate between classes, races,
and genders that were at odds over the shape and
power structure of the evolving bourgeois society.
The dramas function, then, as cathartic forms,
public rituals in which the middle class haunted
itself with its own act of imagined, fantasized
revolution, usually depicted as some form of
matricide or fratricide. In a series of what might
be seen as social and political morality plays, the
middle class audience encountered its own my-
thology of origins, its own “Hyperion”—like
creation of a new order built on the backs of an
aristocracy that simply did not deserve to survive.
As Robert Miles has noted, those involved in
the invention of the gothic embraced the hieratic
function of keeping alive the sacred mementoes
of the race. But ideological conservatism inter-
sected with the democratic nature of artistic
production for the masses, creating what Foucault
has called a “site” of “power/knowledge” at odds
with itself. As a site of opposing strategies, the
gothic drama became a “hazardous play of domi-
nations” seeking to compose a coherent position
amid rapid social, historical, and cultural transfor-
mations. It is, according to Miles, in the moments
of slippage and discontinuity that the ideological
business of the gothic aesthetic is most apparent
(32). For him, the gothic aesthetic incorporates an
idealized national identity together with a myth
of origins (50).
This position is very close to James Watt’s in
Contesting the Gothic (1999). For Watt, the 1790s
through the early 1800s were dominated by what
he calls the creation of “Loyalist Gothic” ro-
mances. He sees these works as reactions to
Britain’s defeat in America in that they portray a
proud heritage of military victory played out
within a moral and political agenda. Set around a
real castle in Britain, these works present a strati-
fied yet harmonious society, use real historical
figures from the British military pantheon (Arthur
or Alfred were particular favorites), and consis-
tently depict the defeat of effeminate or foreign
villains. Loyalist gothics are structurally bound to
depict an act of usurpation which is always ari-
ghted, often through the supernatural agency of a
ghost (7).
One example, according to Watt, is William
Godwin’s early romance Imogen (1748), set in
prehistoric Wales and idealizing a “pure, uncor-
rupted society in the mythical past as a bulwark
against the hegemonic forces of English imperial-
ism” (45). Unlike Gray’s “The Bard,” Godwin’s
novel hints that the act of trespass and usurpation
made when Edward I conquered Wales could be
reversed. Because “Great Britain,” in other words,
could only come into being through acts of
usurpation of property and title condoned by the
public, these acts were played out in veiled form
on the gothic stage, where women were usually
powerless pawns of powerful and corrupt aristo-
crats. The act of forming itself into a nation was,
in effect, the real trauma that was occurring in
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PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
CLIVE BARKER (1952-)
Barker’s style is characterized by cinematic
descriptions of blood and gore, as well as
unabashedly graphic sexual imagery. His
stories are applauded by critics as imagina-
tive and unique. Barker has adapted several
of his own short stories and novellas to the
screen, in motion pictures he directed, includ-
ing the films Hellraiser (1987), Nightbreed
(1990), The Thief of Always (1998), and Lord
of Illusions (1995). Barker is best known for
Clive Barker’s Books of Blood (generally referred
to as the Books of Blood), his six-volume col-
lection of short stories and novellas published
in 1984 and 1985 that encompass the over-
lapping genres of horror and fantasy fiction.
Many of Barker’s stories feature monsters or
apparitions, and in his fictional worlds the
boundaries between life and death are often
blurred. In a number of his stories, death is
welcomed by the protagonist as a transforma-
tion into a higher state of being. Doppel-
gängers are also a staple of his stories.
Barker’s fiction often expresses the sense that
the world of humans is as dark, violent, and
evil as the monsters and ghosts who terrorize
his protagonists. Volume one of the Books of
Blood (1984) includes “The Book of Blood,”
in which ghosts exact revenge against a man
pretending to be a medium by torturing him
and writing the stories of their lives and
deaths into his flesh. The ghosts’ stories are
their “Books of Blood,” written in the lan-
guage of pain. Volume five of the Books of
Blood (1985) was published in the United
States as In the Flesh: Tales of Terror (1986). In
“The Forbidden,” a young woman investigat-
ing urban graffiti learns of a supernatural
creature, known as Candyman, who commits
acts of brutal violence against the inhabitants
of an impoverished neighborhood. In 1992
“The Forbidden” was adapted to the screen
in the film Candyman.
England, enacted vicariously on the London stage
for all to witness and accept.
411

PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
Title page of Henry Siddons’s The Sicilian Romance,
1794.
The quest for an idealized national identity,
however, needs to be set into the still larger
historical context in which popular gothic dramas
were produced. England and Scotland signed the
Act of Union in 1707, ending years of hostility
and territorial skirmishing. But this document
was, as Tom Nairn has pointed out, a largely
“patrician bargain” because the signers were
mostly aristocrats (136f). The task of the next
hundred years was to imaginatively separate and
differentiate England and Scotland in the popular
consciousness—and that became largely the
province of Romantic literature’s cultural work. As
Benedict Anderson noted, one of the ways a
country builds a sense of its own nationality is to
imagine itself as antique (and thus the medieval-
ism in Keats, Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, and
Walter Scott). But an equally effective way to build
the consciousness of a nation state is to construct
a local adversary on the very borders in order, as
Anderson points out, to create a clearly defined
sense of space, a newly sacred territory potentially
threatened by lawless of crude infidels (xiv).
Scotland, Wales and Ireland, became for the
412
Romantic consciousness such border communi-
ties, the “others” that England had to separate
from, master and suppress, dominate and oppress
in order to forge its own sense of amalgamated
nationhood.
Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre (1797) was
the most popular gothic drama performed in Eng-
land in the late 1790s, based on Horace Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto, although the setting and
characters differ in several important ways. The
contested castle has moved from Italy to the
border of Wales and England during the 10th
century. This shift both localizes the place and
makes the gothic a British phenomenon to explore
British anxieties about nationhood, borders, and
outsiders—women and blacks—clamoring to
breech the moats that an aristocratic and male-
dominated culture had constructed for itself.
Angela, the besieged gothic heroine in this drama,
is aided in her struggle against her evil uncle Os-
mond by a group of social outcasts: a fool, a glut-
tonous friar, servants, and finally, the ultimate
outcast, her murdered mother’s ghost. Osmond
had murdered Evelina, his sister-in-law, in a
botched attempt to kill the entire family of his
eldest brother so that he could usurp the estate.
At the drama’s climatic moment (Osmond’s
second attempt to murder his brother Reginald),
the ghost of Evelina appears and throws herself
between the two brothers. This action so startles
Osmond that he drops his sword and Angela “sud-
denly springs forward and plunges her dagger into
Osmond’s bosom.” It is Angela who calmly steps
forward and gives instructions for the care of her
wounded father, cleaning up the mess made by
the warring sons.
The same matter-of-fact presentation is made
of the black servant Hassan and the Indian Saib. It
is as if Lewis has invited the empire’s colonial
lackeys home for dinner, thereby highlighting the
incongruity of Britain’s involvement in the slave
trade and Indian expeditions. These recent histori-
cal realities are transplanted back into the 10th
century, suggesting an analogy between the treat-
ment of women and the treatment of slaves.
Even more fraught with contradictory ideo-
logical baggage is Henry Siddons’ 1794 Sicilian
Romance; or the Apparition of the Cliff, which also
uses the device of a daughter saved by what ap-
pears to be her mother’s ghost. This drama under-
cuts the supernatural element by having the
mother imprisoned by her evil husband so that
he can marry a young and wealthy heiress. Her
ghostly appearances at night, seen by many
around the cliff where she is imprisoned, are
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resolved when the daughter Julia unbars a door
and her mother magically returns, as if from the
dead. When the evil Ferrand discovers the mother
and daughter’s reunion, he resolves to kill them
both himself. As he rushes on them, the mother
pulls a dagger and says, “Advance not, on your
life! / Spite of thy cruelty, I love thee still, / Still
live in hopes to charm thy savage soul, / And melt
it into tenderness and love” (III.iv). This melting
never occurs, and the father cannot be assimilated
into the restored family that sings the praises of
the king in the closing scene. A drama that has
presented the ruling patriarch of this tiny princi-
pality as a ravening, lustful madman concludes,
then, with a song in praise of George III.
Boaden’s Fountainville Forest, based on Radc-
liffe’s Mysteries of the Forest, is relevant here, as is
his later gothic-historicist drama The Cambrio-
Britons, his unsuccessful bid to be taken seriously
as a dramatist in the manner of Shakespeare. Foun-
tainville Forest (1794) presents a mysterious ghost,
simply called a “phantom.” As Adeline, the hero-
ine, reads her murdered father’s journal, the
phantom speaks on three occasions to confirm
her worst fears, that, yes, her uncle was the usurp-
ing murderer of his own brother and now, incestu-
ously, pursues her, his niece. The phantom,
although cowled and ambiguous, represents the
heroine’s dead father, so that the crime here is not
matricide, as it becomes in Lewis, but fratricide.
Dynastic intrigue, warring brothers, and the eroti-
cized daughter-figure are all stock devices by 1794,
but their ritualistic embodiment on stage raises
the questions: what cultural work is being per-
formed? Why does a male ghost, the dead father,
haunt this play rather than the dead mother? Is
the state as well as the family under social and
political siege? Rapid transformations in the fam-
ily structure had caused even the patriarch, it
would appear, to tremble in his own domicile.
Boaden (1762-1839) wrote eight dramas dur-
ing his lifetime, but is best known for his five
theatrical biographies, notably the Life of John
Philip Kemble, a primary source for materials on
the late 18th and early 19th century theatre. Fol-
lowing his adaptations of Radcliffe’s novels,
Boaden wrote Cambrio-Britons, an historical drama
in the style of Shakespeare, first performed on July
21, 1798, at the Haymarket. A play that depicts
the conquest of Wales by England in the 13th
century, the drama was relevant to the contempo-
rary war against France. As Boaden noted in his
Life of Kemble, he used the play to meet “the
menaces of foreign invasion, in the year 1798,
with patriot sentiment.” Written at the height of
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invasion fever, as Cohen observed, the play
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
opened one month before France actually at-
tempted to invade (xxvi). In the same biography
Boaden explained that dramas should not be the
venue for party politics, but that the theater would
be “deficient in its noblest duty, when it inspires
no ardour against an invading enemy” (“Preface”
to Cambrio-Britons). Further, Boaden thought that
the play would inspire every one in the audience
to “thank” him for “seeking to sustain the inde-
pendence of his country” (qtd in Cohen, xxvii).
But he misunderstood, according to Cohen, that
the sympathies of the play are with the Welsh,
who are struggling to maintain their indepen-
dence against the oppressive and corrupt English,
led by King Edward in 1282. The drama’s analogy
actually works against England, aligning the 1798
England with France, an unlawful and greedy
usurper of land not its own. Like Lewis’s depiction
of the African slave Hassan, the gothic is fissured,
the exterior working against and undercutting the
interior of the argument that the drama actually
makes through both the action and the resolu-
tion.
Beyond the confusing and contradictory
political allegory, Boaden uses a female ghost, just
as Lewis does. In this drama the dead mother of
Prince Llewellyn and his traitorous brother David
appears on the altar of a church, urging her two
warring sons to reconcile and join to fight their
common English enemy. This ghost garnered the
most attention for the play, leading critics to ac-
cuse Boaden of plagiarizing Lewis’s Castle Spectre.
In defense of himself, Boaden pointed out that if
anyone were the plagiarist, it was Lewis, whom he
accuses of stealing Boaden’s earlier ghost in The
Fountainville Forest (“Preface” to Cambrio-Britons).
Boaden’s play begins with an atmosphere of
suspicion and paranoia, as every soldier, including
Llewelyn’s own brother, is suspected of disloyalty
to the preservation of Welsh independence. As
one Welsh soldier remarks after accepting a bribe
to change allegiance, “We have now no safety but
in the conqueror’s mercy” (I.i.8). Interestingly,
one of the first figures to speak in the drama is the
Irish minstrel, O’Turloch, who entertains the
Welsh royalty with a song about King Arthur, said
to have been imported by Scottish minstrels. The
song concerns a woman who pleads with Arthur
to avenge her against a knight who has raped her,
a situation that parallels Llewelyn’s wife who has
been pursued aggressively and incestuously by
David, his twin brother. The presence of Arthur,
the last Celtic King, became a stock device in a
number of Loyalist gothic texts that were trying
413
 to recall an idealized Celtic golden age, pre-
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
Norman, pre-aristocratic, and pre-Hanoverian. But
the bard, according to Katie Trumpenet, in Bardic
Nationalism, “For nationalist antiquaries, . . . is
the mouthpiece for a whole society, articulating
its values, chronicling its history, and mourning
the inconsolable tragedy of its collapse. English
poets, in contrast, imagine the bard (and the
minstrel after him) as an inspired, isolated, and
peripatetic figure. Nationalist antiquaries read
bardic poetry for its content and its historical
information; their analyses help to crystallize a
new nationalist model of literary history. The
English poets are primarily interested in the bard
himself, for he represents poetry as a dislocated
art, standing apart from and transcending its
particular time and place” (6). For Trumpener, the
contrast points to the collapse of Celtic clan
culture (in Ireland, Wales and Scotland) and the
rise of a form of individualism and literary com-
modification in England that eventually tri-
umphed over the earlier oral-based culture.
The high point of the drama occurs in a gothic
chapel at the shrine of the mother, Lady Griffyth.
Informed by his wife Elinor that his brother stills
pursues her and has traitorously thrown in with
the English invader, the “haughty Edward,”
Llewellyn confronts his brother before their
mother’s tomb. As they each draw swords to settle
their longstanding rivalry, the ghost of their
mother suddenly appears and speaks: “Forbear!”
As the swords magically fly out of the brothers’
hands, their ghostly mother goes on to pro-
nounce: “Have I not loved you?—Be peace be-
tween you! / Confirm it at the altar!” After the
two men kneel and embrace, their mother gives
her blessing and the chorus of spirits declares:
“Grateful the voice that bids your hatred cease, /
A mother’s mandate of fraternal peace.” In the
elaborate stage directions, the funereal dress falls
off the mother and “her figure seems glorified;
and through the opening window she is drawn,
as it were, into the air, while music, as of immortal
spirits, attends her progress. The brothers gaze
silently after the vision” (II.v.58). This miraculous
disrobing and ascent appears to replay aspects of
the bleeding nun legend in which a murdered
woman can have no eternal peace until she is
avenged and buried in hallowed ground. Boaden’s
adaptation of the legend suggests that the mother
cannot ascend to Heaven until her two sons are
reconciled, but as a political allegory, the image is
loaded with contradictory freight. Reconciled, the
brothers fight the tyrant Edward to a standoff.
After much singing, Edward recognizes Llewellyn
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as the Prince of Wales, and declares to him, “Be
my friend— / My nearest, best ally; and, in her
perils, / Let England ever find her warmest cham-
pion, / Her grace, her glory, in the prince of
Wales!” (III.iv.88).
Politically, the drama appears to affirm a
reconciliation of rival claims to land through the
appearance of a beneficient maternal presence,
ghostly but powerful, absent but present. The dead
mother, rising from her grave to demand coopera-
tion from the warring brothers, suggests at least
the avatar of Elizabeth I, the dead but undead
political mother, wise, skillful, and infinitely
diplomatic in the ways of avoiding direct conflict
and open warfare. Is it possible that the anxieties
about the condition and suitability of the heir to
George III’s throne precipitated the dynastic
emphasis in popular gothic dramas? Beyond
nationalistic debates or fear of French invasions,
British gothic dramas expressed tangible fear that
the House of Hanover had come to an inglorious
end in all but name? The infant daughter of
George IV, Princess Charlotte (b. 1796), appeared
to be a fragile hope for the British monarchy. In
order to buttress her potential status, the spectre
of the last great female queen appears, disguised
as a female ghost haunting the disputed borders
of Wales and England, Scotland and England, Eng-
land and its own colonies abroad. The intense
mourning that gripped England when Charlotte
died in childbirth a mere twenty-one years later
found expression in, as Behrendt documents, a
huge “Charlotte industry,” poems, broadsides, and
souvenir trinkets (122ff). If her death caused such
intense, hyperbolic, and theatrical displays of
mourning, might it not be conjectured that her
birth was also the subject of a certain amount of
concern?
The female ghost who appears in these dramas
also suggests an intense uneasiness about the role
and nature of women in the coming century. That
these ghosts are mothers, murdered, displaced,
separated from their children, also suggests a
deeply conservative agenda. Women, it would
seem, are being properly positioned on the stage
in their maternal roles, because the gothic visual
aesthetics presupposes a masculine subject dazzled
not simply by an eroticization of the female body
but also by her maternal function. (I am thinking
in particular here of Lewis’s ambivalent presenta-
tion of Mathilda/Rosario in The Monk in contrast
to Melmoth the Wanderer’s presentation of Isidora).
In addition, the aesthetics of the sublime presup-
poses a female subject-position disciplined
through the presence of the male gaze (Miles
51)—or what I would call the bourgeois gaze. The

PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

mass audiences that flocked to the gothic dramas
remembered the ghost scenes because those were
the most dramatic, most frightening, most un-
canny appearances of either dead mothers or dead
fathers on the stage. In a nation struggling to
consolidate land it had only recently claimed, as
well as land it was claiming abroad on a tenuous
basis at best, the political guilt and social anxiety
must have been intense. At the same time that
the national borders were viewed as precarious
and diffuse, so were the psychic ones. The ghosts
haunting the gothic stage were the ghosts of
empires lost and found, mothers and fathers and
children displaced and replaced, used and abused.

Works Cited
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. 1991; Backs-
heider, Paula. Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and
Mass Culture in Early Modern England. 1993; Behrendt,
Stephen C. Royal Mourning and Regency Culture: Elegies
and Memorials of Princess Charlotte. 1997; Brooks, Peter.
The Melodramatic Imagination. 1976; Cohen, Steven, ed.
The Plays of James Boaden. 1980; Cox, Jeffrey. “Romantic
Drama and the French Revolution.” In Revolution and
English Romanticism. Ed. Keith Hanley and Raman
Selden. 1990; Lewis, Matthew. “The Castle Spectre.” In
Seven Gothic Dramas: 1789-1825. Ed. Jeffrey Cox. 1992;
Miles Robert. Gothic Writing 1750-1820: A Genealogy.
1993; Nairn, Tom. The Break-Up of Britain. 1977;
Trumpener, Katie. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic
Novel and the British Empire. 1997; Watt, James. Contest-
ing the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764-
1832. 1999; White, Hayden. Metahistory. 1973.

FILM

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PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ

BORIS KARLOFF (1887-1969) AND
FRANKENSTEIN
In 1930, Universal Pictures decided to capital-
ize on the public’s newfound taste for horror
movies with Frankenstein (1931), in which
Bela Lugosi was cast as the monster. When
the studio informed Lugosi, who did not like
the role, that he would only be released from
his contract if he could find another actor for
the part, Lugosi suggested Boris Karloff.
Directed by James Whale, Frankenstein
became an immediate classic. Karloff, whose
strong features, athletic build, and consider-
able height were perfect for the role, gave a
subtle and sympathetic performance that
won over critics and touched the hearts of
audiences. Universal immediately cast the
versatile actor in two more leading roles, The
Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) and The Mummy
(1932). The two films cemented his popular-
ity and, in 1932, 45-year-old Boris Karloff
became a star. Throughout the 1930s, Karloff
starred in a string of popular horror pictures
for Universal, including The Black Cat (1934),
Bride of Frankenstein (1935), The Raven
(1935), and Son of Frankenstein (1939), in
which he portrayed mad scientists and tor-
mented monsters.
Unlike many Hollywood stars, Karloff
never fought his typecasting. He understood
that he owed his fame to Frankenstein and
thus was good-humored about spoofing his
horror image in films such as Abbot and Cos-
tello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (1949). By
the early 1960s, with horror movies once
again in vogue, the aging actor found himself
a cult hero and very much in demand. He
appeared with fellow horror stars Basil Rath-
bone, Peter Lorre, and Vincent Price in two
popular films, The Raven (1963) and The Ter-
ror (1963). He brought his deep, resonant,
and chilling voice to the role of the Grinch in
the television version of Dr. Seuss’s children’s
Christmas tale, How the Grinch Stole Christ-
mas! (1966). Karloff appeared in his final film
at the age of eighty-one, portraying an aging
horror-movie star in Peter Bogdanovich’s Tar-
gets (1968).

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PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

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 PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
Conrad Veidt and Lil Dagover in the 1920 silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

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PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

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 PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

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PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

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PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula, in Tod Browning’s 1931

film adaptation of Dracula.

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S. S. PRAWER (ESSAY DATE 1980)
SOURCE: Prawer, S. S. “The Making of a Genre.” In
Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror, pp. 8-47.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
In the following excerpt, Prawer traces the history and
development of the horror film genre, highlighting seminal
figures and works throughout the twentieth century.
Quite a good scene, isn’t it? One man crazy—and
three very sane spectators!
Frankenstein (1931)
The Gothic terror-fictions which were so
distinctive a legacy of the eighteenth century to
the nineteenth lent themselves, not only to
theatrical stage adaptation, but also to various
kinds of light-and-shadow play: E. G. Robertson’s
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PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
BELA LUGOSI (1882-1956) AND DRACULA
With his aristocratic accent, distinctive profile,
slicked-back dark hair, spidery fingers, mes-
merizing eyes, and swirling black cape,
Hungarian-born actor Bela Lugosi helped to
create cinema’s definitive Dracula, the vam-
pire as sexual and charming as he is villain-
ous. Born Béla Ferenc Dezsö Blask¢ in Lugos
(the town from which he derived his stage
name) near Transylvania, Lugosi came to the
United States in late 1920. His break came
with the title role in the play Dracula, which
ran for 33 weeks on Broadway in 1927 and
successfully toured the West Coast in 1928-
29; this led to the 1931 Universal film, whose
romantic settings and sexual undercurrents
revolutionized the horror film genre and
established Lugosi’s place in Hollywood his-
tory. Lugosi, however, quickly became the
victim of his own success. Despite the star-
dom that he achieved through Dracula,
Lugosi resisted typecasting and aspired
instead to the romantic leading roles he had
performed on the Hungarian stage. Unfortu-
nately, his poor judgment resulted in a series
of bad career choices, long periods of unem-
ployment, and perpetual financial problems.
Perhaps his single worst mistake was reject-
ing a major role in Frankenstein (1932),
Universal’s next big film after Dracula. Origi-
nally slated to play the monster, Lugosi
disliked both the heavy makeup and the
character’s lack of dialogue, and so the part
went to Boris Karloff, who soon surpassed
Lugosi in salary as well as fame, becoming
his lifelong rival. When Universal teamed Kar-
loff and Lugosi in such films as The Black Cat
(1934), The Raven (1935), and The Body
Snatchers (1945), Lugosi received second bill-
ing and played a decidedly supporting role
to Karloff.
‘phantasmagorias’ of the 1790s relied a great deal
on nocturnal churchyard and castle scenes, on
skeletons and ghostly apparitions that seemed to
move when the lenses and reflectors behind lan-
terna magica slides were pushed forward or back-
425
 ward and screens agitated. A hundred years later
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
similar apparitions could be seen in the pioneer-
ing fantasy-films of the conjurer Georges Méliès:
devils (usually played by Méliès himself) were
ubiquitous, bodies turned into skeletons, selenites
frightened travellers to the moon, in Bluebeard’s
Chamber a row of well-dressed ladies appeared to
be hanging from hooks, a living head seemed to
be blown up with a pump and finally to explode,
a seven-headed hydra writhed on the ground, and
devils cavorted with torches as Mephistopheles
made off with Dr. Faustus . . . The double expo-
sures, jump-cuts, and other technical tricks which
Méliès played with the shots he had taken from a
fixed position corresponding to a fixed seat in the
stalls of a theatre—these amused rather than
frightened their audiences, and, in the end,
wearied them sufficiently to ensure Méliès’s
bankruptcy. What audiences failed to derive from
Méliès’s delightful fantasies were sensations of
safely terrifying shock: the kind of shock that the
Lumière brothers provided when they photo-
graphed a train pulling into a station head-on, so
that it seemed about to hurtle out of the screen
on to the spectators in the cinema; or the kind of
shock provided in 1895 by Alfred Clark’s The
Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, where interrupted
camera-cranking and the substitution of a dummy
gave startled spectators the illusion that they were
seeing a human head being chopped off on the
executioner’s block; or that purveyed by Edwin S.
Porter, when he introduced into The Great Train
Robbery (1903) a close-up in which a bandit
pointed his gun directly at the audience. Méliès’s
fantasy, Clark’s intimate view of extreme situa-
tions, and the Lumières’ as well as Porter’s appar-
ent assaults on the audience were all to become
important ingredients in the cinematic tale of ter-
ror.
This genre began to define itself in the first
decade of the twentieth century when the Selig
Polyscope Company brought out a brief adapta-
tion of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1908); the Danish
Nordisk Company followed suit with an adapta-
tion of the same tale (1909) and with two ‘prema-
ture burial’ films entitled The Necklace of the Dead
(1910) and Ghosts of the Vault (1911). The Edison
Company was first in the field with an adaptation
of Frankenstein (1910), which was followed by
three further adaptations of Jekyll and Hyde—
including one produced by ‘Uncle’ Carl Laemmle,
whose Universal Studios were to corner the market
for stories of this kind in a way equalled only by
Hammer Films during their period of gory glory.
These early productions, together with Griffith’s
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The Avenging Conscience, a cento from the works of
Poe first shown in 1915, and Maurice Tourneur’s
Trilby (also 1915), which introduced the figure of
the demonic hypnotist long before Krauss, Klein-
Rogge, and Wegener made it their own, are the
beginnings of a wave whose crest is reached in the
silent German cinema, from The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari and Richard Oswald’s terror-compendium
Uncanny Tales (both 1919) to Galeen’s Alraune
(1928); in the grotesque creations of Lon Chaney
in the U.S.A., from The Miracle Man (1919) to The
Unholy Three (1930); in the films of other nations
from Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage
(1920) and Carl Dreyer’s Leaves from Satan’s Book
(1921) to Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness
of 1926 and Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of
Usher of 1928. On the last-named film Epstein’s
assistant was Luis Buñuel, whose collaboration
with Dali on An Andalusian Dog in the same year
laced surrealism with violent elements that re-
called the tale of terror. The setting for all this
was, of course, the First World War, its anticipa-
tory rumbles, and the social and political upheav-
als that followed in its wake.
A second wave of terror-films emanated from
the U.S.A. almost immediately after the coming of
sound—Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), and
White Zombie (1932) were all made in Carl Laem-
mle’s Universal Studios, where German influences
proved particularly powerful. Key figures in the
dissemination of that influence were the director
Paul Leni and the director/cameraman Karl Fre-
und. The peak of this wave was reached with the
masterly King Kong of 1933; it rolled on, with ap-
parent vigour but slowly diminishing force, until
it receded in mechanical compilations and parody
towards the beginning of the Second World War.
The background here is clearly the Depression in
the U.S.A. and its worldwide repercussions.
The next wave comes on, against the dark sky
of the Second World War and what led up to it,
with a curiously muted roar. The dominant figure
is the producer Val Lewton, whose modestly
budgeted films, from Cat People (1942) to Bedlam
(1946), tried to civilize the horror-movie into
subtler evocations of terror—evocations that made
the audience supply a good deal of what the
screen only suggests. Arthur Lubin’s remake of
The Phantom of the Opera (1943) also toned down
considerably the shocks of the original (how feeble
Claude Rains’s make-up looks when compared
with Chaney’s in the same role!); and the talkative
British movies about ghostly apparitions that
belong to an afterlife but set this world to rights,
Thunder Rock (1942), for instance, or The Halfway
House (1944), were likely to scare only the most
susceptible. This cycle ended, however, with one
of the universally acknowledged classics of the
cinematic tale of terror: Dead of Night, directed by
Alberto Cavalcanti, Robert Hamer, and others in
1945. In assessing the impact of Lewis Allen’s The
Uninvited (1944) and Dead of Night, one has to
remember that before these tales of supernatural
happenings ghosts appearing on the screen tended
to be garrulous moralizers, as in The Halfway
House, or were played for comedy, as in Clair’s The
Ghost Goes West (1935), or were rationally ex-
plained away, as in The Ghost Breakers (1940). In
the history of the sound-film it was The Uninvited
and Dead of Night which signalled the confluence
of the ghost-story properly so called with the tale
of terror.
The time had now come for a fourth wave,
stirred up by the reverberations of the rockets that
had terrorized England during the last days of the
Second World War, and the beginning of space
exploration. From the outset, from the earliest
Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde films, the cin-
ematic tale of terror had shaded over into science
fiction; their coincidence now increased as George
Pal’s Destination Moon (1950) latched on to Fritz
Lang’s pioneering Woman in the Moon (1924) and
pointed forward to Christian Nyby’s (and Howard
Hawks’s!) The Thing from Another World (1951) as
well as to the peak of this whole sub-genre in the
1950s: Don Siegel’s The Invasion of the Body Snatch-
ers (1956). Siegel’s title, suggested by that of Jack
Finney’s novel and imposed on him by the front
office, bespeaks another interesting continuity—
for it recalls, deliberately, the restrained exercise in
terror which Val Lewton and Philip MacDonald
had adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson, and
which Robert Wise had directed, under the title
The Body Snatcher, in 1945. Television now not
only rivalled but fed the cinema: a process dra-
matically demonstrated by the small British firm
Hammer Films, whose first post-war success with
the public came with their 1955 production of
The Quatermass Experiment, based on a science-
fiction thriller in serial form which had kept the
BBC’s audience in breathless suspense for several
weeks.
A great deal has been written about the
science-fiction films that populated the screens in
the fifties and sixties, and from this general discus-
sion five main thematic categories have emerged:
(i) Invasion from outer space:
Works embodying the neurosis of the Cold
War, like The Thing from Another World, belong to
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this category, as do The Invasion of the Body Snatch-
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
ers and countless films in which earthmen face
the task of destroying some Bug-Eyed Monster or
other undesirable alien. Soon, however, significant
variants began to appear, showing different rela-
tions between earthmen and visitors from beyond.
In Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, made
as early as 1951, the ‘invader’ comes, not to
destroy, but to warn men against their self-
destructive course. From this two developments
were possible: towards a film like Nicholas Roeg’s
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), where the visi-
tor from beyond is enfeebled and corrupted by
the commercial civilization into which he comes;
and towards one like Steven Spielberg’s Close
Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), where plainly
benevolent visitors are received with an almost
religious veneration and awe.
(ii) Monsters from our own earth and
seas:
An atomic test or accident rouses The Beast
from 20 000 Fathoms (Eugene Lourie, 1953),
Godzilla (Inoshiro Honda, 1956), or some other
prehistoric giant from his slumbers, or brings
about mutations (the giant ants, for instance, in
Gordon Douglas’s Them, 1954) which then go on
the rampage. The hero of Them, the ultimate
conqueror of the mutants, is an F.B.I. man haunted
by fears of atomic explosion and subversion by an
enemy within—a fact whose connection with
American anxieties of the 1950s has not escaped
film historians and commentators. Beings belong-
ing to an earlier stage of evolution can also be
discovered, and dangerously aroused, by expedi-
tions into unknown territories, as films deriving
ultimately from Conan Doyle’s The Lost World
showed frequently and impressively. King Kong
had belonged to that tribe in the 1930s; in the fif-
ties his worthiest successor was Jack Arnold’s
Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). But
monsters need not be discovered; they can also be
made, like the radioactive children created by an
unholy alliance of scientists and politicians in
Joseph Losey’s The Damned (1961). And if Lourie’s
Beast from 20 000 Fathoms still had to fall victim
to the ‘search it out and destroy it’ philosophy of
so many ‘monster’ films, his successors in Gorgo,
made by the same director in 1960, were allowed
to return to their own element in peace. In the
seven years between these two films ecology
concerns and the Vietnam War had done much to
throw doubt on the morality and wisdom of
destroying alien modes of life that seem to
threaten us.
427
 (iii) Atomic catastrophe and after:
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC Characteristic works in this category are Stan-
ley Kramer’s film of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach
(1959), which depicts a dying world after a disas-
trous atomic war; Franklin Shaffner’s Planet of the
Apes (1968), in which we see a group of men
preserved by chance fighting for survival in a
society of monkeys that have taken over the earth;
and Boris Sagal’s The Omega Man (1971), which
portrays another battle for survival after a cata-
clysm, this time against post-atomic mutants.
(iv) The journey to the stars:
This extension of the imaginary voyages of Ju-
les Verne has many variants, from George Pal’s
Destination Moon to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A
Space Odyssey (1968). Such works may include
intergalactic battles, whose apogee comes in the
naïve but technologically wondrous Star Wars
(George Lucas, 1977), with its simple-minded hero
fighting for good against evil much as Flash Gor-
don used to do in the old serials. Star Wars and its
imitations have been seen, by several social com-
mentators, as a reflection of the early Carter era,
with its post-Watergate longings for clarity, sim-
plicity, moral perspicuity, and a revival of the old
frontier virtues.
(v) The tyrannous future:
A multitude of films show us governments
that forbid books (Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, 1966)
or forbid natural expressions of the human affec-
tions (Lucas’s THX 1138, 1970) or heighten in
various ways what are seen as undesirable features
of our technological civilization (Godard’s Al-
phaville, 1965). If the ultimate inspiration behind
star-journeys, or journeys into the human interior
like Richard Fleischer’s Fantastic Voyage (1966), is
Jules Verne, the inspiration behind ‘tyrannous
future’ films are the dystopias of Aldous Huxley
and George Orwell. Most frightening of all is the
(near) future depicted in Joseph Sargent’s The
Forbin Project (1969), in which super-computers
reveal ‘ambitions’ that outrun and outwit those of
their makers and would-be controllers, and come
to rule the world without human interference.
The anxieties which are mirrored in science-
fiction films from the U.S.A. are connected, in
more obvious ways than those of the horror-
movies, with socio-political anxieties: fears of
invasion during the Korean War and the Cuban
missile crisis, fears of being ‘taken over’ mentally
and spiritually during the McCarthy era, a com-
pound of fear and uneasy conscience during the
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Vietnam War, dread of brainwashing, genetic
engineering, computerized policing, and bacterio-
logical warfare, as well as growing ecological fears
connected with atomic power, aggressive defolia-
tion techniques, various kinds of man-made pol-
lution, the growth of populations, and the pen-
etration of outer space by more and more man-
made objects. Fairy-tales like Star Wars would
appear on this grid as an escapist reaction against
the serious or bitterly satirical symbolization of
this kind of anxiety. Even Star Wars has plain and
obvious links with the horror-movie—one remem-
bers the galactic bar with its assorted monsters,
supplied by a London firm called Uglies Limited;
but entertaining films of this nature have little in
common with such serious projections of the
plight of man trying to cope with his own technol-
ogy as Stanislav Lem’s Solaris, memorably filmed
by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1971.
It was, in fact, their venture into science fic-
tion laced with horror which encouraged Ham-
mer Films to believe that their public was ready
for a new treatment of the old Universal favou-
rites; a treatment which would take account of
the possibilities opened up by larger screens, bet-
ter colour processes, and greater permissiveness in
the depiction of violence and sexual activities. The
Curse of Frankenstein, made in 1957, proved them
right: and so they started a fifth wave of terror-
movies which bore with it not only Hammer’s
own vampire-, zombie-, and mad-scientist-films,
but also films on similar themes from Italy, France,
Germany, Japan, and—above all—Latin America,
where there had always been a keen interest in
such things; an interest sufficiently translatable
into commercial terms to induce Universal to ac-
company their Dracula of 1931 with a Spanish-
speaking version of the same film, shot on the
same sets but employing different actors. Japan,
indeed, which had evolved a marvellous cinematic
tradition of cinematic ghost-stories, culminating
in two crucial episodes of Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Mo-
nogatari (1953) and in Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1964),
produced, with Shindo’s Onibaba (1964), the most
horrifying unmasking scene since Mystery of the
Wax Museum (1933), and all but cornered the
market in powerful monsters with Gojira (usually
known as ‘Godzilla’ in the West) and his manifold
progeny from 1955 onwards. Unlike the proto-
type, however, from which they derived—Lourie’s
The Beast from 20 000 Fathoms—the monsters in
Japanese movies could occasionally be helpful;
they could become man’s allies in his fight against
technological destruction and dessication. The
Swedish cinema, in the meantime, through the
films of Ingmar Bergman, showed the world what
psychologically meaningful use could be made of
the iconography the terror-film had evolved since
the days of the silent German classics. There is,
beyond doubt, a straight line running from
Wiene’s Caligari over Lang’s Destiny (or Tired
Death, 1921) and Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul (1926) to
the terror, dream, and fantasy sequences of Saw-
dust and Tinsel (1953), The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild
Strawberries (1957), The Face (or The Magician,
1958), and Hour of the Wolf (1967). The Hour of the
Wolf pays a self-conscious tribute to that German
inspiration by means of characters who bear
names like Kreisler and Lindhorst; names familiar
from the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann which had
proved such a powerful influence on the early Ger-
man film-makers. Even Bergman’s masterpiece Per-
sona (1966) can be, and has been, seen as a series
of variations on the vampire and Doppelgänger
themes of the terror-film and the literary tales that
preceded it.
While Hammer were reviving the Universal
monsters in their own way, American Interna-
tional Pictures began a cycle whose appreciation
was almost entirely tongue-in-cheek—a perfect
example of ‘camp’ manufacture and reception of
the iconography of terror. The first film in this
series bore the (now notorious) title I Was A Teen-
age Werewolf (1957); it purported to show how a
college student acquired bestial form through an
experiment that went wrong. The absurdity of
plot and acting, and the relentless pop music that
filled the sound-track, gave various kinds of
pleasure to young audiences and encouraged the
film-makers to follow this pilot movie with I Was
A Teenage Frankenstein, and with Teenage Monster
and Teenage Zombie creations that were as awful to
listen to as they were to see. Part of the profits
from this Teenage cycle went into the financing of
a more memorable series of films based, rather
loosely, on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. The first
of these was The Fall of the House of Usher (1960),
directed, like most of those that were to follow, by
Roger Corman, written for the screen by Richard
Matheson, photographed by Floyd Crosby, imagi-
natively designed by Daniel Haller, and starring
Vincent Price. While many of these low-budget
films were meant to be taken straight, a series of
deliberate spoofs were interspersed with them: The
Raven, for instance, directed by Corman in 1963
and bringing together Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre,
and Vincent Price, and The Comedy of Terrors,
directed in the same year by Jacques Tourneur.
As I write this, early in 1978, I feel myself
borne along by yet another wave of terror-films, a
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wave whose crest is formed by what is frequently
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
called ‘meat’ or ‘road accident’ movies—films like
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), which
provide shock through the maximum exhibition
of flesh in the process of being mangled and blood
in the process of being spilt (all simulated, of
course, as one must hasten to add in view of some
disturbing recent developments); by sensationalist
marriages of terror-film and science-fiction idioms,
as in Donald Cammell’s The Demon Seed (1977),
which has Julie Christie raped by a computer; and
by films of demonic possession, destructive paran-
ormal faculties, and eerie reincarnations repre-
sented by such works as Friedkin’s The Exorcist
(1973), de Palma’s Carrie (1976), Frankenheimer’s
The Heretic (1977), and Skolimowski’s The Shout
(1978). Particularly characteristic of our time are
suggestions, in American films of the post-
Watergate era, from The Werewolf of Washington
(1973) to The Omen (1976), as well as in some Brit-
ish films, that if we want to look for demons,
monsters, and devil-worshippers, we shall be most
likely to find them in the offices of those to whom
the destinies of nations have been entrusted. The
crest of this wave seems to have been passed, if
one may judge by the uninventiveness of the
imitations that are now about; but plentiful sup-
ply suggests that the demand continues.
It must not be forgotten, by those who trace
the history of the terror-film in this linear way,
that no development is ever as neat as the histo-
rian would have it; that, at a given period, older
types and models may exist alongside more recent
ones. Mexican terror-films, for instance, as Carlos
Clarens and others have reminded us, managed to
perpetuate the Browning-Lugosi type with all
seriousness into a time in which other countries
saw this merely as a subject for parody, children’s
amusement, or nostalgic recollection.
Three characteristic groups have been isolated
in the most recent history of the terror-film:
Charles Derry, in his book Dark Dreams, describes
them as centring, respectively, on ‘horror of
personality’, ‘horror of Armageddon’, and ‘horror
of the demonic’. In the first, the monster or
monsters at the heart of the film resemble you
and me rather than Frankenstein’s creature, or
King Kong, or Godzilla—but owing to some kink
in their psychic make-up, or some pressure felt as
intolerable, these beings perform the dreadful acts
we read about in the newspapers when we absorb
our daily ration of rapes, mutilations, and sadistic
killings. The key work here is Hitchcock’s Psycho,
released in 1960; but a year later Robert Aldrich’s
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? popularized that
429
 characteristic and particularly unpleasant variant
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
which has become known as the ‘menopausal
murder story’. Ageing actresses are engaged to
perform gory mayhem or be subjected to gro-
tesque tortures not only in Baby Jane, but also in
Strait Jacket (1964), Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte
(1965), Fanatic (1965), and Whatever Happened to
Aunt Alice? (1969). In such works the line that
divides exploration from exploitation is unmistak-
ably crossed.
The second or ‘Armageddon’ group dwells on
large-scale rather than individual destruction,
either performed or threatened: again our newspa-
pers, ever since the dropping of the first atom
bomb, have constantly fed that existential anxiety.
Among the key works are not only the science-
fiction films already discussed above, but also
Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and, more recently,
Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1978), an intelligent
Australian film which shows civilized man seek-
ing a better understanding of nature through
contact with an aboriginal culture—but not until
his own culture has upset nature’s balance with
apocalyptic results. As for Derry’s last category,
the demonic: our newspapers have not lacked, in
recent times, graphic accounts of satanic rites,
witchcraft, and exorcisms in a world whose
religious sense has sought other outlets than the
traditional modes of worshipping God. Key works
in the group of films which reflect this state of af-
fairs are Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s austere black-and-
white transportation of the ‘Devils of Loudon’
story into seventeenth-century Poland under the
title Mother Joan of the Angels (1961) and that film’s
more garish and more popular successors in the
English-speaking world: Ken Russell’s The Devils
(1970) and Friedkin’s The Exorcist.
Two things deserve to be noticed here. Firstly,
although Derry has correctly described dominant
trends, and has given many well-chosen instances
of the different ways in which the themes he
isolates have been treated in recent years, the
themes themselves are not new, either in the
cinema or in literature. All of them, in fact, had
played some part in the German cinema of the
twenties: ‘horror of personality’ in The Student of
Prague, a man-made Armageddon in the flood
sequences of Lang’s Metropolis, demonic posses-
sion in Caligari. Secondly, in two of the three
cycles a key work comes from the cameras of Al-
fred Hitchcock, best known as a maker of
suspense-thrillers not usually thought of as horror-
movies. This demonstrates the fluidity of genres
(what would the ‘horror of personality’ film be
without the film noir, or the ‘Armageddon’ film
430 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
without science fiction?); suggests that a genre
can be powerfully affected by the work of eminent
auteurs even if these are not primarily working in
that genre; and reminds us once again that though
the horror-movie or fantastic terror-film exists to
scare us in delightful ways, it does not have a
monopoly of terror-sequences or terror-themes. It
should also turn our thoughts, once again, towards
Germany; for Hitchcock worked at the UFA studios
in the twenties and learnt a good deal from the
German terror-film. ‘The Lodger’, Hitchcock said to
François Truffaut, ‘is the first picture possibly af-
fected by my period in Germany.’ Lang would
seem to have been a particularly powerful influ-
ence. It may be regarded as a kind of homage that
a film made by Hitchcock for Gainsborough
Pictures in 1926 starred Bernhard Goetzke, who
had portrayed Death in Lang’s Destiny or Tired
Death (a film the young Hitchcock particularly
admired), and that two films he made for
Gaumont British in the early thirties prominently
featured Lang’s latest terror-star, Peter Lorre, the
psychopathic murderer of M—a work that had
managed to transplant the Romantic fantasies of
the early German cinema, and its central Doppel-
gänger image, into a realistic setting and an almost
documentary story-line.
The film-makers who brought about the re-
vival of the German cinema after the Second
World War have, on the whole, trodden paths
remote from those of Wiene and the early Mur-
nau. There are continuities, however. Peter Lorre
returned to Germany for a while to direct, and
star in, The Lost One (1951), which made the
psychopathic killer he had portrayed in earlier
films a homicidal Nazi scientist. Fritz Lang re-
turned to project his master criminal Mabuse into
the world of electronic surveillance (The Thousand
Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, 1960). The atmosphere of
mystery and terror characteristic of the Weimar
cinema has been to some degree preserved in a
large number of films based on the works of Edgar
Wallace; the actor Klaus Kinski has added to the
cinematic repertoire a notable gallery of madmen,
paranoiacs, sadistic killers, and drug addicts which
recalls the Weimar period in its intensity and
demonic power; Rainer Werner Fassbinder has
been able to introduce Gothic-expressionistic ele-
ments into such films as Chinese Roulette (1976)
with its monomaniac characters, its oppressive
house whose obtrusive furnishings imprison the
characters in geometric patterns, its sinister
crippled child at the centre of the intrigue. The
most talented of the younger directors, Werner
Herzog, has shown an interest in unusual states of
mind and soul that even led to an experiment,
Heart of Glass (1976), in which the whole cast was
filmed while under hypnosis. Herzog’s Even
Dwarves Started Small (1970) may be seen, in part,
as an ironic modern variation on Tod Browning’s
Freaks (1932). For the plot of his claustrophobic
Signs of Life (1967), Herzog went to a tale by the
Romantic writer Achim von Arnim, whose evoca-
tions of terror Heine had rated above those of
Hoffmann himself. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
(1974) is dedicated to Lotte Eisner, the chronicler
of the ‘Haunted Screen’ of the early German
cinema and author of the standard work on Mur-
nau; and the conjunction of Herzog and Klaus
Kinski, thrillingly exhibited in Aguirre, Wrath of
God (1972), inevitably pointed towards Murnau
country—not least because Kinski had shown his
mettle as a traditional horror-actor by his trium-
phant assumption of the part of Renfield in Jesus
Franco’s Count Dracula of 1970. Writing in Écran
in 1975, Herzog characteristically said of his Agu-
irre: ‘This film, I think, is not really a narrative of
actual happenings or a portrait of actual people.
At any level it is a film about what lies behind
landscapes, faces, situations and words.’ It comes
as no surprise, therefore, to find Herzog and Kin-
ski collaborating on a version of Nosferatu (released
in 1979) which plays a respectful game of theme
and variations with Murnau’s famous film of the
same name, first shown in 1922.
Herzog’s deep respect for the Weimar cinema,
and his determination to make its traditions valid
for his own contemporaries, are shared by Hans-
Jürgen Syberberg, whose trilogy of films on the
lives of Karl May, Ludwig II of Bavaria, and Hitler
(completed in 1978) introduces images from Cali-
gari and other German movies of the same period;
and by H. W. Geissendörfer, whose Jonathan:
Vampires Do Not Die (1970) pays tribute to Mur-
nau along with Bram Stoker. Despite its technical
accomplishment and its memorable political
overtones and implications, however, Geissendör-
fer’s film had so little success at its first release
that the exhibitors refused to handle it further un-
less scenes of explicit sex and violence were spliced
in—an inverted form of censorship which has
been becoming more and more common since
nude shots of Brigitte Bardot were inserted into
Godard’s Contempt (Le Mépris, 1963) at the behest
of investors anxious to secure better returns.
A host of other German directors of the most
recent past have tried their hand at the evocation
of Murnauesque terrors: Niklaus Schilling, for
instance, whose Shades of Night, first shown in the
early seventies, to be followed by Expulsion from
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Paradise (1977) and Rhinegold (1978), suggested
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
the sinister, demonic aspects of the German
landscape with considerable flair; while Johannes
Schaaf, whose Dream City, also released in the early
seventies, successfully adapted to the modern
screen motifs from Alfred Kubin’s uncanny novel
The Other Side (1909). The Tenderness of Wolves
(1973), made by Uli Lommel with the co-
operation of the ubiquitous Rainer Werner Fass-
binder, is often spoken of as a ‘vampire’-film; it
turns out, however, to be a study of a homosexual
murderer, well played by Kurt Raab; its graphic
presentation of killings and mutilations—Raab is
even shown licking blood off a table—deliberately
distances it from Fritz Lang’s M, which had dealt
with a related theme in 1931. Lang had only sug-
gested the actual murders through shots of aban-
doned balloons, sweets, empty stair-wells, and so
on, and had explained the philosophy behind his
procedures in words very pertinent to the theme
of this book:
If I could show what is most horrible for me, it
may not be horrible for somebody else. Everybody
in the audience—even the one who doesn’t dare
allow himself to understand what really happened
to that poor child—has a horrible feeling that runs
cold over his back. But everybody has a different
feeling, because everybody imagines the most hor-
rible thing that could happen to her. And that is
something I could not have achieved by showing
only one possibility—say, that he tears open the
child, cuts her open. Now, in this way, I force the
audience to become a collaborator of mine; by
suggesting something I achieve a greater impres-
sion, a greater involvement, than by showing
it . . .
(Bogdanovich, 1967, pp. 86-7)
Lang here builds on one of the most important
facts about the cinema-experience: that the specta-
tor is never just the passive recipient of a message,
but that he helps, in varying degrees, to create the
experience he is enjoying. What the film-maker
has to do is activate the imaginations that reach
out to meet his own. Modern audiences, unfortu-
nately, have acquired a craving for the literal and
explicit which makes such artistic restraint less
and less profitable in the competition for shrink-
ing screen space.
One vitally important factor determining the
state of the market for modern films is, of course,
the competition and the patronage of television.
In recent years the small screen has not only
introduced older terror-films to a new generation
of viewers, whose response is significantly condi-
tioned by the domestic setting in which they—
unlike cinema-goers—watch such works, but has
also evolved its own variations. Examples are
431
 legion; they range from ghost-stories based on the
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
tales of M. R. James or specially written by Robert
Muller and others to TV movies like Dan Curtis’s
The Night Stalker (1971) and its sequel The Night
Strangler (1972), scripted by Richard Matheson,
which wittily and frighteningly revived the
vampire- and rejuvenation-tales of the terror-
cinema. The continuities between such works and
the old ‘B’ movies are not only thematic: they are
made under similar restraints of money, location,
and shooting-time, though flexible and sophisti-
cated technical equipment, specially adapted to
the lower definition of the TV screen, is apt to
disguise this. To discuss the relation between film
and television is not part of this book’s purpose;
but it must mention, at least in passing, the effect
that the rediscovery of avant-garde devices—
‘violently clashing images, unusual angles of vi-
sion, frozen frames, shooting through gauze, nega-
tive prints etc.’—by the makers of TV commercials
has had on the iconography, the rhetoric, and the
tempo of terror-films all over the world. ‘Most of
us’, Pauline Kael has justly said, ‘are now so
conditioned by the quick cutting and free associa-
tion of ideas in TV commercials that we think
faster than feature-length movies can move. We
understand cinematic shorthand’ (Toeplitz, 1974,
pp. 240, 242).
Let us now retrace our steps to look at a
sequence from one of the undoubted classics of
the terror-film—a seminal work of the cinema, a
work that stands at a point to which many roads
lead and from which many roads flow; a work,
moreover, from which our culture has derived one
of its most powerful, most easily recognizable, and
most influential, visual images. That work is James
Whale’s Frankenstein of 1931.
By its very title this film places itself in a tradi-
tion which looks beyond the cinema: a tradition
going back to an evening in the Villa Deodati in
1816 at which translations from German ghost-
stories were read aloud, and to a day in 1818 when
Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus was
launched on to a receptive public. That the major-
ity of those lured into the cinema by the advertis-
ing campaign which preceded the film’s release
would not be aware of this provenance does not
matter—though James Whale felt strongly enough
about it to bring Mary Shelley, Shelley, and Byron
into the rather embarrassing prologue which
introduced a sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, in
1935. In Whale’s original Frankenstein enough
survives of the work that has been adapted to re-
evoke the literary climate of an age in which a
German-sounding name in the title of a work at
432
once brought suggestions of uncanny terrors; to
suggest something of the cultural debates and
heart-searchings that went on in the circle around
Shelley and the Godwin family, with its passion-
ate concern about the place of the natural sciences
in the modern world, the nature of families, the
acquisition of language, and the problems of
moral choice; and to make probable that the
central incident did indeed come to its author (as
Mary Shelley assured her readers it did) in a
dream. Between the elaborately structured and
talkative novel—in which even the monster learns
to speak learnedly and at length about Milton,
Goethe, and Volney—and the straightforward
story-line of the film, a large number of stage
adaptations interposed themselves: Peake’s ver-
sion, for instance, which introduced a supersti-
tious servant called Fritz and deprived the monster
of speech (T. P. Cooke had only grunted in that
part); or, a century later, the version of Peggy We-
bling, in which Victor Frankenstein and his friend
Henry Clerval interchanged their first names, and
which also brought the monster face to face with
a crippled girl, confronted him amorously with
Frankenstein’s betrothed, and made him en-
tranced by the sun when he first beheld it. These
features were taken over, in slightly varied form,
by the writers of the scenario and shooting-script,
who included Robert Florey, Garret Fort, and Fran-
cis E. Faragoh. They added many new motifs,
however: it was Florey, for instance, who sug-
gested the monster’s final confrontation with his
maker in a wooden flour-mill, as well as the motif
of the ‘criminal brain’ inserted, through human
error and muddle, into the poor monster’s skull.
Despite all these additions, and despite the many
omissions and simplifications necessary for the
translation of the signifiers of written or printed
texts into the iconic signs of the sound-film, a
good deal of Mary Shelley’s original conception
remains: not least those associations which she
sought to evoke by her allusion to the Prometheus
myth in her sub-title. Whale’s feelings that his
film enshrined a myth—an ultimately religious
myth, like that of Prometheus—is suggested by
the famous answer he gave to members of his
team who wanted a central scene to end in a dif-
ferent way. ‘No’, he said, ‘it has to be like that;
you see, it’s all part of the ritual.’
The circle around Shelley took pride in the
scope of man’s intellect revealed in science as well
as in poetry; but as Mary Shelley’s novel showed,
it was no stranger to worries about the ultimate
effects of scientific endeavour and achievement if
these outstripped social sympathies, responsibil-
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ity, and imagination. Such worries had intensified
in the century that elapsed between the novel and
the film—a film which bears as distinct and
complex a relation to the time within which it
was conceived, the early thirties of our century, as
did the novel to the time of Godwin, Shelley, and
Erasmus Darwin. Part of a cycle of cinematic tales
of terror conceived and executed in the Depres-
sion years in the U.S.A., James Whale’s Franken-
stein deals in terrors that have an underground
relation to the frightening economic and social
world in which they took shape: a world in which
manipulations of the stock-market had recoiled
on the manipulators; in which human creatures
seemed to be abandoned by those who had called
them into being and those who might have been
thought responsible for their welfare; in which
men were prevented from being men, from feel-
ing themselves full and equal members of society,
and were thereby filled with destructive rages such
as those the poor monster gives way to after his
taunting by the sadistic hunchback who is just a
little better off than the monster himself. Like
other films in this cycle, Frankenstein not only gave
expression to such resentments but also offered
escape from the burden they placed on the con-
sciousness, through delicious thrills, through
cathartic acts of violence and destruction, and
through scenes of baronial high life and ethnic
merry-making which have worn least well in a
film that still has power to excite a modern audi-
ence.
One of the charges that have been brought
against Whale’s film is that it betrays its genre,
and lets down the side of ever-advancing cin-
ematic art, by failing to make use of the rich
language of camera angle, camera movement, and
editing which the great pioneers—Griffith, Eisen-
stein, Murnau—had evolved by the time James
Whale came to make his celebrated movie. Even
Richard Annobile, who chose this work above all
others to open his Film Classics series, makes a
complaint of this kind. One has only to look at
the film’s opening sequence, however, to convince
oneself that this charge is as mistaken as similar
charges brought against The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
That opening sequence does three things superbly
well:
(i) placing the film which is to come within not
a literary but a cinematic tradition, already well
established despite the comparative newness of
film art;
(ii) presenting the forces which will be set clash-
ing in the unfolding story through predomi-
nantly visual, cinematic means, without under-
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lining by the portentous mood-music that spoils
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so many Hollywood films;
(iii) introducing objects, characters, and actions
which are essential elements of the unfolding
story but which may also be seen to have sym-
bolic significance. Several of them, in fact,
become recurrent motifs, leitmotifs, when they
are recalled in later shots and sequences.
Let us look for a moment at the way all this is
done. The film begins with a prologue, spoken by
Edward Van Sloan in a pretence of stepping in
front of a theatre curtain. This prologue links itself
directly and deliberately to the original epilogue
(now cut from most copies in circulation) of Tod
Browning’s Dracula, spoken by the same actor in a
very similar role; and the design behind the open-
ing credits which follow in Frankenstein, with its
two eyes emitting beams of light, recalls the play
made with Lugosi’s eyes in Dracula, where pin-
points of light had been directed on to them by
Tod Browning and his cameraman to make them
shine out hypnotically. Indeed, an early poster of
Frankenstein announces that Lugosi would play
the central part and includes a visual allusion to
his magnetic gaze. The ‘clawing hand’ motif
behind these same opening credits of Frankenstein
also refers us back to Dracula, and beyond that to
a whole clutch of horror-movies and horror-
comedies—culminating in Paul Leni’s The Cat and
the Canary (1927), a key work in the transition
from the fantastic cinema of Weimar Germany to
the American terror-film—in which this motif
played a thrilling part. No less surely, however,
does the design refer us forward—to the role
which staring eyes and clawing hands will play in
the early sequences of Frankenstein itself. Before
we come to them, however, another design ap-
pears behind the titles: a revolving collage of eyes,
which bears a striking and surely not accidental
relation to the famous collage of eyes in the false
Maria’s dance sequence of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
(1927). The shadowy demonic face that appears
behind these eyes has what was known in those
days as ‘the German look’; it recalls advertise-
ments for German films which concentrated on
the angular features of Conrad Veidt, or the
demonic apparition that materializes in Rabbi
Loew’s study in the conjuration scene of The Go-
lem: How it came into the World (1920). This is only
the first of several visual allusions, in Whale’s film,
to the German cinema of the macabre: the central
creation-scene embodies reminiscences of a similar
scene in Rotwang’s laboratory in Metropolis, while
The Golem is recalled, no less surely, by the impres-
sive staircase down which Dwight Frye scuttles in
433
 Frankenstein’s tower laboratory, and by the lake-
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
side confrontation of the monster and a little girl.
Like Rex Ingram in The Magician of 1926 (a film
which Whale would seem to have studied very
carefully indeed) and like Tod Browning and
Robert Florey, Whale was able to draw on German
traditions as well as on the American tradition of
the grotesque exemplified in the films of Lon
Chaney Senior.
It must be stressed, at this point, that the town
and countryside constructed for James Whale in
the Universal studios by Charles D. Hill and oth-
ers are much less stylized than the medieval Pra-
gue Hans Poelzig had built for Wegener and Ga-
leen in 1920. Jack C. Ellis (1979, p. 100) has
described Poelzig’s sets admirably: ‘The abstractly
fashioned medieval town, with its sharply angled
roofs and tilted chimney-pots, looks like twisted
gingerbread; there isn’t a straight line visible. A
gigantic gate dwarfs the human beings. Irregular
arches and inverted V’s predominate. The camera
frequently shoots through the archways, impos-
ing their strange shapes on the frame itself . . .’
Nevertheless, Whale’s film demonstrates that he is
quite consciously working in an established and
developing genre that includes the Scandinavian
and German along with the American cinema,
and that he is playing a significant game of theme
and variation. The iconography of his own film,
in its turn, influenced the developing genre indel-
ibly, and has been a source of inspiration and allu-
sion for a multitude of film-makers—though no
one has ever paid to it as moving and as meaning-
ful a tribute as Victor Erice, who in The Spirit of the
Beehive (1973) confronted a little girl growing up
in Franco’s Spain with Whale’s Frankenstein,
showed what a central part Karloff’s monster as-
sumed in her fantasies and dreams, and demon-
strated how it helped her to interpret and to come
to terms with her own world. . . .
Whale’s first Frankenstein film has its detrac-
tors—but there is one thing on which there is
almost universal agreement: the scenes in which
the monster appears must be reckoned among the
classics of the cinema. Here much of the credit
must again go to Whale; but he shares it, as every
director must, with his cameraman (Arthur
Edeson), with the special effects department
which set up the impressive laboratory-scene, with
the make-up designer Jack Pierce, and—above
all—with Boris Karloff. From the moment its hand
twitches into life while face and body are yet hid-
den beneath their shroud, Karloff’s monster is
unforgettable: nothing can ever quite efface the
thrill of watching the successive views Whale’s
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mobile camera allows us of the lumbering figure
first announced by the sound of its heavy foot-
steps: a medium-shot view from behind is fol-
lowed by one of head and shoulders as the mon-
ster turns around; only then are we given our first
look at those infinitely sad features in two close-
ups that fill the screen as no others will in the
course of the whole film. A hundred imitations
and parodies cannot dull the impact of the im-
ages created by Whale, Edeson, Pierce, and Karloff
when we see the monster raise his misshapen
hands towards the light from which he received
life, to have that light immediately shut out by
his creator and to be confronted with another
kind of light, the flaming torch wielded by Dwight
Frye’s malevolently hunched figure, the fire in
which the monster will ultimately find his death,
in mocking inversion of the Prometheus myth of
Mary Shelley’s sub-title; when we see Karloff’s
monster discover his own humanity by compar-
ing his hands with those of the little girl who
befriends him by the lake, and when we watch
him being taught the delights of play by this little
girl—how can one ever forget the radiant happi-
ness that illuminates and beautifies his charnel-
house features at this point? No later debasements,
in countless sequels, parodies, and exploitational
variations—not even Mel Brooks’s charmingly
conceived comedy Young Frankenstein (1974)—can
ever dispel the magic of that classic, wordless
performance.
Karloff’s performance was not without its
precedents, however. If his make-up in Franken-
stein occasionally reminds us of Cesare’s in Cali-
gari, his whole demeanour recalls even more forc-
ibly the animated clay-figure that Paul Wegener
had portrayed in the Golem films of 1914 and
1920. Here is a contemporary reaction to the first
Golem:
What makes the film worth discussing is only We-
gener’s embodiment of the Golem—the affecting
portrayal of a creature struggling out of mere exist-
ence towards some sentient connection with the
world, struggling to become a man . . . In lyrical
passages Wegener demonstrates possibilities of the
film which transcend those of the theatre: a mere
creature, he stands on the dream-breathing earth
and slowly lifts his arms in astonishment, in half-
conscious joy, in agitation—an image never to be
forgotten. This creature of inadequacy is sur-
rounded by an atmosphere of sadness: a melan-
choly sense of doomed efforts to reach the unat-
tainable, as if the animal kingdom had sent a
representative to mirror the human environment
in its soul; as if, on an enchanted midnight, the
gates of a felt beauty, a soul-suffused landscape,
 had been opened before the animal—but there it
stands, in perplexity and anguish, unable to grasp
what is before it; and the hour goes by.
(Die Schaubühne, xi, 1915, 225-7)
What Arnold Zweig here says of Wegener’s
Golem in 1915 he could have applied verbatim,
sixteen years later, to Frankenstein’s monster as
Boris Karloff played it. . . .
As everyone knows from seeing comedy-
thrillers in the cinema and watching The Munsters
or Monster Squad on television, terror and laughter
are near neighbours in our reaction to the iconog-
raphy of the cinematic tale of terror. We are here
in the presence of grotesque art, in which impulses
towards horrified recoil are stirred up at the same
time as impulses to laugh; these inhibit one
another and what results is a characteristically
complex response. The masters of this kind of
grotesque film have worked out all sort of devices
to prevent us from laughing at the wrong mo-
ments. They introduce figures specifically designed
as comic relief, to drain off our laughter, or induce
the sort of double-take which Ivan Butler has
described as characteristic of James Whale’s The
Old Dark House: the hideous apparition everyone
has been waiting for turns out to be a harmless-
looking little old man; but almost as soon as this
anti-climax has taken effect the camera focuses,
for a moment, on that little old man’s expression
when he thinks himself unobserved and freezes
laughter by making us realize, in a flash, that the
real horror is, indeed, here. Nor have the masters
of the macabre shown themselves averse to push-
ing their own effects towards the response of
laughter through controlled experiments in
parody. Paul Leni followed up the ‘Ivan the
Terrible’ and ‘Jack the Ripper’ episodes of Wax-
works with a classic comedy-thriller, The Cat and
the Canary; James Whale succeeded his serious and
dignified Frankenstein with the more tongue-in-
cheek Bride of Frankenstein, where the grotesquely
amusing element is most effectively concentrated
in Ernest Thesiger’s performance as Dr. Pretorius;
and the Polanski who made Repulsion (1965) and
Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is the same director who
also made the parodistic Dance of the Vampires
(1967)—a parody in which large portions, particu-
larly towards the end of the film, are played chill-
ingly ‘straight’.
With his usual virtuosity, Alfred Hitchcock has
memorably demonstrated the improbable affinity
of farce and terror at the opening of Vertigo (1958).
The hero of the film, played by James Stewart, is
discovered in that very position of peril at which
cinema-audiences had laughed again and again in
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the films of Harold Lloyd: clinging perilously to
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
the window-sill of a high building, while a city
street is held in focus far below him. The terror we
are made to share in that sequence is in no way
diminished—is, if anything, intensified—by our
recollection of such comedies as Safety Last.
Within the terror-film, however, the bravest
confrontation of the risible remains the central
figure of Murnau’s Nosferatu. The vampire’s huge
ears and claws, his long pointed nose, his rabbit
teeth, his jerky movements would seem to be
made for laughter; yet the power of the film’s
imagery is such that even modern audiences
watch, for the most part, in awed and thrilled
silence.
Comic and parodistic elements enter the vari-
ous terror-film cycles with increased force as they
near their end: one need think only of the se-
quence Caligari—Waxworks (with its parodistic
‘Haroun al Rashid’ episode)—The Cat and the Ca-
nary; or of the way in which the terrifying cre-
ations of the early thirties were made to encounter
Abbott and Costello, the Dead End Kids, the Ritz
Brothers, and Old Mother Riley; or of the fun
poked at Universal and Hammer films in Carry on
Screaming and What a Carve Up (1961), Flesh for
Frankenstein (1973) and Young Frankenstein. In each
case, however, such spoofs are accompanied and
succeeded by seriously meant exercises in terror as
a new cycle gets under way: the Universal cycle of
the early and mid-thirties, the Val Lewton cycle in
the forties, The Exorcist, The Omen, and Burnt Of-
ferings in the seventies.
The cyclic development of the terror-genre
which I have just sketched is accompanied by a
more linear, temporally more straightforward
development conditioned by the film-makers’
desire to test out various degrees of explicitness
and thresholds of acceptability. Early terror-films
showed monsters, but had perforce to be very
reticent in showing sexual activity and violence:
the only blood I can remember seeing in the
Dracula films from Universal is that which oozed
from Renfield’s finger when he had cut it ac-
cidentally, and such nuzzlings as were shown were
very restrained indeed. The Val Lewton cycle tried
even greater reticence, believing that no monster
actually shown can be as frightening as the
monster the audience will produce for itself if the
right suggestions are implanted by what it actu-
ally sees on the screen. Films like The Uninvited
and The Haunting operated on similar principles.
From the emergence of the Hammer horrors on,
however, films have tested their audience’s shock-
ability further and further: in the exhibition of
435

PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
ALFRED HITCHCOCK (1899-1980)
Universally acknowledged as “The Master of
Suspense,” British-born film director Hitch-
cock is renowned for a series of now classic
psychological thrillers that remain a constant
presence in the cultural landscape of the
moviegoer. Hitchcock created and perfected
his own genre of thriller, one which was by
turns romantic, comedic, and macabre.
Hitchcock’s first American film was a col-
laboration with producer David O. Selznick,
Rebecca (1940), based on the novel by
Daphne du Maurier and starring Joan Fon-
taine and Laurence Olivier. Sometimes cited
by Hitchcock as his personal favorite, Shadow
of a Doubt (1943), which starred Joseph Cot-
ten as a killer escaping detection by “visit-
ing” his adoring relatives, dramatized the ter-
rors that can lurk in the shadows of a
seemingly normal small town. It was this
penchant for perceiving the disturbance
underneath the surface of things that helped
Hitchcock’s movies to resonate so powerfully.
In Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958)
Hitchcock examines obsession under the
deceptive guise of a straightforward thriller.
In Rear Window the lead character, portrayed
by actor James Stewart, witnesses a murder
while engaging in his hobby of spying on his
neighbors. In Vertigo, a man (played by
Stewart) is tormented by a lookalike of his
deceased lover (both played by Kim Novak),
with whom he had had an illicit affair. Vertigo
has been praised for Hitchcock’s cinemato-
graphic artistry as well as Stewart’s grim,
haunted performance. The director’s first hor-
ror film, Psycho (1960), inspired by the Ed
Gein multiple murder case, has been analyzed
by numerous film historians and academics,
and is generally considered Hitchcock’s last
great film. The murder of the woman
(portrayed by Janet Leigh) in the shower has
been imitated in countless films since Psy-
cho’s release, and has become part of the
cinema’s iconography. The Birds (1963)—
based on a short story by Du Maurier—was
less highly regarded, but is considered a
durable and complex experiment in terror,
and a testament to Hitchcock’s technical
expertise.
436
straightforward and homosexual (especially
Lesbian) libidinous activity, in the showing of
blood and mutilations of all kinds, in the repul-
siveness of the monsters created by make-up
experts, in everything calculated to excite disgust
and even nausea, from the green vomit of The
Exorcist to the wriggling monsters emerging from
a man’s stomach by erupting through his skin in
David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1976). The fact that
evil is so often allowed to triumph at the end of
more recent films is as much connected with this
change in the tolerance threshold as with the
incidence of a darker, more pessimistic outlook on
life. We have come a long way from the days in
which Graham Greene could say, as he did in
1936, that ‘terror on the screen has always, alas!
to be tempered to the shorn lamb’.
Mass production, saturation advertising, and
exploitation of tried and proven formulas have
become ever more noticeable features of terror-
film manufacture. When Hammer had shown the
market for such things, companies all over the
world jumped on to the bandwagon and made
vampire-, monster-, and ‘resurrection’- films;
when The Exorcist made money, companies all
over the world brought out films that linked
demonic possession with heads spinning round
360° and graphically shown sores and vomiting.
In the process, convention tended to be degraded
to cliché, development to shameless imitation or
unimaginative ‘going one better’, terror to physi-
cal repulsion, and genre to formula. In such a situ-
ation, imaginative and original film-making tends
to become submerged by inferior exploitation-
products; one may trust to time, however, to win-
now the wheat from this mass of chaff.
As the history of the terror-film genre pro-
ceeds, directors frequently introduce allusions
calculated to place their films within that
genre—as when Eugene Lourie has the infant
monster of Gorgo transported past a London
cinema showing Hammer’s 1959 version of The
Mummy. At the same time the characters, themes,
images, lighting-patterns, and atmospheric ambi-
ence characteristic of the genre appear more and
more often in films that are not primarily terror-
films or horror-movies—films by directors with a
strong artistic purpose, like Buñuel, Bergman, and
Fellini, and also films by entertainers like Norman
Jewison, whose resurrectionscene in Fiddler on the
Roof (1974) makes an amusing parodistic use of
‘horror’ conventions. Has any terror-film after Nos-
feratu ever employed a more startling shock-cut
than that which occurs at the opening of David
Lean’s version of Great Expectations (1946) when
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Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho.
Magwitch, the convict, suddenly looms up among
the graves? Analysts of the Hollywood cinema in
particular have vied with one another in pointing
to the manifold uses distinguished directors have
made of horror-movie imagery. Here is Eric Rhode
on Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940):
Rebecca opens . . . with its camera edging forward
through a dank, leafy garden to a shrouded
country house called Manderley. In the past, such
evocations of the eerie—of entombed emotions
brought to light—had been the preserve of the
horror movie. Hollywood studios now applied it
to nearly every genre.
(Rhode, 1976, p. 385)
Here is Pauline Kael, on resemblances between
Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) and Karl Fre-
und’s Mad Love (1935):
. . . there was the Gothic atmosphere, and the
huge, dark rooms with lighted figures, and Peter
Lorre, bald, with a spoiled-baby face, looking
astoundingly like a miniature Orson Welles . . .
Not only is the large room with the fireplace at
Xanadu similar to Lorre’s domain as a mad doc-
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PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
tor, with similar lighting and similar placement of
figures, but Kane’s appearance and make-up in
some sequences might be a facsimile of Lor-
re’s . . .
(Kael, 1974, p. 64)
And here, lastly, is Richard Corliss on Wilder’s
Sunset Boulevard (1950)—a film which anticipated
the ‘menopausal murder story’ of the 1960s:
Sunset Boulevard is the definitive Hollywood hor-
ror movie. Practically everything about this final
Brackett-Wilder collaboration is ghoulish. The film
is narrated by a corpse that is waiting to be fished
out of a swimming pool. Most of it takes place in
an old dark house that opens its doors only to the
walking dead. The first time our doomed hero . . .
enters the house, he is mistaken for an undertaker.
Soon after, another corpse is buried—that of a pet
monkey, in a white coffin. Outside the house is
the swimming pool, at first filled only with rats,
and ‘the ghost of a tennis court.’ The only musi-
cal sound in the house is that of the wind, wheez-
ing through the broken pipes of a huge old organ.
The old man who occasionally plays it calls to
mind Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera—that
and other images of the Silent Era. The old man is
437
 Erich von Stroheim, playing himself as he plays
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
the organ, with intimations of melancholia,
absurdity and loss . . . Desmond-Swanson is
Dracula, or perhaps the Count’s older, forgotten
sister, condemned to relive a former life, sucking
blood from her victim . . .
(Corliss, 1975, pp. 147-8)
Analyses such as these serve to show up
vividly how the American cinema has used genre-
conventions to transcend genre while most seem-
ing to affirm it.
What we have just heard Rhode say of Rebecca
reminds us that it is not only specific characters
and specific images which migrate from the terror-
film into other genres. Whole feeling-patterns
reemerge in different context as the history of the
cinema proceeds along its rapid way. Take Robert
Sklar’s description, in Movie-Made America, of the
claustrophobia characteristic of the Hollywood
film noir, the psychological thriller of the 1940s:
The hallmark of the film noir is its sense of people
trapped—trapped in webs of paranoia and fear,
unable to tell guilt from innocence, true identity
from false. Its villains are attractive and sympa-
thetic, masking greed, misanthropy, malevolence.
Its heroes and heroines are weak, confused,
susceptible to false impressions. The environment
is murky and close, the setting vaguely oppressive.
In the end, evil is exposed, though often just
barely, and the survival of good remains troubled
and ambiguous.
(Sklar, 1978, p. 253)
That evokes admirably an atmosphere which
the film noir shares with many a studio-bound
horror-movie. Nor is the influence all one way,
from horror-movie to other kinds and genres.
What Citizen Kane may have taken from Mad Love
or Son of Kong it amply repaid with The Haunting,
in which Robert Wise applied to the ghost-story
the lessons he had learnt while cutting and edit-
ing Kane under Welles’s direction. The house that
turns out to be the most memorable character in
the film is Kane’s Xanadu transported into a New
England setting.
The development traced in this chapter has,
from the first, proceeded along international as
well as national lines. We saw macabre German
films influence Hollywood—where the most
distinguished of its directors and actors found
themselves at one time or another; in its turn
Hollywood influenced film-making in England,
France, Spain, and Italy; and just as an actor like
Conrad Veidt played important roles in England
and the U.S.A. as well as in his native Germany,
so, at a later date, would Christopher Lee, Barbara
Steele, and Boris Karloff turn up in Italian or
438
Hispanic terror-films as readily as in British or
American ones. With the growing sophistication
of post-synchronizing and dubbing techniques
the cinema is once again becoming as interna-
tional in its appeal as it was before the coming of
sound. It is obvious that audience reactions will
differ to some degree from country to country,
from region to region, just as expectations will
vary. Popular films will therefore try to work at
many levels, to appeal to many differing audi-
ences, while attempting, at the same time, to
establish conventions through which expectations
and responses may be standardized. Recent British
horror-movies have aimed, for instance, at an
international target audience aged between eigh-
teen and thirty; and in an interview with Edward
Buscombe one of their most popular stars, Peter
Cushing, has described their appeal by means of a
telling comparison:
Well, you see, for eighteen years these pictures
have been popular and the mass of people who go
to these pictures, it’s rather like those who buy
their favourite brand of chocolates; they know
that when they open the box they’ll find the
coconut creams and the truffles and that sort of
thing, and they know when they see this kind of
film they’ll get what they’re looking for. And so
they’re catered for by the scriptwriters.
(Buscombe, 1976, p. 23)
That pinpoints admirably the paradoxically
reassuring, familiar side of horror-movies, their
‘culinary’ or ‘confectionary’ qualities, as well as
one kind of feed-back between audiences and
movie-makers on which a profit-oriented industry
has to rely.
There is no lack of socially conscious com-
mentators who have spelt out for us what Peter
Cushing’s remarks imply: that the cinema is no
mere technology which can be used by artists of
varying kinds for their own purposes; that it is,
rather, a means of production and distribution
owned and to some extent controlled by entrepre-
neurs, ‘movie moguls’, tycoons, bankers, and—
increasingly—vast multinational companies. Vari-
ous mechanisms are, however, at work in
competitive societies like our own to ensure that
the cinema can never become a too easily manipu-
lated money-spinner or a wholly reliable instru-
ment of social control. True, the necessity of mak-
ing a profit by means of an expensive commodity
like the film will inevitably lead to questionable
‘public relations’ exercises, to the taking of easy
options, to truckling (at times) to what is least at-
tractive in the popular mood or the official ‘line’
of a given moment, to exploitation and over-
exploitation of what has proved attractive in the
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past. If the public has signified its approval of a
film called Psycho by flocking to the box-office in
great numbers, we may be sure that a whole series
of similar subjects will follow, under such titles as
Maniac, Paranoiac, Fanatic, or Hysteria. This in turn
will mean that the public’s appetite becomes
jaded—demanding either stronger and stronger
doses of the same sensations, or something alto-
gether new. To this demand the industry will
sometimes respond with gimmicks that soon lose
their attractiveness: 3-D effects, skeletons creaking
across the auditorium, ‘fear-flashers’, ‘horror-
horns’, cinema seats wired to give harmless
tingling shocks . . . In the end, however, it will
have to turn to creative film-makers, realizing that
it cannot rely on ‘safe’ recipes, that it needs fresh
ideas and forms which will appeal to many kinds
of audiences, will attract new viewers, and are
clearly beyond studio-hacks content to exploit
well-tried formulas. ‘Being entertained’, the
sociologist Herbert J. Gans has said, in a study of
the accommodations that take place between
directors, screen-writers, producers, financiers, and
various kinds of audience,
means, on the one hand, that people want to
satisfy various latent needs and predispositions,
and on the other hand, that they want to be
surprised with something new or different. Be-
cause people have these predispositions, their
choices follow some analyzable pattern. But while
there may be enough of a pattern to encourage
the movie makers to inferences about future
choices, there is never enough to provide reliable
predictions.
(Rosenberg and White, 1957, pp. 315-16)
Select Bibliography
Bogdanovich, P., The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, New York,
1963.
———, Fritz Lang in America, London, 1967.
Buscombe, E., Making ‘Legend of the Werewolf’, London,
1976.
Corliss, R., Talking Pictures. Screenwriters in the American Cin-
ema, New York, 1974 (Penguin edn., 1975).
Derry, C., Dark Dreams. A Psychological History of the Modern
Horror Film, London, 1977.
Kael, P., I Lost it at the Movies, New York, 1965.
———, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. New York, 1968.
———, and others, The Citizen Kane Book, Boston, 1971
(Paladin edn., 1974).
Rhode, E., Tower of Babel. Speculations on the Cinema,
London, 1966.
———, A History of the Cinema. From its Origins to 1970.
London, 1976.
Rosenberg, B., and White, D. M., (eds.), Mass Culture. The
Popular Arts in America, New York, 1957.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Sklar, R., Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
Movies, New York, 1975 (London, 1978).
Toeplitz, J., Hollywood and After. The Changing Face of
American Cinema, London, 1974.
DAVID PUNTER (ESSAY DATE
1996)
SOURCE: Punter, David. “Gothic in the Horror Film
1930-1980.” In The Literature of Terror: A History of
Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Vol. 2, pp.
96-118. Essex, England: Longman, 1996.
In the following essay, Punter offers an assessment of the
Gothic as represented in horror films produced between
1930 and 1980.
The international history of the horror film to
1980 may be seen in three principal phases: the
German masterpieces of the silent era; the devel-
opments in America between 1930 and the late
1950s; and the largely British-centred product of
the 1960s and 1970s. In this chapter, I want, as
with the fiction, to restrict myself to American
and British work, but it is worth noting from the
outset that behind all subsequent horror films
there lurks, in a curiously resonant parallel with
eighteenth-century Gothic fiction, a German pres-
ence. It manifests itself in theme, in content, in a
specific set of photographic styles, indeed in an
entire mise en scène which runs from the range of
Universal Studios films of 1931 and 1932 to the
Hammer cycle of the 1960s. The horror film thus
has a complexly twisted provenance: out, origi-
nally, of a body of legendry which owes much to
real or fake German and central European sources
and ‘Transylvanian’ settings, via English
nineteenth-century fictional developments, but
then mediated again through the directorial styles
of the great German directors, Wegener, Wiene,
Murnau and Lang.
This is by no means to assume that all horrify-
ing films are Gothic; but at the same time it is
true that the fundamentally formulaic model
which is conventionally known as ‘the horror
film’ has indeed many Gothic aspects. In order to
investigate these, I intend to examine briefly six
different areas of the horror film, treating each
through one or two specific examples. First, there
are the 1930s American films, mostly out of
Universal Studios, mostly again making use of
previously existent horror plots, and relying
heavily on both the directorial talents of such men
as Tod Browning and James Whale, and even
more on the acting presence of Boris Karloff and
Bela Lugosi, still the forgers of the most culturally
prominent images of Frankenstein’s monster and
Dracula respectively. A period of comparative
439
 infertility, relieved only by the undoubted but
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
minor-key successes of the Lewton/Tourneur
production team, is followed by an upsurge in the
1950s, typically of horror films with a science-
fiction bias and an all too obvious political con-
tent; here a succession of extended images emerges
in which are encoded arguments about the Cold
War, about fears of invasion from the East, and
about the dangers of technologisation. The 1960s
are marked by two rather divergent developments:
the emergence, in America, of Roger Corman as a
horror auteur of enormous significance, more
specifically identified as a major reinterpreter of
Poe; and in England the prominence of Hammer
Studios, which give rise to a whole series of further
reinterpretations of the classic myths, and also to
a less well-known but equally important series of
examinations of psychopathology (Taste of Fear
(1960), Maniac (1962), Paranoiac (1963), Fanatic
(1965), The Anniversary (1967)). Historically along-
side the work of Corman and Hammer there runs
a rather different emergent tradition, superficially
very much outside the Gothic formulae and
represented in the work of such diverse directors
as Hitchcock, Polanski and Michael Powell: films
which might be described as revelations of the
terror of everyday life, which prise apart the bland
surfaces of common interaction to disclose the
anxieties and aggressions which lie beneath. And
finally we have the 1970s and the coming of a
new range of films, of which one of the most
prominent examples is The Exorcist, films which
have been widely condemned as exploitative, yet
which, if we are to follow through any argument
about the social significance of the forms of terror,
must be considered in a more detailed way.
In one sense at least the horror film is very
similar to eighteenth-century Gothic fiction, in
that, while being a popular form, it demonstrates
on closer inspection both a surprisingly high level
of erudition, actual on the part of its makers and
also imputed to its audience, and also a very high
level of technical virtuosity. Films like Freaks
(1932), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The
Masque of the Red Death (1964), the Hammer
Dracula (1958), and Peeping Tom (1960) (to name
only one film from each of the first five categories
listed above) all demonstrate in different ways
both the amount of technical care and ingenuity
lavished on horror films and also the degree of
psychological sophistication possessed by many
of their makers. In fact, it would be fair to say that
the whole development of the horror film is
closely interlocked with the rather belated spread
and reception of Freudian theory.
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The prolificness of horror films in the years
1931 to 1933 is extraordinary; these two years saw
the appearance not only of Browning’s Dracula
and Whale’s Frankenstein, but also of Rouben
Mamoulian’s splendid version of Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde (to date the most frequently filmed of Gothic
fictions); Schoedsack and Pichel’s The Most Danger-
ous Game; Erle C. Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls; Vic-
tor Halperin’s White Zombie; Karl Freund’s The
Mummy; and of course King Kong, a key twentieth-
century myth, also directed by Schoedsack and
Pichel. One obvious feature which connects many
of these films is their dependence on Gothic liter-
ary sources; but there are other, more important
aspects which justify defining them as a sub-genre.
First, there is the genuine complexity of their at-
titudes towards the monstrous. In Frankenstein and
King Kong, of course, we are now all too familiar
with the ambiguous emotional effects which these
early directors proved so unexpectedly adept at
producing; but there are also strong veins of
unexpected sympathy running through the
Mamoulian Jekyll and Hyde, largely because of the
sensitive playing of Fredric March, through The
Most Dangerous Game, a ‘tightly constructed, liter-
ate horror film’1 which brings to the screen a fresh
and important image of the displaced, anachronis-
tic and bloodthirsty aristocrat, and through White
Zombie, with its languorous style and sharpness of
social perception.
Allied with this is the photographic inven-
tivenes of the films. Real or unreal as the settings
may supposedly be, they are linked by an air of
doom, whether it be evidenced in the first grave-
yard sequence of Frankenstein or in the endless
revolution of the zombie-powered mill-wheel in
White Zombie. And the monsters themselves,
whatever form they may take, are allowed the
same grace, are allowed frequently a shadowiness,
a half-seen quality which effectively permits a
space for the complex interplay of audience emo-
tions. To connect the thematic and the technical,
one might perhaps say that what the 1930s hor-
ror films essentially possessed was a rare serious-
ness, of tone and feeling; their directors were
content to be unrushed, to allow space and time
for their conceptions to emerge on the screen, and
in doing so they managed to create a series of
works which possessed a genuinely tragic quality,
at least insofar as they realised a sense of powerful
forces, forces of destiny, operative in human life.
Whale’s Frankenstein is, in fact, not one of the
more consistently tactful of these films, and this is
largely reflective of the conflict within the film
between fidelity to the original story and an at-
tempt, interesting in its details, at updating. The
laboratory in which Frankenstein’s experiments
take place, for instance, is an odd blend of early
nineteenth-century scientific paraphernalia and
more advanced apparatus based on electricity.
There is also the much criticised story change
which resulted in the monster being given a
madman’s brain. Whale, a remarkably sophisti-
cated director, was clearly attempting to suggest
further ways, technical and psychological, in
which the Frankenstein myth might be explored
and recast for our times, and to a considerable
extent he succeeded. If part of the essence of the
Gothic is an insistence that it is possible to take
melodramatic forms and conduct within them a
complex and contemporary psychological argu-
ment, then Whale’s Frankenstein is indeed a
Gothic film at a deeper level than merely in terms
of the portrayal of settings.
Much of the complexity of Mary Shelley’s text
remains present in the film. The obsessional
nature of Frankenstein’s motives, the monster’s
thwarted groping towards understanding, the
emphasis on the contradiction between ‘correct’
family life and isolation, the arguments about
natural evil, all persist in Whale’s hands; and what
is improved above all else in the film, due to Kar-
loff’s participation, is the presence of the monster
himself. His acting is poised precisely on the edge
of the monstrous, never degenerating into the
clodhopping vulgarity with which he is sometimes
parodied; the creature may have a preternaturally
beetling brow, but beneath it is a face capable of a
sensitive and moving range of expressions; the
figure itself may initially appear mechanical and
robot-like, but Karloff’s sense of movement en-
dows it with an uncanny fluidity which keeps our
doubts about what is and what is not human ever
open. Mary Shelley’s over-compensatory denun-
ciations of her creation are absent, which renders
the scenes between the monster and the uncom-
prehending villagers all the more poignant.
In wider terms, Frankenstein and its sister films
represent a strange collection of social and cultural
forces. Schoedsack and Pichel made the social
point apparent in the plot of King Kong, with its
film director out to provide bread and circuses for
the masses of the Depression; yet these films, like
the Gothic novels, are not mere pot-boilers, and
for an exactly identical reason: because they spring
not only from social roots but also from the logic
of internal technical development within culture.
They are the first interesting product of the sound
revolution, and of the accompanying situation in
which film therefore stood poised on the brink of
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becoming a popular medium. And just as the
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
expansion of the reading-public in the late eigh-
teenth century led to a series of experiments in
popular fiction, so the potential expansion of the
film-watching public in the late 1920s generated a
field in which directors could remain imbued with
the excitement of the medium while attempting
to provide popular filmic fare.
Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls, a film version of
The Island of Dr Moreau, is another example of this.
Here, in fact, directorial intention considerably
outstripped public response: the theme of miscege-
nation was pushed out into the open and personi-
fied in the form of an all too seductive panther-
woman, and the result was outrage. Yet in terms
of actual violence, Island of Lost Souls, like almost
all the horror films of the early 1930s, was ex-
tremely reticent; it is greatly to the credit of both
Whale and Kenton, in these particular films, that
they used the possibilities of visualisation not to
emphasise lurid situations but for quite a contrary
purpose: to illumine further the conflicts of aspira-
tion and doom which are at the heart of the
Gothic.
For Moreau, as played by Charles Laughton, is
just as complex a monster as Frankenstein or his
creation. He is a splendid mixture of the diaboli-
cal and the gentlemanly, his whole being seem-
ingly pivoted around the ambivalent connota-
tions of his whip: is this a matter of life, death
and pain, or merely, like hunting, another way for
the bored upper classes to pass the time? Laugh-
ton manages to oscillate between venom and
joviality in a way which at times surpasses the
potential of the tale itself, strongly assisted by the
settings, encapsulations of colonialism. One of
the finer points of both Island of Lost Souls and
Frankenstein, in fact, is a use of shadow, inherited
from the German cinema, which serves as a direct
intensification of the Gothic mood: both Moreau
and the monster, in crucial scenes, are accompa-
nied by a larger-than-life-size shadow which is a
direct visual equivalent of both the transcendence
of human life which they variously represent and
the doom which consequently awaits them.
To concentrate on directors and production
company styles in the early horror film is, of
course, to beg an obvious question: clearly many
of the films were vehicles for particular stars.
Lugosi, at the high point of his career, was receiv-
ing as much fan-mail as any more conventional
male romantic lead, and the whole history of the
horror film, like the history of the Gothic novel,
can be read as the evolution of a series of types of
the hero/villain. Frankenstein and Island of Lost
441
 Souls, like many other horror films then and since,
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
end in the same way (with some literary justifica-
tion in the latter case, precious little in the
former): with an uprising of the repressed—angry
villagers or beast-men—and the ritual purgation
of the disordering element, but without leaving
the audience feeling that all the relevant moral is-
sues have thereby been solved. It is easy to scorn
the horror-film convention whereby the hero/
villain lives to fight another day and reappears in
endless sequels, and clearly this device has some
of its roots in the box-office, but it also reflects a
genuine difficulty, native to the Gothic, with al-
laying the fears which these powerful figures
represent. In the context of the long series of
Frankenstein and Dracula films which have fol-
lowed the originals, the problem of the undead
gains an added dimension.
One of the most depressing features in the
evolution of the horror film is the way in which,
after the Second World War, these complexities of
response seemed to come for a time to be system-
atically eliminated from the genre. The typical
product of the 1950s lies on the edge of horror
and science fiction: it confronts order with disrup-
tion in a simplistic fashion, usually by allowing
some kind of generalised human society to stand
as unquestioned and by throwing against it an
alien being or species which never stands a
chance. The beast may come from the stars or
from 20,000 fathoms, from Mars or from beneath
the earth, from the moon, Venus, the ocean floor
or the black lagoon (Flying Disc Men from Mars
(1950), Radar Men from the Moon (1952), War of the
Worlds (1952), The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
(1953), It Came from Outer Space (1953), Invaders
from Mars (1953), Killers from Space (1953), Creature
from the Black Lagoon (1954), The Monster from the
Ocean Floor (1954), to name but a few), but
wherever it comes from generally it might as well
not have bothered: the moral virtues of the clean-
cut American hero, sometimes backed up by
clean-cut American tanks and guided missiles,
prove far too strong—or unattractive—for it to
withstand. It is easy to read in this phenomenon
a new American defensiveness, a Cold War para-
noia, a continual acting-out of physical, mental or
moral invasion and of strategies for resistance. Yet
even here, in a most unpromising field, there were
considerable achievements.
Perhaps the most imposing still remains Don
Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with its solid
evocation of small-town America and its uncom-
promising insistence on vulnerability. Here there
is no question of a direct battle between hero and
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invaders; the invaders have come not to wipe out
the human race but to replace it with exact
duplicates, and the hero’s problem is to convince
anyone that this is happening before the authori-
ties themselves are taken over. The last scene of
all, where his story is finally beginning to be
believed, is rather a letdown; but that immediately
preceding, in which, fleeing from the invaders, he
arrives at a busy highway and wastes several
minutes in a hysterical attempt to persuade
someone to stop and take notice before being
knocked down, has a nightmare power.
The mise en scène of films like Invasion of the
Body Snatchers is a very long way from the 1930s
films: settings are contemporary and normative to
the point of deliberate banality, photography is
mostly clear and flat, although Siegel in this
respect produces a more inventive film than most.
The great practical virtue of his plot-line, of
course, is that he is able to raise the issue of the
human and the non-human without having to
call on a special-effects department: the only way
of telling the supplanters from the supplanted is
by their lack of emotion, which is a matter for
acting skill rather than heavy machinery. This
stylistic naturalism, however, becomes in Siegel’s
hands, an appropriate way of exploring contempo-
rary social anxieties, not about the inability to
understand but about the inability to communi-
cate the understanding which has been forced
upon one.
Yet in the end, Invasion of the Body Snatchers
remains a conservative film. The invaders repre-
sent a possible order based on pure reason, the
excision of the messiness of emotion, and there is
no doubt that this alternative is held by the direc-
tor in low esteem, but the psychological conflict is
displaced: instead of being between ego and id,
between reason and the uncontrolled, it is merely
between two different kinds of conventionality.
The hero and his fiancée—before she is herself
taken over—do not represent any form of emo-
tional life dominant enough to engage us in real
choices: the change which would be involved
were they to succumb would not, we feel, be
particularly large anyway. Yet the film manages to
haunt, to linger in the mind: largely because of
the sense of a closing circle which it powerfully
conveys, the sense of impending isolation against
which succumbing to the ‘easeful death’ which
the invaders promise gains a certain concreteness.
A film on which it is worth concentrating
more closely is the rather later Night of the Living
Dead (1968), directed on a limited budget by
George Romero and played by amateur actors. It
might seem historically out of place to consider it
at this point, but the film is a self-conscious com-
ment on and extension of the 1950s mode, mark-
ing a circling back from science-fiction stereotypes
into a Gothicism of setting and authorial attitude.
Huss and Ross summarise it as ‘underground cult
film on zombies, now emerging above ground’,2
which is either a very unselfconscious or a very
witty summary, its theme being precisely the
return of the dead from their graves. Its immense
yet offbeat popularity is certainly in need of
explanation: made by a television crew, shot in
unfashionable black-and-white and with acting
which is patchy at best, it yet became one of the
most frequently shown films on the university
and film society circuit.
Basically, it works through a series of inver-
sions, which can only be properly understood by
an audience which already has a certain familiar-
ity with the assumptions both of the zombie film
and of 1950s science fiction. The plot is initially
conventional: a ‘representative’ group of Ameri-
cans gets holed up in an isolated house, and in at-
tempting to defend it against the returning dead
go through the usual gamut of hysteria, courage
and leadership struggles. Precisely those clean-cut
kids, however, whom one naturally expects to
survive get rather satisfyingly killed. Several of the
group reveal themselves to be so generally appall-
ing that one starts to want the living dead to get
on with the job. And the one apparent survivor, a
competent black who manages to outlast the
siege, eventually emerges from the house in such
a state of exhaustion and personal disappointment
that he is instantly gunned down by the sheriff’s
men as one of the walking dead.
Almost all zombie films reflect fears about de-
individuation. In Night of the Living Dead, it is
highly unclear where the state of zombiedom
begins and ends: some of the inhabitants of the
house are such withered creatures of convention
that one supposes absorption into this inverted
afterlife would make little difference. Romero
takes advantage of the besieged house to conduct
a very similar exploration to that which takes
place in almost all 1970s disaster movies: an
investigation into what happens to people under
the dual stress of external danger and internal
claustrophobia. But where disaster movies typi-
cally emerge with a Fascist answer (strong leader-
ship, the dispensability of the weak), Romero’s at-
titude is very different: danger usually brings out
not the best but the worst in people, and where it
does bring out the best, that best is generally un-
recognisable to the world outside. One is reminded
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forcibly of the ending of Lord of the Flies, where
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
matters which have seemed of vital importance
are suddenly dwarfed by the reappearance of adult
reality.
One of the more disturbing features of Night
of the Living Dead is that Romero is content to
reside neither within the expressionism of the
1930s nor in the naturalism of the 1950s, but
moves between one and the other: the house is
depressingly, flatly real and unexciting, but some
of the shots of the slowly but inexorably ap-
proaching zombies are ‘atmospheric’ almost to
the point of parody. The effect of this appears to
be to deprive the viewer of a consistent perspec-
tive, which is perhaps one source of the film’s
power. A problem with it is that, because of the
film’s self-consciousness, any attempt at a discus-
sion of it makes it sound as though parody is
indeed an important element; yet this is very far
from the actual effect of the film, which is in-
tensely serious. It seems, in fact, almost like the
product of a mood of exasperation: as if the people
involved with making it had finally become ir-
ritated with the horror film’s unwillingness to
speak its name, to confess explicitly its psychologi-
cal and social emphases, and had set about trying
to rectify the situation by producing a film which
proved that apparently melodramatic and outworn
apparatus could still be profoundly disturbing, and
not only at the sensory level.
Returning to the late 1950s, the commercial
initiative in horror films passed decisively to
Britain with the release in 1957 of Hammer
Studios’ Curse of Frankenstein. I want for the mo-
ment, however, to remain with America, and with
the horror films of Roger Corman. It should be
stressed that these are only a small and transient
part of his whole output: the most prolific
director/producer in the cinema of these decades,
Corman turned his hand to horror most consis-
tently between 1960 and 1964, very possibly
precisely as a response to Hammer’s demonstra-
tion of the further commercial possibilities of the
field. During these years he made a cycle of seven
films (The House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the
Pendulum (1961), The Premature Burial (1961), Tales
of Terror (1962), The Haunted Palace (1963), The
Masque of the Red Death (1964), The Tomb of Ligeia
(1964)), which are usually referred to, not without
reservations, as the Poe cycle. The reservations are
important in two specific ways: although in each
of the films Corman adapts elements of Poe’s
stories (except in The Haunted Palace, which is in
fact based on Lovecraft’s Case of Charles Dexter
Ward (1927-8)) he is forced, by the brevity of the
443
 stories themselves and by audience assumptions
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
regarding narrative film, to add much to them,
and he also makes little attempt, except in The
Tomb of Ligeia, to invoke the drowsy, opiated tone
of Poe. To criticise Corman as an exploiter of Poe
seems to be beside the point: Corman’s cycle is
surely very much a self-consistent set of horror
films, with their own detailed and impressive mise
en scène, within which elements of Poe are embed-
ded.
What the films show is that Corman, as of
himself, has a thoroughly distinctive Gothic vi-
sion. The intricate passageways, the creaking
tombs, the wry but gleeful ironies of dialogue have
more in common with Matthew Lewis than with
Poe; indeed, Corman is probably the only contem-
porary director who could satisfactorily film The
Monk. The films are a set of variations on a group
of essential elements, not necessarily all present in
any one film: a bravura use of colour and décor; a
masterful if repetitive evocation of suspense; the
inimitable acting of Vincent Price, which slides
from high tragedy to high camp with no evident
disruption of tone—perhaps Jacobean would be
the best term for Price’s style; a brilliant use of
dream inserts; and an insistence on not simplify-
ing or resolving the battle between good and evil
which the films dramatise.
The two best films in the cycle are the last two,
partly because Corman had at last a reasonable
budget available, partly too because they contain
Price’s most extraordinary performances. With The
Masque of the Red Death, it must have been appar-
ent from the outset that there was not a great deal
Corman could do within the bounds of the story,
exiguous as it is: he bolsters it up with an insert
adaptation of ‘Hop-Frog’, but even so the result
bears little relation to Poe’s world. What it does
take from Poe, and put to excellent use, is the dé-
cor of Prospero’s castle, with its single-colour
rooms opening into each other in vistas of breath-
taking magnificence. The Poe story, however, is
essentially in a monotone, and this is a source of
its power: the situation is imbued with doom from
the outset, with Prospero’s attempt to resist the
Red Death by shutting himself and his friends in
his castle and indulging in narcotic revelry resem-
bling a Gothic act of divine defiance, and thus
necessarily entailing its own defeat. Corman’s film
is far more various: the lusts and appetites of Pros-
pero’s curious ‘court’ and of Prospero himself are
foregrounded, and suspense is created by Cor-
man’s ability precisely to enable his audience to
forget the inevitable outcome for considerable
periods of time. The ending has been much criti-
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cised: after the dance is finished, and Price has
encountered a satisfactorily bloody death, the Red
Death figure is seen meeting with other hooded
figures and conferring with them on the success
of their operation. It may be that the realisation
of this scene is crude, but the purpose is important:
first as a simple parody of the happy ending, but
second as a demonstration of the smallness of the
world in which we have just been absorbed. Like
Chinese boxes, the ending of the film shows the
tale of Prospero’s doom only to have been one
among others, and we are left still having to
adumbrate a further level: in whose service do
these various Deaths operate?
In a sense, it is an unusual role for Price:
whereas he is usually constrained to act the part
of a doom-laden and enfeebled aristocrat, here he
is permitted the full range of Promethean defi-
ance—again, most unlike any of Poe’s more fully
realised characters, but with a very close relation
to Schedoni, Melmoth and those other more lusty
and powerful rejecters of divine limitation. His
role in The Tomb of Ligeia is more typical: in this
film the elements of Poe are at their strongest in
narrative terms, although again there is a vitality,
even in some cases an ordinariness, to the charac-
terisation which belies Poe’s dream-tones even
while giving added filmic bite to the intrusion of
the supernatural into a world which at least has
one or two features in common with our own. As
in the Corman House of Usher, Price chooses to
emphasise febrility (most notoriously by wearing
dark glasses almost throughout), and admirably
complements Corman’s scenery of decaying
grandeur.
The cycle gained a popularity similar in kind
to that of Romero’s film: critics were at best
lukewarm, pointing reasonably to a grand guignol
quality which inevitably lapsed into self-parody,
yet there is clearly something about the films
which transcends this danger. It could be hypoth-
esised that their appeal may lie in their reflection
of a crumbling adult world, certainly a possible
way to appeal to a predominantly youthful audi-
ence.3 It would seem, though, that perhaps the
matter is more complex than this: certainly the
conflagrations which terminate several of the
films are satisfying in these terms, but they would
not be so were it not for the loving care with
which Corman chooses to portray the world
which is passing. As with the Gothic, there are
elements here of both attraction and repulsion.
What is totally absent from the films is any kind
of bourgeois moralism: usually one of the stron-
gest audience reactions comes from the portrayal
of the ‘hero’ in House of Usher, who is indeed a
bourgeois character, trying to impose a schema of
rationalism on the events with which he is con-
fronted; naturally he fails at every turn, much to
the intended and actual delight of viewers. In this
sense the Corman cycle plays out yet again the
problem of the bourgeoisie’s relations with the
aristocracy, and in doing so demonstrates the
extraordinary fact that audiences in the 1960s and
1970s have not lost their taste for watching yet
again a struggle which has been historically
superseded for 150 years.
And this is perhaps the most curious fact
about Corman’s work—and, as we shall see, about
the success of Hammer Studios: that both sub-
genres demonstrate the extent to which our im-
ages of terror have become embedded in the end-
less recasting of a specific historical period. This is
not to say that Corman’s films possess intricate
period accuracy, but that they accurately reflect
what appears to be a received notion of period,
and one which still occasions interest and indeed
considerable excitement. In this sense, Corman
works not so much from Poe as alongside him:
both men express a fascination with the original
Gothic, and in both cases it is mediated through a
deliberate vulgarisation, which is presumably in
itself a significant element of an attempt to deal
with historical problems. To go further than this
would be difficult without an extended discussion
of the concept of ‘camp’;4 but at least one can say
that camp is a form of irony, and that Corman’s
films work through a dialectic of response. That is
to say, they appear to be appealing to the terrible,
and to a certain extent they are; but they are also
appealing to shared assumptions about the limita-
tions of terror, and thus are self-ironising in a way
which earlier Gothic films were not.
Corman’s films—and Price’s acting—demand
audience collusion, and it is in this structural
sense, and not merely because of the extent of
their appeal, that they can most fairly be called
‘cult’ films. They permit their audience to ac-
knowledge its own intelligence and reasonable-
ness before deliberately abandoning it. It has often
been said that only a secure avant-garde can afford
seriously to affront or abandon good taste, and
certainly Corman’s films afford intellectual relief—
not escape—of a kind which cannot be far distant
from the excitement ladies in the late eighteenth
century derived from observing the wickedness of
an Ambrosio. Corman’s cinema is neither realist
nor psychological: it is, in a sense, a cinema of
pure formalism, and only because it is so reliant
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on fixed form can it afford the gross excesses of
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
colour and dialogue which typify it.
Although Corman’s work and the horror
films, directed mostly by Terence Fisher and made
by Hammer have often, quite reasonably, been
contrasted, nonetheless there are similarities. The
mingled audience response of fear and laughter
which greets Dracula’s fifteenth resurrection is the
sure mark of ‘cult’, of a situation in which the
rules are clearly known, and because they are, the
filmmaker is free to move knowingly between the
many variations possible on a theme. Yet in the
long run what seems to be most remarkable about
Hammer’s films is, as David Pirie points out in A
Heritage of Horror, their place in specifically British
cultural life:
It certainly seems to be arguable on commercial,
historical and artistic grounds that the horror
genre, as it has been developed in this country by
Hammer and its rivals, remains the only staple
cinematic myth which Britain can properly claim
as its own, and which relates to it in the same
way as the western does to America. . . . The
rather striking truth is that in international com-
mercial terms, the British cinema . . . has ef-
fectively and effortlessly dominated the ‘horror’
market over a period of almost twenty years with
a series of films which, whatever their faults, are
in no way imitative of American or European
models but derive in general from literary sources.5
The reason for this, clearly, lies in the ‘British-
ness’ of the sources with which the Hammer films
deal; their international success, real as it undoubt-
edly is, would only have been possible under
conditions where Hammer found itself—
unexpectedly—able to reach a large home market
with a product which, in 1957, already seemed to
American film companies outmoded and prepos-
terous.
A point from which to begin in trying to
establish the nature of Hammer’s contribution to
the development of the horror film is that, just as
it is deceptive to consider the Corman horror cycle
as remakes of Poe, so it is deceptive to regard Ham-
mer as indulging in remakes of American 1930s
horror cinema. The roots of Hammer’s treatment
of the Frankenstein and Dracula myths, like the
roots of Corman’s films, lie not in nineteenth- or
twentieth-century American adaptations of the
Gothic, but more directly in the Gothic itself
considered from the vantage-point of the 1960s.
That is to say that Hammer horror is, again like
Corman’s, self-ironising; but this is only a similar-
ity of means, and the ends of Corman and Fisher
are radically different. Hammer’s films do not on
the whole embark on the tricky balancing of good
445
 and evil which Corman attempts, and nor do they
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
strive so cheerfully to establish their own fiction-
ality. Fisher is a moralistic director, not in any
particularly strong sense, but in the simplicity of
his demarcations between good and evil and in
the way in which it is assumed that the moralism
in some sense justifies the depiction of terror. It is
not without symbolic significance that where Cor-
man turned to the amoral nightmares of Poe,
Hammer began its venture into horror with a ver-
sion of Frankenstein which took with great serious-
ness many of Mary Shelley’s more erudite argu-
ments, or that in film after film they stress the
nature/artifice contradiction which so beset a
writer like Radcliffe.
When The Curse of Frankenstein first appeared,
it was rapidly condemned on the grounds of
explicit sadism, a criticism which seems to us now
rather surprising, for the kinds of ritualised
violence which occur in Hammer films seem very
much bounded by assumptions of the form. What
has been more shocking in Hammer films over
their latter years has been the boldness and
explicitness with which successive directors have
dwelt upon the connections between violence and
sexuality. Undoubtedly commercial pressures are
partly responsible for this, but there again in the
context of the Gothic tradition as we have tried to
outline it, it seems hardly reprehensible for the
film to bring into the open aspects of texts which
are already present; and in fact one of the conse-
quences of Fisher’s moralism is that the fatal at-
tractiveness of evil is inevitably undermined in all
his films by his insistence on punishing the seduc-
tive. One can fairly see the Frankenstein cycle as a
set of explorations of various sides of the multifac-
eted Frankenstein myth, informed by no little
intelligence and discrimination. In The Curse of
Frankenstein, for instance, the character of Fran-
kenstein himself is deliberately altered in order to
bring him more into line with the more charis-
matic Gothic heroes, with the consequence that
the Faustianism of the original is brought closer
to the surface; also he is considerably fore-
grounded at the expense of the monster, which
provides opportunities for investigation of the
psychological significance of the creator himself.
In The Revenge of Frankenstein (1957), the scientist’s
character becomes more complex again, as Fisher
shows him simultaneously capable of cruelty and
disinterested kindness, and brings him into close
proximity with the stereotype of the victimised
pioneer. While The Horror of Frankenstein (1970),
directed not by Fisher but by Jimmy Sangster,
demonstrates Hammer’s ability to parody itself:
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the very fact that the parody is far from successful
underlines the complexity of approach which lies
behind the better films, despite their apparent
simplicity of appeal.
But clearly it is in the context of their Dracula
films that Hammer has moved furthest into the
realm of horror as sexual pathology. This is partly
a question of character presentation: while Lugosi
was well equipped to emphasise the shadowy
foreignness and supernatural menace of the
Dracula figure, he never made it quite clear what
it was that his victims found so fatally attractive
in a fate worse than death. Christopher Lee, on
the other hand, has all the makings of an accept-
able alternative to conventional life and sexuality:
he has not only power but seductiveness, plausibil-
ity and a glint of knowing humour. Where Lugo-
si’s posturings often seemed directed principally
at the audience, and his films therefore suffered
from a lack of internal psychological coherence,
Lee’s mesmeric effect on his usually nubile victims
is readily appreciable as rooted in the obliging at-
tractiveness of noblesse.
The strength of Hammer’s Dracula films lies
in an odd closeness to Stoker’s text: not usually in
terms of plot, but then Dracula was hardly remark-
able for plot in the first place, but for a decadent
poetic treatment of ancient legendry. The Ham-
mer Draculas have a sense of historical depth: as
in the Corman films, the fact that we as audience
are assumed to be already fully conversant with
the details of the legends frees the various direc-
tors Hammer have employed—Fisher being here
again the most important—to weave free-floating
poems of colour and allusion around the basic
elements. In the later years, this took directions
which seem entirely justifiable in terms both of
passages from Stoker and also of other, later, liter-
ary treatments of vampirism: the transference of
vampiric powers back from male to female, and
the appearance of elements of both male and
female homosexuality within the narrative. Stok-
er’s Dracula becomes rightly blended with
LeFanu’s ‘Carmilla’ (1872) and Stevenson’s sultry
‘Ollala’ (1886) in a hypnotic anthology of perver-
sions. That all the vampires, male and female, in
Hammer’s films are sexually attractive, sometimes
to the point of caricature, recalls precisely scenes
in Stoker like that of the three female vampires,
all long-drawn hisses and blood-red lips: that the
breast into which the stake is plunged is invari-
ably beauteous only brings out one of the princi-
pal arguments behind vampire fiction, that only
for those who are in unfortunate possession of
sexual attractions and urges which they are
personally or socially incapable of expressing is
vampirism a significant psychological danger.
Hammer’s films are undoubtedly of variable
quality, and they have committed some genuine
disasters; nonetheless, the Frankenstein and
Dracula cycles constitute a real attempt to accept,
and even strengthen, the period bases of the
literature while bringing out psychological impli-
cations in a way which has only more recently
become permissible. Their other claim to fame
may possibly come to rest on their series of
psychological thrillers, from Taste of Fear on, in
which various everyday psychopathologies are
explored: here Hammer works the other way
round, by taking precisely the contemporary and
demonstrating within it the continuing presence
of archaic fears and lusts. Both modes are varieties
of melodrama, and both juxtapose past and
present in such a way as to question the historical
and social limits of reason.
With respect to this latter sub-genre, however,
Hammer has neither the psychological sophistica-
tion nor the directorial talent to rival the masters
whom it attempts to imitate, and here I want to
glance briefly at three films which fall into the
general field of terror pathology: Alfred Hitch-
cock’s Psycho (1960), Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom
(1960) and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965).
They are all much written about, and I have no
intention here of attempting any kind of detailed
analysis: rather I want to bring out what seems to
me one important feature of them in relation to
other horror material, namely their relation to
Gothic motifs and attitudes. To start from simple
premises: each of the three films is a study in
paranoia. Each of them posits a correlation be-
tween paranoia and a thwarting in the relation
between the ordered and the chaotic. Each of
them, in the search for a visual equivalent for a
psychological state, finds a setting which relates
closely to traditional imagery: in Psycho, the
house, with its cellars and mysterious doors, is
pure American Gothic, as Hitchcock of course
intended; in Peeping Tom, the film-processing
laboratory which is a substitute for the hero’s
homelessness, shot as it is in half-tones and
impossible as it is to discern its physical limits, is
the laboratory of generations of Frankensteins, in
which the endless attempt is continued to discern
the secrets of (the hero’s own) creation; Catherine
Deneuve’s apartment in Repulsion, albeit out-
wardly contemporary, is nonetheless capable at
times of sprouting supernatural apparitions wor-
thy of the direst secrets of Udolpho.
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One of the most remarkable features of Psycho
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
is Hitchcock’s determination and ability to involve
the audience in complex ways with the unfolding
of the plot. The obvious example is the shower
murder of Janet Leigh, which requires us to find a
whole new way of engaging with what is left of
the film, a moment which follows on from our
unwelcome realisation that we are being required
to participate in Norman Bates’s unpleasant
voyeurism. If one of the principal strengths of
Gothic fiction was its undermining of simple
processes of identification, its development of the
intense ambiguities of persecution, then it is a
strength which Psycho shares. The most remark-
able feature in this respect is the ending: since by
then we are being invited to take simultaneously
two opposite views of the putative inhabitant of
Norman’s body, we are effectively prevented from
absolute moral resolution. We have, as Robin
Wood comments, been led into a complicity with
Norman, and with the film itself;6 we are provided
with no way out of the maze in which this has
trapped us. And the way in which Hitchcock
achieves this manipulation is shameless: subtle
though he is in technical terms—and the stabbing
of Leigh is a supreme example of photographic
virtuosity and even reticence—in other ways his
style is pure bravura. He is quite unashamed of
coincidence; he is addicted to nasty jokes (for
example in the film, there is the revelation of
Mummy’s ‘mummy’, and his general practical-
joker reputation is always a necessary adjunct to
reading the films); and he is overjoyed by the pos-
sibilities of sexual titillation of his audience, as in
the entire treatment of Leigh’s body. A film which
can be referred to as ‘balancing us, even at its most
horrifying, on the knife-edge where there is almost
no distinction between a laugh and a scream’7 is
once again elaborating the mixture of seriousness
and grotesquerie which has always been a hall-
mark of the Gothic: like Matthew Lewis’s writing,
like Vincent Price’s acting, Hitchcock’s directing is
to do with virtuoso spectacle. Both camerawork
and acting are theatrical; the music which ac-
companies Psycho would not be out of place in a
Victorian melodrama.
Psycho is not precisely a study of an obsession:
it is an investigation of what effect viewing the
outcome of an obsession has on an audience. It
has often been remarked that the interpretation
which the psychiatrist offers at the end is inad-
equate, and this is perfectly true, not because
Hitchcock wanted it to be specifically so, but
because it does not matter one way or the other.
Hitchcock is interested only in the fact that
447
 reasonably similar obsessions do occur, and in the
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
possibilities which this fact affords for cinema.
Here again, as in the fiction, specific concern with
narrative is intertwined with a concern for explor-
ing the limits of the medium itself: terror is the
clearest and most easily examinable of audience
responses to attempt to provoke, the reaction
which therefore gives most satisfaction to the
virtuoso director of popular films. Just, again, as
with the fiction, Psycho is at least partly an explo-
ration of the potential of disruption of expecta-
tions, and its horror emerges from its form as well
as from its content.
Many of the same things could be said about
Powell’s Peeping Tom, except that here the director
has added important extra twists to the argument
by making the paranoiac hero himself a film
cameraman, and by rendering as the source of his
disturbance a set of previous experiences—at the
hands of his sadistic father—which also involved
film. This complexity makes for a highly self-
reflexive film; it has by no means the same power
for instant shock as Hitchcock’s best work, but its
central thematics are far more tightly woven.
Discussion of Psycho, so widely regarded as the
most important modern exercise in filmic terror,
may well suggest that there is indeed no such
thing as a ‘straight’ horror film, and perhaps this
is true: but Peeping Tom certainly comes very close
to it. As hinted above, it is far from free from
Gothic devices but these are put to use not as
irony but as density; the fact that the audience is
aware of the cultural provenance of motifs such as
the discovery of a murder victim in a trunk does
not undermine the intensity with which we are
required to confront Carl Boehm’s psychosis but
reinforces it, since it is precisely through the power
of film that he endures his repression.
Boehm acts a photographer and amateur film-
maker whose principal obsession is with photo-
graphing moments of pure terror. To facilitate this
task, he has an array of specialist equipment
including a tripod the front leg of which is able to
snap up and pierce the throat of its victim. As the
film progresses, Powell reveals more and more of
the origins of Boehm’s situation: in particular he
shows, through clips inserted from film supposed
to be in Boehm’s own possession, how his father,
played by Powell himself, had sought to investi-
gate his fear responses by such devices as releasing
live lizards into his bed and filming his reaction.
The father is supposed to be the author of a series
of works on the psychology of fear, in respect of
which the son was his guinea-pig. Where the
psychological interest in Psycho is largely spurious
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or at best secondary, in Peeping Tom it is central:
Powell is tracing the genesis and operations of a
psychosis. Interestingly, this seems to make his
actual horrors not more convincing to the audi-
ence but less: precisely because of the absence of
forced suspense or melodrama, we lack equipment
with which to deal with the film, and the result is
often a great deal of nervous laughter.
To say, then, that Boehm’s photographic
laboratory bears a relation to Frankenstein’s
haunts is not to say that this is a device for directly
alerting the audience’s assumptions; instead, it is
a further indication of the kind of grotesquely
distorted world in which Boehm perforce lives—in
which, as we come to realise, he has been ef-
fectively placed by his dead father. Similarly, there
is a Gothic complexity to the narrative structure
and to the unfolding of stories within stories, films
within films, but this is not a mere device but an
essential way of representing the induced tortu-
ousness of Boehm’s mind. Every sudden and ap-
parently inexplicable cut, every narrative twist,
every insertion of the past replicates the false
channels of action and response which have been
set up in his psyche. The father’s investigations
into fear, into what prevents us from confronting
the world directly, have produced in the son a
syndrome whereby methods of evasion have been
honed to a fine point (the point of the bayonet
tripod) and the world has ceased to appear real
except insofar as it appears on a screen or through
the lens of a camera. The implications for the
nature of the horror film are vast: the whole issue
is raised here of the dimming of responses through
overexposure, of the moral ambiguity of confront-
ing one’s own fears in real or represented form, of
the effects film may have when it takes it upon
itself to experiment with emotional response.
Psychological concerns and the concerns of the
medium are elided in a brilliant series of meta-
phors: after all, all Boehm is seeking in his murder-
ous procedures is a moment of recognition, a mo-
ment when he can perceive in another
(momentarily) living being the basic configura-
tion which has been made into the basis of his
own personality. Through film he seeks a repeti-
tion, confirmation and explanation of previous
experience, as do we all; the fact that film for him
is film of terror means only that his own previous
experience has been of a suffering too intense and
too unintelligible for him to get past without the
aid of cultural props. Aristotle’s concept of the
tragic is not very different.
Andrew Sarris says of Roman Polanski’s Repul-
sion that it is ‘the scariest if not actually the gori-
est Grand Guignol since Psycho’, but in terms of
tone it is very different from either Psycho, with its
ironic black humour, or the seriousness of Peeping
Tom. On the one hand, it was passed by the cen-
sor on release without cuts because of professional
affirmation that it constituted an important study
of a psychopathic condition; on the other, as Sar-
ris goes on to say, ‘Polanski is actually interested
more in the spectacle of repression released than
in the psychology of the repressed female’.8 What
Polanski appears at first glance to do in the film is
invite us to share in distorted perception: Cathe-
rine Deneuve’s obvious delusions are presented in
an identical filmic texture to the rest of the events.
The delusions themselves are extensions of envi-
ronment: the heroine spends most of the film
locked in her flat, which gradually becomes more
and more menacing as walls crack, unused doors
are forced open and hands appear where no hands
should be. Repulsion is a study less of claustropho-
bia than of invasion, finding a series of visual cor-
relatives for the rape anxiety which is the main
form Carol’s paranoia takes.
The repertoire of effects gains novelty only
from its incorporation into a contemporary loca-
tion in South Kensington: otherwise, they are
traditional—the beauty parlour in which Carol
works appears at first sight to be some kind of
torture chamber; darkened corridors yield dire
experiences; the entire flat at one point expands
in Carol’s mind to enormous proportions in
which items of furniture are lost. Horror is present
here even—and particularly—in the heroine’s
Gothic retreat. Furthermore, Carol’s problem is
partly presented as one of excessive sensibility,
linked with a problematic urge towards excessive
cleanliness and order which turns into chaos.
Carol is unable to stand contact with the gross
world: the presence of her sister’s boyfriend,
Michael, and his belongings in the flat provoke
her to fury and eventually terror. Strangely,
however, her sensibility does not actually produce
much sympathy on the part of director or viewer;
it is mostly presented as a profoundly irritating
absentmindedness and selfishness. Carol’s world
is one in which other people have ceased to exist
except as intrusions into her privacy; when she
realises her inability to keep them out, she aban-
dons all attempt at order, allowing the flat to
degenerate into filth and chaos.
Many critics have suggested that the impor-
tance of Repulsion is that it allows us entrance into
the heroine’s own perspectives on the world, and
this is partly true, but there is also a further ele-
ment of directorial presence which dialectically
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alienates us from her. The fact that we see her delu-
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
sions as real does not encourage us to accept the
view she has of other characters or of herself. The
fact that we are able to share the manifestations
of her paranoia carries with it the corollary that
we remain aware that the actual extent of her
persecution is minimal: the attempt to indicate an
explanation by tracking into her family photo-
graph at the end is perfunctory, certainly by
comparison with the genuine attempts, ironic or
serious, to introduce a level of explanation in Psy-
cho or Peeping Tom. In terms of relations of repres-
sion, Polanski’s treatment of Deneuve is more
sadistic than Hitchcock’s treatment of Leigh: he
offers us an attractive but unobtainable heroine,
and then proceeds to martyr her as a ritual punish-
ment for her purity. In this context it is significant
that when Carol is finally carried from the flat, it
is by Michael. It has been suggested that this, and
the curious look which he gives her, reflect a pos-
sibility that she has been in love with him all
along, despite her apparent revulsion, but it seems
more likely that Polanski is here reasserting a
characteristic treatment of women in horror
literature, leaving Carol passive and broken in the
arms of the male who, through doing nothing at
all, has emerged once more as successful, capable
and dominant.
In these three films, then, we have a range of
attitudes to the possibilities of terror for outlining
and underlining psychopathology: in Psycho, a
black irony which involves characters and audi-
ence in a playing-off of moods, attitudes and
interpretations; in Peeping Tom, a flat presentation
designed to engage our sympathies by a well-
rounded statement of the hero’s plight; in Repul-
sion, a presentation of spectacle which involves us
in the director’s vindictiveness towards his heroine
and the qualities which she symbolises. Funda-
mentally, these are three different balances of the
dreadful and the pleasurable, three different rela-
tions between terror and psychological well-being.
It is, of course, thoroughly understandable that
alongside the development of the ‘traditional’ hor-
ror film there should have arisen a genre more
designed to cope with specifically contemporary
perceptions of terror: what is harder to understand
is that in the 1970s both of these forms appear to
have been temporarily supplanted at least in terms
of commercial success by a third form, which
returns to age-old themes of satanism and posses-
sion. Rather ironically, the first important expo-
nent of the form was Polanski himself in Rose-
mary’s Baby (1968), but a more typical example is
449
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
Max Schreck as Count Orlok in the 1922 film Nosferatu.
The Exorcist (1973), directed by William Friedkin
from a book by W. P. Blatty.
As Pauline Kael says, The Exorcist is a Gothic
work in its trappings, and not a Gothic relieved
with the ironic spice of comedy, as are Psycho and
Rosemary’s Baby in their different ways, but a film
of ‘gothic seriousness’ which functions ‘below the
conscious level’.9 In other words, and in sharp
contrast with almost all the other works we have
discussed in this chapter, it is a work which
professes not knowledge but ignorance, ignorance
of the psychological ambivalence of the vocabu-
lary of Gothic images. Yet this ignorance is itself
fake: clearly Blatty—who actually, as writer and
producer, appears to have had most say in the
shape of the film—is in fact all too well aware of
the manipulative potential of film, but chooses to
delude us into believing in his literal-mindedness.
It is doctors and psychiatrists themselves who in
the film recommend that the case of twelve-year-
old Regan MacNeil be referred to the exorcists;
thus the audience is put in the position, not of
interpreting horror symbolism as commentary on
psychological disorder, but of accepting it whole-
sale as the outward and visible sign-system of the
Devil.
450
On the whole, immersion in Gothic fiction
and film makes one very wary of using the term
‘exploitation’, and it is in any case a difficult term
to justify objectively in the case of a highly
popular work. Any work which attempts to pro-
vide a point of view can be judged in some sense
as non-exploitative, whether that point of view be
regarded as good, evil, valid, invalid or criminal.
What makes it possible nonetheless to call The
Exorcist a work of exploitation is precisely that it
does not have a point of view at all. It is not the
case that what ought to be disturbing about the
film is its apparent spurious vindication of the
Catholic Church and of the real existence of the
Devil; the really disturbing feature is that this is
clearly a matter of no importance whatever in the
film, despite Blatty’s own religious affiliations. The
Exorcist is simply a sequence of special effects, its
narrative submerged during the actual viewing
experience, and deliberately so. Let it not be said
that there is much wrong with the effects them-
selves: they work extremely well for the most part,
and several of the images of terror which are called
upon are also quite new.
What is good in the best horror films, from
Hammer to Psycho, is their ability to use images of
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terror to provoke powerful tensions between dif-
ferent interpretations; this is a process which The
Exorcist sets out to short-circuit. From the first mo-
ments, we are left in no doubt whatever as to the
reality of the little girl’s possession. The audience
is thus reduced to a nadir of passivity: it is highly
significant that one of the most appalling and hor-
rifying scenes occurs when an attempt is made at
medical treatment of the girl’s condition, for what
this demonstrates is that the film’s makers were
drawing throughout upon a single language and a
single level of intensity with complete disregard
of the film’s narrative or thematic coherence. The
object-lesson which one might draw from The
Exorcist is not about a decreasing vitality in the
horror film, or about the dangers of pop religion,
but about a crisis in film itself, which is well
outside the scope of this book, and which rests on
recognition and exploitation of the extraordinary
power of film to appear to make its audiences ac-
cept assumptions which in the cold light of day
appear the most arrant nonsense; this crisis, which
bears upon media proliferation, will be addressed
more thoroughly in Chapter Seven.
This being said, The Exorcist nonetheless is a
horror film, and as such it corresponds with the
most uninspired Gothic magazine fiction of the
1840s in its literal-mindedness and lack of ironic
tension. What makes it remarkable is only the
technical skill—and 10 million dollars—which
went into its making. It would perhaps be as well,
however, to conclude on a more positive note.
Despite the existence of The Exorcist and its
numerous progeny, horror film has substantially,
and to a rather surprising extent, continued in the
Gothic tradition of providing an image-language
in which to examine social and psychological
fears. The idea that we have all become too
sophisticated to watch the traditional horror film
has been long belied at Hammer’s turnstiles: of
course the way in which we watch them is pro-
foundly self-conscious and complicated, but this
was certainly true for most early Gothic fiction.
For it is not enough to say that horror motifs have
lost their bite because we no longer ‘believe in’
them; we have never believed in them as simply
existent, but more as valuable and disturbing
fictional images which gain their vitality, when
they do, from the underlying truth which they
represent.
Notes
1. Carlos Clarens, Horror Movies (London, 1968), p. 123.
2. Focus on the Horror Film, ed. Roy Huss and T. J. Ross
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1972), p. 12.
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PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
F. W. MURNAU (1888-1931) AND NOSFERATU
Next to Fritz Lang and G. W. Pabst, motion
picture director F. W. Murnau (born Friedrich
Wilhelm Plumpe) was one of just three direc-
tors responsible for revolutionizing German
silent cinema during the 1920s.
Almost universally considered a master-
piece of expressionist theatre, the 1922 film
Nosferatu provided Murnau with his first
artistic breakthrough in Germany. Subtitled
Ein Symphonie des Grauens (“A Symphony of
Horror”), Nosferatu was an unauthorized
adaptation—as well as the earliest surviving
screen rendering—of Bram Stoker’s 1897
novel Dracula. Murnau’s version of the age-
old vampire tale was as much a reflection of
the horror that befell Germany in the post-
World War I era as it was of Stoker’s novel.
Beyond reflecting a period of cultural unease,
Nosferatu provided the dramatic template for
every big-screen vampire that followed, from
Bela Lugosi’s 1931 portrayal of Dracula to
Klaus Kinski’s 1979 reprisal of the original
Murnau character created by actor Max
Schreck. Viewed from a modern perspective,
Murnau’s film is no longer horrifying in the
traditional sense, yet it remains effective for
its dark, minimalist approach, as well as its
dramatic tension and uncomfortably believ-
able tone. Despite screenwriter Henrik Ga-
leen’s and Murnau’s efforts to disguise the
film’s debt to Dracula by changing the title,
character names, and settings, Stoker’s
widow sued Nosferatu’s production company,
Pana-Film, for copyright infringement and in
the process nearly crushed the film. In part
because of the financial distress surrounding
the Stoker lawsuit, the already troubled Pana-
Film was unable to distribute Nosferatu
widely, leaving the film for later audiences to
discover.
3. See Clarens, p. 185.
4. The most interesting arguments are those in Susan
Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New
York and Toronto, 1966), pp. 275-92.
451
 5. David Pirie, A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
Cinema 1946-1972 (London, 1973), pp. 9-10.
6. See Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films (London, 1969), pp.
112-23.
7. John Russell Taylor, Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear (London,
1964), pp. 197-8.
8. Andrew Sarris, Confessions of a Cultist: On the Cinema,
1955-1969 (New York, 1971), pp. 208, 209.
9. Pauline Kael, Reeling (London, 1977), p. 250.
TELEVISION
LENORA LEDWON (ESSAY DATE
1993)
SOURCE: Ledwon, Lenora. “Twin Peaks and the Televi-
sion Gothic.” Literature/Film Quarterly 21, no. 4 (1993):
260-70.
In the following essay, Ledwon defines “Television
Gothic” and demonstrates how this modification of the
early Gothic novel resembles and differs from its Gothic
literary predecessors as exemplified by the television series
Twin Peaks.
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
Sylvia Plath, “Elm”
The twentieth century has proven congenial
to the Gothic. Gothic literature and film attest to
the continuing vitality of the genre. Examples of
today’s popular Gothic include such works as
Stephen King’s The Shining with its Gothicized
haunted hotel, modern Gothic romances and
Harlequin clones whose covers feature persecuted
maidens in the shadow of gloomy mansions, and
horror films as diverse as Psycho, Night of the Living
Dead, and the perennial remake of Dracula. How-
ever, while many scholars and critics have ad-
dressed the use of Gothic elements in literature
and film, the field of the Television Gothic has yet
to be explored in any detail.1 This is despite the
fact that television would seem an ideal medium
for Gothic inquiry. It is, after all, a mysterious box
simultaneously inhabited by spirit images of
ourselves and inhabiting our living rooms.
In fact, television has aired its fair share of
programs with Gothic elements. (“Aired” itself is a
good Gothic concept—ghostly messages traveling
through the air.) Thriller, The Outer Limits, The
Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, The Night Stalker, Friday
the 13th: The Series, the original Dark Shadows and
its stupendously dull 1991 remake (a sort of Dy-
nasty with fangs) are but a few examples of series
that utilized Gothic devices. However, David
Lynch’s Twin Peaks is the first series to tap the full
potential of the “Television Gothic.”
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This new Television Gothic utilizes familiar
Gothic themes and devices such as incest, the
grotesque, repetition, interpolated narration,
haunted settings, mirrors, doubles, and supernatu-
ral occurrences. But these elements undergo a sea
change once they are immersed in the “currents”
of television. What could have been a soothing
repetition of formula instead becomes a disturb-
ing process of transgression and uncertainty.
Twin Peaks as a Television Gothic is a distinctly
post-modern form, Gothic as process rather than
product. The basic methodology of this process
involves the combination and exploitation of two
highly domestic forms—television and the Gothic
novel. The result of this process is a series in which
the domestic is the Gothic and television becomes
the ghost in the home. In exploring this new
Television Gothic, it is useful to: (1) start with a
working definition of “Gothic,” then (2) present
an overview of typical Gothic devices operating in
Twin Peaks, and finally, (3) analyze two fundamen-
tal Gothic elements that are transmuted through
the medium of television—incest and the family
romance, and the fragmented and multi-formed
narrative.
Definitions
“I perceive,” said Emily, smiling, “that all old
houses are haunted. . . .”
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolfo (1794)
Definitions, like old mansions, are inclined to
be haunted—haunted by past definitions. “Televi-
sion Gothic” is a haunted phrase, testifying to the
intrusion of the past into the present. In order to
appreciate the nature of this haunting, we must
begin with a definition of the Gothic and with an
acknowledgment of the limits of such a defini-
tion.
Any definition of a genre is at best incomplete.
There will always be exceptions, overlaps, and grey
areas. Further, such definitions all too often reduce
and trivialize a complex subject. Those of us
interested in genre criticism console ourselves by
the hope that well thought out models will be
recognized as just that—models. As such, they
should serve as aids to understanding, not as
prescriptive chains on thinking.
Even among other genres, the Gothic seems
particularly difficult to define. Part of the difficulty
lies in the fact that, rather than speaking of one
monolithic category of “Gothic,” it is more ap-
propriate to recognize that there are many Goth-
ics.2 But a larger part of this difficulty lies in the
fact that the Gothic itself is an unstable genre,
one that is characterized more by its process than
by its individual products. The Gothic is easy to
recognize, but hard to define.
Although difficult to define, its very fluidity
and resistance to boundaries make the Gothic a
particularly apt genre for television. As will
become evident, Twin Peaks taps into this Gothic
resistance, creating a Television Gothic character-
ized by a polysemous mingling of “authentic”
representations which constantly forces the viewer
into an uneasy oscillation between ways of under-
standing.
Given all the above caveats, we will, for the
sake of convenience, focus our definition on three
commonly accepted fundamental characteristics
of the Gothic. Our working definition of “Gothic”
will include the following primary elements: (1)
the use of standard Gothic devices which gener-
ally are recognized as capable of producing fear or
dread, (2) the central enigma of the family, and
(3) a difficult narrative structure (one that frus-
trates attempts at understanding). The transforma-
tion of these Gothic elements into “Television
Gothic” in Twin Peaks is the subject of the rest of
this essay.
Gothic Devices in Twin Peaks
“I will read you their names directly; here they
are, in my pocket-book. Castle of Wolfenbach,
Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of
the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the
Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us
some time.”
“Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you
sure they are all horrid?”
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818)
Something “horrid” is the first recognizable
hallmark of the Gothic. Commentators note that
the Gothic is “a literature of nightmare”
(MacAndrew 3), “literature where fear is the
motivating and sustaining emotion” (Gross 1). In
fact, fear is one of the engines that drives the plot
of Twin Peaks. Windom Earle would have agreed
with Austen’s two young friends concerning their
interest in the horrid. Discovering the secret of
what draws BOB to humans, Earle comments, “It’s
fear! My favorite emotional state!”
Those particular Gothic devices used to pro-
mote fear are fairly well identified. In her study of
Gothic conventions, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes
that one knows generally what to expect in the
way of Gothic paraphernalia:
You know the important features of its mise en
scène: an oppressive ruin, a wild landscape, a
Catholic or feudal society. You know about the
trembling sensibility of the heroine and the
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impetuosity of her lover. You know about the
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
tyrannical older man with the piercing glance who
is going to imprison and try to rape or murder
them. You know something about the novel’s
form: it is likely to be discontinuous and invo-
luted, perhaps incorporating tales within tales,
changes of narrators, and such framing devices as
found manuscripts or interpolated histories. You
also know that, whether with more or less rel-
evance to the main plot, certain characteristic
preoccupations will be aired. These include the
priesthood and monastic institutions; sleeplike
and deathlike states; subterranean spaces and live
burial; doubles; the discovery of obscured family
ties; affinities between narrative and pictorial art;
possibilities of incest; unnatural echoes or silences,
unintelligible writings, and the unspeakable; gar-
rulous retainers; the poisonous effects of guilt and
shame; nocturnal landscapes and dreams; appari-
tions from the past; Faust- and Wandering Jew-
like figures; civil insurrections and fires; the
charnel house and the madhouse.
(Sedgwick 9-10)
All these devices are recognizably Gothic, and
many of them occur in Twin Peaks. For example,
the woods around Twin Peaks are a wild and
mysterious landscape. (“There’s a sort of evil out
there. Something very, very strange in these old
woods,” muses Sheriff Truman.) The Book House
Boys form a secret, quasi-mystical institution.
Subterranean spaces exist (Owl Cave), as do
resonant silences, guilt and shame, nocturnal
landscapes and dreams. Strange fires occur (the
fire at the Packard Mill and the mysterious com-
mand, “Fire, walk with me”). The flickering
torches of the charnel house are replaced with the
cold glare and strobe effect of fluorescent lights in
the morgue. Discovered manuscripts (Laura Palm-
er’s diary) and mediated narratives (Cooper’s
tapes) abound. Cooper’s quest for knowledge and
his decision to sell his soul qualify him as a Faust-
like figure. And, of course, the unspeakable oc-
curs: rape, incest, and murder. The most antisocial
of crimes intrude into the sanctuary of domestic-
ity.
Doubles in Twin Peaks
The stranger youth and I approached each other
in silence. . . . What was my astonishment on
perceiving that he was the same being as myself!
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions
of a Justified Sinner (1824)
Exploring all the Gothic devices in Twin Peaks
at any great length would be impractical here, but
the device of the Double can exemplify how rich
the series is in Gothic terms. It should not be
surprising that a series titled “Twin Peaks” should
be filled with doubles. In fact, there are several
453
 dozen examples of doubles in Twin Peaks, typi-
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
cally serving as mirror images of good and evil,
original and imitation, appearance and reality. A
few examples follow.
Laura and Maddy are identical cousins (remi-
niscent of a warped version of The Patty Duke
Show). There are two sets of BOBs and Mikes—the
teen-agers (Bobby and Mike) and the spirit pres-
ences of the demonic BOB and the mysterious
Mike. There is an enigmatic White Lodge and its
counterpart Black Lodge, one representing good
and one evil. Laura has led a double life as good-
girl Prom Queen and as a wanton bad girl. There
are two sets of books for the Packard Sawmill (one
the original, one a fake). There are two diaries of
Laura Palmer (one a “cover” story and one a secret
diary). The series Twin Peaks is doubled by the
series Invitation to Love. Love and fear double as
mirror images, as engines which attract spirits
from another plane of existence. Dream beings
have counterparts in the town of Twin Peaks
(BOB/Leland, the giant/the old bellhop, Mike/the
one-armed man). The same actress, Sheryl Lee,
plays both Laura Palmer and Maddy Ferguson.
The same actress, Piper Laurie, plays both Cathe-
rine Martell and the mysterious Japanese business-
man. The dwarf warns Cooper of the existence of
a “dopplegänger” (German for “double”). There
are two Dale Coopers in the final episode, one
good and one evil.
The sheer exuberance behind the use of such
Gothic devices is extraordinary. Lynch exploits
the television potential of Gothic devices to the
hilt. While a literary text can only create doubles
through written representations, television per-
mits such visual doubling devices as the same ac-
tor or actress playing two characters, or a giant
suddenly appearing where an old bellhop stood a
moment before. The visualization of Gothic im-
ages heightens and intensifies the standard func-
tion of the double—to problematize the distinc-
tion between appearance and reality. Equally
significant for the Television Gothic is how Twin
Peaks uses Gothic devices such as the double to
challenge the distinction between the normal and
the abnormal, the domestic and the uncanny.
Lynch transforms standard Gothic devices
into Television Gothic by domesticating them. He
brings the horrid and the normal into juxtaposi-
tion until the viewer is unsure what is normal
anymore. By using television to do this, Lynch
challenges the most deep-seated expectations of
the aim of television. As David Marc notes, “the
aim of television is to be normal. The industry is
obsessed with the problems of norms, and this
manifests itself in both process and product”
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(327). When the boundary between the normal
and the Gothic begins to crack, it becomes clear
that for Twin Peaks the normal is the Gothic.
Domestic Gothic
Heaven directed my bloody hand to the heart of
my child.
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764)
Television, the most domestic of all mediums,
is a natural venue for the Gothic, the most dis-
turbed of domestic fictions. As John Ellis observes
in Visible Fictions, “broadcast TV is a profoundly
domestic phenomenon” (113). A television set is
an everyday item within the home, it is “another
domestic object” (Ellis 113). Like that other
strangely domestic item, the Gothic novel, televi-
sion can create a sense of the uncanny precisely
by drawing on the unfamiliarity of the familiar. In
fact, the Television Gothic is the uncanny/
unheimlich contained within the familiar/heimlich
of the home.
In his essay, “The Uncanny,” Freud traces the
development of the German terms, “unheimlich”
and “heimlich.” Initially, heimlich meant homely,
plain, familiar, comfortable. Unheimlich, or un-
canny, meant everything that was not home-like.
Over time, the meaning of “heimlich” changed, so
that which had been familiar and domestic came
to mean that which was guarded, furtive, with-
drawn, and hidden. The key point here is that un-
heimlich and heimlich are not two antithetical
states. Rather, one thing is contained within the
other. The uncanny is that which ought to remain
hidden and secret, but which has become visible.
What strikes us as uncanny is not something new,
but something familiar.
Just as the heimlich contains within it the un-
heimlich, so does the familiar domestic home
contain within it the Gothic potential of Televi-
sion.
Heimlich
Home
Unheimlich Television
The home contains the uncanny. The un-
canny is familiar and terrible in its familiarity.
Television is the ghost in the home, a barely
perceptible presence that can be at once familiar
and strangely disturbing. Neil Postman notes that:
television has achieved the status of “myth,” as
Roland Barthes uses the word. He means by myth
a way of understanding the world that is not
problematic, that we are not fully conscious of,
that seems, in a word, natural. A myth is a way of
thinking so deeply embedded in our conscious-
ness that it is invisible. This is now the way of
television. We are no longer fascinated or per-
plexed by its machinery. We do not tell stories of
its wonders. We do not confine our television sets
to special rooms. We do not doubt the reality of
what we see on television, are largely unaware of
the special angle of vision it affords.
(79)
Television’s Gothic potential stems in large
part from its reassuring domesticity (its “natural”
presence and acceptance in the home) combined
with its under-utilized ability to disrupt viewers’
comfortable notions of domesticity.
What is so frightening about the Television
Gothic? The fact that it returns to the domestic
sphere something repressed yet familiar—the
specters of incest and family violence. Like the
early Germanic invaders after whom it takes its
name, the Gothic brings with it the threat of the
destruction of culture. The Television Gothic, even
more so, makes such threats strikingly visible and
manifest. There it is, on your television screen, in
your own living room—a father assaulting and
killing a “daughter” in his living room.3 Sarah
Palmer voices the complaint of the Television
Gothic when she cries, “What is going on in this
house?” The domestic gone horribly wrong is the
essence of the Television Gothic. Lynch taps into
our need to turn common life into the stuff of
nightmare so that we can call it unreal. Better the
Gothic, than the horror of everyday domestic life.
As James B. Twitchell astutely points out in
Dreadful Pleasures, “the early gothic usually tells
the story of a single and specific family romance
run amok: ‘father’ has become monstrous to
‘daughter.’” (“Father” includes any role of paternal
dominance [Twitchell 42].) The dysfunctional
family lies at the heart of the Gothic, and thus the
Gothic is profoundly domestic. In what is gener-
ally known as the earliest Gothic novel, The Castle
of Otranto, Prince Manfred of Otranto desires to
marry his prospective daughter-in-law (a barely
concealed incestuous desire), and eventually kills
his real daughter by stabbing her with his phallic
dagger. In Twin Peaks, fathers are repeatedly
monstrous to daughters. Leland Palmer compul-
sively kills daughters. He rapes and kills his real
daughter, Laura, as well as killing her double,
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Maddy, and another young girl. Ben Horne sleeps
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
with one daughter-figure, Laura, and narrowly
avoids sleeping with his own daughter, Audrey.
Facing a masked Audrey in the brothel, One-Eyed
Jack’s, Ben suggestively comments, “You know
how to interest a man.” Father/daughter incest
marks the Gothic plot.
Both Castle of Otranto and Twin Peaks feature
the most anti-domestic (that is, destructive of
domesticity) of crimes, but a crime that is ineluc-
tably tied to the domestic. Early Gothics distance
this crime by placing it in the past (the Middle
Ages were a popular time period) or in a foreign
locale (Italy was a favorite spot for dark deeds). In
contrast, Twin Peaks affirms the closeness of the
Gothic. Where Twin Peaks modifies the Gothic
genre, causing a shifting in the Gothic process, is
in its insistence on the quotidian, the common,
the ordinary as the essence of Gothic. The prom
queen, the town diner, the local sheriff, the high
school football star, the motorcycle-riding rebel,
the family dinner table—all these are familiar
television fare. Even that most ubiquitous of all
twentieth-century artifacts—plastic—assumes the
mantle of the uncanny. “She’s dead. Wrapped in
plastic,” says Pete in the pilot episode after find-
ing the body of Laura Palmer, prom queen.
Common plastic appropriates the heady status
of the Gothic veil. Layers of translucent plastic
tease the viewer’s eye with the suggestion of a
female body. When a hand removes the plastic,
revealing Laura Palmer’s face, the lingering camera
shot is as resonant as the moment Emily lifts the
black veil in Mysteries of Udolfo, but for different
reasons. Udolfo resonates with the strangeness of
the Gothic, Twin Peaks with the ordinariness of
the Gothic. The terrible object behind the veil is a
gruesome wax figure of a body in the last stages of
decay. The figure beneath the plastic is a much
more common object—a dead body. Where the
wax figure creates distance between viewer and
text because of its exotic, unusual, and bizarre
qualities, the body creates closeness because of its
ordinariness.
The Television Gothic reveals what is behind
the veil in the first episode, while readers of Udolfo
had to wade through several hundred additional
pages before learning the mystery of the veil.
What is the difference? By postponing revelation,
Radcliffe makes the Gothic moment remote, at-
tenuated and rarefied. By beginning with the
unveiling, David Lynch makes the Gothic im-
mediate.
It may be objected that with this early unveil-
ing, Lynch is in fact destroying the Gothic. “How
obvious,” we think. “We recognize this. Here is
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 that most ordinary of objects in any mystery—a
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
body.” But our moment of certainty is short-lived.
It is precisely Lynch’s point (and a point that
characterizes Twin Peaks as a Television Gothic)
that the ordinary is the Gothic. Consider, for
example, the bizarre image of blood dripping on a
donut. A commonplace, ubiquitous object such as
a donut can be uncanny when it is juxtaposed
with another common item—blood. And this
point, the ordinariness of the Gothic, is reinforced
through the series’ emphasis on the enigma of the
family.
Incest and child murder are not the only fam-
ily enigmas in the series. Gothics fairly bristle with
family mysteries, and Twin Peaks is no exception.
In fact, Lynch uses physical and mental deformity
metonymically to suggest the extent of the dis-
torted and dysfunctional family. The strained fam-
ily dinners at the Horne’s are silent except for the
monotonous humming of the teen-aged autistic
son, dressed in full Indian war bonnet. Donna’s
mother is in a wheelchair. Nadine has only one
eye and limits her discussions with her husband
to her obsession with silent drape runners. The
Log Lady talks to her log in lieu of a husband.
Sarah Palmer is subject to visions and fits of
(demonic?) possession and her husband, Leland,
goes insane.
In addition to the above examples of dysfunc-
tional families, examples of spouse abusers are
plentiful in Twin Peaks. Leo routinely beats his
wife, Shelley, and leaves her to die in a fire he sets.
Nadine emotionally abuses Ed. Windom Earle kills
his wife, Caroline. Earle approves of Leo’s abusive
behavior (“domestic violence—now I’m partial to
that!”) and in turn keeps Leo imprisoned as a
slave/pet/torture object in a cabin in the woods.
Earle as the manic ex-husband plots to destroy a
King and Queen (Cooper and Annie), as if no
symbols of wedded power can be allowed to exist.
In his glee over his plotting, Earle comments, “I
haven’t been this excited since I punctured Caro-
line’s aorta!” Domestic violence and dysfunctional
families are the norm in the series.
In fact, it is difficult to find any “normal”
nuclear family within the world of Twin Peaks.
This is particularly telling, in light of comments
such as John Ellis’s that “home” and “family” are
part of “a powerful cultural construct . . . broad-
cast TV assumes that this is the basis and heart of
its audience” (Ellis 113). If this is the case, Lynch’s
construction of anti-nuclear families, a construc-
tion meant to be projected into the homes of
other families, must be powerfully unsettling. In
fact, it must be Gothic.
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Narrative Structure and Television
Gothic
The explanation occupied several pages, which, to
the torture of young Melmoth, were wholly illeg-
ible.
Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
In addition to the enigma of the family,
another key aspect of the Gothic is its narrative
ambiguity. Gothic novels are characterized by
problematic structures. One much-commented-
upon characteristic of the Gothic is “the difficulty
the story has in getting itself told” (Sedgwick 13),
a problem in structure which means that Gothics
“cannot be efficiently told” and are criticized for
being “unaesthetic, anti-artistic, preserving only
the unities of the subconscious” (Twitchell 41).
The Gothic structure is complex and convo-
luted. In the Gothic, stories are interrupted by
other stories, fragments of lost manuscripts give
tantalizing hints at meaning, poetry is interspersed
throughout prose, and baroque, overly-detailed
explanations and descriptions contribute to a
general hemorrhaging of language.
Similarly, the Television Gothic as exemplified
by Twin Peaks is filled with multiple story lines
(love stories, a murder mystery, international busi-
ness deals, a paternity mystery, a beauty contest,
etc.), fragments of interpolated narratives (such as
Laura Palmer’s diary or Cooper’s dictation, and
perhaps even the commodified products of the
series including books, tapes, newspapers, and
even collectible trading cards), poetry and cryptic
messages (“Fire, walk with me,” “I will tell you
three things”) and puzzles within puzzles. If, as
Raymond Williams suggests, “flow” is “the charac-
teristic organization and therefore the characteris-
tic experience” of television, then what is one to
make of a series that resists such organization
(Williams 86)? An important aspect of the work-
ings of flow, according to Williams, is the creation
of “a sense of the world,” that is, of some mean-
ing (Williams 116-18). Twin Peaks frustrates flow
by its constant fracturing, restructuring and
undercutting of meaning. Catherine Martell, wait-
ing to discover the secret of Eckhardt’s black
puzzle box, sums up the frustrating process, say-
ing, “I can’t take any more of this. Boxes inside
boxes. Whatever is in that better be worth a
fortune.”
In fact, inside the box within the box within
the box is a key—suggesting only the existence of
yet another box. Twin Peaks takes our desire for
meaning and aggravates it. Explanations are
baroque and overly complicated, like Gothic
architecture. In place of highly detailed decora-

Scene from David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks.
tions (which distract and bewilder), or elaborate
stained glass (glass which is opaque rather than
transparent), the Television Gothic gives us too
many clues and too many messages. For example,
Cooper’s explanation (in episode seventeen) of
the solution to the murder of Laura Palmer is
spoken very rapidly, overwhelms the viewer with
a profusion of explanation, and is not based on
scientific rationality but on allegory and the
language of dreams. (Cooper explains that the
dwarf in his dream danced and that Leland
danced; he says that BOB had gray hair, and Le-
land’s hair turned gray; and he says that the let-
ters under the fingernails of the victims were spell-
ing out BOB’s name.) Such a baroque explanation
is closer to a parody of meaning than to a real
explanation. (In fact, Saturday Night Live success-
fully parodied Twin Peaks in a skit starring Kyle
MacLachlan as Dale Cooper.)
Even more significantly, the narrative process
of Twin Peaks frustrates our very expectations of
genre itself. This Television Gothic never comes to
rest at any one point. There is no moment of
complete ease or comfort, no point at which the
series settles into one easy mode. Rather, there is a
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PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
constant slippage of meaning. The series never
settles into a familiar groove for any significant
length of time. The Television Gothic frustrates at-
tempts to pin it down to any one particular narra-
tive form.
It is a commonplace of genre criticism to as-
sume that viewers are attuned to those semiotic
cues that forecast the type of genre, and hence
the type of narrative to follow. As Jane Feuer notes
in her discussion of the sitcom, television genre
“assures the interpretability of the text” for the
audience (119). Genre makes a series comfortable
and understandable (or perhaps boring and
predictable). For example, the various semiotic
cues of the conventional Gothic are part of our
cultural furniture. We understand that mysterious
wounds in the heroine’s throat signal a vampire
story. However, unlike the run-of-the-mill televi-
sion Gothic, a characteristic of the “new” Televi-
sion Gothic (as exemplified by Twin Peaks) is that
the genre does not assure the interpretability of
the text. Rather, the genre assures a multiplicity of
possible interpretations. (In this respect, Twin
Peaks is not so much a “newer” Gothic than series
such as Dark Shadows, as it is “true-er” to its Gothic
457
 origins. It is the first television series to fully
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
explore the potential of the Television Gothic, and
hence the first “pure” Television Gothic.) Signs
which ordinarily would determine a set pattern,
when proliferated in the Television Gothic, create
an opening in time and space (like the opening to
the Black Lodge) which allows for an excess or
superabundance of meaning.
Where Television Gothic breaks the bounds of
genre is in its resistance to a single, discrete form
of narrative. This resistance is carried out through
obsessive, exuberant multiplicity. Twin Peaks not
only offers multiple story lines (Cooper’s investiga-
tion of the murder, business intrigues between
Catherine and Ben, adulterous affairs carried on
by Bobby and Shelley and by Ed and Norma, etc.),
and multiple narratives, but also multiple shifts
between conventional or more “settled” Gothic
genres. In contrast, a viewer of the 1991 remake
of Dark Shadows knows what to expect from the
very first episode, if not from the very first scene.
All the symbols and apparatus of the vampire
story are familiar and predictable territory. Twin
Peaks teases the viewer by focusing on not one,
but a multitude of potential narratives, each of
which itself is open to multiple interpretations. To
grasp the extent of this multiplicity, it is helpful
to contrast the operation of narrative drive in Twin
Peaks with the operation of narrative drive in the
horror film genre.
In American Film Genres, Stuart M. Kaminsky
charts out seven main branches of the horror film,
noting a separate “source of horror” in each
branch: (1) “Animal drives which threaten man”;
(2) “Immortal parasite”; (3) “Witches, corrupt
humans who worship evil”; (4) “Rescurrected
dead, or possessed beings who are figuratively
dead”; (5) “Unpredictable madmen”; (6) “Mad
scientist and created monster”; and (7) “Creatures
from outer space, inside the Earth, or from the id”
(152-53). Typically, we expect one primary source
of horror per film. Twin Peaks, as a Television
Gothic, manages to fit into each of these categories
at various points in the series, while resisting al-
legiance to any one. For example, (1) Animal
drives of sexuality, fear, and rage fuel the crimes
in the series; (2) BOB is called a “parasite”; (3) Lana
may be a witch, and Windom Earle has studied a
tribe of Indians who worship evil; (4) Leland is
possessed by BOB; (5) Earle is a madman; (6) Earle
also is a mad scientist, and his creature is Leo
(called “Leo-stein” by Bobby, in a reference to
Frankenstein’s monster); and (7) Project Bluebook
references in the show suggest the possibility of
alien creatures from outer space, while “the evil in
458 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
the woods” suggests the presence of evil within
Nature itself, and Albert suggests that BOB may
simply be “the evil that men do.”
Part of the contrast, of course, lies in the
nature of the two media. Film does not have the
same Gothic potential as television, precisely
because of the finite time period for a film. A film
must end, while a television series has a seem-
ingly infinite potential to continue telling the
story and to continue multiplying meanings.
However, other television shows with Gothic ele-
ments have failed to fully utilize the Gothic
potential of television. Each Night Stalker episode,
for example, simply introduced a new monster
which reporter Carl Kolchak would destroy.
(Interestingly, Kolchak narrates his story into a
tape recorder, like Cooper.) There never was any
real doubt or uncertainty about the outcome. The
clues pointing to the existence and type of the
monster in each series proceeded in a logical,
linear fashion. In Twin Peaks, on the other hand,
logic and meaning are confounded. Each semiotic
cue which ordinarily would narrow the range of
narrative meaning combines with other cues to
expand the possible meanings. (Are there aliens at
work in Twin Peaks? Is BOB a demonic spirit or a
parasite from another planet? What do the Indians
have to do with this? Is it all something in the
coffee or the cherry pie?) A proliferation and
superabundance of meaning is the result.
In addition to Twin Peaks’ multiple narrative
drives and resistance to any one form, the series
demonstrates a second narrative technique unique
to the Television Gothic—the use of a domestic
technological device to explore the ways technol-
ogy transmits emotional extremes. Repeatedly, the
viewer experiences moments in which
emotionally-charged voices and images are medi-
ated through technological devices such as tele-
phones, microphones, tape recorders, video cam-
eras and even television. Such technological
reproductions, because they are reproductions and
not “originals,” are themselves ghostly. And the
final device transmitting these extremes of fear
and love is the television set. Television becomes
the ghost in the home.
Examples of technology as a mediating narra-
tive tool are plentiful. In the pilot episode, Sarah
Palmer’s anguished cries at first learning of her
daughter’s death are mediated through a tele-
phone receiver. As Leland drops the phone,
Sarah’s pain registers through the lingering sound
of her voice on the dangling receiver. In another
example from the pilot episode, the school princi-
pal announces the death of Laura Palmer over the
school P.A. system. He is overcome by grief during
his announcement. We see the effect of the an-
nouncement on the students, followed by a linger-
ing shot of the empty school hallway with the
principal’s disembodied voice echoing through
the hall.
Such moments of technological mediation re-
occur throughout the series. For example, in
several episodes we hear the tape-recorded voice
of Laura Palmer discussing things that frighten
her and excite her. We see a videotape of a highly
distraught Windom Earle discussing his obsession
with an Indian tribe devoted to evil for its own
sake. Microphones squeak and buzz, preventing
important announcements (“Is this thing on?”). A
tape recording of Waldo the mynah bird transmits
the final painful words of Laura Palmer, “hurting
me, hurting me.” On several occasions, individu-
als are wired for eavesdropping purposes under
circumstances fraught with danger. Radio trans-
missions from outer space (or perhaps from the
woods) warn Cooper of danger. Audrey is tied up
and videotaped for purposes of extortion. And, in
perhaps the most blatant example, Windom Earle
uses an electronic device to administer painful
shocks to Leo.
Lucy, the dippy secretary, pinpoints the prob-
lem of all this mediation in one of her deceptively
naive remarks, saying, “I’m going to transfer
him—well, not him, but his call.” What you get
with an electronic transfer is not the individual,
and not even the original message, but the re-
creation of a message. Whether the message must
travel along miles of television wire, be transferred
to audiotape, or be split up into signals that are
sent into space and bounced off a satellite before
re-emerging in the images on your television,
there exists the haunting possibility that some-
thing is lost in the mediating process. Such im-
ages are not the original. They are ghostly.
The fact that so many important communica-
tions in Twin Peaks are mediated through techno-
logical devices highlights two standard Gothic
complaints—the difficulty of communication and
the impossibility of ever really knowing another
human being. Additionally, there is one final
explanation for this narrative device, an explana-
tion highly significant for the Television Gothic.
Twin Peaks’ emphasis on mediated messages—
messages that are transmitted through technologi-
cal devices—underscores the limits of the medium,
and suggests that television itself is the ghost in
the home.
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Conclusions
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
O! what an infinite difference between this mo-
ment and the next!
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolfo (1794)
The more things change, the more they stay
the same. When Horace Walpole wrote the first
Gothic novel in 1764, he was attempting some-
thing new. In his Preface to the Second Edition of
The Castle of Otranto, he comments on his intent
to create a new form:
It was an attempt to blend the two kinds of
romances, the ancient and the modern. In the
former, all was imagination and improbability; in
the latter, nature is always intended to be, and
sometimes has been, copied with great success.
Invention has not been wanting, but the great
resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a
strict adherence to common life.
(19)
Castle of Otranto Walpole’s attempt to “recon-
cile the two kinds” of writing (19).
Similarly, television’s heavy reliance on “real-
ity programming” would seem to tip the scales in
favor of common life, drying up television’s
potential for “fancy.” Lynch’s Twin Peaks can be
seen as a twentieth-century reconciliation of com-
mon and uncommon, home-like and uncanny,
domestic and Gothic. The result of this new
Television Gothic is a format in which the domes-
tic itself operates as the Gothic.
Notes
1. Analysis of the Gothic in literature is extensive, and
what follows is a very selective list. Standard back-
ground reading should include Montague Summers’s
The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel (London:
Fortune P, 1938). Two particularly useful bibliographies
are Robert Donald Spector’s The English Gothic: A
Bibliographic Guide to Writers from Horace Walpole to
Mary Shelley (Westport: Greenwood P. 1984) and Fred-
erick S. Frank’s Gothic Fiction: A Master List of Twentieth
Century Criticism and Research (Westport: Meckler,
1988). Recent works focusing on the American Gothic
include: Louis S. Gross, Redefining the American Gothic:
From Wieland to Day of the Dead (Ann Arbor: UMI
Research P, 1989) and Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B.
Browne, eds., The Gothic World of Stephen King: Land-
scape of Nightmares (Bowling Green: Bowling Green
State U Popular P, 1987). Finally, of particular interest
for those interested in Gothic narrative structure is
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s excellent analysis, The Coher-
ence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Arno P, 1980).
Turning to film, a selective sampling of work on
Gothic and horror (the two terms, though deserving
separate definitions, are often used interchangeably)
includes the following: Gregory A. Waller, ed., Ameri-
can Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film
(Urbana, U of Illinois P, 1987); Stuart M. Kaminsky,
American Film Genres: Approaches to a Critical Theory of
Popular Film (New York: Dell P, 1974); Barry Keith
Grant, ed., Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film
459
 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow P, 1984); James Donald, ed.,
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
Fantasy and the Cinema (London: British Film Institute,
1989); Emily D. Edwards, “The Ecstasy of Horrible
Expectations: Morbid Curiosity, Sensation Seeking,
and Interest in Horror Movies,” Current Research in
Film 5, ed. Bruce A. Austin (Norwood, NJ: Ablex,
1991): 19-38; and Ruth Perlmutter, “The Cinema of
the Grotesque,” Georgia Review 33.1 (Spring 1979):
168-93. A useful analysis of the “boom and bust” cycle
of horror films for the period of 1978 to 1983 can be
found in Robert E. Kapsis’s “Hollywood Genres and
the Production of Culture Perspective,” Current
Researches in Film 5 (1991): 68-85. Particularly interest-
ing for students of the Gothic are Charlene Burnell’s
“The Gothic: a Literary Genre’s Transition to Film,”
Planks of Reason: 79-100 and Roger Dadoun’s “Fetish-
ism in the Horror Film,” Fantasy and the Cinema: 39-
61. Finally, mandatory readings are Robin Wood’s two
articles on American horror films of the ’60s and
’70s—“Return of the Repressed,” Film Comment 14.4
(1978):25-32 and “Gods and Monsters,” Film Com-
ment 14.5 (1978): 19-25.
The pickings are lean as far as finding essays on televi-
sion and the Gothic, but Gregory A. Waller’s “Made-
for-Television Horror Films,” American Horrors: 145-61,
is an insightful work which explores the technical
limitations of made-for-television horror films: Ad-
ditionally, while not a scholarly work, Stephen King’s
Danse Macabre (New York: Berkley Books, 1981)
contains an interesting and entertaining chapter on
the limits of television horror, titled, “The Glass Teat,
or, This Monster Was Brought to You by Gainesburg-
ers.”
2. While most commentators trace the origins of the
Gothic to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto
(1764), there is less agreement on how to categorize
the branches of the Gothic. It is possible to discuss the
Sentimental Gothic, the Schauer-Romantik Gothic,
the Explained Supernatural Gothic, the Unexplained
Supernatural Gothic, the Historical Gothic, etc.
3. What makes such moments significantly different
from scenes of family violence in soap operas is the
series’ insistence on the uncanny moment, an insis-
tence that is purely Gothic in origin.
Works Cited
Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. 1818. Ed. Anne Henry
Ehrenpreis. New York: Penguin, 1987.
Burnell, Charlene. “The Gothic: A Literary Genre’s Transi-
tion to Film.” Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film.
Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1984.
Dadoun, Roger. “Fetishism in the Horror Film.” Fantasy and
Cinema. Ed. James Donald. London: British Film
Institute, 1989. 39-61.
Donald, James, ed. Fantasy and the Cinema. London: British
Film Institute, 1989.
Edwards, Emily D. “The Ecstasy of Horrible Expectations:
Morbid Curiosity, Sensation Seeking, and Interest in
Horror Movies.” Current Research in Film 5. Ed. Bruce A.
Austin. Norwood: Ablex, 1991. 19-38.
Ellis, John. Visible Fictions—Cinema: Television: Video.
London: Routledge, 1982.
460 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Feuer, Jane. “Genre Study and Television.” Channels of
Discourse: Television and Contemporary Criticism. Ed.
Robert C. Allen. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P,
1987. 113-33.
Frank, Frederick S. Gothic Fiction: A Master List of Twentieth
Century Criticism and Research. Westport: Meckler, 1988.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Studies in Parapsychology.
Ed. Philip Rieff. New York: Collier Books, 1963. 19-60.
Grant, Barry Keith, ed. Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror
Film. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1984.
Gross, Louis S. Redefining the American Gothic: From Wieland
to Day of the Dead. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1989.
Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justi-
fied Sinner. 1824. London: Cresset, 1947.
Hoppenstand, Gary, and Ray B. Browne, eds. The Gothic
World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares. Bowling
Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1987.
Kaminsky, Stuart M. American Film Genres: Approaches to a
Critical Theory of Popular Film. New York: Dell, 1974.
Kapsis, Robert E. “Hollywood Genres and the Production of
Culture Perspective.” Current Researches in Film 5. Ed.
Bruce A. Austin. Norwood: Ablex, 1991. 68-85.
King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. New York: Berkley Books,
1981.
MacAndrew, Elizabeth. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New
York: Columbia UP, 1979.
Marc, David. “Beginning to Begin Again.” Television: The
Critical View. Ed. Horace Newcomb. 4th ed. New York:
Oxford UP, 1987. 323-60.
Maturin, Charles Robert. Melmoth the Wanderer. 1820. Intro.
William F. Axton. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1961.
Perlmutter, Ruth. “The Cinema of the Grotesque.” Georgia
Review 33:1 (1979): 168-93.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse
in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin, 1985.
Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolfo. 1794. Ed. Bonamy
Dobree. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions.
New York: Arno, 1980.
Spector, Robert Donald. The English Gothic: A Bibliographic
Guide to Writers from Horace Walpole to Mary Shelley.
Westport: Greenwood, 1984.
Summers, Montague. The Gothic Quest: A History of the
Gothic Novel. London: Fortune, 1938.
Twitchell, James B. Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern
Horror. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985.
Waller, Gregory A. “Made-for-Television Horror Films.”
American Horrors. Ed. Gregory A. Waller. Urbana: U of
Illinois P, 1987.
Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. 1764. Intro. Marvin
Mudrick. New York: Macmillan, 1963.
Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form.
New York: Schocken Books, 1975.
Wood, Robin. “Gods and Monsters.” Film Comment 14.5
(1978): 19-25.
———. “Return of the Repressed.” Film Comment
14.4.(1978): 25-32.
MUSIC
ELIZABETH JANE WALL HINDS
(ESSAY DATE WINTER 1992)
SOURCE: Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall. “The Devil Sings
the Blues: Heavy Metal, Gothic Fiction and
‘Postmodern’ Discourse.” Journal of Popular Culture 26,
no. 3 (winter 1992): 151-64.
In the following essay, Hinds correlates Gothic fiction
and heavy metal music, asserting that, among other
features, the two artistic forms share a culturally
subversive nature and “are peculiar in their purposeful
deformity and evocation of the Satanic.”
Maybe it’s the time of year;
And then maybe it’s the time of man.
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young “Woodstock”
It is a long way from the 1764 appearance of
Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto to the 1968 Led
Zeppelin I, but the monstrous subgenre behavior
of the latter, one of the first unabashedly Heavy
Metal albums, surprisingly resembles the former,
both formally and historically. The first in a series
of albums that came to define Heavy Metal music,
this LP did to what had by then become main-
stream Rock what Walpole, and later, M.G. Lewis
and Mary Shelley, had done to the mainstream
novel. Zeppelin I retained the outward form of its
parent—standard LP format, largely with newly-
written material, but also with one cover version
(“You Shook Me”), the four-man band with bass
and electric guitars, drums and vocals and the
general outline of the Rock lyric—and proceeded
to rearrange those basic elements into a genre with
an altogether more brash, raunchy and musically
subversive arrangement.1
As I will illustrate momentarily, the appear-
ance of Gothic fiction in the late eighteenth
century and that of Heavy Metal in the late
twentieth follows the same historical path as their
two parent-forms, namely the novel and Rock
music, both of which served subversive purposes
at the time of their birth. While both parent-
genres followed the same trajectory from radical-
ism to mainstream culture as do many new
genres, their offspring share more than just the
historical movement of subversion-to-hegemonic
form. The histories of both subgenres are peculiar
in their purposeful deformity and evocation of
the Satanic: both can be described as a monstrous
Gothic Other whose family resemblance to their
respective parent was inescapable, but which was,
like an unwashed and slightly retarded younger
brother, an Other whose distortions of the parent-
form became repulsive to the very audience who
had supported its entry into the world.
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By concentrating on these two species of sub-
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
genre, what I aim to discover is three-fold. First, I
will describe the nature of the two species Gothic
fiction and Heavy Metal. By “nature,” however, I
do not mean to abstract a principle of operation
separate from its cultural context, or what is bet-
ter called its historical position, but rather to
discover this “nature” in that very historical posi-
tion itself. Thus, the epigraph to this paper. The
second, or ulterior, motive is to come to an
understanding of “subgenre” as both a term and a
concept—what it is we mean when we say “sub-
genre” rather than “movement”—thereby reclaim-
ing the value of those generic (i.e., aesthetic)
categories that have been lost to the forward rush
of New-Historical and ideological criticism. It is by
redefining “subgenre,” a manageable if somewhat
reductive category, as taking its characteristics
from the flux of epistemic history that I hope to
achieve this recuperation. My third and final goal
is to register a critique of the very historicist—
indeed Marxist—theoretizing gesture that makes
this kind of study possible in the first place.
Through this final critique, in hopes of opening a
new space for understanding, I will imitate the
defining feature of the subgenres under discussion
in their habit of biting the hands that feed them.
Nineteen sixties Rock music, very like the
novel in the mid-eighteenth century, was for a
short time a radical, subversive form. No one
would argue against the novel’s being, by defini-
tion, a “new” and popular form, appealing to the
sensibilities of an undereducated mass audience
and frequently claiming as its own the values of
this bourgeois crowd. The 1960s Rock audience
was just such a crowd—one who liked the sounds
music made, felt its instrumental and lyrical
power, but who lacked the resources to educate
itself formally. Partly due to its youthful energy
and partly due to its position in history, the 1960s
Rock band found itself speaking the language of
rebellion: instrumentally, it found the sound of
Big Bands and Bing Crosby too easy on the ear,
too mushy; its lyrics found the crooning of
euphemistic love songs and the nonsense verse of
1950s “bubblegum” pop too arid and politically
unaware.
This group of musicians—foreseen in Buddy
Holly and Elvis Presley—found its leading voices
in The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones—
those bands who insisted that a handful of people
could make a loud and joyful enough noise to
forge a Revolution in sound. The music became
louder, it became more sexually suggestive, and,
most importantly, it began to express the News of
461
 the World in lyrics about the pleasures and punish-
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
ments of the drug culture (The Byrds’ “Eight Miles
High”) and, especially, in lyrics about the Vietnam
War (John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s “Give
Peace a Chance”). Indeed, no one would question
the formation of Rock & Roll in the 1960s as a
radical casting off of previous popular music
standards.
By the late 1960s, however, a hegemonic force
had taken hold of Rock music—the same force,
spurred by a species of international capitalist ide-
als brought about by the very nature of “the
popular,” meaning “that which sells,” that had
very quickly drawn the novel into its maw in the
later eighteenth century. Completely unawares,
these two “radical” forms suddenly found them-
selves co-opted into the mainstream, produced
and bought in outrageous numbers, consumed
quickly and rehearsed widely. The sign of the
novel’s sudden acceptance—indeed, an even
bourgeois status—came in the lightning bolt of
parody, in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Rock was less
parodied than simply engulfed and accepted: wit-
ness the appearance in 1967 and 1970 respectively
of “Elenor Rigby” and “Hey Jude” in Muzak. Not
much later, the lyrics of both began appearing in
anthologies used for Freshman English courses.
The power of international capitalism to
embrace and celebrate that which is initially
subversive had taken hold, in their respective eras,
of both the novel and of Rock music, incorporat-
ing both genres into its mass marketing strategies,
thereby recreating the form itself vis-a-vis the
marketplace. It is at this point—or rather the two
points of the late eighteenth and late twentieth
centuries—of absolute assimilation that the sub-
genres of Gothic fiction and Heavy Metal were
born. The Gothic novel was undoubtedly a rela-
tion of the parent in its prose, highly-storied form,
the “well-made” novel of Richardson and Field-
ing. But where the novel had revealed a closely-
knit formal design—a beginning, middle and end
centered about a causally-connected universe of
motivation and action—the Gothic novel was
generally episodic in structure, often with much-
maligned “flaws” consisting in unmotivated
(usually evil) actions and strands of plot that tend
to appear and disappear without explanation.
Where the novel had espoused restraint, the
Gothic novel demonstrated uninhibited libido,
even outright perversion with incest, rape and
sado-masochism of all varieties. And finally, where
the novel had espoused the singularly righteous
in moral vision, detailing the rewards of a good
heart and virtuous action within the social sphere,
462 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
the Gothic novel, although conservative like its
parent, took the low road, demonstrating in too-
close detail the rewards and punishments of the
carnally evil, the best full-blown example of which
was Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, organized
over a chronology of three hundred years, detail-
ing the desperate attempts of Melmoth who, hav-
ing sold his soul to the devil for an extended life,
attempts to prolong his term on earth by convert-
ing others in a series of disconnected episodes
ending in Melmoth’s eventual failure: in the end,
he is “called home” to Satan and must return by
way of falling through a craggy abyss, wasting
away by starvation for three days and finally be-
ing torn to shreds by demons.
Early Heavy Metal music concentrated more
intensively on the reward end of the carnal
spectrum, but in its totality bespoke the same mes-
sage of perversion as did the Gothic Novel. Instru-
mentally, this Heavy Metal style—a name anach-
ronistically applied, I should and—twisted the
basic Rock arrangement into what one might call
an episodic format. Where the standard Rock
single was approximately three minutes long,
contained three or sometimes four verses alternat-
ing with a two-to-four-line chorus and faded out
with repetitions of the chorus, Led Zeppelin I
contained a range from three to seven and a half
minutes (the latter with “Baby, I’m Gonna Leave
You”) and a very irregular pattern of repetition for
the chorus. Further, while the Heavy Metal form
retains the electric guitar emphasis and solos of
mainstream Rock, these solos became famous for
irregularity and a seemingly uncontrolled form-
lessness; to call on the originators again, “Dazed
and Confused”—including the studio version
from Zeppelin I, but especially the live version of
the concert film The Song Remains the Same—
demonstrates the limits of the guitar solo that
changes both rhythm and key and that extends
its length to the outrageous—nearly ten minutes.
To draw out the analogy, the drum and keyboard
solos of early Metal music draw on the “virtuoso”
performance style of Rock’s Jazz roots to distort
and intensify the mainstream Rock concept of the
solo. In short, with its irregular placement and
number of choruses and verses, its length of solo
performances, the intensified role of the bass
guitar and lower registers in general, Heavy Metal
perverted the well-made, beginning-middle-end
structure of the standard into more a series of
loosely connected “episodes” than a coherency of
“song.”
It is in its lyrics, however, that Heavy Metal
most systematically subverts its mother form;
Robert Pattison accounts for the centrality of these
lyrics by writing that they “may be trite, obscene,
and idiotic—which is to say, they may be vulgar—
but they are certainly not incidental, and the
proof of their importance is their consistency”
(ix). In response to the generally positive—one
might say the “feel-good” lyrics of mainstream
1960s Rock—Heavy Metal lyrics focused more
particularly on the blatant, the sexual and often,
the horrific. Recall some of the most popular of
1960’s lyric messages: “Love is all you need”
(Beatles, “All You Need is Love”) and “I want to
hold your hand” (Beatles, “I Want to Hold Your
Hand”) are both sweetened versions of social and
personal closeness. Even the lyrics of the Stones’
“Satisfaction” and The Who’s “Squeeze Box”
euphemistically suggest the sex act, drawing
largely on the metaphor and allusion of the previ-
ous fifty years of popular music. Subverting the
genre, indeed, epitomizing the notion of “sub-
genre,” Heavy Metal made sex, not love. The lyr-
ics here are blatant and often violent. The range
of sexual conversation in even the early days of
this music moves from the frank—again, the
“Dazed and Confused” of Zeppelin I repeats,
“Sweet little baby, I want you again”—to the
outright bluntness of the third Zeppelin album
(Led Zeppelin III) in “Whole Lotta Love”: “Way
down inside, woman, you need it. . . .” Coupled
with the alternating short bass and guitar notes
and Robert Plant’s moaning, the sexual message
could not be more clear or less softened by any
euphemism of romance.
Like many others, Will Straw points out “an
expression of violent sexuality” in Heavy Metal,
but seeks to gloss over this overt sexual message
by hurriedly noting that Heavy Metal’s lyrics are
often at the same time “explorations of nonro-
mantic and nonerotic themes” (107). It is precisely
those “nonromantic and nonerotic themes”
which surround the overtly sexual notations that
cause Heavy Metal’s sexuality to be, or to be
received as, “subversive”: when “Dazed and
Confused” places the line “Sweet little baby, I
want you again” in a series of lamentations on
the unfaithfulness of women, the juxtaposition is,
at the very least, paradoxical. The magnified range
of sexual attention in Heavy Metal music should
recall the sexual frankness of the Gothic’s “School
of Horror,” of which M.G. Lewis’ The Monk is only
the most notorious example, in which Ambrosio,
the monk, rapes and later murders his sister, with
the help of Matilda, a young initiate of a Satanic
order, who has dressed as a man to enter the
monastery and “convert” Ambrosio.2 The monk’s
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sexual exploits are made all the more “horrific” by
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
placing them in the context of the monastery
(appropriately, under the monastery in the laby-
rinthine dungeon).
More importantly, these subgenres are distin-
guished by their use of sex as a literal act rather
than a metonymic expression of romantic love. If
Rock music indeed takes part in what Bram Dijk-
stra calls an “aesthetic of sensuousness” (qtd. in
Wicke 53), as one could argue for the novel as
well—an aesthetic that glorifies or at least takes as
subject and object the physical, everyday activities
of dancing, flirting, courting, marrying—then the
subgenres of Heavy Metal and Gothic fiction take
those barely-disguised and socially sanctioned
euphemisms for sex and draw them from the
“hidden” background into a surface of literal ac-
tion. Of the staple Gothic theme of incest, for
example, William Patrick Day has pointed out that
“it was also an aspect of popular fiction, though
the threat seems to have been more popular than
the actuality” (emphasis added) (120). This literal
sexuality distinguishes the two subgenres not only
from their parent genres, but also from the closely-
related subgenres of “hard” Rock and the picar-
esque novel, both of which went directly for the
sensuous throat, as did the Gothic novel and
Heavy Metal, and refused the “communalism”
implied in mainstream Rock’s dance music format
(e.g., the Beatles’ “She Loves You”) and the main-
stream novel’s insistence on societal values (e.g.,
Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe). These related sub-
genres formally rejected the communal values of
the mainstream in much the same way as Heavy
Metal and Gothic fiction rejected the same popu-
lar forms, but the message of sexuality in hard
Rock and the picaresque remained euphemized:
Jethro Tull could produce a number like “Velvet
Green,” instrumentally and structurally diverse
and as evocative of sexuality as any Heavy Metal
band, but those evocative lyrics still came from
the “lyric” tradition of suggestion (“Won’t you
have my company? / Yes, take it in your hand”);
likewise, Moll Flanders may live and breathe in a
loosely episodic universe, peopled by first one
husband or lover after another (an important sub-
genre marker: one cannot always tell the
difference), but the sex act itself is kept in the
background, even though Moll can thrive, liter-
ally, only on sex (Defoe, Moll Flanders).
Gothic fiction’s and Heavy Metal’s making
literal the act of sex is, as indicated in the previ-
ous plot summary of The Monk, frequently of a
piece with Satanic subject matter, although the
Satanic takes up a life of its own in both subgenres
463

PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
SHIRLEY JACKSON (1919-1965)
Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” (1948)
established her literary reputation as an
author of Gothic horror fiction. This fre-
quently anthologized tale exemplifies the
central themes of Jackson’s fiction, which
include such ordinary yet grotesque realities
as prejudice, psychological malaise, loneli-
ness, and cruelty. In works that often contain
elements of conventional Gothic horror,
Jackson chronicles the universal evil underly-
ing human nature. Her relatively impassive
prose style belies the nihilism of her outlook;
similarly, the charming hamlets that serve as
settings for her tales contrast with the true
malevolence of their inhabitants. “The Lot-
tery” opens on a lovely June morning when
the citizens of a tranquil village gather in the
town square for an annual drawing. Amidst
laughter and gossip, families draw slips of
paper from a ballot box until housewife Tessie
Hutchinson receives the paper with a black
mark on it, and the villagers stone her to
death as a ritual sacrifice. The shocking
impact of this unanticipated ending is intensi-
fied by Jackson’s casual, detached narrative
and serene setting. Jackson was perpetually
intrigued with the powers of the mind, and
her fiction is replete with psychological
insights. Her protagonists are frequently
forlorn, socially misfit young women who
undergo turbulent passages into adulthood.
The Haunting of Hill House (1959) is at once
considered Jackson’s most powerful explora-
tion of individual loneliness and her greatest
work of horror fiction. Eleanor Vance is one
of four individuals who is asked to come to
Hill House in order to investigate the possibil-
ity of paranormal phenomena there. It rapidly
becomes clear that Eleanor’s loneliness and
weakness of will make her unusually suscep-
tible to the influences at the house. In effect,
the house subsumes her: she identifies herself
with the house and its previous occupants,
and the supernatural manifestations make it
clear that she will not be allowed to leave.
She attempts to drive away, but the car
crashes into a tree and she dies. Jackson pos-
sessed more than 200 books on black magic
and considered herself a practicing witch.
464
beyond its connection with the sexual. A healthy
branch of Metal music is overtly Satanic, begin-
ning popularly with Led Zeppelin’s “The Battle of
Evermore,” from their untitled fourth album, and
extending through Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear
the Reaper” to the lyrics of present-day Ozzie Os-
born, former lead singer for Black Sabbath. The
late 1960s was the beginning of outright Satanism
in the Rock format, I should say, since the Devil
has long been a powerful character in the Blues
lyric, another ancestor of both mainstream Rock
and Heavy Metal; this diabolical lineage has been
noted by almost every critic to write on either the
Rock genre or its Heavy Metal subgenre.3 The
Blues lyrics of Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, Skip
James, and particularly of Robert Johnson were
filled with references to Satan, as in Johnson’s line,
“Hello, Satan, I believe it’s time to go,” to such a
degree that the Blues became known as “Devil’s
music.”4 These references continued to thrive in
the later Zeppelin and other Heavy Metal lyrics,
building up a myth of the Heavy Metal band as
necessarily Satanic. The rumor of “back-masking”
on “Stairway to Heaven,” (Led Zeppelin, Untitled)
supposedly designed to record the statement, “I
worship you, my Satan,” backward throughout
the song, was no doubt spurred by this overarch-
ing myth of the Satanic within the Blues. It is
especially interesting that the Satan-hunters felt it
necessary to play “Stairway to Heaven” backward
in search of the satanic message, when the song
preceding it on the album, “The Battle of Ever-
more,” constitutes an openly Satanic epic battle,
even played forward.5
As Pattison explains, however, the occult
underpinnings of the Blues mythology as em-
braced by Heavy Metal bore only a marginal
relationship to “reality”; in effect, occult refer-
ences play on the already-established mythology
in order to forge a sense of the subversive more
than through any “real” belief in Satan or occult
practices. Pattison argues that the players of both
Rock and Heavy Metal are quite aware that their
occult is a myth (30-55).6 To put it differently, the
occult serves merely as a sign-system within which
Satanic references signify, in one sense, only
“subversion.” What would be the point of an
admittedly empty myth, then? To fly in the face
of established—mass cultural—mythologies, just
as Gothic fiction, particularly in its “school of hor-
ror” phase, attempted to supply a shock element
to carve out an identity in contradistinction to,
not simply as one variation upon, mainstream
culture. As Peter Wicke notes, subcultures within
“highly developed capitalism” may express “dis-
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
tance through excess” (84). The “horror” of excess,
regarding both genres, is best expressed in a news
item retailed by Pattison as indicative of actual
mass cultural response to the “cult” of Heavy
Metal:
In 1984, the New York Daily News ran an Associ-
ated Press story under the headline, “Satan-Rock
Girl Murdered Mom”: “A teenage girl who a
prosecutor said was involved with her boyfriend
in Satanism and heavy-metal rock music has been
convicted of murdering her mother, former chair-
man of a group dedicated to stopping violence in
the home.” To make matters worse, her boyfriend
“had orange hair.”
(175)
The orange hair is the give-away: that the As-
sociated Press found the boyfriend’s hair color
relevant speaks to consumer culture’s deep fear of
the subculture as it takes the subculture’s bait. To
some extent, this bait merely enforces “differ-
ence.” It is in this respect that the two sub-popular
forms under discussion represent “subgenre” par
excellence, and here that they become more than
just examples of generic behavior. The subgenre
differs in kind from a “movement,” such as Imag-
ism in the early twentieth century, which differs
from its parent genre, Modernism, only in degree.
A movement lifts out a select number of the par-
ent genre’s characteristics, to magnify and elabo-
rate those few characteristics. Alastair Fowler’s
definition of subgenre, in fact, more closely ap-
proximates what I see as the behavior of a move-
ment: “such groups have a relatively simple logi-
cal relation [to the parent genre]: their features are
more or less disjunct subsets of the sets of features
characterizing kinds . . . external forms and all”
(112). The subgenre, I believe, while it is a “dis-
junct subset,” is labelled “sub-” in the vernacular
not without reason. It positively revolts against
many of the parent form’s “external forms,” and
in a sort of adolescent rage, pits itself against the
very universe its parent inhabits, retaining only
the family resemblance. Gothic fiction and Heavy
metal epitomize this subgeneric behavior because
they manifest the “sub-” in several conceptions:
subversive, substandard, subliminal and, if one
takes the parent genres’ form as the “well-made”
standard, substandard. These two “Satanic” off-
spring go to great lengths to define and illustrate
“difference,” and further, a difference “beneath,”
hidden under the socially acceptable.
This difference, however, does not merely
indicate the rebelliousness of youth (although it is
that—remember that Lewis was eighteen when he
wrote The Monk), nor does it merely signify
“subversion,” but more subtly implies a critique
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
of the mainstream culture it exists within, a
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
critique manifested in the very Satanism which
appears to be a mythology emptied of its value. If
the subculture, expressed through the subgenres
of Heavy Metal and Gothic fiction, rebels through
excess in a kind of parody of the mass movements
surrounding it, its rebellion is of a deeply conser-
vative nature, one which rejects the ideology that
can take part so willingly in mass production and
consumption. The now-commodifed genres are
ridiculed and rejected by their subgenres for the
commodification itself, for their own emptiness of
value, while the subgenres Gothic fiction and
Heavy Metal attempt to reinsert absolute value
into the apparently value-less free-play of com-
modity consumption.
Absolute value, in this case, is not positive or
“religious,” yet it does pretend to worship a deity,
thereby subscribing to the concept of transcen-
dence. This mythology reinscribes an essential
value outside of, or prior to, the alternating cur-
rents of supply and demand which equate value
with capital and makes valuable only that which
sells, in what Dana Polan terms “a spectacle of
superficiality” (46). The absolute value asserted by
these subgenres, then, can only be spiritual, and
then only in the Emersonian sense, in which the
non-material is placed in the position of power.
The devil positively causes destruction in the
Gothic novel; and the devil is the source of energy
in “The Battle of Evermore,” as is Blake’s Satan in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. To be sure, this
Satan does destroy—usually individual lives in the
Gothic novel, sometimes entire civilizations in
Heavy Metal lyrics—but its power is nevertheless
spiritual, asserting itself against the Hallmark-card
“spiritualism” of commodity culture, the one that
pays lip-service to a God who likes everyone
equally and wants “only the best” for everyone.
Through this “alternate” spirituality, the
Satanic impulse bears out the remarkable ability
of popular audiences to make meaning of those
products presented as empty form, little more
than advertising, whether the ad is for bourgeois
moral virtues or for Reeboks. As Paul Willis writes,
Though the whole commodity form provides
powerful implications for the manner of its
consumption, it by no means enforces them.
Commodities can be taken out of context, claimed
in a particular way, developed and repossessed to
express something deeply and thereby to change
somewhat the very feelings which are their prod-
uct. And all this can happen under the very nose
of the dominant class—and with their products.
(6)
465
 To witness this active reinscription of the com-
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
modified into an alternate universe of spiritual,
albeit retrograde, power, is to return some modi-
cum of power to the otherwise passive receiver of
popular genres: the young female of the late
eighteenth century, reading novels in place of be-
ing educated, or the young male or female sitting
in front of MTV.7
So how far can we push the analogy between
Gothic fiction of the eighteenth century and the
Heavy Metal beginning in the late 1960s? Histori-
cally, the movements are entirely of a piece: both
arose on the heels of new and hugely popular
forms of cheap entertainment intended for the
amusement of the masses. And as we have seen,
both subgenres of those more popular, more
widespread forms took shape by intensifying the
focus of the parent-genres, by perverting the
structure of the parent-genres through appeals to
a lower order of sensibility and by making literal
what was euphemized in the parent-genres. In ef-
fect, both Gothic fiction and Heavy Metal repre-
sent a return of the repressed—a once-again,
newly repressed freedom of form and sexuality—
emerging in the wake of supposedly revolutionary
genres whose radicalism had become hegemonic
manifestations of the larger culture and who, as a
result, had lost their power to move.
Naturally, both Gothic fiction and Heavy
Metal music succumbed to the very influences
they initially set out to subvert. Naturally, that is,
because both subgenres belong to already co-opted
discourses, those parent-genres which exist, or
existed in the past, only by virtue of participation
in commercial culture. By definition, those co-
opted discourses can be defined only in terms of
their production/consumption matrix, what Mary
Poovey describes, discussing Rock music, as the
mutual dependence of the product with its adver-
tisement (615-16). Fredric Jameson describes Rock
music and Gothic fiction alike, in their popular
natures, likewise as products of “late capitalism”;
as “products,” they may only produce subgenres
that must finally grow into products as well, in
order to survive in a consumer culture. Gothic fic-
tion and Heavy Metal both became instant suc-
cesses, so much so that as early as 1803 Jane Aus-
ten was to publish Northanger Abbey, the first
widely-known parody of the Gothic form. Heavy
Metal has likewise been parodied—most success-
fully in the 1984 Rob Reiner film This Is Spinal
Tap—but has, more importantly, been imitated
extensively and without variation, possibly more
than any other Rock genre. As a result, popular
Heavy Metal productions can be nearly indistin-
466
guishable from each other. At the same time, some
of Heavy Metal’s subversive impulse has cooled,
resulting in the shortened form and euphemistic
lyrics of its parent twenty years ago. A staple of
the form has become, in fact, the love ballad,
painfully sentimental and often as painfully self-
referential, as with Bon Jovi’s “Wanted, Dead or
Alive,” which chronicles the life of the suffering
Heavy Metal band on the road. With its quickness
to imitate its own form, Heavy Metal, like Gothic
fiction, as quickly has ceased to be a subversive,
energized genre, and has instead become both a
subject of parody and a product of ravenous
consumer appetite.
While Jameson’s description of this process
sheds light on both the nature of the subgenre
and the nature of consumerism, it is in the weak-
ness of his (and others’—I only take Jameson as a
leading voice of ideological criticism) label “post-
modernism” that we may discover the power of
the subgenre as an activity. Jameson aptly de-
scribes the “new” of any genre as “ugly, dissonant,
bohemian, sexually shocking” to the prevailing
bourgeois culture, noting simply that that new-
ness, in becoming co-opted, ceases to shock and
opens a space for a yet-newer genre to come along
and make its noise (27). However, he goes on, the
postmodern newness is of a different order; “it is
not just another word for the description of a
particular style” (15). Jameson insists, in fact, that
the postmodern is indeed what it sounds like: “a
periodizing concept” which describes such a high
degree of integration among production, product
and consumption that it can take place only in
the historical era of late capitalism. Which returns
us to the question of Gothic fiction. If what I have
argued is correct—that both Gothic fiction upon
its first arrival and Heavy Metal Music are by
definition subgeneric because they assert the
transcendent spiritual against a prevailing com-
modification, and that they both succumbed to
weakened stylization in capitulating to consumer
demands—then what Jameson describes as “post-
modern” cannot be a periodizing concept, rather,
must be “the description of a particular style,”
since the first Gothic fiction arrived, not in a
period of late capitalism, but during the boom
years of emergent Western capitalism. The Gothic
fiction Jameson refers to, in fact, is a “paralitera-
ture” in his terminology, an “airport paperback
category” (14).
Jameson’s Gothic fiction, it turns out, is not
the historical Gothic fiction of this essay, but is
instead a genre uprooted from its “periodized”
moorings. Jameson’s “airport Gothic” is the
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already co-opted product, already made imitative
and already long past its prime; existing in the
same culture as Heavy Metal music, this Gothic
may indeed be a postmodern product, historically
speaking. But the postmodern itself, pastiche in
style, effacing of boundaries, particularly the
boundaries of high-and mass-culture, and not
least of all existing outside the categories of “art”
and “taste”—this postmodernism, which Jameson
among others insists results in a value-less culture
of late capitalism, is precisely what I have de-
scribed as “mainstream” culture against which the
subgenre revolts.8 In other words, what Jameson
has described as a late twentieth-century phenom-
enon was already emergent with capitalism itself,
born with what Foucault has identified as a great
epistemic upheaval in the late eighteenth century.
There are, of course, distinguishing features of
postmodernism, in particular the species of “hy-
perspace” Jameson identifies in the postmodern
“texts” of architecture and novel; I do not wish,
therefore, to disempower the term altogether. I
have attempted, instead, to re-historicize the
discussion of commodity culture: to identify the
emergence of two subgenres I see as absolutely
dependent upon the economic conditions within
which they have prevailed, and thereby to describe
the nature of “subgenre” itself, as it exists and
existed historically, rather than elide historical
necessity with the theoretizing gaze that would
telescope all manner of texts, both genre and sub-
genre, into the space of the postmodern, in spite
of their varying historical “ages.”9 What the
Satanic subgenres do have in common, histori-
cally speaking, is their appearance during respec-
tive ages of cultural shift, at times of deep change
which bring about a dual sense of belatedness and
dread, an understanding that an “age” has passed
and the new one is none other than chaos itself.
As Raymond Williams argues in The Country and
the City, there have been many ages of such shift,
each of which views the just-passed age in its
newly historicized or narrative form as unified in
ideology and “whole” in the perception of its
inhabitants. It matters little whether this deep
change is “real,” as we have been taught by Fou-
cault to believe of the late eighteenth century, or
perceived but untested, as we speculate about the
late twentieth century. What matters is that the
emergent subgenre, attempting to assert a “nostal-
gic” value, responds to what is perceived as
chaos—the necessary chaos of the ongoing—by
thrusting at it a spiritual power of destructive
force. But rather than privilege our own age by
calling this phenomenon postmodern, it might
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better be served under the label “the Henry Ad-
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
ams effect,” for it was Adams who best described
the vertigo of experience in an as-yet-unstoried
present. At the Great Exposition of 1900, “his
historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of
forces totally new” (382), Adams sounds like a
guest of “postmodernism,” come to remind us of
history:
armed with instruments amounting to new senses
of indefinite power and accuracy, while they
chased force into hiding-places where Nature
herself had never known it to be, making analyses
that contradicted being, and syntheses that endan-
gered the elements. . . . (389) In 1900 they were
plainly forced back on faith in a unity unproved
and an order they had themselves disproved. They
had reduced their universe to a series of relations
to themselves.
(495)
Notes
1. For a more thorough description of Heavy Metal’s
characteristics, see Robert L. Gross, “Heavy Metal
Music: A New Subculture in American Society,” Journal
of Popular Culture 24.1 (Summer 1990) 119-30. Gross
notes that different critics “place” the origin of Heavy
Metal with different bands and different times, but
most agree on the years 1967-1968, and disagree only
whether it was Led Zeppelin (1968) or Black Sabbath
(1969) who recorded Heavy Metal first. Will Straw’s
essay, “Characterizing Rock Music Culture: The Case
of Heavy Metal,” On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written
Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (New
York: Pantheon, 1990) also lays out some parameters
of Heavy Metal, with more attention to its sociologi-
cal, subcultural status.
2. For a good synopsis of the “School of Horror” within
Gothic fiction, see Brendan Hennessay, The Gothic
Novel (Essex: Longman, 1978) or Devendra Varma, The
Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in Eng-
land: Its Origins, Efflorescence Disintegration and Residu-
ary Influences (New York: Russell and Russell, 1957).
3. Just three among a score of commentators on this
subject are Robert Gross, “Heavy Metal Music”; Janet
Podell, ed., Rock Music in America Vol. 58.5 of The Refer-
ence Shelf (New York: Wilson, 1987); Robert Pielke, You
Say You Want A Revolution (Chicago: Nelson-Hall,
1986).
4. For thorough discussions of Satan’s role in the Blues,
see Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (New York: Viking,
1981).
5. The Blues influence on Led Zeppelin goes beyond the
lyrics to instrumentation and even Robert Plant’s vo-
cal style. Compare Palmer’s description of William
Bunch (a.k.a. Peetie Wheatstraw, the devil’s son-in-
law, the High Sherrif from Hell) whose “distinctive
calling card” was a “frayed timbre” embellished with a
falsetto “ooh, well, well” (Palmer 114-15) to Plant’s
equally falsetto moaning in several lyrics, especially
the ending of “Kashmir” (Physical Graffiti [US: Swan
Song, 1975]). Palmer likewise notes in passing one of
Wheatstraw’s lyrics, in which he “advertised his sexual
prowess” in graphic sexual description: “Well, the first
woman I had, she made me get on my knees / And
467
 had the nerve to ask me, ooh, well, well, if I liked lim-
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
burgercheese” (Palmer 115-16).
6. The Satanic is, however, a myth taken seriously from
time to time: note Palmer’s anecdote about Muddy
Waters, who said he was afraid of Robert Johnson
because of rumors that Johnson was in league with
the devil, who supposedly taught him to play guitar
during a year-long, mysterious absence from the Mis-
sissippi Delta. Waters said simply, “he was a dangerous
man” (Palmer 111).
7. See Ann Kaplan’s Rocking Around the Clock: Music
Television, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture
(London: Methuen, 1987) for a discussion of MTV’s
now-central position within the world of Rock music.
8. See also Ann Kaplan, “Feminism/Oedipus/
Postmodernism: The Case of MTV,” Postmodernism and
Its Discontents Theories, Practices, ed. Ann Kaplan (New
York: Verso, 1988) 30-44.
9. I share some portion of this critique of postmodern
theorizing with Jean-Francois Lyotard, who likewise
argues that the postmodern age is not the first to as-
sert an energy of subversion against prevailing culture;
however, Lyotard tends to pit postmodernism only
against modernist culture, where he discovers a similar
movement, where I have preferred to reach backward
to an earlier era, one more consonant with burgeon-
ing capitalism. See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition:
A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and
Brian Massumi, Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 10
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984).
Works Cited
Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiogra-
phy. Boston: Houghton, n.d.
Day, William Patrick. In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study
of Gothic Fantasy. Chicago, n.p.: 1985.
Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. N.p., 1722.
Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of
Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard.
New York: Random, 1965.
Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the
Theory of Genres and Modes. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1982.
Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.”
Postmodernism and Its Discontents: Theories, Practices. Ed.
Ann Kaplan. New York: Verso, 1988. 13-29.
Lewis, Matthew Gregory. The Monk: A Romance (!). London:
Bell, 1796.
Maturin, Charles. Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale. London:
Hurst and Robinson, 1820.
Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues. New York: Viking, 1981.
Pattison, Robert. The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the
Mirror of Romanticism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
Polan, Dana. “Postmodernism and Cultural Analysis
Today.” Postmodernism and Its Discontents: Theories, Prac-
tices. Ed. Ann Kaplan. New York: Verso, 1988.
Poovey, Mary. “Cultural Criticism: Past and Present.” Col-
lege English 52.6 (Oct. 1990).
Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa Harlowe; or The History of a
Young Lady. N.p., 1747-48.
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Straw, Will. “Characterizing Rock Music Culture: The Case
of Heavy Metal.” On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written
Word. Ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. New
York: Pantheon, 1990.
Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. Three Gothic Novels.
Ed. E.F. Bleiler. New York: Dover, 1966.
Wicke, Peter. Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics and Sociology.
Trans. Rachel Fogg. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York:
Oxford UP,
Willis, Paul. Profane Culture. London: Routledge, 1978.
Discography
The Beatles. “All You Need is Love.” Parlophone, 1967.
“Elenor Rigby.” Capitol, 1966.
“Hey Jude.” Apple, 1968.
“I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Parlophone, 1963.
“She Loves You.” Parlophone, 1963.
Blue Oyster Cult. “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” Columbia, 1976.
Bon Jovi. “Wanted, Dead or Alive.” MCA, 1986.
The Byrds. “Eight Miles High.” Columbia, 1966.
Jethro Tull. “Velvet Green.” Songs From the Wood. Chrysalis,
1977.
Led Zeppelin. “Dazed and Confused.” The Song Remains the
Same. Swansong, 1976.
Led Zeppelin I. Atlantic, 1968.
Led Zeppelin III. Atlantic, 1970.
Untitled. Atlantic, 1971.
Lennon, John and Paul McCartney. “Give Peace a Chance.”
Apple, 1969.
Rolling Stones. “Satisfaction (I Can’t Get No).” Atlantic,
1965.
The Who. “Squeeze Box.” MCA, 1975.
JAMES HANNAHAM (ESSAY DATE
1997)
SOURCE: Hannaham, James. “Bela Lugosi’s Dead and
I Don’t Feel So Good Either: Goth and the Glorifica-
tion of Suffering in Rock Music.” In Gothic: Transmuta-
tions of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art, edited by
Christoph Grunenberg, pp. 118-92. Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1997.
In the following essay, Hannaham delineates the themes,
artists, and works associated with the Gothic in rock
music.
If rock and roll is just the blues with an
emphasis on adolescent sex, then Goth rock is
rock and roll with death and madness. Gothic
imagery and influence has skulked at the margins
of rock music for decades, and indeed the blues
has plenty of subject matter in common with
what came to be known, in the late 1970s and
early 80s, simply as “Goth.” Its less-than-subtle
influences streamed from the Gothic novels of the
nineteenth century as well as contemporary hor-
ror films, especially 1950s B-movies.
Even though blues songs might have dealt
with death, madness, and loss, the blues were
meant to be part testimony and part catharsis.
Black blues singers wailed in order to explain and
share their hardship, and by extension build a
sympathetic society. In a similar way, one of the
predecessors of the blues, the Negro spiritual, at-
tempted to accomplish this feat in a more literal
way. The spiritual was often used as a code to
signal slave escapes, and its lyrics usually drew
parallels between making a break for the promised
land in heaven and stealing away to the promised
land up north.
Once rock and roll became the engine of
American youth culture it remains today rather
than simply “jungle music,” however, the social
meaning of the blues was altered. To say that it
had a positive or negative effect on the quality of
the music is irrelevant. But when people who were
fans of the blues rather than originators began to
play it, this fact allowed for the subject matter of
the blues to become an end in itself. The pain it
described could not only be felt by the singer, but
fetishized and focused inward as well. Pain could
be treated not just as something to express, but
something to strive for. As Shel Silverstein once
sang, “What do you do if you’re young and white
and Jewish. . . . And you’ve never spent the night
in a cold and empty boxcar . . . and the only
levee you know is the Levy who lives down the
block?” The answer is, as Bob Dylan proved, you
sing the blues anyway.
It’s easy to forget that most white Americans
first heard the blues and rock and roll created in
their backyards only once it had been filtered
through the ears of the British Invasion. It arrived,
not sanitized, exactly, but translated, idealized,
and somewhat abstracted. Not that England’s
bluesmen couldn’t feel authentically disenfran-
chised or sad, but their sadness was the result of
an entirely different environment than, say, your
average Mississippi bluesman. But by the time it
reached England, the form of the blues had been
established. It then became possible for the most
salient component of the blues—misery—to
switch from impassioned declaration to a kind of
rapture, a goal, the ultimate state of being for a
blues singer. Chances are when a black American
sang the blues, she just had them. When an
Englishman did it, he also wanted them.
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The simple glorification of suffering, of course,
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
was not enough to give rise to the excesses of
Gothic rock. For that, a certain degree of show-
manship and capitalism was necessary. Gothic
rock perhaps began with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’
1957 hit. “I Put a Spell On You,” which radio sta-
tions banned for his “cannibalistic” howling, sup-
posedly the result of Hawkins’ intoxication during
the recording session. Legendary DJ Alan Freed
encouraged the natural showman Hawkins to milk
the controversy for all it was worth, advising him
to make his stage entrances from out of coffins
(an act for which he later was paid five thousand
dollars every time he performed it), dressed in
high vampire style, with a black cape and a walk-
ing staff adorned with a skull. He eventually sold
two million copies of the record and later quipped
“I wish they’d ban all of my records.”
As the late 50s and 60s progressed, rock and
roll became the theater of the world. As pop stars
got more ambitious and successful, following the
Beatles’ example and turning their bands into
entertainment industries in their own right that
made films and stage shows and produced the
work of other artists, their positions of wealth and
power became ironic: they’d come to play rock
music with the ideals of young rebels, determined
to dismantle the system, only to be swallowed by
it. Their creative output and personae were used
by advertisers to sell products rather than change
society. The hypocrisy in packaging grandiosity
and teenage rebellion for mass consumption cre-
ated another Gothic monster: Alice Cooper.
Cooper, a minister’s son who named himself
and his band after a girl at his Sunday school, was
discovered by rock’s mad genius, Frank Zappa. Un-
like Zappa, however, Alice Cooper the band was
not known for musicianship, but for its bizarre
theatricality. Audiences at Alice Cooper shows
were regularly treated to mock chicken slaughter-
ing, simulated autoerotic erections and fake blood.
In a particularly notable dramatization of his epic
song “Dead Babies,” Cooper, made up in the
runny black mascara that became his trademark,
brought out hundreds of plastic dolls and dismem-
bered them, to the delight of his audience.
Cooper’s antics may have shocked people, but
his Grand Guignol rock-theater seemed rooted
deeply enough in the realm of fantasy to let his
audience retain a sense of order. Cooper himself,
born Vincent Furnier, was usually quick to make a
distinction between his onstage and offstage im-
ages. “My posture changes when I become Alice,
even my voice,” he told Kerrangg! in 1987.1 “It’s
like a possession—well, I wouldn’t call it posses-
469

PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
Singer Alice Cooper performing on the In Concert
television show on November 24, 1972.
sion but it is like being overcome with this
character.” Offstage, Cooper is an avid golfer. His
character, Alice Cooper, the iconoclastic, gender-
bending social misfit, not only exorcised Furnier’s
personal demons, but channeled that suffering
into a larger-than-life cartoon of pain. Furnier cre-
ated in himself a grotesque rock star that symbol-
ized music industry excess, self-absorption, cult of
personality—in short, he took counterculture to
its illogical extreme. Cooper’s influence remains
one of rock’s biggest triumphs of style-over-
substance.
That same style-over-substance turned into
the albatross around the neck of the particular
branch of subculture that emerged from punk in
1978 and later become known as “Goth.” In fact,
it’s difficult to distinguish between “Goth” and
“post-punk,” for the simple reason that Goth is
more of a fashion statement than a coherent musi-
cal style. In the period from 1978 to about 1984,
hundreds of bands dyed their hair black, wore
black lipstick and white pancake makeup, black
lace and chains. Despite stylistic similarities, heavy
metal music remained separate from this phenom-
enon; in fact, the two genres can be said to have
divided along gender lines. Heavy metal was ag-
gressive, sexist and therefore “masculine,” while
Goth had a softer, more accepting, “feminine”
cast. You can hear it in “Goth-chick” Claudia Haz-
470 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
zard’s description of how to appreciate a Goth
classic: “You can totally emerge yourself in the
music, the consuming power of this song. This
conjures up images of horror films, dark skies,
castles and forbidden vaults. The lyrics are of a
vampire nature and intoxicate you.”2 Goth in-
spired a euphoric if cheesy utopianism rather than
heavy metal’s warlike feudalism.
At the same time, punk flicked its emotional
switch from anger to depression, and became
more atmospheric in the process. But not all
atmospheric post-punk bands sported Goth fash-
ion, and not every death-rocker played atmo-
spheric post-punk. The careers of the most suc-
cessful atmospheric post-punk bands—The Cure,
Siouxsie and the Banshees, New Order, Cocteau
Twins, Dead Can Dance—tended to be long and
uneven, ranging stylistically from New Order’s
“death disco” to Dead Can Dance’s Middle Eastern
and medieval-influenced ragas. The Cure switched
gears a number of times, from snappy power pop
to ponderous dirges to happy ditties about being
in love on a Friday.
Punk and Goth were indistinguishable at first.
In 1976, at age 17, Siouxsie Sioux, the Ur-Goth,
was part of a clique of Sex Pistols fans known as
The Bromley Contingent, famed for their outra-
geous modes of dress. At the time, Sid Vicious of
the Pistols was drumming for an early incarnation
of Siouxsie and the Banshees that had played an
either disastrous or cathartic date at London’s 100
Club:
A wall of noise illuminated the fact that no one
could play. Siouxsie said the Lord’s Prayer. The
melange lasted 20 minutes. They walked off,
bored. “She is nothing if not magnificent,” Caro-
line Coon wrote at the time. “Her short hair,
which she sweeps in great waves over her head, is
streaked with red like flames. She’ll wear black
plastic non-existent bras, one mesh and one rub-
ber stocking and susbender belts all covered by a
polka dotted transparent plastic mac.” Another
observer said that the set was “unbearable.”3
Already, those enraptured by the visual rather
than musical aspects of punk began to idolize
Siouxsie. When The Bromley Contingent made
their way into the studio audience when the
Pistols played the Today show, the rules changed.
“From that day on,” Sex Pistol Steve Jones recalled,
“It was different. Before then it was just music—
the next day it was the media.”4
Once they’d given punk a name, Siouxsie
wanted no part of it. Avidly anti-establishment,
The Banshees had taken two years to land a record
deal despite their high profile, partially because
their lead singer had made it a habit to insult
record company executives in the audience. Fans
were writing “Sign Siouxsie Now!” on the sides of
record company buildings. By 1981 The Banshees
had converged upon London’s legendary Batcave,
the Soho establishment run by members of the
band Specimen. “It was a lightbulb for all the
freaks and people like myself who were from the
sticks and wanted a bit more from life. Freaks,
weirdos, sexual deviants . . . that’s very much the
spirit of what the Batcave was,” former Specimen
keyboardist Jonny Melton remarked.5
Siouxsie and the Banshees’ material took a
turn from punk’s habit of rooting out poser
hypocrites—“Too many critics / Too few writing”
she summed up in “Love in A Void” (Kaleidoscope,
1979)—to obsessions with madness and exotica.
For the center of a scene whose fashion and
contrary stance idealized and emulated old horror
films and witches, the powerful vibrato howl that
won Siouxsie “best female singer” polls in the Brit-
ish music press for years running became the siren
song. Her heavy black makeup, tangled pile of
black hair and smear of red lipstick, pioneered dur-
ing gigs when Cure leader Robert Smith became
the Banshees’ guitarist for a while, became a
trademark of 80s “new wave.”
Rock and roll’s Gothic undercurrents, how-
ever, have rarely merged their dramatic ele-
ments—think vampires—with their purely exis-
tential ones. Everyone feels a certain amount of
alienation, mental stress, and fear of death.
However, not everyone puts on white pancake
makeup, black lipstick, teases their hair and then
gets onstage and sings about it. The requisite
adornment that goes hand in hand with a
“Gothic” aesthetic, as rock and roll defines it, calls
the sincerity of the wearer into question. They’ve
dealt with their feelings of alienation from society
by reinventing themselves as “monsters.” The
observer then wonders whether or not, in addi-
tion to the artifice meant to reinforce the message
of the music, or as Morrissey puts it, wearing
“black on the outside / ’Cause black is how I feel
on the inside” (in the song “Unlovable,” Louder
than Bombs, 1987), doesn’t in fact cancel out the
sincerity of the wearer by further obscuring his or
her identity.
The pop culture legend that finds his way into
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is an eloquent,
unpretentious and genuinely tortured soul who
can represent the pain of his listeners in the mass
media—a secular Christ figure. It’s an extraordi-
nary person from humble beginnings—the poorer
the better—who lives his pain and often dies
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young and/or tragically, à la John Lennon or Kurt
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
Cobain. Except for his race, the archetypal rock
icon remains essentially unchanged since the
heyday of the blues. The more rock stars live up
to their images, the more “real” they appear. Rap
stars are held so closely to their outlaw standard
that Snoop Doggy Dogg’s murder trial only raised
his credibility, and Tupac Shakur was killed in a
drive-by shooting.
Goths, by turning death, madness and vio-
lence into archetypes, de-personalize their con-
nection to horrific events. They position them-
selves as reporters or tour guides to the macabre,
rarely its victims. Even when Siouxsie puts her
own memory of an encounter with a child mo-
lester into song, she casts herself not as nine-year-
old Susan Ballion, but as the sex offender, “Can-
dyman” himself, who intones, “Oh trust in me
my pretty one / Come walk with me my helpless
one” (Tinderbox, 1986).
When Peter Murphy of the seminal Goth
band Bauhaus informs us in a scary voice that (as
we already suspected), “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” or
Siouxsie, decked out in Theda Bara exotica, ser-
enades the victims of Mount Vesuvius, they
emphasize the distance between their own pain
and that which they describe. Their icy remove
doesn’t leave us with the impression that it mat-
ters to them if Lugosi has passed away, or if the
volcano petrified hundreds of Pompeii’s citizens
under molten lava, merely with the feeling that
death is forbidden, mysterious and therefore
glamorous.
Of course, any long-lived movement for
whom fetishizing death is a primary directive
must be, by necessity, taking this stance in the
service of art. Those that truly had the courage of
their convictions would simply kill themselves, or
so the logic seems to go. If this is the case, Joy
Division was the only atmospheric post-punk
band that managed to combine the ideals of blues-
style confessional of which legends are made with
the bleak vision of Goth. As author and critic Jon
Savage explains in his foreword to a biography of
Joy Division’s lead singer Ian Curtis:
[Joy Division’s] first album Unknown Pleasures,
released in June 1979, defined not only a city [the
depressed, postindustrial Manchester, England]
but a moment of social change: according to
writer Chris Bohn, they “recorded the corrosive
effect on the individual of a time squeezed be-
tween the collapse into impotence of traditional
Labour humanism and the impending cynical vic-
tory of Conservatism.”6
471
 Thus, death rock became a moot point on
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
May 18, 1980, when Ian Curtis’ wife Deborah
discovered that Ian had hanged himself in their
kitchen, their phonograph’s stylus still stuck in
the dry groove of a copy of Iggy Pop’s The Idiot in
the next room. He was twenty-three. At the time,
Joy Division was well on the way to becoming
famous for a gloomy, impressionistic sound and
lyrics that didn’t just describe feelings of doom
and hopelessness but embodied them. Curtis’
suicide, coming on the heels of an attempt a
month before, and at least one other when he was
fifteen years old, put the stamp of authenticity on
Joy Division’s dour oeuvre.
At the time of Curtis’ suicide, the band’s
discography consisted of a few EPs and only one
full-length LP, the stark and lonely Unknown Plea-
sures. They’d completed their second, Closer, in
March of that year, but had not yet released it.
Amid much British music press fanfare, the band
had made plans to embark on their first tour of
the United States.
Joy Division defined what Goth could have
become. When they began in 1977, under the
name Warsaw (later changed when they got word
of a London band called Warsaw Pakt), their
angular guitar hackery and fuzzbass echoed the
Sex Pistols and The Buzzcocks. But by the time
they recorded 1979’s Unknown Pleasures, the ang-
sty minimalism of songs like “Digital” had given
way a bit, to a slow, dreamy brooding heretofore
unheard-of in punk rock. They began the switch
from the energy and anger of 1976’s punk revolu-
tion to the self-pity that would characterize the
new wave of the 80s. Plenty of bands had used
echoey reverb before, but with the assistance of
producer Martin Hannett, Joy Division pioneered
its use as a metaphor for emptiness. Many Joy
Division songs sound as if they were recorded in
the deserted school buildings, abandoned facto-
ries, or under the lonely bridges of Manchester.
These bleak soundscapes reinforced Curtis’ lyrics,
which nakedly display his obsession with isola-
tion. Curtis wasn’t simply describing the alien-
ation of the individual from others and society,
but the way in which numbness and surrender
divide the self. On “New Dawn Fades,” he sang,
“Oh, I’ve walked on water / Run through fire /
Can’t seem to feel it anymore / It was me, waiting
for me / Hoping for something more / Me, seeing
me this time, hoping for something else”
(Unknown Pleasures).
Despite his youth, Curtis’ voice sounded old.
He was off-key a great deal of the time, but his
intonation had a haunting power and a creaky
472 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
authority to it. It unevenly lurched from vulner-
ability to anger, from deadpan to melodrama. It
was the perfect instrument to deliver his vision:
shaky and unsure of itself, at times nearly conver-
sational in tone, it said nothing if not that Ian
Curtis was an ordinary man in extraordinary pain.
Though Curtis’ pen touched on subjects like
Nazi death camps (Joy Division was named for
the term the Nazis used to describe women prison-
ers kept to be used as prostitutes) and, on “Atroc-
ity Exhibition,” an insane asylum turned roadside
attraction, his view of death leaned toward exis-
tentialism. “Existence, well what does it matter? /
I exist on the best terms I can / The past is now
part of my future / The present is well out of
hand,” he sang on Closer’s “Heart and Soul.”
In image, too, Joy Division lacked the theatri-
cal pretensions of other bands that grew up
alongside them and in their wake. Instead, they
used funereal black-and-white photographs of
religious statues on their record sleeves. They
presented themselves on stage without referring
to the glam-rock image-makers like T. Rex or
David Bowie who influenced their peers, prefer-
ring to appear simply as regular if dull and remark-
ably disaffected working-class Mancunians. They
were regular blokes who happened to be suicidal,
a stance that contrasted heavily with the usual
methods of incorporating Gothic influence into
rock music. Despite their punk roots, they didn’t
accessorize with makeup, safety pins or outrageous
hair. Nothing was posed. Curtis had developed a
reputation as an energetic live act, due in no small
part to his epilepsy. His bandmates were not even
fully aware of the degree to which he owed his
stage presence to his seizures. As guitarist Bernard
Sumner reminisced, “[Ian] had a fit and we went
on, he was really ill and we did a gig. That was re-
ally stupid.”7 Curtis’ wife also observed:
The fact that most of Ian’s heroes were dead, close
to death or obsessed with death was not unusual
and is a common teenage fad. Ian seemed to take
growing up more seriously than the others, as if
kicking against it would prolong his youth. He
bought a red jacket to match the one James Dean
wore in Rebel Without a Cause. He wanted to be
that rebel, but, like his hero, he didn’t have a cause
either. Mostly his rebellion took the form of verbal
objection to anyone else’s way of life.8
The restraint with which Curtis and Joy Divi-
sion approached their misery, like their neighbors
The Smiths after them, was one reason for the
pervasiveness of their influence. Perhaps not all of
the Goths who flocked to Joy Division’s posthu-
mous releases, who dressed as creatures of the
night to prove their love of death, really wanted
to die. They wanted a community of the living
dead: a society that aligned itself with death
because life was substandard. They wanted an Ian
Curtis to die for them, so they wouldn’t have to
discover for themselves that death had no sting.
Notes
1. TK, “TK,” Kerrangg! 1987.
2. Quoted in Mick Mercer, Gothic Rock. Los Angeles: Cleo-
patra, 1993, p. 37.
3. Jessica Berens, “Portrait: The Masque,” Guardian
Weekend Page (January 14, 1995).
4. Ibid.
5. Mercer, Gothic Rock, p. 102.
6. Deborah Curtis, Touching From a Distance: Ian Curtis
and Joy Division. London: Faber and Faber, 1995, p. xii.
7. Ibid, p. 113.
8. Ibid, p. 5.
FURTHER READING
Criticism
Backscheider, Paula R. “Gothic Drama and National Crisis.”
In Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture
in Early Modern England, pp. 149-88. Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Maintains that the enormous popularity of Gothic drama
can be accounted for by its ability to reproduce and
contain the cultural anxieties that accompanied the
political and social unrest in eighteenth-century England.
Botting, Fred. “Signs of Evil: Bataille, Baudrillard and Post-
modern Gothic.” Southern Review 27, no. 4 (December
1994): 493-510.
Applies the theories of Georges Bataille and Jean Baudril-
lard to analysis of postmodern gothicism in the television
series Twin Peaks and the film Angel Heart.
Brederoo, N. J. “Dracula in Film.” In Exhibited by Candlelight:
Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition, edited
by Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Peter Davidson, and Jane
Stevenson, pp. 271-81. Atlanta, Ga. and Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 1995.
Surveys film adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Bunnell, Charlene. “The Gothic: A Literary Genre’s Transi-
tion to Film.” In Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror
Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 1984. Reprint, pp.
79-100. Lanham, Md. and London: The Scarecrow
Press, 1996.
Appraises Gothic films and maintains that there are
aspects of Gothic literature that make it particularly
amenable to screen adaptation, including the encourage-
ment of active reader participation, the co-existence of
both a diurnal and nocturnal worldview, and the use of
“the setting, the journey, the double . . . , and the
supernatural.”
Collins, Michael J. “Culture in the Hall of Mirrors: Film and
Fiction and Fiction and Film.” In A Dark Night’s Dream-
ing: Contemporary American Horror Fiction, edited by
Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison, pp. 110-22.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Examines Gothic literature and film in order to evaluate
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
interrelationships.
Cox, Jeffrey N. Introduction to Seven Gothic Dramas: 1789-
1825, edited by Jeffrey N. Cox, pp. 1-77. Athens, Ohio:
Ohio University Press, 1992.
Provides an overview of the history of Gothic drama and
an examination of its main features and themes.
Evans, Bertrand. Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947, 257 p.
Influential scholarly analysis of Gothic drama in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
———. “Manfred’s Remorse and Dramatic Tradition.”
PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of
America 62, no. 3 (September 1947): 752-73.
Analyzes Lord Byron’s depiction of his dramatic hero in
Manfred and its connection to remorse and the Gothic
tradition.
Forry, Steven Earl. “The Hideous Progenies of Richard Brins-
ley Peake: Frankenstein on the Stage, 1823 to 1826.”
Theatre Research International 11, no. 1 (spring 1986):
13-31.
Traces the history of Peake’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein as a Gothic drama.
Franceschina, John. Introduction to Sisters of Gore: Seven
Gothic Melodramas by British Women,1790-1843, pp.
1-13. New York: Garland, 1997.
Examines the contributions of women playwrights to the
Gothic genre.
Gamer, Michael. “Authors in Effect: Lewis, Scott, and the
Gothic Drama.” ELH 66, no. 4 (winter 1999): 831-57.
Examines the role of the authorial self as determined by
literary reputation and social status in Gothic dramas by
Sir Walter Scott and Matthew Gregory Lewis.
Goddu, Teresa A. “Bloody Daggers and Lonesome Grave-
yards: The Gothic and Country Music.” South Atlantic
Quarterly 94, no. 1 (winter 1995): 57-80.
Considers the gothicism present in folk literature and
bluegrass music.
Gunn, Joshua. “Gothic Music and the Inevitability of
Genre.” Popular Music and Society 23, no. 1 (spring
1999): 31-50.
Discusses genre formation in popular music and uses
Gothic or “goth” music “to illustrate the way genres are
constructed through the discussions of fans and artists.”
Hogle, Jerrold E. “The Culture of Adolescence: The Lloyd
Webber Musical and the Adaptations that Paved the
Way, 1962-1986.” In The Undergrounds of The Phantom
of the Opera: Sublimation and the Gothic in Leroux’s
Novel and its Progeny, pp. 173-204. New York: Palgrave,
2002.
Comprehensive treatment of the underlying, and varying
significance of the Phantom of the Opera through an
analysis of the original novel by Leroux and the numer-
ous adaptations it has spawned through the twenty-first
century, as well as the cultural context surrounding each
work.
Hutchings, Peter. “Tearing Your Soul Apart: Horror’s New
Monsters.” In Modern Gothic: A Reader, edited and with
an introduction by Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith,
pp. 89-103. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1996.
473
 Discusses the portrayal of serial killers in such films as
PERFORMING ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
Halloween, The Silence of the Lambs, and A Night-
mare on Elm Street.
Jerrentrup, Ansgar. “Gothic and Dark Music: Forms and
Background.” World of Music 42, no. 1 (2000): 25-50.
Asserts that “[w]ithin music-oriented youth subculture,
the Gothics and Darks represent an extraordinary
phenomenon” in Germany, and examines the music, lyr-
ics, and accompanying cultural context.
Morgan, Jack. The Biology of Horror: Gothic Literature and
Film. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
2002, 263 p.
Compares the treatment of the human body and the
macabre in Gothic fiction and film.
Morris, Nigel. “Metropolis and the Modernist Gothic.” In
Gothic Modernisms, edited by Andrew Smith and Jeff
Wallace, pp. 188-206. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave,
2001.
Examines the gothicism and modernism in Fritz Lang’s
science fiction film Metropolis.
Mulvey, Laura. “The Pre-Oedipal Father: The Gothicism of
Blue Velvet.” In Modern Gothic: A Reader, edited and with
an introduction by Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith,
pp. 38-57. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1996.
Discusses Blue Velvet, a film by David Lynch, in terms
of its treatment of tension between conscious and
unconscious thought and the Oedipal narrative.
Pérez Riu, Carmen. “Two Gothic Feminist Texts: Emily
Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and the Film, The Piano, by
Jane Campion.” Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Es-
pañola de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos 22, no. 1 (June
2000): 163-73.
A feminist analysis of the Gothic elements in the novel
Wuthering Heights and in the film The Piano.
Pirie, David. A Heritage of Horror: the English Gothic Cinema,
1946-1972. London: Gordon Fraser Gallery Ltd., 1973,
192 p.
Wide-ranging study of gothicism in English literature and
English horror films. Includes many film stills and
comprehensive filmographies.
Purinton, Marjean D. “Science Fiction and Techno-Gothic
Drama: Romantic Playwrights Joanna Baillie and Jane
Scott.” Romanticism On the Net, no. 21 (February 2001):
<http:⁄⁄users.ox.ac.uk⁄ⵑscat0385⁄21purinton.html>.
474 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Demonstrates how Joanna Baillie and Jane Scott utilized
supernatural elements in Gothic drama to represent and
comment upon scientific conceptions of the human body
informed by early nineteenth-century innovations in
medicine.
Reno, Robert P. “James Boaden’s Fontainville Forest and Mat-
thew G. Lewis’ The Castle Spectre: Challenges of the
Supernatural Ghost on the Late Eighteenth-Century
Stage.” Eighteenth-Century Life 9, no. 1 (October 1984):
95-106.
Examines the treatment and staging of ghosts and
supernatural elements in eighteenth-century dramatic
works by James Boaden and Matthew Gregory Lewis.
Riley, Michael. “Gothic Melodrama and Spiritual Romance:
Vision and Fidelity in Two Versions of Jane Eyre.”
Literature/Film Quarterly, no. 3 (1975): 145-59.
Compares film adaptations of Charlotte Brontë’s novel
Jane Eyre.
Roberts, Marilyn. “Adapting Jane Austen’s Northanger Ab-
bey: Catherine Morland as Gothic Heroine.” In
Nineteenth-Century Women at the Movies: Adapting Clas-
sic Women’s Fiction to Film, edited and with an introduc-
tion by Barbara Tepa Lupack, pp. 129-39. Bowling
Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular
Press, 1999.
Discusses Giles Foster’s television adaptation of Jane
Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey for the British
Broadcasting Corporation.
Stovel, Bruce. “Northanger Abbey at the Movies.” Persua-
sions: Journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America
20 (1998): 236-47.
Surveys film and television adaptations of Jane Austen’s
novel Northanger Abbey.
Stuart, Roxana. Stage Blood: Vampires of the 19th Century
Stage. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State
University Popular Press, 1994, 377 p.
Comprehensive study of the depiction of vampires in stage
dramas during the nineteenth century. Includes discus-
sions of specific plays and films, origins, themes, satire,
and misogyny. Also includes biographical material, a fil-
mography, and cast lists.
Thorp, Willard. “The Stage Adventures of Some Gothic
Novels.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language As-
sociation of America 43, no. 2 (June 1928): 476-86.
Discusses strategies employed by Gothic playwrights to
minimize the effects of the horrors they were staging.
VISUAL ARTS AND THE
GOTHIC
T he dominant style of architecture in Europe
from the twelfth century to the sixteenth
century was first classified as “Gothic” by art crit-
ics and architects such as Giorgio Vasari and Sir
Christopher Wren in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, respectively. The term was ap-
plied disparagingly, derived from “Goth,” the
common term for the fourth- and fifth-century
Tuetonic invaders who were viewed as cruel
barbarians. It is commonly held that the style
originated in France c. 1100 with the Abbey Church
of Saint-Denis, designed by Abbot Suger of Saint
Denis. The Gothic style in architecture is charac-
terized by vaulted ceilings, “flying” buttresses, and
pointed arches, and stems from the desire among
medieval architects to create earthly structures
that reflected a sense of inspired, divine beauty.
Gothic sculpture, which also began in France dur-
ing this same period and appeared largely as
decorative elements adorning Gothic structures,
reflects the inspiration of the divine, but incorpo-
rates as well the beginnings of a humanist ap-
proach, with figures engaged in a search for mean-
ing in their daily lives. Gothic period sculpture
retained the religious and theological themes of
the Romanesque period that preceded it, but
focused closely on the depiction of mortal figures
as pious and physically beautiful. Gothic sculpture
became more and more naturalistic as the style
spread through Europe, and included celebrations
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
of the humanity (rather than the divinity) of such
revered religious figures as the apostles, the
Madonna, and Jesus Christ.
Gothic painting began sometime during the
early thirteenth century in France, England, and
then Germany, and toward the end of the thir-
teenth century in Italy. The four forms of painting
to which the delicate and linear, yet vibrant and
lush Gothic style was applied were frescoes, panel
paintings, manuscript illumination, and stained
glass. As with Gothic sculpture, Gothic painting
and stained glass were largely commissioned to
enhance Gothic architecture, with the exception
of manuscript illumination, which grew out of a
movement toward a more secular society, the
growth of cities, the expansion of trade, the
founding of universities, increased literacy, and
the expansion of the bourgeois class. Art was no
longer limited to works commissioned by church
and aristocratic patrons, and as artists were
increasingly required to obtain membership in a
trade guild, their works became shaped by their
participation in apprenticeships with established
artists.
The Gothic style fell out of favor during the
sixteenth century, with the dawn of the Renais-
sance. The Gothic Revival period in art and
architecture began near the middle of the eigh-
teenth century in England, and was characterized
by an interest in exploring the same human-
475
 divine (or supernatural) connections found in the
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
works of Gothic-period artisans. The Romantics’
interest in classicism spurred an interest in study-
ing the past, but rather than the Romantics’ focus
on the ancient Greeks to study democratic ideals,
the nationalism of the participants in the Gothic
Revival led them to concentrate on their own
heritage. The desire to define and (sometimes)
glorify the ideals of “Old Europe” by erecting
structures and producing artwork in the medieval
Gothic style ran parallel to this same desire as
expressed in Gothic literature. Horace Walpole’s
Gothic cottage, Strawberry Hill (c. 1750-76) in
Twickingham, England is one of the most famous
examples of Gothic Revival architecture, and has
been equally admired and disparaged by com-
mentators for centuries. Other dominant figures
in the Gothic Revival in England include architect
A. W. N. Pugin, art historians and critics Batty and
Thomas Langley, and designer Richard Bentley.
Gothic Revival art and architecture in the
United States were heavily influenced by the
literature of Gothic writers, particularly the novels
of Sir Walter Scott. Major American Gothic Revival
architects included Alexander Jackson Davis and
Ralph Adams Cram. American Gothic painters,
such as Washington Allston, David Gilmour
Blythe, and Thomas Cole depicted the darker side
of the American cultural and natural landscapes.
REPRESENTATIVE WORKS
Washington Allston
Tragic Figure in Chains (painting) 1800
Belshazzar’s Feast (painting) 1817-43
Andrea Pisano
Baptisery, Florence, Italy [sculptor] (bronze doors)
c. 1329-36
Campanile of the Florentine Cathedral Florence, Italy
[sculptor] (marble reliefs) 1337-40
Anonymous
Cathedral of Notre Dame at Chartres, France [archi-
tect] (cathedral) c. 1194-1220
Arnolfo di Cambio
Santa Croce, Florence, Italy [architect] (cathedral)
c. 1294-1310
Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence, Italy [architect]
(cathedral) c. 1296-1310
Palazzo della Signoria, Florence, Italy [architect]
(cathedral) c. 1299-1310
476 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
William Atkinson
Abbotsford [architect] (residence of Sir Walter Scott)
1812-15
David Gilmour Blythe
Art versus Law (painting) 1860
The Hideout (painting) c. 1863
Hieronymus Bosch
Tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins (painting) 1485
The Garden of Earthly Delights (triptych painting) c.
1500
The Temptation of St. Anthony (triptych painting) c.
1500
The Last Judgment (triptych painting) c. 1504
Thomas Cole
Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (painting) 1828
Ruined Tower (painting) c. 1836
Ralph Adams Cram
St. Thomas’s Church, New York City [architect]
(church) 1906-14
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago [architect]
(church) 1911-37
Swedenborgian Cathedral at Bryn Athyn, Pennsylva-
nia [architect] (cathedral) 1913-17
The Substance of Gothic: Six Lectures on the Develop-
ment of Architecture from Charlemagne to Henry
VIII (art history) 1917; second edition, 1925
Alexander Jackson Davis
Glen Ellen, Maryland [architect] (residence of
Robert Gilmor III) c. 1832
Robert De Luzarches, Thomas de
Cormont, and Regnault de Cormont
Cathedral of Amiens, France [architects, c. 1220-35,
c. 1240-80, and c. 1280, respectively] (cath-
edral) c. 1220-80
Jean D’Orbais, Jean (le) Loup, Gaucher
de Rheims, Bernard de Soissons, and
Robert de Coucy
Notre Dame de Rheims, France [also known as Rhe-
ims Cathedral; architects] (cathedral) c.1211
Master Elias of Dereham
Salisbury Cathedral, England [designer] (cathedral)
c. 1220-80
Henry Fuseli
The Nightmare (painting) 1781
Hanns von Burghausen William of Sens

VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

Church of Sankt Jakob at Straubing, Germany Canterbury Cathedral, London, England [architect]
[architect] (cathedral) c. 1395 (cathedral) c. 1175-78
Church of Heilig Geist at Landshut, Germany [archi-
tect] (cathedral) c. 1407
Franciscan church at Salzburg, Germany [architect]
(cathedral) c. 1409 PRIMARY SOURCES
Henry of Reynes JOHN HENRY PARKER (ESSAY
Westminster Abbey, London, England [first archi- DATE 1849)
tect] (cathedral) c. 1245 SOURCE: Parker, John Henry. “The Renaissance, and
Jacobean Gothic.” In An Introduction to the Study of
Batty and Thomas Langley Gothic Architecture. 1849. 14th edition, 1902. Reprint,
Ancient Architecture Restored and Improved (art pp. 212-16. Wakefield, England: EP Publishing, 1978.
history) 1742; second edition published as The following excerpt is from the 1902 edition of Park-
Gothic Architecture Improved, 1747 er’s comprehensive study of the history of Gothic architec-
ture, originally published in 1849. In it, Parker surveys
Nicola Pisano the precursors to the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival.
Pisa Baptisery Pulpit, Pisa, Italy (sculpture) 1259
Arca di San Domenico in San Domenico, Bologna, The Renaissance.
Italy (sculpture) 1264-67 After the time of Henry the Seventh the style
Altar of St. James in Pistoia Cathedral (sculpture) loses its purity; indeed, at that time we find Ital-
1278 ian features introduced, though sparingly, among
the true Gothic, and these become more numer-
Siena Cathedral Pulpit, Siena, Italy (sculpture) ous in the reign of his successor. In foreign
1265-68 countries the Classical or Pagan styles were revived
at an earlier period than with us. The French call
A. W. N. Pugin
it the style of the “Renaissance.” The Elizabethan
Contrasts (art history) 1836; second revised edi-
style is a singular mixture of Gothic and Italian
tion, 1841
details; it is almost confined to domestic build-
Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in ings, but may occasionally be found in additions
England (art history) 1843 and alterations of churches, as at Sunningwell,
St. Augustine’s Church, Ramsgate, England [archi- Berkshire.
tect] (church) c. 1844 In the time of James the First a strenuous ef-
St. Edmund’s College Chapel, Ware, England [archi- fort was made to revive the Gothic style, more
tect] (church) c. 1844-53 especially in Oxford, and although the details are
poor and clumsy imitations, the general effect is
Claus Sluter frequently very good.
Tomb of Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy (sculpture)
c. 1389-1406 Of this period the Schools are a good example,
especially the vaulted room called the “Pig Mar-
The Well of Moses (sculpture) c. 1395-1403
ket,” Lincoln College Chapel is also a very favour-
Chapel of Chartreuse (portal sculptures) c. 1397 able specimen of Jacobean Gothic, as it is often
called. The choir of Wadham College Chapel is
Suger of Saint Denis another very remarkable example, the design and
Abbey Church of Saint-Denis, France [architect]
details of which are so good that it would appear
(cathedral) c. 1127-44
incredible that it could be of this period, but for
Maurice de Sully the fact that the weekly accounts kept by the clerk
Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, France [first of the works for the foundress are preserved
architect] (cathedral) c. 1163 among the records of the college, and leave no
room for doubt on the subject. It is still more
Horace Walpole, Richard Bentley, John extraordinary that the windows of the hall and
Chute, and others ante-chapel were erected at the same time, week
Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, England [designers by week, by another gang of men: the inferiority
and architects] (Walpole’s residence) c. of taste displayed in them would make them ap-
1750-76 pear at least fifty years later. At first sight it would

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VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
SUGER OF ST. DENIS (1081-1151)
A highly capable administrator, Suger, abbot
of St. Denis and royal adviser to King Louis
VI, was very successful in rebuilding the
fortunes of St. Denis. He recorded his activi-
ties in Liber de rebus in administration sua ges-
tis (Book on the Things Accomplished during
his Administration). In 1127 he set about
reforming the abbey and the lives of its
monks, who had acquired a reputation for
worldliness under Suger’s predecessor. The
most visible and lasting result of his energetic
reforms was the restoration, under his super-
vision, of the abbey church. The existing
church had been erected about four hundred
years earlier and had fallen into disrepair. The
restored church would become a model for
all of Europe and for the new architectural
style, Gothic. It featured innovations like
ribbed vaults, the predominance of pointed
arches, and the use of rose windows and
other instances of stained glass; some of
these innovations are attributed to Suger
himself. The restoration involved a lengthy
three-stage process. In 1144 the final stage
was completed, and the choir was dedicated
to St. Denis. In contrast to the darker, less-
open churches of Romanesque style, the
choir magnificently exhibits the potentials of
glass and light. In his Liber de rebus in admin-
sratione sua gestis Suger records the inscrip-
tion on the doors of the church, typical of
the symbolism of the new Gothic style, with
an aesthetic based on Dionysian Neoplatonic
theory: “The noble work is bright, but being
nobly bright it should brighten the mind, al-
lowing it to travel from [earthly] light to the
true light, where Christ is the true door.” . . .
In addition to his career as abbot and royal
advisor, Suger was a minor historian, compos-
ing biographies of Louis VI and Louis VII. He
died at the age of seventy on 13 January
1151.
SOURCE: “Suger of St. Denis.” In World Eras, Vol.
4: Medieval Europe (814-1350), pp. 91-3. Farm-
ington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2001.
478
appear impossible that these two buildings, so
very different in style, can be of the same period,
but we must remember that there was always “an
overlapping of the styles.” Some people would
build in the old-fashioned way, and others in the
new-fashioned way, so that for the space of
perhaps five-and-twenty years a building may be
in the style of the fathers or of the sons. The old-
fashioned style went out of use gradually, not sud-
denly; this is the case now, and it has always been
so.
The cast window of Jesus College Chapel,
Oxford, as seen from the Turl, might very well be
supposed to be the work of the fifteenth century,
if we judged by the design only. Oriel College
Chapel, erected at the same time, is in very
inferior taste. Specimens of fan-tracery vaulting of
this period are numerous in Oxford, chiefly over
the entrance porch or gateway of the colleges; but
by far the most elegant and remarkable example
is the vault over the staircase to the hall of Christ
Church: this was built about 1640, as appears from
the evidence of Antony Wood, who was living at
the time, and from the royal arms in the vault
having Scotland quartered in them. The elegance
of the design of this vault springing from the
slender pillar in the centre is much and justly
admired, but an examination of the details of the
work shews that it is extremely shallow and poor;
it is an evidence of how much may be done by
good design even with bad detail.
In London, the hall of the Archbishop’s Palace
at Lambeth, and Middle Temple hall, copied at
Lincoln’s Inn in 1860, may be mentioned as good
examples of this imitation.
Another attempt at the revival of Gothic was
made in the time of Charles the Second; it was
still less successful in the details, but even then
many of the designs were good. There are many
towers of this period of very good proportions,
though of very clumsy details. The towers of West-
minster Abbey may perhaps be cited as an in-
stance, for although the detail is wretchedly bad,
the general effect at a distance is good.
It is remarkable also that the chancels built at
this period are as large and deep as those of any
earlier period; for instance, the chancel of Islip,
Oxfordshire, built by the celebrated Dr. South1 .
The idea of the divines of this period, under whose
directions these churches were built, appears to
have been that the chancel was the place for the
celebration of the Holy Communion, and should
bear the same proportion to the body of the
church as the number of communicants to the
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Ribbed vaults of the Nave of Basilique de Saint-Denis in Paris, France.
whole congregation. These churches were also
usually furnished with credence-tables 2 , and
lecterns, many of which remain.
Even during the eighteenth century, when
every kind of taste was at the lowest possible ebb,
the people seem to have still retained a lingering
wish for the imitation of Gothic or Christian
forms, and many rude attempts may be seen in
our country churches: and although the architects
and builders considered it necessary to repress this
taste, and make everything in the pseudo-Grecian
or Pagan style, still the love for the Gothic would
peep out here and there. The spire is essentially a
Gothic feature, unknown to Classical art; yet
many spires were rebuilt, and even new ones built,
during this period. The spire of All Saints’ Church,
Oxford, a fine example 3 , was built from the
designs of Dean Aldrich, soon after 1700, and
notwithstanding the purely Italian character of
the building, there is a sort of Gothic tracery in
the tower windows. The same curious and evi-
dently unintentional mixture may be observed in
the tower windows of the church of St. Clement
Danes, Strand, which are of a common Gothic
form.
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VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
Towards the close of that century arose the
school of Horace Walpole and Batty Langley,
which, however ridiculous it may appear to us
now, served to keep alive the taste for Gothic
forms, and paved the way for the revival which
has taken so glorious a start in our own day, and
to the improved character of which “The Oxford
Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Archi-
tecture” materially contributed, by acting on the
minds both of the architects and of their patrons,
and enforcing upon them the necessity for the
careful study of ancient examples4 .
Notes
1. This historical example was unfortunately destroyed
in 1860 (?), by what is falsely called restoration, which
usually means the total destruction of every original
feature and the substitution of the wretched improve-
ment of some modern architect, who entirely despises
and ignores the history of his art.
2. So called from the Italian credenza, a side-board.
3. This elegant and interesting spire was taken down in
1873, and rebuilt, being much out of repair and sup-
posed to be dangerous.
4. The Oxford Architectural Society, established in 1839,
was the earliest in the field, the Cambridge Camden
479
 Society was very nearly simultaneous with it, and the
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
idea was rapidly taken up and followed subsequently
in numerous other places; still it is only just to give
Oxford the credit of having originated the movement.
Upon the whole, this movement has done much
good, although accompanied by much evil, occa-
sioned by the exuberant zeal of young men eagerly
setting about the “restoration” of their churches before
they knew the proper mode of doing it, and before
either architects or workmen were prepared for the
work. In consequence of this unfortunate haste, many
valuable specimens of ancient art have been ir-
reparably destroyed, instead of being carefully pre-
served as models for future ages. At the time that the
movement for the revival of the old English architec-
ture began, it was almost impossible to get workmen
to execute the details of it with any tolerable accuracy,
all the prejudices of their education in their trade were
against it. Much credit is due to Mr. Blore for his
perseverance in establishing a school of workmen.
This idea was afterwards taken up by others, and more
recently the Architectural Museum was formed to sup-
ply the workmen with models, chiefly by the support
of Mr. A. J. B. Beresford-Hope, M.P., who had been one
of the leaders of the Cambridge Camden Society.
The Oxford Society in 1860 changed its title to the
“Oxford Architectural and Historical Society.” The
object of this change is to connect the study of
architecture with that of history, which now forms
part of the course of study pursued at the University.
It is obvious, on a very little consideration, that the
architecture of every people is an essential part of its
history, although it has hitherto been entirely ne-
glected by historians. As the Oxford Society is now
under the patronage of the Professors of Modern His-
tory and of Ecclesiastical History, we may venture to
expect that this long neglect will be remedied, and
that the history of architecture will form a regular
part of the studies of the University.
OVERVIEWS
LINDA BAYER-BERENBAUM (ESSAY
DATE 1982)
SOURCE: Bayer-Berenbaum, Linda. “The Relationship
of Gothic Art to Gothic Literature.” In The Gothic
Imagination: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art, pp.
47-71. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 1982.
In the following essay, Bayer-Berenbaum explores the
common elements of and connections between the Gothic
in art and in literature.
Some critics have alluded to a superficial cor-
respondence between Gothic architecture and
literature, such as an analogy between the wind-
ing, subterranean hallways and the secret recesses
of the mind, but the relationship between the two
art forms is far more fundamental. Gothicism in
art, as in literature, expresses a coherent aesthetic
and philosophic perspective. The different aspects
of Gothic art can be explained in terms of this
480 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
underlying principle, and direct parallels can be
drawn between Gothic techniques in art and in
literature.
The origins of Gothic architecture can be
traced back to a particular style of ornamentation,
and even in these early designs we detect the rest-
less energy that characterizes Gothicism in both
architecture and literature. In literature this energy
fuels the compulsion that drives Gothic characters
to pursue the objects of their curiosity or desires;
it fosters a restlessness that leads them to wander
into the realms of the unknown, and gives them
the requisite strength to defy social prohibitions.
In his work The Paradox of Cruelty, Philip Hallie
emphasizes this type of drive: “Down to his core,
the Gothic villain or the Devil he embodies is rest-
less, ever-active energy, energy always intensified
by single-mindedness.”1 This same frantic dis-ease
is visually apparent in the linear design of early
Gothic ornament and later in the Gothic cathe-
dral.
The earliest evidence of Northern ornament
appears on the tombstones of Teutonic graves and
subsequently in illuminated manuscripts and
decorative carvings. This “linear fantasy” 2 is
characterized by certain intertwining motifs, in
earlier specimens the dot, line, and ribbon, and
later the curve, circle, spiral, zigzag, and S-shape.
The repertoire of motifs is extremely limited, but
a great variety of combinations occurs. The shapes
are knotted and twisted together in a frantic,
springy, undulating pattern. They separate from
one another, run parallel, and then cross again in
a maze of latticed activity, producing “a fantastic
spaghetti-like interlace”3 “whose puzzle asks to be
unraveled, whose convolutions seem alternately
to seek and avoid each other, whose component
parts, endowed as it were with sensibility, captivate
sight and sense in passionately vital movement.”4
The restlessness of the design is reminiscent of the
sleepless, puzzled, tortured souls who populate
the Gothic novel and of the equally devious and
allusive reality their twisted minds contemplate.
This compulsion and lack of peace characterize
the Gothic in all forms, preventing relaxation and
the lapse into partial awareness. Gothic nervous-
ness quickens the senses as more of the mind
becomes awake to more of the world. Even in its
embryonic state, Gothic art displayed the type of
agitation that would continue to appear in Gothic
architecture and literature.
The Gothic line can be described as both
violent and unnatural, for it does not flow rhyth-
mically back and forth in any sort of organic pat-
tern. We could almost say that the Northern line
is supernatural rather than natural, that it has sur-
rendered to the fury of spirits dwelling within it,
which drive it frantically first one way and then
another in ecstatic, relentless activity. Wilhelm
Worringer speaks of the unnatural quality of the
Gothic line when he contrasts early Gothic orna-
ment with Classical ornament. He describes Clas-
sical ornament as an extension of our sense of
harmony. Classical man chooses the proportions
within and around himself that he finds most
pleasing and consciously, carefully applies them
to his art.
On the other hand, the expression of Northern
ornament does not directly depend upon us; we
are met rather by a vitality which appears to be
independent of us, which challenges us, forcing
upon us an activity to which we submit only
against our will. In short, the Northern line does
not get its life from any impress which we will-
ingly give it, but appears to have an expression of
its own, which is stronger than our life.5
Worringer illustrates his psychological analysis
of line with an example from children’s drawings.
We can easily distinguish between the playful
scribbling made by an idle youngster and the er-
ratic, forceful, angry scribbles made by a disturbed
child. We also know in ourselves the difference
between the control exerted when doodling
pleasurably and the desperation in frustrated
scratchings. In the latter case we are overtaken by
our emotions, and the course of our lines seems
to follow a dictate of its own. In this sense Gothic
ornament appears more emotional and less con-
trolled than Classical ornament.
Worringer terms the Northern line superorganic
rather than simply nonorganic, indicating that the
line surpasses measured configurations.
When once the natural barriers of organic move-
ment have been overthrown, there is no more
holding back: again and again the line is broken,
again and again checked in the natural line of its
movement, again and again it is forcibly prevented
from peacefully ending its course, again and again
diverted into fresh complications of expression, so
that, tempered by all these restraints, it exerts its
energy of expression to the utmost until at last,
bereft of all possibilities of natural pacification, it
ends in confused, spasmodic movements, breaks
off unappeased into the void or flows senselessly
back upon itself.6
A force overcoming nature must be beyond
nature, and so we speak of the supernatural in
Gothic line. The theme of the unnatural or
supernatural is certainly fundamental in Gothic
literature, as is the sense of obstruction in the
ordinary course of events. If we describe the
Gothic line in art as repeatedly checked in the
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flow of its movement and thus strengthened by
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
its need to seek devious resolution, we have visu-
ally approximated the excess of energy bred by
repression in the Gothic novel. Irresolute hopeless-
ness, lack of escape, surrender in the face of
despair, and an eventual turning upon the self are
typical attitudes in Gothic literature. The Gothic
character submits to the will of superior powers,
be they internal or external, spirits or fate.
Finally, Worringer speaks of “supersensuous
activity” in Gothic art and of a need to be “freed
from the direct feeling of thraldom to reality.”7
Worringer’s choice of words in Form in Gothic, as
well as Andrew Martindale’s in Gothic Art, Marcel
Aubert’s in The Art of the High Gothic Era, or
Charles Moore’s in The Development and Character
of Gothic Architecture, is remarkably applicable to
Gothic literature when we consider that these art
historians did not deal with Gothic literature or
that literary critics had not distinguished any con-
nection between Gothic art and literature beyond
the use of the same word, which was considered
an accident of etymology. Yet these art critics’
descriptions belie a more basic correspondence.
Gothic art, like Gothic literature, suggests an
expanded reality when it threatens to break
through the confines of linear space in its twisting
inward and outward. In the absence of restriction,
the intensity of movement in Gothic ornament is
actually a picture of the intense, wide-awake souls
incarnate in Gothic novels.
A total expansion of reality is impossible if we
accept the limitations of a purely physical world.
It is for this reason that Gothicism in literature
stresses the spiritual, the penetration of the natural
by the supernatural. Admittedly, it is more dif-
ficult for a comparable interpenetration of the
physical and spiritual in a material art form as
concrete as sculpture or architecture, but Gothic
art has used every technique possible to minimize
its physical restricitons. In other words, Gothic art
attempts to dematerialize its composition in order
to spiritualize its material components. The result
achieved in art, as in literature, is the creation of a
greater single reality in which the spiritual and
physical merge.
In Northern ornament, once again, the convo-
lutions of the line threaten the confines of physi-
cal space and can thus be interpreted as asserting
the spiritual. The line does not appear to be a
product of its space; it defies containment.
Whether we speak of the line as emotional,
psychological, or spiritual, a dimension beyond
the physical is implicit.
481
 Gothic architecture incorporated the spiritual
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
quality of the Northern line into its entire struc-
ture, as well as into the decorative, spiral, plant
tendrils adorning the capitals or the complicated
carvings inside and outside the cathedral. In order
to minimize the heavy quality of stone and stress
its spirituality, Gothic architecture adopted flying
buttresses and pointed arches to facilitate a tower-
ing, vertical structure unimpaired by internal sup-
ports. As a result, solid wall space could be reduced
and great windows accommodated. The height
and the open spaces achieved counteract the
natural weight of stone, and the thrust of steep
pinnacles opposes the pull of gravity. The joining
of pillars to the cross ribs of the vaults through at-
tached columns draws the structure up in a sweep-
ing movement. The pillars do not appear to be
supporting weight or to be pressing down, but
rather soaring upward. Similarly, the outer towers
do not seem to burden the buttressing but rather
to shoot skyward. If we speak in terms of active
carrier and passive burden, these are “standing,
not lying, buildings.”8 The structure of the Gothic
cathedral, like the plot of the Gothic novel, is
dominated by action, by both the tiny, frenetic
movement in ornamentation or detail and the
larger, sweeping, rising movements of construc-
tion or plot.
Another form of dematerialization appears
within the intricate filigree carvings that cover the
walls like a spider-web, the flowing fan tracery on
vaults and windows, and the clutter of ornament
on exterior walls, arches, portals, and towers.
These carvings are often so incredibly delicate that
it is difficult to believe they are actually made of
stone. One carving at the Cloisters in New York
brought there from a French cathedral depicts the
Crucifixion of Christ, a crowd of people, and an
entire city in more than thirty layers of overlap-
ping perspective all within a cup-shaped oval little
bigger than a walnut! Matter has been challenged
here in that the stone seems to have dissolved into
a tiny, magical world. In the whole of the Gothic
cathedral, weight gives way to levitation. The
capitals of columns, indeed the entire building,
has lost its Romanesque heaviness; we could say it
has been disembodied. Within the interior of the
cathedral, a third spiritual effect is achieved by
the stained glass windows, which create a sense of
illusion through the colors and patterns they cast
upon the stone.
The Gothic cathedral is designed to create a
spiritually altered experience for those who enter,
its great height and monstrous proportions dwarf-
ing the viewer. The building is grossly out of
482 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
proportion with human beings and seeks to
emphasize their diminution in the face of larger
and greater forces. The architecture shocks the
viewer out of his normal perception of himself
and distorts the magnitude of his surroundings,
rendering the worshiper, like the victim in Gothic
literature, at the mercy of supernatural forces
within and beyond the self. The victim finally
submits to these forces and to a changed perspec-
tive on reality. The longer one remains within the
Gothic cathedral, the harder it is to project a hu-
man perspective. The structure ceases to appear
abnormally large while the visitor perceives
himself as abnormally small. This shock effect is
not unlike that produced in Gothic literature,
encouraging a keener perception of the self and
the environment and an altered relationship
between the two.
Gothic architecture evokes the world of the
spirits in another way, which is at once more
direct and more superficial than either its demate-
rialization or its altered proportions. The gargoyles
and other carvings on the building designed to
frighten away evil spirits are an obvious allusion
to divine malevolence. The presence of pagan
symbols on religious buildings also underscores a
psychological connection between a sense of God
and a sense of the grotesque, between religion and
Gothicism.
The gargoyles also express an interest in
psychology paralleling the psychological emphasis
in Gothic literature. In his book Gothic Architecture
and Scholasticism, Erwin Panofsky explicitly con-
nects this sculpture with a renewal of interest in
psychology. Insofar as the plant or animal in
Gothic carving came to be considered an organ-
ism in itself rather than merely a copy of the idea
of a plant or animal, Gothic art cultivated both
individual variation and a closer study of nature.
This naturalism can be seen in the individual spe-
cies of vegetation and foliage appearing on the
capitals of columns and in the extensive variety of
flora adorning the entire building. In contrast to
the inorganic treatment of nature in Classical art,
the plants and animals in Gothic sculpture are
very much alive. “Leaves and buds spring from
growing stems, fruits depend naturally from their
branches, animals live and leap.”9 An interest in
particular variation is expressed in animal and hu-
man figures (or in combinations of the two) by
particular facial expressions or body gestures that
convey a range of psychological states from anger,
hatred, fear, and pain, to joy or ecstasy. According
to Panofsky, the perspective interpretation of
space in these carvings also involved a subjectiv-
ism.1 0 Accurate perspective facilitated the natural-
istic portrayal of individual forms as opposed to a
symbolic equivalent for all forms. Extreme subjec-
tivity, to the point of distortion, is comparably
present in Gothic literature.
The subjective realism in Gothic sculpture led
to both individualism and sensualism.
It is something new and stupendous in medieval
ideas that the divine is no longer sought in non-
sensuous abstractions, which lie beyond all that is
earthly and human, in a realm of supernatural in-
variables, but in the center of the ego, in the mir-
ror of self-contemplation, in the intoxication of
psychical ecstasy. It is an entirely new human self-
consciousness, an entirely new human pride, that
deems the poor human ego worthy to become the
vessel of God. Thus, mysticism is nothing but the
belief in the divinity of the human soul, for the
soul can look upon God only because divine it-
self.1 1
A self-conscious egoism and a reinsertion of
the divine within the human is displayed in
Gothic literature through the self-consciousness
and egocentricity of its characters and through its
general descendental mood. Besides human deifi-
cation, the negative depiction of humanity and
divinity (as seen in Gothic villains) is not totally
absent in Gothic art, either. It is immediately ap-
parent in the grotesque aspects of Gothic carving,
but also in a progressive divisibility in Gothic
architecture, the separation into smaller and
smaller parts, that may in a hidden way hint of a
breakdown, of decomposition, of individualism to
the point of isolation. “The Northern individual-
izing process lead . . . to self-negation to self-
contempt. Individual character is here felt to be
something negative, in fact, even something sin-
ful.”1 2 Hence the mystical need to transcend the
self and the tragic inability to do so in the context
of Gothic descendentalism.
The grotesque element in Gothic art, in gar-
goyles and carvings and even in altarpieces, is
probably the most obvious parallel between
Gothic art and literature. As was the case in Gothic
literature, the grotesque in Gothic art is not
achieved by an outright departure from reality but
by a distortion of it or by unusual combinations.
Naturalism is not really abandoned. In Moore’s
words:
A remarkable quality of the grotesque creations of
Gothic art is the close and accurate observation of
nature which they, no less than the images of real
things, display. However fabulous the imaged
creature may be, the materials out of which he is
made are derived from nature. Whether it be
vertebra or claw, wing or beak, eye or nostril,
throat or paw—every anatomical member displays
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an intimate familiarity with the true functional
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
form, and an imaginative sense of its possible
combinations with other members.1 3
The horror in these creatures is not other-
worldly but disturbingly familiar; it is the more
frightening for its fusion of good and evil, beauty
and ugliness.
The Gothic refusal in literature to be limited
to the beautiful or the moral is likewise a part of
Gothic art.
The representation of physical beauty being, with
the Gothic carver, subordinated to the purpose of
enforcing that the soul is more than the body,
and of illustrating the doctrine of the salvation of
the soul by the goodnes of life, and the loss of the
soul by evil life, it was necessary that beings and
things not beautiful should enter into his compo-
sitions. The evils that beset the lives and souls of
men had to be in some way set forth, no less than
the good things he is permitted to enjoy. The
unhappy lot of the wicked had to be figured as
well as the felicities of the good. Hence conspicu-
ous elements in Gothic sculpture, especially after
the beginning of the thirteenth century, are the
monstrous and the grotesque . . . and these ele-
ments have a value apart from their moral signifi-
cance, as affording contrasts to the forms of
beauty.1 4
Moore contrasts the principle of “inclusion”
in Gothic art with that of “selection” in Classical
art. The Greek artist selected the beautiful and
rejected the ugly or imprecise, whereas the Gothic
artist sought to represent the greatest vision and
thus favored a principle of addition rather than
elimination, indicating that beauty may coexist
with imperfection in the wider range of existence.
The principle that Moore calls inclusion Panofsky
terms synthesis and totality, a totality rendered
even more effective by the simultaneous subdivi-
sion in Gothic art. A greater breadth and greater
vision—inevitably a vision of infinity—permeates
both Gothic literature and art.
The inclusion of the ugly may also be related
to the Gothic esteem for power. Moore noticed
the importance of power in Gothic art. “This
distinction between beauty of expression and
power of expression is immediately applicable to
the whole character of the two stylistic phenom-
ena of Classic and Gothic art.”1 5 “Classical archi-
tecture culminates . . . in beauty of expression,
Gothic architecture in power of expression; the
former speaks the language of organic existence,
the latter the language of abstract values.”1 6
Just as Gothic architecture amplifies the inten-
sity of reality, it expands its range by simulta-
neously exploring inward and outward, the
483

VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
Roettgen Pieta, a prominent wood carving in the gothic
style, c. 1300.
minute and the immense. The tiniest of decora-
tions are located within a towering edifice, and
fragile pieces of colored glass are set in stone. The
small and delicate aspects of Gothic architecture
direct our attention inward toward an infinity of
tinier and tinier divisions, progressive divisibility
pointing toward a world within worlds too small
to be seen. During the height of the Gothic
development supports were divided into main,
major, minor, and subminor shafts; the tracery of
windows, blind arcades, and triforia were subdi-
vided into primary, secondary, and tertiary profiles
and millions of ever-increasing complexity; and
the arches and ribs were split into a series of mold-
ings. These progressive divisions contrast with the
enormous height and size of the exterior and the
open, boundless interior, which direct our atten-
tion upward and outward toward an infinity of
larger and larger proportions, toward the world
beyond worlds too large and distant to be seen.
The expansion in either of these directions chal-
lenges the mind to imagine the unimaginable.
In its erosive sense, divisibility in Gothic art
may suggest fragmentation, disintegration, and
484 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
decay, but in a cumulative sense, multiplication
and repetition create the effect of infinite compli-
cation. With the ceaseless repetition of towers and
pinnacles, the compounding of moldings and
shafts, and the elaboration of lacelike spokes of
tracery in windows, portals, arches, and buttress-
ing, variety and complexity replace simplicity and
contribute to the predominant sense of move-
ment in Gothic art, a dynamism that parallels the
fast-moving action of plot and the pervasive
emotional agitation in the Gothic novel.
The great within toward which Gothic archi-
tecture points in its tiny intricacies and divisions-
within-divisions is analogous to the great within
in Gothic literature—the psychological recesses of
the mind, the remote secrets of the unconscious.
The great beyond in Gothic architecture suggested
by greater and greater proportions and by the
upward, vertical thrust can be compared to the
great beyond in Gothic literature—the world of
the supernatural, of forces beyond reason, knowl-
edge, and control. Gothic architecture juxtaposes
extremes of size, weight, and mass in much the
same way that Gothic literature juxtaposes ex-
tremes of color, sound, setting, and character.
(Gothic sculpture of the Middle Ages and the foli-
age and animals that ornamented the cathedral
were often painted in simple, contrasting colors,
as were the decorative borders of illuminated
manuscripts.) Sharp contrasts can also be seen
texturally in the sculptured drapery on figures
where the ridges are pronounced with deep hol-
lows between them.
A contrast in thrust is operative in the flying
buttresses where, in a sense, the building has been
built too high to support itself. An overextension
of height leads to an excessive outward pressure
that must be countered by the inward pressure of
the flying buttresses with added weight from the
towers. A juxtaposition of excessive thrusts main-
tains the structure rather than an initial, self-
contained equilibrium.
Persistent repetition is a key technique in
Gothic art contributing to a sense of infinity.
Repetition is crucial to any form of art, be it in a
repeating color scheme, basic linear patterns, or
selected motifs, but in Gothic art repetition is less
modified. In Classical art, repeated lines and forms
usually appear in reverse, creating a mirror image
to complement the original and conveying a sense
of completion and serenity. Hurried, mechanical
repetition is always avoided in the Classical. In
Gothic art, however, a ceaseless pounding of
identical strokes suggests the infinite persistence
of a particular form. Such reappearance at regular
intervals creates the type of immediacy that Edgar
Allan Poe produced through auditory repetitions,
such as the ticking of a clock, the dripping of
water, or a pounding heart. In Gothic architecture
vertical lines repeat themselves from pillar to pil-
lar, and in Northern ornament and Gothic sculp-
ture repetition continues without accentuation or
pause, building to a state of frenzy. Some critics
consider this exalted hysteria the distinguishing
characteristic of Gothic art. Every inch of avail-
able space is covered with ceaseless activity. Gothic
art is never still as it pushes for greater visual
awareness. “It uses the tumult of sensations to lift
itself out of itself.”1 7 This is the same intoxication
and indulgence displayed in Gothic literature.
A strong movement propels the entire struc-
ture of Gothic architecture both vertically and
horizontally. Pointed arches obviously accentuate
an upward motion, yet they also contribute to a
longitudinal direction in that they make possible
the vaulting of oblong areas. (With the rounded
arch only square areas could be vaulted.) Further-
more, with the use of pointed arches, both the
bays and the main aisles could rise together. The
addition of ribs to cross vaulting (and the more
important structural innovation of having the ribs
bear the weight of the vaults) also created a sense
of linear movement and produced the illusion of
rising height at the center point where the sec-
troids meet. The attached columns that join the
pillars to the ribs give even heavy pillars a sense of
soaring movement as the eye is led upward to the
peak of the vault. The body of Gothic architecture
has “taut sinews and pliant members . . . without
any superfluous flesh or any superfluous mass”1 8
like the lean, bony, angular characters whose
quick, furtive movements and dramatic actions
hurry the pace in Gothic novels. The double
movement in Gothic architecture can be con-
trasted with the single movement in earlier church
architecture. Artistically, the early Christian
basilica had one definite goal—the altar. The
Gothic cathedral moves both toward the altar and
toward heaven (although the vertical movement
is clearly stronger). The simplicity of the basilica
with its single, tangible goal gives way in the
Gothic to a less definite, infinite location.
In a philosophical if not visual manner, the
use of perspective in the interpretation of space,
mentioned earlier in connection with the gro-
tesque, lends “visual expression to the concept of
the infinite; for the perspective vanishing point
can be defined only as the projection of the point
in which parallels intersect.”1 9 Intellectually, the
inclusion of endless variety in the representation
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of different plants and animals also points toward
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
infinity by informing the viewer of the unending
variety of God’s creation. These carvings “induce
a sense of infinity by permitting the beholder to
submerge his being in the boundlessness of the
Creator Himself.”2 0
Beyond the suggestion of infinity, repetition
functions as an organizing principle in Gothic art
that replaces symmetry. In Northern ornament
there is little attempt to harness the activity of the
line or force it to conform to the rules of balance
and proportion. There is rarely a center in these
ornaments, and when a center is present, the
movement is peripheral rather than radial. (The
eye follows the pattern round and round on the
periphery.) In the eccentric Northern ornament
the eye is led through a labyrinth without the pat-
tern of a self-contained whole. “Every point in
this endless movement is of equal value and all of
them combined are without value compared with
the agitation they produce.”2 1 Asymmetry com-
municates a living dynamism; it is not absolute,
like a geometric figure, and is lifelike in its ir-
regularities. Gothic architecture is also markedly
asymmetrical; the building is without a center;
one side need not mirror the other. Just as the line
in Gothic ornament does not circumscribe a space,
so too in Gothic architecture lines indicate move-
ment rather than encompass an area. Space is not
shaped and enclosed but dissected. The internal
volume is not defined by firm walls or shaped by
an arching vault, for Gothic architecture gradually
perfected a rudimentary skeleton of piers, arches,
and buttresses that freed the walls from structural
support and thus from their inert massiveness.
In Gothic literature plot and characters are
often stereotyped and repetitive. We follow them
through a maze of ceaseless complications that
seem to defy organization as well as the laws of
probability. The plot structure itself is asym-
metrical insofar as it is often difficult to locate the
climax toward which the action builds and from
which it declines. A rapid palpitation prolonged
uninterruptedly replaces development. In the
Gothic novel the process rather than the outcome
is crucial. (Try to remember the resolution in The
Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, or even
Dracula.)
Both Gothic art and Gothic literature are not
self-contained. Symmetry and centricity create a
sense of order and completion. We see it all; all is
controlled. Gothic creation, however, is “on the
way”; it is incomplete. The work of art spreads out
from itself at will and goes where the forces of
chance or fate may take it. In the end there is no
485
 pattern, no answer. The process of life for the
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
Gothic soul is beyond reason, and contact with
life takes place beyond the confines of orderly il-
lusions or restrictive limitations. Gothicism tells
people that they must surrender to the process of
living and to the forces of an uncertain future. In
this surrender one is heedless of the balancing
principles of art or society. The goal is the process
itself, an intensified perception of a limitless real-
ity.
Notes
1. Philip Hallie, The Paradox of Cruelty (Middleton,
Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), p. 67.
2. Wilhelm Worringer, Form in Gothic (London: G. P. Put-
nam’s Sons, Ltd., 1927), p. 41.
3. Andrew Martindale, Gothic Art (New York: Frederick A.
Praeger Publishers, 1967), p. 140.
4. Lamprecht, quoted in Worringer, Form in Gothic, p. 41.
5. Worringer, Form in Gothic, p. 42.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., pp. 44-45.
8. Wilhelm Worringer, Form Problems of the Gothic (New
York: G. E. Strechert and Company, 1912), p. 97.
9. Charles Herbert Moore, The Development and Character
of Gothic Architecture (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1890), p. 24.
10. Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism
(New York: Meridian Books, 1960), p. 16.
11. Worringer, Form Problems, p. 139.
12. Ibid., pp. 144-45.
13. Moore, Development and Character, p. 266.
14. Ibid., p. 265.
15. Ibid., p. 51.
16. Ibid., p. 87.
17. Worringer, Form in Gothic, p. 73.
18. Worringer, Form Problems, p. 120.
19. Panofsky, Gothic Architecture, p. 17.
20. Ibid., p. 19.
21. Worringer, Form in Gothic, p. 54.
ARCHITECTURE
AGNES ADDISON (ESSAY DATE
1938)
SOURCE: Addison, Agnes. “Romanticism and the
Gothic Revival.” In Romanticism and the Gothic Revival,
pp. 144-52. New York: Richard R. Smith, 1938.
In the following essay, Addison provides an overview of
the Gothic Revival movement in Europe and the United
States during the nineteenth century.
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If there had been no Romantic Movement,
there would have been no Gothic Revival. If the
classic spirit, which is content with gradual and
continuous growth, had continued throughout
the eighteenth century, the architectural style of
the nineteenth century would have been modi-
fied Renaissance. But as romanticism, with its
spirit of discontent and love of change, disrupted
the natural evolution of history and architectural
styles, the nineteenth century resulted in a period
of eclecticism. The two most important styles of
the Romantic period were connected with the two
dominating ideals of the nineteenth century,
democracy and nationalism. The Greek Revival
was the expression of the former, and the Gothic
Revival of the latter. And even as democratic ideal-
ism was in large measure superseded by imperialis-
tic nationalism, so the Greek Revival was followed
by the Gothic Revival.
The whole history of the Gothic Revival in
England from the time of Batty Langley until the
present is closely connected with the history of
romanticism. No architectural style has been less
associated with aesthetics and abstract principles
of art. That would require more objectivity than is
compatible with the romantic spirit.
In the eighteenth century the artistic interest
in the Gothic was confined to decoration. At that
time it was almost wholly divorced from Chris-
tianity. It was used for garden architecture and for
dwellings. What could be more romantic than a
sham ruin when romantic was defined as fantastic
and fictitious?
Nothing is more displeasing to a classicist than
a ruin, for he enjoys the completed whole. On the
other hand, nothing is more pleasing to the
romantic temperament, which likes the unfin-
ished, the incomplete, for then there is always the
possibility of change. The following quotations
well express the romantic attitude. The first was
written by Shenstone in the middle of the eigh-
teenth century, and the second by A. J. Downing
in the middle of the nineteenth.
“Ruinated structures appear to derive their
power of pleasing from the irregularity of surface
which is variety; and the latitude they afford the
imagination to conceive an enlargement of their
dimensions, or to recollect any events, or circum-
stances appertaining to their pristine grandeur and
solemnity.”1
“It is but a mile from Newport to Carisbrook
Castle, one of the most interesting old Ruins in
England. It crowns a fine hill, and from the top of
its ruined towers, you look over a lovely landscape
of hill and vale, picturesque villages, and green
meadows. The castle, itself, with its fortifications,
covers perhaps half a dozen acres, and is just in
that state of ruin and decay, best calculated to
excite the imagination, and send one upon a voy-
age into dreamland.”2
The eighteenth century was looking for some-
thing different rather than something new. It was
not so interested in creation, as in adaptation.
Therefore any artistic style which had been used
before or elsewhere was pleasing. It was a century
of talent rather than of genius; an age of refine-
ment rather than of innovation. The Adam broth-
ers refined Roman art and Batty Langley at-
tempted to refine the Gothic. There was some
scholarship, but more dilettantism. Eighteenth-
century Gothic reflects all these characteristics.
A stanza from the Lay of the Last Minstrel by
Sir Walter Scott sums up the purely romantic ap-
proach to the appreciation of a mediaeval build-
ing. The subjective, emotional reaction is of
paramount importance, therefore,—
“If thou would’st view fair Melrose aright,
Go visit it by the pale moonlight;
For the gay beams of lightsome day
Gild, but to flout, the ruins gray.”3
About 1820 the attitude toward the Gothic
changed. The architects, at least, instead of look-
ing at the old buildings sentimentally began
studying them carefully. The archaeological ap-
proach followed the emotional; instead of hiding
the outlines of a Gothic building in trees and
shrubs, they began drawing them mathematically
to scale. The sentimental attitude has not com-
pletely died out even today and it continued
throughout the last century. A. W. Pugin gives a
good description of the tourist of about 1835.
“. . . the third class are persons who go to see the
church. They are tourists; They go to see every-
thing that is to be seen; therefore they see the
church,—id est, they walk round, read the epi-
taphs, think it very pretty, very romantic, very
old, suppose that it was built in superstitious
times, pace the length of the nave, write their
names on a pillar, and whisk out, as they have a
great deal more to see and very little time.”4
Nevertheless, the archaeological and scientific
interest in Gothic was beginning among a small
group as early as 1820. The elder Pugin was draw-
ing Gothic details to a mathematical scale. At the
same time Rickman was trying to give a stylistic
label to each phase of mediaeval building. The
purely emotional appreciation of the Gothic was
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VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827)
Romantic poet and artist William Blake had
no formal schooling, but he learned to read
and write at home. At the age of ten he was
sent to Henry Pars’s drawing school. The fam-
ily could not afford further instruction in art,
so at fourteen Blake was apprenticed to an
engraver, James Basire. At one point during
his apprenticeship, Basire sent Blake to West-
minster Abbey to draw monuments that Ba-
sire had been hired to engrave; the Gothic
atmosphere of the church influenced Blake’s
imagination and his artistic style. It was at
this time that he began writing poetry. In
1779 Blake left his apprenticeship and en-
rolled briefly at the Royal Academy before
setting out to make his living as an engraver.
In 1787 Blake’s favorite brother, Robert, died.
Blake had been tending to Robert in his final
illness and was with him when he died. Later
Blake had a vision in which, he claimed,
Robert visited him and showed him the
technique of “illuminated writing,” or relief-
etching. This process consisted of producing
a text and a drawing on a copper plate with
an acid-resistant liquid; the plate was then
dipped in acid, which ate away the untreated
surfaces and left the text and drawing in
relief; Blake would then print the design on
paper and color it with watercolors. He used
the method for all of his books, beginning in
1788 with There Is No Natural Religion, a col-
lection of aphorisms. Blake exemplified the
revolutionary spirit of the Gothic in both his
written and visual artistic endeavors. Blake’s
engravings depicting Biblical themes are
evocative of Gothic illuminated manuscripts,
and his paintings in A Descriptive Catalogue of
Pictures, Poetical and Historical Inventions
(1809) anticipate the supernaturalism of the
Gothic revival. In addition, Blake’s writing,
including The (First) Book of Urizen (1794),
contains many Gothic elements, including
doppelgängers, the supernatural, the de-
monic, and the treatment of socially taboo
subjects.
487
 being replaced by a more minute and painstaking
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
study of the architectural remains of the Middle
Ages.
About a decade later in England there was a
wave of religious feeling which manifested itself
in various ways. Perhaps most important were the
Tractarians at Oxford and the Ecclesiologists at
Cambridge. Both felt that the only way to improve
divine worship was to improve church planning,
and that by making churches conform to the
liturgy and rubrics, the services would naturally
improve. The only known type of architecture
which conformed to the old usage was the Gothic.
Hence they advocated the revival of Gothic for
religious reasons, and in the ’40’s a moral consid-
eration was added to the appreciation of the
Gothic.
It may seem strange that the Romanticists
were content with the Gothic instead of creating
a new style. But the eighteenth century did not
want anything completely original, merely adapta-
tions of many different styles. Chambers built a
Chinese pagoda with gilt dragons in Kew Gardens.
It was as much admired and marvelled at as Wal-
pole’s Gothic Strawberry Hill or the classical
façades and interiors of the Adams.
“Variety’s the very spice of life
That gives it all its flavour.”5
Those lines from The Task by Cowper, pub-
lished in 1785, might well be the motto of the
second half of the eighteenth century.
By the early nineteenth century and the
beginning of the Romantic Movement, the Gothic
had come to symbolize certain of the aims and
aspirations of the period. No new art could have
been more symbolic, more expressive of the
nineteenth-century manifestation of the romantic
spirit. Gothic was non-classical, closely connected
with Christianity, with national history. It ap-
peared to be fantastic, imaginative, irrational and
emotional. They saw in it the reproduction in
stone of the primeval forests. Almost every aspect
of their new attitude toward art and life they saw
in Gothic architecture. Therefore, naturally, the
architects did not attempt to create a new style
when an old one would most perfectly fit the taste
of their clients. The Middle Ages as seen through
romantic spectacles seemed very good to most
people and they were content to have a Gothical
house to live in, and later in the century, people
felt morally better to worship in an Early Deco-
rated church. No other architectural style would
have suited the mediaevalists, so there had to be a
Gothic Revival. An etching by Pugin well sums up
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one attitude of the period: one Gothic cathedral is
worth more than ten Renaissance buildings: “They
were weighed in the balance and found wanting.”
In England the Gothic Revival was not depen-
dent on the literature of the Romantic Movement
to any great extent, for none of the greatest of the
School, except Walter Scott, were interested in the
Middle Ages. The reason for that was that Shake-
speare and early ballads were no novelty to the
English as they were to the Germans and French.
In England, there had been no far-reaching classi-
cism to stamp out the late mediaeval literature.
Even in the Augustan Age Spenser was read and
admired. Therefore the English Romantics, in their
quest for change, could not turn to the authors
whose work was always read. Instead, Wordsworth
received mystic inspiration from Nature, Shelley
and Keats from antique Greece, and Byron from
the Orient. In England, there were two phases of
the Gothic Revival: the secular revival of the
eighteenth century which was more closely con-
nected with the literature of the period; and the
ecclesiastical revival of the nineteenth century
which was connected with the reform of the
Anglican church.
In France the literature of the Romantic Move-
ment was more important in forming an interest
in Gothic architecture, especially Chateaubriand’s
Le Génie, and Hugo’s Notre Dame. But the classic
tradition was so strong in France that they could
not accept modern Gothic as a usable style, but
contented themselves by restoring the mediaeval
monuments, by archaeology and history.
In Germany, the spirit of the literature of the
Romantic Movement and that which animated
the building of modern Gothic, seem to be most
closely connected, for both express the coming
nationalism.
The Gothic Revival in the United States is an
importation from England. At first it seems most
incongruous, for it has not even the excuse of be-
ing a reminder of former national greatness. On
reflection, both the Gothic Revival and the eclecti-
cism of American architecture are seen to be true
expressions of American history. The Colonies
became a nation in the Romantic period, and
romantic ideas were in large measure responsible
for the formation of American ideals. The keynote
of American civilization was given in the often
quoted words of Thomas Jefferson in the Declara-
tion of Independence. “We hold these truths to be
self-evident that all men are created equal; that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain
inalienable rights, that among these are life,
liberty and pursuit of happiness.” That sentence
might be called the epitome of romantic political
thought, and it has molded the attitude of the
citizens of the United States to the present day,
and most especially that of the immigrants. It is
by recognition of the fundamental romanticism
of the United States that the present inconsisten-
cies in its civilization become understandable.
Love of change might better be the motto of the
United States than e pluribus unum. So if this
romantic attitude be accepted, it is not surprising
that the romantic style of the Gothic Revival
flourishes in the United States.
The most reiterated criticism of Gothic Revival
architecture runs as follows: Architecture must
conform to the spirit of the time in which it is
built. It must conform to the main characteristics
of the age in material, construction and design.
The nineteenth century was an age of mechanical
inventions, of the growth of democratic theory in
government, of trade and industry, of materialism
and agnosticism. It was as completely different
from the Middle Ages as was possible in govern-
ment, social conditions and religious feeling.
Therefore every building of the Gothic Revival
was false to the spirit of the age, and in conse-
quence cannot be considered as good architecture.
This criticism has grown out of a one-sided
interpretation of the nineteenth century. It ignores
the importance of the Romantic Movement.
As early as 1870 when Eastlake was writing
his History of the Gothic Revival, people were begin-
ning to feel that it was incongruous to erect build-
ings in a Gothic style in the nineteenth century.
Eastlake, himself, writes, “At first it may seem
strange that a style of design which is intimately
associated with the romance of the world’s his-
tory should now-a-days find favour in a country
distinguished above all others for the plain
business-like tenour of its daily life.”6 And at heart,
although he was a Gothic Revivalist, he did find it
strange.
But thirty years earlier, when Pugin was writ-
ing his Apology for the Revival of Christian Architec-
ture in England, the Gothic Revival was at its
strongest and no such doubt of its fitness had
entered his mind. He wrote as follows: “It will not
be difficult to show that the wants and purposes
of Civil Buildings now are almost identical with
those of our English forefathers. In the first place,
climate, which necessarily regulates the pitch of
roofs, light, warmth, and internal arrangement,
remains of course precisely the same as formerly.
Secondly, we are governed by nearly the same laws
and the same system of political economy. The
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Sovereign, with the officers of state connected
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
with the crown,—the Houses of Peers and Com-
mons,—the judges of the various courts of law,
and form of trial,—the titles and rank of the nobil-
ity,—the tenures by which their lands are held,
and the privileges they enjoy,—the corporate bod-
ies and civic functionaries,—are all essentially the
same as in former days. There is no country in
Europe which has preserved so much of her
ancient system as England.”7
These two quotations shows the difference in
attitude toward the Gothic Revival even during
the nineteenth century. So long as the spirit of
the Romantic Movement was prevalent, the
Gothic Revival expressed the spirit of romanti-
cism. But later, when that spirit was almost
crushed out by Victorian materialism, the Gothic
Revival was no longer a vital style and it did seem
strange that England should be dotted with
modern Gothic buildings.
But whether current taste says that the Gothic
Revival is good or bad, it is at least one of the most
lasting and tangible legacies of the Romantic
Movement, and shows that the nineteenth cen-
tury was not completely engrossed by Progress,
Industry, Science and the Future, but, also, looked
backward to discover the Middle Ages.
Notes
1. Shenstone, [William]. Essays on Men and Manners,
p. 67.
2. Downing, [Andrew]. Rural Essays, p. 525.
3. Scott, [Sir Walter]. Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto II, st.
1.
4. Pugin, Contrasts, p. 36.
5. Cowper, The Task, Bk. 2, l. 606.
6. Eastlake, op. cit., p. 2.
7. A. W. Pugin, Apology, p. 37.
Works Cited
Langely, Batty and Thomas. Ancient Architecture Restored and
Improved. London, 1742.
Langley, Batty and Thomas. Gothic Architecture Improved.
2nd ed. of foregoing work with new title. London,
1747.
This is the first architectural work to be devoted to
Gothic architecture since the Renaissance. It has been
much criticized but it is a sincere attempt to analyze
the styles of mediaeval architecture. His historical
theories have all been proved wrong. He thought that
the Gothic, or Saxon, as he preferred to name it, style
was formed before the Danish invasions. Yet, as a
pioneer and example of the mid-eighteenth century
fad for the Gothic, it is important.
489
 Pugin, A. W. Contrasts. London, 1836. 2nd revised edition,

VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

London, 1841.
One of the most brilliant and stimulating books writ-
ten by an architect, glowing with the fiery zeal and
enthusiasm of a convert to Rome. The central theme
that the world and art were good before the Reforma-
tion and the Renaissance perverted religion and
aesthetics has since been often echoed by Catholic
historians. The plates contrasting fifteenth and
nineteenth-century architecture are as good propa-
ganda as the text.
Pugin, A. W. An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture
in England. London, 1843.
The first book points out in what a bad state architec-
ture is and the second shows how it can be improved
by a sincere and conscientious rival of “Christian”
styles.
Eastlake, Charles L. A History of the Gothic Revival. London,
1872.
The first and only book giving a detailed history of the
Gothic Revival in England. Absolutely indispensable.

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 VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
ALEXANDER JACKSON DAVIS (1803-1892)
Alexander Jackson Davis was a leading figure
of the nineteenth-century Gothic revival in
American architecture. Picturesqueness was
predominant in all Davis’s works, including
his design for Glen Ellen (1832), the Maryland
residence of Robert Gilmor III. Yet in his last
major project, an unsuccessful submission in
the 1867 competition for the New York City
Post Office, he designed a metal and glass
structure which clearly presaged twentieth-
century “functional” concepts. Far from be-
ing contradictory, however, both picturesque-
ness and functionalism were from the first
inherent in the American—as distinct from
English or French—Gothic revival. In America,
Gothic revival architecture never challenged
the Roman or Greek revival in mass popular-
ity; indeed, its associations were fundamen-
tally “anti-establishment.” Gothic was an
“arty” style, associated with the idea of the
“natural man.” There was always something
eccentric about it: a typical example was the
exaggerated asymmetry and anticlassical
proportions of Davis’s H. K. Harral house in
Bridgeport, Conn. (ca. 1846; demolished).
Such stylistic self-consciousness inevitably
encouraged self-conscious formalism—
emphasis on the “naturalness” of Gothic
forms and structure as an end in itself—and
thence to the kind of “functionalism” exhib-
ited in Davis’s 1867 Post Office design. For
historical reasons, however, the picturesque
side of Gothic revival architecture predomi-
nated in America so that its chief legacy was
the Arts and Crafts movement of about 1890
to about 1910, prefaced by the Romanesque
of H. H. Richardson and climaxed by the early
work of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Combining something of both trends, Davis
has claim to be the most representative of all
American Gothic revivalists.

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VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

KERRY DEAN CARSO (ESSAY DATE

DECEMBER 2002)
SOURCE: Carso, Kerry Dean. “Diagnosing the ‘Sir
Walter Disease’: American Architecture in the Age of
Romantic Literature.” Mosaic 35, no. 4 (December
2002): 121-42.
In the following essay, Carso demonstrates how Gothic
literature influenced Gothic Revival architecture in the
United States, particularly the designs of architect Alex-
ander Jackson Davis.

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 When a client commissioned American
Gothic Revival architect Alexander Jackson Davis
(1803-1892) to design a house, the first thing
Davis wanted to know was his client’s reading
habits. Davis wrote to one client, “It is impossible
for me to tell what expression to give the exterior
that will answer your own beau ideal unless I am
better acquainted with your temper! That is,
whether you read Shakespeare more than Thom-
son; Moore more than Collins; or Homer at all;
either in the Iliad or Odyessy [sic]; or whether you
read the great book of Nature” (emph. Davis’s;
Brendel-Pandich 79). Although Davis does not
mention Ann Radcliffe or Horace Walpole here,
he very well could have, because on Davis’s
bookshelf, along with Boydell’s Shakespeare
library, were a number of Gothic novels that he
read on a regular basis.
Gothic novels and historical romances, such
as those written by Sir Walter Scott, were devoured
with pleasure by an avid reading audience. Wal-
pole wrote his novel The Castle of Otranto as a
method of escapism, a way of “exchanging what
is called the realities of life for dreams” (letter to
George Montagu, 5 January 1766, Correspondence
X. 192). Recent critics have argued that Gothic
literature is not an escapist form of literature—a
way for readers to revel in nostalgic representa-
tions of an idealized past—but rather a literature
reflective of the historical and cultural forces of
contemporary life. For instance, in Gothic America:
Narrative, History and Myth, Teresa A. Goddu argues
that American Gothic literature should be read
within an historical and racial context, rather than
as an escapist literature. My interpretation negoti-
ates between these two apparently conflictive ap-
proaches. I argue that Gothic literature does
transport its reader to imaginary realms and by-
gone eras of castles and superstitious awe, and that
people read Gothic novels to escape from the
humdrum reality of real life, but, like any form of
cultural production, Gothic literature cannot help
but engage with the time in which it is written.
These two interpretations do not have to be mutu-
ally exclusive.
What is clear is that Gothic novels and histori-
cal romances influenced the architects and clients
of American architecture quite seriously. Indeed,
“works of the imagination” (as Davis labelled
them in his catalogue of books) profoundly af-
fected American architecture in the heyday of
Gothic Revival design (the 1830s and 1840s).
Scott’s novels were particularly widely read and
admired. In Europe, as in the United States, Scott’s
fiction and his home Abbotsford had a large influ-
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VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
L. N. COTTINGHAM (1787-1847)
Architect Cottingham became interested in
the preservation of medieval architecture and
in the design and construction of structures
built in the Gothic style while studying West-
minster Hall and the Chapel of Henry VII in
his early thirties. Cottingham’s passionate
defense and promotion of Gothic Revival
architecture departed from the majority of
English architects and scholars, who favored
Classicism. Cottingham’s archeological and
preservationist approach to architecture was
unique and influenced both his contemporar-
ies and his successors. While most of his
original architectural work has been de-
stroyed or restored in a contrasting style, Cot-
tingham’s role in preserving medieval struc-
tures and the education of his colleagues and
the public about Gothic and Gothic Revival
architecture had a lasting impact on
nineteenth-century English architecture. His
work exerted a tremendous influence on later
artists and scholars, including A. W. N. Pugin
and John Ruskin.
ence on later European architecture, as critic
Charles L. Eastlake acknowledged in the nine-
teenth century (115).
For the most part, architectural historians
have failed to examine the complex interrelation-
ships between Gothic Revival architecture and
Gothic literature. One notable exception is Wil-
liam Pierson, who acknowledges the influence of
Scott and Walpole (who both built influential
Gothic Revival houses) in his important book
American Buildings and Their Architects: Technology
and the Picturesque, The Corporate and the Early
Gothic Styles. But Pierson never mentions Gothic
novelists such as Ann Radcliffe and Charles Ma-
turin, both of whom held a prominent place on
the reading lists of Gothic Revival architects and
clients alike. In the end, formal analysis takes
precedence over cultural history in Pierson’s ap-
proach. Besides Pierson’s book, there are three
other major architectural histories on the Ameri-
can Gothic Revival in this period: Phoebe Stan-
ton’s The Gothic Revival and American Church
497
 Architecture: An Episode in Taste, 1840-1856; Calder
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
Loth and Julius T. Sadler Jr.’s The Only Proper Style:
Gothic Architecture in America; and Wayne An-
drews’s American Gothic: Its Origins, Its Trials, Its
Triumphs. Stanton’s book is limited to ecclesiasti-
cal Gothic and is now three decades old, while
The Only Proper Style and American Gothic are
aimed at a popular audience.
In general, the study of nineteenth-century
Gothic Revival architecture has been limited to
formal analyses and attempts to see the style as
prefiguring later architectural movements. About
Gothic Revival architects such as Davis and Ri-
chard Upjohn, architectural historian Talbot Ham-
lin writes: “Creation, not nostalgia, was their
brightly burning torch” (3). Hamlin highlights
how these architects were innovators in the new
materials of glass and iron. Often, architectural
historians attempt to place Gothic Revival build-
ings into a modernist continuum, as if the style’s
relationship to modernism is the only way in
which it can be redeemed. Epitomizing this kind
of analysis is Vincent Scully’s book The Shingle
Style and the Stick Style: Architectural Theory and
Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright. In
this seminal book, Scully argues that Andrew
Jackson Downing’s advocacy of wooden cottages,
often in a Gothic Revival mode and harmonizing
with their rural environment, prefigured
twentieth-century architecture. Inspired by Scully,
James Early’s book Romanticism and American Ar-
chitecture argues that nineteenth-century Romantic
functionalist theory, especially the work of A. J.
Downing, influenced Modern architects, and
Frank Lloyd Wright in particular.
My approach in this essay is different. Rather
than analyze Gothic Revival architecture in light
of proto-modernist innovations, my aim is to
place the style in its historical and cultural context.
Examining American romanticism in architecture
in light of the contemporaneous Gothic novel-
reading craze reveals new interpretative possibili-
ties. My goal is to recreate the intellectual climate
of the period. In this sense, my approach to the
Gothic is revisionist.
In the past few decades, Gothic literature has
experienced a renaissance of sorts. Scholarly books
and articles on the Gothic have proliferated, while
paperback editions of long-forgotten Gothic
novels have become available. With the waning
popularity of Gothic novels in the second quarter
of the nineteenth century came obscurity. It was
not until the 1920s and 1930s when Gothic
literature became a subject for serious scholarly
study, beginning with Edith Birkhead’s The Tale of
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Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance and Montague
Summers’s The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic
Novel. These pioneering works were followed by
Devendra Varma’s The Gothic Flame: Being a His-
tory of the Gothic Novel in England. Because of its ir-
rationality and mystery, the Gothic novel lends
itself to psychoanalytic interpretations. One of
the best-known psychoanalytic studies of Ameri-
can Gothic is Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the
American Novel (first published in 1960). In the
1970s and beyond, feminist scholars have begun
examining Gothic literature, focussing on women
writers and women readers. Recently, a wide range
of approaches including poststructuralism, queer
theory, postcolonial theory, and Marxism have
been applied to the Gothic genre with provoca-
tive results. With this new interest and the eleva-
tion of Gothic literary studies, we can now look at
the effect of Gothic literature on other cultural
expressions, including art and architecture.
But, even with this recent explosion of Gothic
criticism, scholars have failed to juxtapose Gothic
novels and dramas with archival architectural
sources to explore the interrelationship between
literature and architecture in the United States in
the first half of the nineteenth century. My goal is
to reveal these connections. The scholars who
have rescued the Gothic novel from literary
history’s dust heap have provided cultural histori-
ans with a base from which to examine the sweep-
ing influence of this significant literary genre. In
the United States, Gothic novels and Scott’s
historical romances (which were inspired by
Gothic pioneers Walpole and Radcliffe), had an
enormous impact on architecture in the period
between 1800 and 1850. The groundwork in
Gothic literary scholarship allows us to move
beyond literature to examine how the Gothic
seeps into other forms of artistic creation.
One of the earliest American architects to
enjoy Gothic novels was Benjamin Henry Latrobe
(1764-1820). Although born in Great Britain and
educated in Europe, Latrobe immigrated to the
United States at the age of thirty-one, arriving in
March 1796. About three months after relocating
to Virginia, Latrobe wrote in his journal that he
found Radcliffe’s descriptions of buildings so “suc-
cessful” that he “once endeavored to plan the
Castle of Udolpho from [Radcliffe’s] account of it
and found it impossible” (Latrobe 166).
Latrobe began experimenting with Gothic
architectural forms for residential design in the
United States in 1799. Latrobe’s Gothic work
includes Sedgeley (built for William Crammond
near Philadelphia in 1799 and considered the first
Gothic Revival house in the United States); the
Baltimore Cathedral design (unexecuted; 1805);
Christ Church in Washington, DC (1806-07); the
Bank of Philadelphia (1807-08); and St. Paul’s in
Alexandria, Virginia (1817). But, overall, Latrobe’s
Gothic output pales in comparison to his rational
neoclassical efforts such as the Bank of Pennsylva-
nia (1799-1801). Although Latrobe’s landscape
paintings display an intense interest in the pictur-
esque and his interiors (such as the south wing of
the United States Capitol, 1804-06; altered c. 1818-
27) betray these leanings (Cohen and Brownell
15-24), in general, his Gothic Revival buildings
are not full-blown picturesque. Indeed, his Gothic
Revival designs are symmetrical with superficial
Gothic detailing. For example, Sedgeley is a
geometric form gothicized by the placement of
pointed arch windows in the pavilions that
protrude from the corners of the house. Despite
this Gothic touch, there is little mystery or
surprise in store for the observer of Latrobe’s
Gothic creations. Although he clearly read Radc-
liffe’s books and was quite possibly influenced by
them, he did not translate the mysterious, ram-
bling architectural spaces of her stories into his
own architecture.
Other American architects, too, dabbled in
Gothic Revival design before the 1830s. Some
notable examples include Maxmilian Godefroy’s
St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore (1806); Charles
Bulfinch’s Federal Street Church in Boston (1809);
and the unexecuted design for Columbia College
(1813) by James Renwick Sr., engineer and father
of the architect James Renwick. Daniel Wads-
worth, who designed for himself a Gothic Revival
villa called Monte Video (c. 1805-1809) near
Hartford, Connecticut, explained that, to him, the
Gothic style was not inherently menacing as are
the castles and convents of Gothic novels: “There
is nothing in the mere forms or embellishments
of the pointed style [. . .] in the least adapted to
convey to the mind the impression of Gothic
Gloom” (qtd. in Andrews 38, emph. Wadsworth’s).
His house bears out this belief; Gothic details ap-
pear as an afterthought, a decorative motif rather
than a programmatic agenda.
It was not until the 1830s and 1840s that
American Gothic Revival architecture came of age.
The most prominent designer of Gothic residences
in this period was Davis. Davis was born in New
York City in 1803 and, during his boyhood, lived
in New Jersey and New York. When he was six-
teen, he moved to Alexandria, Virginia, to learn a
trade with his older brother Samuel. Davis worked
as a type compositor in the newspaper office.
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VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
filled with two of his favourite activities: reading
and acting. An amateur actor who performed in
several plays while he was in Virginia, Davis was a
voracious reader as well. His two pocket diaries
from this period, preserved at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York, are filled with youth-
ful exuberance. Elaborately illustrated (Davis was
an aspiring artist as well), these diaries reveal an
acute interest in Gothic fiction and dark drama.
Often, Davis would begin an entry with an il-
lustration from a text, which would then be
excerpted in his own handwriting. Among the
dramas that he read and illustrated were Maturin’s
Bertram: or the Castle of St. Aldobrand and Heinrich
Zschokke’s Abaellino.
Maturin was an Irish Gothic novelist and
dramatist who corresponded with an encouraging
Scott. After reading Maturin’s drama Bertram, Scott
wrote that the character of Bertram had a “Satanic
dignity which is often truly sublime” (qtd. in
Lougy 42). Starring Edmund Kean, Bertram opened
on 9 May 1816 at the Drury Lane Theatre in
London, with the support of Lord Byron, who was
impressed with the play. Bertram and Maturin’s
Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer were young
Davis’s favourites (Donoghue). In one of his
pocket diaries, Davis made an illustration of the
play’s first act, showing a ship tossed on a stormy
sea in view of a Gothic convent. On the shore are
monks kneeling in prayer for the safety of the
ship, which is captained by Bertram, the hero-
villain of the play. The setting of the play is quint-
essentially Gothic from the “rock-based turrets”
(3) of the convent to the moonlit “terrassed
rampart” of the castle of Aldobrand (26). Davis
copied an excerpt from the play into his diary and
as the budding actor included Bertram in his list of
recitations.
Heinrich Zschokke’s Abaellino is a German
drama that was translated and adapted to the
American stage by William Dunlap and opened in
New York on 11 February 1801. A popular play, it
was performed in New York for the next twenty-
five years and was also produced in Philadelphia,
Boston, Albany, Charleston, and other American
cities. Like Bertram, Abaellino is a fascinating
Gothic hero-villain. Davis chooses Act I, Scene I
to illustrate in his journal. In Davis’s drawing,
Abaellino sits sullenly in a “mean apartment,” as
it is described in the play. On the table are “a
Bottle and Glasses, Chairs” (3). Such is the extent
of the stage directions. Davis greatly elaborates
this meagre description by adding what appear to
be instruments of torture and weapons hanging
499
 on the wall. Alongside these mediaeval-looking
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
implements are a shelf and more bottles, which
hint at the wanton excess of the bandit lifestyle
(do they contain poison? Liquor?). The figure of
Abaellino is seated off-centre, a compositional
choice that emphasizes the room rather than the
figure. A Gothic representation, Davis’s visualiza-
tion of the bandit’s chamber suggests the potential
cruelty and perversity of the outlaws. One poten-
tial source for Davis’s drawing is the stage set from
a performance of the play in which Davis acted.
While he was a youth in Alexandria, Davis
engaged in amateur theatricals and became inter-
ested in stage design. He dreamed of becoming a
professional actor. Davis and his brother Samuel
took part in the Philo-Dramatic Society, a group
that performed plays in Alexandria. In his diary,
he kept a list of his performances, which included
Shakespearean tragedies (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet,
King Lear) and contemporary pieces (Douglas, Lov-
ers’ Vows, Abaellino, and Venice Preserved). In the
same diary in which Bertram and Abaellino ap-
pear, he illustrates “Bed Scene in Othello.” Davis’s
illustration filters the Shakespearean scene
through contemporary Gothic, emphasizing the
mysterious flicker of the nightstand candle and
the inky blackness of unknowable architectural
spaces. Again, it is possible that Davis’s representa-
tion of Othello derives from contemporary perfor-
mances of the play that he witnessed. In the
spring of 1823, on his way to New York City, Davis
stopped in Baltimore where he made an attempt
at professional acting by auditioning with a group
of players from North Carolina. He was not
selected, so he moved on to Wilmington, Dela-
ware, where he performed “Rhetorical Entertain-
ments” to support himself. Again, in Philadelphia
and in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he attempted
acting, but to no avail. These youthful experiences
were just the beginning of Davis’s lifelong interest
in the theatre. Throughout his life, he advised
builders on acoustics and sight lines in theatre
design (Donoghue).
At the age of twenty, Davis moved to New
York City, and his fascination with the theatre
continued. In the evenings, he frequented the
theatre and was on the free list at both the Park
Theatre and the Castle Garden Theater in 1826
and 1828 (Donoghue). He also expressed his love
of drama in his artistic work. In 1825, he com-
pleted a study for a proscenium featuring Egyptian
columns and Greek bas-relief sculpture and nu-
merous portraits of actors in character, including
“Brutus in the Rostrum” and “Mr. Kemble as
Roma” (Rebora 27).
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That so early in his life Davis was fascinated
with the theatre is significant to his later Gothic
Revival architectural creations. The dramatic im-
ages he drew for his youthful diaries display his
acute interest in stage design and scenography.
Indeed, Gothic Revival architecture is inherently
theatrical, a quality often commented upon by
architecture critics. For instance, architectural
historian William Pierson declares that Strawberry
Hill “is a stage set. It was meant to create a special
kind of environment, to accommodate the taste
and vision of the owner” (Pierson 107, emph.
Pierson’s). Davis often used trompe-l’oeil materials
to create theatrical effects, substituting plaster for
stone. Davis’s houses, then, become stage sets, in
which the owners’ mediaeval fantasies, inspired
by Gothic romances, can take flight.
While still in Alexandria, Davis’s sensible older
brother bristled at what he perceived to be the
younger Davis’s useless pastime of reading Gothic
books. Later in life, Davis wrote to William Dun-
lap about himself in the third person for Dunlap’s
History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design
in the United States: “Like another Franklin,
strongly addicted to reading, he limited himself to
the accomplishment of a fixed task, and being a
quick compositor, he would soon complete it, and
fly to his books, but not like Franklin, to books of
science and useful learning, but to works of
imagination, poetry, and the drama; whence,
however, he imbibed a portion of that high
imaginative spirit so necessary to constitute an
artist destined to practise in the field of inven-
tion” (Dunlap 210). Davis’s brother condemned
such reading and turned Davis’s attention to “his-
tory, biography and antiquities, to language and
the first principles of the mathematics” (211). His
brother’s concern was perhaps warranted: one
British critic lambasted Maturin’s Bertram for its
“rotten principles and a bastard sort of senti-
ment,” while another felt that the play excited
“undue compassion for worthless characters, or
unjust admiration of fierce and unchristian quali-
ties” (Ranger 16). His brother’s admonitions
taught the young Davis that reading Gothic
novels was a frivolous activity. From the evidence
of his diaries, it appears that Davis took little heed
of his brother’s warnings. In fact, he becomes a
life-long reader of Gothic novels and plays.
The architectural allure of Gothic literature
fascinated Davis. As a young man, Davis was
known to “pass hours in puzzling over the plan of
some ancient castle of romance, arranging the trap
doors, subterraneous passages, and drawbridges,
as pictorial embellishment was the least of his
care, invention all his aim” (Dunlap 211). Any
Gothic novel of the late eighteenth century may
have been the subject of his artistic dreaming, but
most likely he is referring here to either Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto or Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of
Udolpho, two of the most popular and influential
of the Gothic novels. Davis’s catalogue of books
show that he owned both books. One of his early
architectural drawings from age fifteen (1818)
survives at the Avery Library at Columbia Univer-
sity. The image depicts a partly ruinous labyrin-
thine space with a multitude of pointed arches
leading to mysterious staircases (perhaps inspired
by Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carceri). Light
filters in through barred windows. The architec-
tural space of this dungeon is inherently unknow-
able. This drawing shows his early interest in the
Gothic underworld, which is described in detail in
The Castle of Otranto. The castle of Otranto con-
tains intricate subterranean passages that lead
from the castle to the church of St. Nicholas, and
through which the virtuous Isabella is chased by
the lustful Manfred.
That the future Gothic Revival architect de-
lighted in Gothic romances comes as little surprise,
since architectural space is a pre-eminent concern
of writers such as Walpole and Radcliffe. Indeed,
in Udolpho, the castle plays such an important role
that it almost transforms into a freethinking
character in the text. When the heroine Emily first
views Udolpho, the castle “seemed to stand the
sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on
all, who dared to invade its solitary reign.” The
mood evoked by the mysterious mediaeval archi-
tectural setting is crucial to the genre. Emily looks
at the castle with “melancholy awe” and almost
expects to see “banditti start up from under the
trees.” Illuminated by the setting sun, “the gothic
greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls
of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and
sublime object” (226-27). Such descriptions no
doubt piqued Davis’s architectural curiosity.
As an adult, Davis remained faithful to his
early love of Gothic novels. To Radcliffe’s The
Romance of the Forest he gave the highest praise.
His day book indicates that he spent 22 April 1848
rereading Radcliffe’s novel. Around the same time,
he also reread Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of
Wakefield. In his day book, in the margin next to
these entries, he had scribbled “considering
forgetfulness of these works a fault.” It is likely
that Davis was reading his edition of Ballantyne’s
Novelist’s Library. Both The Romance of the Forest
and The Vicar of Wakefield were in this collection.
Indeed, by owning this collection, Davis had in
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his library all of Radcliffe’s books, as well as Wal-
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
pole’s The Castle of Otranto, all of which he care-
fully notes in his catalogue of books. And he made
a point to remember these early influences even
in the course of his busy architectural practice in
1848, when he was at the height of his popularity
as a designer of Gothic villas for wealthy clients.
The popularity of Radcliffe, “the Queen of
Ghost Stories and Subterranean Horror” (as one of
Scott’s contemporaries called her), along with her
“numerous train of imitators,” gave way in the
early nineteenth century to Scott’s brand of
historical romance (qtd. in Robertson 31-32). Scott
turned from writing poetry to writing novels with
Waverley, the first in a long succession of historical
novels that enchanted his readers in both Great
Britain and the United States. Among his more
than twenty novels are Guy Mannering, Rob Roy,
The Heart of Midlothian, The Bride of Lammermoor,
Ivanhoe, and Redgauntlet. Scott was the first major
historical novelist; his popularity outlived him
and continued long after his death in 1832. Mark
Twain later derisively labelled American interest
in the Middle Ages “The Sir Walter Disease”
(Twain 501).
Scott’s books were republished in the United
States soon after they appeared in England. Boston
publisher Samuel Goodrich gives us a sense for
Scott’s renown on this side of the Atlantic: “The
appearance of a new novel from his pen caused a
greater sensation in the United States than did
some of the battles of Napoleon, which decided
the fate of thrones and empires. Everybody read
these works; everybody—the refined and the
simple—shared in the delightful trances which
seemed to transport them to remote ages and
distant climes” (qtd. in Hart 74). Goodrich re-
ported that one of his younger sisters memorized
the long poem The Lady of the Lake and “was ac-
customed of an evening to sit at her sewing, while
she recited it to an admiring circle of listeners”
(69). Goodrich’s sister was not the only American
reading Scott by the fireside. Davis also recorded
such pleasant pastimes in his journals. On a visit
with friends in October 1841, Davis recorded in
his letterbook that he and his hosts, Mr. and Mrs.
James, “passed the evening in agreeable conversa-
tion, and reading Scott and Shakespeare” before
retiring to bed at 11 p.m. On 15 October 1848, he
was engrossed in Waverley (see Davis, Day Book).
Indeed, Davis’s catalogue of books shows that he
owned all of the Waverley novels, and his day
book indicates that he read them often.
Scott cannot be considered a Gothic novelist
in the same way that his predecessors Walpole
501
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
Sir Walter Scott’s castle, Abbotsford.
and Radcliffe are. Scott’s genre is historical ro-
mance, but the influence of the Gothic is omni-
present in his work. From his earliest days and
throughout his life, Scott read tales of terror. In
1808, in his “Ashestiel Autobiography,” he wrote
of a youthful taste for “the wonderful and terrible,
the common taste of children, but in which I have
remained a child even unto this day” (qtd. in Rob-
ertson 52). He contributed to Matthew Lewis’s
Tales of Wonder; wrote reviews of Gothic novels,
including Maturin’s Fatal Revenge in 1810 and
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818; and composed
studies of individual Gothic authors Walpole, Rad-
cliffe, and Clara Reeve for Ballantyne’s Novelist’s
Library.
In 1812, after the success of his three poems
and before he began writing his Waverley novel
series, Scott purchased 110 acres, upon which he
built his elaborate Gothic castle (1812-1815;
enlarged in 1819). He named his new home Ab-
botsford after the monks of Melrose Abbey. The
architect was William Atkinson. Abbotsford has
been described as “an asymmetrical pile of towers,
turrets, stepped gables, oriels, pinnacles, crene-
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lated parapets, and clustered chimney stacks, all
assembled with calculated irregularity” (Pierson
292). Visitors flocked to Abbotsford to see the
author and his residence first-hand, and, accord-
ing to Thomas Carlyle, Abbotsford soon “became
infested to a great degree with tourists, wonder-
hunters, and all that fatal species of people” (qtd.
in Pierson 290). Included among the tourists was
notable American Robert Gilmor III (1808-1874),
who later returned to the United States with vi-
sions of Abbotsford and its charming host promi-
nent in his fertile imagination.
Gilmor was the nephew of the well-known
Baltimore art collector Robert Gilmor. In 1828,
Gilmor graduated from Harvard and received a
diplomatic appointment that took him to Europe
from 1829 until 1830. When his father died in
1830, the young Gilmor returned to the United
States. His travel diary, now at the Maryland
Historical Society, details his visits to France, Italy,
Switzerland, England, Scotland, Ireland, and
Wales. On 24 May 1830, Gilmor visited Strawberry
Hill, “the famous residence of Walpole” (Gilmor,
24 May 1830), as he (Gilmor) called it.
 Horace Walpole bought Strawberry Hill, a
small house overlooking the Thames River in
Twickenham, in 1748. In 1754, he created the
Strawberry Hill Committee, including himself and
designers Richard Bentley and John Chute. (Other
architects also contributed to the design.) Over
the course of the following decades, Walpole and
his associates made additions to Strawberry Hill,
creating a Gothic Revival castle unlike any build-
ing before it. The style, which has been called
everything from “light Gothic,” to “rococo
Gothic,” relied as much on whimsical inventive-
ness as on archaeological research into mediaeval
architectural forms. For the overall affect, Walpole
sought the “gloomth of abbeys and cathedrals”
(letter to Horace Mann, 27 April 1853, Correspon-
dence XX.372). He filled his castle with his collec-
tion of curiosities and opened it for viewing to the
public.
Architectural historians often praise Straw-
berry Hill for introducing asymmetry into British
domestic design and historicism into the Gothic
Revival. But it is also important for another
reason: the castle inspired Walpole to write his
Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto in 1764. In A
Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole, Wal-
pole writes that Strawberry Hill is “a very proper
habitation of, as it was the scene that inspired,
the author of The Castle of Otranto” (iv). One June
morning, Walpole awoke from a dream: “I had
thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural
dream for a head filled, like mine, with Gothic
story) and that, on the uppermost bannister of a
great staircase, I saw a gigantic hand in armor”
(letter to William Cole, 9 March 1765, Correspon-
dence, I.88). That evening, Walpole sat down to
write The Castle of Otranto. The setting of the story,
as Walpole tells us in the preface, is “undoubtedly
laid in some real castle” (Preface to the 1st ed. 8);
indeed, as W.S. Lewis has shown, the rooms at
Strawberry Hill and those in the pages of The
Castle of Otranto correspond (88-90). Read by Brit-
ish and American readers alike, The Castle of
Otranto enjoyed popularity long after Walpole’s
death in 1797. When Gilmor visited Strawberry
Hill in 1830, the castle was in the possession of
Walpole’s heir, the Earl of Waldegrave.
Upon arriving at Strawberry Hill, Gilmor
admired the “superb pile,” and especially enjoyed
the company of his hosts, the Earl of Waldegrave
and his wife. About the castle, Gilmor wrote:
Tis in the most beautiful Gothic (light) style.
Much cut up into small rooms, none, except the
long picture gallery being large. Some of the ceil-
ings beautifully gilded others beautifully fitted in
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wood or scagliola. But all things, wainscottings,—
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
door—fireplaces—all Gothic. [. . .] These same
rooms crammed—most literally crammed—with
chef d’oeuvres of Antient and modern paintings,
statuary, sarcophaguses, Bronzes and silver carv-
ings of Benvenuto Cellini and others. [. . .] In this
superb cabinet of curiosities for such the gothic
castle deserves to be called, I strolled delighted.
(24 May 1830, emph. Gilmor’s)
Gilmor is most affected by the fact that he is
in the actual building in which Walpole wrote his
Gothic tale, The Castle of Otranto. About that
evening he wrote: “We retired about 11—I to my
nice little Gothic chamber where I slept most
soundly till [. . .] next morning. Lord W and I
breakfasted together in the superb gothic library—
where the Castle of Otranto was written.” Gilmor
clearly relishes the proximity to Walpole and to
the place where the first Gothic novel was writ-
ten. On 28 May 1830, Lady Waldegrave opened to
Gilmor “all the precious cabinets” of Walpole,
bringing the young Gothic enthusiast that much
closer to the fascinating figure of Walpole
(Gilmor).
Three months later, on 18 August 1830,
Gilmor actually met a great novelist: Scott. Upon
meeting the “Great Enchanter,” Gilmor was struck
by his countenance in which beamed “all that
genius which his voluminous and highly interest-
ing works indicate.” The next day, Gilmor went to
Abbotsford, where Scott led him through his
“splendid castle.” Gilmor admired Scott’s library
and armoury, “the finest things of the kind” he
had ever seen. The highlight for Gilmor was his
visit to Scott’s “little sanctum sanctorum, a snug
place from which have emanated those great
works which have so long enchanted the world”
(Gilmor). Again, what most impressed Gilmor was
his proximity not just to the novelists themselves
but also to the fiction he loved.
Scott entertained Gilmor on rides through the
countryside with storytelling. On one occasion,
Scott recounted the ending of his novel The Bride
of Lammermoor, and on another, Gilmor himself
recited a couplet from Scott’s poem The Lay of the
Last Minstrel. An aspiring poet, Gilmor, like Davis,
was an avid reader of Scott’s works. Gilmor has
been described as having “an almost fanatical pas-
sion for the romances of Sir Walter Scott”
(Donoghue).
Perhaps it was a love of Gothic fiction that
brought Gilmor and Davis together when the
former returned to the United States in 1830. In
1832, Gilmor commissioned Davis and his partner
Ithiel Town to design for him a castellated resi-
dence on the Gunpowder River near Baltimore.
503
 Gilmor named the house Glen Ellen, after his wife
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
Ellen Ward (with the additional association of
Scott’s Ellen, the heroine of The Lady of the Lake);
the addition of the word Glen gave the name a
Scottish ring (Pierson 292). During the design
process, Davis reduced the height of the house
from two stories to one storey. Crenellated towers
and ornate pinnacles vertically interrupt the
horizontal massing of Glen Ellen. The half-
octagonal bay on the west façade features delicate
tracery. Davis called Glen Ellen the “first English
Perpendicular Gothic Villa [in America] with Barge
Boards, Bracketts, Oriels, Tracery in Windows,
etc.” (Schimmelman 155). The executed design is
significant in American architectural history as
the first consciously designed asymmetrical Ameri-
can house since the seventeenth century.
On 21 September 1832, not long after Gilmor’s
return in late 1830 or early 1831, Scott died. Two
weeks later, on 5 October 1832, Davis makes his
first notes on Glen Ellen in his day book. Perhaps
Gilmor may have conceived of Glen Ellen as a
tribute or romantic memorial to his genial host at
Abbotsford (Snadon 93). Indeed, as William Pier-
son has shown, the plans of Abbotsford and Glen
Ellen both display a progression from left to right
of octagonal corner turret to octagonal bay to
square corner tower (Pierson 295). Davis also
designed a ruined gatelodge for the Glen Ellen
estate, reminiscent of Scott’s beloved Melrose Ab-
bey, a ruined mediaeval structure near Abbotsford
(Schimmelman 155).
But Abbotsford is not the only source for Glen
Ellen. Gilmor was very impressed with the rococo
Gothic he saw at Strawberry Hill, and the interior
decoration of Walpole’s residence becomes the
inspiration for the exterior ornamentation at Glen
Ellen (Snadon 95). The battlements, pinnacles,
towers, and pointed arch windows all recall
Strawberry Hill, and the long rectangular parlour
mirrors Walpole’s mediaeval gallery (Brendel-
Pandich 70-71). Both Abbotsford and Strawberry
Hill are sited along rivers; it is significant, then,
that Gilmor chose a site for Glen Ellen on the
Gunpowder River, twelve miles north of Baltimore
(Snadon 101).
While Town, Davis, and Gilmor were clearly
indebted to Walpole and Atkinson, Glen Ellen is
quite unlike anything that had come before it in
American architecture. Most striking is its adop-
tion of the complete Gothic program: it is asym-
metrical in plan and elevation; its rooms are of
disproportionate sizes; its ornamentation is both
whimsical and reliant on recognizable mediaeval
architectural forms. Glen Ellen is certainly not a
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repetition of Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s and
Daniel Wadsworth’s earlier forays into the Gothic
Revival style for domestic architecture. Unlike
Sedgeley and Monte Video, where Gothic Revival
ornament appears as an afterthought, Glen Ellen
wears its mediaeval styling in a more assertive
manner. Here Town and Davis enlisted the pictur-
esque element of surprise; the beholder of Glen
Ellen views a shifting façade with unexpected
tower protrusions and heavily ornamented bay
windows. Although light and airy Glen Ellen lacks
the gloom of Radcliffe’s architectural spaces, the
architects do create a villa in which the element
of surprise is paramount.
What is most significant about Glen Ellen is
its conception as a place of fantasy, a literary
indulgence to whet the Gothic appetite of its well-
travelled owner. That Glen Ellen imitates the
façade of Abbotsford or the interior ornamenta-
tion of Strawberry Hill is important; but more
momentous is the idea of Glen Ellen as a retreat
into the mediaeval world popularized by Gothic
novels and historical romances. Finding particular
architectural motifs at Glen Ellen inspired by
specific literary passages in Gothic fiction is dif-
ficult (in part because Glen Ellen was demolished
in the 1930s). But Glen Ellen is Gothic fiction
transformed into stone, a constant reminder of its
owner’s preferred reading material. With Glen
Ellen, Gilmor pays homage to his favourite writ-
ers, thus participating in the cult of the Gothic
author. Although he is the first, Gilmor will not
be the last to yield to his literary fantasies by creat-
ing a permanent reminder of his Gothic passion.
Influenced by Gothic novels and historical ro-
mances, American writers James Fenimore Cooper
and Washington Irving gothicized their houses
(Otsego Hall and Sunnyside, respectively) after
visiting Gothic sites in Europe. After Glen Ellen,
Davis went on to design numerous Gothic Revival
cottages and villas, including his masterpiece,
Lyndhurst in Tarrytown, New York (1838; 1865).
Why were American architects, artists, and
their clients so interested in mediaeval architec-
ture? Their reading habits tell us a great deal.
Mediaeval architecture plays a crucial role in
Gothic novels and historical romances, leading
some curious readers to visit mediaeval and
Gothic Revival architectural sites related to their
favourite novels. That American Gothic Revival
architecture was closely related to the fictional
works of writers such as Radcliffe and Scott is
highlighted by a nineteenth-century observer’s
comments on a Gothic Revival building in New
York City. Thomas Aldrich Bailey wrote in 1866
about the University of the City of New York (now
New York University; original building
demolished) on Washington Square: “There isn’t
a more gloomy structure outside of Mrs. Radcliff’s
[sic] romances, and we hold that few men could
pass a week in these lugubrious chambers, without
adding a morbid streak to their natures—the
genial immates [sic] to the contrary notwithstand-
ing” (Donoghue). Usually, though, the Gothic
Revival buildings constructed in the United States
in this period were anything but gloomy. Like
Strawberry Hill, Davis’s designs were light and
airy, delicate rather than dark and massive (Davis
does begin to experiment more with fortified
castle designs in the 1850s). As Janice Schimmel-
man has argued, Scott’s novels recast the Gothic
architectural style, moving it away from the
barbarism associated with the Middle Ages and
toward a more domestic ideal. An American
author who wrote at the same time as Scott sums
it up nicely by saying, “A castle without a ghost is
fit for nothing but to live in” (Schimmelman 19).
The links between Gothic literature and
Gothic Revival architecture is certainly strong,
beginning with Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. Indeed,
as Anne Williams has pointed out, Walpole’s castle
itself was in part inspired by Alexander Pope’s
poem Eloisa to Abelard. Architecturally, Strawberry
Hill represents a pastiche of mediaeval forms, knit-
ted together by lath and plaster rather than
traditional Gothic stonework. Walpole and his
committee on taste ignored mediaeval building
methods to create a whimsical building, more a
work “of fancy than of imitation,” as Walpole
admits (letter to Mary Berry, 17 October 1794, Cor-
respondence XII.137). It is Walpole’s residence that
inspires him to write the first Gothic novel, The
Castle of Otranto, in 1764. In the first preface, writ-
ten anonymously, Walpole states that the author
seems to describe certain parts of a presumably
real castle: “The chamber, says he, on the right hand;
the door on the left hand; the distance from the chapel
to Conrad’s apartment: these and other passages are
strong presumptions that the author had some
certain building in his eye” (8, emph. Walpole’s).
The building the author had in mind was his own
castle, Strawberry Hill. From the very beginning,
the Gothic Revival is a phenomenon that crosses
modern disciplinary boundaries. Therefore, the
Gothic as an aesthetic movement should not be
studied in isolation, as the work of architect Davis
indicates.
That American architects and clients read
Gothic literature and historical romances changed
the course of American architecture. When Davis
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first became a practising architect, neoclassicism,
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
and the Greek Revival in particular, held sway.
But Davis and his clients, their imaginations full
of Gothic stories, transformed American domestic
architecture, creating neo-mediaeval fantasies in
stone unlike anything that had come before.
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 Lewis, Matthew. Tales of Wonder. London: W. Bulmer, 1801.
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Lewis, W.S. “The Genesis of Strawberry Hill.” Metropolitan
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1995.
ART
ANDREW MARTINDALE (ESSAY
DATE 1967)
SOURCE: Martindale, Andrew. Introduction to Gothic
Art, pp. 7-15. London: Thames and Hudson, 1967.
In the following essay, Martindale offers an overview of
the forms and periods of Gothic art, and how “Gothic”
has been variously defined.
It is traditionally held that Gothic art makes
its debut with the patronage of the Abbot Suger,
of the monastery of St Denis near Paris. Suger
ruled from 1122 to 1151, and during the period of
his abbacy a start was made on the rebuilding of
the abbey church. The decoration and architecture
of this building contained features which were to
make it important and influential in the develop-
ment of French art; and it is with this develop-
ment and with its effect outside the territory of its
origin that the first part of this book is concerned.
This is one of the great transition periods in the
history of European art. It was a period of intense
experiment, unevenly and untidily distributed.
But by c. 1250, European art had been trans-
formed, and in all media what might be called a
recognizably Gothic style was in the process of
emerging.
It is always wise to be cautious in the use of
the word ‘Gothic’. The hunt for ‘Gothic charact-
eristics’ is hampered from the start by the vague
and imprecise nature of the term. As is well
known, it was first applied to art in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries in a derogatory sense
to denote art which possessed in general a pre-
Renaissance and non-Italianate appearance. It was
never a precise descriptive word, since it was
coined by men who were uninterested in making
it precise. It meant, in effect, ‘barbarian’. At the
time of the Gothic revival in the eighteenth
century it ceased to be abusive, and became
merely descriptive of all medieval art up to the
time of the Italian Renaissance. Subsequent to
this, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a
large section was split off at one end to be labelled
‘Romanesque’ or ‘Norman’. Thus, by a rather
unsatisfactory process of elimination, ‘Gothic’
came to describe that art which was produced
between the Romanesque and Renaissance peri-
ods.
This period actually extends for at least two
hundred years, and during this time, not unex-
pectedly, European art underwent so many
changes that it is hardly possible to divine a
‘Gothic style’ underlying the whole process.
Insight into these changes is moreover hampered
by one serious lack. To trace the changes in art in
any detail almost inevitably entails some com-
ment on the apparent purpose of the artists. The
processes of artistic creation are hard enough to
divine even in cases with copious documentation.
In medieval studies, the lack of documents con-
taining useful comment on actual works of art
even by interested spectators—let alone practising
artists—is almost complete. Renaissance writers,
rightly or wrongly, thought that they knew what
art was about and what artists were trying to do,
and educated people made it their business to be
interested in the subject. Medieval artists appear
to have escaped this type of interest, but, as a
result, the art historian is deprived of a very
important and illuminating source of informa-
tion. There are almost no explanations by contem-
poraries of works of art around them.
This feature creates such a deep division
between the writing of medieval and post-
medieval art history that some comment is worth
while. The exaltation of art and the artist is, and
has been for about four centuries, a common
feature of western European culture. One might
perhaps think that this is an attitude immutable
and unchanging, but in fact it is one which was
entirely alien to the Middle Ages. There can be
little doubt that people did on occasion exercise
intelligent patronage in the arts. But there is no
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sign that a sustained interest in art and artists was
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anything but exceptional. The main reason for
this must have been that anyone passing through
any form of academic training was instilled with
certain prejudices which made such an interest
very difficult to sustain.
The influence of the Schools was felt particu-
larly in two ways. In the first place, there was a
prejudice against any occupation involving
manual work—against the so-called mechanical
arts, among which painting, sculpture and build-
ing were certainly numbered. This prejudice can
be traced back to Aristotle but it was incorporated
into the teaching of the Christian Church, which
set contemplation above action, thinking above
performing, and, after the example of Christ, Mary
above Martha. Artificers were not worth serious
thought; and neither were their artefacts, or, at
least, not for any inherent characteristics which
they might possess.
One here passes to the second important
strand of scholastic thought which inhibited
perceptive thinking about art. Material things, it
was taught, were of value only in as far as they
revealed some aspect of the eternal world and of
the nature of God. The roots of this attitude are
also to be found in the ancient world, particularly
in the writings of Plato and later in those of the
neo-Platonists. To these writers, the highest task
of man was to attempt to know the truth which
resided in the eternal world. Christian thought
was profoundly affected by this outlook, and
Christian philosophers came to teach that the vis-
ible world was only worthy of attention to the
extent that it reflected and revealed some aspect
of the Divinity. This automatically created a divi-
sion between matter and its revealed content. As
John Scotus Erigena, the ninth-century scholar,
wrote, ‘We understand a piece of wood or stone
only when we see God in it’. Earlier and later
examples of this type of thought are not difficult
to find, and it will be apparent that reflection of
this kind effectively excluded all appreciation of
style in art. Art derived its importance from what
it represented and not how this was achieved.
It would be wholly unrealistic to suppose that,
because this type of approach to art was the
recommended one, all educated people adopted it
to the exclusion of any other. There is every reason
to suppose that more recognizably normal at-
titudes to art existed, if only because they were
specifically ridiculed by Christian writers. St Au-
gustine was very firm with those who professed
an instinctive enjoyment of music, saying that
this placed them on a level similar to birds. True
507
 appreciation consisted in knowing the intervals
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
and consonances and understanding in them the
reflection of the divine harmony of the universe.
John Scotus, already mentioned, makes it clear
that looking at an object with what today would
be called a collector’s eye was frowned on because
it almost certainly invoked cupidity and avarice.
This general attitude or prejudice cannot have
prevented people from entertaining views about
artists and exercising preferences. But it did ef-
fectively prevent them from publicizing their
preferences in writing; and it effectively prevented
the growth of any sort of tradition of informed
comment on art.
One therefore enters a period of art history
deprived of two important classes of evidence.
Almost nothing is known during the Middle Ages
of people’s reactions to art. There are no accounts
of how a monastic chapter reacted when faced by
three different designs for a new abbey church. It
was probably much like any modern committee,
but one does not know for certain. The second
lack is more serious since it concerns the indi-
vidual artists and works. Almost no biographical
material exists. For instance, William of Sens, one
of the great names of English twelfth-century
architecture, had no biographer. Nothing is known
about his training from direct contemporary
testimony or early life—where he was born, where
he travelled, what other buildings he was respon-
sible for apart from Canterbury Cathedral, and so
on. This is true of most of the names in medieval
art; and usually, of course, not even the names
survive. This means that much medieval art his-
tory becomes a rather depersonalized study. The
historian has perforce to deal in ‘Schools’, by
which he means rough groups of monuments
which appear to have a stylistic affinity. This is an
unavoidable misfortune, to be deplored the more
because it leads on the one hand to accounts of
works of art as if they were ‘untouched by human
hand’, or rather by ‘human foibles’; and on the
other hand, to a great deal of sentimental non-
sense about the ‘anonymity’ of medieval artists
which is best relegated to the pages of romantic
fiction. It also results in misleading discussions on
the ‘meaning of Gothic art’, about which, by the
nature of the surviving literary evidence, we can
never know very much.
We can, however, gather up some of the
shreds of evidence that remain concerning at-
titudes to art. In practice, medieval patrons appear
to have approached art in an ordinary business-
like way. From the mid-thirteenth century con-
tracts begin to survive, and these sometimes
508 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
specify another work to be used as a model for the
undertaking involved. The exemplar is found set
up as a point of reference for beauty as well as
size, and this at least suggests what one would
expect, namely that medieval patrons knew what
they liked and were anxious to have their require-
ments met. Alberti, the fifteenth-century scholar
and architect, wrote the following advice to
architects: ‘Lastly, I advise you not to be so far car-
ried away by the desire of glory rashly to attempt
anything entirely new or unusual. . . . Remember
. . . with how much grudging and unwillingness
people will spend their money in making trial of
your fancies.’ This advice would seem to be
entirely appropriate at almost any period in his-
tory, not excluding the Middle Ages, and to all
forms of art.
Addiction to sight-seeing is not a modern
phenomenon but has probably always existed. At
its lowest level, it seldom does any service to art.
But at an intelligent level it must in the Middle
Ages have helped the circulation of ideas and
objects. Pilgrimages and diplomatic missions
provided fruitful possibilities from which people
returned armed with both ideas and souvenirs.
Rome was, of course, at all times much visited,
and there is a series of medieval handbooks on
the sights to be noted. The Abbot Suger, we know,
cast envious eyes on the marble columns of the
Baths of Diocletian, but in the end contented
himself with imitating the Roman basilicas by
including a small portion of mosaic on the west
front of St Denis. The Bishop of Winchester, Henry
of Blois, bought a number of antique statues while
on a visit to Rome in 1151 and sent them home
to Winchester. The Abbot of Westminster, return-
ing from the Court of Rome in 1269, brought back
men and materials to construct a marble pave-
ment in the new church of Westminster after the
Roman manner.
Not much is known about local arrangements
for dealing with sight-seers. But it is perhaps worth
noting that in the Monastic Constitutions com-
piled for Christchurch, Canterbury, in the third
quarter of the eleventh century, special provision
was made for sightseers wishing to see the domes-
tic quarters of the monks. The duty of showing
people round was entrusted to the monk respon-
sible for receiving guests. Presumably all monaster-
ies of any splendour or size found similar arrange-
ments necessary.
It was observed above that by c. 1250 a Euro-
pean Gothic style was beginning to emerge. Books
of this nature are liable to get entangled in defini-
tions of ‘Gothic’, and in order to avoid this,
something should be said at the start about the
position taken in this book. ‘Gothic art’ has here
been taken in the first instance as that art which
was developed in the Île-de-France and northern
France between c. 1140 and 1240. It is the art of
an area taken over a rather long period of develop-
ment and the story to be followed concerns the
process by which other areas of France and other
countries surrounding France came by degrees to
accept the idea that it was desirable to copy this
art. In this story, the reign of Louis IX (1226-70)
forms a central point. In most countries before
this time, the influence of France and, by this
definition, the Gothic style of art, is confused.
Questions concerning what is or is not Gothic are
difficult and occasionally acrimonious. The first
chapter of this book deals with this developmental
period. An attempt is made to sketch out events
in the north of France and around Paris and then
to set alongside this the art of other countries in
order to see at what point these came to be af-
fected by Gothic ideas.
During the period covered by the second
chapter, 1240-1350, the position clarifies briefly.
During the reign of Louis IX, there was a sudden
wave of enthusiasm for north-French artistic ideas
both in the peripheral areas of Frence itself and
outside. This emerges with particular clarity in
architecture but it is true of all the arts. From this
time, Paris became an important European centre
of fashion and art.
The third chapter deals with what is perhaps
the joker in this art-historical pack—Italian art.
The Italian resistance to orthodox French Gothic
art as it materialized around 1240 seems to have
been considerable. Italian artists were certainly
impressed by particular details of French art. But
at no point did any Italian try to build a rayon-
nant cathedral or to carve a French type of portal;
and not until the fourteenth century are there
signs of anyone imitating the dainty style associ-
ated with the court of Louis IX. Such resistance
arouses a certain admiration, but makes it impos-
sible to deal with Italian Gothic art at the same
time as that of Germany or England.
The final chapter is concerned with the period
c. 1350-1400 throughout Europe, and including
Italy. There appears to have been an increased
exchange of ideas across the Alps during that
period which lends some justification to this
grouping. Certainly the Parisian painters showed
more and more awareness of Italian art. The one
unexpected phenomenon during these years was
the sudden emergence of Prague as a centre of
curious hybrid culture, when it became for a
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comparatively short time the centre of the empire
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
and the seat of the imperial court.
The historian of art is usually held to be under
some obligation to explain his subject-matter as
the emanation of the age with which he is deal-
ing. Art may be a reflection of the human spirit,
but it is notoriously difficult to explain how the
spirit of an age renders inevitable the type of art
which is produced during that age. There is always
a residue of doubt left at the end which leads one
to reflect that in history nothing is inevitable until
it has actually happened. To try to explain artistic
form in terms of history seems to be an occupa-
tion of doubtful value. It is, of course, easy
enough, and illuminating, to reverse something
of this process and to use art to throw light on
history. Every major work of art is an expression
of some aspect of the people and society that
produced it. It is not fanciful to see the power of a
monastery reflected in a great monastic church.
The splendour of the east end of St Denis in Paris
will tell us a great deal about the Abbot Suger who
built it, just as the bareness of the abbey church of
Fontenay will illustrate general propositions about
the austerity of St Bernard and the early Cister-
cians. Likewise, the sumptuous fittings of the
surviving medieval basilicas in Rome form an ap-
propriate background to claims of the thirteenth-
century papacy. Art, in fact, has and had a func-
tion both then and now as a background against
which major events were played out and against
which they may still be imagined.
But can one deduce from the surviving evi-
dence why a particular individual in a particular
society produced a particular form of art? This
would lead to a complex line of speculation which
sought a connection between the history of
changing forms and the flux of ideas. There are,
on the other hand, certain quite obvious ways in
which ideas influence the content of art. Emile
Male began his book on thirteenth-century art by
saying that ‘art in the Middle Ages is a script’.
Every large and complicated assembly of art
represents a certain amount of book-work on the
part of somebody; this applies to secular as well as
religious art. A cathedral portal was almost cer-
tainly worked according to a programme laid
down by a scholar—probably a canon—and its
significance is generally to be apprehended
through some text with which the man was
familiar. To this extent, such art will express some
aspect of contemporary thought, and in its con-
tent will be the product of its historical back-
ground.
509

VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ
EDWARD GOREY (1925-2000)
In Gorey’s darkly drawn alphabets and picture
stories, the comic and macabre combine in a
unique mix of sophisticated nonsense. De-
spite the fact that the cast of characters in his
quaint vignettes include hapless and unfortu-
nate children who meet their demise in his
singular alphabets—“G is for George smoth-
ered under a rug; H is for Hector done in by
a thug”—and the child-eating Wuggly Ump,
young people as well as adults respond glee-
fully to Gorey’s morbid sense of humor. Go-
rey’s black and white pen and ink images
expose a shadowy corner of our collective
memory, conjuring up a shroud of Victorian
darkness sparingly highlighted by Edwardian
innocence: dapper young men in striped
jackets and straw boater hats play croquet
amid the bleak, desolate landscape of an
isolated country estate; proper young chil-
dren are left unattended by maids and nan-
nies to wander amid the suffocating shadows
of dark hallways and forgotten rooms;
bustled, corseted ladies in lace and veils stand
primly about; and diaphanous damsels,
beaded and bobbed, lounge languorously on
musty, overstuffed Victorian furniture. There
is always an impending threat, sometimes
unmentioned and unseen, but more often
brought to life in Gorey’s typically menacing
but never overstated manner. The elements
of childhood terror—the bad dream that
wakes us from a sound sleep, the irrational
fears we laugh at in the cheerful light of dawn
but that become darkly oppressive when
conjured up alone at night—these are the
ingredients of Gorey’s art. Wordplay is used
to great effect in tempering the pall of
malevolence that would otherwise over-
whelm Gorey’s Gothic tales. The author’s
nightmarish world is rendered less threaten-
ing when the hapless victims of his calamitous
plots carry silly names: Maudie Splaytoe, the
ballet dancer who meets a tragic end in The
Gilded Bat (1966); vapid Miss Scrim-Pshaw,
the menacing Throbblefoot Spectre; and oth-
ers, residing in such places as Wunksieville,
Weedhaven Laughing Academy, or Penwiper
Mews.
510
Art is also to a large extent the product of
economic circumstance. The raw material and the
labour have to be obtained and paid for, and
expensive art (most good art is expensive) appears
in places where funds are available. The most obvi-
ous instances of this are to be found in architec-
ture—by far the most expensive of the arts.
Architecture on a large scale flourished mainly in
areas where commerce flourished. This means that
in almost any century during the Middle Ages,
the greatest concentration of important building
activity in Europe is to be found in the vicinity of
a line drawn on the map from Bologna to London,
allowing a slight divergence to take in the Rhine
Valley. This was the central ‘corridor’ of European
trade, and the presence of money is obvious from
the amount of significant architecture.
The directness of this dependence emerges
when one considers the sources tapped in order to
raise money for church building. The bishop, of
course, almost always contributed, if the work was
a cathedral. The ruling chapter might divert funds
from revenues to aid the work. But many of the
means depended directly on the presence of a
large quantity of people with surplus money.
Indulgences were sold, and gifts were solicited in
return for perpetual prayers for benefactors. Offer-
ings were taken from pilgrims at shrines and the
relics were taken on a tour of the surrounding
countryside and even farther afield. Local confra-
ternities were organized in the area to raise funds,
and the perennial box or trunk was left in evidence
for people to drop contributions into. All these
devices depended for their yield on ready access
to money. A tour of the relics through an area
populated only by impoverished peasants was not
going to help the church fabric even though it
might help the peasants.
One change in the nature of buildings erected
began to take effect during the period covered by
the first chapter of this book. Much of the major
building is cathedral architecture. With certain
obvious exceptions (St Denis in Paris is one),
monastic church building dwindled in impor-
tance. This does not in itself denotes some sort of
monastic decline, but probably means that by
1200 the greater monasteries had on the whole
got churches with which they were satisfied. By
contrast, many towns were not satisfied with their
chief ecclesiastical buildings, and were willing to
pay a great deal in order to make it possible for
the bishop and chapter to replace them. The years
1140-1250 were a period in which it became pos-
sible to build churches the size and height of
which had not been known since the fall of the
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Roman Empire. The initial driving force behind
these various enterprises must have gathered part
of its momentum from civic pride.
One further development had important
consequences for art during this period, namely
the growth of the universities and the increasing
demands of scholarship. This slow process which
was spread across the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries produced an increasing demand for
texts, and this demand came to be satisfied by
workshops of scribes working independently of
monastic scriptoria. The era of commercial book-
production had dawned. This type of production
did not, of course, necessarily involve high-quality
artistic endeavour. The point at which illumina-
tion became primarily a secular craft carried out
by professionals is harder to judge. There were
still eminent monastic scriptoria in Italy during
the fifteenth century. But the change had already
begun in the twelfth.
PAUL WILLIAMSON (ESSAY DATE
1995)
SOURCE: Williamson, Paul. Introduction to Gothic
Sculpture 1140-1300, pp. 1-7. New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1995.
In the following essay, Williamson analyzes the cultural,
philosophical, and theological traditions that contributed
to the popularity of Gothic sculpture during the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries.
The Context of Gothic Sculpture
In the middle of the twelfth century the
prestige of the great monasteries was unchal-
lenged, the most influential religious and intel-
lectual figures being powerful monks such as the
Benedictine Abbot Suger and the Cistercian St Ber-
nard of Clairvaux. Artistic endeavour was, as ever,
dominated and controlled by its principal patrons,
and at this time the monastic houses provided the
greatest opportunities for employment. By 1300
all this had changed. The intervening century and
a half witnessed not only events of pivotal impor-
tance for the history of European civilisation but
also saw a fundamental shift in the perception of
man’s relation to God, propagated by great think-
ers such as Albertus Magnus and St Thomas
Aquinas and spread through the agency of the
new universities. Towns grew in size, communica-
tions and literacy improved, and better technol-
ogy—including the development of the deep
plough and the introduction of the windmill—
revolutionised farming methods, bringing a new
prosperity which provided the wherewithal for a
vast increase in building. By the late twelfth
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century the traditional monastic orders seemed ir-
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
relevant to the lives of the growing urban popu-
lace, and a plethora of more accessible new sects—
some heretical—had sprung up. It was because of
their ability to channel popular support in their
own direction, away from these dangerous minori-
ties, that the mendicant orders of the Franciscans
and Dominicans were able to exert control so
quickly over both the laity and the papacy.
Throughout this period the Pope struggled to
retain a position of pre-eminence. His temporal
power was increasingly undermined by ambitious
leaders and forced alliances and conflicts, first
with the Hohenstaufen then with the Angevins.
The growing power of Capetian France, set in train
by the advances gained by Philip Augustus (1180-
1223), culminated in the ignominious ‘Babylon-
ish Captivity’, when the papal court was trans-
ferred to Avignon in 1307. Various attempts were
made to unite the Christian community, either by
decree—such as the Fourth Lateran Council,
convened by the brilliant and successful Innocent
III in 1215—or by military muscle-flexing against
an outside enemy. Crusades were one of the most
effective ways of doing this as they offered both
spiritual profit (through indulgences) and material
gain; the Fourth Crusade, which ended with the
disgraceful sacking of Constantinople in 1204, was
only the most notorious of these adventures. The
granting of indulgences, used so effectively to
finance many of the cathedrals constructed in the
thirteenth century, reached a climax in 1300 with
the first Roman Jubilee (the Anno Santo). This was
the brainchild of the beleaguered Pope Boniface
VIII, but rather than signalling a celebration of
unity it represented nothing less than a desperate
final attempt to raise money, not from wealthy
individuals but from the public at large.1
The Jubilee was created to harness popular
devotion to St Peter, the first saint of Christen-
dom. As a phenomenon, a fixed point in time, it
was no more than the essence of a well-established
ecclesiastical practice. The standing of every
cathedral was dependent on the status of its relics
or patron saint, and it was in the interest of any
bishop to forge strong links between his church,
the civic authorities and the populace. Very few
churches had the aristocratic financial support
that Cologne Cathedral, for instance, could
muster, and instead there was the expectation that
contributions would come from a broad spectrum
of society. It should never be forgotten how
central the cathedral was to the life of the medi-
eval citizen, although it is as well to recognise that
most contemporary accounts of the relations
511
 between town and chapter were compiled by
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
ecclesiastical chroniclers and are necessarily one-
sided. The most well-known illustration of the
common devotion of the populace is the cel-
ebrated episode of the hauling of plaustra (carts
filled with building material) by people from all
walks of life to help with the construction of Char-
tres Cathedral in around 1145, an event that was
copied elsewhere and again at Chartres itself after
the fire of 1194. It has been pointed out that this
dedication on the part of the people may not
always have been disinterested, as the spending
by pilgrims at the time of the Chartres Fair ac-
counted for a large proportion of the town’s an-
nual income. Nevertheless, it was important to
approach the collecting of building funds with
sensitivity, especially in straitened times: the mass
rebellion against the chapter of Reims Cathedral
in 1233 was a reminder that Christian charity had
its limits.2
The cathedral also dominated the thirteenth-
century town by dint of its sheer size. In a society
unused to large buildings the visual effect of a
church of Lincoln Cathedral’s dimensions can
only be imagined. The silhouettes of these struc-
tures would have been visible for miles around,
dwarfing the shops and domestic buildings in
their shadow and acting as magnets for visitors.
When the faithful approached the cathedrals
more closely they would have noticed, as we do
today, that the architecture was articulated by
sculpture; and stepping through the main portal,
perhaps sculpted with the Last Judgement or the
Coronation of the Virgin, they would have been
confronted by the figured choirscreen with a
painted triumphal cross above. At every turn, in
every chapel, they would have seen images of the
Virgin and Child and numerous saints, and their
progress through the church would have been
punctuated by architectural sculpture both orna-
mental and figurative. How did all this strike the
medieval spectator and how was the sculpture
understood?
It has long been recognised that one of the
most important results of the so-called ‘Twelfth-
century Renaissance’ was to change the common
man’s attitude to God. The medieval humanism
of St Anselm, Master Eckhart and others encour-
aged philosophers to re-discover the individual
and to analyse the relationship between the soul
and God. Through the joint channels of the new
universities and preaching to the masses, new
light pierced the darkness of a blind faith invari-
ably centred on a frightening eschatology. The
translation of classical texts—especially Aristo-
512 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
tle—in the century between 1150 and 1250 pro-
vided a corpus of rational treatises which trickled
down into public consciousness, and this indepen-
dence of thought, of unbiased enquiry, began to
permeate the arts. The spirit of scientific curiosity
which stimulated the production of herbal manu-
scripts, for example, allowed the sculptors of Paris,
Bourges and Reims, and later at Southwell, to
experiment with the carving of naturalistic leaf
forms; and the remarkable and epoch-making
heads at Reims, grimacing and grinning with a
verisimilitude unknown in the twelfth century,
are no less eloquent evidence of a new fascination
with physiognomy and the mental condition.3
Man was freeing himself from a fear bred
through ignorance, and the church needed to ap-
peal to an audience quite different from that to be
found in the monasteries. No generalisation can
escape the criticism of the specialist, but there is
something to be said for a view that sets the typi-
cal Romanesque Last Judgement tympanum—
perhaps exemplified by Conques—against the
Gothic topos at Reims [93] as an illustration of the
changes which took place. In the former Christ
sits in Majesty, the Damned to his left, the Blessed
to his right, in a straightforward image of the
Judgement Day, offering no hope to the sinner.
Although at Reims the figure of Christ is still awe-
somely omnipotent, the prospect of Salvation is
emphasised by the presence of the interceding
figures of the Virgin and St John to each side of
Christ and a reduction in the size of Hell at the
bottom right. This comparison could be repeated,
using different examples and gaining similar
results, but the point has been made.4 As God,
through Christ, was made to appear more human
and more forgiving, so the Virgin assumed an
increasingly important rôle as his caring mother
and as an intercessor for mankind. The cult of the
Virgin grew up as a result of the Queen of Heaven’s
perceived position at Christ’s side, and between
1150 and 1300 this public devotion was also
manifested in an expansion of Marian iconogra-
phy—the appearance of the Coronation of the
Virgin on the tympanum being perhaps the most
conspicuous development—and the creation of
an unprecedented number of statues of the Virgin
and Child.5
Starting off simply as images of the Virgin, in
due course many of these cult statues came to be
worshipped in their own right, despite the warn-
ings against idolatry issued by Durandus and
several other thirteenth-century commentators.
Miracles were often reported in connection with
statues of the Virgin, especially at sites of pilgrim-
age, and in this general climate it is hardly surpris-
ing that there should be stories of statues acting as
intermediaries or even coming to life.6 One of the
most celebrated fables of this period, the story of
Theophilus and his pact with the Devil, invariably
shows the former praying before a figure of the
Virgin [225] in the hope that his plea for mercy
would be rewarded. Many other miracles of this
type are recounted in Gautier de Coincy’s Miracles
de la Sainte Vierge and illustrated in the mid
thirteenth-century Cántigas of Alfonso X El Sabio
in the Escorial, and a comparable episode is played
out on the trumeau socle of the Judgement portal
on the north transept of Reims Cathedral [1].
Similar incidents were recorded in connection
with figures of the Crucified Christ.7
If these single images offered the greatest
emotional and spiritual attraction to the medieval
onlooker, the sculptures of the portals were the
means by which instruction and moral exegesis
were passed on. The sculptures on the outside of
the Gothic church provided the approaching
public with its first experience of Christian doc-
trine made visible, while inside the building, nar-
rative programmes in stained glass replaced the
wall-paintings and historiated capitals which had
fulfilled the same rôle in Romanesque structures.
It will be seen that what distinguished the icono-
graphic schemes on the earliest Gothic portals, at
Saint-Denis and Chartres, from their predecessors
was the amount of thought that went into their
creation, and it is self-evident that their value as
tools for teaching was recognised by influential
theologians. Both Abbot Suger and Thierry, the
Chancellor of the School of Chartres in the middle
of the twelfth century, seem to have played an
important part in the development of the portal
as a bearer of intellectually coherent messages,
and at the beginning of the following century
another chancellor of Chartres, Peter of Roissy,
apparently used the decoration of the right-hand
portal of the north transept to rebut contemporary
heresies.8 Elsewhere, ‘site-specific’ iconographic
programmes were also planned—most notably on
the transepts of Notre-Dame in Paris in the middle
of the thirteenth century—which would have had
a special resonance for a particular audience.9
The cathedral was often at the centre of the
town, usually next to the market, so was uniquely
well-placed for social gatherings. The deep porches
of the more ambitious churches would have
provided shelter for large numbers of people and
could be used in a variety of ways. The ubiquitous
subject of the Last Judgement on Gothic portals,
often with the supporting figures of Virtues and
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Vices and Wise and Foolish Virgins, would serve
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
as an especially appropriate backdrop to the
dispensation of justice, as was the case at León
Cathedral. Here, from an early date, a column set
on the front of a Gothic canopied tabernacle was
placed between the piers to the left of the Judge-
ment portal [2]. Its function is literally spelt out
by the inscription LOCUS APPELLACIONIS carved on its
front face, and the arms of León and Castile ap-
pear below.1 0 Presiding over this symbol, in the
niche behind, is the seated figure of King So-
lomon, and a later personification of Justice, hold-
ing a sword and scales, has been inserted among
the jamb figures of the adjacent doorway. León
was not an isolated case, and it is known that tri-
als were also conducted in the area of the south
transept of Strasbourg Cathedral, in the west
porches of the Minster of Freiburg im Breisgau,
Saint-Urbain at Troyes, and elsewhere.1 1
The centrality of the cathedrals and lesser
churches to medieval society is also illustrated by
the numbers of workmen involved in their con-
struction and embellishment. At the peak of the
great period of rebuilding, roughly speaking in
the years between 1180 and 1250, no member of
society living within reach of a cathedral undergo-
ing construction would have been untouched by
the work, and a good proportion would have been
actively engaged on it. Peasants and other un-
skilled workers normally employed in the fields
might have been called upon to carry wood or
stone to the building-site, but once the material
had arrived it was handed over to the specialist
mason, usually described as a cementarius, latho-
mus, maçon or tailleur de pierre in contemporary
documents.1 2 In the absence of any qualifying
descriptions referring unequivocally to carvers of
figures in the period before about the middle of
the thirteenth century, one cannot assume that
the masons responsible for sculpting the jamb
figures and reliefs on Gothic portals were special-
ists in that area. It may well have been the case
that such people existed, but it is more likely that
they formed part of a masons’ lodge charged with
a wide variety of stone cutting.1 3 One of the most
significant developments in the production of
sculpture throughout Europe in the period with
which this book is concerned is the emergence of
the specialist ymagier tailleur during the thirteenth
century, a profession at first limited to the making
of smaller images—predominantly in wood—and
not part of the building trade. By 1300 such
specialists were also engaged in the making of
monumental sculpture.
513
 The Making of Gothic Sculpture
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC The mason-sculptor of the Early Gothic cathe-
dral was of course subordinate in all he did to the
master mason or architect, who in turn was
answerable to a body of canons charged with the
supervision of work.1 4 Once the design of the
portal, for instance, was worked out, the selection
of stone blocks was made and the sculptors set to
work in the masons’ yard. The freestone used for
architectural sculpture was almost always the same
as for the rest of the building.1 5 It is probable that
for large figures instructions were sent to the
quarry to hew blocks of the appropriate size, but
in numerous instances there is evidence that the
sculptors made do with the ready-cut blocks
already available. On the west portal of Rochester
Cathedral of around 1170 the jamb figures were
made from two separate pieces joined together
below the knee [155], and the same feature is vis-
ible in the thirteen century on at least four of the
life-sized figures of the Wells west front; in Ger-
many, the statues of Ecclesia [263] and Synagoga in
the Paradise porch at Magdeburg Cathedral are
also constructed in this way, and Arnolfo di Cam-
bio had to piece together two blocks of marble
before carving the seated Virgin and Child for the
façade of the Florence Duomo [379].1 6 Occasion-
ally two figures from the same ensemble are
carved from different stones, as was the case in
the famous Annunciation group in the Westmin-
ster chapter house [305-6]: the choice of Caen
limestone for one and Reigate sandstone for the
other goes some way towards explaining the dif-
ferent condition of the two pieces.1 7 It also il-
lustrates the pragmatism of the Westminster
masons, who would obviously have been aware
that the sculptures were destined to be painted. In
other instances different types of stone may have
been selected in the recognition that some were
more amenable to detailed carving than others:
this would appear to be the case on the now-
dismantled canopy tomb from Sawley [316], of
about 1275-80, where the angels are carved from
a fine limestone but the sections of roll-moulding
are sandstone.1 8
The block was reduced with a variety of tools,
ranging from a mason’s axe—to rough out the
basic shape of the figure—to different types of
chisels, drills and points. No working drawings by
Gothic sculptors have survived, and it is likely
that most carving was done directly on to the
block, which had first been marked out.1 9 The
marks of the larger flat chisels have often survived
on the backs of the sculptures, while the her-
ringbone patterns of the finest claw chisels some-
514 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
times remain, usually hidden under paint. Al-
though the fine grid of ridges left by the claw
chisel would often have acted as a suitable founda-
tion for the application of a ground for pigmenta-
tion it was nonetheless the usual practice to finish
the carving by rubbing the surface down with files
or rasps, and it is this smooth appearance that is
now most often encountered. A telling illustration
of the different stages of carving a relief is provided
by the recently uncovered back face of the mid-
twelfth-century lintel at Saint-Germain-des-Prés in
Paris. Intended as a relief of the Last Supper—
finally completed on the other side—this shows
the carving progressing from barely blocked-out
figures on the right to a virtually finished head on
the far left.2 0
Two different stages of carving can be seen in
a stained glass window at Chartres, of about 1225
[3]. On the right a sculptor uses a mallet and chisel
on a propped-up semi-carved crowned figure
(comparable to a king on the north transept
porch) while a second workman stands at rest,
lifting a glass to his lips. It can be seen that the
figure has reached the intermediate stage between
blocking out and the carving of fine detail, and
the facial features have not been completed. On
the left the same sculptor has almost completed
the figure—note the detailed finish of the head—
and is shown using a long flat chisel or scraper to
refine the drapery folds. On finishing life-sized
statues such as this the sculptor would sometimes
hack out the back of the figure—as at Wells and
later at Exeter—to reduce the weight and make it
easier to lift into position. The sculptures were
also frequently given numbers or other assembly
marks to ensure correct installation.2 1
There can be no doubt that large jamb figures
and much of the relief sculpture associated with
portals or other ensembles were almost invariably
made on the ground in the masons’ yard, and not
carved in situ. Confirmation of this is provided by
occasional evidence of sculptures being cut down,
presumably at the point of installation, because of
inconsistencies in measurement. The lintels on
the south portal of the west façade of Chartres
Cathedral were shortened on the right side and
the bottom voussoirs truncated for this reason,
and it can be seen that many reliefs constructed
of more than one block of stone were divided
compositionally to take into account the fact that
each slab was carved separately.2 2 On the other
hand it is as well to be aware of the practice of re-
using portals within a later architectural context,
an occurrence which happened surprisingly fre-
quently and which often involved the adaptation
of the earlier composition to its new setting. The
most celebrated instance of this is the installation
of the largely twelfth-century St Anne portal in
the early thirteenth-century façade of Notre-Dame
in Paris, but other examples are to be found at
Bourges Cathedral (the north and south lateral
portals), Dijon (Saint-Bénigne), Laon Cathedral
(the right portal of the west front) and Ávila
Cathedral (the north portal, formerly on the west
façade).
After the sculptures had been installed, the
scaffolding would have remained in place while
they were painted. Before passing on to this vital
component of Gothic sculpure, it should also be
pointed out that just prior to the final stage it is
likely that some more carving was done and joints
were filled. Certain parts of the portal were more
likely to be carved in situ than others, especially
those architectural features which formed an
integral part of the construction, such as archi-
volts; and although there is overwhelming evi-
dence that the vast majority of figured voussoirs
were carved in the masons’ yard and constructed
on site, this was not always the case. In chapter
three it will be seen that the two portals of the
Lady Chapel at Glastonbury Abbey were in posi-
tion but unfinished in 1189; the carving of the ar-
chivolts of the south doorway—which was clearly
being executed in situ—had barely started by this
time, only two of the scenes being partially
indicated on the second order [4]. It is possible
that when work came to a halt the decorative pro-
gramme was completed in paint in the hope that
carving might be resumed at a later date. This was
not to be the case on the south portal, although
the figured archivolts of the north doorway were
eventually carved in around 1220.2 3 Another
probable instance of carving après la pose may be
found in the north porch of the collegiate church
of Candes-Saint-Martin on the Loire (c.1240-50).
Here the jamb figures were worked from rectangu-
lar blocks set into the wall (some of these still
remain outside the porch), and the architectural
sculptures—the voussoirs, the demi-angels above
the heads of the jamb figures, the spandrels of the
canopies which enclose them, and the bosses—
were seemingly in the process of being carved in
situ before being left in an unfinished state,
perhaps because funding had ceased [5].2 4
The painting of stone sculpture would usually
have been carried out by specialists rather than
the sculptors who had taken the work to its pen-
ultimate stage. This is indicated by the Paris guild
regulations (gathered together by the provost of
Paris, Etienne Boileau, in around 1268) which list
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how such ymagiers paintres (sic) should conduct
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
themselves. It is also apparent from the few
thirteenth-century accounts of payments made to
individuals for painting sculptures, such as that of
April 1253 at Westminster Abbey, ‘to Warin the
painter for painting 2 images with colour—11s’.2 5
The sculptures were first treated with a sealant or
insulation layer, usually of animal or fish glue or
casein, to counteract the porosity of the stone,
and to this was added a ground—often of gypsum
or lead white with a drying medium—upon which
the paint would be applied. In some cases, as at
Lausanne Cathedral and on a number of sepul-
chral effigies, the ground was built up and mod-
elled (or cast and applied) before being painted,
giving the surface a detailed finish difficult to
achieve in carved stone.2 6 The original coloured
aspect of Gothic sculpture is now difficult to
reconstruct in the mind’s eye and very few exter-
nal sculptures retain any visible remains of pig-
mentation. A fortunate exception is the Lausanne
south porch [88, 89], where recent conservation
work has revealed the astonishingly high quality
of the painted decoration.2 7 However, many of
the major monuments of Gothic sculpture are
beginning to yield something of their original co-
loured appearance to conservators prepared to
make painstaking inspections of their weathered
surfaces, and considerable traces of paint have
been discovered on the Royal Portal at Chartres,
at Etampes and Bourges, the west façade and
Kings’ gallery at Notre-Dame in Paris, the gabled
porch of Ferrara Cathedral, and elsewhere.2 8
Sculptures made for interior settings usually
preserve their colouring more completely than
those outdoors. Of these, it is the sculptures in
wood which offer the largest sample of poly-
chromed work. As already noted, there were guilds
of ymagiers-tailleurs in Paris from at least the early
thirteenth century, and the regulations laid out in
Etienne Boileau’s Livre des Métiers give clear
instructions as to how wood (and ivory and bone)
sculptures should be made and how they should
be painted, so as to protect patrons from inferior
workmanship. These imagers worked in small ate-
liers, with only one apprentice; the regulations go
into some detail over the training of the latter
(which should take at least seven years) and
continue with advice on the correct procedures
for carving figures and crucifixes:
None may or should work on a holiday observed
by the town, nor at night, because darkness does
not allow the work of our profession, which is
carving.
None in the profession above may or should make
a figure (ymage) or crucifix, or any other thing
515
 pertaining to the Holy Church, if he does not
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
make it of the appropriate material, or if it has not
been ordered by another, by a cleric or some man
of the Church, or a knight or nobleman, for their
use. And this has been established by the master
of the guild because one of our number had made
works which were blameworthy, and the master
was held responsible.
No workers in this profession may or should make
a crucifix or figure which is not carved of a single
piece. And this has been ordained by the master
of the guild because one of our number had made
figures and crucifixes which were neither good
nor proper, because they were made of many
pieces [in the margin is added: No workers in this
profession may or should make a figure of more
than one piece, excepting the crown, if it is not
broken during carving, then one may make it
good; and excepting the crucifix, which is made
of three pieces, the body of one piece and the
arms. And this has been established by the master
of the guild because one of our number had made
figures which were not well constructed, good or
proper, because they were made of many pieces].2 9
Two guild masters were appointed by the King
to oversee the standards established by the guild
regulations, who were empowered to levy fines
for any infringement. The general regulations con-
nected with the painting of sculpture were similar
to those for the ymagiers-tailleurs, although the
painters were allowed to take on as many ap-
prentices as they liked [6] and to work at night;
consistent with the regulations for the sculptors
the most detailed comments were concerned with
the technical side of the work. Hence:
No figure painters should or may sell something
as gilded, where the gold is not applied to silver;
and if the gold is applied to tin and is sold as
gilded, without saying the work is faulty, then the
gold and the tin and all the other colour should
be scraped off; and whosoever has sold such a
work as gilded should remake it in a good and
legal manner, and pay a fine to the King accord-
ing to the judgement of the provost of Paris.
If figure painters apply silver over tin, the work is
faulty, if it has not been ordered as such or
declared at point of sale; and if it is sold without
saying, the work should be scraped, and made
good and legal, and a fine should be paid to the
King in the manner stipulated above.
No faulty works of the profession above should be
burnt, out of respect for the saints, in whose
memory they were made.3 0
There is no reason to doubt that other major
centres in Europe also had guilds and regulations
of a similar type at this date, although it is not
until the following century that documentary
evidence emerges. Variations obviously existed
from country to country, so that in Italy, for
516
instance, crucifix figures were frequently made
from five pieces: the arms, legs and torso—includ-
ing the head—being carved separately and fitted
together prior to being painted.3 1 Different types
of wood were used throughout Europe, depending
on local availability, with a preponderance of oak
and walnut in the North and pine or poplar in
Italy and Spain, and as a general rule the heart-
wood was removed from large sculptures to
prevent splitting.3 2 If the common complaint in
connection with stone sculpture is that most of it
has been stripped of its original colour, the major
impediment to the appreciation of wood sculpture
is overpainting. Wood sculptures, especially cult
statues, were regularly repainted from the Middle
Ages onwards (see pp. 113-14), so that their
present colouring is often very different from that
intended. Inevitably, the later layers of paint—in
some cases up to twenty separate applications—
distort and coarsen the subtle original relation-
ship between the carved and the painted, but as
more sculptures are conserved an increasingly
clear picture is emerging of the consummate skill
of the statue painters.3 3
Finally, something should be said about the
size of the workshops. By the end of the thirteenth
century all the evidence points to a common pat-
tern, moving away from the great masons’ yards
of the cathedrals towards comparatively small
workshops, some based in one place, others
peripatetic. This was of course at least partly to do
with the reduction in the number of large-scale
sculptural programmes and a subsequent change
in patronage. Around 1300 there was nothing to
compare with the volume of work generated by
the decoration of Reims or Wells cathedrals, and
the new methods of employment, exemplified by
the ‘taskwork’ payments pioneered in the mid
century at Westminster Abbey, favoured small
groups of sculptors, moving from one job to the
next. The équipe assembled by the Parisian master
mason Etienne de Bonneuil in 1287 to travel to
Uppsala Cathedral in Sweden was therefore prob-
ably typical, and his arrangements for payment
reflect the increasing professionalism of the
workshop leaders. An excerpt from the contract
bears this out:
To all who will see this letter, Renaut le Cras,
Provost of Paris, gives greeting. We make known
that before us appeared Etienne de Bonneuil, to
be master mason and master of the church of
Uppsala in Sweden, proposing to go to said
country as he had agreed upon. And he acknowl-
edged having rightfully received and obtained
advance payment of forty Paris livres from the
hands of Messrs. Olivier and Charles, scholars and
clerks at Paris, for the purpose of taking with him
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 at the expense of said church four mates and four
yeomen (bachelers), seeing that this would be to
the advantage of said church for the cutting and
carving of stone there. For this sum he promised
to take said workmen to said land and to pay all
their expenses . . .3 4
It is of interest to compare this document with
the slightly earlier agreements made between the
operarius of Siena Cathedral and Nicola Pisano in
1265-7 for the Siena pulpit (p. 248). Although
referring to very different commissions, both sets
of documents vest responsibility for the comple-
tion of work in one man, the leader of a small
team. In their own ways they reveal the begin-
ning of a trend towards independence, setting the
agenda for the development of artists in the
fourteenth century.
Notes
1. R. and C. Brooke, Popular Religion in the Middle Ages:
Western Europe 1000-1300 (London, 1984), 153-5. A
succinct account of the rise of the mendicant orders
and their relationship to the Papacy is to be found in
G. Barraclough, The Medieval Papacy (London, 1968),
127-40.
2. For the ‘cult of carts’ see T. G. Frisch, Gothic Art 1140-
c.1450. Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,
1971), 23-30, and B. Ward, Miracles and the Medieval
Mind: theory, record and event 1000-1215 (London,
1982), 150-3. The importance of Chartres Cathedral
for the generation of income for the townspeople is
laid out in O. von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins
of gothic architecture and the medieval concept of order
(3rd ed., Princeton, 1988), 166-9. For Reims see B.
Abou-el-Haj, ‘The urban setting for late medieval
church building: Reims and its cathedral between
1210 and 1240’, Art History, XI (1988), 17-41.
3. There is of course a vast literature on the development
of learning and philosophy in the twelfth and early
thirteenth centuries but the essays contained in R. L.
Benson and G. Constable, with C. D. Lanham (eds),
Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Oxford,
1982), the brilliant selective observations by R. W.
Southern, Medieval Humanism and other studies
(Oxford, 1970), and a percipient article by G. B. Lad-
ner, ‘The life of the mind in the Christian West around
the year 1200’, in The Year 1200: A Symposium (New
York, 1975), 1-23, provide an introduction to the field.
A more general survey is given by J. H. Mundy, Europe
in the High Middle Ages 1150-1309 (London and New
York, 1973).
4. See M. H. Caviness, ‘“The simple perception of mat-
ter” and the representation of narrative, ca. 1180-
1280’, Gesta, XXX (1991), 48-64, esp. 48-9, who, by
pointing out the similarities between such exemplars,
demonstrates the dangers of a too facile approach to
the separation of ‘Gothic’ from ‘Romanesque’.
5. P. Verdier, Le Couronnement de la Vierge. Les origines et
les premiers développements d’un thème iconographique
(Montreal, 1980); P. Schine Gold, The Lady and the
Virgin. Image, attitude and experience in twelfth-century
France (Chicago and London, 1985), 43-75.
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6. See the illuminating discussions in T. A. Heslop, ‘At-
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
titudes to the visual arts: the evidence from the writ-
ten sources’, in J. Alexander and P. Binski (eds), Age of
Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200-1400 (exh.
cat., London, 1987), 26-32, and M. Camille, The Gothic
Idol: Ideology and Image-making in Medieval Art
(Cambridge, 1989), 197-241.
7. V. F. Koenig (ed.), Gautier de Coincy, Les miracles de la
Sainte-Vierge (4 vols, Geneva, 1955-66); J. Guerrero
Lovillo, Las Cántigas: Estudio arqueológico des sus minia-
turas (Madrid, 1949), 266-82. The precise interpreta-
tion of the Reims trumeau socle remains unclear (W.
Sauerländer, Gothic Sculpture in France 1140-1270
(London, 1972), 482).
8. See p. 39. A note of caution in regarding certain Ro-
manesque schemes as responses to current heresies is
sounded by W. Cahn, ‘Heresy and the interpretation
of Romanesque art’, in Romanesque and Gothic. Essays
for George Zarnecki (Woodbridge, 1987), I, 27-33.
9. See p. 153. Again, for a judicious commentary on the
twelfth-century spectator, see W. Cahn, ‘Romanesque
sculpture and the spectator’, in D. Kahn (ed.), The Ro-
manesque Frieze and its Spectator (The Lincoln Symposium
Papers) (London, 1992), 45-60.
10. F. B. Deknatel, ‘The thirteenth century Gothic sculp-
ture of the cathedrals of Burgos and Leon’, Art Bulletin,
XVII (1935), 339-40.
11. See pp. 57 and 195. A similar function can also be
traced as far away as Stary Zamek in Lower Silesia in
around 1260 (P. Crossley, ‘Kasimir the Great at Wiślica’,
in Romanesque and Gothic, op. cit., 46-7).
12. See D. Knoop and G. P. Jones, The Mediaeval Mason
(2nd edition, Manchester, 1966); R. Recht (ed.), Les
bâtisseurs des cathédrales gothiques (exh. cat., Strasbourg,
1989); and the individual case studies of different
French cathedrals in D. Kimpel and R. Suckale,
L’architecture gothique en France 1130-1270 (Paris,
1990). An excellent study by C. R. Dodwell, ‘The
meaning of “Sculptor” in the Romanesque period’, in
Romanesque and Gothic, op. cit., 49-61, is of use for the
earlier part of the thirteenth century.
13. Knoop and Jones, op. cit., 74-5; for the case of Exeter
Cathedral around 1300 see J. A. Givens, ‘The fabric ac-
counts of Exeter Cathedral as a record of medieval
sculptural practice’, Gesta, XXX (1991), 112-18.
14. Von Simson, op. cit., 228-29.
15. E. Farrell and R. Newman, ‘The materials of Gothic
sculpture’ in D. Gillerman (ed.), Gothic Sculpture in
America. I. The New England Museums (New York and
London, 1989), ix-xxi.
16. For Rochester and Wells see W. H. St John Hope and
W. R. Lethaby, ‘The imagery and sculptures on the
west front of Wells cathedral church’, Archaeologia,
LIX (1904), pls XXXVI (Rochester), XXVII (N.78), XLII
(S.22), XLVII (N.44), XLIX (N.74).
17. P. Williamson, ‘The Westminster Chapter House An-
nunciation group’, Burlington Magazine, CXXX (1988),
123-4, and idem., 928.
18. Idem., Northern Gothic Sculpture 1200-1450 (Victoria
and Albert Museum, London, 1988), 43 (cat. nos 5-8).
19. The drawings by Villard de Honnecourt are more likely
to be records of sculptures he had seen than working
517
 sketches: for these see H. R. Hahnloser, Villard de Hon- ‘The polychromy of the portals of the Gothic cathedral

VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

necourt. Kritische Gesamtausgabe des Bauhüttenbuches
ms.fr 19093 der Pariser Nationalbibliothek (2nd ed.,
Graz, 1972).
20. P. Plagnieux, ‘Le portail du XIIe siècle de Saint-
Germain-des-Prés à Paris: état de la question et nouv-
elles recherches’, Gesta, XXVIII (1989), 21-9. For an
analysis of the tool-marks on certain sculptures in Re-
gensburg Cathedral see F. Fuchs, ‘Beobachtungen zur
Bildhauertechnik an den mittelalterlichen Skulpturen
des Regensburger Domes’, in Der Dom zu Regensburg.
Ausgrabung—Restaurierung—Forschung (Munich and
Zürich, 1990), 237-47. On tools see P. Rockwell, The
art of stoneworking: a reference guide (Cambridge, 1993),
31-68 and pls 1-10.
21. In the case of Reims see H. Deneux, ‘Signes lapidaires
et épures du XIIIe siècle à la cathédrale de Reims’, Bul-
letin Monumental, LXXXIV (1925), 99-131, and now,
most comprehensively, R. Hamann-MacLean and I.
Schüssler, Die Kathedrale von Reims, Die Architektur
(Stuttgart, 1993), I/1, 261-94; I/2, figs 349-77; I/3, pls
167-8.
22. See, for instance, the tympanum from St Cäcilien in
Cologne [100]. These prefabricated blocks were not
always installed correctly (or did not always fit
together accurately in situ), as may be seen in one of
the angels in the Lincoln Angel choir (A. Gardner, The
Lincoln Angels (Lincoln Minster Pamphlet (First Series),
6, 1952), fig. S.5).
23. See p. 107 and pl. 164.
of Bourges’, Preprints of the ICOM Committee for
Conservation 7th Triennial Meeting, Copenhagen, 10-14
September 1984, 84.5.1-4; M. Chataignère, ‘Etude
technique de la polychromie’, in A. Erlande-
Brandenburg and D. Thibaudat, Les sculptures de Notre-
Dame de Paris au musée de Cluny (Paris, 1982), 121-3;
R. Rossi Manaresi and O. Nonfarmale, Notizie sul res-
tauro del protiro della cattedrale di Ferrara (Bologna,
1981). For an overview see R. Rossi Manaresi, ‘Consid-
erazioni tecniche sulla scultura monumentale policro-
mata, romanica e gotica’, Bollettino d’Arte, XLI (1987),
173-86.
29. Translated from Depping, op. cit., 156-7.
30. Ibid., 158-9.
31. For a typical Central Italian example of around
1230-50 see P. Williamson, The Thyssen-Bornemisza
Collection: Medieval sculpture and works of art (London,
1987), cat. no. 13.
32. See Williamson, op. cit., note 18 (1988), 14-16.
33. For an exemplary investigation into a Mosan Virgin
and Child of about 1270, with a coloured illustration
showing its evolution through eight different paint
schemes, see R. Didier, L. Kockaert, M. Serck-Dewaide
and J. Vynckier, ‘La Sedes Sapientiae de Vivegnis: étude
et traitement’, Bulletin de l’Institut royal du Patrimoine
artistique, XXII (1988/89), 51-77.
34. Frisch, op. cit., 56-7.

24. L. Schreiner, Die frühgotische Plastik Südwestfrankreichs

(Cologne-Graz, 1963), 106-12, 162-4.
25. H.-B. Depping (ed.), Réglemens sur les arts et métiers de
Paris, rédigés au XIIIe siècle, et connus sous le nom du
Livre des Métiers d’Etienne Boileau (Paris, 1837), 157-9
(see also the comments of M. Blindheim, Main trends
of East-Norwegian wooden figure sculpture in the second
half of the thirteenth century (Oslo, 1952), 92). A later
edition may also be consulted: R. de Lespinasse and F.
Bonnardot (eds), Histoire Générale de Paris. Les métiers
et corporations de la ville de Paris. XIIIe siècle. Le Livre des
Métiers d’Etienne Boileau (Paris, 1879). It should be
noted that a separate guild existed for Maçons, Tailleurs
de pierre, Plastriers and Morteliers (for its regulations see
Depping, op. cit., 107-12). For the Westminster refer-
ence see H. M. Colvin (ed.), Building Accounts of King
Henry III (Oxford, 1971), 228-9.
26. A. Brodrick, ‘Painting techniques of Early Medieval
sculpture’, in Romanesque: stone sculpture from medieval
England (exh. cat., Leeds, 1993), 18-27.
27. E. Deuber-Pauli and T. A. Hermanès, ‘Le portail peint
de la Cathédrale de Lausanne: histoire, iconographie,
sculpture et polychromie’, Nos monuments d’art et
d’histoire, XXXII (1981), 262-74; V. Furlan, R. Pancella
and T. A. Hermanès, Portail peint de la Cathédrale de
Lausanne: analyses pour une restauration (Lausanne, n.d.
[1982]); T. A. Hermanès and E. Deuber-Pauli, ‘La
couleur gothique’, Connaissance des Arts, no. 367
(September 1982), 36-45.
28. O. Nonfarmale and R. Rossi Manaresi, ‘Il restauro del
“Portail Royal” della cattedrale di Chartres’, Arte Medi-
evale, 2nd series, I (1987), 259-75; C. di Matteo and
P.-A. Lablaude, ‘Le portail polychrome de Notre-Dame
d’Etampes’, Monuments historiques, 161 (January-
February 1989), 86-90; R. Rossi-Manaresi and A. Tucci,

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 VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
Henry Fuseli’s Nightmare, 1781.

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VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

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VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ

WASHINGTON ALLSTON (1779-1843)
Allston, America’s first important painter of
the romantic movement, created landscapes,
historical scenes, and literary pieces that
exude dramatic terror as well as quiet mys-
tery. Allston was in Paris in 1803 and 1804,
and in Rome from 1804 to 1808, where he
became acquainted with poet Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and author Washington Irving. All-
ston returned to America in 1808 and stayed
in Boston, occupying the very room that the
painters John Copley and John Trumbull had
used. In 1811 he sailed with his wife to Eng-
land, where she died in 1815. Among the
paintings of this second English period were
the Angel Releasing St. Peter from Prison
(1812) and the Dead Man Revived by Touch-
ing the Bones of the Prophet Elisha (1811-13),
both developed into scenes of Gothic sus-
pense. Allston returned to America (where he
would remain for the rest of his life) in 1818
and took up residence in Boston. In Europe,
Allston had painted scenes of either a dra-
matically bizarre or a sweetly joyous nature,
treating emotional subjects openly, and
exploring themes of supernatural salvation.
His American paintings are usually more
intimate and smaller in scale than those done
in Europe. The heroic Belshazzar’s Feast
(1817-43) was out of keeping with the more
subdued mood of the American period. This
huge canvas, begun in Europe, was taken up,
put down, and taken up again at the end of
Allston’s life but never finished. Allston was
preparing to work on the figure of the King
on the day of his death. The image of the
prophet Daniel interpreting the handwriting
on the wall haunted Allston to the point that
he found himself unable to undertake other
commissions. Allston’s insistence that colors
and forms could produce psychological reac-
tions in the spectator, regardless of the
subject of the painting, anticipated the work
of James McNeill Whistler and the thinking of
early-twentieth-century theoreticians of non-
objective painting. Allston was the first
American painter to draw more from the
workings of his personal inner vision than
from external reality.

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Washington Allston, 1779-1843.

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VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

Washington Allston’s Belshazzar’s Feast, 1817-43.

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 VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC

FURTHER READING
Criticism
Barnes, Carl F., Jr. “The Gothic Architectural Engravings in
the Cathedral of Soissons.” Speculum: A Journal of
Medieval Studies 47, no. 1 (January 1972): 60-64.
Studies the material culture and folk art in the medieval
French Gothic Cathedral of Soissons.

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1 525
 Blum, Pamela Z. Early Gothic Saint-Denis: Restorations and
VISUAL ARTS AND THE GOTHIC
Survivals. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992,
187 p.
Discusses the nineteenth-century restoration of the Royal
Abbey of Saint-Denis in France, and argues that contrary
to the opinions of other experts, much of the original
twelfth-century sculpture survived the restoration.
Bolton, Jonathan. “Empire and Atonement: Geoffrey Hill’s
‘An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture
in England.’” Contemporary Literature 38, no. 2 (summer
1997): 287-306.
Explores Geoffrey Hill’s use of poetry as a means of
reconciling England’s policies of imperialism and oppres-
sion of the lower classes with the opulence and grandeur
of Gothic architecture in his sonnet sequence “An Apol-
ogy for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England.”
Eastlake, Charles L. A History of the Gothic Revival. London,
1872, n.p.
Earliest detailed study of the Gothic Revival in England.
Gaborit, Jean René. “General Notes.” In Great Gothic Sculp-
ture, translated by Carole Sperri and Lucia Wildt, pp.
177-84. New York: Reynal and Company, in associa-
tion with William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1978.
Traces the progress of Gothic art and architecture in
Europe from the twelfth century through the late nine-
teenth century.
Howard, Seymour. “Blake: Classicism, Gothicism, and
Nationalism.” Colby Library Quarterly 21, no. 4
(December 1985): 165-87.
Asserts that “[w]hat William Blake . . . made of Classic
and Gothic art in his work is akin to the patriotic and
personal interests of his contemporaries.”
Hyman, Timothy. Sienese Painting: The Art of a City-Republic
1278-1477. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003, 224 p.
Provides an overview of painting in Siena during the
thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, including links to French
Gothic architecture and Sienese Gothic art.
Jones, Peter Blundell. “Architecture as Mnemonic: The Ac-
cumulation of Memories around Morris’s Red House.”
Nineteenth-Century Contexts 21, no. 4 (2000): 513-40.
Examines the role of memory in the Gothic Revival
architecture of William Morris.
526 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1
Marius, Richard C. “Goodbye to Gothic: On Finding
Oneself in the Camp of the Enemy.” Soundings: An
Interdisciplinary Journal 79, nos. 1-2 (spring-summer
1996): 79-93.
Discusses themes and figures in architecture of Gothic
cathedrals, as well as the treatment of folk craft,
architecture, and French Gothic cathedrals in literature.
Masheck, J. D. C. “Irish Gothic Theory Before Pugin.” Stud-
ies: An Irish Quarterly Review 70 (summer-autumn 1981):
206-19.
Discusses the Gothic Revival movement in Ireland during
the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century.
Myles, Janet. L. N. Cottingham, 1787-1847: Architect of the
Gothic Revival. London: Lund Humphries Publishers,
1996, 176 p.
Comprehensive study of the contributions of leading Me-
diaevalist architect L. N. Cottingham to the Gothic
Revival in nineteenth-century architecture.
Ogden, Daryl. “The Architecture of Empire: ‘Oriental’
Gothic and the Problem of British Identity in Ruskin’s
Venice.” Victorian Literature and Culture 25, no. 1
(1997): 109-20.
Studies John Ruskin’s treatment of Gothic architecture in
The Stones of Venice, and how this relates to British
identity and orientalism.
Patrick, James. “Newman, Pugin, and Gothic.” Victorian
Studies 24, no. 2 (winter 1981): 185-207.
Discusses architecture by A. W. Pugin, and Cardinal John
Henry Newman’s relationship to the Gothic Revival
movement and Tractarianism.
Toman, Rolf, editor. The Art of Gothic: Architecture, Sculpture,
Painting, translated by Christian von Arnim. Köln,
Germany: Könemann, 1999, 521 p.
Full-length study of the development of Gothic art forms
worldwide throughout history.
von Simson, Otto. “Gothic Form.” In The Gothic Cathedral:
Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of
Order, pp. 3-20. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1956.
Illustrates the essential components of Gothic form as it
applies to the architecture of cathedrals.
The Subject Index includes the
authors and titles that appear in
the Author Index and the Title
Index as well as the names of
other authors and figures that are
discussed in the Gothic Literature
set. The Subject Index also lists
literary terms and topics covered
in the criticism. The index provides
page numbers or page ranges where
subjects are discussed and is fully
cross referenced. Page references to
significant discussions of authors,
titles, or subjects appear in bold-
face; page references to illustra-
tions appear in italic.
A burlesque 2: 454
Abaellino (Zschokke) 1: 499–500
Abartis, Caesarea 2: 115–20
The Abbess (Ireland) 3: 199
The Abbot (Scott) 3: 307, 310
Abbotsford 1: 502, 503, 504
“Die Abenteuer der
Silvester-Nacht” (Hoffmann) 2:
388, 395–96
Abercrombie, Dr. 1: 333–35
Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner) 2:
293–94, (sidebar) 304
Beardsley, Aubrey and 2: 299
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
Faustian legend 2: 302
sexuality 2: 303
Abyss (motif) 3: 480–83
“Act 1” (Boaden) 1: 394–98
“Adam Bell” (Hogg) 2: 422
Addison, Agnes 1: 486–90
Addison, Augustan 1: 41, 44–45
“An Address to the Muses”
(Baillie) 2: 67
“Address to the Reader” (Reeve)
1: 113–15
“Addresses to the Night” (Baillie)
2: 56
Adelgitha; or The Fruits of a Single
Error (Lewis) 3: 44–45
Adventure fiction 3: 359
“An Adventure of Hardress
Fitzgerald” (Le Fanu) 3: 7
“The Adventure of My Aunt”
(Irving) 2: 452
“The Adventure of the German
Student” (Irving) 2: 442–46
as ambiguous gothic 2: 452–53
parody 2: 458–59
psychological gothicism of 2:
450–51
sexual innuendo 2: 456–58
The Adventure of the Popkins
Family” (Irving) 2: 452
The Adventures of Ferdinand Count
Fathom (Smollet) 1: 1–2, 5
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(Twain) 3: 158
“Advertisement” (Brown) 2:
155–56
“Advertisement to the History of
SUBJECT INDEX
Good Breeding” (Walpole) 3:
446
Aedes Walpolianae (Walpole) 3:
430, 446
Aestheticism 1: 107–8
in eighteenth-century Europe
1: 48–57
Wharton, Edith 3: 468–69
Wilde, Oscar 3: 487, 489, 493–
99, 511–16
African American experience 1:
108, 118–27, 180–92; 3: 146–48
After Dark (Collins) 2: 220
“After Holbein” (Wharton) 3: 459
“The Aftermath of Gothic
Fiction” (Lovecraft) 1: 260–64
“Afterward” (Wharton) 3: 459,
468, 469, 471
“Afterword: Reflections on the
Grotesque” (Oates) (sidebar) 3:
179
“Against Gothic” (Clery) 3:
437–42
“Against Nature” (Oates) 3: 182
Against Our Will: Men, Women,
and Rape (Brownmiller) 1: 216
Agapida, Fray Antonio. See Irving,
Washington
The Age of Innocence (Wharton) 3:
458, 459–60, 483
“Age of Lead” (Atwood) 2: 11
Aikin, John 1: 2, 4–7, (sidebar) 7,
46
Ainsworth, William Harrison
(sidebar) 1: 94, 95
545
SUBJECT INDEX AL AARAAF, TAMERLANE, AND MINOR POEMS
Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor
Poems (Poe) 3: 187
“Alastor” (Shelley, P.) 1: 24
The Albigenses (Maturin) 3: 74,
79–81, 84
Alcott, Louisa May
Angel in the House 1: 203–4
compared to Oates, Joyce
Carol 3: 175
social violence 1: 197–206
Alcuin (Brown) 2: 153–54, 159
The Alhambra (Irving) 2: 442
Alias Grace (Atwood) 2: 2–3
“Alice Doane’s Appeal”
(Hawthorne) 2: 371
“Alkmene” (Dinesen) 2: 276
“‘All She Said Was “Yes”’”
(Jackson) 1: 277
“All Souls” (Wharton) 3: 467,
468, 469, 471, 473–74
Allegory 1: 69–73
Allston, Washington (sidebar) 1:
522, 523, 524
Alnwick 1: 494–96
“The Altar of the Dead” (James)
2: 466–67
The Ambassadors (James) 2: 462
Ambiguous Gothic
Irving, Washington 2: 453–55
The Island of Dr Moreau 1: 164
Mysteries of Winterthurn 3: 176
psychoanalysis 2: 412–17
“Der Sandmann” 2: 412
“Ambitious Nature of Man”
(Godwin) 2: 324–27
The American (James) 2: 462, 472
American Appetites (Oates) 3: 165
American culture 3: 168–77
“American Female Gothic”
(Showalter) 1: 210–20
American Gothic (painting) 1: 73,
73–74
American Gothic tradition 1:
57–74
Brown, Charles Brockden 2:
156–62
compared to medieval
literature 2: 298–99
cultural identity in 1: 121–27
vs. European Gothic tradition
1: 57–65; 2: 156–58
Faulkner, Wiliam 2: 298–305
fear 1: 65
feminist literary theory 1:
210–19
founding authors 1: 2; 2: 158
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 1:
212–15
grotesques 2: 300–301
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2:
368–77
historiography of 1: 68–69
iconography of 2: 301
Irving, Washington 2: 443,
446–51, 451–55
King, Stephen 2: 494–99
546
Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 168–84
Otherness in 1: 67–74
painting and 1: 518–25
patterns 2: 301–3
psychological horror 2: 299
Rice, Anne 3: 279–85
Salem witch trials 1: 62–65
Southern Gothic 2: 300–306
theological debate in 3:
277–78
women writers 1: 210–19
See also Gothic movement
American International Pictures
1: 429
“American Literature—Dr.
Channing” (Hazlitt) (sidebar) 2:
163
American Mineralogical Society 2:
165
American Psycho (Ellis) 1: 36–38
American realism, Gross Clinic
(painting) 1: 519
American Review and Literary
Journal 2: 162–64
The American Scene (James) 2: 472
“An Analysis of The Monk and Its
German Sources” (Conger) 2:
349–54
Ancient literature 1: 16
Andrézel, Pierre. See Dinesen, Isak
Andriano, Joseph 2: 411–19
Anecdotes of Painting (Walpole) 3:
446–47
“The Angel at the Grave”
(Wharton) 3: 468
Angel in the House 1: 131, 203–4
The Angelic Avengers (Dinesen) 2:
258, 263
The Animals in That Country
(Atwood) 2: 2
Animism 3: 243–44
“Ann Radcliffe” (Scott) (sidebar)
3: 238
Anne of Geierstein (Scott) 3: 311,
312, 315
“Anne Rice: Raising Holy Hell,
Harlequin Style” (Ingebretsen) 3:
277–86
Antebellum period 1: 180–92, 520
Anti-Catholicism. See Catholicism
The Antiquary (Scott) 1: 96–97; 3:
299, 314
Antonina; or, The Fall of Rome
(Collins) 2: 201–2, 206–10
Anxiety. See Fear
“An Apology for The Monk” (A
Friend to Genius) 3: 48–51
Appel, Alfred 2: 300–301
The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and
Some Stories (du Maurier) 2: 279
“L’Apres-midi-d’un faune”
(Faulkner) 2: 293
Apuleius 1: 20–21
Arbus, Diane 1: 215
Archetypes
Gothic fiction 3: 464–65
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
King, Stephen 2: 485
“Pomegranate See d” 3:
464–66
Prometheus 3: 338–42
“Der Sandman” 2: 413–14
Architecture 1: 40–41, 52, 475–76,
486–506; 2: 252–55
Alnwick renovation 1: 494–96
American 1: 497–505
castles 1: 492–94
Cottingham, L. N. (sidebar) 1:
497
European history 1: 490–96; 3:
142–43
gargoyles 1: 482
Gilmor, Robert III 1: 502–5
Glen Ellen 1: 504
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
2: 344–49
Gothic revival 1: 477–78, 486–
89, 497–505
in Gothic Wood 1: 73–74
grotesques 1: 483
houses 3: 143–44
imagination in 1: 483–84
inclusion of the ugly 1: 483
Latrobe, Benjamin Henry 1:
498–99
as metaphor 1: 69–70, 72; 2:
242–45, 301, 344–48
as motif 3: 315–16
naturalism and 1: 482–83
nineteenth-century attitude
toward 1: 487–88
in Northanger Abbey 2: 41–45
origins 1: 480
physical restrictions 1: 481–82
relationship to literature 1:
480–86, 497–505
religious buildings 1: 510–11,
511–13
repetition 1: 484–85
Romantic attitude toward 1:
486–87, 488
Scott, Sir Walter 3: 315–16
spiritual world and 1: 482
Strawberry Hill 1: 58, 502–3; 3:
430, 442, 447–48
as sublime 1: 55–56
supernatural and 1: 481, 484;
3: 315
Wadsworth, Daniel 1: 499
written histories 1: 497–98
Aristocracy
Decadent Aristocrat 3: 189
“The Fall of the House of
Usher” 3: 221
family curse and 1: 294–96
vampires 1: 344, 350
Wharton, Edith 3: 448, 466–68
Armadale (Collins, Wilkie) 1: 88
Armageddon in films 1: 430
Art 1: 506–26
Christianity and 1: 507

Middle Ages attitude toward 1:
507–12
religious influence on 1:
512–13
sculpture 1: 475–76, 511–17
“The Art of Fiction” (James) 2:
467
The Art of the Novel (James) 2: 473
Arthur Mervyn (Brown) 2: 154,
159–62, 168
“Artist of the Beautiful”
(Hawthorne) 2: 381
Arvin, Newton 3: 111–19, 118
As I Lay Dying (Faulkner) 2:
293–95, 304
Askew, Alice and Claude 1: 362,
365
“Aspects of the Supernatural in
the Shorter Fiction of James
Hogg” (Mack) 2: 425–28
The Assassins (Oates) 3: 164
“The Assassins” (Shelley, P.) 1:
9–12
The Assignation (Oates) 3: 179–80
Astoria; or, Anecdotes of an
Enterprise beyond the Rocky
Mountains (Irving) 2: 442–43
“At Home All Was Blood and
Feathers: The Werewolf in the
Kitchen—Angela Carter and
Horror” (Wisker) 2: 182–90
“At the Tourist Centre in Boston”
(Atwood) 2: 9
The Athenaeum (periodical) 3: 393
“Atrophy” (Wharton) 3: 471
“Atwood Gothic” (Mandel) 2:
5–10
Atwood, Margaret 2: 1, 1–24
on Beloved 3: 149
portrayal of women 2: 189
principal works 2: 3–4
“Atwoodian Gothic: From Lady
Oracle to The Robber Bride”
(Howells) 2: 10–17
Auerbach, Nina 1: 203–4, 361–76;
3: 20
Austen, Jane 1: 74–76, 80–81,
221–22; 2: 25, 25–47, 236
Atwood, Margaret and 2: 3
principal works 2: 27
Radcliffe, Ann and 2: 36–40
Austen-Leigh, R. A. 2: 32
Austen-Leigh, William 2: 32
“Austen’s Sense and Radcliffe’s
Sensibility” (Conger) 2: 35–40
“The Author in the Novel:
Creating Beckford in Vathek”
(Gill) 2: 95–101
“Automata” (Hoffmann). See “Die
Automate” (Hoffmann)
“Die Automate” (Hoffmann) 2:
388, 395
“Aylmer Vance and the Vampire”
(Askew) 1: 362, 365
Azemia (Beckford) 2: 80
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
B Because It Is Bitter, and Because It
Bachman, Richard. See King,
Stephen
Backsheider, Paula 1: 410
A Backward Glance (Wharton) 3:
469, 476–80
Bag of Bones (King) 2: 482
Bailey, Thomas Aldrich 1: 504–5
Baillie, Joanna 2: 49, 49–77
compared to Wollstonecraft,
Mary 2: 63
on human nature 2: 51–54,
56–57
madness as theme 1: 340–41
obituary (sidebar) 2: 55
principal works 2: 50–51
on utopia 2: 63–65
witchcraft 2: 69–73
Baillie, John 1: 56
Bailyn, Bernard 1: 121–22
Baldick, Chris 3: 84–91, 219–20
“The Ballad of Reading Gaol”
(Wilde) 1: 34
The Ballad of Reading Gaol,and
Other Poems (Wilde) 3: 488, 499
Balzac, Honoré de 3: 100–103
Banshees (musical group) 1:
470–71
Baptiste, Jean 1: 291–92
Barbauld, Anna Laetitia (Aikin) 1:
2, 4–7, (sidebar) 7, 46; 3: 24–25,
443
“The Barber of Duncow” (Hogg)
2: 422
Barker, Clive 1: 287–90, (sidebar)
411
Barker, Martin 2: 184
Barkham, John 2: 282–83
Barnaby Rudge (Dickens) 2: 252
Barnes, Djuna 2: 188
“Bartleby the Scrivener” (Melville)
3: 108
compared to “The Fall of the
House of Usher” 3: 122–23
Gothic language 3: 124
landscape motif 3: 123–24
modernity of 3: 122–24
Basil (Baillie) 2: 50, 54
Basil: A Story of Modern Life
(Collins) 2: 205, 214
Basilique de Saint-Denis 1: 479
“The Battle of Evermore” (song)
1: 463
Baudelaire, Charles 3: 99–100
Bayer-Berenbaum, Linda 1:
480–86
“The Beach of Falesá” (Stevenson)
3: 360–61
Beardsley, Aubrey 2: 299
“The Beast in the Jungle” (James)
2: 466–70, 471
Beating fantasy 3: 329, 330
Beattie, James 1: 50, 51, 220
“The Beauties” (Walpole) 3: 446
THE BETROTHED
Is My Heart (Oates) 3: 165
Beckett, Samuel 1: 31, 38–39
Beckford, William 2: 79, 79–102
Fonthill Abbey 2: 85–86
Henley, Samuel and 2: 87–88
homosexuality 2: 87, 98
Oriental tales 1: 260–61; 2:
88–89
principal works 2: 81
self-identity 2: 95–101
“Becoming an Author in 1848:
History and the Gothic in the
SUBJECT INDEX
Early Works of Wilkie Collins”
(Heller, Tamar) 2: 205–10
Beddoes, Thomas Lovell (sidebar)
1: 377
“Bela Lugosi’s Dead and I Don’t
Feel So Good Either: Goth and
the Glorification of Suffering in
Rock Music” (Hannaham) 1:
468–73
Belinda (Edgeworth) 1: 207
Bell, Currer. See Brontë, Charlotte
Bell, Ellis. See Brontë, Emily
The Bell Jar (Plath) 1: 215–16
Bell, Michael Davitt 2: 451–56
“The Bell Tower” (Melville) 3:
108, 110–11, (sidebar) 111, 113
La Belle Dame sans Merci (Keats) 1:
19
Bellefleur (Oates) 3: 163–65, 177,
179
American culture 3: 172–74,
178
American Gothic tradition 3:
172–74
castle as Gothic convention 3:
172
sexuality 3: 173
Beloved (Morrison) 3: 136
Atwood, Margaret on 3: 149
Echo mythology 3: 140
excerpt (sidebar) 3: 151
”Foreword” 3: 137–38
ghosts 3: 138
house in 3: 144–47
as slave narrative 3: 146–47
trauma in 3: 150–60
Belshazzar’s Feast (painting) 1:
524
Benedict, Williston R. 2: 429–32
“Benito Cereno” (Melville) 3: 108,
113, 119–22
“Berenice” (Poe) 3: 189, 203–4
Bergman, Ingrid 2: 468
“Die Bergwerke zu Falun”
(Hoffmann) 2: 388, 399
Berkman, Sylvia 2: 283–84
Berry, Mary 3: 430–31
Bertram; or, The Castle of St.
Aldobrand (Maturin) 1: 337–38,
407–8, 499, 500; 3: 74, 84
Bessborough, Lady 2: 85–86
The Betrothed (Scott) 3: 311, 314
547
SUBJECT INDEX BEUMEIER, BEATE
Beumeier, Beate 2: 194–200
Beutel, Katherine Piller 3: 138–42
“Bewitched” (Wharton) 3: 457,
459
“Beyond Blood: Defeating the
Inner Vampire” (Valente) 3:
415–27
“Beyond the Pleasure Principle”
(Freud) 1: 87
Bhabba, Homi 3: 151–52
Bierce, Ambrose 1: 198, (sidebar)
199
The Big Sleep (Chandler) 1: 36
The Big Sleep (film) (Faulkner) 2:
294
Bildungsroman 2: 246–48
Billy Budd (Melville) 3: 109,
111–12
Biographical Memoirs of
Extraordinary Painters (Beckford)
2: 79
“The Birds” (du Maurier) 2: 280,
283–84
The Bird’s Nest (Jackson) 1: 276
Birkhead, Edith 1: 16–21,
(sidebar) 3: 246
“The Birthmark” (Hawthorne) 2:
365, 375
“Black Andie’s Tale of Tod
Lapraik” (Stevenson) 3: 360
The Black Book (Morrison) 3: 146
“The Black Cat” (Poe) 3: 188–89,
189, 213
The Black Dwarf (Scott) 3: 307,
315
Black House (King) 2: 482, 487,
491–93
The Black Robe (Collins) 2: 202,
217–26
Black Venus (Carter) 2: 180, 183
Black Water (Oates) 3: 165
“The Blackness of Darkness: E. A.
Poe and the Development of the
Gothic” (Fiedler) 3: 205–11
Blackstone, William 1: 224–25
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 1:
25
review of Die Elixiere des Teufels
2: 391–92
review of Melmoth the Wanderer
(sidebar) 3: 98
Blair, Hugh 1: 45
Blair, Robert 1: 53
Blake, William
engravings of (sidebar) 1: 487
influence on Faulkner, William
2: 306–12
Prometheus mythology 3: 339
Blatty, W. P. 1: 450
Bleak House (Dickens) 2: 229–30,
237, 242–45
Bleiler, E. F. 1: 351; 2: 85–89,
393–401
The Blind Assassin (Atwood) 2:
2–3, 3
548
The Blithedale Romance
(Hawthorne) 2: 364, 371
Blixen, Tania. See Dinesen, Isak
Blood Canticle (Rice) 3: 264
Blood Is Not Enough (Datlow) 1:
366–67
A Bloodsmoor Romance (Oates) 3:
163–65, 177
American culture 3: 178
compared to Little Women 3:
175
fetishism 3: 174
heroines 3: 174–75
“Bloodstains” (Oates) 3: 180–81,
182–83
“The Bloody Chamber” (Carter)
2: 182, 187
The Bloody Chamber and Other
Stories (Carter) 2: 180–83,
187–88, 199
Bloom, Harold 3: 337–42
“Blue-Bearded Lover” (Oates) 3:
179–80
Bluebeard’s Egg (Atwood) 2: 11
Blues (music) 1: 369, 464
The Bluest Eye (Morrison) 3:
135–36, 144, 148
Blythe, David Gilmour 1: 524
Boaden, James 1: 394–98,
(sidebar) 399, 413–15
“Bodies” (Oates) 3: 183
Bodily Harm (Atwood) 2: 11, 189
The Body Snatcher (film) 1: 400
“The Body-Snatcher” (Stevenson)
3: 360
Boileau, Etienne 1: 515–16
Boileau, Nicolas 1: 41, 44, 148
“The Bold Dragoon” (Irving) 2:
449
Booker Prize 2: 2
The Bookman (periodical) (sidebar)
3: 405
Borges, Jorges Luis 2: 9; 3: 179
Bosch, Hieronymous 3: 53–60
The Bostonians (James) 2: 462
Botting, Fred 1: 21–30, 48–57; 2:
215–17; 3: 348–56
“The Bottle Imp” (Stevenson) 3:
360, 362–64
“A Bottle of Perrier” (Wharton) 3:
459, 467, 468, 471
Boulger, James 3: 92
Bowen, Elizabeth 1: 173–79,
(sidebar) 333
Bowen’s Court (Bowen) 1: 173–79
Boz. See Dickens, Charles
“Boz’s Gothic Gargoyles”
(Hollington) (sidebar) 2: 252
Bracebridge Hall; or, The Humorists:
A Medley (Irving) 2: 442, 447,
(sidebar) 450
Bradbury, Ray (sidebar) 1: 172
Braddon, May Elizabeth 1: 354
Brantly, Susan C. 2: 269–78
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
The Bravo of Venice (Lewis) 3:
43–44
Brennan, Matthew C. 3: 372–82
Breve fra Afrika (Dinesen) 2: 258
Brewster, David 1: 334
“The Bridal of Polmood” (Hogg)
2: 437
The Bride of Lammermoor (Scott) 1:
25; 3: 300, 312, 314
The British Critic (periodical) 2:
327
Brockway, James (sidebar) 2: 191
Bromley Contingent 1: 470–71
Brontë, Charlotte 2: 103, 103–30
compared to Brontë, Emily 2:
104
compared to Wharton, Edith
3: 480
depravity 2: 115
Gothic conventions 2: 108–9,
111–13, 121–27
heroines 2: 107–14
influence of Lewis, Matthew
Gregory 2: 122–27
principal works 2: 105
Brontë, Emily 1: 262–63, 331; 2:
131, 131–51
compared to Brontë, Charlotte
2: 104
influence of Byron, Lord
George Gordon 2: 145
principal works 2: 133
Brook Farm 2: 364
Brooke-Rose, Christine 2: 410
Bross, Addison 2: 299
The Brothers Karamazov
(Dostoevski) 1: 315
Brown, Charles Brockden 1: 2; 2:
153, 153–78
American Gothic tradition 2:
156–62
compared to Schiller, Friedrich
(sidebar) 2: 171
detective fiction 1: 250–51
Godwin, William and 2: 168,
170–72, (sidebar) 171
principal works 2: 155
protagonists 2: 159–62
Brown, Jane K. 2: 354–62
Brown, Marshall 2: 354–62
The Brownie of Badsbeck (Hogg) 2:
422, 437–38
“The Brownie of the Black Haggs”
(Hogg) 2: 422, 428
Brownmiller, Susan 1: 216
Buch Annette (Goethe) 2: 341
“Bulletin” (Jackson) 1: 271–72
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 1: 2,
12–16, 14, (sidebar) 15, 262–63
Burke, Edmund 1: 55, 97, 107–8,
110–13, 149
on French Revolution 3:
350–51

as political writer (sidebar) 1:
30
on the sublime 1: 148–50; 3:
91–92
Burlesque 2: 298, 452–54
Burns, Robert 1: 18
Burns, Sarah 1: 518–25
Burwick, Frederick 1: 332–42
“The Bus” (Jackson) 1: 268
“A Bus Along St. Clair:
December” (Atwood) 2: 6
Butler, Judith 1: 379, 384
Butler, Marilyn (sidebar) 3: 328
By the North Gate (Oates) 3: 164
Byron, Lord George Gordon 1: 2,
240–43, (sidebar) 241; 3: 342
Clairmont, Claire and 3:
344–46
influence on Brontë, Emily 2:
145
lampoon of The Monk 3: 51–52
on Lewis, Matthew Gregory 3:
36, (sidebar) 42
romantic heroes of 1: 24, 253–
54; 2: 299
Shelley, Mary and 3: 344
on Vathek (sidebar) 2: 95
C 382–84
C. 3. 3. See Wilde, Oscar
Cabbalism 1: 254–55
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (film)
1: 419
Calder, Jenni 1: 131
Caleb Williams (Godwin) 1: 2, 81,
87; 2: 321–24, 335
compared to Wieland; or, The
Transformation 2: 168, 170–71
doubles 3: 369
as early detective fiction 1:
249–50
European Gothic tradition 2:
337–38
as evil 2: 327
Gothic narrative 2: 330–37
influence of French Revolution
1: 78–80
influence on Frankenstein; or,
The Modern Prometheus 3: 339
motifs 2: 333–34
narrative structure 3: 86
Poe, Edgar Allan on 3: 212
as political commentary 3:
212–13
preface 2: 324
review 2: 327–30
social injustice in 1: 22–23
Calhoon, Kenneth S. 2: 344–49
Calvinism
in horror fiction 3: 277
Melmoth the Wanderer 3: 91–96
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
The Private Memoirs and Confes-
sions of a Justified Sinner 2:
429–31
sublime 3: 91–96
“Calvinism and Gothicism: The
Example of Brown’s Wieland”
(Gilmore) 2: 170–77
The Calvinist Temper in English
Poetry (Boulger) 3: 92
Cambrio-Britons (Boaden) 1:
413–15
Candid Reflections . . . on what is
commonly called the Negroe-Cause,
by a Planter (Long) 1: 208
Cannibalism 2: 237
“The Canterville Ghost” (Wilde)
3: 487–88
Capitalism, Wharton, Edith 3:
467–75
Capon, William 1: 403
Capote, Truman 1: 66, 70, 2: 304
Captain Bonneville (Irving) 2: 443
“Cardillac the Jeweller”
(Hoffmann). See “Das Fräulein
von Scuderi”
“The Cardinal’s Third Tale”
(Dinesen) 2: 267–68
“Carmilla” (Le Fanu) 1: 31, 139,
352–58; 3: 2–5
doubles 1: 382
dreams 1: 329–30
mother-child relationship 1:
narrative structure 3: 271
power of women 1: 355–58; 3:
18–21
as supernatural horror tale 3:
22–27
vampire-victim relationship 1:
356–57; 3: 19–20
victimization of women 1:
355–58; 3: 17–21
women in nineteenth century
3: 16–21
Carmilla and 12 Other Classic Tales
of Mystery (Le Fanu) 3: 3–5
“Carmilla and the Gothic Legacy:
Victorian Transformations of
Supernatural Horror” (Geary) 3:
21–27
“Carnival” (Dinesen) 2: 264–65
Carnival: Entertainments and
Posthumous Tales (Dinesen) 2:
258
Carrie (King) 2: 481
Carrion Comfort (Simmons) 1: 366
Carso, Kerry Dean 1: 496–506
Carter, Angela 2: 179, 179–200
fairy tales 2: 185–86
fantasy 2: 183–90, 197–99
fetishism 2: 184–85
gender construction 2: 199
humor 2: 185
literary influences of 2: 188
portrayal of women 2: 183–85
THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO: A STORY
principal works 2: 181
psychological horror 2: 183–89
on Rice, Ann (sidebar) 3: 267
sexuality as theme 2: 184–89
Carwin the Biloquist (Brown) 2:
160, 161, 169–70
“The Caryatids: an Unfinished
Tale” (Dinesen) 2: 264–65, 269
Casebeer, Edwin F. (sidebar) 2:
492
“The Cask of Amontillado” (Poe)
3: 188, 189, 197–98
Castle (Gothic convention) 1:
SUBJECT INDEX
251, 284–85
Barker, Clive 1: 287–90
Bellefleur 3: 172
Bleak House 2: 242–45
The Castle of Otranto 1: 402; 2:
301; 3: 196–97
feminist literary theory 1: 211
King, Stephen 1: 284–90
Little Dorrit 2: 252–53
Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale
3: 128–32
Morrison, Toni 3: 136
The Mysteries of Udolpho 1: 226
Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 194–97
Radcliffe, Ann 2: 252
See also Haunted house
Castle Dangerous (Scott) 3: 307,
311, 315
The Castle of Andalusia (O’Keeffe)
1: 406–7
The Castle of Otranto: A Story
(Walpole) 1: 57–58, 459; 2: 36,
299–300; 3: 449
authorship of 3: 434–35, 437,
444–46
castle as Gothic convention 1:
402; 2: 301; 3: 196–97
“counterfeit” Gothic in 3:
451–52
critical reception of 3: 442–52
doubles in 3: 369
excess as theme 3: 355
family murder 2: 310–11
ghosts 3: 451–52
heroine in 2: 138, 144
influence of Strawberry Hill 1:
503
influence on Davis, Alexander
Jackson 1: 501
influence on Dracula 3: 395–
404
influence on Pierre; or, The
Ambiguities 3: 115
labyrinth in 3: 197
mysterious portrait in 1: 252,
254; 2: 252; 3: 25, 199
as original Gothic literature 1:
1–2, 402; 2: 116; 3: 431
political elements 3: 450
preface 3: 338–40, 432–34, 449
prophecy in 3: 200
review 3: 435, 436–37
Scott, Sir Walter on 3: 432
549
SUBJECT INDEX CASTLE OF WOLFENBACH; A GERMAN STORY
servants 2: 299–300
subversive nature of 3: 437–42,
448
supernatural 3: 449–51
Castle of Wolfenbach; a German
story (Parsons) 1: 2, 7–9, 96
The Castle Spectre (Lewis) 1: 402;
3: 32, 37
German romantic influence 1:
408
ghosts 1: 338
inspiration for 3: 34–36
literary influences on 3: 42
madness 1: 338
as model for Gothic
melodrama 3: 41–43
nationalism 1: 412
“To the Reader” 3: 34–36
The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne
(Radcliffe) 1: 2; 3: 231–32,
239–340
Catalogue of Royal and Noble
Authors (Walpole) 3: 446
Catharine,or the Bower (Austen) 2:
32–33
Cathedrals. See Religious
buildings
“Catherine Morland’s Gothic
Delusions: A Defense of
Northanger Abbey” (Glock)
(sidebar) 2: 37
Catholicism
Collins, Wilkie 2: 217–26
Martineau, Harriet 2: 218
Maturin, Charles Robert 3: 87–
88, 94–96
misogyny and 2: 221
Rice, Anne 3: 279
Cat’s Eye (Atwood) 2: 2, 11–13
“The Cenci” (Shelley, P.) 1: 24
Chamber’s Cabinet Cyclopedia
(Shelley) 3: 320
Chambers, Sir William 1: 405
Chandler, Helen 3: 417
Chandler, Raymond 1: 36
“Chapter 1” (Brontë, E.) 2:
133–35
“Chapter 1” (Brown) 2: 156
“Chapter 1” (du Maurier) 2:
281–82
“Chapter 14” (Austen) 2: 27–31
“Charles” (Jackson) 1: 265–66,
269
“Charles Brockden Brown and the
Invention of the American
Gothic” (Fiedler) 2: 156–62
“Charles Dickens and Mrs.
Radcliffe: A Farewell to Wilkie
Collins” (Coolidge Jr.) (sidebar)
2: 237
“Charlotte Brontë’s Lucy Snowe”
(Waring) (sidebar) 2: 121
“Charlotte Brontë’s ‘New’ Gothic”
(Heilman) 2: 107–14
Charnas, Suzy McKee 1: 368–169
550
Chase (motif)
Faulkner, William 2: 301–2
James, Henry 2: 473–74
Shelley, Mary 3: 339
Chekhov, Anton 1: 2
Chesterton, G. K. 3: 366, 368
“A Child is Being Beaten” (Freud)
3: 329
Child, Lydia Marie 1: 187–88
Childbirth 1: 216
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron)
1: 24
Children
punishment of 2: 239–40
relationship to mother 1:
377–81
in ’Salem’s Lot 1: 372
“The Children of the Corn”
(King) 2: 481
A Child’s Garden of Verses
(Stevenson) 3: 359–61
The Chimes (Dickens) 2: 230
de Chirico, Giorgio 1: 147
Chorley, H. F. (sidebar) 2: 137
“Christabel” (Coleridge) 1: 19, 24,
(sidebar) 48
Christianity
art and 1: 507
The Sphinx 3: 498–99
Wharton, Edith 3: 470–71
Christine (King) 2: 482
castle in 1: 285–86
compared to The Strange Case
of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 2:
487
family 2: 501
film 2: 488
werewolf myth 2: 486
A Christmas Carol (Dickens) 2:
229–30
A Chronicle of the Conquest of
Granada (Irving) 2: 442
The Circle Game (Atwood) 2: 1–2,
3, 8
Citizen Kane (film) 1: 437
Civilisation and its Discontents
(Freud) 1: 90; 3: 372
Clairmont, Claire 3: 344–46
Clara Howard (Brown) 2: 154, 162
Clark, Robert 1: 58
Cleishbotham, Jedediah. See Scott,
Sir Walter
Cleland, John 1: 50
Clendenning, John 2: 446–51
Clery, E. J.
on Baillie, Joanna 2: 54–61
on The Castle of Otranto: A Tale
3: 437–42
value of Gothic fiction in 18th
century 1: 220–28
Clover, Carol 3: 284
Cobb, Palmer (sidebar) 2: 412
The Cock and Anchor (Le Fanu) 3:
1, 7–10, 16
Cock Lane ghost 1: 18
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
The Coherence of Gothic
Conventions (Sedgwick) 1: 72; 2:
10
Cole, Thomas 1: 524
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1: 2,
18–19, 24, (sidebar) 48, 236–41
ghosts 1: 337
on The Mysteries of Udolpho 3:
245–46
review of The Monk 3: 46–48
sea stories 1: 251
Collected Stories of William
Faulkner (Faulkner) 2: 294,
307–8
Collins, Wilkie 1: 88–89; 2: 201,
201–28,219
anti-Catholicism 2: 218–26
curse narratives 1: 298–300
detective fiction 2: 216
development of writing style
2: 205–10
Dickens, Charles on (sidebar)
2: 223
Eliot, T. S. on (sidebar) 2: 215
Gothic conventions 2: 215–17
principal works 2: 202
sensation fiction 2: 211–15,
218–19, 223–26
Collins, William 1: 18, 53–54
Colman, George 1: 403
Come Along with Me (Jackson) 1:
276
Comedy. See Humor
“The Company of Wolves”
(Carter) 2: 182, 186, 187
“The Composition of Northanger
Abbey” (Emden) 2: 31–35
Confessional novels 3: 211–17
Confessions of an English
Opium-Eater (DeQuincey) 1: 331
The Confidence-Man: His
Masquerade (Melville) 3: 108–9
Conger, Syndy McMillen 2:
35–40, 136–46, 349–54
Conrad, Joseph 1: 31–32
Convent stories 2: 223–24
Coolidge, Archibald C. Jr.
(sidebar) 2: 237
Cooper, Alice 1: 469–70, 470
Cooper, James Fenimore 1: 2, 58;
3: 206
Corliss, Richard 1: 437–38
Corman, Roger 1: 443–46
Cottingham, L. N. (sidebar) 1:
497
“Councillor Krespel” (Hoffmann).
See “The Cremona Violin”
Count Basil (Baillie) 2: 50, 63, 65
Count Dracula (character) 1:
166–69, 342–55, 362–63, 424, 3:
417
characterization of 3: 405–10
compared to psychic vampires
1: 365–66

“counterfeit” Gothicism of 3:
397–404
supernatural 1: 358–59
Count Robert of Paris (Scott) 3:
300, 311
Covent Garden (theater) 1: 389
Cox, Jeffrey 2: 62
Craft, Christopher 3: 284
Crayon, Geoffrey. See Irving,
Washington
The Crayon Miscellany (Irving) 2:
442
“The Cremona Violin”
(Hoffmann) 2: 388
Cresserons, Charles de. See Le
Fanu, Joseph Sheridan
The Cricket on the Hearth
(Dickens) 2: 230
The Critic (periodical) (sidebar) 3:
125
“The Critic as Artist” (Wilde) 3:
507
A Critical Dissertation on the Poems
of Ossian, the Son of Fingal (Blair)
1: 45–46
The Critical Review (periodical) 3:
434–35, 444
Critique of Judgement (Kant) 1: 150
Crosman, Robert 2: 308–10
Cross, Wilbur 2: 368
Crowe, Catherine 3: 24
Cry to Heaven (Rice) 3: 263–64
Cujo (King) 2: 491
Cultural identity 1: 121–27,
171–79
Curse narratives
Baptiste, Jean 1: 291–92
haunted house 1: 290–300
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 1:
292–95
“The Curse of Ancient Egypt”
(Carter) (sidebar) 3: 267
The Curse of Frankenstein (film) 1:
428, 446
Curtis, Ian 1: 471–73
Cycle of the Werewolf (King) 2:
482, 486, 487–89
D 272
Dacre, Charlotte 1: 208–10
“The Daemon Lover” (Jackson) 1:
269–70
Dagover, Lil 1: 419
“Daisy” (Oates) 3: 180, 181,
183–84
Daisy Miller (James) 2: 462
The Damnation Game (Barker) 1:
289–90
Danse Macabre (King) 2: 481–82,
483–85, 485–86
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
“Daphne du Maurier and Gothic
Signatures: Rebecca as
Vamp(ire)” (Horner and Zlosnik)
2: 284–91
Dark Dreams (Derry) 1: 429–30
The Dark Half (King) 2: 486,
489–90
The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the
Calla (King) 2: 482
The Dark Tower VI: The Songs of
Susannah (King) 2: 482
The Dark Tower VII: The Dark
Tower (King) 2: 482
Datlow, Ellen 1: 366–67
Davenport, Basil (sidebar) 2: 285
Davenport-Hines, Richard
Treadwell 1: 490–96
David Copperfield (Dickens) 2: 248
Davis, Alexander Jackson (sidebar)
1: 491, 497, 499–501, 503–4
Day, William Patrick 2: 312–13,
317; 3: 178
“De Grey: A Romance” (James) 2:
462, 463
De Monfort (Baillie, Joanna) 2: 50,
54–56, 58–60
review of (sidebar) 2: 68
social progress of 2: 62–66
De Profundis (Wilde) 3: 488
Deacon Brodie,or the Double Life
(Stevenson) 3: 368
“The Dead” (Oates) 3: 179
The Dead Zone (King) 2: 482,
490–91
“Death by Landscape” (Atwood)
2: 11
Decadence movement 3: 487, 489
Decadent Aristocrat (Gothic
convention) 3: 189
“The Decay of Lying” (Wilde) 3:
493
“Dedication” (Goethe) 2: 343–44
DeFoe, Daniel 3: 212
Degeneration
Machen, Arthur 1: 169–71
Stevenson, Robert Louis 1:
158–60
Stoker, Bram 1: 166–69
Wells, H. G. 1: 162–66
Wilde, Oscar 1: 160–62
Deleuze, Gilles 3: 226–27
“The Deluge at Norderney”
(Dinesen) 2: 257–58, 267–68,
Delusion and Dream (Freud) 1:
326–27
Demon and Other Tales (Oates) 3:
167–68
Demonic possession 1: 328, 430
“Demons” (Oates) 3: 164
Dennis, John 1: 148–49
DeQuincey, Thomas 1: 331
Derrickson, Teresa 1: 197–207
Derrida, Jacques 1: 154–55; 3: 350
Derry, Charles 1: 429–30
DISGUISE
A Description of Strawberry Hill
(Walpole) 3: 442
Desire (theme) 2: 194–99
Detective fiction 1: 36–37
Caleb Williams 1: 249–50
Collins, Wilkie 2: 216
Edgar Huntly or Memoir of a
Sleep-Walker 1: 250–51
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
1: 250–51
Mysteries of Winterthurn 3:
175–77
“Development of a Child” (Klein)
SUBJECT INDEX
1: 381
Devil 1: 313; 2: 434–36; 3: 198
“The Devil and Anne Rice” (Rice
and Gilmore) (sidebar) 3: 278
“The Devil and Tom Walker”
(Irving) 2: 442
“The Devil in Manuscript”
(Hawthorne), witchcraft 2: 371
“The Devil Sings the Blues: Heavy
Metal, Gothic Fiction and
‘Postmodern’ Discourse” (Hinds)
1: 461–68
The Devil’s Elixir (Hoffmann). See
Die Elixiere des Teufels
Devlin, James E. 2: 456–58
“Diagnosing the ‘Sir Walter
Disease’: American Architecture
in the Age of Romantic
Literature” (Carso) 1: 496–506
Diamond, Cora 3: 515–16
Dichtung und Wahrheit (Goethe) 2:
344
Dickens, Charles 2: 229, 229–56
cannibalism 2: 237
childhood memories (sidebar)
2: 237
on Collins, Wilkie (sidebar) 2:
223
Eliot, T. S. on (sidebar) 2: 215
Gothic conventions 2: 251–55
humor 2: 234–41
imagery 2: 242–45
principal works 2: 231
“Dickens’ Gloomiest Gothic
Castle” (Ronald) 2: 242–45
Dinesen, Isak 2: 257, 257–78
European Gothic tradition 2:
261–68, 271
horror specialist 2: 283–84
imagination 2: 262–63, 268
Kierkegaard, Søren and 2: 272
on “The Monkey” 2: 276
portrayal of women 2: 264–68
principal works 2: 259
supernatural 2: 263
“‘Dirty Mama’: Horror, Vampires,
and the Maternal in Late
Nineteenth-Century Gothic
Fiction” (Michelis) 1: 376–85
Disguise (theatrical device) 1:
406–7
551
SUBJECT INDEX DO WITH ME WHAT YOU WILL
Do with Me What You Will (Oates)
3: 164
“Doge und Dogaressa”
(Hoffmann) 2: 398
The Dolliver Romance (Hawthorne)
2: 376
“Dolph Heyliger” (Irving) 2: 449
Dombey and Son (Dickens) 2: 230,
251–52
Domestic fiction 1: 265–69
“Don’t Look Now” (du Maurier)
2: 280
Doppelgänger
definition 2: 485
Hoffmann, E. T. A. 1: 305; 2:
391–92, 399–400, 414, 431
James, Henry 2: 473–77
A Legend of Montrose 3: 314
in nineteenth-century
literature 1: 232–33
Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 183–84
Old Mortality 3: 314
Persona (film) 1: 429
The Picture of Dorian Gray 1:
160–62
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde 1: 158–60
“Dorian Gray and the Gothic
Novel” (Poteet) 3: 504–9
Dostoevski, Fyodor 1: 2, 315–16;
2: 433–34
“The Double as Immortal Self”
(Rank) 1: 310–16
“‘Double Born’: Bram Stoker and
the Metrocolonial Gothic”
(Valente) 1: 33
Double Persephone (Atwood) 2:
1–2, 8
Doubleday, Ellen 2: 289
Doubleday, Neal Frank 2: 368–78
Doubles (literary device)
Beckett, Samuel and 1: 38–39
Caleb Williams 3: 369
“Carmilla” 1: 382–84
The Castle of Otranto 3: 369
definition 2: 485–86
Dinesen, Isak 2: 272–73
“The Fat Boy” 2: 236
Foucalt, Michel 3: 350
Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus 1: 26; 3: 338–42,
350
The Italian; or, The Confessional
of the Black Penitents 3: 369
King, Stephen 2: 485–93
Lacan, Jacques 3: 350
Lives of the Twins 3: 178
Melmoth the Wanderer 1: 27
in modern literature 1: 32–35
Nemesis 3: 178
Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 178
The Private Memoirs and Confes-
sions of a Justified Sinner 1: 29
Snake Eyes 3: 178
Soul/Mate 3: 178
552
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde 3: 368–69, 372,
374–81
as supernatural self 1: 310–16
Twin Peaks (television show) 1:
453–54
Vathek 3: 369
The Woman in White 2: 216
See also Doppelgänger
Dougherty, Stephen 3: 218–28
Douglas, Mary 1: 132–33
Douglas, Sir George 2: 432
Douglass, Frederick
“Down, Satan!” (Barker) 1:
287–88
Doyle, Arthur Conan 1: 365
Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret
(Hawthorne) 2: 376
“Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment”
(Hawthorne) 2: 364, 375
“Dr. Jekyll and the Emergence of
Mr. Hyde” (Miyoshi) 3: 365–70
Dracula (character). See Count
Dracula
Dracula (film) 1: 424, (sidebar)
425; 3: 417
Dracula (Stoker) 1: 31, 33–34,
358–59; 3: 385–87
American Psycho and 1: 37
Anglo-Irish identity 1: 171–79
characterization of Count
Dracula 1: 342–44; 3: 405–10
characters as Irish allegory 3:
415–27
“counterfeit” Gothic in 3:
397–404
critical reception 3: 386–87
degeneration 1: 166–69
dreams 1: 168, 330
eroticism in 1: 136–38
film adaptations 1: 446–47
influence of The Castle of
Otranto 3: 395–404
mythology 1: 166–69
narrative structure 3: 270–71
review 3: 393–95, (sidebar) 405
sensationalism 3: 393
Summers, Montague on
(sidebar) 3: 395
victims in 1: 133–36
as Victorian text 1: 128–40
Dracula’s Guest (Stoker) 3: 386–93,
401
Drama 1: 389–91, 401–15
character development 1:
405–6
Davis, Alexander Jackson 1:
499–500
disguise in 1: 406–7
Gothic motifs in 1: 401–9
importance of 1: 26–27
influence of German romantic
playwrights 1: 407–9
landscape as motif 1: 402–5
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
Lewis, Matthew Gregory 1:
338, 402, 408, 412; 3: 32, 34–
36, 37, 41–43
Maturin, Charles Robert 1:
337–38, 407–8, 499, 500; 3:
74, 84–85
nationalism 1: 412
Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 164
repetition in 1: 407
sociopolitical ideology 1:
410–15
stage design 1: 404–5
vampire plays 1: 348–49
Wilde, Oscar 3: 488, 495–97
See also specific names of
plays
The Drawing of the Three (King) 2:
486–87
The Dream (Baillie) 2: 58
“The Dreamers” (Dinesen) 2: 258
Dreams
Dracula 1: 168, 330
horror films 1: 415–16
Jung, Carl G. 1: 329
Myers, F. W. H 1: 330–31
The Private Memoirs and Confes-
sions of a Justified Sinner 2:
431–32
psychology of 1: 326–32
role in Gothic fiction 1: 329–
32; 2: 253
Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and
Incidents (Beckford) 2: 79–80, 87,
89, 97–98
Drury Lane theater 1: 389
Druse, Eleanor. See King, Stephen
du Maurier, Daphne 2: 115, 118,
279, 279–92
Doubleday, Ellen and 2: 289
horror 2: 283–84
Jung, Carl G. and 2: 289
principal works 2: 280
self-identity 2: 289–90
vamp vs. femme fatale 2:
285–86
Dunbar, William 1: 121–22
“The Dungeon” (Oates) 3: 183,
184
“The Dutchess at Prayer”
(Wharton) 3: 463
Duthie, Peter 2: 61–67
Dyer, Richard 2: 188
E
Eakins, Thomas 1: 519
“The Early Gothic Novel”
(Lovecraft) (sidebar) 3: 443
The East Indian (Lewis) 3: 38
“Echoes” (Dinesen) 2: 258
“Edgar Allan Poe” (Lawrence)
(sidebar) 3: 203

“Edgar Allan Poe” (Lovecraft)
(sidebar) 3: 219
Edgar Huntly or Memoir of a
Sleep-Walker (Brown) 1: 250–51;
2: 154, 159–60
Edgeworth, Maria 1: 207,
(sidebar) 3: 306
The Edible Woman (Atwood) 2: 1,
9 of Werter” (Scott) (sidebar) 2: 350
Edinburgh Journal of Science, 1:
334–35
Edinburgh (Scot’s) Magazine, 1: 25
Edmundson, Mark 1: 520
“Edward Randolph’s Portrait”
(Hawthorne) 2: 370
Edwards, Jonathan 3: 277–78
The Effusions of Sensibility; or,
Letters from Lady Honoria
Harrowhart to Miss Sophonisba
Simper (Lewis) 3: 37–38
Egan, James 3: 168–78
Ehrengard (Dinesen) 2: 258
“The Eighteenth-Century Psyche:
The Mysteries of Udolpho”
(Williams) 3: 252–60
Elbert, Monika 3: 466–75
Elder, Marjorie 2: 382–86
Elinor and Marianne (Austen) 2:
25, 33
Eliot, T. S. (sidebar) 2: 215
Die Elixiere des Teufels (Hoffmann)
2: 388, 394, 405
compared to The Private
Memoirs and Confessions of a
Justified Sinner 2: 431
doppelgänger 2: 391–92, 400
influence of The Monk 3:
40–41
uncanny 1: 304
Elizabethan literature 1: 17
Ellis, Bret Easton 1: 36–38
Ellis, S. M. (sidebar) 3: 6
Elwin, Malcolm 3: 368
Emden, Cecil S. 2: 31–35
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 3: 468,
470, 472, 474
“Emily’s Demon-Lover: The
Gothic Revolution and The
Mysteries of Udolpho” (Graham)
3: 249–52
Emma (Austen) 2: 26–27, 32
Emmeline,or, the Orphan of the
Castle (Smith) 1: 96
“Endicott and the Red Cross”
(Hawthorne) 2: 370
Enfield, William 3: 246–49
The English Review, 2: 85
Enigmatic code 1: 319–20
Enlightenment 1: 48–57, 67
An Enquiry Concerning Political
Justice and Its Influence on General
Virtue and Happiness (Godwin) 1:
22; 2: 321–23, 330–31, 334; 3:
212
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
“Epistle to Thomas Ashton from
Florence” (Walpole) 3: 446
The Epistolary Intrigue (Lewis) 3:
37–38
“The Erl-King” (Goethe). See “Der
Erlkonig” (Goethe)
“The Erl-King. From the German
of Goethe. Author of the Sorrows
“The Erl-King’s Daughter” (Scott)
3: 293–94
“Der Erlkonig” (Goethe) (sidebar)
2: 350
Eroticism
in Dracula 1: 136–38
homoeroticism 3: 274–75
vampires 3: 274–76
See also Sexuality
Essay on Sepulchres (Godwin) 1:
98, 101
An Essay on the Sublime (Baillie) 1:
56
“Ethan Brand” (Hawthorne) 2:
365, 374
Ethan Frome (Wharton) 3: 457–58
Ethics of the Sexual Difference
(Irigaray). See Ethique de la
difference sexuelle
Ethique de la difference sexuelle
(Irigaray) 1: 90–91
Ethwald (Baillie) 2: 58
Europe, eighteenth century
aestheticism in 1: 48–57
attitude toward architecture 1:
486–87, 488; 3: 142–43
copyright laws 1: 95
function of literary criticism 1:
95–96
as impetus for Gothic move-
ment 1: 1, 30–31
marriage laws 1: 224–26
role of women 2: 63–65
value of Gothic fiction 1: 221–
27; 3: 23–24
“European Disruptions of the
Idealized Woman: Matthew
Lewis’s The Monk and the
Marquis de Sade’s La Nouvelle
Justine” (Wright) 3: 61–70
European Gothic tradition 1:
74–104, 3: 124–25
vs. American Gothic tradition
1: 57–65; 2: 156–58
Caleb Williams 2: 337–38
development of Gothic fiction
1: 260–64
Dinesen, Isak 2: 261–68, 271
Faulkner, William 2: 298–305
feminist literary theory of 1:
86–91
French Revolution and 1:
74–85
German Romanticism 2:
271–72
“THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 378–
79; 3: 125
influence on Poe, Edgar Allan
3: 188, 194–95
Melmoth the Wanderer 3: 84–91
Melville, Herman 3: 118–22
nationalism in 1: 93–102, 158–
71; 2: 240
Romanticism 1: 249–58
See also Gothic movement
The Europeans (James) 2: 462
“The Eve of St. Agnes” (Keats) 1:
19, 24
SUBJECT INDEX
Evil eye (superstition) 1: 307
Examples of the Interposition of
Providence in the Detection and
Punishment of Murder (Fielding)
3: 24–25
“Excerpt from a letter dated 3
March 1886” (Symonds)
(sidebar) 3: 365
Excess (theme) 3: 352–55, 355
The Exorcist (Blatty) 1: 450
The Exorcist (film) 1: 450–51
“Expedition to Hell” (Hogg) 2:
424–25
Expensive People (Oates) 3: 164,
178
“Extract from a note appended to
a letter on December 9, 1838”
(Beckford) 2: 83–85
Eyes (motif) 3: 472–73
“The Eyes” (Wharton) 3: 457,
459, 472–73
F
A Fable (Faulkner) 2: 294
“The Face of the Tenant: A
Theory of American Gothic”
(Savoy) 1: 66–74
The Fair Maid of Perth (Scott) 3:
312–13
Fairy tales 2: 13, 185–86
“The Fall of the House of
Clennam: Gothic Conventions
in Little Dorrit” (Jarrett) 2:
251–55
“The Fall of the House of Usher”
(Poe) 1: 71–72; 3: 188–89, 196
aristocracy 3: 221
castle in 3: 194–97
compared to “Bartleby the
Scrivener” 3: 122–23
family curse in 2: 221
family murder 2: 311
film adaptation 3: 224
haunted house in 3: 225–26
madness in 3: 204
miscegenation 3: 221–27
slavery 3: 223
553
SUBJECT INDEX “THE FALL RIVER AXE MURDERS”
“The Fall River Axe Murders”
(Carter) 2: 182–83
“Fame” (Jackson) 1: 266
Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter
Scott (Hogg) 2: 422
Family
in horror films 1: 420–22
Jackson, Shirley 1: 265–82
King, Stephen 2: 501–3
Twin Peaks (television show) 1:
455–56
“Family” (Oates) 3: 164
Family curse (Gothic convention)
1: 290–300; 3: 221
The Family Legend (Baillie) 2: 58
Family murder (Gothic
convention) 2: 216, 311
“Family Portraits” (Baptiste) 1:
291–92, 292
“Famine Country” (Oates) 3: 181,
183, 184
Famous Imposters (Stoker) 3: 402
Fanshawe: A Tale (Hawthorne) 2:
364, 379
“Fantasia of the Library”
(Foucault) 1: 92
Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier
(Hoffmann) 2: 393, 395
Fantasmagoriana (Shelley) 1: 25
Fantastic (genre)
definition 1: 128–29
Dinesen, Isak 2: 270–71
Dracula 1: 139
Gebir 1: 257–58
Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 168–77,
180
Fantasy (Gothic element) 2:
183–90, 197–99
“The Fat Boy” (Dickens) 2:
235–38
Fatal Revenge; or The Family of
Montorio (Maturin) 3: 73–74, 84,
92–93
Faulkner, William 2: 293,
293–320
chase in 2: 301–2
grotesques 2: 301
influence of Beardsley, Aubrey
2: 299
influence of Blake, William 2:
306–12
principal works 2: 295–96
Southern Gothic 2: 297–305
Wandering Jew 2: 302
“Faulkner’s Miss Emily and
Blake’s ‘Sick Rose’: ‘Invisible
Worm,’ Nachträglichkeit, and
Retrospective Gothic 2: 306–12
Faust (character) 2: 156–57, 299
See also specific works
“Faust and the Gothic Novel”
(Brown, J. and M.) 2: 354–62
Faust: Ein Fragment (Goethe) 2:
342, 349–53
Faust II (Goethe) 2: 342, 354–61
554
Faust: Part I (Goethe). See
Faust—Der Tragödi erster Teil
Faust—Der Tragödi erster Teil
(Goethe) 2: 341–42, 343–44,
354–61
Fear 2: 10
“All Souls” 3: 473–74
architecture as representation
2: 344–48
comedy and, in films 1: 435
of death 1: 400–401
Gothic response to 1: 1–2
vs horror 3: 237–38, 463
King, Stephen 2: 495, 504
in literary history 1: 16–21, 65
The Marble Faun 2: 383–84
nationalism and 1: 93–102
Radcliffe, Ann 2: 336
of Rice, Anne (sidebar) 3: 278
Scott, Sir Walter 3: 309–13
sublime and 1: 110–13, 148–49
See also Horror; Psychologi-
cal horror; Supernatural
The Feast of All Saints (Rice) 3:
263–64
Fedorko, Kathy A. 3: 476–85
Female Gothic 1: 210–19
freaks 1: 215–16
Radcliffe, Ann 3: 252–59
Shelley, Mary 3: 327–33
“Female Gothic: The Monster’s
Mother” (Moers) (sidebar) 3: 338
“Female Sexuality” (Freud) 1: 378
Feminist literary theory 1: 86–91,
108–9
American Gothic tradition 1:
210–19
“Taming a Tartar” 1: 203–6
Wharton, Edith 3: 459–60,
480–82
Femme fatale, 2: 139, 285–86
“Die Fermate” (Hoffmann) 2: 397
Ferriar, John 1: 207
Fetishism 2: 184–85; 3: 174
Fiedler, Leslie 1: 66–67, 212, 520
on American Gothic tradition
2: 298–305
on Brown, Charles Brockden 2:
156–62
on Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 205–11
Fielding, Henry 1: 490; 3: 24–25
Fielding, Penny 1: 38
Films, horror 1: 398–401, 415–52
American International
Pictures 1: 429
Armageddon 1: 430
comedy and fear 1: 435
Corman, Roger 1: 443–46
demonic 1: 430
Dracula films 1: 446–47
family portrayal in 1: 420–22
German 1: 429, 430–31, 439
Hammer Films 1: 428–29, 435,
440, 445–47
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
history of development 1:
425–39
Japanese 1: 428
King, Stephen 1: 398–401
Lang, Fritz 1: 429, 431
monsters 1: 416–17, 427–30,
442
Poe, Edgar Allan 1: 429,
444–45
popularity of 1: 415
psychological thrillers 1: 438
science fiction 1: 427–29
Surrealist movement and 1:
416
television and 1: 431–32
zombie films 1: 443
See also specific names of
films
Fingal (Macpherson) 1: 97–98
Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces
(Carter) 2: 180, 183–85, (sidebar)
191
First Impressions (Austen) 2: 25,
32, 33
First Love: A Gothic Tale (Oates) 3:
165
Fisher, Bejamin F. IV 3: 128–32
Five Sermons on the Errors of the
Roman Catholic Church (Maturin)
3: 92, 95
Fleetwood; or, The New Man of
Feeling (Godwin) (sidebar) 2:
330, 331
Flight (motif). See Chase (motif)
Folklore, vampire 1: 344–45, 349,
353
Fontaine, Joan 2: 119
Fonthill Abbey 2: 85–86
Forbes, Esther 1: 62–65
“’A Forced Solitude’: Mary Shelley
and the Creation of
Frankenstein’s Monster”
(Tillotson) 3: 342–48
“Foreword” (Morrison) 3: 137–38
“A Forgotten Creator of Ghosts:
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu,
Possible Inspirer of the Brontës”
(Kenton) (sidebar) 3: 22
The Fortunes of Nigel (Scott) 3:
298, 311, 313
The Fortunes of Perkin Warbek
(Shelley) 3: 320
The Fortunes of Torlough O’Brien
(Le Fanu) 3: 7, 10–15
“Foucault in the House of Usher:
Some Historical Permutations in
Poe’s Gothic” (Dougherty) 3:
218–28
Foucault, Michel 1: 92, 145–46
doubles in 3: 350
family curse in 1: 295–96; 3:
221

Fountainville Forest,a Play, in Five
acts, as Performed at the
Theatre-Royal Covent-Garden
(Boaden) 1: 394–98, 413
Foxfire (Oates) 3: 165
The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and
Ethics in Greek Tragedy and
Philosophy (Nussbaum) 3: 510
“Fragment of a Novel” (Byron) 1:
240–43
Frank, Frederick S. 2: 89–95,
(sidebar) 3: 434
Frankenstein (film) (sidebar) 1:
416, 432–35, 440–42
Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus (Shelley) 1: 2, 25–27,
31; 2: 116; 3: 319–21, 343
as autobiography (sidebar) 3:
328, 342–47
birth metaphor (sidebar) 3:
338
British politics in 3: 348–55
compared to Caleb Williams 3:
339
compared to Pet Sematary 2:
500
compared to The Strange Case
of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 3:
371
compared to “The Bell Tower”
(sidebar) 3: 111
compared to Wonderland 3:
169–70
doubles in 3: 338–42, 350
dramatization of 1: 26
enigmatic code 1: 319–20
excess in 3: 352–55
female body 3: 330
feminist literary theory of 1:
108
film adaptation of 1: 422–25,
440–42
French Revolution 1: 82–85; 3:
350–52
heroine in 2: 138
as horror classic 1: 261–62
influence of St. Leon 2: 323
influence on Interview with a
Vampire 3: 280
influences on 3: 321
loneliness in 3: 342–47
Milton, John in 3: 341
monster 3: 335–36, 339–42,
348–55
morality of 3: 335–36
narrative structure 3: 86
Promethean mythology 3:
338–442
psychoanalysis of 1: 322–24,
331
Scott, Sir Walter on 3: 336–37,
(sidebar) 349
Shelley, Percy Bysshe on 3:
335–36
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
as social philosophy 1: 255
supernatural 3: 336–37
“Frankenstein, or the New
Prometheus” (Bloom) 3: 337–42
Fraser, Graham 1: 38–39
“Das Fräulein von Scuderi”
(Hoffmann) 2: 398
Fredolfo: A Tragedy (Maturin) 3:
74, 84–85
“Das fremde Kind” (Hoffmann) 2:
397
French authors 1: 2; 3: 97–103
French Revolution 1: 74–85, 410;
3: 350–52
French Ways and Their Meaning
(Wharton) 3: 476, 479
Freund, Karl 1: 437
Freud, Sigmund 1: 70–71, 87, 90;
3: 372
beating fantasy 3: 329
demonic possession 1: 328
dream interpretation 1:
326–32
ghost stories 3: 462–63
on humor 2: 18
on hysteria 3: 243
Jung, Carl G. and 1: 329
Nachträglichkeit 2: 310
Oedipal complex 1: 377–79,
380, 384
pre-oedipal 1: 377–79
on “Der Sandmann” 2: 402–3,
408–9, 413
on the sublime 1: 152–53
uncanny 1: 301–10, 454,
(sidebar) 2: 308
See also Psychoanalysis
Friedkin, William 1: 450–51
A Friend to Genius (critic) 3:
48–51
“The Friends of the Friends”
(James) 2: 471, 473
Frisch, Shelley L. 2: 408–11
“From Otranto to
Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner’s
Gothic Heritage” (Kerr) 2:
297–306
“From the Sublime to the
Uncanny: Victorian Gothic and
Sensation Fiction” (Milbank) 1:
86–92
The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton) 3:
463
Fugitive Verses (Baillie) 2: 49
“The Fullness of Life” (Wharton)
3: 458
Furnier, Vincent. See Cooper,
Alice
“Further Confessions” (Oates) 3:
180
Fuseli, Henry 1: 519, 520
Fuss, Diana 1: 72–73
GENRES
G
Gamer, Michael 3: 442–54
A Garden of Earthly Delights
(Oates) 3: 164
The Garden of Earthly Delights
(painting) 3: 56
Gardiner, H. W. 3: 379
Garner, Margaret 3: 146–47
Gaslight (film) 1: 339–40
Geary, Robert F. 3: 21–27
Gebir (Landor) 1: 257–58
Gender identity
SUBJECT INDEX
Klein, Melanie on 1: 379–81
pre-oedipal stage 1: 377–79
vampires 1: 382–84; 3: 275,
281–85
Gender relations
Northanger Abbey 1: 221–22
“Taming a Tartar” 1: 199–200
Villette 2: 122–27
Gender roles 3: 476–80
Genres
adventure fiction 3: 359
Ambiguous Gothic 2: 412–17,
453–55; 3: 176
Bildungsroman 2: 246–48
comic Gothic 2: 17–23
confessional novels 3: 211–17
convent stories 2: 223–24
curse narratives 1: 290–300
detective fiction 1: 36–37,
249–51; 2: 216; 3: 175–77
domestic fiction 1: 265–69
doppelgänger 1: 158–60, 305; 2:
391–92, 399–400, 414, 431,
473–377, 485
fantastic 1: 128–29; 3: 168–77,
180
female Gothic 1: 210–19; 2:
20, 36; 3: 252–59, 327–33
ghost stories 2: 6–8, 11, 229,
230, 364, 395, 462–64, 466–
71, (sidebar) 471; 3: 181, 459,
461–62, 466–75
historical novels 1: 58–65; 2:
400
horror 1: 261–62; 2: 481–504
Jacobin 1: 78
mystery 2: 249
novel of manners 2: 247–48
Oriental 1: 260–61; 2: 88–89,
96
romances 1: 49–52, 129–33,
220–26, 249–58, 501–2; 2:
115–20, 213–17, 368–77,
380–81; 3: 6–15
satire 3: 283
sea stories 1: 251–52; 3:
205–11
sensation fiction 1: 87–91,
354; 2: 211–15, 218–19, 223–
26, 431, 447; 3: 5–6
slave narratives 1: 183–92; 3:
146–48
555
SUBJECT INDEX “A GENUINE BORDER STORY”
Southern Gothic 2: 297–305;
3: 178
sportive Gothic 2: 447–51,
451–53
television Gothic 1: 452–59
terror-romances 1: 249–58
travel narrative 3: 107–8
urban Gothic 1: 129, 130–33,
139
vampire fiction 3: 266–76
Westerns 3: 205–6
See also Gothic movement
“A Genuine Border Story” (Hogg)
2: 427
Getatore (superstition) 1: 308–9
“The Ghost of Edward” (Baillie) 2:
59
“The Ghost of Fadon” (Baillie) 2:
60
Ghost stories
Atwood, Margaret 2: 6–8, 11
“Die Automate” 2: 388, 395
Dickens, Charles 2: 229, 230
Freudian analysis 3: 462–63
James, Henry 2: 462–64, 466–
71, (sidebar) 471
“Legends of the Province-
House” 2: 364
“Night-Side” 3: 181
Wharton, Edith 3: 459, 461–
63, 466–75, 482
Wilde, Oscar 3: 488
Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery
(Le Fanu) 3: 1
The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton
(Wharton) 3: 466
“The Ghostly Rental” (James) 2:
461, 463, 471–72
Ghosts 1: 18
Beloved 3: 150–60
Cambrio-Britons 1: 413–15
The Castle of Otranto: A Story 3:
451–52
The Castle Spectre 1: 338
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1:
337
hallucinations 1: 333–41
Morrison, Toni 3: 138
Shelley, Mary on 3: 321–24
Wharton, Edith 3: 460–62,
466–75
See also Grotesques;
Supernatural
Ghosts (Wharton) 3: 457, 459,
460–62
“Ghosts in the Machines: The
Haunted Castle in the Works of
Stephen King and Clive Barker”
(Oakes) 1: 283–90
“The Giant Woman” (Oates) 3:
180
The Giaour (Byron) (sidebar) 2: 95
Gibbs, Kenneth 2: 494–99
Giddens, Anthony 1: 130–31
Gide, André 2: 423
556
Gil Blas (Le Sage) 1: 334
Gill, R. B. 2: 95–101
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 1: 109,
212, (sidebar) 213, 214–15
Gilmor, Robert III 1: 502–5
Gilmore, Michael T. 2: 170–77
Gilmore, Mikal (sidebar) 3: 278
“The Girl with the Hungry Eyes”
(Leiber) 1: 364–65, 367
Girouard, Mark 1: 490
Glen Ellen (house) 1: 504
“Glenallan” (Bulwer-Lyton) 1:
12–16
Glock, Waldo S. (sidebar) 2: 37
Go Down, Moses (Faulkner) 2: 294
Gobineau, Arthur de 3: 222
“Goblin Market” (Rossetti)
(sidebar) 1: 143
“The Goblin Who Stole a Sexton”
(Dickens) 2: 231–34
Goddu, Teresa A. 1: 180–97, 520
Godwin, William 1: 2, 20, 81, 87;
2: 321, 321–39
canonization of writers 1: 98
compared to Brown, Charles
Brockden (sidebar) 2: 171
confessional style of 3: 211–13
on cultural nationalism 1: 99,
101
detective fiction 1: 249–50
on government 3: 350–51
influence of DeFoe, Daniel 3:
212
influence of Richardson, Sam-
uel 3: 212–13
influence of the French
Revolution 1: 78–80
influence on Brown, Charles
Brockden 2: 168, 170–72
influence on The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym 3: 213–17
necromancy 2: 326–27
philosophy of 2: 330–37
Poe, Edgar Allan on (sidebar)
2: 328; 3: 212
“Preface” to Fleetwood; or, The
New Man of Feeling (sidebar)
2: 330
principal works 2: 323–24
Shelley, Mary and 3: 319, 339,
345–46
social injustice 1: 22–23
sorcery 2: 325
supernatural 2: 324–27
witchcraft 2: 325–26
Wollstonecraft, Mary and 2:
322
“The Godwinian Confessional
Narrative and Psychological
Terror in Arthur Gordon Pym”
(Markley) 3: 211–18
“Godwin’s Necromancy” (Poe)
(sidebar) 2: 328
“Godwin’s Things As They Are”
(The Monthly Review) 2: 327–30
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1:
2; 2: 341, 341–62
architecture 2: 344–49
Lewis, Matthew Gregory and
2: 349–53
märchen 2: 396
translation of “Der Erlkonig”
(sidebar) 2: 350
uncanny 1: 308
Goethe’s Faust: Part II (Goethe).
See Faust II
Goethe’s Roman Elegies (Goethe) 2:
341
Goetz of Berlichingen with the Iron
Hand (Goethe). See Goetz von
Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand
Goetz von Berlichingen mit der
eisernen Hand (Goethe) 2: 341
“The Gold Bug” (Poe) 3: 206
The Golden Ass (Apuleius) 1:
20–21
The Golden Bowl (James) 2: 462
“The Golden Pot” (Hoffmann).
See “Der goldene Topf”
“Der goldene Topf” (Hoffmann)
2: 388, 402, 415
interpretations of 2: 393–97
supernatural 2: 412
Golem (film) 1: 434–35
Gondal (imaginary island) 2: 131,
132
Goodness, nature of 3: 510–11
Goodrich, Samuel 2: 364
Gorey, Edward (sidebar) 1: 510
Goth (music) 1: 470–73
Gothic (term)
architecture 3: 142
Brontë, Charlotte and 2: 104–5
definition 1: 507; 2: 10–11,
113–14
negative connotations of 1:
40–42, 507; 2: 297–98
Oates, Joyce Carol on 3:
178–80
Gothic America (Goddu) 1: 520
“Gothic and Decadence: Robert
Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde,
H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Arthur
Machen” (Punter) 1: 158–71
“Gothic and Romance:
Retribution and Reconciliation”
(Sage) 3: 6–16
“The Gothic Arsenal of Edith
Wharton” (Murray) 3: 462–66
“The Gothic Caleb Williams”
(Rizzo) 2: 337–38
“Gothic Drama as Nationalistic
Catharsis” (Hoeveler) 1: 410–15
“Gothic Fiction and the French
Revolution” (Paulson) 1: 74–86
“The Gothic Formula of
‘Bartleby’” (Ryan) 3: 122–24

“Gothic Genealogies: Dracula,
Bowen’s Court, and Anglo-Irish
Psychology” (Ingelbien) 1:
171–80
“The Gothic Imaginary: Goethe
in Strasbourg” (Calhoon) 2:
344–49
“Gothic in the Horror Film
1930-1980” (Punter) 1: 439–52
“Gothic Letter on a Hot Night”
(Atwood) 2: 8
“Gothic Libraries and National
Subjects” (Lynch) 1: 92–102
Gothic literature. See Gothic
movement
“Gothic Motifs in the Waverly
Novels” (Le Tellier) 3: 305–16
Gothic movement
abnormal psychology 1:
332–41
aestheticism 1: 48–57, 107–8
African American experience
1: 108, 180–92
American vs. European 1: 57–
65; 2: 156–58
Antebellum period 1: 180–92
art 1: 506–26
cannibalism 2: 237
character types 1: 20; 2: 298–
302, 403–7
compared to modernism 1:
30–39
“counterfeiting” 3: 397–404,
451–52
demonic women in fiction 2:
14–16
drama 1: 26–27, 401–15
evolution of 1: 40–47
Faustian legend 2: 156–57, 299
films 1: 415–52
French authors 1: 2
French Revolution 1: 74–85,
410
Irish authors 1: 38
language of 1: 38–39
libraries in 1: 92–102
as masculine endeavor 1: 523
medieval in 1: 49–51, 61,
511–13
music 1: 461–73
1990s 1: 520
origins 1: 1–2, 30–31; 2: 116,
189
overviews 1: 1–102
performing arts 1: 389–474
poetry of 1: 18–20, 24, 52–55
reader appreciation 1: 4–5
relationship of architecture to
literature 1: 480–86, 497–505
romances vs. novels 1: 49–52
Romanticism and 1: 2, 21–29,
42–45; 2: 271, 494; 3: 124,
308–9
Russian authors 1: 2
Scottish writers 1: 2
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
social history of 1: 48–57
television 1: 452–60
Victorian period and 1: 61–62,
86–91
visual arts 1: 475–526
women’s lack of recognition 1:
212
See also American Gothic
tradition; European Gothic
tradition; Genres; specific
topics
“Gothic Origins” (Botting) 1:
48–57
“Gothic Plot in Great
Expectations” (Loe) 2: 245–51
“Gothic Possibilities in
Moby-Dick” (Fisher) 3: 128–32
“Gothic Pyrotechnics” (Brockway)
(sidebar) 2: 191
“Gothic Repetitions: Toni
Morrison’s Changing Use of
Echo” (Beutel) 3: 138–42
Gothic revival
American 1: 497–505
architecture 1: 477–78, 486–
89, 497–505
Davis, Alexander Jackson
(sidebar) 1: 491
England vs. United States 1:
488–89
“Gothic Spaces, The Political
Aspects of Toni Morrison’s
Beloved” (Weissberg) 3: 142–50
“The Gothic Spirit” (Ranger) 1:
401–11
“The Gothic Text: Life and Art”
(Fedorko) 3: 476–85
“Gothic Transformations: Isak
Dinesen and the Gothic” (James,
S.) 2: 261–69
“The Gothic Unity of Godwin’s
Caleb Williams” (Graham) 2:
330–37
“The Gothic Vathek: The Problem
of Genre Resolved” (Frank) 2:
89–95
“The Gothic Wilde” (Lawler) 3:
493–502
Governor General’s Award 2: 1, 3
Graham, Kenneth 2: 330–37; 3:
249–52
Graham’s Magazine, (sidebar) 2:
369
“The Grave” (Blair, R.) 1: 53
Graveyard poetry 1: 52–55
Gray, Thomas 3: 446
“The Great Carbuncle,” 2: 374
Great Expectations (Dickens) 2:
229–30, 247, 252
as Bildungsroman 2: 246–48
cannibalism 2: 237
Gothic plot 2: 248–51
as novel of manners 2: 247–48
punishment of children 2:
239–40
A HAUNT OF FEARS
The Great God Pan (Machen) 2:
169–70
The Greater Inclination (Wharton)
3: 457
Green, Howard 2: 261
“Green Tea” (Le Fanu) 1: 335–36;
3: 2
Greg, W. R. 2: 120–21
“The Grey Champion”
(Hawthorne) 2: 370
Griffin, Susan M. 2: 217–28
Griffith, Clark 3: 202–5
Grimké, Sarah 1: 182
SUBJECT INDEX
Gross Clinic (painting) 1: 519
Gross, Louis S. 1: 57–66
“The Grotesque and the Gothic”
(Appel) 2: 300–301
Grotesques 1: 19
American Gothic tradition 2:
300–301
architecture 1: 483
Carter, Angela 2: 190–94
definition 2: 300
sublime and 2: 300
techno-gothic 2: 68–72
See also Ghosts
Guattari, Felix 3: 226–27
Guy Deverell (Le Fanu) 3: 1–2
Guy Domville (James) 2: 462,
466–67, 473
Guy Mannering (Scott) 3: 306–7,
310–14
H
Halberstam, Judith 1: 197–99,
205; 2: 234
Hale, Sarah J. 1: 211–12
Halloween (Burns) 1: 18
Hallucinations 1: 333–41
The Hamlet (Faulkner) 2: 294
Hammer Films 1: 428–29, 435,
440, 445–47
The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood) 2:
1–2, 11, 13
Hannah, Barbara 3: 380
Hannaham, James 1: 468–73
The Happy Prince (Wilde) 3: 488
Hardy, Thomas 1: 34–35
The Harlem Book of the Dead (Van
Der Zee) 3: 146
Harlequin formula 3: 281–83
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine,
(sidebar) 2: 55
Hartman, Geoffrey 2: 302
Haslam, John 1: 338–39
Haslam, Richard 3: 91–97
Hassan, Ihab 2: 301, 302
A Haunt of Fears (Barker) 2: 184
557
SUBJECT INDEX THE HAUNTED CASTLE
The Haunted Castle (Railo) 1: 284
“The Haunted Chamber”
(Radcliffe) 3: 233–37
Haunted house (Gothic
convention)
“The Fall of the House of
Usher” 3: 225–26
The House of Seven Gables 1:
292–94
symbolism of family curse 1:
290–300
See also Castle (Gothic
convention)
“Haunted Houses I and II”
(Mighall) 1: 290–301
The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s
Bargain (Dickens) 2: 230
“The Haunted Palace” (Poe) 3:
223–24
Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque
(Oates) 3: 163–64, 180, 184
The Haunting (film) 1: 281
“A Haunting Back: Harriet Jacobs,
African-American Narrative, and
the Gothic” (Goddu) 1: 180–97
The Haunting of Hill House
(Jackson) (sidebar) 1: 464
film adaptation 1: 281
loneliness in 1: 273–74
supernatural 1: 274–75
To Have and Have Not (film)
(Faulkner) 2: 294
Hawkins, Anthony Hope 1: 130
“Hawthorne and the Gothic
Romance” (Lundbland) 2:
378–82
Hawthorne, Julian (sidebar) 3:
503
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 363,
363–86
curse narratives 1: 292–95
European Gothic tradition 2:
378–79; 3: 125
Goodrich, Samuel and 2: 364
influence of German Romanti-
cism 2: 379
influence of Maturin, Charles
Robert 2: 374
influence of Radcliffe, Ann 2:
376
influence on James, Henry 2:
462–63
mysterious portrait and 2: 370
Poe, Edgar Allan on (sidebar)
2: 369, 379
principal works 2: 365–66
spiritualism 2: 379–80
witchcraft 2: 371–73
“Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun: A
Gothic Structure” (Elder) 2:
382–86
“Hawthorne’s Use of Three
Gothic Patterns” (Doubleday) 2:
368–78
The Hay Wain (painting) 3: 55
558
Hazlitt, William (sidebar) 2: 163,
(sidebar) 3: 298
The Heart of Midlothian (Scott) 3:
292
fear 3: 310
mystery 3: 308
robbers 3: 313
violence 3: 311–12
“Heat” (Oates) 3: 178
Heat: And Other Stories (Oates) 3:
165
Heavy metal music
compared to Gothic novel 1:
461–67
Led Zeppelin I 1: 461
Satanism 1: 463–65
sexuality in lyrics 1: 462–63
subversive nature of 1: 466–67
Hedonism 3: 512–15
Heilman, Robert B. 2: 107–14
“The Hellbound Heart” (Barker)
1: 288–89
Heller, Tamar 2: 205–10
Heller, Terry 2: 312–19
Helyer, Ruth 1: 36–37
Henley, Samuel 2: 87–88
Hennelly, Mark M. Jr 3: 51–61
Henriquez (Baillie) 2: 58
“Henry James’ Ghost Stories”
(Woolf) (sidebar) 2: 471
Heredity. See Family curse (Gothic
convention)
A Heritage of Horror (Pirie) 1: 445
Heroes 1: 24; 2: 299
Byronic (sidebar) 1: 241,
253–54
doubles and 1: 313
in drama 1: 405–6
Melville, Herman 3: 116
solitude 1: 253–54
Heroes and Villains (Carter) 2: 180,
188
Heroines
A Bloodsmoor Romance 3:
174–75
of Brontë, Charlotte 2: 107–14
The Castle of Otranto 2: 138,
144
of Dinesen, Isak 2: 264–68
in drama 1: 405–6
femme fatale 2: 139
Frankenstein; or, the Modern
Prometheus 2: 138
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 1:
214–15
The Italian 2: 138, 139
Jane Eyre 2: 115–20, (sidebar)
116
Justine 3: 64, 67–69
Little Dorrit 2: 253
madness 1: 339–41
Melmoth the Wanderer 2: 138–
41, 144
Melville, Herman 3: 115–16
The Monk 2: 138–39; 3: 64–67
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
“The Monkey” 2: 274–75
The Mysteries of Udolpho 2: 138,
139, 144; 3: 254–59
Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 183
Radcliffe, Ann 1: 221–24; 3: 64
in Rebecca 2: 118–19, 285–90
submissiveness 2: 138
Wuthering Heights 1: 138–45
See also Women
“Heroines of Nineteenth-Century
Fiction” (Howells) (sidebar) 2:
116
Herzog, Werner 1: 430–31
Hibbert, Samuel 1: 334, 336–37,
338
Hieroglyphic Tales (Walpole) 3: 431
The High Bid (James) 2: 462
Hill, Leslie 1: 376
The Hill of Dreams (Machen) 1:
170–71
Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall 1:
461–68
Historical novels 1: 58–65; 2: 400
Historiography 1: 68–69
The History of Caliph Vathek: An
Arabian Tale (Beckford). See
Vathek
History of English Poetry (Wharton)
1: 54
A History of New York, from the
Beginning of the World to the End
of the Dutch Dynasty (Irving) 2:
441–42
A History of the Life and Voyages of
Christopher Columbus (Irving) 2:
442–43
Hitchcock, Alfred 1: 435, (sidebar)
436, 437, 447–48
Hoeveler, Diane Long 1: 410–15;
3: 327–35
Hoffmann, E. T. A. 1: 2; 2: 387,
387–420
Cobb, Palmer on (sidebar) 2:
412
compared to Shelley, Mary 3:
330
doppelgänger 1: 305; 2: 391–92,
399–400, 414, 431
Gide, André and 2: 423
influence of Lewis, Matthew
Gregory 3: 40–41
influence on Hogg, James 2:
431
märchen 2: 395, 397
musical life 2: 387, 398
principal works 2: 388–89
psychological horror 2: 411–17
Scott, Sir Walter on (sidebar) 2:
392, 401, 407
uncanny guest 1: 302–4; 2:
403–11
“Hoffmann’s Uncanny Guest: A
Reading of ‘Der Sandmann’”
(Prawer) 2: 401–8

“Hoffmann’s Weird Tales”
(Literary World), 2: 392–93
“Hogg” (Saintsbury) (sidebar) 2:
429
Hogg, James 1: 2, 28–29, 80; 2:
421, 421–39
compared to Dostoevski, Fyo-
dor 2: 433–34
influence of Hoffmann, E. T.
A. 2: 431
influence on Poe, Edgar Allan
3: 213
poetry 2: 421–23, 427
principal works 2: 423–24
Scott, Sir Walter and 2: 421–
22, 432–33
supernatural 2: 422–23, 425–
28, 431–32
Hogle, Jerrold E. 3: 395–405
Hollington, Michael (sidebar) 2:
252
“The Hollow of the Three Hills”
(Hawthorne) 2: 364, 366–68,
371
Holt, Victoria 2: 115, 119–20
“Homely Gothic” (Botting) 2:
215–17
Homosexuality 1: 72–73
Beckford, William 2: 87, 98
in “The Monkey” 2: 273–76
See also Sexuality
Hooper, Jane Margaret 1: 296–98,
300
Hope, Anthony. See Hawkins,
Anthony Hope
“Hop-Frog: Or, the Eight Chained
Orang-Outangs” (Poe) 3: 189
Horace 1: 41
“Le Horla” (Maupassant) 1: 314
Horner, Avril 2: 284–91
Horror
architecture as representation
2: 344–48
Calvinist motifs in 3: 277
Dinesen, Isak 2: 283–84
drama 1: 390
films, 1930-1980 1: 439–51
films, American 1: 398–401,
415–39
films, German 1: 429, 430–31,
439
films, Japanese 1: 428
Lewis, Matthew Gregory
(sidebar) 3: 62
in The Mysteries of Udolpho 1:
225–26
Oates, Joyce Carol on (sidebar)
3: 179
pornography and 2: 187–88; 3:
284
science fiction films 1: 427–29
slavery as 1: 181–92, 520
television 1: 390–91, 431–32
vs. terror 3: 237–38, 463
Wharton, Edith 3: 463–66
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
“INTERRACIAL SEXUAL DESIRE IN CHARLOTTE DACRE’S ZOFLOYA”
in Wuthering Heights 1: 262–63
zombie films 1: 443
See also Fear; Psychological
horror; Supernatural
“The House” (Jackson) 1: 280
The House and the Brain
(Bulwer-Lytton) 1: 262–63
House at Hawk’s End (Nicole) 2:
120
The House by the Churchyard (Le
Fanu) 3: 1–2, 5
The House of Mirth (Wharton) 3:
457–358, 459–60, 481
The House of Raby; Or, Our Lady of
Darkness (Hooper) 1: 296–98,
300
The House of Seven Gables
(Hawthorne) 2: 364–65, 380
family curse 1: 294–95
haunted house 1: 292–94
mysterious portrait 2: 370
witchcraft 2: 373
The House of the Vampire (Viereck)
1: 363
“How Readers Make Meaning”
(Crosman) 2: 308–10
Howe, S. G. 1: 296
Howells, Coral Ann 2: 10–17
Howells, William Dean (sidebar)
2: 116, 462
“Howe’s Masquerade”
(Hawthorne) 2: 369
Huckleberry Finn (Twain) 1:
125–26
Human nature 2: 51–54, 56–57
Hume, David 2: 95, 99–100
Hume, Marilyn 2: 146–50
Humor
Carter, Angela 2: 185
Dickens, Charles 2: 234–41
in early Gothic literature 2:
298
and fear, in films 1: 435
Irving, Washington 2: 451–54
Lady Oracle 2: 17–23
“The Legend of Sleepy Hol-
low” 2: 447–48
The Magic Toyshop 2: 185
The Private Memoirs and Confes-
sions of a Justified Sinner 2:
433–34
Hurd, Richard 1: 42–46, 54–55; 3:
449–50
Hysteria
as deception 2: 69–73
feminist literary theory 1: 211
Freud, Sigmund on 3: 243
See also Madness
I “Interracial Sexual Desire in
“I and My Chimney” (Melville) 3:
114
I Lock the Door upon Myself (Oates)
3: 165
“’I Wants to Make Your Flesh
Creep’: Notes toward a Reading
of the Comic-Gothic in
Dickens” (Wolfreys) 2: 234–42
“I Was a Teenage Grave Robber”
(King) 2: 481
Identity crisis, “Der Sandmann,”
2: 412–17
Illustrations of madness: exhibiting
a singular case of insanity and a
no less remarkable difference in
SUBJECT INDEX
medical opinion: developing the
nature of the assailment,and the
manner of working events; with a
description of the tortures
experienced by bomb-bursting,
lobster-cracking, and lengthening of
the brain (Halsam) 1: 338–39
“‘I’m in the Business Too’: Gothic
Chivalry, Private Eyes, and
Proxy Sex and Violence in
Chandler’s The Big Sleep”
(Rzepka) 1: 36
Imagery
in Bleak House 2: 242–45
Melville, Herman 3: 113–14
music 3: 114
tower 3: 113–14
Imagination 2: 262–63, 268
Imogen (Godwin) 1: 411
The Importance of Being Earnest
(Wilde) 3: 488
In a Glass Darkly (Le Fanu) 1:
335–36; 3: 2
“In Cold Blood” (Capote) 1: 66
In the Circles of Fear and Desire
(Day) 2: 312–13, 317
“In the Region of Ice” (Oates) 3:
183
Incest. See Sexuality, incest
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
(Jacobs) 1: 185–92
The Infernal Desire Machines of
Doctor Hoffman (Carter) 2: 180,
195–99
Ingebretsen, Edward J. 3: 277–86
Ingelbien, Raphael 1: 171–80
Ingemann, Bernhard Severin 2:
272–73
An Inland Voyage (Stevenson) 3:
359
Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual
Powers (Abercrombie) 1: 333–34
Insanity. See Madness
Intentions (Wilde) 3: 488, 493,
504, 507
Interlunar (Atwood) 2: 11
The Interpretations of Dreams
(Freud) 1: 326–28
Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya”
(Mellor) 1: 207–10
559
SUBJECT INDEX “THE INTERRUPTED CADENCE”
“The Interrupted Cadence”
(Hoffmann). See “Die Fermate”
“An Interview with Angela
Carter” (Carter and Katsavos) 2:
181–82
Interview with the Vampire (Rice) 1:
369–70; 3: 263–65
Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus 3: 280
theological debate in 3:
278–85
See also Vampire Chronicles
“The Intoxicated” (Jackson) 1:
271, 272
“Introduction: The Art of
Haunting” (Burns, S.) 1: 518–25
“An Introduction to the American
Horror Film” (Wood) 1: 415–25
Introduction to The Best Tales of
Hoffmann (Bleiler) 2: 393–401
Introduction to The Castle of
Otranto (Gamer) 3: 442–54
Introduction to The Castle of
Otranto: A Gothic Story and The
Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy
(Frank) (sidebar) 3: 434
Introduction to Frankenstein; or
The Modern Prometheus (Butler,
M.) (sidebar) 3: 328
Introduction to Gothic Art
(Martindale) 1: 506–11
Introduction to Gothic Sculpture
1140-1300 (Williamson) 1:
511–18
Introduction to Melmoth the
Wanderer (Baldick) 3: 84–91
Introduction to Plays on the
Passions (Duthie) 2: 61–67
“Introductory” (Birkhead) 1:
16–21
“Introductory Discourse” (Baillie)
2: 51–54, 56–57, 62, (sidebar) 68
Intruder in the Dust (Faulkner) 2:
302
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(film) 1: 442
Iphigenia in Tauris (Goethe). See
Iphigenie auf Tauris
Iphigenie auf Tauris (Goethe) 2:
341
Ireland, W. H. 3: 199
Irigaray, Luce 1: 90–91
“Irving and the Gothic Tradition”
(Clendenning) 2: 446–51
Irving, Henry 3: 400–401
Irving, Washington 1: 262; 2:
379, 441, 441–60
Ambiguous gothic 2: 453–55
American Gothic tradition 2:
443, 446–55
burlesque 2: 452–54
compared to Radcliffe, Ann 2:
453–55
560
compared to Scott, Sir Walter
2: 453
humor 2: 451–52
innovator of sportive Gothic
2: 447–51, 451–53
parody 2: 448–49, 453, 458–59
principal works 2: 443
the sublime 2: 452
use of sexual innuendo 2:
456–58
“Irving’s ‘Adventure of the
German Student’” (Devlin) 2:
456–58
“Irving’s German Student”
(Lupack) 2: 458–59
“Irving’s Use of the Gothic
Mode” (Ringe) (sidebar) 2: 450
Irwin, Joseph James (sidebar) 3:
62
Island Nights’ Entertainments
(Stevenson) 3: 360
The Island of Dr Moreau (Wells) 1:
162–66, 163
Island of Lost Souls (film) 1:
441–42
“Isle of the Devils” (Lewis) 1: 208
“The Isle of Voices” (Stevenson)
3: 360
IT (King) 2: 501
The Italian; or, The Confessional of
the Black Penitents (Radcliffe) 2:
36; 3: 232, 243
doubles in 3: 369
heroine in 2: 138, 139
women’s education 3: 239–40,
242–44
Italy: With Sketches of Spain and
Portugal (Beckford) 2: 80
Ivanhoe (Scott) 3: 308, 310, 312
J Johnson, Greg 3: 178–85
Jackson, Shirley 1: 264–82,
(sidebar) 464
house theme 1: 280–82
loneliness theme 1: 272–78
marriage reflected in fiction 1:
266
misanthropy theme 1: 278–80
science fiction 1: 271–72
supernatural 1: 264, 267–72,
274–75
Jacobs, Harriet 1: 185–92
Jaffe, Aniela 3: 465
“James Boaden” (Temple)
(sidebar) 1: 399
James, Henry 1: 31, 129; 2:
214–15, 461, 461–80
compared to Lewis, Matthew
Gregory 2: 446–47
doppelgänger 2: 473–77
ghost stories 2: 462–64, 466–
71, (sidebar) 471
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
Gothic conventions 2: 470–77
house metaphor 2: 472–77
Howells, William Dean and 2:
462
influence of Hawthorne,
Nathaniel 2: 462–63
principal works 2: 464–65
supernatural 2: 463–64,
470–73
Wharton, Edith and 3: 459,
483
James, M. R. 1: 38
James, Sibyl 2: 261–69
“Jamesian Gothicism: The
Haunted Castle of the Mind”
(Shelden) 2: 470–78
Jameson, Fredric 1: 146–47,
466–67
Jane Austen and her Art (Lascelles)
2: 32
“Jane Austen’s Gothic
Architecture” (Lamont) 2: 41–46
Jane Eyre (Brontë, C.) 2: 103–5,
111, (sidebar) 121
Gothic conventions 2: 108–9
heroines (sidebar) 2: 116
masculine tone 2: 114–15
as prototype for modern
Gothic 2: 115–20
Jane Eyre (film) 1: 119
Jane Talbot (Brown) 2: 154, 162
“Janice” (Jackson) 1: 269
Jarrett, David 2: 251–55
Jazz (Morrison) 3: 140–41
Jentsch, E. 1: 301–2
The Jewel of Seven Stars (Stoker) 3:
386
Jewsbury, Geraldine (sidebar) 2:
207
“Joanna Baillie and Charlotte
Dacre” (Clery) 2: 54–61
Johnson, Diane 1: 217–19
Johnson, Heather 2: 190–94
Johnson, Samuel 1: 50–51
“The Jolly Corner” (James) 2: 461,
463–64, 466–77
“Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu” (Ellis)
(sidebar) 3: 6
“Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu”
(Rolleston) 3: 5–6
Joshi, S. T. 1: 264–83
“A journal entry of October 15,
1821” (Byron) (sidebar) 3: 42
Journal of a West India Proprietor,
Kept during a Residence in the
Island of Jamaica (Lewis) 3:
32–33
The Journal of Julius Rodman (Poe)
3: 206
Journal of Natural Philosophy
(Nicholson) 1: 336
The Journal of Sir Walter Scott
(Scott) 3: 299

The Journals of Eleanor Druse: My
Investigation of the Kingdom
Hospital Incident (King) 2: 482
The Journals of Susanna Moodie
(Atwood) 2: 2, 6, 11
A Journey Made in the Summer of
1794 through Holland and the
Western Frontier of Germany
(Radcliffe) 3: 232
Joy Division (musical group) 1:
471–73
Jude the Obscure (Hardy) 1: 35
Jung, Carl G. 2: 147, 412
dream interpretation 1: 329
du Maurier, Daphne and 2:
289
Freud, Sigmund and 1: 329
individuation 3: 481
psychological horror 3: 463
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde 3: 373–74
Justine (Sade) 3: 61–69
K Kotzebue, August von 1: 407–9
Kael, Pauline 1: 437
Kafka, Franz 3: 170
Kant, Ïmmanuel 1: 150–55
Karloff, Boris (sidebar) 1: 416,
434–35; 3: 353
Karpinski, Joanne B. 1: 68
Kater Murr (Hoffmann) 2: 403
Katsavos, Anna 2: 181–82
Keats, John 1: 2, 19, 24, (sidebar)
2: 171
Kemble, John Philip 1: 403
Kenilworth (Scott) 3: 297, 310, 312
Kenton, Edna (sidebar) 3: 22
Kerenyi, Karl 3: 465
“Kerfol” (Wharton) 3: 459, 471,
474
Kerr, Elizabeth M. 2: 297–306
Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe)
1: 185–86
Kidnapped: Being Memoirs of the
Adventures of David Balfour in the
Year 1751 (Stevenson) 3: 359–60
Kierkegaard, Søren 2: 272
Kilgour, Maggie 1: 67
“Kilmeny” (Hogg) 2: 423, 427
Kincaid, James 2: 236–37
King, Stephen 2: 481, 481–505
American Gothic tradition 2:
494–99
castle in 1: 284–90
compared to Shelley, Mary 2:
500
compared to Stevenson, Robert
Louis 2: 485–87
doubles in 2: 485–93
families, American 2: 501–3
fear 2: 495, 504
on film adaptation of The Shin-
ing 1: 219
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
horror films 1: 398–401
influence of Melville, Herman
2: 494–99
principal works 2: 482–83
quest in (sidebar) 2: 492
serial killers 2: 490–93
supernatural 2: 501–4
vampires 1: 371–73; 3: 270
“The King’s Betrothed”
(Hoffmann). See “Die
Königsbraut”
Kirland Revels (Holt) 2: 119–20
Kiss Me Again, Stranger (du
Maurier), review of 2: 282–83
Klein, Melanie 1: 317–25
Lacan, Jacques on 1: 381
on mother 1: 379–81
Oedipal complex 1: 380
Klein Zaches (Hoffmann) 2: 405
Knapp, Steven 1: 144
Knickerbocker, Diedrich. See
Irving, Washington
Kollin, Susan 1: 36
“Die Königsbraut” (Hoffmann) 2:
400–401
Kristeva, Julia 2: 287; 3: 482
Kroker, Arthur 1: 147
“Kubla Khan” (Coleridge) 1: 19,
(sidebar) 48
L 335–36
Labyrinth (Gothic convention) 3:
197–98
Lacan, Jacques 1: 317, 381; 3: 350
LaCapra, Dominick 3: 152–55,
158
“The Lady of the House of Love”
(Carter) 2: 182, 199
The Lady of the Lake (Scott) 3:
290, 306
Lady Oracle (Atwood) 2: 2, 3, 10
as comic Gothic 2: 17–23
compared to Cat’s Eye 2: 12
excerpt (sidebar) 2: 18
literary conventions in 2:
11–13
Lady Susan (Austen) 2: 33
Lady Windermere’s Fan (Wilde) 3:
488, 495
“The Lady’s Maid’s Bell”
(Wharton) 3: 458, 467, 471
The Lair of the White Worm
(Stoker) 3: 386
Lamb, Mary 1: 100
Lamont, Claire 2: 41–46
“Landing in Luck” (Faulkner) 2:
293
Landor, Walter Savage 1: 257–58
Landscape (motif)
“Bartleby the Scrivener” 3:
123–24
A LEGEND OF MONTROSE
The Castle of Otranto 1: 402
in drama 1: 402–5
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale 3:
113
Radliffe, Ann 1: 403; 3: 113
Lang, Fritz 1: 429, 431
Langbaum, Robert 2: 262
Langhorne, John 3: 435
Langstaff, Launcelot. See Irving,
Washington
Lanone, Catherine 3: 97–104
Laplanche, Jean 2: 310–11
Lascelles, Mary 2: 32
SUBJECT INDEX
Lasher (Rice) 3: 264
The Last Days of Pompeii
(Bulwer-Lytton) (sidebar) 1: 15
The Last Man (Shelley) 3: 320
Last Tales (Dinesen) 2: 258
“The Later Years, 1820-1824”
(Lougy) 3: 76–84
Latrobe, Benjamin Henry 1:
498–99
“The Laugh” (Wharton) 3: 478
Laurencin, Marie 2: 261
Lawler, Donald 3: 489, 493–502
Lawrence, D. H. (sidebar) 3: 203
Lay of the Last Minstrel (Scott) 1:
487; 3: 290
Lay Sermons (Hogg) 2: 427
Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan 1: 31,
89–90, 139; 3: 1, 1–29, (sidebar)
6
abnormal psychology in 1:
development of vampire 1:
353–58
doubles in 1: 382–84
dreams 1: 329–30
historical romances 3: 6–15
influence of (sidebar) 3: 22
influence on Stoker, Bram 1:
358
marriage of 3: 17–18
principal works 3: 3
sensation fiction 1: 354; 3: 5–6
women in 3: 16–17
Le Guin, Ursula K. (sidebar) 1:
291
Le Sage, Alain René 1: 334
Le Tellier, Robert Ignatius 3:
305–16
Leatherdale, Clive 3: 405–15
Led Zeppelin (musical group) 1:
461–62, 463
Led Zeppelin I (music recording) 1:
461, 462
Ledwon, Lenora 1: 452–60
Lee, Sophia 1: 115–18, (sidebar)
119
A Legend of Montrose (Scott)
architecture motif 3: 315
doppelgänger 3: 314
fear 3: 310
561
SUBJECT INDEX “THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW”
mystery in 3: 307
violence 3: 312
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
(Irving) 2: 441–43, 447, 447–48,
457
Legends. See Mythology
Legends of Angria (Brontë, C.) 2:
103
“Legends of the Province-House”
(Hawthorne) 2: 364
Leiber, Fritz 1: 364–65
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers
(Goethe) 2: 341
“Leixlip Castle” (Maturin) 3:
75–76
“Leonardo Da Vinci and a
Memory of his Childhood”
(Freud) 1: 152
Lerner, Gerda 3: 17
Leroux, Gaston 1: 2
Lestat (character) 1: 369–70; 3:
269–70, 271–76, 280–83
A Letter from Xo Ho,a Chinese
Philosopher at London, to His
Friend Lien Chi at Peking
(Walpole) 3: 446
Letter to Katharine de Mattos: 1
January 1886 (Stevenson)
(sidebar) 3: 373
“A Letter to Richard Woodhouse
on September 21, 1819” (Keats)
(sidebar) 2: 171
Letter to Sir Walter Scott
(Edgeworth) (sidebar) 3: 306
“Letter to Wilkie Collins on
September 20, 1862” (Dickens)
(sidebar) 2: 223
Letters (correspondence)
du Maurier, Daphne 2: 289–90
Lewis, Matthew Gregory 3:
37–38
Walpole, Horace 3: 429,
431–32
See also specific letters
Letters from Africa (Dinesen). See
Breve fra Afrika (Dinesen)
Letters of Horace Walpole (Walpole)
3: 429
The Letters of Oscar Wilde (Wilde)
3: 504–5
Letters on Chivalry and Romance
(Hurd) 1: 42–46, 54–55; 3:
449–50
Letters on Demonology and
Witchcraft (Scott) 1: 334, 335,
337, 338
Letters on Natural Magic (Brewster)
1: 334
Lévy, Maurice 3: 193–202
Lewes, George Henry 1: 300
Lewis, Matthew Gregory 1: 2, 48,
76–79, 81, 86–87, 402; 3: 31,
31–71
Byron, Lord George Gordon
on 3: 36, (sidebar) 42
562
compared to Bosch, Hierony-
mous 3: 53–60
compared to James, Henry 2:
446–47
compared to Rice, Anne 3: 279
German romantic influence 1:
408
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
and 2: 349–53
heroines 2: 138–39, 144,
297–98
influence of 3: 40–45
influence on Brontë, Charlotte
2: 122–27
influence on Hoffmann, E. T.
A. 3: 40–41
letters of 3: 37–38
madness as theme 1: 338; 3:
203
marriage of 3: 36
mastery of horror (sidebar) 3:
62
on The Mysteries of Udolpho 3:
39
nationalism 1: 412
plagiarism 3: 61
principal works 3: 33
racial phobia of 1: 208
Sade, Marquis de and 3: 61–69
Scott, Sir Walter on 3: 36
Shelley, Percy Bysshe and 3:
59–60
wasted talent of 3: 355
Lewis, W. S. 3: 447
Libraries 1: 92–102
Life among the Savages (Jackson) 1:
266–67
Life and Death in Psychoanalysis
(Laplanche) 2: 310–11
“Life and I” (Wharton) 3: 470,
476–78, 482–84
Life before Man (Atwood) 2: 2
“Ligeia” (Poe) 3: 188, 189
animated tapestry in 3: 200
castle in 3: 194–95
madness in 3: 204
Light in August (Faulkner) 2:
293–94, 302, 304
Lionel Lincoln (Cooper) 1: 58–62
Literary criticism, function of 1:
95–96
Literary Women: The Great Writers
(Moers) 1: 210–11
Literary World, 2: 392–93
“The Little Antiquary” (Irving) 2:
452
Little Dorrit (Dickens) 2: 229–30,
251–55
“The Little Photographer” (du
Maurier) 2: 284
Little Women (Alcott) 3: 175
Lives of the Necromancers; or, An
Account of the Most Eminent
Persons in Successive Ages, Who
Have Claimed for Themselves, or
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
to Whom Has Been Imputed by
Others, the Exercise of Magical
Power (Godwin) 2: 324–27
Lives of the Novelists (Scott) 3: 313
Lives of the Twins (Oates) 3: 165,
178
Livre des Métiers (Boileau) 1:
515–16
Loe, Thomas 2: 245–51
Loneliness (theme) 1: 272–78; 3:
342–47
Long, Edward 1: 208
The Long Story (Beckford). See The
Vision
Longinus (philosopher) 1: 148–49
“The Looking Glass” (Wharton)
3: 467–68, 471
“Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime”
(Wilde) 3: 487
Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and
Other Stories (Wilde) 3: 488
“The Lottery” (Jackson) 1:
272–73, (sidebar) 464
Lougy, Robert 3: 76–84
Louis (character) 1: 369–70; 3:
268–70, 280–84
as narrator 3: 271
sexuality of 3: 274–75
Love (Carter) 2: 180
Love and Death in the American
Novel (Fiedler) 1: 67, 212, 520; 2:
298–303
Lovecraft, H. P. 1: 260–64, 261
on Poe, Edgar Allan (sidebar)
3: 219
supernatural (sidebar) 1: 260
on Walpole, Horace (sidebar)
3: 443
Loved and Lost (Le Fanu) 3: 17
“The Lovely Night” (Jackson) 1:
268–69
“The Lover’s Tale” (Maturin) 3:
77–78, 87, 90
Love’s Knowledge: Essays on
Philosophy and Literature
(Nussbaum) 3: 511
“The Loves of the Lady Purple”
(Carter) 2: 183–84, (sidebar) 191
The Loving Spirit (du Maurier) 2:
279
Lubbock, Percy 3: 436–37
“Lucky to Get Away” (Jackson) 1:
266
“Luella Miller” (Wilkins-Freeman)
1: 365
Lugosi, Bela 1: 424, (sidebar) 425;
3: 353, 417
Lukacs, George 1: 58; 2: 209
Lundblad, Jane 2: 378–82
Lupack, Barbara Tepa 2: 458–59
Lynch, David 1: 454–56
Lynch, Deidre 1: 92–102
Lyotard, Jean-Francois 1: 153
“Lyttil Pynkie” (Hogg) 2: 422

M Marmion (Scott) 3: 290, 306, 309,
“The Macabre and the
Unexpected” (Barkham) 2:
282–83
MacAndrew, Elizabeth 3: 465
Macaulay, Thomas Babington 3:
447
Machen, Arthur 1: 169–71
Mack, Douglas S. 2: 425–28
Macpherson, James 1: 20, 97–98
MacPherson, Jay (sidebar) 3: 111
Mad Love (film) 1: 437
“Mad Monkton” (Collins) 1:
298–300
“Mademoiselle de Scuderi”
(Hoffmann). See “Das Fräulein
von Scuderi”
Madness
Bertram 1: 337–38
The Castle Spectre 1: 338
Gaslight 1: 339–40
as Gothic theme 1: 339–41; 2:
67–68
heroines 1: 339–41
Matthews, James Tilly 1:
338–39
Maupassant, Guy de 1: 314
Orra 1: 340–41
Poe, Edgar Allan 1: 314–15; 3:
202–5
Witchcraft 2: 72–73
“The Yellow Wallpaper” 1:
214–15
See also Hysteria
Magic. See Sorcery
The Magic Toyshop (Carter) 2: 180,
182, 183–85
Magistrale, Tony 3: 124–28
“Main Street” (Hawthorne) 2: 375
“The Making of a Genre” (Prawer)
1: 425–39
“The Making of the Count”
(Leatherdale) 3: 405–15
Malin, Irving 2: 300–302
“The Man of the Crowd” (Poe) 3:
198
Mandel, Eli 2: 5–10
“Manfred” (Byron) 1: 24
Mangan, James Clarence 3: 82, 83
Mansfield Park (Austen) 2: 26–27,
32
Manuel (Maturin) 3: 74, 77, 84
The Marble Faun (Faulkner) 2:
294, 376
The Marble Faun (Hawthorne) 2:
363–65, 371–73, 382–85
Märchen (literary myth) 2:
394–95, 397
Mardi: And a Voyage Thither
(Melville) 3: 108
“Markheim” (Stevenson) 3: 360,
368
Markley, A. A. 3: 211–18
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
312
The Marne (Wharton) 3: 458
Marriages and Infidelities (Oates) 3:
164, 180
Martindale, Andrew 1: 506–11
Martineau, Harriet 2: 218
“Mary Burnet” (Hogg) 2: 427–28
“Mary Shelley and Gothic
Feminism: The Case of ‘The
Mortal Immortal’” (Hoeveler) 3:
327–35
Marya (Oates) 3: 164
The Masque of Red Death (film) 1:
444
“The Masque of the Red Death”
(Poe) 3: 188–89, 204, 224
The Master Flea (Hoffmann) 2:
397
The Master of Ballantrae
(Stevenson) 3: 360
Mathilda (Shelley) 3: 330
“Matthew Gregory Lewis”
(Montague) 3: 36–46
Matthews, James Tilly 1: 338–39
“Maturin and the ‘Calvinist
Sublime’” (Haslam) 3: 91–97
Maturin, Charles Robert 1: 2, 80,
87, 337–38; 3: 73, 73–105
Catholicism 3: 87–88, 94–96
compared to Don Quixote 3:
82
compared to Wilde, Oscar 3:
504–9
death of 3: 81–82
German romantic influence 1:
407–8
heroines 2: 138–41, 144
influence of Romantic poets 3:
82
influence on Davis, Alexander
Jackson 1: 499
influence on French authors 3:
97–103
influence on Hawthorne,
Nathaniel 2: 374
labyrinth convention 3: 197
on Melmoth the Wanderer
(sidebar) 3: 85
portrayal of women 3: 80
principal works 3: 74
religion and 3: 79, 81
Scott, Sir Walter and 3: 82–83
use of Gothic conventions 1:
27–29
Maupassant, Guy de 1: 314
“Mayfair Witches” series (Rice) 3:
263–65
Maynard, Temple J. (sidebar) 1:
399
“The May-Pole of Merry Mount”
(Hawthorne) 2: 364
McCullers, Carson 1: 215; 2: 298,
300
McDowill, Margaret 3: 464
MEMNOCH THE DEVIL
Medieval literature
compared to American Gothic
tradition 2: 298–99
horror as theme 1: 16–17
Meigs, J. Aitken 3: 218–19
“Meister Martin der Küfner und
seine Gesellen” (Hoffmann) 2:
398–99
Méliès, George 1: 426
Mellard, James M. 2: 306–12
Mellor, Anne K. 1: 207–10
Melmoth réconcilié (Balzac) 3:
100–103
SUBJECT INDEX
Melmoth, Sebastian. See Wilde,
Oscar
Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin) 1:
2, 31, 80, 87; 2: 254; 3: 73–74,
76, 297
as autobiography 3: 77
Calvinism 3: 91–96
compared to The Picture of
Dorian Gray 3: 504–9
European Gothic tradition 3:
84–91
evil 1: 462
Gothic conventions in 1:
27–29
heroine in 2: 138–41, 144
influence on Fanshawe: A Tale
2: 379
labyrinth in 3: 197
mysterious portrait 1: 252; 3:
506–7
narrative structure 3: 77–78,
86–87, 98–99
“Preface” (sidebar) 3: 85
psychological horror in 1:
27–28
religion in 3: 79, 87–89
review (sidebar) 3: 98
sadism 3: 199
sequel to 3: 100–103
sublime 3: 91–96
“Melville and the Gothic Novel”
(Arvin) 3: 111–19, 118
Melville, Herman 1: 143–44; 3:
107, 107–33
compared to Poe, Edgar Allan
3: 122–23
European Gothic tradition 3:
118–22
Gothic influence on 3: 111–16
imagery 3: 113–14
influence on King, Stephen 2:
494–99
monsters 3: 116
music imagery 3: 114
mysterious portrait convention
3: 114–15
principal works 3: 109–10
“Melville’s Use of the Gothic
Tradition” (Shetty) 3: 118–22
Memnoch the Devil (Rice) 3: 264,
273–74
See also Vampire Chronicles
563
SUBJECT INDEX MEMOIRS OF CARWIN THE BILOQUIST
Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist
(Brown) 2: 171–72, 176
Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (Brown)
2: 170
Memoirs of the Life of William
Collins, Es., R. A. (Collins) 2:
201, 205–10
“The Merry Men” (Stevenson) 3:
360
The Merry Men and Other Tales and
Fables (Stevenson) 3: 360
“The Metamorphosis” (Oates) 3:
179
Metrical Legends of Exalted
Characters (Baillie) 2: 60
“Metzengerstein” (Poe) 3: 189,
199–200
Miall, David S. 3: 238–45
Michelis, Angelica 1: 376–85
“The Midnight Mass” (Collins) 2:
218
Mighall, Robert 1: 290–301
Milbank, Alison 1: 86–92
Miles, Robert 1: 411
The Milesian Chief (Maturin) 1:
27; 3: 73–74, 83, 84, 85
Milton, John 2: 170–76; 3: 339,
341
“The Mines of Falun”
(Hoffmann). See “Die Bergwerke
zu Falun”
“The Minister’s Black Veil”
(Hawthorne) 2: 364
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
(Scott) 3: 290
“The Mirror and the Cameo:
Margaret Atwood’s
Comic/Gothic Novel, Lady
Oracle” (Vincent) 2: 17–24
A Mirror for Witches (Forbes) 1:
62–65
“Mirrored Worlds and the Gothic
in Faulkner’s Sanctuary” (Heller,
Terry) 2: 205–10
Mirroring (literary convention) 2:
312–18
Misanthropy 1: 278–80
Miscegenation 3: 218–19, 221–27
Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose
(Aiken, Barbauld) 1: 2, (sidebar)
7 supernatural 3: 138–42,
Miscellaneous Plays (Baillie) 2: 50
Mishra, Vijay 1: 143–57
Misogyny 2: 221
“Miss Braddon” (James, H.) 2:
214–15
“Miss Jeromette and the
Clergyman” (Collins) 2: 203–4
The Mist (King) 1: 286–87
Mitchell, S. Weir (sidebar) 1: 213,
213–14
Miyoshi, Masao 3: 365–70
564
Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale
(Melville) 3: 107–9
Captain Ahab as Gothic villain
3: 126–27
castle in 3: 128–32
compared to The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym 3: 206–8
compared to The Shining 2:
494–99
film adaptation 3: 129
landscape motif 3: 113
mysterious portrait in 3: 114
review (sidebar) 3: 125
“The Modern American Horror
Movie—Text and Subtext”
(King) 1: 398–401
Modern Novel Writing; or, The
Elegant Enthusiast (Beckford) 2:
80
Modernism 1: 30–39, 109
Moers, Ellen 1: 210–11, 215,
(sidebar) 3: 338
Mogen, David 1: 68
Mona Lisa 1: 32–33
Monasteries. See Religious
buildings
The Monastery (Scott) 3: 314
The Monk (Lewis) 1: 2, 48, 76–79,
81, 86–87; 3: 32–33, 66
as advocate of virtue 3: 48–51
compared to Justine 3: 61–69
compared to paintings of
Bosch, Hieronymous 3: 54–60
compared to Villette 2: 122–27
excess in 3: 355
heroine in 2: 138–39; 3: 64–67
indecency of 3: 46–48
influence of Faust: Ein Frag-
ment 2: 349–53
influence on Die Elixiere des
Teufels 3: 40–41
Lord Byron’s lampoon of 3:
51–52
madness as theme 3: 203
as original Gothic literature 2:
116
“The Preface” 3: 34
publishing history 3: 39–40
as sensational fiction 3: 31
sexuality 1: 463
Monk, Samuel H. 1: 148, 152
“The Monkey” (Dinesen) 2:
259–61, 269
doubles in 2: 272–73
Gothic conventions 2: 263–68
heroine in 2: 274–75
homosexuality 2: 273–76
monsters 2: 267
reader response 2: 276–77
“The Monk’s Gothic Bosh and
Bosch’s Gothic Monks”
(Hennelly) 3: 51–61
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
“’The Monster Never Dies’: An
Analysis of the Gothic Double in
Stephen King’s Oeuvre”
(Strengell) 2: 485–93
Monsters
ambivalence toward 1: 417
as cultural symbols 1: 198–99
Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus 1: 25–26, 83–85,
255; 3: 335–36, 339–42, 343,
348–55
horror films 1: 416–17, 427–
30, 442
Karloff, Boris 1: 434–35
Melville, Herman 3: 116
“The Monkey” 2: 267
Pet Semetary 2: 486
sexuality of 2: 188
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde 3: 370–72
in “Taming a Tartar” 1: 199–
207
techno-gothic grotesques 2:
68–72
See also Vampires; Were-
wolves
“Monte Verità” (du Maurier) 2:
284
The Monthly Review (periodical) 2:
327–30; 3: 51, 444–45
The Moonstone (Collins) 2: 201,
(sidebar) 207
“‘More Demon than Man’:
Melville’s Ahab as Gothic
Villain” (Magistrale) 3: 124–28
Moretti, Franco 2: 234
Morrison, Toni 1: 108; 3: 135,
135–61
on The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn 3: 158
American Africanism 1:
118–27
castle convention 3: 136
Echo mythology 3: 138–41
ghosts 3: 150–60
inspiration for Beloved 3:
137–38
oral tradition 3: 147
portrayal of women 3: 139–41,
147–48
principal works 3: 136
Pulitzer Prize 3: 135
148–49
Morse, Heyward 2: 468
“The Mortal Immortal: A Tale”
(Shelley) 3: 330–33
Mosses from an Old Manse
(Hawthorne) 2: 364–65, 379,
381
Mothers
Freud, Sigmund on 1: 377–79
Klein, Melanie on 1: 379–81
power of 3: 480–84

relationship to children 1:
377–81
Wharton, Edith and 3: 476–77,
483–84
The Mountain Bard: Consisting of
Ballads and Songs, Founded on
Facts and Legendary Tales (Hogg)
2: 422
Movie-Made America (Sklar) 1: 438
“The Moving Finger” (Wharton)
3: 458
“Mr Adamson of Laverhope”
(Hogg) 2: 426–27
“Mr. Jones” (Wharton) 3: 459
“Mrs. Ann Radcliffe: The Craft of
Terror” (Varma) (sidebar) 3: 253
“MS. Found in a Bottle” (Poe) 3:
188, 202
Murder in the Dark (Atwood) 2:
10, 11, 17
Murders in the Rue Morgue (film) 1:
418–19
Murders in the Rue Morgue (Poe) 1:
250–51
Murdoch, Iris 3: 510–11
Murnau, F. W. (sidebar) 1: 451
Murphy, Dennis Jasper. See
Maturin, Charles Robert
Murray, Margaret P. 3: 462–66
Music 1: 391, 461–73
blues 1: 464
Bromley Contingent 1: 470–71
Goth 1: 470–73
heavy metal 1: 461–67
imagery 3: 114
punk 1: 470–73
rock 1: 461–62, 469–73
See also specific names of
musical groups, songs and
albums
My Heart Laid Bare (Oates) 3: 165
“My Life with R. H. Macy”
(Jackson) 1: 265
Myers, F. W. H 1: 330–31
Mysteries 2: 249; 3: 306–8
The Mysteries of Udolpho
(Radcliffe) 1: 2, 80–81, 92–93; 2:
25, 59; 3: 231–33, 255
castle convention in 1: 226
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor on 3:
245–46
compared to Billy Budd 3:
111–12
compared to Twin Peaks 1: 455
Enfield, William on 3: 246–49
“The Haunted Chamber” 3:
233–37
heroine in 1: 221–24; 2: 138,
144; 3: 254–59
horror 1: 225–26
influence on Davis, Alexander
Jackson 1: 501
influence on Northanger Abbey
2: 34–40
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
Lewis, Matthew Gregory on 3:
39
as original Gothic literature 2:
116
Psyche mythology 3: 252–56
sublime theme in 3: 313
suspense narrative of 3:
249–52
women’s education 3: 239–43
Mysteries of Winterthurn (Oates) 3:
163–65, 175–78
The Mysterious Mother (Walpole) 3:
431, (sidebar) 434
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
(Dickens) 2: 230
Mysticism 1: 254–55
Mythology
Carter, Angela 2: 188–89
Dracula 1: 166–69
Echo 3: 138–41
Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus 3: 338–42
horror films 1: 445–47
märchen 2: 394–95
motherhood (sidebar) 3: 338
Prometheus 3: 338–42
Psyche 3: 252–56
sexuality 2: 188–89
The Sphinx 3: 498
vampire 3: 266–76
Wharton, Edith 3: 465,
(sidebar) 467
Mythology of the Secret Societies
(Roberts) 1: 79
N Newgate novels (sidebar) 1: 94
Nachträglichkeit (deferred action)
2: 310
Nachtstüke (Hoffmann) 2: 397
“Naked” (Oates) 3: 182
“Napoleon and the Spectre”
(Brontë, C.) 2: 105–7
“Narrative and Psychology in
Gothic Fiction” (Punter) 1:
317–26
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym (Poe) 1: 118, 251; 3: 204,
207
biographical analysis of 3:
205–11
compared to Moby-Dick; or, The
White Whale 3: 206–8
history of critical reception 3:
189–90
influence of Godwin, William
3: 211–17
as Western novel 3: 205–6
Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass (Douglass) 1: 183–85
Nash, Jesse W. 2: 499–504
National Book Award 3: 163–64
NIXON, RICHARD
Nationalism
drama 1: 412
European Gothic tradition 1:
93–102, 158–71; 2: 240
Maturin, Charles Robert 3: 83
Native Son (Wright) 1: 180
Naturalism 1: 129–30, 482–83
Naylor, Gloria 3: 142
Necromancy 2: 326–27, (sidebar)
328
Nemesis (Oates) 3: 165, 178
Neoclassicism 1: 50–55
“Never Bet the Devil your Head”
SUBJECT INDEX
(Poe) 3: 198
New American Gothic (Malin) 2:
301–2
“New Approaches to the Study of
Women in American History”
(Lerner) 3: 17
“New Life for an Old Tradition:
Anne Rice and Vampire
Literature” (Wood, M.) 3:
266–76
The New Magdalen (Collins,
Wilkie) 1: 88
The New Monthly Magazine, 2:
428–29
“New Novels: The Moonstone: A
Romance” (Jewsbury) (sidebar) 2:
207
“New Publications, with Critical
Remarks: The Private Memoirs
and Confessions of a Justified
Sinner” (The New Monthly
Magazine) 2: 428–29
“A New Year’s Eve Adventure”
(Hoffmann). See “Die Abenteuer
der Silvester-Nacht”
Newton, Judith 3: 17, 21
Nicholas Nickleby (Dickens) 2: 230
Nicholson, Jack 2: 498
Nicholson, William 1: 336
Nicolai, Friedrich 1: 336–37
Nicole, Claudette 2: 115, 120
Nietzsche, Friedrich 1: 147; 3: 470
Night of the Living Dead (film) 1:
442–43
Night Side: Eighteen Tales (Oates)
3: 163–65, 170, 180–84
Night Thoughts (Young) 1: 53
Nightmare (Gothic element)
“The Company of Wolves” 2:
187
Gorey, Edward (sidebar) 1: 510
horror films 1: 415–16
Nightmare (painting) 1: 519
Nights at the Circus (Carter) 2:
180, 182, 185–86, 197–99
“Night-Side” (Oates) 3: 181
The Night-Side of Nature (Crowe)
3: 24
Nightwood (Barnes) 2: 188
Nixon, Richard 1: 369
565
SUBJECT INDEX “’NO MORE THAN GHOSTS MAKE’”
“’No More Than Ghosts Make’:
The Hauntology and Gothic
Minimalism of Beckett’s Late
Work” (Fraser) 1: 38–39
No Name (Collins, Wilkie) 1: 88
The Nocturnal Minstrel (Sleath) 1:
98
Northanger Abbey (Austen) 1:
74–76, 80–81; 2: 25–31, 236
architecture 2: 41–45
compared to The Blind Assassin
2: 3
gender relations 1: 221–22
Gothic extravagance in
(sidebar) 2: 37
influence of The Mysteries of
Udolpho 2: 34–40
revision of 2: 31–35
sensibility in 2: 36–40
Northanger Novelists 1: 7
Nosferatu (film) 1: 450, (sidebar)
451
Nostalgia 1: 69
The Notebooks of Henry James
(James) 2: 473
Nothing Sacred (Carter) 2: 180
“Novel Notes: Dracula” (The
Bookman), (sidebar) 3: 405
Novel of manners, Great
Expectations, 2: 247–48
““The Novel of Suspense’: Mrs.
Radcliffe” (Birkhead) (sidebar) 3:
246
Novels. See Genres
“Novels of the Season” (Whipple)
2: 114–15, 135–36
“The Nuns of Magwan” (Collins)
2: 218, 219–20
Nussbaum, Martha C. 3: 510–11
“Nussknacker und Mausekönig”
(Hoffmann) 2: 396–97
“Nutcracker and the King of
Mice” (Hoffmann). See
“Nussknacker und Mausekönig”
“Nymph of the Fountain”
(Beckford) (sidebar) 2: 84
O the South Seas (Melville) 3: 108,
O. Henry Award 3: 164
Oakes, David A. 1: 283–90
Oates, Joyce Carol 1: 216–17; 3:
163, 163–86
American Gothic tradition 3:
168–84
compared to Alcott, Louisa
May 3: 175
doppelgänger 3: 183–84
fantastic 3: 168–77
on Gothic 3: 178–80
heroines 3: 183
on horror (sidebar) 3: 179
566
Kafka, Franz and 3: 170
National Book Award 3:
163–64
O. Henry Award 3: 164
otherness as theme 3: 170, 183
principal works 3: 165–66
Southern Gothic 3: 178
on The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde 3: 370–72
Observations on Maniacal Disorders
(Pargeter) 1: 339
O’Connor, Flannery (sidebar) 1:
68, 69, 215; 2: 304
O’Connor, William Van 3: 118
“October 4, 1957, and an
Invitation to Dance” (King) 2:
483–85
Ode on Melancholy (Keats) 1: 19
Ode on the Superstitions of the
Scottish Highlands (Collins,
William) 1: 18
“Ode to Fear” (Collins, William)
1: 53–54
Oedipal complex 1: 377–79, 380,
384
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as
Experience and Institution (Rich)
1: 216
O’Keeffe, John 1: 406–7
“Olalla” (Stevenson) 3: 368
The Old Curiosity Shop (Dickens)
2: 229–30, 252
The Old English Baron (Reeve)
(sidebar) 1: 112, 113–15, 115, 2:
252
Old Mortality (Scott)
doppelgänger 3: 314
fear 3: 309–10
violence 3: 312
“An Old Woman’s Tale”
(Hawthorne) 2: 364
Oldstyle, Jonathan. See Irving,
Washington
Oliphant, Margaret 2: 211–14
Oliver Twist (Dickens) 2: 230,
239–40, 248
O’Malley, Patrick 1: 35
The Omen (film) 1: 422
Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in
114, 119
“On Fable and Romance”
(Beattie) 1: 50
“On Frankenstein” (Shelley, P.) 3:
335–36
“On Ghosts” (Shelley) 3: 321–24
“On the Pleasure Derived from
Objects of Terror, with Sir
Bertrand, A Fragment” (Aiken,
Barbauld) 1: 4–7, (sidebar) 7, 46
“On the Relative Simplicity of
Gothic Manners to Our Own”
(Walpole) 3: 446
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
“On the Supernatural in Fictitious
Composition” (Scott) (sidebar)
2: 392, (sidebar) 3: 349
“On the Supernatural in Poetry”
(Radcliffe) 3: 237–38
“On the Uncanny” (Freud) 1:
70–71, 87
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
(King) 2: 482
“One Ordinary Day, with
Peanuts” (Jackson) 1: 279
Oral tradition
Morrison, Toni 3: 147
supernatural as theme 1:
17–18
Oriental tales 1: 260–61; 2:
88–89, 96
Orlok, Count (character) 1: 450
Ormond (Brown) 2: 153–54,
159–61
Orra (Baillie, Joanna) 1: 340–41;
2: 50, 56, 58, 59–60
Osceola. See Dinesen, Isak
Osmyn the Renegade (Maturin) 3:
76
Ossian (Macpherson) 1: 20, 45–46
The Other House (James) 2: 472
“Other Themes” (Railo) 1: 249–60
Otherness (theme) 1: 67–74
in American Gothic paintings
1: 521–25
Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 170, 176,
183
“The Others” (Oates) 3: 179–80
“Our Library Table” (Chorley)
(sidebar) 2: 137
Our Mutual Friend (Dickens) 2:
229–30, 237
“Our Vampire, Our Leader:
Twentieth-Century Undeaths”
(Auerbach) 1: 361–76
Out of Africa (Dinesen) 2: 257–58
The Outcry (James) 2: 462
“The Oval Portrait” (Poe) 1:
252–53; 3: 189, 192–95, 199
“Owen Wingrave” (James) 2: 463
“Oxford’s Ghosts: Jude the Obscure
and the End of the Gothic”
(O’Malley) 1: 35
P
Pain 1: 110–13
“The Painter’s Adventure” (Irving)
2: 452
Painting 1: 475–76, 518–25; 3:
53–60, 447
See also specific names of paint-
ings
Pandora (character) 3: 271
Paradise Lost (Milton) 2: 170–76;
3: 339, 341

“The Parasite” (Doyle) 1: 365
Pargeter, William 1: 339
Parisi, Peter 3: 284
Parker, John Henry 1: 477–80
“Parodied to Death: The
Postmodern Gothic of American
Psycho” (Helyer) 1: 36–37
Parody 2: 448–49, 458–59
Parsons, Mrs. Eliza 1: 2, 7–9
“Part II: Sections I and II, and
Part IV: Sections V, VI, VIII, and
IX” (Burke) 1: 110–13
Passages from the French and
Italian Notebooks of Nathaniel
Hawthorne (Hawthorne) 2: 382
The Passion of New Eve (Carter) 2:
180, 190–94
A Passionate Pilgrim (James) 2: 477
Pater, Walter 1: 32–33
“The Pathology of History”
(Gross) 1: 57–66
Patriarchy
Antonina; or, The Fall of Rome
2: 206–10
The Magic Toyshop 2: 185
Wharton, Edith 3: 476–80
Patterns (literary convention) 2:
301–3, 368–77
Pattison, Robert 1: 463, 464–65
Paulson, Ronald 1: 74–86
“The Pavilion on the Links”
(Stevenson) 3: 360
Peabody, Sophia 2: 364
Peck, Gregory 3: 129
Peeping Tom (film) 1: 447–48
Penny dreadful 1: 2
Percy, Thomas 1: 54
Peregrine Pickle (Smollet) 1: 50
The Perfectionist (Oates) 3: 164
Peri Hypsous (Longinus) 1: 148–49
Perkins, Anthony 1: 437
Persona (film) 1: 429
Personal Reminiscences of Henry
Irving (Irving, H.) 3: 400–401
Persuasion (Austen) 2: 25–27, 32,
42
Perversity, sexual 2: 186, 288
Pet Sematary (King) 2: 482, 486,
499–504
Petersen, Karen 2: 261
Peveril of the Peak (Scott) 3: 292,
297, 311, 315
A Philosophical Enquiry into the
Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime
and Beautiful (Burke) 1: 107,
110–13
Physiognomy 1: 107
The Piazza Tales (Melville) 3: 108,
110–11
The Pickwick Papers (Dickens) 2:
229–34, 235, 237
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde)
1: 31, 37–38; 3: 487–89,
(sidebar) 503
aestheticism 3: 494–95
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
author’s defense of 3: 492–93
compared to Melmoth the
Wanderer 3: 504–9
degeneration 1: 160–62
doubles in 1: 34
Hedonism 3: 512–15
morality 3: 510–16
mysterious portrait convention
1: 253; 3: 488, 494–95, 506–7
review 3: 502–4
supernatural 3: 511–15
themes 1: 162
Pierre; or, The Ambiguities
(Melville) 1: 143–44; 3: 108–9
music imagery 3: 114
mysterious portrait conventi-
ion 3: 114–15
symbolism in 3: 115
tower imagery 3: 113
Pierson, William 1: 497
The Pilgrims of the Sun (Hogg) 2:
422–23, 427
“Pillar of Salt” (Jackson) 1: 268
The Pirate (Scott) 3: 292, 297, 315
architecture motif 3: 315
buccaneers 3: 313
fear 3: 310
mystery in 3: 300–304, 307
superstition 3: 314
Pirie, David 1: 445
“The Pit and the Pendulum”
(Poe) 3: 189, 198–99
Planche, J. R. 1: 348–49
Plath, Sylvia 1: 215–16
Playing in the Dark (Morrison) 1:
108
Plays on the Passions (Baillie). See
A Series of Plays: In Which It Is
Attempted to Delineate the Stronger
Passions of the Mind—Each
Passion Being the Subject of a
Tragedy and a Comedy
“A Plea for Sunday Reform”
(Collins) 2: 218
“The Pleasure Principle” (Freud)
1: 90
“Poe and Hoffmann” (Cobb)
(sidebar) 2: 412
“Poe and the Gothic” (Griffith) 3:
202–5
“Poe and the Gothic Tradition”
(Lévy) 3: 193–202
Poe, Edgar Allan 1: 2, 71–72; 2:
311; 3: 187, 187–230
American Africanism and 1:
118
animated tapestry convention
3: 199–200
Blythe, David Gilmour and 1:
524
castle convention 3: 194–97
Cole, Thomas and 1: 524
compared to Melville, Herman
3: 122–23
POETRY
compared to Stevenson, Robert
Louis 3: 365
on Cooper, James Fenimore 3:
206
cultural identity in 1: 126–27
decadent aristocrat convention
3: 189
detective fiction 1: 250–51
devil 3: 198
on Godwin, William (sidebar)
2: 328
horror films 1: 429, 444–45
SUBJECT INDEX
influence of European Gothic
tradition 3: 188, 194–95, 202,
211–13
influence of Hogg, James 3:
213
influence of Walpole, Horace
2: 310–11
influence on Gothicism 1: 31
labyrinth convention 3:
197–98
Lawrence, D. H. on (sidebar) 3:
203
Lovecraft, H. P. on (sidebar) 3:
219
madness as theme 1: 314–15;
3: 202–5
on Mosses from an Old Manse
2: 379
mysterious portrait convention
3: 199
mysticism 1: 254–55
Otherness of 1: 523–24
principal works 3: 190
prophecy convention 3: 200
sadism 3: 198–99
transcendence 2: 494–96
on Twice Told Tales (sidebar) 2:
369
Wandering Jew (Gothic
convention) 3: 198
Poems (Wilde) 3: 487
Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton
Bell (Brontë, C. and Brontë, E.)
2: 103, 132
Poems. by Edgar Allan Poe (Poe) 3:
187
Poems: Wherein It Is Attempted to
Describe Certain Views of Nature
and of Rustic Manners (Baillie) 2:
49–50, 56
The Poetic Mirror; or, The Living
Bards of Britain (Hogg) 2: 422
“Poetics of the Uncanny: E. T. A.
Hoffmann’s ‘Sandmann’”
(Frisch) 2: 408–11
Poetry
ballads 1: 258
Graveyard school 1: 52–55
Hogg, James 2: 421–23, 427
Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 187–88,
189
Romanticism and 3: 369
567
SUBJECT INDEX THE POISONED KISS AND OTHER STORIES FROM THE PORTUGUESE
Scott, Sir Walter 3: 289–90,
293–94
supernatural themes 1: 18–20
Walpole, Horace 3: 446
Wilde, Oscar 3: 487, 488, 497–
99, 499
See also specific titles and
authors
The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories
from the Portuguese (Oates) 3:
164, 170, 180
Polanski, Roman 1: 449
Polidori, John 1: 243–49, 262,
344–47, 345, (sidebar) 362
Political ideology. See
Sociopolitical ideology
“The Politics of the Gothic
Heroine in the 1790s” (Clery) 1:
220–28
“Pomegranate See d” (Wharton)
3: 457, 459, 461, 470, 471
female archetypes 3: 464–66
female mythology (sidebar) 3:
467
as ghost story 3: 463–65
Pornography
American Psycho 1: 37
horror and 2: 187–88; 3: 284
The Magic Toyshop 2: 184–85
psychological horror and 2:
187–88
The Sadeian Woman: An
Exercise in Cultural History 2:
187–88
See also Sexuality
The Portable Faulkner (Faulkner) 2:
294
Porte, Joel 3: 277
Portrait, mysterious (Gothic
convention)
The Castle of Otranto 1: 252; 2:
252, 254; 3: 25, 199
“Family Portraits” 1: 292
The House of Seven Gables 2:
370
Little Dorrit 2: 254
Melmoth the Wanderer 1: 252;
3: 199, 506–7
Melville, Herman 3: 114–15
The Oval Portrait 1: 252–53
The Picture of Dorian Gray 1:
253; 3: 488, 494–95, 506–7
Poe, Edgar Allan 3: 199
Rossetti, Christina 1: 252–53
terror-romanticism and 1:
252–53
The Portrait of a Lady (James) 2:
462, 471–72
The Possessed (Dostoevski) 1: 315
“The Possibility of Evil” (Jackson)
1: 275–76
The Posthumous Papers of the
Pickwick Club (Dickens). See The
Pickwick Papers
Postman, Neil 1: 455
568
“Postmodern Gothic: Desire and
Reality in Angela Carter’s
Writing” (Neumeier) 2: 194–200
“Postmodern Gothic: Stephen
King’s Pet Sematary” (Nash) 2:
499–504
Postmodernism
Carter, Angela 2: 188
Jameson, Fredric on 1: 466–67
Pet Sematary 2: 500–504
sublime 1: 147–48
Poteet, Lewis J. 3: 504–9
Powell, Michael 1: 447–48
“The Power of Allusion, the Uses
of Gothic: Experiments in Form
and Genre” (Johnson, G.) 3:
178–85
Power Politics (Atwood) 2: 1, 9
Prawer, S. S. 1: 425–39; 2: 401–8
“The Preceptor as Fiend:
Radcliffe’s Psychology of the
Gothic” (Miall) 3: 238–45
“Preface” (Godwin) (sidebar) 2:
330
“Preface” (Lewis) 3: 34
“Preface” (Maturin) (sidebar) 3:
85
“Preface” (Wharton) 3: 460–62,
472, 474
“Preface to Wuthering Heights”
(Brontë, C.) (sidebar) 2: 147
The Prelude (Wordsworth) 1: 21
Prest, Thomas Preckett 1: 349
Price, Vincent 1: 444–45
Pride and Prejudice (Austen) 2:
26–27
The Prince of Angola (Ferriar) 1:
207
The Prisoner of Zenda (Hawkins) 1:
130
The Private Memoirs and
Confessions of a Justified Sinner
(Hogg) 1: 80; 2: 421–23, 427
bad grammar in 2: 428–29
Calvinism 2: 429–31
compared to Die Elixiere des
Teufels 2: 431
criticism of 2: 432
Devil as divine 2: 434–36
dreams 2: 431–32
German Romanticism and 2:
432
as greatest Scottish book 2:
432–38
narrative structure 3: 86
publication history 2: 429
Saintsbury, George on (sidebar)
2: 429
Scottish influence in 1: 28–29;
2: 436–37
supernatural 2: 423, 431–32
The Professor (Brontë, C.) 2:
103–4, 107, 122
The Progress of Romance (Reeve) 1:
51–52
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
“Prologue and Act 1, Scene 1”
(Siddons) 1: 398
Prophecy (Gothic convention) 3:
200
“The Prophetic Pictures”
(Hawthorne) 2: 364, 370
“Providence and the Guitar”
(Stevenson) 3: 361
Psycho (film) 1: 437, 447–48
Psychoanalysis 1: 70–71, (sidebar)
2: 308
Ambiguous Gothic 2: 412–17
beating fantasy 3: 329, 330
of Beloved 3: 150–60
The Castle of Otranto 1: 322
dreams 1: 326–29
Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus 1: 322–24
Klein, Melanie 1: 317–25,
379–81
LaCapra, Dominick 3: 152–55,
158
object-relations psychology 1:
319, 321
“A Rose for Emily” 2: 310–11
symbolism 1: 321–22
See also Freud, Sigmund
Psychological horror
American Gothic tradition 2:
299
Carter, Angela 2: 183–89
Hoffmann, E. T. A. 2: 411–17
Jung, Carl G. 3: 463
The Marble Faun 2: 383–84
Melmoth the Wanderer 1: 27–29
Mosses from an Old Manse 2:
365
pornography and 2: 187–88
psychological thrillers 1: 438
“Young Goodman Brown” 2:
365
See also Horror
Psychology
abnormal 1: 332–41
Gil Blas 1: 334
interpretation of The Strange
Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(Stevenson) 3: 373–81
in Night Side: Eighteen Tales 3:
180–84
supernatural and 1: 232
Pugin, A. W. 1: 487
Pulitzer Prize
Morrison, Toni 3: 135
Wharton, Edith 3: 458, 459
Punch (periodical) 2: 218, 226
Punk music 1: 470–73
Punter, David 1: 158–71, 317–26,
439–52; 3: 278
The Purcell Papers (Le Fanu) 3:
1–2, 6–7, 9–10, 12
Purcell, Reverend Francis. See Le
Fanu, Joseph Sheridan
Purinton, Marjean D. 2: 67–76

“Purity and Danger: Dracula, the heroines 1: 221; 2: 138, 144; 3:
Urban Gothic, and the Late 64
Victorian Degeneracy Crisis” influence on Davis, Alexander
(Spencer) 1: 127–43 Jackson 1: 501
“Puss-in-Boots” (Carter) 2: 182 influence on Gothic fiction 3:
Putzel, Max (sidebar) 2: 304 40
influence on Hawthorne,
Nathaniel 2: 376
influence on Melville, Herman
3: 111–16
influence on Poe, Edgar Allan
Q 3: 194–95, 202
“Queen of May” (Jackson) 1: 266 influences on 3: 232
The Queen of the Damned (Rice) 3: landscape as motif 1: 403, 404;
263–64 3: 113
See also Vampire Chronicles legacy of (sidebar) 3: 253
The Queen’s Wake, 2: 422 Lewis, Matthew Gregory on 3:
Quentin Durward (Scott) 3: 311, 39
313 library in 1: 92–93
Quest (Gothic convention) 2: mysterious portrait 1: 252
473–74, (sidebar) 492 obsoleteness of 2: 452
patterns in 2: 301
principal works 3: 233
Scott, Sir Walter on (sidebar) 3:
238
sublime as theme 1: 87; 3: 313
R supernatural 1: 332–33
“Race and the Gothic Monster: Wollstonecraft, Mary and 3:
The Xenophobic Impulse of 239
Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Taming a on women’s education 3:
Tartar’” (Derrickson) 1: 197–207 238–44
“Race, Labor, and the Gothic Radical Innocence (Hassan) 2: 301,
Western: Dispelling Frontier 302
Myths in Dorothy Scarborough’s Railo, Eino 1: 249–60, 284
The Wind” (Kollin) 1: 36 Raising Demons (Jackson) 1:
Race relations 1: 108 267–68
Alcott, Louisa May 1: 200 The Rambler (Johnson) 1: 50–51
in early American literature 1: Rambles Beyond Railways (Collins)
118–27 2: 218, 219
Gobineau, Arthur de 3: 222 Rambles in Germany and Italy in
interracial desire 1: 207–10 1840, 1842, and 1843 (Shelley)
miscegenation 3: 218–28 3: 320
in The Shadow Knows 1: 218 Ranger, Paul 1: 401–11
in “Taming a Tartar” 1: 200– Rank, Otto 1: 310–16
203, 205–6 “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
in Zofloya 1: 208–10 (Hawthorne) 2: 365, 375
Radcliffe, Ann 1: 20, 80–81; 3: “Rat Krespel” (Hoffmann) 2: 388,
231–62 397
animism 3: 243–44 Rathbone, Basil 3: 353
Austen, Jane and 2: 36–40 Die Räuber (Schiller) (sidebar) 1:
Birkhead, Edith on (sidebar) 3: 275
246 “The Raven” (Poe) 3: 189
castle in 2: 252 “Ravenna” (Wilde) 3: 497
compared to Irving, Raven’s Wing (Oates) 3: 179
Washington 2: 453–55 Rayner (Baillie) 2: 58
compared to Scott, Sir Walter “The Readerhood of Man”
3: 310 (Brooks-Rose) 2: 410
compared to Walpole, Horace “Reading Rooms: M. R. James and
2: 36 the Library of Modernism”
fear 2: 336 (Fielding) 1: 38
female Gothic 3: 252–59 “The Real Right Thing” (James) 2:
feminist literary theory and 1: 473
86 The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein,
founder of Gothic genre 1: 2 Philosophy, and the Mind
Gothic veil 1: 455 (Diamond) 3: 515–16
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
A REVIEW OF DRACULA, BY BRAM STOKER
Rebecca (du Maurier) 2: 118–19,
279–80
“Chapter 1” 2: 281–82
film adaptation 1: 437
heroine as vampire 2: 286–90
melodrama (sidebar) 2: 285
symbolism 2: 284–91
vamp vs. femme fatale 2:
285–86
Rebecca (film) 1: 437
“Recent Novels” (The Spectator), 3:
393–94
“Recent Novels” (The Times,
SUBJECT INDEX
London) 3: 394–95
“Recent Novels: Villette” (Greg) 2:
120–21
“Recent Popular Novels: The
Woman in White” (Dublin
University Magazine) 2: 211
The Recess; Or, A Tale of Other
Times (Lee) 1: 115–18, (sidebar)
119, 126
Recollections of an Excursion to the
Monasteries of Alcobaca Batalha
(Beckford) 2: 80
“The Reconstruction of the
Gothic Feminine Ideal in Emily
Brontë’s Wuthering Heights”
(Conger) 2: 136–46
“Recovering Nightmares:
Nineteenth-Century Gothic”
(Thomas, R.) 1: 326–32
Redburn: His First Voyage (Melville)
3: 107, 108, 112, 114, 119
Redgauntlet (Scott) 3: 299, 307,
311
Reeve, Clara 1: 51–52, 80,
(sidebar) 112, 113, 113–15; 2:
252
“Reflections of Excess:
Frankenstein, the French
Revolution, and Monstrosity”
(Botting) 3: 348–56
“Reflections on the Grotesque”
(Oates) (sidebar) 3: 179
Reflections on the Revolution in
France (Burke) 1: 97; 3: 350–51
The Reivers (Faulkner) 2: 294
“The Relationship of Gothic Art
to Gothic Literature”
(Bayer-Berenbaum) 1: 480–86
Religious buildings 1: 510–13
“The Renaissance, and Jacobean
Gothic” (Parker) 1: 477–80
“The Renegade” (Jackson) 1:
270–71, 277
Repetition (theatrical device) 1:
407
Repulsion (film) 1: 449
The Return of the Vanishing
American (Fiedler) 2: 304–5
Reversals (literary device) 1: 23,
26
A review of Dracula, by Bram
Stoker (The Athenaeum), 3: 393
569
SUBJECT INDEX A REVIEW OF MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHITE WHALE
A review of Moby-Dick; or, The
White Whale (The Critic),
(sidebar) 3: 125
A review of Mysteries of Udolpho,
by Ann Radcliffe (Coleridge) 3:
245–46
Review of The Mysteries of
Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe
(Enfield) 3: 246–49
“Review of New Books: Twice Told
Tales” (Graham’s Magazine),
(sidebar) 2: 369
A review of The Castle of Otranto:
A Story (Langhorn) 3: 435
A review of The Castle of Otranto:
A Story (Lubbock) 3: 436
A review of The Castle of Otranto:
A Story(The Critical Review), 3:
434–35
“A review of The Monk”
(Coleridge) 3: 46–48
A review of The Strange Case of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde(The Times), 3:
364–65
Reynolds, David S. 1: 520
Rhode, Eric 1: 437
Rice, Anne 3: 263, 263–87
American Gothic tradition 3:
279–85
author’s fears (sidebar) 3: 278
Catholicism 3: 279
compared to Lewis, Matthew
Gregory 3: 279
Harlequin formula and 3:
281–83
principal works 3: 265–66
rewriting vampire mythology
3: 266–76
self-consciousness of (sidebar)
3: 267
vampires of 1: 369–71
Rich, Adrienne 1: 216
Richardson, Samuel 3: 212–13
Richter, David H. 3: 278–79
Rieger, James 1: 346
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
(Coleridge) 1: 19, 251
Der Ring des Polykrates (Schiller) 1:
306–7
The Ring of Polykrates (Schiller).
See Der Ring des Polykrates
Ringe, Donald A. (sidebar) 2: 450
“Rip Van Winkle” (Irving) 2:
441–43, 449–50, 457
Riquelme, John Paul 1: 30–40
The Rise of Life on Earth (Oates) 3:
165
Rizzo, Betty 2: 337–38
“The Roads Round Pisa”
(Dinesen) 2: 269
Rob Roy (Scott) 3: 292, 297,
299–300, 312
The Robber Bride (Atwood) 2: 2,
10, 13, 213–17
570
“The Robber Bridegroom”
(Atwood) 2: 11
“Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (Brennan) 3:
372–82
Roberts, Bette 3: 279
Roberts, J. M. 1: 79
Robertson, Fiona 3: 297–305
Rock (music) 1: 469–70
Rock music 1: 469–73
The Rocky Mountains; or, Scenes,
Incidents, and Adventures in the
Far West (Irving) 2: 442
Roderick Hudson (James) 2: 462
Roettgen Pieta (carving) 1: 484
“Roger Malvin’s Burial”
(Hawthorne) 2: 364
Rogers, Samuel 2: 85
Rokeby (Scott) 3: 290, 306
Rolleston, T. W. 3: 5–6
“The Romance Feeling”
(Summers) 1: 40–48
“’Romance of a Darksome Type’:
Versions of the Fantastic in the
Novels of Joyce Carol Oates”
(Egan) 3: 168–78
“The Romance of Certain Old
Clothes” (James) 2: 462, 463,
465–66, 471
The Romance of the Forest
(Radcliffe) 1: 2; 2: 252; 3: 232,
239–40, 246
“The Romance of the Impossible”
(Hawthorne) (sidebar) 3: 503
Romances
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 368–
77, 380–81
Jane Eyre as prototype 2:
115–20
Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan 3:
6–15
vs. novels 1: 49–52
as reflection of female oppres-
sion 1: 220–26
revival of 1: 129–30
The Robber Bride 2: 213–17
Scott, Sir Walter 1: 501–2
sea stories 1: 251–52
terror-romance 1: 249–58
urban Gothic and 1: 130–33
The Woman in White 2: 216
“Romancing the Shadow”
(Morrison) 1: 118–27, 520–21
“Romantic Supernaturalism: The
Cast Study as Gothic Tale”
(Burwick) 1: 332–42
“Romantic Transformations”
(Botting) 1: 21–30
Romanticism
African American experience
1: 119–27
cabbalism and 1: 254–55
drama 1: 258, 390
European Gothic tradition 1:
249–58; 2: 271–72
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
German 1: 407–9; 2: 271, 379,
411–12, 432
Gothic heroes in 1: 24
Gothic movement and 1: 2,
21–29, 42–45; 2: 271, 494; 3:
124, 308–9
Gothic revival and 1: 486–89
grotesques 2: 300
Maturin, Charles Robert 3: 82
opposition within movement
1: 255–56
poetry 3: 369
“Romanticism and the Gothic
Revival” (Addison) 1: 486–90
Romiero (Baillie) 2: 58
Römishe Elegien (Goethe) 2: 341
Ronald, Ann 2: 242–45
The Rose and the Key (Le Fanu) 1:
89
“A Rose for Emily” (Faulkner) 2:
293–95, 296–97, 306–12
Rose, Jacqueline 1: 380
Ross, Marlon 1: 101
Rossetti, Christina (sidebar) 1:
143, 252–53
Ruskin, John 2: 300
Russian authors 1: 2
Ryan, Steven T. 3: 122–24
Rymer, James Malcolm 1: 349
Rzepka, Charles 1: 36
S
“The Sacrifice” (Oates) 3: 180–81,
182, 184
Sade, Marquis de 3: 61–69, 249
The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in
Cultural History (Carter) 2: 180,
187–88, 199
Sadism 3: 198–99
Sage, Victor 3: 6–16
Saint-Germain, Count (character)
1: 367–68
Saintsbury, George (sidebar) 2:
429
’Salem’s Lot (King) 2: 482, 499
family 2: 502
influence of Watergate scandal
1: 371
vampires 1: 371–73; 3: 270
Salmagundi; or, The Whim-whams
and Opinions of Launcelot
Langstaff, Esq., and Others
(Irving) 2: 441–42
Salomé (Wilde) 3: 487, 489,
495–97
“Salvator Rosa” (Hoffmann). See
“Signor Formica”
Sampson, George 1: 102
Sanctuary (Faulkner) 2: 293–94,
312–18
Sanders, Scott P. 1: 68

“The Sand-man” (Hoffmann). See
“Der Sandmann”
“Der Sandmann” (Hoffmann) 2:
388–91
as Ambiguous Gothic 2: 412
archetypes 2: 413–14
compared to “The Mortal Im-
mortal: A Tale” 3: 330
Freud, Sigmund on 2: 402–3,
408–9, 413
identity crisis 2: 412–17
narrative structure 2: 401–7
ncanny guest in 1: 302–4; 2:
403–11
reader response 2: 397, 410–11
Sartoris (Faulkner) 2: 294
Satanism 1: 463–65
See also Devil
Satire 3: 283
Savage, Jon 1: 471
Savoy, Eric 1: 66–74
Scarborough, Dorothy 1: 36
The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne) 2:
363–65
symbolism 2: 376
witchcraft 2: 372–73
“Scheme for Raising a large Sum
of Money by Message Cards and
Notes” (Walpole) 3: 446
Schiller, Friedrich von 1: 152,
274, (sidebar) 275
compared to Brown, Charles
Brockden (sidebar) 2: 171
influence on Gothic drama 1:
407–9
uncanny 1: 306–7
Scholes, Robert 3: 249
Schopenhauer, Arthur 1: 152–53
Schreck, Max 1: 450
Scott, Sir Walter 1: 2, 262, 335; 3:
289, 289–317
Abbotsford 1: 502
anonymity 3: 290
antiquarianism influence on 1:
25
architecture motif and 3:
315–16
on The Castle of Otranto 3: 432,
443–44
compared to Irving,
Washington 2: 453
compared to Radcliffe, Ann 3:
310
on Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus 3: 336–37,
(sidebar) 349
Gilmor, Robert III and 1: 503
on Gothic ambiguity 2: 453
on hallucinations 1: 334, 338
Hazlitt, William (sidebar) 3:
298
on Hoffmann, E. T. A. (sidebar)
2: 392, 401, 407
Hogg, James and 2: 421–22,
432–33
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
letter from Edgeworth, Maria
(sidebar) 3: 306
on Lewis, Matthew Gregory 3:
36
literary legacy and 1: 92–93,
96–97, 102
Maturin, Charles Robert and,
3: 82–83
mystery and 3: 298–304,
306–8
on Nicolai, Friedrich 1: 336–37
popularity in America 1: 501
principal works 3: 292–93
on Radcliffe, Ann (sidebar) 3:
238
romances 1: 501–2
Romantic attitude toward
architecture 1: 487
Southern Gothic 2: 303
supernatural 3: 313–16,
(sidebar) 349
translation of Goethe (sidebar)
2: 350
Wavery Novels 3: 289–92,
297–304, 305–16
Scottish writers 1: 2
Sculpture 1: 475–76, 514–17
Sea stories 1: 251–52; 3: 205–11
A Season of Dreams (Appel) 2:
300–301
“Secrecy, Silence, and Anxiety:
Gothic Narratology and the
Waverly Novels” (Robertson) 3:
297–305
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 1: 72; 2:
10
“A Select Party” (Hawthorne) 2:
373–74
Self-identity
of Beckford, William 2: 95–101
doubles as supernatural 1:
310–16
of du Maurier, Daphne 2:
289–90
Oates, Joyce Carol 3: 183
“Der Sandmann” 2: 412–17
Senf, Carol A. 1: 342–61; 3: 16–21
Sensation fiction 1: 87–91
German 2: 431
Irving, Washington 2: 447
Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan 1:
354; 3: 5–6
The Woman in White 2: 211–
15, 218–19, 223–26
“Sensation Novels” (Oliphant) 2:
211–14
Sense and Sensibility (Austen) 2:
25–27, 32, 33
The Sense of the Past (James) 2:
472
Sensibility 2: 36–40
The Separation (Baillie) 2: 58
Septimius Felton (Hawthorne) 2:
376
SEXUALITY
The Serapion Brethren (Hoffmann).
See Die Serapionsbrüder
Die Serapionsbrüder (Hoffmann) 2:
392–93, 397–401, 402–3, 405
Serial killers, King, Stephen 2:
490–93
A Series of Plays: In Which It Is
Attempted to Delineate the Stronger
Passions of the Mind—Each
Passion Being the Subject of a
Tragedy and a Comedy (Baillie) 2:
50–51, 51–60
authorship of 2: 54–55
SUBJECT INDEX
modern critical reception 2:
65–67
review (sidebar) 2: 68
social progress in 2: 61–65
“Seven Gothic Tales” (Brantly) 2:
269–78
Seven Gothic Tales (Dinesen) 2:
257–61, 269–71, (sidebar) 270
“Seven Gothic Tales: The Divine
Swank of Isak Dinesen” (Updike)
(sidebar) 2: 270
Several Perceptions (Carter) 2: 180
Sex Pistols (musical group) 1:
470–71
Sexual innuendo 2: 456–58
Sexuality 1: 30
Absalom! Absalom! 2: 303
American South 2: 303
Bellefleur 3: 173
Black House 2: 482
Carter, Angela 2: 184–89
fetishism 2: 184–85; 3: 174
heavy metal lyrics 1: 462–63
incest 2: 310–11; 3: 329–30
interracial 1: 207–10
The Monk 1: 463
monsters 2: 188
mythology and 2: 188–89
perversion 2: 186, 311
pre-oedipal stage 1: 377–79
Rebecca 2: 286–90
“A Rose for Emily” 2: 310–11
The Sadeian Woman: An
Exercise in Cultural History 2:
187–88
Salomé 3: 496–97
Sanctuary 2: 315–17
The Shadow Knows 1: 217–18
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde 2: 482; 3:
375–76
vampires 1: 350–51, 357, 368,
370
Victorian attitudes 1: 132, 137,
207
in Victorian Gothic 1: 87–91
Wharton, Edith 3: 478–79,
483–84
of Wilde, Oscar 3: 488
See also Eroticism;
Homosexuality;
Pornography
571
SUBJECT INDEX SEXUALITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Sexuality and Its Discontents
(Weeks) 1: 138
The Shadow (Gothic convention)
2: 146–50
Shadow Dance (Carter) 2: 180
The Shadow Knows (Johnson) 1:
217–19
“Shadow—A Parable” (Poe) 3:
190–92
Shadows on the Grass (Dinesen) 2:
267
Shakespeare, William, influence
of 1: 98
Shelden, Pamela Jacobs 2: 470–78
Shelley, Mary 1: 2, 31, 261–62; 3:
319, 319–35
attitude toward female body 3:
329–33
Byron, Lord George Gordon
and 3: 344
chase motif and 3: 339
Clairmont, Claire and 3:
344–46
compared to Hoffmann, E. T.
A. 3: 330
compared to King, Stephen 2:
500
education of 3: 345–46
female Gothic 3: 327–33
film adaptation of Frankenstein;
or, The Modern Prometheus 1:
432–33
Frankenstein as autobiography
(sidebar) 3: 328
on ghosts 3: 321–24
Godwin, William and 2: 323;
3: 319, 339, 345–46
heroines 2: 138; 3: 327–33
incest 3: 329–30
influence of the French
Revolution 1: 82–85
loneliness 3: 342–47
Polidori, John and 3: 344
principal works 3: 321
Shelley, Percy Bysshe and 3:
319–21, (sidebar) 328, 344–46
social philosophy 1: 255
use of Gothic elements, 1: 25
Wollstonecraft, Mary and 3:
319, 328–29, 342
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 1: 2, 9–12,
(sidebar) 76, 82–83
Clairmont, Claire and 3:
344–46
on Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus 3: 335–36
Lewis, Matthew Gregory and
3: 59–60
Polidori, John and 3: 344
Shelley, Mary and 3: 319–21,
(sidebar) 328, 344–46
The Shepherd’s Calendar (Hogg) 2:
425–28, 427–28
Shetty, Nalini V. 3: 118–22
Shilling shocker 1: 2
572
The Shining (film) 1: 69, 219, 498
The Shining (King) 2: 482, 494–99
Shirley (Brontë, C.) 2: 104, 110–11
“Shirley Jackson: Domestic
Horror” (Joshi) 1: 264–83
Showalter, Elaine 1: 210–20
A Sicilian Romance (Radcliffe) 1: 2,
398; 2: 254; 3: 232
The Sicilian Romance,or, The
Apparition of the Cliffs, An Opera,
by Henry Siddons (Siddons) 1:
398, 412, 412–13
“The Sick Rose” (Blake) 2: 306–12
Siddons, Henry 1: 398, 412–13
The Siege of Salerno (Maturin) 3:
76
“The Signalman” (Dickens) 2: 230
“Signor Formica” (Hoffmann) 2:
399–400
Simmons, Dan 1: 366
“Sinister House” (Davenport)
(sidebar) 2: 285
Sioux, Siouxsie 1: 470–71
“Sir Bertrand, a Fragment” (Aiken,
Barbauld) 1: 2, 5–7, (sidebar) 7,
46–47; 3: 24–25
“Sir Edmund Orme” (James) 2:
463
“Sir Walter Scott” (Hazlitt)
(sidebar) 3: 298
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon,
Gent. (Irving) 2: 441–42, 447–49,
(sidebar) 450
Sketches by Boz (Dickens) 2: 230,
(sidebar) 252
Sketches of the Philosophy of
Apparations (Hibbert) 1: 334,
336–37, 338
“A Skilled Hand Weaves a Net of
Horror” (Berkman) 2: 283–84
Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the
Technology of Monsters
(Halberstam) 1: 197–99
Sklar, Robert 1: 438
Skywalk (Brown) 2: 153
Slave narratives 1: 183–92; 3:
146–48
Slavery
American creativity and 1:
520–21
“The Fall of the House of
Usher” 3: 223
Garner, Margaret 3: 146–47
as horror 1: 181–92, 520
Sleath, Eleanor 1: 98
A Small Boy and Others (James) 2:
472
Smith, Alexander 2: 225
Smith, Charlotte 1: 96
Smith, Iain Crichton 2: 432–38
Smith, Rosamond. See Oates,
Joyce Carol
Smollet, Tobias 1: 1–2, 5, 20, 50
Snake Eyes (Oates) 3: 165, 178
Snitow, Ann 3: 281–82
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
The Snow-Image, and Other Tales
(Hawthorne) 2: 365
“The Snowstorm” (Oates) 3: 180,
183
Social criticism 3: 458, 466–75
Social history 1: 48–57; 2: 61–67
Social philosophy 1: 255
“Socialized and Medicalized
Hysteria in Joanna Baillie’s
Witchcraft” (Purinton) 2: 67–76
Sociopolitical ideology in drama
1: 410–15
Soldier’s Pay (Faulkner) 2: 294,
299
Solstice (Oates) 3: 183
Son of Frankenstein (film) 3: 353
Son of the Morning (Oates) 3: 164,
168, 170–72, 177
Song of Solomon (Morrison) 3: 136,
138–39
Sorcery 2: 325
The Sorrows of Young Werther
(Goethe). See Die Leiden des
jungen Werthers
“The Soul of Man Under
Socialism” (Wilde) 3: 495
Soul/Mate (Oates) 3: 165, 178
The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner)
2: 294
South, American and Gothic
tradition 2: 302–5
South, European and
terror-romanticism 1: 256–57
Southam, B. C. 2: 32
Southern Gothic 2: 297–305; 3:
178
The Sovereignty of God (Murdoch)
3: 510–11
Spargo, R. Clifton 3: 150–60
Spark, Muriel 3: 338
The Spectator (periodical) 3:
393–94
“The Spectre Bridegroom” (Irving)
2: 448–49
Spectres. See Ghosts; Grotesques
“Speeches for Dr. Frankenstein”
(Atwood) 2: 4–5
Spencer, Kathleen L. 1: 127–43
The Sphinx (Wilde) 3: 497–99
“The Sphinx without a Secret”
(Wilde) 3: 490–92
Spiritualism 1: 482; 2: 379–80
“The Split Second” (du Maurier)
2: 284
The Spoils of Poynton (James) 2:
472
Sportive Gothic 2: 447–51,
451–53
The Spy (periodical) 2: 422
“The Squaw” (Stoker) 3: 386
St. Irvyne (Shelley, P.) 1: 24
St. James Gazette (periodical) 3:
502–4
St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth
Century (Godwin) 2: 321–23

St. Ronan’s Well (Scott) 3: 292,
308, 311
“Stairway to Heaven” (song) 1:
464
“Stephen King and the Tradition
of American Gothic” (Gibbs) 2:
494–99
“Stephen King’s Canon: The Art
of Balance” (Casebeer) (sidebar)
2: 492
Stevenson, Robert Louis 1: 31,
314; 3: 359, 359–84, (sidebar)
373
compared to King, Stephen 2:
485–87
compared to Poe, Edgar Allan
3: 365
degeneration 1: 158–60
principal works 3: 361–62
Stoker, Bram 1: 32–34, 127–40,
358–59, 364; 3: 385, 385–428
characterization of Count
Dracula 3: 405–10
“counterfeit” Gothicism 3:
397–404
cultural identity in Dracula 1:
171–79
degeneration 1: 166–69
development of Count Dracula
1: 342–44
dreams 1: 330
influence of Le Fanu, Joseph
Sheridan 1: 358
influence of Walpole, Horace
3: 395–404
Irish allegory in Dracula 3:
415–27
Irving, Henry and 3: 400–401
principal works 3: 387
“Stoker’s Counterfeit Gothic:
Dracula and Theatricality at the
Dawn of Simulation” (Hogle) 3:
395–405
Stone, Edward 2: 309
Storm and Stress movement 2:
349–53
“Storms” (Hogg) 2: 425–26
“The Story of a Lie” (Stevenson)
3: 361
The Story of a Lie,and Other Tales
(Stevenson) 3: 360
“The Story of Prince Alasi and the
Princess Firouzkah” (Beckford) 2:
88
“The Story of Prince Barkiarokh”
(Beckford) 2: 88
“The Story of Princess Zulkais and
the Prince Kalilah” (Beckford) 2:
88
“The Story of the Young Italian”
(Irving) 2: 455
“The Story of the Young Robber”
(Irving) 2: 447, 448, 452
“A Story Replete with Horror”
(Benedict) 2: 429–32
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
“The Stout Gentleman” (Irving)
2: 442
Stowe, Harriet Beecher 1: 182–83,
185–90; 3: 223
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde (Stevenson) 1: 31, 314;
3: 359–61, (sidebar) 365
as autobiography 3: 368
compared to Frankenstein; or,
The Modern Prometheus 3: 371
compared to works of King,
Stephen 2: 485–87
critical reception 3: 361, 366
dedication of (sidebar) 3: 373
degeneration 1: 158–60
doubles in 3: 368–69, 372,
374–81
film adaptation 3: 368
Jung, Carl G. 3: 373–81
monster 3: 370–72
review 3: 364–65
sexuality 2: 487; 3: 375–76
Victorian morality and 3:
370–72
The Strange Case of Robert Louis
Stevenson (Elwin) 3: 368
“Strange Stories by a Nervous
Gentleman” (Irving) 2: 452, 455
“Strange Stories: Irving’s Gothic”
(Bell) 2: 451–56
A Strange Story (Bulwer-Lytton)
(sidebar) 1: 15, 263
“Strangers in Town” (Jackson) 1:
277
Strawberry Hill (castle) 1: 58,
502–4; 3: 430, 442, 447–48
Strawberry Hill Press 3: 446
Strengall, Heidi 2: 485–93
“The Strength of
Backward-Looking Thoughts”
(Davenport-Hines) 1: 490–96
“The Student from Salamanca”
(Irving) 2: 442
Studies in the History of the
Renaissance (Pater) 1: 32–33
“A Study in Puppydom” (St. James
Gazette), 3: 502–4
Sublime 1: 55–56, 87–91, 143–55
architecture as 1: 55–56
vs. beautiful 1: 107–8
Burke, Edmund on 1: 148–50;
3: 91–92
fear and 1: 110–13, 148–49
grotesques and 2: 300
Irving, Washington 2: 452
Kant, Immanuel on 1: 150–55
in Melmoth the Wanderer 3:
91–96
Radcliffe, Ann 1: 87; 3: 313
Suger of St. Denis (sidebar) 1:
478, 506, 508
“Suger of St. Denis” (World Eras),
(sidebar) 1: 478
Sula (Morrison) 3: 148
TABLETOP OF THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS
Summers, Montague 1: 40–48; 3:
36–46, (sidebar) 395
The Sundial (Jackson) 1: 277–78,
279–81
Sunset Boulevard (film) 1: 437–38
Supernatural 1: 231–33; 2: 10–11
architecture and 1: 481, 484
“Carmilla” 3: 26–27
The Castle of Otranto: A Story 3:
449–51
Count Dracula 1: 342–44, 358
Dinesen, Isak 2: 263
doubles and 1: 310–16
SUBJECT INDEX
dreams 1: 327
fantastic novels 1: 128–29
Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus 3: 336–37
Godwin, William on 2: 324–27
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2: 378
history in Gothic literature 3:
22–27
Hogg, James 2: 422–23, 425–
28, 431–32
Jackson, Shirley 1: 264, 267–
72, 274–75
James, Henry 2: 463–64,
470–73
King, Stephen 2: 501–4
Lovecraft, H. P. (sidebar) 1: 260
Morrison, Toni 3: 138–42,
148–49
oral tradition 1: 17–18
The Picture of Dorian Gray 3:
511–15
poetry 1: 18–20
psychology and 1: 232, 332–41
Scott, Sir Walter 3: 313–16,
(sidebar) 349
urban Gothic 1: 139
Wharton, Edith 3: 457, 458–
59, 470–75
See also Fear; Ghosts; Hor-
ror; Psychological horror
Superstition
evil eye 1: 307
getatore 1: 308–9
Scott, Sir Walter 3: 314–16
vampires 1: 345, 348–49
“Superstition” (Hogg) 2: 422, 427
Surfacing (Atwood) 2: 2, 3, 6–8, 11
Surrealist movement 1: 416
Survival: A Thematic Guide to
Canadian Literature (Atwood) 2:
3, 7
Swithen, John. See King, Stephen
Symonds, John Addington
(sidebar) 3: 365
T
Tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins
(painting) 3: 54
573
SUBJECT INDEX “THE TALE OF GUZMAN’S FAMILY”
“The Tale of Guzman’s Family”
(Maturin) 3: 77, 87, 90
“The Tale of Stanton” (Maturin)
3: 77–78
The Tale of the Body Thief (Rice) 3:
264
See also Vampire Chronicles
“Tale of the Indians” (Maturin) 3:
77–78
“Tale of the Spaniard” (Maturin)
3: 77–78, 93–94
A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens) 2:
230
Tales of a Traveller (Irving) 2: 442,
447, 452–53
Tales of the Dead (Shelley) 1: 25
Tales of the Grotesque and
Arabesque (Poe) 3: 198–99
Tales of the Wars of Montrose
(Hogg) 2: 422
Tales of Wonder (Lewis) 3: 32
The Talisman (King) 2: 482,
487–89
The Talisman (Scott) 3: 307–8,
310, 312, 315
Taltos (Rice) 3: 264
Tam O’Shanter (Burns) 1: 18
Tamerlane, and Other Poems (Poe)
3: 187
“Taming a Tartar” (Alcott)
Angel in the House 1: 203–4
feminist literary theory 1:
203–6
gender relations 1: 199–200
monster 1: 199–207
race relations 1: 200–203,
205–6
“The Tapestried Chamber” (Scott)
3: 294–97
Tapestry, animated (Gothic
convention) 3: 199–200
Tar Baby (Morrison) 3: 136, 138
Techno-Gothic 2: 68–73
Television 1: 452–60
“The Tell-Tale Heart” (Poe) 3:
188–89, 213
“The Temple” (Oates) 3: 167–68
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
(painting) 3: 57
The Tenants of Malory (Le Fanu) 3:
10
Terror. See Fear
“Terror Made Relevant: James’s
Ghost Stories” (Thorberg) 2:
466–70
Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Hardy) 1:
34–35
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(film) 1: 422–25
“Textualising the
Double-Gendered Body: Forms
of the Grotesque in The Passion
of New Eve” (Johnson) 2: 190–94
them (Oates) 3: 163
574
Theology debate in Gothic
tradition 3: 277–78
“Theorizing the (Gothic)
Sublime” (Mishra) 1: 143–57
“A Theory of Knowledge” (Oates)
3: 181–82, 184
“They Eat Out” (Atwood) 2: 9
Things As They Are; or, The
Adventures of Caleb Williams
(Godwin). See Caleb Williams
“The Third Baby’s the Easiest”
(Jackson) 1: 265–66
“This is a photograph of Me”
(Atwood) 2: 8
Thomas, Ronald R. 1: 326–32
Thompson, G. R. 2: 301
Thorberg, Raymond 2: 466–70
Thoreau, Henry David 3: 468,
469, 472, 474
“Thrawn Janet” (Stevenson) 3:
360
“The Three Graves: A Fragment of
a Sexton’s Tale” (Coleridge) 1:
236–41
The Three Imposters (Machen) 1:
170
The Three Perils of Man; or War,
Women, and Witchcraft (Hogg) 2:
422
The Three Perils of Woman; or Love,
Leasing, and Jealousy (Hogg) 2:
427
“Tibby Hyslop’s Dream” (Hogg) 2:
428
“The Tiger’s Bride” (Carter) 2: 182
Tillotson, Marcia 3: 342–48
The Times, London, review of
Dracula, 3: 394–95
“To the Editor of the St. James
Gazette” (Wilde) 3: 492–93
“To the Reader” (Lewis) 3: 34–36
“Tobias Martin, Master Cooper
and His Men” (Hoffmann). See
“Meister Martin der Küfner und
seine Gesellen”
The Token (Goodrich) 2: 364
Tom Jones (Fielding) 1: 490
The Tomb of Ligeia (film) 1: 444
The Tommyknockers (King) 1: 287
Torquato Tasso (Goethe) 2: 341
A Tour on the Prairies (Irving) 2:
442–43
“Toward a History of Gothic and
Modernism: Dark Modernity
from Bram Stoker to Samuel
Beckett” (Riquelme) 1: 30–40
Tracy, Spencer 3: 368
Transcendence 2: 494–96
“The Transcendental Economy of
Wharton’s Gothic Mansions”
(Elbert) 3: 466–75
Transcendentalism 3: 468,
470–71, 472, 474
“The Transformation” (Shelley) 3:
324–26
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
“The Translation” (Oates) 3: 180,
184
“Translation from an Ancient
Chaldee MS” (Hogg) 2: 422
“Translator’s Preface” (Walpole) 3:
432–34
“Trauma and the Specters of
Enslavement in Morrison’s
Beloved” (Spargo) 3: 150–60
Travel narratives 3: 107–8
“The Travelling Companion”
(Stevenson) 3: 368
Travels with a Donkey in the
Cévennes (Stevenson) 3: 359
Treasure Island (Stevenson) 3:
359–60
“The Trial for Murder” (Dickens)
2: 230
“Tricks with Mirrors” (Atwood) 2:
6
“The Triumph of Night”
(Wharton) 3: 459, 468, 471–73
The Tryal (Baillie) 2: 50, 63, 66
The Turn of the Screw (James, H.)
1: 31; 2: 461–68, 468, 471, 473
Turner, Nat 1: 181–82
“Turtle-God” (Oates) 3: 183
Twain, Mark 1: 125–26; 3: 158
Twice-Told Tales (Hawthorne) 2:
364, (sidebar) 369
Twin Peaks (television show) 1:
453–59, 457
“Twin Peaks and the Television
Gothic” (Ledwon) 1: 452–60
“Twins” (Oates) 3: 178
Twister (film) 1: 69
Twitchell, James P. 1: 344, 351
Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life
(Melville) 3: 108
U
“The Ugly-Pretty, Dull-Bright,
Weak-Strong Girl in the Gothic
Mansion” (Abartis) 2: 115–20
Uncanny 1: 454
Freud, Sigmund 1: 301–9, 454
guest 1: 302–4; 2: 403–11
repetition and 1: 305–6
Schiller, Friedrich von 1: 306–7
television Gothic and 1:
454–56
“The Uncanny” (Freud) 1:
301–10, (sidebar) 2: 308
“’Uncanny Drives’: The Depth
Psychology of E. T. A.
Hoffmann” (Andriano) 2:
411–19
Uncanny guest (Gothic
convention) 1: 302–4; 2: 403–11

Uncle Silas: A Tale of
Bartram-Haugh (Le Fanu) 1:
89–90; 3: 1–3, 5, 16–17
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 1:
185–90; 3: 223
The Uncommercial Traveller
(Dickens) 2: 238–39
“Der unheimliche Gast”
(Hoffmann) 2: 402
Unholy Loves (Oates) 3: 164
Unknown Pleasures (music
recording) 1: 472
The Unvanquished (Faulkner) 2:
294
Updike, John (sidebar) 2: 270
Urban Gothic 1: 129, 130–33,
138–40
Urfaust (Goethe) 2: 357
Utopia 2: 63–65
V 368, 370
Valente, Joseph 1: 33; 3: 415–27
Valperga (Shelley) 3: 320
The Vampire Armand (Rice) 3: 264
“The Vampire as Gothic Villain”
(Senf) 1: 342–61
Vampire Chronicles (Rice) 1:
369–70; 3: 262–65
eroticism 3: 274–76
Harlequin formula 3: 283
narrative structure 3: 271–72
as revisionist vampire mythol-
ogy 3: 266–76
See also specific titles of books
Vampire fiction 3: 266–76
“The Vampire in Literature”
(Summers) (sidebar) 3: 395
The Vampire Lestat (Rice) 3:
263–64
See also Vampire Chronicles
The Vampire; or, the Bride of the
Isles (Planche) 1: 348
The Vampire Tapestry (Charnas) 1:
368–169
Vampires 1: 32–33, 233, 342–87,
3: 266–76
as aristocracy 1: 344, 350
“Carmilla” 1: 353–58, 382–84;
3: 19–20
Count Dracula 1: 166–69, 342–
44, 358–59, 362–64, 424, 3:
405–10, 417
drama 1: 348–49
Edwardian 1: 363
eroticism 3: 274–76
folklore 1: 344–45, 349, 353
gender identity 1: 382–84; 3:
275, 281–85
“The Girl with the Hungry
Eyes” 1: 364–65
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
Jewish characteristics of 2: 287
King, Stephen 1: 371–73; 3:
270
“The Lady of the House of
Love” 2: 188
Lestat 1: 369–70; 3: 269–76,
280–83
literary history of 1: 255
Louis 1: 369–70; 3: 268–70,
271, 274–75, 280–84
Mona Lisa 1: 32–33
1980s movies 1: 372
Nixon, Richard and 1: 369
parasitism 1: 351–52, 356, 365
psychic 1: 362–67
Rebecca 2: 286–90
revisionist mythology 3:
266–76
Rice, Anne 1: 369–71; 3: 262–
76, 280–84
Saint-Germain, Count 1:
367–68
sexuality of 1: 350–51, 357,
superstition 1: 345, 348–49
The Vampyre. A Tale 1: 243–29,
344–47
Varney the Vampire; or, The
Feast of Blood (Rymer or Prest)
1: 349–52
women 1: 352–58, 364–67; 3:
19–20
See also Monsters; Rice,
Anne; Stoker, Bram
The Vampyre. A Tale (Polidori) 1:
243–49, 262, 344–49, (sidebar)
362
Van Der Zee, James 3: 146
Varma, Devendra P. (sidebar) 3:
253, 463
Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of
Blood (Rymer or Prest) 1: 349,
349–52
Vathek (Beckford) 2: 79–81
author’s personae in 2: 96–101
criticism of 2: 91
doubles in 3: 369
as Gothic tale 2: 89–94
influence on The Giaour
(sidebar) 2: 95
inspiration for 2: 83–85
as Oriental tale 1: 260–61; 2:
88–89, 96
review 2: 85, (sidebar) 86
unauthorized translation 2:
81–83, 88
writing of 2: 87–89
Veidt, Conrad 1: 419
“Verging on the Gothic:
Melmoth’s Journey to France”
(Lanone) 3: 97–104
Vertigo (film) 1: 435
WALPOLE, HORACE
Victimization
“Carmilla” 1: 355–58
Dracula 1: 133–36
of women 1: 355–58; 2: 185,
188–89; 3: 327–33
Victorian period 1: 61–62, 86–91
Angel in the House 1: 131,
203–4
cultural attitudes 1: 131–33
Dracula and 1: 128–40, 166–69
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde and 3: 370–72
Viereck, George Sylvester 1: 363
SUBJECT INDEX
Villette (Brontë, C.) 2: 103–4
compared to The Monk 2:
122–27
Gothic conventions 2: 108,
111–13, 121–27
review 2: 120–21, (sidebar) 121
as reworking of The Professor 2:
122
Vincent, Sybil Korff 2: 17–24
Violence
American Psycho 1: 36–38
The Castle of Otranto 2: 310–11
“The Fall of the House of
Usher 2: 311
Oates, Joyce Carol on 1: 217
O’Connor, Flannery (sidebar)
2: 168
Scott, Sir Walter 3: 311–11
social 1: 197–206
against women 1: 218–19; 2:
185, 188–89
“A Virtuoso’s Collection”
(Hawthorne) 2: 374
The Vision (Beckford) 2: 79
Visual arts 1: 475–526, 480–86
La Volonté de savoir (Foucalt) 1:
295–96
Von Deutscher Baukunst (Goethe)
2: 344
Voyagers to the West (Bailyn) 1:
121–22
W
Wadham College Chapel 1:
477–78
Wadsworth, Daniel 1: 499
“Waiting for Shilo” (MacPherson)
(sidebar) 3: 111
Walden (Thoreau) 3: 468, 470,
474
Waller, Gregory 3: 269
Walpole, Horace 1: 31, 80; 2: 297,
299–300; 3: 429, 429–55
Berry, Mary and 3: 430–31
compared to Radcliffe, Ann 2:
36
excess as theme 3: 355
Gray, Thomas and 3: 446
575
SUBJECT INDEX WANDERING JEW
heroines 2: 138, 144
influence of Hurd, Richard 3:
449–50
influence on Davis, Alexander
Jackson 1: 501
influence on Gothic genre
(sidebar) 3: 443
influence on Melville, Herman
3: 115
influence on Poe, Edgar Allan
2: 310–11
influence on Stoker, Bram 3:
395–404
legacy of 1: 57–58
letters of 3: 429, 431–32
literary form of 1: 459
mysterious portrait in 1: 252;
2: 252, 254; 3: 25, 199
originator of Gothic literature
1: 1–2, 402; 2: 116
patterns in 2: 301
poetry of 3: 446
principal works 3: 432
prophecy in 3: 200
psychoanalysis of 1: 322
singularity of 3: 447
Strawberry Hill 1: 58, 502–3; 3:
430, 447–48
Strawberry Hill Press 3: 446
Wandering Jew (Gothic
convention)
Faulkner, William 2: 302
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2:
373–74
“The Man of the Crowd” 3:
198
Melmoth the Wanderer 3: 74
“The Mortal Immortal: A Tale”
3: 330
precursor for Count Dracula 3:
402
Warfel, Harry R. 2: 164–70
Waring, Susan M. (sidebar) 2: 121
Washington Square (James) 2: 462
Watching (motif) 3: 471
Watergate scandal 1: 371
Watt, James 1: 411
Waverly Novels 3: 289–92,
297–316
See also specific titles in series
Waverly; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since
(Scott) 1: 2; 3: 289–90, (sidebar)
306
fear, 3: 309, 310
mystery in 3: 306
supernatural 3: 313–14
violence 3: 312
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
(Jackson) 1: 278, 280–82
We Were the Mulvaneys (Oates) 3:
165
Weeks, Jeffrey 1: 138
Wein, Toni 2: 121–29
Weir of Hermiston (Stevenson) 3:
360
576
Weissberg, Liliane 3: 142–50
Weld, Theodore 1: 182
“Welldean Hall” (Hogg) 2: 437
Welles, Orson 1: 437; 2: 119
Wells, H. G. 1: 162–66
Werewolves
The Bloody Chamber and Other
Stories 2: 188
Christine 2: 486
King, Stephen 2: 487–89
See also Monsters
Werke (Goethe) 2: 344–48
Wesley, John 1: 17–18
Westerns (novels) 1: 36; 3: 205–6
Whale, James 1: 422–25
Wharton, Edith 3: 457, 457–86
abyss in 3: 480–83
aestheticism 3: 468–69
on American writers 3: 468–69
aristocracy 3: 448, 466–68
autobiographies 3: 476–84
capitalism 3: 467–75
Christianity 3: 470–71
compared to Brontë, Charlotte
3: 480
cultural elitism of 3: 468–69
European heritage 3: 468–69
feminist literary theory 3:
459–60
gender roles 3: 476–80
ghost stories 3: 461–75, 482
ghosts 3: 460–62, 466–75
horror 3: 463–66
James, Henry and 3: 459, 483
mythology 3: 465, (sidebar)
467
Nietzsche, Friedrich and 3: 470
patriarchy 3: 476–80
principal works 3: 460
Pulitzer Prize 3: 458, 459
realism 3: 468
relationship with mother 3:
476–77, 483–84
sexuality 3: 478–79, 483–84
social criticism 3: 458
supernatural 3: 457, 458–59,
470–75
Thoreau, Henry David 3: 468,
469
Transcendentalism 3: 468, 474
as woman writer 3: 478, 480
Wharton, Thomas 1: 54
What I Lived For (Oates) 3: 165
“What is Gothic About Absalom,
Absalom!” (Putzel) (sidebar) 2:
304
“Where Are You Going, Where
Have You Been?” (Oates) 1:
216–17; 3: 164, 179
Where Are You Going, Where Have
You Been?: Stories of Young
America (Oates) 3: 164
Whipple, E. P. 2: 114–15, 135–36
A Whisper of Blood (Datlow) 1:
366–67
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
White Goddess 3: 211
White-Jacket: or, The World in a
Man-of-War (Melville) 3: 108,
115
“Who Is Heathcliff? The Shadow
Knows” (Hume, M.) 2: 146–50
“Why Is Your Writing So
Violent?” (Oates) 1: 217
Wicke, Jennifer 3: 396
Widdicombe, Toby 3: 468
“The Widows” (Oates) 3: 180, 183
Wieland; or, The Transformation
(Brown) 2: 153–55, 159–61, 167
compared to Caleb Williams 2:
168, 170–71
influence of Paradise Lost 2:
170–76
introduction to 2: 155–56
Keats, John on (sidebar) 2: 171
as original Gothic literature 2:
116
review 2: 162–64
“Wieland; or, The Transformation”
(Warfel) 2: 164–70
The Wild Irish Boy (Maturin) 3:
73, 83, 84, 94
The Wild Palms (Faulkner) 2: 294
Wilde, Oscar 1: 31, 34; 3: 487,
487–518
aestheticism 3: 487, 489, 493–
99, 511–16
compared to Maturin, Charles
Robert 3: 504–9
Decadence movement 3: 487
defense of The Picture of Dorian
Gray 3: 492–93
degeneration 1: 160–62
ghost stories 3: 488
influence on The House of the
Vampire 1: 363
morality of 3: 509–16
principal works 3: 489–90
sexual misconduct charge 3:
488
Wilder, Billy 1: 437–38
Wilderness Tips (Atwood) 2: 11
“Wilkie Collins and Dickens”
(Eliot) (sidebar) 2: 215
Wilkins-Freeman, Mary E. 1: 365
“William Beckford and Vathek”
(Bleiler) 2: 85–89
“William Wilson” (Poe) 3: 189,
213, 215
Williams, Anne 1: 67, 69; 3:
252–60
Williamson, Paul 1: 511–18
Willing to Die (Le Fanu) 3: 17
Willis, Paul 1: 465
Wilson, J. J. 2: 261
The Wind (Scarborough) 1: 36
The Wings of the Dove (James) 2:
462, 471
Winter’s Tales (Dinesen) 2: 258
Wise Children (Carter) 2: 186
Wisker, Gina 2: 182–90

“The Witch of Fife” (Hogg) 2: 423
Witchcraft
Godwin, William 2: 325–26
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2:
371–73
Victorian attitudes 1: 132–33
Witchcraft (Baillie) 2: 50, 58,
69–73
The Witching Hour (Rice) 3: 264
With Shuddering Fall (Oates) 3:
164–65, 178
“‘Withered, Wrinkled, and
Loathsome of Visage’: Reading
the Ethics of the Soul and the
Late-Victorian Gothic in The
Picture of Dorian Gray” (Womack)
3: 509–17
Within the Rim and Other Essays,
1914-15 (James) 2: 472
Wolfreys, Julian 2: 234–42
Wollstonecraft, Mary 1: 83, 221,
223
compared to Baillie, Joanna 2:
63
Godwin, William and 2: 322
Radcliffe, Ann and 3: 239
Shelley, Mary and 3: 319, 328–
29, 342
Womack, Kenneth 3: 489, 509–17
Woman and the Demon (Auerbach)
3: 20
The Woman in White (Collins,
Wilkie) 1: 88–89; 2: 201–2, 211
Gothic conventions in 2:
215–17
review 2: 211
as sensation fiction 2: 211–15,
218–19, 223–26
A Woman of No Importance
(Wilde) 3: 488
Woman’s Record (Hale) 1: 211–12
Women 1: 210–29
American Gothic writers 1:
210–19
artists 2: 261
attraction to Gothic 2: 11, 189
demonic (fictitious) 2: 14–16
education of 3: 238–44
eighteenth-century marriage
laws 1: 224–26
female body 3: 329–33
Gothic portrayal of 1: 108–9;
3: 465
Gothic writers, lack of recogni-
tion 1: 212
hysteria as deception 2: 69–73
interracial sexual desire 1:
207–10
Maturin, Charles Robert 3: 80
Morrison, Toni 3: 139–41,
147–48
mythology 3: 465
GOTHIC LITERATURE: A GALE CRITICAL COMPANION, VOL. 1
power in nineteenth century
1: 356–58; 3: 16–21
pre-oedipal stage 1: 377–79
as puppets 2: 183–85
romance as reflection of op-
pression 1: 220–26
Sanctuary 2: 317–18
“Taming a Tartar” 1: 203–6
vampires 1: 352–58, 364–67; 3:
19–20
victimization of 1: 355–58; 2:
185, 188–89; 3: 327–33
in Victorian England 1: 131–
33, 203–5; 2: 63–65; 3: 20–21
violence against 1: 218–19; 2:
185, 188–89
White Goddess 2: 303
Willing to Die 3: 17
as writers 3: 478, 480
See also Heroines
“Women and Power in
‘Carmilla’” (Senf) 3: 16–21
Women; or Pour et contre (Maturin)
3: 74, 79, 81, 83, 84, 95–96
Women, Power, and Subversion
(Newton) 3: 17, 21
Wonderland (Oates) 3: 164–65,
177, 183
American culture 3: 168–70
American Gothic tradition 3:
168–70
compared to Frankenstein; or,
The Modern Prometheus 3:
169–70
as Southern Gothic 3: 178
“Wonderlands” (Oates) 3: 178–79
Wood, Grant 1: 73–74
Wood, Martin J. 3: 266–76
Wood, Robin 1: 415–25
Woodstock (Scott) 3: 311, 315
Woolf, Virginia (sidebar) 2: 471
“The Wool-Gatherer” (Hogg) 2:
422, 438
Wordsworth, William 1: 21
“A Work of Genius: James Hogg’s
Justified Sinner” (Smith) 2:
432–38
World Eras, (sidebar) 1: 478
“Worldly Goods” (Jackson) 1: 267
Worringer, Wilhelm 1: 481
“Wrapping Workhouse” (Dickens)
2: 238–39
Wren, Sir Christopher 1: 40–41
Wright, Angela 3: 61–70
Wright, Richard 1: 180
“Writer and Humanitarian”
(Irwin) (sidebar) 3: 62
The Writing of Fiction (Wharton)
3: 464, 468, 470, 476, 479–80
Wuthering Heights (Brontë, E.) 2:
131–33, 264
“Chapter 1” 2: 133–35
dream interpretation in 1: 331
ZSCHOKKE, HEINRICH
film adaptation 2: 142
Healthcliff as The Shadow 2:
146–50
heroine in 2: 138–45
immorality of 2: 135–36
influence of Gothic on 2: 136–
38, 145
preface (sidebar) 2: 147
review (sidebar) 2: 137
spiritual horror 1: 262–63
Wylder’s Hand (Le Fanu) 1: 89; 3:
1–2
Wyler, William 2: 142
SUBJECT INDEX
X
Xenophobia 1: 93–94
Y
Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn 1: 367–68
Yeats, W. B. 1: 31–32
“The Yellow Mask” (Collins) 2:
202, 217–26
“The Yellow Mask, the Black
Robe, and the Woman in White:
Wilkie Collins, Anti-Catholic
Discourse, and the Sensation
Novel” (Griffin) 2: 217–28
“The Yellow Wallpaper” (Gilman)
1: 109, 212–15, (sidebar) 213
Yoknapatawpha novels 2:
297–306
You Are Happy (Atwood) 2: 5–6, 8
You Can’t Catch Me (Oates) 3: 165
You Must Remember This (Oates) 3:
164–65
Young, Edward 1: 53
“Young Goodman Brown”
(Hawthorne) 2: 363, 365,
372–73, 378
Z
Zanoni (Bulwer-Lytton) (sidebar)
1: 15
Zastrozzi (Shelley, P.) 1: 24
Zgorzelski, Andrzej 1: 128
Zlosnik, Sue 2: 284–91
Zofloya (Dacre) 1: 208–10
Zombie (Oates) 3: 165
Zschokke, Heinrich 1: 499–500
577
 GOTHIC
LITERATURE
A Gale Critical Companion
GALE CRITICAL COMPANION ADVISORY BOARD Barbara M. Bibel Mary Jane Marden
Librarian Collection Development Librarian
Oakland Public Library St. Petersburg College
Oakland, California Pinellas Park, Florida

James K. Bracken Heather Martin

Professor and Assistant Director Arts & Humanities Librarian
University Libraries University of Alabama, Sterne Library
The Ohio State University Birmingham, Alabama
Columbus, Ohio Susan Mikula
Director
Dr. Toby Burrows
Indiana Free Library
Principal Librarian
Indiana, Pennsylvania
The Scholars’ Centre
University of Western Australia Library Thomas Nixon
Nedlands, Western Australia Humanities Reference Librarian
University of North Carolina, Davis Library
Celia C. Daniel Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Associate Librarian, Reference
Howard University Mark Schumacher
Washington, D.C. Jackson Library
University of North Carolina
David M. Durant Greensboro, North Carolina
Reference Librarian
Gwen Scott-Miller
Joyner Library
Assistant Director
East Carolina University Sno-Isle Regional Library System
Greenville, North Carolina Marysville, Washington
Nancy Guidry Donald Welsh
Librarian Head, Reference Services
Bakersfield Community College College of William and Mary, Swem Library
Bakersfield, California Williamsburg, Virginia
Foreword by Jerrold E. Hogle ............................ xiii On the Subject Of ѧ Samuel Taylor

CONTENTS
Coleridge (1772-1834) ............................. 48
Preface ............................................................. xix On the Subject Of ѧ Flannery O’Connor
(1925-1964) .............................................. 68
Acknowledgments .......................................... xxiii On the Subject Of ѧ Percy Bysshe Shelley
(1792-1822) .............................................. 76
Chronology of Key Events ............................. xxxiii On the Subject Of ѧ William Harrison
Ainsworth (1805-1882) ............................ 94

Society, Culture, and the Gothic

VOLUME 1 Introduction .................................................
Representative Works ...................................
107
109
Primary Sources ............................................ 110
Overviews ..................................................... 127
Gothic Literature: An Overview Race and the Gothic .................................... 180
Introduction ..................................................... 1 Women and the Gothic ............................... 210
Representative Works ....................................... 2 Further Reading ............................................ 228
Primary Sources ................................................ 4 Sidebars:
Overviews ....................................................... 16 On the Subject Of ѧ Clara Reeve
Origins of the Gothic ..................................... 40 (1729-1807) ............................................ 112
American Gothic ............................................ 57 On the Subject Of ѧ Sophia Lee
European Gothic ............................................ 74 (1750-1824) ............................................ 119
Further Reading ............................................ 104 On the Subject Of ѧ Christina Rossetti
Sidebars: (1830-1894) ............................................ 143
On the Subject Of ѧ John Aikin On the Subject Of ѧ Ray Bradbury
(1747-1822) and Anna Laetitia (Aikin) (1920-) .................................................... 172
Barbauld (1743-1825) ................................. 7 On the Subject Of ѧ Ambrose Bierce
On the Subject Of ѧ Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1842-1914) ............................................ 199
(1803-1873) .............................................. 15 On the Subject Of ѧ Charlotte Perkins
On the Subject Of ѧ Edmund Burke Gilman (1860-1935) and “The Yellow
(1729?-1797) ............................................. 30 Wallpaper” .............................................. 213

v
CONTENTS Gothic Themes, Settings, and Figures Overviews ..................................................... 480
Introduction ................................................. 231 Architecture .................................................. 486
Representative Works ................................... 233 Art ................................................................. 506
Primary Sources ............................................ 236 Further Reading ............................................ 525
Overviews ..................................................... 249 Sidebars:
Haunted Dwellings and the Supernatural ... 264 On the Subject Of ѧ Suger of St. Denis
Psychology and the Gothic ......................... 301 (1081-1151) ............................................ 478
Vampires ....................................................... 342 On the Subject Of ѧ William Blake
Further Reading ............................................ 385 (1757-1827) ............................................ 487
Sidebars: On the Subject Of ѧ Alexander Jackson
On the Subject Of ѧ George Gordon Davis (1803-1892) .................................. 491
Noel, Lord Byron (1788-1824) ............... 241 On the Subject Of ѧ L. N. Cottingham
On the Subject Of ѧ H. P. Lovecraft (1787-1847) ............................................ 497
(1890-1937) ............................................ 260 On the Subject Of ѧ Edward Gorey
On the Subject Of ѧ Friedrich von (1925-2000) ............................................ 510
Schiller (1759-1805) ............................... 275 On the Subject Of ѧ Washington Allston
On the Subject Of ѧ Ursula K. Le Guin (1779-1843) ............................................ 522
(1929-) .................................................... 291
On the Subject Of ѧ Sigmund Freud
(1856-1939) and “The Uncanny” .......... 308
On the Subject Of ѧ Elizabeth Bowen
(1899-1973) ............................................ 333 Author Index .................................................. 531
On the Subject Of ѧ John William
Polidori (1795-1821) .............................. 362 Title Index ...................................................... 535
On the Subject Of ѧ Thomas Lovell
Subject Index .................................................. 545
Beddoes (1803-1849) .............................. 377

Performing Arts and the Gothic

Introduction ................................................. 389
Representative Works ................................... 391 VOLUME 2
Primary Sources ............................................ 394
Drama ........................................................... 401
Film ............................................................... 415
Television ...................................................... 452 Margaret Atwood 1939-
Music ............................................................ 461 Canadian novelist, poet, short story writer,
Further Reading ............................................ 473 essayist, critic, and author of children’s books
Sidebars: Introduction ..................................................... 1
On the Subject Of ѧ James Boaden Principal Works ................................................ 3
(1762-1839) ............................................ 399 Primary Sources ................................................ 4
On the Subject Of ѧ Clive Barker General Commentary ...................................... 5
(1952-) .................................................... 411 Title Commentary .......................................... 17
On the Subject Of ѧ Boris Karloff Further Reading .............................................. 24
(1887-1969) and Frankenstein ................ 416 Sidebars:
On the Subject Of ѧ Bela Lugosi From the Author: An excerpt from
(1882-1956) and Dracula ........................ 425 Lady Oracle ................................................ 18
On the Subject Of ѧ Alfred Hitchcock
(1899-1980) ............................................ 436
On the Subject Of ѧ F. W. Murnau Jane Austen 1775-1817
(1888-1931) and Nosferatu ..................... 451
English novelist
On the Subject Of ѧ Shirley Jackson
Introduction ................................................... 25
(1919-1965) ............................................ 464
Principal Works .............................................. 27
Primary Sources .............................................. 27
Title Commentary .......................................... 31
Visual Arts and the Gothic Further Reading .............................................. 46
Introduction ................................................. 475 Sidebars:
Representative Works ................................... 476 About the Author: “Gothic Extravagance”
Primary Sources ............................................ 477 in Northanger Abbey .................................. 37

vi G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2
Joanna Baillie 1762-1851 Further Reading ............................................ 150

CONTENTS
Scottish poet, playwright, editor, and critic Sidebars:
Introduction ................................................... 49 About the Author: H. F. Chorley’s
Principal Works .............................................. 50 negative response to Wuthering
Primary Sources .............................................. 51 Heights .................................................... 137
General Commentary .................................... 54 About the Author: Charlotte Brontë’s
Title Commentary .......................................... 61 Preface to the 1850 edition of
Further Reading .............................................. 76 Wuthering Heights ................................... 147
Sidebars:
About the Author: An excerpt from
a death notice in Harper’s New Monthly Charles Brockden Brown 1771-1810
Magazine ................................................... 55 American novelist, essayist, and short
About the Author: An early reviewer story writer
applauds Baillie’s talent ........................... 68 Introduction ................................................. 153
Principal Works ............................................ 155
Primary Sources ............................................ 155
William Beckford 1760-1844 General Commentary .................................. 156
Title Commentary ........................................ 162
English novelist and travel writer Further Reading ............................................ 177
Introduction ................................................... 79 Sidebars:
Principal Works .............................................. 81 About the Author: William Hazlitt
Primary Sources .............................................. 81 assesses Brown’s literary talent .............. 163
Title Commentary .......................................... 85 About the Author: John Keats on
Further Reading ............................................ 101 Wieland ................................................... 171
Sidebars:
From the Author: An excerpt from
“Nymph of the Fountain,” written
c. 1791 ...................................................... 84 Angela Carter 1940-1992
English novelist, short story writer, nonfiction
About the Author: An early review of
writer, scriptwriter, and author of children’s
Vathek ....................................................... 86
books
About the Author: Byron notes Vathek Introduction ................................................. 179
as a source for oriental elements in The Principal Works ............................................ 181
Giaour ....................................................... 95 Primary Sources ............................................ 181
General Commentary .................................. 182
Further Reading ............................................ 200
Charlotte Brontë 1816-1855 Sidebars:
About the Author: James Brockway on
English novelist and poet
Carter’s “Gothic Pyrotechnics” in
Introduction ................................................. 103
Fireworks ................................................. 191
Principal Works ............................................ 105
Primary Sources ............................................ 105
General Commentary .................................. 107
Title Commentary ........................................ 114 Wilkie Collins 1824-1889
Further Reading ............................................ 129 English novelist, short story writer, travel
Sidebars: writer, and playwright
About the Author: William Dean Introduction ................................................. 201
Howells lauds the title character of Principal Works ............................................ 202
Jane Eyre .................................................. 116 Primary Sources ............................................ 203
About the Author: Susan M. Waring General Commentary .................................. 205
praises Villette ......................................... 121 Title Commentary ........................................ 211
Further Reading ............................................ 228
Sidebars:
About the Author: Geraldine Jewsbury
Emily Brontë 1818-1848 on the beauty of The Moonstone ............ 207
English novelist and poet About the Author: T. S. Eliot on
Introduction ................................................. 131 Collins and Charles Dickens ................. 215
Principal Works ............................................ 133 About the Author: Charles Dickens
Primary Sources ............................................ 133 remarks to Wilkie Collins on Collins’s
Title Commentary ........................................ 135 talent ...................................................... 223

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2 vii
CONTENTS Charles Dickens 1812-1870 William Godwin 1756-1836
English novelist, short story writer, English philosopher, novelist, essayist,
playwright, poet, and essayist historian, playwright, and biographer
Introduction ................................................. 229 Introduction ................................................. 321
Principal Works ............................................ 231 Principal Works ............................................ 323
Primary Sources ............................................ 231 Primary Sources ............................................ 324
General Commentary .................................. 234 Title Commentary ........................................ 327
Title Commentary ........................................ 242 Further Reading ............................................ 338
Sidebars:
Further Reading ............................................ 255
About the Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Sidebars:
reviews Godwin’s Lives of the
About the Author: Archibald C.
Necromancers ........................................... 328
Coolidge Jr. on Dickens’s childhood
From the Author: An excerpt from the
memories and the Gothic ...................... 237
Preface to Fleetwood ................................ 330
About the Author: Michael Hollington
on “Dickensian Gothic” ........................ 252

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

1749-1832
Isak Dinesen 1885-1962
German poet, novelist, playwright, short
Danish short story writer, autobiographer, story writer, essayist, critic, biographer,
novelist, playwright, and translator memoirist, and librettist
Introduction ................................................. 257 Introduction ................................................. 341
Principal Works ............................................ 259 Principal Works ............................................ 342
Primary Sources ............................................ 259 Primary Sources ............................................ 343
Title Commentary ........................................ 261 General Commentary .................................. 344
Further Reading ............................................ 278 Title Commentary ........................................ 349
Sidebars: Further Reading ............................................ 362
About the Author: John Updike on Sidebars:
Dinesen’s “Divine Swank” in Seven From the Author: Sir Walter Scott’s
Gothic Tales ............................................. 270 translation of Goethe’s “Der Erlkonig”
(“The Erl-King”) ..................................... 350

Daphne du Maurier 1907-1989

English novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804-1864
and editor American novelist, short story writer,
Introduction ................................................. 279 and essayist
Principal Works ............................................ 280 Introduction ................................................. 363
Primary Sources ............................................ 281 Principal Works ............................................ 365
Primary Sources ............................................ 366
Title Commentary ........................................ 282
General Commentary .................................. 368
Further Reading ............................................ 291
Title Commentary ........................................ 382
Sidebars:
Further Reading ............................................ 385
About the Author: Basil Davenport on
Sidebars:
Rebecca as a melodrama ......................... 285
About the Author: Edgar Allan Poe
reviews Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales ... 369
About the Author: Herman Melville
William Faulkner 1897-1962 reviews Mosses from an Old Manse ......... 380
American novelist, short story writer, poet,
screenwriter, and essayist
Introduction ................................................. 293 E. T. A. Hoffmann 1776-1822
Principal Works ............................................ 295 German short story writer, novella writer,
Primary Sources ............................................ 296 novelist, and music critic
General Commentary .................................. 297 Introduction ................................................. 387
Title Commentary ........................................ 306 Principal Works ............................................ 388
Further Reading ............................................ 319 Primary Sources ............................................ 389
Sidebars: General Commentary .................................. 391
About the Author: Max Putzel on Title Commentary ........................................ 401
Faulkner’s Gothic ................................... 304 Further Reading ............................................ 419

viii G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2
Sidebars: Principal Works ............................................ 482

CONTENTS
About the Author: Sir Walter Scott on Primary Sources ............................................ 483
Hoffmann’s talent and mental state ..... 392 General Commentary .................................. 485
About the Author: Palmer Cobb on Title Commentary ........................................ 494
Hoffmann’s genius ................................. 412 Further Reading ............................................ 504
Sidebars:
About the Author: Edwin F. Casebeer
James Hogg 1770-1835 on the influence of King’s life on his
Scottish poet, novelist, short story and works ...................................................... 492
song writer, journalist, editor, playwright,
and essayist
Introduction ................................................. 421
Principal Works ............................................ 423 Author Index .................................................. 511
Primary Sources ............................................ 424
General Commentary .................................. 425 Title Index ...................................................... 515
Title Commentary ........................................ 428
Further Reading ............................................ 438 Subject Index .................................................. 525
Sidebars:
About the Author: George Saintsbury
on The Private Memoirs and Confessions
of a Justified Sinner .................................. 430

VOLUME 3
Washington Irving 1783-1859
American short story writer, essayist,
historian, journalist, and biographer
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu 1814-1873
Introduction ................................................. 441
Principal Works ............................................ 443 Irish novelist, short story writer, poet,
Primary Sources ............................................ 444 journalist, and editor
General Commentary .................................. 446 Introduction ..................................................... 1
Title Commentary ........................................ 456 Principal Works ................................................ 3
Further Reading ............................................ 459 Primary Sources ................................................ 3
Sidebars: General Commentary ...................................... 5
About the Author: Donald A. Ringe on Title Commentary .......................................... 16
Irving’s Gothic ....................................... 450 Further Reading .............................................. 27
Sidebars:
About the Author: S. M. Ellis on
Le Fanu’s horror fiction ............................. 6
Henry James 1843-1916
About the Author: Edna Kenton on
American novelist, short story and
Le Fanu’s legacy ....................................... 22
novella writer, essayist, critic, biographer,
autobiographer, and playwright
Introduction ................................................. 461
Principal Works ............................................ 464 Matthew Gregory Lewis 1775-1818
Primary Sources ............................................ 465 English novelist, playwright, diarist, prose
General Commentary .................................. 466 writer, and poet
Title Commentary ........................................ 470 Introduction ................................................... 31
Further Reading ............................................ 478 Principal Works .............................................. 33
Sidebars: Primary Sources .............................................. 34
About the Author: Virginia Woolf on General Commentary .................................... 36
James’s ghost stories .............................. 471 Title Commentary .......................................... 46
Further Reading .............................................. 70
Sidebars:
Stephen King 1947- About the Author: Lord Byron on
American novelist, short story writer, “Monk” Lewis .......................................... 42
novella writer, scriptwriter, nonfiction writer, About the Author: Joseph James Irwin
autobiographer, and author of children’s books on Lewis’s mastery of horror and
Introduction ................................................. 481 terror ......................................................... 62

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2 ix
CONTENTS Charles Robert Maturin 1780-1824 Further Reading ............................................ 185
Irish novelist and playwright Sidebars:
Introduction ................................................... 73 From the Author: Oates’s “Reflections
Principal Works .............................................. 74 on the Grotesque” ................................. 179
Primary Sources .............................................. 75
General Commentary .................................... 76
Title Commentary .......................................... 84 Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849
Further Reading ............................................ 104 American short story writer, poet, novelist,
Sidebars: essayist, editor, and critic
From the Author: An excerpt from Introduction ................................................. 187
Maturin’s Preface to Melmoth the Principal Works ............................................ 190
Wanderer ................................................... 85 Primary Sources ............................................ 190
About the Author: An excerpt from General Commentary .................................. 193
an early review of Melmoth the Title Commentary ........................................ 205
Wanderer ................................................... 98 Further Reading ............................................ 228
Sidebars:
About the Author: D. H. Lawrence on
the purpose of Poe’s tales ..................... 203
Herman Melville 1819-1891
About the Author: H. P. Lovecraft on
American novelist, short story writer, and poet Poe’s literary innovations ...................... 219
Introduction ................................................. 107
Principal Works ............................................ 109
Primary Sources ............................................ 110
General Commentary .................................. 111 Ann Radcliffe 1764-1823
Title Commentary ........................................ 118 English novelist, poet, and journal writer
Further Reading ............................................ 132 Introduction ................................................. 231
Sidebars: Principal Works ............................................ 233
About the Author: Jay MacPherson on Primary Sources ............................................ 233
General Commentary .................................. 238
Melville’s “The Bell Tower” and
Title Commentary ........................................ 245
Frankenstein ............................................ 111
Further Reading ............................................ 260
About the Author: Excerpt from an
Sidebars:
early review of Moby-Dick ...................... 125
About the Author: Sir Walter Scott on
Radcliffe’s talent ..................................... 238
About the Author: Edith Birkhead on
Toni Morrison 1931- Radcliffe and the Gothic ........................ 246
American novelist, essayist, playwright, critic, About the Author: Devendra P. Varma
author of children’s books, and editor on Radcliffe’s legacy ............................... 253
Introduction ................................................. 135
Principal Works ............................................ 136
Primary Sources ............................................ 137 Anne Rice 1941-
General Commentary .................................. 138 American novelist, short story writer, and
Title Commentary ........................................ 142 screenwriter
Further Reading ............................................ 160 Introduction ................................................. 263
Sidebars: Principal Works ............................................ 265
From the Author: An excerpt from the General Commentary .................................. 266
conclusion of Beloved ............................. 151 Title Commentary ........................................ 277
Further Reading ............................................ 286
Sidebars:
Joyce Carol Oates 1938- About the Author: Angela Carter on
Rice’s self-consciousness ........................ 267
American novelist, short story writer, essayist,
critic, playwright, author of children’s books, From the Author: Rice on her fears ......... 278
nonfiction writer, and poet
Introduction ................................................. 163
Principal Works ............................................ 165 Sir Walter Scott 1771-1832
Primary Sources ............................................ 167 Scottish novelist, poet, short story writer,
General Commentary .................................. 168 biographer, historian, critic, and editor
Title Commentary ........................................ 178 Introduction ................................................. 289

x G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2
Principal Works ............................................ 292 Sidebars:

CONTENTS
Primary Sources ............................................ 293 About the Author: Montague Summers
Title Commentary ........................................ 297 on the enduring nature of Dracula ........ 395
Further Reading ............................................ 317 About the Author: An excerpt from
Sidebars: an early review of Dracula ..................... 405
About the Author: William Hazlitt on
Scott’s achievements as a writer of
prose ....................................................... 298 Horace Walpole 1717-1797
About the Author: Maria Edgeworth, English novelist, biographer, memoirist,
in a letter to Sir Walter Scott, 1814 ....... 306 historian, essayist, playwright, and letter writer
Introduction ................................................. 429
Principal Works ............................................ 432
Primary Sources ............................................ 432
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 1797-1851
Title Commentary ........................................ 434
English novelist, editor, critic, short story Further Reading ............................................ 454
and travel writer Sidebars:
Introduction ................................................. 319 About the Author: Frederick S. Frank
Principal Works ............................................ 321 on The Mysterious Mother ....................... 434
Primary Sources ............................................ 321 About the Author: Sir Walter Scott
General Commentary .................................. 327 offers high praise for Walpole and The
Title Commentary ........................................ 335 Castle of Otranto ..................................... 435
Further Reading ............................................ 356 About the Author: H. P. Lovecraft on
Sidebars: Walpole’s influence on the Gothic ........ 443
About the Author: Marilyn Butler on
Shelley’s life and its impact on
Frankenstein ............................................ 328 Edith Wharton 1862-1937
About the Author: Ellen Moers on American short story writer, novelist, essayist,
motherhood, the Female Gothic, and and autobiographer
Frankenstein ............................................ 338 Introduction ................................................. 457
About the Author: Sir Walter Scott on Principal Works ............................................ 460
Frankenstein and the use of the Primary Sources ............................................ 460
supernatural in fiction ........................... 349 General Commentary .................................. 462
Further Reading ............................................ 485
Sidebars:
About the Author: Annette Zilversmit
Robert Louis Stevenson 1850-1894
on Wharton’s “Pomegranate Seed” ....... 467
Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet,
essayist, and playwright
Introduction ................................................. 359
Principal Works ............................................ 361 Oscar Wilde 1854-1900
Primary Sources ............................................ 362 Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist, essayist,
critic, poet, and short story writer
Title Commentary ........................................ 364
Introduction ................................................. 487
Further Reading ............................................ 382 Principal Works ............................................ 489
Sidebars: Primary Sources ............................................ 490
About the Author: John Addington General Commentary .................................. 493
Symonds on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ...... 365 Title Commentary ........................................ 502
From the Author: Stevenson’s dedication Further Reading ............................................ 517
in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ....................... 373 Sidebars:
About the Author: Julian Hawthorne
on The Picture of Dorian Gray ................. 503
Bram Stoker 1847-1912
Irish novelist, short story writer, and essayist
Introduction ................................................. 385
Author Index .................................................. 523
Principal Works ............................................ 387
Primary Sources ............................................ 387 Title Index ...................................................... 527
Title Commentary ........................................ 393
Further Reading ............................................ 427 Subject Index .................................................. 537

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2 xi
 These very useful Critical Companion volumes
offer a wide range of historical accounts about,
literary excerpts from, and critical interpretations
of a long-standing mode of fiction-making that
has come to be called “the Gothic.” Though this
label has most often been attached to “terrifying”
or “horrific” pieces of prose fiction ever since
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (the found-
ing text of this form, first published in 1764)
added the subtitle A Gothic Story to its Second Brit-
ish Edition of 1765, the hyperbolic and haunting
features of this highly popular, but often contro-
versial, mode have proliferated across the last two-
and-a-half centuries in an increasing array of
forms: novels, prose “romances,” plays, paintings,
operas, short stories, narrative and lyric poems,
“shilling shocker” tales, newspaper serials and
crime-reports, motion pictures, television shows,
comic books, “graphic” novels, and even video
games. That variety of presentation is what now
makes “the Gothic” the best phrase for describing
this ongoing phenomenon. It has proven to be a
set of transportable features more than it has been
a single genre. Its variations are not so much
similar in compositional form as they are inclined
to share certain settings, symbols, situations,
psychological states, and emotional effects on
readers or audiences, all of which appear at least
somewhat in The Castle of Otranto but have gone
on to vary greatly in their manifestations over
time. The incompatible generic ingredients of the
Gothic initially—Walpole saw it as a combination
FOREWORD
of the supernatural “ancient” and the more
realistic “modern” romance—have made it un-
stable from the start and so have led it to “expati-
ate” widely and wildly (Walpole’s own word in
his 1765 Preface) and hence to carry its volatile
inconsistency into every form it has assumed,
from its beginnings in mid-eighteenth century
England to its current profusion throughout the
Western world at the dawn of the twenty-first
century.
Yet what are the traits that hold “the Gothic”
together, if only just barely, as it spreads itself like
one of its specters or monstrosities across literary,
dramatic, and other audio-visual forms? As the
following essays and excerpts show, all truly
Gothic stories or stagings take place, at least part
of the time, in some sort of antiquated (sometimes
falsely antiquated) space, be it a castle, ruin,
crumbling abbey, graveyard, old manor house or
theater, haunted wilderness or neighborhood, cel-
lar or attic full of artifacts—or aging train station,
rusted manufacturing plant, or outdated space-
ship. This space, reminiscent of medieval “Gothic”
castles or churches but often existing long after
those in more modern recastings of their features,
threatens to overwhelm and engulf protagonists
(including readers or viewers) in the setting’s vast-
ness, darkness, and vaguely threatening, even ir-
rational, depths. That is usually because this space
is haunted or invaded by some form of ghost,
xiii
FOREWORD specter, or monster, a frightening crosser of the
supposed boundaries between life and death,
natural and supernatural, or “normal” and “abnor-
mal.” Usually this figure betokens some hidden
“primal crime” buried from sight ages ago or hav-
ing occurred in the recent past, the truth about
which at least seems to lie in the darkest depths,
or deepest darkness, of the antiquated space.
Gothic protagonists and their readers or viewers,
faced with this haunting in such a setting, are thus
pulled back and forth (like the Gothic as a mode)
between older and newer states of being, longing
to escape into the seeming safety of one or the
other but kept in a tug-of-war of terrifying sus-
pense between the powers of the past and the
present, darkness and daylight, insane incoher-
ence and rational order.
At the same time, the extreme fictionality of all
these elements is so emphasized in the melodra-
matic exaggeration of Gothic description and
characterizations that the threats in these situa-
tions are made to seem both imminent (about to
appear) and immanent (sequestered within) and
yet safely distant, at least for readers or audiences.
As in the “scary movies” of more recent times,
many of which employ or derive from the Gothic,
the spectators of such fictions can experience the
thrill of fear that the threats really arouse and at
the same time feel entirely safe from those threats
because it is all so obviously artificial and unlikely
to become real or lead to real consequences. Any
fiction that does not have all these basic features
to some extent is not really “Gothic” through and
through, although many adjacent fictions (such
as those of Charles Dickens or Herman Melville or
most films directed by Alfred Hitchcock or M.
Night Shyamalan) use pieces of the Gothic to
arouse some of the suggestions and effects associ-
ated with it.
Even when fictions are thoroughly Gothic,
however, as are the ones most emphasized in these
volumes, they can vary widely across a continuum
between terror and horror. Near the end of her life
and career, Ann Radcliffe, arguably the most
influential British author of Gothic romances in
the turbulent 1790s (including The Mysteries of
Udolpho and The Italian), composed a dialogue
“On the Supernatural in Poetry” that appeared
posthumously with her last novel, Gaston de
Blondeville, in 1826. There her fictional interlocu-
tors make a clear distinction between devices that
invoke “the terrible” (a suspenseful uncertainty
about hidden possibilities that could be violent or
repulsive or supernatural but rarely appear in such
extreme forms) and blatant descriptions that
xiv G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2
expose “the horrible” (the unambiguously violent,
deadly, grotesque, and even horrifically supernatu-
ral, so much so that the line between what is
“sanctioned” and “forbidden” has been crossed
without a doubt). Radcliffe herself, as her novels
show, clearly prefers the suggestiveness of terror,
to the point where her violence is more potential
than actual and the apparently supernatural is
always explained away, as is the case with many
of her successors in Gothic writing. She thereby
places herself and her imitators squarely in the
tradition of the “sublime” defined as the safely
fearful or awesome by Edmund Burke in his 1757
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas
of the Sublime and Beautiful.
Gothic “horror,” by contrast, became most
epitomized in Radcliffe’s time by Matthew Lewis’s
The Monk (1796), filled as it is, not just with a
vociferous anti-Catholicism that Radcliffe shares,
but with explicit sexual intercourse, incestuous
rape and murder, the brutal dismembering of a
tyrannical nun by a mob, and the physical ap-
pearance of Satan himself as homosexually seduc-
tive. The blatantly stagey hyperbole of Lewis’s
style makes all this less immediate than it might
otherwise be, but it also defines the “horrible”
extreme of the Gothic continuum that locates the
mere potentiality of “terror” at its opposite end. It
thus helps establish a polarity across which the
Gothic has played ever since, as it wafts between,
say, Daphne du Maurier’s Radcliffean Rebecca
(1938) and William Peter Blatty’s horrific The Exor-
cist (1971) and their ongoing imitators of both
types. The Gothic is set off from other forms of
fiction by its Walpolean features but also demar-
cated within itself by its leanings at times towards
“terrific” suspense, on the one hand, and graphic
“horror,” on the other. The two come together
mostly in extreme cases such as Stoker’s original
novel Dracula (1897), where suspenseful intima-
tions about the Count’s vampiric nature in “sub-
lime” Transylvania give way to his graphic gorg-
ing of himself with the blood of a married woman
before witnesses in Victorian London, after which
he breaks all “normal” gender boundaries by
drawing the same woman to his breast to suck up
his own already vampiric blood. It is this whole
range of Gothic possibilities that the following
excerpts and accounts explore, since this anamor-
phic (or self-distorting) and metamorphic (or
shape-shifting) form of fiction has been pulled
between these extremes, we now see, from its
earliest manifestations.
The tension between the terrifying and the
horrible in the Gothic, moreover, has developed
into another continuum of symbolic possibili-
ties—the “psychological” versus “ontological” or
supernatural Gothic—especially since 1800. If
Radcliffe’s heroines in the 1790s think themselves
into states of fear that are finally based on associa-
tions of ideas not corroborated by the outside
world, it is a small step from there to the projec-
tion of a whole state of mind into an external
space that is vast, dark, and threatening more
because of drives inside the observer than its own
separate features. Hence the tormenting Spirits
that rise in the Higher Alps at the bidding of the
title character in Lord Byron’s Gothic verse-drama
Manfred (1817) are, as he admits, “The mind, the
spirit, the Promethean spark, / The lightning of
my being” as much as anything else. At about the
same time, though, Dr. John Polidori, Byron’s
personal physician and occasional lover, forecasts
the late Victorian coming of Dracula with his
Byronic novella The Vampyre (1819), in which the
predatory Lord Ruthven seems threatening at first
only in the suspicious thoughts of the hero
(Aubrey) until the latter faces the horror that his
own sister “has glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE,”
which Ruthven turns out to have been for centu-
ries. In this latter case, Gothic monstrosity is
granted the ontological state of being quite
outside any observer, a distinct existence con-
firmed from multiple points of view, as in Stoker’s
Dracula. Throughout the nineteenth century, start-
ing with the Romantic era of Byron and Polidori,
the Gothic careens incessantly between the strictly
psychological, where ghosts or monsters are more
mental than physical, and the unabashedly super-
natural in which an other-worldly horror violently
invades the space of the self from outside its
boundaries. When both are involved, though, the
nineteenth century tilts more often towards root-
ing the supernatural in the psyche. That is cer-
tainly the case in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818), now the most famous Gothic tale in his-
tory, where the half-fantastic creature composed
from multiple carcasses is mostly an outsized
sewing-together of his creator’s most repressed,
libidinous, and boundary-crossing impulses.
As supernatural levels of being have become
increasingly doubted in the post-Renaissance
world of the West, the terrors or horrors generated
from within have become a staple of the Gothic
and projected onto its haunted settings, just as
much as older beliefs in seductive Satan-figures
have continued to be in the vein of The Monk, The
Exorcist, or Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles (1976-
2001). The most debated Gothic story in Western
history may be Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2
(1898), in which the highly repressed governess of
FOREWORD
two children in a castellated old estate-house is
convinced she sees the ghosts of her predecessor,
Miss Jessel, and Jessel’s lower-class lover, Peter
Quint, but may just as likely be projecting them
onto the estate-world she observes as she subli-
mates her own desires for an absentee Master far
above her in social station. Even today, as parts of
these volumes show, readers and viewers cannot
be sure when they begin Gothic tales or films—
though they often find out in “twist” endings (in
such pictures as The Sixth Sense and The Others)—
whether the haunting specters they see are the
delusions of characters or unambiguously other-
worldly, outside any psychological point of view.
We sometimes long for the comfort of supernatu-
ral visitations but fear how much this longing
comes from irrational psychic forces in ourselves
and others, and the Gothic plays on and explores
these apprehensions, as it has for over two hun-
dred years.
But this last point demands a fuller answer to
the most lingering question about the conflicted
oddity that is the Gothic as it multiplies into all
the forms explored in these volumes: Why do we
have this malleable symbolic mode in Anglo-
European Western culture and its former colonies,
and why does this anamorphic form, torn as it is
between extremes (supernatural/realistic, horrible/
terrifying, really frightening/merely fictional,
ontological/psychological, and others), persist
from The Castle of Otranto in the 1760s through
Frankenstein and Dracula to films, novels, and
video games of today, some of which keep repeat-
edly adapting some of those older stories for new
audiences? Numerous answers are offered in the
definitional and interpretive essays that follow, as
well as in some Gothic tales themselves, here
excerpted at their most indicative moments. But I
would like to begin the discussion by suggesting
the most overriding reasons why the Gothic has
arisen and why it persists as a cultural formation
clearly needed, as well as wanted, by Western read-
ers and audiences.
To begin with, “the Gothic” comes about at a
time in the West when the oldest structures of
Christian religiosity (including Roman Catholi-
cism) and social hierarchies seemingly predeter-
mined to the advantage of hereditary aristocrats
(symbolized by their castles or estate-houses) are
starting to fragment and decay, as in Walpole’s
principal Ghost (who appears initially in pieces),
even as these receding forms hang on as standard
grounds of being in the minds of many. At such a
time, the older symbols of power seem increas-
xv
FOREWORD ingly hollowed out, like the ruins of medieval
Gothic structures, while they also seem locations
that vaguely harbor historical foundations for hu-
man minds newly liberated by the rational and
scientific Enlightenment that is overthrowing the
older orders by degrees in the eighteenth century.
In this situation, while beliefs about the self-
determining (rather than strictly hereditary)
individual start to gain ascendancy and give
greater weight to personal psychology over prede-
termined roles, Westerners face an existential
anxiety about where they really come from and
the orders to which they belong when the best-
known external indicators of those groundings
are becoming empty repositories, realms filled up
with the nostalgic desires projected into them
more than the metaphysical and cultural certain-
ties once manifested by them.
As Leslie Fiedler has shown by exposing the
basis of the American Gothic in Love and Death in
the American Novel (1960), this uprooted, yet root-
seeking, condition for Westerners around 1765
makes them hover between longings for past
securities, though these are also seen as primitively
irrational and confining, and longings for rebel-
lion against those patriarchal schemes, which
simultaneously produce a sense of guilt about the
overthrow of those “fathers,” making that revolu-
tion a sort of “primal crime.” Guilt, after all, is
what Walpole’s Prince Manfred feels when he
finds that his own grandfather once murdered the
original founder of Otranto and usurped its
birthright from the latter’s heirs, the same way as
the rising middle class of the eighteenth century
(the main readership of the Gothic as time went
on) probably felt about gradually decimating the
very power-bases it now sought to occupy in place
of the aristocracy. In addition, Fiedler writes, this
sense of haunted guilt and uncertainties about
middle-class entitlement raised “the fear that in
destroying the old ego-ideals of Church and State,
the West has opened a way for the inruption of
darkness: for insanity and the disintegration of
the self.” The Gothic of Walpole and its accelera-
tion by the 1790s in Radcliffe and Lewis come
about, since fictions always respond to the needs
of their audiences, to address and symbolize this
cultural and psychological condition of early
capitalist and pre-industrial modernity. That is
why the early Gothic places both desires for lost
foundations and fears about the irrational dark-
ness lying outside the limits of newly enlightened
reason in the same antiquated spaces and their
mysterious depths, which Gothic characters from
Manfred to Lewis’s monk then seek to penetrate
xvi G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2
or recover and escape or destroy so as to construct
a sense of identity that is somehow both grounded
and self-determined. The Gothic is a powerful
symbolic indicator, then, of the social and psychic
contradictions out of which the modern Western
self emerged and keeps emerging, and we need
and want it, I would argue, to keep retelling that
story that is so basic to our modern sense of
ourselves.
The story has kept developing in the West,
however, and the Gothic has developed with it.
As the ideological belief in personal self-making
becomes even more accepted towards the end of
the eighteenth and the beginning of the nine-
teenth centuries, the individual mind comes to be
viewed as the dynamic, but also anxious, site of
its own “ghosts” and increasing depths. Ann Rad-
cliffe and many of her contemporaries accept the
basic premises of empirical psychology, which
claims (since John Locke in the 1690s, anyway)
that the human mind begins as a near-vacancy
and gradually accumulates and organizes the
memories it retains (hence the “ghosts”) of earlier
and more recent sense-perceptions. Adult observa-
tions in later life are therefore colored by the as-
sociations of previous, and now ghost-like, impres-
sions that are applied to the intake of newer
phenomena. Terry Castle can consequently see in
The Female Thermometer (1995) that the Rad-
cliffean Gothic turns landscapes as well as charac-
ters into “spectralized” thoughts within reflective
states of mind that make nature seem already
painted (and thus filtered by perceivers) and
people already colored by older sayings and texts
about their “types.” To observe at any moment in
the Gothic from the 1790s on is to call attention,
at least some of the time, to the lenses of percep-
tion and the gradually accumulated psychic layers
of associated memories that are projected onto
any object contemplated or produced by the
perceiving self. Ruins and old houses, as well as
Frankenstein-ian creatures, are now filled with
dark indications of deep past threats because the
mind transfers its own layers of developing percep-
tions, as well as middle-class guilt, into what it
sees and thus confronts its own “doubling” there,
its deepest internal memories reembodied in
perceptions of external depths now haunted by
mental ghosts. When Victor Frankenstein first sees
the face of his finished creature in Mary Shelley’s
Gothic book, he falls into a regressive dream in
which the mottled visage of his fabrication from
dead bodies becomes linked to his longing for his
own deceased mother, whose corpse he pre-
consciously has seen himself re-embracing while
he tries to make life out of death without the
biological involvement of a woman. By 1820 at
least, the Gothic has become the fictional locus
where outward quests for self-completion now are
seen as mainly inward probings through the
archaic layers of the self. Gothic “objects,” from
antiquated locations to other people to mere
things, have thus become manifestations of the
perceiver’s own growing depths of thought in
which the desire for pre-rational foundations is
actually pursuing “the mother” conceived of as
the initial interplay of self and other that produces
the confused beginnings, later repressed, of all
thought, sensation, and memory.
It is no wonder, then, that the Gothic comes
to be torn constantly between terror and horror,
on one level, and the psychological and the clearly
supernatural, on another. Terror offers the uneasy
comfort that what we fear, being mentally con-
structed for the most part, could be non-existent
in the end (as in Radcliffe’s conclusions), except
in our own minds. Such solipsism, however, can
also be seen as a myopic middle-class or even
aristocratic avoidance of the violent upheavals
and even greater displacements of older orders
brought on by the exploding mercantile and
industrial economies—and the racist imperialism
that went with them—in the nineteenth century.
Consequently, this era’s Gothic invasions of the
isolated psyche by “horror,” the external violence
and many forms of non-middle-class “ugliness”
that cannot be wished away as mere thought,
force this counter-awareness on audiences, albeit
through extreme fictionality, increasingly so in
the form of the vampire made prominent by Poli-
dori. By the time of the serialized Varney the Vam-
pire (1847), usually attributed to Thomas Peckett
Prest, and the many stagings of vampire plays in
Victorian England, France, and America, this
Gothic monster can symbolize many potential
invaders of middle-class security simultaneously,
from vengeful old aristocrats to foreign and racial
“others” to diseases of the blood made more
virulent by urban growth, foreign tourism, and
the expansion of prostitution. The nineteenth
century in the West, we can say, needs the Gothic
to carry out and fictively obscure the cultural
hesitation at the time between middle-class
withdrawal into increasing private spaces, includ-
ing sheer thought (which thereby confronts its
own deep irrationalities), and the need of the
same people to face the horrors of growing cities
and empires with their illnesses, “unclean” impov-
erished laborers, exploited women, and enslaved
“colored” races.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2
What the Gothic does in part, among its reac-
FOREWORD
tion to these changes, is to increase the struggle
between its psychological and supernatural ten-
dencies. First, it becomes the source of many
symbols for the concept of the “unconscious” that
Sigmund Freud, building on many others, brought
into wide prominence by the end of the nine-
teenth century and the early decades of the
twentieth. Especially insofar as the Gothic has
gradually become a realm of mental projection
and of the mind forced back to the beginnings
and hauntings of its own development, it has
provided the archaic depths, dim repositories,
memory-traces, accumulations of memories layer
upon layer, and primal states (including regres-
sions back to “mother” or sheer vacancy) from
which Freud and his contemporaries craft their
description of the unconscious and its sublima-
tion by pre-conscious and conscious levels of
thought. In the early twentieth century, the
Gothic therefore comes to be seen as primarily
psychological in the sense of psychoanalytic, as
long having manifested in its haunted spaces and
the mental quandaries of its characters the pro-
cesses of thought described by Freud, even though
it is more accurate to say that the Gothic first
helped make Freud’s schemes conceivable and
expressible. Back in Freud’s formative period,
though, the assertion of the human species’s long
physical evolution by Charles Darwin and others
from the 1850s on challenges the layerings of
personal consciousness with a biologically histori-
cal progression beyond, yet still working inside,
individual people. The Gothic reacts by reinvok-
ing its old invasions of supernatural, or at least
trans-individual, forces to show psychological
projections running up against pervasive external
drives that may really control the psyche after all.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde (1886) may seem to suggest a psycho-
logical bifurcation in the Victorian self, with Jekyll
as internalized superego and Hyde as raging libido,
but the Doctor’s attempts to control this internal
split finally cannot prevent the “troglodytic”
emergence of all that remains primitively devolved
in his superficially evolved condition. Even more
dramatically, Stoker’s Count Dracula arouses and
enacts unconscious libidinal desires by being a
devolved, “child-brain” force supernaturally driv-
ing across centuries that invades “civilized” Eng-
land with all the diseases and the racial and
animalistic “others” that the supposedly evolved
want to keep distant from themselves and cannot.
The Turn of the Screw plays out an undecidability
between the dominance of the psychological and
xvii
FOREWORD the power of the supernatural because the
nineteenth-century West in its final years needs
ways to articulate that it is frantically at odds with
itself over what to believe about the deepest
foundations of life.
The Gothic from its beginnings and as it
evolves with the cultural changes around it, in
other words, turns out to be the modern Western
world’s most striking, if most conflicted, symbolic
method for both confronting and disguising its
own unresolved struggles with incompatible
beliefs about what it means to be human. Wal-
pole’s Castle starts the tradition by leaving its read-
ers caught where most of them already were:
between longings for a fading hierarchical order
underwritten by supernatural assurances (“ancient
romance”) and desires for greater self-
determination based on free re-imaginings of
uprooted older perceptions (“modern romance”).
Radcliffe and Lewis, during the revolutionary
1790s, help readers confront and prevent cultural
dissolution by offering reassurances that spectral
perceptions of danger to the self can finally
control the terror those specters produce and
shocking revelations at the same time that current
upheavals are but symptoms of multiple irratio-
nalities that established religion and governments
have tried to repress only to force them towards
more extreme violence. Frankenstein offers a
condemnation and a celebration of the scientific
and industrial advances puzzled over by its read-
ers, along with symbols for the unsettled debate
over whether life is externally infused (by, say,
some ultimate Father) or internally generated
(primarily within the mother whom Victor both
remembers and tries to forget). Jekyll and Hyde and
Dracula both blame individual free will for invit-
ing its underlying depravities into consciousness
and point to attacks on the evolved Anglo race by
“devolved” levels of humanity from other times
and places. In extreme forms of expression that
allow us to perceive or avoid such levels in our
thinking, the Gothic holds up to us our conflicted
conservative and progressive tendencies in the full
cry of their unresolved tug-of-war in our culture
and in ourselves. Our hesitation between psycho-
logical and supernatural causes for events or
xviii G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2
between inherited and self-determined founda-
tions of identity or between feeling controlled by
our pasts and asserting our capacities to alter
ourselves decisively in the present: all these still-
active antinomies of modern existence are what
the Gothic is fundamentally generated to articu-
late and to obscure.
Over one hundred years after Stoker’s Dracula,
of course, the kinds of tendencies we are torn
between have changed somewhat, as the more
recent Gothic certainly shows. We both want to
transcend, even forget, and want to throw our-
selves fully into the past (or is it fully past?) condi-
tion of slavery and racism that haunts the history
of America in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Ab-
salom! (1936) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).
We want to preserve childhood innocence and see
it as really filled with dark drives to be conquered
and controlled in Stephen King’s The Shining
(1977) and Daniel Mann’s Willard (1982) as well
as The Exorcist and its “prequels” and sequels on
film. We paranoiacally want to find evidence of
old conspiracies that explain our current confu-
sions of values and see them as but the imagin-
ings of diseased nostalgic minds in the quite
Gothic X-Files television series (1993-2002) or the
four Alien films (1979-97) full of Gothic echoes.
Still, the Gothic, as the accounts and excerpts in
these volumes will reveal in fuller detail, remains
one of the key ways we come to terms, while also
avoiding direct confrontation, with the betwixt-
and-between, regressive-progressive, seemingly
predetermined-hopefully undetermined nature of
modern life. The Gothic is complex and tangled
in its proliferations, but fairly simple in its aims: it
allows us to play with our inexplicable and
haunted modern lives in some fictional safety
while concurrently helping us give shape and
form to the conflicted beings we really are. I
therefore invite our readers to enjoy and ponder
the following descents into the Gothic maelstrom
of pleasure and fear that reveals so much about
modern Western existence.
—Jerrold E. Hogle, Ph.D.
University of Arizona
The Gale Critical Companion Collection
In response to a growing demand for relevant
criticism and interpretation of perennial topics
and important literary movements throughout
history, the Gale Critical Companion Collection
(GCCC) was designed to meet the research needs
of upper high school and undergraduate students.
Each edition of GCCC focuses on a different liter-
ary movement or topic of broad interest to stu-
dents of literature, history, multicultural studies,
humanities, foreign language studies, and other
subject areas. Topics covered are based on feedback
from a standing advisory board consisting of refer-
ence librarians and subject specialists from public,
academic, and school library systems.
The GCCC is designed to complement Gale’s
existing Literary Criticism Series (LCS), which
includes such award-winning and distinguished
titles as Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism
(NCLC), Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism
(TCLC), and Contemporary Literary Criticism (CLC).
Like the LCS titles, the GCCC editions provide
selected reprinted essays that offer an inclusive
range of critical and scholarly response to authors
and topics widely studied in high school and
undergraduate classes; however, the GCCC also
includes primary source documents, chronologies,
sidebars, supplemental photographs, and other
material not included in the LCS products. The
graphic and supplemental material is designed to
extend the usefulness of the critical essays and
provide students with historical and cultural
PREFACE
context on a topic or author’s work. GCCC titles
will benefit larger institutions with ongoing
subscriptions to Gale’s LCS products as well as
smaller libraries and school systems with less
extensive reference collections. Each edition of
the GCCC is created as a stand-alone set provid-
ing a wealth of information on the topic or move-
ment. Importantly, the overlap between the
GCCC and LCS titles is 15% or less, ensuring that
LCS subscribers will not duplicate resources in
their collection.
Editions within the GCCC are either single-
volume or multi-volume sets, depending on the
nature and scope of the topic being covered. Topic
entries and author entries are treated separately,
with entries on related topics appearing first, fol-
lowed by author entries in an A-Z arrangement.
Each volume is approximately 500 pages in length
and includes approximately 50 images and side-
bar graphics. These sidebars include summaries of
important historical events, newspaper clippings,
brief biographies of important figures, complete
poems or passages of fiction written by the author,
descriptions of events in the related arts (music,
visual arts, and dance), and so on.
The reprinted essays in each GCCC edition
explicate the major themes and literary techniques
of the authors and literary works. It is important
to note that approximately 85% of the essays
reprinted in GCCC editions are full-text, meaning
xix
PREFACE that they are reprinted in their entirety, including
footnotes and lists of abbreviations. Essays are
selected based on their coverage of the seminal
works and themes of an author, and based on the
importance of those essays to an appreciation of
the author’s contribution to the movement and
to literature in general. Gale’s editors select those
essays of most value to upper high school and
undergraduate students, avoiding narrow and
highly pedantic interpretations of individual
works or of an author’s canon.
Scope of Gothic Literature
Gothic Literature, the fourth set in the Gale
Critical Companion Collection, consists of three
volumes. Each volume includes a detailed table of
contents, a foreword on the subject of Gothic
literature written by noted scholar Jerrold E.
Hogle, and a descriptive chronology of key events
throughout the history of the genre. The main-
body of volume 1 consists of entries on five topics
relevent to Gothic literature and art, including 1)
Gothic Literature: An Overview; 2) Society, Cul-
ture, and the Gothic; 3) Gothic Themes, Settings,
and Figures; 4) Performing Arts and The Gothic;
and 5) Visual Arts and the Gothic. Volumes 2 and
3 include entries on thirty-seven authors and liter-
ary figures associated with the genre, including
such notables as Matthew Gregory Lewis, Stephen
King, Edgar Allan Poe, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Woll-
stonecraft Shelley, and Bram Stoker, as well as
entries on individuals who have garnered less at-
tention, but whose contributions to the genre are
noteworthy, such as Joanna Baillie, Daphne du
Maurier, Washington Irving, Edith Wharton, and
Oscar Wilde.
Organization of Gothic Literature
A Gothic Literature topic entry consists of the
following elements:
• The Introduction defines the subject of the
entry and provides social and historical infor-
mation important to understanding the criti-
cism.
• The list of Representative Works identifies
writings and works by authors and figures as-
sociated with the subject. The list is divided
into alphabetical sections by name; works
listed under each name appear in chronologi-
cal order. The genre and publication date of
each work is given. Unless otherwise indicated,
plays are dated by first performance, not first
publication.
• Entries generally begin with a section of Pri-
mary Sources, which includes essays, speeches,
xx G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2
social history, newspaper accounts and other
materials that were produced during the time
covered.
• Reprinted Criticism in topic entries is arranged
thematically. Topic entries commonly begin
with general surveys of the subject or essays
providing historical or background informa-
tion, followed by essays that develop particular
aspects of the topic. For example, the Gothic
Themes, Settings, and Figures entry in volume
1 of Gothic Literature begins with a section
providing primary source material that dem-
onstrates gothic themes, settings, and figures.
This is followed by a section providing topic
overviews, and three other sections: Haunted
Dwellings and the Supernatural; Psychology
and the Gothic; and Vampires. Each section
has a separate title heading and is identified
with a page number in the table of contents.
The critic’s name and the date of composition
or publication of the critical work are given at
the beginning of each piece of criticism.
Unsigned criticism is preceded by the title of
the source in which it appeared. Footnotes are
reprinted at the end of each essay or excerpt.
In the case of excerpted criticism, only those
footnotes that pertain to the excerpted texts
are included.
• A complete Bibliographical Citation of the
original essay or book precedes each piece of
criticism.
• Critical essays are prefaced by brief Annota-
tions explicating each piece. Unless the de-
scriptor “excerpt” is used in the annotation,
the essay is being reprinted in its entirety.
• An annotated bibliography of Further Read-
ing appears at the end of each entry and sug-
gests resources for additional study. In some
cases, significant essays for which the editors
could not obtain reprint rights are included
here.
A Gothic Literature author entry consists of the
following elements:
• The Author Heading cites the name under
which the author most commonly wrote, fol-
lowed by birth and death dates. Also located
here are any name variations under which an
author wrote. If the author wrote consistently
under a pseudonym, the pseudonym will be
listed in the author heading and the author’s
actual name given in parenthesis on the first
line of the biographical and critical informa-
tion. Uncertain birth or death dates are indi-
cated by question marks.
 • A Portrait of the Author is included when
available.
• The Introduction contains background infor-
mation that introduces the reader to the
author that is the subject of the entry.
• The list of Principal Works is ordered chrono-
logically by date of first publication and lists
the most important works by the author. The
genre and publication date of each work is
given. Unless otherwise indicated, plays are
dated by first performance, not first publica-
tion.
• Author entries are arranged into three sections:
Primary Sources, General Commentary, and
Title Commentary. The Primary Sources sec-
tion includes letters, poems, short stories,
journal entries, and essays written by the
featured author. General Commentary in-
cludes overviews of the author’s career and
general studies; Title Commentary includes
in-depth analyses of seminal works by the
author. Within the Title Commentary section,
the reprinted criticism is further organized by
title, then by date of publication. The critic’s
name and the date of composition or publica-
tion of the critical work are given at the begin-
ning of each piece of criticism. Unsigned criti-
cism is preceded by the title of the source in
which it appeared All titles by the author
featured in the text are printed in boldface
type. However, not all boldfaced titles are
included in the author and subject indexes;
only substantial discussions of works are
indexed. Footnotes are reprinted at the end of
each essay or excerpt. In the case of excerpted
criticism, only those footnotes that pertain to
the excerpted texts are included.
• A complete Bibliographical Citation of the
original essay or book precedes each piece of
criticism.
• Critical essays are prefaced by brief Annota-
tions explicating each piece. Unless the de-
scriptor “excerpt” is used in the annotation,
the essay is being reprinted in its entirety.
• An annotated bibliography of Further Read-
ing appears at the end of each entry and sug-
gests resources for additional study. In some
cases, significant essays for which the editors
could not obtain reprint rights are included
here. A list of Other Sources from Thomson
Gale follows the Further Reading section and
provides references to other biographical and
critical sources on the author in series pub-
lished by Gale.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2
Indexes
PREFACE
The Author Index lists all of the authors
featured in the Gothic Literature set, with references
to the main author entries in volumes 2 and 3 as
well as commentary on the featured author in
other author entries and in the topic volumes.
Page references to substantial discussions of the
authors appear in boldface. Authors featured in
sidebars are indexed as well. The Author Index
also includes birth and death dates and cross refer-
ences between pseudonyms and actual names,
and cross references to other Gale series in which
the authors have appeared. A complete list of
these sources is found facing the first page of the
Author Index.
The Title Index alphabetically lists the titles
of works written by the authors featured in
volumes 2 and 3 and provides page numbers or
page ranges where commentary on these titles can
be found. Page references to substantial discus-
sions of the titles appear in boldface. English
translations of foreign titles and variations of titles
are cross-referenced to the title under which a
work was originally published. Titles of novels,
plays, nonfiction books, films, and poetry, short
story, or essay collections are printed in italics,
while individual poems, short stories, and essays
are printed in roman type within quotation
marks.
The Subject Index includes the authors and
titles that appear in the Author Index and the Title
Index as well as the names of other authors and
figures that are discussed in the set. The Subject
Index also lists hundreds of literary terms and top-
ics covered in the criticism. The index provides
page numbers or page ranges where subjects are
discussed and is fully cross referenced.
Citing Gothic Literature
When writing papers, students who quote
directly from the GL set may use the following
general format to footnote reprinted criticism. The
first example pertains to material drawn from
periodicals, the second to material reprinted from
books.
Markley, A. A. “The Godwinian Confessional Narra-
tive and Psychological Terror in Arthur Gordon Pym.”
The Edgar Allan Poe Review 4, no. 1 (spring 2003):
4-16; reprinted in Gothic Literature: A Gale Critical
Companion, vol. 3, ed. Jessica Bomarito (Farmington
Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2006), 29-42.
Mishra, Vijay. “Theorizing the (Gothic) Sublime,” in
The Gothic Sublime (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1994), 19-43; reprinted in Gothic Literature:
A Gale Critical Companion, vol. 1, ed. Jessica Bomarito
(Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2006), 211-
17.
xxi
PREFACE Gothic Literature Advisory Board
The members of the Gothic Literature Advisory
Board—reference librarians and subject specialists
from public, academic, and school library sys-
tems—offered a variety of informed perspectives
on both the presentation and content of the Gothic
Literature set. Advisory board members assessed
and defined such quality issues as the relevance,
currency, and usefulness of the author coverage,
critical content, and topics included in our prod-
uct; evaluated the layout, presentation, and
general quality of our product; provided feedback
on the criteria used for selecting authors and top-
ics covered in our product; identified any gaps in
our coverage of authors or topics, recommending
authors or topics for inclusion; and analyzed the
appropriateness of our content and presentation
for various user audiences, such as high school
xxii G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2
students, undergraduates, graduate students,
librarians, and educators. We wish to thank the
advisors for their advice during the development
of Gothic Literature
Suggestions are Welcome
Readers who wish to suggest new features, top-
ics, or authors to appear in future volumes of the
Gale Critical Companion Collection, or who have
other suggestions or comments are cordially
invited to call, write, or fax the Product Manager.
Product Manager, Gale Critical Companion
Collection
Thomson Gale
27500 Drake Road
Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535
1-800-347-4253 (GALE)
Fax: 248-699-8054
The editors wish to thank the copyright holders
of the excerpted criticism included in this volume
and the permissions managers of many book and
magazine publishing companies for assisting us in
securing reproduction rights. We are also grateful
to the staffs of the Detroit Public Library, the
Library of Congress, the University of Detroit
Mercy Library, Wayne State University Purdy/
Kresge Library Complex, and the University of
Michigan Libraries for making their resources
available to us. Following is a list of the copyright
holders who have granted us permission to repro-
duce material in this edition of Gothic Literature.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright, but
if omissions have been made, please let us know.
Copyrighted material in Gothic
Literature was reproduced from the
following periodicals:
Americana: The Journal of American Popular
Culture (1900-present), v. 2, spring, 2003. Copy-
right © 2003 Americana: The Institute for the
Study of American Popular Culture. Reproduced
by permission.—American Transcendental Quar-
terly, v. 9, March 1, 1995; v. 1, 2001. Copyright ©
1995, 2001 by The University of Rhode Island.
Both reproduced by permission.—Arizona Quar-
terly, v. 34, 1978 for “The Gothic Formula of
‘Bartleby’” by Steven T. Ryan. Copyright © 1978
by Arizona Board of Regents, The University of
Arizona, Tucson, AZ. Reproduced by permission of
the publisher and author.—Bucknell Review, v.
XII, May, 1964. Reproduced by permission.—Col-
lege English, v. 27, March 1, 1966 for “Dr. Jekyll
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
and the Emergence of Mr. Hyde” by Masao Miy-
oshi. Republished in The Divided Self: A Perspec-
tive on the Literature of the Victorians, New York
University Press, 1969, University of London Press,
1969. Copyright © 1966 by the National Council
of Teachers of English. Reproduced by permission
of the publisher and author.—Comparative Lit-
erature Studies, v. 24, 1987. Copyright © 1987 by
The Pennsylvania State University. Reproduced by
permission of the publisher.—Costerus, v. I, 1972.
Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by
permission.—Critical Survey, v. 15, September,
2003. Copyright © 2003 by Critical Survey. Repub-
lished with permission of Critical Survey, con-
veyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.—
Dalhousie Review, v. 47, summer, 1967 for “Terror
Made Relevant: James’s Ghost Stories” by Ray-
mond Thorberg. Reproduced by permission of the
publisher and author.—Deutsche Vierteljahrss-
chrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesge-
schichte, March 1, 2001 for “The Gothic IMAGI-
NARY: Goethe in Strasbourg” by Kenneth S.
Calhoon. Reproduced by permission of the au-
thor.—Dickens Quarterly, September 1, 1989; v.
16, September 1, 1999. Copyright © 1989, 1999
by the Dickens Society. Both reproduced by per-
mission.—Dickens Studies Newsletter, v. VI,
September 1, 1975. Copyright © by the Dickens
Society. Reproduced by permission.—Dickensian,
September 1, 1977 for “The Fall of the House of
Clennam: Gothic Conventions in Little Dorrit” by
xxiii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS David Jarrett. Reproduced by permission of the
author.—The Edgar Allan Poe Review, v. IV,
spring, 2003 for “The Godwinian Confessional
Narrative and Psychological Terror in Arthur Gor-
don Pym” by A.A. Markley. Copyright © 2003 The
Pennsylvania State University. Reproduced by
permission of the publisher and author.—
Eighteenth-Century Fiction, v. 15, January 1,
2003. Copyright © 2003 Eighteenth-Century Fic-
tion, McMaster University. Reproduced by permis-
sion.—ELH, v. 48, autumn, 1981; v. 59, spring,
1992; v. 70, winter, 2003. Copyright © 1981, 1992,
2003 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All
reproduced by permission.—ESQ: A Journal of
the American Renaissance, v. 18, 1972 for “Poe
and the Gothic Tradition” by Maurice Lévy.
Translated by Richard Henry Haswell. Reproduced
by permission of the publisher and the transla-
tor.—European Romantic Review, v. 13, June 1,
2002 for “Interracial Sexual Desire in Charlotte
Dacre’s Zofloya” by Anne K. Mellor. Copyright ©
2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd. Reproduced by permis-
sion of the publisher and author. http://ww-
w.tandf.co.uk/journals—Faulkner Journal, v. II,
fall, 1986. Copyright © 1987 by Ohio Northern
University. Reproduced by permission.—German
Life and Letters, v. XVIII, 1964-1965. Copyright
© 1964-1965 Basil Blackwell Ltd. Reproduced by
permission of Blackwell Publishers.—Gothic. New
Series, v. I, 1986; 1987; v. II, 1987. Copyright ©
1986, 1987 by Gary William Crawford. All repro-
duced by permission of the author.—Journal of
Evolutionary Psychology, v. X, August 1, 1989.
Copyright © 1989 by the Institute for Evolution-
ary Psychology. Reproduced by permission.—
Journal of Popular Culture, v. 13, 1979; v. 26,
winter, 1992; v. 30, spring, 1997. Copyright ©
1979, 1992, 1997 Basil Blackwell Ltd. All repro-
duced by permission of Blackwell Publishers.—
Literature/Film Quarterly, v. 21, 1993. Copyright
© 1993 Salisbury State College. Reproduced by
permission.—Malahat Review, 1977 for “Atwood
Gothic” by Eli Mandel. Copyright © The Malahat
Review, 1977. All rights reserved. Reproduced by
permission of the Literary Estate of the author.—
Mississippi Quarterly, v. XLII, summer, 1989.
Copyright © 1989 by Mississippi State University.
Reproduced by permission.—Modern Fiction
Studies, v. XVII, summer, 1971; v. 46, fall, 2000.
Copyright © 1971, 2000 The Johns Hopkins
University Press. Both reproduced by permis-
sion.—Mosaic, v. 35, 2002; v. 35, March 1, 2002.
Copyright © Mosaic 2002. All acknowledgment of
previous publication is herewith made.—Narra-
tive, v. 12, January 1, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by
the Ohio State University. Reproduced by permis-
sion.—The Nation and The Athenaeum, v.
XXXIII, May 26, 1923. Copyright 1923 New
xxiv G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2
Statesman, Ltd. Reproduced by permission.—New
York Times Book Review, March 8, 1953 for “The
Macabre and the Unexpected” by John Barkham.
Copyright 1953, renewed 1981 by The New York
Times Company. Reproduced by permission of the
Literary Estate of John Barkham.—Papers on
Language and Literature, v. 20, winter, 1984; v.
37, winter, 2001. Copyright © 1984, 2001 by The
Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University at
Edwardsville. Both reproduced by permission.—
Princeton University Library Chronicle, v. XLIV,
spring, 1983 for “A Story Replete with Horror” by
Williston R. Benedict. Copyright © 1983 by
Princeton University Library. Reproduced by
permission of the author.—Prism(s): Essays in
Romanticism, v. 9, 2001. Copyright © 2001 by
the American Conference on Romanticism. Repro-
duced by permission.—Review of Contemporary
Fiction, fall, 1994. Copyright © 1994 The Review
of Contemporary Fiction. Reproduced by permis-
sion.—Review of English Studies, v. XIX, 1968.
Reproduced by permission of the publisher.—The
Saturday Review of Literature, v. XVIII, Septem-
ber 24, 1938 for “Sinister House,” by Basil Daven-
port. Copyright © 1938, renewed 1966 Saturday
Review Magazine, © 1979 General Media Interna-
tional, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the pub-
lisher.—Studies in American Fiction, v. 7, spring,
1979. Copyright © 1979 Northeastern University.
Reproduced by permission.—Studies in English
Literature 1500-1900, v. 39, autumn, 1999.
Copyright © 1999 The Johns Hopkins University
Press. Reproduced by permission.—Studies in the
Literary Imagination, v. VII, spring, 1974. Copy-
right © 1974 Department of English, Georgia State
University. Reproduced by permission.—Studies
in the Novel, v. IX, summer, 1977. Copyright ©
1977 by North Texas State University. Reproduced
by permission.—Studies in Romanticism, v. 40,
spring, 2001. Copyright 2001 by the Trustees of
Boston University. Reproduced by permission.—
Studies in Scottish Literature, v. XXVIII, 1993.
Copyright © G. Ross Roy 1993. Reproduced by
permission of the editor.—Studies in Short Fic-
tion, v. 21, fall, 1984. Copyright © 1984 by Stud-
ies in Short Fiction. Reproduced by permission.—
Studies in Weird Fiction, spring, 1990; winter,
1994; v. 24, winter, 1999. Copyright © 1990, 1994,
1999 Necronomicon Press. All reproduced by
permission of the author.—Studies on Voltaire
and the Eighteenth Century, Transactions of the
Eighth International Congress on the Enlighten-
ment III, v. 305, 1992 for “The Gothic Caleb Wil-
liams” by Betty Rizzo. Copyright © 1992 Univer-
sity of Oxford. Reproduced by permission of the
publisher and author.—Victorian Newsletter, fall,
2002 for “Who Is Heathcliff? The Shadow Knows”
by Marilyn Hume. Reproduced by permission of
the publisher and author.—West Virginia Univer-
sity Philological Papers, v. 42-43, 1997-1998.
Reproduced by permission.—Wordsworth Circle,
v. 31, summer, 2000; v. 34, spring, 2003. Copyright
© 2000, 2003 Marilyn Gaull. Both reproduced by
permission of the editor.
Copyrighted material in Gothic
Literature was reproduced from the
following books:
Andriano, Joseph. From Our Ladies of Darkness:
Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction.
The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.
Copyright © 1993 by The Pennsylvania State
University. Reproduced by permission of the
publisher.—Atwood, Margaret. From The Animals
in That Country. Atlantic-Little Brown Books,
1969. Copyright © 1968 by Oxford University
Press (Canadian Branch). All rights reserved.
Reproduced by permission of Houghton Mifflin
Company, in Canada by Oxford University
Press.—Auerbach, Nina. From Our Vampires, Our-
selves. University of Chicago Press, 1995. Copy-
right © 1995 by The University of Chicago. All
rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the
publisher and the author.—Baldick, Chris. From
an Introduction to Melmoth the Wanderer. Edited
by Douglas Grant. Oxford University Press, 1989.
© Oxford University Press 1968, Introduction and
Select Biography © Chris Beldick 1989. Repro-
duced by permission of Oxford University Press.—
Bayer-Berenbaum, Linda. From The Gothic Imagi-
nation: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art.
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982. Copy-
right © 1982 by Associated University Presses, Inc.
Reproduced by permission.—Bell, Michael Davitt.
From The Development of American Romance:
The Sacrifice of Relation. The University of
Chicago Press, 1980. Copyright © 1980 by The
University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Repro-
duced by permission.—Bleiler, E. F. From “Intro-
duction: William Beckford and Vathek,” in Three
Gothic Novels: The Castle of Otranto, Vathek,
The Vampyre. Edited by E.F. Bleiler. Dover Publi-
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Festival of Festivals, 1979. Copyright © Robin
Wood, Richard Lippe, and Festival of Festivals. All
rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the
publisher and the author.—Wright, Angela. From
“European Disruptions of the Idealized Woman:
Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and the Marquis de
Sade’s La Nouvelle Justine,” in European Gothic: A
Spirited Exchange, 1760-1960. Edited by Avril
Horner. Manchester University Press, Manchester,
UK, 2002. Copyright © 2002 by Manchester
University Press. Reproduced by permission of the
publisher and author.
Photographs and Illustrations in Gothic
Literature were received from the
following sources:
A Description of Strawberry Hill, by Horace Walpole,
frontispiece.—Abbotsford, home of Sir Walter
Scott, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—
Ainsworth, William Harrison, photograph. ©
Getty Images.—Allston, Washington, photograph.
The Library of Congress.—American Gothic, paint-
ing by Grant Wood, 1930, photograph. Photogra-
phy © The Art Institute of Chicago. Reproduced
by permission.—Atwood, Margaret, photograph
by Christopher Felver. Copyright © Christopher
Felver/Corbis.—Austen, Jane, engraving.—Baillie,
Joanna, photograph. © Hulton-Deutsch/Corbis.—
Balshazzar’s Feast, painting by Washington All-
ston, ca. 1817-1843. © The Detroit Institute of
Arts/Bridgeman Art Library.—Beckford, William,
photograph. © Michael Nicholson/Corbis.—Berg-
man, Ingrid and Heywood Morse in the 1959 film
xxx G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2
adaptation of Turn of the Screw by Henry James,
photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Bierce, Am-
brose, drawing by J. J. Newbegin, 1896.—Brad-
don, Mary Elizabeth, engraving. © Hulton Getty/
Liaison Agency.—Brontë, Charlotte, illustration.
International Portrait Gallery.—Brontë, Emily,
painting by Bramwell Brontë.—Brown, Charles
Brockden, print.—Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George,
photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Burke, Ed-
mund, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Capote,
Truman, photograph. © Hulton-Deutsch Collec-
tion/Corbis.—Carter, Angela, photograph. © Jerry
Bauer. Reproduced by permission.—Castle of
Otranto, by Horace Walpole, c. 1790, illustration.—
Castle of Wolfenbach; a German Story, by Eliza
Parsons, 1793, title page.—Christine, movie still,
photograph. The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by
permission.—Collins, William Wilkie, photo-
graph. The Library of Congress.—Cooper, Alice,
performing on the In Concert television show on
November 24, 1972, photograph. © Bettmann/
Corbis.—Dickens, Charles, photograph. Hesketh
Pearson.—Dinesen, Isak, photograph. Corbis-Bett-
mann.—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Spencer Tracy as
Dr. Jekyll, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—
Dracula, Helen Chandler, as Mina Seward, with
Bela Lugosi, as Count Dracula, photograph. The
Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—
Dracula’s Guest, written by Bram Stoker, title
page.—du Maurier, Daphne, photograph. © Time
Life Pictures/Getty Images.—Faulkner, William,
photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Frankenstein,
by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1831, illustration.
Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced by permis-
sion.—Fall of the House of Usher, by Edgar Allan
Poe, illustration. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Gargoyle
of 15th Century Spanish Building, photograph. ©
Manuel Bellver/Corbis.—Gilman, Charlotte Per-
kins, c. 1890, photograph.—Godwin, William,
painting by James Northcote. From Vindication of
the Rights of Women, by William Godwin, 1802.—
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, illustra-
tion. © Corbis.—Hawthorne, Nathaniel, photo-
graph.—Hoffmann, E. T. A., photograph. Mary
Evans Picture Library. Reproduced by permis-
sion.—Hogg, James, photograph. © Rischgitz/
Getty Images.—Irving, Washington, photograph.
The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institu-
tion.—James, Henry, photograph.—Jane Eyre, Or-
son Welles as Edward Rochester, with Joan Fon-
taine as Jane Eyre, photograph. The Kobal
Collection. Reproduced by permission.—King,
Stephen, photograph. Corbis-Bettmann.—Le
Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, photograph.—Legend of
Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving, illustration.
© Bettmann/Corbis.—Lewis, Matthew Gregory,
photograph by H. W. Pickersgill.—Varney the
Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood, title page. © Getty
Images.—Lovecraft, H. P., photograph.—Lugosi,
Bela, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Maturin,
Charles Robert, photograph. © The Granger Col-
lection, New York.—Melville, Herman, photo-
graph. The Library of Congress.—Morrison, Toni,
photograph. Copyright © Nancy Kazerman/
ZUMA/Corbis.—Nave of Basilique de Saint-Denis,
June 19, 1996, photograph. © Robert Holmes/
Corbis.—Nightmare, painting by Henri Fuseli,
1791. Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced by
permission.—Nosferatu, Max Schreck (Count Or-
lok) standing on deck of ship, 1922, photograph.
© Bettmann/Corbis.—O’Connor, Flannery, photo-
graph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Oates, Joyce
Carol, photograph. © Nancy Kaszerman/Corbis.—
Peck, Gregory, photograph. The Kobal Collection.
Reproduced by permission.—Poe, Edgar Allan,
photograph.—Polidori, John William, painting by
F. G. Gainsford, c. 1816, photograph. © The
Granger Collection, New York.—Psycho, Norman
Bates (Anthony Perkins) approaching the motel,
photograph. © Underwood and Underwood/Cor-
bis.—Reeve, Clara, photograph. © Getty Images.—
Rice, Anne, photograph. © Mitchell Gerber/Cor-
bis.—Roettgen Pieta, wood carving, c. 1300,
photograph. © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.—
Schiller, Friedrich von, engraving. The German
Information Center.—Scott, Sir Walter, photo-
graph. The Library of Congress.—Shelley, Mary
Wollstonecraft, illustration.—Son of Frankenstein,
with Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, and Bela
Lugosi, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Steven-
son, Robert Louis, engraving. The Library of
Congress.—Stoker, Bram, photograph. © Hulton-
Deutsch Collection/Corbis.—The Castle Spectre, by
Matthew Gregory Lewis, illustration. Mary Evans
Picture Library. Reproduced by permission.—The
Fall of the House of Usher, directed by Roger Cor-
man, photograph. © A.I.P./The Kobal Collection.
Reproduced by permission.—The Haunting, 1963,
movie still. © MGM/The Kobal Collection. Repro-
duced by permission.—The Island of Dr. Moreau,
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2
poster. © A.I.P./The Kobal Collection. Reproduced
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
by permission.—The Italian; or, The Confessional of
the Black Penitents, by Ann Radcliffe, 1797 edition,
title page.—The Mysteries of Udolpho, frontispieces
by Ann Radcliffe.—The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym, written by Edgar Allan Poe, title page. Special
Collections Library, University of Michigan.
Reproduced by permission.—The Old English
Baron: A Gothic Story, by Clara Reeve, 1778, illustra-
tion.—The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times, by
Sophia Lee, 1786, title page.—The Shining, directed
by Stanley Kubrick, 1980, photograph. © Warner
Bros./The Kobal Collection.—The Sicilian Romance;
or, The Apparition of the Cliffs, an Opera, by Henry
Siddons, 1794, title page.—The Table of the Seven
Deadly Sins, painting by Hieronymous Bosch, c.
1480-1490, Northern Renaissance, photograph. ©
Archivo Iconografico, S.A./Corbis.—The Tempta-
tion of Ambrosio, from Matthew Gregory Lewis’s
The Monk, illustration.—The Woman in White, by
Wilkie Collins, title page. Special Collections
Library, University of Michigan. Reproduced by
permission.—Things as They Are; or, The Adventures
of Caleb Williams, by William Godwin, title
page.—Twin Peaks, scene from the television series
by David Lynch, 1990, photograph. © Corbis
Sygma.—Veidt, Conrad and Lil Dagover in the
1920 silent horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,
photograph. © John Springer/Corbis.—von Go-
ethe, Johann Wolfgang, photograph. © Bettmann/
Corbis.—Waddy, F., satirical caricature in “Once a
Week,” 1873. Mary Evans Picture Library. Repro-
duced by permission.—Walpole, Horace, photo-
graph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Wharton, Edith,
1905, photograph. The Library of Congress.—
Wieland; or, The Transformation, by Charles Brock-
den Brown, Philadelphia, David McKay, Publisher,
1881, title page.—Wilde, Oscar, photograph. The
Library of Congress.—Wuthering Heights, by Emily
Brontë, movie poster, photograph. © Cinema-
Photo/Corbis.
xxxi
1081 1220

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

● Suger of Saint Denis is born in Saint Denis, ■ Construction of the Cathedral of Amiens in
France. France.
■ Master Elias of Dereham begins designing the
1127 Salisbury Cathedral in England.
■ Abbot Suger of Saint Denis begins redesigning
the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis in France.
1245
■ Construction of the current Westminster Ab-
1151
bey in London, England.
● Abbot Suger of Saint Denis dies on 13 January
in St. Denis, France.
C. 1329
C. 1163 ■ Andrea Pisano begins his bronze sculptures for
the Baptisery in Florence, Italy.
■ Construction of the current Cathedral of Notre
Dame de Paris in France.
1485
C. 1175 ■ Hieronymus Bosch completes the painting
■ Construction of the current Canterbury Cathe- Tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins.
dral in England.
C. 1600-01
C. 1194 ■ William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is staged.
■ Construction of the current Cathedral of Notre
Dame at Chartres (also known as Chartres
C. 1606
Cathedral) in France.
■ William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is staged.
C. 1211
■ Construction of the current Cathedral of Notre 1717
Dame de Rheims (also known as Rheims ● Horace Walpole is born on 24 September in
Cathedral) in France. London, England.

xxxiii
CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS 1727 1762
■ Daniel Defoe’s An Essay on the History and Real- ● James Boaden is born on 23 May at White
ity of Apparitions is published. Haven in Cumberland, England.
● Joanna Baillie is born on 11 September in
1729 Bothwell, Lanarkshire, Scotland.
● Edmund Burke is born on 12 January in Dub-
lin, Ireland. 1764
● Clara Reeve is born on 23 January in Ipswich, ● Ann Radcliffe is born on 9 July in London,
Suffolk, England. England.
■ Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is
1742 published.
■ Batty and Thomas Langley’s Ancient Architec-
ture Restored and Improved is published.
1770
● James Hogg is born in Ettrick, Selkirkshire,
1749 Scotland.
● Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is born on 28
August in Frankfurt, Germany.
1771
● Charles Brockden Brown is born on 17 Janu-
1750
ary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
● Sophia Lee is born in London, England.
● Sir Walter Scott is born on 15 August in Edin-
■ Horace Walpole and Richard Bentley begin burgh, Scotland.
designing Strawberry Hill, Walpole’s residence
in Twickenham, England.
1772
1753 ● Samuel Taylor Coleridge is born on 21 October
in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, England.
■ Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Ferdinand
Count Fathom is published.
1773
1756 ■ John Aikin and Anna Laetitia (Aikin) Bar-
bauld’s Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, by J. and
● William Godwin is born on 3 March in Wis-
A. L. Aikin is published.
beach, England.

1757 1775
● William Blake is born on 28 November in ● Matthew Gregory Lewis is born on 9 July in
London, England. London, England.

■ Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into
the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beauti-
ful is published.
1759
● Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller is
born on 10 November in Marbach, Germany.
● Jane Austen is born on 16 December in Steven-
ton, Hampshire, England.
1776
● Ernst Theodor Wilhelm (later E. T. A.) Hoff-
mann is born on 24 January in Königsberg,
Germany.

1760 1777
● William Beckford is born on 29 September in ■ Clara Reeve’s The Champion of Virtue. A Gothic
London, England. Story is published.

xxxiv G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2
1778 1791

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

■ Clara Reeve’s The Champion of Virtue is pub- ■ Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest is
lished as The Old English Baron. published.

1779 1792
● Washington Allston is born on 5 November in ● Percy Bysshe Shelley is born on 4 August in
South Carolina. Field Place, Sussex, England.
■ Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the
1780 Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and
Moral Subjects is published.
● Charles Robert Maturin is born on 25 Septem-
ber in Dublin, Ireland.
1793
1781 ■ Mrs. Eliza Parsons’s Castle of Wolfenbach; A Ger-
man Story is published.
■ Henry Fuseli completes the painting The Night-
mare.
1794
1783 ■ James Boaden’s Fontainville Forest is produced.

● Washington Irving is born on 3 April in New ■ J. C. Cross’s The Apparition is produced.

York City. ■ William Godwin’s Things As They Are; or, The
■ Sophia Lee’s The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times Adventures of Caleb Williams is published.
is published. ■ Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, A
Romance; Interspersed with some pieces of Poetry
is published.
1786
■ The unauthorized translation of William Beck- ■ Henry Siddons’s The Sicilian Romance; or, The
ford’s Vathek is published as An Arabian Tale. Apparition of the Cliff is produced.

1787 1795
● Lewis Nockalls Cottingham is born on 24 ● John William Polidori is born on 7 September
October at Laxfield, Suffolk, England. in England.

■ William Beckford’s Vathek is published.

1796
■ Marquis von Grosse’s Genius (Horrid Mysteries)
1788
is published.
● George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron is born on
22 January in London, England. ■ Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance
is published.

1789
1797
■ James Cobb’s The Haunted Tower is produced.
● Horace Walpole dies on 2 March in London,
■ George Colman the Younger’s The Battle of England.
Hexham is produced.
● Edmund Burke dies on 9 July in Beaconsfield,
Buckinghamshire, England.
1790 ● Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley) is
■ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust: Ein Frag- born on 30 August in London, England.
ment is published.
■ Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Castle Spectre: A
■ Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance is published. Drama is produced.

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2 xxxv
CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS 1798
■ Regina Maria Roche’s Children of the Abbey is
published.
■ The first volume of Joanna Baillie’s A Series of
Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate the
Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Be-
ing the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy is
published.
■ Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or, The
Transformation is published.
1799
■ Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly; or,
Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker and the first volume
of Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793
are published.
1800
■ Washington Allston completes the painting
Tragic Figure in Chains.
■ The second volume of Charles Brockden
Brown’s Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year
1793 is published.
1802
■ The second volume of Joanna Baillie’s A Series
of Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate
the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion
Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy is
published.
1803
● Edward Bulwer-Lytton (Edward George Earle
Lytton Bulwer) is born on 25 May in London,
England.
● Thomas Lovell Beddoes is born on 30 June in
Clifton, Shropshire, England.
● Alexander Jackson Davis is born on 24 July in
New York City.
1804
● Nathaniel Hawthorne is born on 4 July in
Salem, Massachusetts.
1805
● William Harrison Ainsworth is born on 4
February in Manchester, England.
● Friedrich von Schiller dies on 9 May in We-
imar, Germany.
xxxvi G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2
1806
■ Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, The Moor is
published.
1807
● Clara Reeve dies on 3 December in Ipswich,
Suffolk, England.
1808
■ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust—Der
Tragödie erster Teil (Faust: Part One) is published.
1809
● Edgar Allan Poe is born on 19 January in
Boston, Massachusetts.
1810
● Charles Brockden Brown dies on 22 February
in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
■ Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Zastrozzi, A Romance is
published.
1811
■ Percy Bysshe Shelley’s St. Irvyne; or, The Rosi-
crucian: A Romance is published.
1812
● Charles Dickens is born on 7 February in
Portsmouth, Hampshire, England.
■ The third volume of Joanna Baillie’s A Series of
Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate the
Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Be-
ing the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy is
published.
■ George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage: A Romaunt is published.
1813
■ George Gordon, Lord Byron’s The Giaour: A
Fragment of a Turkish Tale is published.
1814
● Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is born on 28 August
in Dublin, Ireland.
■ Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly; or, ’Tis Sixty Years
Since is published.
1816 1821

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

● Charlotte Brontë is born on 21 April in Thorn- ● John William Polidori commits suicide on 27
ton, Yorkshire, England. August in London, England.
■ George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s ■ Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English
Pilgrimage: Canto the Third is published. Opium Eater is published.

■ Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel: Kubla

Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep is published. 1822
■ Jane Scott’s The Old Oak Chest is produced. ● E. T. A. Hoffmann dies on 25 June in Berlin,
Germany.
● Percy Bysshe Shelley drowns on 8 July in the
1817
Gulf of Spezia near Lerici, Italy.
● Jane Austen dies on 18 July in Winchester,
Hampshire, England.
1823
■ Washington Allston begins the painting Bels-
hazzar’s Feast. ● Ann Radcliffe dies on 7 February in England.
■ Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, The
■ George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Manfred, A
Fate of Frankenstein is produced.
Dramatic Poem is published.
■ E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann” (“The
Sandman”) is published. 1824
■ William Wilkie Collins is born on 8 January in
London, England.
1818
● Sophia Lee dies on 13 March in Clifton, Eng-
● Matthew Gregory Lewis dies on 16 May dur- land.
ing a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean from
Jamaica to England. ● Lord Byron dies on 19 April in Cephalonia,
Greece.
● Emily Brontë is born on 30 July in Thornton,
Yorkshire, England. ● Charles Robert Maturin dies on 30 October in
Dublin, Ireland.
■ Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion
■ Catherine Gore’s The Bond, a Dramatic Poem is
is published.
produced.
■ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein; or,
■ James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confes-
The Modern Prometheus is published.
sions of a Justified Sinner is published.
■ Washington Irving’s Tales of a Traveller is
1819 published.
● Herman Melville is born on 1 August in New
York City.
1825
■ Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci is produced. ■ James Fenimore Cooper’s Lionel Lincoln; or, The
■ Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geof- Leaguer of Boston is published.
frey Crayon, Gent. is published.
■ John William Polidori’s The Vampyre; a Tale is 1826
published. ■ Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Glenallan is published.

1820 1827
■ John Keats’s Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. ● William Blake dies on 12 August in London,
Agnes, and Other Poems is published. England.
■ Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer ■ Thomas Moore’s The Epicurean. A Tale is
is published. published.

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2 xxxvii
CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS 1830 1842
● Christina Rossetti is born on 5 December in ■ Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni is published.
London, England. ● Ambrose Bierce is born on 24 June in Horse
Cave Creek, Meigs County, Ohio.
1832
● Johann Wolfgang von Goethe dies on 22 1843
March. ● Henry James is born on 15 April in New York
City.
● Sir Walter Scott dies on 21 September in Ab-
botsford, Scotland. ● Washington Allston dies on 9 July in Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts.
■ Architect Alexander Jackson Davis completes
■ A. W. N. Pugin’s Apology for the Revival of
Glen Ellen, the Baltimore, Maryland residence
Christian Architecture in England is published.
of Robert Gilmor III.

1844
1834
● William Beckford dies on 2 May in England.
● Samuel Taylor Coleridge dies on 25 July in
England.
1845
■ Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Fre-
1835
derick Douglass, an American Slave is published.
● James Hogg dies on 21 November in Scotland.
■ Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales by Edgar A. Poe and The
Raven and Other Poems are published.
1836
● William Godwin dies on 7 April in London, 1846
England. ■ Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Lucretia; or, The Chil-
■ Thomas Cole completes the painting Ruined dren of Night is published.
Tower. ■ Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Dvoinik: Prikliucheniia gos-
podina Goliadkina (The Double: A Poem of St.
Petersburg) is published.
1837
■ Charles Dickens’s Posthumous Papers of the Pick-
1847
wick Club is published under the pseudonym
Boz. ● L. N. Cottingham dies on 13 October in
London, England.
■ Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales is
published. ● Bram Stoker is born on 8 November in Clon-
tarf, Ireland.
■ Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. An Autobiography
1838 is published under the pseudonym Currer Bell.
■ Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist is published. ■ Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is published
■ Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gor- under the pseudonym Ellis Bell.
don Pym is published. ■ Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood, writ-
ten by either Thomas Peckett Prest or James
Malcolm Rymer, is published.
1839
● James Boaden dies on 16 February in England.
1848
● Emily Brontë dies on 19 December in
1840 Haworth, Yorkshire, England.
■ Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and ■ Charles Dickens’s The Haunted Man, and The
Arabesque is published. Ghost’s Bargain is published.

xxxviii G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2
1849 1857

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

● Thomas Lovell Beddoes commits suicide on ■ Wilkie Collins’s The Dead Secret is published.
26 January in Basel, Switzerland. ■ Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit is published.
● Edgar Allan Poe dies on 7 October in Balti- ■ G. W. M. Reynolds’s Wagner the Wehr-wolf is
more, Maryland. published.

1850 1859
● Robert Louis Stevenson is born on 13 Novem- ● Washington Irving dies on 28 November in
ber in Edinburgh, Scotland. Irvington, New York.

■ Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter: A Ro-

mance is published. 1860
● Charlotte Perkins Gilman is born on 3 July in
Hartford, Connecticut.
1851
■ Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White is pub-
● Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley dies on 1 Febru- lished.
ary in Bournemouth, England.
■ Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun; or,
● Joanna Baillie dies on 23 February in Hamp- The Romance of Monte Beni is published.
stead, England.
■ Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven 1861
Gables, a Romance is published. ■ Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave
■ Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is Girl, Written by Herself is published under the
published. pseudonym Linda Brent.

1852 1862
■ Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, ● Edith Wharton is born on 24 January in New
Life among the Lowly is published. York City.
■ Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story is
published.
1853
■ Charlotte Brontë’s Villette is published under 1864
the pseudonym Currer Bell.
● Nathaniel Hawthorne dies on 19 May in Ply-
■ Charles Dickens’s Bleak House is published. mouth, New Hampshire.
■ Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas: A Tale of
C. 1854 Bartram-Haugh is published.

● Oscar Wilde is born on 16 October in Dublin,

Ireland. 1870
● Charles Dickens dies on 9 June in Rochester,
Kent, England.
1855
● Charlotte Brontë dies on 31 March in 1872
Haworth, Yorkshire, England.
■ Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly is
published.
1856
● Sigismund Solomon Freud (later Sigmund 1873
Freud) is born on 6 May in Freiberg, Moravia, ● Edward Bulwer-Lytton dies on 18 January in
Czechoslovakia. Torquay, Devonshire, England.
■ Herman Melville’s The Piazza Tales is pub- ● Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu dies on 10 February
lished. in Dublin, Ireland.

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2 xxxix
CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS 1882 1894
● William Harrison Ainsworth dies on 3 Janu- ● Robert Louis Stevenson dies on 3 December in
ary. Apia, Samoa.
● Bela Lugosi is born Béla Ferenc Dezsö Blask¢ ● Christina Rossetti dies on 29 December in
on 20 October in Lugos, Hungary. London, England.
■ Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and The
1885 Inmost Light is published.
● Karen Christentze Dinesen, who later wrote
under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, is born
on 17 April near Copenhagen, Denmark. 1896
■ H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau: A
Possibility is published.
1886
■ Guy de Maupassant’s “La Horla” (“The Horla”)
is published Le Gil Blas. 1897
■ Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of ● William Faulkner is born on 25 September in
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is published. New Albany, Mississippi.
■ Bram Stoker’s Dracula is published.
1887
● William Henry Pratt (later Boris Karloff) is 1898
born on 23 November in London, England.
■ Henry James’s The Two Magics: The Turn of the
Screw, Covering End is published.
1888
● Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe (later F. W. Mur-
nau) is born on 28 December in Bielefeld,
1899
Westphalia, Germany. ● Elizabeth Bowen is born on 7 June in Dublin,
Ireland.

1889 ● Alfred Hitchcock is born on 13 August in

■ Wilkie Collins dies on 23 September in Lon- London, England.
don, England.
1900
1890 ● Oscar Wilde dies on 30 November in Paris,
● Howard Phillips Lovecraft is born on 20 France.
August in Providence, Rhode Island.
■ Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is 1904
published.
■ Arthur Machen’s “The Garden of Avallaunius”
is published.
1891
● Herman Melville dies on 28 September in New
1906
York City.
■ Algernon Blackwood’s The Empty House and
■ Oscar Wilde’s Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and
Other Ghosts is published.
Other Stories is published.

1892 1907
● Alexander Jackson Davis dies on 14 January in ● Daphne du Maurier is born on 12 May in
West Orange, New Jersey. London, England.
■ Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall- ■ George Sylvester Viereck’s The House of the
paper” is published. Vampire is published.

xl G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2
1908 1922

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

■ Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, produced by the Selig ■ Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, directed
Polyscope Company, is released. by F. W. Murnau, is released.

1909 1924
■ Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, produced by the Nord- ■ Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks), directed
isk Company, is released. by Paul Leni and Leo Birinsky, is released.

1910 1925
■ Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de L’Opéra (The ● Edward Gorey is born on 22 February in
Phantom of the Opera) is published. Chicago, Illinois.

■ Frankenstein, directed by J. Searle Dawley, is ● (Mary) Flannery O’Connor is born on 25

released. March in Savannah, Georgia.

1911 1927
■ Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome is published. ■ Algernon Blackwood’s The Dance of Death, and
Other Tales is published.

1912
1929
● Bram Stoker dies on 20 April in London, Eng-
● Ursula K. Le Guin is born on 21 October in
land.
Berkeley, California.

1914
1930
● Ambrose Bierce disappears c. 1 January in
■ William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and “A Rose
Mexico and is presumed dead.
for Emily” are published.

1916
1931
● Henry James dies on 28 February in London,
● Chloe Ardelia Wofford (later Toni Morrison) is
England.
born on 18 February in Lorain, Ohio.
● F. W. Murnau dies on 11 March in Santa
1919 Barbara, California.
● Shirley Jackson is born on 14 December in San ■ Dracula, directed by Tod Browning and star-
Francisco, California. ring Bela Lugosi in the title role, is released.
■ Sigmund Freud’s “Das Unheimlich” (“The ■ Frankenstein, directed by James Whale and star-
Uncanny”) is published. ring Boris Karloff as the monster, is released.
■ M, directed by Fritz Lang, is released.
1920 ■ William Faulkner’s Sanctuary is published.
● Ray Bradbury is born on 22 August in
Waukegan, Illinois.
1932
■ Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem:
■ Murders in the Rue Morgue, directed by Robert
How He Came into the World, directed by Carl
Florey, is released.
Boese and Paul Wegener, is released.
■ White Zombie, directed by Victor Halperin, is
■ Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (The Cabinet of
released.
Dr. Caligari), directed by Robert Wiene, is
released. ■ William Faulkner’s Light in August is published.

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2 xli
CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS 1933 1940
■ King Kong, directed by Merian C. Cooper, is ● Angela Carter is born on 7 May in London,
released. England.
■ The Invisible Man, directed by James Whale, is ■ Rebecca, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is re-
released. leased.
■ Island of Lost Souls, directed by Erle C. Kenton,
is released. 1941
● Howard Allen O’Brien (later Anne Rice) is born
1934 on 4 October in New Orleans, Louisiana.

■ Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales is published.

1943
1935 ■ I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, and
The Seventh Victim, all produced by Val Lew-
● Charlotte Perkins Gilman commits suicide on ton, are released.
17 August in Pasadena, California.
■ Bride of Frankenstein, directed by James Whale,
is released.
1945
■ The Body Snatcher, directed by Robert Wise, is
released.
1936
■ Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover, and Other
■ Walter de la Mare’s Ghost Stories is published. Stories is published.
■ William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is pub- ■ H. P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature
lished. is published.
■ H. P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Mad-
ness” is published.
1947
● Stephen King is born on 21 September in
1937 Portland, Maine.
● H. P. Lovecraft dies on 15 March in Providence,
Rhode Island.
1949
● Edith Wharton dies on 11 August in St. Brice- ■ Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery; or, The Adventures
sous-Foret, France. of James Harris is published.
■ Edith Wharton’s Ghosts is published.

1952
1938 ● Clive Barker is born on 5 October in Liverpool,
● Joyce Carol Oates is born on 16 June in Lock- England.
port, New York.
■ Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is published. 1955
■ Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to
1939 Find is published.

● Sigmund Freud dies on 23 September in Lon-

don, England. 1956
● Margaret Atwood is born on 18 November in ● Bela Lugosi dies on 16 August in Los Angeles,
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. California.
■ Son of Frankenstein, directed by Rowland V. Lee, ■ Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don
is released. Siegel, is released.

xlii G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , V O L . 2
1957 1968

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

■ The Curse of Frankenstein, directed by Terence ■ Margaret Atwood’s The Animals in That Country
Fisher, is released. is published.
■ Night of the Living Dead, directed by George A.
1959 Romero, is released.

■ Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is ■ Rosemary’s Baby, directed by Roman Polanski,
published. is released.

■ The Mummy, directed by Terence Fisher, is

released. 1969
■ The Twilight Zone is first televised. ● Boris Karloff dies on 2 February at Midhurst in
Sussex, England.
■ Led Zeppelin’s first two self-titled albums are
1960 released.
■ The Fall of the House of Usher, directed by Roger
Corman, is released.
1970
■ Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is re-
■ Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut album is
leased.
released.
■ Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is published.
1962
■ Night Gallery is first televised.
● William Faulkner dies on 6 July in Byhalia,
Mississippi.
1971
● Isak Dinesen dies on 7 September in Rungsted,
Denmark. ■ Richard Matheson’s Hell House is published.
■ Alice Cooper’s Killer is released.

1963 ■ Black Sabbath’s Paranoid is released.

■ Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is published.

1972
■ The Birds, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is
released. ■ Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing is published.

■ The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise, is ■ Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of
released. Doctor Hoffman is published.
■ Alice Cooper’s School’s Out is released.
1964
● Flannery O’Connor dies on 3 August in Milled- 1973
geville, Georgia. ● Elizabeth Bowen dies on 22 February in Lon-
don, England.
■ The Addams Family is first televised.
■ The Exorcist, directed by William Friedkin, is
■ The Munsters is first televised.
released.

1965 1974
● Shirley Jackson dies on 8 August in North Ben- ■ Angela Carter’s Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces is
nington, Vermont. published.
■ The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, directed by Tobe
1966 Hooper, is released.
■ Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention’s ■ Young Frankenstein, directed by Mel Brooks, is
Freak Out! is released. released.

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CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS 1975 1983
■ Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot is published. ■ Stephen King’s Pet Sematary is published.
■ They Came from Within, directed by David ■ New Order’s Power, Corruption, and Lies is
Cronenberg, is released. released.

1976
1984
■ Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle is published.
■ Joyce Carol Oates’s Mysteries of Winterthurn is
■ Carrie, directed by Brian De Palma, is released. published.
■ The Omen, directed by Richard Donner, is
released.
1986
■ Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire is pub-
lished. ■ Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart is published.
■ Siouxsie and the Banshees’s Tinderbox is re-
1977 leased.
■ Stephen King’s The Shining is published. ■ Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the
Opera is produced.
■ Joyce Carol Oates’s Night Side: Eighteen Tales is
published.
1987
1978 ■ Toni Morrison’s Beloved is published.
■ Dawn of the Dead, directed by George A.
■ The Smiths’s Louder than Bombs is released.
Romero, is released.

1979 1988
■ Bauhaus’s 12-inch single “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” ■ Toni Morrison is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for
is released. Fiction for Beloved.
■ Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other
Stories is published. 1989
■ Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures is released. ● Daphne du Maurier dies on 19 April in Corn-
■ ’Salem’s Lot, directed by Tobe Hooper, is wall, England.
televised.
■ Pet Sematary, directed by Mary Lambert, is
released.
1980
● Alfred Hitchcock dies on 29 April in Los 1990
Angeles, California.
■ Twin Peaks is first televised.
■ Joyce Carol Oates’s Bellefleur is published.
■ The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick, is
released. 1992
● Angela Carter dies on 16 February in London,
1981 England.
■ Stephen King’s Danse Macabre is published. ■ Bram Stoker’s Dracula, directed by Francis Ford
■ Siouxsie and the Banshees’s Juju is released. Coppola, is released.

1982 1993
■ Joyce Carol Oates’s A Bloodsmoor Romance is ■ Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride is pub-
published. lished.

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1994 2000

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

■ Joyce Carol Oates’s Haunted: Tales of the Gro- ● Edward Gorey dies on 15 April in Cape Cod,
tesque is published.
Massachusetts.
■ Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, directed by Ken-
neth Branagh, is released. ■ Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is pub-
lished.
1996
■ Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace is published.

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MARGARET
ATWOOD
(1939 -)
(Full name Margaret Eleanor Atwood) Canadian novelist,
poet, short story writer, essayist, critic, and author of
children’s books.
I nternationally acclaimed as a novelist, poet, and
short story writer, Atwood is widely considered
a major figure in Canadian letters. Using such
devices as irony, symbolism, and self-conscious
narrators, she explores the relationship between
humanity and nature, unsettling aspects of hu-
man behavior, and power as it pertains to gender
and political roles. Her authorial voice has some-
times been described as formal and emotionally
distant, but her talent for allegory and intense
imagery informs an intellectual and sardonic style
popular with both literary scholars and the read-
ing public. Atwood has also been instrumental as
a critic. She has helped define the identity and
goals of contemporary Canadian literature and
has earned a distinguished reputation among
feminist writers for her exploration of women’s is-
sues.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Atwood was born in Ottawa and grew up in
suburban Toronto. As a child she spent her sum-
mers at her family’s cottage in the wilderness of
northern Quebec, where her father, a forest
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entomologist, conducted research. She began to
write while in high school, contributing poetry,
short stories, and cartoons to the school newspa-
per. As an undergraduate at the University of Tor-
onto, Atwood was influenced by critic Northrop
Frye, who introduced her to the poetry of William
Blake. Impressed with Blake’s use of mythological
imagery, Atwood wrote her first volume of poetry,
Double Persephone, which was published in 1961.
The following year Atwood completed her A.M.
degree at Radcliffe College, Harvard University.
She returned to Toronto in 1963, where she began
collaborating with artist Charles Pachter, who
designed and illustrated several volumes of her
poetry. In 1964 Atwood moved to Vancouver,
where she taught English for a year at the Univer-
sity of British Columbia and completed her first
novel, The Edible Woman (1969). After a year of
teaching literature at Sir George Williams Univer-
sity in Montreal, Atwood moved to Alberta to
teach creative writing at the University of Alberta.
Her poetry collection The Circle Game (1966) won
the 1967 Governor General’s Award, Canada’s
highest literary honor. Atwood’s public visibility
increased significantly with the publication of her
poetry collection Power Politics in 1971. Seeking
an escape from increasing media attention, At-
wood left her teaching position at the University
of Toronto to move to a farm in Ontario with her
husband. In 1986 she again received the Governor
General’s Award for her novel The Handmaid’s Tale
1
 (1986) and was later awarded the Booker Prize for
ATWOOD
her novel The Blind Assassin (2000).
MAJOR WORKS
The poems in Atwood’s first volume, Double
Persephone reflect the influence of Blake’s contrast-
ing mythological imagery. While this collection
demonstrates her penchant for using metaphori-
cal language, Atwood’s second volume of poetry,
The Circle Game, garnered widespread critical
recognition. Atwood explores the meaning of art
and literature, as well as the Gothic, in the poetry
collection The Animals in That Country (1968).
Presenting the poet as both performer and creator,
she questions the authenticity of the writing
process and the effects of literature on both the
writer and the reader. In The Journals of Susanna
Moodie (1970) Atwood devotes her attention to
what she calls the schizoid, double nature of
Canada. Centered on the narratives of a Canadian
pioneer woman, Journals investigates why Canadi-
ans came to develop ambivalent feelings toward
their country. Atwood further develops this di-
chotomy in Power Politics, in which she explores
the relationship between sexual roles and power
structures by focusing on personal relationships
and international politics.
The story of an unnamed freelance artist who
journeys to the wilderness of Quebec to investigate
her father’s disappearance, Surfacing (1972) focuses
on the dichotomous nature of family relation-
ships, cultural heritage, and self-perception. The
protagonist of Atwood’s novel Lady Oracle (1976)
is Joan Foster, who writes “costume Gothics” and
fakes her own death to avoid the consequences of
her past mistakes. The novel depicts relations
between mothers and daughters and explores
twentieth-century female identity by illustrating
the monstrosity of the societal roles created by
and for women. Just as Atwood uses monsters
(Joan’s three-way vanity mirror is a “triple-headed
monster” and Joan becomes a “duplicitous
monster”) to highlight the novel’s thematic
concerns, so does Joan utilize her own costume
Gothic characters and narratives to explore the is-
sues that concern her, and in the end is able to
begin writing in a new discipline—science fiction.
In her novel Life before Man (1979) Atwood dis-
sects the relationships between three characters:
Elizabeth, a married woman who mourns the
recent death of her lover; Elizabeth’s husband,
Nate, who is unable to choose between his wife
and his lover; and Lesje, Nate’s lover, who works
with Elizabeth at a museum of natural history. All
2 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
three characters are emotionally isolated from one
another and are unable to take responsibility for
their feelings as their relationships deteriorate.
Atwood turned to speculative fiction with her
novel The Handmaid’s Tale, depicting the dystopia
of Gilead, a future America in which Fundamental-
ist Christians have imposed dictatorial rule. Here,
in a world polluted by toxic chemicals and nuclear
radiation, most women are sterile; those who are
able to bear children are forced to become Hand-
maids, official surrogate mothers who enjoy some
privileges yet remain under constant surveillance.
Almost all other women have been deemed ex-
pendable. While The Handmaid’s Tale focuses on
an imagined future, Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye
(1990) explores how misconceptions about the
past can influence people’s present lives. The story
of Elaine Risley, a prominent artist who returns to
her childhood home in Toronto, Cat’s Eye traces
Elaine’s discovery that her childhood relationships
were often manipulative and that her memories
of past events have not always been accurate or
honest. Considered by many an allegorical explo-
ration of the realities confronting individuals at
the approach of the twenty-first century, this work
reveals the implications of evil and redemption in
both a personal and social context. In Cat’s Eye, as
in all her works, Atwood forgoes specific political
or moral ideologies, concentrating instead on the
emotional and psychological complexities that
confront individuals in conflict with society.
In The Robber Bride (1993) Atwood transforms
the Brothers Grimm’s grisly fairy tale “The Robber
Bridegroom,” about a demonic groom who lures
three innocent maidens into his lair and then
devours them, into a statement about women’s
treatment of each other. Three middle-aged friends
are relieved to reunite at the funeral of the woman
who tormented them in college, stealing from
them money, time, and men, and threatening
their careers and lives. But the villainous Zenia
turns up alive, forcing them to relive painful
memories and come to terms with the connection
between love and destruction. Alias Grace (1996)
represents Atwood’s first venture into historical
fiction. Based on a true story Atwood had explored
previously in a television script titled The Servant
Girl, Alias Grace centers on Grace Marks, a servant
who was found guilty of murdering her employer
and his mistress in northern Canada in 1843.
Some people doubt Grace’s guilt, however, and
she serves out her sentence of life in prison, claim-
ing not to remember the murders. Eventually,
reformers begin to agitate for clemency for Grace.
In a quest for evidence to support their position,
they assign a young doctor, versed in the new sci-
ence of psychiatry, to evaluate her soundness of
mind. Over many meetings, Grace tells the doctor
the harrowing story of her life, which has been
marked by extreme hardship. Much about Grace,
though, remains puzzling; she is haunted by
flashbacks of the supposedly forgotten murders
and by the presence of a friend who had died from
a mishandled abortion. The doctor, Simon Jordan,
does not know what to believe in Grace’s tales.
The Blind Assassin involves multiple story lines. It
is the memoir of Iris, a dying woman in her eight-
ies who retraces her past with the wealthy and
conniving industrialist Richard Griffen and the
deaths of her sister Laura, her husband, and her
daughter, and it is also a novel-within-a-novel, as
interspersed with Iris’s wry narrative threads are
sections devoted to Laura’s novel, The Blind Assas-
sin, published after her death.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
The winner of the 1967 Governor General’s
Award, Canada’s highest literary honor, The Circle
Game established the major themes of Atwood’s
poetry: the inconsistencies of self-perception, the
paradoxical nature of language, Canadian identity,
and the conflicts between humankind and nature.
In addition to her numerous collections of poetry,
Atwood earned widespread attention for Survival:
A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), a
seminal critical analysis of Canadian literature
that served as a rallying point for the country’s
cultural nationalists. In Survival Atwood argues
that Canadians have always viewed themselves as
victims, both of the forces of nature that con-
fronted them as they settled in wilderness terri-
tory and of the colonialist powers that dominated
their culture and politics. She proposes that
Canadian writers should cultivate a more positive
self-image by embracing indigenous traditions,
including those of Native Americans and French
Canadians, rather than identifying with Great
Britain or the United States.
Several commentators have noted a wide
range of Gothic themes, characters, devices, and
stylistic elements in Atwood’s works. Her poetry
collection, The Animals in That Country, has been
assessed as fitting neatly into the Gothic tradition.
This volume contains the poem “Speeches for Dr.
Frankenstein,” in which Atwood explores duali-
ties, dichotomies, tension between opposites, and
doubling. Surfacing has been regarded as an
example of modern female Gothic for its depic-
tion of an emotionally and socially repressed
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protagonist who, after learning of her father’s
ATWOOD
disappearance from his cabin, takes a harrowing
trip with her lover and another couple to the
wilderness. During the journey, she confronts
painful memories from her past and, by moving
beyond the “surface” of her emotions and allow-
ing herself to truly explore her pain, she is able to
free herself from it. Lady Oracle, which Sybil Korff
Vincent calls “the most Gothic of Gothic novels,
a Gothic novel about Gothic novels,” has been
widely discussed as Atwood’s most overtly Gothic
work. Lady Oracle has been compared to Jane Aus-
ten’s Northanger Abbey for its parodic elements and
commentary on the relationship between reality
and the representation of it in Gothic literature.
Michiko Kakutani (see Further Reading) has as-
serted that The Blind Assassin “showcases Ms. At-
wood’s narrative powers and her ardent love of
the Gothic.” This novel, with its parallel narrative
structure, twisted, complex plot, murders, mystery,
and underlying sense of defeat, has been character-
ized as closely resembling classic works of Gothic
fiction.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Double Persephone (poetry) 1961
The Circle Game (poetry) 1966
The Animals in That Country (poetry) 1968
The Edible Woman (novel) 1969
The Journals of Susanna Moodie (poetry) 1970
Procedures for Underground (poetry) 1970
Power Politics (poetry) 1971
Surfacing (novel) 1972
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature
(criticism) 1972
You Are Happy (poetry) 1974
Lady Oracle (novel) 1976
Selected Poems (poetry) 1976
Dancing Girls, and Other Stories (short stories) 1977
Two-Headed Poems (poetry) 1978
Up in the Tree (juvenilia) 1978
Life before Man (novel) 1979
True Stories (poetry) 1981
Bodily Harm (novel) 1982
Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (criticism) 1982
Bluebeard’s Egg (short stories) 1983
3
 Murder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Prose Poems
ATWOOD
(short stories and poetry) 1983
Interlunar (poetry) 1984
The Handmaid’s Tale (novel) 1986
Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New, 1976-
1986 (poetry) 1987
Cat’s Eye (novel) 1990
Wilderness Tips (short stories) 1991
Good Bones (short stories) 1992
The Robber Bride (novel) 1993
Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian
Literature (criticism) 1995
Alias Grace (novel) 1996
The Blind Assassin (novel) 2000
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing
(essays) 2002
Oryx and Crake (novel) 2003

PRIMARY SOURCES

4 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
 ATWOOD

GENERAL COMMENTARY
ELI MANDEL (ESSAY DATE 1977)
SOURCE: Mandel, Eli. “Atwood Gothic.” The Malahat
Review 41 (1977): 165-74.
In the following essay, Mandel studies Atwood’s utiliza-
tion of Gothic themes and devices to express and com-
ment upon complex social, political, and psychological
issues in her works.

Margaret Atwood’s You Are Happy offers not

only her usual poetic transformations, identifica-

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2 5
 tions, witch-woman figures, animal-men, and
ATWOOD
photograph-poems but also an intriguing set of
“Tricks with Mirrors.” It is the mirror poems that
suggest, more pointedly than usual in her work,
questions about duplicity and reflexiveness—
concerns quite different from apparently clear and
accessible social comment. She writes:
Don’t assume it is passive
or easy, this clarity
with which I give you yourself,
Consider what restraint it
takes. . . .
It is not a trick either,
It is a craft:
mirrors are crafty.
. . . . .
You don’t like these metaphors
All right:
Perhaps I am not a mirror.
Perhaps I am a pool.
Think about pools.
(pp. 26-27)
Quite likely the speaker of the poem is meant
to be taken as a lover; certainly she speaks to a
Narcissus gazing at her as if she were a mirror; and
to hear in the voice the artist’s warning about
craftiness may seem perverse, though the sugges-
tion of allegory is so tempting in Atwood’s works
it is difficult to resist. In any event, the mirror
voice does present ambiguous possibilities that
call to mind apparently contradictory qualities in
Atwood’s writing: clarity and accessibility, cer-
tainly, combined with extraordinary deftness in
manipulating contemporary modes of speech and
image, and a compelling toughmindedness, a
ruthless unsentimentality, which is somehow
liberating rather than cynically enclosing. These
modes and attitudes point to social concerns, but
one senses that these surface qualities may be
concealing quite different interests. It is not my
intention to deny the obvious, that she does
handle with force and insight important contem-
porary social metaphors: the politics of love and
self, the mystification of experience, woman as
prisoner of the mind police, social institutions as
models of the police state, the schizophrenic
journey toward health, and so on. But the oracular
qualities of her work, no doubt as attractive as
social commentary to her readers, deserve more
extended commentary than they have received. I
am thinking of the gothic elements of her novels,
6 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
her consistent and obsessive use of reduplicating
images, and her totemic animal imagery.
Margaret Atwood’s comment, in a conversa-
tion with Graeme Gibson, that Surfacing “is a
ghost story” provides the point of departure for
more than one commentary on her work. Less
often noticed is the special form of ghost story At-
wood employs, the story in Journals of Susanna
Moodie, for example. Mrs. Moodie appears to At-
wood, we are told, in a dream, later manifesting
herself to the poet “as a mad-looking and very
elderly lady”; the poems take her “through an
estranged old age, into death and beyond.” (p. 63)
That makes her a ghost in the last poem, “A Bus
Along St. Clair: December,” where she tells us:
I am the old woman
sitting across from you on the bus,
her shoulders drawn up like a shawl;
out of her eyes come secret
hatpins, destroying
the walls, the ceiling.
(p. 61)
Her earthly life, portrayed in the earlier poems,
involves a pattern not unlike the heroine’s journey
into the backwoods in Surfacing: a landing on a
seashore apparently occupied by dancing sand-
flies, a pathway into a forest, confrontation with a
wolfman and other animals, men in masks, deaths
of children, including a drowning, sinister plants.
Gothic tale is a better name than ghost story for
this form, in which the chief element is the threat
to a maiden, a young girl, a woman. In a well-
known passage, Leslie Fiedler, (allegorizing like
mad, incidentally), comments on the chief fea-
tures of the form, its motifs:
Chief of the gothic symbols is, of course, the
Maiden in flight. . . . Not the violation or death
which sets such a flight in motion, but the flight
itself figures forth the essential meaning of the
anti-bourgeois gothic, for which the girl on the
run and her pursuer become only alternate ver-
sions of the same plight. Neither can come to rest
before the other—for each is the projection of his
opposite . . . actors in a drama which depends on
both for its significance. Reinforcing the meaning
. . . is the haunted countryside, and especially
the haunted castle or abbey which rises in its
midst, and in whose dark passages and cavernous
apartments the chase reaches its climax.1
Substitute forest for haunted castle, and think
of the ghosts of Mrs. Radcliffe’s The Italian, and
the ghost story or gothic form of an Atwood poem
or novel begins to take shape. Obviously, it is
richly suggestive of a variety of dark threats, either
psychological or hidden in the social structure.
Atwood’s own political and social commentary
on Canadian imagination employs, with superb
wit and skill, a victor/victim pattern (the haunted
victim, the haunted persecutor, perhaps?) to
outline not only an endlessly repeated pattern,
but a theory of colonialism, that is, victimization.
We see the possibilities: if Surfacing presents itself
as political and social criticism disguised as ghost
story, could it be that Survival takes its unusual
power precisely from the fact that it is a ghost
story disguised as politics and criticism?
A further elaboration is suggested by Ellen Mo-
ers’ comments in the chapter of Literary Women
called “The Female Gothic”: Gothic, says Moers, is
writing that “has to do with fear,” writing in
which “fantasy predominates over reality, the
strange over the commonplace, and the super-
natural over the natural, with one definite aucto-
rial intent: to scare. Not, that is, to reach down
into the depths of the soul and purge it with pity
and terror (as we say tragedy does), but to get to
the body itself, its glands, muscles, epidermis, and
circulatory system, quickly arousing and quickly
allaying the physiological reactions to fear.”2 Mo-
ers’ emphasis on physiological effect seems ap-
propriate. It points to the kind of imagination
found, say, in Michael Ondaatje’s work as well as
in Atwood’s that might appropriately be called a
physiological imagination, whose purpose is evi-
dent.3
Fear. But fear of what? Some say sexuality,
especially taboo aspects of sexuality, incest for
example: the gothic threat to a young woman car-
ries implications of sado-masochistic fantasy, the
victim/victor pattern of Survival. Ellen Moers sug-
gests that in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the real
taboo is birth itself; death and birth are hideously
mixed in the creation of a monster out of pieces
of the human body. (The image involves, as well,
the hideousness of duplication and reduplication.)
In Atwood’s “Speeches for Dr. Frankenstein,”
her Dr. Frankenstein addresses his creation in
unmistakable language about a botched creation,
a birth/death confusion:
I was insane with skill:
I made you perfect.
I should have chosen instead
to curl you small as a seed,
trusted beginnings. Now I wince
before this plateful of results:
core and rind, the flesh between
already turning rotten.
I stand in the presence
of the destroyed god:
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A rubble of tendons,
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knuckles and raw sinews.
Knowing that the work is mine
How can I love you?
(The Animals in That Country, p. 44)
If, as he says to his monster, Dr. Frankenstein
might have trusted in beginnings, in seed, the nar-
rator of Surfacing, it seems, distrusts virtually all
births. How much of the haunting proceeds from
an abortion? We discern a pattern of mixed birth/
death in the book: the baby not born, the baby
aborted, the baby about to be born as a furred
monster, the drowned brother who didn’t drown,
the baby peering out of the mother’s stomach,
the embryo-like frogs, the frog-like embryo, the
man-frog father in the waters, hanging from the
camera with which he might have photographed
the gods.
Who are the ghosts of Surfacing then? In
Survival, which reads like a gloss on Surfacing,
Atwood tells us that the ghost or death goddess of
The Double Hook represents fear, but not fear of
death, fear of life. And babies? Following a rather
horrendous list of miscarriages, cancers, tumours,
stillbirths and worse, which she finds in Canadian
novels, Atwood remarks laconically, “The Great
Canadian Baby is sometimes alarmingly close to
the Great Canadian Coffin.” (p. 208) Who are the
ghosts of Surfacing? A mother, a father, a lost
child, Indians, the animals: all symbols of vitality,
life, our real humanity, that has disappeared and
must be brought back. “It does not approve of me
or disapprove of me,” the narrator says of the
creature who is elemental, as she thinks her father
has become: “it tells me it has nothing to tell me,
only the fact of itself.” (p. 187) And she says of
her parents after her paroxysm in the woods:
“they dwindle, grow, become what they were, hu-
man. Something I never gave them credit for.” (p.
189) Ghosts: only the human body, repressed,
denied; only life denied. All proceeds from the
ghosts: a de-realized world: victimization, sexism,
deformed sexuality, sado-masochism, tearing away
at nature’s body, at our own bodies.
But to say this is to accept the allegory of
gothic that Atwood allows her narrator to spell
out for us (it is worth noting that in the best
gothic fashion, the daylight world after the hor-
rors of the long night reveals that the ghosts are
mechanical or waxwork figures). To say this is also
to explain away not only the ghosts but one of
the most disturbing and most characteristic of At-
wood’s qualities, her sense of doubleness, of
reduplication, in word and image. Even the victor/
7
 victim pattern recurs and the tale told once in
ATWOOD
Surfacing will be told again. At the end, nothing
is resolved.
The ghosts are sexual fears, repressed contents
of the imagination, social rigidity. They are also
literary images, book reflections, patterns from all
those readings in gothic romance, perhaps even
the unwritten thesis Atwood proposed for her
Ph.D., on gothic romance. Reduplication. Marga-
ret Atwood’s first book of poetry bears the title
Double Persephone. The first poem of The Circle
Game is called “This is a photograph of Me,”
and the speaker tells us that if you look closely at
the lake, you will discern her image; in parenthesis
we are told:
(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.
I am in the lake, in the centre
of the picture, just under the surface.
It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion
but if you look long enough,
eventually
you will be able to see me.)
(p. 11)
End of brackets. A kind of insane phenom-
enology takes over that precise meticulous speech;
we enter a world of reflections within reflections,
totemic duplication (consider the possibilities in
the simple four-part structure: man masked; man
unmasked; animal masked; animal unmasked)
and de-realized experience. Mirror, water and
reflection, games like cards and chess, maps or
models, eyes and cameras make up the major
duplications, though there are more subtle ones
in births and ghosts, in movies, photographs,
drownings, archeology, astral travel, revenants,
echoes, icons, comic books and gardens. The list, I
think, could be extended—or duplicated—but its
obsessive nature should be clear. It should also be
clear that the list points up the literary nature of
Atwood’s concerns, otherwise fairly successfully
disguised by her field of reference, popular and
contemporary imagery. In You Are Happy, a poem
called “Gothic Letter on a Hot Night” gives, in a
typically wry and throw-away manner, the reflex-
ive pattern of story within story. Presumably this
speaker faces a blank page and longs for stories
again, but it is not clear whether that is bad (she
ought not to live her life in stories) or good (she
cannot write and therefore all the bad things the
8 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
stories could do will remain undone). Either way,
there is a sinister suggestion that the stories (like
the poem one writes to drown one’s sister, or the
things that go on just outside the frame of the
picture, the part you cannot see) will in fact, or
could in fact, write the lives of the story-teller:
It was the addiction
to stories, every
story about herself or anyone
led to the sabotage of each address
and all those kidnappings
Stories that could be told
on nights like these to account for the losses
litanies of escapes, bad novels, thrillers
deficient in villains;
now there is nothing to write
She would have given almost anything
to have them back,
those destroyed houses, smashed plates,
calendars.
(p. 15)
An ambiguity, unresolved, is that the poem
begins in first person but in the second stanza
shifts to third person narrative. The three—the “I”
speaking, the “you” addressed, and the “she” who
tells stories—remain unidentified. Duplicity, in
part, consists in trying to have it both ways. No
doubt, Atwood would recoil from my reading
backwards to the material from which she begins,
and which often seems to form the object of her
irony: don’t live in stories, you are not literature,
if you think you would like it when the gods do
reveal themselves try it sometime. So Surfacing
moves from the world of ghosts back to the place
where the narrator can be seen for what she is, a
poor naked shivering wretch, scarcely human. But
the ambiguity is in the power of the material. You
Are Happy ends with what looks like a dismissal
of “the gods and their static demands,” but leaves
open the question—again—whether you can only
do this if you have been there, have known them.
Even in parody and irony (let alone social com-
ments on literary forms) the problem, the puzzle
about reduplication remains.
A similar question arises with Robertson
Davies’ World of Wonders; that is, should we read
it psychologically, in Jungian terms, as Davies
intends, or theatrically, as a series of beautifully
structured and terribly inflated poses, or magically,
as not only the charlatan’s illusions but the
magician’s powers. This question is somewhere in
the background of Michael Ondaatje’s The Col-
lected Works of Billy the Kid (all the deceit, the obvi-
ous lies, as Ondaatje says of another poem) and in
Kroetsch’s insistent attempt to uninvent the world
he wants so desperately to be at home in. Perhaps
the disclaimers are essential to the magic of repeti- look, here, Saskatchewan

ATWOOD
tion, a kind of Borgesian pretence that the story is a flat lake, some convenient rocks
where two children pose with a father
or poem is really an essay, or that the essay is a and the mother is cooking something
story. The problem is, whatever philosophic in immaculate slacks by a smokeless fire,
dilemmas duplication raises about time and cause, her teeth white as detergent.
psychologically and poetically it seems far more
Whose dream is this, I would like to know:
sinister than the writer wishes to admit. Either a
. . . . .
fraud or a magician, the crude choice would seem
to be. To which we answer (and this involves the Unsuspecting
reduplication) neither: this is only a story about window lady, I ask you:
both.
Do you see nothing
Psychologically, as Borges points out in Laby- watching from under the water?
rinths, the story of a world created by a written
Was the sky ever that blue?
version of another world of endless reduplication,
of halls of mirrors, is a horror. “Mirrors have Who really lives there?
something monstrous about them . . . because (“At the Tourist Centre in Boston”)
they increase the number of men.”4 In folklore, Borges’ temptation is solipsism (think of your
the doppleganger motif, in which one meets life as a dream). But Atwood’s poem characteristi-
oneself coming back as one goes forward, signifies cally questions the dream. No matter that this is
either death or the onset of prophetic power. In the American dream of Canada, “A manufactured
Jung’s commentary on the I Ching, synchronicity hallucination”; the Unsuspecting Reflection, water
substitutes chance for cause, a randomness that and sky in her own head, doesn’t surface, lives
plays havoc with notions of identity and opens with her unanswered questions.
the possibility of occult possession. The vegetable
It would be possible, I suppose, to read At-
version of this pattern, in its benign form, is
wood’s career as a search for techniques to answer
sacramental, and in its malign or demonic form,
those questions honestly, resolve the reflecting/
cannibalistic. Atwood’s ironic awareness of such reflector dilemma by demystifying experience.
patterns pervades her humanized gardens and Certainly by the time of Power Politics she at-
provides a structural principle for her novel, The tained an impressive command of deflating iro-
Edible Woman. But whatever the psychological nies; a poem like “They Eat Out” sets up oppos-
significance, the literary seems more difficult for ing stereotypes of magical thinking in an
her; for in literary terms, as Borges argues, the atmosphere of fried rice and pop culture:
device of reduplication calls attention to the poem
I raise the magic fork
and hence to the fictional nature of the poem’s
over the plate of beef fried rice
reality. It de-realizes experience:
and plunge it into your heart.
Why does it disturb us that the map be included
There is a faint pop, a sizzle
in the map and the thousand and one nights in
the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why
and through your own split head
does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of
you rise up glowing;
the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? . . .
The inversions suggest that if the characters of a the ceiling opens
fictional work can be readers and spectators, we, a voice sings Love is a Many
its readers or spectators, can be fictitious. In 1833,
Carlyle observed that the history of the universe Splendoured Thing
is an infinite sacred book that all men write and you hang suspended above the city
read and try to understand, and in which they are
also written.5 in blue tights and red cape,
your eyes flashing in unison.
Borges remarks that tales of fantasy are not . . . . .
haphazard combinations: “They have a meaning,
they make us feel that we are living in a strange As for me, I continue eating;
world.”6 Focussing on the obvious, the map of I liked you better the way you were
but you were always ambitious.
Canada in a tourist agency, viewed by a window
lady who sees her own reflection containing the But writing has its own power, its metaphors,
mapped country, Atwood gives us a country like mirrors in the language. No one knows what
stranger than we knew: word the heroine of Surfacing will speak first. It is

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 possible that she will say nothing. Silence can be
ATWOOD
the strategy of those who have endured. But if
there is any sense to my argument that Atwood’s
obsessive concern with mirror and reflection is an
attempt to resolve an impossible dilemma about
writing and experience, or about fiction and
wisdom; and at the same time, a sort of playing
about with the fires of magical possession, then I
would guess that tormented girl would turn
toward us and say:
You don’t like these metaphors
All right
Think about pools.
Notes
1. Love and Death in The American Novel, Meridian Books,
(New York, 1962), 111-112.
2. Literary Women, Doubleday and Company (New York,
1976), 90.
3. Like Atwood, Ondaatje, especially in The Collected
Works of Billy the Kid, and Robert Kroetsch in The
Studhorse Man and Badlands, tend to bring together
images of sexuality, dismemberment, and poetics,
poetic and sexual obsessions leading to anatomies.
4. “Tlön Uqbar, Orbïs Tertius,” Labyrinths, New Direc-
tions (New York, 1962), 3.
5. Partial Magic in the Quixote,” Labyrinths, 196.
6. “Tales of the Fantastic” in Prism international, Volume
Eight, Number One, (Summer, 1968), p. 15.
CORAL ANN HOWELLS (ESSAY
DATE 1996)
SOURCE: Howells, Coral Ann. “Atwoodian Gothic:
From Lady Oracle to The Robber Bride.” In Margaret At-
wood, pp. 62-85. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
In the following excerpt, Howells examines Atwood’s
unique manipulation of Gothic themes, imagery, and
narrative techniques.
Atwoodian Gothic is both sinister and jokey,
rather like the scary game which Atwood describes
in Murder in the Dark, a game about murderers,
victims and detectives played with the lights off.
The only other thing the reader needs to know is
that the victim is always silent and that the
murderer always lies:
In any case, that’s me in the dark. I have designs
on you, I’m plotting my sinister crime, my hands
are reaching for your neck or perhaps, by mistake,
your thigh. You can hear my footsteps approach-
ing, I wear boots and carry a knife, or maybe it’s a
pearl-handled revolver, in any case I wear boots
with very soft soles, you can see the cinematic
glow of my cigarette, waxing and waning in the
fog of the room, the street, the room, even though
I don’t smoke. Just remember this, when the
scream at last has ended and you’ve turned on the
lights: by the rules of the game, I must always lie.1
10
This game is emblematic of Atwoodian
Gothic; its aim is to scare, yet it is a sort of
fabricated fright; there are rules and conventions
and we enter into a kind of complicity because we
want to be frightened. Atwood suggests, ‘You can
say: the murderer is the writer’ and then either
the book or the reader would be the victim, which
makes an interesting identification between
Gothic storyteller and murderer, trickster, liar. We
could take that one stage further with Atwood’s
female Gothic storytellers, Joan Foster in Lady
Oracle, Zenia in The Robber Bride and Atwood
herself, identified as sybils, witches, supreme plot-
ters all (‘I have designs on you’).
So, what is Gothic? At the core of the Gothic
sensibility is fear—fear of ghosts, women’s fear of
men, fear of the dark, fear of what is hidden but
might leap out unexpectedly, fear of something
floating around loose which lurks behind the
everyday. The emblematic fear within Gothic
fantasy is that something that seemed to be dead
and buried might not be dead at all. Hence the
Gothic outbreaks of terror and violence as things
cross forbidden barriers between dream and wak-
ing, life and death. It is easy to recognise a Gothic
novel for it is characterised by a specific collection
of motifs and themes, many of which come
through folklore, fairytale, myth and nightmare.
One of the most succinct accounts of the Gothic
as a literary genre is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s criti-
cal study The Coherence of Gothic Conventions,
which identifies two key terms to define the
Gothic: the Unspeakable and Live Burial.2 Argu-
ably those terms might be seen as different images
for the same thing for they both relate to what is
hidden, secret, repressed, and which is threaten-
ing precisely because it is still alive and blocked
off from consciousness though ready to spring
out, transformed into some monstrous shape—
like Freud’s unheimlich, both familiar and alien to
us.3 It is this uncanny quality of Gothic which is
embodied in its obsession with the transgression
of boundaries and with transformations—‘change
from one state into another, change from one
thing into another’.4 On the level of the super-
natural, there is the phenomenon of ghosts
transgressing boundaries between life and death,
while on the psychological level there is the ero-
sion of boundaries between the self and the
monstrous Other. (What does a Gothic protagonist
see or fear to see when she looks in the mirror?)
In the borderline territory between conscious and
unconscious, a space is opened up for doubles and
split selves, which are not total opposites but
dependent on each other and linked by a kind of
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unacknowledged complicity, like Dr Frankenstein
and his monster. To return to that game in Murder
in the Dark: Atwood reminds players that they
may take turns to be murderer or victim, for one
role does not preclude the other. Gothic finds a
language for representing areas of the self (like
fears, anxieties, forbidden desires) which are unas-
similable in terms of social conventions. In rela-
tion to fiction, the major point to consider is how
these transgressions are expressed through narra-
tive, most obviously in the shifts from realism to
fantasy signalled in dreams and hallucinations,
when frequently the working out of dreams is
crucial to the plot. There is also the difficulty any
Gothic story has in getting itself told at all: Gothic
plots are characterised by enigmas, multiple stories
embedded in the main story, multiple narrators
and shifting points of view, and mixed genres,
where fairy tale may blur into history or autobio-
graphy. At all times the Gothic narrative suggests
the co-existence of the everyday alongside a
shadowy nightmarish world.5
Not surprisingly, the Gothic romance has
traditionally been a favourite genre for women
writers, from Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udol-
pho (1794), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the
Brontës’ Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre (1840s),
through to Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938),
Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), and the
contemporary fiction of Margaret Atwood, Angela
Carter, Beryl Bainbridge, Alice Munro. It is a devi-
ous literature through which to express female
desires and dreads, and in Atwood it is easy to see
the traditional forms surviving, updated but still
retaining their original charge of menace and
mystery, while balancing women’s urge toward
self-discovery and self-assertiveness with self-
doubts, between celebration of new social free-
doms and women’s sense of not being free of
traditional assumptions and myths about feminin-
ity. It is to this territory of Gothic romance that
Atwood returns again and again, using its images
and motifs and its narratives of transgression. To
glance briefly at the pervasiveness of Gothic in At-
wood, one would need to start with her early
watercolours from the late 1960s where sinister
knights in armour with hidden faces peer at
damsels dressed in red, or dark male figures hold
unconscious purple female bodies in their giant
arms.6 Surfacing might be construed as a ghost
story in the Canadian wilderness, a reading sug-
gested by Atwood in an early interview when she
explained that she was writing in the tradition of
the psychological ghost story:
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You can have the Henry James kind, in which the
ATWOOD
ghost that one sees is in fact a fragment of one’s
own self which has split off, and that to me is the
most interesting kind and that is obviously the
tradition I’m working in.7
The motifs of haunted wilderness and the split
self are still there 20 years later in the story ‘Death
by Landscape’ in Wilderness Tips, just as the
werewolf image which was there in The Journals
of Susanna Moodie recurs in ‘Age of Lead’ in that
same collection. The title story in Bluebeard’s Egg
(1983) is a modern revision of fairy tale,8 while
Bodily Harm (1981) and The Handmaid’s Tale
(1985) exploit traditional Gothic motifs in their
representation of classic female fears of sexual
violence or imprisonment. In Cat’s Eye (1988)
the protagonist is haunted by the past and by her
doppelganger Cordelia (‘Lie down, you’re dead!’)
who represents the other half of herself, her dark
mad twin. There is also a poem ‘The Robber
Bridegroom’ in Interlunar (1984), and it is
interesting to note that ‘The Robber Bridegroom’
was considered by Atwood as a possible title for
Bodily Harm. In this recirculation of images and
themes, we note very repetitive patterns which
are the identifying marks of a literary genre. The
same stories are being retold, as the reader is
constantly reminded through intertextual allu-
sions to fairy tales and old Gothic romances, so
that versions that might look contemporary and
new circle around old enigmas. It is from this
Gothic continuum that I wish to single out Lady
Oracle (1976) and The Robber Bride (1993) in
order to examine what transformations of Gothic
conventions Atwood has managed in novels that
are nearly 20 years apart; to see how her changing
use of Gothic conventions reflects her responses
to shifts in cultural mythology, especially in her
thinking about women. What we find is the
reworking of traditional Gothic motifs within the
frames of realistic fiction, for unlike her protago-
nist Joan Foster in Lady Oracle, Atwood does not
‘write with her eyes closed’. On the contrary, At-
wood is an attentive and often satirical critic of
contemporary Canada, exposing popular myths
and social ideologies for Atwood has designs on
us. But then, of course, so did Joan Foster, and so
did Zenia, the Robber Bride.
Atwood described Lady Oracle as ‘a realistic
comic novel colliding with Gothic conventions—I
give you Northanger Abbey’, as she explained for a
lecture in 1982.9 It is also a fictive autobiography,
told by a woman who is a novelist and a poet,
suggesting shadowy parallels with Atwood herself
in her early days of fame when she was becoming
a cultural ikon in Canada. More to the point
11
 because this novel is not autobiography but an
ATWOOD
autobiographical fiction, there are strong parallels
with Cat’s Eye told by that other successful
woman artist, Elaine Risley the painter. In both
cases a woman struggles to find her voice, to
define her identity through telling her life story in
different versions. Lady Oracle and Cat’s Eye are
curiously similar autobiographical projects because
the stories the protagonists tell offer multiple ver-
sions of their lives which never quite fit together
to form the image of a unified and coherent self.
Who is Joan Foster, who writes popular Gothic
romances under the pseudonym Louisa K. Dela-
court? What is the significance of Lady Oracle,
Joan’s other pseudonym when she writes poetry?
The one thing the reader can be sure about with
Joan is that she is a fantasist, and a trickster: ‘All
my life I’d been hooked on plots’.1 0
Lady Oracle is a story about storytelling, both
the stories themselves and the writing process, for
Joan offers us multiple narratives figuring and
refiguring herself through different narrative
conventions. The novel is structured through a
series of interlocking frames. First, there is the
story of Joan’s real life in the present, set in Italy
where she has escaped after her fake suicide in
Toronto, Canada. Enclosed within this is her
private memory narrative of a traumatic child-
hood filled with shame, pain and defiance cen-
tring on her relationship with her neurotic
mother, of an adolescence when she escapes to
London and becomes a writer of popular Gothics,
her marriage to a Canadian, her celebrity as a poet,
to be followed by the threat of blackmail and her
second escape from Canada to Italy. Embedded
within this narrative are snippets from Joan’s
Gothic romances (‘Bodice Rippers’ as she calls
them), which provide more glamorous and dan-
gerous plots than everyday life in Toronto, or even
in Italy, during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Then there is a fourth narrative thread, the curi-
ously mythic ‘Lady Oracle’ poems, produced as
Joan believes by Automatic Writing when she
looks into a dark mirror in her bedroom in Tor-
onto. These shifting frames generate a series of
comic collisions, confrontations and escape at-
tempts, but there are no clear boundaries between
them as borders blur between present and past,
art and life. Joan’s fantasies of escape and transfor-
mation are always duplicitous and riddled with
holes, so that one story infiltrates another and
fantasy is under continual barrage from the claims
of real life. Joan may adopt multiple disguises in
the form of fancy costumes, wigs, different names
and different personas, but ‘it was no good; I
12 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
couldn’t stop time, I could shut nothing out’ (p.
277). Through this shimmer of different figures,
the reader wonders if there is any chance of get-
ting beyond the veils to the centre of the plot or
to the enigma of Joan Foster herself. Do we ever
get beyond the distorting funhouse mirrors? Joan
is nothing if not a self-caricaturist as well as a paro-
dist of Gothic romance conventions, as she
switches between real life and fantasy roles in a
continual process of double coding. All these
fantasies are arguably distorted versions of herself,
a process described by Paul de Man in his essay,
‘Autobiography as Defacement’: ‘Autobiography
deals with the giving and taking away of faces,
with face and deface, figure, figurations and
disfiguration’ in images of the self endlessly
displaced and doubled.1 1
It is arguable that Joan constructs the Gothic
plots in her own life. From her point of view even
her life story could be seen as a tale told by a
ghost, speaking from beyond her watery grave in
Lake Ontario: ‘I planned my death carefully; un-
like my life, which meandered along from one
thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to
control it’ (p. 7). Of course this ‘death’ is another
of her contrived plots for Joan is not dead at all.
One of the things that frightens her most in Italy
is that people at home in Canada will think that
she is really dead, and not even miss her. Having
escaped from her husband Arthur in Toronto, Joan
realises that the other side of her escape fantasy is
isolation:
The Other Side was no paradise, it was only a
limbo. Now I knew why the dead came back to
watch over the living: the Other Side was boring.
There was no one to talk to and nothing to do.
(p. 309)
Such reflection is a result of Joan’s rueful
recognition of the gap between real life and
fantasy, for she is haunted by memories of her
visit to this same Italian village the previous year
with her husband and is now filled with the long-
ing that he will come to rescue her from her own
perfect plot which begins to look ‘less like a Fellini
movie than that Walt Disney film I saw when I
was eight, about a whale who wanted to sing at
the Metropolitan Opera . . . but the sailors
harpooned him’ (p. 9). Critics have been rather
fond of saying that Joan’s real-life narrative and
the Gothic novel she is writing in Italy start off
separate and gradually become entwined till at
the end of the narrative borders blur and Joan
enters the Gothic maze in Stalked by Love.1 2 That
observation is true as far as it goes, but that is not
far enough. Borders between realism and fantasy
are blurred from the beginning as Joan continu-
ally slides from the embarrassments of the present
into fantasy scenarios and back again, for she is
an escape artist who is beset by one inconvenient
insight, ‘Why did every one of my fantasies turn
into a trap?’ (p. 334).
. . . . .
The Robber Bride could be classified as a
mutant form of female Gothic romance with the
return of a ‘demonic woman’ from the dead in a
story about transgressions, magic mirrors, shape
changers and dark doubles, betrayals and omens
of disaster, until the final defeat of the demon by
three women friends when her body is burned up
and its ashes scattered over the deepest part of
Lake Ontario. There is also a multiple homecom-
ing and the restoration of social and family order
at the end. Here we find the key Gothic elements
of the unspeakable and the buried life, together
with a whole range of traditional motifs like
vampires, spells, soul stealing and body snatch-
ing. It could also be argued here that the tradi-
tional Gothic plot is ‘upside-down somehow’, for
though there are female victims there are no rescu-
ing heroes, just as there are no tombs, mazes or
haunted houses; in this story the blood belongs to
history and to metaphor. All of which highlights
the fact that The Robber Bride is a postmodernist
fiction which exploits the shock effects that occur
when Gothic fairy tale migrates into totally differ-
ent genres like the failed family romance, the
detective thriller, and documentary history. Tony,
the professional historian among the three friends,
knows this technique and how it might be used
to engage the interest of listeners and readers:
She likes the faint shock on the faces of her listen-
ers. It’s the mix of domestic image and mass
bloodshed that does it to them.1 3
The novel is both like a fairy tale as its title
indicates and like history, which—as Tony ex-
plains—is always ‘a construct’ (p. 6), being the
combination of different kinds of textual evidence:
social documentary, private memory narrative and
imaginative reconstruction. History is a discon-
tinuous text with crucial gaps, so that different
interpretations of the facts are always possible.
Tony’s words recall those of the American histori-
ographer Hayden White, who suggests that the
narratives of history always reconstruct the avail-
able facts of the past for readers in the present ac-
cording to congenial ideological perspectives and
identifiable literary patterns like the quest of the
hero or fables of decline and fall.1 4
The Robber Bride is the story of Zenia, another
of Atwood’s missing persons like Offred in The
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Handmaid’s Tale or Cordelia in Cat’s Eye, told
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through the multiple narratives of her three
friends, Antonia Fremont (Tony), Roz Andrews,
and Charis. As each of the three tells her own life
story, different overlapping frames of reference are
set up through which Zenia’s character and
significance are given meaning, though Zenia
never exists independently of the stories of others.
It is through her relationships that Zenia’s identity
is constructed, but it is also transformed as it is
refigured through the perspectives of a military
historian (Tony), a successful businesswoman
(Roz) and a New Age mystic (Charis). These
women are all living in Toronto on 23 October
1990, a crucial date for the narrative as on that
day they are having lunch together at a fashion-
able Toronto restaurant called the Toxique and
‘Zenia returns from the dead’ (p. 4). Through the
swirl of contemporary history which Atwood
sketches as a globalised scene of disasters the novel
focuses on this one particular event, the kind of
‘definitive moment’ so useful to historians—and
to novelists—after which ‘things were never the
same again. They provide beginnings for us, and
endings too’ (p. 4). The postmodern self-reflexivity
of the narrative is signalled in the first and last
sections, entitled ‘Onset’ and ‘Outcome’, told by
Tony who has a ‘historian’s belief in the salutary
power of explanations’ while realising the ‘impos-
sibility of accurate reconstruction.’ Yet for all its
enigmas and secrets and dark doubles—traditional
Gothic elements which we are reminded are also
the features of historical and psychological narra-
tives—the novel is structured quite schematically,
moving out from the crisis of Zenia’s Gothic reap-
pearance in the restaurant five years after her
memorial service, then scrolling back through the
life stories of all three in an attempt to track Zenia
down, only to return to the Toxique again about a
week later where the final crisis occurs. Though
the three friends have met to exchange stories of
their confrontation with Zenia, whom they have
all tracked down on the same day and to celebrate
their resistance and her defeat, they discover
something even more startling has happened: Ze-
nia is dead, really dead this time. As Tony’s
husband West says, ‘Again? I’m really sorry’ (p.
449), and there is a second memorial service for
Zenia a year later which is a replay of the earlier
one, when the friends scatter her ashes and return
to Charis’s house to tell stories about Zenia all
over again.
Within that contemporary frame the memory
narratives of Tony, Charis and Roz all occur in
chronological sequence charting the history of
13
 changing cultural fashions in Toronto over the
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past 30 years. Tony’s section (‘Black Enamel’)
recounts her memories of meeting Zenia as a
student in the 1960s as it tracks back through
Tony’s unhappy childhood, and recounts Zenia’s
many attempts to rob Tony of her money, her
professional reputation, and her beloved West.
Charis’s section (‘Weasel Nights’) focuses on her
memories of Zenia in the 1970s, the era of hippies
and draft dodgers, her American lover Billy and
their daughter August, with flashbacks to her
childhood as a victim of sexual abuse; it ends with
Zenia’s seduction of Billy and his disappearance.
Roz’s section (‘The Robber Bride’) recounts her
meetings with Zenia in the 1980s and follows a
similar pattern of recall: childhood memories,
marriage, motherhood and a successful business
career, up to Zenia’s seduction of Roz’s husband
Mitch and his eventual suicide. Only Tony sur-
vives with her man, and it is left to her to give a
narrative shape to the fragments of Zenia which
exist in the multiple anecdotes of these women:
‘She will only be history if Tony chooses to shape
her into history’ (p. 461).
For all three Zenia is the ‘Other Woman’, and
her existence challenges the optimistic assertion
of the early 1970s feminists which Roz recalls with
some scepticism in 1990:
‘The Other Woman will soon be with us’, the
feminists used to say. But how long will it take,
thinks Roz, and why hasn’t it happened yet?’
(p. 392)1 5
Zenia represents a powerfully transgressive ele-
ment which continues to threaten feminist at-
tempts to transform gender relations and concepts
of sexual power politics. It is the otherness of Ze-
nia which is figured in her three avatars in this
novel, identified in the different life stories told
by the three friends. One avatar is from fairy tale:
The Robber Bridegroom by the Brothers Grimm,
which is here feminised by Roz’s twin daughters
and savagely glossed by her through the parodic
mode of double-coding:
The Robber Bride, thinks Roz. Well, why not? Let
the grooms take it in the neck for once. The Rob-
ber Bride, lurking in her mansion in the dark for-
est . . . The Rubber Broad is more like it—her and
those pneumatic tits.
(p. 295)
A second avatar is from the Bible, the figure of
Jezebel in the Old Testament (1 Judges: 21). This is
prefigured in Charis’s childhood when with her
grandmother she used to choose revelatory pas-
sages from the Bible at random and once lit on
the death of Jezebel; that ‘message’ is confirmed
14
on the very day of her last confrontation with Ze-
nia by her morning Bible reading:
She realized it as soon as she got up, as soon as
she stuck her daily pin into the Bible. It picked
out Revelations Seventeen, the chapter about the
Great Whore.
(p. 420)
There is a third avatar advanced by Tony near
the end, that of the medieval French Cathar
woman warrior, Dame Giraude, who in the thir-
teenth century defended her castle against the
Catholic forces of Simon de Montfort. She was
finally defeated and thrown down a well. This is
the most unsettling of Zenia’s avatars because it
introduces a new perspective on her otherness
which extends beyond the demonic. Just as Tony
very much admires the reckless courage of Dame
Giraude fighting for a lost cause so too she has a
sneaking admiration for Zenia as a guerrilla
fighter, despite her own humiliations at her hands:
Zenia is dead, and although she was many other
things, she was also courageous. What side she
was on doesn’t matter; not to Tony, not any more.
There may not even have been a side. She may
have been alone.
(pp. 469-70)
This is a recognition of the ‘otherness’ of Ze-
nia, which cannot be accommodated within the
parameters of the friends’ stories. Tony has always
associated Zenia with war—or ‘Raw’ in terms of
her own subjective life. As a result of having
known Zenia, Tony contemplates writing a book
about female military commanders: ‘Iron Hands,
Velvet Gloves, she could call it. But there isn’t much
material’ (p. 464). It is also Tony who wishes to
give Zenia’s ashes a sort of military burial on
Armistice Day: ‘An ending, then. November 11,
1991, at eleven o’clock in the morning, the
eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh
month’ (p. 465).
Whichever way we look at it, the most inter-
esting figure in the novel is Zenia, the ‘demonic
woman’; she is there in the title and it is her story
which defines and focuses the narrative. How is it
that this traditionally Gothic figure survives as
such a powerful force in Atwood’s novel about
contemporary social reality in 1990s Toronto? I
wish to suggest that Atwood herself has done a Dr
Frankenstein performance here, reassembling
parts of old legends and fairy tales in order to cre-
ate her female monster who strides through three
Canadian women’s stories from the 1960s to the
1990s haunting their lives and wreaking havoc.
However, Atwood revises the Frankenstein ending
for it is the monster who destroys herself and it is
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the three friends who survive, though their
memories of Zenia will live on. This is perhaps
putting it rather melodramatically, but what Zenia
represents will always exceed the bounds of
decorum. Her power is the power of female sexual-
ity, and the figure of Zenia relates directly to
contemporary social myths about femininity; it
also relates to male (and female) fantasies about
the feminine; and in addition it challenges femi-
nist thinking about gender relations. In her read-
ing from The Robber Bride at the National Theatre
in London in 1993 Atwood offered an important
clue to an interpretation of her new novel when
she said, ‘It’s a book about illusion: now you see
it, now you don’t.’ Through Zenia’s story Atwood
confronts the ideology of traditional female
romance where ‘getting the power means getting
the man, for the man is the power’ (a statement
made by Atwood in Wales in 1982). In this novel
Atwood is investigating the extent to which that
old proposition about power still holds true in the
feminist—or post-feminist—1990s. In answer to a
question asked at the National Theatre, ‘Why
should women now mind much about having
men taken away from them by other women?’,
Atwood replied, ‘This is not ideology; it’s real life.’
I would add that The Robber Bride is also fantasy,
for this is a fantastic tale which examines once
again the fantasies that underpin real life as well
as fiction. Female sexuality has always been a
problem for real women and real men, just as it is
a problem for feminism: ‘Male fantasies, male
fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies?’ (p.
392). Have women internalised these fantasies to
such an extent that as Roz fears, ‘You are a woman
with a man inside watching a woman’? Atwood
answers Roz’s rhetorical questions by investigat-
ing the effects of fantasies of desirable femininity
on women themselves. Zenia inhabits that fantasy
territory:
The Zenias of this world . . . have slipped sideways
into dreams; the dreams of women too, because
women are fantasies for other women, just as they
are for men. But fantasies of a different kind.
(p. 392)
Who is Zenia? And what kind of fantasy is
she for her three contemporaries? Zenia seems to
be real but she has a double existence for she
belongs to two different fictional discourses, that
of realism and of fantasy. She is a very transgres-
sive figure who exists both as a character in the
realistic fiction and also as the projection of three
women’s imaginations. As the Other Woman, her
identity is fabricated through their stories about
her, which are all stories of seduction, betrayal
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and humiliation. She herself is an enigma. Indeed
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she derives meaning only within the signifying
structures of other people’s stories and then
always retrospectively. Zenia is a liar, a floating
signifier, possibly a void and certainly a fraud.
There is no indication that she has any indepen-
dent subjective life, unless it is her ‘aura’ which is
savagely at variance with her glamorous appear-
ance; it is according to Charis, ‘a turbulent muddy
green . . . a deadly aureole, a visible infection’ (p.
66). At least this is how Zenia appears to one of
her victims, always on the loose and ready to rob
them of whatever is most precious to them. Zenia
is everything they want most and everything they
fear, for she represents their unfulfilled desires just
as she represents their repressed pain-filled child-
hood selves. She is the dark double of them all,
having multiple identities but no fixed identity.
As Tony discovers after systematic research:
Even the name Zenia may not exist . . . As for the
truth about her, it lies out of reach, because—ac-
cording to the records, at any rate—she was never
even born.
(p. 461)
Indeed, there are three different versions of
Zenia’s life story which have been tailored to fit
the lives of Tony, Charis, Roz. She is what they
most desire and dread to be. They all think oc-
casionally that they would like to be someone
other than the persons they are; most of the time
they would like to be Zenia. It is no wonder that
Tony reaches this conclusion:
As with any magician, you saw what she wanted
you to see; or else you saw what you yourself
wanted to see. She did it with mirrors. The mirror
was whoever was watching, but there was noth-
ing behind the two-dimensional image but a thin
layer of mercury.
(p. 461)
Why cannot the three women let Zenia go,
when they believe she is dead and when they have
been to her memorial service five years earlier?
Having been tricked and robbed by Zenia of men,
money and self confidence, they keep on meeting
once a month for lunch because of her. The posi-
tive outcome is that they become fast friends, and
it is worth noting that this is the first time such a
group of loyal female friends has appeared in At-
wood’s fiction. However, the fact remains that
they meet to tell stories about Zenia, and actually
it is their collective need of her which brings her
back from the dead—or would do so, if she were
really dead. When she commits suicide the three
friends stand looking at her, still needing to
believe that she is looking at them:
15
 Zenia revolves slowly, and looks straight at them
ATWOOD
with her white mermaid eyes.
She isn’t really looking at them though, because
she can’t. Her eyes are rolled back into her head.
(pp. 446-7)
The switch in narrative perspective reminds
readers of whose is the active needy gaze and it is
not Zenia’s. Even when they have scattered her
ashes in Lake Ontario at the end, their stories will
still be about Zenia. They need her, or their stories
about her, in order to define themselves, for the
‘good’ women are shown to be as dependent on
the ‘Other Woman’ as she is on them. Zenia is
inside each one, for she represents their unfulfilled
shadow selves: ‘Was she in any way like us? thinks
Tony. Or, to put it the other way around: Are we
in any way like her?’ (p. 470). The dark reflection
in the magic mirror is still there, in that ‘infinitely
receding headspace where Zenia continues to
exist’ (p. 464).
As Alison Light wrote of Daphne du Maurier’s
Rebecca, that story of another ‘demonic’ woman:
It demarcates a feminine subjectivity which is
hopelessly split within bourgeois gendered rela-
tions . . . [it] makes visible the tensions within
the social construction of femininity whose defini-
tions are never sufficient and are always remind-
ers of what is missing, what could be.1 6
Light’s remark about a woman’s novel of the
late 1930s needs very little updating in relation to
The Robber Bride written nearly 60 years later
where the concept of split feminine subjectivity is
shared by all three of Atwood’s protagonists.
Signalled in their doubled or tripled names (Tony/
Antonia Fremont/Tnomerf Ynot; Roz Andrews/
Rosalind Greenwood/Roz Grunwald; and Charis,
formerly known as Karen), it is commented on
explicitly in all three. Since childhood Tony has
always been able to write and spell backwards:
‘It’s her seam, it’s where she’s sewn together; it’s
where she could split apart’ (p. 19). Similar com-
ments are offered about Charis, who was ‘split in
two’ as a sexually abused child (p. 263) and about
Roz, whose life was ‘cut in two’ when her Jewish
father returned to Toronto after the Second World
War (p. 332). All three have a seam, a split, which
is the space of repression occupied by their ‘dark
twins’ and Zenia operates on this edge of desire
and lack which is the borderline territory of the
marauding Gothic Other.
Zenia is a threat because of her flaunting
sexuality, her deceptions and betrayals, her ruth-
less contempt for others and her random destruc-
tiveness. With her siren song she seduces men and
16
pulls them inside out and then abandons them,
though as Tony realises there is nothing gender-
specific about this with Zenia:
How well she did it, thinks Tony. How completely
she took us in. In the war of the sexes, which is
nothing like a real war but is instead a kind of
confused scrimmage in which people change al-
legiances at a moment’s notice, Zenia was a double
agent.
(p. 185)
The otherness which Zenia represents has to
be construed as deviant, dangerous and threaten-
ing, and it has to be annihilated again and again.
Her punishment is very like Rebecca’s in the
earlier novel when Rebecca suffered murder,
vilification and cancer of the womb; Zenia com-
mits suicide—or was she murdered?—she is dis-
credited through the revelation that she was a
drug dealer and possibly an arms smuggler, and
she is reputed to be suffering from ovarian cancer.
As Tony repeats, ‘Zenia is history’, which does not
necessarily mean that she is dead and out of the
way but that her story will continue to be retold
in different versions and endlessly speculated
upon. It is symptomatic that even her funeral urn
splits in two and her ashes blow about all over her
three mourners. In this Gothic fairy tale retold
from a feminist perspective, Zenia is a very disrup-
tive figure for she is the spectacle of desirable
femininity, a beautiful façade which hides what-
ever is behind it. (Is it neurotic insecurity? or
nothingness? or frigidity? or is it ruthless egoism?)
The final image of Zenia is given by Tony in her
ambiguous elegy:
She’s like an ancient statuette dug up from a Mi-
noan palace: there are the large breasts, the tiny
waist, the dark eyes, the snaky hair. Tony picks
her up and turns her over, probes and questions,
but the woman with her glazed pottery face does
nothing but smile.
(p. 470)
Always an enigma, Zenia is still present or as
present as she ever was within her shifting figura-
tions. During the narrative she has taken on all
the pains of the twentieth century as the Jewish
victim of Nazi persecution and of European wars,
as displaced person, as victim of violence and
sexual abuse, as suffering from cancer, AIDS and
drug addition—just as she has been the ikon of
desirable femininity, Robber Bride, Whore of Baby-
lon, and woman warrior. She remains un-dead, a
vampiric figure desiring ‘a bowl of blood, a bowl
of pain, some death’ (p. 13) for she derives her life
from the insecurities and desires of the living.
The ending of The Robber Bride is not an end-
ing but merely ‘a lie in which we all agree to
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conspire’ (p. 465). We are reminded of Atwood’s
voice in Murder in the Dark whispering, ‘I have
designs on you . . . by the rules of the game, I
must always lie.’ Atwood takes Gothic conven-
tions and turns them inside out, weaving her illu-
sions ‘like any magician making us see what she
wants us to see’, as she transgresses the boundaries
between realism and fantasy, between what is ac-
ceptable and what is forbidden. Of course these
are fictions; Lady Oracle and The Robber Bride
are illusions created by Atwood’s narrative art, but
they speak to readers in the present as they chal-
lenge us to confront our own desires and fears. At-
wood, like the old Gothic novelists, like Joan
Foster and like Zenia, ‘does it with mirrors’.
Notes
1. Margaret Atwood, Murder in the Dark (1984) (London:
Virago, 1994) pp. 49-50.
2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conven-
tions (New York and London: Methuen, 1986) pp. 4-5.
3. For a succinct discussion of the uncanny, see Rosemary
Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London:
Methuen, 1981) pp. 63-72.
4. Earl Ingersoll (ed.) Margaret Atwood: Conversations
(London: Virago, 1992) p. 45.
5. See also C A Howells, Love, Mystery and Misery: Feeling
in Goltic Fiction (London: Athlone Press, 1978); Wil-
liam Patrick Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A
Study of Gothic Fantasy (Chicago and London: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1985) and Michelle A. Massé, In
the Name of Love: Women, Masochism and the Gothic
(Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press,
1992).
6. Sharon R. Wilson, ‘Sexual Politics in Margaret At-
wood’s Visual Art (With an Eight-Page Color
Supplement)’, in K. van Spanckeren and J. Garden Cas-
tro (eds) Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988)
pp. 215-232.
7. Conversations, p. 18.
8. C. A. Howells, ‘A Question of Inheritance: Canadian
Women’s Short Stories’, in J. Birkett and E. Harvey
(eds.), Determined Women: Studies in the Construction of
the Female Subject, 1900-90 (London: Macmillan, 1991)
pp. 108-20.
9. Quoted from Atwood’s address delivered at a confer-
ence ‘Imagined Realities in Contemporary Women’s
Writing’, Dyffryn House, Cardiff, October 1982.
10. Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle (1976) (London: Virago,
1993) p. 310.
11. Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as Defacement’, MLN,
vol. 94 (1979) pp. 931-55.
12. For a full account of criticism of Lady Oracle, see Marg-
ery Fee, The Fat Lady Dances: Margaret Atwood’s Lady
Oracle (Toronto: ECW, 1993).
13. Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride (1993) (London:
Virago, 1994) p. 3.
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14. Hayden White, ‘The Historical Text as Literary
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Artefact’, in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criti-
cism (Baltimore, Md, and London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1978) pp. 81-100.
15. As an interesting historical note which shows how at-
tentive Atwood is to precision of contemporary detail,
from 1972-77 there was a Toronto-based feminist col-
lective newspaper called The Other Woman. This
information is from M. Fulford (ed.), The Canadian
Women’s Movement, 1960-1990: A Guide to Archival
Resources (Toronto: ECW, 1992) p. 53.
16. Alison Light, ‘Returning to Manderley—Romance Fic-
tion, Sexuality and Class’, Feminist Review, vol. 16
(1984) pp. 7-25.
TITLE COMMENTARY
Lady Oracle
SYBIL KORFF VINCENT (ESSAY
DATE 1983)
SOURCE: Vincent, Sybil Korff. “The Mirror and the
Cameo: Margaret Atwood’s Comic/Gothic Novel, Lady
Oracle.” In The Female Gothic, edited by Julian E.
Fleenor, pp. 153-63. Montreal, Quebec, and London:
Eden Press, 1983.
In the following essay, Vincent illustrates how, with Lady
Oracle, Atwood invents “a new sub-genre—the comic/
Gothic,” that conforms to the sensibilities of the Female
Gothic tradition without the expected elements of terror
and resolution, and with an updated representation of
the psyche of the contemporary woman.
Atwood has created a new sub-genre—the
comic/Gothic—which more accurately depicts the
psychological condition of the modern woman
than does the traditional Gothic novel. In Lady
Oracle, we find the Female Gothic novel explored
from virtually every angle. It is not a true Gothic
in that it does not, at any time, arouse feelings of
terror and it does not leave the reader with any
satisfactory sense of relief. Rather, Atwood gives us
an anatomy of both the Female Gothic and the
Gothic sensibility. She explores a number of pos-
sible explanations for the development of such a
sensibility and demonstrates that it may find
expression in various literary forms. She also
shows that the familiar trappings of the Gothic—
the pursuits and escapes, the sense of isolation,
the cruelty, the ambivalent, persecuting/protecting
males, the hostile females, the elaborate details of
costume, the hints of supernatural influences—are
not sufficient to guarantee a Gothic novel.
What constitutes a Gothic novel is not so
much those elements as the attitude—the feeling
17

ATWOOD
FROM THE AUTHOR
AN EXCERPT FROM LADY ORACLE
Arthur never found out that I wrote Costume
Gothics. . . .
He wouldn’t have understood. He
wouldn’t have been able to understand in
the least the desire, the pure quintessential
need of my readers for escape, a thing I
myself understood only too well. Life had
been hard on them and they had not fought
back, they’d collapsed like soufflés in a high
wind. Escape wasn’t a luxury for them, it was
a necessity. They had to get it somehow. And
when they were too tired to invent escapes
of their own, mine were available for them at
the corner drugstore, neatly packaged like
the other painkillers. They could be taken in
capsule form, quickly and discreetly, during
those moments when the hair-dryer was
stiffening the curls around their plastic rollers
or the bath oil in the bath was turning their
skins to pink velvet, leaving a ring in the tub
to be removed later with Ajax Cleanser, which
would make their hands smell like a hospital
and cause their husbands to remark that they
were about as sexy as a dishcloth. Then they
would mourn their lack of beauty, their
departing youth. . . . I knew all about
escape, I was brought up on it.
SOURCE: Atwood, Margaret. “Chapter 4.” In Lady
Oracle, 1976. Reprint, pp. 31-2. New York:
Anchor Books, 1998.
of fear, the concept of multiple selves or no self,
the search not for a “they” but for an “I.” With
the same elements and the same attitude, but in
different proportions, and with a gift for the
unexpected simile, Atwood produces a comic
novel instead. The reader is too busy laughing at
the predicaments and observations of the heroine
to feel anything like terror, but she can certainly
identify with her feelings and experience a distinct
unease.
This new sub-genre, comic/Gothic, has a
sound psychological basis. Freud noted long ago
that the comic situation reassures us that the
victim is stronger than she appears. She will
18
triumph over her adversity, perhaps merely by her
resignation and acceptance, or by her absurd defi-
ance. Enjoyment is derived from the saving of
psychic energy which would otherwise be ex-
pended on pity or fear. When the heroine derides
herself and depicts her tribulations as comical she
is saving both herself and the audience the energy
needed for grief and compassion. She is also
forestalling the pain which would ensue if the
story were told seriously and the audience were
not sympathetic. With each joke she demonstrates
to the world and to herself that she has mastered
her anxiety over her pain. At the same time she
punishes the originator of the pain—parent, lover,
the world in general, or part of her own
psyche—by degrading the originator.1
Humor releases suppressed emotions and eases
frustrations. Humorists “choose grim laughter as a
homeopathic protection against total disintegra-
tion.”2 The function of humor is “the expression
and release of the nervous, muscular and, at base,
psychic reflexes of aggression.” 3 The critical
detachment of the comic speaker dispels anxiety,
while the energy of the unexpressible emotion is
released in harmless laughter at something trivial
or absurd. In a situation where there is no appar-
ent resolution and hence no restorative catharsis,
humor helps to ease the anger and pain of both
speaker and reader.
Atwood’s humor in Lady Oracle tends to be
female humor in that it presupposes a female audi-
ence. The heroine, Joan, also uses “courting
humor,” which is the humor women use towards
men, and consists of adopting a childlike, “dumb
Dora” posture, or teasing and thus offering a chal-
lenge which provokes a libidinous response and a
desire to overpower the female. The exercise of
wit requires a certain “distancing” of the audi-
ence. It is an intellectual exercise and is antitheti-
cal to the sensual and emotive relationship which
the courting woman hopes will prevail. When she
does use wit it is an anti-courting device, signal-
ling that she does not want or expect an emotional
relationship and that she is not to be regarded as
a female.
Atwood, through her narrator/heroine, Joan,
more often employs female-to-female humor. She
exhibits hostility towards men, anger at the female
condition, personal anecdotes about the body and
its functions, sexual experiences, and, of course,
allusions to the Gothic novels which are being
satirized. The comic devices most often employed
are absurd similes and imagery, ironic understate-
ment, and caricature or exaggeration. Such humor
acts as a tension-relieving mechanism, and estab-
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lishes rapport between author and audience
through common interests and problems. As the
teller of a humorous tale, Joan gains a sense of
power. She deliberately manipulates her audience
and experiences a sense of control lacking in her
actual life.
Joan’s self-deprecating humor also indicates
her terrible ambivalence about being female,
which is the heart of the traditional Gothic novel.
Her body is seen as a traitor leading her into pain-
ful situations. By joking about her body she exerts
control. The humor which Joan directs towards
her mother further underscores the hostility about
being female. The usual psychodynamics of
comedy are a reversed oedipal situation; a father
figure is turned into an impotent clown while the
child is free and victorious. Joan’s humor debases
the all-powerful mother with whom she is com-
peting, hopelessly and fearfully, for the love of the
father, and her self-deprecating humor represents
a self-imposed punishment for those longings.
Atwood’s comic/Gothic novel thus carries out
in a somewhat different way the functions of the
traditional Gothic. The Gothic novel is a literary
representation of our innermost fears. What we
fear so much is ourselves. Using Pogo’s words to
describe the Gothic we see that “we have met the
enemy and she is us.” Or perhaps more accurately,
the Gothic depicts multiple selves engaged in
some endless psychic basketball game wherein the
team members frequently foul each other in their
anxiety to score. Those selves within us which
seem to dominate our waking lives are often the
victims in our dreams. The pleasure-seeking self,
resenting the suppression which the conscious,
achieving self has enforced in the waking hours,
punishes the self in the dream. The achieving self
recognizes that there is that within her that can
destroy her, and the person as a whole recognizes
that conflicts within are threatening her over-all
well being.
The Gothic novel, and the dream of pursuit
and escape which it articulates, is an expression of
our fears of those enemies within us. We are our
own harshest critics and most severe task-masters;
we are also our own mermaids who will wreathe
our limbs with seaweed and draw us down into
the waters of madness.
These conflicts, especially prevalent in societ-
ies where considerable emphasis is placed on
personal achievement and self-denial, are com-
mon to both women and men, and Gothic novels
are certainly not the exclusive property of female
writers and readers. The Female Gothic, however,
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is a category within the genre which specifically
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deals with female anxieties and conflicts from a
female perspective. In addition to possessing the
general characteristics of pursuit and escape,
loneliness, elements of the supernatural, sadism,
and a sense of antiquity, it relates particularly to
the female condition.
For a woman, achievement has historically
and universally depended upon being beautiful,
desirable and fertile. Through her sexuality, every
girl is taught, she will acquire the male who will
protect her, provide for her, and give her an
identity. At the same time, her sexuality entails
the discomfort and mysterious terror of the
menstrual flow, the threat of ravishment or pene-
tration, the discomfort and innate repugnance of
bearing within one’s own body an alien being,
and the pain and danger of childbirth.
So, while the practical daytime girl bends
every effort towards enhancing her desirability
and securing a mate, the nighttime girls longs to
remain child or neuter. In dreams she threatens
and punishes the daytime girl. Virtually every
Female Gothic portrays the same dream image:
the young, lovely girl fleeing through the night,
bare branches tearing at her flimsy clothing, a
shadowy male figure nearby, and a huge old house
looming behind her. The heroine is being pursued
and tormented for no very clear reason by no very
clear enemy. The author may supply some superfi-
cial rationale for the pursuit, but it is apparent
that it is her sexual desirability that makes the
heroine a victim.
The male is often both persecutor and rescuer,
reflecting the ambivalent position which males
occupy in relation to females, as well as the
woman’s mixed emotions toward sexual inter-
course. Other females also frequently menace the
heroine. They are expressions of her own libidi-
nous longings which will lead her into the peril-
ous entrapments of marriage and childbearing.
But they are also expressions of the stern con-
science which exacts morality, purity, duty and
self-sacrifice. Nature—the branches of the image—
conspires to strip the heroine of her protection.
The vast structure of knowledge, custom and order
(the old house of the image) is no shelter; it is a
prison, a madhouse, a charnelhouse, haunted
with memories of pain, helplessness and failure.
The message is as subtle as a billboard: it is not
safe to be a woman.
The Gothic brings the dream to consciousness
and resolves its terror. Unlike a nightmare, in the
novel the heroine does elude and outwit her
19
 pursuers. Eventually, through a happy combina-
ATWOOD
tion of beauty, brains, and character, she makes
the passage into womanhood, is loved and re-
spected, and achieves status and security. The
reader is permitted to live out her own terrors and
desires vicariously, always secure in the knowledge
that the author is in control. The author will wake
her from the nightmare in time and make certain
that her daytime perception of herself and her
place in the world is reaffirmed. The highly
formulaic and predictable structure, trite symbol-
ism, and stereotyped characterization of most
Gothics assure the reader that it is safe to proceed
and enables the reader to relax her ego-protecting
barriers so that her thwarted, secret selves may for
a time find some conscious expression.
The peculiarly female perspective of the Fe-
male Gothic is demonstrated by its setting and at-
tention to detail. The setting is usually indoors,
not merely because women generally spend most
of their time indoors, but also because most of
their perils are internal—within the family, within
their bodies, within their souls. Attention to
details of costume, furnishings and customs, one
of the more delightful esthetic pleasures of the
Female Gothic, reflects female perception first of
all because within the restricted female milieu
such details are more noticeable. Furthermore,
female achievement often depends on a mastery
of such details. A successful woman is identified
by her clothes, furniture, etc. An elaborate delinea-
tion of small details gives an illusion of power. As
a little girl delights in dressing and undressing her
dolls, a woman delights in decorating her home,
because here she has dominion. The careful
furnishing of the novel, which Atwood so ably
satirizes in her novel-within-a-novel, demonstrates
mastery of the situation.
As well, an emphasis on concrete objects as-
sures us of reality. Women in particular are often
isolated from contact with others and have com-
paratively few opportunities to assure themselves
of their own reality through sports, say, or to gain
fame and recognition through achievements.
Identity is gained through things: “I am my china,
my pictures, my perfume. I know I exist because I
cleaned this cup.” At times this dependency on
things creates an illusion that the things dominate
the person. The special horror of things is a com-
mon element in Gothic novels. They seem to take
on a perverse life of their own, a horror well
depicted by the surrealist painters. An image
familiar to all movie-goers is the hero, driven to
distraction, smashing a mirror. This is an assertion
of one’s mastery over the world of things, an
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insistence on an autonomous identity apart from
any image. For who among us has not at some
time grasped the goblet, felt it cold and hard
against our fingers, and felt ourselves somehow
weak, soft, fluid—not quite there?
In the Gothic those prosaic things assume an
air of menace. Why are the jewels glittering, the
candelabra gleaming, the curtains rustling? Are
they really there, or do I imagine them? Am I re-
ally here or do they imagine me? Through a
scrupulous attention to minor details, the author
causes the novel to affect the reader on many
levels at once, from an ordinary interest in the
environment of the fiction providing credibility
and verisimilitude, to the striking of sympathetic
vibrations of horror within the reader.
The Female Gothic, then, expresses conflicts
within the female regarding her own sexuality and
identity, and uses a highly stylized form and
elaborate detail to effect psychic catharsis.
Whereas the psychological novel analyzes the
roots of anxiety and its effects realistically and
conquers anxiety through reason, the Gothic
dramatizes anxiety and through exaggeration—
playfulness, even, in the case of Lady Oracle—
renders it harmless. It permits us to experiment,
to play at terror, to become familiar with it and
recognize it as a fact of life. Lady Oracle’s empha-
sis on playfulness renders it more compatible with
the contemporary woman’s condition as it drama-
tizes and externalizes her inner conflicts.
Unlike the traditional Gothic, which has no
humor, this novel abounds in ludicrous images
and metaphors. For example, “I felt through my
brain for whatever scraps of political lore might
be lodged there inadvertently, like bits of spinach
among my front teeth.”4 However, it follows the
typical Gothic plot development, leading the
reader through the suspense of trying to discover
who or what is persecuting the heroine.
Although the novel begins at a chronological
point where the heroine has apparently achieved
safety from her supposed enemies, she is, in fact,
in the most critical danger from her true inner
enemies. As she recalls her life, we are introduced
to the various possibilities which might account
for her terror—her mother, her uncertain sense of
identity, the pressures of society, her sexual
conflicts, her experiences with men, her fear of
death, and her own warring selves.
To make obvious that this is an analysis of the
Gothic form, Lady Oracle is a novel-within-a-
novel. Joan, the heroine, writes “costume Goth-
ics.” We are invited to compare her personal nar-
rative with her works in progress, which represent
a sub-text to what she tells us about herself. As
she works through her own inner mazes, the
personal narrative and the work-in-progress begin
to merge, and her various selves achieve some sort
of synthesis. As readers we are often more caught
up in the work-in-progress than the “true” narra-
tive, just as Joan lives more fully in her fantasy
life than in her real life.
A comparison of the openings of the true and
fictive narratives provides an insight both into
Joan’s nature and the Gothic sensibility. She
begins her confession with “I planned my death
carefully.” She has lost control of her life and must
destroy her former self by making her death an
artistic creation, thus gaining control of her life
and mastering her fear of death. She is “feeble,”
her life “flabby” and convoluted, “scrolling and
festooning like the frame of a baroque mirror”—an
image revealing a surrealistic and dreamlike syna-
esthesia which perceives a mirror frame as a living
vine. Death is definite and hard, depicted through
images of a Quaker church and a severe black
dress. She longs for order, silence, simplicity, wish-
ing to escape a tawdry, confusing circus world of
trumpets, megaphones and spangles. She speaks
of a “shadow,” of a “corpse”—Gothic symbols
representing spiritual threat and material corrup-
tion. Believing the shadow will be mistaken for
the reality, she will play a hoax on death. She will
create her self by herself. But her image of herself
as a bungler insures that she will fail, will remain
the persecuted heroine of her own romances.
Comparing this to the opening of the work-
in-progress, we find the heroine, Charlotte, is also
thinking about death—the death of her mother.
There is a similar concern with clothing, allusions
to neatness and purity through a Quaker refer-
ence, a similar palette of black, white and gray,
and reference to a frame, symbolizing entrapment.
But there is also sunshine and emotion. Key words
are tears, sad, darling, heart, and hopeful. The vine-
like characteristics of Joan’s mirror-frame are actu-
ally the “curling tendrils” of Charlotte’s mother’s
hair, like spider webs. The vine-like mirror-frame
of Joan’s confession is an actual frame on a cameo
brooch which is Charlotte’s only legacy from her
dead mother. Joan’s life, which seems to her an
empty, shifting, imageless mirror, in her novel is
concentrated into the cameo—a precise, perfect,
unchanging image derived from the mother,
which she can wear as she chooses and hence
control. What is more, Charlotte is by trade a
jeweler and can refashion the cameo as she likes.
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We learn from these two versions of a Female
ATWOOD
Gothic within a Gothic, contemporary vs. tradi-
tional, that the Gothic sensibility both fears and
longs for death as an end to fear. It prefers a world
of fantasy which it can control. It has an uncertain
sense of identity, fears its own wild impulses, and
has a concomitant passion for control.
Bearing in mind that storytelling is a means
of survival for Joan, if we can trust her confession,
her problems originated with her uncertain sense
of identity beginning with her own name. She
was named “Joan” after Joan Crawford (whose real
name was Lucille). She does not feel adequate to
the movie-star image and suspects she was really
named for the martyred Joan of Arc.
In a seminal episode, chubby little Joan is
denied the opportunity to perform as a butterfly
in a ballet recital because of her appearance. She is
cast as a mothball, comic relief, instead. The
mothball is an instrument of death for the but-
terflies, and for her own fragile ego. Disguised as
the mothball, Joan expresses her rage and frustra-
tion in a socially approved way, as a comedian.
This dramatizes Joan’s survival techniques—
disguise, comedy, and death. She symbolically de-
stroyes her enemies, including those within her
who longed to be butterflies and rebelled at her
humiliation. The mothball is also a preservative,
and with disguise, comedy and symbolic death,
she preserves what is left of her ego.
To defy her mother and the society which
pressures her into being beautiful and punishes
any deviation, Joan overeats and becomes grossly
fat. But, more than from defiance, she “ate from
panic. Sometimes I was afraid I wasn’t really there,
I was an accident. . . . Did I want to become solid
as a stone, so she wouldn’t be able to get rid of
me. . . . What had I done?” Her tenuous sense of
reality is buttressed by the material—the food she
consumes and her own obvious and solid flesh.
Overeating also renders Joan safe from the
sexual advances which she fears. “It is not sexu-
ally titillating to observe the torture of a fat
person,” she observes. Ambivalence towards
sexuality is demonstrated in another passage
wherein she is accosted in the park by a man who
first exposes himself and then hands her a bunch
of daffodils. Subsequently her female companions
from her Brownie troupe blindfold her and leave
her tied to a tree. A man whom she suspects is the
exhibitionist rescues her. In her dreams the fleet-
ingly glimpsed penis turns into menacing ten-
tacles, and then into glorious flowers. Here is the
mingled terror and desirability of the pending
21
 sexuality of the prepubescent girl. She longs for
ATWOOD
the forbidden sexual act which will deliver her
from her helpless childhood state, but also feels
fear, guilt, shame, and a need for punishment.
Desire for sexual maturity is a desire to gain the
secret knowledge and power that her mother has,
and which the mother both forbids to and de-
mands of her. Through a male she can conquer
the internalized mother figure who denies her her
true identity.
Ambivalence towards sexuality is emphasized
by the contrasts between the erotic passages of
Joan’s confession and her fiction. In the latter,
words such as fiery and wild animal abound: it is
serious, dangerous and thrilling. In the former,
erotic scenes are ludicrous. A middle-aged lover in
striped pajamas seduces Joan, who has a sprained
ankle. She surrenders her virginity because she is
too embarrassed to admit she didn’t know he was
making advances. A lover called the Royal Porcu-
pine advances on Joan, growling softly. She
protests he hasn’t washed his hands. Joan imag-
ines making love with the produce-vendor, “surg-
ing together on a wave of plums and tangerines,”
mingling her romantic nature and her earthy
perceptions.
Joan’s identity confusion is demonstrated by
the two images of her self—a ballerina and a circus
fat lady. These meld into a fat lady dressed in a
ballerina costume walking a high wire over a
crowd. Although Joan longs for achievement and
adulation, she fears it and so invents other selves.
She becomes thin and beautiful, takes an alias,
and flees to England to create her own life. “I’d
spent all my life learning to be one person and
now I was a different one. I had been an excep-
tion, with the limitations that imposed; now I was
average and I was far from used to it.” She lies
about her past and denies her former self. The old
photograph of herself on her bureau is identified
as a fictitious aunt who “was always trying to tell
me how to run my life.” But just as within the
overweight body of the teenager there was a
slender ballerina, so surrounding the beautiful
adult woman is the wraith of the circus fat lady
she still feels she is.
Joan establishes a truly separate identity as
Louisa Delacorte, author of Costume Gothics, suc-
cessful, independent, self-sufficient—and through
her writing can play out all her fantasies. Her
“good” heroines can be punished and persecuted,
and also achieve success. Her “bad” heroines (who
resemble Joan physically) indulge in all sorts of
wanton and lascivious behavior, humiliate the
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“good” heroine, and then are destroyed. Sin, guilt,
shame, expiation are all worked out in the fantasy
world. “As long as I could spend a certain amount
of time each week as Louisa I was all right, I was
patient and forbearing, warm, a sympathetic
listener. But if I was cut off, if I couldn’t work at
my current Costume Gothic, I would become
mean and irritable, drink too much, and start to
cry.”
Louisa gratified Joan’s superego. As a bum-
bling, absent-minded housewife, Joan gratifies her
id. She marries Arthur, a high-minded young man
who looks “Byronic” and reminds her of the hero
of her current novel. He loves her for her earnest,
energetic failures in the kitchen and her obvious
female attractions. She is careful to keep hidden
both her success as a writer and her past as an
overweight Brownie.
Joan experiments with automatic writing,
develops her psychic powers, and discovers still
more selves. The automatic writings are published
as a volume of poetry, called “Lady Oracle.” It
seems to Joan an “upside-down Gothic” with all
the right elements but no true love and happy
ending. The poems are filled with images of pain
and death, and describe a tri-partite woman—
dark, redgold and blank—who must be obeyed. As
she stares into her mirror and transcribes, Joan
glimpses the ghost of her mother. Her mother had
owned a triplicate mirror, and always appeared to
the child as having three heads. The adult Joan
owns a triplicate mirror, too.
The poems are a huge success and still another
self appears—Joan the celebrity. “My dark twin,
my funhouse mirror reflection. She was taller than
I, more beautiful, more threatening. She wanted
to kill me and take my place.”
Even for as skillful a dissembler as Joan, it
becomes increasingly difficult to keep separate the
strands of her real life and keep distinct the realms
of fantasy and reality. She takes a lover, the Royal
Porcupine, and with him lives out her fantasies.
He is the romantic, dangerous hero of her novels,
willing to be her playmate, to dress up in absurd
costumes, and to waltz through an empty loft clad
only in a lace tablecloth. But this purely libidinous
life cannot last. He wants to marry her and read
the morning paper together, and Joan fears the
merging of the real and the phantom. She knows
that every woman longs for a dashing hero in a
cape who will rescue her from a balcony but she
really wants a husband to help her with the
dishes. She dare not lose the distinction between
the two worlds, for then she will lose control. Her
novels enable her to satisfy both needs, for herself
as well as for her readers. Joan is always sympa-
thetic to her reader’s needs; unlike Austen’s
Northanger Abbey, a comic novel satirizing the
readers of Gothic novels, Atwood’s comic novel
satirizes the Gothic but understands its function.
Joan’s fictions begin to take on some of her
real-life traits. Humor seeps in, as for example
“Redmond’s eye slid like a roving oyster over her
blushing countenance.” At the same time her life
becomes more like one of her fictions. She be-
comes involved in a terrorist plot, is blackmailed,
and receives ominous threats from a never-
revealed enemy. These are the external signs of
her inner conflict: “There was always that shad-
owy twin, thin when I was fat, fat when I was
thin, myself in silvery negative. . . . It was never-
never land she wanted, that reckless twin. But not
twin even, I was more than double. I was triple,
multiple, and now I could see that there was more
than one life to come, there were many.”
To regain control, Joan fakes her own death.
“Maybe I really did want to die, or I wouldn’t have
pretended to do it. But that was wrong; I pre-
tended to die so I could live, so I could have
another life.” By killing her old selves, Joan
punishes them for the wicked deeds she has
enjoyed, and atones. But the past she has tried to
bury, the old selves she has tried to destroy, rise
up in her imagination as a huge featureless fat
lady—“. . . my ghost, my angel, then she settled
and I was absorbed into her. Within my former
body I gasped for air.”
She protests against the female nature which
engulfs her. She knows that she does not want to
spend her life in a cage as a “fat whore, a captive
Earth Mother.” She wants to be female and yet
create, control, take responsibility for her own life,
dare to want glory for her own achievements—
and this is as difficult as a fat lady crossing a high
wire. “You could dance, or you could have the
love of a good man. But you were afraid to dance,
because you had this unnatural fear they’d cut
your feet off.”
At the extreme of a terror which she ascribes
to male domination, Joan attacks the next man
she encounters, a harmless reporter. Subsequently
she aids his recovery and confesses her true story
to him. Presumably the “new Joan” has found her
true identity, resolved her internal conflicts, and
henceforth will be brave, honest, aggressive and
responsible. That she has defended herself, albeit
mistakenly—after all, this is a comic novel—
presupposes she has found a self worth defending.
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By drawing blood from the male, rendering
ATWOOD
him helpless (she hits him over the head with a
bottle) and then reviving him, Joan turns the male
into the ravished and rescued, and herself into
persecutor and protector. Like her father, who had
been both a doctor and an assassin during the war,
she can give and take life. She need no longer fear
her own femaleness, nor the males who forbid
her an identity. Joan decides she will no longer
write Gothics; she will write a novel about real
people—“less capes and more holes in stockings.”
The novel thus shows the “characteristic comic
movement from a lesser to a greater awareness of
worldly reality.”5
Atwood’s conclusion is too reassuring to be
reassuring. We suspect that Joan is once again
adopting a disguise to elude the realities of her
psychic conflicts—this time the militant female. It
may be that the condition of women in the
modern world is not so grave anymore, and such
“new Joans” can indeed create themselves. In
today’s more open environment, with more op-
portunities for personal achievement and indepen-
dence, and hence less dependence on sexuality
for survivial, with more comradeship between the
sexes, with medical advancements and better sex
education, women need not suffer the terrors and
conflicts which the traditional Gothic novel
psychologically dramatizes. The choices and pos-
sibilities are not so hard and fixed as a cameo; they
are fluid, changeable, like the shifting images in a
funhouse mirror.
But this multiplicity and uncertainty produces
its own psychic state. Instead of terror there is
anxiety and confusion. We all know laughter is as
much a response to tension as are screaming or
crying, but it is a more socially acceptable re-
sponse. As women move out into the crowded
streets of contemporary life, the piercing scream
of the terrified Gothic heroine seems to be giving
way to the nervous giggle of the uncertain comic/
Gothic heroine. Insofar as the ancient fears and
restrictions of women persist, the inner conflicts
of women persist and the genre remains viable.
Notes
1. Martin Grotjahn, M.D., Beyond Laughter: Humor and
the Sub-Conscious, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957),
p. 257.
2. Jesse Bier, The Rise and Fall of American Humor (New
York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968), p. 307.
3. Ibid., p. 456.
23
 4. Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle (New York: Simon &
ATWOOD
Schuster, 1976).
5. Robert Heilman, The New Ways of the World: Comedy
and Society (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1978),
p. 182.
FURTHER READING
Criticism
Barzilai, Shuli. “‘Say That I Had a Lovely Face’: The Grimms’
‘Rapunzel,’ Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shalott,’ and Atwood’s
Lady Oracle.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 19, no.
2 (fall 2000): 231-54.
Views Lady Oracle as a künstlerroman, with sources
from works by the Brothers Grimm and Tennyson.
Becker, Susanne. “Exceeding Even Gothic Texture: Margaret
Atwood and Lady Oracle.” In Gothic Forms of Feminine
Fictions, pp. 151-98. Manchester, England: Manchester
University Press, 1999.
Delineates the various elements of the Gothic tradition
within Lady Oracle.
Grace, Sherill. “More than A Very Double Life.” In Violent
Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood, edited by Ken Nor-
ris, pp. 111-28. Montreal, Quebec: Véhicule Press, 1980.
Asserts that Lady Oracle is “an amusing parody of
Gothic romance and realist conventions, a satiric com-
mentary on Atwood’s own experiences as a writer and
upon aspects of contemporary society, and a portrayal of
‘the perils of Gothic thinking.’”
Ingersoll, Earl G. and Philip Howard, editors. Margaret At-
wood: Conversations Princeton, N.J.: Ontario Review
Press, 1978, 265 p.
Collection of interviews with Atwood from the 1970s.
Kakutani, Michiko. A review of The Blind Assassin, by
Margaret Atwood. The New York Times (8 September
2000): 43.
Laudatory assessment of The Blind Assassin.
McCombs, Judith. “‘Up in the Air So Blue’: Vampire and
Victims, Great Mother Myth and Gothic Allegory in
Margaret Atwood’s First, Unpublished Novel.” Centen-
nial Review 33, no. 3 (summer 1989): 251-57.
Examines the gothicism present in Atwood’s treatment of
motherhood in her first, unpublished novel.
McKinstry, Susan Jaret. “Living Literally by the Pen: The
Self-Conceived and Self-Deceiving Heroine-Author in
Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle.” In Margaret Atwood:
Reflection and Reality, edited by Beatrice Mendez-Egle
and James M. Haule, pp. 58-70. Edinburgh: Pan
American University, 1987.
Assesses Atwood’s treatment of Joan Foster as the heroine
of Lady Oracle as it compares to the conventional depic-
tion of heroines in classic Gothic fiction.
24 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
McMillan, Ann. “The Transforming Eye: Lady Oracle and
Gothic Tradition.” In Margaret Atwood: Vision and
Forms, edited and with an introduction by Kathryn
VanSpanckeren, edited by Jan Garden Castro, pp. 48-
64. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1988.
Compares Atwood’s treatment of chastity and the
victimization of women to Jane Austen’s treatment of the
same subjects in Northanger Abbey, and explores the
authors’ sources in the Gothic tradition.
Northey, Margot. “Sociological Gothic: Wild Geese and Sur-
facing.” In The Haunted Wilderness: The Gothic and
Grotesque in Canadian Fiction, pp. 62-9. Toronto, On-
tario and Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press,
1976.
Asserts that Atwood’s novel Surfacing utilizes the Gothic
mode to comment on conditions in society, and is an
example of what Northey terms “sociological Gothic”
literature.
Poznar, Susan. “The Totemic Image and the ‘Bodies’ of the
Gothic in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye.” Yearbook of
Comparative and General Literature 47 (1999): 81-107.
Treats Cat’s Eye as a künstlerroman and compares it to
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto.
Rosowski, Susan J. “Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle: Social
Mythology and the Gothic Novel.” Research Studies 49,
no. 2 (June 1981): 87-98.
Surveys the Gothic elements in Lady Oracle.
OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:
Additional coverage of Atwood’s life and career is contained
in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Ameri-
can Writers Supplement, Vol. 13; Authors and Artists for Young
Adults, Vols. 12, 47; Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fic-
tion: Biography & Resources, Vol. 1; Bestsellers, Vol. 89:2;
Contemporary Authors, Vols. 49-52; Contemporary Authors
New Revision Series, Vols. 3, 24, 33, 59, 95, 133; Contemporary
Literary Criticism, Vols. 2, 3, 4, 8, 13, 15, 25, 44, 84, 135;
Contemporary Novelists, Ed. 7; Contemporary Poets, Ed. 7;
Contemporary Popular Writers; Contemporary Women Poets;
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 53, 251; DISCovering
Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors:
Canadian; DISCovering Authors: Modules, Most-studied
Authors, Poets, and Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Encyclo-
pedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Ed. 3; Exploring
Novels; Feminism in Literature: A Gale Critical Companion;
Feminist Writers; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 5; Literature
Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Major
21st-Century Writers; Novels for Students, Vols. 1, 14, 18, 20;
Poetry Criticism, Vol. 8; Poetry for Students, Vol. 7; Reference
Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Young Adult
Writers; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 3, 13; Short Story Criti-
cism, Vols. 2, 46; Something about the Author, Vol. 50;
Twayne’s Companion to Contemporary Literature in English,
Ed. 1; Twayne’s World Authors; World Literature Criticism; and
World Writers in English, Vol. 1.
JANE AUSTEN
(1775 - 1817)
English novelist.
O riginally written between 1798 and 1799, but
not published until 1818, Northanger Abbey
is considered Jane Austen’s first significant work
of fiction, and is her only work to be widely
studied as part of the Gothic literary tradition.
The novel is in part a burlesque of the Gothic and
sentimental fiction that was popular in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries particu-
larly of Ann Radcliffe’s novels, such as The Myster-
ies of Udolpho. In addition to its parodic elements,
Northanger Abbey also follows the maturation of
Catherine Morland, a naive eighteen-year-old,
ignorant of the workings of English society and
prone to self-deception. Influenced by her reading
of novels rife with the overblown qualities of hor-
ror fiction, Catherine concocts a skewed version
of reality by infusing real people, things, and
events with terrible significance. However, Cathe-
rine’s impressions, though clouded by Gothic
sentiment, often hint at an insightful, if uncon-
scious, judgment of character that cuts through
the social pretensions of those around her. In this
respect Austen’s novel carries on an ironic dis-
course which makes it not only a satire, but also a
sophisticated novel of social education.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Austen began writing while she was still living
at her childhood home at Steventon Rectory in
Hampshire, England. Her life at Steventon, though
sheltered from the world at large, gave her an
intimate knowledge of a segment of English
society—the landed gentry—that was to provide
the material for most of her fiction, and by 1787
Austen had already begun to produce stories,
dramas, and short novels. In 1795 she com-
menced writing Elinor and Marianne, an early ver-
sion of her first published novel, Sense and Sensibil-
ity (1811). One year later, she started First Impres-
sions, the work that eventually evolved into Pride
and Prejudice (1813). When Austen finished First
Impressions in 1797, her father submitted it to a
London publisher. Although rejected, the story
remained a popular favorite among the circle of
relations and acquaintances with whom Austen
shared her writings. In 1798 and 1799 Austen
wrote most of a novel that was later revised,
bought by the publisher Richard Crosby, and
advertised in 1803 as “In the Press, SUSAN; a
novel, in 2 vols.” It remained unpublished, how-
ever, and was later revised again and published in
1818, after Austen’s death, as Northanger Abbey,
along with the novel Persuasion.
25
 MAJOR WORKS
AUSTEN Austen’s career is generally divided into an
early and a late period, the former encompassing
the juvenilia, as well as Sense and Sensibility, Pride
and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey, the latter
including Emma (1816), Mansfield Park (1814), and
Persuasion. They are separated by a hiatus of eight
years. There is a remarkable consistency in the
work of the early and late periods, marked by a
certain mellowing of tone in the later works. The
plots of Austen’s novels revolve around the
intricacies of courtship and marriage between
members of the upper class. Austen’s detractors in
more egalitarian eras find fault with what they
perceive to be a rigid adherence to a repressive
class system. Also, in commenting on the narrow-
ness of her literary world and vision, some critics
wonder if novels of such small scope can truly
reflect the human condition. However, Austen’s
talents are uniquely suited to her chosen subject.
Her realm is comedy, and her sense of the comedic
in human nature informs her technique, which is
judged as superb for its delineation of character,
control of point of view, and ironic tone. Although
Austen chose as her subject the people she knew
best, she illuminated in their characters the follies
and failings of men and women of all times and
classes.
While ostensibly a burlesque of the conven-
tional modes of Gothic horror fiction, Northanger
Abbey is also a novel of education that focuses on
the theme of self-deception. Austen portrays
Catherine as an inversion of the typical Gothic
heroine, making her neither beautiful, talented,
nor particularly intelligent, but rather ordinary in
most respects. In contrast, several other characters
in the novel are presented as pastiches of stock
Gothic characters—Isabella and General Tilney,
for example, are parodies of the damsel and the
domestic tyrant. These individuals seem to fit into
Catherine’s deluded perspective of the world
which, in the tradition of Miguel de Cervantes’s
Don Quixote, leaves her unable to distinguish
between reality and the romanticized version of
life she finds in popular novels. Other characters
in the novel serve to balance the work. Henry Til-
ney is often regarded by critics as Austen’s mouth-
piece—though he, too, is occasionally an object of
irony and ridicule. For example, he fails to realize
that Catherine’s delusions, though excessive, hint
at the true nature of people and events. Thus,
Catherine is the first to understand that General
Tilney, although not a murderer, is cruel and
mercenary. This ironic aspect of the novel alludes
to a larger theme in the work, that of the moral
26 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
significance of social conventions and conduct—a
subject that Austen explored in greater detail in
later novels.
Catherine’s introduction into society begins
when Mr. and Mrs. Allen, her neighbors in Ful-
lerton, invite her to vacation with them in the
English town of Bath. There she meets the some-
what pedantic clergyman Henry Tilney and the
dramatic Isabella Thorpe, who encourages Cathe-
rine in her reading of Gothic fiction. Her circle of
acquaintances widens with the arrival of James
Morland, Catherine’s brother and a love interest
for Isabella, and John Thorpe, Isabella’s rude, con-
niving brother. The setting shifts from Bath to
Northanger Abbey, the ancestral home of the Til-
neys, when John deceives General Tilney, Henry’s
father, into believing that Catherine is an heiress.
Austen’s satire of Gothic horror novel conventions
begins as Henry and Catherine drive up to the Ab-
bey and the former plays on the heroine’s roman-
tic expectations of the estate. When Catherine
reaches her destination she is disappointed to find
a thoroughly modern building, completely lack-
ing in hidden passageways, concealed dungeons,
and the like. Later, Austen allows Catherine’s
imagination to run amok, only to reveal the
objects of her fears as ordinary and mundane. At
the climax of the novel, General Tilney—whom
Catherine suspects of having murdered or shut up
his wife somewhere in the abbey—turns the
heroine out after learning that she does not come
from a wealthy family. At the close of the novel,
the outraged Henry proposes marriage to Cathe-
rine, now divested of her delusions by Henry and
his sister Eleanor. General Tilney, who proves to
be not a murderer, but rather an individual of
questionable moral and social character, eventu-
ally gives his consent to the marriage after learn-
ing that his daughter Eleanor is also engaged—to
a wealthy Viscount.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Critics have generally regarded Northanger Ab-
bey to be of lesser literary quality than Austen’s
other mature works. Some scholars have observed
occasional lapses in her narrative technique of a
sort that do not appear in later novels. By far the
greatest debate surrounding Northanger Abbey,
however, is the question of its aesthetic unity. Crit-
ics have traditionally seen the work as part novel
of society, part satire of popular Gothic fiction,
and therefore not a coherent whole. Detractors,
focusing on the work as a parody, have found its
plot weak, its characters unimaginative and
superficial, and its comedy anticlimactic due to its
reliance on an outmoded style of fiction. Others,
while conceding the lack of an easily discernible
organizing principle, argue that the work is uni-
fied on the thematic level as not merely a satire of
popular fiction, but also an ironic presentation of
a self-deceived imagination that is quixotically
wrong about reality but right about human moral-
ity. In addition, critics have considered Northanger
Abbey a transitional work, one that moves away
from the burlesque mode of juvenilia and toward
the stylistic control of such masterpieces as Mans-
field Park and Emma.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Sense and Sensibility (novel) 1811
Pride and Prejudice (novel) 1813
Mansfield Park (novel) 1814
Emma (novel) 1816
Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. 4 vols. (novels)
1818
Lady Susan (novel) 1871
The Watsons (unfinished novel) 1871
Love and Friendship and Other Early Works
(juvenilia) 1922
[Sanditon] Fragments of a Novel (unfinished novel)
1925
Jane Austen’s Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Oth-
ers (letters) 1932
Volume the First (juvenilia) 1933
Volume the Third (juvenilia) 1951
Volume the Second (juvenilia) 1963
PRIMARY SOURCES
JANE AUSTEN (NOVEL DATE 1818)
SOURCE: Austen, Jane. “Chapter 14.” In Northanger
Abbey. 1818. Reprint edition, pp. 107-16. New York:
Signet, 1996.
In the following excerpt from Northanger Abbey, first
published in 1818, Catherine discusses the pleasure she
derives from reading Gothic fiction—Ann Radcliffe’s Mys-
teries of Udolpho, in particular—versus what she
perceives as the drudgery of reading nonfiction works,
such as histories.
The next morning was fair, and Catherine
almost expected another attack from the as-
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
sembled party. With Mr. Allen to support her, she
AUSTEN
felt no dread of the event: but she would gladly
be spared a contest, where victory itself was pain-
ful, and was heartily rejoiced therefore at neither
seeing nor hearing anything of them. The Tilneys
called for her at the appointed time; and no new
difficulty arising, no sudden recollection, no
unexpected summons, no impertinent intrusion
to disconcert their measures, my heroine was most
unnaturally able to fulfil her engagement, though
it was made with the hero himself. They deter-
mined on walking around Beechen Cliff, that
noble hill whose beautiful verdure and hanging
coppice render it so striking an object from almost
every opening in Bath.
“I never look at it,” said Catherine, as they
walked along the side of the river, “without think-
ing of the south of France.”
“You have been abroad then?” said Henry, a
little surprised.
“Oh! No, I only mean what I have read about.
It always puts me in mind of the country that
Emily and her father travelled through, in The
Mysteries of Udolpho. But you never read novels, I
dare say?”
“Why not?”
“Because they are not clever enough for you—
gentlemen read better books.”
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has
not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably
stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and
most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of
Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not
lay down again; I remember finishing it in two
days—my hair standing on end the whole time.”
“Yes,” added Miss Tilney, “and I remember
that you undertook to read it aloud to me, and
that when I was called away for only five minutes
to answer a note, instead of waiting for me, you
took the volume into the Hermitage Walk, and I
was obliged to stay till you had finished it.”
“Thank you, Eleanor—a most honourable
testimony. You see, Miss Morland, the injustice of
your suspicions. Here was I, in my eagerness to
get on, refusing to wait only five minutes for my
sister, breaking the promise I had made of reading
it aloud, and keeping her in suspense at a most
interesting part, by running away with the vol-
ume, which, you are to observe, was her own,
particularly her own. I am proud when I reflect on
it, and I think it must establish me in your good
opinion.”
27
 “I am very glad to hear it indeed, and now I
AUSTEN
shall never be ashamed of liking Udolpho myself.
But I really thought before, young men despised
novels amazingly.”
“It is amazingly; it may well suggest amaze-
ment if they do—for they read nearly as many as
women. I myself have read hundreds and hun-
dreds. Do not imagine that you can cope with me
in a knowledge of Julias and Louisas. If we proceed
to particulars, and engage in the never-ceasing
inquiry of ‘Have you read this?’ and ‘Have you
read that?’ I shall soon leave you as far behind me
as—what shall I say?—I want an appropriate
simile.—as far as your friend Emily herself left
poor Valancourt when she went with her aunt
into Italy. Consider how many years I have had
the start of you. I had entered on my studies at
Oxford, while you were a good little girl working
your sampler at home!”
“Not very good, I am afraid. But now really,
do not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the
world?”
“The nicest—by which I suppose you mean
the neatest. That must depend upon the binding.”
“Henry,” said Miss Tilney, “you are very
impertinent. Miss Morland, he is treating you
exactly as he does his sister. He is forever finding
fault with me, for some incorrectness of language,
and now he is taking the same liberty with you.
The word ‘nicest,’ as you used it, did not suit him;
and you had better change it as soon as you can,
or we shall be overpowered with Johnson and
Blair all the rest of the way.”
“I am sure,” cried Catherine, “I did not mean
to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and
why should not I call it so?”
“Very true,” said Henry, “and this is a very
nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and
you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a
very nice word indeed! It does for everything.
Originally perhaps it was applied only to express
neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement—
people were nice in their dress, in their senti-
ments, or their choice. But now every commenda-
tion on every subject is comprised in that one
word.”
“While, in fact,” cried his sister, “it ought only
to be applied to you, without any commendation
at all. You are more nice than wise. Come, Miss
Morland, let us leave him to meditate over our
faults in the utmost propriety of diction, while we
28 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
praise Udolpho in whatever terms we like best. It is
a most interesting work. You are fond of that kind
of reading?”
“To say the truth, I do not much like any
other.”
“Indeed!”
“That is, I can read poetry and plays, and
things of that sort, and do not dislike travels. But
history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested
in. Can you?”
“Yes, I am fond of history.”
“I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty,
but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or
weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with
wars and pestilences, in every page; the men all so
good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it
is very tiresome; and yet I often think it odd that
it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be
invention. The speeches that are put into the
heroes’ mouths, their thoughts and designs—the
chief of all this must be invention, and invention
is what delights me in other books.”
“Historians, you think,” said Miss Tilney, “are
not happy in their flights of fancy. They display
imagination without raising interest. I am fond of
history—and am very well contented to take the
false with the true. In the principal facts they have
sources of intelligence in former histories and
records, which may be as much depended on, I
conclude, as anything that does not actually pass
under one’s own observation; and as for the little
embellishments you speak of, they are embellish-
ments, and I like them as such. If a speech be well
drawn up, I read it with pleasure, by whomsoever
it may be made—and probably with much greater,
if the production of Mr. Hume or Mr. Robertson,
than if the genuine words of Caractacus, Agricola,
or Alfred the Great.”
“You are fond of history! And so are Mr. Allen
and my father; and I have two brothers who do
not dislike it. So many instances within my small
circle of friends is remarkable! At this rate, I shall
not pity the writers of history any longer. If people
like to read their books, it is all very well, but to
be at so much trouble in filling great volumes,
which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly
ever look into, to be labouring only for the tor-
ment of little boys and girls, always struck me as a
hard fate; and though I know it is all very right
and necessary, I have often wondered at the
person’s courage that could sit down on purpose
to do it.”
“That little boys and girls should be tor-
mented,” said Henry, “is what no one at all
acquainted with human nature in a civilized state
can deny; but in behalf of our most distinguished
historians, I must observe that they might well be
offended at being supposed to have no higher
aim, and that by their method and style, they are
perfectly well qualified to torment readers of the
most advanced reason and mature time of life. I
use the verb ‘to torment,’ as I observed to be your
own method, instead of ‘to instruct,’ supposing
them to be now admitted as synonymous.”
“You think me foolish to call instruction a tor-
ment, but if you had been as much used as myself
to hear poor little children first learning their let-
ters and then learning to spell, if you had ever
seen how stupid they can be for a whole morning
together, and how tired my poor mother is at the
end of it, as I am in the habit of seeing almost
every day of my life at home, you would allow
that ‘to torment’ and ‘to instruct’ might some-
times be used as synonymous words.”
“Very probably. But historians are not ac-
countable for the difficulty of learning to read;
and even you yourself, who do not altogether
seem particularly friendly to very severe, very
intense application, may perhaps be brought to
acknowledge that it is very well worth-while to be
tormented for two or three years of one’s life, for
the sake of being able to read all the rest of it.
Consider—if reading had not been taught, Mrs.
Radcliffe would have written in vain—or perhaps
might not have written at all.”
Catherine assented—and a very warm panegy-
ric from her on that lady’s merits closed the
subject. The Tilneys were soon engaged in another
on which she had nothing to say. They were view-
ing the country with the eyes of persons ac-
customed to drawing, and decided on its capabil-
ity of being formed into pictures, with all the
eagerness of real taste. Here Catherine was quite
lost. She knew nothing of drawing—nothing of
taste: and she listened to them with an attention
which brought her little profit, for they talked in
phrases which conveyed scarcely any idea to her.
The little which she could understand, however,
appeared to contradict the very few notions she
had entertained on the matter before. It seemed
as if a good view were no longer to be taken from
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
the top of an high hill, and that a clear blue sky
AUSTEN
was no longer a proof of a fine day. She was heart-
ily ashamed of her ignorance. A misplaced shame.
Where people wish to attach, they should always
be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind
is to come with an inability of administering to
the vanity of others, which a sensible person
would always wish to avoid. A woman especially,
if she have the misfortune of knowing anything,
should conceal it as well as she can.
The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful
girl have been already set forth by the capital pen
of a sister author; and to her treatment of the
subject I will only add, in justice to men, that
though to the larger and more trifling part of the
sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement
of their personal charms, there is a portion of
them too reasonable and too well informed
themselves to desire anything more in woman
than ignorance. But Catherine did not know her
own advantages—did not know that a good-
looking girl, with an affectionate heart and a very
ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting a clever
young man, unless circumstances are particularly
untoward. In the present instance, she confessed
and lamented her want of knowledge, declared
that she would give anything in the world to be
able to draw; and a lecture on the picturesque im-
mediately followed, in which his instructions were
so clear that she soon began to see beauty in
everything admired by him, and her attention was
so earnest that he became perfectly satisfied of her
having a great deal of natural taste. He talked of
foregrounds, distances, and second distances—
side-screens and perspectives—lights and shades;
and Catherine was so hopeful a scholar that when
they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntar-
ily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to
make part of a landscape. Delighted with her
progress, and fearful of wearying her with too
much wisdom at once, Henry suffered the subject
to decline, and by an easy transition from a piece
of rocky fragment and the withered oak which he
had placed near its summit, to oaks in general, to
forests, the enclosure of them, waste lands, crown
lands and government, he shortly found himself
arrived at politics; and from politics, it was an easy
step to silence. The general pause which succeeded
his short disquisition on the state of the nation
was put an end to by Catherine, who, in rather a
solemn tone of voice, uttered these words, “I have
heard that something very shocking indeed will
soon come out in London.”
29
 Miss Tilney, to whom this was chiefly ad-
AUSTEN
dressed, was startled, and hastily replied, “Indeed!
And of what nature?”
“That I do not know, nor who is the author. I
have only heard that it is to be more horrible than
anything we have met with yet.”
“Good heaven! Where could you hear of such
a thing?”
“A particular friend of mine had an account
of it in a letter from London yesterday. It is to be
uncommonly dreadful. I shall expect murder and
everything of the kind.”
“You speak with astonishing composure! But I
hope your friend’s accounts have been exagger-
ated; and if such a design is known beforehand,
proper measures will undoubtedly be taken by
government to prevent its coming to effect.”
“Government,” said Henry, endeavouring not
to smile, “neither desires nor dares to interfere in
such matters. There must be murder; and govern-
ment cares not how much.”
The ladies stared. He laughed, and added,
“Come, shall I make you understand each other,
or leave you to puzzle out an explanation as you
can? No—I will be noble. I will prove myself a
man, no less by the generosity of my soul than
the clearness of my head. I have no patience with
such of my sex as disdain to let themselves
sometimes down to the comprehension of yours.
Perhaps the abilities of women are neither sound
nor acute—neither vigorous nor keen. Perhaps
they may want observation, discernment, judg-
ment, fire, genius, and wit.”
“Miss Morland, do not mind what he says;
but have the goodness to satisfy me as to this
dreadful riot.”
“Riot! What riot?”
“My dear Eleanor, the riot is only in your own
brain. The confusion there is scandalous. Miss
Morland has been talking of nothing more dread-
ful than a new publication which is shortly to
come out, in three duodecimo volumes, two
hundred and seventy-six pages in each, with a
frontispiece to the first, of two tombstones and a
lantern—do you understand? And you, Miss Mor-
land—my stupid sister has mistaken all your clear-
est expressions. You talked of expected horrors in
London—and instead of instantly conceiving, as
any rational creature would have done, that such
words could relate only to a circulating library,
30 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
she immediately pictured to herself a mob of three
thousand men assembling in St. George’s Fields,
the Bank attacked, the Tower threatened, the
streets of London flowing with blood, a detach-
ment of the Twelfth Light Dragoons (the hopes of
the nation) called up from Northampton to quell
the insurgents, and the gallant Captain Frederick
Tilney, in the moment of charging at the head of
his troop, knocked off his horse by a brickbat from
an upper window. Forgive her stupidity. The fears
of the sister have added to the weakness of the
woman; but she is by no means a simpleton in
general.”
Catherine looked grave. “And now, Henry,”
said Miss Tilney, “that you have made us under-
stand each other, you may as well make Miss Mor-
land understand yourself—unless you mean to
have her think you intolerably rude to your sister,
and a great brute in your opinion of women in
general. Miss Morland is not used to your odd
ways.”
“I shall be most happy to make her better
acquainted with them.”
“No doubt; but that is no explanation of the
present.”
“What am I to do?”
“You know what you ought to do. Clear your
character handsomely before her. Tell her that you
think very highly of the understanding of
women.”
“Miss Morland, I think very highly of the
understanding of all the women in the world—
especially of those—whoever they may be—with
whom I happen to be in company.”
“That is not enough. Be more serious.”
“Miss Morland, no one can think more highly
of the understanding of women than I do. In my
opinion, nature has given them so much that they
never find it necessary to use more than half.”
“We shall get nothing more serious from him
now, Miss Morland. He is not in a sober mood.
But I do assure you that he must be entirely
misunderstood, if he can ever appear to say an
unjust thing of any woman at all, or an unkind
one of me.”
It was no effect to Catherine to believe that
Henry Tilney could never be wrong. His manner
might sometimes surprise, but his meaning must
always be just: and what she did not understand,
she was almost as ready to admire, as what she
did. The whole walk was delightful, and though it pleased that the party had not been prevented by

AUSTEN
ended too soon, its conclusion was delightful too; her refusing to join it, and very heartily wishing
her friends attended her into the house, and Miss that it might be too pleasant to allow either James
Tilney, before they parted, addressing herself with or Isabella to resent her resistance any longer.
respectful form, as much to Mrs. Allen as to Cathe-
rine, petitioned for the pleasure of her company
to dinner on the day after the next. No difficulty
was made on Mrs. Allen’s side, and the only dif-
ficulty on Catherine’s was in concealing the excess TITLE COMMENTARY
of her pleasure.
Northanger Abbey
The morning had passed away so charmingly
as to banish all her friendship and natural affec-
tion, for no thought of Isabella or James had
crossed her during their walk. When the Tilneys
were gone, she became amiable again, but she was
amiable for some time to little effect; Mrs. Allen
had no intelligence to give that could relieve her
anxiety; she had heard nothing of any of them.
Towards the end of the morning, however, Cathe-
rine, having occasion for some indispensable yard
of ribbon which must be bought without a mo-
ment’s delay, walked out into the town, and in
Bond Street overtook the second Miss Thorpe as
she was loitering towards Edgar’s Buildings be-
tween two of the sweetest girls in the world, who
had been her dear friends all the morning. From
her, she soon learned that the party to Clifton
had taken place. “They set off at eight this morn-
ing,” said Miss Anne, “and I am sure I do not envy
them their drive. I think you and I are very well
off to be out of the scrape. It must be the dullest
thing in the world, for there is not a soul at Clif-
ton at this time of year. Belle went with your
brother, and John drove Maria.”
Catherine spoke the pleasure she really felt on
hearing this part of the arrangement.
“Oh! yes,” rejoined the other, “Maria is gone.
She was quite wild to go. She thought it would be
something very fine. I cannot say I admire her
taste; and for my part, I was determined from the
first not to go, if they pressed me ever so much.”
Catherine, a little doubtful of this, could not
help answering, “I wish you could have gone too.
It is a pity you could not go all go.”
“Thank you; but it is quite a matter of indif-
ference to me. Indeed, I would not have gone on
any account. I was saying so to Emily and Sophia
when you overtook us.”
Catherine was still unconvinced; but glad that
Anne should have the friendship of an Emily and
a Sophia to console her, she bade her adieu
without much uneasiness, and returned home,

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32 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
 AUSTEN

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2 33
AUSTEN

34 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
 AUSTEN

SYNDY MCMILLEN CONGER

(ESSAY DATE 1987)
SOURCE: Conger, Syndy McMillen. “Austen’s Sense
and Radcliffe’s Sensibility.” Gothic, n.s., 2 (1987): 16-
24.
In the following essay, Conger argues that rather than
denouncing Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic “sensibility” in

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2 35
 Northanger Abbey, Austen affirms its essence and
AUSTEN
expands upon its utility as both a heroic virtue and a
means of achieving growth.
The intrinsic value of Northanger Abbey is
still disputed, but its significance in literary his-
tory generally is not: it is viewed as a key moment
in the history of the novel. Here Ann Radcliffe’s
Female Gothic, the last representative of a century
of literary emotionalism, is parodied to death by
the novel of social realism: here Louis Bredvold’s
“natural history of sensibility”1 comes to an end.
Recent revisionists2 see Austen as more indebted
to her predecessor but still believe that she resists
Radcliffe’s endorsement of the heart. Marilyn
Butler insists that Austen’s heroines “are rebuked
for letting interiority guide them” (140, 145), and
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar also argue that
Catherine Morland, foreshadowing Austen’s later
heroines, must “relinquish” her “subjectivity” to
save herself (121, 129, 144).3 This vision of Austen
sacrificing Radcliffe’s subjectivity on the altar of
realism or propriety or common sense wants some
revision itself, for it rests on cursory assumptions
about Radcliffe’s achievement. The two authors
are not poles apart at all on the question of
sensibility; they are, on the contrary, two of the
most prominent of many women writers involved
in a late-century enterprise best briefly described
as “saving sensibility.”4
By the time Radcliffe completed The Italian,
she had also reformed the English Gothic novel,
divorcing it from sensation and wedding it to
sentiment. She focuses her fictions not on the
supernatural and irrational forces that drive
forward Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto but
rather on the sensitive human psyche responding
to such forces; and the effect is to establish that
special form of eighteenth-century sensitivity,
sensibility, as the behavioral norm. In Radcliffe’s
world sensibility is not confined to a few amiable
eccentrics: all her good characters have it; con-
versely, all her wicked characters are without it,
are, instead, slaves to the brute passions. Yet she
never recommends sensibility blindly. First she
reconstructs it,5 then tests it for viability in the
laboratory of Gothic terrors.
This rehabilitation of sensibility6 was no small
undertaking. A cult term that emerged mid-
century but eluded precise definition, at first it
referred to a bundle of loosely compatible but
positive ideas: “delicate sensitiveness of taste” or
“the capacity for refined emotion”; most specifi-
cally the “readiness to feel compassion for suffer-
ing,” to forgive, and to be charitable (OED, cf.
Hagstrum 5-9). Especially after the appearance of
36
The Sorrows of Young Werter in England in 1779,
however, it began to seem suspect, to raise a
number of troubling questions. Was its cultivation
more apt to lead to emotional refinement or
excess, sensitivity to others or egotism, morality
or pathological behavior? It declined in status,
mocked and abandoned by leading authors and
rendered lugubrious by minor ones. Radcliffe’s
guarded endorsement of it in The Mysteries of Udol-
pho suggests that she was well aware of this
tarnished reputation.
Mr. St. Aubert, the heroine’s father, is willing
to defend sensibility only as the lesser of two evils:
“Whatever may be the evils resulting from a too
susceptible heart, nothing can be hoped from an
insensible one” (1.20). For St. Aubert, sensibility is
a central, even an indispensable human attribute,
but not a sufficient virtue unto itself. “Sentiment
is a disgrace,” says the dying man to his daughter,
“instead of an ornament, unless it lead us to good
actions” (1.80). Since it too easily invites self-
indulgence or “the pride of fine feeling” (1.79),
both of these being obstacles to fellow-feeling, its
necessary companions are self-control and mod-
eration: “I would not annihilate your feelings, my
child, I would only teach you to command them”;
“All excess is vicious” (1.20). Actually, his praise of
sensibility, when compared to the successes of its
avatars in Udolpho and The Italian, is unnecessarily
faint. These characters do occasionally succumb
to excessive emotionality; but, more often, the
special gifts of sensibility serve them well, helping
them to survive in a hostile world.
First, they are acutely perceptive. They use
their senses: visual, common, moral. They com-
bine an awareness of their own hearts with a
scrutiny of others’ faces to gain an intuitive
knowledge or “emotional consciousness” (OED)
of their situations. When left alone, they tend to
scan their minds, sorting out and, if necessary,
challenging their feelings or their ideas; they tend
to set their inner lives in order. At other times, the
same sensitivity and capacity for fine discernment
turns outward—they are all skilled physiogno-
mists: they scan eyes, study gestures, and draw ac-
curate inferences about the emotional or moral
state of persons around them (Ellena de Rosalba’s
study of her jailor Spalatro’s face, for instance,
saves her life). This special consciousness of inside
and outside, coupled with their capacity for
intense concentration, often grants them the
advantage in self-control.7 They are conversant
with their own hearts and this habitual rational
attention to emotion sets them free from passion’s
tyranny. Under stress their minds are nearly
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
always clear, agile and strong. Witness Emily talk-
ing to Count Morano just as he has decided to
abduct her by force: “Calm, Intreat you, these
transports, and listen to reason, if you will not to
pity. You have equally misplaced your love, and
your hatred” (2.264).
These characters of sensibility are clearly
designed to be stronger than the creations of mid-
century ironists Mackenzie and Sterne, Harleys
and Yoricks who were frequently immobilized by
their own or others’ emotions. Radcliffe’s sensibil-
ity is much more than passive capacity for refined
emotions, even for compassion. It energizes the
whole mind, heightening its ordinary powers of
perception, communication, concentration, and
self-control. It is a new normative, moderate,
rational subjectivity; and it is worth saving because
it is a saving grace. The startling fact about recent
Radcliffe criticism, seen in this light, is that it sees
her fictions as hypocritical and deeply subjective.
Radcliffe indulges in “every excess of sensibility
which she explicitly warns against” (Kahane 52);
her fictions “might virtuously proclaim the merits
of self-control,” but what they show is a “world
governed by subjectivity.” They are pure “explora-
tion of her heroines’ inner state of being at vari-
ous levels of consciousness,” one such level being
“‘inner rage and unspecified . . . guilt’” (Butler
133).
This preoccupation with Radcliffe’s supposed
covert message at the expense of her overt one
focuses attention on a single but essential fact
about Gothic fiction, one amply discussed by
students of the genre from Eino Railo to Tzvetan
Todorov—its subrational appeal. But Gothic fic-
tion appeals to us, such students are quick to add,
because it brings some order to the chaotic subra-
tional realm.8 The Gothic objectifies fears and
desires in specific events, characters, and objects
and then rationalizes them, making the latent
manifest and, at the same time, usually less
threatening. This objectifying process leads
Todorov to suggest that Gothic fiction is ersatz
psychoanalysis; and recent studies of the Female
Gothic support his claim. Tania Modleski argues
that the Female Gothic enables women readers to
“work through profound psychic conflicts,” that
it legitimizes a temporary paranoia in readers by
allowing them to identify with guiltless heroines
placed in a hostile environment (83). These fic-
tions give vent to terror and hostility but without
finally recommending such attitudes (Fleenor 17).
Political persuasion may determine whether
critics view this textual doubleness as therapeutic
or repressive, but I doubt if it justifies their refus-
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AUSTEN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“GOTHIC EXTRAVAGANCE” IN NORTHANGER
ABBEY
The meaning of Catherine’s adventures,
including her Gothic aberrations at
Northanger, is indissolubly a part of the
formal structure of the novel. Without the
dual form in which pairs of opposites are
dramatically illustrated, especially the contrast
between reason and imagination, the growth
of wisdom and experience in Catherine Mor-
land would be not only incomplete but also
formally chaotic and therefore aesthetically
meaningless. In the penultimate chapter,
where the contrast between romance and
common life is repeated from Chapter ii (Vol.
I), Jane Austen achieves a resolution of the
antithesis between Gothic romance and the
reality of everyday life in the achievement of
her own novel: Gothic extravagance does
have a place in literature if it serves an
aesthetic rather than an empirical function.
She seems to banish romantic material from
the novel in the comic finality of Catherine’s
humiliation, but ironically allows it a legiti-
mate existence by the formal success with
which she has employed the Gothic episode.
SOURCE: Glock, Waldo S. “Catherine Morland’s
Gothic Delusions: A Defense of Northanger Ab-
bey.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and
Literature, no. 32 (1978): 33-46.
ing to see the doubleness at all, of insisting that
Radcliffe, for Austen saw that doubleness, even if
she responded to it with characteristic tact. She
worried about Radcliffe’s affective appeal but
without condemning it; and she did not let it
undermine her admiration for the ethic of sensibil-
ity that Radcliffe’s texts manifestly defend. In fact,
Northanger Abbey moves towards a subtle en-
dorsement of that ethic, while Catherine acts out
a confrontation with the problem of the Gothic’s
special subjective appeal.
Catherine’s misreadings and misadventures
have been much discussed, but a few points need
to be made about them for present purposes.
37
 Catherine is a naive reader, consuming Udolpho
AUSTEN
without ever activating her analytical faculty: she
reads for plot and for thrills (1.25). Moreover, she
allows Mrs. Radcliffe to activate her dream-making
process; and that leads her to confuse fiction and
reality as had her cervantick predecessor and, also
as he had, to imitate the heroines of her idol. In
this case, by practicing physiognomy, by reading
a man’s character in his face: General Tilney’s
“silent thoughtfulness,” “downcast eyes,” and
“contracted brow” add up in her roused imagina-
tion to the “air and attitude of a Montoni!”
(2.150).
Catherine’s muddle reflects clear recognition
on Austen’s part of the danger of Gothic fiction—
its activation of passive-agressive fantasies and
volatile emotions; but her response to that danger
is neither to condemn the reader nor the author,
but simply to insist on the separateness of fiction
and reality (Glock 44-45) and, even more impor-
tant, on the inapplicability of emotions depicted
and elicited in fiction to life. As Catherine sadly
notes to herself after Henry’s astonished lecture—
“Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been
admitting?” (2.159)—we had best confine our
“craving to be frightened” (2.160) to the aesthetic
realm.
Northanger Abbey does not limit its evalua-
tion of Radcliffe’s subjective appeal, however, to
these few negative moments. On the contrary, it
contains many suggestions that Udolpho presents
Catherine with psychological benefits as well as
dangers. It may not enhance her power of self-
control, but it nevertheless does increase her abili-
ties to see and to converse. While she views Bath
from the hills with the Tilneys, Catherine is able
to compare the new scene to Radcliffe’s “the south
of France” and to chat, as a result, more easily
with Henry; and if it guides her aesthetic apprecia-
tion of landscape in Bath, it intensifies her moral
awareness at the Abbey. On the one hand, this
results in a mistaken inference about the General,
but, on the other, it also provides a helpful bridge
in Catherine’s education between the moral idyll
of her childhood and the crasser actual world
outside her home.
Catherine notices herself that she feels some-
how protected by Udolpho—a neglected insight of
hers that anticipates Modleski’s thesis by 200
years: “While I have Udolpho to read,” she as-
sures Isabella Thorpe, “I feel as if nobody could
make me miserable” (1.25). The reviewers of Aus-
ten’s day might have insisted that such an attitude
endangered Catherine’s virtue; Austen’s text,
however, demonstrates that Catherine is right,
38 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
that Udolpho shields her from graver actual dan-
gers, a delightful reversal of the reviewers’ favorite
cliche. At the Allens’, Catherine’s “raised, restless,
and frightened imagination” busies itself with
Udolpho while her adult chaperone worries about
dressmakers (1.34). In town Catherine ponders
the mystery of the black veil whenever Isabella
chatters to her mindlessly about clothes or men
or her brother John rattles about carriages and
women’s faces (1.22-23). Upon arrival at the Til-
ney abbey, Catherine views the spotless well-lit,
modernized interior with the eye of a disap-
pointed Gothic addict, oblivious to the General’s
struggle to impress her with his riches (1.128).
Udolpho may burden Catherine temporarily with a
few embarrassing fantasies, but it is often the best
of the offered leisure pursuits and a positive
preventive to vanity, frivolity, or materialism—a
position on novel reading, incidentally, also taken
by Mr. Rambler and another of his admirers, Mary
Wollstonecraft.9
Implicit in Catherine’s story is at least one
other tribute to Udolpho: a subtle endorsement of
Radcliffe’s ethic of sensibility. Those who persist
in seeing Catherine as progressing away from such
an ethic may be dazzled by the parody into believ-
ing that its presence somehow magically banishes
everything Radcliffe stood for from Austen’s fic-
tive world. If Northanger Abbey moves its heroine
away from one kind of subjectivity, however, it is
only to move her towards another. It is not so
much a progress as a process of refinement, one
in which the heroine is gradually divested (Moler
36) of certain excessive traits and certain false
friends until she stands before us, at the end, as
an approximation of Radcliffe’s ideal (granted,
that in Austen’s fiction there are only approxima-
tions of ideals) of rational sensibility (Duckworth
8).
Catherine begins her story as a tomboy, a
reluctant scholar, and a naif, still “ignorant and
uninformed as the female mind at seventeen usu-
ally is” (1.5). She is also burdened, however, by
excessive sensibility; she is indiscriminately good-
natured and the difficulties she has at Bath stem
as much from her “too susceptible heart” as they
do from her inexperience. She thinks well of
nearly everyone, and refuses to pass judgment on
her brother James’s new friends, the Thorpes. It
seems harsh to infer from this, however, as Stuart
Tave has done, that Catherine is an “amiable
idiot” (60); for even in the brisk round of mind-
less activity she is caught up in at Bath, she shows
signs of awakening sensitivity, discernment, and
self-control. She doubts Henry’s playful assertions,
she worries about the impropriety of riding in car-
riages and missing appointments, and she finally
sees that she must, for the sake of her own and
her friends’ feelings, sometimes say no to the
whims of others. Her sensibility, even if it renders
her gullible, at the same time makes her teachable
and flexible, two valuable assets in the complex
moral world of Austen’s novels.
Isabella presents a particular danger to Cathe-
rine in her still malleable condition, that of tempt-
ing her to become a heroine of false sensibility.
Isabella’s mode of discourse, which Catherine
begins to echo during her Bath period, is exagger-
ated and insincere, the vocabulary of sentiment
without the substance to back it up that St. Aub-
ert deplores. The Tilneys are a better influence on
Catherine. Eleanor Tilney is presented as Isabella’s
foil, the genuine version of what Isabella professes
to be: all decorum, sensitivity, and fellow-feeling.
She is very much like her analogue Emily St. Aub-
ert, but with one important exception: she does
not wear her heart on her face. Her sensibility is
concealed by a quiet reserve (1.38).
In contrast, Henry enters the novel in the role
of a talkative antic commentator. He mocks the
Bath society’s attention to surfaces so much that
Catherine concludes, shortly after meeting him,
that he indulges “himself a little too much with
the foibles of others” (1.15). Gilbert and Gubar
agree, pegging him as “his father’s son,” opinion-
ated, condescending, even insensitive and misogy-
nistic to a degree (140); but the fact remains that
he is by far the more sympathetic of Catherine’s
two suitors. John Thorpe’s remarks begina and
end with himself and his own concerns; he
remains blind to his weaknesses and essentially
unaware of the needs of others. In contrast, Henry,
even if his discerning mind is sometimes “more
nice than wise” (1.84), knows himself and attends
to others. He is his sister’s counterpart: a complete
man of sensibility disguised in motley. He has
moral sense, common sense, a keen capacity for
empathy, acuteness of apprehension, refined taste,
and a capacity for forgiveness too, even of a young
woman who sees his father as a murderer! Henry
generally keeps this sensibility under cover of his
wit; but when he is pressed by his father to
abandon Catherine and to consider a financially
more advantageous marriage, his sentimental
values emerge. He rejects the advice of his father
and hastens to Catherine’s house to bring about a
visibly sentimental unraveling: “He felt hemself
bound as much in honour as in affection to Miss
Morland” (2.202).1 0
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At Northanger Abbey, then, Catherine is
AUSTEN
taught to distinguish sentimental fiction from
reality, but, as might be surmised by the company
she keeps, she is not stripped of her sensibility.
Her abbey experiences rather refine her character
than revolutionize it. Much that is affected and
adolescent falls away at the abbey—the extrava-
gance of diction, imagination, and curiosity. What
remains is essentially Radcliffe’s ideal: the well-
regulated, yet sensitive and charitable, mind. After
the General has peremptorily ordered Catherine
to leave, even though she is stunned and deeply
shamed, she checks her own grief to minister to
Eleanor’s. When Eleanor begs her, with a “look of
sorrow,” to write her despite her father’s interdict,
Catherine’s pride melts “in a moment” and she
instantly says “Oh, Eleanor, I will write to you
indeed” (2.185). Eleanor is equally generous in
these last moments, pressing her pocket money
on Catherine for the unexpected journey. Not just
their tears and words on this occasion, but their
acute consciousness of the moral and emotional
dimensions of the crisis, their giving and forgiv-
ing natures, and their self-control for each others’
sakes, mark them as heroines of sensibility in Rad-
cliffe’s sense.
Radcliffe’s special subjectivity does not seem
to me to be sacrificed in this scene or elsewhere in
Northanger Abbey. What has been sacrificed, if
anything, is the assumption that sensibility is
necessarily on the face or in the self-consciousness
of the characters. Sensibility here and elsewhere
in Austen’s works has become so quiet that it is
often overlooked. It has no unmistakable surface
characteristics.1 1 It can underlie Henry’s teasing
conversation as well as the sweet, serious discourse
of his sister; Mrs. Allen’s absent-minded permis-
siveness but also Mrs. Morland’s gentle scrutiny
and periodic lectures. In this context, it should be
fairly obvious why Austen seems skeptical of the
Gothic frame that Radcliffe had given to sensibil-
ity. Austen needed to divest it of the Gothic
atmosphere of exaggeration to save it for her own
more subtle fictional reality, one where faces more
often serve as masks than as windows to the heart.
One can only be sure that someone else has
sensibility in an Austen novel after a lapse of time
and events: only if a professed concern for others
has been translated, as St. Aubert recommends,
into actions, tested by adversity, and remains
unshaken, is it true sensibility. Three characters in
Northanger Abbey clearly fail this test of time,
even though they imagine themselves in firm pos-
session of aesthetic and moral sense: both the
Thorpes’ and the General’s attentiveness to Cathe-
39
 rine melt away with their misconceptions of the
AUSTEN
Morland fortune. In contrast, there is no special
awareness in Eleanor, Henry, Mrs. Morland, or
Catherine that their actions can be identified with
a code called sensibility, yet they obviously can. It
is as if, to survive, sensibility has gone under-
ground. Radcliffe had declared it to be normative;
Austen rather clearly but unobtrusively assumes it
to be, mentioning it less often than Radcliffe but
nevertheless granting it a central position in
Northanger Abbey that it never after relinquishes.
People with it in her novels—Catherine, Marianne
Dashwood, Colonel Brandon, Anne Elliott, and
Fanny Price—need never be given up for lost; and
those without it (just as St. Aubert had assured
Emily)—the Thorpes, the Misses Steele or Ber-
tram—are seldom to be saved. For Austen not only
is sensibility, as it is for Radcliffe, a measure of
moral excellence and the key to true propriety; it
has also become the leaven for growth, the secret
ingredient of her Bildungsroman. Clearly, North-
anger Abbey does not mark the death of Radc-
liffe’s sensibility but rather its fruitful transfigura-
tion.
Notes
1. Stuart M. Tave argues persuasively for this keen
distinction between Radcliffe and Austen. Others who
do so include Frank W. Bradbrook, Waldo S. Glock,
Kenneth Moler, and Mary Lascelles.
2. They base their arguments on Harold Bloom’s assump-
tions about authors and their predecessors and the
“anxiety of influence.” Judith Wilt offers a similar
reading but her focus is not so conspicuously feminist.
My own revisionist reading is closest to Jean Hag-
strum’s, who sees Austen’s novels as contemplative
reconsiderations of the values of sensibility. I draw on
Hans-Robert Jauss’s reception theory; particularly, on
his convictions that texts are best considered in
contexts, in relationship to analagous works in their
time (synchronic study) and in the past (diachronic
study), and that these relationships are nearly always
complex ones.
3. Cf. the similar readings of David Levine, of Judith
Wilt, who sees Austen’s heroines trying to “cut . . .
destructive emotion down to size” (135), and of Coral
Ann Howells, who emphasizes Austen’s greater atten-
tion to “balance” in matters of feeling.
4. Katharine Rogers has suggested that eighteenth-
century English women writers felt, to some degree,
liberated by the literary mode of sensibility, even
though they were often ambivalent about it. It
authorized the expression of emotions which the
culture-at-large (and their conduct books) did not.
Sensibility may have appealed to women on a number
of other levels as well: linguistic, social, ethical.
Women at the time were encouraged to be silent, or if
allowed to speak, were untrained to speak the language
of pure logic. Sensibility valued the non-verbal forms
of communication fostered by silence—sympathy,
facial expression, gesture—and it spoke characteristi-
40 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
cally in a language that was alogical, that blended
together thought and emotion. They faced poverty,
even disgrace, if they were ever judged harshly by
parents or husbands. The literature of sensibility
emphasized suitors, husbands, and fathers who
forgave. The fascination of women writers and readers
of fiction with sensibility in the eighteenth century
received attention early in our century from J. M. S.
Tompkins. More recently, their interest in foreign
literature of sensibility has been under investigation
by Grieder and Conger.
5. Gary Kelly (51) sees the importance of sensibility for
Radcliffe but believes that reason constitutes for her
an opposing set of values. Howells does, too, discuss-
ing feeling in various Gothic novelists, including Rad-
cliffe, in a much more general sense.
6. Useful critics on sensibility besides Louis Bredvold are
Ronald S. Crane, Jean Hagstrum, John K. Sheriff, and
Ian Watt. For special attention to women, see also
Carol Gilligan, Katharine Rogers, and Patricia M.
Spacks.
7. Nina da Vinci Nichols (205) has recently made an
important distinction between Radcliffe’s and Mat-
thew G. Lewis’s Gothic fiction. Radcliffe’s characters
are concerned about identity and “power over the
self”; Lewis’s Ambrosio is motivated by a desire for
“power over others.”
8. Theodore Ziolkowski reiterates the necessity of reason
in the making of Gothic literature in Disenchanted Im-
ages.
9. See Samuel Johnson’s Rambler No. 4 and Mary Woll-
stoncraft’s Vindication (18.2). See also the works by
Robert Scholes on Johnson and Austen and by Lloyd
W. Brown and Margaret Kirkham on Austen and
Feminism.
10. The conclusion of Northanger Abbey is a visibly
sentimental unraveling. Radcliffe could hardly have
done better. The heroine sits over her needlework,
“sunk again, without knowing it herself, into languor
and listlessness.” The hero suddenly arrives and is
introduced by a “conscious daughter” to her mother;
and he is doing his best to apologize for the lack of
propriety in his sudden appearance “with the embar-
rassment of real sensibility.” The mother, too, man-
ages a good-natured response: “He did not address
himself to an uncandid judge or a resentful heart. Far
from comprehending him or his sister in their father’s
misconduct, Mrs. Morland . . . received him with the
simple professions of unaffected benevolence . . .
(2.196).
11. Spacks sheds valuable light on Austen’s interest in
concealment.
Works Cited
Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey Ed. John Davie. New York:
Oxford UP, 1980.
Bloom Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford
UP, 1973.
Bradbrook, Frank W. Jane Austen and Her Predecessors.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966.
Bredvold, Louis I. The Natural History of Sensibility. Detroit:
Wayne State UP, 1962.
Brown, Lloyd W. “Jane Austen and the Feminist Tradition.”
Nineteenth-Century Fiction 28 (1973): 321-38.
Butler, Marilyn. “The Woman at the Window: Ann Rad-
cliffe in the Novels of Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane
Austen.” Women and Literature 1 (1980): 128-48.
Conger, Syndy M. “Fellow Travellers: Englishwomen and
German Literature.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture
14 (1984): 143-71.
Crane, Ronald S. “Suggestions towards a Genealogy of the
‘Man of Feeling.’” English Literary History 1 (1934):
205-30.
Duckworth, Alistair. The Improvement of the Estate. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1971.
Fleenor, Julian E. Ed. “Introduction,” The Female Gothic.
Montreal, Quebec: Eden, 1983. 3-28.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the
Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Liter-
ary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1982.
Glock, Waldo. “Catherine Morland’s Gothic Illusions: A
Defense of Northanger Abbey.” Rocky Mountain Review of
Language and Literature 32.1 (1978): 33-46.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sorrows of Young Werter:
A German Story. Trans. Richard Graves. London: Dods-
ley, 1779.
Grieder, Josephine. Translations of French Sentimental Prose
Fiction in Late Eighteenth-Century England: The History of
a Literary Vogue. Durham: Duke UP, 1975.
Hagstrum, Jean. Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from
Milton to Mozart. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.
Howells, Coral Ann. Love, Mystery, and Misery: Feeling in
Gothic Fiction. London: Athlone, 1978.
Jauss, Hans-Robert. Literaturgeschichte Als Provokation Der Lit-
eraturwissenschaft. Muenchen (Munich): Wilhelm Fink,
1979.
Kahane, Claire. “Gothic Mirrors and Feminine Identity.”
The Centennial Review (Winter 1980): 43-64.
Kelly, Gary. “‘The Constant Vicissitude of Interesting
Passions’ Ann Radcliffe’s Perplexed Narratives.” Ariel-E
10 (1979): 45-64.
Kirkham, Margaret. Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction. To-
towa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983.
Lascelles, Mary. Jane Austen and Her Art. New York: Oxford
UP, 1939.
Modleski, Tania. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced
Fantasies for Women. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1982.
Moler, Kenneth. Jane Austen’s Art of Allusion. Lincoln: U of
Nebraska P, 1968.
Nichols, Nina da Vinci. “Place and Eros in Radcliffe, Lewis,
and Brontë.” In The Female Gothic see under Fleenor).
Radcliffe, Ann. The Italian. Ed. Frederick Garber. London:
Oxford UP, 1968. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Ed. Bonomy
Dobree. New York: Oxford UP, 1970.
Railo, Eino. The Haunted Castle. New York: Humanities,
1964.
Rogers, Katharine M. “The Liberating Effect of Sentimental-
ism.” Ch. 4 in Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England.
Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1982.
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Scholes, Robert. “Dr. Johnson and Jane Austen.” Philological
AUSTEN
Quarterly 54 (1975): 380-90.
Sheriff, John K. The Good-Natured Man: The Evolution of a
Moral Ideal, 1660-1800. University: U of Alabama P,
1982.
Spacks, Patricia M. “Taking Care.” Ch. 3 of The Female
Imagination. London: Allen and Unwin, 1976.
Tave, Stuart M. Some Words of Jane Austen. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1973.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a
Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cor-
nell UP, 1973.
Tompkins, J.M.S. The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800.
Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1961.
Watt, Ian. “Sense Triumphantly Introduced to Sensibility.”
In Jane Austen: “Sense and Sensibility,” “Pride and Preju-
dice,” and “Mansfield Park”: A Casebook. Ed. B. C.
Southam. New York: Macmillan, 1976. 119-29.
Wilt, Judith. Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Women.
Ed. Charles W. Hagelman, Jr. New York: Norton, 1967.
Ziolkowski, Theodore. Disenchanted Images: A Literary Iconol-
ogy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.
CLAIRE LAMONT (ESSAY DATE
1995)
SOURCE: Lamont, Claire. “Jane Austen’s Gothic
Architecture.” In Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and
Developments in the Gothic Tradition, edited by Valeria
Tinkler-Villani, Peter Davidson, and Jane Stevenson,
pp. 107-15. Atlanta, Ga. and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995.
In the following essay, Lamont discusses the significance
and symbolic use of Gothic architecture in Northanger
Abbey.
When Catherine Morland is invited to visit
the Tilneys at Northanger Abbey these are her
reflections:
She was to be their chosen visitor, she was to be
for weeks under the same roof with the person
whose society she mostly prized—and, in addition
to all the rest, this roof was to be the roof of an
abbey!—Her passion for ancient edifices was next
in degree to her passion for Henry Tilney—and
castles and abbies made usually the charm of
those reveries which his image did not fill. To see
and explore either the ramparts and keep of the
one, or the cloisters of the other, had been for
many weeks a darling wish, though to be more
than the visitor of an hour, had seemed too nearly
impossible for desire. And yet, this was to happen.
With all the chances against her of house, hall,
place, park, court, and cottage, Northanger turned
up an abbey, and she was to be its inhabitant. Its
long, damp passages, its narrow cells and ruined
chapel, were to be within her daily reach, and she
could not entirely subdue the hope of some
traditional legends, some awful memorials of an
injured and ill-fated nun.1
41
 This paper is about Jane Austen’s Gothic
AUSTEN
architecture. I have started with a quotation which
expresses Catherine Morland’s view of Gothic
architecture, that it is a matter of “castles and ab-
bies”. The Gothic novels of the late-eighteenth
century make frequent use of these two types of
medieval building, the castle and the monastery,
both of which had a domestic function but were
not primarily defined by that function. As these
two settings figure repeatedly in Gothic novels
they come to take on features of two opposing
signifying systems. The castle is associated with
aggression, extroversion and the male; it domi-
nates its landscape. The monastery is associated
with repression, introversion and the female, and
lies half-hidden in a valley. It is typical of early
Gothic novels to be set in remote parts of conti-
nental Europe, and in an earlier century. However
vestigial the historical sense of the novelists they
set their novels in some sort of medieval world. In
Northanger Abbey, however, the setting is in the
south-west of England in Jane Austen’s present,
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Medieval castles and monasteries were visible in
her world but both would have lost their raison
d’être, military or spiritual. They would be visible
as ruined, restored or imitated.
In Northanger Abbey the heroine makes her
first visit from home to Bath, apparently one of
the least Gothic of settings. Having been originally
a Roman settlement, it was rebuilt in the eigh-
teenth century with neo-classical architecture as
the medicinal properties of its waters were ex-
ploited. From Bath Catherine Morland makes two
Gothic excursions. The first is the abortive trip to
Blaize Castle; the second is the visit to Northanger
Abbey. Catherine imagines Blaize Castle to be “an
edifice like Udolpho” (102), and before agreeing
to go on the trip asks “may we go all over it? may
we go up every staircase, and into every suite of
rooms?” (102) She anticipates “the happiness of a
progress through a long suite of lofty rooms” or
“along narrow, winding vaults” (104). The party
never reaches Blaize Castle, and it is never actu-
ally pointed out in the novel that it was it was
not, as John Thorpe had asserted, an old castle,
“the oldest in the kingdom” (101), but an
eighteenth-century Gothic imitation.2
There is no doubt about the age of Northanger
Abbey. Catherine learns its history from Eleanor
Tilney:
Many were the inquiries she was eager to make of
Miss Tilney; but so active were her thoughts, that
when these inquiries were answered, she was
hardly more assured than before, of Northanger
42
Abbey having been a richly-endowed convent at
the time of the Reformation, of its having fallen
into the hands of an ancestor of the Tilneys on its
dissolution, of a large portion of the ancient build-
ing still making a part of the present dwelling
although the rest was decayed, or of its standing
low in a valley, sheltered from the north and east
by rising woods of oak.
Critics of the Gothic motif of the monastery
usually stress imprisonment rather than the
spiritual role of such a building. A monastic build-
ing in the Gothic novel is a place where someone
is kept either against their will or at least in denial
of the full range of their passions. Catherine Mor-
land shares this view; she expects to find evidence
of “an injured and ill-fated nun” (150). Eleanor
Tilney’s account of the history of Northanger Ab-
bey, however, does not appear to invite that
interpretation. Northanger had been “a well-
endowed convent at the Reformation” which had
“fallen into the hands of an ancestor of the Til-
neys on its dissolution” (“fallen” implies either
coming down, or chance). The word “convent”
was in the late eighteenth century just acquiring
its specific modern meaning of a religious house
for women.3 We may read the convent as a safe
and spiritual retreat for women, which has now
become the personal property of one man. What
was endowed as a convent has become a private
house where women are oppressed by one man,
and a man significantly called General Tilney. His
name indicates that he would be more at home in
a castle. Catherine Morland, who is not interested
in history, and particularly not the “quarrels of
popes and kings” (123), does not meditate on this
paradox. For her a castle or an abbey would do.
She does not detect that although castles may
have lost their original purpose with the cessation
of fighting, it is a question whether the same can
be said of a convent. One thing that the English
Reformation has achieved is to give the powerful
male, whose attributes are reflected in the castle,
ownership also of the convent.
General Tilney exercises his ownership of
Northanger Abbey in a way that no other man
does in Jane Austen’s novels. In her other novels a
woman is mistress of the house and is in charge
of the domestic arrangements. This is still the case
when the mistress is not a wife but an unmarried
daughter. Even Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion does
not deny his daughter her rights as mistress of the
house. General Tilney issues invitations on behalf
of his daughter and orders meals, overriding his
daughter in each case (148, 171, 186). Catherine
expects the domestic arrangements at Northanger
to be in Eleanor’s hands: after Henry Tilney’s
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
frightening account of a Gothic bedroom she
takes comfort from the belief that “Miss Tilney,
she was sure, would never put her into such a
chamber as he had described!” (167) (She does
not say that the Abbey would not have such a
chamber.)
Jane Austen’s norm of village Anglicanism
does not imply that society is any the better for
the dissolution of a convent. Catherine Morland’s
progress in the novel is from her parsonage home
at Fullerton to the vicarage she will share with
Henry Tilney at Woodston. Between these two
havens of integrity she visits Bath and Northanger.
Both of these, built as places of healing, have lost
their proper function and are now given over to
fashion and materialism.
Catherine’s Gothic reveries are filled with
“castles and abbies”: “To see and explore either
the ramparts and keep of the one, or the cloisters
of the other, had been for many weeks a darling
wish . . .” (150). For Catherine a Gothic castle
should contain, besides its defining architectural
features of ramparts and keep, towers and long
galleries, suites of lofty rooms, many staircases,
and narrow, winding vaults (101-102, 104). An
abbey should have cloisters, long, damp passages,
narrow cells and a ruined chapel (150). That much
she has gathered from her reading of Gothic
novels, before her conversation with Henry Tilney
in the curricle on the way to Northanger. He
confirms her view that a Gothic house has stair-
cases, gloomy passages and lofty rooms, not to
mention “a secret subterraneous communication
between your apartment and the chapel of St
Anthony, scarcely two miles off” (164, 166).
How are these expectations fulfilled at
Northanger Abbey? Jane Austen does not usually
spend much time describing a house from the
outside. She is more interested in a house as a liv-
ing space, and with its interior dynamics. How-
ever, the approach to a Gothic building is an
important descriptive moment in the Gothic
novel, and Catherine’s first sight of Northanger
Abbey cannot be passed over:
every bend in the road was expected with solemn
awe to afford a glimpse of its massy walls of grey
stone, rising amidst a grove of ancient oaks, with
the last beams of the sun playing in beautiful
splendour on its high Gothic windows. But so low
did the building stand, that she found herself pass-
ing through the great gates of the lodge into the
very grounds of Northanger, without having
discerned even an antique chimney.
(167)
In the Gothic that draws on architecture the
façade is frequently presented as the face in front
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
of the labyrinthine brain behind (Poe’s House of
AUSTEN
Usher is perhaps the most famous example).
Northanger Abbey will not be read from the
outside, and the heroine enters with no guidance.4
Once inside, Catherine is first shown into “the
common drawing-room”. The architectural feature
mentioned in that room is the Gothic window:
The windows, to which she looked with peculiar
dependence, from having heard the General talk
of his preserving them in their Gothic form with
reverential care, were yet less what her fancy had
portrayed. To be sure the pointed arch was pre-
served—the form of them was Gothic—they
might be even casements—but every pane was so
large, so clear, so light! To an imagination which
had hoped for the smallest divisions, and the
heaviest stone-work, for painted glass, dirt and
cobwebs, the difference was very distressing.
(168)
Catherine is obviously in a house which has
undergone modern restoration. The General has
preserved the pointed arches of the windows, but
has made a compromise with history in not restor-
ing painted glass, small divisions in the panes,
dirt, and cobwebs. He has picked on a characteris-
tic feature, the pointed arch, for preservation and
discreetly modernized the rest. The Gothic here
appears to be optional; it is not structurally neces-
sary. Catherine may criticize this compromise, but
then she has no clear sense of the implications of
what she is asking for. She wants not only the
original windows, but also the dirt derived,
presumably, from many years of subsequent
neglect. As her mother was to remark of her,
“Catherine would make a sad heedless young
house-keeper to be sure . . .” (245).
Of all Jane Austen’s novels, Northanger Abbey
gives the most detailed description of a domestic
interior. It is the only one of her novels to make
serious use of architecture in its plot. The Gothic
house with its complicated interior, its subter-
ranean vaults, or, especially in later novels, its at-
tics, lends itself to interpretation which sees these
architectural features as representing aspects of
life which have been frustrated or repressed. For
all Henry Tilney’s terrifying description of the
subterranean passage that leads from the heroine’s
bedroom to the ruined chapel of St Anthony (166)
Northanger Abbey is not described as having any
subterranean passages, not even a decent cellar.
Nor is it described as having an attic. The architec-
ture, and any psychological reading of it, is not
based on a vertical view of the house with “normal
life” on one or two floors and the suppressed
abnormal in basement or attic below or above.
The important architectural feature of Northanger
43
 Abbey is not its vertical dimensions, but its
AUSTEN
horizontal ones. Catherine expected an abbey to
have cloisters; Northanger Abbey does; it is based
on a quadrangle.
On her first evening Catherine sees that the
house is built on a quadrangle (168). The next day
she is given a tour. The house surrounds a court
(181), and it has two floors. On the ground floor
are the public rooms and offices, and on the up-
per floor the bedrooms. The rooms on the ground
floor are tall, which is why the “broad staircase of
shining oak” required “many flights and many
landing-places” to reach the upper floor (168).
Catherine is first taken round the building on the
ground floor. She is taken through a suite of
rooms: the “common drawing-room”, which led
into “a useless anti-chamber” which led in turn
into “the real-drawing-room” which led into the
library (186). Catherine had expected a Gothic
building to offer “suites of rooms”, that is rooms
leading off each other, rather than each going off
a hall or corridor. Northanger Abbey offers such a
suite, though not quite up to Catherine’s wishes
(186). As she is taken round the quadrangle she is
told that three sides retain the original Gothic
architecture, and that of these one was more
Gothic than the other two in that it retained ele-
ments of its convent origin in the remains of a
cloister and cells (187). The fourth side of the
building was modern. After being shown round
the ground floor, Catherine is taken upstairs.
There, the organization of the rooms was differ-
ent. The rooms did not open off one another in a
suite, but there was on the inner side of the
quadrangle a corridor or gallery, whose windows
looked across the quadrangle, and off this gallery
were the bedrooms whose windows therefore
looked outwards (168). Eleanor Tilney shows
Catherine round the upper floor, but she is twice
interrupted by an imperious request from her
father before they can get right round. On both
occasions they are stopped at a folding door, on
the far side of which is the room which Eleanor’s
mother had occupied (189, 194). The consequence
is that Catherine has been taken round the house
on the ground floor; but only round part of it on
the upper floor.
Catherine had glimpsed beyond the folding
door on the upper floor “a narrower passage, more
numerous openings, and symptoms of a winding
stair-case” (189). She deduced that this was the
side of the house where the remains of the original
abbey were most preserved (191). She had seen
that it had a staircase, and her Gothic imagina-
tion had speculated that Mrs Tilney could have
44 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
been taken down it “in a state of well-prepared
insensibility” (191). On the third attempt to see
Mrs Tilney’s room Catherine goes alone.5 She
walks round the gallery, through the folding door,
and enters Mrs Tilney’s room (196). She is disap-
pointed. It is a pleasant modern room, with sash
windows, through which the western sun was
shining. Gothic rooms, as had been established
earlier, have casement windows (168). It was usu-
ally the east wing in a Gothic novel that was the
most ruinous.6 Catherine had wanted to visit a
Gothic house; she has done so, and has been
muddled by its architecture. She realizes her
mistake in interpreting the upper floor of
Northanger Abbey in terms of her Gothic expecta-
tions rather than in the light of her knowledge of
the ground floor. She knew that the fourth side of
the quadrangle was modern; but she had not sup-
posed Mrs Tilney’s room to be at one end of that
side (196).
I have suggested that an important feature of
the Gothic interior is the suite of rooms, one room
leading off another. In the Gothic building the
room does not have have certain bounds. This is
true on the ground floor of Northanger Abbey,
where one room leads off another in wealthy
show. It is of more threatening significance in the
Gothic bedroom. As Henry Tilney points out, a
Gothic heroine hoping to have safety at last in a
bedroom finds that the room has no lock, or that
some hidden door opens off it (165-66). The
Gothic bedroom is not a place of security because
its bounds are not secure; there might be a hidden
opening within it leading to a succession of
vaulted chambers containing who knows what
horrors, most of which are not at first noticed.7
This is the parodic version of the splendid suite of
rooms. The two versions of the suite of rooms may
be thought of as representing public show and
private neurosis. At Northanger Abbey Catherine
was relieved to find that her room was decorated
with wallpaper (169). The Gothic bedroom would
be hung with tapestry, and there would be no
knowing, until some storm of wind revealed an ir-
regularity in the wall behind, what sort of hidden
entrance it might conceal. It is an indication of
the all-revealing nature of modern architecture,
and the speedy collapse of her Gothic fantasies,
that Catherine was so sure that the doors that she
observed in Mrs Tilney’s modern room led only to
dressing-closets that she did not even bother to
check that that was so: “she had no inclination to
open either” (196).
It is a feature of recent criticism of Northanger
Abbey to acknowledge but not stress Catherine’s
Gothic disappointments. Feminist critics in par-
ticular have drawn attention to the fact that while
Catherine may have been mistaken in thinking
that Mrs Tilney had been either murdered or
imprisoned, no one believes that she had been a
happy woman. The patriarchal power of General
Tilney over the women in his household is the
modern equivalent of the authoritarian power of
the Gothic hero.8 The fact that Catherine’s three
disappointments (over the chest, the ebony
cabinet and Mrs Tilney’s room) all involve her
expectations of Gothic evidence being followed
by an extremely domestic reality (the folded
counterpane, the laundry list, and the well-kept
bedroom) can be read as a reproof to Catherine
for her failure to realize the progress of society
which has allowed a comfortable home to super-
sede the discomforts of the Gothic. Or, following
Katherine Ferguson Ellis, her discoveries can be
read as representing the tyranny of the home-as-
haven ideal on the woman who inhabits it.9 In
such readings Northanger Abbey is a Gothic novel
in spite of itself.
Northanger Abbey is a Gothic novel which
uses architecture as a way of exploring unacknowl-
edged areas of human psychology. If one such area
is patriarchal power, another is the nature of the
attraction which Catherine feels for Henry Tilney.
Repeatedly, Catherine’s interest in Gothic architec-
ture is matched by her interest in Henry Tilney:
“Her passion for ancient edifices was next in
degree to her passion for Henry Tilney” (149). On
the way to Blaize Castle she had “meditated, by
turns, on broken promises and broken arches,
phaetons and false hangings, Tilneys and trap-
doors” (103). On the road to Northanger she had
“an abbey before, and a curricle behind” (162). In
deciding to explore Mrs Tilney’s room on her own
she chooses a day when Henry Tilney is away. But
he returns before he is expected. Catherine has
just let herself out of the bedroom and closed the
door:
At that instant a door underneath was hastily
opened; some one seemed with swift steps to
ascend the stairs, by the head of which she had
yet to pass before she could gain the gallery. She
had no power to move. With a feeling of terror
not very definable, she fixed her eyes on the
staircase, and in a few moments it gave Henry to
her view.
“Mr Tilney!” she exclaimed in a voice of more
than common astonishment. He looked aston-
ished too. “Good God!” she continued, not at-
tending to his address, “how came you here?—
how came you up that staircase?”
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“How came I up that staircase!” he replied, greatly
AUSTEN
surprised. “Because it is my nearest way from the
stable-yard to my own chamber; and why should
I not come up it?”
(196-97)
Catherine had not experienced Gothic terror
in the bedroom; she was feeling it now. Catherine
knew that Gothic buildings had staircases, and
she knew of the existence of this one. She is
surprised because the only function she had had
for that staircase was for Mrs Tilney to be brought
down it “in a state of well-prepared insensibility”.
The staircase had not delivered an unconscious
woman, however, but a lover come back before he
was expected.
Northanger Abbey is the only novel by Jane
Austen in which the heroine goes to stay in the
hero’s home, and there is sexual tension in her
use of its architecture. Catherine’s love of Henry
Tilney and her love of the Gothic had always been
confused. In her search for Mrs Tilney’s room she
manages to put herself in the direct route between
the stables and Henry’s bedroom. As Henry points
out where she stands is in his space rather than in
hers:
“This passage is at least as extraordinary a road
from the breakfast-parlour to your apartment, as
that staircase can be from the stables to mine.”
(197)
There seems to be sexual adventure in Cathe-
rine’s Gothic enquiries. Her conscious mind is
exploring a Gothic bedroom; but in so doing she
is suppressing knowledge she had about the
house. Henry Tilney rushing up the staircase while
she is frozen at the top of it is a powerful image.
Her astonished question, “how came you here?”
is a statement of her failure to understand the
architecture which had so engrossed her imagina-
tion.
Notes
1. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818), ed. Anne Henry
Ehrenpreis, Penguin, 1972, 149-50.
2. Andor Gomme, Michael Jenner and Bryan Little, Bris-
tol: An Architectural History, London, 1979, 174-75.
3. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, 1989, convent,
sb., 6.
4. In contrast, Emma remarks of the other abbey in Jane
Austen’s novels, Donwell Abbey, home of Mr Knight-
ley, “It was just what it ought to be, and it looked
what it was” (Emma [1816], ed. Ronald Blythe, Pen-
guin, 1966, 353).
5. Catherine’s solitary exploration of Northanger may
draw on Blanche’s exploration of Chateau-le-Blanc in
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), ed.
Bonamy Dobrée, Oxford, 1966, 479-80.
45
 6. For instance in The Mysteries of Udolpho, 377. This
AUSTEN
detail was picked up by Walter Scott in a humorous
account of the types of novel popular in his day, “. . .
must not every novel-reader have anticipated a castle
scarce less than that of Udolpho, of which the eastern
wing had long been uninhabited . . .” (Waverley
[1814], ed. Claire Lamont, Oxford, 1981, 3).
7. This is true of Emily’s bedroom at Udolpho (The
Mysteries of Udolpho, 235) and Adeline’s in Ann Radc-
liffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), ed. Chloe
Chard, Oxford, 1986, 144.
8. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in
the Attic, New Haven and London, 1979, 135.
9. Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels
and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology, 1989, x-xii.
FURTHER READING
Bibliographies
Handley, Graham. Jane Austen: A Guide Through the Critical
Maze. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992, 139 p.
Provides a guide to Austen criticism from early reviews
through the 1980s.
Roth, Barry. An Annotated Bibliography of Jane Austen Studies,
1984-94, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996, 438 p.
Offers a bibliography of studies on Jane Austen.
Biographies
Austen-Leigh, James. A Memoir of Jane Austen. London: R.
Bentley, 1870, 364 p.
Presents an affectionate biography of Austen by her
nephew.
Chapman, R. W. Jane Austen: Facts and Problems. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1948, 224 p.
Provides an early biography by one of Austen’s twentieth-
century critics.
Halperin, John. The Life of Jane Austen. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1984, 399 p.
Links Austen’s life to her works.
Jenkins, Elizabeth. Jane Austen: A Biography. New York: Gros-
set and Dunlap, 1948, 286 p.
Offers a detailed treatment of Austen’s life and works.
Nokes, David. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1997, 512 p.
Attempts to correct the portrait of the sweet maiden aunt
painted by Austen’s family; considered by critics to be
somewhat speculative in its alternative interpretation of
Austen’s life.
Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Knopf, 1997,
352 p.
Offers a popular biography focusing on Austen’s family.
Criticism
Auerbach, Nina. “Jane Austen and Romantic Imprison-
ment.” In Jane Austen in a Social Context, edited by
David Monaghan, pp. 9-27. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes &
Noble, 1981.
46 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
Discusses tone, satire, and Gothic elements in North-
anger Abbey.
Clarke, Stephen. “Abbeys Real and Imagined: Northanger,
Fonthill, and Aspects of the Gothic Revival.” Persua-
sions 20 (1998): 93-105.
Compares Austen’s depiction of Gothic architecture and
the monastery to Gothic conventions, within the context
of Gothic Revival architecture.
Derry, Stephen. “Freud, the Gothic, and Coat Symbolism in
Northanger Abbey.” Persuasions 18 (December 1996):
49-53.
Theories of Sigmund Freud inform this assessment of the
use of the coat as a symbol of Catherine Morland’s
sexuality in Northanger Abbey.
Dussinger, John A. “Parents against Children: General Til-
ney as Gothic Monster.” Persuasions 20 (1998): 165-74.
Explores Austen’s gothicism in her representation of
General Tilney as an example of cruelty in parent-child
relations in Northanger Abbey.
Gay, Penny. “In the Gothic Theatre.” Persuasions 20 (1998):
175-84.
Offers parallels between the handling of anxiety and fear
in Northanger Abbey and in Ann Radcliffe’s The
Romance of the Forest.
Hermansson, Casie. “Neither Northanger Abbey: The Reader
Presupposes.” Papers on Language and Literature: A
Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature
36, no. 4 (fall 2000): 337-56.
Assesses Northanger Abbey as a parody of a Gothic
novel.
Hoeveler, Diane. “Vindicating Northanger Abbey: Mary
Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Gothic Feminism.” In
Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism, edited by De-
voney Looser, pp. 117-35. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995.
Studies correlations between the feminist ideals expressed
in Northanger Abbey and in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
Jerinic, Maria. “In Defense of the Gothic: Rereading
Northanger Abbey.” In Jane Austen and Discourses of Femi-
nism, edited by Devoney Looser, pp. 137-49. New York:
St. Martin’s, 1995.
Rejects the classification of Northanger Abbey as a
parody of the Gothic novel and argues that it is “an
imitation, and not a complete rejection, of Ann Radc-
liffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho.”
Levine, George. “Translating the Monstrous: Northanger Ab-
bey.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30, no. 3 (December
1975): 335-50.
Maintains that General Tilney’s “monstrousness is part
of Jane Austen’s literary imagination,” and argues that
the fact that Northanger Abbey is “to a certain extent
trapped by the materials of literary gimmickry it rejects”
is an intentional, integral part of parodic style and is
evocative of Austen’s later novels.
Mudrick, Marvin. “The Literary Pretext Continued: Irony
versus Gothicism: Northanger Abbey.” In Jane Austen:
Irony as Defense and Discovery, pp. 37-49. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952.
Regards Austen’s juxtaposition of the “Gothic and
bourgeois worlds” in “ironic contrast” in Northanger
Abbey as the author’s method of “invalidat[ing]” the
Gothic narrative form.
Roberts, Bette B. “The Horrid Novels: The Mysteries of Udol-
pho and Northanger Abbey.” In Gothic Fictions:
Prohibition/Transgression, edited and with an afterword
by Kenneth W. Graham, pp. 89-111. New York: AMS,
1989.
Compares Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho to
Northanger Abbey, identifying elements in the latter
work as parody of the former.
Sears, Albert C. “Male Novel Reading of the 1790s, Gothic
Literature and Northanger Abbey.” Persuasions 21 (1999):
106-12.
Views Northanger Abbey in terms of its perspective on
male readers of Gothic fiction at the end of the eighteenth
century.
Tandrup, Birthe. “Free Indirect Style and the Critique of the
Gothic in Northanger Abbey.” In Romantic Heritage: A
Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 81-92. Copenhagen:
University of Copenhagen, 1983.
Highlights Austen’s use of free indirect discourse to
denounce Gothic literature in Northanger Abbey.
Wallace, Tara Ghoshal. “Northanger Abbey and the Limits of
Parody.” Studies in the Novel 20 (1988): 262-73.
Remarks on the roles of the narrator and the reader in the
parodic discourse in Northanger Abbey.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
Wilt, Judith. Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence.
AUSTEN
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980, 307 p.
Full-length analysis of gothicism in the works of Jane
Austen, T. S. Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence.
OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:
Additional coverage of Austen’s life and career is contained
in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Au-
thors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 19; Beacham’s Guide to
Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 3; British Writers, Vol. 4; Brit-
ish Writers: The Classics, Vol. 1; British Writers Retrospective
Supplement, Vol. 2; Concise Dictionary of British Literary
Biography, 1789-1832; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol.
116; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DIS-
Covering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors: Modules,
Most-studied Authors and Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0;
Exploring Novels; Feminism in Literature: A Gale Critical Com-
panion; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 1; Literature and
Its Times, Vol. 2; Literature and Its Times Supplement, Vol. 1;
Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criti-
cism, Vols. 1, 13, 19, 33, 51, 81, 95, 119, 150; Novels for
Students, Vols. 1, 14, 18, 20; Twayne’s English Authors; World
Literature and Its Times, Vol. 3; World Literature Criticism; and
Writers for Young Adults Supplement, Vol. 1.
47
JOANNA BAILLIE
(1762 - 1851)
Scottish poet, playwright, editor, and critic.
A lthough Baillie was well recognized and
respected among the literati during her life-
time, her works fell into neglect soon after her
death and have only resurfaced in literary scholar-
ship within the last several decades. She is now
recognized for her significant influence on such
writers as William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and
Percy Bysshe Shelley, and is considered by many
critics to have served as a model for later women
writers. Baillie’s works, which include twenty-six
plays and several volumes of poetry, provide
insight into the history of dramatic theory and
criticism as well as into the history of women’s
roles in theatre.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Baillie was born in 1762 in Bothwell, Lanark-
shire, Scotland to James Baillie, a pastor, and his
wife, Dorothea Hunter. Baillie was born a prema-
ture twin; her unnamed sister died within hours
of delivery. Her parents already had two children,
Agnes and Matthew. In the late 1760s, Baillie’s
father was promoted to a higher position at the
collegiate church at Hamilton, a country setting
that allowed Baillie the opportunity to enjoy
outdoor activities. Though her brother attended
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
school, Baillie did not, relying instead on her
father for her education. James Baillie, as was typi-
cal for the time, stressed to his daughter the
importance of developing her moral faculties over
her intellectual skills, and emphasized that one
should not give into one’s emotions. Baillie was
not fond of her studies and did not learn to read
until, as she stated, she was nine years old. In the
early 1770s, both Baillie sisters were sent to a Glas-
gow boarding school, and it was there that Joanna
first developed an interest in books, writing and
adapting stories to entertain her classmates. Baillie
also became interested and quite proficient in the
study of mathematics, abstract theorizing, prob-
lem solving, and philosophy. In 1778, when James
Baillie died, the family became dependent on
Dorothea’s brother, William Hunter, a well-known
anatomist who provided them with financial
security as well as residence at his estate in Long
Calderwood. Upon Hunter’s death in 1783, Mat-
thew inherited his uncle’s medical school and
London home, and the Baillie family moved to
London to manage the new household. In 1790,
while living in this London home, Baillie anony-
mously published Poems: Wherein It Is Attempted to
Describe Certain Views of Nature and of Rustic Man-
ners. The small volume did not receive sufficient
notice or circulation to satisfy Baillie, and she
reprinted much of it, along with other poems writ-
ten while she was in her seventies, in an expanded
version entitled Fugitive Verses, in 1840. Upon Mat-
49
 thew’s marriage, the Baillie women moved to
BAILLIE
Hampstead, where they remained for the rest of
their lives. In 1798, Baillie published, again
anonymously, the first of what would eventually
be three volumes of plays (the second and third
volumes were published in 1802 and 1812,
respectively). These volumes were entitled A Series
of Plays: In Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the
Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Being
the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy, but were
more commonly known as Plays on the Passions.
The first volume contained, among others, Basil, a
tragedy on love; The Tryal, a comedy on love; and
possibly Baillie’s most famous play, De Monfort, a
tragedy on hatred. Baillie died in 1851.
MAJOR WORKS
Baillie’s first publication, Poems: Wherein It Is
Attempted to Describe Certain Views of Nature and of
Rustic Manners, received little attention until after
she had established a literary career. The first
volume of Plays on the Passions, however, which
Baillie published anonymously, quickly became
the focus for discussion in literary circles, making
this her first critically acclaimed work. Previously,
success on the stage had been a prerequisite for
the publication of a drama, but Baillie’s publica-
tion of plays that had never been performed
piqued the interest of many readers. In the preface,
Baillie revealed her intent to trace the passions “in
their rise and progress in the heart.” She stated
further that “a complete exhibition of passion,
with its varieties and progress in the breast of man,
has, I believe, scarcely ever been attempted in
Comedy.” The prevailing assumption of critics was
that the anonymous author of Plays on the Pas-
sions was a man, until it was pointed out that
there were more heroines in the dramas than
heroes, and speculation began that the writer
might be a woman. Baillie’s authorship of the
work was not revealed until 1800, when the third
edition was published with her name on the title
page. Sir Walter Scott, who some critics suspected
had authored Plays on the Passions, became friends
with Baillie and encouraged her to write more
dramas. The second volume of Plays on the Pas-
sions, published in 1802, was well received by the
public. Another collection entitled Miscellaneous
Plays was published in 1804. In 1812, Baillie’s last
volume of Plays on the Passions was published, and
was assessed as representing a departure from her
earlier theories. Baillie noted that the second and
last volume of the series had not received as much
50 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
praise as had the first, and she retired from active
publishing for a number of years.
Many of Baillie’s tragedies, De Monfort and Orra
(1812; included in Volume 3 of Plays on the
Passions) in particular, have been discussed as
examples of Gothic fiction. The plays’ eerie set-
tings have been compared to those of Ann
Radcliffe’s novels, but Baillie’s haunting plots and
tortured characters are often regarded as more
direct than Radcliffe’s. In addition, her plays are
noted for their strong female characters and social
commentary. De Monfort centers on a love triangle
devoid of romantic intentions, which leads to a
murder, while Orra tells the tale of a young,
independent heiress who refuses to wed and
ultimately is driven mad by a fake haunting
designed to trick her into marriage. The title
character in Count Basil struggles to reconcile his
desire for love and honor. The Tryal offers oppos-
ing perspectives on love, and Witchcraft (1836;
included in Dramas) focuses on three women
identified as witches, one of whom narrowly
escapes being burned at the stake.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Critics comment on the depiction of the ef-
fects of the intense emotions expressed by many
of Baillie’s characters, an approach that E. J. Clery
refers to as “interiorized Gothic.” Clery credits
Baillie’s style with inspiring later Gothic writers
such as Charlotte Dacre, Charles Brockden Brown,
Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe. Several critics
point to Baillie’s use of the Gothic to critique the
morals and values of her time, especially with
regard to traditional views of women. Peter Duthis
asserts that several of Baillie’s plays, Count Basil
and De Monfort in particular, portray the tension
wrought by upheavals in aristocratic society and
the threat such upheavals posed to traditional
gender roles. After Baillie’s death, her works were
gradually forgotten, and it was not until the late
twentieth century that Baillie’s writings again
garnered scholarly interest. Drama historians and
feminist commentators in particular recognize the
historical importance of Baillie’s complex and py-
schologically insightful portrayals and her com-
mentary on gender dynamics and social mores.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Poems: Wherein It Is Attempted to Describe Certain
Views of Nature and of Rustic Manners [anony-
mous] (poetry) 1790
*A Series of Plays: In Which it is Attempted to
Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each
Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a
Comedy. 3 vols. (plays) 1798, 1802, and 1812
Miscellaneous Plays (plays) 1804
Rayner (play) 1804
The Family Legend: A Tragedy (play) 1810
Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters (poetry) 1821
A Collection of Poems. Chiefly Manuscript, and from
Living Authors [editor] (poetry) 1823
A View of the General Tenour of the New Testament
Regarding the Nature and Dignity of Jesus Christ:
Including a Collection of the Various Passages in
the Gospels, Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles
Which Relate to That Subject (essay) 1831
†Dramas. 3 vols. (plays) 1836
Fugitive Verses (poetry) 1840
Ahalya Baee: A Poem (poetry) 1849
Lines to Agnes Baillie on Her Birthday (poetry) 1849
* The first volume was published anonymously in 1798,
with the author identifying herself for the second and
third volumes, in 1802 and 1812, respectively. Volume
1 includes De Monfort, Basil, and The Tryal. Volume 3
includes Orra: A Tragedy, in Five Acts.
† This collection includes the plays Witchcraft, The Sepa-
ration, and Henriquez, among others.
PRIMARY SOURCES
JOANNA BAILLIE (ESSAY DATE
1798)
SOURCE: Baillie, Joanna. “Introductory Discourse.” In
A Series of Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate the
Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Being the
Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy. Vol. 1, 1798. Second
edition, pp. 1-11. London, 1799.
In the following excerpt from her “Introductory Discourse”
to Volume 1 of her Plays on the Passions, first published
in 1798, Baillie comments upon the universal human
preoccupation with emotion, the spiritual, and the
unknown.
It is natural for a writer, who is about to
submit his works to the Publick, to feel a strong
inclination, by some Preliminary Address, to
conciliate the favour of his reader, and dispose
him, if possible, to peruse them with a favourable
eye. I am well aware, however, that his endeav-
ours are generally fruitless: in his situation our
hearts revolt from all appearance of confidence,
and we consider his diffidence as hypocrisy. Our
own word is frequently taken for what we say of
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
ourselves, but very rarely for what we say of our
BAILLIE
works. Were these three plays, which this small
volume contains, detached pieces only, and
unconnected with others that do not yet appear, I
should have suppressed this inclination altogether;
and have allowed my reader to begin what is
before him, and to form what opinion of it his
taste or his humour might direct, without any
previous trespass upon his time or his patience.
But they are part of an extensive design: of one
which, as far as my information goes, has nothing
exactly similar to it in any language: of one which
a whole life’s time will be limited enough to ac-
complish; and which has, therefore, a consider-
able chance of being cut short by that hand which
nothing can resist.
Before I explain the plan of this work, I must
make a demand upon the patience of my reader,
whilst I endeavour to communicate to him those
ideas regarding human nature, as they in some
degree affect almost every species of moral writ-
ings, but particularly the Dramatic, that induced
me to attempt it; and, as far as my judgment
enabled me to apply them, has directed me in the
execution of it.
From that strong sympathy which most crea-
tures, but the human above all, feel for others of
their kind, nothing has become so much an object
of man’s curiosity as man himself. We are all
conscious of this within ourselves, and so con-
stantly do we meet with it in others, that like
every circumstance of continually repeated occur-
rence, it thereby escapes observation. Every person
who is not deficient in intellect, is more or less oc-
cupied in tracing amongst the individuals he
converses with, the varieties of understanding and
temper which constitute the characters of men;
and receives great pleasure from every stroke of
nature that points out to him those varieties. This
is, much more than we are aware of, the occupa-
tion of children, and of grown people also, whose
penetration is but lightly esteemed; and that
conversation which degenerates with them into
trivial and mischievous tattling, takes its rise not
unfrequently from the same source that supplies
the rich vein of the satirist and the wit. That eager-
ness so universally shewn for the conversation of
the latter, plainly enough indicates how many
people have been occupied in the same way with
themselves. Let any one, in a large company, do
or say what is strongly expressive of his peculiar
character, or of some passion or humour of the
moment, and it will be detected by almost every
person present. How often may we see a very
stupid countenance animated with a smile, when
51
 the learned and the wise have betrayed some na-
BAILLIE
tive feature of their own minds! and how often
will this be the case when they have supposed it
to be concealed under a very sufficient disguise!
From this constant employment of their minds,
most people, I believe, without being conscious of
it, have stored up in idea the greater part of those
strong marked varieties of human character,
which may be said to divide it into classes; and in
one of those classes they involuntarily place every
new person they become acquainted with.
I will readily allow that the dress and the man-
ners of men, rather than their characters and
disposition are the subjects of our common
conversation, and seem chiefly to occupy the
multitude. But let it be remembered that it is
much easier to express our observations upon
these. It is easier to communicate to another how
a man wears his wig and cane, what kind of house
he inhabits, and what kind of table he keeps, than
from what slight traits in his words and actions
we have been led to conceive certain impressions
of his character: traits that will often escape the
memory, when the opinions that were founded
upon them remain. Besides, in communicating
our ideas of the characters of others, we are often
called upon to support them with more expence
of reasoning than we can well afford, but our
observations on the dress and appearance of men,
seldom involve us in such difficulties. For these,
and other reasons too tedious to mention, the
generality of people appear to us more trifling
than they are: and I may venture to say that, but
for this sympathetick curiosity towards others of
our kind, which is so strongly implanted within
us, the attention we pay to the dress and the man-
ners of men would dwindle into an employment
as insipid, as examining the varieties of plants and
minerals, is to one who understands not natural
history.
In our ordinary intercourse with society, this
sympathetick propensity of our minds is exercised
upon men, under the common occurrences of life,
in which we have often observed them. Here van-
ity and weakness put themselves forward to view,
more conspicuously than the virtues: here men
encounter those smaller trials, from which they
are not apt to come of victorious, and here,
consequently, that which is marked with the
whimsical and ludicrous will strike us most forc-
ibly, and make the strongest impression on our
memory. To this sympathetick propensity of our
minds, so exercised, the genuine and pure comick
of every composition, whether drama, fable, story,
or satire is addressed.
52 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
If man is an object of so much attention to
man, engaged in the ordinary occurrences of life,
how much more does he excite his curiosity and
interest when placed in extraordinary situations
of difficulty and distress? It cannot be any pleasure
we receive from the sufferings of a fellow-creature
which attracts such multitudes of people to a pub-
lick execution, though it is the horrour we con-
ceive for such a spectacle that keeps so many more
away. To see a human being bearing himself up
under such circumstances, or struggling with the
terrible apprehensions which such a situation
impresses, must be the powerful incentive, which
makes us press forward to behold what we shrink
from, and wait with trembling expectation for
what we dread.1 For though few at such a spectacle
can get near enough to distinguish the expression
of face, or the minuter parts of a criminal’s behav-
iour, yet from a considerable distance will they
eagerly mark whether he steps firmly; whether the
motions of his body denote agitation or calmness;
and if the wind does but ruffle his garment, they
will, even from that change upon the outline of
his distant figure, read some expression connected
with his dreadful situation. Though there is a
greater proportion of people in whom this strong
curiosity will be overcome by other dispositions
and motives; though there are many more who
will stay away from such a sight than will go to it;
yet there are very few who will not be eager to
converse with a person who has beheld it; and to
learn, very minutely, every circumstance con-
nected with it, except the very act itself of inflict-
ing death. To lift up the roof of his dungeon, like
the Diable boiteux, and look upon a criminal the
night before he suffers, in his still hours of privacy,
when all that disguise, which respect for the
opinion of others, the strong motive by which
even the lowest and wickedest of men still con-
tinue to be moved, would present an object to the
mind of every person, not withheld from it by
great timidity of character, more powerfully at-
tractive than almost any other.
Revenge, no doubt, first began amongst the
savages of America that dreadful custom of sacri-
ficing their prisoners of war. But the perpetration
of such hideous cruelty could never have become
a permanent national custom, but for this univer-
sal desire in the human mind to behold man in
every situation, putting forth his strength against
the current of adversity, scorning all bodily
anguish, or struggling with those feelings of
nature, which, like a beating stream, will oft’times
burst through the artificial barriers of pride. Before
they began those terrible rites they treat their
prisoners kindly; and it cannot be supposed that
men, alternately enemies and friends to so many
neighbouring tribes, in manners and appearance
like themselves, should so strongly be actuated by
a spirit of publick revenge. This custom, therefore,
must be considered as a grand and terrible game,
which every tribe plays against another; where
they try not the strength of the arm, the swiftness
of the feet, nor the acuteness of the eye, but the
fortitude of the soul. Considered in this light, the
excess of cruelty exercised upon their miserable
victim, in which every hand is described as ready
to inflict its portion of pain, and every head
ingenious in the contrivance of it, is no longer to
be wondered at. To put into his measure of misery
one agony less, would be, in some degree, betray-
ing the honour of their nation, would be doing a
species of injustice to every hero of their own tribe
who had already sustained it, and to those who
might be called upon to do so; amongst whom
each of these savage tormentors has his chance of
being one, and has prepared himself for it from
his childhood. Nay, it would be a species of
injustice to the haughty victim himself, who
would scorn to purchase his place amongst the
heroes of his nation, at an easier price than his
undaunted predecessors.
Amongst the many trials to which the human
mind is subjected, that of holding intercourse, real
or imaginary, with the world of spirits: of finding
itself alone with a being terrifick and awful, whose
nature and power are unknown, has been justly
considered as one of the most severe. The work-
ings of nature in this situation, we all know, have
ever been the object of our most eager inquiry. No
man wishes to see the Ghost himself, which
would certainly procure him the best information
on the subject, but every man wishes to see one
who believes that he sees it, in all the agitation
and wildness of that species of terrour. To gratify
this curiosity how many people have dressed up
hideous apparitions to frighten the timid and
superstitious! and have done it at the risk of
destroying their happiness or understanding for
ever. For the instances of intellect being destroyed
by this kind of trial are more numerous, perhaps,
in proportion to the few who have undergone it,
than by any other.
How sensible are we of this strong propensity
within us, when we behold any person under the
pressure of great and uncommon calamity! Deli-
cacy and respect for the afflicted will, indeed,
make us turn ourselves aside from observing him,
and cast down our eyes in his presence; but the
first glance we direct to him will involuntarily be
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one of the keenest observation, how hastily so-
BAILLIE
ever it may be checked; and often will a returning
look of inquiry mix itself by stealth with our
sympathy and reserve.
But it is not in situations of difficulty and
distress alone, that man becomes the object of
this sympathetick curiosity; he is no less so when
the evil he contends with arises in his own breast,
and no outward circumstance connected with him
either awakens our attention or our pity. What
human creature is there, who can behold a being
like himself under the violent agitation of those
passions which all have, in some degree, experi-
enced, without feeling himself most powerfully
excited by the sight? I say, all have experienced;
for the bravest man on earth knows what fear is
as well as the coward; and will not refuse to be
interested for one under the dominion of this pas-
sion, provided there be nothing in the circum-
stances attending it to create contempt. Anger is a
passion that attracts less sympathy than any other,
yet the unpleasing and distorted features of an
angry man will be more eagerly gazed upon, by
those who are no wise concerned with his fury or
the objects of it, than the most amiable placid
countenance in the world. Every eye is directed to
him; every voice hushed to silence in his pres-
ence; even children will leave off their gambols as
he passes, and gaze after him more eagerly than
the gaudiest equipage. The wild tossings of despair;
the gnashing of hatred and revenge; the yearnings
of affection, and the softened mien of love; all the
language of the agitated soul, which every age and
nation understands, is never addressed to the dull
nor inattentive.
It is not merely under the violent agitations of
passion, that man so rouses and interests us; even
the smallest indications of an unquiet mind, the
restless eye, the muttering lip, the half-checked
exclamation, and the hasty start, will set our at-
tention as anxiously upon the watch, as the first
distant flashes of a gathering storm. When some
great explosion of passion bursts forth, and some
consequent catastrophe happens, if we are at all
acquainted with the unhappy perpetrator, how
minutely will we endeavour to remember every
circumstance of his past behaviour! and with what
avidity will we seize upon every recollected word
or gesture, that is in the smallest degree indicative
of the supposed state of his mind, at the time
when they took place. If we are not acquainted
with him, how eagerly will we listen to similar
recollections from another! Let us understand,
from observation or report, that any person har-
bours in his breast, concealed from the world’s
53
 eye, some powerful rankling passion of what kind
BAILLIE
soever it may be, we will observe every word,
every motion, every look, even the distant gait of
such a man, with a constancy and attention
bestowed upon no other. Nay, should we meet
him unexpectedly on our way, a feeling will pass
across our minds as though we found ourselves in
the neighbourhood of some secret and fearful
thing. If invisible, would we not follow him into
his lonely haunts, into his closet, into the mid-
night silence of his chamber? There is, perhaps,
no employment which the human mind will with
so much avidity pursue, as the discovery of
concealed passion, as the tracing the varieties and
progress of a perturbed soul.
It is to this sympathetick curiosity of our
nature, exercised upon mankind in great and try-
ing occasions, and under the influence of the
stronger passions, when the grand, the generous,
and the terrible attract our attention far more than
the base and depraved, that the high and power-
fully tragick, of every composition, is addressed.
Note
1. In confirmation of this opinion I may venture to say,
that of the great numbers who go to see a publick
execution, there are but very few who would not run
away from, and avoid it, if they happened to meet
with it unexpectedly. We find people stopping to look
at a procession, or any other uncommon sight, they
may have fallen in with accidentally, but almost never
an execution. No one goes there who has not made
up his mind for the occasion; which would not be the
case, if any natural love of cruelty were the cause of
such assemblies.
GENERAL COMMENTARY
E. J. CLERY (ESSAY DATE 2000)
SOURCE: Clery, E. J. “Joanna Baillie and Charlotte Da-
cre.” In Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shel-
ley, pp. 85-116. Devon, United Kingdom: Northcote
House in Association with the British Council, 2000.
In the following excerpt, Clery surveys Baillie’s Gothic
dramas, particularly De Monfort and Orra.
In 1798, the year after Radcliffe bowed out of
the literary scene, a volume was published anony-
mously with the arresting title A Series of Plays:
In Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stron-
ger Passions of the Mind. The contents did not
disappoint. There was an ‘Introductory Dis-
course’ outlining not only a grandiose scheme for
the analysis of each passion in a paired tragedy
and comedy, but also a radical theory for regener-
ating dramatic writing. The three plays themselves
54 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
were judged to be masterly; particularly the
tragedies, De Monfort and Basil, focused respec-
tively on the antithetical passions of hate and love
(those posited by the philosopher Malebranche as
the root passions). The plots had a simplicity and
the language a poetic resonance that had long
been missing from British drama.
The volume soon aroused intense interest and
speculation. Who was the author? The first re-
views, in the New Monthly Magazine and the Criti-
cal Review, praised the strength and originality of
the writing while assuming that the author was a
man. Some thought it might be Walter Scott. Back
in Bath, Hester Piozzi recorded that ‘a knot of
Literary Characters [including Sarah Siddons] met
at Miss [Sophia] Lee’s House . . . deciding—
contrary to my own judgment—that a learned man
must have been the author; and I, chiefly to put
the Company in a good humour, maintained it
was a woman. Merely, said I, because the heroines
are Dames Passées, and a man has no notion of
mentioning a female after she is five and twenty.’1
The dramatist Mary Berry had received the book
incognito from the author, and had stayed up all
night reading it, noting in her diary the following
year that ‘The first question on every one’s lips is,
“Have you read the series of plays?” Every body
talks in the raptures I always thought they de-
served of the tragedies, and of the introduction as
of a new and admirable piece of criticism’.2 She
too was of the opinion that the author was a
woman, ‘only because, no man could or would
draw such noble and dignified representations of
the female mind as Countess Albini and Jane de
Monfort. They often make us clever, captivating,
heroic, but never rationally superior.’3 The opinion
grew that Ann Radcliffe was the author, trying her
powers in a new genre. Mrs Piozzi reported it as
fact to one correspondent. A Mrs Jackson spread
the rumour, with a detailed list of stylistic evi-
dence; Radcliffe apparently tried and failed to
contact her and put a stop to it.
The play De Monfort went into production at
Drury Lane, with Sarah Siddons and her brother
John Philip Kemble in the lead parts, and still the
author did not come forward to claim credit and
payment. The playbills were silent on the matter.
But some time before its theatrical unveiling,
Joanna Baillie disclosed her name, and on open-
ing night, 29 April 1800, she attended with a party
of friends and relations. One critic described in
retrospect the astonishment caused by the revela-
tion of her authorship:
The curiosity excited in the literary circle, which
was then much more narrow and concentrated
 than at present; the incredulity, with which the
first rumour that these vigorous and original
compositions came from a female hand, was
received; and the astonishment, when, after all
the ladies who then enjoyed any literary celebrity
had been tried and found totally wanting in the
splendid faculties developed in those dramas, they
were acknowledged by a gentle, quiet and retiring
young woman, whose most intimate friends, we
believe, had never suspected her extraordinary
powers.4
It is a literary Cinderella story, in which the
heroine goes to the ball and lives happily ever
after. In spite of recent misguided attempts by
some feminist critics to represent Baillie as an op-
pressed and marginal writer, the fact is that she
went on to a highly productive publishing career,
a career met with continuous acclaim, and
crowned by the appearance of her collected poems
and plays in 1851, just before her death aged 88.5
She had a large circle of friends including some of
the most prominent cultural figures of the day.
Maria Edgeworth, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Walter
Scott, Lord and Lady Byron, Wordsworth, and
Southey, were among her ardent admirers. If her
work came under attack from the notoriously
severe pen of Francis Jeffrey at the Edinburgh Re-
view, assassin of Lyrical Ballads, then it has to be
said she was in excellent company.6 Her sex was
neither a barrier to success and celebrity, nor a
shield against serious criticism. Her exceptional
literary status, transcending conventions of gen-
der, rested on a tradition which by now included
the outstanding examples of Siddons and Rad-
cliffe: women who displayed genius through rule-
breaking and the imaginative flights characteristic
of Gothic.
Joanna Baillie was born in 1762. Her father
was a Presbyterian minister who became professor
of divinity at the University of Glasgow before dy-
ing in 1783. The Baillies were descendants of the
Scottish patriot Sir William Wallace. Her mother
was the sister of the famous surgeon Dr William
Hunter, who at his death left his London practice
and property to Joanna’s brother, Matthew. In
1784 Joanna travelled south to join him with her
mother and elder sister Agnes. When Matthew
married, the Baillie women set up independently
in Hampstead, where Joanna and Agnes were to
remain until the end of their long lives.
As a child at boarding school Joanna had
excelled in music, drawing, mathematics and
theatrical improvisations. A birthday poem ad-
dressed to Agnes recalls how she discovered her
skill for story-telling through the pleasure of evok-
ing fear and wonder in her sister, an eager auditor:
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BAILLIE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AN EXCERPT FROM A DEATH NOTICE IN
HARPER’S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE
Joanna Baillie, the most illustrious of the
female poets of England, unless that place be
assigned to Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
notwithstanding her many affectations and
great inequalities, died at Hampstead, on the
23d of February, at the age of 90 years,
within a few weeks. She is best known by her
Plays on the Passions, in which she made a
bold and successful attempt to delineate the
stronger passions of the mind by making
each of them the subject of a tragedy and a
comedy. . . . Her dramas are wrought wholly
out from her own conceptions, and exhibit
great originality and invention. Her power of
portraying the darker and sterner passions of
the human heart has rarely been surpassed.
Scott eulogized “Basil’s love and Montfort’s
hate” as a revival of something of the old
Shaksperean strain in our later and more
prosaic days. But her dramas have little in
common with those of Shakspeare, so full of
life, action, and vivacity. Their spirit is more
akin to the stern and solemn repose of the
Greek dramas. They have little of the form
and pressure of real life. The catastrophe
springs rather from the characters themselves
than from the action of the drama. The end
is seen from the beginning. Over all broods a
fate as gloomy as that which overhung the
doomed House of Atreus. Her female charac-
ters are delineated with great elevation and
purity. Jane de Montfort—with her stately
form which seems gigantic, till nearer ap-
proach shows that it scarcely exceeds middle
stature; her queenly bearing, and calm,
solemn smile; her “weeds of high habitual
state”—is one of the noblest conceptions of
poetry.
SOURCE: “Monthly Record of Current Events.”
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 2, no. 11 (April
1851): 709.
Thy love of tale and story was the stroke
At which my dormant fancy first awoke,
And ghosts and witches in my busy brain
55
 Arose in sombre show, and motley train.
BAILLIE
This new-found path attempting, proud was I,
Lurking approval on thy face to spy,
Or hear thee say, as grew thy roused attention,
‘What! is this story all thine own invention?’7
Her first publication was a book of poetry
which appeared in 1790 but went almost un-
noticed. Already, though, it showed her interest in
the study of human nature and the influence on
the mind of contrasting passions. The subtitle
explains that the poems will illustrate ‘the Differ-
ent Influence Which the Same Circumstances
Produce on Different Characters’ and there is a
series of ‘Addresses to the Night’ by ‘A Fearful
Mind’, ‘A Discontented Mind’, ‘A Sorrowful Mind’
and ‘A Joyful Mind’.8
Passion in the Present Tense
Baillie’s tragedies, particularly De Monfort and
Orra, have been discussed as examples of Gothic
writing in a number of critical studies.9 Some of
the settings are indeed strongly reminiscent of
Radcliffe: the woods by night in De Monfort, with
a requiem sounding faintly from an isolated
convent; the castle in Orra, the haunt of outlaws
under cover of strange legends, riddled with secret
passages, its chambers furnished with locks on the
outside. But in terms of plot, they represent an
inversion of Reeve and Radcliffe’s technique of
encrypting homicidal passion in the distant past,
and a decisive rejection of the tragicomic structure
which permitted the redemption of evil. The
contrast should perhaps even be understood as
polemical. The trappings of Radcliffe-romance are
included by Baillie only to emphasize their es-
sential irrelevance: the real drama is all in the
mind. Baillie refuses to buffer the tortured scenes
she represents. This is passion in the present tense,
as it had also appeared in Lee’s The Recess, but in
Baillie it is simplified and refined to achieve the
transparency of a theorum. The remarks of Joseph
Donohue regarding Baillie’s conception of dra-
matic character are especially resonant: ‘Gothic
drama, beginning with Home’s Douglas, placed
special emphasis on an event that took place years
before and continues to exert its effects thereafter.
De Monfort internalizes this convention by
redefining it as a mental process in which an evil
passion inexplicably takes root in the fallow soul
of man and slowly chokes away his life force.’1 0
This experiment bears some relation to Lewis’s
The Monk, as an illustration of the corrosive effect
of lust on the character of Ambrosio. The Plays
on the Passions, as they are generally called, made
an important contribution towards the opening
56
up of new possibilities within Gothic writing, as a
now-familiarized audience looked for ever-
stronger sensations. Future Gothic writers—
Charlotte Dacre, Charles Brockden Brown, Mary
Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe—would follow this direc-
tion of interiorized Gothic.
Baillie’s ‘Introductory Discourse’ from the
1798 volume of plays provides a theoretical basis
for the externalized spectacle of inner passions.
Wittily, she frames the discussion in terms of the
ruling passion of the reader. We are all, she claims,
driven to poetry and fiction by curiosity about
human nature. We want to go beyond the official
accounts of history writing, penetrate the private
space of the home and, further, to enter into the
minds of others and rummage among their secret
desires and motives. We can be diverted for a
while by images of the marvellous in romance, or
the artifices of sentimental fiction, or the pleasures
of epic and pastoral verse, but the ‘great master-
propensity’ for authentic pictures of nature will
always reassert itself. Our curiosity about ‘beings
like ourselves’ must be fed if we are to lend a work
of literature our ‘sympathetick interest’. Nowhere
is this rule more applicable than in drama: pared
down as it is to dialogue, if the characters do not
speak from nature, then the author can offer no
compensating distractions. The study of human
nature and the persuasive depiction of character—
which Baillie terms ‘characteristick truth’—are
crucial to the dramatist’s art.
Baillie represents the taste for tragedy as
something universal and primitive. Tragedy is the
‘first-born’ of dramatic genres, for a number of
reasons. In addition to catering to the ‘natural
inclination’ for ‘scenes of horrour and distress, of
passion and heroick exertion’, tragedy permits the
maximum exercise of curiosity and sympathy. In
tragedy we are permitted behind the scenes into
the lives and minds of ‘heroes and great men’,
normally only glimpsed from afar. And in tragedy
we see those extremes of conflict and suffering
which most powerfully engage our feelings. At
this point Baillie introduces the ultimate purpose
of tragedy (now personified as a female muse),
which doubles as a sketch of her own innovative
theatrical practice:
to her only it belongs to unveil to us the human
mind under the dominion of those strong and
fixed passions, which seemingly unprovoked by
outward circumstances, will from small begin-
nings brood within the breast, till all the better
dispositions, all the fair gifts of nature are borne
down before them. Those passions which conceal
themselves even to the dearest friend; and can,
often times, only give their fulness vent in the
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 lonely desert, or in the darkness of midnight. For
who hath followed the great man into his secret
closet, or stood by the side of his nightly couch,
and heard those exclamations of the soul which
heaven alone may hear, that the historian should
be able to inform us? and what form of story, what
mode of rehearsed speech will communicate to us
those feelings whose irregular bursts, abrupt transi-
tions, sudden pauses, and half-uttered suggestions,
scorn all harmony of measured verse, all method
and order of relation?
No wonder Baillie’s contemporaries were
riveted by her vision. It is both alluring and
intensely sinister. The passions are constructed as
an inexplicable fatality, divorced from social
context, unfolding with an irresistible autono-
mous force, pent up within an individual life
which it will parasitically devour. And the audi-
ence is to be made privy to this horrible spectacle
of a soul eaten alive, will eavesdrop on exclama-
tions of isolated torture which only heaven should
hear,1 1 will be initiated into the language of the
unspeakable. The workings of the soul are repre-
sented as absolutely private and secret, precisely
in order to enhance the pleasure of violation and
absolute public exposure in the name of
‘sympathy’ and knowledge.
In a study of this length, it is not possible to
explore very far the social resonances of Baillie’s
poetics, though it is easy enough to identify
certain ideological affinities. Baillie brilliantly
refashions tragedy along Gothic lines for an age of
possessive individualism and state surveillance.
Her theatre most closely resembles Jeremy
Bentham’s panopticon, the ideal prison, in which
the perfect visibility of the prisoners by an unseen
eye stands, according to Michel Foucault’s well-
known account, as a general model for relations
of power in the modern liberal state. But the bale-
ful cast of her ideas has been obscured in recent
criticism, by a determination to take the stress on
sympathetic identification as a cosy, feminine
alternative to ‘patriarchal’ tragic practice. Attempt-
ing to set up Baillie as a feminist sacred cow does
her no favours. There is nothing cosy about her
tragedies nor the response to them demanded of
the viewer. Like the other writers discussed in this
book, she was determined above all to make her
mark in the literary world, and was willing to use
the most powerful—the most ideologically arrest-
ing—means to do so. Issues of gender play a part
in this ambition. But Baillie was intent on demon-
strating her ability as a woman to rival men in the
display of genius, not on defining an alternative
feminine aesthetic. Harriet Martineau spoke of
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cherishing Baillie’s memory for the ‘invulnerable
BAILLIE
justification which she set up for intellectual
superiority in women’.1 2
In the ‘Introductory Discourse’, there is an
interesting shift in the gender of personal pro-
nouns relating to dramatic writing. At first, when
Baillie discusses the primary concerns of the
dramatist, she refers to ‘him’ and ‘his’ works. At a
later stage, as she warms to her argument, tragedy
(it has already been noted) is personified as a ‘she’,
who puts into effect ‘her’ various techniques,
including the innovations cited above. Personifica-
tion is a common enough device in aesthetic
discussion of the time, but here, given the sex of
the author which would be revealed in the third
edition of 1800, there is a fortuitous merging of
art and artist, equivalent to Sarah Siddons’s
representation as the Tragic Muse. There is a
subliminal message asserting women’s capacity
for representing and embodying tragic passion,
reinforced by a statement in a footnote:
I have said nothing here with regard to female
character, though in many tragedies it is brought
forward as the principal one of the piece, because
what I have said of the above characters is likewise
applicable to it. I believe there is no man that ever
lived, who has behaved in a certain manner, on a
certain occasion, who has not had amongst
women some corresponding spirit, who on the
like occasion, and every way similarly circum-
stanced, would have behaved in the like manner.
But Baillie goes much further than simply
claiming her place among tragedians. The overall
purpose of the ‘Discourse’ is a critique of the
entire dramatic inheritance in tragedy and com-
edy, condemnation of tired imitation in contem-
porary practice, and a call for bards possessing
‘strong original genius’ to point the way back to
truth and nature. It goes without saying that the
author herself must be numbered among this elite.
While she is appropriately modest as a neophyte,
she also has the courage of her convictions: ‘I am
emboldened by the confidence I feel in that can-
dour and indulgence, with which the good and
enlightened do ever regard the experimental efforts
of those, who wish in any degree to enlarge the
sources of pleasure and instruction amongst men’.
Innovation is her raison d’être. Her manifesto is
not bolstered by didacticism. Indeed, she rebukes
tragic poets who have been led away from analysis
of the passions by ‘a desire to communicate more
perfect moral instruction’. The benefit of tragedy
should derive from ‘the enlargement of our ideas
in regard to human nature’: a knowledge of the
self, which may indirectly lead to moral improve-
ment.
57
 The project Baillie outlined publicly at the age
BAILLIE
of 36 lasted almost a lifetime. In the course of her
prolific career she produced three volumes of Plays
on the Passions—ten plays in all—and thirteen
other plays, not to mention numerous poems. Ber-
trand Evans has proposed that ten of the tragedies
can be categorized as Gothic drama: Orra, The
Dream, Henriquez, Romiero, Ethwald (in two
parts), De Monfort, Rayner, The Family Legend,
The Separation, and Witchcraft. 1 3 I will be
discussing only two of them, already mentioned:
De Monfort (1798), by far the best known of her
works then and now, and Orra (1812), which
Evans claims best illustrates ‘Miss Baillie’s
“Gothicity”’.1 4
Kemble’s rapid determination to bring De
Monfort to the stage of Drury Lane, in spite of the
play’s anonymity, has already been mentioned. It
is unsurprising, given the fact that the play might
have been written as a vehicle for himself and Sid-
dons. Baillie’s nephew suggested that the charac-
ters of De Monfort and his elder sister Jane were
indeed intended as portraits of the two actors.1 5
For Kemble, the role of a man of fine qualities
driven to murder by an irrational hatred presum-
ably reflected his talents as an interpreter rather
than his actual personality. But in the case of Jane
De Monfort, a woman who has nobly sacrificed
her life to the duty of caring for her orphaned
siblings, but who is still capable of enthralling
every man she meets with her beauty and bear-
ing, the terms in which she is praised in the play
unquestionably echo descriptions of Siddons.1 6
She is ‘A noble dame, who should have been a
queen’ (DM I. i. 5); ‘So stately and so graceful is
her form’, comments a servant, ‘I thought at first
her stature was gigantic’ (DM II. i. 10-11): the awe
she inspires is almost supernatural, as is her ability
to turn all around her into willing slaves. It is
understandable that Siddons requested Baillie to
‘write me more Jane De Monforts’. The produc-
tion only lasted for eleven performances and there
are mixed reports of its reception,1 7 but Siddons
chose it for her benefit on 5 May 1800, acted the
role again in Edinburgh in 1810 with her son
Henry as De Monfort, and continued to use the
play in recitations.1 8
The plot takes the novel form of a perverse
love triangle, without romantic love. De Monfort
is monomaniacally attached to Rezenfelt through
his hatred, and there are homoerotic undercur-
rents in their interaction. Jane, De Monfort’s sister,
who raised him after the death of their mother,
attempts to draw him away from this hate by ap-
pealing to their mutual love, which itself has a
58 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
focused intensity verging on the incestuous. The
addition of a third current, an unfounded rumour
mentioned in passing that Rezenfelt and Jane are
secretly in love, produces a short-circuit in De
Monfort’s mind that leads to murder. He waylays
Rezenfelt in the woods outside the town and
savagely stabs him to death.
The context for the drama is deliberately
vague. The initial stage direction sets the scene as
simply ‘a town in Germany’. At the outset we
learn that De Monfort has left his home to return
to the town where he once lived. He is moody
and irascible, yet his servants are loyal, and a
friend, Count Freberg, who hurries to greet him,
bears witness to his previously amiable nature. A
first aside from De Monfort to the audience,
however, signals a radical disaffection from his
surroundings. The second scene develops sus-
pense, as indications of De Monfort’s pathology
emerge, through symptom (he wrecks a room at
the very mention of Rezenvelt), and the image of
an incommunicable interiority. He taunts Freberg
for his attachment to social surfaces and inability
to penetrate the depths of human nature:
That man was never born whose secret soul,
With all its motley treasure of dark thoughts,
Foul fantasies, vain musings, and wild dreams,
Was ever open’d to another’s scan.
(DM I. ii. 96-8)
The play’s concern with the distance between
workable social conduct and the tangled depths
of selfhood is shown thematically through numer-
ous references to clothing and masks. Flimsy,
changeable garments, often inappropriately worn,
metaphorize the thin layer of public seeming, a
fragile membrane that if severed, would enable
the passions to pass freely from subjective confine-
ment into violent reality. The anxiety provoked
by this idea finds relief only in the figure of Jane,
who represents an ideal of transparent meaning, a
seamless union of nature and apperance. And yet
Jane is chiefly responsible for the disastrous release
of De Monfort’s hatred.
In a key episode in the second scene of Act II,
Jane forces her brother to confess his feelings.
Impervious to his attempted defence of his ‘secret
troubles’, his ‘secret weakness’, she applies every
weapon of emotional blackmail. De Monfort
agrees at last to ‘tell thee all—but, oh! thou wilt
despise me. / For in my breast a raging passion
burns, / To which thy soul no sympathy will
own—’ (DM II. ii. 8-10). And so it transpires: Jane
is horrified and uncomprehending. Threatened
with rejection, De Monfort agrees to meet Rezen-
felt and be reconciled with him, an action which
will only result in an escalation of their animosity.
The problem is that De Monfort did not—could
not—‘tell all’. The intensity of his hatred is not
proportionate to the identifiable cause: Rezenfelt’s
habit of covertly goading him while pretending
friendship. It is the nature of a ruling passion to
be monstrous, autogenic, incommunicable. In De
Monfort’s case it grows to overpower one of his
other prime characteristics, pity.
The audience is called upon to wonder as they
witness the hero’s deterioration, rather than to
understand it in logical terms. As a bridge, there is
the more homely yet comparable spectacle of the
Countess Freberg’s envy of Jane, exacerbated by
the latter’s kindly condescension. But from the
final scene of Act IV through the final Act, as the
drama grows wilder it is shifted to the appropriate
setting of a wood where ‘Foul murders have been
done, and ravens scream; / And things unearthly,
stalking through the night, / Have scar’d the
lonely trav’ller from his wits’ (IV. ii. 223-5), and to
a lonely convent which stands in it. The ‘thickly-
tangled boughs’ provide the obvious correlative
for De Monfort’s state of mind as he stalks his
victim, and the old Gothic convent where he is
brought, frozen with horror, after committing the
act, is a monument to isolation. Jane arrives, once
again shattering his solitude, and endeavouring to
fix his mind on prayer and redemption. But the
failure of communication—Jane: ‘What means
this heavy groan?’ De Monfort: ‘It has a
meaning’—sums up the strange confusion of the
scene as he, shackled by officers of justice, quickly
expires of an internal haemorrhage. In Baillie’s
original version the peculiar non-event of De
Monfort’s death occurs off-stage, as if this reverse
of a coup de théâtre were designed to taunt the
audience, with its penchant for predictable shock-
tactics. When Edmund Kean restaged the play in
1821, at the urgent request of Byron,1 9 at least
two important revisions were introduced. De
Monfort’s hatred was motivated by a love rivalry
with Rezenfelt, and De Monfort was brought on-
stage to die. These changes help to indicate the
originality, the troubling strangeness, of the
original version.2 0
‘A Midnight in the Breast’
De Monfort’s collapse and death are brought
about partly by remorse, partly by sheer horror at
the nature of the act he has committed, and
specifically, superstitious fear at being left alone
with the corpse of his victim. An early poem, ‘The
Ghost of Edward’, dealt with the fanciful horrors
that attack the mind. There is ‘a midnight in the
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breast’: in this instance also, fear is exacerbated by
BAILLIE
guilt.2 1 Fear of the supernatural—in isolation from
any causal factors—was the passion Baillie deter-
mined to explore at full length in a tragedy from
her last volume of Plays on the Passions published
in 1812, Orra. Set in the late fourteenth century
in Switzerland, it concerns the machinations in
the household of Count Hughobert, where his
ward, the heiress Orra, is being pressured to marry
Hughobert’s son, Glottenbal, while also being
wooed by a young nobleman of reduced fortunes,
Theobald. The plot may sound conventional but
the heroine is not. She wants to marry no one
and live independently (there is some slight men-
tion of charitable works), and manages to persuade
Theobold to be her friend rather than her lover.
She is not especially beautiful (Theobold: ‘to speak
honestly, / I’ve fairer seen’, I. i. 129-30), and her
character is a composite of mirth and dread, as if
Annette, Emily’s servant from The Mysteries of
Udolpho, had usurped the lead role. Romantic love
is displaced, as it was in De Monfort and in many
of Baillie’s other plays, with the result that expec-
tations are disrupted and it becomes possible to
create more interesting and varied parts for
women.
Orra adores ghost stories, and this is her
downfall. She is not only highly susceptible to
fear but also addicted to the sensation:
Yea, when the cold blood shoots through every
vein:
When every pore upon my shrunken skin
A knotted knoll becomes, and to mine ears
Strange inward sounds awake, and to mine eyes
Rush stranger tears, there is a joy in fear.
(II. i. 170-75)
Her chief resource to feed her passion is Cath-
rina, one of her attendants, who has an inexhaust-
ible supply of supernatural legends. But Cathrina
is in the power of Rudigere, an illegitimate rela-
tion of the count’s who plots to marry Orra in
order to improve his fortunes. Cathrina has been
his mistress and borne his child, and, to save her
reputation, she enters into Rudigere’s plot to have
Orra removed to an ancient castle rumoured to be
haunted. There he will use Orra’s fear to blackmail
her into a union with Glottenbal (he tells the
count), but in fact with himself. Theobold learns
of the conspiracy, and plans to rescue her by
impersonating the spirit of the place, a spectre
huntsman. But a message forewarning her goes
astray, and terror at his ghostly appearance drives
her into a state of derangement, from which, it
seems, she will not recover. A repentant Hugh-
59
 obert arrives on the scene with his family, and the
BAILLIE
villainous Rudigere kills both himself and his rival,
the obtuse Glottenbal.
As in the case of De Monfort, the relation of
Orra to an emergent Gothic genre is not straight-
forward. The play is a medley of familiar tropes:
the haunted castle with a story of murder attached
to it, riddled with secret passages (cf. almost any
Gothic novel from Castle of Otranto onwards); the
band of outlaws who use the castle as a hide-out
under cover of supernatural rumour (cf. The
Mysteries of Udolpho, Charlotte Smith’s The Old
Manor House, and many others); the noble outlaw
chief (a childhood friend of Theobald, who lends
his assistance; cf. Schiller, and Dacre’s Zofloya);
the heroine kept in a bedchamber with locks on
the outside only (Mysteries of Udolpho etc.); the
ballad tradition of elopement with a phantom
lover (Bürger’s ‘Lenore’, and its variants); the
rescue involving impersonation of a phantom
lover which ends in disaster (cf. the Bleeding Nun
episode from The Monk). Indeed, the play’s generic
knowingness might lead one to imagine that its
purpose was solely critical, even satirical. It is
worth bearing in mind that two of the best-known
burlesques of Gothic were published soon after: E.
Stannard Barrett’s The Heroine in 1813 and Jane
Austen’s Northanger Abbey in 1818. Certainly it is
true to say that the devices included by Baillie are
more or less stripped of affect: the supernatural is
explained so far in advance that the audience is in
no danger of falling in with Orra’s delusions. But
on the other hand, neither is the viewer permit-
ted the security of detached criticism. Baillie
maintains sympathetic identification with the
heroine throughout the play by showing her
insight into her own situation, her courageous
resistance to oppression, and her inner struggle
against fear. The catharsis of terror for the audi-
ence comes with the final scene, and the pitiful
spectacle of Orra surrounded by mind-forged
monsters.
Orra’s passion for fear is not blamed. Like De
Monfort’s hatred it is something inexplicable and
irresistible, an inner sublime. Baillie clearly indi-
cates in her characterizations that possession of a
powerful ruling passion is an index of greatness of
soul; but it also creates an imbalance which is
ultimately self-destructive. It opens De Monfort to
criminality, and Orra to victimage. The audience
is not called upon to judge and condemn, but
rather to lend their understanding and, at the
same time, to wonder at these human meteors
and derive a vicarious thrill from their disastrous
fates. As in all Gothic writing, the purpose of
60 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
instruction is a fig-leaf; the fundamental pleasure
is amoral. Baillie’s methods reflected and facili-
ated the shift of Gothic away from the conven-
tions which had been associated with the earlier
phase of experimental supernaturalism and were
thus becoming redundant, to the surer founda-
tions of an inner landscape. Passion itself becomes
the plot, but unmotivated, reified, an object of
fascination in its own right. It would be inap-
propriate as well as anachronistic to call this psy-
chological drama. The diseases of the mind are not
submitted to logic. The increase of knowledge may
be Baillie’s expressed aim, but it is knowledge of
an unabashedly corrupt and disingenuous kind,
combining the pleasure of unveiling with the
retention of some ultimate mystery.
Discussion of Baillie’s drama has almost always
excluded mention of her poetry, but she was a
well-regarded and frequently anthologized poet as
well. Her choice of subject matter and form was
wide-ranging, but includes a number of supernatu-
ral ballads which Orra would have appreciated.
Her Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters was
said to have brought her £1,000 from the publish-
ers Longman,2 2 and went through two editions in
the year of publication, 1821. ‘The Ghost of
Fadon’, from this volume, is based on a legend
concerning William Wallace, a distant ancestor of
Baillie.2 3 Here, in contrast to the plays, the super-
natural is manifestly public. Not only does the
ghost appear to a whole company of soldiers, but
he challenges Wallace to a duel, and physically
blocks him when he tries to escape, eventually
presiding over the burning of the castle where the
company had attempted to find shelter after
military defeat by the English. He is public, too,
in his historical significance. He is the spectre of
Fadon, a follower killed by Wallace under suspi-
cion of spying. The haunting suggests that he was
wrongfully killed, an omen of bad luck for the na-
tion.
Day rose; but silent, sad, and pale,
Stood the bravest of the Scottish race;
And each warrior’s heart began to quail,
When he look’d in his leader’s face.
There were a variety of Gothic modes cur-
rent—several forms of fiction, tragic drama, bal-
lads, odes, prose poems in the manner of Ossian—
and Baillie felt no inhibition about testing her
powers in more than one. In this poem she flaunts
her ability to play on the superstition of her read-
ers, while also signalling her personal investment
in nationalist politics.
Notes myself. Baillie returned the compliment in an ode ad-

1. Cit. Margaret S. Carhart, The Life and Works of Joanna
Baillie, Yale Studies in English, 64 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1923), 15. See also Norton, Mistress of
Udolpho, 185-7.
2. Cit. Carhart, Joanna Baillie, 17.
BAILLIE
dressed ‘To Mrs Siddons’, ‘our tragic queen’, praising
especially the subtlety and variety of her depictions of
the passions.
19. At the time, Byron was a member of the management
committee at Drury Lane.

3. Cit. Carhart, Joanna Baillie, 15.
4. Quarterly Review, cit. Carhart, Joanna Baillie, 17.
5. Ellen Donkin’s chapter on Baillie in Getting Into the Act
(London: Routledge, 1995) is the prime example; she
lays great emphasis on Piozzi’s statements that by
revealing her identity and therefore her sex Baillie
opened herself to spiteful criticism, but fails to provide
any persuasive evidence. The current dominant read-
ing of Baillie by critics such as Anne Mellor and Cathe-
rine Burroughs suggests that she was self-marginalized,
that is, writing from a position of conscious subordina-
tion and gendered critique; with this interpretation,
too, I would disagree. Gender politics is not the begin-
ning and end of Baillie’s audacious challenge to
theatrical orthodoxy. She was simply the most vision-
ary and influential dramatist of her day.
6. See Carhart, Joanna Baillie, 47-52, which counters
Donkin’s very partial version.
20. Another strategy of containment in the first performed
version was the Epilogue, written by the Duchess of
Devonshire. In the most conventional terms, it urges
the audience to ‘bid the scene’s dread horror cease /
And hail the blessing of domestic peace’. It is included
in Cox, Seven Gothic Dramas, 313-14.
21. From Poems (1790), reproduced in Lonsdale,
Eighteenth-Century Women Poets.
22. Carhart, Joanna Baillie, 29.
23. The poem is included in Jerome M. McGann (ed.),
The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse, (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Abbreviations
DM Joanna Baillie, De Monfort: A Tragedy, in Seven Gothic
Dramas 1789-1825, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox (Athens, OH:
Ohio University Press, 1992).

7. ‘Lines to Agnes Baillie on Her Birthday’, The Dramatic

and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie (London: Long-
man, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1851), 811.
8. Some of the poems were later included in revised form TITLE COMMENTARY
in Fugitive Verses (1740). See Roger Lonsdale’s remarks
in Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthol-
ogy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, Plays on the Passions
1989), 429-30.
9. Notably Bertrand Evans, Gothic Drama from Walpole to
Shelley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1947); Paul Ranger, Terror and Pity;
and Jeffrey N. Cox (ed.), Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789-
1825 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), which
contains the text of De Monfort.
10. Joseph W. Donohue, Dramatic Character in the English
Romantic Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1970), 81.
11. A formulation repeated by Baillie in De Monfort, IV. ii.
26-7.
12. Cit. Carhart, Joanna Baillie, 64-5; Harriet Martineau,
Autobiography, ed. M. W. Chapman (Beston, 1877),
vol. I, p. 270.
13. Evans, Gothic Drama, 201.
14. Evans, Gothic Drama, 201.
15. Cit. Carhart, Joanna Baillie, 116.

16. See Campbell, Mrs Siddons: ‘Joanna Baillie has left a

perfect picture of Mrs Siddons, in her description of
Jane de Monfort’ (p. 303).
17. See Carhart, Joanna Baillie, 121-2.
18. See Carhart, Joanna Baillie (pp. 128-42), on the stage
history of De Monfort after the original Drury Lane
production. Cox, Seven Gothic Dramas (pp. 55-7), has
an interesting discussion of Siddons as a dramatic
interpreter of Gothic, but sees her acting style as typi-
cally passive, in contrast to Paula Backscheider, and

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 BAILLIE
Witchcraft

MARJEAN D. PURINTON (ESSAY

DATE 2001)
SOURCE: Purinton, Marjean D. “Socialized and Medi-
calized Hysteria in Joanna Baillie’s Witchcraft.” Prism(s):
Essays in Romanticism 9 (2001): 139-56.
In the following essay, Purinton analyzes Baillie’s
portrayal of what was often medically and scientifically
sanctioned persecution of women in her drama Witch-
craft.

Because many Romantic-period dramas are

engaged with political frenzy following the French
Revolution and are shaped by psychosocial issues
associated with the Gothic, it is not unusual for us
to see “madness,” in various manifestations, play-
ing a significant part on the stage. The physiology
of excessive emotions had also become, by the
end of the eighteenth century, a significant focus
of scientific inquiry and discourse. By the early
nineteenth-century, the prevailing medical opin-
ion had gendered emotions so that women who
exhibited excessive feelings and unconventional
behaviors were “hysterical,” a physiological effect
of their inferior biology, the symptom of their
anatomical reproductive capacity.1
As I have argued elsewhere, the intertextuality
of science and medicine in Romantic drama may
explain the predominance of gothic and melo-
drama during the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries.2 Numerous Romantic dramas
stage physicality in gothic forms that are signifi-
cantly redefined by discursive and cultural inter-

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2 67

BAILLIE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AN EARLY REVIEWER APPLAUDS BAILLIE’S
TALENT
In the “Introductory Discourse,” which
abounds in imagery, the author has exhibited
much knowledge of the human mind, and
has displayed his information and discern-
ment in such a style, as convinces the reader,
at the outset, that he is not incompetent to
the arduous task he has undertaken. He treats
at great length, and with much ingenuity, on
the construction of the drama; in which, . . .
he has not adhered to his own rules. He
expresses his approbation of those styles of
writing which apply more forcibly to the
heart than to the fancy, and thinks the drama
the most approved vehicle. . . .
The Tragedy of De Monfort is still superior
to Basil. The hero is a more original character,
and more forcibly drawn; but it is too diffuse.
The last act might be omitted altogether with
advantage, adding a little only at the end of
the fourth. With these improvements it would
make an excellent play, and one which, we
have no doubt, would be received with the
greatest pleasure by an English audi-
ence. . . .
It is with great pleasure that we notice a
publication, in which so much original genius
for dramatic poetry is evidently displayed.
May we not hope that, in the unknown
author of these Dramas, exists the long
wished-for talent, which is to remove the
present opprobrium of our theatres, and sup-
ply them with productions of native growth,
calculated not for the destruction of idle time,
but, for the amusement of ages? We are will-
ing, in some degree, to cherish the expecta-
tion.
SOURCE: A review of A Series of Plays In Which It Is
Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of
the Mind, Vol. 1, by Joanna Baillie. The British
Critic and Quarterly Theological Review 13
(March 1799): 284-90.
ests in science. Science did, in fact, take form in
the theatre, where production strategies were
68
shaped by the machinery of staging and dramatic
content was manifestly and latently concerned
with medical discoveries and practices.3 Con-
versely, the theatre was appropriated by science as
the actual site for staging its experiments. Since
the seventeenth century, Robert Boyle’s demon-
strations for students were staged as anatomical
theatres of medicine with formalized and regular-
ized performances.4 Staged dissections functioned
in spectacularly pedagogical ways in science’s
institutional training. Scientific and medical
interests were theatricalized in other public but
non-dramatic forms, such as traveling shows,
itinerant lectures with demonstrations, extrava-
gant displays or exhibitions, and forums at the
Royal College of Surgeons.5 Social controversies
connected to medical sciences were also frequently
staged for public display in non-dramatic settings
such as courtrooms and executions.6
Seemingly natural elements associated with
science and medicine were staged as gothic and
technologically designed and manipulated to cre-
ate a world of illusions and phantasmagoria.7 Both
gothic and science were discursive fields upon
which anxieties about social identity and physical-
ity could be displaced, and the gothic conventions
of drama were particularly convenient for play-
wrights’ use in negotiating the influences of sci-
ence and medicine upon culture. The strategy for
performing the discourses of science and practices
of medicine, I call the “techno-gothic,” an ideo-
logically charged and melodramatic structure in
which disturbing issues and forbidden topics are
recontextualized by the intersecting fields of the
supernatural and science—or gothic and technol-
ogy. The techno-gothic relies upon a set of readily
available and easily recognized dramatic conven-
tions (gothic) that function as interpretation of
scientific discourses (technology) within theatri-
calized contexts of social critiques and cultural
changes. Techno-gothic drama is, in fact, a product
of the Romantic revolution in science, as its forms
mediate post-Enlightenment dualisms such as
biochemistry and magic, romance and gothic,
medicine and quackery, bodies and spirits. The
techno-gothic came to be expressed in two popu-
lar and powerful performance modes: grotesques
and ghosts.
Techno-gothic grotesques embody discursively
constructed and spectacularly displayed monsters
or aberrations. Historically, monsters had been
exhibited in public places, but it is the beginning
of the nineteenth-century when teratology began
to decipher in scientific terms the grotesque bod-
ies theatrically displayed.8 Physicality offered a
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way of performing scientific preoccupations with
the body, its anatomy, is physiology, its potential
for disease and deformity, its propensity for physi-
cal disabilities and socio-sexual transgressions. The
techno-gothic grotesque makes visible the threat-
ening “other,” simultaneously disturbing and ap-
pealing, terrifying and pleasurable.9 Science and
stage engendered new perceptions of physicality,
transforming the body into a text that could be
read and interpreted by both the trained medical
gaze and the curious theatergoer. Physiognomy
and phrenology comprised scientific disciplines
intent on reading the body, but reading a perform-
ing body, and one that was physically grotesque,
was especially tricky as it was legitimately artificial
and fictive, disguised and costumed.1 0 While the
malformed, hybrid, and at times carnivalesque,
monstrous, and sick body of the techno-gothic
grotesque excited contradictory responses of
sympathy and abomination, it also destabilized
cultural norms.1 1 Its physical physicality was, on
the one hand, a spectacular body of gothic terror
and curiosity; and, on the other hand, a politicized
text placed on display at the anatomical “clinic”
where theatergoers or readers could participate in
the culture’s scientific interpretations and medical
diagnoses.
If the techno-gothic grotesque created a per-
forming body that could not be easily read, the
techno-gothic ghost challenged legibility in its
performance of disembodiment. In their unstable
and myriad forms, techno-gothic ghosts resist
spatial limitations and discernable significations.
Technologically designed special effects of the
stage and the culture’s preoccupation with hysteria
stimulated the imagination to contemplate the
absence of substance, religious and pagan spirits,
inchoate psychology and neurology—areas which
science sought to explain with empirical evidence.
By manipulating the ways light bounced from a
polished and curved plane, for example, produc-
tion managers could create optical effects. Specta-
tors looking into a mirror could be terrified by the
appearance floating upon its surface, a phantom
signifying fictions generated by both superstition
and science.1 2 By manipulating characters’ re-
sponses and plot developments, playwrights could
create discursive and dramatic phantasmagoria
that pricked spectators’ and readers’ imaginative
participation in the culture’s craze over mental
and physical matters. Ghosts were, of course, a
gothic convention at the beginning of the nine-
teenth century, but they were also the way in
which Romantic-period playwrights could theatri-
calize the scientific scrutiny and speculation of
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mental disorders—hallucinations, hysteria, deliria,
BAILLIE
madness, mania—that were charged with new
medical significations.
For women playwrights, especially, techno-
gothic grotesques and ghosts provided a way for
them to participate in the scientific revolution of
the early nineteenth century in a speaking posi-
tion rather than as an object. For women writers,
it was particularly complicated to portray a body
scientifically sexed as female and culturally gen-
dered as feminine, for, by some medical accounts,
female bodies were already grotesque. It was
similarly tricky for women playwrights to portray
“mad” or hysterical women in their dramas,
characters that seemed to confirm scientific inter-
pretations of women as victims of their own bod-
ies, always with the propensity for excessive and
uncontrollable emotions. One way for women to
challenge the biological limits placed on them by
science was to stage madness as a deliberate and
calculated strategy used by female characters, a
“staged” guise or costume put on to deceive male
characters who assume that they are truly mad.
We see this strategy, for example in Sophia Lee’s
1794 tragedy Almeyda; Queen of Granada. Joanna
Baillie’s drama Witchcraft (1836), however, ex-
poses the theoretical and fictive nature of medical
science in characterizing male but especially
female characters as techno-gothic grotesques pos-
sessed by techno-gothic ghosts. At a metadramtic
level, furthermore, Witchcraft stages a society
haunted by a techno-gothic ghost in its depiction
of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch
hunts as conceptual analogues to early
nineteenth-century medical practices intent on
dominating, controlling and persecuting women
by naming them as techno-gothic grotesques,
witches marginalized as “others” whose diseased
presence must be purged from the social body.1 3
Baillie writes her play at the apex of literary
and scientific discussions about monstrosity and
phantasmagoria, and these discourses, no doubt,
informed her thinking about women persecuted
by social conventions based on superstition and
fiction but legitimized by religion and medicine.
Even by the middle of the nineteenth century and
following prolific scientific activity, the unknown,
superstition, and spectral still created fear and ter-
ror. Charles Lamb asserts in “Witches and Other
Night-Fears” (1823) that the most cruel, torment-
ing devil to humankind is “the simple idea of a
spirit unembodied” (80). In Letters on Demonology
and Witchcraft (1830), Walter Scott diagnoses those
who claimed to see apparitions as “mad,” patho-
logically unbalanced, deceived by a “lively dream,
69
 a waking reverie, the excitation of a powerful
BAILLIE
imagination, or the misrepresentation of a dis-
eased organ of sight” (344). It was also in 1830
that John Herschel offers a scientific explanation
for seemingly intangible phenomena by identify-
ing the optical necessity of something between
the eye and the thing seen. What the “thing” is,
he concedes, has been variously conjectured.
Some imagine that “all visible objects are con-
stantly throwing out from them, in all directions,
some sort of resemblances or spectral forms of
themselves, when received by the eyes, produce
an impression of objects” (249-50). One of the
definitions of “spectral,” Anne Williams reminds
us, is “produced merely by the action of light on
the eye or on a sensitive medium” (114). Optical
illusions, whether reflected by the human eye, the
magic lantern shows, or the theatre’s curved mir-
rors, generated medical and popular interest.1 4
Baillie explicitly acknowledges in her note to
Witchcraft that the subject of the drama was sug-
gested to her by her reading of Scott’s The Bride of
Lammermoor (1819) and its concern with witch-
craft trials that she found curious but unsatisfacto-
rily developed. In a journal entry dated 22 July
1827, Walter Scott notes Baillie’s tragedy and
ponders: “Will it be real Witch craft—the Ipsissi-
mus Diabolus [the very devil himself]—or an
imposter—or the half crazed being who believes
herself an ally of condemned spirits and desires to
be so? That last is a sublime subject” (Journal 331).
Baillie’s note to her drama reveals how the suspi-
cion of being a witch powerfully convinces the
accused that she is a witch. Baillie’s reading public
would have been familiar with the powerful and
electrifying influence of staged science as itinerant
lecturers and “doctors” performed electrocutions
of torpedo fish, intoxications by nitrous oxide as
well as extravagant displays of magneticism and
galvanization. At the end of the eighteenth
century, Franz Anton Mesmer had made famous
showy and popular demonstrations in magnetic
healing, hypnosis, and somnambulism.1 5 Sur-
geons, such as John Hunter, maintained anatomi-
cal collections that included skulls, feral children,
dissected appendages, and colonized specimens,
all with a variety of physical deformities. More
commercialized “freak” shows featured giants,
midgets, bearded ladies, hermaphrodites, and mad
women.1 6 These variously displayed techno-gothic
grotesques constituted Romantic-period analogues
to public trials and executions of seventeenth-
century witches—monsters, dehumanized “oth-
ers” displayed and purged from a “normative”
social body.
70 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
Baillie’s thinking about witchcraft might have
been influenced by a specific seventeenth-century
witchcraft case involving a Scottish midwife,
Margaret Lang, whose dangerous mixture of medi-
cal skill and spiritual gifts made her the perfect
target of a witch hunt in Erskine, near Paisley, the
setting of Baillie’s play, and whose plight was
chronicled in A History of the Witches of Renfrew-
shire. In 1696, Christian Shaw, the eleven-year old
daughter of a Scottish lord, accused Margaret and
two dozen others of bewitching her and conspir-
ing with the devil to kill her. Once “Pinched Mag-
gie,” as she came to be called, was named, others
came forward with accusations of having seen her
at nocturnal “witch” gatherings at Kilmalcolm at
which magic was practiced. Margaret was sen-
tenced to be hanged and then burned.1 7 Baillie
would have probably recognized the theatricality
of accused witches public examinations, trials, and
executions during the seventeenth century as well
as the spectacle such a re-staging of witchcraft
would create for early nineteenth-century specta-
tors. In an 1827 letter to Walter Scott, Baillie
proclaims: “Renfrew Witches upon a polite stage!
Will such a thing ever be endorsed!” (Letters
1.441). Witch-hunts in Scotland, as Baillie’s read-
ing would have revealed, endorsed beliefs in
diabolical conspiracies—a notion dramatized in
Baillie’s play—and amassed over 1,337 executions
plus additional deaths from suicides, torture, and
neglect. The Presbyterian Church ordered its
Calvinist ministers to seek out witches, and all
women, especially those who challenged patriar-
chal society, were potential witches.1 8
Ecclesiastical condemnation of independent
women had, during the course of the late eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries, been
replaced with an equally powerful check on
female liberation—scientific and medical “discov-
eries” that pronounced women inferior in
anatomy and in mind. Baillie, of course, grew up
in a household of physicians; her uncle, Dr. Wil-
liam Hunter, and her brother, Dr. Matthew Baillie,
were renowned anatomists whose medical theatres
were, in fact, the sites of medical instruction.1 9
Baillie’s medical knowledge would have recog-
nized the historical associations of female healers
and midwives with witchery—a connection that
reclassified “wise” women as “evil” and “melan-
cholic” and helped to legitimize the male medical
profession of the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries.2 0 It was during this time that
uterine theories of hysteria were reintroduced into
medical discourses. Inspired by botanical and
zoological taxonomies of naturalists Carolus Lin-
naeus and the Comte de Buffon, physicians linked
hysteria causally to female sexuality. 2 1 With
shadows of the earlier religious theories about
witchcraft still lingering in the social unconscious,
medical discourses re-eroticized madness as a
distinctly female disorder and recontextualized
witches as neurotic, hysterical, psychotic, and
emotionally disturbed women. What had been at-
tributed to witchcraft was now attributed to the
weaker female constitution. In short, women who
did not perform the roles assigned by patriarchal
culture were diagnosed as mad—techno-gothic
grotesques outside the boundaries of “normative”
society as classified by the period’s scientific
revolution.
It is in the context of these cultural changes
that Baillie’s drama portrays male figures of legal
and ecclesiastical authority in collusion against
any woman, regardless of class or circumstances,
believed to be involved in witchery.2 2 From the
beginning of the play, Grizeld Bane, Mary Mac-
murren, and Elspy Low are reputed witches whose
nocturnal activities on the moor and economic
hardships cast suspicion on them. The Sheriff rei-
fies these local stereotypes in his question: “Are
not witches always old and poor?” (3.2.630).
These three hags routinely meet at “Warlock’s
Den,” a deserted cave in the woods; during a
stormy night, they have been seen dancing with a
man presumed dead for three years, a techno-
gothic ghost that figures significantly in rendering
the women techno-gothic grotesques. Further-
more, Mary Macmurren’s son Wilkin is an idiot, a
mental derangement popularly believed to be the
result of her intercourse with the devil. By all ac-
counts of the play’s characters, these women are
techno-gothic grotesques, monsters and human
aberrations to be feared and avoided or eliminated.
Of course, any contact with them makes even
healthy innocents guilty by association.
All three witches have cleverly eluded arrest
until Mary Macmurren is found in the custody of
constables in Act Four, but she is saved from be-
ing burned at the stake by a decree from the King
and Parliament declaring that “the law punishing
what has been called the crime of witchcraft as a
felonious offense be repealed. . . . Henceforth
there shall no person be prosecuted at law as a
wizard or witch, throughout these realms”
(5.2.641). While Mary is not proven innocent of
witchcraft, the law that would condemn her is
unmasked as unjust. Other means of marginaliz-
ing threatening women are nonetheless devised,
and the revelation about Grizeld Bane at the end
of the play points to the ways in which post-
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Enlightenment medicine names women insane, a
BAILLIE
techno-gothic grotesque, a strategy for containing
women that will not be declared unlawful.
We learn that Grizeld is “a miserable woman
whose husband was hanged for murder, at Inv-
erness, some years ago, and who thereupon
became distracted . . . [and] was . . . kept in close
custody. But she has, no doubt,” Fatheringham
reports, “escaped from her keepers, who may not
be very anxious to reclaim her” (5.2.642). Ironi-
cally, it is not witchcraft but mental illness that af-
flicts Grizeld, a nineteenth-century diagnosis of
female behavior when it does not conform to
social standards. Matthew Baillie’s own account in
his third Gulstonian Lecture of 1794 medically
explains Grizeld’s abilities to overpower her keep-
ers and how her various actions throughout the
play might be attributable to her nerves’ excite-
ment of her muscles into motion: “Muscles are
capable of being thrown into a much greater
degree of contraction by emotions of the mind
than perhaps by any other cause; and it is this
circumstance which gives the astonishing strength
sometimes exerted by maniacs” (147). Here physi-
ological interpretations make legitimate observa-
tions of behaviors attributed to those with mental
and emotional disorders—techno-gothic gro-
tesques termed “witches” by the culture depicted
in Baillie’s drama.
While these techno-gothic grotesques have
done no harm to anyone, the drama unmasks the
dangerous techno-gothic grotesque of Refrewshire,
a woman whose appearances and economic sta-
tion betray her monstrous heart and the witchery
she attempts to effect in order to realize personal
revenge for unrequited love. Annablla Gordon
seizes upon the cultural disposition in which
suspicion of women breeds unreasonable, hysteri-
cal responses and repression. Eleven-year-old Jessie
Dungarren has not been well, and the prevailing
church and medical interpretation of her infirmity
of sleeplessness, fever, erratic behavior—babbling
and convulsions—is that she has been bewitched.
Her nervous disease, as Thomas Trotter character-
izes it in his 1807 A View of the Nervous Tempera-
ment, arises from the mind that, under the influ-
ence of this malady, can conjure up “blue devils,
ghosts, hobgoblins” (185). While Trotter attributes
nervous temperament to various female mental
and bodily functions, in Baillie’s drama, it is
suspected that Grizeld Bane, Mary Macmurren,
and Elspy Low are somehow involved. This situa-
tion is perfect for Annabella’s own little drama of
witchcraft to implicate Violet Murrey as a witch.
Violet is in love with Robert Dungarren, the man
71
 Annabella believes she would have if Violet were
BAILLIE
not in her way, a fictive situation that modifies
the 1696 Margaret Lang witch-hunt with elements
of gothic romance.
An additional ingredient to Annabella’s brew
is the reporting of Rutherford, the parish minister,
of having seen, or at least of having believed to
have seen, Violet with the ghost of a dead man
on the moor. Violet has already been discredited
as a healthy member of society through the ac-
tions of her father, a man who had been convicted
of murder and who was believed to have died fol-
lowing his escape from prison. We know that the
techno-gothic ghost she meets on the moor dur-
ing the stormy night is none other than her father,
very much alive but in hiding until he can prove
his innocence. Violet is unwilling to betray her
father, who must remain apparitional to everyone
else. With Violet’s character already tainted, An-
nabella realizes that it will not take much con-
trived evidence to cast her as a witch, and with
the help of Black Bawldy, a gullible herdboy, An-
nabella seals Violet’s fate. During one of Jessie’s
fits, she reportedly tears the garment of the witch
with whom she wrestles. Annabella pays Bawldy
to secure one of Violet’s gowns so that she may
tear it, matching the tear with that Jessie has
snatched from her ghostly visitor. This is the
evidence that convinces even the skeptical citizens
that Violet is guilty of witchcraft. Annabella has
convinced herself that Violet will not be allowed
to be executed, for as she assures Bawldy, “Mary
Macmurren will be burnt, for an example to all
other witches and warlocks, but a respite and
pardon will be given to Violet Murrey; it is only
her disgrace, not her death, that is intended”
(4.2.633). She is, however, playing with the fire of
societal ignorance and fear.
We come to realize that Annabella is delu-
sional, a state of mind, along with delirium, that
was of immense interest to the medical profes-
sionals of the Romantic period. In An Inquiry into
the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement (1798),
Alexander Crichton maintains: “All delirious
people, no matter whether they be maniacs or
hypochondriacs, or people in the delirium of
fever, or of hysteria, differ from those of a sound
mind in this respect, that they have certain
diseased perceptions and notions in the reality of
which they firmly believe, and which conse-
quently become motives of many actions and
expressions which appear unreasonable to the rest
of mankind” (1.137-38). Annabella suffers from
what Crichton refers to as one kind of diseased
notion entertained by delirious people: “They are
72 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
diseased abstract notions, referable to the qualities
and conditions of persons and things, and [her]
relation to them; as when [she] imagines that [her]
friends have conspired to kill [her]” (1.141), or in
Annabella’s case, imagines that Violet will rob her
of the man she loves. As we have seen, however,
Annabella has to persuade herself that “revenge is
sweet; revenge is noble; revenge is nature”
(5.1.637), as she is tormented by conflicted mental
commotions.
Grizeld accurately assesses Annabella’s charac-
ter when she tells her that she is the “best” of
Satan’s queens and princesses, for “there is both
wit and wickedness in thee to perfection”
(4.2.633). Grizeld alarms Annabella with a rhetoric
that would brand her the very techno-gothic
grotesque that Annabella would declare of others,
and Grizeld emphasizes: “There is not a cloven
foot, nor a horned head of them all wickeder and
bolder than thou art” (5.1.638). Annabella scorn-
fully dismisses Grizeld’s accusations: “She is but
raving: the fumes of her posset have been work-
ing in her brain” (4.2.634). Although each woman
characterizes the other as a techno-gothic gro-
tesque, it is only Grizeld that is marked by religion
and medicine as witch, as hysterical who must,
therefore, be extracted from society. These dra-
matically enhanced character analyses direct our
attention to the importance of perspective in
perception. Just as Annabella cannot see the
techno-gothic ghost to which Grizeld points in
the corner of the room as the “Master” they both
serve, the good people of Renfrewshire cannot see
Annabella for the techno-gothic grotesque she is.
It is only when Anabella’s strangled corpse is laid
before the crowd gathered for the witches’ execu-
tion that she is unmasked as techno-gothic gro-
tesque. Like the crowd in Baillie’s drama, we read
the spectacular body of Annabella differently; we
come to see her as a woman complicit in using
the fear of witchcraft to serve her own selfish goals
and to deflect attention from her own neurotic
behaviors.
Madness serves post-Enlightenment medicine
in a similar way to that of seventeenth-century
religion’s deployment of witch-hunting—as a
check on female power and independence.
Baillie’s play explores the roots of early
nineteenth-century’s psycho-medical treatment of
women and its continued perversion of the magic-
healer-witch into the hysteric by male physicians
who linked hysteria causally with female sex-
uality. Medical science is exposed as interpretative
and inexact as “witchcraft” itself, as the bewitch-
ing effects of cultural hysteria are staged. Metadra-
matically, witchcraft functions as a metaphor and
commentary on madness as a cultural signifier
and as a kind of cultural ghost haunting the medi-
cal and scientific practices of Baillie’s day. In Mad-
ness and Civilization, Michel Foucault describes a
pedagogical technique used to treat mad patients
during the Romantic period that replicates the
metadramatic cure for social madness staged in
Baillie’s Witchcraft. According to Foucault, “the
cure by theatrical representation” was often suc-
cessful with patients who had come to see illusion
as reality (187). Staged illusions and images
presented an alternative reality to that created by
patients, and they sometimes came to recognize
that their perceptions of reality were fictions of
their own making. The patients, like Baillie’s read-
ers, are forced to confront what Foucault describes
as “a crisis which is, in a very ambiguous manner,
both medical and theatrical” (180).
Witchcraft offers us a theatrical illusion of
social reality, a pedagogical strategy adopted from
medical practices, encouraging us to reevaluate
medical perceptions of hysteria offered in the
scientific revolution of her day that continue to
inform our perspectives on madness. In this way,
Baillie’s Witchcraft anticipates twentieth-century
arguments by American psychological feminists
like those of Juliet Mitchell and Phyllis Chesler,
who point out that female behavior is termed
“mad” by a social and medical culture that re-
quires repressed female sexuality and rejects at-
tempts to reconnect mind and body from its post-
Enlightenment divisive taxonomies and as well as
twentieth-century positions by American feminist
spiritualists like those of Starhawk and Carol
Christ who seek to reclaim witchcraft and goddess
religions as enabling discourses and practices for
female identity.2 3
Notes
1. In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault notes
that until the end of the eighteenth century “the
uterus and the womb remained present in the pathol-
ogy of hysteria” (144), informing notions at the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century identifying “hysteria
and hypochondria as mental diseases” (158). Laurinda
S. Dixon explains that the ancient notion of the capri-
cious womb, capable of extensive sympathy with the
rest of the body, remained a fixture of eighteenth-
century medical theory, and by the beginning of the
nineteenth century, women’s susceptibility to illness
was based on their “proper” function in society and
their “peculiar” anatomy. According to Dixon, medi-
cal theorists used “the authority of biology to justify
maintaining the cultural and political differences
between the sexes that were thought to be crucial to
social stability” (Perilous Chastity 236). Mark S. Micale
points out that nineteenth-century notions of hysteria
were defined by a set of highly negative character traits
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in women: “eccentricity, impulsiveness, emotionality,
BAILLIE
coquettishness, deceitfulness, and hypersexuality”
(Approaching Hysteria 24). Peter Melville Logan dis-
cusses the transition of female hysteria from a physi-
cal to a psychological ailment (Nerves and Narratives
93-107).
2. See my essays “Science Fiction and Techno-Gothic
Drama: Romantic Playwrights Joanna Baillie and Jane
Scott,” Romanticism on the Net 21 (February 2001); “By-
ron’s Disability and the Techno-Gothic Grotesque” in
The Deformed Transformed, European Romantic Review,
forthcoming; “Theatricalized Bodies and Spirits:
Techno-Gothic as Performance in Romantic Drama,”
Gothic Studies, forthcoming.
3. Barbara Marie Stafford (Body Criticism 366-75) and
Paul Ranger (“Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast” 70-
119) delineate various scientific and stage devices
popular during the Romantic period.
4. See Roy S. Porter (“Medical Science and Human Sci-
ence in the Enlightenment” 64-66) for a discussion of
Thomas Beddoes’s and Humphry Davy’s experiments
in pneumatic medicine and their lectures on chemistry
in theatres built specifically for scientific studies. Ac-
cording to Margaret S. Carhart, Joanna Baillie’s uncle,
William Hunter, maintained the Hunter School of
Anatomy on Windmill Street in London. The medical
school included an anatomical theatre and museum,
and Joanna’s brother, Matthew Baillie, inherited it in
1783 (The Life and Work of Joanna Baillie 9-11). Mat-
thew Baillie was named Physician Extraordinary to
King George III in 1810.
5. See Cathy Cobb and Harold Goldwhite (Creations of
Fire 151-211); Edwin Clarke and L. S. Jacyna
(Nineteenth-Century Orgins of Neuroscientific Concepts
160-211); Gloria Flaherty (“The Non-Normal Sciences:
Survivals of Renaissance Thought in the Eighteenth
Century” 71-91); Lindsay Wilson (Women and Medicine
in the French Enlightenment 104-24); Ludmilla Jor-
danova (“Gender, Generation and Science: William
Hunter’s Obstetrical Atlas” 385-412); Christopher Fox
(“Introduction: How to Prepare a Noble Savage: The
Spectacle of Human Science” 11-12); Robert Bogdan
(Freak Show 106-11 and “The Social Construction of
Freaks” 23-37); Elizabeth Grosz (“Intolerable Ambigu-
ity: Freaks as/at the Limit” 55-66) for discussions of
various non-dramatic shows and displays featuring
aberrant bodies.
6. In Romantic Theatricality, Judith Pascoe characterizes
the theatricality of the 1794 Treason Trials and the
public spectacle of Marie Antoinette, for example
(33-67 and 95-129). My essay “Women’s Sovereignty
on Trial: Joanna Baillie’s Comedy ‘The Tryal’ as Met-
atheatrics” analyzes the public’s fascination with the-
atricalized litigation and ritualized courtship/marriage
staged in Baillie’s 1798 comedy as a pedagogical
strategy for women (132-57). In her Introductory
Discourse to the 1798 Plays on the Passions, Baillie
points out the pedagogical function of public proces-
sions and hangings that, like drama, can generate
“sympathetic curiosity” between actor and spectator
(2). Foucault notes how, in the nineteenth century,
madness was a public spectacle with organized perfor-
mances in which madmen sometimes played the roles
of actors and sometimes played the role of spectators
(Madness and Civilization 68-70). Madness was a thing
to be looked at, Foucault explains, and “madmen
remained monsters—that is, etymologically, beings or
things to be shown” (70).
73
 7. See Paul Ranger (“Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast”
BAILLIE
19-41), Richard Leacroft (The Development of the English
Playhouse 119-238), and Terry Castle (The Female Ther-
mometer 140-67) for explanations about how science
affected theatrical staging devices and special effects.
8. Robert Bogdan’s describes exotic exhibitions of
“freaks” accompanied by scientific discourses and tera-
tological taxonomies. According to Bogdan, showmen
often asked scientists to authenticate monsters, for
“linking freak exhibits with science made the attrac-
tions more interesting, more believable, and less
frivolous . . .” (“The Social Construction of Freaks”
29; see also Freak Show 1-21).
9. Mariana Warner has shown how the grotesque
paradoxically presents terror and mockery in its
“parodic harshness, sick humour, shivery manipula-
tion of fear and pleasure in the monstrous” (No Go the
Bogeyman 67). See also Lucie Armitt’s distinction
between grotesque and caricature (Theorising the Fan-
tastic 68-70).
10. Deidre Lynch points out that a performer’s face
provided spectacular evidence of how passions
“stamped” the muscles of the face. Spectators were
expected to look at the sentiment written across the
performer’s body (“Overloaded Portraits: The Excess of
Character and Countenance” 137). According to E. J.
Clery, David Garrick’s technique of acting was depen-
dent on the audience’s knowledge of the body, a
taxonomy of the passions registered by facial expres-
sions and bodily gestures (The Rise of Supernatural Fic-
tion, 1762-1800 42-49).
11. Freddie Rokem acknowledges that a staged body func-
tions as a “sign” of “cultural and aesthetic codes of
bodily behavior” for audiences (“Slapping Women: Ib-
sen’s Nora, Strindberg’s Julie, and Freud’s Dora” 222).
Veronica Kelly and Dorothea von Mucke maintain
that the body stands in a multiple complex relations
to culturally produced meanings. In the production of
dominant cultural codes, the body “regulate[s] the
excesses of signifying practice and define[s] the
subjectivity of agents in the semiotic transaction”
(“Introduction: Body and Text in the Eighteenth
Century” 9).
12. Terry Castle points to the ways in which non-dramatic
but staged science excited audiences to question the
reality of optical illusions in magic lantern shows,
which “developed as mock exercises in scientific de-
mystification, complete with preliminary lectures on
the fallacy of ghost-belief” (“Phantasmagoria: Spectral
Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie”
30). See also Terry Castle (The Female Thermometer 168-
89) and Barbara Marie Stafford (Body Criticism 366-75).
13. Foucault describes how the social fear, a fear formu-
lated in medical terms but animated by a moral myth,
arose throughout the Romantic period that madness
was a mysterious disease, contagious and corrupting
(Madness and Civilization 199-220).
14. In the Introductory Discourse to the 1798 Plays on the
Passions, Baillie remarks about the compelling nature
of the world of spirits, our interest in finding ourselves
“alone with a being terrific and awful, whose nature
and power are unknown.” Baillie adds that we prefer
vicarious explorations of the supernatural as an object
of inquiry: “No man wishes to see the Ghost himself,
74 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
which would certainly procure him the best informa-
tion on the subject; but every man wishes to see one
who believes that he sees it, in all the agitation and
wildness of that species of terror” (3).
15. Interestingly, Franz Anton Mesmer argued that
medicine had ignored a majority of chronic illnesses,
including epilepsy, mania, melancholy, so-called “ill-
nesses of the nerves,” often confusing crisis with
disease (“Dissertation by F. A. Mesmer, Doctor of
Medicine, on His Discoveries” 105).
16. Dennis Todd details the celebrated case of Mary Toft,
the illiterate wife of a poor journeyman cloth-worker,
who purportedly gave birth to her first rabbit in
October 1726, an incident that excited medical and
public attention (Imaginary Monsters 1-37). Rosi Braid-
otti notes that the medical profession benefited by
examining human exhibits in raree shows (Nomadic
Subjects 91-92). Scientists who examined “freaks,”
explains Bogdan, frequently presented their com-
mentaries in newspapers and pamphlets, and some
exhibits were presented to medical societies (Freak
Show 106-111). See Also Richard D. Altick (The Shows
of London 217-20).
17. A History of the Witches of Renfrewshire 151-52. The
Renfrew Witches incident is discussed by Anne Llewel-
lyn Barstow (Witchcraze 124-25).
18. Christina Larner (Enemies of God 63). Mary Daly notes
that a 1563 Scottish witch-law dropped the distinc-
tion between “good” and “bad” witch (Gyn/Ecology
193), and so in the case Renfrew Witches, any witch-
craft would have been persecuted. The English Parlia-
ment made accusations of witchcraft and sorcery il-
legal in 1736.
19. “Life of Joanna Baillie” ix. See also Margaret Carhart
(Life and Work of Joanna Baillie 9-11).
20. See, for example, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre
English (Witches, Midwives, and Nurses 6-20); Mary
Daly (Gyn/Ecology 183-213).
21. Mark S. Micale (Approaching Hysteria 22-23). For a
developed analysis of the causal links of hysteria to
female sexuality, see Ilza Veith’s Hysteria: The History of
a Disease.
22. Elizabeth A. Fay includes a brief mention of Baillie’s
Witchcraft, which, she maintains, “explores how real
social restrictions on women’s behavior or their
imaginations can lead them literally into life-
threatening situations that are historically plausible,
such as accusations of witchcraft” (A Feminist Introduc-
tion to Romanticism 117).
23. See, for example, Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and
Feminism, Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness, Star-
hawk’s “Witchcraft as Goddess Religion” (394-400),
and Carol P. Christ’s “Why Women Need the God-
dess: Phenomenological, Psychological, and Political
Reflections” (345-58).
Works Cited
Altick, Richard D. The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1978.
Armitt, Lucie. Theorising the Fantastic. London: Arnold,
1996.
Baillie, Joanna. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie. Vol. 1.
Ed. Judith Bailey Slagle. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickin-
son UP, 1991.
———. Introductory Discourse to Plays on the Passions.
1798. The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie,
Complete in One Volume. 2nd ed. London: Longman,
1851. 1-18.
———. Witchcraft: A Tragedy in Prose, in Five Acts in Miscel-
laneous Plays. 1836. The Dramatic and Poetical Works of
Joanna Baillie, Complete in One Volume. 2nd ed. London:
Longman, 1851. 613-43.
Baillie, Matthew. “The Gulstonian Lectures, Read at the
College of Physicians, May 1794: Lecture III.” Lectures
and Observations on Medicine. London: Taylor, 1825.
140-60.
Barstow, Anne Llewellyn. Witchcraze: A New History of the
European Witch Hunts. London: Pandora, 1994.
Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for
Amusement and Profit. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.
———. “The Social Construction of Freaks.” Freakery:
Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. Ed. Rose-
marie Garland Thomson. New York: New York UP,
1996.
Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Dif-
ference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York:
Columbia UP, 1994.
Carhart, Margaret S. The Life and Work of Joanna Baillie. New
Haven: Yale UP, 1923; rpt. Archon Books, 1970.
Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: 18th-Century Culture
and the Invention of the Uncanny. New York: Oxford UP,
1995.
———. “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the
Metaphorics of Modern Reverie.” Critical Inquiry 15.1
(1988): 26-61.
Chesler, Phyllis. Women and Madness. New York: Double-
day, 1972.
Christ, Carol P. “Why Women Need the Goddess: Phenom-
enological, Psychological, and Political Reflections.”
All American Women: Lives that Divide, Ties that Bind.
New York: Macmillan, 1986. 345-58.
Clarke, Edwin, and L. S. Jacyna. Nineteenth-Century Origins
of Neuroscientific Concepts. Berkeley: U of California P,
1987.
Clery, E. J. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.
Cobb, Cathy, and Harold Goldwhite. Creations of Fire:
Chemistry’s Lively History from Alchemy to the Atomic
Age. New York: Plenum Press, 1995.
Crichton, Alexander. An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of
Mental Derangement: Comprehending a Concise System of
the Physiology and Pathology of the Human Mind, and a
History of the Passions and Their Effects. 2 vols. London:
Cadell and W. Davies, 1798.
Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism.
Boston: Beacon, 1978.
Dixon, Laurinda S. Perilous Chastity. Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1995.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deidre English. Witches, Midwives,
BAILLIE
and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. New York:
Feminist Press, 1973.
Fay, Elizabeth A. A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism.
Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998.
Flaherty, Gloria. “The Non-Normal Sciences: Survivals of
Renaissance Thought in the Eighteenth Century.” In-
venting Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains. Ed.
Christopher Fox, Roy S. Porter, and Robert Wokler.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. 271-91.
Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of
Insanity in the Age of Reason. 1965. Trans. Richard
Howard. New York: Vintage, 1988.
Fox, Christopher. “Introduction: How to Prepare a Nobel
Savage: The Spectacle of Human Science.” Inventing
Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains. Ed. Christo-
pher Fox, Roy S. Porter, and Robert Wokler. Berkeley: U
of California P, 1995. 1-30.
Grosz, Elizabeth. “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the
Limit.” Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary
Body. Ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson. New York: New
York UP, 1996. 55-66.
Herschel, John Frederick William. A Preliminary Discourse on
the Study of Natural Philosophy. 1830. New York: Johnson
Reprint, 1996.
A History of the Witches of Renfrewshire. 1698. New ed.
Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1877.
Jordanova, Ludmilla. “Gender, Generation and Science:
William Hunter’s Obstetrical Atlas.” William Hunter
and the 18th-Century Medical World. Ed. William F.
Bynum and Roy S. Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1985. 385-412.
Kelly, Veronica, and Dorothea von Mucke. “Introduction:
Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century.” Body and
Text in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Veronica Kelly and
Dorothea von Mucke. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994.
1-20.
Lamb, Charles. “Witches, and Other Night-Fears.” 1823. Es-
says of Elia and Last Essays of Elia. New York: Dutton,
1978. 76-82.
Larner, Christina. Enemies of God: The Witch-hunts in Scot-
land. London: Chatto & Windus, 1981.
Leacroft, Richard. The Development of the English Playhouse.
Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. “Life of Joanna Baillie.” The
Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie, in One
Complete Volume. 2nd ed. London: Longman, 1851.
v-xx.
Logan, Peter Melville. Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural His-
tory of Hysteria in 19th-Century Prose. Berkeley: U of
California P, 1997.
Lynch, Deidre. “Overloaded Portraits: The Excess of Charac-
ter and Countenance.” Body and Text in the Eighteenth
Century. Ed. Veronica Kelly and Dorothea von Mucke.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994. 112-43.
Mesmer, Franz Anton. “Dissertation by F. A. Mesmer, Doc-
tor of Medicine, on His Discoveries.” 1799. Mesmerism:
A Translation of the Original Scientific and Medical Writ-
ings of F. A. Mesmer. Trans. and compiled by George
Bloch. Los Altos, CA: William Kaufmann, 1980. 89-
130.
75
 Micale, Mark S. Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpre-
BAILLIE
tations. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.
Mitchell, Juliet. Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Harmond-
sworth: Penguin, 1974.
Pascoe, Judith. Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and
Spectatorship. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997.
Porter, Roy S. “Medical Science and Human Science in the
Enlightenment.” Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-
Century Domains. Ed. Christopher Fox, Roy S. Porter,
and Robert Wokler. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.
53-87.
Purinton, Marjean D. “Bryon’s Disability and the Techno-
Gothic Grotesque in The Deformed Transformed.” Euro-
pean Romantic Review, forthcoming.
———. “Science Fiction and Techno-Gothic Drama: Roman-
tic Playwrights Joanna Baillie and Jane Scott.” Romanti-
cism on the Net 21 (Feb. 2001). http: www.sul.stanford
.edu/mirrors/romnet.
———. “Theatricalized Bodies and Spirits: Techno-Gothic as
Performance in Romantic Drama.” Gothic Studies,
forthcoming.
———. “Women’s Sovereignty on Trial: Joanna Baillie’s
Comedy The Tryal as Metatheatrics.” Women in British
Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790-
1840. Ed. Catherine Burroughs. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2000. 132-57.
Ranger, Paul. “Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast”: Gothic
Drama in the London Patent Theatres, 1750-1820.
London: Society for Theatre Research, 1991.
Rockem, Freddie. “Slapping Women: Ibsen’s Nora, Strind-
berg’s Julie, and Freud’s Dora.” Textual Bodies: Changing
Boundaries of Literary Representation. Ed. Lori Hope
Lefkovitz. Albany: SUNY P, 1997. 221-43.
Scott, Walter, Sir. The Journal of Sir Walter Scott. Ed. W.E.K.
Anderson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972.
———. Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, Addressed to J.
G. Lockhart, Esq. 1830. 2nd ed. London, 1831.
Stafford, Barbara Marie. Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in
Enlightenment Art and Medicine. Cambridge: Mas-
sachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1991.
Starhawk. “Witchcraft as Goddess Religion.” Women in Cul-
ture. Ed. Lucinda Joy Peach. Malden, MA: Blackwell,
1998. 394-400.
Todd, Dennis. Imaging Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in
Eighteenth-Century England. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1995.
Trotter, Thomas. A View of the Nervous Temperament; being a
Practical Enquiry into the Increasing Prevalence, Prevention,
and Treatment of those Diseases Commonly Called
Nervous, Bilious, Stomach and Liver Complaints; Indiges-
tion, Low Spirits, Gout, & c. London: Longman, 1807.
Veith, Ilza. Hysteria: The History of a Disease. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1965.
Warner, Mariana. No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and
Making Mock. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998,
1999.
Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1995.
76 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
Wilson, Lindsay. Women and Medicine in the French Enlight-
ment: The Debate over Maladies des Femmes. Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.
FURTHER READING
Biography
Carhart, Margaret Sprague. The Life and Work of Joanna
Baillie. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1923,
215 p.
Comprehensive, authoritative biography and overview of
Baillie’s works.
Criticism
Brigham, Linda. “Aristocratic Monstrosity and Sublime
Femininity in De Monfort.” SEL: Studies in English
Literature, 1500-1900 43, no. 3 (summer 2003): 701-18.
Examines Baillie’s theories regarding the emotions, as
stated in her “Introductory Discourse” to the first volume
of Plays on the Passions, and compares them to the
theories of Edmund Burke to illustrate how “they relate
to political and feminist topics in the 1790s and early
nineteenth century.”
Burroughs, Catherine B. “English Romantic Women Writers
and Theatre Theory: Joanna Baillie’s Prefaces to the
Plays on the Passions.” In Re-Visioning Romanticism: Brit-
ish Women Writers, 1776-1837, edited by Carol Shiner
Wilson and Joel Haefner, pp. 274-96. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.
Studies Baillie’s prefaces to her Plays on the Passions as
examples of “theatre theory” and “locates them within a
tradition of women writing about the stage.”
———. “‘Out of the Pale of Social Kindred Cast’: Conflicted
Performance Styles in Joanna Baillie’s De Monfort.” In
Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices,
edited by Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley, pp.
223-35. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New Eng-
land, 1995.
Argues that the “dramaturgical tension that results from”
De Monfort’s “conflicting acting modes” (“statuesque
stasis” vs. “emotive school”) indicates that Baillie was
ambivalent “about prescribing a particular style of
performance for characters navigating her fictionalized
social settings.”
Dowd, Maureen A. “‘By the Delicate Hand of a Female’:
Melodramatic Mania and Johanna Baillie’s Spectacular
Tragedies.” European Romantic Review 9, no. 4 (fall
1998): 469-500.
Compares Baillie’s dramatic works to those of Friedrich
von Schiller and maintains that “the gaps between
Baillie’s prefatory rhetoric and her dramatic productions
operate as a cultural performance that usefully il-
luminates the intersection of commercial concerns,
national interest, and gender issues in late eighteenth-
and early nineteenth-century British theater.”
Forbes, Aileen. “‘Sympathetic Curiosity’ in Joanna Baillie’s
Theater of the Passions.” European Romantic Review 14,
no. 1 (March 2003): 31-48.
Discusses Baillie’s theory of “sympathetic curiosity,” as
evidenced in her plays, and asserts that “Baillie innova-
 tively combines the two concepts [of ‘sympathy’ and
‘curiosity’] in a dramatic tension that aims to delineate
the human passions.”
Gamer, Michael. “National Supernaturalism: Joanna Baillie,
Germany, and the Gothic Drama.” Theatre Survey 38,
no. 2 (November 1997): 49-88.
Discusses the debate over Gothic drama’s legitimacy and
examines how Baillie produced engaging plays which
managed to avoid the stigma afforded other Gothic works.
Harness, William. “Celebrated Female Writers: Joanna
Baillie.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 16, no. 91
(August 1824): 162-78.
Highly laudatory overview of Baillie’s career.
Jeffrey, Francis. A review of A Series of Plays In Which It Is At-
tempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind,
Vol. II, by Joanna Baillie. The Edinburgh Review 11, no.
4 (July 1803): 269-86.
Mixed review of the second volume of Plays on the Pas-
sions.
———. A review of A Series of Plays: In Which It Is Attempted
to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind, Vol. III, by
Joanna Baillie. The Edinburgh Review 19, no. 38
(February 1812): 261-90.
Assesses the third volume of Plays on the Passions as
“decidedly inferior to any of her former volumes” but
declares that “at the same time . . . it contains indica-
tions of talent that ought not to be overlooked, and
specimens of excellence, which make it a duty to examine
into the causes of its general failure.”
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
Meyers, Victoria. “Joanna Baillie’s Theatre of Cruelty.” In
BAILLIE
Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist: Critical Essays,
compiled by Thomas C. Crochunis, pp. 87-107. New
York and London: Routledge, 2004.
Examines Baillie’s treatment of human psychology and
morality in Plays on the Passions, particularly in terms
of her presentation of violence and cruelty.
Purinton, Marjean D. “Joanna Baillie’s Count Basil and De
Monfort: The Unveiling of Gender Issues.” In Romantic
Ideology Unmasked: The Mentally Constructed Tyrannies
in Dramas of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Shel-
ley, and Joanna Baillie, pp. 125-62. Newark, Del.:
University of Delaware Press, 1994.
Places Baillie’s works within the context of works by other
women writers of her time and examines the overlap of
political and gender issues in Count Basil and De Mon-
fort.
Watkins, Daniel P. “Class, Gender, and Social Motion in
Joanna Baillie’s De Monfort.” Wordsworth Circle 23, no.
2 (spring 1992): 109-17.
Stresses the historical value of De Monfort’s depictions
of social conditions and class conflicts.
OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:
Additional coverage of Baillie’s life and career is contained
in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Dictio-
nary of Literary Biography, Vol. 93; Literature Resource Center;
Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 71, 151; and
Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2.
77
WILLIAM
BECKFORD
(1760 - 1844)
(Also wrote under the pseudonyms Lady Harnet Marlow
and Jacquetta Agneta Manana Jenks) English novelist
and travel writer.
B eckford is primarily remembered for his novel
Vathek (1787), which has been consistently
hailed as a seminal contribution to the genre of
oriental romance, and less consistently as part of
the Gothic tradition. The story of an evil caliph’s
journey to the underworld in pursuit of forbidden
knowledge, Vathek is noted for its captivating plot
and unique narrative style.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Beckford was born into one of the richest and
most prominent families in England. His father,
William Beckford, formerly lord mayor of London,
had accumulated great wealth from investments
in Jamaican sugar plantations and his mother,
Maria Hamilton, was of noble ancestry. As the
only child of a late marriage, Beckford was pam-
pered by both parents, but he received a rigorous
education in preparation for a political career and
could speak French fluently at age four. When he
was nine, “England’s wealthiest son,” as Lord By-
ron called Beckford, inherited his father’s estate.
Afterwards, he continued to follow a rigid program
of classical studies under the strict guidance of his
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
mother, amid a succession of tutors. Despite their
efforts, an interest in oriental literature, thought
to have been brought on by his reading of The
Arabian Nights, became Beckford’s passionate
obsession. In 1777, he left with a tutor for Geneva,
Switzerland, to complete his education. There
Beckford met a number of notable figures, includ-
ing Voltaire, and began his first literary work, an
autobiographical narrative entitled The Long Story
that was never completed and remained unknown
until a portion of it was published in 1930 as The
Vision.
Following his return from Switzerland in
1778, Beckford entered into a tumultuous period
of his life. While touring England in 1779, he
developed what he called a “strange wayward pas-
sion” for William Courtenay, the eleven-year-old
son of Lord Courtenay of Powderham Castle.
Beckford also became romantically involved with
Louisa Beckford, the unhappily married wife of
one of his cousins. Despite the emotional distress
he suffered as a result of these relationships, Beck-
ford published his first work in 1780, a burlesque
of then-popular sketches of painters’ lives entitled
Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters. Later
in 1780, the restless Beckford began a European
tour that his family hoped would help solve his
emotional problems and prepare him for public
life. Though it failed to alleviate his mental
anguish, his journey resulted in Dreams, Waking
Thoughts, and Incidents (1783), an epistolary travel
79
 book composed from notes kept during his trip. Switzerland, France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. In
BECKFORD
After this work had been printed, however, Beck- 1796, he returned permanently to England. Ostra-
ford suppressed its distribution and burned all but cized from society, he spent much of the remain-
a few copies; biographers have speculated that his der of his life collecting books, paintings, and rare
family thought the content of Dreams, Waking objects of art and building Fonthill Abbey, an
Thoughts, and Incidents might damage his political extravagant Gothic structure. Beckford grew
prospects or add to rumors circulating about his notorious as the creator of the increasingly popu-
friendship with Courtenay. lar Vathek, which had been reissued numerous
times since its publication, and as the eccentric
In 1781, Beckford hosted a sumptuous Christ-
owner of Fonthill, where he lived until financial
mas party that he later credited with directly
difficulties forced him to sell the estate in 1822
inspiring his exotic oriental novel, Vathek. For
and move to Landsdown Crescent, Bath. Beck-
three days, Courtenay, Louisa Beckford, and other
ford’s literary output during this period was scant.
guests wandered through Beckford’s country
In the late 1790s, he wrote two minor novels
home surrounded by music, dancers, and theatri-
burlesquing the sentimentalism of contemporary
cal lighting effects. Shortly after this fantastical
novelists, Modern Novel Writing; or, The Elegant En-
celebration, Beckford wrote the initial French-
thusiast (1796) and Azemia (1797). In 1834, he
language draft of Vathek in one sitting, though
published Italy: With Sketches of Spain and Portugal,
scholars believe that he revised and expanded the
a two-volume work that consists of extensive revi-
novel many times before its publication four years
sion of Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents as
later. In this work, the caliph Vathek travels to the
the first volume and an account of his journeys
underworld domain ruled by Eblis, a satanic
through Spain and Portugal as the second. His
figure. There, Vathek seeks forbidden wisdom,
final travel book, Recollections of an Excursion to the
only to face eternal damnation in the Palace of
Monasteries of Alcobaça Batalha, appeared in 1835.
Subterranean Fire. Beckford based many of his
After living his last years in relative seclusion,
characters upon historical figures and provided a
Beckford died at Landsdown in 1844.
wealth of oriental detail, including descriptions of
Eastern costumes, customs, and plant and animal
life. He intended to add to this story four episodic
tales narrated by sufferers in the Palace of Subter-
MAJOR WORKS
ranean Fire, and while composing them, he ar-
Apart from Vathek, Beckford’s works fall
ranged for the Reverend Samuel Henley, an orien-
loosely into two categories: travel sketches and
tal enthusiast and former professor, to translate
satirical writings. His travel sketches, including
the entire work into English and add footnotes
Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents, Italy: With
explaining the oriental allusions. Beckford’s
Sketches of Spain and Portugal, and Recollections of
completion of the episodes, however, was hin-
an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaça and
dered by misfortune. At his family’s insistence, he
Batalha, are generally commended for their bal-
married Lady Margaret Gordon in 1783, a match
anced prose and descriptive artistry. Of Beckford’s
they hoped would quell rumors concerning his
satiric writings, Biographical Memoirs of Extraordi-
homosexuality. In June 1784 the couple’s first
nary Painters is praised as a witty burlesque, while
child was stillborn. Later that same year Beckford
Modern Novel Writing and Azemia are usually
was publicly accused of sexual misconduct with
dismissed as minor works.
Courtenay, and the resulting scandal forced Beck-
ford and his wife to flee to Switzerland, where
Margaret Beckford died in May 1786 after giving
birth to their second daughter. Throughout these
CRITICAL RECEPTION
ordeals, Beckford instructed Henley to withhold
Though most of his writings met with favor-
his English translation of Vathek until the compan-
able receptions and have continued to be praised
ion episodes were finished. In a betrayal of trust,
by scholars, Beckford’s lasting critical acclaim rests
however, Henley released an anonymous English
upon Vathek. In discussing Vathek, critics have
translation of Vathek in June 1786. Beckford
focused on its style, autobiographical overtones,
subsequently published a French edition of Vathek
and historical significance. While acknowledging
in order to claim authorship, and the uncom-
Vathek‘s popular appeal, commentators have
pleted episodes remained unpublished until 1912.
consistently been troubled by what early reviewer
For the next ten years, Beckford spent the William Hazlitt (see Further Reading) termed its
majority of his time abroad, traveling throughout “mixed style.” Critics have noted a tonal shift

80 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
from the initially comic account of Vathek’s
journey to the tragic depiction of, in the words of
Jorge Luis Borges (see Further Reading), “the first
truly atrocious Hell in literature.” Reviewers have
ascribed this variance to authorial attributes rang-
ing from artistic coarseness, to moral ambivalence,
to a genius for irony. Beckford’s unusual life and
his treatment of aberrant sexual themes, puerile
innocence, and domineering mothers have also
led to a profusion of biographical interpretations
of Vathek, particularly during the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Later twentieth-century
commentators, however, generally avoided bio-
graphical critiques, emphasizing instead Beck-
ford’s anticipation of the orientalism of such
nineteenth-century poets as Lord Byron, Thomas
Moore, and Robert Southey. Critics generally note
that unlike the works of earlier English authors
who employed oriental elements to embellish
philosophical musings or to serve moralistic
purposes, Vathek exhibits a fascination with exoti-
cism for its own sake, with Beckford placing
greater emphasis than previous writers upon
producing an accurate depiction of the East. Com-
mentators also point out that in Vathek Beckford
combined polished Augustan prose with such
characteristically Romantic concerns as human
aspiration, loss of innocence, and the mysterious,
thus reflecting the incipient transition in English
literature from Neoclassicism to Romanticism. For
its historical significance, as well as its continuing
fascination for readers, Vathek is regarded as a
minor masterpiece. Furthermore, as critics such as
Frederick S. Frank have argued, the novel’s struc-
ture, themes, and symbolism place Vathek firmly
in the tradition of Gothic fiction.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters
(fictional memoirs) 1780
Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents (travel
sketches) 1783
*Vathek (novel) 1787
Modern Novel Writing; or, The Elegant Enthusiast,
and Interesting Emotions of Arabella Bloomville
[as Lady Harriet Marlow] (novel) 1796
Azemia [as Jacquetta Agenta Mariana Jenks] (novel)
1797
Italy: With Sketches of Spain and Portugal. 2 vols.
(travel sketches) 1834
Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Al-
cobaça and Batalha (travel sketches) 1835
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
†The Episodes of Vathek (novel fragment) 1912
BECKFORD
‡The Vision (novel fragment) 1930; published in
The Vision. Liber Veritatis
* The unauthorized translation of Vathek was published
as An Arabian Tale, 1786.
† This work consists of Beckford’s original French-
language episodes, dated 1783-86, and an English
translation of them.
‡ The Vision is part of Beckford’s unfinished narrative,
known as The Long Story, written in 1777.
PRIMARY SOURCES
WILLIAM BECKFORD (NOVEL
DATE 1786)
SOURCE: Beckford, William. “The History of the Caliph
Vathek.” In An Arabian Tale, from an Unpublished
Manuscript: With Notes Critical and Explanatory, pp.
1-10. London, 1786.
In the following excerpt from the unauthorized 1786
translation of Vathek, the title character is introduced
and the setting for the narrative is established.
Vathek, ninth Caliph of the race of the Abas-
sides, was the son of Motassem, and the grandson
of Haroun Al Raschid. From an early accession to
the throne, and the talents he possessed to adorn
it; his subjects were induced to expect, that his
reign would be long, and happy. His figure was
pleasing, and majestick; but when he was angry,
one of his eyes became so terrible, that no person
could bear to behold it; and the wretch upon
whom it was fixed, instantly fell backward; and,
sometimes, expired. For fear, however, of depopu-
lating his dominions, and making his palace
desolate; he, but rarely, gave way to his anger.
Being much addicted to women, and the
pleasures of the table; he sought, by his affability,
to procure agreeable companions; and he suc-
ceeded the better, as his generosity was un-
bounded; and his indulgences, unrestrained: for,
he was, by no means, scrupulous: nor did he
think, with the Caliph, Omar Ben Abdalaziz; that
it was necessary to make a hell of this world, to
injoy Paradise in the next.
He surpassed in magnificence all his predeces-
sors. The palace of Alkoremmi, which his father
Motassem had erected, on the hill of Pied Horses;
and which commanded the whole city of Sama-
rah; was, in his idea, far too scanty: he added,
therefore, five wings; or rather, other palaces:
which he destined for the particular gratification
of each of his senses.
81
 In the first of these, were tables continually
BECKFORD
covered, with the most exquisite dainties; which
were supplied, both by night and by day, accord-
ing to their constant consumption; whilst the
most delicious wines, and the choicest cordials,
flowed forth from a hundred fountains, that were
never exhausted. This Palace was called THE ETERNAL
OR UNSATIATING BANQUET.
The second, was stiled THE TEMPLE OF MELODY, OR
THE NECTAR OF THE SOUL. It was inhabited by the most
skilful musicians, and admired poets of the time;
who not only displayed their talents within, but,
dispersing in bands without, caused every sur-
rounding scene to reverberate their songs; which
were continually varied in the most delightful suc-
cession.
The palace named THE DELIGHT OF THE EYES, OR THE
SUPPORT OF MEMORY; was one entire enchantment.
Rarities collected from every corner of the earth,
were there found in such profusion, as to dazzle
and confound, but for the order in which they
were arranged. One gallery exhibited the pictures
of the celebrated Mani; and statues, that seemed
to be alive. Here, a well-managed perspective at-
tracted the fight; there, the magick of opticks
agreeably deceived it: whilst the Naturalist, on his
part, exhibited, in their several classes, the various
gifts that Heaven had bestowed on our globe. In a
word, Vathek omitted nothing, in this palace, that
might gratify the curiosity of those who resorted
to it; although he was not able to satisfy his own;
for, he was, of all men, the most curious.
THE PALACE OF PERFUMES, which was termed like-
wise, THE INCENTIVE TO PLEASURE, consisted of various
halls, where the different perfumes which the
earth produces, were kept perpetually burning in
censers of gold. Flambeaus and aromatick lamps
were here lighted, in open day. But, the too power-
ful effects of this agreeable delirium might be
avoided, by descending into an immense garden;
where an assemblage of every fragrant flower dif-
fused through the air the purest odours.
The fifth palace, denominated THE RETREAT OF
JOY, OR THE DANGEROUS; was frequented by troops of
young females, beautiful as the Houris, and not
less seducing; who never failed to receive, with
caresses, all whom the Caliph allowed to approach
them: for, he was by no means disposed to be jeal-
ous, as his own women were secluded, within the
palace he inhabited, himself.
Notwithstanding the sensuality in which
Vathek indulged, he experienced no abatement in
the love of his people; who thought, that a
sovereign immersed in pleasure was not less toler-
82 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
able to his subjects, than one that employed
himself in creating them foes. But, the unquiet
and impetuous disposition of the Caliph, would
not allow him to rest there. He had studied so
much for his amusement, in the life-time of his
father, as to acquire a great deal of knowledge;
though not a sufficiency to satisfy himself: for, he
wished to know every thing; even, sciences that
did not exist. He was fond of engaging in disputes
with the learned, but liked them not to push their
opposition with warmth. He stopped the mouths
of those, with presents, whose mouths could be
stopped; whilst others, whom his liberality was
unable to subdue, he sent to prison, to cool their
blood: a remedy that often succeeded.
Vathek discovered also a predilection for
theological controversy; but, it was not with the
orthodox that he usually held. By this means he
induced the zealots to oppose him, and then
persecuted them in return; for, he resolved, at any
rate, to have reason on his side.
The great prophet Mahomet, whose Vicars the
Caliphs are, beheld with indignation, from his
abode in the seventh heaven, the irreligious
conduct of such a vicegerent. “Let us leave him to
himself,” said he to the Genii, who are always
ready to receive his commands: “let us see to what
lengths his folly and impiety will carry him: if he
run into excess, we shall know how to chastise
him. Assist him, therefore, to complete the tower,
which, in imitation of Nimrod, he hath begun;
not, like that great warriour, to escape being
drowned; but from the insolent curiosity of
penetrating the secrets of Heaven:—he will not
divine the fate that awaits him.”
The Genii obeyed; and when the workmen
had raised their structure a cubit, in the day-time;
two cubits more were added, in the night. The
expedition with which the fabrick arose, was not
a little flattering to the vanity of Vathek. He
fancied, that even insensible matter shewed a
forwardness to subserve his designs; not consider-
ing that the successes of the foolish and wicked
form the first rod of their chastisement.
His pride arrived at its height, when having
ascended, for the first time, the eleven thousand
stairs of his tower, he cast his eyes below, and
beheld men not larger than pismires; mountains,
than shells; and cities, than bee-hives. The idea,
which such an elevation inspired, of his own
grandeur, completely bewildered him; he was
almost ready, to adore himself; till, lifting his eyes
upward, he saw the stars, as high above him, as
they appeared, when he stood on the surface of
the earth. He consoled himself, however, for this
transient perception of his littleness, with the
thought of being great in the eyes of others; and
flattered himself, that the light of his mind would
extend, beyond the reach of his sight; and transfer
to the stars the decrees of his destiny.
With this view, the inquisitive Prince passed
most of his nights on the summit of his tower: till
he became an adept in the mysteries of astrology;
and imagined that the planets had disclosed to
him the most marvellous adventures, which were
to be accomplished by an extraordinary person-
age, from a country altogether unknown.
Prompted by motives of curiosity, he had always
been courteous to strangers; but, from this instant,
he redoubled his attention; and ordered it to be
announced by sound of trumpet, through all the
streets of Samarah, that no one of his subjects, on
peril of his displeasure, should either lodge or
detain a traveller; but, forthwith, bring him to the
palace.
Not long after this proclamation, there arrived
in his metropolis, a man so hideous, that the very
guards who arrested him, were forced to shut their
eyes, as they led him along. The Caliph himself
appeared startled at so horrible a visage; but, joy
succeeded to this emotion of terror, when the
stranger displayed to his view, such rarities as he
had never before seen; and of which he had no
conception.
In reality, nothing was ever so extraordinary
as the merchandize this stranger produced. Most
of his curiosities, which were not less admirable
for their workmanship, than splendor, had be-
sides, their several virtues; described on a parch-
ment fastened to each. There were slippers, which
enabled the feet to walk; knives that cut without
the motion of a hand; sabres, which dealt the
blow, at the person they were wished to strike:
and the whole, enriched with gems, that were,
hitherto, unknown.
The sabres, especially, whose blades emitted a
dazzling radiance; fixed more than all, the Caliph’s
attention; who promised himself to decypher, at
his leisure, the uncouth characters engraven on
their sides. Without, therefore, demanding their
price; he ordered all the coined gold to be brought
from his treasury, and commanded the merchant
to take what he pleased. The stranger complied,
with modesty and silence.
Vathek, imagining that the merchant’s tacitur-
nity was occasioned by the awe which his pres-
ence inspired; incouraged him to advance, and
asked him, with an air of condescension: “Who
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
he was? whence he came? and where he obtained
BECKFORD
such beautiful commodities?” The man, or rather,
monster, instead of making a reply, thrice rubbed
his forehead, which, as well as his body, was
blacker than ebony; four times clapped his
paunch, the projection of which was enormous;
opened wide his huge eyes, which glowed like
firebrands; began to laugh with a hideous noise,
and discovered his long, amber-coloured teeth,
bestreaked with green.
WILLIAM BECKFORD (LETTER
DATE 9 DECEMBER 1838)
SOURCE: Beckford, William. “Extract from a note ap-
pended to a letter on December 9, 1838.” In The Life of
William Beckford, edited by John Walter Oliver, pp. 89-
91. London: Oxford University Press, 1932.
In the following excerpt from a note appended to a letter
dated December 9, 1838, Beckford recounts the circum-
stances that inspired him to write Vathek.
Immured we were ‘au pied de la lettre’ for
three days following—doors and windows so
strictly closed that neither common day light nor
common place visitors could get in or even peep
in—care worn visages were ordered to keep
aloof—no sunk-in mouths or furroughed fore-
heads were permitted to meet our eye. Our société
was extremely youthful and lovely to look upon—
for not only Louisa in all her gracefulness, but her
intimate friend—the Sophia often mentioned in
some of these letters—and perhaps the most
beautiful woman in England, threw over it a
fascinating charm. Throughout the arched Halls
and vast apartments we ranged in, prevailed a soft
and tempered radiance—distributed with much
skill under the direction of Loutherbourg himself
a mystagogue. The great mansion at Fonthill
which I demolished to rear up a still more extraor-
dinary edifice was admirably calculated for the
celebration of the mysteries. The solid Egyptian
Hall looked as if hewn out of a living rock—the
line of apartments and apparently endless pas-
sages extending from it on either side were all
vaulted—an interminable stair case, which when
you looked down it—appeared as deep as the well
in the pyramid—and when you looked up—was
lost in vapour, led to suites of stately apartments
gleaming with marble pavements—as polished as
glass—and gawdy ceilings—painted by Casali with
all the profligacy of pencil—for which in that evil
day for the arts he was so admired. From these
princely rooms—a broad flight of richly carpetted
comfortable steps led to another world of deco-
rated chambers and a gallery designed by Soane,—
still above which—approached by winding stairs—
83

BECKFORD
FROM THE AUTHOR
AN EXCERPT FROM “NYMPH OF THE
FOUNTAIN,” WRITTEN C. 1791
Meanwhile the Count’s servants were exert-
ing their utmost efforts to revive the extin-
guished fire. They thought they could hear
the sound of human voices within, whence
they concluded that the Countess was still
alive. But all their stirring and blowing were
ineffectual. The wood would no more take
fire than if they had put on a charge of snow-
balls. Not long afterwards Count Conrad
rode up full speed, and eagerly inquired how
it fared with his lady. The servants informed
him that they had heated the room right hot,
but that the fire went suddenly out, and they
supposed that the Countess was yet alive.
This intelligence rejoiced his heart. He dis-
mounted, knocked at the door, and called
out through the keyhole, ‘Art thou alive,
Matilda?’ And the Countess, hearing her
husband’s voice, replied, ‘Yes, my dear lord, I
am alive, and my children are also alive.’
Overjoyed at this answer, the impatient
Count bade his servants break open the door,
the key not being at hand, he rushing into
the bathing-room, fell down at the feet of his
injured lady, bedewed her unpolluted hands
with the tears of repentance, led her and the
charming pledges of her innocence and love
out of the dreary place of execution to her
own apartment, and heard from her own
mouth the true account of these transactions.
Enraged at the foul calumny and the shame-
ful sacrifice of his infants, he issued orders to
apprehend and shut up the treacherous nurse
in the bath—The fire now burned kindly,—
the chimney roared,—the flames played aloft
in the air,—and soon stewed out the diaboli-
cal woman’s black soul.
SOURCE: Beckford, William. “Nymph of the
Fountain.” In Gothic Tales of Terror, Volume
One: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain,
edited by Peter Haining. 1972. Reprint edition,
pp. 138-75. Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books
Inc., 1973.
you entered another gallery,—filled with curious
works of art and precious cabinets. Through all
these suites—through all these galleries—did we
84
roam and wander—too often hand in hand—
strains of music swelling forth at intervals—
sometimes the organ—sometimes concerted
pieces—in which three of the greatest singers then
in Europe—Pacchierotti, Tenducci, and Rauzzini—
for a wonder of wonders—most amicably joined.
Sometimes a chaunt was heard—issuing, no one
could devine from whence—innocent affecting
sounds—that stole into the heart with a bewitch-
ing languour and melted the most beloved the
most susceptible of my fair companions into tears.
Delightful indeed were these romantic wander-
ings—delightful the straying about this little
interior world of exclusive happiness surrounded
by lovely beings, in all the freshness of their early
bloom, so fitted to enjoy it. Here, nothing was
dull or vapid—here, nothing ressembled in the
least the common forms and usages, the ‘train-
train’ and routine of fashionable existence—all
was essence—the slightest approach to sameness
was here untolerated—monotony of every kind
was banished. Even the uniform splendour of
gilded roofs—was partially obscured by the va-
pour of wood aloes ascending in wreaths from cas-
solettes placed low on the silken carpets in porce-
lain salvers of the richest japan. The delirium of
delight into which our young and fervid bosoms
were cast by such a combination of seductive
influences may be conceived but too easily. Even
at this long, sad distance from these days and
nights of exquisite refinements, chilled by age,
still more by the coarse unpoetic tenor of the
present disenchanting period—I still feel warmed
and irradiated by the recollections of that strange,
necromantic light which Loutherbourg had
thrown over what absolutely appeared a realm of
Fairy, or rather, perhaps, a Demon Temple deep
beneath the earth set apart for tremendous myster-
ies—and yet how soft, how genial was this quiet
light. Whilst the wretched world without lay dark,
and bleak, and howling, whilst the storm was rag-
ing against our massive walls and the snow drift-
ing in clouds, the very air of summer seemed play-
ing around us—the choir of low-toned melodious
voices continued to sooth our ear, and that every
sense might in turn receive its blandishment
tables covered with delicious viands and fragrant
flowers—glided forth, by the aid of mechanism at
stated intervals, from the richly draped, and
amply curtained recesses of the enchanted pre-
cincts. The glowing haze investing every object,
the mystic look, the vastness, the intricacy of this
vaulted labyrinth occasioned so bewildering an ef-
fect that it became impossible for any one to
define—at the moment—where he stood, where
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
he had been, or to whither he was wandering—
such was the confusion—the perplexity so many
illuminated storys of infinitely varied apartments
gave rise to. It was, in short, the realization of
romance in its most extravagant intensity. No
wonder such scenery inspired the description of
the Halls of Eblis. I composed Vathek immediately
upon my return to town thoroughly embued with
all that passed at Fonthill during this voluptuous
festival.
It will be seen that the Khalifeh’s adventures
were written down, not at the age of seventeen as
Lord Byron has chosen to fancy, but at the age of
twenty and two.
TITLE COMMENTARY
Vathek
THE ENGLISH REVIEW (REVIEW
DATE SEPTEMBER 1786)
SOURCE: A review of The History of Caliph Vathek: An
Arabian Tale, by William Beckford. The English Review 8
(September 1786): 180-84.
In the following excerpt, the critic offers a negative as-
sessment of Vathek, faulting principally its morality.
We are told in the preface to [Vathek], “that it
is translated from a manuscript, which, with some
others of a similar kind, was collected in the East
by a man of letters, and communicated to the edi-
tor above three years ago.” In an age that has
abounded so much with literary impostures, we
confess that we cannot see the propriety of such a
palpable fiction. The general strain of the work,
and the many allusions to modern authors,
indicate the author to be an European.
As an imitation of Arabian tales, this work pos-
sesses no in considerable merit. The characters are
strongly marked, though carried beyond nature;
the incidents are sufficiently wild and improbable;
the magic is solemn and awful, though sometimes
horrid; anachronisms and inconsistencies fre-
quently appear; and the catastrophe is bold and
shocking. The chief defect of the work arises from
the moral, which is the foundation of the tale,
and tinctures the whole. Indolence and childish-
ness are represented as the source of happiness;
while ambition and the desire of knowledge, so
laudable and meritorious when properly directed,
are painted in odious colours, and punished as
crimes. The most formidable foes of princes,
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
especially oriental princes, are indolence and the
BECKFORD
love of pleasure; and those passions that put the
powers of the soul in motion, and lead to brilliant
actions, though sometimes misapplied, are always
respectable. . . .
The moral which is here conveyed, that igno-
rance, childishness, and the want of ambition, are
the sources of human happiness, though agree-
able to the strain of eastern fiction, is inconsistent
with true philosophy, and with the nature of man.
The punishments of vice, and the pains of grati-
fied curiosity, ought never to be confounded.
Although the tree of knowledge was once forbid-
den, in the present condition of humanity it is
the tree of life.
The notes which are subjoined to this history
contain much oriental learning, and merit the at-
tention of the curious reader.
E. F. BLEILER (ESSAY DATE 1966)
SOURCE: Bleiler, E. F. “William Beckford and Vathek.”
In Three Gothic Novels: The Castle of Otranto, Vathek,
The Vampyre, edited by E. F. Bleiler, pp. xix-xxx. New
York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1966.
In the following excerpt, Bleiler provides details from
Beckford’s life and on the composition and publication of
Vathek.
In October 1817, Samuel Rogers the poet hap-
pened to be not too far from Salisbury, when he
received an invitation to visit Fonthill Abbey, the
home of the eccentric millionaire and author Wil-
liam Beckford. Fonthill Abbey was surely the most
remarkable building in England at the time, and a
contemporary letter by Lady Bessborough de-
scribes Rogers’s impressions:
He was received [at the thirty-eight-foot-high
doors, which were opened] by a dwarf, who, like a
crowd of servants thro’ whom he passed, was
covered with gold and embroidery. Mr. Beckford
received him very courteously, and led him thro’
numberless apartments all fitted up most splen-
didly, one with Minerals, including precious
stones; another the finest pictures; another Italian
bronzes, china, etc. etc., till they came to a Gal-
lery that surpass’d all the rest from the richness
and variety of its ornaments. It seem’d clos’d by a
crimson drapery held by a bronze statue, but on
Mr. B.’s stamping and saying, ‘Open!’ the Statue
flew back, and the Gallery was seen, extending
350 feet long. At the end an open Arch with a
massive balustrade opened to a vast Octagon Hall,
from which a window shew’d a fine view of the
Park. On approaching this it proved to be the
entrance of the famous tower—higher than Salis-
bury Cathedral [over 285 feet]; this is not finish’d,
but great part is done. The doors, of which there
are many, are violet velvet covered over with
85

BECKFORD
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AN EARLY REVIEW OF VATHEK
The editor in the Preface to [Vathek] informs
us, that it is translated from an unpublished
Arabian Manuscript, which was put into his
hands about three years ago, with some
more of the same kind, by a gentleman who
had collected them during his travels in the
East. How far the above assertion is founded
in truth, it may not be easy, nor is it material,
to determine. If it be not a translation, the
author has, at least, shewn himself, generally
speaking, well acquainted with the customs
of the East, and has introduced a sufficient
quantity of the marvellous, an absolutely
necessary ingredient to enable the work to
pass muster as an Arabian Tale. It however
differs from the generality of them, in this,
that it inculcates a moral of the greatest
importance, viz. That the pursuit of unlawful
pleasures, and such as are repugnant to the
principles of religion and morality, unavoid-
ably leads us to misfortunes in this life, and
misery in the next; and that the enjoyment
resulting from them is at best but precarious
and nugatory. . . .
Such is the scope of this tale, which,
whether it be the produce of Arabia, or of
the fertile banks of the Seine, (which a variety
of circumstances induces us to believe it is)
from the eagerness of mankind to admire
whatever o’ersteps the limits of nature, and
hurries us into the regions of fancy, bids fair
to acquire that popularity which the moral it
inculcates well deserves.
SOURCE: A review of The History of Caliph Vathek:
An Arabian Tale, by William Beckford. European
Magazine and London Review 10 (August 1786):
102-04.
purple and gold embroidery. They pass’d from
hence to a Chapel, where on the alter were heaped
Golden Candlesticks, Vases, and Chalices studded
over with jewels; and from there into a great mu-
sick room, where Mr. Beckford begg’d Mr. Rogers
to rest till refreshments were ready, and began
playing with such unearthly power. . . . They went
on to what is called the refectory, a large room
built on the model of Henry 7 Chapel, only the
86
ornaments gilt, where a Verdantique table was
loaded with gilt plate fill’d with every luxury
invention could collect. They next went into the
Park with a numerous Cortege, and Horses and
Servants, etc., which he described as equally
wonderful, from the beauty of the trees and
shrubs, and manner of arranging them, thro’ a
ride of five miles . . . and came to a beautiful Ro-
mantick lake, transparent as liquid Chrysolite (this
is Mr. Rogers’s, not my expression), covered with
wildfowl. . . . [On the next day Mr. Rogers] was
shewn thro’ another suite of apartments fill’d with
fine medals, gems, enamell’d miniatures, draw-
ings, old and modern, curios, prints and Manu-
scripts, and last a fine and well-furnish’d library,
all the books richly bound and the best editions,
etc. etc. An Old Abbe, the Librarian, and Mr.
Smith, the water-colour painter, who were there,
told him there were 60 fires always kept burning,
except in the hottest weather. Near every chimney
in the sitting rooms there were large Gilt fillagree
baskets fill’d with perfum’d coals that produc’d
the brightest flame.
The creator and ruler of this almost unbeliev-
able Gothic empire of some six thousand land-
scaped acres, a huge cathedral-like building with
the highest tower in England, to say nothing of a
fifteen-mile-long outer wall, twelve feet high and
topped with spikes, was of course William Beck-
ford (1760-1844), the author of Vathek.
Beckford was the only legitimate son of Wil-
liam Beckford the Elder, an important political
and mercantile figure of the day. Pitt’s lieutenant
and John Wilkes’s friend, the elder Beckford had
been Lord Mayor of London twice. Licentious,
colorful, shrewd yet reckless, he was the firebrand
of the Whig opposition. He was also probably the
richest man in England, with a family cloth busi-
ness, extensive property holdings in England, and
a fortune in government bonds. A West Indian by
birth, he was also one of the largest land and slave
owners in Jamaica. As later events proved during
the lifetime of his son, this wealth was not all
honestly gained. He died in 1770, when his son
was ten years old.
The Lord Mayor obviously planned to mould
his son into an empire builder. Young William
was brought up bilingually on English and French,
started Latin at six, and Greek and philosophy at
ten. Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, law, physics, and
other sciences were added at seventeen. His tutors
were selected from the best practitioners in vari-
ous fields. Foremost among them was young Wolf-
gang Mozart, who gave him piano lessons while
in England. In his old age Beckford claimed to
have given the tune “Non più andrai” to Mozart
in their childhood; he also claimed that Mozart
had written him telling him that he planned to
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
use it in The Marriage of Figaro. Unfortunately,
since no trace of this correspondence has survived,
the whole story is very suspect.
The senior Beckford’s plans did not work out.
It was true that young William was precociously
intelligent, very gifted verbally, musically and
artistically, and a handsome and appealing child.
He certainly had many qualities which might
have carried out his father’s hopes. But he was
also emotionally unbalanced, passionate, haughty,
vindictive, and a thoroughgoing hedonist. He did
not care about manipulating men in his father’s
way; he simply bought them, as needed, with his
enormous fortune. Politics meant little to him,
and in later life he became an M.P. mostly to
protect his own interests at Fonthill. Worst of all,
from his father’s point of view, he was either not
interested in business or had no aptitude at all for
it; money to him was simply something that
flowed in and could be used to buy pleasures.
Another facet of his personality that emerged
when he was very young was an escapism focused
on the Near East. He devoured The Arabian Nights
and its imitations, and gathered together every-
thing that he could about the Moslem world. All
through his later life, no matter where he trav-
elled, no matter what he was doing, the magic
world of medieval Islam encompassed him. While
this interest may have been fostered by his Orien-
talist art tutor, Alexander Cozens, perhaps a deeper
reason lay within his own personality; Beckford
often referred to himself as a Caliph, and where
better than in the whimsical, irresponsible world
of the fictional Harun al-Rashid could he find his
dreams made real?
Beckford’s early life was scandalous, even by
eighteenth-century standards. His early maturity
followed a pattern: he could remain in England
for only short periods of time, for scandal soon
would mount so high that his family would be
forced to ship “the fool of Fonthill” to the Conti-
nent until things could cool off. During this
period he took his cousin’s wife as a mistress. This
caused a family schism, but the situation was
made worse when it was discovered that this was
mostly a tactic to establish a homosexual relation-
ship with young “Kitty” Courtenay. On the Conti-
nent, he travelled with such magnificence
(including musicians and artists) that his entou-
rage was at times taken for the Austrian Emperor’s.
Such ostentation he could well afford, for during
the 1780’s he had a fortune of about a million
pounds and a yearly income of one hundred and
fifty thousand pounds, both of which figures
should be multiplied by twelve, in most areas, to
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
indicate their present purchasing power. Attracted
BECKFORD
by the wealth, the worst adventurers from the
stews of Venice became his intimates, and the
shadiest circles of Paris and Naples knew him well.
Around the end of 1781 Beckford became
acquainted with Samuel Henley, who was to be
his collaborator on Vathek. Henley, who was cur-
rently tutoring cousins of Beckford’s at Harrow,
had been professor of moral philosophy at Wil-
liam and Mary in Virginia, but as a Tory had
returned to England at the Revolution. Although
his personal life was not the most reputable, he
was in orders, was a very competent scholar, and
had some pretensions to being an Orientalist.
Beckford first employed him to edit Dreams, Wak-
ing Thoughts and Incidents, which was based on
Beckford’s travels in Spain and Portugal. The book
was prepared for the press, was printed, and ready
to be distributed in 1783 when Beckford’s family
forced the book to be suppressed. It is not known
why the family took such violent measures, since
the book is harmless enough, but it has been sug-
gested that it was too frivolous for a future ruler of
empire. Just what Henley contributed is also not
exactly known.
Some time early in 1782 Beckford began to
work on his Arabian tale, Vathek. In his old age,
he claimed to have written it in three days and
two nights, but references in his letters indicate
that the book took considerably longer, perhaps
three or four months. On April 25th he referred to
it as “going on prodigiously,” and by the end of
May it was finished.
Beckford wrote his novel in French, and then
decided to translate it. He was dissatisfied with his
own translation, however, considering it too Gal-
lic. He then recruited Henley to help him. For the
next couple of years, while Beckford flitted back
and forth between England and the Continent,
the two men worked on it desultorily.
In 1783 the scandal with “Kitty” Courtenay
was on the point of breaking disastrously. Beck-
ford’s family seems to have feared a criminal
prosecution, and persuaded him to marry and
beget a couple of children. In this year he married
Lady Margaret Gordon, by whom he had two
children before her death in May 1786. In 1784
he returned to Paris, where in addition to moving
in high social circles he became involved in the
shabby occultism that surrounded the court. In
the same year, back in England, he became a
Member of Parliament, was proposed for a baron-
age, but was rejected, presumably because of his
personal life.
87
 By the spring of 1785 Vathek was basically
BECKFORD
finished, except for notes which Henley was to
provide, and four nouvelles (the Episodes) which
Beckford planned to insert in the framework of
the story. These were still incomplete. In June
1785 Beckford left for Switzerland, leaving both
the French and English manuscripts of Vathek
with Henley, who wanted to continue work on
them. In February 1786 Beckford may have begun
to suspect that Henley was moving too fast, for he
baldly ordered him not to publish: “The Publica-
tion of Vathec must be suspended at least another
year. I would not have him on any account
precede the French edition . . . the Episodes to
Vathec are nearly finished, and the whole thing
will be completed in eleven to twelve months.”
In the first week of June 1786, however, The
History of the Caliph Vathek, An Arabian Tale
from an Unpublished Manuscript, with Notes
Critical and Explanatory appeared on the Lon-
don bookstalls. Henley had broken faith. Beckford
did not learn of publication for several months,
but was understandably furious at Henley’s breach
of confidence. He raged at Henley, who replied
disingenuously that he thought Beckford wanted
the book published. He also referred adroitly to
the scandal that had caused Beckford’s marriage,
and hinted that his association with Beckford was
really an attestation of faith in him.
Henley unquestionably acted badly, but it is
difficult to understand why he risked alienating a
wealthy and powerful patron. Greed for money
may have motivated him, or perhaps (since it is
known that he felt proprietary toward the English
Vathek) he feared that Vathek would follow the
way of Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents
and never see publication. Needless to say, his ac-
tions led to a breach with Beckford, who never
forgave him. Henley spent the rest of his life in
poverty, making a poor living at teaching, hack
writing, and editing. Beckford even had the
satisfaction of rejecting an appeal for financial
help. Henley died in 1815.
The further history of Vathek is confused,
since soon after Henley’s English translation ap-
peared, two French language editions were pub-
lished, one at Lausanne, the other at Paris. It used
to be believed that Beckford had rushed the Lau-
sanne edition into print from his original manu-
script, and then, recognizing that it needed
improvement, had corrected his text and reissued
it at Paris. Now, however, the situation is believed
to have been more complex. According to the
modern reconstruction of events, Beckford had
no copy of his French manuscript, which may
88 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
have been lost in the mails or retained by Henley.
Beckford thereupon obtained a copy of the English
book and hired Jean-David Levade, a hack transla-
tor, to turn it back into French. This version of
Vathek was published at Lausanne; Beckford ap-
parently did not see it until it was printed. When
he saw it, he recognized that it was unworthy of
him. He invoked the help of French literary
friends, and set about retranslating it himself. This
translation was then published at Paris. In 1815
Beckford prepared a third, revised French edition,
which also appeared in Paris.
The text of Vathek, too, has presented prob-
lems. Four stories, told by denizens of Hell whom
Vathek met in the halls of Iblis, were to have been
inserted in the framework. Beckford spoke of
working on them, but after the appearance of
Henley’s translation, he seems to have put them
aside. They remained a legend during Beckford’s
lifetime, and as the novel rose in critical estima-
tion, many persons asked to see them, including
Lord Byron. But Beckford would not show them
to anyone, and after a time it came to be believed
that they had never existed at all.
At the turn of the present century, however,
three French manuscripts were found in a docu-
ment chest in the possession of one of Beckford’s
collateral descendants, the Duke of Hamilton.
These manuscripts turned out to be the two long
stories, “The Story of Prince Alasi and the
Princess Firouzkah” and “The Story of Prince
Barkiarokh,” as well as a fragment entitled “The
Story of the Princess Zulkaïs and the Prince Ka-
lilah.” These three stories, which are in the same
vein as Vathek, were published in French and in
Sir Frank Marzials’s English translation from 1909
to 1912.
. . . . .
III
Beckford’s Vathek is almost universally recog-
nized as a minor work of genius and as the best
Oriental tale in English, but paradoxically there is
strong doubt whether Vathek really should be
placed in the stream of English literature. It was
written in French, and all its major predecessors
and sources were French. In English literature it
stands isolated; it had no real forerunners and no
worthy successors.1
The development of the Oriental tale in the
eighteenth century was overwhelmingly a French
phenomenon. Its manifestations in other lan-
guages, such as in the work of Gozzi and Wieland,
are obviously derivative and of secondary impor-
tance. The genre began with Galland’s French
translation of The Thousand and One Nights (1704-
1712), which was received with delight and
enthusiasm. There had been earlier Oriental mate-
rial in Italian and French, it is true, but none of
this had the overwhelming power that The Thou-
sand and One Nights demonstrated. These stories
appealed strongly to the Rococo mind, what with
the wide range of opportunities they offered:
delicacies of style, elaboracies of construction,
adventure, eroticism, moralism, sensibility, fan-
tasy, philosophy and irony.
Many great authors contributed to the devel-
opment of the Oriental tale in France. There were
Voltaire’s contes philosophiques (Zadig, La Princesse
de Babylone, etc.), Montesquieu’s satire on French
institutions (Lettres persanes), and the humorous
half-parodies of Caylus (Contes orientales) and
Count Anthony Hamilton (Les quatre Facardins,
etc.). There were also many collections of less
distinguished stories imitating The Arabian Nights,
but which were simply more or less successful
thrillers. T. S. Gueullette, for example, wrote col-
lections of Chinese tales, Moghul tales, Tartarian
tales, and even Peruvian tales, all of which pro-
vided dreary imitations of Galland’s spirited
translation. At one time, during the last part of
the eighteenth century, a compilation of such
“Arabian” material was published; entitled Cabinet
des fées, it runs to several hundred volumes.
In English literature the Oriental tale is far less
important. It remained a half-subliminal form,
sometimes used as a vehicle for criticism; some-
times as an embodiment for a moral sentiment or
an allegory; sometimes as a frame for an essay, as
with Addison; and sometimes even as a story for
its own sake. Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World and
Johnson’s Rasselas are the only members of the
form that survive at all (except Vathek), and there
seems little else that deserves to live, with the pos-
sible exception of certain of Dr. Hawkesworth’s
stories. Most Oriental material is poverty-stricken
in both idea and execution.
Beckford’s contribution lies in the imagina-
tion that he brought to a basically dull genre. He
was successful in regaining the sense of wonder
that permeated the original Islamic stories. His
was a recreation of the Gothicism of Islam, a
cultural milieu as medieval as the European Gothi-
cism of Walpole and his contemporaries. Beckford
created afresh the Magic culture in its most
delightful as well as its most horrific form.
Vathek is a skilfully plotted, amusing story,
pervaded with a strong feeling for irony and a
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
sense of the ludicrous that emerges from even the
BECKFORD
sinister activities of the mad caliph and his
frenzied companions. The story is original with
Beckford, for no Islamic sources have ever been
found, although there does seem to have been a
Caliph Watik. What parallels exist between Vathek
and other works of literature are mostly of French
origin. Yet part of his story he found very close at
hand. Carathis, as his contemporaries recognized,
is the image of his mother; Nouronihar is prob-
ably based on his mistress and cousin, Mrs. Peter
Beckford, who shared impiety, lust and stupidity
with Nouronihar; and Vathek is obviously and
admittedly Beckford himself in his headlong quest
for new sensation, new beauty, and peace. A
forewarning of Vathek is to be found in one of
the dreams reported in Beckford’s Dreams, Wak-
ing Thoughts and Incidents: “I hurried to bed,
and was soon lulled asleep by the storm. A dream
bore me off to Persepolis; and led me thro’ vast
subterraneous treasures to a hall, where Solomon,
methought, was holding forth on their vanity.”
Equally, the domains of Vathek came to be repre-
sented in Fonthill, and just as Walpole’s Castle of
Otranto is the embodiment of a building, Vathek
is a man, a building, and a mode of thought all
remarkably hypostatized as a novel.
Note
1. M. G. Lewis, who shared with Beckford the character-
istics of great wealth, West Indian possessions, moral
turpitude, and a taste for the marvelous, and the
young George Meredith are the only authors who
seem to have produced even entertaining work in this
tradition immediately after Beckford. The Oriental
ethnographic novel of Thomas Hope, James Morier
and Meadows Taylor was a different phenomenon,
with roots in both the picaresque novel and Sir Walter
Scott.
FREDERICK S. FRANK (ESSAY DATE
1990)
SOURCE: Frank, Frederick S. “The Gothic Vathek: The
Problem of Genre Resolved.” In Vathek and the Escape
from Time: Bicentenary Revaluations, edited by Kenneth
W. Graham, pp. 152-72. New York: AMS, 1990.
In the following essay, Frank argues for the placement of
Vathek within the Gothic tradition.
This short essay investigates the problem of
genre or genres in Beckford’s Vathek.1 The paper
develops an argument for a Gothic Vathek, a work
that is structurally, thematically, and symbolically
in harmony with the central motifs of an emer-
gent Gothic tradition. The critical argument is
built upon four propositions about the generic
characteristics of Beckford’s orientalized Gothic
89
 novel, those features of form and theme which
BECKFORD
Vathek shares in common with other Gothic
examples taken from the period. The four Gothic
aspects that I want to examine are: first, the pat-
tern of the demonic quest or perverse pilgrimage,
a Gothic version of the long and dark voyage of
the hero; second, the physical and psychological
nature of the protagonist, since I want to argue
that Vathek himself is an early manifestation of
the heroic villainy so characteristic of the Gothic
novel’s tormented tormentor, those towering and
terrifying beings who have risked all for evil or
those “grand, ungodly, godlike”2 men who can
slay with the eye or paralyze with the voice or im-
mobilize their victims in other unusual ways;
third, the preference of the characters for dimin-
ishing enclosures and similar forms of architec-
tural sequestration as denoted by such Gothic
locales as towers, grottos, caverns, contracting cor-
ridors, and subterranean theatres of hellish an-
guish; and finally, the evocation of a hypotheti-
cally malignant cosmos, an ontologically
unreliable and ambiguously deceiving Gothic
universe in which all moral norms are inverted or
twisted, where disorder is far more likely than
order, and where universal darkness can bury all
without warning and at any moment.
If we take the metaphoric aspects of Vathek
seriously, the novel makes its statement about
God, the self, and the world in a speculative man-
ner similar to other models of high Gothic fiction.
Like other Gothic writers active at the end of the
eighteenth century, Beckford uses his own Gothic
novel to confront the moral ambiguities of an
inexplicable universe; nor can we overlook the
fact that Beckford ends Vathek with an austere
moral concerning nothing less than “the condi-
tion of man upon earth.”3 Vathek’s Gothic, like
other varieties of Gothic within the genre, cer-
tainly does amuse and entertain us, and no one
would want to overlook the role of the ludicrous
in Beckford’s Gothic text. But the risible diversion
of the reader is not always its sole aim or end.
Gothics such as Vathek are also concerned with
matters of first and final causation as well as
fundamental issues of existence. Furthermore,
Gothics such as Vathek project a disquieting
Weltanschauung and by so doing, they engage us
in final questions by displaying for the reader a
world in which evil is stronger than good, instabil-
ity more probable than stability, and unnatural
passions closer to the true core of human behavior
than the calm control of the intellect. Inquisitive
characters in Gothic fiction (the inordinately curi-
ous caliph Vathek is a prime example) are forced
90 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
to ask their questions and seek their answers in a
sort of intellectual vacuum without the support of
stable value systems to affirm any answers their
quest might lead them to. Symbolically speaking,
they must move through a landscape of collapsed
ego-ideals wherein the older symbols of authority,
secular and divine, lie everywhere in ruin. Beck-
ford’s characters, like the entrapped casts of other
Gothic novels, are never free, although they may
delude themselves with the dream of freedom by
their sensual and sadistic conduct. At issue
throughout Vathek, as one pro-Gothic reader of
the novel has stated it, is the “contradiction
between the illusion of man’s freedom and the
reality of his imprisonment in a necessitarian uni-
verse.”4
From the advantageous retrospective of liter-
ary history, Vathek can be studied as a prototype
of the subjective and subversive Gothic tenden-
cies in the late eighteenth century which were
beginning to challenge and displace an exhausted
classicism and a moribund rationalism in the arts.
The Gothic novel attained its astounding preemi-
nence (in the form of literally thousands of horrid
titles) in the late 1790s in the maiden-centered
romances of Mrs. Radcliffe and the outrageous
supernaturalism of Lewis’s The Monk. Nearly four
decades separate Vathek from the masterworks of
Gothicism, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Ma-
turin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and James
Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). But
at the beginnings of the Gothic movement, Beck-
ford’s Vathek enjoyed the unique status of being a
model for the emergent energies of the Gothic.
Yet, the Vathek of 1786 has no close literary
equivalent, unless the irrational itself be denomi-
nated a genre. Preceding Vathek were several nar-
rative experiments important to recognize in sum-
marizing the rise of the Gothic genre: Thomas
Leland’s Longsword, Earl of Salisbury (1762); Horace
Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764); Clara Reeve’s
Old English Baron (1777). Leland’s Longsword, an
elaborately plotted romance of chivalry set in an
imaginary Middle Ages, contained both the quest
and a panorama of grandly gloomy architectural
settings. Walpole’s Otranto supernaturalized the
sinister properties of Gothic architecture and
added the pursuing hero-villain and the fleeing
maiden as they performed their violent minuet in
“the long labyrinth of darkness,”5 the basement
of the haunted castle. Clara Reeve relaxed and
normalized the irrational atmosphere already as-
sociated with the new genre, but she also cleverly
installed a forbidden chamber within the castle,
thus donating a mandatory fixture to the Gothic
interior. At the climax of Vathek, we have an
enlarged version of Clara Reeve’s chamber of hor-
rors. These romances were the only available
Gothic models when Beckford sat down to com-
pose his Vathek. Beckford was very much aware
of these Gothic contemporaries and conscious too
of the rational malaise that had generated their
Gothic endeavors. The Gothics of Leland, Wal-
pole, and Reeve had challenged the efficacy of
rationalism both as an outlook and a response to
existence. In its abhorrence of limits and its
repudiation of a meaningful universe, the Gothic
Vathek of Beckford is an extension of the darken-
ing vision of these first Gothics.
The first reviewers of Vathek found no dif-
ficulty in assigning Gothic traits to the work. The
English Review for 1786, to choose just one in-
stance, discussed Vathek in terms of vigorous
extremes and grotesque energy. “The characters,”
noted the reviewer, “are strongly marked though
carried beyond nature; the incidents are suf-
ficiently wild and improbable; the magic is solemn
and awful, though sometimes horrid; anachro-
nisms and inconsistencies frequently appear; and
the catastrophe is bold and shocking.” 6 The
sadistic absurdities and diabolical climax aroused
the moral fury of the reviewer of the 1834 edi-
tion. Writing in The Southern Literary Messenger,
the reviewer denounced the novel’s Gothic quali-
ties as “obscene and blasphemous in the highest
degree. . . . We should pronounce it, without
knowing anything of Mr. Beckford’s character, to
be the production of a sensualist and an infidel—
one who could riot in the most abhorred and
depraved conceptions—and whose prolific fancy
preferred as its repast all that was diabolical and
monstrous, rather than what was beautiful and
good.”7
Modern criticism of Vathek, however, has
tended to dismiss or ignore the novel’s affinities
with “the monstrous and diabolical” currents of
Gothicism in order to stress Beckford’s predisposi-
tion to irony and his cynical undercutting of
Vathek’s carefully built moods of terror. With the
exception of the conclusion of the quest far down
within the fiery Hall of Eblis, Vathek, is viewed as
a work which shows so much vacillation between
hilarity and horror that to call it Gothic in any
sense is to misrepresent its literary essence and its
generic category. The anti-Gothic view is expressed
by one of the best twentieth-century editors of
Vathek, who believes that any concession to
Gothic responses would deny Beckford’s comic
purposes. “There was nothing in Vathek,” Roger
Lonsdale assures us, “which obliged reviewers to
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
connect it with contemporary ‘Gothic’ tendencies
BECKFORD
in the novel. It is not easy to see that Vathek sets
out to exploit the imaginative terror, the suspense
of psychological shock tactics which were enter-
ing the English novel about this time.”8 The case
against a Gothic Vathek gathers additional impe-
tus from the opinions of R. D. Hume and Freder-
ick Garber, two sympathetic and perceptive inter-
preters of Gothic fiction. Garber, who has edited
Mrs. Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797) and written
many incisive commentaries on the place of the
Gothic in literary history, nevertheless can find
no place for Vathek in the annals of Gothicism.
Writes Garber: “Vathek has been called a counter-
part of the Gothic but it shows none of that
calculated fuzziness through which the Gothic
exposed the uncertainty of our daily perceptions
of experience.”9 And R. D. Hume, whose 1969
PMLA essay, “Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revalua-
tion of the Gothic Novel,” is something of a
landmark in the debate over the Gothic genre’s
crucial importance and its growing scholarly
respectability, finds Vathek to be too flippant,
ironic, and burlesque in tone to merit a Gothic
classification. Writes Hume: “Vathek is often
treated as a Gothic novel on the grounds that it
exploits horror and magic scenery in Schauer-
Romantik fashion. Yet I must agree with the work’s
recent editor that Vathek is not centrally of the
Gothic type. Its horrors reach the point of bur-
lesque, and its continual return to a detached and
even comic tone set it apart.”1 0 For Hume, and his
position may be regarded as the orthodox posi-
tion on Vathek’s Gothicism, the work is best
comprehended within the subgenres of comedy
such as farce, burlesque, and harlequinade, “a
dark-tinged but high spirited comedy” and “an
existential crisis defused by comic exaggeration.”1 1
Beckford shares with other early Gothic writ-
ers a paradoxical sense of the chaotic whereby im-
ages of former order are demonically reversed.
Thus, it is Satan (or Eblis, as the archfiend is called
in the Muhammadan tradition) who is the prime
mover and highest authority in Vathek’s anarchic
and nihilistic universe; the unspeakably repulsive
becomes the attractive or the hilarious blurs into
the hideous; the infernal replaces the celestial as
the objective of the quester’s journey; and the
desire for damnation supplants salvation as the
pilgrim soul’s sharpest desire. These bizarre inver-
sions directly connect Vathek with some major
Gothic themes found in other specimens of Gothi-
cism from Walpole’s Otranto to Maturin’s Melmoth.
After consciously choosing evil, Beckford’s Satanic
hero makes a first voyage of no return in his
91
 profane quest for an infernal Xanadu. In the dark
BECKFORD
voyage of the hero may be seen a composite of
Gothic motifs: a displacement of soul and loss of
self which the hero attempts to counter by a
descent to the lower depths; the hero’s mounting
awareness of the futility of spiritual values and the
pointlessness of human wisdom and intelligence;
realization of a universe controlled by a fiendish
deity devoted to man’s confusion and despair; the
Faustian problem of the overreacher’s limitless
desire in a limited cosmos; and the ridiculousness
of suffering as symbolized by the proximity of
pleasure and pain in many of Vathek’s adventures
en route to hell.
The mythic and philosophic elements of the
Gothic outlook first converge in the physical and
psychological aspects of Vathek himself, a model
Gothic protagonist. Whether he be a debauched
monk, rapist nobleman, cruel count, ferocious
brigand, or malicious caliph, the Gothic villain is
a two-sided personality, a figure of great power
and latent virtue whose chosen career of evil is
the result of a clash between his passionate nature
and the unnatural restraints of conventions,
orthodoxy, and tradition. Moreover, Vathek is the
first Gothic villain whose moral and physical
features are given in detail. Vathek’s predecessor,
Manfred, in The Castle of Otranto, is barely de-
scribed at all and one looks in vain for any lavish
description of the hideous Gothic face and frame,
always a landmark passage in later varieties of the
Gothic. But in the makeup of Beckford’s caliph,
we find the progenitor of almost every single later
Gothic villain, for Vathek’s Satanic personality is
inscribed in his face and single overwhelming eye.
The lethal optic, like Vathek’s private tower, is an
image of absolute and pernicious power. It con-
notes his contempt for rational and mortal limits
and functions as it will in later Gothic figures as a
weapon of visionary penetration. Vathek is first
introduced to the reader by way of the awesome
eye: “His figure was pleasing and majestic; but
when he was angry, one of his eyes became so ter-
rible, that no person could bear to behold it; and
the wretch upon whom it was fixed, instantly fell
backward, and sometimes expired.”1 2 Vathek’s
deadly glance, the single eye that can maim or
slay, is almost immediately transplanted to the
Gothic features of Mrs. Radcliffe’s Montoni and
Schedoni, Lewis’s Ambrosio, and attains its de-
monic zenith first in the blazing eyes of Melmoth
the Wanderer and eventually in the ocular stimu-
lus to madness in the “vulture eye” of the prostrate
old man in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The Gothic
eye which is frequently used to immobilize a
92 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
reluctant maiden or to paralyze a rival heir to the
castle originates with Beckford’s caliph.
Complementing the ferocious and supernatu-
ral eye in the personage of Vathek is the character’s
passionate commitment to evil, the final stage of
Faustian curiosity and ungratified sensuality.
Vathek’s passion for the supreme climb culmi-
nated by a haughty seclusion within a tower, or
its reverse, the ultimate descent to the Palace of
Subterranean Fire, are two images of perverted
aspiration which give Vathek its model Gothic
structure. Vathek’s toweromania, or compulsion
to elevate and isolate himself in contemptuous
pride at some supreme pinnacle is counterpointed
throughout the narrative by his excessive grot-
tophilia, the impulse to descend to an ultimate
darkness there to dwell eternally within a fiery
abyss presided over by demons. Inspired by “an
insolent curiosity of penetrating the secrets of
heaven,”1 3 Vathek transmits to the Gothic villains
who come after him in the genre a powerful long-
ing for absolutes in a universe devoid of such
finalities. Atop one of his flaming towers, Vathek
amuses himself with the mass strangulation of his
subjects. In the depths of the earth at the opposite
end of the novel’s axis of Gothic action he joins
the vast congregation of the damned upon seeing
his breast become “transparent as crystal, his heart
enveloped in flames.”1 4 The Gothic Vathek is the
genre’s first full-length portrait of a tormented
tormentor, a metaphysical isolate and a monoma-
niac who thirsts to realize himself in evil.
Various examples of the Vathekian traits of
future Gothic villains might be cited to demon-
strate Beckford’s major contribution to the mak-
ing of the Gothic hero. Here, for example, is
Count Rudiger of Frankheim, the hero of Monk
Lewis’s little known Gothic novella, Mistrust: or,
Blanche and Osbright. When we first see this titanic
villain, he is standing in an open grave glaring
defiantly upward in a posture of mortal defiance.
Note that Count Rudiger derives both the death-
dealing eye and the fatal passion from Vathek.
Those powerful emotions which would certainly
prove fatal to any ordinary human being become
a source of malignant strength for the Vathekian
character who denounces life even as he seeks to
triumph over it:
His heart was the seat of agony; a thousand
scorpions seemed every moment to pierce it with
their poisonous stings; but not one tear forced
itself into his bloodshot eyeballs; not the slightest
convulsion of his gigantic limbs betrayed the
silent tortures of his bosom. A gloom settled and
profound reigned upon his dark and high-arched
eyebrows. Count Rudiger’s stature was colossal;
 the grave in which he stood, scarcely rose above
his knees. His eyes blazed; his mouth foamed; his
coal-black hair stood erect, in which he twisted
his hands, and tearing out whole handsful by the
roots, he strewed them on the coffin, which stood
beside his feet.1 5
If the character of the protagonist helps to
identify the genre of Vathek, the hero’s destina-
tion and his progressively frustrated experiences
as he approaches his journey’s end further define
just how deeply Gothic the work is. Vathek’s
Gothic grail is nothing less than damnation for
himself and those who accompany him in the
voyage downward and inward to hell. The quest
is demonic because it begins in torment, proceeds
through heightened degrees of self-destruction,
and climaxes in the hopeless horror of body and
of soul for the disappointed quester. Unlike a
traditional epic hero whose descent into the
underworld takes him to his heroic limits and
yields him a transcendent or victorious release
from the darkness of self-doubt, Vathek’s descend-
ing voyage ends in perplexity, guilt, and despair.
Gifted with the power of perpendicular imagina-
tion, a necessary angle of vision for realizing the
upper and lower limits of Gothic fantasy, Beck-
ford conveys his hero along a vertical axis of
exotic anguish and blue fire effects. Enroute to
hell, Vathek and Nouronihar traverse an insular
landscape rich in diabolical spectacle. Indeed, it is
almost as if we were hearing descriptions of
Dante’s inferno as Laurence Sterne might have
written them. The algolagnic terrain offers stair-
ways spiraling downward to black depths of no
return, Gothic pits containing chuckling ghouls
who must be fed on live children, a pyramid of
skulls nearly as high as the Gizeh monument,
reptiles with human faces, toxic delicacies and
idolatrous banquets consisting of “roasted wolf”
vultures à la daube . . . rotten truffles; boiled
thistles: and such other wild plants, as must ulcer-
ate the throat and parch up the tongue,”1 6 odd
lights and bizarre beasts including an omnipres-
ent squadron of vultures, flaming towers, and a
kaleidoscopic subterranean amphitheatre in which
Vathek’s sorceress mother, Carathis, performs
obscene rites amidst an ornate charnel decor to
the accompaniment of a shrieking chorus of one-
eyed negresses and burning mummies. Across
quivering plains of black sand, through swarms of
curious insects, past batallions of howling cripples
and cubit-high dwarfs, into blizzards of burning
snowflakes Vathek makes the Gothic’s downward
voyage of no return.
Vathek’s precursor, the European Faust had
sold his soul out of a desire for power and pleasure,
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
but Beckford’s Islamic Faust already possesses
BECKFORD
these and willingly renounces them to seek pain
and damnation. One of the deepest and most
enduring patterns of the Gothic quest which
brings the ambitious character to the horror of
horrors in an underground of no return is to be
observed in Vathek’s perverse pilgrimage. The
Gothic hero’s abhorrence for limits stimulates his
Satanic vanity; his vanity expresses itself in a
destructive pursuit of an ideal of horrid beauty
typically depicted elsewhere throughout Gothic
fiction by the maiden and villain performing their
deadly duet of flight and pursuit through the
subterranean passageways of a haunted building.
The destructive pursuit of beauty culminates in
spiritual and metaphysical frustration for Vathek
thus implying an irrationally determined universe
in which man is fixed as an eternal victim con-
demned to occupy forever some chamber of hor-
rors. In Vathek’s case, the destination is an “im-
mense hall . . . where a vast multitude is
incessantly passing”1 7 in a never-ending parade of
anguish.
The transcendental or epic hero often climaxes
his quest by arriving at some vision of totality, but
when Gothic heroes venture into the heart of
darkness their experiences at the dead center often
invert the conventional romance’s pattern of
achievement and self-fulfillment. From Beckford’s
Vathek to Melville’s Captain Ahab, the Gothic
hero is a frustrated quester whose pursuit of the
absolute ends by condemning him to endless
circuits ‘“round perdition’s flame.” 1 8 Gothic
novels after Vathek adhere to the pattern of the
ironic quest, a destructive version of the hero’s
long journey to a dark place which the Gothic
hero makes not in order to rescue the maiden but
to rape her.
The pro-Gothic reading of Beckford’s strange
novel enables us to recognize the motif of the
dark, inward voyage as a characteristic of the genre
at large. Gothic romances like Vathek mock the
very form they feed on for they “retain the
structure of romance, but invert the hero’s
progress. The result is a linear descent: aestheti-
cally, from the Hill of the Pied Horses to the Hall
of Eblis; psychologically, from wishfulfillment to
frustration; and metaphysically, from a vision of
humanity as unlimited potentiality to humanity
as finite actuality in an alien world.”1 9 Other
characters throughout the Gothic genre who
decide to risk all for evil suffer the fate of Vathek
in similar gruesome confinements of body and
soul. In Gothic terms, the Eblis episode means a
permanent condition of disunity between the self
93
 and nature, the self and society, and the self and
BECKFORD
God. At the end of the novel, we have entered the
zone of ultimate cosmic discord intensified by the
dreadful apprehension that the world is under the
control of a demon and that there is “no exit.”
The imagery of death-in-life or life-in-death which
typifies the high Gothic through such situations
as premature burial, cadaverous enclosure, and
lingering impalement attains its first full develop-
ment in the descriptions of Vathek and company
in the Hall of Eblis.
The final point to be made for a Gothic Vathek
involves the way in which the work’s atmosphere
goes beyond comedy, irony, and wild disorder to
evoke the theme of a malignant universe in which
the imagination, always striving to be free of
rational bounds, is repeatedly denied its goals.
Freedom of mind is perpetually at issue through-
out Gothic fiction, the physical flight and pursuit
through avenues of darkness and the other forms
of dreadful entrapment all indicating symbolically
the imagination’s containment by finite ideas and
restrictive ideological structure. Beyond the buf-
foonery of Vathek, the theme of freedom is power-
fully stated through Vathek’s continuous contact
with a world that continuously disappoints his
suprarational desire to liberate himself from all
mortal restraints. Each of his Gothic ordeals is a
perverse universe’s reminder to him of an invin-
cible and limited reality impeding every effort of
the imagination to break through rational de-
fenses. This menace of limits which a malignant
cosmos fixes upon its creatures of aspiring imagi-
nation is at the very core of Vathek’s Gothicism
as well as a trait of the Gothic tradition at large,
where characters constantly strive to be free but
exist in bondage to some grotesque enclosure, be
it a haunted castle or an arabesque Hades thronged
with the damned in flaming heart postures. In her
important treatise, “On the Pleasure Derived from
Objects of Terror,” (1792) Beckford’s contempo-
rary, the Gothic theorist Ann Letitia Aikin Bar-
bauld, describes the degree of terror experienced
when a character is confronted and overwhelmed
by an unholy or perverse “otherness,” as Vathek is
each time he attempts to overreach the limits of
self. Higher Gothic horror of the sort we encounter
in the climactic scenes in the Hall of Eblis places
Vathek in the highest category of the Gothic
genre, the region of total ontological distress,
where the mythology of the imaginative self as an
agent of control gives way to the nightmare of a
supreme and malignant “otherness” which can-
not be escaped or transcended. The conditions of
such an otherness are expressed by Mrs. Barbauld
94 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
as “Solitude, darkness, low-whispered sounds,
obscure glimpses of objects, flitting forms [which]
tend to raise in the mind that thrilling, mysteri-
ous terror which has for its object the ‘powers
unseen and mightier than we,’”2 0 precisely the
conditions which prevail at the frustrated termi-
nus of Vathek’s imaginative quest.
G. R. Thompson has written that “the Gothic
romance is a genre that in its historical develop-
ment, as well as in individual texts, moves from a
stable modality of clearly defined conventions and
forms toward an unstable and deliberately indeter-
minate modality. Frequently, the Gothic veers
toward the grotesque, a mode of inherent instabil-
ity that plays on the dissolution of norms—
ontological, epistemological and aesthetic.”2 1 The
Gothic Vathek is just such an apocalyptic narra-
tive where the problem of genre can only be
resolved by viewing the work as part of the
energetic revolt against reason spearheaded by the
dominance of the tale of terror during the closing
decades of the eighteenth century. In the chaotic
landscape of the Gothic tradition it stands like
one of Beckford’s infernal towers deep within the
zone of ultimate Gothic fantasy where we find
not just a destabilization of the norms cited by
Thompson, but the dark universe’s mockery of all
human striving.
Notes
1. William Beckford, Vathek, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1970).
2. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter 16 (“The Ship”).
3. Beckford, Vathek, p. 120.
4. Kenneth W. Graham, “Beckford’s ‘Vathek’: A Study in
Ironic Dissonance,” Criticism, 14 (1972), 252.
5. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story,
in Three Gothic Novels, ed. E. F. Bleiler, p. 36.
6. English Review, 8 (1786), 180-184.
7. Southern Literary Messenger, 1 (1834), 188-189.
8. Roger Lonsdale, Introduction to Vathek by William
Beckford, pp. vii-xxxi.
9. Frederick Garber, “Beckford, Delacroix, and Byronic
Orientalism,” Comparative Literature Studies, 18 (1981),
321-332.
10. R. D. Hume, “Exuberant Gloom, Existential Agony,
and Heroic Despair: Three Varieties of Negative
Romanticism,” in The Gothic Imagination: Essays in
Dark Romanticism, ed. G. R. Thompson, pp. 109-117.
11. R. D. Hume, “Exuberant Gloom,” p. 117.
12. Beckford, Vathek, p. 1.
13. Beckford, Vathek, p. 4.
14. Beckford, Vathek, p. 114.
 15. Matthew G. Lewis, Mistrust: or, Blanche and Osbright, in
Seven Masterpieces of Gothic Horror, ed. R. D. Spector,
pp. 237-330.
16. Beckford, Vathek, p. 49.
17. Beckford, Vathek, p. 109.
18. Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 36 (“The Quarter-Deck”).
19. Randall Craig, “Beckford’s Inversion of Romance in
Vathek,” Orbis Litterarum, 39 (1984), 95-106.
20. Ann Letitia Aiken Barbauld, “On the Pleasure Derived
from Objects of Terror,” in The Evil Image, eds. Patricia
L. Skarda and Nora Crow Jaffe, pp. 10-13.
21. G. R. Thompson, “The Form of Gothic Romance,” a
paper delivered at the Modern Language Association
Meeting, Washington, DC, December 1984, pp. 1-26.
R. B. GILL (ESSAY DATE JANUARY
2003)
SOURCE: Gill, R. B. “The Author in the Novel: Creat-
ing Beckford in Vathek.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 15,
no. 2 (January 2003): 241-54.
In the following essay, Gill examines the authentic autho-
rial persona in Vathek.
According to David Hume, “The mind is a
kind of theatre where several perceptions succes-
sively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide
away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures
and situations.”1 Hume’s well-known account of
personal identity aptly describes William Beck-
ford—petulant heir to great wealth, a member of
Parliament, connoisseur, architectural dilettante,
fugitive from sexual scandal, and author of
Vathek, one of the most enjoyable and intriguing
of the eighteenth-century Oriental tales. Across
the pages of Vathek and, indeed, of Beckford’s
whole life pass and mingle the successive actors of
his disjointed identity.
Hume’s caution to the reader is especially
relevant in Beckford’s case: “the comparison with
theatre must not mislead us. They are the succes-
sive perceptions only, that constitute the mind;
nor have we the most distant notion of the place,
where these scenes are represented, or of the
materials, of which it is compos’d.” The spectators
of Beckford’s life and the readers of his tale have
wished to know the materials of which his inner
self was composed in order to explain his theatrics,
but they have never agreed on what they found.
And Beckford himself, complaining of the mask
he wore, yet intent on preserving a gentlemanly
image, a man unwillingly hastened by his family
and his wealth from one performance to the next,
seems never to have found that inner being with
which he could be at peace. The result is that there
are many Beckfords, some he himself created and
many created by his various critics.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
BECKFORD
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BYRON NOTES VATHEK AS A SOURCE FOR
ORIENTAL ELEMENTS IN HIS THE GIAOUR
The circumstance to which the above story
relates was not very uncommon in Tur-
key. . . . The story in the text is one told of
a young Venetian many years ago, and now
nearly forgotten. I heard it by accident recited
by one of the coffee-house story-tellers who
abound in the Levant, and sing or recite their
narratives. The additions and interpolations
by the translator will be easily distinguished
from the rest, by the want of Eastern imagery;
and I regret that my memory has retained so
few fragments of the original. For the con-
tents of some of the notes I am indebted
partly to D’Herbelot, and partly to that most
Eastern, and, as Mr. Weber justly entitles it,
“sublime tale,” the Caliph Vathek. I do not
know from what source the author of that
singular volume may have drawn his materi-
als; some of his incidents are to be found in
the Bibliothèque Orientale; but for correctness
of costume, beauty of description, and power
of imagination, it far surpasses all European
imitations; and bears such marks of original-
ity, that those who have visited the East will
find some difficulty in believing it to be more
than a translation. As an Eastern tale, even
Rasselas must bow before it; his “Happy Val-
ley” will not bear a comparison with the “Hall
of Eblis.”
SOURCE: Byron, George Gordon, Lord. “A footnote
to The Giaour.” In The Poetical Works of Lord
Byron. Collected and Arranged with Illustrative
Notes by Thomas Moore, Lord Jeffrey, Sir Walter
Scott [and others] with a Portrait and Numerous
Illustrations on Steel, p. 76. New York: G. Virtue,
1813.
But these created selves are, to use Hume’s
terms for personal identity, “merely verbal” (p.
262). These verbal Beckfords are plots without a
story, the texts he and we write in lieu of an
anchoring identity. The problem in Beckford’s
case lies not so much in this textuality as in our
desire (and his) to find the originating self of that
text. The ambiguities surrounding Beckford
prompt a search for biographical explanations. Yet
95
 Beckford’s personae within Vathek and his life are
BECKFORD
clearly created ones, even though they are offered
as biographical fact. In this respect, Beckford’s
presence in the novel is typical of other authorial
personae, artistic creations that paradoxically
function properly only when taken as factual
biography. But when that paradox tempts critics
into the impossible task of locating the true self of
the author, they find only what Hume notes is a
mysterious and inexplicable fiction. Vathek is a
clear case of a novel especially in need of a
biographical centre to resolve its ambiguities.2 Not
finding that centre or authorial identity, critics
(and Beckford himself) have created a number of
identities to satisfy their own perceptions of the
needs of the novel.
A straightforward Oriental tale whose quick
narrative and polished style cover no depths of
complex psychological characterization, Vathek
would not seem to offer special problems of
interpretation. Yet critical views of this novel vary
widely. It has been seen as both Gothic and non-
Gothic, satiric and non-satiric, realistic and
fantastic, neoclassic and romantic, socially con-
ventional and anti-bourgeois, metaphysical and
messageless, as well as both unified and split in its
sensibility. Vathek has been valued for its “cor-
rectness of costume,” criticized for its elaborate
explanatory notes, and, notably, regarded as
moral, immoral, amoral, and “anti-moral.”3
The diverse critical opinions arise in part from
the intriguing mixture of opposites in Beckford’s
style. Whether we consider it Oriental or Gothic
or whatever, Vathek is essentially the sort of fabu-
lar parable that the eighteenth-century reader
enjoyed. It is thus outside the realistic mainstream
that has come to represent for us the novel’s most
characteristic mode of addressing moral issues.
And yet, on its surface at least, it is an explicitly
moral parable. Consequently, there is difficulty for
us, as there was for Beckford’s contemporaries, in
reconciling the fabular, Eastern exoticism of
Vathek with its moral elements. Further, we can-
not say of Vathek, as we can of Candide and Rasse-
las, that its imaginative centre lies in the moral
message, for our interest in the perverse actions of
the characters frequently jars with the conven-
tional morals, particularly the closing moral that
“the condition of man upon earth is to be—
humble and ignorant.”
There is an additional mixing of opposites in
the self-conscious playfulness of Beckford’s style.
Like Sterne, Beckford watches himself write and is
intrigued by the possibilities of expressing himself
in guises—now moral, now perverse, now coy,
96 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
now sublime. He cannot resist indulging himself
momentarily in some ludicrous or incongruous
aspect of his material. The storks, for instance,
that join the morning prayers of Nouronihar and
Gulchenrouz by the lake are a poke at the solem-
nity of religious greybeards, but their incongruity
as members of the worshipping congregation is so
striking that it distracts attention from the narra-
tive, an indulgence we enjoy as part of a highly
self-referential style. Beckford is not willing to sup-
press these moments of self-conscious fun; Vathek
smiles at its sardonic incongruities from the first
paragraph to its closing moralisms.
Beckford uses authorial self-consciousness in
the text of Vathek to remove himself from his oc-
cult material and thus to preserve, or create, an
aura of sophistication and control. Here is no
romantic subordination or merging of author with
his outré creation, as we find in the works of Poe.
Rather, Vathek is an eighteenth-century amalgam
of Pope’s proud epic notes in the Dunciad (a
similarity Beckford recognized) and Sterne’s
sophisticated and intensely self-aware metafiction.
Beckford wants us to observe him laughing at his
subject, manipulating it: a gentleman engaged
with compromising material but, nevertheless, in
thorough control of it and able to smile know-
ingly at his own folly. In this mixture of opposites,
Vathek, like many other neoclassical works, has a
civilized sophistication that acknowledges its own
role-playing.
In fact, Beckford cared greatly about the im-
age of himself created in Vathek. In this respect
the novel is a literary counterpart of Fonthill, the
Gothic abbey on which he later lavished his ef-
forts and money. On occasion he claimed, some-
what misleadingly, to have written the novel in
several days in a fit of inspiration, and he roman-
ticized about the “most extravagant intensity” of
the Christmas celebration at Fonthill that formed
part of the inspiration of the novel. Beckford’s let-
ters reveal that he was very much aware of the ef-
fect of his image on others—and that he enjoyed
the thought. Vathek is “the only production of
mine which I am not ashamed of” he wrote to
Samuel Henley; and in a different letter he spoke
of the “honours” with which he expected Vathek
to be received. To another correspondent he wrote
of “ma vanité” of the Caliph, and in the journal
of his stay in Portugal he noted that he was
“extremely impatient” to receive “the last
monthly reviews in which I expect to read a
critique on Vathek.” Cyrus Redding, his first
biographer, recalled, “To abuse Vathek he deemed
a personal insult. His pride took the alarm and he
could scarcely restrain his anger, so fierce when
aroused, though evanescent.”4
The references in his letters to shame, honour,
and pride reveal his characteristic concern with
the relationship between his work and his reputa-
tion. Biographers often note the changes that
Beckford made in his papers and letters in order
that they appear most advantageous. Contempo-
raries of Beckford such as Mrs Thrale, William
Hazlitt, and Byron understood the degree to
which public appearance was involved in Beck-
ford’s effects and enjoyed the scandal that at-
tended his reputation. A continuing motif in the
Portuguese journal, written shortly after publica-
tion of Vathek, is Beckford’s awareness that others
are watching his carefully contrived self-image: “I
hear there is no conversation in Lisbon but of my
poetry.” “My reputation as a devotee spreads
prodigiously.” Although he notes, “I am sick of
forming the chief subject of conversation at all
the card tables,” he also takes care to record the
surprise with which “the whole herd of precen-
tors, priests, musicians and fencing masters” listen
to his playing and singing. Again, “my singing,
playing and capering subdues every Portuguese
that approaches me.” In preparation for a trip to a
convent, he writes, “I am furbishing up a string of
highly polished saintly speeches for the occasion.”
And later, “for flippery in crossing myself and
goosishness in poking out my head I will turn my
back to no one.” Beckford, then, works carefully
to create a persona; he attentively watches people
react to that image; and he self-consciously
distances himself from his creation through self-
abnegating humour with such references as “flip-
pery,” “goosishness,” and “capering.”5
It is true that he grew restive with his public
self. In one entry, after worrying about a possible
scrape with a “young friend,” he continues with
the complaint often quoted by critics, “How tired
I am of keeping a mask on my countenance. How
tight it sticks—it makes me sore.” Significantly, he
immediately follows this complaint with self-
conscious observation upon it: “There’s a meta-
phor for you. I have all the fancies and levity of a
child.”6 The ingredients of Beckford’s dilemma are
here—the concern with image, the restiveness,
and the recurrent self-consciousness that flickers
over his thoughts and actions. He does not remove
his mask but worries, instead, about getting into a
scrape. For all the restiveness, the image of himself
that Beckford contrived to project was exterior: he
was concerned with his public reputation, with
the appurtenances of a gentlemanly and leisured
class, with his adeptness in Oriental matters, and
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with the skill of his style and of the “magnifi-
BECKFORD
cence” with which Vathek concludes.
Yet that exterior image has never seemed suf-
ficient or trustworthy, a circumstance that ac-
counts for the central critical dilemma of Vathek.
The novel’s puzzling mixture of opposites invites
the reader to seek an inner author, the “real” Beck-
ford accessible through psychological examina-
tion. Behind the varying judgments of Beckford’s
novel lie critical assessments of his inner person.
There are explanations that he was impotent,
homosexual, bisexual, dominated by a Calvinist
mother, grieving for his dead wife, a leisurely
country gentleman, bitter, mad, vile, sadistic, a
“barely socialized psychopath,” and so on.7 With-
out question, the novel is a document in Beck-
ford’s life, as biographically relevant as, say, his
construction of Fonthill. Nor is Beckford the type
of artist whose work rises self-contained and
impersonal above its historical contingencies.
Vathek is a minor novel, interesting in itself
certainly, but also of legitimate interest as a record
of the tastes of its author and age.
Nevertheless, for all the care and intelligence
expended on it, the search for the inner, unifying
Beckford has not been successful. Mme de Staël,
to whom Beckford had given a copy of his travel-
ogue Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents,
wrote to him, “You dream when you have noth-
ing to describe. Imagination, which invents or
represents objects, has never been given more
freedom.” Likewise, André Parreaux has noted that
seeing “le vrai visage” of Beckford behind his mask
is a matter of great difficulty. V.S. Pritchett claimed
that “everything Beckford writes is suspect, for
truth and fiction are hard to separate in this inces-
santly revising and play-acting autobiographer.”8
And that is the dilemma. The search for the
interior Beckford seems a necessary step to recon-
ciling the opposites in his life and work, but that
search cannot lead us past the contrived and
public mask it was Beckford’s fate to wear.
For both practical and theoretical reasons, the
inner Beckford cannot be found. First, it is impor-
tant to bear in mind the well-known dangers of
moving back and forth between biography and
art. One need not be unduly afraid of the Inten-
tional Fallacy or of its reverse, biography based on
interpretation of the artist’s works, to recognize
the difficulties and dangers and, therefore, the
need of great caution. Is Fielding the compassion-
ate observer of the ambiguities of mercy in Tom
Jones or the sterner remembrancer of justice in
Amelia? And to what extent can we move from
97
 his actual experience as magistrate of the Bow
BECKFORD
Street police court to the more sombre judicial
tone of that later novel?
But no matter how receptive we are to the
intermingling of biography and art, we must al-
low for the great practical difficulties that interfere
with our understanding of the relevant facts of
Beckford’s life. Beckford was born to a public fam-
ily with the expectation and the means of creat-
ing and protecting an appropriate public image.
There is evidence that the suppression of Dreams,
Waking Thoughts and Incidents came as a result
of family fears that its injudicious subjectivity
might endanger a public career. “Neither Orlando
nor Brandimart,” he wrote of the matter, “were
ever more tormented by Daemons and Spectres in
an enchanted Castle than Wm. Bd. in his own
Hall by his nearest relations.”9
His marriage to Lady Margaret Gordon again
seems the result of a family strategy, as was his
short stay in Parliament. Lady Hamilton’s vivid
letter to Beckford in 1780 attempting to dissuade
him from a scandalous liaison in Venice stresses
the public image that Beckford’s relations valued
above all. What is the struggle against temptation
for, she asks. “No less than honor, reputation and
all that an honest and noble Soul holds most dear,
while Infamy, eternal infamy (my soul freezes
while I write the word), attends the giving way to
the soft alluring of a criminal passion.”1 0 For most
of his life Beckford seems to have resented and
struggled against these impositions on his private
self, but he did not throw them off. The private
Beckford remained cloistered. Unlike Byron, Par-
reaux notes, Beckford would not play the role of
outcast but tried to maintain the fiction of having
a privileged place in the society of his time.1 1 In
fact, much of the pathos of Beckford’s life results
from the disparity between his compromised
reputation and his expectations of an aristocratic,
privileged position. Beckford chose an unhappy
role to play, but the important point here is that
he chose the public and proper role urged on him
by his family.
Beckford’s sexuality has been a key concern of
critics looking for the inner explanation of
Vathek’s opposites. In 1785 Beckford left England
temporarily in the wake of a scandal over his
relationship with the young William Courtenay.
The opprobrium remaining from this incident
together with continuing rumours plagued him
throughout his life. But our understanding of this
matter is enormously complicated by the practical
difficulties of determining the facts, by the differ-
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ent theoretical models used to explain the facts,
by the limitations of any sort of psychological
explanation, and by the divergent uses that critics
make of their conclusions even when they agree
on the facts. We know that Beckford was married
with two daughters, that his wife maintained her
faith in him, and that he grieved her death. What
lies behind the protective public face must be
surmised. Beckford’s letters and papers contain
helpful information, but, as noted, they were
revised in places with the intention of portraying
a desirable image; they are often oblique, and, as
Boyd Alexander observes, Beckford “dramatises
and exaggerates his moods and feelings.” Beck-
ford himself lamented in his Journal, “I have
more profligacy of tongue than of character and
often do my utmost to make myself appear worse
than I am in reality.”1 2
Further, even where the facts seem clear, there
is the theoretical difficulty of knowing how to
interpret them. What do we want to say—that he
was homosexual, bisexual, merely self-indulgent
without a strongly marked sexual orientation? Do
we want to psychoanalyse him as a case of “narcis-
sistic paederasty”? This last diagnosis is informa-
tive, a perceptive use of psychological criticism to
explain the tensions in Beckford’s style, but at bot-
tom it illustrates the limitations of attempts to
explain what lurks behind the scenes of the mind.
Its diagnosis, “narcissistic paederasty,”1 3 is not
defined precisely enough for use as the key to a
complex man’s very difficult personality. It in-
cludes childishness as well as child-love; it is
metaphorical (“a self-devouring child wishing to
rape his own image”); and it is governed by the
need to find a psychological unity beneath the
behavioural data. Like so many explanations of
sexuality, it is an imposition of a unifying concept
on separate facets of behaviour. This interpreta-
tion, then, leaves us in the biographical dilemma.
It is meaningful precisely because it creates a
unifying matrix for separate and heterogeneous
elements in Beckford’s actions. As we have seen,
we need interpretation imposed on the discrete
items of Beckford’s life in order to understand
them in relationship with each other. Yet, equally
clearly, there is no justification for believing that
whatever interpretation we may impose is histori-
cally verifiable truth.
What indeed does it mean to “understand”
the sources of a person’s acts and ideas? One’s ac-
tions stem from the intricate causal network that
is one’s whole being; therefore, no explanation
can be complete. Any attempt at explanation
must be an abstraction, a grouping or a simplifica-
tion of a myriad causes. It represents the critic’s
decision about where to draw the line between
significance and insignificance. And that decision
must necessarily be personal and subjective. What
shall we make, for instance, of an opinion that
Vathek may embody Beckford’s complex reaction
to his “possessive and autocratic mother”?1 4
Again, I find the suggestion reasonable but am
not certain that any array of biographical facts, no
matter how extensive, would persuade another
reader less convinced of the importance of paren-
tal influence than I am. What then of his equally
dominating father, Alderman Beckford, twice Lord
Mayor of London, robust heterosexual and extro-
vert, who seems to have been both amused and
impatient with the whims of his wilful child? Do
our own explanatory models hold that fathers are
not as influential as mothers?1 5 Or do we see a
malign conjunction in their mutual influences?
The point, of course, is that each of us will
delineate the boundaries between significance and
insignificance in different ways, ways owing as
much to our explanatory models of child develop-
ment as to objectively demonstrable facts about
William Beckford.
Critics whose thinking is determined by one
explanatory model will regard another as lacking
in the requisite rigour of method and verifiability.
Many types of explanations have only practical
justification and, therefore, offer no a priori
reasons why their results may not be duplicated
by another type of explanation. Thus, psycho-
analysis may in practice accomplish in contempo-
rary society what advice from village elders or
purification rituals accomplished in other ages.
Because these explanatory models enable a person
better to function in his or her environment and
a critic to unite disparate facts under a common
hypothesis, we value them highly. A model or
system of beliefs with explanatory powers will
come to seem self-evident, its underlying assump-
tions justified by the results they produce. In Beck-
ford’s case, some sort of sexual hypothesis may
unite his behaviour patterns with the ambivalent
closing moral of Vathek and with what we know
of human behaviour from our own experiences
and studies. These are significant results. They
may lead us to accept the critic’s interpretation,
but they leave unanswered such questions as
whether we understand Beckford’s behaviour pat-
terns as they really were and whether the psycho-
logical aspects of the hypothesis (for instance,
“narcissistic paederasty”) are empirically verifiable
concepts.
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Further, even satisfying explanations leave
BECKFORD
undetermined the extent to which the critic’s own
interpretations are mediated by personal and
social codes.1 6 The subtleties of George Haggerty’s
account of Beckford’s search for a “true heart’s
friend”1 7 are an advance over earlier stereotypes
or what he calls “essentialist” categorizations, but
his views so clearly originate in a personal thesis
concerning “love” that one accepts them with the
same caution necessary in reading Timothy
Mowl’s more commonsensical portrait of Beck-
ford as robust bisexual horseman. The openness
with which we now discuss sexual behaviour al-
lows honest explorations, but falls easy prey to
the temptations of biographical creation, which it
is the purpose of this paper to delineate. Sex is far
too interesting a matter to approach dispas-
sionately. Self-congratulation on exposing the
equivocations of past critics, the wrinkled pleasure
of rehearsing Beckford’s perfervid letters, and the
rivalries of competing models of Beckford’s desires
all increase the risks that personal zest rather than
objectivity accounts for our explanations.
What in the end are the truth-value and the
verification procedure of a claim that Beckford
died “at the age of eighty-four—unrepentant, un-
reformed, and immature”?1 8 I choose this remark
because it comes from a respected critic of Beck-
ford; it is both adroit and compelling. Yet its
virtues are dexterity of statement (entirely a verbal
virtue) and ability to bring a number of biographi-
cal strands into a single formulation (a literary
and logical virtue). Neat summation is appealing
in a linear, logical mode such as biography, but
life itself is confused, contradictory, and illogical.
What counts as a literary virtue may be in fact a
liability in the search for truth. As we have seen,
such a claim has its own sort of meaningfulness,
but we who understand ourselves only with dif-
ficulty may remain sceptical of the biographer’s
ability to reduce another human’s inner being to
clear patterns.1 9
Hume’s point was similar and adds to the
theoretical obstacles we face in finding a “real”
Beckford. Although we have a great “propension
. . . to imagine something unknown and mysteri-
ous, connecting the parts” of our personal identity,
that mysterious something is a feigned support
and centre rather than a “true” entity. We know
only the perceptions of others and ourselves rather
than their causes. Instead of the “nice and subtile
questions concerning personal identity [which]
can never possibly be decided,” Hume notes that
the mind “gives rise to some fiction or imaginary
99
 principle of union.” Our personal identity is a
BECKFORD
“grammatical” matter, a syntax of the self created
from discrete parts (pp. 254, 262-63).
Hume’s scepticism springs from philosophical
analysis and properly concerns the existence of
personal identity rather than its characteristics,
which I claim Beckford and his critics are search-
ing for. Back of Hume’s analysis, however, lies an
English—and especially an eighteenth-century
English—emphasis on the social bases of personal-
ity, the self as acted role. As Lord Chesterfield
writes (notoriously but not atypically) to his son,
“Manner is all, in everything; it is by manner only
that you can please, and consequently rise.”2 0 And
in his account of himself, Hume stresses his own
manners and sociability: “I was a man of mild
dispositions, of command of temper, of an open,
social, and cheerful humour. . . . Even my love
of literary fame, my ruling passion, never soured
my temper.”2 1 An eighteenth-century gentleman
might well doubt the inner self, for the class and
the age place their interests in mannerly, social
roles. For Hume, Chesterfield, and Beckford, one’s
identity was created, a composed grammar or
syntax of the self rather than a deep structure.
We can return now to Beckford with some
sympathy and understanding for his lot, that of
replacing personal identity with a public face. In
Vathek we have a work whose mixture of opposites
seems to demand an author’s personality to give
it unity. Yet the very prominent personality that
Beckford interjects into Vathek stands aloof from
his material, for Beckford is eager that we see him
laughing and manipulating the diverse attitudes
of Vathek without being compromised by naïve
commitment to them. That public, mannered
Beckford is all we have—but not all we need if we
are to depart satisfied with a unified impression of
Vathek. And so we create for Beckford an inner,
unifying personality, aware now that it is our own
creation. We do for the novel what Beckford did
for it: we write an imaginatively embellished
biography of the Caliph of Fonthill just as he
wrote of Vathek Billah, ninth Caliph of the Abas-
sides.2 2
We end up with creations—an aristocratic
Beckford defying middle-class morality in Vathek,
or an infantile, sexually insecure Beckford project-
ing his interests on the novel, or a “nervous, self-
conscious, shoulder-shrugging” littérateur, or even
the impersonal artist whose work “might not be
due so much to [his] own neuroses as to certain
conventions” within an artistic tradition.2 3 Our
Beckford may or may not be the “true” Beckford,
100 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
but this construction renders the novel more
meaningful. Where conflicting opposites have de-
constructed author and novel, the interpretive
critic has reconstructed them. Thus, we find the
many different Beckfords in the critical literature.
To some extent these critics are creating their own
selves in the person of Beckford, shaping the work
so it will pass through the network of their own
adaptive and defensive strategies, as Norman Hol-
land has put it. To some extent, no doubt, their
work is a more literary attempt to supply an
orderly grammar of logical relationships to their
perceptions of Vathek.2 4
In each of these cases lies the reality, now
often noted in biographical as well as critical stud-
ies, that every subject is changed by the discourse
that embodies it. William Epstein has observed
that “the decline of faith in the unmediated,
ontological status of ‘events’” must influence all
but the most unexamined approaches to biogra-
phy.2 5 Any Beckford that we (and he) perceive is a
product of the interpretive codes that govern our
cognitive being. What sort of man lies behind or
transcends these codes is, as Hume would put it, a
“nice and subtile question” (p. 262). For, indeed,
whether we take our cue from Hume or Derrida,
the absolute origin of perception is inseparable
from the activity that records it. Whether we look
at the issue practically, theoretically, or (to use
eighteenth-century terms) in the clear light of
reason, the Beckford we find is a creation of
cultural and interpretive codes. The insights of
Enlightenment English empiricism, the twists of
postmodern criticism, and the reticence of polite
and experienced observers of human nature can
go no further than the public Beckford.
There is no alternative to accepting the di-
lemma of the desirability and impossibility of
biographical interpretation. A critic must put
together a unified interpretation of the data,
knowing all along that interpreted data is mean-
ingful creation rather than fact independent of its
expression. That is the dilemma of all biography;
Beckford’s case only makes it especially clear. In
the end, we come to something very close to Hu-
me’s sceptical reflections on personal identity. We
(and Beckford himself) know the “successive
perceptions” (p. 253) of the novel and the life but
lack the most distant notion of their underlying
causes or, for that matter, of their basic unity. Yet
we see Beckford struggling unsuccessfully to find
himself and critics struggling to create narratives
to bind together their perceptions. The effort in
each case must be unsuccessful, but, paradoxically,
it is also understandable and necessary.
Notes
1. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A.
Selby-Bigg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965),
p. 253. References are to this edition.
2. Roger Lonsdale writes: the “difficulty of attaching any
clear meaning or satiric purpose to Vathek has also
tended to force its readers back on the author itself for
enlightenment.” See introduction, William Beckford,
Vathek (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1983), p. viii.
3. Summaries of critical reactions can be found in Lons-
dale, pp. xix-xxii; Dan J. McNutt, The Eighteenth-
Century Gothic Novel: An Annotated Bibliography of Criti-
cism and Selected Texts (New York: Garland, 1985), pp.
265-310; and Brian Fothergill, Beckford of Fonthill
(London: Faber and Faber, 1978), pp. 128-35.
4. Fothergill, p. 134. See also Lonsdale, pp. x-xiv; and
The Journal of William Beckford in Portugal and Spain
1787-1788, ed. Boyd Alexander (New York: John Day,
1955), p. 139.
5. Beckford, Journal, pp. 38, 41, 44, 76, 86, 92, and 225.
For discussion of Beckford’s revisions and his reputa-
tion, see Guy Chapman, Beckford (New York: Scrib-
ner’s, 1937), p. 323; Timothy Mowl, William Beckford:
Composing for Mozart (London: John Murray, 1998),
passim; James Lees-Milne, William Beckford (Montclair,
NJ: Allanheld, Osmun, 1979), p. 107; and McNutt, pp.
288, 301-4.
6. Beckford, Journal, p. 41. See also André Parreaux, Wil-
liam Beckford: Auteur de “Vathek” (Paris: Nizet, 1960),
p. 76.
7. See John T. Farrell, “A Reinterpretation of the Major
Literary Works of William Beckford,” Dissertation Ab-
stracts 45 (1984), 1758A (University of Delaware);
George E. Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and
Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1999), pp. 136-51; and Mowl, p. 111.
8. Mme de Staël is quoted in William Beckford, Dreams,
Waking Thoughts and Incidents, ed. Robert J. Gemmett
(Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
1971), p. 26; Parreaux, p. 78; V.S. Pritchett, “Vile
Body,” New Statesman 63 (1962), 265-66.
9. Chapman, p. 168.
10. Beckford, Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, pp.
16-17.
11. Parreaux, p. 77.
12. Quoted in Boyd Alexander, Life at Fonthill, 1807-1822
(London: Rupert Hart Davies, 1957), p. 26.
13. See Magdi Wahba, “Beckford, Portugal and ‘Childish
Error,’” William Beckford of Fonthill, 1760-1844: Bicen-
tary Essays, ed. Fatma Moussa Mahmoud (Port Wash-
ington, NY: Kennikat, 1960), p. 58.
14. Lonsdale, introduction to Vathek, p. viii.
15. For differing ideas of parental influence, see Lonsdale,
introduction to Vathek, p. viii; and Mowl, p. 31.
16. For discussions of limitations imposed by “conceptual
paradigms” and hypotheses, see David E. Swalm,
“Locating Belief in Biography,” Biography 3 (1980), 23;
and Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form
(New York: St Martin’s Press, 1984), pp. 10, 209.
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17. Haggerty, p. 151.
BECKFORD
18. Alexander, p. 15.
19. See Noel Chabani Manganyi, “Psychobiography and
the Truth of the Subject,” Biography 6 (1983), 44-45,
50.
20. Earl of Chesterfield, Letters to His Son by the Earl of
Chesterfield (Washington: M. Walter Dunne, 1901),
2:395.
21. Ernest Campbell Mossner, “My Own Life,” The Life of
David Hume (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1954),
p. 615.
22. See Kenneth W. Graham, “Implications of the Gro-
tesque: Beckford’s Vathek and the Boundaries of
Fictional Reality,” Tennessee Studies in Literature 23
(1978), 64.
23. James Henry Rieger, “Au Pied de la Lettre: Stylistic
Uncertainty in Vathek,” Criticism 4 (1962), 310; James
K. Folsom, “Beckford’s Vathek and the Tradition of
Oriental Satire,” Criticism 6 (1964), 53.
24. Norman Holland, “Unity Identity Text Self,” PMLA 90
(1975), 816-17; Peter Nagourney, “The Basic Assump-
tions of Literary Biography,” Biography 1 (1978), 93.
25. William Epstein, Recognizing Biography (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), p. 36.
FURTHER READING
Biographies
Alexander, Boyd. England’s Wealthiest Son: A Study of Wil-
liam Beckford. London: Centaur Press, 1962, 308 p.
A highly regarded study of Beckford’s character that
incorporates material from unpublished documents.
Brockman, H. A. N. The Caliph of Fonthill. London: Werner
Laurie, 1956, 219 p.
A study of Beckford that focuses on his life at Fonthill
Abbey.
Fothergill, Brian. Beckford of Fonthill. London: Faber and
Faber, 1979, 387 p.
A detailed examination of Beckford’s life.
Oliver, J. W. The Life of William Beckford. London: Oxford
University Press, 1932, 343 p.
Full-length biography of Beckford.
Criticism
Borges, Jorge Luis. “About William Beckford’s Vathek.” In
Other Inquisitions: 1937-1952, translated by Ruth L. C.
Simms, pp. 137-40. Austin: University of Texas Press,
1943.
Offers his assessment of the Palace of Subterranean Fire
in Vathek, maintaining that the novel is an early
example of the “uncanny.”
Conant, Martha Pike. “The Imaginative Group.” In The
Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century, pp.
1-72. New York: Columbia University Press, 1908.
Explores Vathek’s unique qualities as well as its place in
the history of the oriental tale in eighteenth-century Eng-
land.
101
 Garrett, John. “Ending in Infinity: William Beckford’s Ara-
BECKFORD
bian Tale.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 5, no. 1 (October
1992): 15-34.
Attempts “to chart the terrain of Vathek from the dual
perspective of East and West, which is how Beckford
himself viewed it.”
Gemmett, Robert James. William Beckford. Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1977, 189 p.
A full-length survey of Beckford’s life and works.
Graham, Kenneth W. “Beckford’s Vathek: A Study in Ironic
Dissonance.” Criticism 14, no. 3 (summer 1972): 243-
52.
Maintains that Beckford’s adept use of ironic dissonance
in Vathek enabled him to “achieve a successful blending
of the improbable and the true.”
Haggerty, George E. “Literature and Homosexuality in the
Late Eighteenth Century: Walpole, Beckford, and
Lewis.” In Homosexual Themes in Literary Studies, edited
by Wayne R. Dynes and Stephen Donaldson, pp. 167-
78. New York: Garland, 1992.
A comparative study that focuses on recurring homosexual
themes in the works of Beckford, Horace Walpole, and
Matthew Gregory Lewis.
Hazlitt, William. “Mr. Beckford’s Vathek,” The Complete
Works of William Hazlitt: Literary And Political Criticism,
Vol. 19, edited by P. P. Howe, pp. 98-104. London: J.
M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1933.
Originally published in the Morning Chronicle on
October 20, 1823. Praises Vathek as a moral work,
claiming that because of Beckford’s balanced use of irony
and dispassionate depiction of evil, readers “take the
virtuous side in self-defence, and are invited into a sense
of humanity.”
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Hume, Robert D. “Exuberant Gloom, Existential Agony,
and Heroic Despair: Three Varieties of Negative Roman-
ticism.” In The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Ro-
manticism, edited by G. R. Thompson, pp. 109-27. Pull-
man: Washington State University Press, 1974.
Uses the term “Negative Romanticism” to classify writers
who “are possessed by the Romantic discontents, but
entirely lack the Romantic faith in man’s ability to
transcend his condition or transform it” and who often
exhibit a resultant attraction to dark forces, and consid-
ers the extent to which Vathek is a Negative Romantic
novel.
Keegan, P. Q. “Gleanings from Anglo-Oriental Literature.”
The New Monthly Magazine, no. 66 (June 1877): 674-87.
Focuses on Vathek as a study of the results of extreme
selfishness and excess.
More, Paul Elmer. “William Beckford.” In The Drift of
Romanticism: Shelburne Essays. Eighth series, pp. 1-36.
New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913.
Evaluates Beckford’s symbolic representation of Romantic
egotism in Vathek.
OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:
Additional coverage of Beckford’s life and career is con-
tained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale:
British Writers, Vol. 3; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols.
39, 213; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 1; Literature
Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vol.
16; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; and
Supernatural Fiction Writers.
CHARLOTTE
BRONTË
(1816 - 1855)
(Also wrote under the pseudonym Currer Bell) English
novelist and poet.
T he author of vivid, skillfully constructed
novels, Brontë created female characters who
broke the traditional, nineteenth-century fictional
stereotype of a woman as submissive and depen-
dent, beautiful but ignorant. Her highly acclaimed
Jane Eyre (1847) best demonstrates these attitudes:
its heroine is a plain woman who displays intel-
ligence, self-confidence, a will of her own, and
moral righteousness. With an oeuvre consisting of
four novels, some poems, and other writings from
her youth, Brontë is hailed as a precursor of
feminist novelists, and her works, often depicting
the struggles and minor victories of everyday life,
are considered early examples of literary realism.
Her novels, particularly Jane Eyre and Villette
(1853), have been discussed as part of the Gothic
literary tradition, and contain elements of mys-
tery, heightened passions, and the supernatural.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
The eldest surviving daughter in a motherless
family of six, Brontë helped to raise her remaining
brother, Branwell, and two sisters, Emily and
Anne. Her father, a strict Yorkshire clergyman,
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believed firmly in the values of self-education and
forbade his family from socializing with other
children. Intellectual growth was encouraged,
however, and he introduced his family to the Bible
and to the works of William Shakespeare, William
Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Sir Walter Scott. In
their youths, the Brontë siblings collaborated on a
series of imaginative stories, plays, and poems set
in the fictional land of Angria. Charlotte’s contri-
bution to these tales, which were collected and
published posthumously as Legends of Angria
(1933), served as a catalyst for her mature works
and marked the beginning of her interest in writ-
ing.
For many years Brontë concealed her writing
from her family. After the accidental discovery
that Emily, too, secretly wrote verse, and that
Anne shared their interest, the three published, at
their own expense, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton
Bell (1846). The sisters assumed masculine pseud-
onyms both to preserve their privacy and to avoid
the patronizing treatment they believed critics ac-
corded women writers. Poems sold only two cop-
ies, but Charlotte was undeterred and continued
to write. Her first novel, The Professor (1857), was
rejected by six publishers, but her next work, Jane
Eyre, was accepted immediately. The work received
lavish attention, was praised by Queen Victoria
and George Eliot, and brought Brontë into popular
literary circles, where she met William Makepeace
103
 Thackeray (to whom she dedicated the second edi-
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
tion of Jane Eyre), Matthew Arnold, and Harriet
Martineau.
Brontë went on to publish two more novels,
Shirley (1849) and Villette. During the writing of
Shirley, Brontë experienced a series of personal
tragedies that marked the beginning of a time of
intense sorrow and loneliness. Within a period of
about nine months, Brontë lost her three remain-
ing siblings, first Branwell, then Emily, and finally
Anne in the spring of 1849. After their deaths,
Brontë found it very trying to write in solitude.
She eventually began work on her final novel, Vil-
lette, basing its plot and characters on her unpub-
lished The Professor. The year after Villette’s publica-
tion, in 1854, Brontë married Arthur Bell Nicholls.
She became pregnant early in 1855, dying in
March of that year from complications related to
her pregnancy. The Professor was published after
her death, in 1857.
MAJOR WORKS
Many who have studied Brontë’s life and
works have noted connections between the two,
with each of her novels reflecting autobiographi-
cal details. In Jane Eyre, the young heroine spends
many years as a student, and later a teacher, at a
strict girls’ boarding school, Lowood. This fictional
school bears a resemblance to the Clergy Daugh-
ters’ School at Cowan Bridge, the harsh institu-
tion where Brontë and her sisters were sent during
their youths. As an adult Jane Eyre becomes a
governess, a job also held by Brontë. The somber
tone of Brontë’s second published novel, Shirley,
reflects her grief following the deaths of her
brother and two sisters. The heroine of the book,
modeled after Emily, is a stoic figure whose cour-
age serves as both a tribute to Brontë’s sister and a
lesson to the reader. Shirley depicts the friendship
of two women, Caroline Helstone and Shirley
Keeldar, in the midst of conflict and upheaval in
the industrial region of Yorkshire, England.
Brontë’s travels to Brussels and her passionate at-
tachment to Constantin Héger, a married school-
master in whose home she lived, are recreated in
the student-teacher relationships and in the male
characters of The Professor and Villette.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
While Jane Eyre was immediately popular,
initial critical reception of the novel varied.
Several commentators admired the power and
104 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
freshness of Brontë’s prose; others, however,
termed the novel superficial and vulgar. Perhaps
the best known early review, by Elizabeth Rigby
(see Further Reading), flatly condemned Jane Eyre
as “an anti-Christian composition.” Still other crit-
ics questioned the authorship of the novel. Some
doubted that a woman was capable of writing
such a work, while E. P. Whipple of the North
American Review contended that the book was
coauthored by a man and a woman. In succeed-
ing generations, the critical assessment of Jane Eyre
improved considerably, and for many years,
Charlotte was considered the outstanding literary
figure of the Brontë family. However, David Cecil’s
essay (see Further Reading), published in the early
1930s, proclaimed Emily the greater writer and
marked a temporary end of Charlotte’s critical
superiority in the eyes of some critics. Influenced
by Cecil’s article, these critics compared Charlotte’s
works to those of Emily, disputing the originality
and intellectual quality of Charlotte’s novels.
Many studies of Brontë’s works are focused more
on her life than on her writing. During the
nineteenth century, reviewers often addressed the
nature of Jane’s character; by the turn of the
century, critics tended to assess Jane as a person of
courage and integrity. Critical interpretations dur-
ing the twentieth and twenty-first century have
tended to be more specific in their approach. The
characters of Jane, Rochester, and Bertha have
been the subjects of detailed analyses, and review-
ers have also debated the nature and import of
Rochester’s disability. Critics frequently discuss
the novel’s structure, its symbolism, and its
autobiographical elements. Feminist literary criti-
cism has given new impetus to a revaluation of
the significance of Brontë’s attempts to depict
through her fiction some of the struggles of
women in the nineteenth century. While
twentieth- and twenty-first-century discussions of
the novel’s single theme vary, most scholars agree
that in Jane Eyre Brontë wished to stress the pos-
sibility of equality in marriage.
In terms of Brontë’s novels as examples of
Gothic literature, many critics have posited that
Brontë broadened the definition of Gothic. While
not adhering strictly to the model of traditional
Gothic literature, Brontë did borrow liberally from
the genre, incorporating dark, mysterious, and
supernatural elements into the plots of her novels.
In his influential 1958 essay, Robert B. Heilman
described Brontë’s works as “new Gothic” novels
that expand the Gothic tradition by exploring the
place of heightened passions in routine, daily life.
Her use of Gothic literary elements, Heilman
wrote, “released her from the patterns of the novel
of society and therefore permitted the flowering
of her real talent—the talent for finding and giv-
ing dramatic form to impulses and feelings which
. . . increase wonderfully the sense of reality in
the novel.” A number of critics have suggested
that Brontë expanded Gothic conventions
through her unconventional female characters. In
her 1999 essay, for example, Toni Wein categorized
Villette as a departure from traditional Gothic
literature because the female characters, with their
manipulations and survival mechanisms, are
portrayed as heroic rather than evil. In a 1979 es-
say, Caesarea Abartis examined the ways in which
Brontë both adhered to and deviated from Gothic
convention, suggesting that Jane Eyre is a precur-
sor to the modern romance novel.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell [as Currer Bell,
with Ellis and Acton Bell (pseudonyms of
Emily and Anne Brontë)] (poems) 1846
Jane Eyre. An Autobiography [as Currer Bell] (novel)
1847
Shirley: A Tale [as Currer Bell] (novel) 1849
Villette [as Currer Bell] (novel) 1853
The Professor: A Tale [as Currer Bell] 1857
Emma (unfinished novel) 1860
*The Brontës’ Life and Letters (letters) 1908
Legends of Angria (juvenilia) 1933
Five Novelettes: Passing Events, Julia, Mina Laury,
Henry Hastings, Caroline Vernon (novellas) 1971
* This work includes letters written by Charlotte, Emily,
and Anne Brontë.
PRIMARY SOURCES
CHARLOTTE BRONTË (STORY
DATE 1833)
SOURCE: Brontë, Charlotte. “Napoleon and the
Spectre.” In Great Ghost Stories: 34 Classic Tales of the
Supernatural, compiled by Robin Brockman, pp. 415-
20. New York: Gramercy Books, 2002.
The following short story originally appeared in a
manuscript titled “The Green Dwarf” (dated 10 July
1833-2 September 1833) and was first published in
1919.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
Well, as I was saying, the Emperor got into
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
bed.
‘Chevalier,’ says he to his valet, ‘let down
those window-curtains, and shut the casement
before you leave the room.’
Chevalier did as he was told, and then, taking
up his candlestick, departed.
In a few minutes the Emperor felt his pillow
becoming rather hard, and he got up to shake it.
As he did so a slight rushing noise was heard near
the bed-head. His Majesty listened, but all was
silent as he lay down again.
Scarcely had he settled into a peaceful attitude
of repose, when he was disturbed by a sensation
of thirst. Lifting himself on his elbow, he took a
glass of lemonade from the small stand which was
placed beside him. He refreshed himself by a deep
draught. As he returned the goblet to its station a
deep groan burst from a kind of closet in one
corner of the apartment.
‘Who’s there?’ cried the Emperor, seizing his
pistols. ‘Speak, or I’ll blow your brains out.’
This threat produced no other effect than a
short, sharp laugh, and a dead silence followed.
The Emperor started from his couch, and,
hastily throwing on a robe-de-chambre which hung
over the back of a chair, stepped courageously to
the haunted closet. As he opened the door some-
thing rustled. He sprang forward sword in hand.
No soul or even substance appeared, and the
rustling, it was evident, proceeded from the fall-
ing of a cloak, which had been suspended by a
peg from the door.
Half ashamed of himself he returned to bed.
Just as he was about once more to close his
eyes, the light of the three wax tapers, which
burned in a silver branch over the mantelpiece,
was suddenly darkened. He looked up. A black,
opaque shadow obscured it. Sweating with terror,
the Emperor put out his hand to seize the bell-
rope, but some invisible being snatched it rudely
from his grasp, and at the same instant the
ominous shade vanished.
‘Pooh!’ exclaimed Napoleon, ‘it was but an
ocular delusion.’
‘Was it?’ whispered a hollow voice, in deep
mysterious tones, close to his ear. Was it a delu-
sion, Emperor of France? No! all thou hast heard
and seen is sad forewarning reality. Rise, lifter of
the Eagle Standard! Awake, slayer of the Lily Scep-
tre! Follow me, Napoleon, and thou shalt see
more.’
105
 As the voice ceased, a form dawned on his
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
astonished sight. It was that of a tall, thin man,
dressed in a blue surtout edged with gold lace. It
wore a black cravat very tightly round its neck,
and confined by two little sticks placed behind
each ear. The countenance was livid; the tongue
protruded from between the teeth, and the eyes
all glazed and bloodshot started with frightful
prominence from their sockets.
‘Mon Dieu!’ exclaimed the Emperor, ‘what do I
see? Spectre, whence cometh thou?’
The apparition spoke not, but gliding forward
beckoned Napoleon with uplifted finger to follow.
Controlled by a mysterious influence, which
deprived him of the capability of either thinking
or acting for himself, he obeyed in silence.
The solid wall of the apartment fell open as
they approached, and, when both had passed
through, it closed behind them with a noise like
thunder.
They would now have been in total darkness
had it not been for a dim light which shone round
the ghost and revealed the damp walls of a long,
vaulted passage. Down this they proceeded with
mute rapidity. Ere long a cool, refreshing breeze,
which rushed wailing up the vault and caused the
Emperor to wrap his loose nightdress closer round,
announced their approach to the open air.
This they soon reached, and Nap found him-
self in one of the principal streets of Paris.
‘Worthy Spirit,’ said he, shivering in the chill
night air, ‘permit me to return and put on some
additional clothing. I will be with you again
presently.’
‘Forward,’ replied his companion sternly.
He felt compelled, in spite of the rising indig-
nation which almost choked him, to obey.
On they went through the deserted streets till
they arrived at a lofty house built on the banks of
the Seine. Here the Spectre stopped, the gates
rolled back to receive them, and they entered a
large marble hall which was part concealed by a
curtain drawn across, through the half transpar-
ent folds of which a bright light might be seen
burning with dazzling lustre. A row of fine female
figures, richly attired, stood before this screen.
They wore on their heads garlands of the most
beautiful flowers, but their faces were concealed
by ghastly masks representing death’s-heads.
‘What is all this mummery?’ cried the Em-
peror, making an effort to shake off the mental
106 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
shackles by which he was so unwillingly re-
strained, ‘Where am I, and why have I been
brought here?’
‘Silence,’ said the guide, lolling out still further
his black and bloody tongue. ‘Silence, if thou
wouldst escape instant death.’
The Emperor would have replied, his natural
courage overcoming the temporary awe to which
he had at first been subjected, but just then a
strain of wild, supernatural music swelled behind
the huge curtain, which waved to and fro, and
bellied slowly out as if agitated by some internal
commotion or battle of waving winds. At the same
moment an overpowering mixture of the scents
of moral corruption, blent with the richest Eastern
odours, stole through the haunted hall.
A murmur of many voices was now heard at a
distance, and something grasped his arm eagerly
from behind.
He turned hastily round. His eyes met the
well-known countenance of Marie Louise.
‘What! are you in this infernal place, too?’ said
he. ‘What has brought you here?’
‘Will your Majesty permit me to ask the same
question of yourself?’ said the Empress, smiling.
He made no reply; astonishment prevented
him.
No curtain now intervened between him and
the light. It had been removed as if by magic, and
a splendid chandelier appeared suspended over
his head. Throngs of ladies, richly dressed, but
without death’s-head masks, stood round, and a
due proportion of gay cavaliers was mingled with
them. Music was still sounding, but it was seen to
proceed from a band of mortal musicians stationed
in an orchestra near at hand. The air was yet
redolent of incense, but it was incense unblended
with stench.
‘Mon Dieu!’ cried the Emperor, ‘how is all this
come about? Where in the world is Piche?’
‘Piche?’ replied the Empress. ‘What does your
Majesty mean? Had you not better leave the apart-
ment and retire to rest?’
‘Leave the apartment? Why, where am I?’
‘In my private drawing-room, surrounded by
a few particular persons of the Court whom I had
invited this evening to a ball. You entered a few
minutes since in your nightdress with your eyes
fixed and wide open. I suppose from the astonish-
ment you now testify that you were walking in
your sleep.’
 The Emperor immediately fell into a fit of
catalepsy, in which he continued during the
whole of that night and the greater part of the
next day.
GENERAL COMMENTARY
ROBERT B. HEILMAN (ESSAY DATE
1958)
SOURCE: Heilman, Robert B. “Charlotte Brontë’s ‘New’
Gothic.” In From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad: Essays
Collected in Memory of James T. Hillhouse, edited by R.
C. Rathburn and Martin Steinman, pp. 118-32. Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958.
In the following essay, Heilman illustrates how Brontë
added depth and complexity to the Gothic heroines of her
works.
In that characteristic flight from cliché that
may plunge him into the recherché the critic
might well start from The Professor and discover
in it much more than is implied by the usual
dismissal of it as Charlotte Brontë’s poorest work.
He might speculate about Charlotte’s singular
choice of a male narrator—the value of it, or even
the need of it, for her. For through William Crim-
sworth she lives in Héger, making love to herself
as Frances Henri: in this there is a kind of raven-
ousness, inturning, splitting, and doubling back
of feeling. Through Crimsworth she experiences a
sudden, vivid, often graceless mastery. But these
notes on the possible psychology of the author
are critically useful only as a way into the strange
tremors of feeling that are present in a formally
defective story. Pelet identifies “a fathomless
spring of sensibility in thy breast, Crimsworth.” If
Crimsworth is not a successful character, he is the
channel of emotional surges that splash over a
conventional tale of love: the author’s disquieting
presence in the character lends a nervous, off-
center vitality. The pathos of liberty is all but
excessive (as it is later in Shirley Keeldar and Lucy
Snowe): Crimsworth sneers, “. . . I sprang from
my bed with other slaves,” and rejoices, “Liberty I
clasped in my arms . . . her smile and embrace
revived my life.” The Puritan sentiment (to be
exploited partially in Jane Eyre and heavily in
Lucy Snowe) becomes tense, rhetorical, fiercely
censorious; the self-righteousness punitive and
even faintly paranoid. Through the frenetically
Protestant Crimsworth and his flair for rebuke
Charlotte notes the little sensualities of girl
students (“parting her lips, as full as those of a
hot-blooded Maroon”) and the coquettish yet
urgent sexuality of Zoraide Reuter perversely
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
responding to Crimsworth’s ostensible yet not
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
total unresponsiveness to her: “When she stole
about me with the soft step of a slave, I felt at
once barbarous and sensual as a pasha.”
Charlotte looks beyond familiar surfaces. In
Yorke Hunsden she notes the “incompatibilities of
the ‘physique’ with the ‘morale.’” The explosive
Byronic castigator has lineaments “small, and
even feminine” and “now the mien of a morose
bull, and anon that of an arch and mischievous
girl.” In this version of the popular archetype,
“rough exterior but heart of gold,” Charlotte bril-
liantly finds a paradoxical union of love and hate;
she sees generosity of spirit sometimes appearing
directly but most often translated into antithetical
terms that also accommodate opposite motives—
into god-like self-indulgence in truth-telling;
almost Mephistophelian cynicism; sadism and
even murderousness in words.
Charlotte’s story is conventional; formally she
is for “reason” and “real life”; but her characters
keep escaping to glorify “feeling” and “Imagina-
tion.” Feeling is there in the story—evading repres-
sion, in author or in character; ranging from
nervous excitement to emotional absorption;
often tense and peremptory; sexuality, hate, ir-
rational impulse, grasped, given life, not merely
named and pigeonholed. This is Charlotte’s ver-
sion of Gothic: in her later novels an extraordinary
thing. In that incredibly eccentric history, The
Gothic Quest, Montague Summers asserts that the
“Gothic novel of sensibility . . . draws its emo-
tionalism and psychology . . . from the work of
Samuel Richardson.” When this line of descent
continues in the Brontës, the vital feeling moves
toward an intensity, a freedom, and even an
abandon virtually non-existent in historical
Gothic and rarely approached in Richardson.
From Angria on, Charlotte’s women vibrate with
passions that the fictional conventions only partly
constrict or gloss over—in the center an almost
violent devotedness that has in it at once a fire of
independence, a spiritual energy, a vivid sexual
responsiveness, and, along with this, self-
righteousness, a sense of power, sometimes self-
pity and envious competitiveness. To an extent
the heroines are “unheroined,” unsweetened. Into
them there has come a new sense of the dark side
of feeling and personality.
The Professor ventures a little into the psychic
darkness on which Villette draws heavily. One
night Crimsworth, a victim of hypochondria,
hears a voice saying, “In the midst of life we are
in death,” and he feels “a horror of great dark-
ness.” In his boyhood this same “sorceress” drew
107
 him “to the very brink of a black, sullen river”
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
and managed to “lure me to her vaulted home of
horrors.” Charlotte draws on sex images that recall
the note of sexuality subtly present in other
episodes: “. . . I had entertained her at bed and
board . . . she lay with me, . . . taking me
entirely to her death-cold bosom, and holding me
with arms of bone.” The climax is: “I repulsed her
as one would a dreaded and ghastly concubine
coming to embitter a husband’s heart toward his
young bride; . . .” This is Gothic, yet there is an
integrity of feeling that greatly deepens the
convention.
From childhood terrors to all those mysteri-
ously threatening sights, sounds, and injurious
acts that reveal the presence of some malevolent
force and that anticipate the holocaust at Thorn-
field, the traditional Gothic in Jane Eyre has often
been noted, and as often disparaged. It need not
be argued that Charlotte Brontë did not reach the
heights while using hand-me-down devices,
though a tendency to work through the conven-
tions of fictional art was a strong element in her
make-up. This is true of all her novels, but it is no
more true than her counter-tendency to modify,
most interestingly, these conventions. In both Vil-
lette and Jane Eyre Gothic is used but characteris-
tically is undercut.
Jane Eyre hears a “tragic . . . preternatural . . .
laugh,” but this is at “high noon” and there is
“no circumstance of ghostliness”; Grace Poole, the
supposed laugher, is a plain person, than whom
no “apparition less romantic or less ghostly could
. . . be conceived”; Charlotte apologizes ironically
to the “romantic reader” for telling “the plain
truth” that Grace generally bears a “pot of porter.”
Charlotte almost habitually revises “old Gothic,”
the relatively crude mechanisms of fear, with an
infusion of the anti-Gothic. When Mrs. Rochester
first tried to destroy Rochester by fire, Jane “bap-
tized” Rochester’s bed and heard Rochester “fulmi-
nating strange anathemas at finding himself lying
in a pool of water.” The introduction of comedy
as a palliative of straight Gothic occurs on a large
scale when almost seventy-five pages are given to
the visit of the Ingram-Eshton party to mysterious
Thornfield; here Charlotte, as often in her novels,
falls into the manner of the Jane Austen whom
she despised. When Mrs. Rochester breaks loose
again and attacks Mason, the presence of guests
lets Charlotte play the nocturnal alarum for at
least a touch of comedy: Rochester orders the
frantic women not to “pull me down or strangle
108
me”; and “the two dowagers, in vast white wrap-
pers, were bearing down on him like ships in full
sail.”
The symbolic also modifies the Gothic, for it
demands of the reader a more mature and compli-
cated response than the relatively simple thrill or
momentary intensity of feeling sought by primi-
tive Gothic. When mad Mrs. Rochester, seen only
as “the foul German spectre—the Vampyre,”
spreads terror at night, that is one thing; when,
with the malicious insight that is the paradox of
her madness, she tears the wedding veil in two
and thus symbolically destroys the planned mar-
riage, that is another thing, far less elementary as
art. The midnight blaze that ruins Thornfield
becomes more than a shock when it is seen also
as the fire of purgation; the grim, almost roadless
forest surrounding Ferndean is more than a har-
rowing stage-set when it is also felt as a symbol of
Rochester’s closed-in life.
The point is that in various ways Charlotte
manages to make the patently Gothic more than
a stereotype. But more important is that she
instinctively finds new ways to achieve the ends
served by old Gothic—the discovery and release
of new patterns of feeling, the intensification of
feeling. Though only partly unconventional, Jane
is nevertheless so portrayed as to evoke new feel-
ings rather than merely exercise old ones. As a girl
she is lonely, “passionate,” “strange,” “like nobody
there”; she feels superior, rejects poverty, talks
back precociously, tells truths bluntly, enjoys “the
strangest sense of freedom,” tastes “vengeance”;
she experiences a nervous shock which is said to
have a lifelong effect, and the doctor says “nerves
not in a good state”; she can be “reckless and
feverish,” “bitter and truculent”; at Thornfield she
is restless, given to “bright visions,” letting “imagi-
nation” picture an existence full of “life, fire, feel-
ing.” Thus Charlotte leads away from standard-
ized characterization toward new levels of human
reality, and hence from stock responses toward a
new kind of passionate engagement.
Charlotte moves toward depth in various ways
that have an immediate impact like that of Gothic.
Jane’s strange, fearful symbolic dreams are not
mere thrillers but reflect the tensions of the
engagement period, the stress of the wedding-day
debate with Rochester, and the longing for Roch-
ester after she has left him. The final Thornfield
dream, with its vivid image of a hand coming
through a cloud in place of the expected moon, is
in the surrealistic vein that appears most sharply
in the extraordinary pictures that Jane draws at
Thornfield: here Charlotte is plumbing the psyche,
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
not inventing a weird décor. Likewise in the
telepathy scene, which Charlotte, unlike Defoe in
dealing with a similar episode, does her utmost to
actualize: “The feeling was not like an electric
shock; but it was quite as sharp, as strange, as
startling: . . . that inward sensation . . . with all
its unspeakable strangeness . . . like an inspira-
tion . . . wondrous shock of feeling. . . .” In her
flair for the surreal, in her plunging into feeling
that is without status in the ordinary world of the
novel, Charlotte discovers a new dimension of
Gothic.
She does this most thoroughly in her portrayal
of characters and of the relations between them.
If in Rochester we see only an Angrian-Byronic
hero and a Charlotte wish-fulfillment figure (the
two identifications which to some readers seem
entirely to place him), we miss what is more
significant, the exploration of personality that
opens up new areas of feeling in intersexual
relationships. Beyond the “grim,” the “harsh,” the
eccentric, the almost histrionically cynical that
superficially distinguish Rochester from conven-
tional heroes, there is something almost Lawren-
tian: Rochester is “neither tall nor graceful”; his
eyes can be “dark, irate, and piercing”; his strong
features “took my feelings from my own power
and fettered them in his.” Without using the
vocabulary common to us, Charlotte is presenting
maleness and physicality, to which Jane responds
directly. She is “assimilated” to him by “something
in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves”;
she “must love” and “could not unlove” him; the
thought of parting from him is “agony.” Roches-
ter’s oblique amatory maneuvers become almost
punitive in the Walter-to-Griselda style and once
reduce her to sobbing “convulsively”; at times the
love-game borders on a power-game. Jane, who
prefers “rudeness” to “flattery,” is an instinctive
evoker of passion: she learns “the pleasure of vex-
ing and soothing him by turns” and pursues a
“system” of working him up “to considerable ir-
ritation” and coolly leaving him; when, as a result,
his caresses become grimaces, pinches, and tweaks,
she records that, sometimes at least, she “decid-
edly preferred these fierce favors.” She reports, “I
crushed his hand . . . red with the passionate
pressure”; she “could not . . . see God for his
creature,” and in her devotion Rochester senses
“an earnest, religious energy.”
Charlotte’s remolding of stock feeling reaches
a height when she sympathetically portrays
Rochester’s efforts to make Jane his mistress; here
the stereotyped seducer becomes a kind of lost
nobleman of passion, and of specifically physical
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
passion: “Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
as my own. . . .” The intensity of the pressure
which he puts upon her is matched, not by the
fear and revulsion of the popular heroine, but by
a responsiveness which she barely masters: “The
crisis was perilous; but not without its charm . . .”
She is “tortured by a sense of remorse at thus hurt-
ing his feelings”; at the moment of decision “a
hand of fiery iron grasped my vitals . . . black-
ness, burning! . . . my intolerable duty”; she
leaves in “despair”; and after she has left, “I longed
to be his; I panted to return . . .”—and for the
victory of principle “I abhorred myself . . . I was
hateful in my own eyes.” This extraordinary open-
ness to feeling, this escape from the bondage of
the trite, continues in the Rivers relationship,
which is a structural parallel to the Rochester af-
fair: as in Rochester the old sex villain is seen in a
new perspective, so in Rivers the clerical hero is
radically refashioned; and Jane’s almost accepting
a would-be husband is given the aesthetic status
of a regrettable yielding to a seducer. Without a
remarkable liberation from conventional feeling
Charlotte could not fathom the complexity of Riv-
ers—the earnest and dutiful clergyman distraught
by a profound inner turmoil of conflicting
“drives”: sexuality, restlessness, hardness, pride,
ambition (“fever in his vitals,” “inexorable as
death”); the hypnotic, almost inhuman potency
of his influence on Jane, who feels “a freezing
spell,” “an awful charm,” an “iron shroud”; the
relentlessness, almost the unscrupulousness, of his
wooing, the resultant fierce struggle (like that with
Rochester), Jane’s brilliantly perceptive accusation,
“. . . you almost hate me . . . you would kill me.
You are killing me now”; and yet her mysterious
near-surrender: “I was tempted to cease struggling
with him—to rush down the torrent of his will
into the gulf of his existence, and there lose my
own.”
Aside from partial sterilization of banal Gothic
by dry factuality and humor, Charlotte goes on to
make a much more important—indeed, a radi-
cal—revision of the mode: in Jane Eyre and in the
other novels, as we shall see, that discovery of pas-
sion, that rehabilitation of the extra-rational,
which is the historical office of Gothic, is no
longer oriented in marvelous circumstance but
moves deeply into the lesser known realities of
human life. This change I describe as the change
from “old Gothic” to “new Gothic.” The kind of
appeal is the same; the fictional method is utterly
different.
When Charlotte went on from Jane Eyre to
Shirley, she produced a book that for the student
109
 of the Gothic theme is interesting precisely
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
because on the face of things it would be expected
to be a barren field. It is the result of Charlotte’s
one deliberate venture from private intensities
into public extensities: Orders in Council, the Lud-
dites, technological unemployment in 1811 and
1812, a social portraiture which develops Char-
lotte’s largest cast of characters. Yet Charlotte can-
not keep it a social novel. Unlike Warren, who in
the somewhat similar Night Rider chose to reflect
the historical economic crisis in the private crisis
of the hero, Miss Brontë loses interest in the public
and slides over into the private.
The formal irregularities of Shirley—the stop-
and-start, zig-zag movement, plunging periodi-
cally into different perspectives—light up the
divergent impulses in Charlotte herself: the desire
to make a story from observed outer life, and the
inability to escape from inner urgencies that with
centrifugal force unwind outward into story
almost autonomously. Passion alters plan: the
story of industrial crisis is repeatedly swarmed over
by the love stories. But the ultimate complication
is that Charlotte’s duality of impulse is reflected
not only in the narrative material but in two dif-
ferent ways of telling each part of the story. On
the one hand she tells a rather conventional,
open, predictable tale; on the other she lets go
with a highly charged private sentiency that may
subvert the former or at least surround it with an
atmosphere of unfamiliarity or positive strange-
ness: the Gothic impulse.
For Charlotte it is typically the “pattern”
versus the “strange.” She describes “two pattern
young ladies, in pattern attire, with pattern
deportment”—a “respectable society” in which
“Shirley had the air of a black swan, or a white
crow. . . .” When, in singing, Shirley “poured
round the passion, force,” the young ladies
thought this “strange” and concluded: “What was
strange must be wrong; . . .” True, Charlotte’s
characters live within the established “patterns”
of life; but their impulse is to vitalize forms with
unpatterned feeling, and Charlotte’s to give play
to unpatterned feeling in all its forms. She detects
the warrior in the Reverend Matthew Helstone;
reports that Malone the curate “had energy
enough in hate”; describes Shirley weeping with-
out apparent reason; recounts Mrs. Yorke’s para-
noid “brooding, eternal, immitigable suspicion of
all men, things, creeds, and parties”; portrays
Hiram Yorke as scornful, stubborn, intolerant of
superiors, independent, truculent, benevolent
toward inferiors, his virtues surrounding an ag-
gressive amour propre.
110 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
Shirley is given a vehement, sweeping, unin-
hibited criticalness of mind; in her highly articu-
late formulations of incisive thought is released a
furious rush of emotional energy. Within the
framework of moral principles her ideas and feel-
ings are untrammeled. She vigorously debunks cli-
chés against charity, but against the mob she will
defend her property “like a tigress”; to Yorke’s face
she does a corrosive analysis of his personality;
she attacks Milton in a fiery sweeping paean to
Eve, the “mother” of “Titans”; in an almost
explosive defense of love she attacks ignorant,
chilly, refined, embarrassed people who “blas-
pheme living fire, seraph-brought from a divine
altar”; when she insists that she must “love” before
she marries, her “worldly” Uncle Sympson retorts,
“Preposterous stuff!—indecorous—unwomanly!”
Beside the adults who in ways are precocious
are the precocious children—the Yorkes who have
their parents’ free-swinging, uninhibited style of
talk; Henry Sympson, having for his older cousin
Shirley an attachment that borders on sexual feel-
ing; and most of all Martin Yorke, aged fifteen, to
whose excited pursuit of Caroline, almost ir-
relevant to plot or theme, Charlotte devotes two
and a half zestful chapters. Martin is willing to
help Caroline see Robert Moore, “her confounded
sweetheart,” to be near her himself, and he plans
to claim a reward “displeasing to Moore”; he
thinks of her physical beauties. Once he gets
between Robert and Caroline at goodbye time;
“he half carried Caroline down the stairs,”
“wrapped her shawl round her,” and wanted to
claim a kiss. At the same time he feels “power over
her,” he wants her to coax him, and he would like
“to put her in a passion—to make her cry.”
Charlotte subtly conveys the sexuality of his
quest—a rare feat in the nineteenth-century novel.
In Robert Moore, the unpopular mill-owner,
Charlotte finds less social rightness or wrongness
than his strength, his masculine appeal; her
sympathy, so to speak, is for the underside of his
personality. It “agreed with Moore’s temperament
. . . to be generally hated”; “he liked a silent,
sombre, unsafe solitude”; against the vandals his
“hate is still running in such a strong current”
that he has none left for other objects; he shows
“a terrible half” of himself in pursuing rioters with
“indefatigable, . . . relentless assiduity”; this
“excitement” pleases him; sadistically he likes to
“force” magistrates to “betray a certain fear.” He is
the great lover of the story; he almost breaks Caro-
line’s heart before he marries her, and he even has
a subtle impact on Shirley, teasingly communi-
cated, though officially denied, by Charlotte.
What Caroline yields to is his “secret power,”
which affects her “like a spell.” Here again Char-
lotte records, as directly as she can, simple sexual
attractiveness. From the problem novel she veers
off into “new Gothic”; in old Gothic, her hero
would have been a villain.
True to convention, the love stories end hap-
pily. But special feelings, a new pathos of love,
come through. Louis Moore demands in a woman
something “to endure, . . . to reprimand”; love
must involve “prickly peril,” “a sting now and
then”; for him the “young lioness or leopardess”
is better than the lamb. There is that peculiarly
tense vivacity of talk between lovers (the Jane-
Rochester style), who discover a heightened, at
times stagey, yet highly communicative rhetoric,
drawing now on fantasy, now on moral convic-
tion, verging now on titillating revelation, now
on battle; a crafty game of love, flirting with an
undefined risk, betraying a withheld avowal,
savoring the approach to consummation, as if the
erotic energy which in another social order might
find a physical outlet were forcing itself into an
electric language that is decorous but intimately
exploratory. Between Louis Moore, who has “a
thirst for freedom,” and Shirley, to whom finding
love is the Quest for the Bridle (for “a master
[whom it is] impossible not to love, and very pos-
sible to fear”), there is an almost disturbingly taut
struggle, a fierce intensification of the duel be-
tween Mirabel and Millamant, complex feelings
translated into wit, sheer debate, abusiveness of
manner, and a variety of skirmishings; Louis, the
lover, adopting the stance of power and con-
sciously playing to fright; the pursuit of an elusive
prey ending in a virtual parody of “one calling,
Child! / And I replied, My Lord”; over all of this a
singular air of strained excitement, of the working
of underlying emotional forces that at the climax
leads to a new frenetic intensification of style in
Louis’s notebook:
“Will you let me breathe, and not bewilder me?
You must not smile at present. The world swims
and changes round me. The sun is a dizzying
scarlet blaze, the sky a violet vortex whirling over
me.”
I am a strong man, but I staggered as I spoke. All
creation was exaggerated: colour grew more vivid:
motion more rapid; life itself more vital. I hardly
saw her for a moment; but I heard her voice—
pitilessly sweet. . . . Blent with torment, I experi-
enced rapture.
Nor does Charlotte’s flair for “unpatterned
feeling” stop here: Shirley, the forceful leader who
has already been called “a gentleman” and “cap-
tain,” languishes under the found bridle of the
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
masterful lover, whom she treats chillily and
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
subjects to “exquisitely provoking” postpone-
ments of marriage; he calls her a “pantheress” who
“gnaws her chain”; she tells him, “I don’t know
myself,” as if engagement had opened to her eyes
a previously undetected facet of her nature.
Though “these freaks” continue, she is “fettered”
at last; but not before the reader is radically stirred
by the felt mysteries of personality. Before Char-
lotte, no love story tapped such strange depths,
no consummation was so like a defeat.
Here Charlotte is probing psychic disturbance
and is on the edge of psychosomatic illness. The
theme draws her repeatedly. When Caroline
thinks Robert doesn’t love her, she suffers a long
physical decline, described with painful fullness.
She “wasted,” had a “broken spirit,” suffered
“intolerable despair,” felt the “utter sickness of
longing and disappointment,” at night found “my
mind darker than my hiding-place,” had “melan-
choly dreams,” became “what is called nervous,”
had “fears I never used to have,” “an inexpressible
weight on my mind,” and “strange sufferings,”
believed at times “that God had turned His face
from her” and sank “into the gulf of religious
despair.” Charlotte divines this: “People never die
of love or grief alone; though some die of inher-
ent maladies which the tortures of those passions
prematurely force into destructive action.” Caro-
line lingers in illness, has fancies “inscrutable to
ordinary attendants,” has a hallucination of talk-
ing to Robert in the garden. Shirley, having been
bitten by a dog which she believes to be mad,
becomes seriously ill; psychosomatic illness
springs directly from Charlotte’s special sensitivity
to the neurotic potential in human nature. A
complementary awareness, that of the impact of
the physical on the psychic, appears when she
observes the “terrible depression,” the “inexpress-
ible—dark, barren, impotent” state of mind of
Robert when he is recovering from a gunshot
wound.
To give so much space to a lesser work is
justifiable only because some of its contents are of
high historico-critical significance. Though Shir-
ley is not pulled together formally as well as Jane
Eyre or even the more sprawling Villette, and
though the characters are as wholes less fully real-
ized, still it accommodates the widest ranging of
an extraordinarily free sensibility. Constantly, in
many different directions, it is in flight from the
ordinary rational surface of things against which
old Gothic was the first rebel in fiction; it abun-
dantly contains and evokes, to adapt Charlotte’s
own metaphor, “unpatterned feeling.” It turns up
111
 unexpected elements in personality: resentfulness,
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
malice, love of power; precocities and perversities
of response; the multiple tensions of love between
highly individualized lovers; psychic disturbances.
And in accepting a dark magnetic energy as a
central virtue in personality, Charlotte simply
reverses the status of men who were the villains
in the sentimental and old Gothic modes.
Of the four novels, Villette is most heavily
saturated with Gothic—with certain of its tradi-
tional manifestations (old Gothic), with the
undercutting of these that is for Charlotte no less
instinctive than the use of them (anti-Gothic),
and with an original, intense exploration of feel-
ing that increases the range and depth of fiction
(new Gothic).
As in Jane Eyre, Charlotte can be skillful in
anti-Gothic. When Madame Beck, pussyfooting in
espionage, “materializes” in shocking suddenness,
Lucy is made matter-of-fact or indignant rather
than thrilled with fright. “No ghost stood beside
me . . .” is her characteristic response to a Beck
surprise. Once the spy, having “stolen” upon her
victims, betrays her unseen presence by a sneeze:
Gothic yields to farce. Technically more complex
is Charlotte’s use of the legend of the nun suppos-
edly buried alive and of the appearances of a
visitant taken to be the ghost of the nun: Charlotte
coolly distances herself from this by having Lucy
dismiss the legend as “romantic rubbish” and by
explaining the apparitions as the playful inven-
tions of a giddy lover. True, she keeps the secret
long enough to get a few old Gothic thrills from
the “ghost,” but what she is really up to is using
the apparitions in an entirely new way; that is, for
responses that lie beyond the simplicities of terror.
First, the apparitions are explained as a prod-
uct of Lucy’s own psychic state, the product, Dr.
John suggests, of “long-continued mental con-
flict.” In the history of Gothic this is an important
spot, for here we first see the shift from stock
explanations and responses to the inner human
reality: fiction is slowly discovering the psychic
depths known to drama for centuries.
Then, when Lucy next sees the nun, she
responds in a way that lies entirely outside fic-
tional convention: “I neither fled nor shrieked
. . . I spoke . . . I stretched out my hand, for I
meant to touch her.” Not that Lucy is not afraid,
but that she is testing herself—an immense change
from the expectable elementary response: the fris-
son disappears before the complexer action that
betokens a maturing of personality.
112 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
Finally, Paul and Lucy both see the spectre and
are thus brought closer together: they have had
what they call “impressions,” and through shar-
ing the ghost they assume a shared sensibility.
Paul says, “I was conscious of rapport between
you and myself.” The rapport is real, though the
proof of it is false; the irony of this is a subtle
sophistication of Gothic.
The responsiveness, the sensitivity, is the
thing; many passages place “feeling” above “see-
ing” as an avenue of knowledge. Reason must be
respected, for it is “vindictive,” but at times
imagination must be yielded to, like a sexual pas-
sion at once feared and desired. There is the sum-
mer night when the sedative given by Madame
Beck has a strange effect:
Imagination was roused from her rest, and she
came forth impetuous and venturous. With scorn
she looked on Matter, her mate—
“Rise!” she said; “Sluggard! this night I will have
my will; nor shalt thou prevail.”
“Look forth and view the night!” was her cry; and
when I lifted the heavy blind from the casement
close at hand—with her own royal gesture, she
showed me a moon supreme, in an element deep
and splendid.
. . . She lured me to leave this den and follow her
forth into dew, coolness, and glory.
There follows the most magnificent of all
Charlotte’s nocturnes: that vision of the “moonlit,
midnight park,” the brilliance of the fete, the
strange charm of places and people, recounted in
a rhythmical, enchanted style (the “Kubla Khan”
mode) which at first reading gives the air of a
dream mistaken for reality to what is in fact real-
ity made like a dream. This is a surrealistic, trance-
like episode which makes available to fiction a
vast new territory and idiom. The surrealistic is,
despite Montague Summers, one of the new
phases of Gothic, which in its role of liberator of
feeling characteristically explores the non-
naturalistic: to come up, as here, with a pro-
founder nature, or a nature freshly, even disturb-
ingly, seen.
The surrealism of Lucy’s evening is possible
only to a special sensitivity, and it is really the
creation of this sensitivity, in part pathological,
that is at the apex of Charlotte’s Gothic. In The
Professor the tensions in the author’s contempla-
tion of her own experience come into play; in
Shirley various undercurrents of personality push
up into the social surfaces of life; in Jane Eyre
moral feeling is subjected to the remolding pres-
sures of a newly vivid consciousness of the diverse
impulses of sexuality; and in Villette the feeling
responses to existence are pursued into sufferings
that edge over into disorder. The psychology of
rejection and alienation, first applied to Polly,
becomes the key to Lucy, who, finding no cathar-
sis for a sense of desolation, generates a serious in-
ner turmoil. She suffers from “a terrible oppres-
sion” and then from “anxiety lying in wait on
enjoyment, like a tiger crouched in a jungle . . .
his fierce heart panted close against mine; . . . I
knew he waited only for sun-down to bound
ravenous from his ambush.” Depression is fed by
the conflict between a loveless routine of life and
her longings, which she tried to put down like
“Jael to Sisera, driving a nail through their
temples”; but this only “transiently stunned”
them and “at intervals [they] would turn on the
nail with a rebellious wrench: then did the temples
bleed, and the brain thrill to its core.”
These strains prepare us for the high point in
Charlotte’s new Gothic—the study of Lucy’s
emotional collapse and near breakdown when
vacation comes and she is left alone at the school
with “a poor deformed and imbecile pupil.” “My
heart almost died within me; . . . My spirits had
long been gradually sinking; now that the prop of
employment was withdrawn, they went down
fast.” After three weeks, storms bring on “a
deadlier paralysis”; and “my nervous system could
hardly support” the daily strain. She wanders in
the street: “A goad thrust me on, a fever forbade
me to rest; . . .” She observes a “growing illusion”
and says, “. . . my nerves are getting over-
stretched; . . .” She feels that “a malady is grow-
ing upon” her mind, and she asks herself, “How
shall I keep well?” Then come “a peculiarly
agonizing depression”; a nine-days storm: “a
strange fever of the nerves and blood”; continu-
ing insomnia, broken only by a terrifying night-
mare of alienation. She flees the house, and then
comes the climactic event of her going to a church
and despite the intensity of her Protestant spirit
entering the confessional to find relief.
From now on, overtly or implicitly, hypochon-
dria and anxiety keep coming into the story—the
enemies from whose grip Lucy must gradually free
herself. At a concert she spotted the King as a
fellow-victim of “that strangest spectre, Hypo-
chondria,” for on his face she saw its marks, whose
meaning, “if I did not know, at least I felt, . . .”
When, after her return to Beck’s on a rainy night,
things are not going well, a letter from Dr. John is
“the ransom from my terror,” and its loss drives
her almost to frenzy. She describes night as “an
unkindly time” when she has strange fancies,
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
doubts, the “horror of calamity.” She is aware of
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
her “easily-deranged temperament.” Beyond this
area of her own self-understanding we see conflicts
finding dramatic expression in her almost wild ac-
ceptance of Rachel’s passionate acting of Phèdre
(“a spectacle low, horrible, immoral”), which
counterbalances her vehement condemnation of
a fleshy nude by Rubens (one of the
“materialists”). Paul identifies her, in a figure
whose innocence for him is betrayed by the deep,
if not wholly conscious, understanding that leads
Charlotte to write it: “a young she wild creature,
new caught, untamed, viewing with a mixture of
fire and fear the first entrance of the breaker in.”
There is not room to trace Lucy’s recovery,
especially in the important phase, the love affair
with Paul which is related to our theme by com-
pelling, as do the Jane-Rochester and Louis Moore-
Shirley relationships in quite different ways, a
radical revision of the feelings exacted by stereo-
typed romance. What is finally noteworthy is that
Charlotte, having chosen in Lucy a heroine with
the least durable emotional equipment, with the
most conspicuous neurotic element in her tem-
perament, goes on through the history of Lucy’s
emotional maturing to surmount the need for
romantic fulfillment and to develop the aesthetic
courage for a final disaster—the only one in her
four novels.
Some years ago Edmund Wilson complained
of writers of Gothic who “fail to lay hold on the
terrors that lie deep in the human soul and that
cause man to fear himself” and proposed an
anthology of horror stories that probe “psycho-
logical caverns” and find “disquieting obsessions.”
This is precisely the direction in which Charlotte
Brontë moved, especially in Lucy Snowe and
somewhat also in Caroline Helstone and Shirley
Keeldar; this was one aspect of her following hu-
man emotions where they took her, into many
depths and intensities that as yet hardly had a
place in the novel. This was the finest achieve-
ment of Gothic.
Gothic is variously defined. In a recent book
review Leslie Fiedler implies that Gothic is shoddy
mystery-mongering, whereas F. Cudworth Flint
defines the Gothic tradition, which he considers
“nearly central in American literature,” as “a liter-
ary exploration of the avenues to death.” For
Montague Summers, on the other hand, Gothic
was the essence of romanticism, and romanticism
was the literary expression of supernaturalism.
Both these latter definitions, though they are im-
practically inclusive, have suggestive value. For
originally Gothic was one of a number of aesthetic
113
 developments which served to breach the “classi-
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
cal” and “rational” order of life and to make pos-
sible a kind of response, and a response to a kind
of thing, that among the knowing had long been
taboo. In the novel it was the function of Gothic
to open horizons beyond social patterns, rational
decisions, and institutionally approved emotions;
in a word, to enlarge the sense of reality and its
impact on the human being. It became then a
great liberator of feeling. It acknowledged the non-
rational—in the world of things and events, oc-
casionally in the realm of the transcendental,
ultimately and most persistently in the depths of
the human being. (Richardson might have started
this, but his sense of inner forces was so overlaid
by the moralistic that his followers all ran after
him only when he ran the wrong way.) The first
Gothic writers took the easy way: the excitement
of mysterious scene and happening, which I call
old Gothic. Of this Charlotte Brontë made some
direct use, while at the same time tending toward
humorous modifications (anti-Gothic); but what
really counts is its indirect usefulness to her: it
released her from the patterns of the novel of
society and therefore permitted the flowering of
her real talent—the talent for finding and giving
dramatic form to impulses and feelings which,
because of their depth or mysteriousness or
intensity or ambiguity, or of their ignoring or
transcending everyday norms of propriety or
reason, increase wonderfully the sense of reality
in the novel. To note the emergence of this “new
Gothic” in Charlotte Brontë is not, I think, to
pursue an old mode into dusty corners but rather
to identify historically the distinguishing, and
distinguished, element in her work.
TITLE COMMENTARY
Jane Eyre
E. P. WHIPPLE (ESSAY DATE
OCTOBER 1848)
SOURCE: Whipple, E. P. “Novels of the Season.” The
North American Review 67, no. 141 (October 1848): 354-
70.
In the following excerpt from a review of Jane Eyre,
Whipple presumes the novel was written largely by
Patrick Branwell Brontë—due to the novel’s “masculine
tone”—with additional material supplied by the Brontë
sisters. Whipple also asserts that the Brontës’ portrayal
of the darker side of humanity is not representative of
most people, but rather of “a sense of the depravity of hu-
man nature peculiarly their own.”
114
Not many months ago, the New England
States were visited by a distressing mental epi-
demic, passing under the name of the “Jane Eyre
fever,” which defied all the usual nostrums of the
established doctors of criticism. Its effects varied
with different constitutions, in some producing a
soft ethical sentimentality, which relaxed all the
fibres of conscience, and in others exciting a
general fever of moral and religious indignation.
It was to no purpose that the public were solemnly
assured, through the intelligent press, that the
malady was not likely to have any permanent ef-
fect either on the intellectual or moral constitu-
tion. The book which caused the distemper would
probably have been inoffensive, had not some sly
manufacturer of mischief hinted that it was a book
which no respectable man should bring into his
family circle. Of course, every family soon had a
copy of it, and one edition after another found
eager purchasers. The hero, Mr. Rochester, (not
the same person who comes to so edifying an end
in the pages of Dr. Gilbert Burnet,) became a great
favorite in the boarding-schools and in the wor-
shipful society of governesses. That portion of
Young America known as ladies’ men began to
swagger and swear in the presence of the gentler
sex, and to allude darkly to events in their lives
which excused impudence and profanity.
While fathers and mothers were much dis-
tressed at this strange conduct of their innocents,
and with a paradonable despair were looking for
the dissolution of all the bonds of society, the
publishers of Jane Eyre announced Wuthering
Heights, by the same author. When it came, it was
purchased and read with universal eagerness; but,
alas! it created disappointment almost as universal.
It was a panacea for all the sufferers under the
epidemic. Society returned to its old condition,
parents were blessed in hearing once more their
children talk common sense, and rakes and bat-
tered profligates of high and low degree fell
instantly to their proper level. Thus ended the last
desperate attempt to corrupt the virtue of the
sturdy descendants of the Puritans.
The novel of Jane Eyre, which caused this
great excitement, purports to have been edited by
Currer Bell, and the said Currer divides the author-
ship, if we are not misinformed, with a brother
and sister. The work bears the marks of more than
one mind and one sex, and has more variety than
either of the novels which claim to have been
written by Acton Bell. The family mind is strik-
ingly peculiar, giving a strong impression of unity,
but it is still male and female. From the masculine
tone of Jane Eyre, it might pass altogether as the
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composition of a man, were it not for some
unconscious feminine peculiarities, which the
strongest-minded woman that ever aspired after
manhood cannot suppress. These peculiarities
refer not only to elaborate descriptions of dress,
and the minutiæ of the sick-chamber, but to vari-
ous superficial refinements of feeling in regard to
the external relations of the sex. It is true that the
noblest and best representations of female charac-
ter have been produced by men; but there are
niceties of thought and emotion in a woman’s
mind which no man can delineate, but which
often escape unawares from a female writer. There
are numerous examples of these in Jane Eyre. The
leading characteristic of the novel, however, and
the secret of its charm, is the clear, distinct,
decisive style of its representation of character,
manners, and scenery; and this continually sug-
gests a male mind. In the earlier chapters, there is
little, perhaps, to break the impression that we are
reading the autobiography of a powerful and
peculiar female intellect; but when the admirable
Mr. Rochester appears, and the profanity, brutal-
ity, and slang of the misanthropic profligate give
their torpedo shocks to the nervous system,—and
especially when we are favored with more than
one scene given to the exhibition of mere animal
appetite, and to courtship after the manner of
kangaroos and the heroes of Dryden’s plays,—we
are gallant enough to detect the hand of a gentle-
man in the composition. There are also scenes of
passion, so hot, emphatic, and condensed in
expression, and so sternly masculine in feeling,
that we are almost sure we observe the mind of
the author of Wuthering Heights at work in the
text.
The popularity of Jane Eyre was doubtless due
in part to the freshness, raciness, and vigor of
mind it evinced; but it was obtained not so much
by these qualities as by frequent dealings in moral
paradox, and by the hardihood of its assaults upon
the prejudices of proper people. Nothing causes
more delight, at least to one third of every com-
munity, than a successful attempt to wound the
delicacy of their scrupulous neighbours, and a dar-
ing peep into regions which acknowledge the
authority of no conventional rules. The authors of
Jane Eyre have not accomplished this end without
an occasional violation of probability and consid-
erable confusion of plot and character, and they
have made the capital mistake of supposing that
an artistic representation of character and man-
ners is a literal imitation of individual life. The
consequence is, that in dealing with vicious
personages they confound vulgarity with truth,
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
and awaken too often a feeling of unmitigated
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
disgust. The writer who colors too warmly the
degrading scenes through which his immaculate
hero passes is rightly held as an equivocal teacher
of purity; it is not by the bold expression of
blasphemy and ribaldry that a great novelist
conveys the most truthful idea of the misan-
thropic and the dissolute. The truth is, that the
whole firm of Bell & Co. seem to have a sense of
the depravity of human nature peculiarly their
own. It is the yahoo, not the demon, that they
select for representation; their Pandemonium is of
mud rather than fire.
CAESAREA ABARTIS (ESSAY DATE
1979)
SOURCE: Abartis, Caesarea. “The Ugly-Pretty, Dull-
Bright, Weak-Strong Girl in the Gothic Mansion.” Jour-
nal of Popular Culture 13 (1979): 257-63.
In the following essay, Abartis illustrates how Jane Eyre
serves as “the prototype for the modern Gothic” or
romance novel in which a female protagonist overcomes
personal challenges and escapes peril to win the love of a
man to whom she will remain “subordinate economically
and socially.”
If you ask a reader of modern Gothic novels
to describe the heroine, you are liable to get an
impossible portrait: the Gothic heroine is passive,
weak and virginal, but simultaneously, or under
another name and in another novel, she is pas-
sionate, strong and independent. How do these
apparently paradoxical types function in the
Gothic formula? In the former type of plot some-
one else—usually the hero—wins; in the latter
type she loses. These types can be seen clearly in
four novels: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847),
Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), Victoria
Holt’s Kirkland Revels (1962) and Claudette Nicole’s
House at Hawk’s End (1971).1
If I may be permitted to judge a book by its
cover, I can derive some of the chief elements of
the Gothic novel from the artist’s cover painting.
Always there is a young and beautiful woman fac-
ing front, with a high wind scattering her hair
about. Often she is wearing a nightgown. Invari-
ably she is running away from a gloomy castle or
Victorian mansion which has a light in only one
window. Less often there is a second figure on the
cover—a man—strong, handsome, with the sym-
bols of wealth and power. He may be riding a
horse in pursuit of the heroine, or perhaps stand-
ing some distance behind her, watching her. The
composition of the cover depicts, in short, the
character, plot and setting of the Gothic novel: in
115

CHARLOTTE BRONTË
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS LAUDS THE TITLE
CHARACTER OF JANE EYRE
[No] heroine of Thackeray’s except Becky
Sharp seems to me quite so alive as the Jane
Eyre of Charlotte Brontë, whom I do not class
with him intellectually, any more than I class
her artistically with the great novelists. . . .
She was the first English novelist to present
the impassioned heroine; impassioned not in
man’s sense but woman’s sense, in which
love purifies itself of sensuousness without
losing fervor. . . .
Old-fashioned, I have suggested; but
now, after reading [the scene in which Roch-
ester’s mad wife makes her first appearance],
I find that hardly the word. It is old-fashioned
only in the sense of being very simple, and of
a quaint sincerity. The fact is presented, the
tremendous means are used, with almost
childlike artlessness; but the result is of high
novelty. Few would have had the courage to
deal so frankly with the situation, to chance
its turning ludicrous, or would have had the
skill to unfold its fine implications of tender-
ness, and keep them undamaged by the
matter-of-fact details. But Charlotte Brontë
did all this, and did it out of the resources of
her own unique experience of life, which
never presented itself in the light of common
day, but came to her through strange
glooms, and in alternations of native solitude
and alien multitude, at Haworth and in Brus-
sels. The whole story, so deeply of nature, is
steeped in the supernatural; and just as
paradoxically the character of Jane Eyre lacks
that final projection from the author which is
the supreme effect of art, only because she
feels it so intensely that she cannot detach it
from herself.
SOURCE: Howells, William Dean. “Heroines of
Nineteenth-Century Fiction.” Harper’s Bazaar
33, no. 50 (15 December 1900): 2094-100.
a rich and exotic setting the lovely heroine meets
with some vague danger from which she must
escape.
116
The modern Gothic has its roots in the
eighteenth- and nineteenth century thrillers like
Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radc-
liffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Matthew
Lewis’ The Monk (1796), Charles Brockden Brown’s
Wieland (1798) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818). The purpose of these novels is presumably
to elicit and purge feelings of fear and horror in
the reader. This purgation is achieved by setting
the story in castles appointed with secret passages,
ghosts, corpses, spooky sounds and A Dark Secret.
In the modern Gothic the supernatural has been
pretty much suppressed and rationalized, while
the heroine and her romantic interests have as-
sumed the center of the novel. Thus in Kirkland
Revels, what seems to be an apparition is ultimately
explained logically; in House at Hawk’s End, just as
important as the solution to the mystery is the
choice of a lover from the three men who present
themselves to the heroine. The Gothic novel has
moved from ghostly horrors to love fantasies and
this shift has sociological implications. This
category of popular fiction is written almost, or
perhaps exclusively, for women, about women
and by women (the pseudonyms are nearly always
female even though some of the writers are male).
In the past, it has been dismissed from serious
study because it is subliterary, but it is an im-
mensely popular form, as I have discovered from
casual inquiries of women and from examining
bookracks in supermarkets, drugstores and book-
stores.2 The Gothic novel gains significance, if not
from its artistry then from its overwhelming
popularity.
The prototype for the modern Gothic is Char-
lotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Brontë exploits all the
motifs and themes of the Gothic novel, but in an
ambiguous way. Jane is an impoverished orphan
who is neglected and abused by her aunt. Jane
eventually becomes a governess to a child at
Thornfield Hall where the master is Edward
Rochester, a moody, brusque, older man. She
almost marries Rochester before the secret of the
third floor is made known: Rochester has a wife—
demented and bestial. Ultimately, of course, Jane
and Rochester marry, but only after his first wife
has died in the fire which destroys the manor and
cripples and blinds Rochester in a poetic punish-
ment for his bigamous desires.
Jane is the picture of an outsider. She is an
orphan; more, she is a poor orphan; more than
that, a homely, unloved, poor orphan. Almost
obsessively and from the first page, Jane empha-
sizes what she calls her “physical inferiority” (ch.
1, 5), that is, her unattractive face and slight
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figure. Years later, after Jane has grown up, she
meets her nursemaid Bessie, who agrees in that
evaluation, “You were no beauty as a child.” Jane
reponds with a rueful smile: “I felt that it was cor-
rect, but I confess I was not quite indifferent to its
import: at eighteen most people wish to please,
and the conviction that they have not an exterior
likely to second that desire brings anything but
gratification” (ch. 10, 80). On her first day as gov-
ernness, she dresses herself carefully:
It was not my habit to be disregardful of appear-
ance, or careless of the impression I made: on the
contrary, I ever wished to look as well as I could,
and to please as much as my want of beauty
would permit. I sometimes regretted that I was
not handsomer. I sometimes wished to have rosy
cheeks, a straight nose, and small cherry mouth; I
desired to be tall, stately, and finely developed in
figure; I felt it a misfortune that I was so little, so
pale, and had features so irregular and marked.
(ch. 11, 86)
Jane’s description of her physical appearance
is a key to her personality; she has irregular
features and irregular views, but she longs for
“regularity.” Jane sees herself as different by
temperament and education from many of the
people with whom she associates. Thus, she looks
down on uneducated vulgar servants like Sophie,
Grace Poole and even Mrs. Fairfax, none of whom
can be a companion to her soul, but Jane is also
alienated from the rich and beautiful people
because she is poor and homely.
From childhood she has been strong, passion-
ate and independent—when she strikes back at
John Reed who is bullying her, when she rebels
and denounces Mrs. Reed for her coldness, when
she decides to leave Lowood to look for a position
as governess, when she leaves Rochester because
she cannot live with him unmarried, when she
resists St. John’s proposal despite his almost
hypnotic power over her. She is a restless and curi-
ous woman. At Thornfield she occasionally sepa-
rates herself from the household to go to the roof
of the house and to look toward the horizon and
imagine the variety and adventure of the world
that she can never see:
. . . then I longed for a power of vision which
might overpass that limit; which might reach the
busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard
of but never seen: that then I desired more of
practical experience than I possessed; more of
intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with
variety of character, than was here within my
reach. I valued what was good in Mrs. Fairfax, and
was good in Adele; but I believed in the existence
of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and
what I believed in and wished to behold. . . . It is
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
with tranquillity: they must have action; and they
will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are
condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and mil-
lions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody
knows how many rebellions are in silent revolt
against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebel-
lions ferment in the masses of life which people
earth. Women are supposed to be very calm gener-
ally: but women feel just as men feel; they need
exercise for their faculties and a field for their ef-
forts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from
too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation,
precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-
minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures
to say that they ought to confine themselves to
making puddings and knitting stockings, to play-
ing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is
thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them,
if they seek to do more or learn more than custom
has pronounced necessary for their sex.
(ch. 12, 96-7)
This strong feminist statement is, however,
undermined by the plot. Jane exhibits heroic
discontent and eccentricity—traits that the read-
ers of the novel identify with and admit to
themselves only in their fantasies where wealth
and status are bequeathed upon them so that their
discontent can be relieved and their eccentricity
redeemed. It is ironic that even Jane, original and
passionate as she avows herself, is subdued to a
conventional ending. She does not travel to
faraway cities and meet with vital and various
people. The closest she gets to attaining this dream
is to marry a well-traveled man.
The master of Thornfield, Edward Rochester,
falls in love with her despite the fact that she is
“poor and obscure, small and plain” (ch. 23, 224).
He admires her sincerity, intelligence, passion and
strength and promises to be true to her:
“To women who please me only by their faces, I
am the very devil when I find out they have
neither souls nor hearts—when they open to me a
perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps
imbecility, coarseness, and ill-temper: but to the
clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made
of fire, and the character that bends but does not
break—at once supple and stable, tractable and
consistent—I am ever tender and true.”
(ch. 24, 228-9)
When Rochester proposes to Jane, he says she
is his “equal” and his “likeness” (ch. 23, 223).
Rochester perceives their relationship in terms
of power. When they at last reveal their love to
each other, after having held back the admission
out of mingled pride and humility, Rochester says
to her: “Jane, you please me, and you master me—
117
 you seem to submit, and I like the sense of pliancy
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
you impart” (ch. 24, 229). Jane is also aware of
her power over him:
It little mattered whether my curiosity irritated
him; I knew the pleasure of vexing and soothing
him by turns; it was one I chiefly delighted in,
and a sure instinct always prevented me from go-
ing too far: beyond the verge of provocation I
never ventured; on the extreme brink I like to try
my skill
(ch. 26, 138)
She is his subordinate economically and
socially, but emotionally she enjoys power over
him.
Jane is an active principle in the novel, not a
damsel in distress. She even performs the function
of the savior—almost always reserved to the male
protagonist in more recent examples of the Gothic
novel. She saves Rochester’s life at least once and
helps him twice. The first time she meets him, he
falls off his horse and he must lean on her because
he has sprained his ankle. She saves his life when
she wakes in the night to smell smoke and puts
out the fire that Bertha had started in Rochester’s
bedroom. At the end, Jane returns to a Rochester
who has been crippled and blinded in the fire that
burns down Thornfield Hall. Her return lifts him
out of his depression. In a sense, she is no longer
physically inferior to him (because he has lost a
hand and an eye), nor is she financially dependent
on him (because of her inheritance). She says to
him, “I love you better now, when I can really be
useful to you, than I did in your state of proud
independence, when you disdained every part but
that of the giver and protector” (ch. 37, 392).
The ending is not the ending of a typical
Gothic novel. Paradoxically it is Jane’s Victorian
scruples that save her from being a conventional
Gothic heroine. It is not a ghost or murderer that
chases Jane from Thornfield Hall but the revela-
tion of the existence of Rochester’s first wife. The
Gothic machinery grinds to a halt; what propels
the rest of the book is Jane’s struggle with the im-
morality of her love. If the questions of guilt and
religion were removed, the book could conceiv-
ably end earlier with, for example, a fire on the
day after Rochester’s confession. The conflagra-
tion could remove the inconvenient first wife, but
not harm Rochester. He could save Jane and
thereby prove his love. This would be a more typi-
cal modern Gothic ending. Apparently, however,
Rochester’s payment of a hand and an eye is es-
sential to the scheme of retribution. When she
returns to him at the end, it is not, however, as
his equal. Implicit in the final chapter is the
118
reversal of their roles: whereas before he was the
powerful father-figure and she the child, at the
end she is the mother-figure and he the helpless
child.
Another Gothic novel in which the heroine
“saves” the hero but still submits to convention
and domestic joys is Rebecca. The narrator is, like
Jane Eyre, a shy and sensitive orphan. She is not a
governess but she performs an analogous service—
she is a companion to a wealthy woman. Like
Jane, she is considerably younger than her hus-
band—she is twenty-one, he is in his forties and
very much a father-figure to her.3 The heroine is
throughout the novel known only as the second
Mrs. de Winter. We never learn her maiden name,
nor her given name. There is a story in that omis-
sion, for it is her function to become completely
the second Mrs. de Winter and to assume control
of Manderley, the centuries-old ancestral home.
The Great Old House is the indispensable setting
of the Gothic novel and the symbol of what the
Gothic heroine, typically lower class but well-
educated and “different,” aspires to and deserves.
As in this novel, the house is often important
enough to be named, and it is symbolic of the
wealth and states that the reader yearns for and
the heroine achieves. The Great House is not,
however, associate with political power and not
the symbol of what a Lady Macbeth aspires to. It
is a glorified domestic dwelling—that which will
make the little woman of the house into the lady;
it is a middle-class housewife’s dream. Once the
heroine has possession of the house, the emphasis
is on conspicuous consumption—on the magnifi-
cent parties, the dinners, the furnishings, the
repartee of the guests. (We will never find a Gothic
novel set in an efficiency apartment.) When Maxi-
milian de Winter brings his young bride to
Manderley, she tries to accustom herself to the
elegance of the estate:
I leant back in my chair, glancing about the room,
trying to instil into myself some measure of
confidence, some genuine realisation that I was
here, at Manderly, the house of the picture post-
card, the Manderley that was famous. I had to
teach myself that all this was mine now, mine as
much as his, the deep chair I was sitting in, that
mass of books stretching to the ceiling, the
pictures on the walls, the gardens, the woods, the
Manderley I had read about, all of this was mine
now because I was married to Maxim.
(ch. 7, 69)
That is her struggle throughout the book—to
achieve the true possession of Manderley, to as-
sume her rightful place as Mrs. de Winter, lady of
leisure.
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 Out of her insecurity, the second Mrs. de

CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Winter suspects that everyone, the servants and
friends, admired the first Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca,
and she believes that Maxim still loves his first
wife. The heroine’s problems consist of getting
society and the servants to accept her. Maxim
finally confides to his wife that he killed Rebecca,
that she was debauched and wanted to ruin him.
The last fourth of the book, after the dark secret is
revealed, is about the coroner’s inquest into the
death of Rebecca and the magistrate’s investiga-
tion. Now the roles of hero and heroine are
reversed. Like Jane Eyre, the second Mrs. de
Winter must comfort her husband:
Maxim came over to me where I was standing by
the fireplace. I held out my arms to him and he
came to me like a child. I put my arms around
him and held him. We did not say anthing for a
long time. I held him and comforted him as
though he were Jasper [their pet dog]
(ch. 25, 352)

In the course of their ordeal, she demonstrates

her loyalty and love. When Maxim is finally free
of the murder charge, she is determined to take
control of the house. She has grown up, she says,
and this is what she has grown into:
I would go and interview the cook in the kitchen.
They would like me, respect me. . . . I would
learn more about the estate, too. . . . I might take
to gardening myself, and in time have one or two
things altered. . . . There were heaps of things
that I could do, little by little. People would come
and stay and I should not mind. There would be
the interest of seeing to their rooms, having flow-
ers and books put, arranging the food
(ch. 27, 376)
Exactly what Jane Eyre was protesting against:
making puddings and knitting stockings. She
becomes the lady of the manor in this realization,
the domestic achiever par excellence. At the end,
the second Mrs. de Winter, like Jane Eyre, is
deprived of the Great House, which in both cases
burns down, but she is not deprived of the respect-
ability that the Great House represents. Almost
anthropormorphized, the house becomes the
scapegoat for the sins committed in it. The death
of the house allows the heroine to be preserved in
spite of her dallying with a naughty man. The
heroine is mildly punished; the evil past is puri-
fied by fire; wealth and love remain as the hero-
ine’s reward.
In these novels the heroine “saves” the hero
and thereby demonstrates her worthiness to be
the lady of the house. She is, in effect, the frog
princess who becomes transformed by the love of
a good-bad man, and inherits the rewards. But
Orson Welles as Edward Rochester, and Joan Fontaine as
Jane Eyre, in a scene from Robert Stevenson’s 1944 film
adaptation of Jane Eyre.
there is another pattern frequently found in
Gothic novels in which it is the heroine who is
saved by the hero, in such novels as Kirkland Revels
and House at Hawk’s End.
In Kirkland Revels, the heroine, Catherine
Corder, will eventually marry Simon Redvers,
who, in this case, is not much older, nor richer,
nor classier than she is. Catherine has greater
wealth and higher status than Simon—but this is
a result of her first marriage to Simon’s cousin.
She is spirited, sensible, charming and courageous,
and despite, or perhaps, because of these qualities
she must be rescued at the end by the hero. While
she is not an orphan and not impoverished she
does feel alienated and unloved. She meets and
marries Gabriel Rockwell, heir to Kirkland Revels,
a three-hundred year old mansion. One week after
he has taken her to the estate, he is found dead
and the family assumes he committed suicide by
jumping from a parapet. Catherine learns that she
is pregnant and Gothic events transpire: she
awakens and sees a person at the foot of her bed;
an item is missing from her room; she sees a
hooded figure. Catherine assumes that her hus-
band was killed because he was heir to the estate;
if her child is a boy, he will be heir and will also
be killed. Catherine, spunky and nosey, keeps

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 searching for the killer of her husband. At the end
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
the villain chloroforms Catherine and takes her to
a mental institution. The hero, like “a knight of
old,” saves her at the last minute (ch. 7, 250).
Perhaps this is as liberated as the genre can get.
Even though the heroine is active, logical and self-
possessed, she must be in the grip of the villain
for a thrilling climax so that she can be saved by
the hero—not a girl friend or a brother, but a lover.
Every spirited heroine needs a lover—if only to
save her at the end. Certainly one of the implica-
tions of such a plot is that in a husband and in
love there is safety.
Jean Burroughs, the heroine of House at Hawk’s
End, is the most “liberated” and the most in need
of saving. She is a sophisticated city-girl, a buyer
for a large dress house, who comes to Nova Scotia
to forget the swingers and to forget the suicide of
an old boy friend. Gothic events begin to happen:
she hears noises; she sees a red glow on the sea;
there is a rock slide that almost kills her; someone
tries to sink her boat when she is sailing. In the
last two chapters she is saved twice by her home-
town boy friend—once from a mob that wants to
burn down her house and a second time from the
villains who want to drown her. This is the
simplest, barest example of the Gothic formula
that emphasizes the union of love and danger.
When Jean comes to the town, two men court
her. One is a good guy and one is a bad guy, but
she is not able to sort out the good from the evil
until the very end. A mistake in her love life could
be fatal. The true lover proves his love by saving
the heroine, but there is another implication for
the heroine. Love is what the Gothic heroine lives
for, what fulfills her, what saves her in the end.
The rewards and goals are the same for both
kinds of heroines, for the strong and the weak,
the unlovely and the lovely, the naive and the
sophisticated, the proud and the humble, the sav-
ing and the saved. After a trial by danger there
will be a husband, and often wealth. Historically,
the Gothic novel was a way of purging horror and
fear, a way of explicating and integrating the
supernatural and irrational. In more recent Gothic
novels the central character is female and love
becomes a major interest: love solves the mystery
and love is the reward for the heroine.
These books are an index to the dreams of
many women readers and their fantasies of adven-
ture and love. The heroine is an underdog who
finds, in her man, the Prince Charming who can
make a Cinderella out of her, who validates her
hidden beauty and worth. The heroine is never
the shopgirl who marries the clerk. She is never a
120 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
doctor; never the woman who seeks adventure
and is able to deal with it entirely by herself. If
literature is, as Kenneth Burke says, “equipment
for living,” the contemporary Gothic novel equips
the reader to be passive and to hanker after man-
sions.
Notes
1. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Richard J. Dunn (New
York: Norton & Co. 1971), Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
(New York: Avon, 1938), Victoria Holt, Kirkland Revels
(New York: Fawcett World Library, 1962), Claudette
Nicole, House at Hawk’s end (Greenwich Conn.: Fawc-
ett, 1971), Chapter and page citations will be given in
the text.
2. I was able to find only four studies of contemporary
Gothic novels, all of which I recommend: Joanna Russ,
“Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My
Husband: The Modern Gothic,” Journal of Popular Cul-
ture, 6 (Spring, 1973), 666-691; Kay J. Mussell, “Beauti-
ful and Damned: The Sexual Woman in Gothic Fic-
tion,” Journal of Popular Culture, 9 (Summer, 1975), 84-
89; John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance:
Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976); Ellen Moers, Literary
Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976).
3. Maximilian responds to his wife’s questions in this
way, “Well, then. A husband is not so very different
from a father after all. There is a certain type of
knowledge I prefer you not to have. It’s better kept
under lock and key. So that’s that. And now eat up
your peaches, and don’t ask me any more questions,
or I shall put you in a corner” (ch. 16, 202).
Villette
W. R. GREG (ESSAY DATE APRIL
1853)
SOURCE: Greg, W. R. “Recent Novels: Villette.” The Ed-
inburgh Review 97, no. 198 (April 1853): 387-90.
In the following excerpt, Greg offers a laudatory assess-
ment of Villette.
Villette, by the author of Jane Eyre, is a most
remarkable work—a production altogether sui gen-
eris. Fulness and vigour of thought mark almost
every sentence, and there is a sort of easy power
pervading the whole narrative, such as we have
rarely met. There is little of plot or incident in the
story; nearly the whole of it is confined to the
four walls of a Pensionnat at Brussels; but the
characters introduced are sketched with a bold
and free pencil, and their individuality is sustained
with a degree of consistency, which marks a
master’s hand. The descriptions, too, whether the
subjects of them be solemn, ludicrous, or pathetic,
are wonderfully graphic and pictorial. It is clear at
a glance that the groundwork and many of the
details of the story are autobiographic; and we
never read a literary production which so betrays
at every line the individual character of the writer.
Her life has evidently been irradiated by but scanty
sunshine, and she is besides disposed to look
rather pertinaciously on the shady side of every
landscape. With an almost painful and unceasing
consciousness of possessing few personal or
circumstantial advantages; with spirits naturally
the reverse of buoyant; with feelings the reverse of
demonstrative; with affections strong rather than
warm, and injured by too habitual repression; a
keen, shrewd, sagacious, sarcastic, observer of life,
rather than a genial partaker in its interests; gifted
with intuitive insight into character, and reading
it often with too cold and critical an eye; full of
sympathy where love and admiration call it forth,
but able by long discipline to dispense with it
herself; always somewhat too rigidly strung up for
the hard struggle of life, but fighting sternly and
gallantly its gloomy battle,—the character which
Lucy Snowe has here drawn of herself presents
rather an interesting study than an attraction or a
charm.
TONI WEIN (ESSAY DATE AUTUMN
1999)
SOURCE: Wein, Toni. “Gothic Desire in Charlotte
Brontë’s Villette.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-
1900 39, no. 4 (autumn 1999): 733-46.
In the following essay, Wein examines Brontë’s re-working
of earlier Gothic devices and imagery in Villette,
particularly in terms of how she used them to depict
gender roles and sexual desire.
A letter of 16 June 1854 reads as follows: “My
dear Ellen, Can you come next Wednesday or
Thursday? I am afraid circumstances will compel
me to agree to an earlier day than I wished. I sadly
wished to defer it till the 2nd week in July, but I
fear it must be sooner, the 1st week in July, pos-
sibly the last week in June . . . This gives rise to
much trouble and many difficulties as you may
imagine, and papa’s whole anxiety now is to get
the business over. Mr. Nicholls with his usual
trustworthiness takes all the trouble of providing
substitutes on his own shoulders.”1
Despite the language of reluctance and regret,
Charlotte Brontë was facing neither surgery nor
the firing squad. Rather, the “it” she refers to in
this letter to her friend, Ellen Nussey, is her long-
deferred marriage. Admittedly, this letter carries
biographical and psychological interest. But I am
more interested in the way her characterization of
Arthur Nicholls as “providing substitutes” an-
nounces a theme and dominant trope crucial to
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SUSAN M. WARING PRAISES VILLETTE
The book Jane Eyre . . . was the first adequate
expression of the feeling which wrestled
within her, and the heart of Charlotte Brontë
found in words only, uncontrolled by any
rules of rhythm, the joy of expression, the
right of recognition. It is therefore that Jane
Eyre may not be too strictly judged, for it
was an outburst, a great surging heart burst-
ing its bounds and finding outlet for its ac-
cumulated passion. . . .
Villette shows us the third style of the
master-genius. In the Brontë case at all events
it is the perfected development of ripened
power. Patience has wrought her “perfect
work,” suffering terrible and almost unremit-
ting fulfilled her divinest mission, and calm
with the repose of power, majestic almost to
austerity, yet with a trembling about the
mouth which tells of tears that are ended,
Villette stands upon its pedestal the master-
piece of its author. . . .
The wonderful tale is told, the unprec-
edented book, full of human nature as any
play of Shakspeare’s, ended. Take it, search it
thoroughly, it was meant to bear close and
stern inspection. Hold it in the strongest light,
try it by the severest tests, and know this Vil-
lette of Charlotte Brontë’s is, as far as human
art can make it, a diamond without a flaw,
one entire and perfect chrysolite. May no
other woman ever write so well, may none
other ever suffer so acutely!
SOURCE: Waring, Susan M. “Charlotte Brontë’s
Lucy Snowe.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
32, no. 160 (February 1866): 368-72.
understanding Brontë’s literary maneuverings.2
Like her future husband, Brontë works a series of
substitutions in her novels.
Much light has been shed by critics who have
focused on these doublings, displacements, repres-
sions, and subversions.3 Despite their varying
theoretical backgrounds, consensus that Brontë
121
 employed these strategies as a critique of Victorian
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
culture has gradually coalesced. To that end,
identities, bodies, gender, and genre have all been
said to migrate; and, indeed, all of these emigrants
wash up on the shores of Belgium’s Villette. Yet
less attention has been paid to an even more
significant aspect of Brontë’s work: her reterritori-
alization of migratory texts. Pondering Brontë’s
substitutions for possible relocations yields in-
sights about her professionalism as well as her
literary products.
After all, Villette is Brontë’s reworking of her
first novel, The Professor. Her initial efforts to
publish it had provoked continual rebuffs from
publishers; after the encouragement of George
Smith had produced the success of Jane Eyre,
Brontë’s repeated suggestions that he next publish
The Professor prompted gentle rebukes. Part of
the objection to The Professor was its size, two
volumes, a distinctly anomalous commodity.4
Charlotte wrote Smith on 5 February 1851, with-
drawing her offer of her “martyrized M.S.” to one
“who might ‘use it to light an occasional cigar.’”
In her letter, Charlotte ironically suggests that she
should be locked up in prison for twelve months,
at the end of which time she would come out
either “with a 3 vol. M.S. in my hand, or else with
a condition of intellect that would exempt me
ever after from literary efforts and expectations.”5
In September, Smith placed additional pressure on
her by repeating the firm’s post-Jane Eyre sugges-
tion that she write a novel in serial form. Charlotte
refused.6
Although little credit is given to Charlotte as a
business-woman, we can see her awareness of liter-
ary marketing from the very beginnings of her
career as a novelist, a transition motivated by
financial pragmatics after the failure of the sisters’
volume of poems, for whose publication they had
been forced to pay.7 When she finally revised The
Professor, her remodeling entailed more than a
narrative elaboration and a narratorial shift from
the third into the first person. Brontë also carved
emphatically Gothic features onto what had been
principally a double bildungsroman. Those Gothic
features bear a canny resemblance to one of the
most scandalous Gothic texts of the previous
century, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796).
A tale of substitutions and possession, The
Monk’s relics in Villette speak to Brontë’s struggle
to gain possession of herself as a woman, as an
author, and as an heir to literary conventions. As
Luce Irigaray imagines the dilemma: “How find a
voice, make a choice, strong enough to cut
through these layers of ornamental style, that
122 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
decorative sepulchre, where even her breath is
lost. Stifled under all those airs.”8 But the voice
that Charlotte Brontë finds by tunneling out from
within the tomb of the Gothic novel does more
than keen a “female Gothic” or lament the “femi-
nine carceral” of domestic space.9 In Villette, that
voice cries out against institutional forces of
education, of art, and of religion, a message also
contained in The Monk.1 0 She thereby sounds a
second alarm: that possession can be barred as ef-
fectively by business conventions of literature as
by literary conventions of style or voice. At the
same time that the word possession points to
ownership, it also means a haunting. To form the
self, whether as a private individual or as a profes-
sional author, one must strive to ensure that the
self one possesses is not formed or possessed by
others.
Brontë’s possession by Gothic in general may
have provided her with models to substitute a dif-
ferent structural logic of desire from that fostered
by serialization,1 1 as Linda K. Hughes and Michael
Lund have described it: “[its] intrinsic form more
closely approximates female than male models of
pleasure. Rather than inviting sustained arousal of
attention until the narrative climax is reached,
spending the driving energy of narrative and
sundering the readers from the textual experience,
the installment novel offers itself as a site of
pleasure that is taken up and discharged only to
be taken up again (some days or weeks later), and
again, and again.”1 2 Yet I do not thereby mean to
imply that Brontë resorts to a male structure of
desire. Instead, in true Gothic tradition, she
hybridizes: she encloses her structurally deferred
climaxes in a three-volume tomb, at the same time
that she thwarts the serial’s (and autobiography’s)
construction of intimacy between readers and
characters through her (and Lucy’s) refusal to
provide closure.
Brontë’s structural Gothicizing reads as evi-
dence that she consciously engaged in rewriting
gender codes.1 3 But by limiting our attention to
examples of so-called “female Gothic,” and by see-
ing Ann Radcliffe as the only precursor for Brontë,
we miss seeing how her reworking of gender codes
also serves her professionalism.1 4 Narratively and
thematically, Brontë redefines desire. In mapping
the traces of The Monk in Villette, then, I will
contend that Brontë draws on The Monk because
in that novel she finds an analysis of substitution’s
dangers and delights. For Lewis, both dangers and
delights lie in substitution’s resemblance to a
pornographic economy of exchange. Lewis sees
women as counters in that system of barter. Forced
to enter into an economy of exchange that de-
manded she relinquish autonomy while it prom-
ised her some range of mobility beyond the
confines of the home, Brontë responds by making
the nun the figure through which erotic desire
becomes buoyantly disembodied and endlessly
deferred, the possession of the self through substi-
tution.1 5
Even more than Jane Eyre, with its “mad-
woman in the attic,” Villette is a haunted text.
Brontë possesses her literary heritage by creating a
surrogate Gothic. Critics usually point to the
haunting figure of the nun as the key Gothic ele-
ment, although they seldom agree about its
significance. To Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar,
the nun is a projection of Lucy’s need for nullity;1 6
for Eve Sedgwick, the nun dramatizes Lucy’s
constitutive need for doubleness. Christina Crosby
detects the nun as mirroring the narcissistic Laca-
nian Imaginary Other.1 7 To some, the nun repre-
sents Brontë’s anticlericalism;1 8 while Q. D. Leavis,
who saw the nun as nothing more than a plot
device for maintaining suspense and for generat-
ing sales, is not far removed from Brontë’s contem-
porary, the reviewer of the Literary Gazette, who
recognized a Byronic prototype when identifying
the nun as “a phantom of the Fitz-fulke kind.”1 9
But a covey of nuns broods over more characters
than Lucy. Paul’s history with Justine-Marie forms
the most obvious analogue. The prehistory of the
pensionnat also suggests whole generations sub-
ject to ecclesiastic visitations whose terror—
diurnal or nocturnal—may have been equal. These
nuns form a sisterhood that extends beyond the
borders of Villette, back to the Gothic novels half
a century old.
Of all the possible precursors, Lewis’s The Monk
looms the largest in Brontë’s text. Our first intro-
duction to the legend of Brontë’s nun reveals its
close bonds with the story of Lewis’s Agnes. Like
the pensionnat’s nun, Agnes is immured alive in
the vaults of her convent “for some sin against
her vow.”2 0 Agnes’s sin is fecund concupiscence;
we never learn what the Belgian nun had done,
although a sexual aura attaches to her by associa-
tion, both because wanton nuns and monks were
a cliché by that time, and because Ginevra confis-
cates the nun’s identity to cover her own esca-
pades.2 1 Confiscation of identity lies at the core of
Lewis’s tale as well: Agnes lands in the convent
only after she has attempted to elope with her
lover, Don Raymond, by assuming the guise of a
bleeding nun, said to haunt the castle of her aunt.
If any figure can be said to haunt the pages of
Villette, it is this last unwilling nun, Beatrice de
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las Cisternas. Raymond and Agnes’s concerted
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
plan fails when the real ghostly nun appears in
Agnes’s stead. Raymond cannot tell the difference;
instead, he rapturously clasps the phantom to his
breast and exclaims: “Agnes! Agnes! Thou art mine
/ Agnes! Agnes! I am thine! / In my veins while
blood shall roll, / Thou art mine! / I am thine! /
thine my body! thine my soul!” (p. 166). This
jubilant crowing of patriarchal possession soon
sticks in Raymond’s craw, however. The Bleeding
Nun nightly visits Raymond’s bedchamber, not to
glut him with the pleasures of the flesh, since she
has none, but to rewrite his poetic will by revers-
ing the possessive pronouns: “Mine thy body!
Mine thy soul” (p. 170). Beatrice’s haunting of
Raymond’s bedchamber, at the precise moment
when his desire was to be realized, resembles the
nun’s appearances to Lucy at moments when she,
too, seems poised to find happiness beyond the
walls of her confinement, especially through her
growing intimacy with Dr. John. Given the resem-
blance, it is doubly surprising that critics of Brontë
read the scene as revealing Lucy’s psychological
inability to cathect with another human being or
her anxieties about sex, or that critics of Lewis fail
to so read his scene. Rather than evenly distribute
a unilinear reading of this nature to either scene,
however, we should recognize the similarity of
their underlying logic. Like Lucy, Raymond has
his desire stimulated by the encounter, setting off
a chain reaction through which he will learn to
love precisely the same kind of emaciated nun, as
though the nun carries a contagion which purges
the fleshly from both Raymond and Agnes.
Raymond escapes the nun’s possession when
the Wandering Jew miraculously arrives to shrieve
her soul. Raymond, too, is enjoined to penitence:
he must lay Beatrice’s bones to rest in her ancestral
grave, much as Lucy can only free herself from
her obsession with Dr. John by burying his letters
to her. In fact, Lucy creates a second tomb, sealing
her letters under a slab of slate and mortar right
beside that of the Belgian nun. And she acquires
the casket in which those letters will rest by
journeying into the “old historical quarter of the
town,” and purchasing a used glass jar from the
“old Jew broker” who owns the pawn shop, as
though Villette, the book, had metaphorically
domesticated and domiciled the Wandering Jew
in Villette, the town.2 2
This scene does not exhaust the presence of
resemblances between The Monk and Villette.2 3
Nevertheless, the burial in the garden marks an
apotheosis. Raymond’s scene of burial may stage
his penitence, but that repentance permits him to
123
 substitute new objects of desire. The same interpre-
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
tation applies to Brontë’s reenactment of Lewis’s
scenes. Like Lucy and Raymond, Brontë has her
desire pointed by her Gothic encounters. Like
theirs, this desire substitutes a new outlet for its
original source. We can read these resemblances as
a metanarrative about Brontë’s authoring of her
own literary self, for, while she exhumes ancestral
texts, she also buries the spirit of their letters.
Brontë rejects and rewrites the perverted
representations of women and/or of values that
rustle through these earlier Gothic letters. It is not
so much the logic of substitution to which she
objects. This logic governs male Gothic from the
time of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto,
where Theodore is rewarded with another bride to
replace the innocent female destroyed by Gothic
ambition.2 4 Brontë targets the locus of this substi-
tution in Lewis. With the exception of Beatrice,
women are either bartered brides, functioning to
consolidate wealth and status, or battered virgins,
servicing a similar passion for power now figured
as sexual dominance.
At first glance, Lewis may seem to critique
such an instrumental attitude toward sexuality by
revealing the pornographic outlook underlying it
through his portrait of Ambrosio. Ambrosio,
“drunk with desire,” consummates his apostasy
and his ecstasy in Matilda’s arms, muttering
“Thine, ever thine” (Lewis, p. 109). But just as Am-
brosio’s reference to his liaison as his “commerce
with Matilda” reveals the economics of desire, so
his swift revulsion betrays the tendency of con-
summation to consume the consumer, making
any such lasting fidelity impossible (pp. 230, 236-
7). Both Matilda and Ambrosio are victims of a
gendered double bind. The more time Matilda
spends with Ambrosio, the more she wants him:
the more she wants him, the less he wants her.
But Lewis here seems to want to have it both ways:
he first blames Matilda for having caused Ambro-
sio’s disgust, then delineates how such generosity
inaugurates an increasingly selfish reaction.
The ambiguity of Lewis’s position could arise
from his attempt to analyze the way Ambrosio’s
entrapment in this situation, like his incarceration
in the monastery, teaches him progressively to
devalue other lives. Lewis shows how such indura-
tion causes Ambrosio to split Matilda in two.
When Ambrosio mentally divorces Matilda from
her body, emotionally discarding all but her physi-
cal shell which he refers to as “it,” Lewis brilliantly
conveys the magnitude of such objectification of
the feminine (p. 241). Offended, Lewis’s censors
made him substitute the conventional pronoun
124 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
“she” in the fourth and fifth editions for the
blatant disregard suggested by the indefinite
pronoun. But their tiny sentimentalizing gesture
seems impotent against the onslaught of Ambro-
sio’s dehumanization of Antonia. Ambrosio may
at first think that he loves Antonia chastely, but
appreciation of her beauty rapidly transforms itself
into appetite (p. 243): “Grown used to her mod-
esty, it no longer commanded the same respect
and awe: he still admired it, but it only made him
more anxious to deprive her of that quality which
formed her principal charm” (p. 255). When Am-
brosio finally captures Antonia in the charnel
vaults of the monastery, even his gaze can no
longer hold her in a fixed image. Instead, her
identity migrates, mingling first with the corrupt
bodies surrounding her, then dissolving into that
of her dead mother, killed by Ambrosio (p. 364).
However, Lewis’s delight in describing these
scenes supplements and cancels the analysis of
danger. Although Ambrosio’s desire for Antonia
vanishes with her rape, he still cannot let her go
free; he imagines keeping her a prisoner of his
new desire for an endless succession of penitent
nights (p. 371). Only Matilda’s arrival, and the
warning that they are surrounded by archers come
to rescue Antonia, breaks the spell of irresolution
in which Ambrosio seeks to hold Antonia. He
takes her in the same position in which he had
earlier raped her, both times prostrate with sup-
plicating prayers, now using his poniard as the
weapon of penetration.
Beyond the pornographic violence of the
scene lies a still more pernicious implication, one
that mitigates his seeming sympathy with Matilda
and Antonia’s plight. Women are trapped in a
double bind. As vestal females, they are vulner-
able to appropriation. But Lewis also implies that
sexual desire in women unleashes in them a
potential masculinity that provokes Ambrosio’s
distaste: “Now [Matilda] assumed a sort of courage
and manliness in her manners and discourse, but
ill calculated to please him. She spoke no longer
to insinuate, but command . . . Pity is a sentiment
so natural, so appropriate to the female character, that
it is scarcely a merit for a woman to possess it, but to
be without it is a grievous crime” (pp. 233-4, my
emphasis). The final words of the passage collapse
the values of the omniscient narrator with those
of Ambrosio. So, too, does the portrait of Beatrice,
who like Matilda momentarily rises above her gen-
dered fate and receives in consequence a narrative
punishment all the more severe.
Only women who mask their masculine intel-
ligence with feminine modesty receive approba-
tion. The reward to women for such complicitous
compliance is to become commodified and hence
substitutable. With Antonia conveniently dead, it
does not take Lorenzo long to substitute Virginia.
Once again, the narrator foreshadows his approval
of Lorenzo’s decision, placing “not unwisely” into
the mouth of Lorenzo’s uncle the maxim that
“‘men have died, and worms have ate them, but
not for love!’”—a proverb that failed to disturb
the censors (p. 381). This unacknowledged quota-
tion from William Shakespeare’s As You Like It also
disguises the potential feminism of its original ut-
terance. Rosalind speaks those words to Orlando
while playing Ganymede playing Rosalind, in
order to cure Orlando of his idealism and to incite
his appreciation for her self, rather than for some
Petrarchan fiction. By surreptitiously relocating
those words into the mouth of the duke, Lewis
makes the maxim part of the “old boy” network
of truth, which is further validated by the author-
ity of the omniscient narrator who boldly declares
his status as M.P. in the third edition. In contrast
to the protean authority of the men, the women
are unidimensional clichés, fixated in their affec-
tions and transfixed accordingly by their circum-
stances.
If Lewis’s novel collapses the authorial and
characterological perspectives, its message also
merges with that articulated by Brontë’s father
and Robert Southey. They warned her that women
had no right to possess a literary career. Later in
life, Charlotte wrote that her father had always
instilled in her the view of writing and literary
desires as a rebellion from her female duties.2 5 She
heard the same strictures from Southey, whom
she wrote for advice about how to become a
professional poet. Despite his protestation of
impropriety, Southey must certainly have known
how many women had successfully made litera-
ture the “business” of their lives at that juncture.
Brontë’s novel, then, is “new Gothic” insofar
as it makes women’s authorization of substitu-
tion, demonic in Lewis, heroic.2 6 Each of the
women in Villette—Madames Beck and Wal-
ravens, Mrs. Bretton, Ginevra, Lucy, and Polly—
survives by a strategy of substitution. Ginevra
stands as the most obvious entry here. Madame
Beck fails to obtain a youthful lover, but she gains
voyeuristic satisfaction from her role as surveil-
lante. Mrs. Bretton lives in John (Brontë, p. 267);
Madame Walravens becomes a death-like ringer
for her granddaughter, stealing in the process the
house, affection, and jewels that might otherwise
have been Justine-Marie’s.2 7
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Perhaps the most astute pupil of substitution
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
is little Polly, who early learns to corral her desire
precisely by displacing it. The first example of her
mastery of this technique, which she will employ
to such great effect with John, occurs when she is
merely seven. Knowing she is about to leave the
household and return to her papa, Polly longs to
rush to Graham and tell him the news, hoping
that his despair will match her own. Instead, she
fondles Lucy Snowe: “In the evening, at the mo-
ment Graham’s entrance was heard below, I found
her at my side. She began to arrange a locket-
ribbon around my neck, she displaced and re-
placed the comb in my hair; while thus busied,
Graham entered” (p. 40). Polly then gets Lucy to
deliver the news, freeing herself to observe Gra-
ham’s reaction.
In fact, alone of all the women in Villette,
Lucy at first seems to be innately passive. Peter
Brooks may see desire as the very spark necessary
for all narrative, but Lucy seems curiously devoid
of passion or need at the start of hers.2 8 But, of
course, the novel reveals that calm to be fictive,
the result of a momentary translation, a fact that
the mature Lucy knows and signals to the reader
by prefacing her momentary poise in language
that underscores its artificiality: “In the autumn of
the year _____, I was staying at Bretton; my
godmother having come in person to claim me of
the kinsfolk with whom was at that time fixed my
permanent residence” (p. 6). The unnamed “kins-
folk” from whom Lucy so strenuously distances
herself can be none other than the parents she
loses. Although we never learn what happens, the
shadow of those events and the subsequent
vagrancy of Lucy’s life cast doubt on the “fixity”
and “permanence” of all existence, as does the
passive construction of her temporary placement
there. What Lucy learns in the course of her life is
to seize control of her translations. Without that
lesson, her fate would have resembled that of Miss
Marchmont, frozen into place by events. And it is
through Polly that Lucy will first learn to activate
her desires.
Lucy feels compelled to intervene in Polly’s
actions, to exercise vicarious restraint over the
child’s emotions (p. 13); Polly’s emotions, how-
ever, seem to exercise more power over Lucy than
the reverse. Stoic Lucy, “guiltless” of the “curse” of
“an overheated and discursive imagination,”
nonetheless imagines rooms to be “haunted” by
Polly’s presence (p. 15). Polly’s proposed absence
causes Lucy to break through her normal reserve.
She invites Polly into her bed “wishing, yet
scarcely hoping, she would comply”; when Polly
125
 comes, “gliding like a small ghost over the carpet,”
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
she is “warmed . . . soothed . . . tranquillized
and cherished” in Lucy’s arms (p. 44).
Moreover, as far as we know, Polly is the only
person ever to share Lucy’s bed. Gilbert and Gubar
are right to follow Leavis in seeing Polly as Lucy’s
other self. But they miss the fact that, from the
beginning, Polly is described in imagery that con-
nects her to the full-grown nuns Lucy will later
encounter. If Polly is a “demure little person in a
mourning frock and white chemisette,” a frock
that Lucy pointedly tells us is black three pages
earlier, her costume merges with her actions to
turn her into a type of the bleeding nun (p. 20):
doggedly hemming a handkerchief for her father,
the needle “almost a skewer, pricking herself ever
and anon, marking the cambric with a track of
minute red dots; occasionally starting when the
perverse weapon—swerving from her control—
inflicted a deeper stab than usual; but still silent,
diligent, womanly, absorbed” (p. 20). Far from
representing a type that must be feared or re-
nounced, the nun in Villette represents Lucy
Snowe’s embrace of her provisional status.2 9 The
nun blends into Lucy’s persona so that she, too,
becomes a “silence artist,” defying mystery by
adopting it (pp. 680-2).3 0 How fitting, then, that
Ginevra bequeaths the costume of the nun to
Lucy.
Once so metaphorically habited, the swelled
presence of desire takes on a religious cast.3 1 For
both Lucy and Polly, the handwritten word of
John supplants the word of God and becomes a
physical revelation (pp. 254, 326-7, 342-3). Each
performs a similar ritual of dilation, going so far
as to pray before she revels in the letter. But Paul’s
letters do more than refresh or sustain (p. 713);
they enable Lucy to incorporate her lover, so that
his absence marks the summit of their love: “I
thought I loved him when he went away; I love
him now in another degree; he is more my own”
(p. 714). Paul’s fate when clasped to Lucy’s heart
must mirror Lucy’s when cradled in the “bosom
of my kindred”: both types of love can be safely
possessed only in the reflection of memory, while
the actual bodies must endure the clammy em-
brace of the engulfing sea. Immured in the con-
vent of knowledge Paul had created for her, Lucy’s
life becomes one of singular, not serial, devotion.
Her conventual existence appears most strongly
in the collapse of her narrative into the histories
of the three Catholics who had seemed her nem-
eses, in a final act of substitution (p. 715). She
may not count her beads in a Carmelite convent,
126 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
but she does tell her story, her metaphorical habit
of black and white a fitting emblem of the printed
page.
The unspoken fact of Paul’s fate signals how
heretical Brontë’s narrator and narrative truly
are.3 2 Charlotte had originally planned to end the
book with a clear announcement of Paul’s death.
Her father objected strenuously, declaring his dis-
like for books that “left a melancholy impression
on the mind.”3 3 Unable or unwilling to defer
completely to his wish for a “happy ending,”
Charlotte left her story open, thus resigning it to
the pornographic imagination that her father,
Patrick Brontë, had always identified with the
novelistic. In his book, The Cottage in the Wood, he
had written: “The sensual novelist and his admirer,
are beings of depraved appetites and sickly imagi-
nations, who having learnt the art of self-
tormenting, are diligently and zealously employed
in creating an imaginary world, which they can
never inhabit, only to make the real world, with
which they must necessarily be conversant,
gloomy and insupportable.”3 4 Literary endeavor
becomes masturbation in Patrick’s barely-coded
epithet of “self-tormenting”; the hothouse secrecy
surrounding such employment accounts for its
resultant depravity and sickliness.
Southey had warned her of such danger: “The
day dreams in which you habitually indulge are
likely to induce a distempered state of mind; and,
in proportion as all the ordinary uses of the world
seem to you flat and unprofitable, you will be
unfitted for them without becoming fitted for
anything else. Literature cannot be the business of
a woman’s life, and it ought not to be.”3 5
Southey’s reference to Charlotte’s “habitual indul-
gence” also characterizes her ambition as a “dis-
tempered,” diseased fixation for which the only
prescription is healthy, self-abnegating work. The
patronizing chauvinism of his attitude resonates
through the uncredited allusion to Shakespeare.
Here Southey, a male poet wielding masculine
privilege through the words of another male poet,
simultaneously implies that Charlotte has fallen
into Hamlet’s state, and invokes Hamlet’s injunc-
tions to Ophelia to “get thee [to] a nunn’ry.”3 6
Villette demonstrates Brontë’s acceptance of
Southey’s implicit advice, as well as the perverse
spin she put on it.
While the pseudonymical “Currer Bell” oc-
cupied a high niche in literary opinion, her
reviews harp on her “depravities” even as they
praise her “Passion and Power.”3 7 The Christian
Remembrancer admits that Brontë has tempered
“the outrages on decorum, the moral perversity,
the toleration of, nay, indifference to vice” which
had “deform[ed]” her Jane Eyre, but it joins
numerous other critics of Lucy who decry her for
her willingness to fall in love and her ability to be
in love with two men at the same time or for her
“masculine” style.3 8 Even reviewers who found
Villette “pleasant” criticized Lucy Snowe’s morbid-
ity and her “tormenting self-regard.”3 9 While all
uniformly praised the abundance of well-drawn
characters, they nonetheless bemoaned the lack
of “breathless suspense, more thrilling incidents,
and a more moving story.”4 0 Conversely, the story
is said to move too much: the narrative jumps
and the focus wavers.4 1 Reviewers’ desires seem to
be piqued and frustrated at the same time.4 2 Their
complaints ironically vindicate the triumph with
which Charlotte Brontë pursued her anomalous
path. Eschewing simultaneously the need for
closure and for the embodiment of desire in a
female body, a containment that in Lewis enforces
female powerlessness, Brontë frees the hallmark of
the pornographic, the desire for desire,4 3 into the
space of literary contingency, as generations of
readers and critics who have been teased by Lucy
Snowe can testify.
Notes
1. Clement Shorter, The Brontës: Life and Letters, 2 vols.
(New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1969), 2:362.
2. Nicholls had to find a substitute curate for Patrick
Brontë’s congregation and a priest to preside at the
wedding. On the marriage day, Patrick Brontë sud-
denly refused to attend, and Nicholls had to find a
substitute to give Charlotte away. Her friend, Miss
Wooler, performed that function. On Charlotte
Brontë’s arrogation of fact to fancy in Villette, see Juliet
Barker, The Brontës (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995),
pp. 668, 704-5, 708, 713, 715. Cf. Claudia Klaver,
“Homely Aesthetics: Villette’s Canny Narrator,” Genre
26, 4 (Winter 1993): 409-29.
3. A brief listing would include Robyn R. Warhol,
“Double Gender, Double Genre in Jane Eyre and Vil-
lette.” SEL 36, 4 (Autumn 1996): 857-75; Patricia E.
Johnson, “‘This Heretic Narrative’: The Strategy of the
Split Narrative in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette,” SEL 30, 4
(Autumn 1990): 617-31; John Kucich, Repression in
Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and
Charles Dickens (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London:
Univ. of California Press, 1987); Nina Auerbach,
Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth
(Cambridge MA and London: Harvard Univ. Press,
1982), pp. 127-8; Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The
Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven
and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1979); Eve Sedgwick,
The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Arno
Press, 1980), especially chap. 3, “Immediacy, Double-
ness, and the Unspeakable: Wuthering Heights and Vil-
lette,” pp. 104-53.
4. On the importance of length, see Shorter, 1:382, and
Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith, introduc-
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
tion to Villette by Brontë, ed. Rosengarten and Smith
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. xi-xlix, xv.
5. Qtd. in Rosengarten and Smith, p. xv.
6. Rosengarten and Smith, p. xviii. Brontë’s claim that
“she was unwilling to release her work for publication
before it had been completed” flies in the face of other
evidence. According to Elizabeth Gaskell, Brontë
contemplated “tales which might be published in
numbers” (The Life of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Alan Shel-
stone [New York: Penguin, 1975], p. 293). I owe this
information to Catherine A. Judd’s “Male Pseudonyms
and Female Authority in Victorian England,” in Litera-
ture in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British
Publishing and Reading Practices, ed. John O. Jordan
and Robert L. Pattern (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1995), pp. 250-68, 264-5 n. 20. Barker records in
The Brontës that Brontë had originally planned “three
distinct and unconnected tales which may be pub-
lished either together as a work of three volumes of
the ordinary novel-size, or separately as single vol-
umes” (p. 499).
7. Judd forms one recent exception, drawing on the
healthy precedent of Gaskell’s treatment of Charlotte
Brontë in The Life.
8. Luce Irigaray, “Any Theory of the ‘Subject’ Has Always
Been Appropriated by the ‘Masculine,’” in Speculum of
the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 133-46, 143.
9. See Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Double-
day, 1976); Tamar Heller, “Jane Eyre, Bertha, and the
Female Gothic,” in Approaches to Teaching Brontë’s
“Jane Eyre,” ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Beth Lau
(New York: Modern Language Association of America,
1993), pp. 49-55. Klaver aligns the Gothic elements,
especially the nun, with “typically Radcliffean devices
to create suspense and speculation in her narrative,
but then [Lucy], also like [Ann] Radcliffe, dismisses
them all with the most banal of rational explanations”
(p. 418). On the distinction between male and female
Gothic, from which I wish to distance myself, see
Robert Miles, Gothic Writing, 1750-1820: A Genealogy
(London and New York: Routledge, 1993), especially
pp. 88, 98, 103-4; and Anne Williams, Art of Darkness:
A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago and London: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 18-24. She calls The Monk a
pornographic narrative because sexuality is shown as
the “prime motive” of all action (p. 116). Yet to her,
Ambrosio’s carnality lines him up with the feminine.
10. By comparison, Bretton Hall and La Terrasse seem
almost the only nonconfining spaces.
11. See Barker, pp. 160-1, 191, 500.
12. Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, “Textual/sexual
pleasure and serial publication,” in Jordan and Patten,
pp. 143-64, 143.
13. A position shared by Warhol, p. 858.
14. Rather than being suffocated by the present’s contra-
dictory attitude to female authorship, Charlotte
cleared space for herself by preserving the male
pseudonym and simultaneously creating a very private
female persona as the source for her literary output.
See Judd’s very persuasive discussion, especially pp.
252-3, 257-8.
15. This essay both draws on and modulates the work of
Kucich. I find Kucich’s discussion extremely attractive,
especially his attention to the place of desire in
127
 Brontë’s work, but he defines her desire as repressed
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
(pp. 38-9); see p. 30 for his definition of repression.
Cf. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of
Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century
England (New York: Basic Books, 1964), especially
p. 195. Marcus’s attention to the pornographic fantasy
of endless seminal fluid finds an interesting counter-
part in Brontë’s text, which increasingly spews out
water imagery inextricably intertwined with eruptions
of desire, whether frustrated or realized. For a small
sample, see pp. 6, 152, 218-9, 221, 223, 258, 420-1 of
Villette. The “lecture pieuse” of Catholic martyrs
incites the same pornographic response: “it made me
so burning hot, and my temples and my heart and
my wrist throbbed so fast, and my sleep afterwards
was so broken with excitement, that I could sit no
longer” (p. 162).
Obviously, The Monk fixed much of its pornographic
gaze on the explicit sexuality of religious figures.
Perhaps another telling resemblance between the two
novels lies in The Monk’s greatest provocation to
scandal: its censure of the Bible as pornographic.
Though considerations of length prevent me from
detailing Brontë’s biblical allusions, she heretically
rewrites the Bible as much as she piously cites it. Cf.
Susan VanZanten Gallagher, “Jane Eyre and Christian-
ity,” in Hoeveler and Lau, pp. 62-8; and Keith A. Jen-
kins, “Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë’s New Bible,” in Ho-
eveler and Lau, pp. 69-75. Many of Villette’s citations
are perverse applications of water, fountain, and thirst
imagery originally found in the two books of
“Johns”—the Gospel according to John and Revela-
tion; see John 4:13-5, 6:35, and 7:37 and Rev. 7:16,
14:7, and 22:17. I would suggest that, in this imbri-
cated relationship, we find Brontë’s greatest heresy,
her incorporation of and twist on the pornographic
imagination.
16. Gilbert and Gubar, p. 425.
17. Christina Crosby, “Charlotte Brontë’s Haunted Text,”
SEL 24, 4 (Autumn 1984): 701-15. LuAnn McCracken
Fletcher articulates a similar position when she claims
the nun emphasizes the fictionality of identity
(“Manufactured Marvels, Heretic Narratives, and the
Process of Interpretation in Villette,” SEL 32, 4 [Autumn
1992]: 723-46).
18. See Robert Heilman, “Charlotte Brontë, Reason, and
the Moon,” in Critical Essays on Charlotte Brontë, ed.
Barbara Timm Gates (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), pp.
34-49, 36; and Harriet Martineau, “Review of Villette
by Currer Bell,” in Gates, pp. 253-6, 255. Janice Carl-
isle considers the nun a figure of repressed desire in
“The Face in the Mirror: Villette and the Conventions
of Autobiography,” in Gates, pp. 264-87, 282-3, while
E. D. H. Johnson sees her as equal to the unreason
Lucy must renounce (“‘Daring the Dread Glance’:
Charlotte Brontë’s Treatment of the Supernatural in
Villette,” NCF 20, 4 [March 1966]: 325-36).
19. Q. D. Leavis, introduction to Villette (New York: Harper
Colophon, 1972), p. xxiii, cited by Gilbert and Gubar,
p. 683 n. 13. Review of Villette in The Literary Gazette
(5 February 1853), rprt. in The Brontës: The Critical
Heritage, ed. Miriam Allott (London and Boston: Rout-
ledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 178-81, 180.
20. Matthew Lewis, The Monk, ed. Louis Peck (New York:
Grove Press, 1952), p. 148. Citations will come from
this edition and henceforth will be cited parentheti-
cally.
128 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
21. See Max Byrd, “The Madhouse, the Whorehouse, and
the Convent,” PR 44, 2 (Summer 1977): 268-78.
22. Brontë, Villette, ed. Rosengarten and Smith, p. 423. All
references to Villette will be to this edition and
henceforth will be cited parenthetically in the text.
23. Cf. the descriptions of Baroness Lindenburg and
Madame Beck in character (Brontë, pp. 95, 98, 100-2,
695-7; Lewis, pp. 123, 145); in habits of spying
(Brontë, pp. 100, 421-2, 647; Lewis, p. 155); and in a
taste for young men (Brontë, pp. 140-5; Lewis, pp.
147-50). Paul’s history after the death of Justine-Marie
reads like Raymond’s fate had he not been freed from
the Bleeding Nun. More importantly, when Lucy
describes Paul as monitor of mores and the human
heart, he suddenly resembles Satan (Brontë, pp. 486-7;
Lewis, pp. 416-7).
24. As the Gothic novel reaches the end of its first phase
with Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer,
the structural logic of substitution dominates the
sexual logic.
25. Barker, p. 243. Thus, Carol Christ sees Brontë steeling
herself to prefer a realist aesthetic, especially in Vil-
lette, as a means of subduing this mutinous attraction
(“Imaginative Constraint, Feminine Duty, and the
Form of Charlotte Brontë’s Fiction,” WS 6, 3 [1979]:
287-96).
26. The phrase is Heilman’s; see his “Charlotte Brontë’s
‘New’ Gothic,” in From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad:
Essays Collected in Memory of James T. Hillhouse, ed.
Robert Rathburn and Martin Steinmann Jr.
(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1958), pp.
118-32. I interpret her “newness” very differently.
27. When the old woman emerges from the stone walls of
the Rue des Mages, behind the portrait of her grand-
daughter, “the portrait seemed to give way” (Brontë,
p. 562).
28. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention
in Narrative (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). Brooks’s
strictly male notion of desire and its accompaniments
deforms his definition of women’s plots as resistance
and endurance: “a waiting (and suffering) until the
woman’s desire can be a permitted response to the
expression of male desire” (p. 330).
29. Lucy is not unique among Brontë’s women in this
respect: Eliza Reed in Jane Eyre and Sylvie in The Profes-
sor both enter convents. See Kucich, p. 92. Kate Mil-
lett has Lucy trying on and rejecting all of the alterna-
tive female role models (Sexual Politics [New York:
Doubleday, 1970], pp. 140-7, rprt. in Gates, pp. 256-
64). Joseph P. Boone calls the nun the “false mirror of
[Lucy’s] sexuality” (“Depolicing Villette: Surveillance,
Invisibility, and the Female Erotics of ‘Heretic
Narrative,’” [Novel 26. 1 (Fall 1992)]: 20-42).
30. On Lucy as a “silence artist,” see Sedgwick, pp. 130-1.
Ultimately Sedgwick sees the nun as corresponding to
the letters. Cf. Gilbert and Gubar’s suggestion that
“Lucy is the nun who is immobilized by this internal
conflict” (p. 412, my emphasis).
31. Cf. Kucich, p. 109.
32. Anne Mozley’s unsigned review for the Christian Re-
membrancer (April 1853) shows that the narratorial
and characterological heresy fused in the public’s
mind (rprt. in Allott, pp. 202-8, 202).
 33. Barker, p. 723.
34. Qtd. in Barker, p. 243.
35. Barker, p. 262.
36. William Shakespeare. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of
Denmark. in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2d edn., ed. G.
Blakemore Evans (Boston and New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1997), pp. 1183-1245, III.i.120.
37. G. H. Lewes in the Leader (12 February 1853), rprt. in
Allott, pp. 184-6, 184.
38. Mozley, p. 203. See esp. William Makepeace Thacker-
ay’s letters of March and April 1853, rprt. in Allott, pp.
197-8.
39. Review of Villette in The Spectator (12 February 1853),
rprt. in Allott, pp. 181-4, 181.
40. Lewes, p. 184.
41. Mozley, p. 204; review of Villette in the Athenaeum (12
February 1853), rprt. in Allott, pp. 187-90, 188; and
review of Villette in Revue Des Deux Mondes (15 March
1853), rprt. in Allott, p. 199-200, 199.
42. Review of Villette in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine (May
1853), rprt. in Allott, pp. 212-5, 214.
43. On the link between the specularized female body
and female powerlessness, see Elaine Scarry. The Body
in Pain (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 207,
361 n. 20. Susan Faludie’s article on the Hollywood
porn industry shows male porn stars in suffering
acknowledgment that the “desire for desire” rules
pornographic producers and consumers alike (“The
Money Shot,” New Yorker [30 October 1995]. pp. 64-
87).
FURTHER READING
Bibliographies
Crump, Rebecca W. Charlotte and Emily Brontë: A Reference
Guide. 3 vols. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982-1986, 194 p.
Provides an annotated compilation of secondary sources
from 1846 to 1983.
Passel, Anne. Charlotte and Emily Brontë: An Annotated Bibli-
ography. New York: Garland Publishing, 1979, 359 p.
Organizes criticism by text.
Biographies
Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. London: E. P.
Dutton, 1908, 411 p.
Offers a biography by one of Brontë’s contemporaries;
includes large extracts from Brontë’s correspondence.
Gérin, Winifred. Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius.
London: Oxford University Press, 1967, 617 p.
Biography focusing on Charlotte Brontë’s development as
an author.
Gordon, Lyndall. Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life. New
York: W. W. Norton, 1996, 418 p.
Provides revisionist insights into Brontë’s life.
Miller, Lucasta. The Brontë Myth. New York: Knopf, 2004,
351 p.
Offers a biography that retraces myth surrounding the
Brontë sisters, particularly Charlotte.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
Criticism
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Alexander, Christine. “‘That Kingdom of Gloom’: Charlotte
Brontë, the Annuals, and the Gothic.” Nineteenth-
Century Literature 47, no. 4 (March 1993): 409-36.
Examines the influence on Brontë’s writings of the Gothic
tales included in popular nineteenth-century periodicals
and annuals, gift books containing poetry, prose fiction,
and illustrations.
Avery, Simon. “‘Some Strange and Spectral Dream’: The
Brontës’ Manipulation of the Gothic Mode.” Brontë
Society Transactions 23, no. 2 (October 1998): 120-35.
Explores the ways in which the Brontës each utilized and
modified the traditional Gothic.
Cecil, David. “Charlotte Brontë.” In Early Victorian Novelists:
Essays in Revaluation, pp. 119-54. New York: Bobbs-
Merrill, 1935.
Delineates Brontë’s flaws as a novelist while at the same
time averring that she is a creative genius and that even
her weakest passages are “pulsing with her intensity, fresh
with her charm.”
Chen, Chih-Ping. “‘Am I a Monster?’: Jane Eyre among the
Shadows of Freaks.” Studies in the Novel 34, no. 4
(winter 2002): 367-84.
Relates Brontë’s presentation of Bertha Mason in Jane
Eyre to the freak shows popular during the nineteenth
century, suggesting parallels between Bertha’s “enfreak-
ment” and Jane’s search for her own identity.
Chesterton, G. K. “Charlotte Brontë as a Romantic.” In
Charlotte Brontë, 1816-1916: A Centenary Memorial, pp.
49-54. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1917.
Discusses the coexistence of romance and realism in the
novels of Charlotte Brontë.
Crosby, Christina. “Charlotte Brontë’s Haunted Text.” SEL:
Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 24, no. 4
(autumn 1984): 701-15.
A feminist interpretation that examines the impact of
Gothic elements on Villette, a work often categorized as
a realist novel.
DeLamotte, Eugenia C. “Gothic Romance and Women’s
Reality in Jane Eyre.” In Perils of the Night: A Feminist
Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic, pp. 193-228. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Explores the combination of Gothic elements and realism
in Jane Eyre and the impact of that combination on
Jane’s quest for her identity.
Gubar, Susan. “The Buried Life of Lucy Snowe: Villette.” In
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, by Sandra M.
Gilbert and Susan M. Gubar, pp. 399-440. New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979.
Suggests that Villette, with a protagonist cut off from
society, family, money, and confidence, “is perhaps the
most moving and terrifying account of female deprivation
ever written.”
Martin, Robert Bernard. “Jane Eyre.” In Accents of Persuasion:
Charlotte Brontë’s Novels, pp. 57-108. London: Faber &
Faber, 1966.
An interpretation of Jane Eyre as a novel that seeks a
balance between reason and passion.
129
 Milbank, Alison. “‘Handling the Veil’: Charlotte Brontë.” In
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian
Fiction, pp. 140-57. New York: St. Martin’s, 1992.
Delineates Brontë’s expansion of the traditional women’s
role in Gothic literature.
Nicoll, W. Robertson. “Charlotte Brontë and One of Her
Critics.” The Bookman 10 (January 1900): 441-43.
Presents a review of Villette from the Christian Remem-
brancer and a response by Brontë in which she protests
the reviewer’s judgments of her character.
Rai, Amit S. “The Black Spectre of Sympathy: The ‘Occult’
Relation in Jane Eyre.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory
14, no. 3 (July-September 2003): 243-68.
Asserts the importance of sympathy in Jane Eyre as a
“paradoxical mode of power.”
Rigby, Elizabeth. “Vanity Fair—and Jane Eyre.” The London
Quarterly Review, no. 167 (December 1948): 82-99.
An unsigned review attributed to Rigby. Describes Jane
Eyre as a “remarkable” work, but criticizes the author for
a combination of “total ignorance of the habits of society,
a great coarseness of taste, and a heathenish doctrine of
religion.”
130 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
Woolf, Virginia. “Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.” In her
Collected Essays, pp. 185-90. London: The Hogarth
Press, 1966.
Compares Jane Eyre with Wuthering Heights, praising
the former as a vivid, absorbing, passionate, and poetic
novel.
OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:
Additional coverage of Brontë’s life and career is contained
in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Au-
thors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 17; Beacham’s Guide to
Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 2; British Writers, Vol. 5; Brit-
ish Writers: The Classics, Vol. 2; British Writers Retrospective
Supplement, Vol. 1; Concise Dictionary of British Literary
Biography, 1832-1890; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols.
21, 159, 199; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: Brit-
ish; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors
Modules: Most-studied Authors and Novelists; DISCovering
Authors 3.0; Exploring Novels; Feminism in Literature: A Gale
Critical Companion; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 2; Literature
Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols.
3, 8, 33, 58, 105, 155; Novels for Students, Vol. 4; Twayne’s
English Authors; World Literature and Its Times, Vol. 4; and
World Literature Criticism.
EMILY BRONTË
(1818 - 1848)
(Full name Emily Jane Brontë; also wrote under the
pseudonym Ellis Bell) English novelist and poet.
B rontë is considered an important yet elusive
figure in nineteenth-century English literature.
Although she led a brief and circumscribed life,
spent in relative isolation in a parsonage on the
Yorkshire moors, she left behind a literary legacy
that includes some of the most passionate and
inspired writing in Victorian literature. Today,
Brontë’s poems are well regarded by critics, but
they receive little attention, and her overall
reputation rests primarily on her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). While Brontë incorpo-
rated into that work the horror and mystery of a
Gothic novel, the remote setting and passionate
characters of a Romantic novel, and the social
criticism of a Victorian novel, she transformed all
of these traditions. In this story of extraordinary
love and revenge, Brontë demonstrated the con-
flict between elemental passions and civilized
society, resulting in a compelling work that has
been elevated to the status of a literary classic. At
the same time, Brontë’s writings have raised many
questions about their author’s intent. Unable to
reach a consensus concerning the ultimate mean-
ing of her works and reluctant to assign them a
definitive place in the English literary tradition,
critics continue to regard Brontë as a fascinating
enigma in English letters.
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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Although Brontë’s life was outwardly unevent-
ful, the unusual circumstances of her upbringing
have prompted considerable scrutiny. One of six
children born to Maria Branwell Brontë and the
Reverend Patrick Brontë, she was raised in the
parsonage at Haworth by her father and maternal
aunt following her mother’s death in 1821. In
1825 she was sent to the Clergy Daughters’ School
at Cowan Bridge, but returned to Haworth when
her sisters Maria and Elizabeth became ill at the
institution and died. A significant event in
Brontë’s creative life occurred in 1826 when
Patrick Brontë bought a set of wooden toy soldiers
for his children. The toys opened up a rich fantasy
world for Emily and her siblings Charlotte, Bran-
well, and Anne: Charlotte and Branwell created
an imaginary African land called Angria, for which
they invented characters, scenes, stories, and
poems, and Emily and Anne later conceived a
romantic legend centered upon the imaginary
Pacific Ocean island of Gondal. The realm of Gon-
dal became a lifelong interest for Brontë and, ac-
cording to many scholars, a major imaginative
source for her writings. In addition to composing
prose works (now lost) concerning the history of
Gondal, she wrote numerous poems that were
evidently directly inspired by Gondal-related
themes, characters, and situations. While Brontë
was intellectually precocious and began writing
poetry at an early age, she failed to establish social
131
 contacts outside of her family. She briefly attended
EMILY BRONTË
a school in East Yorkshire in 1835 and worked as
an assistant teacher at the Law Hill School near
Halifax in about 1838, but these excursions from
home were unsuccessful, ending in Brontë’s early
return to Haworth. She stayed at the parsonage,
continuing to write poetry and attending to
household duties, until 1842, when she and
Charlotte, hoping to acquire the language skills
needed to establish a school of their own, took
positions at a school in Brussels. Her aunt’s death
later that year, however, forced Brontë to return to
Haworth, where she resided for the rest of her life.
In 1845, Charlotte discovered one of Emily’s
private poetry notebooks. At Charlotte’s urging
Emily reluctantly agreed to publish some of her
poems in a volume that also included writings by
her sisters. Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell,
reflecting the masculine pseudonyms adopted by
Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, respectively, was
published in May 1846. While only two copies of
the book were sold, at least one commentator,
Sydney Dobell, praised Emily’s poems, singling
her out in the Athenaeum as a promising writer
and the best poet among the “Bell” family. Mean-
while, Brontë had been working on Wuthering
Heights, which was published in 1847 in an edi-
tion that also included Anne’s first novel, Agnes
Grey. Brontë’s masterpiece was poorly received by
contemporary critics who, repelled by the vivid
portrayal of malice and brutality in the book,
objected to the “degrading” nature of her subject.
Brontë worked on revising her poetry after pub-
lishing Wuthering Heights, but her efforts were
soon interrupted. Branwell Brontë died in Septem-
ber 1848, and Emily’s health began to decline
shortly afterwards. In accordance with what
Charlotte described as her sister’s strong-willed
and inflexible nature, Brontë apparently refused
medical attention and died of tuberculosis in
December 1848.
MAJOR WORKS
Although Brontë is more distinguished as a
novelist than as a poet, scholars regard her poetry
as a significant part of her oeuvre. In particular,
lacking first-hand information concerning her life
and opinions, commentators have looked to the
poems as a source of insight into Brontë’s person-
ality, philosophy, and imagination. Critics have
attempted to reconstruct a coherent Gondal
“epic” from Brontë’s poems and journal entries.
In addition to identifying Gondal’s queen, com-
monly referred to as Augusta Geraldine Almeda,
and her lover Julius Brenzaida as key characters in
132 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
the Gondal story, scholars have underscored the
presence of wars, assassination, treachery, and
infanticide in Brontë’s fantasy realm. Critics have
consequently noted many similarities between the
passionate characters and violent motifs of Gon-
dal and Wuthering Heights, and today a generous
body of criticism exists supporting the contention
that the Gondal poems served as a creative fore-
runner of the novel.
In Wuthering Heights, Brontë chronicles the at-
tachment between Heathcliff, a rough orphan
taken in by the Earnshaw family of Wuthering
Heights, and the family’s daughter, Catherine. The
two characters are joined by a spiritual bond of
preternatural strength, yet Catherine elects to
marry her more refined neighbor, Edgar Linton of
Thrushcross Grange; ultimately, this decision leads
to Catherine’s madness and death and prompts
Heathcliff to take revenge upon both the Lintons
and the Earnshaws. Heathcliff eventually dies,
consoled by the thought of uniting with Cathe-
rine’s spirit, and the novel ends with the sugges-
tion that Hareton Earnshaw, the last descendant
of the Earnshaw family, will marry Catherine’s
daughter, Catherine Linton, and abandon Wuth-
ering Heights for Thrushcross Grange.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Initially, critics failed to appreciate Brontë’s
literary significance. While commentators ac-
knowledged the emotional power of Wuthering
Heights, they also rejected the malignant and
coarse side of life that it depicted. Charlotte Brontë
responded to this latter objection in 1850, defend-
ing the rough language and manners in her sister’s
novel as realistic. At the same time, however, she
acknowledged the dark vision of life in the book,
which she attributed to Emily’s reclusive habits.
This focus on Brontë’s aloofness, combined with
the mystical aspects of her poetry and the super-
natural overtones of Wuthering Heights, fostered
an image of the writer as a reclusive mystic that
dominated Brontë criticism into the twentieth
century. During that century, however, a number
of modern studies brought Brontë’s craftsmanship
to light. Recognition of her artistry increased
dramatically as scholars discovered the sophistica-
tion and complexity of her images, characteriza-
tions, themes, and techniques in Wuthering
Heights. Interest in her poetry has also grown,
primarily due to investigations into its Gondal
background, so that today Brontë is the focus of
considerable scholarly attention as both a novelist
and poet.
 Many critics have noted the Gothic elements
in Brontë’s novel, particularly the distinct architec-
ture of Wuthering Heights, the characterization of
Heathcliff as a dark, brooding hero, and ghostly
wanderings on the moors. Syndy McMillen Con-
ger wrote that Wuthering Heights arouses emotions
“central to the Gothic experience: melancholy,
desire, and terror.” Commentators observe that
Brontë heightened her story as well with fierce
animal imagery and scenes of raw violence. Dream
motifs figure prominently in Wuthering Heights,
and critics also stress the importance of windows
as symbolic vehicles for spiritual entrance and
escape in the novel. While the Gothic tradition
influenced Brontë, she also deviated from that
tradition in significant ways, notably in her
characterization of Catherine Earnshaw. The typi-
cal Gothic heroine is petite, naïve, and morally
virtuous, but Catherine, as Conger wrote, is
“complicated, analytical, and uninhibited.” The
subject of wide-ranging critical debate for genera-
tions, Wuthering Heights continues to defy catego-
rization and endures as a literary classic.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell [as Ellis Bell,
with Currer and Acton Bell (pseudonyms of
Charlotte and Anne Brontë)] (poems) 1846
*Wuthering Heights [as Ellis Bell] (novel) 1847
†Life and Works of the Sisters Brontë. 7 vols. [with
Charlotte and Anne] (novels and poetry)
1899-1903
The Shakespeare Head Brontë. 19 vols. (novels,
poetry, and letters) 1931-38
Gondal Poems (poetry) 1938
The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë (poetry)
1941
* This edition of Wuthering Heights was published with
Anne Brontë’s novel Agnes Grey.
† This work includes letters written by Charlotte, Emily,
and Anne Brontë.
PRIMARY SOURCES
EMILY BRONTË (NOVEL DATE
1847)
SOURCE: Brontë, Emily. “Chapter 1.” In Wuthering
Heights. 1847. Reprint edition, pp. 1-6. New York:
Bantam Dell, 2003.
The following excerpt comprises Chapter 1 of Wuthering
Heights, which was first published in 1847.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
1801—I have just returned from a visit to my
EMILY BRONTË
landlord—the solitary neighbour that I shall be
troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country!
In all England, I do not believe that I could have
fixed on a situation so completely removed from
the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s
Heaven: and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suit-
able pair to divide the desolation between us. A
capital fellow! He little imagined how my heart
warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes
withdraw so suspiciously under their brows, as I
rode up, and when his fingers sheltered them-
selves, with a jealous resolution, still further in his
waistcoat, as I announced my name.
‘Mr. Heathcliff?’ I said.
A nod was the answer.
‘Mr. Lockwood, your new tenant, sir. I do
myself the honour of calling as soon as possible
after my arrival, to express the hope that I have
not inconvenienced you by my perseverance in
soliciting the occupation of Thrushcross Grange: I
heard yesterday you had had some thoughts—’
‘Thrushcross Grange is my own, sir,’ he inter-
rupted, wincing. ‘I should not allow any one to
inconvenience me, if I could hinder it—walk in!’
The ‘walk in’ was uttered with closed teeth,
and expressed the sentiment, ‘Go to the Deuce’:
even the gate over which he leant manifested no
sympathizing movement to the words; and I think
that circumstance determined me to accept the
invitation: I felt interested in a man who seemed
more exaggeratedly reserved than myself.
When he saw my horse’s breast fairly pushing
the barrier, he did pull out his hand to unchain it,
and then suddenly preceded me up the causeway,
calling, as we entered the court,—
‘Joseph, take Mr. Lockwood’s horse; and bring
up some wine.’
‘Here we have the whole establishment of
domestics, I suppose,’ was the reflection, suggested
by this compound order. ‘No wonder the grass
grows up between the flags, and cattle are the only
hedge-cutters.’
Joseph was an elderly, nay, an old man: very
old, perhaps, though hale and sinewy.
‘The Lord help us!’ he soliloquised in an
undertone of peevish displeasure, while relieving
me of my horse: looking, meantime, in my face
so sourly that I charitably conjectured he must
have need of divine aid to digest his dinner, and
his pious ejaculation had no reference to my
unexpected advent.
133
 Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathc-
EMILY BRONTË
liff’s dwelling. ‘Wuthering’ being a significant
provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmos-
pheric tumult to which its station is exposed in
stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they
must have up there at all times, indeed: one may
guess the power of the north wind blowing over
the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted
firs at the end of the house; and by a range of
gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as
if craving alms of the sun. Happily, the architect
had foresight to build it strong: the narrow
windows are deeply set in the wall, and the
corners defended with large jutting stones.
Before passing the threshold, I paused to
admire a quantity of grotesque carving lavished
over the front, and especially about the principal
door; above which, among a wilderness of crum-
bling griffins and shameless little boys, I detected
the date ‘1500,’ and the name ‘Hareton Earnshaw.’
I would have made a few comments, and re-
quested a short history of the place from the surly
owner; but his attitude at the door appeared to
demand my speedy entrance, or complete depar-
ture, and I had no desire to aggravate his impa-
tience previous to inspecting the penetralium.
One step brought us into the family sitting-
room, without any introductory lobby or passage:
they call it here ‘the house’ preeminently. It
includes kitchen and parlour, generally; but I
believe at Wuthering Heights the kitchen is forced
to retreat altogether into another quarter: at least I
distinguished a chatter of tongues, and a clatter of
culinary utensils, deep within; and I observed no
signs of roasting, boiling, or baking, about the
huge fire-place; nor any glitter of copper saucepans
and tin cullenders on the walls. One end, indeed,
reflected splendidly both light and heat from
ranks of immense pewter dishes, interspersed with
silver jugs and tankards, towering row after row,
on a vast oak dresser, to the very roof. The latter
had never been underdrawn: its entire anatomy
lay bare to an inquiring eye, except where a frame
of wood laden with oatcakes and clusters of legs
of beef, mutton, and ham, concealed it. Above
the chimney were sundry villanous old guns, and
a couple of horse-pistols: and, by way of orna-
ment, three gaudily painted canisters disposed
along its ledge. The floor was of smooth, white
stone; the chairs, high-backed, primitive struc-
tures, painted green: one or two heavy black ones
lurking in the shade. In an arch under the dresser,
reposed a huge, liver-coloured bitch pointer, sur-
rounded by a swarm of squealing puppies; and
other dogs haunted other recesses.
134 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
The apartment and furniture would have been
nothing extraordinary as belonging to a homely,
northern farmer, with a stubborn countenance,
and stalwart limbs set out to advantage in knee-
breeches and gaiters. Such an individual seated in
his armchair, his mug of ale frothing on the round
table before him, is to be seen in any circuit of
five or six miles among these hills, if you go at the
right time after dinner. But Mr. Heathcliff forms a
singular contrast to his abode and style of living.
He is a dark-skinned gipsy in aspect, in dress and
manners a gentleman: that is, as much a gentle-
man as many a country squire: rather slovenly,
perhaps, yet not looking amiss with his negli-
gence, because he has an erect and handsome
figure; and rather morose. Possibly, some people
might suspect him of a degree of underbred pride;
I have a sympathetic chord within that tells me it
is nothing of the sort: I know by instinct, his
reserve springs from an aversion to showy displays
of feeling—to manifestations of mutual kindli-
ness. He’ll love and hate equally under cover, and
esteem it a species of impertinence to be loved or
hated again. No. I’m running on too fast: I bestow
my own attributes over liberally on him. Mr.
Heathcliff may have entirely dissimilar reasons for
keeping his hand out of the way when he meets a
would-be acquaintance, to those which actuate
me. Let me hope my constitution is almost pecu-
liar: my dear mother used to say I should never
have a comfortable home; and only last summer I
proved myself perfectly unworthy of one.
While enjoying a month of fine weather at
the seacoast, I was thrown into the company of a
most fascinating creature: a real goddess in my
eyes, as long as she took no notice of me. I ‘never
told my love’ vocally; still, if looks have language,
the merest idiot might have guessed I was over
head and ears: she understood me at last, and
looked a return—the sweetest of all imaginable
looks. And what did I do? I confess it with
shame—shrunk icily into myself, like a snail; at
every glance retired colder and farther; till finally
the poor innocent was led to doubt her own
senses, and, overwhelmed with confusion at her
supposed mistake, persuaded her mamma to
decamp.
By this curious turn of disposition I have
gained the reputation of deliberate heartlessness;
how undeserved, I alone can appreciate.
I took a seat at the end of the hearthstone op-
posite that towards which my landlord advanced,
and filled up an interval of silence by attempting
to caress the canine mother, who had left her
nursery, and was sneaking wolfishly to the back of
my legs, her lip curled up, and her white teeth
watering for a snatch.
My caress provoked a long, guttural gnarl.
‘You’d better let the dog alone,’ growled Mr.
Heathcliff in unison, checking fiercer demonstra-
tions with a punch of his foot. ‘She’s not ac-
customed to be spoiled—not kept for a pet.’
Then, striding to a side door, he shouted
again—‘Joseph!’—
Joseph mumbled indistinctly in the depths of
the cellar, but gave no intimation of ascending; so
his master dived down to him, leaving me vis-à-
vis the ruffianly bitch and a pair of grim shaggy
sheep-dogs, who shared with her a jealous guard-
ianship over all my movements.
Not anxious to come in contact with their
fangs, I sat still; but, imagining they would
scarcely understand tacit insults, I unfortunately
indulged in winking and making faces at the trio,
and some turn of my physiognomy so irritated
madam, that she suddenly broke into a fury, and
leapt on my knees. I flung her back, and hastened
to interpose the table between us. This proceeding
roused the whole hive. Half-a-dozen four-footed
fiends, of various sizes and ages, issued from hid-
den dens to the common centre. I felt my heels
and coat-laps peculiar subjects of assault; and, par-
rying off the larger combatants as effectually as I
could with the poker, I was constrained to de-
mand, aloud, assistance from some of the house-
hold in reestablishing peace.
Mr. Heathcliff and his man climbed the cellar
steps with vexatious phlegm: I don’t think they
moved one second faster than usual, though the
hearth was an absolute tempest of worrying and
yelping.
Happily, an inhabitant of the kitchen made
more dispatch: a lusty dame, with tucked-up
gown, bare arms, and fire-flushed cheeks, rushed
into the midst of us flourishing a frying-pan: and
used that weapon, and her tongue, to such pur-
pose, that the storm subsided magically, and she
only remained, heaving like a sea after a high
wind, when her master entered on the scene.
‘What the devil is the matter?’ he asked, eye-
ing me in a manner I could ill endure after this
inhospitable treatment.
‘What the devil, indeed!’ I muttered. ‘The herd
of possessed swine could have had no worse spirits
in them than those animals of yours, sir. You
might as well leave a stranger with a brood of
tigers!’
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
‘They won’t meddle with persons who touch
EMILY BRONTË
nothing,’ he remarked, putting the bottle before
me, and restoring the displaced table. ‘The dogs
do right to be vigilant. Take a glass of wine?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Not bitten, are you?’
‘If I had been, I would have set my signet on
the biter.’
Heathcliff’s countenance relaxed into a grin.
‘Come, come,’ he said, ‘you are flurried, Mr.
Lockwood. Here, take a little wine. Guests are so
exceedingly rare in this house that I and my dogs,
I am willing to own, hardly know how to receive
them. Your health, sir!’
I bowed and returned the pledge; beginning
to perceive that it would be foolish to sit sulking
for the misbehaviour of a pack of curs: besides, I
felt loath to yield the fellow further amusement at
my expense; since his humour took that turn.
He—probably swayed by prudential consider-
ations of the folly of offending a good tenant—
relaxed a little in the laconic style of chipping off
his pronouns and auxiliary verbs, and introduced
what he supposed would be a subject of interest
to me,—a discourse on the advantages and disad-
vantages of my present place of retirement.
I found him very intelligent on the topics we
touched; and before I went home, I was encour-
aged so far as to volunteer another visit to-
morrow.
He evidently wished no repetition of my
intrusion. I shall go, notwithstanding. It is aston-
ishing how sociable I feel myself compared with
him.
TITLE COMMENTARY
Wuthering Heights
E. P. WHIPPLE (ESSAY DATE
OCTOBER 1848)
SOURCE: Whipple, E. P. “Novels of the Season.” The
North American Review 67, no. 141 (October 1848): 354-
70.
In the following excerpt, Whipple presumes that the
author of Wuthering Heights is male and faults the
novel as amoral and offensive.
Acton Bell, the author of Wuthering Heights,
. . . when left altogether to his own imaginations,
135
 seems to take a morose satisfaction in developing
EMILY BRONTË
a full and complete science of human brutality. In
Wuthering Heights he has succeeded in reaching
the summit of this laudable ambition. He appears
to think that spiritual wickedness is a combina-
tion of animal ferocities, and has accordingly
made a compendium of the most striking quali-
ties of tiger, wolf, cur, and wild-cat, in the hope of
framing out of such elements a suitable brute-
demon to serve as the hero of his novel. Compared
with Heathcliff, Squeers is considerate and Quilp
humane. He is a deformed monster, whom the
Mephistopheles of Goethe would have nothing to
say to, whom the Satan of Milton would consider
as an object of simple disgust, and to whom Dante
would hesitate in awarding the honor of a place
among those whom he has consigned to the burn-
ing pitch. This epitome of brutality, disavowed by
man and devil, Mr. Acton Bell attempts in two
whole volumes to delineate, and certainly he is to
be congratulated on his success. As he is a man of
uncommon talents, it is needless to say that it is
to his subject and his dogged manner of handling
it that we are to refer the burst of dislike with
which the novel was received. His mode of delin-
eating a bad character is to narrate every offensive
act and repeat every vile expression which are
characteristic. Hence, in Wuthering Heights, he
details all the ingenuities of animal malignity, and
exhausts the whole rhetoric of stupid blasphemy,
in order that there may be no mistake as to the
kind of person he intends to hold up to the
popular gaze. Like all spendthrifts of malice and
profanity, however, he overdoes the business.
Though he scatters oaths as plentifully as senti-
mental writers do interjections, the comparative
parsimony of the great novelists in this respect is
productive of infinitely more effect. It must be
confessed that this coarseness, though the promi-
nent, is not the only characteristic of the writer.
His attempt at originality does not stop with the
conception of Heathcliff, but he aims further to
exhibit the action of the sentiment of love on the
nature of the being whom his morbid imagina-
tion has created. This is by far the ablest and most
subtile portion of his labors, and indicates that
strong hold upon the elements of character, and
that decision of touch in the delineation of the
most evanescent qualities of emotion, which
distinguish the mind of the whole family. For all
practical purposes, however, the power evinced in
Wuthering Heights is power thrown away. Night-
mares and dreams, through which devils dance
and wolves howl, make bad novels.
136 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
SYNDY MCMILLEN CONGER
(ESSAY DATE 1983)
SOURCE: Conger, Syndy McMillen. “The Reconstruc-
tion of the Gothic Feminine Ideal in Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights.” In The Female Gothic, edited by
Julian Fleenor, pp. 91-106. Montreal, Quebec: Eden
Press, 1983.
In the following essay, Conger studies the influence of the
traditional Gothic genre on Wuthering Heights as well
as Brontë’s innovations within and upon the Gothic tradi-
tion, particularly in terms of her portrayal of the heroine.
In the first chapter of Wuthering Heights,
Emily Brontë invites her readers to expect a Gothic
thriller, an eighteenth-century form bound by a
set of narrative conventions long established and
easily recognized by 1847. She opens her tale by
sketching the outline of a dwelling on a hill,
which, like the Gothic castle in its age, disrepair,
and isolation, is a monument to the fragility of
human constructs. Next she fills in details de-
signed to elicit the emotions central to the Gothic
experience: melancholy, desire, and terror. The
hilltop is bleak with the only vegetation being “a
few stunted firs” and “a range of gaunt thorns.”1
Grass grows between the flagstones leading to the
door, over which the narrator sees Gothic orna-
mentation: “grotesque carving,” “a wilderness of
crumbling griffins and shameless little boys,” and
a barely visible ancient date “1500” and name.
Like the narrator’s name, “Lockwood,” which has
the unsettling connotation of something or
someone being shut out, and the name above the
door, “Hareton Earnshaw,” which suggests nature’s
mockery of woman’s birthright or wages (hare ⫹
earn ⫹ shaw, ‘a clump of bushes or trees; thicket;
copse’), other names also evoke that sense of
vague threat so pervasive in the Gothic world:
“Wuthering Heights” for a house constantly buf-
feted by “atmospheric tumult” and “Heathcliff”
for the abruptly inhospitable landlord. While
Lockwood quickly recognizes the morose, dark-
skinned gypsy as an isolato and a misanthrope,
the reader is very apt to assume, in this context,
that he is a Gothic villain.
Critics often take note of these Gothic charac-
teristics but rarely linger on them, perhaps assum-
ing that Gothic details are mere “trappings” (a
favorite word, after all, of early students of the
Gothic novel),2 decorative devices which could in
no way touch the essence of Wuthering Heights.
Such an assumption can handicap readers, con-
demning them to unnecessary historical short-
sightedness in their interpretation of Brontë’s
masterpiece. The rather obvious fact that Wuther-
ing Heights is much more than a re-creation of
Gothic formulae should not deter us from asking
ourselves what Brontë did for the Gothic tradition
and what the Gothic tradition did for Brontë. Her
contribution to the tradition was to give it aes-
thetic respectability and also to introduce liberat-
ing modifications into what had become an overly
rigid plot form. The tradition provided her with a
unique opportunity to define for herself and for
her readers a new kind of Gothic heroine.
From the protagonist’s perspective, the tradi-
tional Gothic plot can be briefly described as fear-
ful periods of pursuit and flight or confinement,
persecution, and escape; brief interludes of recon-
ciliation with loved ones; and a final, advanta-
geous marriage and the restoration of tranquillity.
Brontë’s first modification in this traditional
formula is to introduce her heroine not as a mar-
riageable young woman but as a child. Catherine
will also be wooed, terrorized and pursued, and
married, but Brontë first develops her into a
complex and individualized character. Her second
innovation is to reverse the significance attached
to marital and extramarital love. Brontë’s heroine
is married early in the novel, but this marriage is
no resolution as it is in the traditional Gothic. It
does not settle conflicts but exacerbates them, and
in Brontë’s structure, replaces the period of fearful
confinement found in the middle of the tradi-
tional Gothic novel. Whether or not Nelly believes
the perception valid, for Catherine marriage has
seemed a dungeon: “Oh! I’m burning! I wish I
were out of doors—I wish I were a girl again, half
savage, and hardy, and free. . . .” This second
change signals nothing less than a redefinition of
freedom. In the early Gothic novel freedom is as-
sociated with escape from the dark usurper into
marriage. In Wuthering Heights, however, in a
way which underlines Brontë’s adherence to the
romantic inversion of eighteenth-century values,3
freedom is inextricably bound to a social outcast
and to the lawless—even incestuous—relationship
he offers her.
This redefinition of freedom is rather too radi-
cal to have grown simply from Brontë’s discontent
with the traditional strictures of a genre. At the
hub of both structural changes stands the heroine,
and this suggests that underlying Brontë’s urge to
modify Gothic conventions is a dissatisfaction
with contemporary fictional definitions of femi-
ninity and feminine happiness. Indeed, the por-
trait of the heroine which emerges from the novel
makes such a conclusion ineluctable; for Cathe-
rine is a Gothic heroine quite free from the social
and literary proscriptions of her forerunners. For
this reason with Emily Brontë the term Female
Gothic may be said to take on special significance.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
EMILY BRONTË
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
H. F. CHORLEY’S NEGATIVE RESPONSE TO
WUTHERING HEIGHTS
Here are two tales [Agnes Gray and Wuthering
Heights] so nearly related to Jane Eyre in cast
of thought, incident, and language as to
excite some curiosity. All three might be the
work of one hand,—but the first issued
remains the best. In spite of much power and
cleverness; in spite of its truth to life in the
remote nooks and corners of England, Wuth-
ering Heights is a disagreeable story. The Bells
seem to affect painful and exceptional sub-
jects:—the misdeeds and oppressions of
tyranny—the eccentricities of “woman’s
fantasy.” They do not turn away from dwell-
ing upon those physical acts of cruelty which
we know to have their warrant in the real an-
nals of crime and suffering,—but the contem-
plation of which true taste rejects. The brutal
master of the lonely house on “Wuthering
Heights”—a prison which might be pictured
from life—has doubtless had his prototype in
those ungenial and remote districts where
human beings, like the trees, grow gnarled
and dwarfed and distorted by the inclement
climate; but he might have been indicated
with far fewer touches, in place of so entirely
filling the canvas that there is hardly a scene
untainted by his presence. . . . Enough of
what is mean and bitterly painful and degrad-
ing gathers round every one of us during the
course of his pilgrimage through this vale of
tears to absolve the Artist from choosing his
incidents and characters out of such a dismal
catalogue; and if the Bells, singly or col-
lectively, are contemplating future or frequent
utterances in Fiction, let us hope that they
will spare us further interiors so gloomy as
the one here elaborated with such dismal
minuteness.
SOURCE: Chorley, H. F. “Our Library Table.” The
Athenaeum, no. 1052 (25 December 1847):
1324-25.
It no longer simply means Gothic novels written
by females for females, imitative of male forms
and attitudes. With Brontë it means literature
137
 which deliberately reorders the Gothic experience
EMILY BRONTË
in order to speak to women about themselves in a
new way. Brontë’s departures from the conven-
tional Gothic heroine—and the implications of
those departures for her readers—will be the focus
of the remainder of this essay. It begins with a
review of Catherine’s foremothers.
The picture of ideal femininity which emerges
from early novels in the Gothic tradition is at once
reductive and fragmented, a negative fictional
construct born of a repressive society. The
eighteenth-century Gothic heroine is made exem-
plary more for what she lacks than for what she
has. Antonia wins praise from Lewis in The Monk
(1796), for example, for lacking fullness of figure,
for being “rather below than above the middle
size” and “light and airy.”4 She also wins praise
for lacking any distinctive physical qualities: “her
eyes were not very large, nor their lashes particu-
larly long.” Hers is not an awesome physical
beauty, Lewis explains, but a beauty of tempera-
ment—of the submissive personality: “not so
lovely from regularity of features, as from sweet-
ness and sensibility of countenance. . . .”
Submissiveness is a key personality trait of the
persecuted Gothic maiden well into the nine-
teenth century.5 Insofar as it is humanly possible,
she obeys the dicta of parents and society, given
perhaps their most uncompromising articulation
by Isidora’s mother in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wan-
derer (1820): “perfect obedience . . . and unbroken
silence.”6 Only when the Gothic heroine is con-
fronted by dastardly behavior does she offer posi-
tive resistance, but it typically takes the puerile
form of empty threats, unanswered prayers, or
unheard shrieks. In less life-threatening circum-
stances, she frets and waits but rarely makes an
independent attempt to change the questionable
values or behavior of those around her. Isabella’s
response to Manfred’s indignities in The Castle of
Otranto (1764) is paradigmatic: she flees the
secular world without any attempt to expose his
outrageous desires. True, Radcliffe’s Ellena Rosalba
(The Italian, 1797) once refuses to accept unpleas-
ant alternatives offered her by an unjust abbess,
and Emily St. Aubert (The Mysteries of Udolpho,
1792) similarly refuses to sign away her property
rights despite Montoni’s threats. But this is a pas-
sive resistance, the last resort of those convinced
they are powerless. Active, constructive resistance
lies outside the ken or the capability of the early
Gothic heroine. Submissiveness, this time coupled
with total self-abnegation, is even held up as ideal
by Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter in her Franken-
stein (1817). Mary Shelley grants her heroine
138 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
Elizabeth intelligence, but Victor prizes her most
for her “light and airy” figure and her yielding
nature: “No one could better enjoy liberty, yet no
one could submit with more grace than she did to
constraint and caprice.”7 She is to him most
“enchanting” when she is “continually endeav-
ouring to contribute to the happiness of others,
entirely forgetful of herself.”
As the above examples may already have sug-
gested, the early Gothic heroine was not only
weak-willed but also sometimes weak-minded,
although in this respect she grows in stature as
the nineteenth century approaches. Isabella’s
mind is never assessed by Walpole and Lewis’ An-
tonia is not even allowed to read an unexpurgated
Bible for fear her mind will be tainted. Radcliffe’s
heroines, although they seem schooled most in
the useful and fine arts of sewing, drawing, versify-
ing, painting, and singing, sometimes also receive
more rigorous intellectual training. Emily St. Aub-
ert’s father insists that she study Latin, English,
and science: “‘A well-informed mind,’ he would
say, ‘is the best security against the contagion of
folly and vice.’”8 Maturin’s Immalee-Isidora has
the most formidable mind of all; her thoughts are
often intelligent and boldly heterodox. She bewil-
ders her Roman Catholic mother, for instance, by
insisting on the precedence of piety over cer-
emony. Nor does Isidora easily accept the suppres-
sion of her naturally exuberant emotions by her
mother, who brands them “violent” and “unman-
nerly.”
Such signs of intellect, however, most not be
overrated. The scanty training these girls receive
cannot give them sufficient strength to cope
independently with the perplexities they encoun-
ter without and within, and they are easy prey
not only for fortune hunters but for themselves.
Lacking constructive ways of occupying their
minds, they frequently suffer from excess sensibil-
ity, a painfully exaggerated state of emotional
awareness, bringing with it acute sensitivity to
external stimuli and a tendency to fall victim to
the paralyzing, diffuse emotions of sentiment and
anxiety. Just as nameless wishes and fears will
invade the idle mind, so dark imaginings often
usurp the ill-informed mind. These heroines have
overly vivid imaginations, a propensity to invent
dangers where none exist. Emily is repeatedly
warned by her father about the dangers of overly
fine feelings, but when Montoni shuts her in his
remote castle, she is much more the victim of the
terrors she invents than she is of him. Even if
these heroines survive the tests of sensibility and
fancy, they are sure to capitulate intellectually dur-
ing the ordeal of love. The minds of Emily and
Immalee, both relatively perceptive young
women, turn to butter when they are with their
lovers. They lose all ability to think or act on their
own.
Physically slight, emotionally passive, and
intellectually ill-trained—wherein lies such a
heroine’s stature? Primarily in her moral impec-
cability. The Gothic heroine is morally flawless;
hers is a purity of mind which becomes more
pronounced as the turn of the century approaches.
She never has a vindictive thought, even in the
wake of abuses. She never dreams an unaccept-
able dream. Her innocence is so thorough in some
cases that she has virtually no knowledge at all of
evil. Antonia must learn only too late what the
special glint in the friar Ambrosio’s eye means.
Immalee listens incredulously to Melmoth’s tales
of man’s cruelty to his fellow creatures: “‘In the
world that thinks!’ repeated Immalee,
‘Impossible!’” These heroines are Eves before the
fall, invested with mythical perfection which first
becomes explicit in Maturin’s portrayal of Imma-
lee. Of sexuality and physical passion these mythi-
cal creatures are equally ignorant, a clue to us that
their creators equated passion with evil. Antonia
“knows not in what consists the difference of Man
and Woman.” “Of passion,” Immalee said “she
knew nothing, and could propose no remedy for
an evil she was unconscious of”
Balancing the frail, submissive paragon in
early Gothic fiction is the dark, imperious, passion-
ridden one, the femme fatale. She has the inde-
pendence of spirit, the emotional vibrancy, the
ingenuity, and the moral fallibility the heroine
often lacks, but she pays a price for these strengths.
She is their victim. In her youth, the dark woman
is often loving but of a “warm and voluptuous
character” as was Beatrice de las Cisternas in The
Monk. As she ages, if her wishes are in any way
thwarted, and they invariably are, she grows
insatiable, ungovernable, and even deliberately
wicked. She becomes then an exacting and jeal-
ous competitor for a young man’s affections, as is
the Baroness Lindenberg in The Monk; or a “vindic-
tive, yet crafty and deceitful” mother, as is the
Marchesa de Vivaldi in The Italian;9 or a merci-
lessly punitive Mother Superior as are the abbesses
in The Italian and The Monk. Her last days and her
death may be unquiet. Her conscience may weigh
heavily enough with crimes to drive her into
temporary insanity and delirium, as it does Si-
gnora Laurentini in The Mysteries of Udolpho; and
just as she is a conscience-plagued woman in life,
so she may be transformed after death into a rest-
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less ghost, as Beatrice becomes the “Bleeding Nun”
EMILY BRONTË
of The Monk.; At her most extreme, the femme fa-
tale has struck an alliance with the devil, as has
Matilda in The Monk in this case her kiss damns as
well as fires the soul of her lover, Ambrosio.
The woman reading this fiction in the eigh-
teenth century is hardly to be envied. The price
she paid for the privilege of emotional release was
high; she was most cruelly reduced and divided
against herself. She might temporarily enjoy read-
ing of the villain’s lust or the hero’s sentimental
adoration, but she was quietly being instructed at
the same time to choose between two equally
impossible feminine models. Did she yearn only
to be virtuous? Then she must strive for a body
“light and airy” and a mind equally so; she must
be utterly compliant, selfless, dependent, and
pure. Did she pine instead for an all-subsuming,
passionate love affair? Then she must expect to be
soundly punished, even damned, or become vi-
cious, subject to criminal impulses and madness.
The choice is rather obviously unsatisfactory, at
the very least encouraging the female reader to
repress any urges to express or please herself,
and—perhaps even more dangerously in the long
run—perpetuating the myth that she was fated,
whether good or bad, to be a victim of passions
beyond her control, if not of her own, then those
of others. Little wonder that Mary Wollstonecraft
repudiated such fiction in Maria, or, The Wrongs of
Women (1798) and such feminine models in A
Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792): “I wish
to persuade women to endeavor to acquire
strength, both of mind and body.”1 0 In such fic-
tion the bounds of femininity were painfully nar-
row.
In the first few episodes of Wuthering Heights,
Emily Brontë studiously avoids recreating such
stereotyped Gothic heroines. The reader meets no
gentle maiden or femme fatale in these early
scenes; instead Brontë offers two Catherines, one
far too sullen to qualify as the angelically compli-
ant Gothic heroine, and the other far too complex.
The younger Catherine is fair and pretty but un-
pardonably rude to Lockwood when he comes to
tea, a rudeness which is easily traceable in the
personality of her mother, the elder Catherine, as
it emerges from her childish scrawl and Lock-
wood’s dream. This elder Catherine as a child is at
once naughty and loving, disobedient and loyal,
and a childish specter both terrifying and pitiful.
From the outset, then, she is clearly a new compos-
ite heroine, combining positive and negative at-
tributes of earlier feminine characters of the
Gothic tradition.
139
 This is not to deny a family resemblance
EMILY BRONTË
between Catherine and the Gothic heroines before
her. She is, for example, as easily tyrannized by
emotions and unrealistic fantasies as Emily St.
Aubert. She grieves at Heathcliff’s disappearance
until she makes herself physically ill, even as a
strong young woman. Then, when a second bout
of illness proves fatal during her first pregnancy,
violent emotions are again the primary underly-
ing cause, something Nelly recognizes but cannot
understand or help. Her fantasies, though a
comforting refuge against a hostile environment
for Catherine the child (the fantasy of her father
in heaven, for example), are sadly self-defeating
and delusive for Catherine the adult. She should
see that her marriage to Edgar cannot “aid Heath-
cliff to rise” when the two men despise each other.
She should see that even if her wealth could in
some way aid Heathcliff, she could still never
marry him so long as Edgar remained alive. She
should, after Isabella’s elopement, work to recon-
cile herself to the inevitable rift between Edgar
and Heathcliff instead of withdrawing to a world
of unrecoverable childhood fantasies: “Oh, if I
were but in my own bed in the old house!”
Sometimes the fantasies cause positive harm. Her
delusory accusations of Nelly only harden her
nurse against her; and her fantasy-inspired wish
to catch a breath of night air from the moors does
little to cure her fever.
The family resemblance is strongest between
Radcliffe’s and Maturin’s heroines and Catherine.
Like them, she is drawn to nature, though for her
it is not an emblematic reminder of God’s Provi-
dence, as they believe, but rather is itself divine.
Catherine’s heaven is the heath: “. . . heaven did
not seem to be my home,” Catherine admits to
Nelly as she shares a dream she’s had of dying,
“and I broke my heart with weeping to come back
to earth; and the angels were so angry that they
flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the
top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing
for joy.” Catherine also shares with Emily, Ellena,
and Immalee a propensity to almost deify her lov-
ers, to over-idealize love bonds. The passages
which illustrate this are often quoted, but they are
so central to this point and a number of others to
follow that they are included here in their entirety:
I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton than
I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in
there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I
shouldn’t have thought of it. It would degrade me
to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know
how I love him; and that, not because he’s hand-
some, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I
am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine
140
are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a
moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire. . . .
I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody
have a notion that there is, or should be, an exist-
ence of yours beyond you. What were the use of
my creation if I were entirely contained here? My
great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s
miseries, and I watched and felt each from the
beginning; my great thought in living is himself.
If all else perished, and he remained, I should still
continue to be; and, if all else remained, and he
were annihilated, the Universe would turn to a
mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it.
My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods.
Time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter
changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles
the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible
delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff—he’s
always, always in my mind. . . .
(pp. 100-02)
This speech has been heralded as the articula-
tion of a new love ethos, one with metaphysical
dimensions: the identification of love as a natural,
hence amoral, impulse which cannot be judged
by sublunary standards.1 1 Such assumptions,
viewed from the perspective of the Gothic tradi-
tion, however, are actually not new at all. Cathe-
rine’s words echo sentimental love declarations in
the pages of Radcliffe and Maturin. Strikingly
similar in diction and tone to the words above,
for example, are Immalee’s words mourning and
idealizing her love for the absent Melmoth: “The
lightnings are glancing round. . . . I lived but in
the light of his presence—why should I not die
when that light is withdrawn?” Immalee even
reaches out for the same metaphors and absolute
expressions in her attempt to express what seems
to her inexpressible: “Roar on, terrible ocean! thy
waves . . . can never wash his image from my
soul,—thou dashest a thousand waves against a
rock, but the rock is unmoved—and so would be
my heart.” Catherine’s uniqueness, critical opin-
ion to the contrary, does not reside in how she
loves.
Catherine and Immalee have in common not
only how they love but whom they love. Both
prefer their demon lovers, rebels against the hu-
man and the divine, a preference which at first
seems to identify both heroines as notably non-
conformist. Yet Melmoth the Wanderer and Wuth-
ering Heights exist on very different levels of
abstraction, and parallels between the two must
be drawn carefully. Melmoth’s rebellion is one of
mind and soul; he himself is a preternatural Faus-
tian character whose function in the novel is
mythical—repeated reenactment of Satan’s temp-
tation. The story of his temptation of Immalee,
consequently, has few social implications; it is
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primarily spiritual allegory.1 2 Heathcliff, on the
other hand, is a flesh and blood landlord whose
crimes are primarily social ones—alienation of a
father’s affections, usurpation, seduction, tyranny
over wife and child—and the story of Catherine’s
love for him abounds in social and psychological
implications. Seen in these terms, Catherine is by
far the more radical of the two heroines, for she
chooses a social outcast, one who pits himself
against economic and conjugal privilege and one
whose implicit democratic and romantic values
could alter the fabric of society.1 3
Still another important distinction between
Immalee and Catherine should be drawn. Al-
though Immalee loves a damned soul, her love
for him is conventional, in terms of Gothic fic-
tion, insofar as it is faultlessly pure. She loves him
for awakening her emotionally and intellectually,
and she is blinded until the very end of her life to
the malicious side of his nature. Catherine’s love
for Heathcliff is far less immaculate. Far from be-
ing blind to his fiendish qualities, she sees them
with unerring clarity: “. . . he’s a fierce, pitiless,
wolfish man.” Catherine’s attachment to this
“wolfish man,” although sometimes expressing
itself in terms of compassion or affection, is more
often disturbing in its admixture of antagonism,
pathological loyalty, arrogance, monomania,
narcissism, and incest. In fact, there is a touch of
the pathological about Catherine in other at-
titudes she shares with her prototypes: she is not
simply the occasional victim of whim or imagined
terror but her passions’ willing slave; she is not
simply appreciative of nature but a nature wor-
shipper, a near pagan; and she is not simply the
unwitting prey of a rebel lover but embraces her
lover’s anarchic values. In depicting such a rebel
heroine as Catherine, Brontë not only goes beyond
Gothic conventions, she hovers visibly close to
the limits of the socially acceptable. Nevertheless,
her readers are not quite free to reject Catherine,
as they could villains like Manfred or Ambrosio,
unless they are willing to reject a heroine. Instead,
they must entertain the possibility that a woman
need not be angelically pure to be worthy of at-
tention. Clearly, even when Catherine seems most
like her prototypes, she is very different from
them. It is time to examine those differences.
What distinguishes Catherine above all is the
unique complexity and energy of her personality.
Catherine’s mind is complicated, analytical, and
uninhibited, all qualities never before granted a
Gothic heroine. Catherine’s complexity is more
than amply illustrated by her central conflict, the
seeds of which lie buried in her childhood memo-
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ries of a benevolent father, a fire and brimstone
EMILY BRONTË
servant, and a selfish, tyrannical brother. These
adult models produce in Catherine a love of gentle
kindness, a well-informed aversion to cruelty, and
a keen sense of injustice. At the same time they
encourage in her a sympathetic admiration and
love for her stoic fellow sufferer, the gypsy child
Heathcliff—her father inspires her to it, Hindley
drives her to it. Heathcliff becomes increasingly
cruel himself as a young man, but Catherine’s love
for him persists, eventually, according to Nelly,
growing immoderate.
Catherine’s conflict first takes form after she
unexpectedly finds herself a guest in the home of
the Lintons after a midnight ramble with Heathc-
liff on the moors. Although she at first expresses
disdain for the spoiled, rich children, she returns
home from her stay metamorphosed. Now Heath-
cliff’s angry and uncouth appearance repels her
and she rebukes him. Subsequently she suffers
acutely when he is banished for a fight with the
haughty Edgar, and she finds her feelings reversed.
She becomes impatient with the whining Edgar
and longs for Heathcliff. Her unresolved feelings
for the two young men cause a crisis, of course,
when Edgar proposes. She isn’t certain—should
she bow to the love-hate she feels for the savage
but oppressed Heathcliff, or should she acquiesce
to Edgar, refined and gentle like her father, but
somewhat distant and cowardly? Which one does
she admire the most and dislike the least? When
Catherine tries to explain her indecision to the
exasperated Nelly, she represents it not as a battle
between head and heart but as a disturbance of
soul. In reply to Nelly’s question, “Where is the
obstacle?” Catherine replies “‘Here! and here!’ . . .
striking one hand on her forehead, and the other
on her breast. ‘In whichever place the soul lives.’”
This is a conflict which engages, in a manner
unprecedented in Gothic heroines, ambiguous
desire against ambiguous desire, complex against
complex, ego against alter-ego (“Nelly, I am
Heathcliff”).
Gothic heroines were traditionally placed in a
conflict situation between a dark seducer and a
fair lover, but theirs was an external conflict;1 4
they never felt—or admitted they felt—a pull in
two directions. Catherine is the first important
exception to that pattern, for she internalizes her
conflict completely. She is not simply placed
between two lovers; she feels divided between two
lovers. From this Brontë’s story derives at least
two important advantages. First, the symbolic
resonance of the traditional Gothic triad of
characters is enhanced. Now both villain and lover
141

EMILY BRONTË
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of Wuthering Heights.
can be seen as extensions of the heroine’s mind
and can represent her own conflicting social and
emotional needs. Catherine wishes to marry
wisely, to enhance her uncertain social status, but
she has also contemplated marrying unwisely—
for love alone—and living a beggarly existence
with Heathcliff. She needs an environment which
can shield her from emotions of ravaging inten-
sity, and yet she isn’t content without the child-
hood companion who is most apt to inspire such
emotions. She longs for the near pathological at-
tachment of Heathcliff as much as for the gentle,
more rational adoration of Edgar. Second, this
internalization, since it obviously increases the
psychological complexity of the Gothic heroine,
broadens immeasurably the bounds within which
femininity may move. A heroine’s mind, Brontë is
insisting here, need not be a blank tablet. It may
sometimes be plagued by contradictory or self-
defeating desires.
Nor is Catherine’s mind passive, dependent,
or inhibited. She seems to have been born with
an energetic need to analyze, articulate, and
conquer what she sees around and within herself.
142
This is plain from the very beginning of the novel
in her Testament diary (which covers, as Lock-
wood reports, “every morsel of blank that the
printer had left.” She compares and judges Hind-
ley incisively as a father figure: “Hindley is a
detestable substitute.” Notice that she is keenly
aware of injustice and expresses that insight by
artfully juxtaposing the self-indulgent comfort
Hindley allows himself and the pain he inflicts on
others: “While Hindley and his wife basked
downstairs before a comfortable fire . . . we were
. . . groaning and shivering . . . ,” or, “Frances
pulled his [Heathcliff’s] hair heartily; and then
went and seated herself on her husband’s knee,
and there they were, like two babies, kissing and
talking nonsense by the hour. . . .”
Catherine is also willing to subject herself
publicly to unflinching analysis, although she is
not entirely free of subtle self-deceptions. As a
young woman, she convinces herself mistakenly
that Heathcliff will not care if she marries Edgar.
Later she nearly convinces herself that Edgar and
Heathcliff have killed her when, as Heathcliff
reminds her, she has actually broken her own
heart. Despite such delusions, Catherine is vastly
superior in self-understanding to the previous
Gothic heroines who were, for the most part, pas-
sive and impassive receptors; and she shares her
understanding without affectation or scruple.
Earlier heroines had internalized the laws of
propriety too fully ever to air the contents of their
minds publicly, nor did they always fully know
their own minds. Ellena’s response to Vivaldi’s
urgent pleas to marry him rather than seek retire-
ment is all too typical. The situation begs for hon-
est emotional response and an intelligent reassess-
ment of plans, but Ellena refuses to change her
answer. She “gently reproached him for doubting
the continuance of her regard . . . but would not
listen. . . . She represented . . . that respect to
the memory of her aunt demanded it.” After
Vivaldi departs, Ellena is left to disperse encroach-
ing depression, a sign of unexamined and unre-
solved concerns.
In contrast, Catherine rarely hides or fails to
scrutinize her own thoughts, sometimes with
breathtaking honesty. Her character gains breadth
and depth and credibility as she shares not only
surface responses, but unrecoverable dreams of
the past, impossible dreams for the future, senti-
ments from the dark, not so respectable corners of
her mind, and misgivings about those sentiments.
“I want to cheat my uncomfortable conscience
. . .”; “Nelly, I see now, you think me a selfish
wretch . . .”; “What did I say, Nelly? I’ve forgot-
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ten. Was he vexed at my bad humour this after-
noon?”; “Why am I so changed? Why does my
blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words?
I’m sure I should be myself were I once among
the heather.” Catherine may seem narcissistic and
unrestrained, but she is nonetheless a valuable
corrective to unreflective and unresponsive Gothic
heroines that preceded her. The same concerns
which impel Walpole’s heroine to flight, Lewis’ to
prayer, Radcliffe’s to diversions, and Maturin’s to
daydreams, compel Catherine to examine her own
heart. She is the first fully introspective Gothic
heroine.
These strengths, however much they may win
Catherine grudging admiration, do not make her
easier to live with. Her list of human imperfec-
tions is so long one wonders that she is a heroine
at all. It should come as no surprise that Brontë
has created in Catherine a heroine whose faults
often closely resemble those of the traditional
femme fatale of Gothic fiction. She is sometimes a
raving fury; and, before her, such fury is displayed
only by the scheming, ambitious Signora Lauren-
tini, Beatrice, and the Baroness Lindenberg. Also
like these wicked women, Catherine is often
proud, self-centered, imperious, manipulative, and
cruel. She coerces those around her into obedi-
ence by command, humiliation or self-
punishment (Brontë’s depiction of the little
Catherine as a girl whose heart’s desire is a riding
whip is far from gratuitous). Her love is literally
fatal both to her and to Heathcliff. Most important
and emblematic of all these darker characteristics,
however, is Catherine’s introduction into the story
as a ghost. Despite her appearance as a defenseless
child-specter who has lost her way on the moors,
Lockwood’s response to her in his nightmare is
horror, and rightly so. The experience has the
earmarks of the classic ghost story: the scratching
sound on the windowpane, the ice-cold hand, the
melancholy voice, the seductive pleading, and the
bleeding. This scene firmly allies Wuthering
Heights with the Gothic tradition, of course.
However, another more important alliance is also
struck here—an intimate alliance between the
Gothic heroine and the demonic or supernatural
realm.
In earlier novels, the heroine moves apart
from this world, terrorized or occasionally helped
by it, and indeed sometimes helping to create it
in her own frightened imagination, but never
actively participating in it. She is a creature of the
diurnal sphere, estranged from nocturnal desires
and terrors, perceiving them as outside threats, as
totally “other,” and as uncanny. Only the villain-
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esses ally themselves with the dark powers. Cathe-
EMILY BRONTË
rine, by contrast, is introduced by Brontë as an
uncanny, nocturnal creature, an identity she never
completely sheds. For a short time she has a
promisingly happy life as Edgar’s wife in the
“sunshine” at Thrushcross Grange, but she
emerges from and returns to a nightmare world of
“wuthering” self-destructive passions: greed,
revenge, lovehate. In a most telling moment dur-
ing her final illness, Catherine feels herself
haunted and Nelly forces her to realize that the
ghost she thinks she sees is her own mirrored
reflection: “‘Myself,’ she gasped, ‘and the clock is
striking twelve! It’s true, then; that’s dreadful!’”
This poignant scene at once recalls the earlier
scene in which Catherine is a child-ghost and
refines the sense in which we should see her as an
adult. She is self-tortured, haunted by her own
unfulfillable, child-like desires. Since Heathcliff is
equally plagued by such hopeless desires, it is only
too appropriate that she should haunt him, too,
after her death. Brontë has naturalized the super-
natural in a most convincing way through Cathe-
rine, but beyond that she has also given her read-
ers a heroine more complete and more truly pitiful
than earlier ones. Catherine finally experiences
what is the most somber insight a Gothic character
can have or inspire: that the demonic springs from
her own imagination. Catherine is the first Gothic
heroine to acknowledge the dark side of her soul.
Catherine’s dark side and her recognition of
that dark side represent a change of major impor-
tance in the depiction of heroines in the Gothic.
Such self-recognition—that “of the enlightened
person feeling haunted by some demonic self”—is
believed by Francis Russell Hart to lie at the center
of the Gothic experience. His description of that
experience reads like a commentary on Cathe-
rine’s mirror scene:
What gives the point its full and terrifying truth
in an enlightenment context is that the demonic
is no myth, no superstition, but a reality in hu-
man character or relationship, a novelistic real-
ity. . . . Are there really ghosts? asks Carlyle-
Teufelsdröckh. We are ghosts.1 5
What Hart says is particularly true for male
characters in the Gothic, who are granted some
degree of imperfection and self-awareness from
the beginning. Manfred is made to see fully the
wickedness of his lust for power; Ambrosio finally
recognizes himself as a willing devil’s accomplice;
and after William Frankenstein’s murder, Victor
admits his own complicity in this diabolic deed:
“Sleep fled from my eyes; I wandered like an evil
spirit.” Not until Brontë, however, does the Gothic
143
 heroine come to a comparable level of wholeness
EMILY BRONTË
and self-awareness. Catherine’s self-recognition is
not without pain, but it is a pain that heals, one
which allows sympathetic readers to cease utterly
denying their own negative impulses. The split in
the feminine psyche implicitly encouraged by
earlier Gothic fiction is, through Catherine,
questioned. Further, the Gothic heroine has been
freed from what was always the worst of the tyran-
nies inflicted on her: that of the ideal of moral
perfection.
Although it would be an overstatement to say
that Brontë has given us a completely mature
heroine, it can certainly be said that she has of-
fered us a more mature vision of woman’s charac-
ter than did authors from Walpole to Maturin,
one much more integrated and less restricted
physically, emotionally, and intellectually.1 6 By
way of final illustration and summary, I would
like to focus briefly on heroines’ death scenes,
partly because they have been slighted, but mostly
because Catherine’s death scene is pivotal in the
realigning of reader sympathies. Only if Brontë al-
lows Catherine to face death admirably can we be
sure that she is being recommended to us as a
heroine.
Walpole’s Matilda dies a perfectly exemplary
death. Killed by her father in their chapel, she is
selfless, pious, and forgiving as her life ebbs slowly
away. Her only thoughts are for her parents: “. . .
as soon as Hippolita was brought to herself, she
[Matilda] asked for her father . . . seizing his hand
and her mother’s, locked them in her own, and
then clasped them to her heart. Manfred could
not support this . . . pathetic piety.”1 7 Radcliffe
consistently paints two pictures of female death,
both in the exemplary mode, one offering a posi-
tive, the other a negative, model. Emily’s mother
dies with perfect composure born of lifelong self-
control and piety, and she is surrounded by
solicitous loved ones when she dies. Signora Lau-
rentini and Madame Cheron, on the other hand,
die disquieted and abandoned, the one tortured
by memories of her wickedness, the other by the
greed of her hastily-chosen husband. The final
hours of Lewis’ heroine are horrific, yet she dies
with as much serentiy as Emily’s mother. Antonia
is drugged, then entombed, and finally raped and
stabbed to death by Ambrosio in a corpse-filled
vault; she nevertheless surrenders her life with
gentle resignation, selflessly spending her last
minutes convincing Lorenzo that he should not
despair. Maturin’s angelic Isidora also dies in a
dungeon, a prison of the Inquisition where she
has been placed because of her liaison with Mel-
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moth, but she nonetheless dies without resent-
ment and with his name on her lips: “Para-
dise! . . . Will he be there!”
Catherine’s death is not nearly so exemplary
and edifying. Death and suffering are not really
the result of someone else’s malice but of her own
headstrong refusal to relinquish Heathcliff’s
friendship to save her marriage. She throws a
tantrum after Edgar requires her to choose be-
tween him and Heathcliff. Then she lives for a
week on nothing, in the words of Nelly, but “cold
water and ill-temper,” a form of self-abuse which
weakens her already fragile constitution. Nor does
Catherine have much composure during the last
months of her life. Rather, she suffers agonies as
extreme as those of the most wicked femme fa-
tale: melancholy, regression, temporary disorienta-
tion, helpless fury, self-pity, and the terrors of
paranoia and delusion. Like other heroines, Cathe-
rine is allowed the comfort of having her loved
one with her during her last conscious moments,
but again these moments are markedly different
from those of Matilda’s, Antonia’s or Isidora’s. Her
concern is not to comfort Heathcliff but to punish
him for what she believes is his heartlessness. She
refuses to pity him, accuses him of being the death
of her, and expresses the vindictive wish that he
could be made to suffer as much as she has: “I
wish I could hold you . . . till we were both dead!
I shouldn’t care what you suffered. I care nothing
for your sufferings. Why shouldn’t you suffer? I
do!” His own frenzy at being thus accused checks
her anger, however, and she suddenly modifies
her wish: “I only wish us never to be parted. . . .”
Then she relents even more, asking him to em-
brace and forgive her as she has forgiven him, and
his embrace conveys the love he cannot articulate.
In death, as in life, Brontë allows Catherine to
be a whole and credible person, one with negative
and positive characteristics. The noble martyr-like
stances of Matilda, Antonia, and Immalee on the
edge of the grave are not to be scoffed at; but from
the reader’s perspective, these saintly images are
apt to create anxiety or guilt. The authors have
made idols of their heroines, unattainable ideals
to emulate. Women are to die selflessly, sweetly,
obediently, and without any regrets or anger, even
in death to be denied the privilege of swerving for
a moment from the path of perfection. Cathe-
rine’s death, in contrast, is not one to recommend
for imitation; much of the time Catherine is at
her vindictive worse. Still, despite her childish
behavior, she manages in her last moments to
achieve forgiveness and an open expression of her
love. Nor should we forget the “unearthly beauty”
Brontë gives her dying heroine. Brontë’s implicit
lesson to her female readers was clearly that they
could, even if they were overwhelmed momen-
tarily by cruel or selfish thoughts, hope to die with
some dignity and some small measure of comfort.
As no attempt was made here to prove a direct
influence of specific Gothic novels on Wuthering
Heights, no time was spent on works identified as
important in molding either Brontë’s mind or her
work. Of all the literary influences on the
Brontës—and those include the works of Shake-
speare, Milton, Richardson, Radcliffe, E. T. A. Hoff-
mann, Scott, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and George
Sand1 8 —Helene Moglen believes the single most
important figure was Lord Byron. The rebellion
that was Byron’s life, including his flagrant viola-
tions of propriety in matters of love, and especially
his scandalous affair with his half-sister, appar-
ently left a deep impression on the young Brontës.
Their juvenalia include transparently Byronic
values and characters.1 9 Moglen’s emphasis on
Byron serves well as a reminder that a literary
event just as crucial to the making of Wuthering
Heights as the Gothic novel was the Romantic
revolution. Its spirited affirmation of the value of
individual subjective experience, and its tentative
dream of woman as intellectual companion as
well as lover, no doubt encouraged Brontë in her
efforts to create a new, intelligent, imaginative,
and passionate heroine. Brontë could also draw
inspiration from the turn-of-the-century Woll-
stonecraft who, in fact, was more the radical,
pleading for the outright rejection of the myth of
romantic passion in her Vindication.2 0 Like her
sister Charlotte, Emily could never quite give up
this myth,2 1 but this very refusal may finally ac-
count for the extraordinary success of Wuthering
Heights. Brontë was finally a more successful
iconoclast than Wollstonecraft. With none of the
self-conscious irritation of Jane Austen in
Northanger Abbey (1818) but with just as much
persuasiveness, Brontë deconstructed Walpole’s
feminine ideal and replaced it with her own. The
alluring surface romance of Wuthering Heights
and its initial evocation of Gothic convention are
the sugar coating which apparently made the
feminist pill quite palatable. At least for the dura-
tion of Brontë’s “Gothic thriller,” readers tacitly
accept a number of irreverently non-Victorian no-
tions about women: a woman should be assumed
to have physical and intellectual as well as emo-
tional needs and strengths; a woman has the right
to physical, emotional, and intellectual autonomy
both before and after marriage; a woman has the
right to be imperfect—to be mistaken, passionate,
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
inquisitive, angry, confused, and even selfish or
EMILY BRONTË
cruel, and still command respect as a human be-
ing; a woman has the right to be outstanding, to
be openly intelligent and complex, and still com-
mand affection.
These ideas are tempered in the latter half of
the novel, but the statement Brontë makes
through Catherine and Heathcliff, as so many
modern readers continue to acknowledge, is the
one that haunts the mind. Although there are
disgruntled censors of the ilk of John Beversluis,
who insists that Catherine is simply a petulant,
indecisive woman,2 2 the admirers drown them
out. Catherine is named Brontë’s “supreme and
original creation,”2 3 and her love for Heathcliff is
“what . . . D. H. Lawrence called true human-
ity.”2 4 Through it Brontë is “positing . . . natural
human values, especially, love and integrity,
against a corrupt and deadened society”2 5 and “af-
firming . . . man and woman’s more primary
needs.”2 6 Part of this praise no doubt springs from
our own continuing reluctance to relinquish the
myth of romantic love unto death which Brontë
dramatizes, but it nevertheless demonstrates the
power Catherine continues to exert on the mod-
ern imagination. Brontë’s rescue of the languish-
ing maiden from the Gothic bastille began no
revolutions; but it has unquestionably helped to
save both heroine and genre from oblivion and to
free the woman from the persistent fetters of the
eighteenth-century ideal, which were, according
to Wollstonecraft, “worse than Egyptian bond-
age.”2 7
Notes
1. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. Hilda Marsden
and Ian Jack (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).
2. Early discussion of the Gothic novel by Ernest Baker,
Edith Birkhead, K.K. Mehrota, Eino Railo, Montague
Summers, and Devendra Varma tend to dwell on
Gothic “devices” and their sources and to slight
important questions about the structure and psycho-
logical function of the novels. In the last fifteen years,
however, new theoretical ground has been broken on
these questions by such studies as: Gerhard Bierwirth,
“Die Problematik des englischen Schauerromans: Ein
kritisches Modell zur Behandlung diskriminierter Lit-
eratur,” Diss. Frankfurt/M., 1970; Peter Brooks, “Virtue
and Terror: The Monk,” ELH, 40, 2 (1973), 249-63; Fran-
cis Russel Hart, “The Experience of Character in the
English Gothic Novel,” in Experience in the Novel,
Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Roy
Harvey Pearce (New York: Columbia Univ. Press,
1968); Robert D. Hume, “Gothic Versus Romantic: A
Revaluation of the Gothic Novel,” PMLA, 84 (1969),
282-90; Ellen Moers, “Female Gothic,” in Literary
Women (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1963); and Tz-
vetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a
145
 Literary Genre, tr. Richard Howard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cor-
EMILY BRONTË
nell Univ. Press, 1975). Moers’ study is the best avail-
able discussion of Brontë in the context of the Female
Gothic tradition.
3. I am indebted to Helene Moglen’s most lucid discus-
sion of the Brontës and Romanticism in Charlotte
Brontë: The Self Conceived (New York: W.W. Norton &
Co., 1976), pp. 19-78, 230-42, and also to her interpre-
tation of Wuthering Heights as an “account of the
development of a human personality, the specifically
female personality,” in “The Double Vision of Wuther-
ing Heights: A Clarifying View of Female Develop-
ment,” The Centennial Review of Arts and Sciences, 15
(1971), 391-405.
4. Matthew Lewis, The Monk: A Romance, ed. Howard
Anderson (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 9.
5. Patricia Meyer Spacks, “The Dangerous Age,”
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 11, 4 (Summer, 1978), 417-
38, emphasizes the importance of submissiveness (p.
432) as does Katharine M. Rogers, The Troublesome
Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle:
Univ. of Washington Press, 1966).
6. Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, ed.
William F. Axton (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press,
1961), p. 253.
7. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, or The
Modern Prometheus (The 1818 Text), ed. with variant
readings, James Rieger (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-
Merrill Co., 1974), p. 30.
8. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance
Interspersed with some Pieces of Poetry, eds. Bonamy Do-
brée and Frederick Garber (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1970), p. 6.
9. Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, or the Confessional of the
Black Penitents: A Romance, ed. Frederick Garber (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), p. 7.
10. Mary Wollstonecraft, “An Introduction to the First
Edition,” of A Vindication of the Rights of Women with
Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, ed. Charles W.
Hagelman, Jr. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1967),
p. 34. Helen Mews, Frail Vessels: Woman’s Role in
Women’s Novels from Fanny Burney to George Eliot (Univ.
of London: The Athlone Press, 1969), believes that
“society’s two different images of women, inherited
from the long past,” caused “perplexity” and “ten-
sion” for women between 1750 and 1850 (p. 5).
11. Two recent reaffirmations of this romantic interpreta-
tion are H.P. Sucksmith’s “The Theme of Wuthering
Heights Reconsidered,” Dalhousie Review, 54, 3
(Autumn, 1974), 418-28; and Peter Widdowson’s
“Emily Brontë: The Romantic Novelist,” Moderna
Sprak, 56, 1 (1972), 1-19.
12. “. . . a tragic allegory of Christian history,” Axton’s
introduction to Melmoth the Wanderer, p. xvii. Con-
trasting Melmoth and Wuthering Heights reveals the
weakness in Mews’ contention that Brontë’s message
is “poetic,” not “social” (p. 80).
13. See Arnold Kettle, “Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights,”
in Vol. I of An Introduction to the English Novel
(Evanston: Harper & Row, 1960).
14. An insightful Freudian analysis of the Gothic heroine’s
situational conflict has been done by Cynthia Griffin
Wolff entitled “The Gothic Hero-Villain: An Attractive
Nuisance.” (See Wolff’s essay in this anthology.)
146 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
15. Hart, pp. 94, 99.
16. Moglen, “The Double Vision,” pp. 391-93.
17. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story,
ed. W.S. Lewis (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964),
p. 106.
18. For discussion of Brontë’s possible sources, see Mary
Visick, The Genesis of Wuthering Heights (London:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1958); Ruth M. Mackay, “Irish
Heaths and German Cliffs: A Study of the Foreign
Sources of Wuthering Heights,” Brigham Young University
Studies, 7 (1965), 28-39; Leicester Bradner, “The
Growth of ‘Wuthering Heights,’” in Wuthering Heights:
An Anthology of Criticism, ed. Alastair Everitt (New
York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), pp. 14-38; J.V. Arnold,
“George Sand’s Mauprat and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering
Heights,” Revue de la littérature comparée, 46 (1972),
209-18; Rolf R. Nicolai, “‘Wuthering Heights’: Emily
Brontë’s Kleistian Novel,” South Atlantic Bulletin, 38, 2
(1973), 23-32; and Patrick Diskin, “Some Sources of
‘Wuthering Heights,’” NQ (July/August, 1977), 354-61.
19. Moglen, Charlotte Brontë, esp. pp. 26-33.
20. Wollstonecraft, “that grand passion not proportioned
to the puny enjoyments of life, is only true to the
sentiment, and feeds on itself,” p. 66. Cf. pp. 121-122.
21. Moglen speaks convincingly in concluding Charlotte
Brontë of “her continuing inability to break free of
that circle of romantic idealism which had bound her
to life,” p. 226.
22. John Beversluis, “Love and Self Knowledge: A Study of
Wuthering Heights,” English, 24, 120 (Autumn, 1975),
77-82.
23. Leicester Bradner, p. 38.
24. F.H. Langman, “Thoughts on Wuthering Heights,” in
Everitt, p. 76.
25. Widdowson, p. 17.
26. Sucksmith, p. 422.
27. Wollstonecraft, p. 179.
MARILYN HUME (ESSAY DATE
FALL 2002)
SOURCE: Hume, Marilyn. “Who Is Heathcliff? The
Shadow Knows.” Victorian Newsletter 102 (fall 2002):
15-18.
In the following essay, Hume explores how Brontë uses
the character of Heathcliff to reveal and represent the will
of the unconscious or “shadow” side of humanity.
Charlotte Brontë asks in the preface to the
1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, “Whether it
is right or advisable to create things like Heathc-
liff,” and goes on to say that she scarcely thinks it
is. She also suggests that the author has little
control over this creative process once it has been
set in motion, claiming that it has a life of its own
(xxxvi). What is it in Heathcliff that so concerns
Charlotte Brontë that she feels a need to question
the wisdom of his existence? Is it pure evil in some
demonic form? Is it wild unbridled passion, part

EMILY BRONTË
of the nature of the moors? Is he more simply a
tyrant, a cruel sadistic despot? Is he a romantic
lover, slave to his own passions and victim of
circumstance? In Heathcliff Emily Brontë gives us
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
all of these characters and phenonena. He is not
CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S PREFACE TO THE 1850
one to the exclusion of the others: he is all. In EDITION OF WUTHERING HEIGHTS
Heathcliff we have a man to stir our feelings, a
Wuthering Heights was hewn in a wild work-
man to enrage our senses, engage our passions
shop, with simple tools, out of homely
and walk over our graves. He disturbs us so
materials. The statuary found a granite block
because he reflects our unconscious minds. He
on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw
plays out our fantasies and our nightmares. Heath-
how from the crag might be elicited a head,
cliff is a man formed by the unconscious projec-
savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with
tions of the characters in the novel—the projec-
at least one element of grandeur—power. He
tion of all they find unacceptable in themselves.
wrought with a rude chisel, and from no
He is a man formed, particularly, by the uncon-
model but the vision of his meditations. With
scious projections of the narrators and Catherine
time and labour, the crag took human shape;
Earnshaw. Everything rejected by the conscious
and there it stands colossal, dark, and frown-
sensibilities of Lockwood, Nelly Dean and Cathe-
ing, half statue, half rock: in the former sense,
rine finds unlimited freedom of expression in
terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost
Heathcliff, where it surfaces to taunt and confuse
beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey,
its creators. These unconscious projections of
and moorland moss clothes it; and heath,
unacceptable traits take the form of “The Shadow”
with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance,
as described by Carl G. Jung.
grows faithfully close to the giant’s foot.
C. G. Jung sees shadow as manifesting in his
own dreams and in the dreams of his analysands. SOURCE: Bell, Currer (psuedonym of Charlotte
Aspects of the shadow are also projected on to Brontë). “Preface to Wuthering Heights.” In
The Life and Works of the Sisters Brontë: Wuther-
others: ing Heights by Emily Brontë and Agnes Grey by
The shadow personifies everything that the subject Anne Brontë. Vol. 5, 1903. Reprint edition, pp.
liii-lviii. AMS Press, Inc., 1973.
refuses to acknowledge about himself and yet is
always thrusting itself upon him directly or
indirectly—for instance, inferior traits of character
and other incompatible tendencies. . . . The
shadow is that hidden, repressed, for the most part
inferior and guilt laden personality whose ultimate
ramifications reach back into the realm of our
animal ancestors and so comprise the whole
historical aspect of the unconscious. If it has been influenced by their own perception of themselves.
believed hitherto that the human shadow was the In the case of Lockwood, he at first sees Heathcliff
source of all evil, it can now be ascertained on
as similar to himself. This view is expressed by
closer investigation that the unconscious man,
that is, his shadow, does not consist only of mor- Lockwood in the following excerpt and is from
ally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a the start a little hard for the reader to accept:
number of good qualities, such as normal in-
“Thrushcross Grange is my own, sir,” he inter-
stincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights,
rupted, wincing, “I should not allow anyone to
creative impulses, etc.
inconvenience me, if I could hinder it—walk in!”
(399)
The “walk in” was uttered with closed teeth and
expressed the sentiment, “Go to the Deuce!” Even
Shadow is encountered either in our dreams
the gate over which he leant manifested no sym-
or projected onto the world. In Wuthering pathising movement to the words, and I think
Heights, others project their shadow side on to that circumstances determined me to accept the
Heathcliff. In this essay we look specifically at how invitation; I felt interested in a man who seemed
that occurs with the characters of Lockwood, Nelly more exaggeratedly reserved than myself.
(3)
Dean and Cathy.
Wuthering Heights is written with a framed Lockwood wants to see in Heathcliff a man
narrative. The first narrator is Mr. Lockwood and who is reserved, and more so than himself. He
the second is Nelly Dean. These two narrators see wants to see this level of reservation as admirable
Heathcliff differently. Their perception of him is in Heathcliff and therefore fine in him too:

G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2 147
 I know, by instinct, his reserve springs from an
EMILY BRONTË
aversion to showy displays of feeling—to manifes-
tations of mutual kindness. He’ll love and hate
equally under cover, and esteem it a species of
impertinence to be loved or hated again—No, I’m
running on too fast—I bestow my own attributes
over liberally on him.
(5)
By Lockwood’s own admission, he consciously
bestows his attributes on Heathcliff. Consciously
he sees himself as reserved and finds this accept-
able. Consciously he bestows that attribute on
Heathcliff. The shadow, however, personifies
everything the subject refuses to acknowledge
about himself. What is it that Lockwood refuses
to acknowledge about himself that he uncon-
sciously projects onto Heathcliff? Emily Brontë
soon gives us an example of Lockwood’s uncon-
scious self. Lockwood tells of an incident in which
he met a young woman to whom he was at-
tracted. He makes it plain to her that he is at-
tracted to her but when she responds he shuns
her. She is so overwhelmed with confusion at her
supposed mistake that she leaves. He confesses
that because of this he has gained the reputation
of deliberate heartlessness, a reputation he cannot
accept (6). He cannot see himself as heartless, yet
clearly he is.
Emily Brontë gives us another look at this true
aspect of Lockwood’s character in the episode
when he sees Cathy’s ghost:
The intense horror of nightmare came over me; I
tried to draw back my arm, but, the hand clung to
it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed,
“Let me in-let me in!”
“Who are you?” I asked, struggling, meanwhile, to
disengage myself.
“Catherine Linton,” it replied, shiveringly. . . .
“I’m come home, I’d lost my way on the moor!”
As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child’s face
looking through the window—Terror made me
cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking
the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken
pane, and rubbed it to and fro until the blood ran
down and soaked the bed clothes.
(25)
Lockwood admits that in his dream he is cruel
and deliberately heartless but these are aspects of
his personality that he does not consciously ac-
cept. Lockwood cannot integrate cruelty as part of
who he is, so he relegates cruelty to his shadow
side. He projects this shadow onto Heathcliff. He
is attracted to Heathcliff not for the reasons of his
conscious mind but because Heathcliff personifies
his forbidden self. Heathcliff is cruel and deliber-
ately heartless.
148
Lockwood also has a strange Biblical dream
which serves to illuminate his shadow. He dreams
he is travelling with Joseph to hear the famous
James Branderham preach from the text “Seventy
Times Seven” (22). He dreams that Joseph, the
preacher or himself has committed the “First of
the Seventy First,” and is to be publicly exposed
and excommunicated. This refers to the story in
Matthew known as “The Parable of the Unforgiv-
ing Servant.” The sin referred to is that of unfor-
giveness: “Then Peter came to Jesus and asked,
‘Lord, if my brother keeps on sinning against me,
how many times do I have to forgive him? Seven
times?’ ‘No, not seven times,’ answered Jesus, ‘but
seventy times seven’” (Matt. 18: 21-22). In the
dream Lockwood fights with the whole assembly.
He has no weapon to use in self defense. Joseph
and the others all have staves. In the language of
symbols, the stave used as a weapon has punitive
meaning (Tresidder 191). In Jungian psychology it
is generally believed that when a person is in
conflict with someone else in a dream that other
person is a shadow figure representing qualities
the dreamer refuses to admit as part of his person-
ality (Robertson 130). Lockwood, not suprisingly,
offers us no interpretation of this dream, other
than to blame it on bad tea and bad temper. We
are given no interpretation from any other source
in the text and yet it would seem to have some
meaning. Using the Jungian model, one may
reasonably propose that Lockwood is repressing
his desire to punish others and his inability to
forgive them. In the dream he is going to be
exposed and punished by the whole assembly and
by Joseph, whom he refers to as his most fero-
cious assailant, and by Branderham. These figures
all represent the repressed side of Lockwood in his
dream. In his waking life Heathcliff represents this
shadow side of Lockwood. Lockwood’s repressed
punitive side finds free expression in Heathcliff:
Heathcliff is punitive, ferocious and unforgiving.
The second narrator, Nelly Dean, has a differ-
ent part to play in forming Heathcliff. We have
no dreams to give us a glimpse of Nelly’s uncon-
scious mind. Nelly does, however, fantasize about
Heathcliff, particularly about the circumstances of
his birth:
“You’re fit for a prince in disguise. Who knows,
but your father was Emperor of China, and your
mother an Indian queen, each of them able to
buy up, with one week’s income, Wuthering
Heights and Thrushcross Grange together? And
you were kidnapped by wicked sailors, and
brought to England. Were I in your place, I would
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
 frame high notions of my birth; and the thoughts
of what I was should give me courage and dignity
to support the oppressions of a little farmer.”
(57)
Heathcliff as far as we can learn from the text
does not fantasize about his parentage. Nelly
fantasizes about Heathcliff’s parentage. Nelly, it
appears, is not content with her own humble sta-
tion in life, a station determined by parentage.
Nelly is a servant, but she does not like to be
treated as one. When she is treated as a servant
she objects. When Catherine, for example, treats
her as a servant she refers to Catherine as haughty
and says, “she ceased to hold any communica-
tions with me except as a mere servant” (87). Nelly
finds this form of communication unacceptable.
Nelly has no mysterious background to fantasize
about for herself. Indeed, such fantasies on her
own behalf would be incompatible with Nelly’s
view of herself as, “a steady, reasonable kind of
body” (62). Romantic thoughts and fancies are
not part of Nelly’s conscious thinking. It would
not be acceptable for a country girl to be so fanci-
ful. She must find some other outlet for these
desirable but forbidden fantasies. Nelly relegates
these desires and fantasies to her unconscious
mind where they manifest in the romantic per-
sona of Heathcliff.
Cathy, though not a narrator, is clearly crucial
to the development of Heathcliff. Emily Brontë
uses Cathy as the one character who understands
Heathcliff, the only one who knows his true
character. She knows him so well because he is,
indeed, part of her. He is her shadow side.
Heathcliff comes into Cathy’s life when they
are children. They quickly become very close,
recognizing in each other a common wildness,
lack of convention and love of the moors:
But it was one of their chief amusements to run
away to the moors in the morning and remain
there all day, and the after punishment grew a
mere thing to laugh at. The curate might set as
many chapters as he pleased for Catherine to get
by heart, and Joseph might thrash Heathcliff till
his arm ached; they forgot every thing the minute
they were together again, at least the minute they
had contrived some naughty plan of revenge; and
many a time I’ve cried to myself to watch them
growing more reckless daily, and I not daring to
speak a syllable for fear of losing the small power I
still retained over the unfriendly creatures.
(46)
Nelly describes two equally truculent children.
Wild and defiant of any convention or guidance,
they are described by her as “unfriendly” and as
“creatures.” As children they are a pair. Then,
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
beginning with her visit to the Lintons, Cathy
EMILY BRONTË
starts to repress this side of her nature. She
consigns it to her unconscious shadow and lives
it, as projection, through Heathcliff. From this
point on the boundary between Cathy and Heath-
cliff blurs. When she returns from Thrushcross
Grange she is dressed like a lady. She adopts the
airs and graces of a lady and consciously cultivates
her relationship with Edgar Linton. She decides
over a very short period of time that she will
marry him. Cathy feels that she is repressing part
of herself but is powerless to stop. She cannot ac-
cept her own wild nature as an integral part of her
personality and conform to the dictates of her
society to be a lady. She chooses the latter. She
rejects the wild part of herself in the form of
Heathcliff. She tells Nelly that it would degrade
her to marry Heathcliff now that he is so low.
Cathy’s inability to be true to her feelings and
marry Heathcliff also serves as metaphor for her
rejection of “the hatless little savage” (52) she can
no longer allow herself to be. Cathy’s savage
nature is relegated to her unconscious shadow side
where it immediately manifests in Heathcliff.
Cathy, to comfirm this, dramatically declares that
she is Heathcliff:
My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods.
Time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter
changes the trees—my love for Heathcliff re-
sembles the eternal rocks beneath—a source of
little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am
Heathcliff—he’s always, always in my mind—not
as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure
to myself—but as my own being—so, don’t talk of
our separation again—it is impracticable.
(82)
From this moment on, Heathcliff fully embod-
ies Cathy’s rejected self.
When Cathy returns from Thrushcross
Grange, Heathcliff is at first nowhere to be found.
He continues to hide from Cathy and to sulk.
Then, still at this point seeing himself as Cathy’s
partner, he starts to question his role. He hangs
around Nelly for awhile and finally summons up
the courage to say, “Nelly, make me decent, I’m
going to be good” (55). Nelly takes this on as her
project. She washes Heathcliff and dresses him up.
She encourages him to frame high notions of his
birth, suggesting that perhaps he may be a prince
from some foreign land. She tells him that all he
needs to be handsome as he wishes is to have a
good heart. Heathcliff as a young boy wants to be
fair and handsome and have a chance at being
rich like Edgar Linton. In fact, he wants the same
things Cathy wants, and at this point is willing to
try to get them by following Cathy’s lead and
149
 conforming. He is ready to be amiable. An ami-
EMILY BRONTË
able Heathcliff, however, is not acceptable to
anyone. The Lintons are perfectly content to be
amiable themselves. They don’t need and won’t
accept that from Heathcliff. Hindley is determined
to keep Heathcliff down and together they thwart
Heathcliff’s attempt to “be good.” From Heath-
cliff’s first appearance at Wuthering Heights as “a
dirty, ragged, black-haired child” (36), he has a
disruptive effect on all those around him. Cathy
and Hindley are upset because the gifts their father
has for them are broken. The household is thrown
into confusion by his arrival. They refer to him as
“it” and they reject him:
They entirely refused to have it in bed with them,
or even in their room, and I had no more sense,
so I put it on the landing of the stairs, hoping it
might be gone by the morrow. By chance, or else
attracted by hearing his voice, it crept to Mr Earn-
shaw’s door and there he found it on quitting his
chamber. Inquiries were made as to how it got
there; I was obliged to confess, and in recompense
for my cowardice and inhumanity was sent out of
the house.
(37)
Heathcliff has spent only one night at Wuth-
ering Heights at this point and already there is
confusion and conflict. Not only is there external
conflict between the children and Heathcliff, and
the children and their father, and Mr. Earnshaw
and Nelly, but there is also internal conflict in
Nelly. Nelly refers to her actions as cowardly and
inhuman. A peaceful domestic scene becomes one
of confusion, chaos and conflict. Throughout the
novel, Heathcliff causes chaos, confusion and
conflict among others. He also causes the same
emotions within others. It is fair to say that where
Heathcliff is, there is no peace. What is it in
Heathcliff that so disrupts others?
It is an aphorism that whatever most attracts
or repels us in another is generated by something
in ourselves: something of ourselves we see re-
flected back to us by the recipient of our atten-
tion. It is our unconscious shadow side that so
disturbs and attracts us. It is this shadow that we
find reflected back to us that so upsets our psyche.
The characters in Wuthering Heights, especially,
but not exclusively, Lockwood, Nelly Dean and
Catherine, face their shadow in Heathcliff. In
Heathcliff they are brought face to face with
everything they refuse to acknowledge in them-
selves. When they are faced with this embodiment
of their shadow, it is no wonder that chaos, confu-
sion and conflict ensue. And when she is faced
with this embodiment, it is no wonder that
150
Charlotte Brontë questions the wisdom of the
creation of Heathcliff. Heathcliff is, after all, unac-
ceptable.
Works Cited
Brontë. Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847. New York: Penguin
Classics, 1995.
Good News Bible: Today’s English Version. New York: American
Bible Society, 1976.
Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Ed. Aniela Jaffe;
trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage
Books, 1989.
Robertson, Robin. Beginners Guide to Jungian Psychology. York
Bach, ME: Nicholas Hays, Inc., 1992.
Tresidder, Jack. Dictionary of Symbols. San Fransisco:
Chronicle Books, 1998.
FURTHER READING
Bibliographies
Barclay, Janet M. Emily Brontë Criticism 1900-1982: An An-
notated Checklist. Westport, Conn.: Meckler, 1984,
162 p.
Provides an annotated list of writings on Emily Brontë.
Crump, Rebecca W. Charlotte and Emily Brontë: A Reference
Guide. 3 vols. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.
Provides critical sources from 1846-1983.
Biography
Grin, Winifred. Emily Brontë. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1971, 290 p.
Offers a scholarly biography that attempts to clarify the
myths about Brontë’s personality.
Criticism
Apter, T. E. “Romanticism and Romantic Love in Wuthering
Heights.” In The Art of Emily Brontë, edited by Anne
Smith, pp. 205-22. London: Vision Press, 1976.
Discusses Brontë’s treatment of Romantic love in Wuth-
ering Heights, noting that Catherine and Heathcliff’s
relationship is presented as “suffering love,” whereas
Cathy and Hareton’s bond serves as “an alternative to
that destructive, Romantic love.”
Brennan, Matthew C. “Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.”
In The Gothic Psyche: Disintegration and Growth in
Nineteenth-Century English Literature, pp. 77-96. Colum-
bia, S.C.: Camden House, 1997.
Examines the impact of Gothic convention on Wuther-
ing Heights.
Cottom, Daniel. “I Think; Therefore, I Am Heathcliff.” ELH
70, no. 4 (winter 2003): 1067-88.
Examines Gothic novels, including Wuthering Heights,
in light of the writings of philosopher René Descartes.
Davies, Cecil W. “A Reading of Wuthering Heights.” Essays in
Criticism 19, no. 3 (July 1969): 254-72.
Refers to Brontë’s poetry and the Gondal stories in an
examination of the mysticism of Wuthering Heights.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
Dobell, Sydney. “Sydney Dobell’s Article on Currer Bell,
Contributed to the Palladium in 1850.” Brontë Society
Transactions 5, no. 28 (1918): 210-36.
Assumes that Wuthering Heights was written by Currer
Bell (pseudonym of Charlotte Brontë) and approaches it
as that author’s first work, deeming it a novel of
extraordinary power but uneven form.
“Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey.” The Eclectic Review 1
(February 1851): 222-27.
Praises Brontë’s depiction of scenery in Wuthering
Heights, but asserts that the novel’s characters are exag-
gerated and unsympathetic, and the situations unbeliev-
able.
Haggerty, George E. “The Gothic Form of Wuthering
Heights.” Victorian Newsletter 74 (fall 1988): 1-6.
Argues that in Wuthering Heights Brontë “looks into
the heart of Gothic fiction, . . . uncovers the most deeply
rooted formal problems which Gothic novelists themselves
were never able to resolve, and forges a solution to those
problems out of the literary smithy of her own soul.”
Knoepflmacher, U. C. Wuthering Heights: A Study. Athens:
Ohio University Press, 1994, 138 p.
An in-depth examination of Wuthering Heights that
analyzes the novel’s context, structure, meaning, and
critical reception.
Lewes, George Henry. A review of Wuthering Heights, by
Emily Brontë. The Leader 1, no. 30 (28 December 1850):
953.
Provides a qualified endorsement of Wuthering Heights,
pronouncing it a powerful but coarse work.
Pykett, Lyn. “Gender and Genre in Wuthering Heights:
Gothic Plot and Domestic Fiction.” In Wuthering
Heights: Emily Brontë, edited by Patsy Stoneman, pp.
86-99. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.
Examines Wuthering Heights in the context of late
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature, study-
ing in particular “the relationship of the woman writer to
the history and tradition of fiction.”
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Immediacy, Doubleness, and the
Unspeakable: Wuthering Heights and Villette.” In The
Coherence of Gothic Conventions. 1976. Reprint edition,
pp. 97-139. New York: Methuen, 1986.
Discusses both the direct and indirect modes of narration
and communication in Wuthering Heights.
Stoneman, Patsy, ed. Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1998, 208 p.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
Selected commentary on Wuthering Heights, including
EMILY BRONTË
essays by Q. D. Leavis, Terry Eagleton, and Sandra Gil-
bert.
Swinburne, Algernon Charles. “Emily Brontë.” The Ath-
enaeum, no. 2903 (16 June 1883): 762-63.
Addresses several controversial aspects of Wuthering
Heights, including the novel’s unusual structure and
depiction of cruelty and brutality.
Symons, Arthur. “Emily Brontë.” The Nation 23, no. 21 (24
August 1918): 546-47.
Lauds the passion and intensity of Wuthering Heights,
deeming it an unforgettable work.
Thomas, Ronald R. “Dreams and Disorders in Wuthering
Heights.” In Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of
the Unconscious, pp. 112-35. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1990.
Explores the role of dreams in Wuthering Heights using
the theories of Sigmund Freud.
Twitchell, James. “Heathcliff as Vampire.” Southern Humani-
ties Review 11 (1977): 355-62.
Surveys critical reactions to Heathcliff in Wuthering
Heights, suggesting that the character is metaphorically
akin to a vampire.
Vitte, Paulette. “Emily Brontë, Rimbaud, Poe and the
Gothic.” Brontë Society Transactions 24, no. 2 (October
1999): 182-85.
Traces the treatment and manipulation of the Gothic
tradition in poetry by Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe, and Arthur
Rimbaud.
OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:
Additional coverage of Brontë’s life and career is contained
in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Au-
thors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 17; Beacham’s
Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography & Resources, Vol. 1;
Beacham’s Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 3; British
Writers, Vol. 5; British Writers: The Classics, Vol. 1; British
Writers Retrospective Supplement, Vol. 1; Concise Dictionary of
British Literary Biography, 1832-1890; Dictionary of Literary
Biography, Vols. 21, 32, 199; DISCovering Authors; DISCover-
ing Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCover-
ing Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors, Novelists, and Po-
ets; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Exploring Novels; Feminism in
Literature: A Gale Critical Companion; Literature and Its Times,
Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature
Criticism, Vols. 16, 35; Poetry Criticism, Vol. 8; Twayne’s
English Authors; World Literature and Its Times, Vol. 3; and
World Literature Criticism.
151
CHARLES
BROCKDEN
BROWN
(1771 - 1810)
American novelist, essayist, and short story writer.
B rown is remembered as the author of the first
Gothic novel produced by an American.
Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), which
draws on the traditions of both Gothic and
sentimental novels, explores such issues as suicide,
murder, seduction, and insanity. He also wrote
three other novels dealing with horror and the
supernatural, all with a peculiarly American flavor,
replacing the expected tropes of European Gothic
with American images, including the frontier,
forests, caves, and cliffs. Many critics fault Brown’s
work for what are perceived as serious stylistic and
structural deficiencies, but they also express
admiration for his intense artistic vision and his
struggle to reconcile his Romantic imagination
with the Enlightenment ideals of reason and real-
ism. Brown is also recognized as one of the first
Americans to gain a significant audience abroad
and to attempt to support himself through his
literary endeavors; for this reason he has been
called the first professional writer in the United
States. His work also reflects an interest—radical
for his time—in the rights and roles of women.
Hailed as a central figure in the literature of hor-
ror and the supernatural, Brown has been seen as
an important influence on the masters of Ameri
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
can Gothic writing, including Edgar Allan Poe,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, and
Stephen King.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Brown was born to a Quaker family in Phila-
delphia in 1771. The Quakers’ disdain for formal
higher education resulted in the sixteen-year-old
Brown’s being apprenticed to a lawyer. While
employed at the law office, Brown pursued his
literary interests and joined the Belles Lettres Club,
where he participated in philosophical and politi-
cal discussions. In 1789 he published a series of
essays as “The Rhapsodist,” in which he analyzes
the effectiveness of the government created after
the American Revolution. His interest in radical
social and political ideas was furthered by his read-
ing of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the
Rights of Women (1792) and William Godwin’s An
Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793). Many
critics have maintained that these two works
heavily influenced Brown’s later thinking and
writing. After abandoning his legal career in 1792,
Brown completed his first novel, the now-lost Sky-
Walk, in 1797. During the next several years,
Brown embarked upon a period of extraordinary
literary activity, publishing Alcuin (1798), a fic-
tional dialogue on women’s rights, and his first
significant novel, Wieland, in 1798. Ormond, the
153
 first part of Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly all ap-
BROWN
peared during 1799. The proceeds from these
works, however, were not sufficient for Brown to
support himself, and as he grew increasingly
interested in marrying and having a family, Brown
joined his family’s mercantile business in 1800.
During his courtship of Elizabeth Linn in the early
1800s, Brown wrote the second part of Arthur
Mervyn and his last two novels, Clara Howard and
Jane Talbot, which were published in 1801. At this
point, Brown turned to journalistic endeavors,
producing political pamphlets and essays, and
editing a journal. He married in 1804 and sup-
ported his wife and children on his editorial work
after the family business dissolved in 1806. Brown
died in 1810, of tuberculosis.
MAJOR WORKS
Brown wrote essays, short stories, and politi-
cal pamphlets, and translated a work of nonfic-
tion about the United States from the French, but
modern critics have given little attention to these
works, except as a means of elucidating aspects of
Brown’s major novels. The dialogue Alcuin, al-
though considered a minor work, is studied by
modern critics in an effort to dissect Brown’s
feminism. In this fictional exchange between a
man and a woman, arguments both for and
against political and educational equality of the
sexes are presented. Brown continued to explore
such issues in his novels, which all contain strong
female characters. Like Brown’s minor works, the
sentimental novels Clara Howard and Jane Talbot
generate relatively little critical interest and are
regarded as exhibiting Brown’s shift from radical
to more conservative views.
The plots of Brown’s four major novels, which
combine elements of the Gothic and the senti-
mental novel, are often considered convoluted
and episodic, though highly imaginative. What
unites the novels is Brown’s focus on psychologi-
cal aberrations and the reactions and development
of his characters. The epistolary novel Wieland,
Brown’s best-known work, is about an archetypal
Gothic heroine, Clara Wieland, whose peaceful
life with her brother, Theodore, and his family is
destroyed by the appearance of a mysterious
stranger, Carwin. Theodore begins to hear a
disembodied voice, which he takes to be God’s,
and thereafter he hurls himself into an obsessive
religious melancholy. He hears the voice com-
mand him to kill his wife and children, which he
154 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 2
does. He is about to murder his sister and the man
she loves when Carwin confesses he has been
responsible for the voices. But, shockingly, he was
not responsible for the voice that commanded
Theodore to murder his family. Wieland has been
seen variously as a cautionary tale on the dangers
of religious fervor, an indictment of patriarchal
institutions, a critique of Puritanism, and a self-
referential allegory of the writing process itself.
Edgar Huntly also explores the problems of
humans’ inability to trust their sense perceptions.
In the novel, the narrator follows the sleepwalk-
ing Huntly, whom he suspects is his best friend’s
murderer, through a labyrinthine frontier. His
journey symbolizes the moral dilemma at the core
of the novel: whether criminology can begin to
fathom a mind in nightmarish conflict. Ormond
focuses on Brown’s ideas regarding the necessity
of educational equality for women. The villainous
Ormond terrorizes the beautiful Constantina Dud-
ley after having had her father killed, holding her
captive and threatening to rape her. But she
defeats him (and the oppression he symbolizes)
by stabbing him. In Arthur Mervyn, as a plague of
yellow fever ravages Philadelphia, the narrator
rescues the young waif Mervyn, whose true nature
remains ambiguous to the very end. The story has
been interpreted as Brown’s argument for civic
responsibility toward the impoverished, the ill,
and the downtrodden. Brown examines, by way
of the apparently innocent narrator’s adventures,
the theme of appearance versus reality. The narra-
tor becomes implicated in several crimes, but his
declarations of benevolent intentions contradict
his actions.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Brown is known as being the first professional
fiction writer in the United States, but he struggled
to support himself through his literary efforts,
turning toward journalism and editorial work in
his later years to make a living. However, Brown’s
writing was well received by some contemporary
critics, who praised his clear and forceful style and
knowledge of the human heart while maintaining
that his stories were improbable and that his use
of detail and his narrative technique interfered
with plot movement. Many important nine-
teenth-century writers admired Brown’s works,
including Poe, Hawthorne, John Keats, Sir Walter
Scott, and Mary Shelley, who counted Brown’s
four Gothic novels among her six favorite books.
 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, critics focused on the importance of
Brown’s contribution to American letters. For his
use of realistic details of American life, particularly
his portrayal of Native Americans and the frontier,
and for his role in initiating the American literary
preoccupation with psychological horror, Brown
was acclaimed as a pioneer in fiction and the
father of American Gothic literature. Critics who
viewed his contribution as mainly historical,
however, censured his overblown style, illogical
plots, and unrealistic characters. From the mid-
twentieth century on, critics have generally
acknowledged the weaknesses in Brown’s style but
praised his attempts at reconciling eighteenth-
century Enlightenment ideals with nineteenth-
century Romantic principles; his exploration of
the conflict between rationalism and the irrational
power of the imagination; and his creation of the
particularly American brand of Gothic fiction.
Some critics have argued that Brown’s novels can-
not be truly classified as Gothic but rather as
romances of mystery and terror that are only
“superficially” Gothic, using Gothic trappings to
delve into the psychology of the characters. Other
commentators consider Brown’s use of the Gothic
as similar to that of William Godwin in its focus
on the psychological and the revolutionary, while
yet others have regarded Brown’s gothicism as
based more on German sources and works by
English authors. As the interest in the genre of
Gothic literature grows, so does interest in and
admiration of Brown’s works, which are widely
viewed as innovations in American gothicism and
the literature of psychological horror.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Alcuin: A Dialogue (fictional dialogue) 1798
Wieland; or, The Transformation (novel) 1798
Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793. 2 vols.
(novel) 1799-1800
Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. 3 vols.
(novel) 1799
Ormond; or, The Secret Witness (novel) 1799
Clara Howard (novel) 1801; also published as Philip
Stanley; or, The Enthusiasm of Love, 1807
Jane Talbot, a Novel (novel) 1801
*Carwin, the Biloquist, and Other American Tales and
Pieces. 3 vols. (unfinished novel and short
stories) 1822
The Novels of Charles Brockden Brown. 7 vols.
BROWN
(novels) 1827
The Rhapsodist, and Other Uncollected Writings
(essays and novel fragment) 1943
The Novels and Related Works of Charles Brockden
Brown. 6 vols. (novels and unfinished novels)
1977-87
*Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (unfinished novel)
1978
* Carwin, the Biloquist and Memoirs of Stephen Calvert were
published earlier in William Dunlap’s The Life of
Charles Brockden Brown: Together with Selections from the
Rarest of His Printed Works, from His Original Letters, and
from His Manuscripts before Unpublished, 1815.
PRIMARY SOURCES
CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN
(ESSAY DATE 1798)
SOURCE: Brown, Charles Brockden. “Advertisement.”
In Wieland: or, The Transformation: An American Tale,
n.p. New York: T & J Swords, 1798.
In the following introduction to Wieland, Brown urges
the reader to consider the artistic merits of his work.
The following Work is delivered to the world
as the first of a series of performances, which the
favorable reception of this will induce the Writer
to publish. His purpose is neither selfish nor
temporary, but aims at the illustration of some
important branches of the moral constitution of
man. Whether this tale will be classed with the
ordinary or frivolous sources of amusement, or be
ranked with the few productions whose useful-
ness secures to them a lasting reputation, the
reader must be permitted to decide.
The incidents related are extraordinary and
rare. Some of them, perhaps, approach as nearly
to the nature of miracles as can be done by that
which is not truly miraculous. It is hoped that
intelligent readers will not disapprove of the man-
ner in which appearances are solved, but that the
solution will be found to correspond with the
known principles of human nature. The power
which the principal person is said to possess can
scarcely be denied to be real. It must be acknowl-
edged to be extremely rare; but no fact, equally
uncommon, is supported by the same strength of
historical evidence.
Some readers may think the conduct of the
younger Wieland impossible. In support of its pos-