Unutterable Horror
Unutterable Horror
A History of Supernatural Fiction
S. T. Joshi
Hippocampus Press ———————— New York
Copyright © 2012, 2014 by S. T. Joshi. First Hippocampus Press edition, 2014. Originally published by PS Publishing Ltd. Published by Hippocampus Press P.O. Box 641, New York, NY 10156. http://www.hippocampuspress.com All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Cover design by Barbara Briggs Silbert. Cover illustration by Harry Clarke for Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Hippocampus Press logo designed by Anastasia Damianakos. First Electronic Edition 135798642 978-1-61498-113-8 epub 978-1-61498-114-5 mobi
To Steven J. Mariconda
Contents
Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century Preface
I. Introduction
II. Anticipations i. Supernaturalism in Greek Literature ii. Supernaturalism in Latin Literature iii. The Middle Ages and the Elizabethans
III. The Gothics i. Types of Gothic Fiction ii. The Historical Supernatural iii. The Explained Supernatural iv. The Byronic Gothic v. The Christian Supernatural vi. The Theory of the Gothic vii. The Nature of Gothic Fiction
IV. Interregnum i. Supernaturalism in the Romantic Poets ii. German Grotesque iii. The Weird Short Story iv. French Supernaturalism v. Anticipations of Poe: Washington Irving
V. Edgar Allan Poe i. Poe and the Gothics ii. Theory and Practice iii. Death as Threshold v. Fantasy and Science vi. The Longer Tales vii. Conclusion
VI. Mid-Victorian Horrors i. Christian Supernaturalism ii. High and Low iii. Occasional Supernaturalism iv. The Americans v. French and German Supernaturalism vi. Irish Gothic: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
VII. The Deluge: British and European Branch i. Ghosts and More Ghosts ii. Horrors in the Mainstream iii. Between the Genres
iv. French Horror v. Slumming with Stoker and Others
VIII. The Deluge: American Branch i. The East Coast School ii. The West Coast School iii. Eccentrics
Epilogue
Bibliographical Essay
Bibliography A. Primary Texts B. Secondary Literature
Volume 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries Preface
IX. The Titans i. Arthur Machen: The Evils of Materialism ii. Algernon Blackwood: Nature as God and Refuge iii. Lord Dunsany: Fantasy and Terror iv. M. R. James: The Pinnacle of the Ghost Story
X. Other Early Twentieth-Century Masters i. The Evolution of the Ghost Story ii. Walter de la Mare: The Psychological Ghost Story iii. Other British Masters iv. The American School
XI. Novelists, Satirists, and Poets i. William Hope Hodgson: Things in the Weeds ii. The Horror Novel iii. Horror and Satire iv. Horror and the Mainstream
v. Some Europeans vi. The Development of Weird Poetry
XII. H. P. Lovecraft and His Influence i. Lovecraft and the Pulps ii. The Life of a Dreamer iii. The Theory of the Weird Tale iv. The Lovecraft Mythos v. Characteristics of Lovecraft’s Work vi. Borderline Weirdists: Howard, Smith, Merritt vii. Disciples: Long, Derleth, Wandrei, and Others viii. The Poetry of the Lovecraft Circle
XIII. American Pulpsmiths i. Weird Tales, Unknown, and Other Pulps ii. The Mixing of Genres: Moore, Kuttner, Bloch, Leiber
XIV. Horror at Midcentury i. The Group: Bradbury, Matheson, Beaumont, Nolan ii. Some Short Story Writers iii. Some Novelists iv. Domestic Horror: Shirley Jackson
XV. Anticipations of the Boom i. Throwbacks: Russell, Kirk, Brennan, Walter, Du Maurier ii. Looking Ahead: Dahl, Grubb, Serling, Case
iii. Robert Aickman’s “Strange Stories” iv. Some Novelists: Sturgeon, Wilson, Davies, Levin, Stewart
XVI. The Boom: The Blockbusters i. A Disquisition on Bestsellerdom ii. The Breakthrough: Blatty and Tryon iii. The Bestseller Factory: Stephen King iv. Successors to the King v. Vampires and More Vampires vi. Horrors from the Mainstream vii. The British Invasion viii. Splatterpunk and Its Antecedents ix. The Bridge: Peter Straub
XVII. The Boom: The Literati i. Ramsey Campbell: Horrors of the City ii. Other Short Story Masters iii. Mainstream Horror iv. More Vampires v. Some Other Tale-Spinners
XVIII. The Contemporary Era i. The Blockbusters Resume ii. The Literati Continue iii. Caitlín R. Kiernan: Prose-Poet of the Lost iv. Still More Vampires v. The British School vi. The American School
Epilogue
Bibliographical Essay
Bibliography A. Primary Texts B. Secondary Texts
Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century
Melmoth and Monçada exchanged looks of silent and unutterable horror, and returned slowly home. —Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) The simplest words must intimate, but not portray, the unutterable horror of the catastrophe. —Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Ambitious Guest” (1835) Through a species of unutterable horror and awe, for which the language of mortality has no sufficiently energetic expression, I felt my heart cease to beat, my limbs grow rigid where I sat. —Edgar Allan Poe, “Ligeia” (1838) . . . everywhere cowers and darkens the Unutterable Horror. —Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni (1842)
Preface In spite of the length of this work, my goals in it are relatively humble. I am chiefly interested in the aesthetic and philosophical issues involved in the introduction of the supernatural in a literary work, and I am also interested in tracing the history of this literary mode from the time it became a recognised genre—the later eighteenth century—to the present day. I have also considered it a significant part of my enterprise to gauge the overall aesthetic success of the works I study, with particular emphasis on the effectiveness of the supernatural manifestation in a given work. To that degree, I am attempting to establish a viable canon of supernatural writing, although I trust it will be evident that my judgments are merely suggestive rather than prescriptive. The number of authors and works to be covered has necessitated some sharp curtailments in the kinds of analysis I can provide and perhaps even in the overall scope and direction of the work. For example, I have not found sufficient space to place the authors and works discussed within the context of cultural and intellectual history, even though I see such a context as the most profitable avenue toward the understanding of the literature in question. I have also been unable to examine many individual works in the depth and detail they deserve, nor have I treated non-Anglophone weird fiction as much as I should have. Within these shortcomings, I hope that I have supplied a more adequate picture of the historical progression of supernatural fiction than previous histories, most of which I am sorry to say I find unsatisfactory. My focus has been on the major writers in the field—those, in other words, who have contributed significantly to the genre and who have produced a corpus of work of sufficient breadth and complexity to be worth studying carefully. Individual works of the supernatural by authors who have generally not worked in this mode are rarely discussed unless they are of great
significance and influence. I have also not found it fruitful to compare authors with one another or to treat their works thematically, since it strikes me that each author of supernatural fiction is of such distinctiveness that comparisons would produce minimal enlightenment. Naturally, biographical information on the authors in question is limited to those facets of their lives that are of significance to the understanding of their work. And, of course, every critic of a relatively little-known or understudied branch of literature faces the quandary of how much plot summary to supply. In those works that can be assumed to be widely read I have reduced plot summary to a minimum, but for other works I have felt it necessary to include a somewhat ampler synopsis so that my analysis can be more fully understood. It will be evident to most readers—especially those who know my previous work in the field—that I have found much inspiration in both the theoretical underpinnings and some specific critical judgments in H. P. Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (first published in 1927). I cite this work throughout the text, using the simple abbreviation S. The edition cited is listed in the bibliography. I have sought to provide exact citations to all quotations of primary and secondary works. The editions cited—the great majority of them are not first editions—are listed in the bibliography. I have not always had access to the soundest or most recent editions, as some of these are already difficult to obtain even in large libraries. For shorter works (stories, poems, and the like), I have provided information on original periodical appearances, if known. I may not have cited secondary sources as much as is customary; there is indeed a fair amount of useful criticism and biography on many of the authors discussed in this volume, although some figures have yet to receive the attention they deserve. A bibliographical essay preceding the bibliography provides some discussion of important reference works in this field and other critical works that may be of use to the student and scholar. I have been studying supernatural literature for more than thirty years and have had highly stimulating discussions with many friends and colleagues. Among those who have supplied me with the greatest insights, either in print or viva voce, are Mike Ashley, Jason Brock, Donald R. Burleson, Scott Connors, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Jack M. Haringa, John Langan, Steven J. Mariconda, David E. Schultz, and Robert H. Waugh. I am also grateful to several contemporary authors of supernatural literature for
illuminating many aspects of their own work, among them Sherry Austin, Laird Barron, Ramsey Campbell, Les Daniels, Philip Haldeman, Caitlín R. Kiernan, T. E. D. Klein, Thomas Ligotti, W. H. Pugmire, Joseph S. Pulver, Sr, Michael Shea, Peter Straub, and Jonathan Thomas. —S. T. J. Seattle, Washington November 2009
I. Introduction The study and analysis of the mode of writing that I call supernatural horror is vexed with a multitude of difficulties and paradoxes. I cannot think of any other genre, with the possible exception of the love story (itself a highly nebulous and imprecise construct, since love plays a role in a number of literary modes, including supernatural horror itself), that is defined by an emotion. The genres of the mystery story, the science fiction story, and even the Western are largely formal designations, chiefly constructed around a certain kind of plot or scenario (a puzzle regarding the perpetrator of a crime; the role of science—or, more precisely, some future extrapolation of science or technology—in human life and society) or setting (the American West). What is more, the genre—if indeed it is a genre—is generally designated by those literary exemplars where the twin elements of the supernatural and of horror (which are logically separable) function exclusively or predominantly. There is horror of a sort in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex or Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, but these works are not customarily regarded as works of supernatural horror. Analogously, the supernatural can function in a narrative without the concomitant sensation of horror, although such instances of what is called benign supernaturalism are relatively rare and have generally not been well received by readers and critics, chiefly because of a certain emotive tameness and, more relevantly, because of their excessive closeness to the fairy tale or folktale. What this means is that the horror story (whether supernatural or not) somewhat untidily encompasses those works that focus on the emotion of fear, largely to the exclusion or minimisation of other elements, emotions, or motifs—specifically a broad portrayal of character or of those human relations where fear of terror does not play a role. That this exclusive or
extensive focus on terror substantially accounts for the prejudice directed against the genre by mainstream critics is a matter I shall discuss presently. Part of the reason why this genre is so fraught with conceptual difficulties is that it may not have become a definite genre until well along in its literary development. If, by general consensus, the first work of supernatural horror—the work that initiated the “Gothic” school of writing —was Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), it is at least arguable that supernatural writing did not become a concretised genre until about a century and a half later. The great majority of the nineteenth-century writers who either dabbled or specialised in this mode—notably Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce—do not appear to have considered themselves “horror writers” in anything like the contemporary sense of the term. It is not merely that they published much fiction that is very far from horror (humour and satire in both instances), or that the supernatural work they did publish did not appear in venues specifically devoted to this kind of writing (there were none such until the establishment of the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1923); it is that, so far as can be ascertained from their critical and autobiographical writings, they seem not to have envisioned themselves as writing exclusively or even partly in a given mode of writing radically separable from the mode of writing commonly referred to as “mainstream” fiction. The closest that Bierce came to designating his horror tales (whether supernatural or non-supernatural) by some kind of discrete label is when he referred to them in a letter as “tragic” stories (A Much Misunderstood Man 197). I will maintain that the establishment of Weird Tales itself was the definitive beginning of “supernatural horror” as a distinct genre, just as the establishment of Amazing Stories in 1926 canonically introduced the genre of science fiction. Further difficulties have been caused by a wide confusion—or, perhaps more charitably, a lack of agreement—in the use of terminology to designate the genre. Freud’s essay “Das Unheimliche” (1919) was translated into English as “The Uncanny”—perhaps not the happiest rendition, since the German appears to refer chiefly to phenomena that are unfamiliar or strange. Matters became further confused when Tzvetan Todorov’s treatise Introduction à la littérature fantastique (1970) was translated into English by Richard Howard as The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973). Howard rendered le fantastique as “the fantastic,” understandably enough; but when Todorov sought to
distinguish what he regarded as neighbouring genres or subgenres by the terms l’étrange (what would now be called non-supernatural horror or psychological suspense) and le merveilleux (supernatural horror), Howard rendered these terms as “uncanny” and “marvelous,” respectively, even though the former is very different from what Freud had in mind. Analogously, Rosemary Jackson’s stimulating treatise Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981) uses “fantasy” as an apparent synonym for supernatural horror, even though the former designation now means something very different among writers, readers, and critics working within the genre of supernatural literature. It may be best if I were simply to lay down my own terminology—one chiefly drawn from a general consensus (so far as I can ascertain it) within the contemporary horror community—and elucidate it accordingly. In my understanding, the broad paradigm within which supernatural horror functions is “imaginative fiction,” which includes three fairly separate and distinct genres—science fiction, fantasy, and supernatural horror. (Whether mystery or suspense fiction should be regarded as a component of imaginative fiction is a matter of dispute; in my judgment, it should not be, even though this genre has significant relations to supernatural fiction.) There is in my view a certain overlap in all the genres mentioned, and they might be schematised as follows:
Some of these overlapping segments have their own designations, although there is not the strictest agreement either as to the actual terms to be used for them or their precise peramaters. The overlap between supernatural horror and crime/suspense is perhaps the most fruitful, and I see it as encompassing at least three different subgenres: the explained supernatural, where the supernatural is suggested but explained away at the end as the product of error, hallucination, madness, or trickery (its exemplars are Ann Radcliffe and Charles Brockden Brown among the Gothic writers, as well as the crude “weird menace” pulps of the 1930s); psychological suspense or dark fantasy, where the scenario is non-supernatural but the portrayal of madness or hallucination is so intense as to generate a quasi-supernatural emotion of horror (prototypical are Robert Bloch’s Psycho and the early novels of Thomas Tryon); and the ambiguous horror tale, where doubt remains to the end whether the supernatural has come into play or whether the events are the product of madness, hallucination, or error. Todorov privileged this last subgenre as representative of what he called “the fantastic,” evidently regarding it as aesthetically superior to either supernatural or non-supernatural horror. But an examination of the entire range of horror literature suggests that the ambiguous horror tale represents a very thin sliver of the field, and that the “hesitation” that Todorov felt was the dominant trait of fantastic writing is, on the whole, merely a literary technique to maintain the reader’s interest until the tale finally resolves (as almost all do) into either supernaturalism or non-supernaturalism. (I may remark incidentally that Todorov and others have apparently been led to their view by their admiration of what they take to be the most distinguished instance of the ambiguous horror tale, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, although I shall argue that it is in fact not “ambiguous” in the sense in which it is most frequently assumed to be.) Todorov’s embarrassing suggestion that the rubric of the fantastic can be extended “by temporarily omitting the end of the narrative” (43) shows how far a critic’s perspective lies from that of a creative artist—and how far a theoretician will go to maintain the spurious integrity of a misguided theory. Although Todorov’s schema has been influential (among critics) and has been largely followed by such a work as Terry Heller’s The Delights of Terror: An Aesthetics of the Tale of Terror (1987)—who adds some interesting reflections on the “pleasures” to be gained from reading horror tales,
derived in part from Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory—I have not found Todorov’s classification of “the fantastic” to be helpful. The intersection of science fiction and supernatural horror would seem to be paradoxical, since science fiction (like mystery fiction) is a mode manifestly based upon the use of reason, whereas the essence of supernatural horror is the incursion of the irrational into an objectively real setting. L. P. Hartley emphasised this disjunction between the mystery story and the supernatural horror story in terms that apply just as well to science fiction. In speaking of the “extra thrill” that some people need to maintain an interest in life, Hartley states: Detective-story writers give this thrill by exploiting the resources of the possible; however improbable the happenings in a detective story, they can and must be explained in terms that satisfy the reason. But in a ghost story, where natural laws are dispensed with, the whole point is that the happenings cannot be so explained. A ghost story that is capable of a rational explanation is as much an anomaly as a detective story that isn’t. The one is in revolt against a materialistic conception of the universe, whereas the other depends on it. (vi–viii) Those final two sentences are a bit problematic, but the general sense of the passage is sound. Science fiction is commonly misunderstood to be fiction utilising some element of science or technology, but in fact it must be based upon some hypothetical advance or development of contemporary science or technology; this is where the “imaginative” element enters in. Nevertheless, in doing so, it must adhere to the “possible” (or, at least, the conceivable), else it will cease to be science fiction. (Early instances of the mode, such as the novels of Jules Verne, where some of the uses of scientific advance seem nowadays pretty fantastic do not affect the overall thrust of the argument, since Verne appears to have regarded his scientific developments as plausible or conceivable.) The fusion of supernatural horror with science fiction occurs prototypically in the work of H. P. Lovecraft and some of his followers, with perhaps an anticipation in the work of William Hope Hodgson and others. There are clear historical reasons why the mingling of these two modes occurred at this time (the
early twentieth century), as I shall explain when I study these writers. In the course of their work, it is possible that supernaturalism gets left behind altogether; but since the manifest purpose of these writings was to create a sense of horror, they can be regarded as hybrids. The relation of supernatural horror and what I call fantasy is perhaps the most problematical—or, at any rate, the one with the fewest examples that come to mind. Fantasy, as now understood, refers to a scenario where the author creates his/her world either out of whole cloth (as in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth) or, at least, creates the metaphysical “rules” of his/her realm, even if it is not markedly different from the objectively real world; and these rules are fundamentally arbitrary (I do not use this term pejoratively) because there is no reason why the particular “rules” have been utilised as opposed to other rules that might be imagined. Much of Lord Dunsany’s work may fall into this mode: the realm of Pegana that he envisioned in his early work is a kind of fusion of Greek myth, Middle Eastern or Asian legendry, and so forth, but it is fundamentally a nevernever-land of his own creation that—even though he made some faint efforts to suggest that it existed in the dim prehistory of the earth—has little connexion with the contemporary world as we know it. It is populated by a multitude of gods, demigods, worshippers, and so forth; but there is no intrinsic reason why these particular gods should occupy Pegana as opposed to others that might be imagined. There is considerable terror in some of his tales, but overall the emphasis is on a kind of otherworldly beauty rather than horror. There are very few other instances of this fusion of supernatural horror and fantasy that come to mind. (Fantasy itself can contain elements of horror, but it is not its main emphasis.) Whether the core emotion or complex of emotions that are the focus of the genre—fear, terror, horror, dread, and so forth—can be adequately distinguished is a matter of debate. Various critics—beginning with Ann Radcliffe, who, as we shall see in Chapter III, tried to distinguish terror and horror—have attempted to do so, but their conclusions have not been universally accepted. I do not believe that such an attempt is worth the effort, because any such distinctions will be arbitrary and will only be of use for a given theoretical framework or critical analysis. Consider Noël Carroll’s occasionally insightful The Philosophy of Horror (1990). Although, to my mind, Carroll errs seriously in failing to recognise the fundamental distinction between supernatural horror and science fiction,
and errs still further in maintaining that the crux of the horror tale is a monster (thereby banishing some of the most significant examples of supernatural and non-supernatural horror to some nebulous ground outside the realm of “horror” as he conceives it), he goes on to define the “tale of terror” (15) as the tale of non-supernatural horror and the “tale of dread” (42) as the tale where weird events come to the fore. This latter distinction, he claims, is necessary because “the emotional response they [tales of dread] elicit seems to be quite different from that engendered by art-horror” (42)—a highly dubious assertion, in my judgment, but one that plays a role in his overall analysis. I suppose it could be maintained that I myself am now devising another brace of technical terms for the purpose of my own analysis, and I do not deny that this is so. I have, for example, long borrowed from Lovecraft the terms “weird tale” and “weird fiction” (see my study, The Weird Tale) as a kind of umbrella term for those facets of imaginative fiction encompassing fantasy, supernatural horror, and the overlaps between supernatural horror and crime/suspense. As for horror, my general sense—and it is not much more than that— from an examination of the use of this term both in reference to real life and in reference to fiction is that, in addition to (and perhaps above and beyond) its suggestion of a perception of fear (stemming either from personal danger or from danger to another) and a feeling of disgust and revulsion, it carries with it the idea of the contemplation of something appalling and dreadful. This last component may, indeed, allow for the genre of horror to exist at all, since the sentiment goes beyond the immediate apprehension of bodily harm (which is fear) and points toward the witnessing of some phenomenon that the human mind, whether perceiving immediate danger or not, both fails to comprehend and finds somehow wrong in a moral or metaphysical sense. My major emphasis in this book will be on instances of pure supernatural horror, although the overlapping subgenres discussed above will have to be treated on occasion, if only because of the singular merits of some instances of them or because of their significant influence on the development of supernatural horror itself. Nevertheless, I regard the distinction between supernatural and non-supernatural horror so essential to the understanding of this genre that it may need further elucidation. In order for there to be a discrete genre called supernatural horror, there must be a general understanding—necessarily in flux, and in accordance
with the fluctuations of human knowledge—of what constitutes the “natural.” Non-supernatural horror, or psychological horror, evokes a certain kind of horror, but that emotion is so radically different from the emotion we experience when we witness what Lovecraft somewhat flamboyantly called a “malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space” (S 23) that the two must be considered radically distinct. There is an undeniable sense of fear in witnessing the depradations of a mass-murderer, or even in sensing that the murderer may come after oneself; there is also a sense of fear in witnessing extreme aberrations of the human mind (something we find, for example, in Ramsey Campbell’s magnificent novel of paranoia, The Face That Must Die); but the fear here evoked is not a metaphysical fear, because there is no sense in which our understanding of the universe is jeopardised. But if we were forced to believe in the actual existence of a vampire or a werewolf, our whole conception of the universe would be seen to be fatally erroneous, and this would occur all apart from any terrors evoked by physical mayhem or even by the vagaries of a diseased mind. It is, therefore, entirely understandable that supernatural horror only came into existence when, by the eighteenth century, science (and human knowledge as a whole) had advanced to the point where certain objects or events could be stated with fair certainty to be impossible or, at best, highly improbable. The ghost, the witch, the vampire, the werewolf, the haunted house—these and other motifs only gained currency as supernatural fiction once they were banished from the realm of fact. Lovecraft is particularly emphatic on this point. Remarking that “the crux of a weird tale is something which could not possibly happen,” he goes on to say: If any unexpected advance of physics, chemistry, or biology were to indicate the possibility of any phenomena related to the weird tale, that particular set of phenomena would cease to be weird in the ultimate sense because it would become surrounded by a different set of emotions. It would no longer represent imaginative liberation, because it would no longer indicate a suspension or violation of the natural laws against whose universal dominance our fancies rebel. (Selected Letters 3.434)
This distinction between the natural and the supernatural is vital in understanding why fairy tales, folktales, and the like cannot be regarded as components (although they can be regarded as significant anticipations) of supernatural horror: the events related in them are not rigorously distinguished in terms of their metaphysical status, so that what we would regard as supernatural (if occurring in an objectively real setting) is regarded merely as wondrous or awesome or perhaps even just a little out of the ordinary. Religion is also an important consideration here. The “events” described in most of the world’s scriptures would nowadays be considered “supernatural”—but they were presumably not so considered by their original believers (and, strictly speaking, by their present-day believers, although many non-fundamentalists would not wish to be pinned down on this point), because these events are putatively regarded by each religion as phases of the actual workings of the cosmos. Accordingly, any literary works that rely in religious presuppositions, or that employ religious allegory, cannot be considered instances of supernatural horror. I am not suggesting that all supernatural horror must be rigidly secular in its outlook; we will, indeed, encounter any number of writers who use weird fiction to convey what they believe to be truths about the universe that are in line with some religious worldview or another. Rather, from an historical perspective, literary work must have segregated itself from religious orthodoxy for the supernatural to evoke its full range of emotive effects. (If it is pointed out that many supernatural tales, right down to the present day, make extensive use of demons or of the Devil himself, I can reply that in nearly every instance these figures are used symbolically or metaphorically —in some cases just on this side of allegory.) It is my contention that supernatural horror is a distinctively metaphysical mode of writing, because it allows writers—whether they are aware of it or not—to confront directly the very nature of entity. No other mode of writing appears to embody this possibility. The universe can, in essence, be refashioned—at least as regards the specific supernatural phenomenon utilised—in consonance with an author’s philosophical conceptions. Let it pass that many authors may not be entirely cognisant of this procedure; the fact that supernatural horror holds out the prospect of doing so is what is significant.
Indeed, I will utter the seeming paradox that, just as supernatural horror was born at a time when the very idea of the supernatural was being banished from science and human thought in general, so the majority of supernatural writers—and readers—do not in fact “believe” (literally) in their supernatural creations. The insertion of a ghost in a narrative does not automatically mean (although it might) that the author ascribes to philosophical dualism. I do not wish to suggest that all or even most authors of supernatural fiction are atheists or agnostics; rather, these authors have chosen entities or events “which could not possibly happen” as a means both of conveying a sense of dread to their readers and for broader aesthetic ends. The distinction with mimetic fiction comes to the fore here. Sinclair Lewis may not have thought that any single individual named George F. Babbitt existed, but the essence of the novel Babbitt, and the chief reason why it is such a stellar piece of social realism, is that such an individual could have existed and could have done the things that Babbitt does in that novel. Lovecraft, for his part, was well aware that there was no such entity as Cthulhu, but the distinction is that Lovecraft knew further that there could not possibly be any such entity. Supernatural motifs can be—and usually are—used either for purposes of “imaginative liberation” (as Lovecraft pointed out) and/or for symbolic purposes. The supernatural has been found to be a particularly felicitous and forceful way to convey central human concerns in a way that mimetic fiction cannot do—or, at least, cannot always do so vividly. The vampire, to put it crudely, can be a symbol of a human being’s isolation from society in a way that a depiction of the most radical social “outsider” may not be. I do not wish to assert that supernatural fiction is somehow always superior to mimetic fiction in this use of symbolism; but the history of this literary mode suggests that writers of many different stripes have found the supernatural a valuable means to convey sentiments and effects more potently and plangently than can be done in conventional realism. At the same time, there is a danger that the use of supernatural motifs as symbolism can veer into allegory—a process that effects a negation of the supernatural, since the disjunction between an objectively real world (a world that is, in this precise sense, natural) and the incursion of a given supernatural element would cease to be maintained. The exact relation between author and reader comes into play at this point. It is widely known that many of the leading motifs of supernatural
horror—the ghost, the witch, the haunted house—have their origin in the depths of human history or prehistory. There is every reason to believe that these motifs were believed in as literal realities for millennia, and in some cultures (including our own) a certain proportion of individuals may continue to believe in them. Indeed, it is worth noting that, in the West, many of the standard “monsters” of suprenatural fiction—preeminently the vampire, but also the witch, the sorcerer, and even the werewolf—gained a particular potency because they came to be regarded as violations of the norms of Christianity. But in modern cultures (beginning, say, in the eighteenth century), scientific advance has relegated these motifs to the dustbin of intellectual history, where they can inspire at most a vestigial sentiment of quasi-belief. It is this sentiment that supernatural writers depend on: because belief in ghosts or vampires, for example, can never be wholly eliminated from human thought and emotion, the convincing depiction of them in fiction evokes a dual response—terror at the possible existence of such an entity, and supernatural horror because the conscious mind is aware that these entities “could not possibly” exist. If these two responses seem antipodal or paradoxical, it is by design: the evocation of the strange “reality” of the unreal is the secret to the effectiveness of supernatural horror as a literary mode. Freud seems to have come to this conclusion when he noted that “Our analysis of instances of the uncanny has led us back to the old, animistic conception of the universe” (240). He elaborates the point later in his essay, discussing various conceptions such as the return from the dead: We—or our primitive forefathers—once believed that these possibilities were realities, and were convinced that they actually happened. Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we have surmounted these modes of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation. As soon as something actually happens in our lives which seems to confirm the old, discarded beliefs we get a feeling of the uncanny; it is as though we were making a judgement something like this: “So, after all, it is true that one can kill a person by the mere wish!” or, “So the dead do live on and appear on the scene of their former activities!” and so on. (247–48)
Freud may have been a bit sanguine in adding, “Conversely, anyone who has completely and finally rid himself of animistic beliefs will be insensible to this type of the uncanny” (248), since some of the most distinguished practitioners of weird fiction—notably Poe, Bierce, and Lovecraft—were, by all accounts, pretty hard-headed materialists. But it is exactly the secret of their success that they were momentarily able to frighten themselves by the contemplation of things they knew could not be, and were therefore able to convey that fear to their readers. The literature of supernatural horror has for many years been the subject of literary and cultural prejudice, and perhaps in some circles it continues to be today. There are a multitude of reasons for this, and I think one of the main ones is a surprising inability on the part of mainstream critics to grasp the rhetoric of supernatural fiction. Consider a remark by a distinguished critic, Graham Hough, on D. H. Lawrence’s ghost stories: “Ghosts should be raised in fiction by people who believe in them or by those whose aim is to produce a shudder of the nerves. Lawrence belongs to neither of these classes, and his ghostly visitants only produce effects that in his more vigorous moods would have been achieved through the conflict of character and circumstance” (quoted in Thornton 138). I have already maintained that very few writers of ghost stories actually believe in the literal reality of ghosts (or, at any rate, in the ghosts they have depicted in their tales), and very few aside from hack writers are interested only in producing a shudder. The supernatural can—and, in Lawrence’s work, does—enhance the “conflict of character and circumstance.” Possibly the relative absence, in weird fiction as a whole, of the kind of interpersonal conflict found in mainstream fiction has had something to do with this critical blindness. Many weird writers’ emphasis is elsewhere. It is not that they are uninterested in the portrayal of character or of interpersonal interaction, but that their focus is largely upon the psychology of fear as it affects individuals and groups. And, of course, the obtrusive presence, on bookstore shelves and movie theatres, of flamboyant works of “horror” that are nothing more than excuses for bloodletting and the display of outlandish monsters has worked its harm—although to judge the whole field of weird fiction by these examples would be as fair as to judge mainstream fiction by the examples of Danielle Steel and Dan Brown.
But there are—or have been—broader cultural forces that have led to a denigration of the literature of terror. The chief of them is that, in the Anglo-Saxon world at any rate, the evocation of such an unpleasant emotion as “horror” is regarded as somehow indelicate or even blasphemous. I am not entirely sure that this accusation can be entirely deflected; even L. P. Hartley noted, “Even the most impassioned devotee of the ghost story would admit that the taste for it is slightly abnormal, a survival, perhaps, from adolescence, a disease of deficiency suffered by those whose lives and imaginations do not react satisfactorily to normal experience and require an extra thrill” (vii). Lovecraft put the matter a bit less pejoratively: Reality is all right enough so far as it goes . . . The only trouble is that it doesn’t go far enough for a guy with extreme sensitiveness. . . . It is perfectly true that mild, conventional, and highly respectable people like the average business or professional man can get enough of a kick out of watching the meaningless routine phaemonena of this pimple on the cosmos to warrant their staying alive—but even with them you can see it wears thin now and then, especially in this latest age of standardisation and decreased variety and adventurousness. . . . (Selected Letters 3.139) This may be pejorative in a different way, but it leads to the following conclusion: The real raison d’être of [weird] art is to give one a temporary illusion of emancipation from the galling and intolerable tyranny of time, space, change, and natural law. If we can give ourselves even for rather a brief moment the illusory sense that some law of the ruthless cosmos has been—or could be—invalidated or defeated, we acquire a certain flush of triumphant emancipation comparable in its comforting power to the opiate dreams of religion. Indeed, religion itself is merely a pompous formalisation of fantastic art. Its disadvantage is that it demands an intellectual belief in the impossible, whereas fantastic art does not. (Selected Letters 4.417– 18)
It is customary to deride this “illusion of emancipation” as “escapism,” but Lovecraft’s final remark makes clear what nearly every reader of supernatural fiction will acknowledge: readers are well aware that the whole effect is indeed an illusion—albeit a pleasurable one for them. What is more, the use of the supernatural as symbol underscores the obvious point —one that I trust this treatise will confirm—that significant truths about humanity and its place in the cosmos can be conveyed well outside the context of mimetic realism. If, then, supernatural horror is written for a small coterie of the “sensitive” who don’t find “reality” quite compelling or satisfying, then we are forced to admit that it is a relatively minor literary mode; but that admission does not carry with it the corollary that great work cannot be done in this mode. The long and rich history of supernatural literature, of which this book can treat no more than the most noteworthy exemplars, is a sufficient argument that many distinguished authors have found it tempting to engage in it when conventional modes of realism prove insufficient, and that those relatively few authors who have specialised in it have in some instances produced a body of work that need not fear competition with any other mode of writing. Supernatural horror enjoyed general popularity in only two periods in literary history—the Gothic novel (roughly from 1780 to 1820) and the “horror boom” of the 1970s and 1980s. For the rest of its history, its appeal was indeed restricted to the few, and there is a good case to be made that its greatest aesthetic successes were directly due to that fact. If the prejudice against the supernatural in literature has waned—and a signal instance of it may be the recent publication of two large volumes of American Fantastic Tales (2009) by the Library of America, the nation’s guide to the American literary canon—then it may have done so in part for adventitious reasons, such as the general increase in attention that all genre literature has gained in recent decades as academic and other critics go slumming in the bogs of “popular culture” as a relief from the stodgy and overworked standard canon. My own view is that the study of the literature of supernatural horror need not be regarded as merely a sociological exercise, but rather that the genre at its best can offer aesthetic rewards as high as any other mode of writing, and that it does so in a manner that could not be achieved in any other mode. To delineate and analyse how weird
fiction achieves its effects is a large part of the critical task I have set for myself.
II. Anticipations It is as much a truism to say that supernaturalism enters literature at the very dawn of literary history as it is to say that the lack of a distinction, until relatively recent times, between what is understood to be “natural” and what is “supernatural” makes any examination of antecedents or predecessors to the genre of supernatural fiction that commenced with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) highly problematical. This difficulty confronts us in what is among the earliest surviving literary documents, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the “old version” of which probably dates to around 1700 B.C.E. Although this text includes such staples of later weird fiction as a descent to the underworld, prophetic dreams, and ghosts and monsters of various sorts, the precise degree of the author’s—or, more precisely, the contemporaneous Babylonian culture’s—awareness that these phenomena are “supernatural” is notoriously difficult to determine. Gilgamesh himself comes across as a kind of superhero, since he is of impressive physical stature (“A triple cubic foot was his foot, half a rod his leg, / Six cubits was his stride” [3]) and has other attributes far in excess of ordinary mortals; but, although he is initially portrayed as a tyrant, he undertakes a Faust-like quest for eternal life. As a result of several prophetic dreams, Gilgamesh sets out to kill the fire-breathing ogre Humbaba. Tablet V of Gilgamesh, depicting the battle between Gilgamesh and Humbaba, is highly mutilated, so the details of the conflict are cloudy; but a bronze situla depicting the battle indicates that Humbaba is humanoid in shape (see Andrew George’s translation [45]). There are later battles with a “Bull of Heaven” and a scorpion monster. In spite of his defeat of these entities, Gilgamesh fails in his ultimate quest and comes to the realisation that he must die.
Although Gilgamesh is obviously a work of fiction, it is still not sufficiently distinct from its religious tradition to constitute an independent literary work in which the “supernatural” is employed for its own sake. Gilgamesh himself, although mortal, is declared to be “two-thirds . . . god” (2). In any event, aside from its role in influencing the biblical account of the Deluge, Gilgamesh had little influence upon subsequent literature in the West. As such, it is fitting to begin our discussion of antecedents to supernaturalism with the Greeks.
i. Supernaturalism in Greek Literature There has not been, to my knowledge, much examination of the question of why Greek myth is so bountifully endowed with monsters— several, to be sure, of humanoid form, others of hybrid form, and still others of more eccentric form. Perhaps the question is unanswerable, but some tentative speculation may be useful. As Denys Page long ago noted in The Homeric Odyssey (1955), many of what we would now term “fantasy” or “weird” elements in the earliest literary text of direct relevance to us, Homer’s Odyssey (probably fused together—from oral sources dating to as early as the 12th century B.C.E.—around 700 B.C.E.), are derived in part from, or are representations of, folktales. For example, the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus is an echo of numerous European myths in which a hero is trapped within a giant’s cave. The Odyssey also appears to borrow numerous details from the story of Jason and the Argonauts, evidently a separate myth-cycle that had nothing to do with Odysseus and his peregrinations. As it is, the dominant quasi-supernatural thread running through Greek myth—which, obviously, was not invented in any meaningful sense by the Homeric poets but was merely borrowed or adapted by them—is the existence of a plethora of monsters of all sorts. Some of these monsters are only tangentially alluded to in Homer or in the nearly contemporaneous Theogony of Hesiod, and they range from pure hybrids (the Chimaera, a fire-breathing creature with the head of a lion, the body of a she-goat, and the tail of a snake; the Hydra, a snakelike and multiheaded creature that had the remarkably imaginative feature of growing two heads when one was cut off; the Harpies, depicted usually as birds with the faces of women; the Sirens, also fusions of birds and women) to personifications of natural forces (Charybdis, a whirlpool) to creatures of much more bizarre configuration (Scylla, originally a woman but transformed into a sea creature with six heads and twelve feet, each head having a triple row of teeth). Many of these creatures were featured in the Herakles cycle of twelve “labours.” It is worth noting that every one of these monsters was declared to be the offspring of the gods (as, indeed, were most of the
“heroes” of Greek myth), so that they cannot be envisioned as independently conceived entities of a literary imagination, although some of their details and actions were no doubt the result of literary treatment. In any event, Odysseus’ remarkable narrative of his adventures (books 9–12 of the Odyssey) constitutes perhaps the most concentrated account of supernatural and fantastic events in all antiquity. To the extent that this passage, unlike the (probably much earlier) Iliad, exhibits the burgeoning Greek fascination with the world beyond the confines of Greece or Asia Minor (a fascination likely engendered by traders’ accounts of such remote areas as Sicily, northern Africa, and even the straits of Gibraltar), it could be considered parallel to a similar fascination, exhibited in mediaeval or early Renaissance times, that resulted in the fantastic narratives of Marco Polo, Sir John Mandeville, and other travellers. Book 9 focuses on Polyphemus, the Cyclops, one of a race of uncivilised, unsociable creatures dwelling on an unspecified island in the Mediterranean (105f.). Oddly enough, the fact that this race of beings has only one eye is not specified until line 333, but no doubt every reader (or listener) would have been aware of the fact (the word cyclops means not “one-eyed” but “round-eyed”). Polyphemus himself is referred to as “a monstrous wonder made to behold, not / like a man, an eater of bread, but more like a wooded / peak of the high mountains seen standing away from the others” (9.190–92). His devouring of several of Odysseus’ men, Odyseus’ craftiness in identifying himself as Outis (Nobody), and his ultimate defeat of Polyphemus by getting him drunk and then poking out his eye, are all too well-known to require elaboration. The Laestrygonians—a giant cannibal race whom Odysseus encounters in Book 10—also eat some of Odysseus’ men. At one point a woman member of the race is described as “big as a mountain peak” (10.113). The Greeks flee and come to Circe’s isle of Aiaia (10.135f.). She is surrounded by animals “whom the goddess had given evil drugs and enchanted” (10.213). Sure enough, she gives Odysseus’ men a “potion” (10.234) and strikes them with a wand, whereupon they become pigs. It is of interest that the god Hermes gives Odysseus some “medicine” (10.287) as protection from Circe—the mysterious substance that Homer calls moly. Eventually she changes his men back to human form, but in the process she tells Odysseus that he must go to the house of Hades and talk with Tiresias, the
deceased prophet, for advice on how to return home and what to expect when he gets there. This sets up the descent to Hades in Book 11. We have already seen that a trip to the underworld was included in the Gilgamesh cycle, and no doubt it was a common feature of many mythologies. In the Odyssey, the entire episode was probably an independent narrative that was later inserted into the text (Page 46). In Homer, Hades (let us call it such, even though the customary Greek expression—en Haidou [“in (the house) of Hades”]— makes it clear that Hades is the name of the god ruling the realm and not the name of the place) is not depicted as being under the earth, but rather in some unspecified area to the north (10.507). In any event, Odysseus makes the journey, encountering not only the ghost of Elpenor, a shipmate who had fallen overboard and is therefore unburied, but other ghosts as well. In a bizarre ritual that we find in no other author, the ghosts recognise Odysseus and are able to speak to him only after they drink blood from a sacrifice he has made (11.145f.). In one of the most poignant passages in the work, Odysseus attempts to embrace the shade of his mother but is unable to do so (11.204f.): manifestly the shades are, although visible, either entirely immaterial or of such fine matter that they cannot be grasped. It is also interesting to note that the dead do not know anything of what has happened in the world of the living since their deaths: at one point Achilles, the leader of the Greeks at Troy, after memorably noting that he would rather be a slave in the living world than a king of the dead, asks Odysseus to “tell me anything you have heard of my proud son [Neoptolemus], whether / or not he went along to war to fight as a champion” (11.492–93). There follows a memorable passage about certain shades who are being punished (11.576f.): Tityos (whose liver is being eaten by vultures), Tantalos (who, standing up to his neck in a lake, finds the water receding as he tries to drink it and fruits flying out of his reach as he tries to pluck them), and Sisyphus and his stone. These are, indeed, the sole instances of shades undergoing punishment in Hades; indeed, the passage is so anomalous that, even in antiquity, it was regarded with suspicion, and the critic Aristarchus (among many others down to the present) regarded it as spurious. Book 12 deals with the twin horrors of Scylla and Charybis (12.73f.), followed by the Sirens (165.f). Circe herself provides a memorable description of Scylla:
“In that cavern Skylla lives, whose howling is terror. Her voice indeed is only as loud as a new-born puppy could make, but she herself is an evil monster. No one, not even a god encountering her, could be glad at that sight. She has twelve feet, and all of them wave in the air. She has six necks upon her, grown to great length, and upon each neck there is a horrible head, with teeth in it, set in three rows close together and stiff, full of black death. Her body from the waist down is holed up inside the hollow cavern, but she holds her heads poked out and away from the terrible hollow, and there she fishes, peering all over the cliffside, looking for dolphins or dogfish to catch or anything bigger, some sea monster, of whom Amphitrite keeps so many; never can sailors boast aloud that their ship has passed her without any loss of men, for with each of her heads she snatches one man away and carries him off from the dark-prowed vessel.” (12.85–100) Sure enough, Scylla snatches six of Odysseus’ men (he appears to have an endless supply) as they pass by her (12.245f.). Charybdis appears to be
nothing more than the embodiment of a whirlpool. There is, curiously enough, no physical description of the Sirens (the notion that they are halfhuman and half-bird derives from their depiction on various surviving works of art, presumably of a later date than the Odyssey). Circe had called them “enchanters of all mankind” [12.39–40]), but the wax that Odysseus puts into the ears of his men allow them to escape the Sirens’ fatal song. All the leading Greek tragedians—Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.E.), Sophocles (496?–406/5 B.C.E.), and Euripides (485?–406 B.C.E.)— broached the supernatural in their plays, although in widely varying manners and degrees. It is unfortunate that we have only seven plays each by Aeschylus and Sophocles, out of the dozens they wrote over their long careers, but even the plays that survive provide tantalising hints of the manner in which they approached the supernatural. Aeschylus’ Persae (472 B.C.E.; The Persians), written a few years after the Greeks’ remarkable victory over the Persians at Salamis in 480, introduces what is presumably the first ghost in Western tragedy—the ghost of Darius (the Persian emperor who was himself defeated by the Greeks at Marathon in 490—a battle in which Aeschylus had fought—and died in 485). Darius does little but lament the destruction of the Persian army and fleet, but it is significant that the chorus is indeed afraid of his very appearance: “I shrink in awe from gazing upon thee, I shrink in awe from speaking in thy presence by reason of mine old-time dread of thee” (694– 96), suggesting that, at a minimum, the appearance of a ghost is an anomalous event. As in Homer, Darius is ignorant of what has happened since his death, although in a sense this becomes simply an excuse for his widow Atossa and his son Xerxes to explain the awful fate of the Persians. Darius does state that he comes from “the world below” (697)—one of the first extant indications that Hades is in the underworld. The chief work of Sophocles, from a supernatural perspective, is the Trachiniae (The Women of Trachis; probably staged before 440 B.C.E.). This play deals with the concluding period of the life of the hero Herakles, who has married Deianira and, because of his murder of Iphitus, son of Eurytus, is living in exile in Trachis. A Messenger tells Deianira that Herakles has taken Iole (daughter of Eurytus) as a paramour (379), a point confirmed by Lichas, Herakles’ herald. Deianira is naturally disturbed, but she hopes she can retain Herakles’ love—specifically by the use of a substance given to her by the centaur Nessus. Some time earlier, Nessus,
attempting to rape Deianira, had been killed by Herakles, who sent a poisoned arrow into Nessus’ side. As he is dying, Nessus tells Deianira: “Gather with thy hands The clotted gore that curdles round my wound, Just where the Hydra, Lerna’s monstrous breed, Has tinged the barbèd arrow with her gall. Thus shalt thou have a charm to bind the heart Of Heracles, and never shall he look On wife or maid to love her more than thee.” (572–77) Deianira accordingly rubs this substance over a robe that she then instructs Lichas to present to Herakles. Now Deianira believes that the substance is merely a love-potion that will simply “bind the heart / Of Herakles”; indeed, not long thereafter she frets that she has made a disastrous mistake (“I know not, but I tremble lest deceived / By fond hopes I have wrought a grievous harm” [666–67]). She learns quickly what that “harm” is. She tells the story of how she used a piece of wool to rub the substance over the robe: But as I passed indoors behold a sight Potentous, well nigh inconceivable. It chanced that I had thrown the hank of wool Used for the smearing into the full blaze Of sunlight; with the gradual warmth dissolved It shrank and shrivelled up till naught was left
Save a fine powder, likest to the dust That strews the ground when sawyers are at work— Mere dust and ashes. (693–701) Deianira’s astonished reaction is the clearest indication that she herself has witnessed a supernatural phenomenon. The cataclysm now follows quickly. Hyllus, the son of Deianira and Herakles, states that Herakles, having put on the robe, is experiencing excruciating pain. Deianira promptly kills herself in grief and remorse. It is only at this point that the dying Herakles makes his appearance, dragging his ravaged body onto the stage and telling of the dreadful pain he is feeling (“Again the deadly spasm; it shoots and burns / Through all my vitals. Will it never end, / This struggle with the never-dying worm?” [1081–3]). Aside from a very compressed account of his twelve labours, he tells of the prophecy made by his “sire” (Zeus) that he would be killed not by a living person, but by a dead one (i.e., Nessus). The Trachiniae is a perfect embodiment of the “pity and fear” that governs Greek tragedy, and the plainly supernatural manner of Herakles’ death, caused unwittingly by his own wife, makes it a striking anticipation of much supernatural work in the centuries to come. By an historical accident, we have more plays by Euripides—nineteen —than by the other two tragedians combined. We are accordingly able to get a somewhat better idea of the broad range of topics that the tragedians as a whole broached, although Euripides himself was known in antiquity for his daring, even radical treatments of such issues as feminism, the role of the gods, and so on. Indeed, Euripides developed a reputation even in his own time for religious scepticism, perhaps even atheism—although it is difficult to believe that any of the tragic playwrights, or indeed any of the leading writers or philosophers of the fifth century B.C.E., gave unqualified credence to the Greek pantheon. Some of Euripides’ work embodies what would later be called physical or non-supernatural horror, such as the grisly fate of Pentheus in the Bacchae (405 B.C.E.), who, because he dared to challenge the god Dionysus, was torn to pieces by Dionysus’ servants, the Maenads. Herakles Mainomenos (c. 417 B.C.E.; The Madness of Herakles) is of somewhat
greater relevance. Throughout his life Herakles was dogged by the hostility of Hera, and in this play she incites Herakles into such madness that he kills his wife, Megara, and his children. To the extent that this event is (in the context of the play) unequivocally brought about by the goddess, it cannot from our perspective be considered a supernatural phenomenon. Earlier in the play there is a choral ode that tells of Herakles’ twelve labours. It is unfortunate that these labours are not treated in extenso in any extant work of Graeco-Roman literature, for of course several of them involve manifestly supernatural entities or events—the Hydra; the Nemean Lion, an otherwise invulnerable monster whom Herakles manages to choke with his bare hands; and in particular the final labour, the fetching of the threeheaded dog Cerberus from the underworld. Euripides’ masterwork of horror is Medea (431 B.C.E.). By this time Medea’s reputation as a witch or sorceress was firmly established; and yet, at the outset the reader’s (or viewer’s) sympathy is on her side, as she has been scorned by her husband Jason, who has taken up with a younger woman, Creusa, the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth. Her revenge is to lace a coronet and dress with “poisons” (52), which, when Creusa dons them, causes her extreme pain: Then suddenly we saw a frightening thing. She changed Colour; she staggered sideways, shook in every limb. She was just able to collapse on to a chair, Or she would have fallen flat. Then one of her attendants, An old woman, thinking that perhaps the anger of Pan, Or some other god had struck her, chanted the cry of worship. But then she saw, oozing from the girl’s lips, white froth; The pupils of her eyes were twisted out of sight; The blood was drained from all her skin. (163–70)
It is difficult to know exactly what kind of “poisons” have brought about this effect; but that something highly bizarre is going on is confirmed by the fact that Creon, coming to aid her daughter, somehow sticks to the dress (which by this time has set Creusa’s body on fire), and both perish. The long Messenger’s speech (1136–230) in which this entire episode is related is one of the most powerful and sustained set-pieces of supernatural horror in all Greek literature. One of Euripides’ latest extant works is the Cyclops, the only surviving satyr play. The satyr play was a lighter, oftentimes quite ribald pendant to the trilogy of tragedies performed in the annual dramatic contests in Athens, and its focus on Dionysus or Bacchus (with its consequent emphasis on drinking and sexual licence) structures Euripides’ play in a significant manner. There is nothing, strictly speaking, supernatural about the Cyclops except the very presence of Polyphemus, the Cyclops. The point of interest in this work, from our perspective, is the manner in which virtually the identical scenario found in the Odyssey—the entrapment of Odysseus and his men (here in conjunction with Silenus, an attendant of Bacchus) within Polyphemus’ cave, Polyphemus’ eating of two of Odysseus’ men (described in a quite grisly monologue [557f.]), Odysseus’ plans to get Polyphemus drunk and then stab his eye with a burning wooden stake, and even an elaborate play on words when Odysseus tells the Cyclops that his name is “Outis”—can be used for the purpose of slapstick comedy. By the time we come to the Argonautica of Apollinius Rhodius (295?– 215 B.C.E.), we are in a very different atmosphere from either the Homeric epics or fifth-century Greek tragedy. As one of the most prominent of the Alexandrian poets of the fourth and third centuries, Apollonius and his friend Callimachus adopted a very different attitude to poetry from their predecessors: concerned with displaying their erudition and their sophistication (rather in the manner of such twentieth-century poets as Eliot and Pound), they clearly regarded the tales of Greek myth merely as fodder for the exhibition of their poetical talents. Perhaps Apollonius chose to relate the voyage of the Argo simply because it had not been the subject of any prominent epic (or, for that matter, tragedy) in the past. The result is a work of only intermittent interest—one that in some ways fails to hang together as a unity, but which contains some striking set-pieces. One of the most striking is the story, in Book 2, of the prophet Phineus, who, having offended Zeus, is plagued by the Harpies (their name means “the
snatchers”), who pluck his food away just as he is about to eat it. In many ways this punishment is notably analogous to that of the three notorious characters in Hades, Tityos, Tantalus, and Sisyphus; but Phineus dwells in the very real locale of Bithynia, on the northwestern coast of Asia Minor. Two heroes from the Argo, Zetes and Calaïs, give chase to the Harpies, but the goddess Iris intervenes, saying that they will no longer bother Phineus. It is Phineus who tells the Argonauts of the dangers of the Cyanean Rocks, or the Clashing Rocks. This account—of the immense cliffs that, at the Bosphorus, clash together, crushing any ships that dare attempt to make their way through them—has the flavour of a traveller’s tale, and is perhaps nothing more than a supernaturalisation of the narrowness of the strait at this juncture. The Argo manages to get through, albeit not without difficulty: “Once more the Rocks met face to face with a resounding crash, flinging a great cloud of spray into the air. The sea gave a terrific roar and the broad sky rang again. Caverns underneath the crags bellowed as the sea came surging in. A great wave broke against the cliffs and the white foam swept high above them. Argo was spun round as the flood reached her” (2.565–70). But the most interesting portion of the Argonautica, from our perspective, is the entirety of Book 3, the tale of Jason and Medea. This account deals with the initial encounter of Medea, daughter of King Aeetes of Colchis, whom—it is of some significance to note—the gods cause to fall in love with Jason, and so help him obtain the golden fleece. At the very outset Medea is called “something of a witch” (epei doloessa tetuktai [3.89] —doloessa really meaning subtle or wily). Hecate, goddess of the underworld and of witchcraft, has taught Medea the use of magic herbs, and Medea herself has made a magic ointment from the ichor of Prometheus. This helps Jason overcome the various challenges that Aeetes puts to him— the serpent’s teeth that, when sown, spring up as soldiers, fire-breathing bulls, and so forth. Then, in Book 4, when the golden fleece is found being guarded by an immense snake, Medea fashions a “spell” (4.157) that puts the snake to sleep. The Peri thaumasion (On Marvels) by Phlegon of Tralles (early first century C.E.), a freedman of the Emperor Hadrian, is a prime instance of the accidental nature of the transmission of ancient texts. This text is itself fragmentary, but it is only one example of a minor but apparently popular genre in antiquity—what nineteenth-century scholars somewhat
cumbersomely labelled paradoxography, or accounts of miracles and marvels. This genre goes back at least to the poet Callimachus in the third century B.C.E., and such luminaries as Varro and Cicero evidently dabbled in it; their works, however, do not survive, but Phlegon’s, written in a rather crude and easily understood Greek, does. Phlegon is a kind of Charles Fort of the ancient world, having amassed bizarre and generally preposterous stories of giant bones, women turning into men, monstrous births, and so forth; but his little treatise gains its greatest interest in its opening three chapters, which are humble and not ineffective stories of ghosts. The first and most celebrated one, the tale of Philinnion and Machates, is unfortunately fragmentary, but we can gain some idea of its overall plot from a summary of the story (clearly not invented by Phlegon) in Proclus’ commentary on Plato’s Republic. Proclus dates the events of the story to the reign of Philip of Macedon (r. 359–336 B.C.E.), whereas the extant text of Phlegon fails to provide any date. Proclus goes on to say that a young woman, Philinnion, died shortly after she was married to one Krateros. Six months later she returned from the dead, appearing for several nights to one Machates, “because of her love for him” (quoted in Hansen’s edition of Phlegon, 200), when Machates was staying with her parents. Then she died again, “proclaiming that what she had done was done in accord with the will of the subterranean deities.” This is, aside from the opening segments, largely the tale that Phlegon tells; he has Philinnion state, “It was not without divine will that I came here” (27). She is a surprisingly substantial ghost, as “she ate and drank” (27) with Machates. It is, in fact, not entirely clear why she chose to appear to Machates, as she does not seem to have had any prior relationship with him; or, rather, the true mystery is why Machates was staying with Philinnion’s parents in the first place. In any case, Philinnion’s tomb is opened and, sure enough, it is found empty. This is a remarkable instance of a physical, rather than merely spiritual, resurrection. The other ghost stories in Phlegon are of no particular interest. His treatise was only first translated in full into English in 1996, and the translator, William Hansen, states bluntly that Phlegon “dwells especially on the sensational, the grotesque and the bizarre” (11). Given that Phlegon evidently regards his accounts as true, it is a question whether they should be considered a contribution to supernatural fiction at all; but, as we shall see presently, his little book gained a surprising disciple seventeen hundred years after it was set down.
ii. Supernaturalism in Latin Literature In the realm of weird literature, as in many other realms, the Romans were mere copiers of the Greeks; they took over Greek myth nearly intact, fusing some of the Greek gods with native gods of approximately similar attributes and elaborating upon various Greek myth-cycles in a manner that rarely exceeds the originals in distinction or substance; but by a series of historical accidents, we have some striking examples of weirdness in Latin literature merely because the Greek originals have perished. It is of some interest to note that the first extant instance of supernaturalism (or, rather, pseudo-supernaturalism) in Latin literature is a piece of buffoonery—the Mostellaria of T. Maccius Plautus (250?–184 B.C.E.). This play is generally translated as The Haunted House (from mostellum, a diminutive of monstrum); perhaps a more accurate, if clumsy, rendition would be “Place Where a Strange Entity Appears to Exist.” Of course, there is no ghost or “monster” in this comic play; rather, the ghost is a fabrication by the clever slave Tranio as a means of distracting Theopropides, the father of the wastrel Philolaches, from becoming aware that his son has frittered away a great deal of money by purchasing the freedom of a fetching female slave and giving a succession of lavish parties. Tranio makes no secret of the fact that his purpose is to “frighten his [Philolaches’] father” (421). The plan is to assert that the house has become haunted because its former owner had killed his guest—an appalling crime in Graeco-Roman civilisation and one, therefore, that could plausibly (among the credulous, at any rate) engender the kind of haunting that Tranio is attempting to put over. What is more, Tranio maintains that the guest was actually buried in the house. This, in the slave’s words, is what the spirit of the murdered guest told Philolaches: “Diapontius am I, a guest from o’er the sea. Here do I abide, this house is the abode allotted to me. For Orcus [god of the underworld] hath denied me entrance into Acheron, I having been cut off before my time. I trusted, and I was betrayed. Here was I murdered by my accursed host, for the sake of gold, and in this very house did he
give me secret, unhallowed burial. Hence with you now! Accursed is this house, ’tis a defiled abode!” (497–504) All this sounds plausible enough, but the charade collapses very quickly. The “haunted house” element in Mostellaria comprises a small element of the plot, but to the extent that it is the catalyst for the entire scenario it can be considered significant enough. The fear that Theopropides—in spite of his initial scepticism of the ghost’s appearance to Philolaches in a dream (his repeated queries, “In his sleep?” [in somnis?] suggest that he is initially inclined to interpret the dream merely as a dream and not as a spectral occurrence)—for a time experiences is meant to suggest nothing more than his own credulousness. In spite of Plautus’ racy and slang-ridden prose, clearly reflective of the language of the streets, the manner in which the ghostly phenomena are made the butt of jest suggests a degree of scepticism in even the more uncultivated members of his audience that argues for a substantial level of doubt among the Roman public as a whole as to the reality of supernatural phenomena. It is, indeed, worth comparing this piece with a work of a very different sort written nearly three centuries later—the celebrated letter to Licinius Sura (Letters 7.27) by Pliny the Younger (61?–113? C.E.). This is, of course, the account of a purportedly “real” haunted house. It is remarkable that the otherwise learned and cultivated Pliny can state at the outset his inclination to believe in the existence of ghosts, based in part on a rather absurd story told to him by one Curtius Rufus—a governor’s assistant who claimed that the figure of a woman of immense size appeared to him and announced that she was the spirit of Africa—and in part on the story he proceeds to tell “just as it was told to me” (545). As in Plautus’ play, we are dealing with a house in Athens. It had a bad reputation, as on occasion the clanking of chains could be heard, followed by “the spectre of an old man, emaciated and filthy, with a long flowing beard and hair on end, wearing fetters on his legs and shaking the chains on his wrists” (545). This actually led some occupants of the house to perish in fear, whereupon the house was deserted and lay empty. A philosopher, Athenodorus, comes to Athens and takes note of the house. As in so many later works of Gothic fiction, he decides to spend a night there. He too hears the clanking; then the ghost appears. But being a philosopher, Athenodorus is not frightened. The ghost leads him into the courtyard of the house, then vanishes. The next day
Athenodorus brings city officials to the place and—predictably enough— the bones of the “ghost” are discovered, “twisted round with chains” (547). I repeat my amazement that a figure so obviously civilised as Pliny could swallow this bit of hokum. His purpose, obviously, is not to terrify but to recount a narrative that he genuinely believes to be an indication of the reality of spectres. Several Roman poets made use of ghosts, witches, and lamias (understood variously as witches or sorceresses); perhaps the most noteworthy is Horace (Q. Horatius Flaccus, 65–8 B.C.E.), whose fifth Epode is entirely concerned with Canidia, a witch with “locks and dishevelled head entwined with short vipers” (375), who utters a mad incantation intended to prevent a hapless youth from falling in love with any other woman but her. The poem is richly atmospheric, and Canidia’s evocation of her predecessors in witchcraft—specifically Diana and Medea —adds potency to her incantation. It is difficult to pass over in silence the mad Poem 63 of Catullus (C. Valerius Catullus, 84?–54? B.C.E.), written in a highly unusual metre found almost nowhere in extant Latin poetry and dealing graphically with the selfcastration of Attis, the son and lover of the great mother-goddess Cybele. In the end the poet can only conclude: “Goddess, great goddess Cybele, goddess, lady of Dindymus, far from my house be all thy fury, O my queen; others drive thou in frenzy, others drive thou to madness” (97). Perhaps the subject-matter of this poem is not as distinct from myth as a work of supernatural terror should be, but its vivid first-person depiction of religious frenzy and madness makes it a notable and virtually unique contribution to Latin literature. Also unique, in a very different way, is the Satyricon of Petronius (T. Petronius Arbiter, d. 65 C.E.), the arbiter elegantiae who calmly committed suicide after earning the wrath of his former patron, the emperor Nero. The celebrated werewolf episode in the Satyricon (61–62) is of interest both for numerous details and for the manner in which the story is narrated. A man accompanies a soldier at dawn along a road, as “the moon shone high like noon.” At one point the soldier takes his clothes off, urinates on them, and turns into a wolf. He proceeds to howl and run off into the woods; the clothes, meanwhile, have turned to stone. Later the man hears that a wolf had killed many of the sheep on a farm but had been injured in the neck before he fled. The soldier shows up at an inn, wounded in the neck. This
compact and engaging tale is told by one of Trimalchio’s guests at his banquet, and although he makes evident efforts to depict it as a tale of terror (“My heart was in my mouth, but I stood like a dead man”), the comic undercurrent is unmistakable. It is noteworthy that the narrator is keen on dispelling the incredulity of the assembled guests by vowing to the truth of the account: “Please do not think I am joking; I would not lie about this for any fortune in the world.” The extant text of the Satyricon is perhaps onefifth, or even one-tenth, the size of the total work (it was itself probably left incomplete by Petronius’ death), so possibly it contained other supernatural episodes; but the general tone of this one bespeaks an aggressive scepticism of supernatural phenomena, at least on the part of the refined segments of Roman society. Of the Metamorphoses of Ovid (P. Ovidius Naso, 43 B.C.E.–17 C.E.) it is difficult to speak in small compass, for the entire fifteen books of this epic deal with shape-shifting. Although most of his accounts deal with transformations brought about by the gods, some are of a different sort; and in other cases, the final transformation is only a contrived expedient that allows Ovid to tell several gripping tales of the supernatural, in poetry that is fluid and elegant, if at times glib. We have a half-parodic retelling of the account of Perseus’ slaying of the sea-monster and the rescue of Andromeda (4.663–764), a lengthy account of the witcheries of Medea (7.1–424), a rendering of the transformation of the maiden Scylla into a birdlike monster (8.1–151), and perhaps the most poignant surviving account (although many others must once have existed) of the failed attempt of Orpheus to rescue his dead wife Eurydice from the underworld (10.1–85). Ovid’s purpose is rarely directed toward terror; instead, he seeks to evoke wonder at the transmutation of human to animal. The most celebrated Roman account of a visit to the underworld is of course the sixth book of the Aeneid of Virgil (P. Vergilius Maro, 70–19 B.C.E.), but here terror is even farther from the author’s purpose. At the outset the Sibyl—a witch- or sorceress-like figure—instructs Aeneas on the particulars of his descent (including the pregnant line facilis descensus Averno [6.126]—“the descent to Avernus [the underworld] is easy”—with the implication that the return is of a different order of difficulty). There is considerable horrific imagery in certain aspects of that descent— a deep cave there was
By the dark mere and forest’s gloom, o’er which Nothing that flies could wing a scathless way, Such breath from the black jaws outpouring sped Into the vault of heaven . . . (6.236–41) —followed by a chilling depiction of the monsters he may encounter— Grief and avenging Cares have made their bed; And pale Diseases house, and dolorous Eld, And Fear and Famine, counsellor of crime, And loathly Want, shapes terrible to view, And Death and Travail, and, Death’s own brother, Sleep, And the soul’s guilty joys, and murderous War Full on the threshold, and the iron cells Of the Eumenides, and mad Discord, who With blood-stained fillet wreaths her snaky locks. (6.274–84) But Virgil’s manifest purpose is to lead Aeneas to the shade of his father, Anchises, who utters the imperishable prophecy of Roman greatness that comprises the heart of the book—and which Virgil deliberately confounds at the end of the epic, when Aeneas savagely kills the suppliant enemy Turnus, thereby repudiating Anchises’ command to “spare the defeated” (6.853). It becomes evident that Virgil has consciously imitated numerous facets of Odysseus’ descent into the underworld, most notably in Aeneas’ attempt to embrace Anchises (as Odysseus had attempted to embrace the shade of
his mother). Of some interest is Virgil’s account of the different types of shades in the underworld: aborted fetuses, those doomed to die of false accusations, suicides, and so forth. It is, of course, here that Aeneas has his poignant encounter with Dido, the Carthaginian queen whom he had rejected to pursue his fate as founder of Rome, and of whose death by suicide he had been ignorant until he sees her shade. She refuses to speak to him. It has long been known that the plays of Seneca (L. Annaeus Seneca, 4? B.C.E.–65 C.E.) were a dominant influence on Elizabethan tragedy, in spite of the heavy debt they themselves owe to their Greek originals. Seneca, whose chief work is a succession of distinguished if somewhat rhetorically florid works of Stoic philosophy, made bold to rewrite a number of tragedies by the most celebrated Greek playwrights, infusing them with a degree of over-the-top flamboyance that would have been unimaginable to Aeschylus or Sophocles. But in so doing, he made some interesting emendations of the myths that enhance their supernaturalism. It is instructive to compare Seneca’s treatment of the Herakles/Deianira story, in the play Hercules Oetaeus (Hercules at Oeta; translated in a recent edition as A Cloak for Hercules), with that of his apparent source, Sophocles’ Trachiniae. While the basic outlines of the story are followed, Seneca provides a radically different motivation for some of the central figures. Deianira, in particular, is portrayed as not merely enraged that Hercules has taken Iole as a paramour, but as manifestly wishing to kill her husband with a “spell” (cantus, 469). A Nurse, who figures as a very minor character in Sophocles’ play, takes on a significantly larger role, and in fact presents herself as endowed with supernatural powers: I made the trees leaf out in winter snow and jagged lightning freeze in its sizzling course. I’ve made heavy seas on a calm day and caused fresh springs to rise from desert rocks. I’ve opened wide hell’s gates,
bid spirits speak and Cerberus keep silent, while midnight saw the sun, and day sank, toppled by darkness. Earth and its waters, heaven and Tartarus do my bidding. Nothing holds sway before my chanting; we will break him! My spells will find the way and cause him to bow down. (453–63) In this version, Hercules and others describe in even more gruesome detail the pain he is suffering (“The toxin decomposes / the skin, and the fabric merges with it” [830–31]; “my liver is being scraped dry; persistent fever saps / my blood” [1222–23]; and so forth). The play is of immense length, and it appears that it was expanded at a later date by some other hand. Seneca adheres somewhat closer to his Euripidean model in his version of Medea; but he takes occasion to expand considerably on Medea’s supernatural powers. A Nurse expresses fear that Medea is reciting spells that will harm Jason or Creusa: She prays to Horror to accept her worship, bless her, inspire. Smoke and sulphur rise up from the ground: she breaks them in as if they were purest mountain breezes in Spring, and her exhalations are dreadful. Curses and coughs punctuate one another, and yet she thrives, blossoms, looks much younger, and shines with a beauty that terrifies more than it pleases. (680–90)
Medea, for her part, engages in an invocation to the “gods of the underworld” and the “suffering ghosts of Tartarus” (740–42) as part of an elaborate ritual that will apparently endow the “gifts” (the coronet and robe) she intends to bestow upon Creusa. Significantly, however, the Messenger does little but bluntly report the prompt death of both Creusa and Creon: it is as if Seneca were aware that he had no chance of duplicating the horrific brilliance of the Messenger’s speech in Euripides. Seneca’s Hercules Furens (The Madness of Hercules) in general follows the plot of the Euripides play, but with different emphases that make it more pertinent to our concerns. In the first place, Seneca underscores the hatred of Juno (the Roman version of Hera) for Hercules by summoning up the “secret horrors of the damned” (95–96) from the underworld to battle her nemesis. Seneca also dwells at considerable length on Hercules’ plucking of Cerberus from the underworld, providing a vivid glimpse (probably derived at least in part from Virgil) of the archetypal horrors to be found there: Beyond the Lethe, lies the foul Cocytus, River of Tears, motionless as a swamp, Where starving vultures and the mournful owl Shriek overhead their prophecies of pain. Here in the branches of a black-leafed yew Sits drowsy Sleep, while desperate Famine lies Writhing on the ground, stretching her wasted jaws. Here futile Shame averts his burning face, Always too late, and thin Anxiety Stalks nervously, pursued by dark-eyed Fear. Here is gnashing Pain and black-robed Sorrow,
Trembling Disease and iron-vested War, And, last of all, Old Age, his staff in hand, Tottering forward step by painful step. (679–96) Seneca’s Thyestes is not based upon an extant Greek original, but plays on this theme among both Greek and Latin playwrights surely existed prior to his work. We are here dealing with one of the most gruesome episodes in Greek myth: Atreus, enraged that his brother Thyestes had seduced his wife Aerope, contrives to feed Thyestes a meal consisting of the flesh of his own sons. In the version of the myth that Seneca is following, this hideous event is the result of a familial curse, in that Tantalus—the grandfather of Atreus and Thyestes, and, as we have seen, one of the celebrated victims of punishment in the underworld—once fed the gods a similar meal made up of the flesh of one of his own sons. In Seneca, the Ghost of Tantalus emerges from the underworld to deliver a plaintive monologue before being chased back to Hades by a Fury. It is to be expected that Seneca dwells with the loving attention of a splatterpunk writer on the grisly feast that Atreus prepares for his wayward brother. Seneca’s Agamemnon is an explicit sequel to Thyestes. Here we are introduced to the Ghost of Thyestes, who seeks vengeance against the house of Atreus, including Atreus’ son, Agamemnon. The Ghost again provides an extensive description of the underworld, but otherwise plays no role in the actual action of the play. But Thyestes has his revenge in any case, for Agamemnon is murdered by Aegisthus, the son of Thyestes by his own daughter Pelopia. The Metamorphoses (or Golden Ass) of Lucius Apuleius (2nd century C.E.) is, at least in its title, a deliberate echo of Ovid, although it deals chiefly with only a single metamorphosis—that of a man named Lucius into an ass. Possibly the plural was used because this metamorphosis is preceded by accounts of several other bizarre events, one in particular performed by the female magician (saga) Meroe, who is said to have changed a lover into a beaver, another person into a frog (1.9), and so on. This story is told to Lucius by a traveller named Aristomenes, who goes on to recount the even more bizarre tale of one Socrates, whom Meroe and other witches or magicians killed with a sword wound to the neck, whereupon Meroe
plucked out his heart and sealed up the wound with a sponge. Later Socrates is seen alive, but presently his body gives out, the wound opens, the sponge falls out, and he is dead for good. It should be noted that a companion of Aristomenes immediately expresses scepticism of this outlandish story (“Verily there was never so foolish a tale, nor a more absurd lie than this” [1.20]), but Lucius swallows it (“I think nothing impossible” [1.20]). Lucius is, manifestly, attracted to the bizarre: he has expressly chosen to travel in Thessaly because it is the “birthplace of sorceries and enchantments” (2.1). Later, he is staying with a man named Milo whose wife, Pamphile, has the reputation of being a witch. Lucius, for his part, finds the situation fascinating (“I . . . was curious and coveted after such sorcery and witchcraft” [2.6]). A slave girl, Fotis, with whom Lucius has been carrying on a sexual dalliance expounds Pamphile’s witcheries at length and at one point tells him of an elaborate incantation she once uttered. Lucius now wishes to watch Pamphile in action, and he and Fotis presently see Pamphile turn herself into an owl. Lucius states that he wishes to be turned into an owl; but Fotis anoints him with the wrong ointment, and he turns into an ass instead. The rest of the novel becomes an adventure story in which Lucius is constantly attempting to eat some roses (although it is never explained that doing so will change him back into a man) while being beset by all manner of difficulties. At long last, after praying to Isis, he eats some roses offered by a priest and resumes his own form. The fact that, in the very first paragraph of the novel, we are told that this is a “Milesian tale” transparently indicates the self-parodic (or, at the very least, comic and even buffoonish) nature of the narrative. The phrase “Milesian tale” (a tale putatively originating in the city of Miletus, in Asia Minor) was used throughout the Graeco-Roman world for a story of unbelievable and probably deceitful character, and its use at the very outset of the Metamorphoses is Apuleius’ tip of the hat that his tongue is being held firmly in his cheek in the entirety of his engaging novel.
iii. The Middle Ages and the Elizabethans With the demise of classical civilisation in the fifth century C.E., our interest must necessarily turn to the barbarian conquerors of Rome. Not much is known about the pre-Christian paganism of the German tribes, especially given that Christian influence began to make itself manifest almost immediately upon the German invaders’ sacking of Rome. Accordingly, the chief literary document of the early medieval period—the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf (8th century C.E.)—proves to be an illuminating glimpse at a dark period. Our interest in Beowulf is focused on the creation of Grendel, a manifest invention of the Beowulf-poet. The entity is described as a descendant of Cain, making his relevance to Christian myth immediately obvious. The poet goes on to remark: “From him [Cain] sprang all bad breeds, trolls and elves and monsters—likewise the giants who for a long time strove with God” (3), a conception that has no particular biblical authority but exhibits the degree to which Cain had by this time become the source of all evil. Curiously enough, in spite of the fact that Grendel is variously described as “evil,” a “monster,” a “hell-demon,” and an “enemy of mankind,” no physical description is offered of him. Midway through the text it is stated fairly planly that both Grendel and his mother—who at one point is called a “monster-wife” (23)—are roughly humanoid: [Hrothgar speaks:] “I have heard landsmen, my people, hallcounselors, say this, that they have seen two such huge walkers in the wasteland holding to the moors, alien spirits. One of them, so far as they could clearly discern, was the likeness of a woman. The other wretched shape trod the tracks of exile in the form of a man, except that he was bigger than any other man. Land-dwellers in the old days named him Grendel.” (24) It is, however, stated that the mother has “claws” (27). Manifestly, both are of immense size, since Grendel is able to eat a man whole (13); moreover,
when Grendel’s mother is killed by Beowulf and his comrades, “Four of them had trouble in carrying [her] head on spear-shafts to the gold-hall” (29). Grendel himself, who is said to be “at war with God” (15), is himself mortally wounded by Beowulf and drags himself back to “his joyless home in the fen-slopes” (15), a marvellous image that foreshadows a long tradition in supernatural literature of finding horror in the untenanted wilderness. There are other horrific creatures in Beowulf, such as some watermonsters (25) and a dragon or two. The latter, “which on the high heath kept watch over a hoard [of treasure]” (39), “flies at night wrapped in flame” (40). It is killed by Beowulf and a colleague; but Beowulf himself is mortally wounded in the fight and dies. Beowulf is a fascinating product of the fusion of Christianity and paganism; the battles with Grendel and the dragon are apparently of Scandinavian origin. It is believed that the poem describes an era about two hundred years before the date of writing. It has also been maintained that Beowulf’s battles with the various monsters can be interpreted allegorically, as embodying various Christian principles; but many of these interpretations are highly strained, and it is probably safest to follow R. E. Kaske in asserting that Beowulf, as a literary figure, chiefly embodies the heroic ideal, and that Grendel represents “external evil, or violence,” while the dragon represents “the greatest of internal evils, the perversion of the mind and will” (126). There is certainly no fusion of traditions in Dante’s Divine Comedy (c. 1314), for he is clearly working within the Christian tradition and indeed seeking to convey the truth of that tradition; and while some of the particulars of his envisioned universe—notably the nine circles of hell in the Inferno—are likely to be of his own invention, they are all so subordinated to his Christian philosophy that it is impossible to regard them as independent expressions of his literary imagination. Dante is the prototypical instance of the dangers of regarding a literary work, or any part of it, as “supernatural” when the notion of supernaturalism cannot be said to have been well established: all the horrors of his Inferno are manifestly the product of the God in whom he so fervently believes, and even their nine levels are paralleled by the nine heavenly spheres that lead to Paradise. And yet, the pungency of some of his descriptions cannot be gainsaid. Canto 18 introduces us to Malebolge (literally, “evil pouches”), a “baleful
space” in the middle of which “yawns a pit of great breadth and space” (227). It is populated with a variety of sinners, and “horned demons with great whips [were] lashing them cruelly behind” (229). In the remarkable Canto 25, a serpent seizes upon a hapless sinner and actually fuses bodies with him: “then, as if they had been of hot wax, they stuck together and mixed their colours and neither the one nor the other appeared now what it was before” (309). It is significant that the narrator prefaces this remarkable transformation (probably derived from Ovid’s Metamorphoses) with the cautionary words: “If, reader, thou art now slow to credit what I shall tell, it will be no wonder, for I who saw it scarcely admit it to myself” (309)—a suggestion that, even in the mysterious realm of Hell, incidents of a quasisupernatural cast can occur that strain the credulity even of those who witness them. All this leads to the depiction of Satan in Canto 34: The Emperor of the woeful kingdom stood forth at mid-breast from the ice, and I compare better with a giant than giants with his arms. . . . Ah, how great a marvel it seemed to me when I saw three faces on his head; one in front, and that was red, the two others joined to it just over the middle of each shoulder and all joined at the crown. The right seemed between white and yellow; the left had such an aspect as the people from where the Nile descends. Under each came forth two great wings of size fitting for such a bird, sails at sea I never saw like these; they had no feathers but were like a bat’s, and he was beating them so that three winds went forth from him by which all Cocytus was kept frozen. With six eyes he was weeping and over three chins dripped tears and bloody foam. In each mouth he crushed a sinner with his teeth as with a heckle and thus he kept three of them in pain; to him in front the biting was nothing to the clawing, for sometimes the back was left all stripped of skin. (421, 423) As John D. Sinclair notes in his translation, “The figure of Satan is taken in the main from the common stock of medieval iconography” (429). Dante’s Inferno overall owes much to Graeco-Roman literature, notably Aeneas’ descent into the underworld in Virgil’s Aeneid. Peter S. Hawkins laments that “It is a great pity that Inferno is the only portion of the Commedia most
people read, because the rest of the work serves to melt the Inferno’s deep freeze, to give a sense of hope” (47); but, as with a wide array of literary works both in and out of the Christian tradition, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, it is the horrific parts that have captured the imaginations of centuries of readers and writers, and it is these that continue to colour our views of the literary works and the authors who generated them. The degree to which, in the entire late mediaeval and early modern period, the suspicion of baleful quasi-supernatural forces, chiefly induced by Christian orthodoxy—witches with awesome powers, the Devil and his legions of demons lurking in the shadows and occasionally possessing the bodies of hapless individuals—was accepted even by the educated classes can scarcely be overemphasised. The fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, in both Catholic and Protestant countries, were the heyday of the witchcraft persecutions, and hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children— mostly women—were tried and put to death. It should be recalled that the orthodox belief was that witches had entered into an explicit pact with the Devil, so that their “crime” was not the mere practice of witchcraft but the offence of heresy. It is in the context of this widespread belief in spectres that we should regard the work of the Elizabethan playwrights. These writers—influenced in part, as noted earlier, by the blood-and-thunder of Seneca—enthusiastically made use of both natural and supernatural horror in their plays, but only a few central works need be treated here. The plays of John Webster (1580?–1634?), especially The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1614), have long been notorious for their gruesomeness, but that gruesomeness is of a purely physical sort without the slightest suggestion of supernaturalism, so their relevance to us is quite limited. The White Devil certainly contains more than its share of murder, madness, false imprisonment, and other elements that would become the stock-in-trade of the Gothic novels, but aside from a pseudo-supernatural trick—one character appears to rise from the dead, although it is quickly revealed that the gun that purportedly killed him was loaded with blanks—it features nothing unearthly. The Duchess of Malfi, for its part, is an even more lurid revenge tragedy, containing liberal doses of murder, blasphemy (a cardinal, aside from having a mistress, murders the Duchess with a poisoned Bible), a suggestion of incest, and so forth.
In the end, it is most productive to focus on the supernaturalism found in two of the leading playwrights of the period—William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. Amidst the multitude of supernatural or fantastic phenomena in Shakespeare—the realm of pure fantasy that is the Athens of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the enigmatic monster Caliban in The Tempest, the ghost of Caesar in Julius Caesar, and the like—our chief emphasis must remain focused on the celebrated appearances of ghosts and other supernatural phenomena in Hamlet and Macbeth. Indeed, the most striking thing to observe is the stark differences in the ghostly manifestations in these two plays. There seems no question but that the ghost of Hamlet’s father is meant to be interpreted, in the context of the play, as a real occurrence. In the first place, we are told at the outset that the ghost has appeared twice before (1.1.25), and by both Bernardo and Marcellus, even though Horatio dismisses it as “but our fantasy” (1.1.23). When the Ghost then appears, Horatio not only sees it but attempts to speak to it; but it disappears without utterance. At a later appearance, the Ghost again disappears, and Bernardo remarks: “It was about to speak when the cock crew” (1.1.147). It is at this point that Horatio informs Hamlet of the existence of the Ghost, and Hamlet realises that he must speak to it, so he chooses, not the approach of dawn, but midnight for his vigil; as Horatio remarks, “It then draws near the season / Wherein the spirit held his wont to walk” (1.4.5–6). Again the Ghost enters, and both Hamlet and Horatio see it; later Hamlet and the Ghost appear by themselves, and this time the Ghost speaks, telling the story of his poisoning at the hands of his brother Claudius. It is barely conceivable (as W. W. Greg suggested long ago) that the appearance of the Ghost is a purely psychological phenomenon—a kind of collective hallucination engendered by the superstitiousness of Bernardo and Marcellus, who claim to have seen the Ghost in the first place. But this interpretation is highly strained, for it is difficult to credit how Hamlet could have come by the news of his father’s murder if the Ghost had not told him of it. Moreover, the fact that Horatio, when first seeing the Ghost, states that “It harrows me with fear and wonder” (1.1.44; my emphasis) suggests that a genuinely supernatural phenomenon is taking place, for Horatio clearly believes that ghosts do not and cannot exist, and yet he is confronted with manifest evidence that contradicts his presuppositions (a point that leads to Hamlet’s celebrated utterance, “There are more things in
heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” [1.5.166–67]). It is of some interest to note that the Ghost appears not because, as in so many works of Graeco-Roman literature, it was not given a proper burial—for Shakespeare emphasises that Hamlet’s father was in fact buried in an orthodox Christian rite—but merely because it was the victim of murder. The Ghost itself remarks that it must “walk the night, / And for the day confined to fast in fires, / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burned and purged away” (1.5.10–13). Indeed, part of Hamlet’s hesitation to act upon the ghost’s pleas for revenge rests upon his uncertainty as to whether the ghost is a real phenomenon or either a hallucination or a devil sent to trick or deceive him. When we turn to Macbeth, we are in a very different realm. Shortly after Macbeth has Banquo killed by hired assassins, his Ghost appears—but it is seen only by Macbeth. This is made plain when, at the banquet where the Ghost appears, other characters express puzzlement at Macbeth’s speech and actions: “Here, my good lord. What is’t that moves your Highness?” (3.4.47), Lennox asks in bafflement when Macbeth refuses to sit in the seat designated as his, where Macbeth believes the Ghost is sitting; and Lady Macbeth chides him harshly: “O proper stuff! This is the very painting of your fear” (3.4.60–61). It is plain, therefore, that Macbeth is so consumed with guilt at his murders (he has by this time already killed Duncan as well) that he is envisioning ghosts and goblins pursuing him—a scenario repeated time after time in the subsequent history of supernatural fiction. Presently, Lady Macbeth also appears to suffer hallucinations created by a guilty conscience: her fantasy that her hands are continually stained with blood (“Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand” [5.1.47–48]) leads a Doctor of Physic to lament the “great perturbation in nature” (5.1.9) that is afflicting her. The true supernaturalism in Macbeth is, of course, embodied in the three witches. In their initial appearance, they do nothing more than predict that Macbeth will be king—whereupon they “vanish” (stage direction after 1.3.78). In a sense we can consider this to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, for (forcefully urged by his wife) Macbeth immediately undertakes the murders that lead both to his attaining the kingship and to his ultimate downfall. Even here, however, Macbeth himself speaks of “supernatural soliciting” (1.3.130) in reference to the witches’ prophecy. But the second appearance of the witches (4.1) is of considerably greater interest. Here they
acknowledge that Hecate is their mistress (although the actual apperance of Hecate at 4.1.39–43 is regarded as an interpolation) and, more pertinently, make various cryptic prophecies—such as that “Macbeth shall never vanquished be until / Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill / Shall come against him” (4.1.92–94)—that Macbeth believes only enhances his position, for they seem contrary to nature and therefore of no effect. It should be noted that the actual playing out of these prophecies does not involve any supernaturalism (the one about Great Birnam Wood refers merely to soldiers that have disguised themselves with tree branches, so that it looks to Macbeth as if the wood itself is approaching him), but the witches’ knowledge of these future events is clearly supernatural. Some sidelights on Shakespeare’s distinctive use of the supernatural can be gleaned from a study of his sources. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet probably between 1600 and 1602. The Hamlet story was derived from Saxo Grammaticus’ Historiae Danicae (a treatise in Latin first published in 1514); but this story had no ghost in it. The ghost appears to have been introduced in an anonymous play called Hamlet (now referred to as the UrHamlet) performed no later than 1594. In addition, plays featuring ghosts urging a character toward revenge can also be found in Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (c. 1592) and John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (c. 1600; published 1602). In spite of all these antecedents, Shakespeare’s use of the ghost is both more dramatically effective and more convincing than that of his predecessors, who occasionally descended into implausibility or even buffoonery in the presentation of their spectres. As for Macbeth (performed no later than 1606), the story was derived from Holinshed’s Chronicles, which indeed featured the witches—referred to, in a phrase borrowed by Shakespeare, as the “Weird Sisters,” a locution that points to their function as indicators of destiny (the noun weird meaning, in this context, one’s personal fate or destiny)—but no ghost, either supernatural or psychological. Overall, it is difficult to ascertain Shakespeare’s own attitude toward ghostly phenomena or witchcraft. There is evidence that he read both James I’s treatise Daemonologie (1597), which asserted the existence of witches with supernatural powers, and Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), which cast a highly sceptical eye on the witchcraft phenomenon and chastised the (Catholic) church for its persecution of purported witches. The presentation of ghosts and witches in Hamlet and Macbeth is manifestly designed to heighten the dramatic effect
of the action, and little regarding Shakespeare’s own beliefs can be derived from it. Influential as Shakespeare’s plays were upon the subsequent supernatural tradition, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (probably first performed 1592; published 1604) by Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) might have been even more influential. The simplicity of the scenario— Faustus sells his soul to the Devil for unlimited knowledge, comes to regret his decision (especially his decision to reject God and take the side of the Devil), and ends up in Hell—does not diminish the grim power of the several supernatural episodes. The frequent accusation, made during and after Marlowe’s day, that he was an atheist (even if that term were interpreted as meaning his refusal to accept orthodox Christian theology) certainly falls to the ground in Dr. Faustus, which emphatically endorses the Christian notion of sin and punishment and thereby casts a wide influence on much subsequent literature dealing with temptation, forbidden knowledge, and related issues. And yet, to the degree that the play contains faint hints of sympathy for Faustus and a fascination with the unholy knowledge he has obtained, Dr. Faustus also looks forward to the many Faust figures in supernatural fiction who, at a minimum, elicit our respect and awe if not our admiration. In a thunderstorm, Faustus utters an incantation to summon Lucifer and other devils; they (including Mephistophilis) appear, whereupon Faustus acknowledges his worship of them: So Faustus hath already done, and holds this principle: There is no chief but only Beelzebub, To whom Faustus doth dedicate himself. This word “damnation” terrifies not me, For I confound hell in elysium. (1.3.55–59) Not long thereafter, Faustus signs over his soul to Lucifer by signing his name in blood:
Lo, Mephistophilis, for love of thee I cut mine arm, and with my proper blood Assure my soul to be great Lucifer’s, Chief lord and regent of perpetual night. View here the blood that trickles from mine arm, And let it be propitious for my wish. (1.5.53–58) Lucifer later shows Faustus the seven deadly sins, each of whom delivers a brief monologue emphasising its baneful character. Faustus, however, ends up frittering away the twenty-four years he has been given by Lucifer to gain unholy knowledge and to utilise Mephistophilis as his servant. As the time for his inevitable damnation approaches, Faustus begins expressing regrets for his decision: Though my heart pant and quiver to remember that I have been a student here these thirty years, oh would I had never seen Wittenberg, never read book. And what wonders I have done all Germany can witness, yea all the world, for which Faustus hath lost both Germany and the world, yea heaven itself, heaven, the seat of God, the throne of the blessed, the kingdom of joy, and must remain in hell for ever. Hell, oh hell for ever. Sweet friends, what shall become of Faustus, being in hell for ever? (5.2.46–55) But of course it is too late. Throughout the play, the characters of the Good Angel and the Evil Angel appear, acting respectively as Faustus’ conscience and, as it were, his imp of the perverse. The latter now reveals Hell to him: Now, Faustus, let thine eyes with horror stare Into that vast perpetual torture-house.
There are the furies tossing damned souls On burning forks. Their bodies broil in lead. There are live quarters broiling on the coals That ne’er can die. This ever-burning chair Is for o’er-tortured souls to rest them in. These, that are fed with sops of flaming fire, Were gluttons, and loved only delicates, And laughed to see the poor starve at their gates. But yet all these are nothing. Thou shalt see Ten thousand tortures that more horrid be. (5.2.126–37) The devils carry Faustus down to Hell. Dr. Faustus might be said to be the only Elizabethan tragedy whose very foundation is supernatural. It is true that, in their varying ways, the supernatural episodes in Hamlet and Macbeth are catalysts for the subsequent action, but supernaturalism does not occupy the forefront of the action in those works as it does in Dr. Faustus. The source of the Faust story is a matter of some controversy; evidently Marlowe derived it from a German work (now apparently lost) that served as the basis for an English translation entitled The English Faust Book (1592). But whatever the source, Marlowe has written a gripping play of overreaching and punishment that, however closely it may be tied to religious orthodoxy, set an example for countless supernaturalists of subsequent centuries to follow. iv. Milton and the Eighteenth Century The later seventeenth century, in England and the Continent, was not notable for the production of even proto-supernatural literature: the dominance of Puritanism in England spelled the demise of the thriving
Elizabethan drama, and no one is likely to consider the various monsters populating John Bunyan’s allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678–84)— most notably the fiend Apollyon—as anticipating any significant trends in weird fiction, since these entities are so plainly tied to Christian tradition. Much the same could be said for the one undeniable literary classic of seventeenth-century England, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667); but, just as in the case of Dante’s Inferno, the force of Milton’s imagination allowed his Christian-based visions to cast a much broader shadow over subsequent literature, weird and otherwise, than Bunyan’s. Our interest is almost entirely restricted to Book 2, the detailed description of Satan and his imps in Hell. Let it pass that Milton’s theology departs from Scripture in significant regards; taking a few hints from Revelation and later Protestant tradition, Milton has fashioned an image of Hell that permanently entered the pictorial imagination of Western culture. What strikes us about his depiction is the degree to which it is indebted, for many facets of its imagery, to the monsters of classical antiquity, notably as found in Homer and Virgil—a point that is suggested even in Book 1, with the introduction of Satan and his crew: Thus Satan talking to his nearest Mate With Head up-lift above the wave, and Eyes That sparkling blaz’d, his other Parts besides Prone on the Flood, extended long and large Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge As whom the Fables name of monstrous size, Titanian, or Earth-born, that warr’d on Jove, Briareos or Typhon, whom the Den By ancient Tarsus held . . . (1.192–200)
The pattern continues in Book 2, where the vision of Hell melds with that of Hades: Thither by harpy-footed Furies hal’d, At certain revolutions all the damn’d Are brought: and feel by turns the bitter change Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce, From Beds of raging Fire to starve in Ice Thir soft Ethereal warmth, and there to pine Immovable, infixt, and frozen round, Periods of time, thence hurried back to fire, They ferry over this Lethean Sound Both to and fro, thir sorrow to augment, And wish and struggle, as they pass, to reach The tempting stream, with one small drop to lose In sweet forgetfulness all pain and woe, All I one moment, and so near the brink; But Fate withstands, and to oppose th’ attempt Medusa with Gorgonian terror guards The Ford, and of itself the water flies All taste of living wight, as once it fled
The lip of Tantalus. (2.596–614) The powerful bleakness of Hell is patent even to those who do not ascribe to Milton’s theology: A Universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good, Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, inutterable, and worse Than Fables yet have feign’d, or fear conceiv’d, Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimeras dire. (2.622–28) Milton himself would probably have been appalled to think of himself as some kind of antecedent of supernatural literature, for, in spite of its vivid colouring, his Hell was to him a real and therefore natural place; but with the decline of religious orthodoxy in the eighteenth century and beyond, his frankly lurid painting of the underworld could be relished for what in fact it is—an unfettered exercise of the imagination. As for “The Apparition of Mrs. Veal” (1706) by Daniel Defoe (1660– 1731)—or, to give it its full (and significant) title, “A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal”—there is (as in the case of Phlegon above) some reason to question its inclusion in a study of supernatural fiction, because it is evident that Defoe did not consider it a work of fiction at all. (There is, incidentally, some small doubt whether the tract, published anonymously, even is by Defoe, but the general consensus is that it is.) This simple, straightforward account of a revenant—Mrs. Veal, the day after she died, comes back from the dead and spends two hours with her friend Mrs. Bargrave, whom she has not seen in two and a half years; Mrs. Bargrave, presumably not knowing of Mrs. Veal’s death, talks to her in a normal fashion and only later learns that she has been speaking with a dead person
—became immensely popular in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, chiefly for the bland and deadpan manner of its narration; but a consideration of Defoe’s other works on the same general theme makes it quite clear that he himself was attempting to pass it off as a true account. What is more, Defoe himself did not invent any of the details or characters in the story. Rodney M. Baine, in his admirable (if somewhat credulous) study Daniel Defoe and the Supernatural (1968), points out that various accounts of the “apparition” had appeared in newspapers in late 1705, well before Defoe’s pamphlet appeared, and there is no reason to think that Defoe has embellished any part of the account. Moreover, in spite of the fact that Defoe himself (assuming that the first-person narrator of the account is he) states that “I can avouch for her [Mrs. Bargrave’s] Reputation . . . and I can confirm the Good Character she had from her Youth, to the time of my Acquaintance” (134), there is no evidence that Defoe himself interviewed Mrs. Bargrave or derived the account of Mrs. Veal other than at second hand. One hopes that the long-discredited belief that Defoe fabricated the entire story as a means of selling an English translation of Charles Drelincourt’s Christian’s Defence against the Fears of Death (1675) can finally be put to rest. It is true that Defoe mentions Drelincourt on three separate occasions in his little screed, and it is also true that the work was used as a preface to later editions of Drelincourt; but that is the extent of the connexion with the French theologian. And yet, as Baine points out, Defoe himself clearly sympathised with Drelincourt’s overall message and may well have found in the account of Mrs. Veal a means of combating the growing scepticism in regard to revenants and other such phenomena—a scepticism that Defoe, in his cultural conservatism, appears to have regarded as tantamount to atheism. In the preface to his account he states plainly that “The use which we ought to make of it is, to consider, That there is a Life to come after this, and a Just God, who will retribute to every one according to the Deeds done in the Body” (134). The first part of this statement—assuming the Mrs. Veal story to be true—may be sound enough, but the second does not seem to follow, for it is difficult to ascertain how Mrs. Veal has gained any kind of posthumous reward or punishment for her actions in life. A quick glance at Defoe’s other works on the same general subject —“Vision of the Angelick World” (1720), about the presence of angels in
human history and their role in human affairs; the twin treatises The Political History of the Devil (1726) and A System of Magick (1726), about the Devil and fallen angels, which Defoe regards as unquestioned realities; and, most pertinently, Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727), on apparitions found both in Scripture and in more recent human history—make it quite clear that Defoe was, to be frank, a highly credulous believer in such anomalous phenomena and therefore found the story of Mrs. Veal appealing on more than one level. In the end, it appears that Mrs. Bargrave either invented the story of Mrs. Veal’s apparition herself, or perhaps actually believed that she had been so visited. In Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Samuel Johnson—himself a man of serious, even tormented piety who longed to believe in an afterlife that would mitigate his terrors of death—maintained that “I believe the woman [Mrs. Bargrave] declared upon her death that it was a lie” (quoted in Baine 94); this does not appear to be the case, and Johnson is recording the view at second-hand. In any event, Defoe clearly believed Mrs. Bargrave and hoped that her account was true. “The Apparition of Mrs. Veal,” for all its celebrity, is a poor piece of work even if regarded as purely fictional; for Defoe’s account is so excessively circumstantial, and narrated in such a sober-faced manner, that it fails to develop any emotional resonance. Henry Fielding, in Tom Jones (1749), ridiculed the Mrs. Veal story in passing, and his depiction (Book VII, ch. 14) of Tom Jones himself pretending to be a ghost is merely meant to poke fun at the hapless wight who is taken in by Jones’s charade. The first chapter of Book VIII purports to be a learned disquisition on “the marvellous,” and its main point (“I think it may very reasonably be required of every writer that he keeps within the bounds of possibility” [346]) would, if carried out, mean the effective demise of supernatural literature. Fielding does, however (granting that his entire discussion is cloaked in flippancy) make the important point that actual gods (in the pagan tradition) or God (in the Christian tradition) should not be evoked frivolously, or perhaps at all; instead, “The only supernatural agents which can in any manner be allowed to us moderns are ghosts; but of these I would advise an author to be extremely sparing” (347). That last bit of advice is certainly sensible, although it required Poe and his successors to carry it out. In the one other passage in the eighteenthcentury British novelists that has been singled out—the visit by Renaldo, count de Melvile, to the grave of his beloved, Monimia, at midnight (ch. 62
of Tobias Smollett’s Count Fathom [1753])—there is not even the hint of supernaturalism, although an effective atmosphere of gloom is created. The age was not welcoming of the supernatural: the commencement of empirical science heralded by the establishment of the Royal Society in 1662, the philosophy and physics of Locke and Newton, and the hardheaded rationalism of Dr. Johnson rendered the early and middle eighteenth century stony ground for ghosts and goblins; the same can be said of the Continent, where the philosophes’ aggressive clearing away of the supernatural foundations of the Christian religion may have dissuaded creative artists from using ghosts and goblins even as literary symbols. Some literary historians have argued that the school loosely termed the “graveyard poets” had an influence on subsequent supernatural literature, but the best that can be said of this movement is that it represented a kind of bridge between the Christian supernaturalism of Milton and the romanticism of the later eighteenth century. The poets of this school (if it can really be said to be a school), obsessed in some degree with the phenomenon of death, emphasised the melancholy or moral aspects of death rather than its dreadful of fearful aspects. As Patricia Meyer Spacks has noted in her important study of eighteenth-century supernatural poetry, Milton was, at least early in the century, a significant influence on many minor poets of the period, as in, say, Elizabeth Rowe’s “The History of Joseph.” The few noteworthy supernatural poems of this era— John Gay’s “A True Story of an Apparition” (1720), which contains some splendid horrific imagery; David Mallet’s ballad “William and Margaret” (1730), a powerful fusion of love and death; William Collins’s “Ode to Fear” (1746), heavily indebted to classical literature for its images—do not, cumulatively, amount to much. And the two most noteworthy instances of graveyard poetry, Edward Young’s Night-Thoughts (1742–45) and Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), have little or nothing of the horrific about them. It is, accordingly, not a little surprising that, even in the wake of James Macpherson’s “Ossianic” poems of the 1760s—prose translations or paraphrases of ancient Gaelic poetry, full of wild imagery just on this side of supernaturalism—a humble little book published on Christmas Day of 1764 would initiate a literary genre that would ultimately gain immense popularity and, on occasion, produce works of substantial merit; but such are the vagaries of literary history.
III. The Gothics
i. Types of Gothic Fiction In the second edition (1765) of The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole subtitled his novel “A Gothic Story.” Although it is difficult to deny that Walpole did, after a fashion, give birth to the Gothic novel, we should be aware of a number of caveats surrounding this conventional assertion. Firstly, as James Watt reminds us (Contesting the Gothic 3), most novels under consideration here did not refer to themselves as “Gothic” novels but as “romances,” reflecting a desire to segregate themselves from the realistic novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. Moreover, Gothic fiction took its own time in developing; Walpole’s work did not suddenly impel a legion of imitators. In Frederick S. Frank’s definitive listing of 422 Gothic novels (1762–1826) in Marshall Tymn’s Horror Literature (1981), we can gain a good idea of how quickly the Gothic novel proliferated; broken down in roughly five-year intervals, the rate of production is as follows: 1764–1770: 4 1771–1775: 6 1776–1780: 3 1781–1785: 7 1786–1790: 30 1791–1795: 47
1796–1800: 107 1801–1805: 71 1806–1810: 64 1811–1815: 26 1816–1820: 38 1821–1826: 5
(The total excludes a certain number of titles that are undated.) It can be seen from this breakdown that the true explosion of Gothic novels did not begin until the late 1780s, probably through the simultaneous influence of Ann Radcliffe and the founding in 1790 of William Lane’s Minerva Press, which was consciously designed to capitalise on the burgeoning interest in Gothic fiction, with the result that it published some of the worst drivel ever seen in English literature. What, exactly, does it mean to refer to a work as a “Gothic novel”? Linda Bayer-Berenbaum provides a compact definition of the term:
The word Gothic originally referred to the Northern tribes that invaded Europe during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. The term was later applied by Renaissance critics to the style of architecture that flourished in the thirteenth century, because these critics thought that the style had originated with the Goths. This architecture was held in low esteem during the Renaissance, and the word Gothic therefore developed pejorative connotations suggesting the uncouth, ugly, barbaric, or archaic. It implied the vast and the gloomy, and subsequently denoted anything medieval. Later the word indicated any period in history before the middle or even the end of the eighteenth century. Gothic loosely referred to anything old-fashioned or out of date. The ruins of Gothic cathedrals and castles were naturally termed Gothic, and soon any ruins—the process of decay itself—became associated with the Gothic as did wild landscapes and other mixtures of sublimity and terror. (19) It is because, among many other reasons, the Gothic novels almost always drew upon the mediaeval past—with the exception of Frankenstein and a few others—that the term “Gothic” should be restricted to the works of this period and not extended to the entire range of supernatural, horrific, or weird fiction. It is, moreover, inaccurate and misleading to speak of “The Gothic Movement” as if it were a monolithic entity. Even though the great majority of the immense number of Gothic novels produced during this period (1764–1820) were crass imitations of a handful of illustrious exemplars, the movement (if it can even be called that) quickly fragmented into a number of discrete subgenres that had relatively little to do with one another. Even if a few of the leading figures of Gothic fiction made a token acknowledgement to The Castle of Otranto as the fons et origo of their own work, it becomes clear that several writers, especially Clara Reeve and Ann Radcliffe, consciously departed from the model established by Walpole and worked in very different directions; by the end of the period (roughly coinciding with the emergence of the greatest of Gothic novels, Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, 1820), Walpole’s absurd little novel had largely been forgotten as a model, even if it continued to be reissued and read. By around 1795, indeed, Radcliffe in turn had become
both the pinnacle of Gothicism and the springboard for still further deviations from it, especially in the work of M. G. Lewis and, later, William Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley, and Maturin. We can, therefore, identify the following types of Gothic fiction: 1) The pure historical novel set in mediaeval times; 2) The mingling of the historical novel with the supernatural tale; 3) The “explained” supernatural, where the supernatural is suggested only to be explained away (usually implausibly) as the result of misconstrual or trickery; 4) The Byronic Gothic—a shorthand term not intended here to suggest any direct connexion with Byron, and featuring a focus on a hero/villain who seeks to transcend human bounds; 5) What I would call the Christian supernatural, where supernaturalism is manifested in a specifically Christian mode, either by the utilisation of the actual figure of the Devil, or of demons in league with the Devil, or subordinate entities (evolving out of Christian theology, even if their ultimate origin predated Christianity) such as witches and vampires. Of these schools, I will have nothing to say of (1)—whose pioneering work was Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783–85)—and relatively little of (2), since I maintain that these works had a very slight influence on the progress and development of subsequent supernatural literature, or even the nonsupernatural literature that might conceivably be considered horrific. Indeed, it is worth noting that, of the 422 works cited in Frank’s list, only 106 can be clearly identified as supernatural. It is true that Frank’s idea of what constitutes “Gothic romance” is rather generous, including everything from Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (but, oddly, excluding Faust) to the pornographic novels of the Marquis de Sade to the early historical novels of Sir Walter Scott to Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangeureuses, but
nevertheless the relative paucity of actual supernaturalism in the fiction of this period is noteworthy. The Gothic novel has been the subject of an immense amount of scholarly and critical work—far out of proportion, in my judgment, to its merits on abstractly aesthetic terms. This work ranges from largely historical accounts—including the pioneering studies by Edith Birkhead (The Tale of Terror, 1921) and Eino Railo (The Haunted Castle, 1927)—to those utilising every conceivable sort of theoretical presupposition, including recently even that of queer theory (see Haggerty, Queer Gothic). Of this work I intend to say little, as the great majority of it is not germane to my overriding purpose of establishing the nature, purpose, and function of the supernatural in literature. There is, perhaps, some justification in the critical obsession with this period, since the Gothic novel really was a dominant branch of prose fiction during this time and is therefore of significance to the overall literature and culture of Europe and the United States; but the single-minded focus on this period, conjoined with the deliberate ignorance of subsequent strains of supernaturalism that are of immensely higher literary calibre, makes one seriously doubt the critical judgments of the scholars involved. I shall have more to say about their theorisings about the nature and direction of Gothic fiction at the end of this chapter; for now it may be more productive to gain some idea of the particulars of the leading instances of Gothic fiction before offering some theoretical proposals of our own.
ii. The Historical Supernatural What led Horace Walpole (1717–1797) to write The Castle of Otranto, self-published at his “Gothick” castle at Strawberry Hill on Christmas 1764 (although the first edition bears the date of 1765), under the pseudonym Onuphrio Muralto, is not entirely clear, in spite of the massive amounts of documentary evidence that Walpole himself left, chiefly in the form of correspondence, that would presumably allow an understanding of his chameleonlike and perhaps contradictory personality. Son of the prime minister Robert Walpole, he himself failed at politics and so devoted himself to being a wealthy dilettante, an occupation he practised with verve. His literary tastes can be gauged more from what he disliked than from what he liked; his letters are filled with somewhat captious criticisms of the novels of Fielding and Richardson, and also of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. His disdain for Pope, the icon of eighteenth-century classicism, does suggest a certain fatigue with rationalism unenlivened by imagination. Even Walpole’s building of Strawberry Hill is not without its paradoxes and ambiguities. He did not begin fashioning it into a neo-Gothic castle until around 1750; and prior to this date he can still be seen expressing approval of Palladian classicism in architecture and using “gothic” as an epithet. Moreover, Walpole cannot be said to have invented or initiated the taste for Gothic architecture: as James Watt reminds us, the Gothic revival had really commenced as early as the 1740s (Contesting the Gothic 15). But the decade and a half of work on his castle prior to writing The Castle of Otranto does appear to have had some effect in casting Walpole’s mind to the mediaeval past and in seeing in that past a fruitful source for literary composition. His canonical utterance on the matter occurs in a letter to Horace Mann when he first conceived the idea of building the castle: “I am going to build a little Gothic castle at Strawberry Hill. If you can pick me up any fragments of old painted glass, arms or anything, I shall be excessively obliged to you. I can’t say I remember any such thing in Italy, but out of old châteaus I imagine one might get it cheap, if there is any” (10 January 1750). Three years later he followed up on the idea:
I thank you a thousand times for thinking of procuring me some Gothic remains from Rome; but I believe there is no such thing there: I scarce remember any morsel in the true taste of it in Italy. Indeed, my dear Sir, kind as you are about it, I perceive you have no idea what Gothic is; you have lived too long amidst true taste, to understand venerable barbarism. You say, ‘you suppose my garden is to be Gothic too.’ That can’t be; Gothic is merely architecture; and as one has a satisfaction in imprinting the gloomth [sic] of abbeys and cathedrals on one’s house, so one’s garden on the contrary is to be nothing but riant, and the gaiety of nature. (Letter to Horace Mann, 27 April 1753) There is much of interest here—notably the notion that Gothic was inherently barbaric in contrast to the “true taste” of the Georgian era—but it may be worth focusing on Walpole’s blandly dogmatic utterance that Gothic could apply only to architecture. Manifestly, in the course of the next fourteen years he came to realise that Gothic could be a literary mode also —hence The Castle of Otranto. There is little need to rehearse the plot of this well-known work. It features the attempts of Manfred, the usurper of the noble line of Otranto and occupier of the eponymous castle, to preserve his ill-gotten gains either by fostering the marriage of his son, Conrad, or (when Conrad is supernaturally killed) by himself marrying in order to produce an heir that will retain the castle and title. The would-be bride, Isabella, stoutly refuses, thereby becoming the first in a drearily long line of Gothic heroines whose chief aim is to preserve their chastity. The topos of the nobleman in peasant garb is also introduced in the figure of Theodore, who predictably enough turns out to be the true heir of Otranto. He haunts the dank underground chambers of the castle and seeks a way to topple Manfred; but the job is done for him by the ghost of Alfonso (the father of Theodore and the man whom Manfred had killed to gain the castle and title), who spectacularly destroys the castle at the end and declares Theodore’s title to the line. Where exactly Theodore is to exercise his newly found noble lineage, now that his castle is in ruins, is a matter left for another day. In many ways, Walpole’s two prefaces to the novel—the first appearing with the original (pseudonymous) edition, the second added to the edition
of 1765, when Walpole admitted his authorship—are considerably more interesting than the text itself. The first preface is, in essence, designed to foster a hoax. Here Walpole maintains that the novel that follows is a document printed in 1529 but written sometime between the period 1095 and 1243 (these dates being chosen on the grounds that the incidents in the novel must have occurred between the first and second crusades, “or not long afterwards” [39]). Walpole goes on to say that “The principal incidents are such as were believed in the darkest ages of Christianity” and that the original Italian author meant to “confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions” (39). This is all very clever; for what Walpole is doing, manifestly, is trying to have his cake and eat it too. At the very time that he is exhibiting incidents of the wildest improbability (chiefly by reason of the implausible supernatural manifestations that occur throughout the novel) he is simultaneously stepping back and declaring that only the deluded ignoramuses of the Middle Ages could have believed them—at least, in a literal sense. Walpole concludes this preface by declaring: “I cannot but believe that the groundwork of the story is founded on truth” (42)—but it is not entirely clear what element of “truth” Walpole sees, or intends the reader to see, in the work. If the “moral” of the work, at least on a surface level, is thought to be the comforting adage that usurpers to noble titles (and property) never prosper, then perhaps Walpole is assuming—at least as a gesture to readers who might be inclined to doubt that a tale of such bizarre supernatural occurrences can have any “truth” to it at all—that the core of the tale, shorn of its supernaturalism, can still retain aesthetic validity by the moral soundness of Manfred’s ultimate overthrow and the reinstatement of Theodore to his ancestral estates. There is only one problem with this formulation: it is in fact impossible to make any sense—aesthetic or moral or otherwise—of The Castle of Otranto except by reference to its supernaturalism. Indeed, the one thing that can be said for the novel is that its supernatural manifestations are strictly in accord with its moral (or, perhaps more precisely, social) purpose. The very first such incident—the much ridiculed appearance of the gigantic helmet that kills Manfred’s son Conrad—is an instance of this; for this event causes the unscrupulous Manfred to seek to marry Isabella himself and thereby preserve his lineage—and his control of the castle—by the production of a presumably legitimate offspring. But at the very moment when Manfred utters this plan to the horrified Isabella, another supernatural
incident occurs: “At that instant the portrait of his grandfather, which hung over the bench where they had been sitting, uttered a deep sigh and heaved its breast” (59). Again, when Manfred threatens to execute Theodore, the plumes of the gigantic helmet shake. And, of course, in the climactic scene when the ghost of Alfonso emerges and destroys the castle, he speaks balefully to Manfred, “Behold in Theodore, the true heir of Alfonso!” (145). In effect, every supernatural occurrence is intended only secondarily for a moral purpose; its prime motivation is the aristocratic aim of preserving the legitimacy of succession at Otranto. All this makes one see the truth of Sir Walter Scott’s passing comment regarding Walpole’s “respect for birth and rank” (Lives of the Novelists, 191). The question of what led Walpole to write this curious little novel in the first place may cast some light on the central question of his attitude toward his work, and specifically toward the supernatural phenomena featured in it. It seems obligatory to cite the dream that Walpole maintained—several months after the novel was published—inspired the work: I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that 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 armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands, and I grew fond of it . . . (Letter to William Cole, 9 March 1765) This, quite frankly, does not tell us much of value; indeed, it is not at all clear what the strange phrase “Gothic story” could refer to. It may not even refer to literature, for it is not certain what previous literature Walpole could have read to inspire the dream. At this point we may as well discuss Thomas (or John) Leland’s Longsword, Earl of Salisbury: An Historical Romance (1762), which some overzealous historians and critics claim is the true founding work of the Gothic novel. But while Longsword is of some interest as perhaps being the first British historical novel—it is set in the time of Henry III—its influence on subsequent Gothic literature appears to be minimal. As K. K. Mehrotra wrote long ago, Longsword “was
surprisingly negligible as a stimulating and inspiring force” (52). There is, in fact, not a single mention of Longsword in any of the tens of thousands of surviving letters written by Walpole. Aside from the fact that there is nothing supernatural in Longsword, the mere fact that it deals with a usurper to a noble title who is ultimately overthrown does not seem sufficient to serve as a central influence on The Castle of Otranto. The editor of a recent edition of the novel, John C. Stephens, writes with charitable enthusiasm that “virtually all of the stock romantic devices—that would be repeated ad nauseam in the Gothic tales of terror—are present in more or less prominence in Longsword” (xviii), but, as Mehrotra points out, the fact that the novel was not reprinted until 1831, after the Gothic movement had already fizzled out, makes one doubt its direct influence on any writer aside perhaps from Clara Reeve, who consciously acknowledged a debt to it. We are still no nearer to Walpole’s motivations in writing The Castle of Otranto, and perhaps they can never be known. But Walpole’s casual mention in the original preface to the novel that supernatural phenomena “are exploded now even from romances” may offer a clue. This idea is picked up in an important passage in the second preface: It was an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, 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 success. Invention has not been wanting; but the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life. But if in the latter species Nature has cramped imagination, she did but take her revenge, having been totally excluded from old romances. The actions, sentiments, conversations, of the heroes and heroines of ancient days were as unnatural as the machines employed to put them in motion. (43) Here again one can sense Walpole’s attempt to have his cake and eat it too. It is, however, difficult to imagine how he is adhering to the canons of “modern” romance, except by his assertion (and that is all it is) that he is attempting a faithful, “realistic” depiction of life in the mediaeval era. But Walpole is manifestly responding to those many critics who, in the wake of
the realistic novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett (all of whose works he disliked), condemned the use of anything fantastic or supernatural as beyond the pale. Samuel Johnson was prototypical in this regard: The works of fiction, with which the present generation seems more particularly delighted, are such as exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind. . . . Its province is to bring about natural events by easy means, and to keep up curiosity without the help of wonder: it is therefore precluded from the machines and expedients of the heroic romance, and can neither employ giants to snatch away a lady from the nuptial rites, nor knights to bring her back from captivity; it can neither bewilder its personages in deserts, nor lodge them in imaginary castles. (Rambler No. 4 [31 March 1750]) This could have been written as a review of The Casle of Otranto, and indeed many reviews of the novel took exactly this tack in criticising it. But the importance of Walpole’s statement in the second preface is precisely in his vaunting of “imagination” over mundane reality; for in this way Walpole makes clear that, for him, the supernaturalism in his novel was manifestly meant to serve a variety of aesthetic purposes and that neither he nor his readers were expected to take it literally. This is exactly the perspective from which genuine weird literature has been, and must be, written: as I have already stated, the supernatural (in literature) cannot exist without a concrete conception of the natural. And Walpole was, by all accounts, exactly the sort of hard-headed eighteenth-century rationalist who, on the surface, would be least likely to write a supernatural novel. But in fact it was his hard-headed rationalism that led him to write it as a gesture of imaginative liberation. It may also be worth pointing out that Walpole was likely influenced by Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), which not only attempted a defence of the Middle Ages as something other than an era of dense ignorance and religious obscurantism but also sought to interpret the supernaturalism of mediaeval literature symbolically—seeing giants, for example, as representative of oppressive feudal lords, savages as their
hapless dependents, and so forth. Whether Walpole wished a directly Hurdian interpretation of the supernaturalism of The Castle of Otranto is unclear, but his comment on the underlying “truth” of his scenario seems to point in this direction. From this perspective, it is highly interesting to learn, as E. J. Clery has shown, of Walpole’s interest in the so-called Cock Lane ghost of 1762. This nine-days’ wonder—a ghost that purportedly made rattling noises in the room of a young woman who had died there—enthralled London for a time, and many notables took occasion to investigate the matter for themselves. Walpole was one of them, but he did so purely as a lark, in the hope that witnessing the ghostly phenomena might provide him with transient amusement. He wrote with bland cynicism in a letter: The house, which is borrowed, is wretchedly small and miserable; when we opened the chamber, in which were fifty people, with no light but one tallow candle at the end, we tumbled over the bed of the child to whom the ghost comes, and whom they are murdering there by inches in such insufferable heat and stench. At the top of the room are ropes to dry clothes—I asked, if we were to have rope dancing between the acts?—we had nothing; they told us, as they would at a puppet-show, that it would not come that night till seven in the morning—that is, when there are only prentices and old women. We stayed, however, till half an hour after one. (Letter to George Montagu, 29 January 1762; quoted in Clery 25) Those “prentices and old women” are exactly analogous to the people of the “darkest ages of Christianity” who, in Walpole’s mind, would have swallowed the surface events of The Castle of Otranto. (There is a further irony in all this, in that the religiously tormented Samuel Johnson desperately hoped that the Cock Lane ghost was a real phenomenon, since he among others hoped it might counteract the spread of religious scepticism that he found so baleful. Alas, the Cock Lane ghost was revealed to be a hoax about a month after its announcement.) Does The Castle of Otranto actually amount to much, judged purely as an aesthetic entity? Perhaps it is unfair to gauge it in light of the subsequent
supernatural tradition that it helped to foster, although this seems to be exactly what H. P. Lovecraft did when he urged a friend in 1927: Have you read The Castle of Otranto? If not, don’t! Let the summary in [Eino] Railo[’s The Haunted Castle] continue to give you a “kick”, for the original certainly won’t! Walpole was too steeped in the classical tradition of the early 18th century to catch the Gothic spirit of the latter half. His choice of words and rhythms is the brisk, cheerful Addisonian one; and his nonchalant and atmosphereless way of describing the most prodigious horrors is enough to empty them of all their potency. Thanks to the secondhand way in which you received it, you have become the first reader to get a genuine shiver from Otranto since the days of Sir Walter Scott! (Selected Letters 2.231–32) There is some truth to this, especially as regards the “cheerful, Addisonian” prose; but no doubt Lovecraft would have agreed that the spareness of the novel’s prose led to a compactness and absence of floridity that more prolix writers like Francis Lathom, Charlotte Dacre, and even M. G. Lewis could not have imagined. The great drawback of most Gothic novels—The Castle of Otranto, Frankenstein, and a very few others excluded—is their appalling length; even the greatest of them, Melmoth the Wanderer, is nearly crippled by this failing. What Lovecraft complained of was Walpole’s unwillingness—it is an open question whether it was an inability—to lay the emotional groundwork for the supernatural. The events simply happen, coming quite literally out of thin air. The immediate effect upon the reader is presumably startlement and wonder, but repeated doses of this kind of thing merely lead to incredulity: whatever sense of reality the novel may initially have had— and it cannot have had much—breaks down rapidly. Walpole, of course, has covered himself by his elaborate preface whereby he has himself eschewed belief in the supernatural manifestations, but this is a feeble aesthetic excuse that cannot conceal the implausible plethora of supernaturalism in a work of scarcely 40,000 words. Walpole’s other creative works need not detain us long. The Mysterious Mother (1768) is a non-supernatural and rather unpleasant drama about
mother-son incest, while the six (or seven) stories that make up Hieroglyphic Tales (1785?) are all very amusing parodies of the Arabian Nights and fantastic romance in general; but as the volume was only privately published in a minuscule number of copies, its influence on subsequent weird fiction was nil. Although The Castle of Otranto was popular—there were three editions in the first two years of its publication—it did not, as I have stated, immediately inspire widespread imitation; a point emphasised by the fact that a full sixteen years passed between the third edition of 1766 and the fourth edition of 1782. Walpole is explicitly and cordially mentioned in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s essay “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror” (1773), but the “fragment” that she appends to the essay as an instantiation of its basic principles, “Sir Bertrand,” seems to owe little to The Castle of Otranto. This potent bit of supernaturalism is a pure nightmare in which Sir Bertrand stumbles into an apparently deserted “antique mansion” (46), is startled by all manner of bizarre occurrences— including a blue flame that recedes as he approaches it—and then, when the flame is suddenly extinguished: “A dead cold hand met his left hand, and firmly he 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 with his” (47). This scene remains effective today, and is not deflated by the rather curious ending (if it can be called that) where Sir Bertrand comes upon a sumptuous banquet tended by nymphs. The overall effect of this work is really that of a fairy tale or folktale; if De Quincey had written it, we would have called it a drug-delirium. A later work did indeed draw upon Walpole, although not in a manner that pleased him. I refer, of course, to Clara Reeve’s The Champion of Virtue (1777), retitled in the 1778 edition as The Old English Baron. The original title in fact more faithfully reflects the character of the work, for it is heavily moralistic and its one (or two) supernatural episodes only seek to underscore its moral message. To the extent that Walpole’s own supernaturalism does very much the same thing, Reeve can be considered a genuine disciple of him; but Reeve and Walpole each avowed a mutual dislike of the means that the other used to achieve their effects. In her preface to the second edition, Reeve announces that her novel is indeed “a literary offspring of the Castle of Otranto” (3) and, alluding to its
subtitle (“A Gothic Story”), calls it “a picture of Gothic times and manners” (3). But she goes on to deliver a gently worded but no less severe condemnation of the excessive supernaturalism in Otranto: . . . the machinery is so violent, that it destroys the effect it is intended to excite. Had the story been kept within the utmost verge of probability, the effect had been preserved, without losing the least circumstance that excites or detains the attention. . . . 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, which I wished might continue to the end of the book; and several of its readers have confessed the same disappointment to me. The beauties are so numerous, that we cannot bear the defects, but want it to be perfect in all respects. (4–5) This is really quite remarkable—particularly her taking up Walpole’s term “imagination” and using it against him. Walpole had his revenge, at least in private correspondence, when he wrote: “I cannot compliment the author of The Old English Baron, professedly written in imitation, but as a corrective to The Castle of Otranto. It was totally void of imagination and interest; had scarce any incidents; and though it condemned the marvellous, admitted a ghost—I suppose the author thought a tame ghost might come within the laws of probability” (letter to William Cole, 17 August 1778). In all honesty, both Reeve and Walpole are largely correct—Walpole especially so. The Old English Baron does not read well, largely because Reeve’s flaccid prose and heavy-handed moralism never allow the tale to come to life. Set in the “minority of Henry VI” (7)—i.e., around 1422—it duplicates The Castle of Otranto in having a tyrannical usurper (Sir Walter Lovel), a man of evidently low birth who is in fact the rightful heir to the castle (Edmund Twyford), and sundry other features that are clearly meant to recall Walpole’s novel. Where Reeve apparently prided herself was in restricting herself to a single supernatural episode, in which the ghost of the original owner of the castle, Lord Lovel, appears to Edmund as he has taken up the challenge of
spending three nights in the deserted wing of the castle where, it turns out, Lovel was murdered. Actually, this supernatural phenomenon is presented in the form of a dream that Edmund experiences during his first night in the deserted wing—but of course, if it is thought to have been a dream rather than an actual apparition, the dream itself could be considered supernatural in its prophetic quality. This entire episode is cleverly prepared for by a previous incident in which Lady Lovel, after being told by Sir Walter that her husband had been killed in battle, later “broke out into passionate and frantic exclamations; she said, that her dear Lord was basely murdered; that his ghost had appeared to her, and revealed his fate: She called upon Heaven and earth to revenge her wrongs; saying, she would never cease complaining to God, and the King, for vengeance and justice” (34). For her pains she is herself killed by Sir Walter after she refuses to marry him; this, in fact, is why the wing is deserted: Soon after [the death of Lady Lovel], it was reported that the Castle was haunted, and that the ghosts of Lord and Lady Lovel had been seen by several of the servants. Whoever went into this apartment were terrified by uncommon noises and strange appearances; at length this apartment was wholly shut up, and the servants were forbid to enter it, or to talk of any thing relating to it: However, the story did not stop here; it was whispered about, that the new Lord Lovel was so disturbed every night that he could not sleep in quiet; and, being at last tired of the place, he sold the Castle and estate of his ancestors, to his brother-in-law the Lord FitzOwen, who now enjoys it, and left this country. (34–35) So, in reality, there are several supernatural incidents, even if they all stem from the central crime of the murder of Lord Lovel; for the appearance of his ghost to his wife is manifestly supernatural and not merely the product of mental perturbation as a result of her grief; and the servants’ witnessing of the ghosts of the two of them is also clearly suggested to be real and not delusional. It is worth noting that, as Eino Railo long ago pointed out, the one innovation in The Old English Baron is the introduction of the deserted wing of section of a castle, and its subsequent haunting.
Walpole’s and Reeve’s novels inspired any number of imitations, adaptations, and so on; but by the late 1780s a new force emerged that would take the Gothic novel in a very different direction.
iii. The Explained Supernatural It might seem on the surface that the reduction of Walpole’s plethora of supernaturalism to Reeve’s single supernatural element would lead naturally to the entire elimination of the supernatural in the work of the most influential of Gothic writers, Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823); but it is by no means clear how or why Radcliffe devised her “explained” supernatural, in which bizarre phenomena are repeatedly suggested only to be resolved by natural means, chiefly as the result of misunderstanding on the part of the character viewing the phenomenon or some kind of trickery on the part of the villain engendering it. In the near total absence of documentary evidence regarding Radcliffe’s literary purposes or influences, we are left with the texts of her six novels and not much else; and of these, several can be dispensed with as being irrelevant to the development of weird fiction. Her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), is a pure historical tale about the feuding of two Scottish clans. A Sicilian Romance (1790) introduces the dubious and implausible trope of the nuptial prisoner —a hapless woman who, because she refuses to die, prevents her husband (or, in this case, a ruthless and violent woman who seeks to replace her) from remarrying. Charlotte Brontë’s employment of the trope in Jane Eyre is made only slightly less ridiculous by her literary artistry. Radcliffe hit her stride with The Romance of the Forest (1791), in many ways her most satisfactory—or, at any rate, enjoyable—novel. The number of elements borrowed from Walpole and Reeve are almost too numerous to tally. The topographical focus of the novel is not a castle but an abbey, where La Motte, a fugitive from justice, holes up with his family. He has a chance encounter with a young woman, Adeline, who is the presumable focus of the reader’s sympathy and the first of Radcliffe’s put-upon virgins; the threat to her virtue coming not from La Motte, but from Marquis de Montalt, who is using the abbey as the focus of a ring of robbers. The curious thing is that Adeline appears to have a succession of prophetic dreams regarding underground passages, a young man imprisoned in a deserted room, and so forth: it is difficult not to interpret these dreams other than supernaturally, for in the course of time we are shown exactly such
passages, including a hidden room with a trunk containing a skeleton and a crumbling manuscript, and at last a personable young man, significantly named Theodore, who ultimately rescues her. It is true that the pseudo-supernatural incidents in The Romance of the Forest are few and far between, but they are ably handled. And yet, perhaps the most interesting feature of the novel is the degree to which Radcliffe— in a deeper echo of the sceptical Walpole than she was perhaps aware of— systematically distances herself from the superstitiousness that leads some of her characters to suspect supernaturalism where there is none. La Motte declares at one point: “Stories of ghosts and hobgoblins have always been admired and cherished by the vulgar” (367), and similar sentiments of eighteenth-century rationalism are peppered throughout the work. Adeline herself, early on, expresses disdain for the life of a nun—“Too long I had been immured in the walls of a cloister, and too much had I seen of the sullen misery of its votaries, not to feel horror and disgust at the prsopect of being added to their number” (290)—that emphatically underscores the religious scepticism of her day and serves as a striking anticipation of the grim working out of this theme in Denis Diderot’s La Réligieuse (1796). Of Radcliffe’s most celebrated novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), it is difficult to speak charitably. It is rare to encounter a literary work so undeserving of its fame, for this is a virtually unreadable novel that highlights all the worst features of Radcliffe’s work—a mincing, languid prose style that is utterly incapable of generating tension or suspense; a perennial harping on the woes of the virginal heroine that borders on selfparody; and a prodigious, appalling verbosity that is more horrifying than anything she actually puts on stage. Even if this tale of Emily St. Aubert’s struggles with the tyrannous Montoni were a half or a third its length, it would fail to be compelling, for the Gothic novel had already become so stereotyped that the ultimate defeat of Montoni and Emily’s reuniting with her lover, Valancourt, are foregone conclusions. Even Radcliffe’s supposed skill at portraying the natural landscape (a landscape that, as far as the southern Italian scenes are concerned, was purely a product of her imagination and not the result of first-hand experience) and in suggesting the sublime is much exaggerated. What we find instead is Radcliffe’s repeated dropping of the word “sublime” as if that alone would be sufficient to create the sensation in the reader. We have already seen this in The Romance of the Forest, when La Motte, upon first
seeing the abbey and its interior, “felt a sensation of sublimity rising into terror—a suspension of mingled astonishment and awe!” (265). But the preceding description of the abbey does not seem sufficient to have engendered such a sentiment. Similarly, in Udolpho we read of Emily’s first glimpse of the castle: Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle, which she understood to be Montoni’s; for, though it was now lighted up 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. As she gazed, the light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy purple tint, which spread deeper and deeper, as the thin vapour crept up the mountain, while the battlements above were still tipped with splendour. (226–27) But again, we are being told what to feel, rather than being given the elements of landscape and architecture that would allow us to feel these emotions for ourselves. In any case, Radcliffe’s portrayals of “gothic greatness” (whatever that might exactly be) after a time become so conventionalised, and her prose style in describing them is so flat and stereotyped, that they cease to have any effect on the reader. The Italian (1797) is probably Radcliffe’s most artistically finished work; but here there is rarely even the pretence of any pseudosupernaturalism, and the novel is strictly one of star-crossed lovers (Vincentio de Vivaldi and his beloved, Ellena Rosalba) and an evil monk, Schedoni, whom Vivaldi’s mother commissions to keep the lovers apart. The novel contains what are probably the two most striking scenes in Radcliffe’s work (the notorious “black veil” incident in Udolpho not excepted): Vivaldi’s torments at the hands of the Inquisition and Schedoni’s creeping into Ellena’s bedroom to kill her, only to find that she wears a locket containing a picture of . . . himself (he is, unbeknownst to either of them, her father). On occasion Radcliffe attempts to imbue the Inquisition scenes with a certain supernatural menace, as when Vivaldi has a dream in which he sees a monk whom he believes to be Schedoni, but it proves to be someone he has not seen before:
Vivaldi at the first glance shrunk back;—something of that strange and indescribable air, which we attach to the idea of a supernatural being, prevailed over the features; and the intense and fiery eyes resembled those of an evil spirit, rather than of a human character. He drew a poniard from beneath a fold of his garment, and, as he displayed it, pointed with a stern frown to the spots which discoloured the blade; Vivaldi perceived they were of blood! He turned away his eyes in horror; and, when he again looked round in his dream, the figure was gone. (318) Not bad. But moments like this are—apparently by design—very rare in this novel. It seems reasonably clear that the Schedoni figure was inspired by that of Ambrosio in M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796), while the Inquisition scenes may well have influenced Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer—although in that regard Maturin would have had plenty of other examples to draw upon. The one moderately interesting point in Radcliffe’s work is the increasing recency of the settings of each successive work. Whereas The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne is clearly mediaeval in its temporal setting, A Sicilian Romance is definitively dated to 1580, The Romance of the Forest to 1658, The Mysteries of Udolpho to 1584, and The Italian to 1758 —a date less than fifty years prior to the publication of the novel, and not by any stretch of the imagination mediaeval or “Gothic” in an historical sense. True enough, the Inquisition scenes in the novel may create the effect of mediaeval religious tyranny (or, more likely, reflect an anti-Catholic bias that comes to full flower in the work of Charles Robert Maturin), but nevertheless even the pretence of appealing to “Gothic” superstition (a pretence that was, in any case, feeble in the entire lack of convincing tokens of mediaevalism in her other novels) has by now been dropped. The point is of significance in the sense that, once the supernatural (not merely the pseudo- or explained supernatural) is manifested in something approximating the contemporary world, the charade that it is meant to convey merely the crude beliefs of a barbaric period must be dropped and attempts must be made to portray that supernaturalism convincingly. Gigantic helmets dropping irrationally out of the sky would no longer be feasible.
I have referred to Radcliffe as the most influential of the Gothic writers; but her influence was strictly circumscribed to the Gothic period itself. Her brand of explained supernaturalism was quickly seen as an aesthetic dead end; as early as 1811, Sir Walter Scott delivered a fitting epitaph upon it. His manner of expressing his criticism on this point is so much shrewder than I or anyone else could manage that it is worth quoting in extenso: Mrs. Radcliffe, a name not to be mentioned without the respect due to genius, has endeavoured to effect a compromise between those different styles of narrative, by referring her prodigies to an explanation, founded on natural causes, in the latter chapters of her romances. To this improvement upon the Gothic romance there are so many objections, that we own ourselves inclined to prefer, as more simple and impressive, the narrative of Walpole, which details supernatural incidents as they would have been readily believed and received in the eleventh or twelfth century. In the first place, the reader feels indignant at discovering he has been cheated into a sympathy with terrors which are finally explained as having proceeded from some very simple cause; and the interest of a second reading is entirely destroyed by his having been admitted behind the scenes at the conclusion of the first. Secondly, the precaution of relieving our spirits from the influence of supposed supernatural terror, seems as unnecessary in a work of professed fiction, as that of the prudent Bottom, who proposed that the human face of the representative of his lion should appear from under his masque, and acquaint the audience plainly that he was a man as other men, and nothing more than Snug the joiner. Lastly, these substitutes for supernatural agency are frequently to the full as improbable as the machinery which they are introduced to explain away and supplant. The reader, who is required to admit the belief of supernatural interference, understands precisely what is demanded of him; and, if he be a gentle reader, throws his mind into the atitude best adapted to humour the deceit which is presented for his entertainment, and grants, for the time of perusal, the premises on which the fable depends. But if the author voluntarily binds himself to account for all the wondrous occurrences which he introduces, we are entitled to exact that the explanation shall be
natural, easy, ingenious, and complete. Every reader of such works must remember instances in which the explanation of mysterious circumstances in the narrative has proved equally, nay, even more incredible, than if they had been accounted for by the agency of supernatural beings. For the most incredulous must allow, that the interference of such agency is more possible than that an effect resembling it should be produced by an inadequate cause. (“Introduction to The Castle of Otranto” 10–11) To this very little need be added, save that it seems a striking anticipation of Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” (for which see the next chapter). It will become evident that Radcliffe’s influence in general, and her use of the explained supernatural in particular, did not extend much beyond the heyday of the Gothic novel itself. Non-supernatural horror fiction did indeed flourish, but in very different forms—either through the horror engendered by psychological aberration (Poe, Bierce, and their followers) or in the realm of psychological suspense, which really did not gain a foothold until well into the twentieth century and of course did not look back to Radcliffe as a forerunner. One writer who did consciously acknowledge a debt to Radcliffe, but whose own working out of the explained supernatural topos proved to be very different and much more aesthetically viable, was the American Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810). As America’s first professional writer Brown has some claim to historical significance—a claim that might be a bit more difficult to make on the basis of his actual work, which is uneven at best. But Brown is perhaps more interesting for what he tried to do than for what he actually accomplished; for, while adopting the “explained supernatural” of Radcliffe, he did nothing less than to set the stage for the profounder studies of psychological aberration that we find in Hawthorne and, especially, Poe. The busy reader would probably be excused for reading nothing but Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), for it is by far the most compelling of Brown’s novels. Its relation to the fragmentary novella “Carwin the Biloquist” (written in the summer of 1798 just as Brown was completing Wieland, and published by him serially in the Literary Magazine in 1803– 04) is complex and need not concern us; but it is of interest to note that the basic plot of Wieland was clearly based upon an actual incident—a case in
1796 in Tomhannock, New York, where a man named James Yates killed his wife and four children, and attempted to kill his sister, under the influence of religious mania. Brown used this incident as the basic framework of Wieland, although inserting as a backdrop the quasi-Byronic hero Carwin, the ventriloquist, who (apparently) causes Theodore Wieland to hear voices that instruct him to kill his wife and children. In his “Advertisement” to the novel, Brown states that his novel “aims at the illustration of some important branches of the moral constitution of man” (3), a locution by which Brown manifestly intends to suggest a psychological analysis of all the characters involved—Wieland himself, his sister Clara, who emerges as a remarkably strong figure of dogged rationalism in the face of horror and tragedy, and the enigmatic Carwin—by means of lengthy monologues, either written or spoken, that occupy much of the novel. The setting in rural Pennsylvania is much more effective than any of Radcliffe’s concocted portrayals of Italy, but far more compelling are the portrayals of character. Each of the central figures emerges crisply and vividly, chiefly by their own words. It should be pointed out that the entire novel purports to be a testament (or testimony) written by Clara to clarify in her own mind the tragedies befalling her family, and perhaps to purge herself of their horrific potency. Her father, himself a religious fanatic, died in spectacular fashion from spontaneous combustion; Brown is careful to add a footnote appealing to journals in France and Italy attesting to the reality of this phenomenon, so that we are clearly not to take it as a supernatural occurrence. But its baneful effect upon Clara’s brother is evident: His father’s death was always regarded by him as flowing from a direct and supernatural decree. It visited his meditations oftener than it did mine. The traces which it left were more gloomy and permanent. This new incident had a visible effect in augmenting his gravity. He was less disposed than formerly to converse and reading. When we sifted his thoughts, they were generally found to have a relation, more or less direct, with this incident. (35) As the novel progresses, a large proportion of space is given to the fundamentally irrelevant recounting of the falling out between Clara and
Pleyel (Wieland’s brother-in-law) over his suspicions that she is in league with Carwin. But after Wieland’s horrible murder of his wife and children, attention refocuses on him, and we are given his lengthy written account of the voice he heard (which he believes to be the voice of God) instructing him to commit these dreadful acts. The common assumption, made both by Clara herself and by the great majority of readers and scholars of the novel, is that Carwin, the “biloquist,” managed to throw his voice in such a way as to lead Wieland to his crimes. But, when Clara confronts him at the novel’s conclusion, he explicitly denies responsibility in the matter: “Catherine [Wieland’s wife] was dead by violence. Surely my malignant stars had not made me the cause of her death; yet had I not rashly set in motion a machine, over whose progress I had no controul, and which experience had shewn me was infinite in power? Every day might add to the catalogue of horrors of which this was the source, and a seasonable disclosure of the truth might prevent numberless ills. . . . “I have uttered the truth. This is the extent of my offences. You tell me an horrid tale of Wieland being led to the destruction of his wife and children, by some mysterious agent. You charge me with the guilt of this agency; but I repeat that the amount of my guilt has been truly stated. The perpetrator of Catherine’s death was unknown to me till now; nay, it is still unknown to me.” (215–16) What I believe Carwin means is this: his reference to “set[ting] in motion a machine” alludes, apparently, to the fact that he did in fact throw his voice on one occasion early in the novel, when both Wieland and Pleyel heard it, as Pleyel notes: “‘Well,’ said he, at length, ‘What do you think of this? This is the self-same voice which I formerly heard; you are now convinced that my ears were well informed.’ “‘Yes,’ said I, ‘this, it is plain, is no fiction of the fancy.’” (44)
At this point we are in fact led to suspect the supernatural, but the moment we learn of Carwin’s ventriloquist abilities (75), it becomes plain that his was the voice that Wieland and Pleyel heard. But what Carwin is asserting to Clara at the end is that he was not responsible for the voice that urged Wieland to kill his wife and children; and, in fact, there seems much truth in the assertion. Indeed, Wieland had himself already made clear that he had been given to “hearing voices” well before Carwin ever emerged on the scene. Carwin apparently is maintaining that the one occasion when he made Wieland hear a disembodied voice aggravated Wieland’s religious mania to the point that he heard a voice (one generated by his own mind, it is needless to add, not by a supernatural force) that instructed him to kill his wife and children. The point is perhaps not of overwhelming significance, but it frees Carwin from at least a certain share of guilt in the whole affair. Indeed, Carwin is by no means the toweringly evil Byronic or Montonian villain of early Gothic fiction; his characterisation—especially in his exculpatory remarks to Clara—is far more complex than that. While he does admit to “a passion for mystery, and a species of imposture” (201)—what Pleyel had earlier referred to scornfully as an “imp of mischief” (123)—he portrays himself as more sinned against than sinning (“My life has been a life of hardship and exposure” [203]). And, when Wieland breaks in on their conversation and threatens to kill Clara, Carwin uses his ventriloquism to save her, whereupon Wieland kills himself. For all its power as an exhibition of the baneful effects of religious mania, Wieland does not contain quite enough psychological analysis of its central figure to qualify as the first genuine novel of psychological terror. The palm for that probably remains with James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). But the work does represent a significant, and positive, shift from the absurd Radcliffian convention of suggesting the supernatural and accounting for it lamely by human contrivance. The phenomenon of ventriloquism had been used at least twice in previous works of Gothic fiction—Elizabeth Bonhote’s Bungay Castle (1796) and Eliza Parsons’s The Mysterious Warning (1798), the latter often assumed to have inspired Brown; but in Wieland the device becomes, in reality, only a minor component of the novel and does not detract from the psychological aberration that in fact led Wieland to commit his crimes. In this sense, Carwin’s exculpation from guilt in those crimes gains aesthetic
significance, for had Wieland really been led to kill his family merely by the contrivance of a thrown voice, rather than from the madness that afflicted his mind, then the phenomenon would indeed have come across as a cheap trick. As it is, Wieland’s madness becomes the genuine efficient cause of his actions; and if there had been greater emphasis on the particulars of that madness—something we do not, curiously, find even in his own written testament—then the novel would have a good claim to be considered a work of psychological terror. The other novels by Brown are less impressive. Arthur Mervyn (1799) seeks to find horror in a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia. Ormond (1799) uses the yellow fever epidemic as a backdrop for a brutal tale of murder and seduction. Edgar Huntly (1799) is somewhat more interesting in its attempt to draw upon the phenomenon of sleepwalking as a substitute for the supernatural. Opening strikingly with the tableau of a sleepwalker digging a hole in the woods, the novel tells of the protagonist, Huntly, learning the tale of Clithero Edny, a servant of a “musing and melancholy deportment” (25) who both walks and talks in his sleep. Clithero tells a long story of being befriended by a Mrs. Lorimer, then inadvertently killing her brother in self-defence and, in an access of madness, almost killing Mrs. Lorimer herself. He flees into a cave—an obvious metaphor for the dark recesses of his own disordered mind. Much later Huntly, who himself becomes afflicted with somnambulism, expostulates: “How little cognizance have men over the actions and motives of each other! How total is our blindness with regard to our own performances!” (278). Evidently sleepwalking is the metaphor that putatively instantiates this proposition, but in reality the phenomenon of sleepwalking is not treated extensively enough in the novel to hammer the point home, nor (again) is there sufficient psychological analysis of either Clithero or Huntly to see in Edgar Huntly a genuine novel of psychological terror. Of Ann Radcliffe’s other disciples, still less need be said. No one would pay the least attention to Francis Lathom (1777–1832) had Jane Austen not mentioned his Midnight Bell (1798) in Northanger Abbey. This novel, although crippled by excessive length and absurdly implausible coincidences, does create a moderately effective sense of supernatural mystery around whether a spectral force could be tolling a bell at midnight in the tower of a haunted castle; and the ultimate naturalistic revelation— that the tolling is being done by the wife of the castle’s owner, a count, who
mistreated her—is not as fatally disappointing as many analogous moments in Radcliffe’s own work. Lathom, who worked in the theatre as both an actor and a playwright, found it to his taste to lay the horror on thick. He was active as a writer for more than forty years, and it has been said that some of his historical Gothics may have influenced Sir Walter Scott. But not one of them is worth reading in its own right, as his entire corpus of work is largely imitative of Radcliffe, Lewis, or other luminaries. The Marquis von Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries (1796) had the distinction of being cited in both Northanger Abbey and in Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey, but it is a nearly unreadable, interminable, and preposterous piece of work. In its telling a convoluted tale of a secret society of Illuminati it perhaps had some influence on the almost equally unreadable novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Still less need be said of other Radcliffe imitators such as Eliza Parsons, Eleanor Sneath, and Sarah Wilkinson.
iv. The Byronic Gothic The cardboard villains of Walpole and Radcliffe—Manfred, Montoni, Schedoni, and the rest—however influential they may have been, are in fact testaments to the literary deficiencies of their authors. As we have seen, Brockden Brown’s Carwin is a much more complex figure, to such an extent that he can scarcely be called a “villain” at all, but Brown’s influence on subsequent Gothic, especially the British school, was minimal. The figure of the towering colossus of a man (it is almost always a man) who seeks more-than-human control of life, knowledge, and society is of course not specific to the Gothic novel, and its roots can be traced to the hubristic characters of Graeco-Roman tragedy and elsewhere. But some of the Gothic novelists lent a particular distinction to the figure by bestowing supernatural powers upon him. We might start our discussion of this figure with William Beckford’s Vathek (1786/1787), if only because there seems no other place to fit this anomalous work into the history of Gothic fiction. The publication history of this short novel is well known. Beckford (1760–1844), an even more wealthy, dilettantish, and architecturally ambitious Englishman than Horace Walpole—his construction of an immense Gothic tower at his palatial residence at Fonthill Abbey exceeded even Walpole’s dallyings with Strawberry Hill—wrote Vathek in French in 1782, shortly after his twentyfirst birthday. He later appointed the scholar Samuel Henley to translate the work, with the understanding that the French text would be published first; but a scandal involving Beckford and his cousin’s wife led him to depart for the Continent, and Henley, understandably worried that his translation would never be published, issued it himself in the summer of 1786, full to the brim with his learned and ineffably pompous notes. Henley attempted to maintain that the work was a translation from an actual Arabic manuscript. Beckford, not pleased with this turn of events, hastily arranged for the publiction of the French work in Lausanne at the very end of 1786 (dated 1787); a more polished edition appeared in Paris in 1787. Given that Beckford worked closely with Henley on the English translation, and
especially given that he made numerous revisions to it in the edition of 1816, the translation has rightfully been taken as definitive. That this “Arabian tale” (conte Arabe) bears little relation to the entire corpus of Gothic fiction is clear; its influences hark back to the Arabian Nights, to Voltaire’s “philosophical tales,” and perhaps to Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas: Prince of Abyssinia (1759). Indeed, by making its protagonist, the Caliph Vathek, a grandson of Haroun al-Raschid (151), Beckford consciously connects his work not only to the Arabian Nights but to the historical record. (Vathek was in fact an historical figure.) But by today’s standards the work would be considered a fantasy: even in those scenes (the novel has no chapter divisions) prior to Vathek’s descent into halls of Eblis (the Islamic hell, presided over by Eblis, the Islamic devil), the supernatural is not portrayed realistically. It would seem that Vathek’s punishment is the result of impiety. The curious entity labelled the Giaour manifestly becomes a tempter figure when he intones to Vathek: “‘Wouldst thou devote thyself to me? adore the terrestrial influences, and abjure Mahomet? On these conditions I will bring thee to the Palace of Subterranean Fire. There shalt thou behold, in immense depositories, the treasures which the stars have promised thee; and which will be conferred by these Intelligences whom thou shalt thus render propitious’” (169). Vathek’s own mother, the sorceress Carathis, declares that her purpose is to “obtain favour with the powers of darkness” (183). And Beckford is careful to add a solemn moral at the very end: “Thus the Caliph Vathek, who, for the sake of empty pomp and forbidden power, had sullied himslef with a thousand crimes, became a prey to grief without end, and remorse without mitigation” (234–35). The problem with this is that the account of Vathek’s “crimes” has been narrated with such sly irony and humour, and with such an obvious sense of relish at the immensity of Vathek’s appetite for perversion, that the tackedon moral comes to seem unconvincing. At the same time, one cannot quite believe that Beckford intended us to regard the “moral” parodically, for the novel does develop a sense of dark and forbidding terror in the memorable scene in the halls of Eblis, shedding entirely the at times buffoonish humour of the earlier portions. It is perhaps best to consider the only “purpose” of Vathek as an exercise of Beckford’s fantastic imagination—and, perhaps, for his skill at incorporating facets of his own life and circumstances into the work. His
friend Cyrus Redding quotes Beckford as saying to him, in regard to the hall of Eblis: Old Fonthill house had one of the largest halls in the kingdom, lofty, and loud echoing, whilst numerous doors led from it into different parts of the building, through dim, long, winding passages. It was from that I formed my imaginary hall—the Hall of Eblis being generated out of that in my own house. Imagination coloured, magnified, and invested it with the Oriental character. All the females mentioned in Vathek, were portraits of those in the domestic establishment at Old Fonthill, their imaginary good or ill qualities exaggerated to suit my purpose. (Memoirs of William Beckford 1.244) Beckford scholars have busily traced many other features of the text to his wide-ranging readings in Oriental and pseudo-Oriental literature; indeed, the most celebrated image in the novel—the denizens of the hall of Eblis, with their hearts encircled by an inextinguishable flame—was borrowed from Thomas-Simon Gueullette’s Mogul Tales (1736) (see Mahmoud, “Beckford, Vathek and the Oriental Tale” 73). Beckford also borrowed from himself. He had written a text entitled The Long Story when he was seventeen (it was published in 1930 as The Vision), and it clearly contains numerous anticipations of some of the elements and themes of Vathek. While Vathek is an eccentric masterpiece par excellence, I cannot see that it had the least influence on any subsequent weird writing for a century or more. This judgment appears to be confirmed by Roger Lonsdale, editor of the Oxford edition of the novel, who writes: “. . . there was nothing in Vathek which obliged the [original] reviewers to connect it with contemporary ‘Gothic’ tendencies. Although later literary historians have frequently resorted to the assertion that such a relationship exists, it is not easy to see that Vathek sets out to exploit the imaginative terror, the suspense or psychological shock tactics which were entering the English novel at about this time” (“Introduction” to Vathek xxv). Of course, Vathek was written at a time when the Gothic movement had barely begun, and some scholars have maintained that the later popularity of Ann Radcliffe and, to a lesser extent, Matthew Gregory Lewis eclipsed Beckford’s mode
of exotic fantasy. There seems to be some truth to this, for the novel itself was certainly not very successful: there were no editions in English between 1786 and 1809, and the latter edition was in large measure made up of unsold sheets of the earlier edition. Frederick S. Frank, however, has made a case for the much greater relevance of Vathek to the Gothic tradition (see Frank’s “The Gothic Vathek”). His argumentation occasionally falls into the class of special pleading, but I believe his contention that the novel’s exemplification of the “Gothic villain” had a significant influence on subsequent Gothic literature can be accepted—with some reservations. Scholars have traced the degree to which Beckford himself identified with the figure of Vathek as representing a kind of emancipation from the bounds of social convention that he himself sought in his life, so that it can hardly be maintained that Beckford intended us to be unequivocally disapproving of Vathek’s mission. Nevertheless, aside from Beckford’s influence on Byron (who championed Vathek in the 1810s and manifestly borrowed from it in his poetic dramas, The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos), Southey, Thomas Moore (Lalla Rookh), and Disraeli (Alroy), it is difficult to trace Vathek’s direct influence on the Gothic novel. As for the Episodes of Vathek—three appallingly long and not very compelling tales of love and damnation—perhaps Beckford was wise in omitting them from the text, as they seriously weaken the final scene of the novel. The tales were lost for nearly a century and a half until they were rediscovered by Lewis Melville in 1909, who arranged for an English translation of the French text and published it in 1912. William Godwin (1756–1836) added to the Byronic villain topos with St. Leon (1799). Of his other novel generally considered Gothic, Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), we need not be concerned, for it is a programmatic work designed to illustrate Godwin’s theories of social justice in its tale of a lowly servant, Caleb Williams, who acts as a kind of detective to prove his aristocratic master, Falkland, a murderer but ends up being pursued himself and is finally thrown into a dungeon. The novel is not ineffective, but in the entire absence of supernatural machinery it can at best be called a tale of psychological suspense, and perhaps even one of the earliest detective novels, although its intellectual substance is far greater than that designation would suggest.
St. Leon is a somewhat different matter. Godwin announces at the outset that his purpose in the novel is to “mix human feelings and passions with incredible situations” (xxiii). The implication is that we are in for some supernaturalism, and sure enough we are. The novel is a searching treatment of the elixir of life, although more in its effects than in its essential nature. Beginning in the year 1520, it tells of Reginald de St. Leon, who is so beset with a succession of misfortunes that he and his family are reduced to penury. In the year 1544 a man bearing the name Francesco Zampieri encounters St. Leon and tells him that he is endowed with great powers. As St. Leon sums it up apocalyptically: The talent he possessed was one upon which the fate of nations and of the human species might be made to depend. God had given it, for the best and highest purposes; and the vessel in which it was deposited must be purified from the alloy of human frailty. It might be abused and applied to the most atrocious designs. It might blind the understanding of the wisest, and corrupt the integrity of the noblest. It might overturn kingdoms, and change the whole order of human society into anarchy and barbarism. It might render its possessor the universal plague or the universal tyrant of mankind. (135) That power is, of course, the “art of multiplying gold, and the power of living for ever” (160), and once Zampieri has bestowed it upon St. Leon, he can die in peace—and does so. In relating the knowledge that Zampieri has passed on to him, St. Leon appears to be a bit coy (“The detail of these secrets I omit; into that I am forbidden to enter” [160]), but probably no amount of mystical or alchemical mumbo-jumbo could have convinced even the most credulous of late eighteenth-century readers that St. Leon actually had such a power. As it is, the novel’s chief purpose is to reflect upon that power’s effects; for it becomes quickly evident that, although the ability to make gold lifts St. Leon’s family out of poverty, the mystery of his sudden acquisition of wealth creates a variety of other difficulties that, as the plot twists and turns over many chapters, lead to the death of his wife, Marguerite, his confinement in the Inquisition for twelve years, and the threat of his destruction in an auto da fé (although presumably he would
somehow survive the punishment). Escaping, he manages to return to his ancestral estates—but before he does so, he takes the elixir of life to rejuvenate himself, and the effect is transformative: Yesterday I was fourscore; to-day I was twenty. Yesterday I was a prisoner, crippled in every articulation; to-day I was a citizen of the world, capable of all its delights. . . . What was most material, my mind was grown young with my body. Weary of eternal struggle, I had lately resigned the contest, and sunk under the ill-fortune that relentlessly pursued me. Now I felt within me a superfluity of vigour; I panted for something to contend with, something to conquer. My senses unfolded themselves to all the curiosity of remark; my thoughts seemed capable of industry unwearied, and investigation the most constant and invincible. (352) This, really, is the one genuinely supernatural moment in the novel. But presently St. Leon realises the true nature of his situation: “I possessed the gift of immortal life; but I looked on myself as a monster who did not deserve to exist” (363). St. Leon is a by no means ineffective piece of work, although it is handicapped by excessive length and excessive moralising. The overall influence of Godwin can be seen in the work of Charles Brockden Brown, but perhaps more directly upon his own daughter and son-in-law, Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley. There is not much reason to waste time on what H. P. Lovecraft rightly referred to as Percy Shelley’s “schoolboy effusions” (S 33), Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne (1811). Zastrozzi is a drearily florid, overwritten, hysterical, and confused bit of rubbish about the titular figure, a giant, whose sole mission in life appears to be to pursue his normally sized halfbrother, Verezzi. This work, more than any other, announces the wretched death of Dr. Johnson’s century. St. Irvyne also features a giant, in this case Ginotti, the leader of a band of robbers who happens to have the secret of eternal life. He needs to pass it on to someone else in order to die in peace, but his chosen victim, Wolfstein, refuses to renounce the Creator as a precondition of obtaining the secret. (Let us recall that in the very year this novel was published, its youthful author issued the pungent essay The Necessity of Atheism.) The novel is only minimally redeemed by its climatic
underground scene, where Ginotti is incinerated by a bolt of lightning but will nevertheless continue living—“a dateless and hopeless eternity of horror” (199). It is just as well that Shelley stuck to poetry hereafter. His wife, Mary (1797–1851), did a rather better job with Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). This richly complex tale fully justifies the mountains of commentary it has inspired, especially in recent decades; the aesthetic failures of the great majority of the imitations it has spawned should surely not be held against it. The apparent inspiration of the work needs little rehearsal. In 1816 the two Shelleys, along with Byron and Dr. John Polidori, gathered at the Villa Diodati, a chalet on the banks of Lake Geneva, and proceeded to have a ghost-story writing contest after reading Fantasmagoriana (1812), a French translation of some German ghost stories. All four claimed to have ideas, but Percy Shelley ended up writing nothing, Byron wrote only a small fragment, and Polidori eventually wrote the novelette “The Vampyre.” Only Mary wrote a work of length and substance. The difficulties in interpreting Frankenstein begin with its subtitle. What does it mean that Dr. Victor Frankenstein is deemed a “modern Prometheus”? On the whole, the figure of Prometheus—the demigod who brought fire to humanity, thereby incurring the wrath of Zeus, who condemned him to eternal punishment—is a positive figure in his benevolence toward humankind, his symbolic quest to expand the boundaries of knowledge, and his defiance of tyranny. One could imagine Mary Shelley sharing this view, especially in light of her husband’s manifestly sympathetic portrayal of Prometheus as a figure of moral perfection in Prometheus Unbound (1820), a work he wrote in 1818–19, apparently just after Mary completed Frankenstein. And while Mary Shelley makes no secret that her novel has a general moral purpose (Frankenstein himself declares, “I imagine that you may deduce an apt moral from my tale” [285], although he neglects to specify what that moral is or should be), she explicitly denies taking a stance one way or the other, as she states in the original preface to the work: “The opinions which naturally spring from the character and situation of the hero are by no means to be conceived as existing always in my own conviction; nor is any inference justly to be drawn from the following pages as prejudicing any philosophical doctrine of whatever kind” (268). Perhaps this means nothing more than the elementary principle that the sentiments expressed by her
characters—whether Frankenstein or anyone else—should not be unthinkingly attributed to herself; but we shall discover that identifying where Shelley’s sentiments do lie is a singularly difficult business. The crux of the issue—made quite clear in the subtitle—is Frankenstein’s usurpation of the role of God as creator. Although it is unclear whether Mary Shelley was an atheist, like her husband, she probably had some tendencies in that direction; but the course of the novel itself strongly suggests that Frankenstein has exceeded his moral status as a human being by the creation of another human being. A standard feminist reading of Frankenstein, found so early as Robert Kiely’s The Romantic Novel in England (1972), declares that Dr. Frankenstein is to be held culpable because he has usurped the woman’s role as childbearer, and that the various misfortunes of the creature (I will not call him a “monster,” as Shelley herself never does so) are a result of his lack of a mother. I will frankly say that there does not seem to be anything explicit in the text to justify this intrepretation, although that by itself does not mean it is erroneous. But what the text does declare, repeatedly, is that Frankenstein has taken over the role of God in his scientific pursuits. The portrayal of Frankenstein is, indeed, singularly complex. Robert Walton, the ship captain who comes upon him in the Arctic ice, initially has nothing but praise for his moral virtues: “He excites at once my admiration, and my pity to an astonishing degree. . . . How can I see so noble a creature destroyed by misery without feeling the most poignant grief?” (283). At the outset, however (although we must bear in mind that the scene with Walton occurs toward the chronological end of the story), Frankenstein is full of warnings against the dangers of knowledge. When Walton expresses the belief that “One man’s life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought” (283), Frankenstein snaps back: “Unhappy man! Do you share my madness? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me; let me reveal my tale, and you will dash the cup from your lips!” (284). As Frankenstein tells his story, the reasons for his outburst become clear. While at university, he finds himself attracted to the “forgotten alchemists” (306). (He had earlier expressed an enthusiasm for Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus.) In a sense, this appeal to the mediaeval alchemical philosophers is an attempt to tie Frankenstein to the Gothic tradition, although in virtually every other regard it is a radical departure from it. But
Frankenstein’s tutor, Professor Waldman, inspires him with the wonders of modern science: “The ancient teachers of this science,” said he, “promised impossibilities and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.” (307) This passage is of the highest importance, for it explicitly signifies Shelley’s departure from her Gothic predecessors’ reliance on mediaeval superstition as the source for terror. It is now the findings of modern science that hold both wonders and terrors—a point that justifies one in regarding Frankenstein as a landmark in the protohistory of science fiction. And that glancing reference to “unlimited powers” also hints at the dangers that Frankenstein is about to bring upon himself. For his goal is nothing less than this: “Whence, I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed?” (311). It may perhaps be a bit of a disappointment—even a copout—that Frankenstein stumbles upon it so quickly (“I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter” [312]), and even more so that he fails to tell it to Walton and, therefore, to the reader (“listen patiently until the end of my story, and you will easily perceive why I am reserved upon that subject” [313]); but, as with St. Leon’s similar coyness in regard to the elixir of life, any technical or pseudo-scientific enunciation of the point was bound to be unconvincing. In any case, Frankenstein’s rueful censure of the man “who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow” (313) looks forward to his moral condemnation of himself, both for devoting attention to science while ignoring all other human concerns (“I seem to have lost all soul or sensation
but for this one pursuit” [315]; and again: “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” [316]), and his blasphemous usurpation of the function of God, made most explicit in his thundering statement: “A new species would bless me as its creator and source” (314). It is of note that Frankenstein is, at this early juncture, already envisioning the production of an entire race of creatures rather than just a single entity. At this point it is worth jumping ahead to the conclusion of the novel, where Frankenstein, after telling the long story of his own confrontation with the creature and his ultimate refusal to build the creature a female that would keep him company and might bear him offspring (which Frankenstein refers to as “a race of devils . . . who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror” [435–36]), provides a self-justification for his acts. He states: “During these last days I have been occupied in examining my past conduct; nor do I find it blameable. In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature and was bound towards him to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being. This was my duty; but there was another still paramount to that. My duties towards the beings of my own species had greater claims to my attention because they included a greater proportion of happiness or misery. Urged by this view, I refused, and I did right in refusing, to create a companion for the first creature. He showed unparalleled malignity and selfishness in evil; he destroyed my friends; he devoted to destruction beings who possessed exquisite sensations, happiness, and wisdom; nor do I know where this thirst for vengeance may end.” (490) This is of intense interest. Frankenstein clearly absolves himself of guilt in the central issue at hand—the seemingly blasphemous creation of a “rational” creature—and only faintly admits culpability in failing to “assure” the creature “his happiness and well-being.” And his motive for refusing to allow the creature to propagate his kind rests upon a striking enunciation of the utilitarian doctrine of “the greatest happiness of the
greatest number” that Jeremy Bentham was only then in the process of formulating. But the crux of the issue is Frankenstein’s refusal to acknowledge any hubris in the actual creation of the entity—a point underscored by Walton’s characterisation of Frankenstein as “noble and godlike in ruin” (484). The great merit of Frankenstein, of course, is the extensive selfjustification provided by the creature himself for his own acts, with the result that the creature’s outward hideousness is mitigated by a sense of his moral complexity. The creature, indeed, has much to answer for; how can he justify his killing of Frankenstein’s brother William, his fiancée Elizabeth, and his close friend Clerval? It is a tall order, and it is not entirely clear that the creature fully turns the trick. His chief assertion rests upon the fact of his loneliness and the wretchedness that his isolation from the rest of humanity has engendered; as he puts it succinctly, “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend” (364). But the creature damages his own case both by his murder of William (and, more so, by his conniving to implicate the nurse Justine as the perpetrator, with the result that she is tried and convicted) and by making veiled threats to Frankenstein of further destruction if the latter does not bring him “relief” by the creation of a female being. (It is at this point, incidentally, that Frankenstein becomes fully aware of his own responsibility toward the creature: “For the first time, also, I felt what the duties of a creator towards his creature were, and that I ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness” [366]. But Frankenstein’s later use of the utilitarian calculus renders this point moot.) In the creature’s long story of his “life” following his creation, there are a few paradoxes. Why, for example, should the creature revert to the intellectual status of a baby, being unable to speak and knowing nothing of the world? Frankenstein had, after all, endowed him with the brain of an adult human being. But this is manifestly a rhetorical device that allows the creature to see the world from a naïve point of view similar to that, say, of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), so that the frequently absurd and irrational conventions of life that we take for granted can be highlighted. In any event, at the end of his narrative, and after Frankenstein has initially refused to make a mate for him, the creature again enunciates his moral status with simple eloquence: “I am malicious because I am miserable” (412).
The question is whether this is in fact so. Perhaps Shelley does not expect us to come to any definitive conclusion; the posing of the query is sufficient for her purposes. But at the end of the novel, after Frankenstein has died and the creature comes to look at his corpse, he makes some extraordinarily compelling remarks. Perhaps overcome by his emotions, he actually asks forgiveness of his creator (“Oh, Frankenstein! Generous and self-devoted being! What does it avail that I now ask thee to pardon me?” [492]) and, after Walton chides him for his “diabolical vengeance” (493), the creature continues with a long self-justification. He first states that his own agonies have been far greater than Frankenstein’s and that he gained no pleasure out of the murders he committed; but he could not endure to see Frankenstein attain happiness (through his impending marriage with Elizabeth) while he remained in misery. And so he killed her: “‘Yet when she died! Nay, then I was not miserable. I had cast off all feeling, subdued all anguish, to riot in the excess of my despair. Evil thenceforth became my good. Urged thus far, I had no choice but to adapt my nature to an element which I had willingly chosen. The completion of my daemoniacal design became an insatiable passion. And now it is ended; there is my last victim!’” (493). That casting off of all feeling relates the creature directly to Frankenstein himself, who also admitted to putting aside “all that related to my feelings of affection” while constructing the creature. Frankenstein is an inexhaustibly interpretable novel; it may be the sole genuine contribution of Gothic fiction to the great literature of the world. The issues it raises—the proper role of knowledge; the quest for the secrets of creation; the need for human sympathy; the moral responsibility to our fellow creatures—are of eternal validity, and Shelley is wise in providing no simple solutions, instead letting her characters express their perspectives and leave it to the reader to gauge their effectiveness and validity. In the history of weird fiction, the novel is crucial in withdrawing terror from the remoteness of the Middle Ages and placing it fully in the contemporary world. More significantly, Shelley herself attests that her prime motive is the creation of fear and the exercise of imagination. Even though, in her original preface, she declares, “I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors” (267), she reverses herself in the preface to the 1831 edition, stating that her goal was to fashion a story “which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the
blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart” (262). To be sure, there is far more in Frankenstein than mere shudders; and Shelley’s triumph is in eliciting fear in the very act of posing the moral conundrums implicit in her story. As she herself states in the 1831 preface: “Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject; and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it” (262). The descent from Frankenstein to Polidori’s “Vampyre” (New Monthly Magazine, April 1819) is indeed a precipitous drop; but that harmless little tale is not without its charms. It is by now well known that the central figure in the story, the vampire Lord Ruthven, is a rather unkind portrayal of Lord Byron, as this passage alone would suffice to demonstrate: “[Lord Ruthven’s] character was dreadfully vicious, for that the possession of irresistible powers of seduction, rendered his licentious habits more dangerous to society” (291). It is of some interest to note, in this first significant vampire tale in English, that Lord Ruthven’s victims are exclusively women—a point that emphasises the importance of the vampire figure as a symbol of seduction and rape, and something that Bram Stoker was not shy in adopting. Otherwise, the tale is slight and uneven. Polidori fails to lay down any of the constricting features of a vampire’s life (inability to walk in the daytime, allergy to garlic, and so forth), these all being Stoker’s inventions. Ruthven walks about like any other human being, his only departure from normality being his requirement of blood to maintain his anomalous life-in-death.
v. The Christian Supernatural One might suppose that any literary work produced in a Christian society would exhibit Christian elements and perhaps even be founded on Christian presuppositions; but, as we have already seen, the degree to which a specifically Christian metaphysic is at play in the Gothic novel varies widely from work to work. The Manichean nature of the Christian mythos, with the frightening presence of what seems to be a nearly all-powerful Satan and a legion of minions, would seem tailor-made for the production of horror literature, as we have already seen in an indirect fashion in the work of Dante and Milton; so it is not surprising that two of the more noteworthy works of Gothic fiction are explicitly founded on Christian myth. The first such work is, of course, Matthew Gregory Lewis’s notorious The Monk (1796). If not of the highest literary quality, it is perhaps the most enjoyable to read of the Gothic novels—at least by current standards, if its liberal doses of sex and blasphemy are taken into consideration. It may be a guilty pleasure, but it is indeed a pleasure. Lewis (1775–1818) is of more than passing interest in his own right. His early voyage to Germany in 1772, where he became well-versed in the language and actually met Goethe, was no doubt central to his becoming a writer, and we shall have to assess the degree to which The Monk is influenced by German sources. He wrote his novel in a period of ten weeks (by his own testimony) in 1794, when he was only nineteen. A letter written to his mother at this time is of some importance: I have again taken up my Romance, and perhaps by this time Ten years I may make shift to finish it fit for throwing into the fire. I was induced to go on with it by reading “the Mysteries of Udolpho,[”] which is in my opinion one of the most interesting Books that ever have been published. I would advise you to read it by all means, but I must warn you, that it is not very entertaining till St. Aubert’s Death. His travels to my mind are uncommonly dull, and I wish heartily that They had been left out, and something substituted in
their room. I am sure, you will be particularly interested by the part when Emily returns home after her Father’s death; and when you read it, tell me whether you think there is any resemblance between the character given of Montoni in the seventeenth chapter of the second volume, and my own. I confess, that it struck me, and as He is the Villain of the Tale, I did not feel much flattered by the likeness. (Letter to his mother, 18 May 1794; quoted in Peck 208–9) This tells us a number of things: that Lewis had already begun The Monk before reading Radcliffe’s novel; that, therefore, The Mysteries of Udolpho can at best have inspired Lewis to continue his novel rather than constituting the actual motivation to write it; and that any parallels between Lewis’s Ambrosio and Radcliffe’s Montoni (or, at any rate, the specific parallel that Lewis cites) are likely to be accidental. And the fact that Lewis found large parts of Udolpho “dull” suggests that he was intent to write a book that would sedulously eschew that characterisation. The novel could well be called “The Evils of Superstition”—or perhaps even “The Evils of Religion.” In this sense, the novel appears to embody the essence of Christian supernaturalism only to subvert it, at least partially. Throughout the work, the focus is on the harm that religion can cause. On the very first page we learn that Madrid—“a city where superstition reigns with despotic sway” (9)—is the setting of the tale. In our very first introduction to its central figure, Ambrosio, the abbot of the Capuchin monastery, he is referred to with obvious sarcasm as “the man of holiness” (16). At this point it is uncertain whether we are dealing merely with the well-known strain of anti-Catholic bias that peppers much of English Gothic fiction, especially in those ubiquitous Inquisition scenes (for this issue see Sage, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition), or more generally with a satire against Christianity in general or even religion in toto. What is made clear, however, is that Ambrosio’s guise of piety is a fraud. After giving a noble sermon that enraptures his listeners, he is described as follows: “He was no sooner alone than he gave free loose [sic] to the indulgence of his vanity. When he remembered the enthusiasm which his discourse had excited, his heart swelled with rapture and his imagination presented him with splendid visions of aggrandisement. He looked round him with exultation; and pride told him loudly that he was superior to the rest of his fellow-creatures” (34). This is not noteworthy for its subtlety, but
the revelation that the sin of pride is one of Ambrosio’s flaws is important for Lewis to establish. Lewis also displays with relish the other crippling sin that will lead to Ambrosio’s demise—the sin of lust. This becomes immediately evident when his faithful servant, Rosario, turns out to be a woman, Matilda, who has donned the disguise to be close to him. In a passage that would probably have made Ann Radcliffe faint dead away, Matilda reveals herself in every sense: As she uttered these last words, she lifted her arm, and made a motion as if to stab herself. The friar’s eyes followed with dread the course of the dagger. She had torn open her habit, and her bosom was half-exposed—and, oh! that was such a breast!—the moonbeams darting full upon it enabled the monk to observe its dazzling whiteness. His eye dwelt with insatiable avidity upon the beauteous orb: a sensation till then unknown filled his heart with a mixture of anxiety and delight; a raging fire shot through every limb: the blood boiled in his veins, and a thousand wild wishes bewildered his imagination. (55) Hot stuff! In all seriousness, the idea that “a sensation till then unknown filled his heart” suggests, perhaps implausibly, that Ambrosio had never had such lustful thoughts before, but that his one glimpse of a beauteous white breast has effected a radical change in his character so that it now becomes the driving motivation for his subsequent acts. At this point Lewis’s anti-religious diatribe could be interpreted merely as a revelation of hypocrisy: the fact that Ambrosio cannot or will not live up to the highest ideals of religion need not imply a condemnation of the principle of religion itself. It is perhaps not too early to bring in a much later passage that sheds further light on this issue. We are now presented with the thoughts of Lorenzo, who has been striving to free his sister, Agnes, from “the horrors of a convent” (120). He ponders the situation: He had long observed with disapprobation and contempt the superstition which governed Madrid’s inhabitants. His good sense had pointed out to him the artifices of the monks, and the gross
absurdity of their miracles, wonders, and superstitious relics. He blushed to see his countrymen the dupes of deceptions so ridiculous, and only wished for an opportunity to free them from their monkish fetters. . . . He resolved . . . to set before the people, in glaring colours, how enormous were the abuses but too frequently practised in monasteries, and how unjustly public esteem was bestowed indiscriminately upon all who wore a religious habit. (275) This passage delicately treads the line between condemning merely the hypocrisy and superstitiousness of individual religious believers (especially those who proclaim their piety by living in convents and monasteries) and condemning all religion as superstition. At any rate, it is likely that some of the opprobrium that descended upon the youthful author was some readers’ sense that Lewis’s screed was uncomfortably close to the attacks of the deist Voltaire and perhaps even of the atheist Diderot. Indeed, the whole story of Agnes’s attempts to free herself from the convent, her love for Don Raymond, and the efforts of Lorenzo on her behalf really add nothing to the overall narrative and merely serve to take the focus away from its true protagonist, Ambrosio. As the novel progresses, Ambrosio’s lustfulness and savagery become almost megalomaniacal. After a dalliance with Matilda (“As she spoke, her eyes were filled with a delicious languor: her bosom panted: she twined her arms voluptuously around him, drew him towards her, and glued her lips to his” [180]), who eventually tells him that he really doesn’t stand a chance with her, Ambrosio’s focus turns to the innocent Antonia, who had come to hear the sermon with which the book opens. For a time it seems as if his feelings for her are genuine love rather than crude lust; but he quickly confounds this idea by groping her (“He fastened his lips greedily upon her, sucked in her pure delicious breath, violated with his bold hand the treasures of her bosom, and wound around him her soft and yielding limbs” [210]). Her mother, Elvira, interrupts this tender scene. It is at this point that Matilda comes close to revealing her true status and power: she claims that she can help Ambrosio gain possession of Antonia through black magic. She speaks obscurely of a “guardian” (213) who can help in the enterprise. Not only does she present to Ambrosio a magic talisman that shows Antonia bathing (during which “a tame linnet flew towards her, nestled its head between her breasts, and nibbled them in wanton play” [217]), but,
after descending into a sepulchre, she actually performs the ceremony as he watches. The “guardian” appears: It was a youth scarcely eighteen, the perfection of whose form and face was unrivalled. He was perfectly naked: a bright star sparkled upon his forehead, two crimson wings extended themselves from his shoulders, and his silken locks were confined by a band of manycoloured fires, which played round his head, formed themselves into a variety of figures, and shone with a brilliancy far surpassing that of precious stones. Circlets of diamonds were fastened round his arms and ankles, and in his right hand he bore a silver branch imitating myrtle. His form shone with a dazzling glory: he was surrounded by clouds of rose-coloured light, and at the moment that he appeared a refreshing air breathed perfumes through the cavern. (221) This is, indeed, one of the more effective supernatural scenes in Gothic fiction, and we are not surprised to find that this is Lucifer, whom Matilda calls by name. The strange thing is that Matilda herself threatens Lucifer into giving up the myrtle, as if she had greater power than he. For the time being, we understand that Matilda has bestowed upon Ambrosio some mysterious powers to effect his purposes. He again goes to Antonia’s room and is interrupted by Elvira, whom he kills. If Ambrosio’s moral fate has not been sealed before (and, in point of fact, up to this point he had been guilty only of certain minor peccadilloes, if his actual conduct and not his mental state is considered), it certainly is now. Ambrosio now gives Antonia a drug that simulates death and buries her in a tomb. Later he wakes her and—not to mince words—rapes her. There is no need to quote the passage in question (304–5), which still carries the power to shock and appall. But the worst part of it is that, now that she has been, as it were, tainted, she can no longer have any viable function in the narrative. Lorenzo had been in love with her, but of course she is now off limits. She flees from Ambrosio but he inflicts fatal wounds on her. Another young woman, Virginia (whose name says it all), is now attracted to Lorenzo; and Lewis is even so tactless as to say that, “the unhappy girl [Antonia] being effectively
out of the way” (317), Lorenzo was now at liberty to pursue her and forget all about Antonia. But Ambrosio’s fate is not yet determined. He and Matilda are captured, put on trial, and tortured. Matilda then comes to him, saying that she has renounced all hope of salvation in exchange for freedom; will he not do the same? Reluctantly, Ambrosio agrees: he himself summons Lucifer and signs a parchment in his own blood. At this point Lucifer, in triumph, tells Ambrosio the truth: it was he who threw Matilda in his way to lure him to his soul’s destruction; through her machinations, Ambrosio has killed his own sister (Antonia) and mother (Elvira). He is condemned to eternal punishment. The subnarrative about Agnes is of only minimal interest, but it does contain the celebrated passage about the Bleeding Nun. Agnes tells Raymond, with peculiar jocularity, the story of this nun who noisily haunts the castle of Lindenberg (“According to the tradition, this entertainment commenced about a century ago. It was accompanied with shrieking, howling, groaning, swearing, and many other agreeable noises of the same kind” [113]), although there is no explanation for why the nun is haunting the place. Later, Raymond actually sees the Bleeding Nun; stricken with terror, he brings in a mysterious figure called the Great Mogul to lay the ghost. In spite of his Islamic-sounding name, the Great Mogul uses explicitly Christian means to rid the castle of the Bleeding Nun, employing a crucifix, a Bible, and other such devices in the solemn ceremony he conducts. We learn shortly thereafter that this person is the Wandering Jew. It is possible that the greatest merit of The Monk lies not in its literary virtues (if any), nor in its (ultimately inconclusive and hardly profound) reflections on religion, but in its mere existence. In spite of Lewis’s acknowledgement of the influence of Ann Radcliffe, the novel presents as stark a contrast to the well-bred tameness of her work as could possibly be imagined; and its emphasis on flamboyant supernaturalism, even if a bit grotesque and extreme, was vital to the subsequent course of weird fiction. Its popularity showed that readers would welcome the over-the-top horrors it embodied as enthusiastically as they did the tight-lipped heroine-in-peril scenarios that Radcliffe would peddle for the rest of the decade. I have mentioned that Radcliffe’s The Italian appears to be influenced by The Monk; but, in reality, it is a rebuke of its flamboyance and an attempt to rewrite it in her prim, non-supernatural manner. Edith Birkhead, whose
sympathy for the Radcliffean school over that represented by Lewis and Maturin is evident, stated that Radcliffe “saved the Gothic tale from an early death” (38), but that distinction could better be bestowed on Lewis; and although he himself made no further efforts to capitalise on the book’s popularity by way of another novel of the same or similar sort, others—like Charlotte Dacre, whose central figure in Zofloya; or, The Moor (1806) turns out to be Satan—were not slow in doing so. As for Lewis himself, he turned his attention to horrific and supernatural drama, although his only real success, at least from a literary perspective, is The Castle Spectre (performed 1797; published 1798), and even that success is a rather modest one. The play is pretty clearly derived from The Castle of Otranto (as a footnote by Lewis in the published version all but admits) and other works dealing with the usurper of a noble title and castle and his eventual downfall. From the outset, it is evident that Earl Osmond has killed Earl Reginald and his wife Evelina to gain possession of the castle; at the same time, he wishes to wed his own niece, Angela, the daughter of Reginald and Evelina, to seal his victory. The play features not only the actual appearance (twice) of the spectre of Evelina, but both deliberate and unwitting instances where characters pretend to be spectres, thereby achieving a kind of clumsy union between Walpolian supernaturalism and Radcliffean explained supernaturalism. And yet, perhaps the most effective scene in the play is Ormond’s account of the hideous dream he has experienced: . . . ’twas a dream of such horror! Did such deams haunt my bitterest foe, I should wish him no severer punishment. . . . [The ghost of Evelina appears to him.] Her infected breath was mingled with mine; her rotting fingers pressed my hand, and my face was covered with her kisses!—Oh! then, then how I trembled with disgust!— And now blue dismal flames gleamed along the walls; the tombs were rent asunder; bands of fierce spectres rushed round me in frantic dance!—Furiously they gnashed their teeth while they gazed upon me, and shrieked in loud yell—“Welcome, thou fratricide!— Welcome, thou lost for ever!”—Horror burst the bands of sleep; distracted I flew hither:—But my feelings—words are too weak, too powerless to express them. (66–67)
Quite impressive, even if it is only a relatively conventional expression of guilt and remorse. Of Lewis’s other supernatural plays, Adelmorn the Outlaw (1801) is an uninspired rehash of The Castle Spectre, while The Wood Daemon (1807) has moments of effectiveness in its account of a peasant who makes an evil bargain with a wood demon to gain handsomeness and military prowess in exchange for a murder he must commit as a sacrifice; when he fails to commit the murder, furies in league with the wood demon snatch the peasant up and bear him off. Like The Castle Spectre, this play must have been impressive if properly staged. Other plays are less central to the horror tradition, but of some interest nonetheless. Alfonso, King of Castile (1801) is a blank verse tragedy with plenty of blood and thunder, but no supernaturalism. The Captive (1803) is a tour de force of sorts—a short dramatic monologue with only a single speaker, a woman thrown into a dungeon (other characters appear only in pantomime). It is an interesting attempt to display madness on stage. Lewis also wrote a four-volume set of Romantic Tales (1808), largely translations or adaptations from the German. It is odd that Lewis did not attempt to write another novel that would recapture the success of The Monk. Possibly he was deterred by the notoriety of the novel and its wide condemnation among reviewers and readers for “immorality”—a point augmented by the fact that he was a member of Parliament at the time the novel appeared. Evidently, the conclusion of the novel, where Ambrosio gets his religiously orthodox comeuppance, was an insufficient balance to the shocking obscenity of the earlier parts of the narrative. Lewis’s turning to drama was, if nothing else, generally successful commercially: he gained £18,000 from the early performances of The Castle Spectre, although his other plays were much less profitable. In 1812, upon the death of his father, he felt obliged to tend to family estates in Jamaica, and he died in 1818 of yellow fever while on board a ship returning to England. If The Monk is merely a light entertainment, the hulking novel that culminates both the “Christian supernatural” mode of this period and the Gothic novel as a whole is a very different matter. I refer, of course, to Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Robert Maturin (1780?–1824). Of Maturin’s other novels very little need be said. The only work of any relevance is his first novel, The Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio (1807), which, in spite of Sir Walter Scott’s charitable review, deserves
Lovecraft’s dismissal of it as a “confused Radcliffian imitation” (S 31). When one has said that it is a non-supernatural work featuring a monk named Schemoli, one has said all one needs to say. Maturin was a Protestant Irish clergyman (a fact of some importance, as we shall see presently) who, in spite of his long friendship with Scott and some successes as a playwright (notably the non-supernatural Gothic play Bertram), was so persistently concerned about impending poverty that his relatively short life seemed largely to be lived in misery. One begins to wonder, then, to what degree he drew upon his own mental and psychological state in some of the more gripping scenes of his best and most enduring novel. The remarkable thing about Melmoth the Wanderer is that, although it is manifestly based on a supernatural premise—John Melmoth, who has sold his soul to the Devil for eternal life, must find someone to take the bargain off his hands, lest he be doomed to eternal torment—the means that Maturin uses to set up the confrontations between Melmoth and his successive would-be victims are such that the novel becomes a systematic display of torture, cruelty, and misery; for Melmoth believes that only the most wretched and desperate would give up their immortal souls to take up his bargain, and so Maturin spends the great bulk of the text in portraying the dismal fates of the hapless individuals (or, in some cases, whole families) whose increasing misfortunes might—at least in Melmoth’s mind—lead them to consider his offer. As a result, the entire novel is, really speaking, a kind of enormously extended conte cruel. This is not by any means a criticism, for Maturin’s handling of these episodes of degradation are masterful and terrifying; indeed, it is such scenes that make as good a case as could be made for considering at least some exemplars of nonsupernatural horror to be legitimately within the realm of weird fiction. Consider the opening tableau, when Stanton, who is haunted by the figure of Melmoth in England, Spain, and elsewhere, is locked in a madhouse. Melmoth comes to him and delivers an incredible lecture about the horrors of such a place: “. . . where be your companions, your peaked men of countries, as your favourite Shakespeare has it? You must be content with the spider and the rat, to crawl and scratch round your flock-bed! . . . How delightful to have vermin for your guests! Aye, and when the
feast fails them, they make a meal of their entertainer! . . . A time will come, and soon, when, from mere habit, you will echo the scream of every delirious wretch that harbours near you; then you will pause, clasp your hands on your throbbing head, and listen with horrible anxiety whether the scream proceeded from you or them.” (55–56) There is much, much more of this, but this should suffice. There is really nothing like this in all Gothic fiction, and it looks forward to the psychological intensity of Poe and Bierce. Then there is the case of Alonzo Monçada, who is the scion of a wealthy family but is nonetheless placed against his will in a monastery. Aside from allowing Maturin to engage in much anti-Catholic polemic, the scenario also offers him great potential for scenes of psychological torture. With the help of his brother, Juan, Alonzo attempts to escape, but is caught and placed in a dungeon. His battles with the horrible reptiles infesting the place lead to this reflection: “‘I do assure you, Sir, I had more to do in my dungeon than in my cell. To be fighting with reptiles in the dark appears the most horrible struggle that can be assigned to man; but what is it compared to his combat with those reptiles which his own heart hourly engenders in a cell, and of which, if his heart be the mother, solitude is the father’” (146). This is followed by a remarkable tableau in which Juan and Alonzo enlist the services of a hideous person, a parricide who is never given a name, who promises to help Alonzo escape but in the end betrays them; inevitably, Alonzo is sent to the Inquisition. It is here that Melmoth appears to him. Maturin slyly alludes to Melmoth’s preternatural age by Alonzo’s remark, “He constantly alluded to events and personages beyond his possible memory,—then he checked himself” (228). Alonzo, like all the others, resists Melmoth’s blandishments and ultimately manages to escape when a fire breaks out in the place (in the course of which the parricide is torn apart by a mob). In spite of the fact that Melmoth himself keeps to the background except at those moments when, in his belief, his chosen victims are at their lowest psychological ebb and therefore amenable to his offer, he nonetheless dominates the novel from beginning to end. The moment he is referred to (by Stanton) as a “tempter” (57), his function as a stand-in for Satan is confirmed. Adonijah, the father of a Jewish man with whom
Alonzo takes refuge, elaborates upon the point, speaking of a “rumour” of “a being sent abroad on the earth to tempt Jew and Nazarene, and even the disciples of Mohammed, whose name is accursed in the mouth of our nation, with offers of deliverance at their utmost need and extremity” (269), and even referring to him as “the evil one” (269). A later character considers Melmoth’s bargain: “He has offered, and proved to me, that it is in his power to bestow all that human cupidity could thirst for, on the condition that—— I cannot utter! It is one so full of horror and impiety, that, even to listen to it, is scarce less a crime than to comply with it!” (427). Curiously enough, it is only at this point that the first explicit indication of the nature of Melmoth’s bargain is provided: “what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” (429). As for Melmoth himself, he defends himself after a fashion, chiefly in the long digression (although perhaps the term has no meaning in a novel that is really nothing but digressions, or at any rate relatively discrete episodes) about the East Indian princess Immalee, who is in fact a Spanish woman named Isadora. To her Melmoth paints a portrait of the evils of religion and the wretchedness of (civilised) humanity in a manner perhaps meant to be reminiscent of Milton’s Satan. In making a simple-minded explanation of the nature of a Supreme Being, Melmoth states, in the manner of the Enlightenment philosophers: “It is right . . . not only to have thoughts of this Being, but to express them by some outward acts. The inhabitants of the world you are about to see, call this, worship,—and they have adopted (a Satanic smile curled his lip as he spoke) very different modes; so different, that, in fact, there is but one point in which they all agree —that of making their religion a torment;—the religion of some prompting them to torture themselves, and the religion of some prompting them to torture others.” (290) That parenthetical aside gives the game away. And yet, lest one assume that Maturin is being a kind of ancestor to Richard Dawkins, he comes through with his patented anti-Catholicism (Immalee: “. . . and when they brought me to a Christian land, I thought I should have found them all Christians.”—“And what did you find them,
then, Immalee?”—“Only Catholics” [344]), but he goes on to utter, through the mouth of Immalee/Isadora, the ultimate characterisation of Melmoth’s psychological plight: “He who is without a God must be without a heart!” (514). And yet, it is earlier stated of Melmoth that, rather like Frankenstein’s creature, “His sarcastic levity bore a direct and fearful proportion to his despair” (352). In spite of the appalling prolixity of the novel—it must be in excess of 150,000 words, and there are all kinds of episodes and segments that have little bearing on the central premise, especially the “Lovers’ Tale” (444f.) toward the end—there is something in the text that keeps the reader wellnigh hypnotised. Perhaps it is nothing more than the intensity of Maturin’s vision, and his consequent use of highly flamboyant and picturesque language to express it. (For those who decry the floridity of Poe, Lovecraft, and others in the weird tradition, the final line of Melmoth the Wanderer is worth remembering: “Melmoth [the Wanderer’s descendant] and Monçada exchanged looks of silent and unutterable horror, and returned slowly home” [542].) The structural anomalies of the novel—the fact that the bulk of the text is presented as the narrative of Monçada, even though the novel opens as the narrative of John Melmoth, descendant of the Wanderer—must be forgiven, as must the tiresome anti-Catholicism, the unconvincing love affair between Melmoth and Immalee, and many other flaws that could be pointed out in the text. There is something of genuine greatness in Melmoth the Wanderer, and its prodigious length, even if it is engendered merely by successive accounts of the pathetic wretches whom Melmoth hopes to tempt, nonetheless give the novel an epic grandeur that is sadly lacking in, say, The Mysteries of Udolpho and certainly in the shilling-shocker, The Monk. It is worth discussing the extent to which both The Monk and Melmoth the Wanderer may have been influenced by German literature. Many of the earlier reviewers of the former, including Coleridge, contended that Lewis was merely aping a variety of German Gothic works in his novel. Syndy M. Conger has written the definitive work on this subject, and she concludes that Lewis, during his visit to Germany in the early 1790s, appears not only to have read Goethe’s early published version of Faust, titled Faust: Ein Fragment (1790), but also some other sections of the work in manuscript. Other works, including Schiller’s unfinished short novel Der Geisterseher (1789; The Ghost-Seer) and J. K. Musäus’s “Die Entführung” (1782–86;
The Abduction), and Veit Weber’s “Die Teufelsbeschwörung” (1791; The Devil’s Oath), played a role in various details of The Monk; but beyond mere details, Conger concludes persuasively that German literature had the effect of transforming the novel from romance to tragedy—although to some extent this transformation remains incomplete because of Lewis’s fatal temptation to descend to over-the-top and at times nearly obscene flamboyance. If any work truly transformed Gothic romance to the true status of tragedy, it is Melmoth the Wanderer, and Conger has demonstrated that it too was significantly influenced by German sources. It appears that Maturin read Faust largely as filtered through Madame de Staël’s discussion and partial translation of it in her work, De l’Allemagne (1813), translated into English that same year as Germany. Maturin was also influenced by Bürger’s “Lenore” and Schiller’s Geisterseher, but Faust was the chief influence, with the result that Melmoth himself becomes a kind of amalgam of Mephistopheles (as tempter) and Faust himself (as quester for forbidden knowledge). The broader question of the place of early German Gothic literature in the development of the supernatural is difficult to treat in small compass. Schiller’s little novel is not supernatural, although it suggests it in the enigmatic figure of the Armenian, who plagues the protagonist with apparent displays of sorcery; but these displays are then systematically exposed as frauds. Schiller was not in fact interested in the supernatural, or even the explained supernatural, as a component of literature; rather, the purpose of his work was largely political and moral: at the beginning of the novel he makes note of “the way the human mind can be deceived and go astray” (5). Christian Heinrich Spiess’s Das Petermännchen (1791–92), about an evil spirit, and Ignaz Ferdinand Arnold’s Der Vampyr (1801), the first known vampire novel, are of some note, although it is difficult to trace their influence upon subsequent literature—especially since no copy of the latter has come to light. German weird writing of this period, including the work of Hoffmann, Tieck, and La Motte Fouqué (to be considered in the next chapter), tended to draw more upon folklore than its English counterpart, and at times its distinction from the actual folktale becomes problematical.
vi. The Theory of the Gothic It is remarkable how quickly writers and critics began to theorise about the nature, scope, direction, and purpose of Gothic fiction, and specifically (what is our prime concern here) the role of the supernatural in fiction. I have already cited passages from prefaces to some of the major novels— including the earliest, those by Walpole and Reeve—that not only provide glimpses of the author’s aesthetic goals but also shed light on their understanding of the role of supernaturalism as an element of literature. A number of reviews of these works indirectly raise the same points, but as they were not primarily designed to be theoretical, they shall not be studied here. Some theorising occurred even before the Gothic period got underway. I refer, chiefly, to Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), which I have already suggested was an influence on the work of Ann Radcliffe. As far as what he refers to in several chapters as “terror,” Burke’s conclusions are perhaps overly schematic; in any event, his reflections largely pertain to the emotions of fear and terror in real life, and their application to literature must be inferred only by implication. But what is significant is Burke’s linkage of these emotions to the sublime (“Whatever . . . is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too” [57])—indeed, he goes on to say that “terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime” (58). Perhaps the most significant feature of Burke’s treatise, from our perspective, is his mere inclusion of the emotions of fear and terror within the scope of a treatise on aesthetics, suggesting thereby that these emotions are indeed amenable to literary treatment. Then there is Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s essay “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror” (1773), which preceded her fragment, “Sir Bertrand.” It would be interesting to know if the essay was written first and the story afterward, as an instantiation of the essay’s chief points, or if the story was written first and the essay written later as a kind of abstraction of its essence. I suspect the former. In any case, Barbauld makes some striking points. While the overall tenor of her short essay clearly owes a debt to
Burke’s theories of the sublime, she advances the argument a bit further— especially in regard to the critical issue (one that remains unresolved today) of why readers would willingly subject themselves to the (presumably unpleasant) experience of being frightened. In real life, after all, fear is an emotion that we seek to avoid. What is it about the fear induced by literature that renders it pleasurable (if, indeed, it does so)? Barbauld’s answer is twofold. She first declares that one phase of the problem can be accounted for by pointing to “the irresistible desire of satisfying curiosity” (82): once we have enmeshed ourselves in a narrative, even one that involves putatively unpleasant or frightening elements as ghosts or villains, we are so driven by curiosity to see how the issue is resolved that we willingly endure the “pain” of the emotions raised. This might be considered a truism; what is more, the notion of satisfying curiosity is not restricted to weird literature, since there is a certain “pain” (or, at any rate, irritation) felt by the failure to satisfy curiosity on any subject, whether weird or not. Barbauld in fact goes on to say: “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” (83). In these cases, she states, “the pleasure constantly attached to the excitement of surprise from new and wonderful objects” (83) triumphs over the pain induced by fear. In other words, the weird work (at its best, presumably) stimulates the exercise of the imagination and becomes, indeed, a venue for imaginative liberation—a point that Walpole himself had come close to making in his prefaces to The Castle of Otranto and that many later theoreticians, including Lovecraft, would endorse. Barbauld does not quite come out and say so, but her essay clearly awards the palm to supernatural as opposed to non-supernatural horror. As instances of “new and wonderful objects” placed before the reader, she cites the Arabian Nights and Otranto, countering these with the scene of “mere natural horror” (83) found in Smollett’s Count Fathom. That “mere” is the giveaway, and the fact that her fragment, “Sir Bertrand,” is emphatically supernatural (even though she states that it works in “both these manners” [i.e., supernatural and non-supernatural]) clearly betrays her preference. It would seem that Nathan Drake’s two essays, one on supernatural and the other on non-supernatural horror, found in the first volume of his Literary Hours (1798) are a direct response to Barbauld, especially given that the latter, “On Objects of Terror,” not only echoes the title of
Barbauld’s essay but is followed by a (rather dull) fragment called “Montmorenci.” Neither essay is of much interest, and the essay on supernaturalism, “On Gothic Superstition,” maintains that supernaturalism is justified because of the “common feelings of humanity” (145)—i.e., the fact that a majority of readers might actually accept the literal existence of ghosts, spectres, and other supernatural manifestations, so that such literature as involves them would in fact be a species of realism. I have already stated that I believe this point of view is erroneous—that supernatural literature becomes a distinct genre only when both readers and writers acknowledge, by and large, the very impossibility of the supernatural phenomena being displayed—except insofar as a vestigial belief in ghosts and such can be utilised by writers to induce the “willing suspension of disbelief.” Drake’s essay gains interest only in his observation that supernatural literature must draw upon phenomena distinct from the standard mythologies of the world. The essay “On Objects of Terror,” although chiefly concerned with non-supernaturalism, makes one interesting point of technique: Terror thus produced requires no small degree of skill and arrangement to prevent its operating more pain than pleasure. Unaccompanied by those mysterious incidents which indicate the ministration of beings mightier far than we, and which induce that thrilling sensation of mingled astonishment, apprehension and delight so irresistably [sic] captivating to the generality of mankind, it will be apt to create rather horror and disgust than the grateful emotion intended. (354) It is, perhaps, difficult to deny that liberal doses of “horror and disgust” enter into the very fabric of even the greatest of supernatural literature, and that even the most elevated writers have occasionally sought to employ mere physical revulsion as one tool among many to inspire the emotion of horror or terror; and Drake’s sensible words could apply just as well to such debased forms of the weird as slasher films and splatterpunk as to the actual examples (Walpole’s Mysterious Mother and Shakesperare’s Titus Andronicus) he actually cites.
Ann Radcliffe’s celebrated essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry”— posthumously published in the New Monthly Magazine in 1826 and also as the preface to her final, purely historical novel Gaston de Blondeville (1826)—is similarly disappointing. It is, indeed, curious that Radcliffe, the pioneer of the explained supernatural, would even trouble herself to write an essay on the supernatural, since she never employed it; and its meandering inconclusiveness (partially the result of its construction as a philosophical dialogue) suggests that she herself had no clearly formed ideas on the subject. Its only point of interest, indeed, is its landmark distinction between terror and horror: Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them. I apprehend, that neither Shakspeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one; and where lies the great difference between horror and terror, but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil? (149–50) Radcliffe’s distinction seems sound, although it becomes unclear how it could be applied to her own work: if her goal was to inspire terror, the mere “obscurity” of the source of fear, if it is known to be non-supernatural (i.e., the equivalent of an axe-murderer), would seem insufficient to the purpose. Radcliffe might respond that her fake supernaturalism might be productive of terror, but its subsequent non-supernatural resolution would have the effect of a deflation that would threaten to condemn the entire work to the level of a cheap trick. As it is, Sir Walter Scott remains the most insightful and penetrating analyst of the weird during this period, even though some of his writings might, from a chronological standpoint, be considered post-Gothic. In such things as his review of Maturin’s Fatal Revenge, his introduction to an 1811 reprint of The Castle of Otranto, the biographies of Walpole, Reeve, and Radcliffe in Lives of the Novelists (1825), and his long essay “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition” (1829) a wealth of interesting
matter can be found. (His review of Frankenstein is disappointingly devoted largely to plot summary.) I have already cited Scott’s pungent criticism of Radcliffe’s explained supernatural. The “Fictitious Composition” essay, written as a lengthy review of Hoffmann’s tales, has much sage advice regarding the technique of writing supernatural tales. He also makes a valuable and still valid distinction between supernaturalism and “the fantastic mode of writing”— in which the most wild and unbounded license is given to an irregular fancy, and all species of combination, however ludicrous, or however shocking, are attempted and executed without scruple. In the other modes of treating the supernatural, even that mystic region is subjected to some laws, however slight; and fancy, in wandering through it, is regulated by some probabilities in the wildest flight. Not so in the fantastic style of composition, which has no restraint save that which it may ultimately find in the exhausted imagination of the author. (281–82) If theorising about the Gothic occurred at a surprisingly early stage, then so did parodies of it—which, in a sense, can count as criticisms (in several senses of the word) in their own right. The first such work appears to have been John O’Keefe’s comic opera The Banditti; or, Love in a Labyrinth (1781), followed some years later by James Cobb’s play The Haunted Tower (1789), later made into an opera. The focus of both works is not the supernatural as such but what the authors evidently regarded as the already hackneyed use of a haunted or otherwise sinister castle, replete with secret passageways, strange lights, and peculiar noises. Eaton Stannard Barrett’s novel The Heroine; or, The Adventures of a Fair Romance Reader (1813) is a somewhat broader satire and much more vicious than the two operatic works, and its focus (as its subtitle suggests) is on the poor taste and naiveté of the (generally female) sentimental reader who is so easily taken in by tales of heroines in peril and villainous villains. Dennis Lawler’s play The Earls of Hammersmith; or, The Cellar Spectre (1814) is in fact supernatural, and it could be said that its focus is the convenient use of the supernatural to point a moral or to advance the plot. Here the triteness of the sainted hero (Sir Walter Wisehead) and the
scheming villain (Lord Bluster) is evident in their very names. Sir Walter, accepting the challenge to spend a night in a haunted chamber (à la The Old English Baron), is warned by a spectre not to marry his beloved, Lady Margaret Marrowbones, because (so the spectre declares) she is his grandmother. Later, Sir Walter’s father is discovered imprisoned in a dungeon (à la The Castle Spectre). It is all good fun, and quite on the mark. The best-known of Gothic parodies, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1819), was written as early as 1803; it famously cites seven novels (which have come to be called the “Northanger novels”) that were all published between 1793 and 1798. But it is noteworthy that none of these novels are supernatural; for of course Austen’s main target is the “heroine in peril” topos, which even Mother Radcliffe was unable to present in other than a ludicrously hackneyed manner. There is, in fact, only the barest hint of a suggestion that Northanger Abbey (which is somewhere in Gloucestershire) is haunted: Mr. Allen, transparently playing up Catherine Morland’s fears of being imprisoned in the place, emphasises its gloominess rather than any supernatural manifestations she will experience: “But you must be aware that when a young lady is (by whatever means) introduced into a dwelling of this kind, she is always lodged apart from the rest of the family. While they snugly repair to their own end of the house, she is formally conducted by Dorothy the ancient housekeeper up a different staircase. And along many gloomy passages, into an apartment never used since some cousin or kin died in it about twenty years before. Can you stand such a ceremony as this? Will not your mind misgive you, when you find yourself in this gloomy chamber—too lofty and extensive for you, with only the feeble rays of a single lamp to take in its size—its walls hung with tapestry exhibiting figures as large as life, and the bed, of dark green stuff or purple velvet, presenting even a funereal appearance. Will not your heart sink within you?” (164–65) And so on and so forth. Only when Allen mentions that the housekeeper “gives you reason to suppose that the part of the abbey you inhabit is undoubtedly haunted” (165) do we have any hint of a parody of supernaturalism; for of course the whole point of the joke is that Northanger
Abbey is a clean, modern, well-lit facility where such things can exist only in a mind, like Catherine’s, overwrought by excessive reading of Gothic novels. Northanger Abbey is, in fact, a kind of one-trick pony; its fundamental device is simply that of comic deflation, as every instance where Catherine thinks something sinister is occuring proves to be something quite ordinary. And Austen’s insufferable decorum never allows the humour to rise above that of polite laughter. Her overall point—that Catherine, her mind full of imaginary horrors, is unable to deal with real tragedy or misfortune (the misfortune, to wit, that her friend Isabella Thorpe has broken off her engagement with her brother James and decided to marry another)—is hammered home a bit too obviously at the end: That room, in which her disturbed imagination had tormented her on her first arrival, was again the scene of agitated spirits and unquiet slumbers. Yet how different now the source of her inquietude from what it had been—how mournfully superior in reality and substance! Her anxiety had foundation in fact, her fears in probability; and with a mind so occupied in the contemplation of actual and natural evil, the solitude of her situation, the darkness of her chamber, the antiquity of the building were felt and considered without the smallest emotion; and though the wind was high, and often produced strange and sudden noises throughout the house, she heard it all as she lay awake, hour after hour, without curiosity or terror. (225) Of Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818) something more, but not much, may be said. The thrust of the satire in this mildly engaging novel is the gloom-and-melancholy school of poets of Peacock’s own acquaintance—Shelley, Coleridge, Thomas Moore, and their lesser imitators. In only a single passage do we have any discussion of the Gothic novel or of supernaturalism; but it is moderately interesting: It is very certain, and much to be rejoiced at, that our literature is hag-ridden. . . . That part of the reading public which shuns the solid food of reason for the light diet of fiction, requires a perpetual
adhibition of sauce piquante to the palate of its depraved imagination. It lived upon ghosts, goblins, and skeletons . . ., till even the devil himself, though magnified to the size of Mount Athos, became too base, common, and popular, for its surfeited appetite. The ghosts have therefore been laid, and the devil has been cast into outer darkness . . . (50–51) The most pertinent aspect of this passage is that it is written in the past tense; for Peacock rightly saw that Gothicism had, through the sheer surfeit of mediocre and hackneyed contributions, played itself out even among those readers who, in the heyday of Walpole, Radcliffe, and Lewis, could not seem to get enough of the stuff. Melmoth the Wanderer was the greatest of the Gothics and virtually the last, even though such dogged professionals as Francis Lathom and Sarah Wilkinson dutifully ground out novels for some years thereafter. In this sense, the rise and fall of the Gothic novel strikingly parallels the horror “boom” of, approximately, 1971 to 1990, when a motley crew of hacks and imitators attempted to seize upon the popularity (and profits) of such things as William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) and the successive blockbusters of Stephen King and ended up only driving the reading public away and forcing horror to return to where it has always belonged, the small press and a small coterie of devoted readers. As for the Gothic novel, it collapsed not only because of its own mediocrity but because of the superlative mastery of some of its successors: the historical phase of the Gothic novel (never a strong point except as a gesture to the remoteness of mediaevalism) was shattered by the authentic historicism of Sir Walter Scott, and the element of terror (whether supernatural or natural) was wholly eclipsed by Poe.
vii. The Nature of Gothic Fiction What, then, can we say of the Gothic school, if school it was? One of the standard affirmations is that it is a subset of the Romantic movement or that it is somehow “pre-Romantic.” I believe we have learned enough of the particulars of some of the leading Gothic novels—and, more relevantly, the stated goals of some of the leading novelists—to make one have at least a few reservations on this point. If we maintain that the fundamental characteristics of Romanticism are 1) its repudiation of classical didacticism, 2) its expression of high or extreme emotion unfettered by classical restraint or reason, 3) fragmentation of the narrative flow by abandonment of classical “unities” and other elements of rigid formalism, and 4) a general appeal to irrationalism (in this case signalled by a wallowing in mediaevalism), then we can quickly conclude (as Elizabeth R. Napier has shown in her pioneering study, The Failure of Gothic) that Gothicism adopted these traits only sporadically and tentatively. Even if Walpole consciously eschewed classicism when writing The Castle of Otranto, he seems to have done so largely out of a spirit of boredom with the mundane realism of Fielding and Smollett, and we have seen that his repudiation of classical rationalism is ambiguous at best; the very fact that he adopted a mediaeval setting for his work allowed him to preserve the rationalism of his own age. And there is, as Napier has demonstrated, plenty of didacticism of a largely classical sort in the work of Walpole, Reeve, and Radcliffe, and we can see heavy-handed moralism also at work in the major novels of Godwin, Mary Shelley, and Maturin. The narrative fragmentation that we find in some of the novels of the period— especially those that, like Reeve’s The Old English Baron, purport to be mediaeval manuscripts—is frequently on a relatively superficial level, and even these novels generally conform to classical notions of unity and closure. In the end it may be undeniable that the Gothic novel is indeed some kind of subset of or antecedent to Romanticism, but its relationship to the leading Romantic works and authors is tangential at best. In a very real sense, the Gothic novel is just as much an “anticipation” of the true history of the supernatural in literature as the works I discussed
in the previous chapter; for, as I will argue in Chapter V, the genre genuinely commenced only with the work of Edgar Allan Poe. The reasons for this are many, and in large part have to do with the embarrassing absence of literary merit in the works in question. Napier has forthrightly exhibited the many aesthetic deficiencies of even the leading Gothic novels, especially in regard to issues such as the convincing portrayal of history and the depiction of character. In reality, there are very few memorable characters in Gothic fiction, even among the great villains like Manfred, Montoni, or Schedoni; indeed, it is a fundamental mistake to believe that the Gothic novel made any serious attempt to explore the complexity of human character on a psychological level. Long ago, Robert Kiely stated that “It is one of the pervading characteristics of all Gothic fiction—and initially one of its failings—that individual personality is subordinated to physical setting” (The Romantic Novel in England 41), and Eino Railo had largely made the same point even earlier, showing that the Gothic castle was a more impressive “character” than any of the actual figures placed within it. At the same time, it becomes difficult in many instances to see the Gothic castle or abbey as somehow symbolic of mental or psychological states. The standard assertion that the ruined castle stands for the fragmented nature of the disturbed protagonist’s psyche sounds good on paper but is hard to apply in specific instances. With the exception of Frankenstein, Melmoth the Wanderer, and a few others, psychological analysis was not a strong suit with the Gothic writers. In regard to supernaturalism, the resolute anthropocentrism of even the most imaginative of Gothic scenarios should be noted. Everything revolves around the human characters on stage. There are, strikingly, no genuine “monsters” in Gothic fiction: even Frankenstein’s creature is merely a humanoid creature made up of disparate human parts. The threshold of death is, indeed, the most significant supernatural element utilised in those Gothic novels that are in fact supernatural, and in many that are not, whether it be the quest for eternal life exemplified by Godwin’s St Leon or Maturin’s Melmoth, or the death-in-life of Polidori’s Lord Ruthven, or the real or fake revenants of Reeve, Radcliffe, and many others. Perhaps it was not to be expected that the early Gothic novelists would extend their supernatural imaginations beyond the human form, but in this aspect as in so many others it was Poe who proved to be the pioneer.
As I have stated, the Gothic novel expired through surfeit and mediocrity. Indeed, it was the very fact that so many writers attempted— and, by and large, failed—to create horror in the space of a novel that led to their downfall; for, as Sir Walter Scott noted in “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition,” “it is evident that the exhibition of supernatural appearances in fictitious narrative ought to be rare, brief, [and] indistinct” (273)—a formula that reduces the Gothic novel (at least of the supernatural variety) to an oxymoron. Since the emotion of terror is difficult or impossible to maintain over the length of a novel, the works in question (as so many others in later years, down to our own day) devolve into suspense novels with occasional supernatural interludes; only rare works like The Monk, Frankenstein, and Melmoth the Wanderer contain a supernatural idea with sufficiently complex ramifications as to require a novel for its execution. By the early nineteenth century, it appears that a number of writers began to come to a realisation of the truth of this axiom, and as a result they increasingly explored supernaturalism in both poetry and in short fiction. It is to these predecessors of Poe that we turn our attention.
IV. Interregnum The novel was not the only literary mode in which the Gothic operated. Both during the Gothic period itself and in what I call the “interregnum”— that period of the 1810s and 1820s prior to the emergence (in the United States) of Edgar Allan Poe—a number of writers found horrific inspiration in poetry and the short story. This utilisation of short forms for the exhibition of weirdness appears to have been due both to aesthetic disenchantment with the plodding verbosity of most of the Gothic novels and to such market factors as the establishment of quarterly or monthly periodicals that welcomed poems and tales rather than novels. In any event, some striking literature was generated, fostering a certain broadening of supernatural themes and motifs. At the same time, several post-Gothic writers in England, Europe, and the United States sought to build upon the work of their predecessors and to employ the supernatural as a catalyst for a wider array of moral, social, and even political messages.
i. Supernaturalism in the Romantic Poets One of the most striking phenomena of the Gothic period was the extent to which both German and British writers expressed weird conceptions in poetry. We have seen that supernatural verse prior to The Castle of Otranto was sparse and insignificant; but, perhaps in part as a result of the publication of Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), supernatural poetry came to a sudden flowering in the 1770s and continued with some notable specimens for several decades thereafter. One of the earliest and most celebrated items, Gottfried August Bürger’s “Lenore” (1773), consciously draws upon the Scottish ballad “Sweet William’s Ghost” from the Percy collection. This poignant tale of a woman who comes to the slow realisation that her lover, who is paying her a nighttime visit, is in fact a ghost was immensely influential in both England and the Continent; six different English translations of it, including one by Sir Walter Scott (as “William and Helen”), appeared during the 1790s. Another immensely popular ballad is “The Erl-King” (1782) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), an extraordinarily moving account of a father who rides madly to save his son from the Erl-King (the king of the elfs) but fails: The father now gallops, with terror half wild, He grasps in his arms the poor shuddering child; He reaches his courtyard with toil and with dread— The child in his arms finds he motionless, dead. (115) But this is by no means the only one of Goethe’s short poems that deserves study here. “The Dance of Death” (1813) tells of corpses emerging from their graves to dance and features tremendous funereal imagery. And the celebrated “Bride of Corinth” (1797), written in a contest with Schiller in ballad-writing, is avowedly derived from the tale of Philinnion and
Machates in Phlegon, but Goethe has transformed this harmless story of a revenant into a searching rumination on the conflict between love and death as well as on that between paganism and Christianity: “From my grave to wander I am forc’d, Still to seek The God’s long-sever’d link, Still to love the bridegroom I have lost, And the life-blood of his heart to drink; When his race is run, I must hasten on, And the young must ’neath my vengeance sink.” (150) Curiously, Goethe’s Faust (1808–32), although we have seen that influenced some Gothic writing even before it was published, is itself less central to the weird tradition than one might think. The actual “compact” between Faust and Mephistopheles (Part I, Scene 4) is handled in a surprisingly subdued fashion, and aside from a few early scenes in Part I the poem is generally lacking in supernatural manifestations. Naturally, the Faust theme has been a dominant one in supernatural litrature, but it does not seem to owe many of its details to Goethe’s epic. The “Tam o’Shanter” (1793) of Robert Burns (1759–1796) is a potent horrific specimen of a wild midnight ride, although manifestly under a Christian perspective (“That night . . . / The Deil had business on his hand” [ll. 77–78]). Much the same can be said of James Hogg’s “The Witch of Fife,” written in a nearly impenetrable Scots dialect and telling the story of a woman who reveals herself to be a witch and speaks of attending a witches’ sabbath in Lapland. The poem is more concentratedly supernatural than the more celebrated “Kilmeny,” whose Scots dialect has been mercifully tempered; but this account of a woman who is kidnapped by the fairies would nowadays be classed more as fantasy than supernatural horror. Both poems are in The Queen’s Wake (1813).
Nearly all the British Romantic poets, with the notable exception of Wordsworth, indulged in the supernatural to varying degrees. (Wordsworth did produce “The Thorn,” a paraphrase of Bürger’s non-supernatural poem of a vicious child-murder.) The poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772– 1834) is replete with horrific imagery. As with Lovecraft a century later, he may have been initially inclined toward the weird by his childhood reading of the Arabian Nights; indeed, much of his weird work falls on either side of the line demarcating fantasy and supernatural horror. Such poems as “Melancholy” (1797) and “The Dungeon” (1798) are replete with Gothic imagery; the opening lines of the former tell the whole story: Stretch’d on a moulder’d Abbey’s broadest wall, Where ruining ivies propp’d the ruins steep— Her folded arms wrapping her tatter’d pall, Had Melancholy mus’d herself to sleep. (73) Of course, Coleridge’s greatest contribution to the weird—and, it is safe to say, the greatest weird poem ever written—is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). It is difficult to write briefly about this imperishable and richly interpretable 625-line poem, but what strikes us immediately is the degree to which it relies on a Christian worldview. While the poem can be read secularly as a simple case of cosmic revenge—the cruelty of the Mariner in his irrational killing the albatross results in the tragic destruction of his crew and in his continual telling of his lamentable tale—the specific language of Coleridge’s poem makes unmistakably clear that the albatross, white in its purity, is a Christ-figure. This becomes apparent in the crew’s first glimpse of the creature: “As if it had been a Christian soul, / We hailed it in God’s name” (ll. 65–66). When the Mariner kills the albatross he is aware that “I had done a hellish thing” (l. 91), and one gains the impression that the adjective is meant literally. Fastened to the Mariner’s neck, the albatross only falls off (after his crew has all died) when he “blessed” (l. 285) God’s creatures. At this juncture the crew comes to life: Beneath the lightning and the Moon
The dead men gave a groan. They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose, Nor spake, nor moved their eyes; It had been strange, even in a dream, To have seen those dead men rise. The helmsmen steered, the ship moved on; Yet never a breeze up-blew; The mariners all ’gan work the ropes, Where they were wont to do; They raised their limbs like lifeless tools— We were a ghastly crew. (ll. 329–40) The relation of the albatross to Christ now becomes explicit: “Is it he?” quoth one, “Is this the man? By him who died on cross, With his cruel bow he laid full low The harmless Albatross.” (ll. 398–401) It is difficult to convey the supernatural richness of the Ancient Mariner: the encounter with a ghost-ship (ll. 171f.), the hideous revivification of the dead crew as they cheerlessly go about their mundane
tasks, and numerous other details create an imperishable amalgam of supernaturalism and religious morality. Coleridge has skilfully used the contemporary popularity of the ballad to create a weird tale in verse that carries the reader along from one horrific scenario to the next. After the Ancient Mariner, anything else by Coleridge would seem a disappointment. The unfinished Christabel (written in 1797–1800, published 1816) is also multilayered; on one level it can be seen as a metaphor for lesbianism, and on another (as John Beer has noted) it explores “the relationship between the world of everyday prudential reasoning and the world of romance” (76). In this scenario, the former is represented by the virginal Christabel, the latter by the strange figure of Geraldine, whom Christabel comes upon in a forest and who claims to have been kidnapped by unspecified warriors. From the start, there seems something not quite right about Geraldine: “Again she [Christabel] saw that bosom old, / Again she felt that bosom cold, / And drew in her breath with a hissing sound” (ll. 457–59). That “hissing sound” is a clever stroke, for it is Geraldine who ultimately reveals herself as an amalgam of woman and snake: A snake’s small eye blinks dull and shy; And the lady’s eyes they shrunk in her head, Each shrunk up to a serpent’s eye, And with somewhat of malice, and more of dread, At Christabel she looked askance! (ll. 583–87) But the poem ends soon thereafter, with the matter unresolved. “Kubla Khan” (written 1798 [not 1797, as Coleridge states in the prefatory note to the poem]; published 1816) is a pure fantasy and hence strictly outside the domain of supernatural horror, but it is so celebrated that it is difficult to pass it over. It is now well known that the 54 lines of the poem were all that Coleridge could recollect of the “two or three hundred lines” (296) that he dreamed after falling asleep over a discussion of Kubla Khan in Purchase His Pilgrimage (1626). The “stately pleasure-dome” (l.
2) of Kubla Khan can be seen, among many other things, as a symbol for the untrammeled fantastic imagination. The writing of these poems led Coleridge to enunciate one of the most celebrated dicta regarding the supernatural in literature—but it should be emphasisewd that his remark was made specifically in the context of supernatural poetry. In chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge recounts how he and Wordsworth conceived the plan to write Lyrical Ballads (1798/1800): the latter would write poems that would underscore “the truth of nature,” while Coleridge would write poems that would suggest “the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of the imagination” (168). This would be achieved by poetry in which “the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural”— yet the task would have to be done in such a manner “as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (168–69). No clearer statement on the symbolic value of the supernatural to convey “truth” could be found; but it is important to note that the “willing suspension of disbelief” is conceived to be a function specific to poetry. It could be argued that that disbelief may in fact be a trifle easier to achieve in poetry than in prose, since expectations of realism in the former are perhaps not quite as rigorous as in the latter; but Coleridge’s general point that the supernatural, if convincingly portrayed, can underscore truths about human life in a manner not always possible to other modes of writing is of great significance. One of Sir Walter Scott’s first books was not a novel but a slim collection of poetry, Apology for Tales of Terror (1799) (in spite of its title, there is no prose discussion of the supernatural in poetry or prose). It includes a number of his translations from the German, including two of Bürger’s poems and Goethe’s “Erl-King,” along with sundry poems by Matthew Gregory Lewis and Robert Southey. But Scott’s most notable original weird poem is “Glenfinlas” (1801), a splendid ballad of supernatural seduction with surprisingly grisly imagery (“And last, the lifeblood streaming warm, / Torn from the trunk, a gasping head” [ll. 243–44]). This sets the stage for Lewis’s Tales of Wonder (dated 1801 but issued in late 1800), a substantial anthology of weird verse whose occasional excesses led to a parodic volume, Tales of Terror (1801), which many later
readers and scholars also believed to have been edited by Lewis, even though it included such obvious buffooneries as “The Scullion Sprite; or, The Garret Goblin” and “The Mud-King; or, Smedley’s Ghost.” Matters were not helped by the fact that Tales of Terror was sometimes dated to 1799—a result of its confusion with Apology for Tales of Terror, one copy of which in fact bore the title Tales of Terror. I am not sure it is known who assembled the parodic Tales of Terror, but some of the poems in Tales of Wonder do leave themselves open to charges of over-the-top luridness— exactly what one would expect from the author of The Monk. Consider Lewis’s wild supernatural revenge ballad “Osric the Lion”: . . . the demons their prey flocked around; They dashed him, with horrible yell, on the ground, And blood down his limbs trickled fast; His eyes from their sockets with fury they tore; They fed on his entrails, all reeking with gore, And his heart was Ulrilda’s repast. (120) On the other hand, the volume does contain such noteworthy items as Lewis’s “Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogene” (from The Monk), a powerful supernatural revenge ballad in which a skeleton drags Imogene away on her wedding night. Lewis in fact wrote his own parody of this ballad, “Giles Jolleys the Grave, and Brown Sally Green,” directly following “Alonzo the Brave” in Tales of Wonder. “The Grim White Woman” is another effective ballad. Lewis also made his own translation of Goethe’s “The Erl-King” and also published an anonymous burlesque of it, “The Cinder-King.” Brief note can be taken of Robert Southey’s entertaining ode “To Horror” (1797), which, although full of pleasantly shuddersome imagery, seems to have no particular message of consequence. The explicitly weird poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley seem confined to juvenilia, as for example the engaging “Ghasta; or, The Avenging Demon!!!” (1810; I have no idea
what the three exclamation marks are meant to convey), announced by the author as a paraphrase from “a few unconnected German Stanzas” (853), or the various poems included in St. Irvyne (1811), some of which appear to have been written as early as 1808. As florid exercises in shuddermongering they are transiently engaging; otherwise, they don’t amount to much. The Lamia (1820) of John Keats (1795–1821) would seem to owe something to Christabel, for here again we are concerned with a snakewoman. Hermes took a snake and turned her into a woman, and she promptly seduces the young philosopher Lycius and marries him; but the older philosopher Apollonius recognises her as a lamia or snake-woman, and she vanishes from the wedding feast. Lycius dies, his marriage robe turned into a shroud. The basic scenario was derived from an anecdote in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). The symbolism of the poem is difficult to interpret; are we to see Lamia as the embodiment of fantastic romance, banished by the excessive rationalism of Apollonius? Whatever the case, the poem seems to end a bit abruptly, its frisson of horror rapidly dispelled. Many other of Keats’s poems touch upon the supernatural in varying degrees, but none so concentratedly as Lamia. The Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779–1852), now better known for his letters and journals and for his recollections of his more distinguished contemporaries than for his own poetry, was once immensely popular, but little of his verse lives today. Much of it is laced with fantasy and the supernatural. The long poem Lalla Rookh (1817) is an instance of the Mogul (Muslim) tale and features some elements of Persian fantasy. Then there is the curious situation surrounding the fragmentary poem “Alciphron.” It was evidently written before the short novel based upon it, The Epicurean (1827), but the latter was published first. Miriam Allen deFord is correct in describing the poem as evidence of “Moore’s lifelong interest in theological speculation” (52), and she is equally right in declaring that it is “talky and exceedingly dull” (53). The novel is a little less so. The basic thrust of the story is the desire of Alciphron, an Epicurean philosopher in Athens, for eternal life (let it pass that this is an utter violation of the core tenets of Epicureanism, which saw in death a state of blissful oblivion) and his voyage to Egypt in quest of it. The work is set in the year A.D. 257. Reaching Alexandria, Alciphron (who tells the story in the first person) realises that he must go “beneath the Pyramids” (13) to find
the soul of the real Egypt. Along the way, he becomes infatuated with a woman he sees in a procession. The underground scene is really a triumph of the imagination, and it creates a sense of pseudo-supernaturalism that lingers even after the phenomena are explained naturalistically: At every step the noise of the dashing waters increased; and I now perceived that I had entered an immense rocky cavern, through the middle of which, headlong as a winter-torrent, the flood, to whose roar I had been listening, poured its dark waters; while upon its surface floated grim, spectre-like shapes, which as they went by sent forth those dismal shrieks I had heard,—as if in fear of some awful precipice towards whose brink they were hurrying. (66) But the novel rapidly suffers a letdown thereafter, as the narrative becomes consumed with the conflict between Alciphron’s inamorata (Alethe, who is a priestess of Isis but wishes to become a Christian) and a high-priest, Orcus, who wishes to convert Alciphron to the Egyptian religion. Nevertheless, as one of the earliest excursions into Egyptian horror it remains notable. The readiness with which Moore transformed his poem into a prose work suggests that the bountiful weirdness in the poetry of the English and German Romantics—much of it in narrative forms such as the ballad—was becoming a kind of pendant to the Gothic novel. But even in its lengthiest instances, such as the Ancient Mariner, these poems were considerably shorter than the standard Gothic novel and, because of their intensity of expression, carried a far greater emotive impact. They were, in effect, versified short stories at a time when the short story did not exist as a stable or consistent prose medium. The precise degree to which this weird verse influenced the actual emergence of the supernatural short story is a subject worth considerable study. The fact that so many early practitioners of the short story—Sir Walter Scott, James Hogg, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and, culminating and eclipsing them all, Poe—were themselves poets is more than suggestive.
ii. German Grotesque The first German supernatural writer of any significance is Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776–1822), whose promising career, both as a writer and as a composer, was cut short by an early death. Hoffmann himself may be of greater importance as an inspirer of art than as an artist himself: his work was the basis—partial or complete—of such musical works as Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, and Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Die Meistersinger. Hoffmann’s own work, indeed, tends toward the grotesque and extravagant to such a degree that it can seem freakish, unfocused, and confused. And there is, in many of his works, a genuine doubt as to whether the supernatural actually comes into play. His extensive interest in what would later become the fields of psychology and psychiatry—especially as found in such early theorists as Johann Christian Reil and Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert—causes many of his tales to flit uneasily between supernatural and psychological horror, especially when the element of dreams (a particular focus of Schubert’s work) is involved. The great majority of Hoffmann’s weird work is confined to his two principal story collections, Fantasiestücke in Callot’s Manier (1814–15; Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner) and Nachtstücke (1816–17; Night Pieces), and the first of his two novels, Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815–16; usually translated as The Devil’s Elixirs). The latter, as the most sizeable of Hoffmann’s weird works, may be taken as typical of both his virtues and his failings. It would be cumbrous to trace the plot of this convoluted, and at times confused, novel. Suffice it to say that it focuses on the life and thoughts of Medardus, a monk whose intense sexual urges—especially as directed toward a young woman, whom he once sees half-naked, and whom he perversely identifies with a portrait of St. Rosalia found in his monastery —leads him to a life of dissipation and even murder. The ostensible trigger of his actions, however, is his imbibing several bottles of an elixir purportedly offered by the Devil to St. Anthony, the celebrated ascetic of early Christianity. Medardus, ordered to guard this elixir, fails to resist the urge to open the bottle and partake of the contents. Its effects—as he tells of
them in his own words—are instantaneous: “Scarcely had I taken a single nourishing draught when a fiery glow poured through my veins and filled me with a feeling of indescribable good health. I drank once more, the joy of a new and wonderful life rising within me” (31). Of course, this—as well as his supposed glimpse of the Devil himself a little earlier—can be interpreted psychologically, as the flaring up of the guilty conscience of a tormented soul. Indeed, throughout the novel there does not seem to be a single episode that can be construed as genuinely supernatural—unless it be the surprising appearance of several doppelgängers who look precisely like him, some of whom are accounted for by their being near or distant relatives of Medardus’s fiendishly complex family line, full of both legitimate and illegitimate offspring. Medardus, at any rate, is convinced that he is the “plaything of some dark power which hurls [me] this way and that, driving [me] to commit ever more despicable crimes” (184). But we never receive any definitive confirmation of this supposition. Perhaps the only genuinely weird passage in this rambling, unfocused novel is a scene toward the end when Medardus, having confessed his various crimes, is confined to the dungeon of a monastery near Rome where he both undergoes torture (as penance) and experiences fantastically bizarre dreams in which his previous victims appear to plague him. But even here the effect is a piquant fusion of physical and psychological horror, and there is not the slightest suggestion of the supernatural. This passage in particular betrays the influence of earlier Gothic fiction, as indeed the overall scenario of the corrupt and irreligious monk does so even more emphatically. (Lewis’s The Monk is cited by name at one point [203].) But overall, The Devil’s Elixirs is a novel that tries the reader’s patience in its seeming incoherence and lack of aesthetic rigour. Much the same could be said of many of Hoffmann’s short stories and novellas. A number of these are pure fairy tales (Märchen) that would now be classified as fantasy, although one of them—“Der goldne Topf” (“The Golden Flower Pot”; in Fantasiestücke) has a number of interesting supernatural elements. Here again the plot is quite complex, but generally focuses upon a student, Anselmus, who becomes involved with an elemental spirit, posing as the Archivist Lindhorst, who wishes to marry off his three daughters—who alternately appear in the form of snakes or beautiful young women—so that he can resume his true form, which is evidently that of a salamander (the representative of a fire elemental). Early
in the tale, Anselmus appears to be beset by supernatural phenomena in which Nature itself becomes animate; he can only conclude that he is mad. Ultimately, Anselmus marries one of Lindhorst’s daughters, Serpentina, and ends up in Lindhorst’s kingdom in Atlantis. The fairy-tale atmosphere of the story does not detract from several powerful scenes of (apparent) supernaturalism. “Der Sandmann” (“The Sandman”; in Nachtstücke) is no doubt Hoffmann’s most celebrated weird tale; its fame was augmented by the fact that Freud used it as the springboard for his discussion of “The Uncanny.” No doubt Freud was fascinated by the prospect of an infantile fear having baleful, even deathly, consequences in later life: the protagonist, Nathanael, remembers the chilling tales that his nurse told him in early childhood about the horrible creature known as the Sandman, who comes to wicked children: “Oh! he’s a wicked man, who comes to little children when they won’t go to bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so that they jump out of their heads all bloody; and he puts them into a bag and takes them to the half-moon as food for his little ones; and they sit there in the nest and have hooked beaks like owls, and they pick naughty boys’ and girls’ eyes out with them.” After this I formed in my own mind a horrible picture of the cruel Sand-man. When anything came blundering upstairs at night I trembled with fear and dismay; and all that my mother could get out of me were the stammered words “The Sand-man! the Sand-man!” whilst the tears coursed down my cheeks. Then I ran into my bedroom, and the whole night through tormented myself with the terrible apparition of the Sand-man. (185) Very Freudian, indeed. The end result of this childhood trauma is that, as a boy, Nathanael thinks that the lawyer Coppelius, a friend of his father, is the Sandman, and indeed Nathanael blames Coppelius for the death of his father in an explosion: “Coppelius, you atrocious fiend, you’ve killed my father” (190). Much later, Nathanael comes to believe that a pedlar named Coppola is Coppelius, and he proves to be correct. Along the way, Nathanael becomes fascinated with a young woman named Olimpia,
apparently the daughter of one Professor Spalanzani; Olimpia for a time takes Nathanael’s attention away from his betrothed, Clara—but Olimpia turns out to be an automaton. At the story’s conclusion, Nathanael and Clara ascend a high tower where Clara points out a “strange little gray bush” (213) that proves to be Coppelius. In an access of madness, Nathanael attempts to hurl Clara from the tower; but her brother, Lothair, comes to her rescue and saves her, pummeling Nathanael in the process. Nathanael himself then jumps to his death. It is, in all honesty, difficult to make sense of “The Sandman” as a coherent narrative; once again, its seeming randomness and lack of focus defy any attempt at harmonising its incidents, or even its symbolism, into a unity. Overall, the crippling influence of childhood terror is clearly evident, but the precise role of other elements of the story—in particular the function of Olimpia the automaton—is by no means evident. “Das Majorat” (“The Entail”; in Nachstücke) is worth some discussion —not intrinsically, but because of its influence on a later masterwork, as shall become evident in the next chapter. In itself it is almost intolerably verbose and meandering. We are here concerned with a nobleman, Baron Roderick von R——, who dwells in a dismal, unfinished castle and dreams of an “evil spirit” that is haunting the castle. His wife, the baroness, believes that “there is some dark family secret locked within these walls” (264). But this promising scenario is confounded by a long, prolix history of the family, involving murders, questionable inheritance, and so forth, so that the supernatural elements in the story—if, indeed, they are genuinely there—have no chance to develop. Other tales by Hoffmann are much more clearly within the domain of the supernatural than The Devil’s Elixirs or “The Sandman.” “Ignaz Denner” (in Nachtstücke) is the hideous tale of a man who uses the blood of children to maintain eternal life and youth. It was considered so grisly that Hoffmann’s publisher excluded it from the Fantasiestücke, and it had to be relegated to his later collection. “Vampirismus” (“Vampirism”; in Die Serapions-Brüder, 1817) is an uninspired vampire tale; “Die Automate” (“The Automata”; in Serapions-Brüder) involves both ghosts and automata; “Die Abenteuer der Silvester-Nacht” (“A New Year’s Eve Entertainment”; in Fantasiestücke) involves a man whose reflection is stolen by the Devil. The influence of earlier Gothic literature on these tales is manifest, and Hoffmann has made some advance upon these already conventional themes
by his focus on mental aberration and the inscrutable nature of dreams and hallucinations. On the whole, however, Hoffmann’s work is a bit too erratic and confused to be aesthetically successful, and he will remain significant more for his influence—especially upon Poe, as we shall see—than for the merits of his own writing. The final word on Hoffmann, much to the dismay of his supporters, was written so early as 1827, when Sir Walter Scott, in a lengthy review of several of Hoffmann’s books, entitled “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition,” uttered a warning that is in some ways truer now than it was when it was written: It was . . . discovered that the supernatural in fictitious composition requires to be managed with considerable delicacy, as criticism begins to be more on the alert. The interest which it excites is indeed a powerful spring; but it is one which is peculiarly subject to be exhausted by coarse handling and repeated pressure. It is also of a character which it is extremely difficult to sustain, and of which a very small proportion may be said to be better than the whole. The marvellous, more than any other attribute of fictitious narrative, loses its effect by being brought much into view. The imagination of the reader is to be excited if possible, without being gratified. If once, like Macbeth, we “sup full with horrors”, our taste for the banquet is ended, and the thrill of terror with which we hear or read of a night-shriek, becomes lost in that sated indifference with which the tyrant came at length to listen to the most deep catastrophes that could affect his house. . . . . . . it is evident that the exhibition of supernatural appearances in fictitious narrative ought to be rare, brief, indistinct, and such as may become a being to us so incomprehensible, and so different from ourselves, of whom we cannot justly conjecture whence he comes, or for what purpose, and of whose attributes we can have no regular or distinct perception. Hence it usually happens, that the first touch of the supernatural is always the most effective, and is rather weakened and defaced, than strengthened by the subsequent recurrence of similar incidents. (314–16)
Hoffmann wrote an opera based upon Undine, the short novel published in 1811 by his friend Friedrich Heinrich Karl, baron de La Motte-Fouqué (1777–1843). Although this work is even more in the fairy-tale tradition than “Die goldne Topf,” it is worth discussing as an exquisite example of the supernatural employed to evoke beauty rather than terror. The basic premise of the story is well known: Undine, a water spirit (as her name indicates, unda being Latin for water), marries a human being, Huldbrand, and for a time the couple seems happy; but the marriage deteriorates, and at one point Huldbrand chastises Undine while they are near a body of water —in express contravention of her wishes—and she plunges into the sea. Huldbrand, meanwhile, has been increasingly attracted to a human woman, Bertalda, and when they marry Undine returns to kill Huldbrand. It is precisely because the “rules” governing the story—the notions that Undine, who has no soul, can only get one by marrying a human being; that she must not be scolded while near the water; that Huldbrand must not marry another—are essentially arbitrary that the story becomes a fantasy rather than a tale of supernatural horror, in spite of its manifestly real-world setting. But the element of the supernatural might be considered covertly present, chiefly in the figure of Kühleborn, her uncle, who increasingly dominates the narrative and becomes a kind of demon-figure. While the protagonists are staying at Castle Ringstetten, the appearances of Kühleborn are explicitly stated to resemble the appearances of a ghost in a Gothic castle: . . . the circumstance that most of all disturbed the inmates of the castle, was a variety of wonderful apparitions which met Huldbrand and Bertalda in the vaulted galleries of the castle, and which had never been heard of before as haunting the locality. The tall white man in whom Huldbrand recognized only too plainly Uncle Kühleborn, and Bertalda the spectral master of the fountain, often passed before them with a threatening aspect, and especially before Bertalda; so much so, that she had already several times been made ill with terror, and had frequently thought of quitting the castle. (65) Both the language and the overall imagery are taken directly from the Gothic novel. Kühleborn becomes increasingly threatening, to the point that
Undine must come to the rescue of Huldbrand and Bertalda when Kühleborn attempts to kill them on a voyage down the Danube. Of course, the chief thematic focus of the work is the contrast between paganism and Christianity. At the very outset Undine’s name is considered “heathenish” (17), and considerable attention is devoted to the question of whether she has been baptised. Indeed, when it is decided that Huldbrand and Undine will marry, a priest conveniently appears to conduct the ceremony. (We later learn that Kühleborn had led the priest to show up at the fisherman’s cottage where the couple was staying.) But Undine’s “heathenish” ways increasingly alienate Huldbrand, to such a degree that he makes what proves to be his fatal decision to discard Undine and unite with Bertalda. At that point, Undine can only declare sadly: “they have opened the spring . . . and now I am here, and you must die” (92). In a gorgeous metaphor that underscores her role as a water-spirit, Undine declares at last, “I have wept him to death” (92). None of La Motte-Fouqué’s other works come even as close as Undine to the realm of the supernatural, and certainly not to that of supernatural horror. But if he had written nothing but Undine, he would deserve a place, and a place of no small significance, in the literature of the imagination.
iii. The Weird Short Story Poe is often called the inventor of the short story, and if we are considering the short story as a meticulously crafted aesthetic entity that is certainly the case; but shorter tales did, as we have already noticed sporadically, make their appearance before Poe initiated his career in the 1830s. Whether we are to regard M. G. Lewis’s Romantic Tales (1808) as the first “horror short story collection” is debatable, especially in light of the facts that (a) the stories are all translations or paraphrases from the German, and (b) most of them are hardly short. But short fiction was triggered not by novelists assembling stories in book form but by the emergence, in the early nineteenth century, of periodicals that welcomed short fiction. Chief among them, from our perspective, was Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Blackwood’s, founded in 1817, from the outset included a (relatively small) number of “sensational tales” as a means of attracting a wider readership than the relatively few who read their political articles or literary reviews. These tales, clearly deriving their imagery from the Gothic novel, were by no means consistently supernatural, and in fact a good many of them were merely excursions into gruesomeness; but in the course of time their appearance did encourage some of the leading supernaturalists of the period to contribute short fiction to the magazine. Annuals like the Keepsake also contained the occasional supernatural specimen; and because these volumes generally were issued around Christmas, the tradition of the “Christmas ghost story” was born. In this interregnum period, three noteworthy writers began contributing short fiction in some quantity, although from the viewpoint of craftsmanship they remain markedly inferior to Poe. Mary Shelley, after writing Frankenstein (and, incidentally, recovering from the early death of her husband in 1822), wrote more than two dozen tales in the succeeding two decades (the last of them dates, apparently, to the late 1830s), although only a relatively small number of these need concern us here. She made no effort to collect the tales herself, and a posthumous edition, Tales and Stories (1891), although seriously deficient,
had to suffice until Charles E. Robinson’s definitive edition of her Collected Tales and Stories (1976). Perhaps the most notable of these is “The Mortal Immortal” (Keepsake for 1834 [1833]), whose very premise would appear to be supernatural: we are at the outset introduced to a man who claims to be 323 years old. But what is of interest is the degree to which the first-person narrator systematically dispenses with many of the obvious supernatural causations that would account for his anomalous longevity. He first rejects out of hand the notion that he is the Wandering Jew (“certainly not. . . . In comparison with him, I am a very young Immortal” [219]) and then doubts whether he is in fact destined to be immortal. He has, it is true, studied with Cornelius Agrippa, but he pokes ribald fun at the prospect that Agrippa was a kind of Satan-figure who had tempted him to renounce his soul for forbidden knowledge (“In spite of the most painful vigilance, I had never detected the trace of a cloven foot; nor was the studious silence of our abode ever disturbed by demoniac howls” [221]). He similarly doubts whether Agrippa “could command the powers of darkness” (226). He does take an elixir from Agrippa—but this appears to be merely a tonic: “longevity was far different from immortality” (226). Granted, the elixir appears to have given the narrator greater vigour and energy, and it is only gradually that he— along with the reader—determines that it has actually bestowed upon him, at the very least, some kind of extended life: he is mortified to find that at one point he looks twenty years old whereas his wife is fifty. The worldweariness that comes upon him with the passage of years may reflect the influence of Godwin’s St. Leon. Two other stories of elongated life can be noted briefly. “Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman” (written in late 1826 but not published until 1863) is a pseudo-fictional account of an actual hoax of the time, when one Roger Dodsworth claimed to have been frozen since 1654 and reanimated in 1826. Shelley presents the matter as a scientific phenomenon: Now we do not believe that any contradiction or impossibility is attached to the adventures of this youthful antique. Animation (I believe physiologists agree) can as easily be suspended for a hundred or two years, as for as many seconds. A body hermetically sealed up by the frost, is of necessity preserved in its pristine
entireness. That which is totally secluded from the action of external agency, can neither have any thing added to nor taken away from it: no decay can take place, for something can never become nothing; under the influence of that state of being which we call death, change but not annihilation removes from our sight the corporal atoma; the earth receives sustenance from them, the air is fed by them, each element takes its own, thus seizing forcible repayment of what it had lent. (44) The rest of the tale is merely a political satire, but the gesture toward scientific verisimilitude is of significance. “Valerius: The Reanimated Man” (probably written in 1819; unpublished in Shelley’s lifetime) is similar, but here no explanation whatever is offered in regard to the reanimation of a man from Roman times. “Transformation” (Keepsake for 1831 [1830]) is of some interest in its relation to Frankenstein. Here a hideous-looking dwarf offers money to a handsome young man to exchange bodies with him for a period of three days only. The young man accepts the offer and finds himself in the twisted body of the dwarf; but three days pass, and the man feels he has been betrayed. The dwarf, true enough, has gone to marry the young man’s fiancée, Juliet. It is at this point, as the young man in the dwarf’s body proceeds to Genoa, that the parallels to Frankenstein accumulate: he is forced to proceed covertly, “for I was unwilling to make a display of my hideousness” (131); he has momentary thoughts of carrying Juliet off by force, just as the creature arrives for his baleful purpose on Frankenstein’s wedding night. In this instance, however, the two merely have a tussle, during which both are stabbed and forthwith return to their own bodies. Some attention should be given to Shelley’s very long novel The Last Man (1826), for although it may not strictly speaking be supernatural—it is, if anything, a work of proto-science fiction—it probes issues that would be taken up by later supernatural writers. It opens in the year 2073, at which time the last king of England has abdicated and republicanism has been established. It would be profitless to examine in detail the plot of this prolix, rambling work, told from the point of view of Lionel Verney, a friend of the son of England’s last king; but, after a very slow beginning, the novel does gain power in its account of the spread of a plague—initially emerging out of Egypt, apparently—throughout the whole world.
Eventually, the plague reaches England; after Verney and others battle marauders from North America and Ireland, they are forced to abandon the island. An unfortunate encounter with religious fanatics in France compels them to go to Switzerland, by which time there are only 50 left. Ultimately, this number is reduced to four: Lionel, his friend Adrian, Clara (Adrian’s daughter), and Evelyn (Lionel’s son). It is thought at one point that the plague might have exhausted itself, but then Evelyn is stricken and dies. There may still be a possibility for the revival of the human race, if Lionel and Clara can survive; but, as they make their way to Greece, a storm at sea renders Lionel the only survivor on the planet. The Last Man is crippled by its slow-moving pace and its deficiency in extrapolating technological and other advances a century and a half beyond the novel’s date of writing; and even the sociopolitical implications are relatively undventurous. Many features of the novel, including its conclusion, are clear reflections of events in the life of Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Nevertheless, the novel does gain a cumulative power in spite of its handicaps. The plague is of course not presented as anything approaching a supernatural phenomenon, but its inexorable progress creates a kind of shuddering terror not found in any previous work of Gothic fiction. It may not stand up well in comparison with M. P. Shiel’s infinitely more skilful novel on the same idea, The Purple Cloud (1901), but it is a commendable feat of the imagination. Two Scotsmen, Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) and James Hogg (1770– 1835), also fostered the evolution of the supernatural short story. Scott’s weird short fiction consists chiefly of only two stories, “The Tapestried Chamber” and “Wandering Willie’s Tale” (a chapter in Redgauntlet, 1824), but other tales are of ancillary interest, not to mention several of his Waverley novels. Scott, as we have seen, was perhaps the acutest critic of the Gothic tale in his time, certainly among those who were practising fiction writers; and his many historical novels and long poems betray Gothic influences from beginning to end. The Black Dwarf (1816), a somewhat crude and undeveloped early work, is a kind of protoFrankenstein novel in its depiction of a dwarf whose physical repulsiveness embitters him against the human race; but the general effect is more that of a fairy tale than of a Gothic novel. The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) has been referred to as Scott’s most Gothic work from an atmospheric point of view, although it is entirely non-supernatural. But supernaturalism does
enter into The Monastery (1820), set in the reign of Elizabeth and focusing simultaneously on Catholic-Protestant troubles and disputes between the English and the Scots, in which the former are, naturally, portrayed as the villains. A benign spectre, the Lady of Avenel, manifests itself at frequent moments and takes an active hand in the advancement of the plot. A pendant to this novel is The Abbot (1820), a novel centring around the escape of Mary Queen of Scots from her imprisonment in Lochleven Castle. The influence of Sophia Lee’s The Recess and Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is particularly evident here. But in the end there is little reason to consider Scott as a supernaturalist beyond his several short stories. “Wandering Willie’s Tale,” written entirely in Scots dialect, tells of the temptation of Steenie Steenson to sell his soul to the Devil; its most effective scene is his venturing into a strange castle where he comes upon the revels of a party of dead men restored to life. Although the at times difficult dialect enhances the verisimilitude of the tale, its general effect is that of a bit of folklore, and to that degree it lacks a certain immediacy and potency. That can hardly be said for “The Tapestried Chamber” (Keepsake for 1829 [1828]), an earlier version of which had appeared as “Story of an Apparition” (Blackwood’s, April 1818). This may be the most effective supernatural short story written up to this time. A very simple account of an apparition—that of a woman of the seventeenth century “of whose crimes a black and fearful catalogue is recorded in a family history” (30)—the tale gains strength from the bluff, imposing figure of the protagonist, General Browne, who is staying with his friend Lord Woodville and who clearly reveals himself as no “weak-minded, superstitious fool” (24). The spectre is introduced very gradually; first only a sound of a rustling gown is heard, then an old woman is seen from a distance in the General’s bedroom, and then finally her hideous face is glimpsed: “Upon a face which wore the fixed features of a corpse were imprinted the traces of the vilest and most hideous passions which had animated her while she lived. The body of some atrocious criminal seemed to have been given up from the grave, and the soul restored from the penal fire, in order to form, for a space, an union with the ancient accomplice of its guilt” (26). This rather curious passage suggests that it is the woman’s moral evil that has rendered her an apparition, not the lack of Christian burial, her death at the hands of a criminal who has escaped punishment, or anything of the sort.
Three other stories are of some interest. In “My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror” (Keepsake for 1829 [1828]) the wife of Sir Philip Forester, who has gone off to war, consults a Dr. Baptista Damiotti, who claims to have the ability to tell the fates of absent friends. After an elaborate hocus-pocus, Sir Philip’s wife sees in a mirror her husband actually leading a young woman down the altar in a marriage ceremony that is interrupted by a sword-fight. Sure enough, later they hear of a sword-fight in which Sir Philip kills a relative and flees to the Continent. “The Two Drovers” (a segment of Chronicles of Canongate [1827]) is really a mainstream story of the deadly conflict between two drovers, but it features a single supernatural episode, where an “auld Highland witch” (104) makes a baleful prediction to one of the drovers: “There is blood on your hand, and it is English blood” (106). A still uncollected early tale, “Phantasmagoria” (Blackwood’s, May 1818), is an effective short tale of a benign apparition. Scott’s greatest contribution to the weird—aside from his critical essays and the biographical sketches of Gothic writers in Lives of the Novelists (1825)—may perhaps be Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830), an exhaustive treatment of witch legendry, told from a markedly sceptical point of view. Although sophistically maintaining that the witchcraft persecutions of mediaeval Europe were derived from a misconstrual of biblical texts (it is hard to know how else to interpret “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” [Exod. 22:18] except in the straightforward manner in which centuries of popes and their underlings did in fact interpret it), Scott nonetheless condemns the ignorance and brutality of the persecutors; along the way, he features interesting discussions of the lore surrounding fairies, elves, ghosts, and evil spirits. The treatise was reprinted throughout the nineteenth century and could well have supplied plot kernels for Victorian weird writers on both sides of the Atlantic. In terms of quantity, Hogg wrote the most sizeable body of short weird fiction prior to Poe, with the possible exception of Washington Irving. More than a dozen tales can be said to utilise the supernatural as either the core of the plot or as a significant component of it. These tales appeared variously in Blackwood’s, the Keepsake, Fraser’s Magazine, and elsewhere, and many of the best were gathered in The Shepherd’s Calendar (1829). Hogg clearly drew extensively upon Scottish myth and legendry, with its accounts of elves, fairies, brownies, and evil spirits, and made no secret of his faithful reflections of tradition. “Mary Burnet” begins with an elaborate apology for
presenting the reader with “such antiquated breathings of tradition” (200), going on to say: “I pledge myself to relate nothing that has not been handed down to me by tradition” (200). “The Laird of Cassway,” we are told, is related “wholly from tradition” (199), and Hogg adds, a bit naively, “if the story was not true, the parties believed it to have been so” (199). In a sense, this reliance on tradition to establish verisimilitude is analogous to the Gothic novelists’ bland assertions that they are merely relating the superstitions of the mediaeval era without passing judgment upon their truth or falsity, and Hogg’s tales are rendered the more vivid by his striking evocations of the Scottish landscape and character. From a modern perspective, it could be said that Hogg’s weird tales contain rather an excess of supernaturalism and are not as aesthetically finished as Poe’s tales; several of them tend to meander and take odd turns. “Mary Burnet,” although it has moments of power, is subject to these criticisms. In this tale, John Allanson asks a “witch or fairy” (72) to make Mary Burnet, a woman he fancies, appear to him; she does so, but presently leaps into a loch and drowns. She is, however, later found awake in her bed —or is this in fact merely a “fairy or evil spirit” (80)? From this point on, the tale becomes increasingly bizarre: at one point John, at a hiring fair, meets seven different women who say they are Mary. Later, we are treated to an entire castle that appears and then vanishes. To be sure, as a friend of John’s states, “We are wandering in a world of enchantment” (87). John dies, but years later Mary reappears, stepping out of a lavish chariot. What is striking about this tale is the constant interaction of fairies and brownies with the human characters of the tale—an apparent reflection of rural superstition regarding these enigmatic figures. “The Witches of Traquair” also contains excessive supernaturalism, featuring an entire village full of witches as well as appearances by the Devil (as the “Master Fiend” [234]) and, as a kind of balance, two “damsels” (227) who prove to be Faith and Charity. It does not surprise us to learn that “The tale is a very old one” (223), dealing with Colin Hyslop’s desire to use witchcraft to win over the fetching Barbara Stewart but fearing damnation for so doing. Several of Hogg’s tales hew closely to religious belief, suggesting that the supernatural is a violation or contravention of Christian doctrine. “The Mysterious Bride” tells how the laird of Birkendelly comes upon a lovely woman he has dreamed about (“the laird was very much like one
bewitched” [149]). She proclaims: “My name is Jane Ogilvie and you were betrothed to me before you were born” (152). They exchange rings, but the laird’s sister declares that this is “not a ring befitting a Christian to wear” (154). Ultimately we learn that the woman is the spirit or reincarnation of a woman who had been betrothed to the laird’s grandfather, who had murdered her and married someone else. “The Barber of Duncow—A Real Ghost Story” contains some fascinating bits of primitive superstition. A ghost tells the barber’s wife that her husband has dallied with several women in a nearby village and has had a number of illegitimate children. The wife disappears, but reappears as a ghost to her aunt, saying that she was murdered by two women. The body of the wife is found, and at this point it is decreed that everyone in the community must touch the corpse—evidently the guilt of the culprit or culprits will somehow become manifest by this procedure. However, when the woman accused of the crime touches the body, nothing happens. When the barber himself touches it, it becomes “bathed in a flood of purple blood that streamed from the wound, as if it had been newly inflicted” (178–79). It transpires that the accused woman and the barber had dressed up as two witches, but that the barber himself had done the actual killing. Other tales of Hogg’s are less substantial but contain some striking passages. “George Dobson’s Expedition to Hell” ponders upon the mystery of dreams; in the judgment of the narrator, “they prove to the unlettered and contemplative mind, in a very forcible manner, a distinct existence of the soul, and its lively and rapid intelligence with external nature, as well as with a world of spirits with which it has no acquaintance, when the body is lying dormant, and the same to it as if sleeping in death” (41–42). The tale appears to instantiate this dictum, for the coach-driver George Dobson seems to find himself in Hell, but later believes it to have been a dream— but since we have been told that dreams somehow allow the soul access to other realms of entity, we are not surprised to come upon evidence that the event was real after all. In “The Brownie of the Black Haggs,” the evil Lady Wheelhope is plagued by a wicked servant who may be a brownie. The tale ultimately becomes one of bizarre obsession, as the Lady cannot keep herself away from the servant she loathes. In a striking anticipation of Poe, “Strange Letter of a Lunatic” (Fraser’s Magazine, December 1830) tells of a man plagued by a double to such an extent that he doubts his own identity.
Hogg’s greatest contribution to weird fiction, however, is the bizarre novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). An earlier novel, The Brownie of Bodsbeck (1820), is a rambling and confused work of the explained supernatural, in which a creature thought to be a brownie is ultimately revealed to be a reformer named John Brown. But the Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a tale of a very different order of genius and is clearly the pinnacle of Hogg’s work in the supernatural, if not of his work as a whole. The pecularity of the novel begins with “The Editor’s Narrative,” which takes up more than a third of the text. Here we learn of George Colwan, who had the misfortune to marry a woman who was a religious fanatic. She bore him two sons, George and Robert; but the senior George comes to doubt that Robert is his own son and therefore banishes him from the house. Robert is raised by a fanatical clergyman, Robert Wringim. The two brothers nonetheless meet frequently, clashing constantly. The younger George is then found dead: was he killed by Robert, or by another man named Drummond? The elder George dies soon thereafter, and witnesses eventually come forth to confirm that Robert is in fact the murderer. Robert’s own “confession” now commences. He tells of how he one day met his exact look-alike: is this his brother, or some kind of guardian angel? Gradually we are led to suspect that he is the Devil. The man states that his name is Gil-Martin, going on to say that “It is not my Christian name; but it is a name which may serve your turn” (134). Gil-Martin continues Robert’s indoctrination into religious fanaticism, declaring that it is Robert’s duty to kill a clergyman, Mr. Blanchard, who had criticised him; Robert does so, whereupon Gil-Martin exults: “‘Thou hast done well for once; but wherefore hesitate in such a cause? This is but a small beginning of so great a work as that of purging the Christian world. But the first victim is a worthy one, and more of such lights must be extinguished immediately’” (146). He goes on to add pregnantly: “I never go but where I have some great purpose to serve . . . either in the advancement of my own power or in thwarting my enemies” (149–50). Gil-Martin now declares that Robert must kill his brother and father. Robert attempts to do so on several occasions but fails. Gil now shapes himself in the form of Drummond and provokes an argument with George; Robert appears and (apparently) kills George. It is at this point that Robert, if he has not been so already, becomes a thoroughly unreliable narrator. On several occasions his account of events
clashes with that of the “Editor,” and at the climatic moment of the death of George, Robert openly admits that he is not at all certain what actually happened: I will not deny, that my own immediate impressions of this affair in some degree differed from this statement [i.e., that Robert killed George]. But this is precisely as my illustrious friend [Gil-Martin] described it to me afterwards, and I can rely implicitly on his information, as he was at that time a looker-on, and my senses all in a state of agitation, and he could have no motive for saying what was not the positive turth. (178) Robert has little justification for being so sanguine on the matter; he presently begins to wonder whether Gil is not some kind of “powerful necromancer” (191). As the tale concludes, Gil appears to Robert in the guise of his dead brother, and Robert flees, experiencing various bizarre manifestations along the way. One of the final entries in what has become his diary is as follows: “If the horrors of hell are equal to those I have suffered, eternity will be of short duration there, for no created energy can support them for one single month, or week. I have been buffeted as never living creature was. My vitals have all been torn, and every faculty and feeling of my soul racked, and tormented into callous insensibility” (250). In a rather odd conclusion, the “Editor” resumes the narrative, reprinting a letter signed by one James Hogg that appeared in Blackwood’s for August 1823 (as, in fact, it did) giving details on Robert’s apparent suicide. The Editor declares that he now doubts that Robert in fact killed George, leaving us with the implication that Gil-Martin actually did so. In spite of the stilted and at times archaic diction, there is a striking sense of contemporaneousness to the Confessions of a Justified Sinner. It may be one of the earliest genuine examples of the unreliable narrator; but more than that, it is a remarkable anticipation of Poe’s ventures into psychological horror. It is, indeed, the first psychological horror novel ever written, and Robert’s confession has all the gripping power of incipient mania and insanity. But the presence of what is clearly the Devil allows the novel to be also authentically supernatural, and in this sense it represents a rare fusion between these two ordinarily disparate modes. Much more so
than Brown’s Wieland, it tells of the baneful effects of religious fanaticism —Louis Simpson (171–72) suggests that the core of the plot, from this perspective, was derived from an actual religious controversy in Scotland a few generations before Hogg’s time—but its true power rests in its exhibiting to the reader the step-by-step disintegration of an already diseased mentality.
iv. French Supernaturalism I have, up to now, not said much about supernaturalism or Gothicism in France. While it is true that several of the leading—as well as some of the lesser—novels of the Gothic period were translated into French, French writers wrote little in this mode themselves. From the late seventeenth century onward, the French appeared more attracted to fantasy—either as manifested in the fairy tale (Madame d’Aulnoy’s Les Contes des fées, 1697) or in the folktale (Antoine Galland’s translation of the Arabian Nights, 1704–17)—than in pure supernaturalism. Aside from Jacques Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux (1772; The Devil in Love), a humorous tale that seems more a parody of Gothicism than a genuine contribution to it, there is little in French literature during this period that is of direct interest to our study. Some attention should be paid to the work of Charles Nodier (1780– 1844), who not only wrote several late Gothic novels—among them Les Proscrits (1802; The Outlaws) and Les Tristes (1806; The Sad Ones)—that reveal his obsession with death, but also several significant works featuring vampires. He not only collaborated with Ginette Picat-Guinoiseau on a dramatic adaptation of Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” entitled Le Vampire (1820), but also used vampires or vampiric figures in such novels as Smarra (1821) and Trilby (1822). Late work by Nodier is more in the fairy tale tradition and appears to reveal the influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Supernaturalism of a very distinctive sort was practised by two French writers, Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo. The works of both writers attest to the manner in which fantasy and horror can be put to the use of fundamentally mainstream concerns of character portrayal and social commentary. Balzac (1799–1850) wrote a number of pseudo-Gothic potboilers early in his career, in the 1820s, although few if any of these involve the supernatural. By 1829, however, he had commenced his immense series of novels and tales, “La Comédie Humaine,” that would establish his international reputation. One subset of these works was what he termed contes philosophiques (philosophical tales), although it appears that some of the components of this subset were incorporated after the fact. The
unifying thread that links these works is a psychological one: the supernatural (or a suggestion of it) is used as a device to reflect upon the transforming nature of external events upon the human psyche. The most striking work of Balzac’s in this regard is Le Peau de chagrin (1831; variously translated as The Wild Ass’s Skin or The Magic Skin). Here we are introduced to a young man, Raphael, who appears at the end of his rope and wishes to commit suicide. Wandering into a curio shop, he is shown a wild ass’s skin, and the aged owner of the shop claims that it can grant wishes— under certain conditions. The central condition governing the skin becomes immediately evident: although it can indeed grant wishes—making Raphael, for example, instantly and fabulously wealthy—every wish it grants shrinks the size of the skin, and Raphael is told that his own life will be correspondingly reduced. At this point the novel treads close between the borderline of fantasy and the supernatural, seeming more like a modern fairy tale than a work of terror. Balzac’s fundamental interest is the effect of the skin on Raphael: it compels him to behave in a highly unnatural manner, since in order to preserve the skin and prevent it from shrinking, he must rid himself of all desires (for any wish that flits through his mind is immediately granted by the skin, which shrinks accordingly), and in spite of his great wealth he turns into a feeble ascetic, eschewing rich foods, women, and all the other facets of life (especially in one of his station) that one would normally expect. It is manifest that the supernatural or fantastic premise has been fashioned chiefly for the purpose of probing Raphael’s tormented psyche. From our perspective Le Peau de chagrin gains some relevance when a zoologist studies the skin in an attempt to determine its nature and properties. The zoologist presently throws up his hands, forcing Raphael to conclude, “There is certainly something infernal in the thing!” (219). This gesture at a pseudo-scientific “accounting” of the magic skin brings the novel more in line with supernaturalism. In any event, by this time Raphael has, in spite of himself, fallen in love with one Pauline, and his fate is inevitable: he dies in longing for her, as the skin shrinks to nothing. Le Peau de chagrin is a powerful and relentless study of character and, in a sense, comes close to being a novel of psychological terror in spite of its supernatural premise. That premise is, as I say, closer to fantasy than to strict supernaturalism, because (as I have explained in Chapter I) the “rules of the game” have essentially been arbitrarily established by the author
without direct reference to any trope derived from folklore or superstition. Moreover, the supernatural element occupies an almost vanishingly small role in the overall novel, being chiefly a catalyst for the events and for the psychological probing of the protagonist. I hardly need say that this is not meant as a criticism of the novel, merely as an indication of the purposes for which Balzac generally employed the supernatural. Only two other works by Balzac centrally involve the supernatural. The short story “L’Elixir de la longue vie” (Revue de Paris, 24 October 1830; “The Elixir of Life”) is a rather buffoonish narrative in which the dying Bartolommeo Belvidero tells his son, Don Juan, that he has a magic lotion that, when rubbed over his dead body, will bring him back to life. Don Juan, however, would prefer that his father remain dead. Nonetheless, he rubs his dead father’s eye with the lotion—and sure enough the eye opens. Realising the value of the substance, he doesn’t waste it on his father but instructs his own son to do what he failed to do. The son complies, rubbing his dead father’s body with the lotion, and Don Juan is immediately reanimated, running amok in the process. The story reads like a parody of Gothic excesses, and may well be so. This may also be the case with “Melmoth reconcilié” (1835; “Melmoth Reconciled”), a conscious sequel of sorts to Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. A bank cashier, Castanier, encounters John Melmoth at the very time when he is about to embezzle some money: in a sense, Melmoth acts as an embodiment of conscience. But Melmoth is also not shy in expressing his supernatural powers: “Who is strong enough to resist me?” said the Englishman, addressing him. “Do you not know that everything here on earth must obey me, that it is in my power to do everything? I read men’s thoughts, I see the future, and I know the past. I am here, and I can be elsewhere also. Time and space and distance are nothing to me. The whole world is at my beck and call.” (316) Castanier accepts Melmoth’s bargain, allowing Melmoth to die in peace, happy and repentant. Castanier, for his part, not only begins to adopt Melmoth’s mannerisms and attitude to life but also, in a brilliant and chilling touch, his physical characteristics: “There was a change in the cashier’s appearance. A strange pallor overspread his once rubicund
countenance; it wore the peculiarly sinister and stony look of the mysterious visitor. The sullen glare of his eyes was intolerable,; the fierce light in them seemed to scorch. The man who had looked so good-humored and goodnatured had suddenly grown tyrannical and proud” (323). Castanier himself leaves no doubt as to the nature of his alteration: “Castanier felt that he had undergone a mental as well as physical transformation” (326). And, exactly as with Melmoth in Melmoth the Wanderer, Castanier “felt the awful melancholy of omnipotence” (330). This single sentence effectively conveys Balzac’s fundamental message: human character, pliable as it is, can be metamorphosed out of recognition by external circumstance. The rest of the long story—in which Castanier, yearning for heaven, seeks desperately for someone to accept the bargain in his turn, finally finding a hapless clerk to do so—comes close to self-parody, but Balzac has made his basic point. La Recherche de l’absolu (1834; The Quest of the Absolute) focuses on a man named Balthazar who seeks the philosopher’s stone, chiefly the means of making gold out of other substances. The novel has no supernatural elements except one fleeting suggestion of it: when a Polish man tells Balthazar that the Absolute is “One Element common to all substances” (72), his put-upon wife thinks he may be the Devil (“Only the Tempter could have those yellow eyes, blazing with the fire of Prometheus” [74]). Nothing much is made of this, however, and the novel is a relentless probing of the obsession that renders Balthazar a self-absorbed maniac and impoverishes his family. We similarly need spend little time on Balzac’s two novels, Louis Lambert (1832) and Séraphita (1835), both of which seem designed to expound the Swedenborgian philosophy. The latter does focus on a strange, androgynous, and possibly supernatural creature who is first called Seraphitus, then Seraphita, but its tedious didacticism renders it an aesthetic failure. As for Victor Hugo’s curious early novel Han d’Icelande (1823; Han of Iceland), set in the wilds of Norway in the year 1699, there is no genuine supernaturalism at all, even though the enigmatic central figure, Han of Iceland, is referred to variously as the Antichrist (46), a “supernatural being” (52), and “in league with the powers of darkness” (59), and is seen performing such appalling acts as killing a wolf with his bare hands and presenting one Lucy Stadt with the skull of the child they had borne two
decades earlier, when Han had raped her. Early in the novel, Han’s history is supplied: “According to tradition, some Iceland peasants found Han, then a child, wandering in the Bessesled Mountains. They were about to kill him, as Astyager destroyed the lion cub of Bactriana, but the bishop interceded on his behalf, and took the cub under his protection, hoping to make a Christian of the devil. The good bishop made every effort to develop his diabolical intellect, forgetting that the hemlock in the hot-house of Babylon never changed into the lily. This imp of darkness repaid all his care by taking flight one fine night across the sea, in the trunk of a tree, previously setting fire to the episcopal manor to lighten up the way. According to the old women’s tales, this is the way the Icelander reached Norway, and he offers the most complete type of a monster, with all the benefits of a good education.” (51–52) This passage, among many others, suggests that Hugo (or his characters) is laying it on a bit thick as regards Han’s diabolical nature. Indeed, in the course of the narrative, in spite of his atrocious behaviour, he gains a certain modicum of sympathy by the role he plays in the coal miners’ struggle against their tyrannical bosses. Han d’Icelande is aesthetically crude and unpolished, but its protagonist was manifestly an anticipation of the figure of Quasimodo in Nôtre Dame de Paris (1831). The work of Balzac and Hugo is really a kind of prelude to the true commencement of French supernaturalism, which really did not hit its stride until the next few generations, in the work of Gautier, Mérimée, and Maupassant.
v. Anticipations of Poe: Washington Irving With the possible exception of Hoffmann, the most distinguished figure in this interregnum period—post-Gothic but pre-Poe—is Washington Irving (1783–1859). Irving, more than Brockden Brown, deserves the title of Poe’s most noted American precursor, if only because he worked with the supernatural liberally in a manner that Brown appeared disinclined to do. Irving, born in New York but spending much of his life travelling throughout England and the Continent, is emphatically Anglo-American in his style, subject matter, and temperament. As is fitting for an author whose second book publication was A History of New York (1809), Irving was deeply knowledgeable in the Dutch legendry of the American continent; indeed, the frequency of his use of the word legend in the titles of his supernatural tales is of some significance. Given that Irving came to literary maturity during the later stages of the Gothic movement, it is likely that he had absorbed at least the more noteworthy contributions to Gothic fiction. The exact degree of Irving’s familiarity with Gothic is not, to my understanding, known, but on the basis of his tales and sketches it seems undeniable that he was well versed in the work of his predecessors in supernatural terror. The array of Irving’s weird work is impressively large, going well beyond the celebrated tales in The Sketch-Book (1820) and Tales of a Traveller (1824). We find other weird specimens in Bracebridge Hall (1822), The Legends of the Alhambra (1832), the late collection Wolfert’s Roost (1855), and even an uncollected item or two. It is exactly the scattered nature of Irving’s supernatural work that has perhaps robbed him of the credit he deserves as a significant forerunner of Poe. A collection of all Irving’s horror tales would serve a valuable purpose. The degree to which Irving was steeped in Gothic imagery is most clearly evident in a trilogy of linked stories in Tales of a Traveller, “The Adventure of the Mysterious Picture,” “The Adventure of the Mysterious Stranger,” and “The Story of the Young Italian.” This rather meandering account focuses upon a purportedly “haunted room” (75) with a curious portrait that (as in Melmoth the Wanderer) appears to follow the occupant of
the room with its eyes. We are then given a long, rambling narrative of an Italian involved in a love triangle, murder, and so forth—all fairly stock Gothic stage properties, but the tale does occasionally generate a powerful atmosphere of terror. In “The Mysterious Chambers” we find a nod to Clara Reeve in the protagonist’s remark, “Here was the haunted wing of the castle” (56). This is not so much a story as, apparently, a first-person narrative by Irving himself in his tour of the “Moorish halls” (56) of the Alhambra. The purportedly haunted nature of the wing is immediately dispelled, but there are nonetheless some vivid spooky effects. In “Legend of the Arabian Astrologer” the astrologer in question appears to use some Egyptian magic to ward off the foes of the Moorish king Aben Hazuz. There is a reference to a “Gothic princess” (114) who, after the astrologer has built a magic palace based upon the mysterious Arabian city of Irem, disappears with Aben Hazuz down a shaft to some underground realm. The long tale “Dolph Heyliger” has a generally Gothic cast also. We are here introduced to the young Dolph, a mischievous boy who is apprenticed to a physician who owns a “haunted” house in the country. As with Clara Reeve’s protagonist, Dolph dares the physician to let him stay there at night. In fact, he stays three nights, during which the ghost of an “elderly man” (477) appears to him, at which point Irving reflects an ancient superstition: “he [Dolph] recollected to have heard it said, spirits have no power to speak until spoken to” (481). The ghost leads Dolph outside to a well, for reasons that are not explained, then disappears. In good Gothic fashion, Irving now indulges in a quite irrelevant digression whereby Dolph boards a ship sailing for Albany and encounters one Antony Vander Heyden, who speaks of “The Storm-Ship”—a story within the story that does little but tell of a strange ship that is seen just before or just after a storm. Eventually we learn that the ghost is that of an old Flemish man who had buried some treasure—in the well. (A later story, “The Haunted Ship,” is another nautical horror tale, dealing with the pranks of a ghostly crew on a ship. The ghosts then attempt to save the ship as it is caught in a tropical storm, but fail.) In The Sketch-Book Irving is attempting—as far as his weird writing is concerned—to establish the young United States as a fecund venue for the supernatural. The difficulty of his task is epitomised by what the prominent
British critic William Hazlitt would say a few years later in reference to Charles Brockden Brown: . . . no ghost, we will venture to say, was ever seen in North America. They do not walk in broad day; and the night of ignorance and superstition which favours their appearance, was long past before the United States lifted up their head beyond the Atlantic wave. . . . In this orderly and undramatic state of security and freedom from natural foes, Mr. Brown has provided one of his heroes with a demon to torment him, and fixed him at his back;— but what is to keep him there? Not any prejudice or lurking superstition on the part of the American reader; for the lack of such, the writer is obliged to make up by incessant rodomontade, and face-making. (“American Literature—Dr. Channing,” Edinburgh Review, October 1829) No doubt Hazlitt exaggerated the freedom from “ignorance and superstition” prevailing in the young nation; but his general point—how do you establish an atmosphere of mediaeval superstition in a nation that did not have a Middle Ages?—is well taken. In Hazlitt’s opinion, Brown failed in his attempt to lodge terror in the human psyche. Irving, for his part, draw upon the legendry of the Dutch—and of the native Americans before them —to create an ersatz mediaevalism that could allow for the full play of superstition. The Dutch presence in the American northeast extended two centuries prior to Irving’s day, and the native American presence uncounted centuries before that. In Irving’s mind, these lengths of time afforded a sufficiency of spectral heritage to develop. It is significant that, in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the narrator emphasises the prevalence of ghostly lore in a long-settled region. After recounting several anecdotes of a general sort relating to the older Dutch inhabitants of the area (the Hudson River valley north of New York City), Irving goes on to say: But all these were nothing to the tales of ghosts and apparitions that succeeded. The neighborhood is rich in legendary treasures of the kind. Local tales and superstitions thrive best in these sheltered
long-settled retreats; but are trampled under foot by the shifting throng that forms the population of most of our country places. Besides, there is no encouragement for ghosts in most of our villages, for they have scarcely had time to finish their first nap, and turn themselves in their graves, before their surviving friends have traveled away from the neighborhood; so that when they turn out at night to walk their rounds, they have no acquaintance left to call upon. This is perhaps the reason why we so seldom hear of ghosts except in our long-established Dutch communities. (309–10) Had this not been written a decade before Hazlitt’s comment, it could have been considered a direct rebuttal of it. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is in fact one of Irving’s most powerful forays into the supernatural—or, perhaps, the pseudo-supernatural. After a tremendous atmospheric build-up in which Ichabod Crane finally encounters the headless horseman, who then throws his head at Crane, knocking him out, we are then given an elaborate naturalistic explanation of the events: the horseman was actually one Brown Bones, Crane’s rival for the affections of Katrina van Tassel; the “head” was in reality a pumpkin; and so forth. Quite frankly, this “explanation” fails to convince; and a postscript that purports to supply the moral of the story—“That there is no situation in life but has its advantages and pleasures—provided we will take but a joke as we find it” (319)—is so preposterous that it makes us suspect that the story really has no “moral” at all, and no other purpose but to convey terror. Irving’s emphasis, in the passage quoted from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” on the supersitition dominant in the rural regions is of direct relevance to the other celebrated tale in The Sketch-Book, “Rip Van Winkle.” This story—based on a German folktale—has suffered, paradoxically, from being too well-known; by which I mean that the standard conception of it—that Van Winkle merely falls asleep and wakes up twenty years later in a world rendered entirely unfamiliar to him by the rapid social changes that have occurred—overlooks the central reason why (or, rather, how) Van Winkle fell asleep in the first place. At the outset it is told that Van Winkle had met a strange band of people in the Catskill Mountains and was enticed into taking a drink offered by them. This, in reality, is the genuine supernatural component of the story, for Van Winkle’s
falling asleep—really his lapsing into a state of suspended animation—is only a product of the apparent magic potion he has drunk. The exact nature or origin of the strange people he encountered in the mountains is never clarified, but they seem somewhat along the lines of trolls or elves. Irving, regrettably, repeats the tactic of the explained supernatural in what would otherwise be a powerfully atmospheric tale, “The Spectre Bridegroom.” Here a man riding to a castle to meet his fiancée is set upon by robbers and mortally wounded, whereupon his friend pretends to be a “spectre bridegroom” before admitting to the deception. “The Adventure of My Aunt” is similar: the aunt appears to notice that the portrait of her dead husband moves, but it is in fact a man hiding behind the portrait. Wisely, however, Irving eschewed the explained supernatural in a number of his most gripping tales. Perhaps the acme of his work in this vein is “The Adventure of the German Student,” far and away the best horror story in Tales of a Traveller. Set in the midst of the French Revolution, the narrative tells of a student, Wolfgang, who meets a young woman near the guillotine—a woman he had dreamed about. Taking her back to his room (for sexual purposes, as Irving states in an unusually frank manner), Wolfgang is horrified to find that she is a headless corpse, thereby revealing the truth of the dialogue he and the woman had had earlier: “I have no friend on earth!” said she. “But you have a home,” said Wolfgang. “Yes—in the grave!” (70) The student goes mad. This tale features an unwontedly grim atmosphere of terror in contrast to the great majority of Irving’s other works. Rather less effective is “The Bold Dragoon,” in which it is suggested that the “haunting” of a room in an inn where a dragoon is staying—the furniture madly comes to life—was caused by a previous tenant, an epileptic who apparently infected the furniture with his malady. “The Adventure of My Uncle” is a simple tale of an apparition: a woman walks into the tower room where the uncle of the title is staying, and he later comes upon her portrait, which establishes her as long dead. But the woman’s story, especially the crucial point of why she is now a ghost, is
never fully explained. As for “The Devil and Tom Walker,” this is merely a moral sketch with no sense of horror at all, even though the supernatural is obviously involved: Walker, encountering the Devil, becomes a usurer in exchange for great wealth, but the Devil snatches him away the moment he is about to foreclose a mortgage on a friend. The generally light-hearted, genial, whimsical, and even occasionally flippant tone that Irving affects in the great majority of his tales would seem to work against the creation of an effective atmosphere of supernatural suspense; but—as, in a somewhat different manner, with M. R. James a century later—this tone frequently has the effect of causing readers to let down their defences so that the supernatural incursion becomes the more powerful and terrifying. The overall looseness and, at times, needless verbosity of Irving’s narratives contrasts strikingly with the best of Poe; nevertheless, the impressive array of Irving’s supernatural and pseudosupernatural work makes him a worthy predecessor to his distinguished countryman.
V. Edgar Allan Poe The work of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) revolutionised and transformed supernatural (and psychological) horror fiction in so profound and multifaceted a way that it could plausibly be maintained that the genre, as a serious contribution to literature, only began with him. In this sense, the entire Gothic movement could be considered a kind of “anticipation” of the true commencement of the field. The keenness with which Poe analysed the psychology of fear; the transcendent artistry of his tales, from construction to prose rhythm to aesthetic focus; the intense emotive power of his principal narratives—these and other elements make Poe not merely the fons et origo of supernatural literature but, in many ways, a figure unsurpassed in the breadth and scope of his work. I intend to say little of Poe’s life, the main outlines of which are sufficiently well known: his birth in Boston to impoverished actors; his early abandonment by his father and the death of his mother in 1811, leading to his adoption and his tortured relationship with his foster father, John Allan; his spotty education in England and the University of Virginia, and his brief enrolment at West Point; his marriage to his child-cousin, Virginia Clemm, and her eventual death from tuberculosis; Poe’s own peregrinations in Richmond, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and elsewhere; and his own early death in a Baltimore gutter. What is striking about Poe’s literary career is its relative brevity: even counting his early poetic work, beginning with Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), it extended scarcely twenty years, while his career as a fiction writer lasted not much more than fifteen. The bulk of Poe’s career was spent as an editor and journalist, and his editorial duties at such magazines as the Southern Literary Messenger (1835–37), Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine (1839–40), Graham’s Magazine (1841–42), and the Broadway Journal (1845–46) occupied the bulk of his
time and restricted the amount of leisure he could devote to fiction and poetry. Poe spent years attempting to found a journal precisely suited to his taste—first the Penn Magazine and then the Stylus—but the plans came to nothing. Although Poe gained distinction as an acute critic and, at times, a harsh and somewhat intolerant book reviewer, he was manifestly determined to establish himself as a poet and story writer of note. He had published three slim volumes of poetry by 1831; as early as 1833 he began to plan a story collection, Tales of the Folio Club. The collections that did emerge—Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (dated 1840 but released in December 1839) and Tales (1845)—did indeed give Poe some standing in American fiction, but brought him relatively little income. They were preceded by the curious short novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). The ill-health that plagued him in his final years—especially after the death of Virginia in 1847—also diminished his creative fires. But although his entire corpus of fiction can fit comfortably in one large volume in the Library of America (matched by an equally large volume of his essays and reviews), in its aggregate it launched a new era in supernatural and psychological horror that, while drawing to some degree upon its predecessors, was forward-looking in its psychological acuity and aesthetic finish. His work signaled the definitive collapse of attenuated Gothicism.
i. Poe and the Gothics The critical question, from an historical perspective, is the precise degree to which Poe was influenced by his Gothic predecessors. Surprisingly little systematic work has apparently been done on this issue. It has been well established that Poe was significantly influenced, in his early poetry, by such Romantics as Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, and Thomas Moore, and we shall presently discuss a central influence of Coleridge in another direction; but the extent to which Poe was influenced—as a poet, short story writer, and critical theorist—by the work of Radcliffe, Lewis, Maturin, Hoffmann, Irving, and many lesser figures of the generations preceding his own is by no means clear and perhaps, by the nature of the existing evidence, can never be clear. As a practising critic and reviewer, Poe had occasion to take note of many books coming off the British and American presses; but, of course, no new works by the leading Gothic writers appeared in the fifteen-year period of his major work as a book reviewer (roughly the years from 1835 to his death). More importantly, the entire Gothic movement was regarded as utterly passé, to the degree that Poe’s own (very different) work in this approximate vein was frequently criticised by reviewers, and even some of his own colleagues, as embarrassingly outmoded. The haunted castle, the terrors of the Inquisition, the perils of saintly heroines—all this was played out, finished; and Poe himself, in some of his passing critical remarks, reflected some of the scorn and ridicule that the Gothic movement was compelled to endure. There are frequent mentions of Horace Walpole in Poe’s existing body of criticism, but not one of them refers to him as the author of The Castle of Otranto. There is not a single reference to M. G. Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, E. T. A. Hoffmann, or James Hogg in Poe’s essays and reviews. The only reference to Lewis comes in a late letter (26 June 1849), and it alludes to one of Lewis’s Gothic plays (449–50). There are two scornful references to Charles Robert Maturin, one of which is fairly early (the “Letter to B——,” 1836) and points to what Poe sees as a fundamental improbability in the very construction of Melmoth the Wanderer: “I should
no doubt be tempted to think of the devil in Melmoth, who labors indefatigably through three octavo volumes, to accomplish the destruction of one or two souls, while any common devil would have demolished one or two thousand” (ER 7). This remark is repeated with little change in a review six years later (ER 189). The “three octavo volumes” comment may also reflect Poe’s early contempt for long works, either in prose or in verse. In regard to Washington Irving, Poe remarks in an 1838 letter that “I can hardly say that I am conversant with Irving’s writings, having read nothing of his since I was a boy, save his ‘[The Conquest of] Granada’” and going on to say, “Irving is much overrated, and a nice distinction might be drawn between his just and his surreptitious and adventitious reputation” (111–12). I have said that there are no references to Ann Radcliffe in Poe’s criticism (nor, in fact, in his relatively small body of surviving letters). But there is in fact one citation of her in his corpus—and it occurs, curiously enough, in a story. “The Oval Portrait” (1842) opens as follows: “The chateau into which my valet had ventured to make forcible entrance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded condition, to pass a night in the open air, was one of those piles of commingled gloom and grandeur which have so long frowned among the Appenines, not less in fact than in the fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe” (CW 2.662). The reference is clearly to The Mysteries of Udolpho, set in the Appenines; but the tone of the remark suggests an awareness that the general scenario of a gloomy and forbidding castle had become painfully hackneyed and all but unusable as a literary device. Are there no Gothic writers, then, whom Poe enjoyed? There are tolerably favourable passing mentions of Charles Brockden Brown, one of which (in an 1843 review of James Fenimore Cooper) cites him and several other writers as among the American authors of “more worthy and more artistical fictions” (ER 480). La Motte-Fouqué’s Undine is praised on several occasions, including an extensive 1839 review of a new edition of the work. In this review Poe actually declares the work to be “the finest romance in existence” (ER 257). But we have already seen that Undine is not central to the supernatural tradition, and its relevance to or influence on Poe does not appear significant. From Poe’s perspective, two Gothic writers of the previous generation were worth singling out—William Godwin and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Poe reviewed Godwin’s late work, Lives of the Necromancers (1834), when it
was first published, and he begins his review with high praise: “The name of the author of Caleb Williams, and of St. Leon, is, with us, a word of weight, and one which we consider a guarantee for the excellence of any composition to which it may be affixed” (ER 259). Much of what he writes about Godwin in this review could be applied just as accurately to himself: [There is] an air of mature thought—of deliberate premeditation pervading, in a remarkable degree, even his most common-place observations. He never uses a hurried expression, or hazards either an ambiguous phrase, or a premature opinion. His style therefore is highly artificial; but the extreme finish and proportion always observable about it, render this artificiality, which in less able hands would be wearisome, in him a grace inestimable. We are never tired of his terse, nervous, and sonorous periods—for their terseness, their energy, and even their melody, are made, in all cases, subservient to the sense in which they are invariably fraught. (ER 259) Burton R. Pollin (“Godwin and Poe”) makes a strong case for the influence of Godwin on Poe in a multiplicity of ways. Godwin’s Caleb Williams— which Poe, echoing a comment he maintained was derived from a letter to him by Charles Dickens, claimed Godwin “wrote . . . backwards” (ER 13) —could well have influenced Poe’s detective stories, which were themselves written (or, at least, conceived) backwards, in the sense that the denouement had to be devised before the mystery plot could be constructed to lead to it. Pollin goes on to say that this general sense of the importance of literary architecture is a significant lesson that Poe could have derived from Godwin, as well as the searching psychological analysis of character that we find in both Caleb Williams and the supernatural St. Leon. I have already noted that there is no explicit mention of Hoffmann in Poe’s entire extant corpus of work; but, as will become evident very quickly, Poe was unquestionably familiar with Hoffmann’s work—at least at second hand. Poe could not read German, so that he was reliant on translations or paraphrases of Hoffmann or criticism or reviews of his work. The very title of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque may have been derived indirectly from Hoffmann. I say indirectly because, more than a
century ago, Gustav Gruener pointed out a provocative phrase in Sir Walter Scott’s celebrated review of Hoffmann (“On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition”): “In fact the grotesque in his compositions partly resembles the arabesque in painting” (14). In the preface to that volume (as I shall discuss in greater detail presently), Poe uses the phrase “phantasy-pieces”— a phrase that he wished to use for a collection of his tales that he was planning in 1842. It is likely, as Gruener maintains, that this title alludes to Hoffmann’s Fantasiestücke of 1814–15. Some influences of specific Hoffmann tales on Poe’s own stories shall be noted in due course.
ii. Theory and Practice At this point it is essential for us to discuss some aspects of Poe’s critical theory, for in this manner we will be able to ascertain some phases of the influence of the Gothic tradition on Poe that we have hitherto touched upon only briefly. It is well known that Poe’s theory of poetry emphasised the aesthetic impossibility of a “long” poem (one that could not be read at a single sitting) and also stressed a “unity of effect”—the given emotional effect toward which every line, indeed every word, of a poem must contribute. The most concise expression of this latter idea occurs in the relatively late essay “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), his largely tendentious account of his conception and composition of “The Raven” (1845): “Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can best be wrought by incident or tone—whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone—afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect” (ER 14). As for the former: If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression—for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and every thing like totality is at once destroyed. But since, ceteris paribus, no poet can afford to dispense with any thing that may advance his design, it but remains to be seen whether there is, in extent, any advantage to counterbalance the loss of unity which attends it. Here I say no, at once. What we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones—that is to say, of brief practical effects. It is needless to demonstrate that a poem is such, only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating, the soul; and all intense excitements are, through a psychal necessity, brief. (ER 15)
Let us overlook the patent fallacies inherent in some aspects of this formulation—the fallacy, for example, that the “effect” of a work is “destroyed” merely because a few minutes, a few hours, or even an entire day, elapses between readings. In many ways it is a compelling and appealing manifesto, and it is worth noting that Poe here encompasses all literary works, not just poems, within its scope. Floyd Stovall long ago established that the essence of this theory of poetry was derived from Coleridge. Our chief concern at the moment is the “unity of effect” idea. We find the following in Coleridge’s Table Talk: “the great thing in poetry is, quocunque modo, to effect a unity of impression upon the whole; and a too great fulness and profusion of point in the parts will prevent this. Who can read with pleasure more than a hundred lines or so of Hudibras at one time? Each couplet or quatrain is so whole in itself, that you can’t connect them. There is no fusion,—just as it is in Seneca” (quoted in Stovall 145). In some of his critical writings Poe sometimes uses the phrase “unity of interest,” which he explicitly states is derived from the critical theory of August Wilhelm von Schlegel; but Stovall has convincingly argued that all Poe’s borrowings of Schlegel are likely to have been made through Coleridge. Poe’s theory of short fiction is manifestly adapted from his theory of poetry, both as regards length and as regards the “unity of effect.” Indeed, that phrase is apparently first used in an 1836 review of Dickens’s Watkins Tottle and Other Sketches (ER 205), and is more exhaustively enunciated in Poe’s celebrated 1842 review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales. After noting acidly that “the ordinary novel is objectionable” chiefly because “it cannot be read at one sitting” and therefore “deprives itself . . . of the immense force derivable from totality,” Poe contrasts the effect of the short story: A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or
indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed; and this is an end unattainable by the novel. Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided. (ER 572) There are some fallacies and anomalies here also: it turns the author into some kind of scientist carefully weighing some particular “effect” to be conveyed to the reader; and the idea that some given word might “indirectly” lead to the preconceived end seems to open the way to fairly broad interpretation as to what words, or even whole scenes or episodes, might be said to contribute to the ultimate effect. But these are small points. It is worth noting, however, that the above theory is not specific to the tale of supernatural horror or, indeed, any other genre of tale. How, then, does Poe justify his focus on horror, terror, the supernatural, and what would (much later) be termed psychological suspense? In the first place— as I shall discuss more extensively in the conclusion to this chapter—it cannot be said that most, or even a bare majority, of Poe’s tales are of this type; he had what to many readers and critics (myself included) a lamentable tendency to engage in what Lovecraft quite accurately labelled “his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo-humour” (S 43). In the second place, Poe on a surprisingly few occasions did defend his taste for the macabre, chiefly as a quest for imaginative expansion. In a lengthy footnote to an article on N. P. Willis that constitutes a section of his late essay “The Literati of New York” (1846), Poe first destroys Coleridge’s purported distinction between fancy and imagination (“it is a distinction without a difference—without a difference even of degree”) and goes on to argue for the aesthetic value of works produced under their aegis: Imagination, fancy, fantasy and humour, have in common the elements combination and novelty. The imagination is the artist of the four. From novel arrangements of old forms which present themselves to it, it selects such only as are harmonious; the result, of
course, is beauty itself—using the word in its most extended sense and as inclusive of the sublime. The pure imagination chooses, from either beauty or deformity [the emphasis is Poe’s], only the most combinable things hitherto uncombined; the compound, as a general rule, partaking in character of sublimity or beauty in the ratio of the respective sublimity or beauty of the things combined, which are themselves still to be considered as atomic—that is to say, as previous combinations. . . . The range of imagination is thus unlimited. Its materials extend throughout the universe. Even out of deformities it fabricates that beauty which is at once its sole object and its inevitable test. (ER 1126–27) If this somewhat laborious passage tells us anything, it is the simple fact that horror, terror, weirdness, and the like can in fact be “beautiful” in the hands of a talented artist. Poe’s criticism of what he terms fantasy (whose “votaries . . . delight not only in novelty and unexpectedness of combination, but in the avoidance of proportion. The result is, therefore, abnormal, and, to a healthy mind, affords less of pleasure through its novelty than of pain through its incoherence” [ER 1127]) is, I maintain, directed at Hoffmann; in effect, what Poe is calling fantasy is what we would call the grotesque. But a somewhat earlier credo is much more relevant to our concerns. This is the preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (CW 2.473–74). This rather aggressive manifesto begins by declaring that Poe wrote the stories in the collection “with an eye to this republication in volume form, and may, therefore, have desired to preserve, as far as a certain point, a certain unity of design” (a highly implausible remark—the tales were written over a period of nearly a decade—but one that seeks to extend Poe’s theory of the short story to an entire volume) and seeks to refute criticisms that Poe indulges too frequently in “‘Germanism’ and gloom”: Let us admit, for the moment, that the ‘phantasy-pieces’ now given are Germanic, or what not. Then Germanism is ‘the vein’ for the time being. To morrow I may be anything but German, as yesterday I was everything else. . . . But the truth is that, with a single exception [“Metzengerstein”], there is no one of these stories in
which the scholar should recognise the distinctive features of that species of pseudo-horror which we are taught to call German, for no better reason than that some of the secondary names of German literature have become identified with its folly. If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul,—that I have deduced this terror only from its legitimate sources, and urged it only to its legitimate results. (CW 2.473) This is probably all we need to establish Poe’s theory of horror. The focus of the discussion is all too obviously Hoffmann, and Poe—whose temperament led him not merely to accuse others wildly of plagiarism but to be excessively sensitive to even the most remote accusations of the same sort as directed toward himself—was seeking to establish his declaration of aesthetic independence from Hoffmann and his predecessors. That pregnant line “I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul” is as precise an indication as anyone could want that Poe was seeking to explore the psychology of fear in his tales of terror, and his ability to do so with the most consummate skill and emotive power is what distinguishes his work from all that went before and a great proportion of what came after. Up to now we have been considering Poe’s theories of poetry and short fiction somewhat abstractly. There is certainly an argument to be made that Poe was merely making virtues out of necessities in his formulations, for not only are his own “long” poems—the early ventures Tamerlane and Al Aaraaf—markedly unsuccessful, but, as I shall examine presently, his longer tales and especially his one “novel,” The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, are scarcely less so from a purely aesthetic standpoint. Poe’s initial work in the short story dates to 1831, and it came at a particularly low point in his life: he had left the University of Virginia in 1826 after attending only a semester; he had enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1827 but was discharged two years later; with the help of his foster-parent, John Allan, he enrolled in West Point in 1830, but when Allan remarried and, through his wife’s influence, severed ties with Poe, the latter got himself expelled from West Point in 1831 and moved to Baltimore, where he had trouble finding work and complained of his threadbare clothes. A Philadelphia newspaper, the Saturday Courier, offered a prize for “the best AMERICAN TALE “ (Silverman 88), and Poe submitted five stories, none of which won the
contest but several of which impressed the judges, leading them to publish “Metzengerstein” and others in the paper. There is, then, a very real possibility that Poe took to short story writing at least in part as a means of making money at a critical point in his life, and that his later vaunting of the merits of short fiction and short poetry (it is likely that he absorbed Coleridge on this point in 1831 as well) was a kind of after-the-fact justification for the kind of work he hoped would bring him a steady income. (In this he proved to be in error, and the bulk of Poe’s meagre revenues came from his editorial duties for various magazines.) It should also be noted—as Michael Allen established in his important treatise Poe and the British Magazine Tradition (1969)—that Poe was significantly influenced by the short fiction that had begun to appear in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, a periodical that was widely read in the United States in the 1810s and 1820s. Poe himself observed, in his review of Twice-Told Tales, that the emotions of “terror, or passion, or horror” are best treated in prose rather than verse, and that “many fine examples” of such tales “were found in the earlier numbers of Blackwood” (ER 573). Of course, Poe was clearly led by temperament to write the kind of supernatural and psychological horror fiction that he wrote; but to the extent that he found suitable models in the “sensational” fiction that Blackwood’s occasionally published, he radically improved upon them by emphasising the “unity of effect” and, to put it simply, by writing infinitely better—more cogently, more skilfully, and with a greater understanding of the psychological effects of the bizarre and the supernatural—than his predecessors or contemporaries. Coming, at last, to Poe’s actual fiction, we can readily identify those stories that most clearly reflect Gothic influence. Poe himself was, as we have seen, aware that “Metzengerstein” (Philadelphia Saturday Courier, 14 January 1832) was one of these. But here, as elsewhere, it would appear that the Gothic influence is manifested largely in the stage properties rather than in the underlying theme. While the general influence of The Castle of Otranto on “Metzengerstein” may be indisputable, as many scholars have maintained, it is noteworthy how few specific parallels to that novel, or any other Gothic novel, can be found in the story; in any case, if The Castle of Otranto is the principal influence, why does Poe refer to the story as “Germanic”? Whatever the case, the supernatural in “Metzengerstein” is used far more rigorously (and sparingly) than in most of its Gothic
predecessors. There are, in effect, three usages of the supernatural in the story. First, after the baron Metzengerstein has set fire to the stables of his rival, Count Berlifitzing, he is appalled to see that a tapestry depicting a horse bending over his erstwhile rider (an ancestor of the count who had been killed by an ancestor of Metzengerstein) has suddenly changed: To his extreme horror and astonishment, the head of the gigantic steed had, in the meantime, altered its poisition. The neck of the animal, before arched, as if in compassion, over the prostrate body of its lord, was now extended at full length, in the direction of the Baron. The eyes, before invisible, now wore an energetic and human expression, while they gleamed with a fiery and unusual red; and the distended lips of the apparently enraged horse left in full view his sepulchral and disgusting teeth. (CW 2.22–23) Truly enough, every word here is carefully chosen. What Poe is wishing to depict (and this is the second supernatural occurrence, assuming it can be logically separated from the first) is the transference of the soul of Count Berlifitzing (who has perished in the flames) to the horse. It is not surprising, therefore, that Metzengerstein becomes fascinated with a white horse that mysteriously appears out of the burning stables—the horse that ultimately plunges, with Metzengerstein on its back, into Metzengerstein’s own castle, now itself ablaze, later in the story. And here the third supernatural manifestation occurs: above the smoking ruins of Metzengerstein castle, “a cloud of smoke settled heavily over the battlements in the distinct colossal figure of—a horse” (CW 2.29). This is the last line of the story, and it integrates all the events of the tale, supernatural and otherwise, into a flawless unity. The grotesqueries of “King Pest” (Southern Literary Messenger, September 1835) would seem to suggest a Hoffmann influence, although T. O. Mabbott, Poe’s most learned editor, notes influences from several other sources, ranging from newspaper accounts to a scene in Disraeli’s novel Vivian Grey (CW 2.238–39). This tale—the first of Poe’s works to produce a genuine (and relatively effective) amalgam of humour and horror—tells, in an almost Dali-esque manner, what happens when two sailors burst in
upon a bizarre gathering in a tavern most of whose members symbolically represent death in some fashion (one of them is wearing a coffin). But the Hoffmann influence is most pronounced on Poe’s most celebrated tale—“The Fall of the House of Usher” (Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, September 1839). It is not merely the use of the name Roderick for the protagonist that highlights the influence of Hoffmann’s “The Entail,” but the fact that the latter deals, as does Poe’s story, with “some dark family secret locked within these walls” (264). There are, of course, other influences, as Mabbott notes (CW 2.393–94), and, if anything, the Hoffmann story may have served as a kind of horrible example of how not to write a compelling tale of supernatural horror. I say “may have,” because there is not much likelihood that Poe actually read the story, either in German or in English, as it was not translated at that time; rather, he probably derived a sense of the story from Sir Walter Scott’s long summary of it in “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition.” The “dark family secret” in Poe’s story resides not merely in the suggestion of incest between Roderick Usher and his sister Madeline (as the narrator notes, “sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them” [CW 2.410]), and not merely in her premature burial, but (as Lovecraft was the first to point out) the fact that the house, Roderick, and Madeline all share a common soul, and that their own dissolution spells the spectacular collapse of the house that concludes the tale. As a result, the title becomes a kind of pun, whereby “house” stands both for the physical structure and the family line. Roderick tips us off to this when he suspects that his own house is animate—a belief that goes well beyond his general view (itself a bit bizarre) “of the sentience of all vegetable things” (CW 2.408). But no analysis of the plot or even of the underlying theme of “The Fall of the House of Usher” can begin to convey its masterful collocation of words, images, and scenes to create a cumulative horror unlike anything that had ever been seen in supernatural literature before and has rarely been seen in the nearly two centuries that have followed. Other Gothic-influenced tales by Poe can be treated in short order. The detective story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (Manuscript, March 1841) finds Dupin and the narrator living in a kind of Gothic castle—“a time-eaten and grotesque mansion, long deserted through superstitions into which we did not inquire, and tottering to its fall in a retired and desolate
portion of the Faubourg St. Germain” (CW 2.532). But all this is merely lagniappe, for the very premise of the tale is its explicability on other than supernatural grounds. “The Pit and the Pendulum” (The Gift, 1842) may be the ultimate refinement of the dungeon motif of Gothic fiction; in spite of its non-supernaturalism it is one of Poe’s masterworks in the maintenance of an unrelenting atmosphere of terror and its meticulous attention to the shifting moods and sensations of its hapless protagonist. Two late stories might be said to reveal some Gothic influence in the general setting and background. “The Cask of Amontillado” (Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book, November 1846) is, of course, nonsupernatural; but its setting in Italy, the descent of the protagonists into some catacombs (corresponding to the Gothic dungeon), and its apparent temporal setting in the past (does the use of flambeaux suggest the mediaeval or Renaissance period?) all point to the lingering shadow of Gothicism. Much the same could be said of “Hop-Frog” (Flag of Our Union, 17 March 1849), although the location of the story is left deliberately vague. Some of the costumes worn by the king and his courtiers in the story are apparently derived from a description of a wedding party at the court of Charles VI of France in 1385, as found in Froissart’s chronicles (see Mabbott’s notes, CW 3.1343 and 1355n12), but there is nothing in the text to suggest a French setting. The remarkable thing about Poe’s work, in fact, is the very lack of substantive connexions with the Gothic movement. “Metzengerstein” was published only twelve years after Melmoth the Wanderer, but we are already in another world. It is not merely that Gothic fiction was, in Poe’s day, entirely dead as a popular literary fashion; it is that Poe felt the need to draw inspiration both from the world around him and from the wells of his own fevered imagination, and he did so in a way that permanently rendered Gothicism of the Walpole-Radcliffe-Lewis-Maturin sort a thing of the past.
iii. Death as Threshold The standard view that Poe was fixated on death is true only to the extent that he appears to have contemplated the threshold between life and death with something approaching wonder and horror. Poe’s religious beliefs were highly unorthodox, and there is little evidence that he was ever a Christian in the common understanding of the term; indeed, his late treatise Eureka (1848) makes it evident that, although he believed in some kind of guiding power in the universe, his views on the afterlife were anything but conventional. To be sure, such a work as the gorgeous prosepoem “Shadow—A Parable” (Southern Literary Messenger, September 1835) makes clear the fascination, perhaps the awe, that Poe felt in the face of death; for the Shadow of the title is nothing but an embodiment of death, as he makes clear in his ponderous utterance toward the end, “I am SHADOW, and my dwelling is near to the Catacombs of Ptolemais, and hard by those dim plains of Helusion which border upon the foul Charonian canal” (CW 2.191). In this work “shadow” is used alternately—and on occasion simultaneously—in its literal signification and as a synonym for “shade,” as the narrator himself announces at the outset: “Ye who read are still among the living; but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows” (CW 2.188). Poe’s reputation for morbidity may not be entirely undeserved, if we take “Berenice” (Southern Literary Messenger, March 1835) as representative of his work. This well-known story of a man fixated with his cousin’s teeth—to the point that, upon her death, he opens her tomb and removes them—would be dreadful enough; but there is the further implication that the narrator, Egaeus, performed his impromptu dental work while Berenice was still alive: for why is Egaeus’s hand “indented with the impress of human nails” (CW 2.218) after his graverobbing? Poe is right in declaring, in a letter, that the story “approaches the very verge of bad taste” (L 58), but the malign artistry of the tale simultaneously distracts us from the horror of the scenario through admiration of Poe’s skill and, paradoxically, enhances our loathing through that very skill. The groundwork has been meticulously arranged: Berenice’s tendency to lapse
into a comalike state that feigns death (“a species of elilepsy not infrequently terminating in trance itself—trance very nearly resembling positive dissolution” [CW 2.211]); the narrator’s fixation with Berenice’s teeth (“and in a smile of peculiar meaning, the teeth [Poe’s emphasis] of the changed Berenice disclosed themselves slowly to my view” [CW 2.215]); and, in general, Egaeus’s own inclination toward monomania (“addicted, body and soul, to the most intense and painful meditation” [CW 2.210])— all of which leads to the spectacular denouement that literally concludes the tale, when Egaeus returns from the tomb with a seemingly innocuous little “box” that “slipped from my hands, and fell heavily, and burst into pieces; and from it, with a rattling sound, there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white, and ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor” (CW 2.219). As for “Ligeia” (Baltimore American Museum, September 1838), it is difficult to speak of it save with superlatives. Poe recognized that it was a triumph; in a letter of early 1846 he states unequivocally that it was “undoubtedly the best story I have written” (L 309), while in an anonymous review of his own work he declares that it is “the most extraordinary of his achievements” (ER 869). The tale is nothing more or less than an exposition of the triumph of the will over death, as suggested by the epigraph from Joseph Glanvil (“Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will” [CW 2.310]). The narrator makes clear Ligeia’s unholy, uncanny, preternatural thirst for life: “I at length recognized the principle of her longing with so wildly earnest a desire for the life which was now fleeing so rapidly away. It is this wild longing—it is this eager vehemence of desire for life—but for life—that I have no power to portray—no utterance capable of expressing” (CW 2.317– 18). And she manifests that desire to the extent of reanimating the corpse of her husband’s second wife, the weak-willed Rowena. This climax is, again, subtly anticipated when the narrator sees a “shadow” (CW 2.320) in Rowena’s room, recalling the fact that Ligeia herself once “came and departed as a shadow” (CW 2.311). Possibly the only perplexing issue, at least in terms of plot, is the inclusion in “Ligeia” of the poem “The Conqueror Worm,” originally published separately (in Graham’s Magazine, January 1843) and inserted into a revised version of the tale (New York New World, 15 February 1845). In the story it purports to be a work by Ligeia. Mabbott maintains that the
poem—a magnificent exposition of the omnipresence of death and the futility of human effort—is “a plain indication that the human will was too feeble to enable Ligeia to win” (CW 2.307); but, as a matter of fact, Ligeia does “win” by reanimating Rowena’s corpse—an event that constitutes (once again) the climax and the conclusion of the story. I hardly think we need take any notice of Joel Porte’s belief (as paraphrased by Scott Peeples) that the poem can be read “as Ligeia’s vision not of the plight of ‘man’ confronted by death but of the plight of woman confronted by ‘the conquering male organ’” (Peeples 53), one of the many absurd and preposterous interpretations to which this story has been subjected by overly ingenious critics. My humble feeling is that Poe simply didn’t want to waste this magnificent poem by letting it languish in a magazine or newspaper—although he did include it in The Raven and Other Poems (1845). Slight variants of the “Ligeia” idea can be found in two tales, one preceding and one following it. “Morella” (Southern Literary Messenger, April 1835) tells of how the narrator marries the woman of that name, but then grows disenchanted with her. She dies, and the child she bore just before her death is also named Morella. This child also dies, and when the narrator goes to bury her in the family tomb he finds that the original Morella’s tomb is empty. Clearly the first Morella’s soul or spirit survived her death and transferred itself into the body of her own daughter. The identity of the names of the two Morellas somewhat telegraphs the punch; but Poe again ingeniously manages to delay the final confirmation of the supernaturalism of the story (the first Morella’s empty tomb) until the final line. Another case of soul-transference, of a highly unusual sort, occurs in “The Oval Portrait” (Graham’s Magazine, April 1842). Here a man who paints his wife’s portrait finds that she is gradually weakening while the painting is taking shape under his hands. In the end we are led to believe that in some inexplicable process the wife’s life-force has been transmitted into the painting, as the painter cries in the final line: “This [the portrait] is indeed Life itself!’ [and] turned suddenly to regard his beloved:—She was dead!” (CW 2.666). I think we are to read this tale as symbolising the painter’s preference for his art over his love for his wife. Perhaps even “The Black Cat” (United States Saturday Post [Philadelphia], 19 August 1843) should be considered here, for here again
we appear to be dealing with metempsychosis. This tale brings “Metzengerstein” to mind in suggesting soul-tranference in animals. The protagonist/narrator opens the tale by convicting himself of perverseness (“this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself—to offer violence to its own nature—to do wrong for the wrong’s sake only” [CW 3.852]), and the entire tale is an instantiation of this trait. Why else would he kill (by the particularly brutal means of hanging) a cat who loves him? Why else would he take in another black cat—also missing an eye, thereby duplicating its predecessor, one of whose eyes the protagonist had viciously cut out of its socket in a drunken fit? Why else would he seek to kill the new cat with an axe when it so clearly has affection for him, and why would he end up killing his wife with that axe when she strives to stop the protagonist from committing his act? The sealing up of the wife (and the cat) behind a wall in the cellar is ultimately detected by a police investigation. The numerous supernatural episodes in the story—as carefully worked out as any in Poe’s tales—are worth studying in detail. The first episode concerns the burning down of the protagonist’s house after his killing of the first cat. On a wall of the smoking ruin he sees something bizarre: “I approached and saw, as if graven in bas relief upon the white surface, the figure of a gigantic cat. The impression was given with an accuracy truly marvellous. There was a rope about the animal’s neck” (CW 2.853). That this phenomenon is indeed an actual occurrence and not a figment of the protagonist’s imagination is confirmed by the fact that others see it as well; and the narrator’s own feeble attempts to account for it naturalistically are both physically and morally inadequate, as the protagonist himself unwittingly reveals: “Although I thus readily accounted to my reason, if not altogether to my conscience [my emphasis], for the startling fact just detailed, it did not the less fail to make a deep impression upon my fancy” (CW 3.853). Of course, the metempsychosis implied by the anomalous similarity of the second cat to the first is the core supernatural phenomenon of the tale; and Poe adds a skilful touch by having a splotch of white fur on the second cat slowly turn into the shape of a gallows—an anticipation of the protagonist’s ultimate fate. I am half inclined to think that the narrator’s unwitting walling up of the cat within the makeshift tomb where he seals up his wife is itself to be regarded as a supernatural event, for it would seem difficult for him not to notice what he has done to the cat. His ultimate selfbetrayal is, however, a result of the perverseness he noted at the outset, for
he would have escaped capture if, in the presence of the police, he had not tapped the wall with his cane in a “phrenzy of bravado” (CW 3.858). Poe’s most thrilling, and appalling, exercise in probing the ambiguous threshold of death is the late story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (American Review, December 1845). Poe was tickled at the fact that the sober narration and pseudo-scientific verisimilitude of the tale caused it to be accepted as the account of an actual event—another, and perhaps the most successful, of the series of hoaxes he perpetrated throughout his career. The story is Poe’s third dealing with the theories of Franz Mesmer (1734–1815), following “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book, April 1844), which also involves reincarnation, and “Mesmeric Revelation” (Columbian Magazine, August 1844), in which a mesmeric patient speaks as if he has had some kind of experiential knowledge of God. Although the basic principles of mesmerism were later adopted in hypnotism, the philosophical or physiological basis for the practice, as propounded by Mesmer and his followers, rested upon fallacious views of “animal magnetism,” and Mesmer is now branded largely a charlatan. Poe, however, was fascinated with Mesmer’s conceptions, as witness his favourable comments on Chauncey Hare Townshend’s Facts in Mesmerism (1840; see CW 3.1024–25). Mercifully, the aesthetic effectiveness of “M. Valdemar” does not depend on its pseudoscientific foundations. The notion that a man, near death, can be held in a kind of suspended animation through what would now be called hypnosis is dreadful enough; that such a man could actually profess his own death (“Yes;—no;—I have been sleeping—and now—now—I am dead” [CW 3.1240]) is worse; that he could be held in this kind of life-in-death for seven months, at the end of which, when the mesmeric “pass” is lifted, the hapless individual collapses in liquescent horror, is surely the acme of physical horror. The final paragraph deserves to be quoted in full: As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of “dead! dead!” absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once—within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk—crumbled—absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putridity. (CW 3.1242–43)
(I agree with Lovecraft for preferring Poe’s original reading, “putrescence,” for his late revision, “putridity.”) I am not sure that any great depth of meaning need be read into the story; its succulent grisliness is perhaps the culmination of Poe’s use of the supernatural to expand the boundaries of imaginative fiction and to probe the ever-perplexing threshold between life and death. But Poe’s focus on death—its perplexities and ambiguities, its possible thwarting by the human will or by supernatural or scientific causation— should not mislead us into thinking that his imagination did not extend beyond the bounds of the human psyche. His hackneyed idea that the most poetical subject is the death of a beautiful woman (see ER 19) is as flawed as many of his other theoretical presuppositions (if for no other reason than in the fallacy of thinking that a human woman is necessarily the most beautiful object in all creation); but we need look no further than Eureka— however arid and outmoded its scientific and philosophical speculations may be—to realise that Poe encompassed the universe, and not merely the earth, within his imaginative range. Some of the most cosmic moments occur in poems early and late. Dreams prove to be a pathway to spectacular cosmic voyages beyond the bounds of mundane reality; as he wrote poignantly in the early poem “Dreams” (1827), “I have been happy—tho’ but in a dream” (l. 27). “Dream-Land” (Graham’s Magazine, June 1844) is perhaps the most eloquent and concentrated expression of this idea; its first stanza, familiar as it is, deserves quotation: By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an Eidolon, named Night, On a black throne reigns upright, I have reached these lands but newly From an utimate dim Thule—
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of Space—out of Time. (ll. 1–8) The late “A Dream within a Dream” (Flag of Our Union, 31 March 1849) uses the contrast of dream and reality to stress the transience and inconsequence of human life: “All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream” (ll. 10–11). One of Poe’s earliest tales, “MS. Found in a Bottle” (Baltimore Saturday Visiter, 19 October 1833), is powerfully cosmic. It may well be the case, as Floyd Stovall has maintained (132–33), that the tale is heavily indebted, in numerous aspects of its plot and imagery, to Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but it is in no sense merely a prose exposition of that ballad. The supernaturalism of the tale extends in two directions. In the first place is the chilling suggestion that the ship, Discovery, upon which the narrator finds himself is somehow animate. Is it possible that it has grown over the years and centuries as it continues along its seemingly aimless course? The narrator thinks of a Dutch apothegm: “It is as sure . . . as sure as there is a sea where the ship itself will grow in bulk like the living body of the seaman” (CW 2.143). And this leads to the second phase of the tale’s supernaturalism; for it is plain that the ship has been at sea, with possibly the same hapless and appallingly aged crew, for centuries. It is here that the cosmicism of the tale truly manifests itself, as the narrator declares toward the end: The ship and all in it are imbued with the spirit of Eld. The crew glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries; their eyes have an eager and uneasy meaning; and when their figures fall athwart my path in the wild glare of the battle-lanterns, I feel as I have never felt before, although I have been all my life a dealer in antiquities, and have imbibed the shadows of fallen columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin. (CW 2.144–45) Superficially similar, but really quite different in its focus, is “A Descent into the Maelström” (Graham’s Magazine, May 1841). Far more
realistic than the half-fantastic “MS. Found in a Bottle,” the story might perhaps be said to display a more restrained and disciplined use of the topographical imagination, but for that very reason it seems to have a somewhat weaker emotive impact than its predecessor. And yet, the first glimpse of the maelström is awe-inspiring: The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray; but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far back as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven. (CW 2.580) The subsequent account of a boat that becomes enmeshed in the maelström, hanging on its very edge but never falling into it, is one of Poe’s great excursions into quasi-supernatural suspense. Several of Poe’s most “cosmic” narratives are his prose-poems, in which he imbued natural forces with a kind of philosophical awe by embodying them in pseudo-allegorical figures. I have already noted the personification of Death in “Shadow—A Parable”; less effective, perhaps, is its companion-piece, “Silence—A Fable” (Baltimore Book, 1838), where “the curse of silence” (CW 2.197) expounded by the Demon of the piece appears symbolic of the cessation of consciousness that follows upon death. Somewhat similar, but more effective, is “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, December 1839), one of several philosophical dialogues written by Poe. The subject of this vignette is nothing less than the destruction of the earth (by a comet), and the two spirits of the title refresh their memories on the final days of the planet’s life. Then the cataclysm comes: For a moment there was a wild lurid light alone, visiting and penetrating all things. Then—let us bow down, Charmion, before the excessive majesty of the great God!—then, there came a
shouting and pervading sound, as if from the mouth itself of HIM; while the whole incumbent mass of ether in which we existed, burst at once into a species of intense flame, for whose surpassing brilliancy and all-fervid heat even the angels in the high Heaven of pure knowledge have no name. Thus ended all. (CW 2.461) “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” (Graham’s Magazine, April 1841) is a somewhat less cosmic rumination on death. But when we turn to “The Masque of the Red Death” (Graham’s Magazine, May 1842), we are in a very different realm altogether. Although the notion of personifying the plague would not seem the most promising of methodologies, Poe’s execution of this conception results in one of his great tales, a sustained prose-poem that somehow transfigures the hapless attendants of Prince Prospero’s ball, furiously seeking merriment while death encompasses them in an increasingly tight vise-grip, into symbols of the fragility of the entire human race when faced with overwhelming power of incurable disease. In this instance, the embodiment of a natural force—the plague—in the figure of a humanlike individual is itself generative of cosmic awe; for Prospero’s attempt to subdue it with a dagger is emblematic of the futility of our race’s flailing attempts to come to terms with the inexorable. And yet, the final paragraph of the tale reveals how much the terror and wonder of this story is engendered merely by the collocation of words: And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all. (CW 2.676–77) iv. Supernatural and Non-Supernatural Revenge The notion of supernatual revenge is perhaps the oldest topos in the realm of supernatural horror, and we have already seen that it animates any number of Gothic novels, as it would animate an incalculable number of
novels and tales in the subsequent two centuries. As a means of linking the use of the supernatural to a satisfying moral outcome, the theme has undeniable appeal, however much it may contradict the actual workings of human society, where the guilty all too often escape the punishment that is their due. A substantial number of Poe’s tales utilise this topos, and at least a few of them do so in a way that infuses them with a novel moral and aesthetic element. But what really saves these stories is the high artistry and emotive power with which he expresses the idea in tale after tale. We have already seen that supernatural revenge is the underlying theme of “Metzengerstein”: right from the point when the baron Metzengerstein is called a “petty Caligula” (CW 2.21) his fate is sealed, even if it requires the metempsychosis of his victim to effect it. A far more ingenious, perhaps even paradoxical, use of the supernatural revenge motif can be found in “William Wilson” (The Gift, 1839), for of course the revenge in this imperishable tale of a doppelgänger is effected by the protagonist upon himself—if we assume that the double he encounters throughout his life is merely an aspect of himself. But the greatness of the story rests precisely in our inability to pinpoint the ontological status of this double. Does the fact that the double speaks only in a whisper indicate that he is merely Wilson’s conscience? Does the fact that both men, implausibly, share the same date of birth (19 January 1813—Poe’s actual birthday and four years after his date of birth [earlier texts gave the year as 1809 and 1811]) mean that the double has no independent existence? At the end the protagonist stabs the double with a sword, and the latter, finally abandoning his whisper, declares (the italics are Poe’s): “You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead—dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me thou didst exist—and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself!” (CW 2.448). Now it appears that the protagonist is the double rather than the converse; and his “death” is not literal (for he is still there to tell us the tale of his “unpardonable crime” [CW 2.426]) but, as the second sentence makes clear, moral and social. “William Wilson”—full of provocative autobiographical details, ranging from the description of Poe’s early schooling at Stoke Newington in England to numerous points of character—is a masterwork in its ambiguity, its dancing on either side of the boundary separating supernatural from psychological horror, and in its unwavering progression from beginning to cataclysmic conclusion. Aside from “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of
Usher,” it would be difficult to find a better instance of the “unity of effect” than this tale. Much the same could be said of “The Tell-Tale Heart” (Boston Pioneer, January 1843), even though it employs what has now become the hackneyed “first-person insane” trope. But Poe should not be held responsible for the overuse or incompetent use of this trope by clumsier hands; his own handling of it is unexceptionable. The root question in this well-known narrative is: Is this tale psychological or supernatural? That is, does the heart of the old man, whom the protagonist has killed for the most irrational of reasons (even though he “loved the old man,” he finds that “my blood ran cold” [CW 3.792] when he sees the old man’s eye—a reflection, presumably, of the ancient superstition of the evil eye), actually beat to such an extent that the protagonist is forced to pry up the floorboards under which he has buried the murdered corpse? It may all be very well to note that the protagonist’s assertion that “Above all was [my] sense of hearing acute” (CW 3.792), so that his detection of the heart beating, combined with his general mental disturbance, caused him to betray himself to the police. But observe the fact that the police themselves “chatted pleasantly, and smiled” (CW 3.797) at the very time when the heart presumably begins beating louder and louder. The protagonist later declares that “they were making a mockery of my horror!” (CW 3.797), but this is as implausible as the makeshift excuses of the protagonist of “The Black Cat” to account for the presence of the cat-shaped shadow on the wall of his burned house. I think we are obliged to believe that the beating of the heart is in fact in the protagonist’s mind, and that this tale is one of pyschological horror. In this sense, it too—like “William Wilson,” although in a very different manner— is a case of (non-supernatural) revenge perpetrated by the victim upon himself. Poe’s triumph of non-supernatural horror, however, is “The Cask of Amontillado” (Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book, November 1846). I have already noted that, in spite of the relative lateness of this tale in Poe’s corpus of fiction, it appears to betray a residual influence of Gothicism in its Italian setting and its apparent temporal setting in the Middle Ages or Renaissance. The plot of this story is too well-known to require exposition, but perhaps some subtleties in Poe’s handling of the revenge theme have escaped some readers. The crux of the tale is not the unspecified “thousand injuries” (CW 3.1256) Montresor has endured from Fortunato, but whether
in fact the former has committed the “perfect crime” and gotten away with it. It would seem that he has; but then, what do we make of the final paragraph, just as Montresor is about to place the final brick that will seal up Fortunato forever in his makeshift tomb in the catacombs: “My heart grew sick—on account of the dampness of the catacombs. I hastened to make an end of my labor. I forced the last stone into its position; I plastered it up. Against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones. For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace requiescat!” (CW 3.1263). So Montresor is telling his story fifty years after the fact; but to whom? When he says at the outset, “You, who so well know the nature of my soul” (CW 3.1256), it can scarcely be doubted that he is talking to a father confessor—probably (as the last paragraph suggests), on his deathbed. But it is Montresor, not Fortunato, who has failed to “rest in peace”—not only because he experienced a twinge of remorse at the very time he committed the act (“My heart grew sick”—followed by a patently absurd attempt to account for it), but because, half a century after the fact, he still tells his story in a manner that reveals his own psychological trauma. Here again, the author of revenge has unwittingly bestowed it upon himself. From the mastery of “The Cask of Amontillado” it is a bit of a fall to the crude physical horror of “Hop-Frog,” but the story is not to be entirely despised. Here there is no ambiguity as to why the grotesque dwarf of the title exacted his revenge upon the king and his courtiers. All too obviously they ridiculed him and humiliated him—once making him “swallow this bumper to the health of your absent friends,” even though Hop-Frog “was not fond of wine; for it excited the poor cripple almost to madness” (CW 3.1347), a matter that Poe knew all too well—although the immediate trigger of Hop-Frog’s plan of revenge is his rage at the mistreatment of his beloved Trippetta, a beautiful female dwarf who had attempted to intercede with the king when Hop-Frog was being forced to consume the wine, whereupon the king “pushed her violently from him, and threw the contents of the brimming goblet in her face” (CW 3.1349). What is more, the king and his courtiers reveal a certain dimwittedness in allowing themselves to be covered with tar and flax in order that they may look like ourangoutangs, allowing Hop-Frog to set them aflame. The symbolism here is very obvious: since the king and his men treated Hop-Frog as somehow subhuman because of his dwarfism and other physical deformities, HopFrog has now returned the favour by reducing them to the level of apes, so
that (in Hop-Frog’s mind, at any rate) there is less moral culpability in killing them. Nevertheless, it can be noted that Poe reinvigorated the already stale motif of supernatural (and non-supernatural) revenge by infusing it with moral subtleties whereby the perpetrator of the revenge became its unwitting victim. The same cannot, regrettably, be said for the great majority of Poe’s successors.
v. Fantasy and Science One of the cleverest ways in which Poe sharpens the horror of his tales is by the very imprecision of their physical and temporal settings. This procedure is in striking contrast to much of the Gothic fiction that preceded him. I have noted that most of the Gothic novels are set in a fairly specific period in the past—purportedly to enhance the plausibility of the supernatural phenomena by placing them within an era and a society in which the widespread superstitiousness of the populace would theoretically render them more credible. But this device was doomed to failure, and on two grounds: first, the notion that our distant ancestors may have regarded a given supernatural event as plausible because of their own credulousness does not necessarily render that event any more plausible to its contemporaneous readers, much less to ourselves; and second, the temporal (and, often, geographical) remoteness of the setting militates against the immediacy of the effect of even the most outlandish and spectacular supernatural incursion. Poe was manifestly aware of these aesthetic difficulties, and he solved them not so much by specificity of time and locale but precisely by a cultivated vagueness, so that the reader’s attention becomes fixated almost exclusively upon the incidents of the tale and, perhaps most importantly, upon the effects of those incidents upon the psyches of its protagonists. This tendency on Poe’s part may have originated in his poetry. Aside from the transparently historical Tamerlane, many of Poe’s poems are set in a realm of his own making and gain a substantial proportion of their power thereby. “The Valley Nis” (1831; later revised as “The Valley of Unrest”) is perhaps the earliest example in Poe’s poetic corpus, introducing us (in the original version) to the valley of the title: There the moon doth shine by night With a most unsteady light— There the sun doth reel by day
“Over the hills and far away.” (ll. 43–46) “The City in the Sea” (first published in Poems [1831] as “The Doomed City”) is tremendously powerful in its imagery stressing the transience of humanity: Lo! Death has reared himself a throne In a strange city lying alone Far down within the dim West, Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best Have gone to their eternal rest. ... Resignedly beneath the sky The melancholy waters lie. So blend the turrets and shadows there That all seems pendulous in air, While from a proud tower in the town Death looks gigantically down. (ll. 1–5, 24–29) “The Haunted Palace” (American Museum, April 1839), with its superb transition from happiness to horror in the last two stanzas; “The Conqueror Worm,” the epitome of pessimism and of the futility of human striving; “For Annie” (Flag of Our Union, 28 April 1849), another encapsulation of pessimism with its doleful threnody on “The fever called ‘Living’” (l. 5)— all these and others gain much of their strength from indefiniteness of setting. This lack of specificity is tied indirectly to Poe’s theory of poetry
(and, hence, short fiction writing), in the sense that the paring away of such mundane details of locale clears the way for the intense focus on the literal and symbolic action of the poems. But these poems are all eclipsed by “Ulalume” (American Review, December 1847), regarded by many as Poe’s greatest poem and his most successful venture (not excluding “The Raven,” which in spite of its familiarity retains its emotive power) in the “death-ofa-beautiful-woman” trope. Its first stanza is imperishable: The skies they were ashen and sober; The leaves they were crispéd and sere— The leaves they were withering and sere: It was night, in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year: It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, In the misty mid region of Weir:— It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. (ll. 1–9) Easily parodied as this may be, it is still capable of transporting readers, by a kind of verbal hypnosis, into a never-never-land of the imagination that prepares them for the supernatural incidents to follow. In the fiction, the tendency toward deliberate imprecision of setting, both temporal and topographical, was gradual. In “Metzengerstein” Poe unambiguously states in the second paragraph that the tale is set in Hungary and, while an explicit temporal setting is not noted, the use of noble protagonists leaves little doubt that the narrative purports to relate events several centuries in the past. “MS. Found in a Bottle” adopts the device of geographical remoteness to render the supernatural events plausible. It also utilises what would later be a much-ridiculed means of establishing a partial imprecision of time: “After many years spent in foreign travel, I
sailed in the year 18—, from the port of Batavia, in the rich and populous island of Java, on a voyage to the Archipelago of the Sunda islands” (CW 2.135). But this setting in Indonesia, itself sufficiently remote, is substantially compounded once the protagonist boards the supernatural Discovery, whose ultimate goal or mission is shrouded in deliberate obscurity. The spectacular image of “stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away into the desolate sky, and looking like the walls of the universe” (CW 2.145) suggests a descent into the far south, perhaps in the direction of Antarctica; but the ship’s destination is the least interesting feature of the narrative. “Berenice” is an interesting case. There is virtually no indication of either the temporal or geographical setting of the tale, and all we are left with are the manifestly artificial names of the two protagonists, Egaeus and his cousin, Berenice. The fact that, as Mabbott points, out the former is “the name of Hermia’s father in Midsummer Night’s Dream” (CW 2.208) may be of significance, as indicating that we are in some kind of fantasy realm. Berenice, of course, is the name of an historical figure (the wife of King Ptolemy III Euergetes of Egypt [third century B.C.E.]) who was then incorporated into some late Graeco-Roman myths articulated by Callimachus, Ovid, and others; but we are scarcely to think of the tale as being set in antiquity, especially with the citation of a sixteenth-century Italian writer, Caelius Secundus Curio, whose book De Amplitudine Beati Regni Dei Egaeus reads. Suffice it to say that the story’s imprecision of setting focuses our attention exclusively on Egaeus’s increasingly frenzied narration of his own shifting emotional state. “Ligeia” is similarly almost wholly lacking in specificity of setting, but the full name of the protagonist’s second wife—“Lady Rowena Travanion, of Tremaine” (CW 2.321)—suggests a mediaeval setting, perhaps fittingly so given Poe’s derivation of the name from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, where a Rowena figures significantly. As for “The Fall of the House of Usher,” its celebrated opening paragraph deliberately fails to establish the house and its locale with any kind of precision, instead opting to stress the imaginative and emotional overtones the house inspires: During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a
singularly dreary tract of country . . . I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows —upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul . . . (CW 2.397) The time of year is autumn because, perhaps, autumn is the prelude of the death of the year, just as the narrator arrives at the House of Usher in the period just prior to its dissolution. It goes without saying that Poe’s topographical vagueness is triggered at least in part by the plain fact that no actual locale could ever feature the collocation of details he wishes to emphasise, in particular the bizarre feature of the “barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn” (CW 2.400—a detail, however, borrowed in part from Hoffmann’s “The Entail”), a suggestion of the house’s instability that anticipates the cataclysmic denouement. In regard to the temporal setting, however, it is worth noting that, even though the house’s “principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity” (CW 2.400), the fact that Roderick Usher at one point played a “wild air from the last waltz of Von Weber” (CW 2.405) surprisingly places the narrative within a period perhaps no less than ten years prior to its first publication, for the death of Karl Maria von Weber (1786–1826) was a relatively recent occurrence. One could continue the catalogue indefinitely. It is of interest, from this perspective, that “A Descent into the Maelström” is much more precise in its geographical setting—the fjords of Norway—than many of Poe’s fantastic tales, for the obvious reason that the maelström in question is specific to this region. “The Tell-Tale Heart,” conversely, is a tour de force precisely because not a single name or place—not the name of the protagonist, nor that of the “old man” he kills, nor the city or country in which the tale takes place—is cited. The result, again, is an almost unendurable fixation upon the bare events of the narrative—or, more precisely, on the narrator’s unreliable account of those events. Somewhere between these extremes is “The Pit and the Pendulum,” where the mention of “inquisitorial voices” (CW 3.681) makes clear that the Inquisition is somehow involved, as does the later citation of “the horrors of Toledo” (CW 3.685), as that Spanish city was a focus of the Inquisition’s activities. But it
is only in the final two sentences that we learn that Toledo has been sacked by the French—an event that occurred in 1808, suddenly thrusting us from what could easily have been a mediaeval or Renaissance temporality to something approaching contemporaneousness. As if to counteract the topographical and temporal imprecision of many of his tales of psychological and supernatural horror (a feature that does not apply to his tales of ratiocination, where specificity of time and place is emphasised), Poe indirectly established the contemporaneousness of many of his narratives by the use of science and philosophy. The point is important as distinguishing Poe from his Gothic predecessors, who rarely placed their narratives in the contemporary world. Although the burden of Poe’s early “Sonnet—To Science” (1829) is that science has impoverished the world by its destruction of myth, Poe was keen on keeping abreast of the latest developments in science and in infusing them into his tales. We have already seen that mesmerism plays a role in several stories. Poe also reveals, in his essays and reviews, a credulous belief in phrenology (see ER 329–32). The late “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” (Flag of Our Union, 14 April 1849) is worth studying here, for this story—Poe’s response to the California gold rush of 1849—is his ultimate refinement of the “philosopher’s stone” topos of Gothic fiction. Von Kempelen’s discovery of the secret of making gold from lead is couched, not in terms of alchemy, but in terms of the most advanced science, making the story a kind of protoscience-fiction tale. Dispensing scornfully with the “old chimera of the philosopher’s stone” (CW 3.1363), the narrator blandly quotes what appears to be Von Kempelen’s utterance (the italics are Poe’s) that “pure gold can be made at will, and very readily, from lead, in connection with certain other substances, in kind and in proportions, unknown” (CW 3.1364), but cagily refrains from giving any precise formula. The story, in its excessively sober journalistic narration, is the last of Poe’s hoaxes, and a prose pendant to his poem on the same subject, “Eldorado” (Flag of Our Union, 21 April 1849). In spite of his frequently stated hostility to didacticism, Poe was not immune from the prevailing tendency to regard fiction as somehow frivolous or illegitimate unless it conveyed something in the way of facts, information, or philosophical truth. I refer here not to Poe’s hoaxes—which purport to be true accounts of bizarre, unusual, or fantastic events, and are really a facet of his satirical writing, the object of satire being the
credulousness of his readers—but to a wide array of tales whose ponderous openings seek to establish some broad philosophical axiom of which the narratives themselves are (or implicitly claim to be) exemplifications. His very first published tale, “Metzengerstein,” begins: “Horror and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages” (CW 2.18). Then there is the celebrated opening of “Berenice”: “Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform” (CW 2.209). The entire paragraph must be read to perceive the degree of Poe’s expression of hopeless pessimism. But in this and in other instances, there is a question whether the subsequent narratives do in fact constitute a real-world “proof” of the axiom in question. Is Poe here also teasing the reader by enunciating a cosmic truth, only to have the events of the story fail to live up to it? How, really, is the narrator’s obsession with Berenice’s teeth an expression of the idea that “Misery is manifold”? One begins to suspect satire here also—not in the sense that the tale itself is to be regarded as some kind of self-parody, but in the sense that the didactic implications of the opening are confounded by the actual narrative, by the end of which we have in fact forgotten the weighty philosophical axiom with which the tale opened. Entire narratives are essaylike in construction and tone; but here too there are some oddities. Two of the three stories to be considered here —“The Man of the Crowd” (Casket, December 1840) and “The Premature Burial” (Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper, 31 July 1844)—partly, and no doubt deliberately, subvert their messages by the skilful introduction of anomalies and ambiguities. Both tales deal with what would come to be regarded as one of Poe’s signature achievements as a writer, and specifically as a writer of horror (not necessarily supernatural) fiction—the psychology of fear. While there is no doubt that Poe’s searching examination of this topos is one of his great contributions to the literature of terror, and one that wellnigh revolutionised the subsequent history of the field, these two stories treat the matter in peculiar ways. In “The Man of the Crowd,” the first-person narrator finds himself fascinated by observing, from a comfortable seat in a coffeehouse in London, a man—“a decrepid [sic] old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age” (CW 2.511)—who continually appears in the crowds of passersby and appears to be afraid to be alone. Presently he takes to following the man, finding that the latter appears to have no fixed purpose in his peregrinations: “He entered shop after shop, priced nothing, spoke no word, and looked at all objects with a
wild and vacant stare” (CW 2.513). The narrator follows the man all night, including a venture into “the most noisome quarter of London, where every thing wore the worst impress of the most deplorable poverty, and of the most desperate crime” (CW 2.514); in the end he can only conclude: “This old man . . . is the type and genious of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds” (CW 2.515). It is only at this point that we realise that the man of the crowd has not uttered a word in explanation of his behaviour, and that all the motives and goals attributed to that behaviour have come from the narrator—who could be (and probably is) quite wrong about the man’s motivations, since it is difficult to credit that merely tracking a man for a day and a night, without interviewing him or probing the rationale for any of his actions, could in any way lead to a plausible account of his behaviour. In effect, the narrator is a kind of proto-Dupin (the story was written just before “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”), but, unlike that pioneering detective tale, there is no way to confirm that the narrator’s assumptions regarding the man of the crowd are in any sense accurate. As for “The Premature Burial,” the fact that it appeared in a newspaper, and that for the great proportion of its narrative it reads like a sober essay, replete with actual instances of premature inhumation, has apparently led many to believe that Poe is speaking of his own fears. But in fact a (presumably) fictional narrative, and narrator, do emerge toward the end of the story—one in which the narrator, although professing that he took “elaborate precautions” (CW 3.965) against premature burial while travelling, appears to find himself in just such a predicament, only to discover that he is in a very narrow bed on a boat. The result is dramatic: . . . out of Evil proceeded Good; for their very excess wrought in my spirit an inevitable revulsion. My soul acquired tone—acquired temper. I went abroad. I took vigorous exercise. I breathed the free air of Heaven. I thought upon other subjects than Death. I discarded my medical books. “Buchan” I burned. I read no “Night Thoughts”—no fustian about church-yards—no bugaboo tales— such as this. (CW 3.968–69; emphasis in original)
This delicious self-dynamating of his own narrative makes one strongly suspect parody. It perhaps cannot be denied that Poe himself was endowed with a fear of premature burial, since it crops up in story after story (most notably “Berenice,” “Ligeia,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”), but Poe here is perhaps having a bit of fun at those of his critics who chastised him for dwelling so obsessively on doom and gloom. In effect, he is having his cake and eating it too: his depiction of the fears of premature burial are enough to chill the stoutest hearts— The unendurable oppression of the lungs—the stifling fumes of the damp earth—the clinging to the death garments—the rigid embrace of the narrow house—the blackness of the absolute night—the silence like a sea that overwhelms—the unseen but palpable presence of the Conqueror Worm—these things . . . carry into the heart, which still palpitates, a degree of appalling and intolerable horror from which the most daring imagination must recoil. (CW 3.961) But that self-refuting ending shows Poe stepping back from the horrors of his own creation with a knowing wink and nod. The final essaylike story in the Poe corpus, “The Imp of the Perverse” (Graham’s Magazine, July 1845), is a bit more orthodox. We have seen that Poe had already touched upon the element of perverseness in “The Black Cat.” He here elaborates exhaustively on the subject, spending perhaps twothirds of the story in a searching examination of this psychological malady and only toward the end declaring, in the guise of his first-person narrator, “You will easily perceive that I am but one of the many uncounted victims of the Imp of the Perverse” (CW 3.1224). He goes on to tell how he had planned the perfect murder and executed it, but then must fight the urge to confess—a matter that he explicitly likens to a ghost: “And now my own casual self-suggestion, that I might possibly be fool enough to confess the murder of which I had been guilty, confronted me, as if the very ghost of him whom I had murdered—and beckoned me on to death” (CW 3.1225). Of course, in the end he does confess. In this particular context, the imp of the perverse appears to function as the result of a process of socialisation that impels one to feel guilt at the commission of a crime, and so to confess
it; but Poe’s psychological acuity in identifying this trait—the fact that we “perpetrate [certain actions] merely because we feel that we should not” (CW 3.1223)—is undeniable. If I have not spoken sufficiently about what may well be the most signal attribute of Poe’s work, either in supernatural or psychological horror—the meticulous, painstaking, and actually horrifying analysis of the disturbed psyches of his most noted protagonists, from Egaeus to Roderick Usher to the unnamed narrators of “The Black Cat,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”—it is because this trait is singularly difficult to analyse without a line-by-line study of the given narratives. On occasion Poe’s narrators will assert an initial rationality that will be progressively undermined as the tale progresses (“MS. Found in a Bottle”: “Upon the whole, no person could be less liable than myself to be led away from the severe precincts of the truth by the ignes fatui of superstition” [CW 2.135]); in other cases, as we have seen in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator’s grasp of sanity and reality seems at the very outset to be severely in question. Poe augments this subversion of his protagonists’ psyches by a manner of story construction whereby the climax of the tale occurs simultaneously with the protagonists’ psychological collapse, a feature that renders both his supernatural tales and his tales of psychological terror the more powerful and credible. It is facile to say that Poe drew his portraits of disturbed psyches chiefly or even largely from his own mental instability— an assumption that perhaps deliberately seeks to minimise the manifest artistry of Poe’s analysis of the conclave of eccentrics he puts on stage.
vi. The Longer Tales Poe’s hostility to the long poem (and, by implication, to the novel) did not prevent him from writing the occasional novella or even short novel. We are here dealing with three items—“The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” (Southern Literary Messenger, June 1835), The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), and “The Journal of Julius Rodman” (Burton’s Gentlemen’s Magazine, January–June 1840). All three are variously unsatisfactory. The first is a broad parody of the tale of “extraordinary adventure,” although Poe makes determined efforts to convey the scientific plausibility of the Dutch protagonist’s voyage from Rotterdam to the moon, where he first comes upon “diminutive habitations” (54) and then the occupants of those habitations: “a vast crowd of ugly little people, who none of them uttered a single syllable, or gave themselves the least trouble to render me assistance, but stood, like a parcel of idiots, grinning in a ludicrous manner, and eyeing me and my balloon askant, with their arms set a-kimbo” (55). But although Pfaall spent a full five years on the moon, he provides only the most fleeting hints of the culture and civilisation of the people he encountered there, promising further revelations at a later date. Poe gives the game away at the end by noting that “Hans Pfaall himself, the drunken villain, and the three very idle gentlemen styled his creditors, were all seen, no longer than two or three days ago, in a tippling house in the suburbs, having just returned, with money in their pockets, from a trip beyond the sea” (57). And the fact that, at the beginning of the tale, we are informed that Pfaall’s balloon was made of “dirty newspapers” (13) suggests at the very least a parody of flamboyant newspaper writing. It is all very amusing, but manifestly inferior to “The Balloon Hoax” (obviously not titled as such in its first appearance—[New York] Extra Sun, 13 April 1844), a much more skilful satire on both journalism and science. As for “The Journal of Julius Rodman,” it is perhaps the most disappointing tale in the entire Poe corpus, and for that reason has been largely, and on the whole justly, ignored. One would scarcely have thought Poe the author of this tiresome and unimaginative work had he not admitted
it himself in a letter: “I can give you no definitive answer (respecting the continuation of Rodman’s Journal,) until I hear from you again” (L 132). This letter was written to William Burton, the owner of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, who had just fired Poe as editor but wanted Poe to continue the serialisation of the novel or novella; obviously, Poe declined. Even with the understanding that the work is a fragment, there is very little to say about it; it seeks merely to capitalise on the interest in western exploration by maintaining that Rodman had travelled across the Rocky Mountains in 1791–94, years before the Lewis and Clark expedition. But what Rodman saw on his travels is unremarkable—not surprisingly, since Poe himself never travelled west of the Mississippi River and was heavily reliant on earlier travel accounts for the details of the Rodman expedition. And now we come to Arthur Gordon Pym. This work certainly has its devotees and has inspired a substantial amount of analysis from critics who continue to be drawn to its “enigmatic” features, but it is difficult to declare it anything but an aesthetic failure. Although it is tangential to our study because it contains no explicit elements of the supernatural (except perhaps toward the end), it is worth studying in some detail. Set in 1827, the short novel recounts the unplanned voyage taken by Pym, who with his friend Augustus Barnard boards the Grampus only to be caught up in a mutiny, during which Pym, Barnard, and one Dirk Peters take charge of the ship. After various horrifying (but purely physical) episodes, including cannibalism, the survivors are picked up by the Jane Guy, which is making its way to Antarctica. But this ship also suffers a sad fate, captured by bloodthirsty natives, leaving only Pym and Peters as survivors. These two manage to escape in a canoe. They enter a “region of novelty and wonder” (236), but very shortly thereafter the work ends, and an editor’s note declares that Pym died before completing his narrative. If assessed as a straightforward adventure story, Pym has numerous flaws. First and foremost is the fundamentally incomplete nature of the narrative. Not only does the novel end abruptly, but no explanation is provided as to how Pym managed to get out of the clutches of the vicious natives and return to civilisation. Pym’s convenient death allows Poe to forego the effort to tie up a number of loose ends and, more significantly, to draw the narrative together into some kind of thematic unity. The exact date and manner of Poe’s composition of the work have never been satisfactorily explained and perhaps cannot be, in the absence of documentary evidence.
Two instalments of the novel appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger (January and February 1837), but these take us only into the middle of chapter 4 (out of 25 chapters); it is unclear how much more Poe had written by this time, but I doubt that he had written the entirety of the work. (Poe’s one comment on the story in surviving correspondence is his offhand comment that Pym was “a very silly book” [L 130].) There is reason to think that Poe, wishing to establish himself as a writer of fiction, hastily completed the work and rushed it into print (it was published by Harper & Brothers in July 1838) after the failure of his attempt to land Tales of the Folio Club, which had been rejected by a Philadelphia publisher in 1835. The novel certainly lacks anything approaching a “unity of effect”: at times it adopts the crudest manner of extending a narrative—the diary (also used in “Hans Pfaall” and “Julius Rodman”)—then abruptly drops that device for orthodox narration. It is entirely lacking in thematic focus. Some commentators have maintained that the concluding portions, where Pym and Peters first encounter a realm where everything is black, then one where everything is white, is meant to reflect on the issue of slavery; but even if this is the case, what position we are to assume Poe takes on the question, and what bearing this has on the overall thematic coherence of the novel, are by no means clear. To be sure, individual passages in the novel are striking and horrific— although, as I have noted, in a purely physical manner. At the outset, Pym, a stowaway, is enclosed in a very narrow space to conceal his presence aboard the Grampus; but this makeshift womb, from which a theoretically “new” Pym might be born, quickly comes close to being a tomb, as the mutiny on deck prevents any food or other aid to come to him, resulting in a near-death experience. The cannibalism scene is pretty dreadful, but it is artfully anticipated by the Grampus’ encounter with a Dutch ship (clearly a kind of Flying Dutchman) whose crew and passengers are all dead; in one particularly loathsome touch, a seagull drops a morsel of human flesh on board the Grampus. The one means of saving Pym from aesthetic condemnation is to declare that it is a parody of some sort; and, indeed, a compelling case can be made for such, although I am not entirely convinced that it will cause us to elevate our opinion of the novel significantly. The fact is that the novel is full of details that make no sense—but the grisly nature of the overall scenario prevents our awareness of the fact until we have had time to reflect
on the novel’s paradoxes and inconsistencies. To take a single example: At one point during Pym’s confinement in the hold of the Grampus, he comes upon a note, written by Barnard in his own blood: “I have scrawled this with blood—your life depends upon lying close” (92). Pym manages to read a portion of this note in the dark, although he had previously fallen into despair because, looking at the reverse of the paper, he ascertained that it was blank. Later, however, we are informed that the paper was “a duplicate of [a] forged letter” (91), so that its reverse could not have been blank. There are countless such instances—far too many to assume that Poe, the most meticulous of writers, could have failed to notice them. We are left, then, with the assumption that Pym is another of Poe’s deadpan hoaxes and satires—a hoax because, as its lengthy title page laboriously declares, it purports to be a true narrative by Pym, and a satire on careless readers whose emotions are so overwhelmed by its hideous accounts of mutiny, death, cannibalism, and savagery that they fail to notice its manifest internal contradictions. Nevertheless, even if this reading of Pym is sound, it fails fully to rescue the work from its aesthetic deficiencies. Poe was wise to stick to short stories from this juncture forward.
vii. Conclusion Certain fastidious critics, from Henry James to Harold Bloom, have questioned the greatness of Poe, both as a poet and as a fiction writer, chiefly because of their apparent distaste for his occasionally florid, flamboyant, and seemingly artificial prose style. On this question much may be said beyond the obvious fact that the enjoyment of or displeasure in this kind of Asianic style is largely a matter of temperament. But it is of interest to see what Poe himself said of his own prose. We find this remarkable assessment in his anonymous review of his Tales (1845): The style of Mr. Poe is clear and forcible. There is often a minuteness of detail; but on examination it will always be found that this minuteness was necessary to the development of the plot, the effect, or the incidents. His style may be called, strictly, an earnest one. And this earnestness is one of its greatest charms. A writer must have the fullest belief in his statements, or must simulate that belief perfectly, to produce an absorbing interest in the mind of his reader. That power of simulation can only be possessed by a man of high genius. It is the result of a peculiar combination of the mental faculties. It produces earnestness, minute, not profuse detail, and fidelity of description. It is possessed by Mr. Poe, in its full perfection. (ER 873) Let us overlook the no doubt tongue-in-cheek self-flattery of the passage. It is not likely that many readers (especially hostile ones) will conclude that Poe’s style is “clear and forcible,” but as a matter of fact the overall thrust of his remarks is that the style is meant to suit the subject-matter, and this it does flawlessly, even triumphantly. All Poe’s critical writing on the craft of poetry or fiction indicates that his prime goal was to create a powerful emotional impact upon his readers; and his manipulation of language was his chief means of effecting that end. The gradual accretion of cumulative power is one of the hallmarks of his prose narratives; Poe early mastered
the ability to modulate the emotional cadence of his prose to create an overwhelming crescendo of horror. “Ligeia” is perhaps the most notable accomplishment in this regard—consider a portion of the final paragraph, where the narrator finally comes to the realisation that the corpse of Rowena has been reanimated by the spirit of Ligeia: Shrinking from my touch, she let fall from her head the ghastly cerements which had confined it, and there streamed forth, into the rushing atmosphere of the chamber, huge masses of long and dishevelled hair; it was blacker than the wings of the midnight! And now slowly opened the eyes of the figure which stood before me. “Here then, at least,” I shrieked aloud, “can I never—can I never be mistaken—these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes—of my lost love—of the lady—of the LADY LIGEIA!” (CW 2.330; italics and small capitals in original) Lurid and overwritten as this appears to be out of context, it is exactly suited to the cataclysmic conclusion that Poe has so artfully orchestrated. That final sentence, with its telling use of polysyndeton and anaphora, point to the careful use of prose-poetic devices to augment the emotive effect of his climaxes. The prose rhythms of such tales as “Morella,” “The Oval Portrait,” “Silence—A Fable,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” are unsurpassed in their aesthetic polish. Not a word could be changed or displaced without spoiling the entire narrative. Moreover, as Michael Allen has pointed out (141f.), Poe modified the floridity of his style in the last decade or so of his career, so that such narratives as “The Descent into the Maelström,” “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” and even “The Tell-Tale Heart” are written with something approaching the spareness of Swift or Hemingway. Poe was possibly responding to criticisms of his earlier prose manner; but whatever the case, the evolution of his style from flamboyance to concision should be noted. We now have to return to an anomaly we noted at the outset of this chapter—the fact that Poe’s tales of supernatural and psychological horror (even including his detective tales) comprise probably less than half of his collected output of fiction; the balance are comic and satirical tales, nowadays generally little read. The matter is not, strictly speaking, of direct
relevance to the history of supernatural fiction, or even to the understanding of Poe’s supernatural work; but it may be of interest to determine whether Poe in fact saw all his fictional work as a unity, and, if so, how he did so. Perhaps a single comment in his essay on N. P. Willis—which we have already seen is one of the few occasions where Poe attempts to provide an aesthetic justification for weird fiction—might suffice: “Imagination, fancy, fantasy and humour, have in common the elements combination and novelty” (ER 1126). The point is made somewhat more amply in his anonymous review of his Tales: The evident and most prominent aim of Mr. Poe is originality, either of idea, or the combination of ideas. He appears to think it a crime to write unless he has something novel to write about, or some novel way of writing about an old thing. He rejects every word not having a tendency to develop the effect. Most writers get their subjects first, and write to develop it. The first inquiry of Mr. Poe is for a novel effect—then for a subject; that is, a new arrangement of circumstance, or a new application of tone, by which the effect shall be developed. And he evidently holds whatever tends to the furtherance of the effect, to be legitimate material. Thus it is that he has produced works of the most notable character, and elevated the mere “tale,” in this country, over the larger “novel”—conventionally so termed. (ER 873) The succulent pun on the two senses of “novel” is delightful. “Novelty” may be a somewhat vague and imprecise conception on which to base a theory of fiction, but in its way it seems to have served as the foundation for much of Poe’s work. The novelty of Poe’s restricting supernatural (and psychological) horror to the intense and condensed mode of the short story; his virtual invention of the genre of the detective story; his radical departure from the thematic and tonal conventions of Gothicism—all these and other elements justify Poe’s self-praise for novelty and originality. The idea of “novelty” is not, in spite of Poe’s comment above, in itself sufficient to account for his extensive use of humour, parody, and satire in a broad spectrum of tales that have not been studied here. One manner of accounting for it may come from a study of his abortive story collection,
Tales of the Folio Club. In a letter Poe described the broad outline of the volume, which by 1836 had evolved into seventeen stories: “They are of a bizarre and generally whimsical character, and were originally written to illustrate a large work ‘On the Imaginative Faculties’” (L 103). Here again the concepts of imagination, strangeness, and humour are fused, as if they are all outgrowths of the same aesthetic stimulus. The framework of Tales of the Folio Club was explained by Poe as follows: I imagine a company of 17 persons who call themselves the Folio Club. They meet once a month at the house of one of the members, and, at a late dinner, each member reads aloud a short prose tale of his own composition. The votes are taken in regard to the merits of each tale. The author of the worst tale, for the month, forfeits the dinner & wine at the next meeting. The seventeen tales which appeared in the Mess are supposed to be narrated by the seventeen members at one of these monthly meetings. As soon as each tale is read—the other 16 members criticise it in turn—and these criticisms are intended as a burlesque upon criticism generally. (L 103–4) That final remark has been taken by some critics as suggesting that even Poe’s grim tales of supernatural and psychological horror are themselves meant parodically. I do not believe we are forced to this conclusion: even though G. R. Thompson (Poe’s Fiction) has made a compelling case for an extensive use of Romantic irony in the horror tales, Michael Allen has countered that the most we can conclude from the inclusion of such tales as “MS. Found in a Bottle” and “Berenice” in the Tales of the Folio Club schema is an indication of Poe’s “tortured uncertainty” (124) about the value of such “sensational” narratives, at least at this early stage of his career. His horror tales are written with such a sense of conviction, and such a sense of their “unity of effect,” that they must be taken largely at face value as excursions into the darker regions of human consciousness and the terrors of the external world. The fact is that many of Poe’s humorous tales are parodies—and parodies of other literary works, especially those appearing in Blackwood’s. This applies not only to such obvious send-ups as “How to Write a Blackwood Article” or “Loss of Breath” (subtitled “A Tale Neither In nor
Out of ‘Blackwood’” [CW 2.61]), but many others. What this means is that these stories are, in effect, an extension of Poe’s work as a literary critic— especially as pertains to his harsh condemnations of plagiarism, verbosity, triteness, and the many other literary flaws he found, or thought he found, in the books that crossed his desk. In employing the element of “novelty” he strove to avoid these gaffes, even at the risk of producing work whose unprecedented intensity of horror and gruesomeness evoked criticism of its own from the squeamish. I repeat that Poe’s work is the true beginning of weird literature. In his day most of the Gothic novels had already become hopelessly passé, and by the end of his creative life he had given them a fitting burial by showing that horror can be conveyed with infinitely greater force and impact by a careful analysis of the psychology of terror, a structure that leads inexorably from the first word to the cataclysmic conclusion, and a “novelty” of subject-matter that puts in the shade the stilted Gothic villains or chainclanking ghosts or hackneyed devils of Gothicism. The true novelty of Poe’s work comes from the innovative supernatural elements found in his greatest tales—the animate ship of “MS. Found in a Bottle,” the psychic vampire of “Ligeia,” the soul shared by house and inhabitants in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the supernatural cat in “The Black Cat,” the hideous life-in-death of “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” and so forth. And Poe should also be given credit for avoiding what were by then the already hackneyed ghosts, vampires, and demons of the earlier Gothic movement. The tales of psychological terror are no less original—the bizarre monomania of “Berenice” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the mental aberrations hinted at in “The Man of the Crowd,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” and “The Premature Burial,” the paradox of revenge in “The Cask of Amondillado.” But Poe’s greatest novelty—and the one facet of his work that his would-be successors and disciples have found the greatest difficulty in duplicating—is the excellence of his output. His greatest tales are imperishable contributions to the literature of the world as they are towering landmarks in the literature of terror. The psychological acuity of his stories and their impeccable concision and unity set a model and a standard that few have equalled and none have surpassed. In their totality they constitute all that is needed to justify the tale of terror as a distinctive and viable branch of literature.
VI. Mid-Victorian Horrors The influence of Poe was by no means quick to manifest itself, even though his works were widely disseminated in the English-speaking world during and after his lifetime, with Baudelaire contributing significantly to his European reputation with skilful translations beginning in 1852. In large part, however, the supernatural writing in the middle decades of the nineteenth century saw an extension of Gothicism that harked back to the novels of the early part of the century. Increased venues for short story writing on both sides of the Atlantic did lead to a substantial increase in supernatural work in short form, especially in the United States, but many writers embodied the supernatural in novelettes or novellas that ill conceal their verbosity and absence of tight construction. We will see some slight influence of contemporary scientific developments upon the weird work of this period: it was, let us recall, in 1859 that Darwin unwittingly created an intellectual revolution with The Origin of Species. Indeed, a passage in an otherwise undistinguished work by Amelia B. Edwards, “The Phantom Coach” (1864), betrays the extent to which some supernatural writers were forced to go on the defensive because scientific advance was making conventional ghosts and goblins increasingly implausible and even the butt of jest: “The world,” he said, “grows hourly more and more sceptical of all that lies beyond its own narrow radius; and our men of science foster the fatal tendency. They condemn as fable all that resists experiment. They reject as false all that cannot be brought to the test of the laboratory or the dissecting-room. Against what superstition have they waged so long and obstinate a war, as against the belief in apparitions? And yet what superstition has maintained its hold upon
the minds of men so long and so firmly? . . . The comparison of causes with effects, however valuable in physical science, is put aside as worthless and unreliable. The evidence of competent witnesses, however conclusive in a court of justice, counts for nothing. He who pauses before he pronounces is condemned as a a trifler. He who believes, is a dreamer or a fool.” (67) There is no need to point out the fallacies of this position if taken as a straightforward intellectual utterance. What is significant is the degree to which scientific advance was requiring supernatural writers to become ever more subtle and indirect in their display of “apparitions” and other weird phenomena, and to imbue those phenomena with symbolic significance in order to justify their appearance in a tale that claimed aesthetic value.
i. Christian Supernaturalism It is no surprise that supernatural writing that was based on explicitly Christian premises actually increased in this and a later period at the exact time when religious scepticism was leading to the radical increase, especially in England, of agnosticism and outright atheism. Writers who endorsed Christian notions of dualism, the efficacy of religious symbols and ritual, and the like found in supernatural fiction a means to validate their beliefs even if it meant invoking the terrors of Satan and his accompanying demons; for the defeat of these evil forces could then be shown to be a triumph of the religion they supported. Two of the most prominent writers of this sort were Captain Marryat and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. There is no question of the Christian orientation of The Phantom Ship (1839), the chief supernatural work of Captain Frederick Marryat (1792– 1848), and a fairly conventional retelling of the “Flying Dutchman” legend. The basic thrust of the legend, faithfully reported by Marryat, is the impiety of Philip Vanderdecken, as he attempts to round the Cape of Good Hope. His wife remembers what he told her: “‘For nine weeks did I try to force my passage against the elements round the stormy Cape, but without success; and I swore terribly. For nine weeks more did I carry sail against the adverse winds and currents, and yet could gain no ground; and then I blasphemed—ay, terribly blasphemed. Yet still I persevered. The crew, worn out with long fatigue, would have had me return to the Table Bay; but I refused; nay, more, I became a murderer— unintentionally, it is true, but still a murderer. A pilot opposed me, and persuaded the men to bind me, and in the excess of my fury, when he took me by the collar, I struck at him; he reeled; and, with the sudden lurch of the vessel, he fell overboard, and sank. Even this fearful death did not restrain me; and I swore by the fragment of the Holy Cross preserved in that relic now hanging round your neck, that I would gain my point in defiance of storm and seas, of
lightning, of heaven, or of hell, even if I should beat about until the Day of Judgment.” (10–11) The upshot is that Vanderdecken can only be absolved if he expresses contrition on that holy relic. All this, in essence, is backstory. The bulk of the actual narrative is taken up with the not particularly compelling story of the attempt by Vanderdecken’s son, also named Philip, to track down his father and present him with the holy relic (one of the seemingly infinite fragments of the Cross that seem to survive here and there) that will lead to Vanderdecken’s absolution. In actuality, this quasi-supernatural premise is merely the makeshift catalyst for a variety of nautical adventures that was the real focus of much of Marryat’s work. Along the way, we meet a particularly insipid heroine, Amine Potts, whom Philip has married, along with all kinds of eccentric nautical characters, among them the one-eyed pilot Schriften, who himself seems not entirely human (Amine says of him: “That creature must be supernatural” [206]). Philip, for his part, believes that Schriften “has his part to play in this wondrous mystery” (246), and, of course, proves to be correct. That The Phantom Ship is nothing more than a post-Gothic pastiche is signified by, among other things, Amine’s seizure by the Inquisition, since she at one point practises a kind of magic (learned from her mother) in order to learn the fate of her husband. Philip spans the globe—or at least a wide arc around the Cape, from Madagascar to Goa—in search of his father. The one effective scene in the novel is the actual encounter of the Flying Dutchman by Philip’s ship, the Utrecht. The two ships seem to be on a collision course: [Philip] said no more; the cutwater of the stranger touched their sides; one general cry was raised by the sailors of the Utrecht—they sprang to catch at the rigging of the other vessel’s bowsprit, which was now pointed between their masts—they caught at nothing— nothing—there was no shock—no concussion of the two vessels— the stranger appeared to cleave through them—her hull passed along in silence—no cracking of timbers—no falling of masts—the foreyard passed through their mainsail, yet the canvas was unrent—
the whole vessel appeared to cut through the Utrecht, yet left no trace of injury—not fast, but slowly, as if she were really sawing through her by the heaving and tossing of the sea with her sharp prow. (215) Philip actually catches sight of his father on board the phantom ship—but, alas! we have many more chapters to go, so the predictable denouement is put off yet again. In the end the elder Vanderdecken, by forgiving his enemy Schriften, thereby “conformed to the highest attributes of Christianity” (349) and is absolved; the Flying Dutchman crumbles to dust. The Phantom Ship has a celebrated episode (ch. 39) that has been printed as a separate narrative entitled “The Werewolf.” This is itself an orthodox werewolf story of no particular distinction, and its sole purpose is to show that one Krantz, a ship captain encountered by Philip, has a legitimate reason for credence in the supernatural. Otherwise, the novel is an aesthetic disaster—appallingly prolix, and written in a stiff, cumbersome style that reads like a bad translation from a foreign language. The Phantom Ship is actually the central component of a loose trilogy of novels by Marryat. The first is Snarleyyow; or, The Dog Fiend (1837), one of the most unintentionally comic titles ever devised, and dealing with a ship captain named Vanslyperken who is accompanied by a particularly vicious dog whom the crewmen believe to be a demon of some kind. These two novels are set in the late seventeenth century, and they are followed by The Privateersman (1846), a non-supernatural historical novel that carries the action forward into the early eighteenth century. That such an accomplished writer as Joseph Conrad (see “Tales of the Sea,” Outlook, 4 January 1898) found some merit in Marryat’s work will, I suppose, keep it alive after a fashion. A far more polished craftsman and prose stylist than Marryat, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) wrote, among his prodigal output, two immense supernatural novels that today make pretty sad reading, along with a masterful short story that will be read as long as supernatural literature remains of compelling interest to the literary public. Of Zanoni (1842) and A Strange Story (serialised in All the Year Round, 10 August 1861–8 March 1862; book publication 1862) there is no need for laborious discussion. Curiously enough, in spite of the widely varying scenes, characters, and events in the two books, they are united by a single thread—the perceived
need to combat atheism and freethought. Bulwer-Lytton, himself deeply learned in occultism and mysticism, found himself increasingly out of step with the growing scientific materialism of his age, and he used these novels to wage a rearguard attack upon what he believed to be the increasingly dismissive attitude of scientists and philosophers in regard to Christian notions of God, soul, and the afterlife. On the surface, the battle against atheism does not seem to be at all what is at stake in Zanoni, an elaboration of a novella, “Zicci,” that had appeared in 1838. In an introduction the author maintains that the work is a romance, but that it is “a truth for those who can comprehend it, and an extravagance for those who cannot” (xvi)—in other words, that the wild, histrionic, and supernatural events of the tale can be read merely as sensationalism by the ignorant, but as divine truth by the initiated. The novel chiefly revolves around a love triangle between Zanoni, a mysterious figure who appears to have discovered the elixir of life; Clarence Glyndon, a young Englishman who yearns for occult knowledge (one of his ancestors, we are told, had been an alchemist [75]); and Viola Pisani, an Italian woman with whom both Glyndon and Zanoni are in love. BulwerLytton’s overall agenda is not slow in manifesting itself. The conflict of science and occultism (which Bulwer-Lytton sees as some kind of higher truth) is stated bluntly: Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny. While we hear, every day, the small pretenders to science talk of the absurdities of Alchemy and the dream of the Philosopher’s Stone, a more erudite knowledge is aware that by Alchemists the greatest discoveries in science have been made, and much which still seems abstruse, had we the key to the mystic phraseology they were compelled to adopt, might open the way to yet more noble acquisitions. The Philosopher’s Stone itself has seemed no visionary chimera to some of the soundest chemists that even the present century has produced. Man cannot contradict the Laws of Nature. But are all the Laws of Nature yet discovered? (93–94) The reasoning here is of some interest: in effect, Bulwer-Lytton is appealing to science itself to refute science—or, at least, to show that future scientific
discovery may triumphantly reveal that the alchemists and other occultists were right all along. The vehicle through which Bulwer-Lytton makes his point is Rosicrucianism. This movement, emerging out of Germany in the early seventeenth century, was a confused mixture of alchemy, astrology, cabbalism, and much else, and was taken seriously by a wide array of thinkers, including Descartes. Bulwer-Lytton seizes upon the notion of the Rosicrucians as a secret society, maintaining that Zanoni and his colleague (or teacher), Mejnour, are the last remaining members of a society that originated, according to Zanoni, in the classical period with the Neoplatonists. Zanoni portrays the society as wholly benevolent—they are seekers after knowledge and also of “the Fount of Good” (347), whatever that may mean. Mejnour, for his part, wishes to create a race of beings that will be “the true lords of this planet” (174)—a plan that sounds sinister enough but is ultimately portrayed as quite the reverse. The secret of extending life is itself depicted as a kind of benign medical knowledge. The danger in all this, as Zanoni warns the eager Glyndon, is the possibility of encountering “the terrible Dweller of the Threshold” (221). What kind of an entity is this? Glyndon finds out: in his impetuous haste to gain “preternatural knowledge” (158), he unwittingly summons the Dweller after imbibing the elixir of life: By degrees, this object shaped itself to his sight. It was as that of a human head, covered with a dark veil, through which glared, with lurid and demoniac fire, eyes that froze the marrow of his bones. Nothing else of the face was distinguishable—nothing but those intolerable eyes; but his terror, that even at the first seemed beyond nature to endure, was increased a thousand-fold, when, after a pause, the phantom glided slowly into the chamber. . . . Its form was veiled as the face, but the outline was that of a female; yet it moved not as move even the ghosts that simulate the living; it seemed rather to crawl as some vast misshapen reptile . . . All fancies, the most grotesque, of Monk or Painter in the early North, would have failed to give to the visage of imp or fiend that aspect of deadly malignity which spoke to the shuddering nature in those eyes alone. (232–33)
All this is quite effective as a horrific set-piece, but it is plain that BulwerLytton intends it symbolically. But what is the Dweller a symbol of? Evidently we are to regard him (or it) as a kind of punishment inflicted upon Glyndon because he drank the elixir merely for the purpose of extending his life, without gaining sufficient wisdom to use that extension prudently. In this sense, the Dweller is a symbol of hubris. The fact that the novel is set in the Reign of Terror is no accident. Bulwer-Lytton has chosen this setting to underscore his point that rampant atheism (which he conceives to be the ultimate root of the French Revolution) can only lead to horror and bloodshed; in essence, the Reign of Terror is a kind of political Dweller of the Threshold. It is significant that Zanoni banishes the Dweller—which has been haunting Glyndon incessantly ever since he summoned it—by an appeal to his religious faith: “Rejoice, then!—thou hast overcome the true terror and mystery of the ordeal. Resolve is the first success. Rejoice, for the exorcism is sure! Thou art not of those who, denying a life to come, are the victims of the Inexorable Horror. Oh, when shall men learn, at last, that if the Great Religion inculcates so rigidly the necessity of FAITH, it is not alone that FAITH leads to the world to be; but that without faith there is no excellence in this—faith is something wiser, happier, diviner, than we see on earth!—the Artist calls it the Ideal—the Priest Faith. The Ideal and Faith are one and the same. Return, O wanderer! return. Feel what beauty and holiness dwell in the Customary and the Old.” (350) If this somewhat incoherent message signifies anything, it is that smug British attitude of the post-revolutionary period (embodied as well in Burke) that the pieties and political conservatism embodied in British Christianity are superior to the wild radicalism of the philosophes. Glyndon also engages in a rather grotesque attempt to kill Robespierre, failing miserably; but Zanoni succeeds, inciting Robespierre’s enemies to kill him. And in a final act of altruistic piety, Zanoni summons the “Evil Omen, the dark Chimera” (361), who tells him that Viola, now in prison and about to be guillotined, will be saved only if Zanoni sacrifices himself for her. In a final lecture Zanoni tells her “of the sublime and intense faith from which
alone the diviner knowledge can arise—the faith which, seeing the immortal everywhwere, purifies and exalts the mortal that beholds—the glorious ambition that dwells not in the cabals and crimes of earth, but amid those solemn wonders that speak not of men, but of God” (379). If Zanoni is marred by its longwindedness and by Bulwer-Lytton’s fatal penchant for schoolroom lecturing, A Strange Story is still more crippled by dragging verbosity. Its religious and philosophical agenda is even clearer. Its protagonist is Allen Fenwick, a physician who settles in a small English town. His philosophical orientation is announced at the outset: “I had espoused a school of medical philosophy severely rigid in its inductive logic. My creed was that of stern materialism” (7). The tone of this passage makes it plain that Fenwick is due for an intellectual fall. Fenwick is, in some sense, a mere observer in the conflict between a curious figure named Margrave, who shows up in the town, and Sir Philip Derval, a mystic and occultist who wishes to “discover and to bring human laws to bear upon a creature armed with terrible powers of evil” (138)—presumably Margrave. One of the few virtues of the novel is the effective portrayal of Margrave as a being both subhuman and superhuman. At one point he exclaims: “Man! man! could you live but an hour of my life you would know how horrible a thing it is to die!” (102)—can this mean that Margrave himself has found the elixir of life? This turns out to be the case, but the real thrust of the remark is a metaphysical one: the denial of the immortality of the soul leads to unbearable horror at the thought of extinction, which then pollutes and corrupts life itself. One of the major foci of the novel is to convince the reader that the immortal soul actually exists, and Bulwer-Lytton performs the task in a particularly crude manner: Fenwick, who has expressed doubts as to whether the soul is distinct from the mind, conveniently goes into a trance and sees the tripartite essence of Margrave (body, mind, soul, each in a different colour). Well, I guess that settles that! Derval—who had declared that “there is truth in those immemorial legends which depose to the existence of magic” (152)—is found murdered, and a steel casket containing certain “medicines” is missing. Fenwick is actually arrested on suspicion of murdering Derval; evidently he has been framed by Margrave. Margrave’s “Shadow” comes to Fenwick in the prison, declaring that he can free Fenwick upon his agreeing to certain conditions. Fenwick agrees and is released. At this point Julius Faber, the physician whom Fenwick replaced, returns to the scene. Although Faber
presents a convincing case that all the seemingly supernatural phenomena that Fenwick has experienced can be accounted for psychologically, Faber himself spends much time expressing his own belief in God, the soul, the afterlife, and so forth. Fenwick, however, is not yet ready to accept this aspect of Faber’s teaching. Many of Fenwick’s actions are inspired by his love for Lilian Asheigh. She is a relatively colourless creature who serves merely as the catalyst of certain phases of the novel’s action. After Fenwick has married Lilian, she receives a poison pen letter from someone in the community accusing her of moral improprieties of various sorts. Incredibly, she goes mad as a result, and much of the rest of the novel is spent in Fenwick’s increasingly harried attempts to cure her. (A woman in the town later admits to writing the letter —under Margrave’s influence.) Fenwick then decides to take Lilian away from England, joining Faber in Australia. The motive for this action will become evident in due course. Faber delivers a ponderous lecture: “. . . whenever I look through the History of Mankind in all ages and all races, I find a concurrence in certain beliefs which seems to countenance the theory that there is in some peculiar and rare temperaments a power over forms of animated organization, with which they establish some unaccountable affinity; and even, though much more rarely, a power over inanimate matter.” (329–30) This is presented as a kind of pseudo-scientific accounting for some of the seemingly supernatural phenomena associated with “magic,” as well as with mesmerism and witchcraft. In effect, Bulwer-Lytton is reverting to the idea expressed in Zanoni that “magic” may simply be a kind of science whose laws orthodox science has not yet discovered. What relevance this has to the overall thrust of the novel is not entirely clear. In any event, Margrave suddenly appears on the scene, declaring that he has discovered the “elixir of life” (371), stating later that his “faculties . . . are given to all men, though dormant in most” (394). As Lilian is now dying, Fenwick agrees to help Margrave make more of the elixir, which is running short, so that he can continue life and also so that Lilian can be saved. Gold is needed, it would appear—hence the transparency of the need to shift the locale to Australia, where an abundance of gold can be had with little
difficulty. Unfortunately, after laborious attempts to collect the gold and fashion the elixir, a stampede of animals fleeing a fire causes most of the elixir to be spilled. This seemingly lamentable eventuality proves, however, to be Fenwick’s salvation. He now reflects on the situation: he had (in his earlier stance as a materialistic physician) tried reason; he had just now tried magic; but both had failed. “Where yet was Hope to be found? In the soul” (430): “All my past, with its pride and presumption and folly, grew distinct as the form of a penitent, kneeling for pardon before setting forth on the pilgrimage vowed to a shrine. And, sure now, in the deeps of a soul first revealed to myself, that the Dead do not die forever, my human love soared beyond its brief trial of terror and sorrow. Daring not to ask from Heaven’s wisdom that Lilian, for my sake, might not yet pass away from the earth, I prayed that my soul might be fitted to bear with submission whatever my Maker might ordain.” (431) But never fear: in a contrived happy ending, Lilian recovers. A Strange Story is, in some senses, an impressive achievement, but its philosophical agenda is too plain to make it a convincing weird tale in its own right. The narrative is so relentlessly symbolic—down to its characters, each of whom merely represents not much more than an intellectual idea— that the supernatural is not, and cannot be, regarded as significant in itself. Marie Roberts maintains that “A Strange Story presents a powerful philosophical argument for the immortality of the soul” (189), but in fact Bulwer-Lytton’s arguments are quite unconvincing and easily refuted. What is remarkable in all this is that Bulwer-Lytton, in one instance, did finally get down from his hobby-horse (and also reined in his habitual prolixity) and produced a gem of the supernatural in “The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain” (Blackwood’s, August 1859), possibly the single most reprinted story in the history of supernatural fiction. If nothing else, as an aesthetic accomplishment the tale would be difficult to excel. In announcing his intention to explore a reputedly haunted house (based on an actual house in Berkeley Square), the first-person narrator not only makes an elaborate protestation of scepticism but treats
the whole adventure as a lark: he speaks to his servant with delighted relish, “From what I hear there is no doubt that something will allow itself to be seen or to be heard—something perhaps excessively horrible” (287). The gradualness with which the supernatural phenomena manifest themselves— first, the footprints of a child appear; then a chair moves; then the servant flees the house, crying, “Run! Run! It is after me!” (294)—creates a powerful sense of cumulative horror. At this point the narrator anticipates what Allen Fenwick would say in A Strange Story: Now, my theory is that the supernatural is the impossible, and that what is called supernatural is only a something in the laws of nature of which we have been hitherto ignorant. Therefore, if a ghost rises before me, I have not the right to say, “So, then, the supernatural is possible,” but rather, “So, then, the apparition of a ghost is, contrary to received opinion, within the laws of nature, namely, not supernatural.” (295–96) This is all very clever, and this time it is not dynamited by subsequent events, but rather confirmed by them. The narrator goes on to say—again in anticipation of A Strange Story—that a ghost is not the soul of a dead person, but “the eidolon of the dead form” (305). In the end, we learn that the ghostly phenomena were brought on by a former tenant who, with her husband, murdered her brother and nephew for inheritance money. But this somewhat mundane “explanation” is further augmented by a subsequent passage—one inexplicably omitted from many printings of the story, even though it validates the subtitle—that the true origin of the phenomena is the mesmeric influence of a preternaturally aged individual (the “brain” of the subtitle). Whether William Harrison Ainsworth (1802–1882) is worth discussing in this context, or any context, is an open question. Amidst his appalling array of dreary and unreadable historical novels we find occasional ghosts, curses, and the like, but they all amount to nothing. The Lancashire Witches (1849) still retains some vestige of a reputation, but it is an entirely nonsupernatural historical account of a seventeenth-century witch trial.
ii. High and Low It is somewhat uncanny that four novels, all published in 1847, embraced the supernatural in a multitude of manners and degrees. It is also of interest that two of these manifestly appealed to highbrow readers while the other two consciously sought to attract the masses, whose taste for the weird and flamboyantly supernatural had already been whetted by the penny dreadfuls, which had commenced in the 1830s. It is no surprise that the latter two considerably outsold the former two, but it is similarly no surprise that the latter would never have been rescued from the oblivion that was their due had they not featured the supernatural, and therefore caught the attention of the diligent scholars who have combed both the highs and the lows of our literary patrimony for specimens of their chosen field. Of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1818–1848) it is difficult to speak in small compass, and even a discussion of its specific supernatural manifestations requires some study of the book’s overall scope and purpose. The degree to which Wuthering Heights itself is a kind of Gothic castle may perhaps have been exaggerated by critics; Brontë very likely did absorb Gothic novels in her youth, but aside from random touches such as Nelly Dean’s offhand remark “I could not half tell what an infernal house we had” (65), not a great deal of emphasis is placed on the house’s supernaturalism, either potential or actual. More might be made of the demonic qualities of Heathcliff himself, although in the end much of the turmoil he causes is either a result of his flouting of Victorian social conventions or, more pertinently, of his carefully planned and ultimately successful quest to secure the Earnshaw/Linton property for himself as vengeance for his scornful treatment by these families and, especially, for Catherine’s refusal to marry him. Indeed, when Catherine Earnshaw writes a letter to Nelly asking, “Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?” (136), it is not entirely clear what led her to make such a statement, just as it is not entirely clear whether the emotional unity of Catherine and Heathcliff (“Nelly, I am Heathcliff” [82], Catherine says at one point) has been thoroughly established by the actual course of the narrative. Heathcliff, for his part, once accuses Catherine herself of being “possessed
with a devil” (159) and later, after Catherine dies, states flamboyantly that he wants Catherine to haunt him: “You said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe—I know that ghosts have wandered on earth” (167). That last statement is augmented by Heathcliff’s much later remark that “I have a strong faith in ghosts” (289). Supernaturalism presumably enters at the very end of the novel, when Heathcliff hears a sigh when he madly attempts to dig up Catherine’s grave, and then, after his own death, when rumours begin to emerge that both a male and a female ghost are seen around the graves. But the most striking supernatural incident is at the very beginning, when the man who hears the entire tale from Nelly Dean, Mr. Lockwood, hearing a tapping on the window, stretches out his hand to investigate: “my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand!” (23). It is Catherine, of course. Lockwood first dismisses the incident as a nightmare, but later admits that “the place was haunted . . . it is—swarming with ghosts and goblins!” (25). The striking physicality of the ghost is not the least of its remarkable features. The supernatural is even more fleeting in the most celebrated work, Jane Eyre, of Emily’s sister, Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855). And yet, what is of interest, from our perspective, is how Brontë stresses, especially in regard to Jane Eyre’s youth and upbringing, the degree to which she is sensitive to incursions of the supernatural. Consider her reaction when, as a child, she read “Bewick’s History of British Birds,” especially some of the pictures in the book, described as follows: The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea, I believed to be marine phantoms. The fiend pinning down the thief’s pack behind him, I passed over quickly: it was an object of terror. So was the black, horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows. (9) Not long thereafter, catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror, she sees the following:
the strange little figure there gazing at me, with a white face and arms specking the gloom, and glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the effect of a real spirit: I thought it like one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp, Bessie’s evening stories represented as coming up out of lone, ferny dells in moors, and appearing before the eyes of belated travellers. (14) And finally, in the celebrated passage when young Jane is incarcerated in the dreaded “red room,” she reflects on what might ensue, given that her harsh aunt, Mrs. Reed, was not following her dead husband’s orders to treat Jane as one of her own children: . . . as I sat looking at the white bed and overshadowed walls— occasionally also turning a fascinated eye towards the dimly gleaming mirror—I began to recall what I had heard of dead men, troubled in their graves by the violation of their last wishes, revisiting the earth to punish the perjured and avenge the oppressed; and I thought Mr. Reed’s spirit, harassed by the wrongs of his sister’s child, might quit its abode—whether in the church vault or in the unknown world of the departed—and rise before me in this chamber. (16–17) The general implication is that this penchant for seeing ghosts and goblins —shared by Jane and others—is a product not only of the ghostly stories her nurse and others had told her as a child, but of the oppressive Christian environment that induces a belief in spirits around every corner. The tendency continues as Jane matures. As she first comes to Thornfield Hall to take up her occupation as governess, she wonders whimsically “if there were a ghost at Thornfield Hall,” to which the sober Mrs. Fairfax replies: “None that I ever heard of” (107). In her first encounter with Edward Rochester she momentarily takes him for a goblin (113). The passing remark that Rochester spends little time at Thornfield because “he thinks it gloomy” (129) at once evokes the Gothic castle of Radcliffean provenance—a connexion that Brontë was well aware her readers would make.
Of course, there is no actual supernaturalism in the core “mystery” of Thornfield Hall—the incarceration, in the attic, of Rochester’s mad first wife, Bertha. There are fleeting attempts at suggesting (purely metaphorically) that Bertha is a kind of supernatural entity: at one point Jane hears a “demoniac laugh” (149); and much later she sees a “fearful and ghastly” (286) face. She elaborates to Rochester: “It was a discoloured face—it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments!” “Ghosts are usually pale, Jane.” “This, sir, was purple: the lips were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed; the black eye-brows wildly raised over the blood-shot eyes. Shall I tell you of what it reminded me?” “You may.” “Of the foul German spectre—the Vampyre.” (286) This entire passage is of consuming interest in suggesting the readiness with which even educated persons of the period resorted to supernatural causation in explaining anomalous phenomena. But supernaturalism does enter into Jane Eyre at a critical moment at the end. After she has left Thornfield in the wake of discovering Rochester’s still-living wife, she comes (by one of the most whopping coincidences that ever disfigured a great novel) to the home of the man who proves to be her first cousin, the clergyman St John Rivers. As St John relentlessly presses her to marry her and go with him on a missionary jaunt to India, she is on the point of yielding when she hears Rochester’s voice calling “Jane! Jane! Jane!” (424). At this point we are almost prepared to think that Brontë has engineered another whopping coincidence—but it quickly becomes apparent that Rochester is not there. So then are we to assume that the cry was merely a hallucination on Jane’s part—perhaps a psychological trick that her mind engendered, since she clearly does not wish to marry Rivers? It seems likely . . . until Rochester, now blinded and
crippled following the burning of Thornfield and the death of Bertha, admits that he himself made such a cry at the exact time when Jane must have heard it (429). Jane observes: “The coincidence struck me as too awful and inexplicable to be communicated or discussed” (453). This telling use of the supernatural is clearly designed to underscore the psychic unity of Jane and Rochester—a unity that is, in many ways, far more convincing than that of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. Rochester, indeed, is a kind of Heathcliff Lite—brooding, irascible, and occasionally violent, but nothing like the demon that Emily Brontë makes of her changeling; and there is reason to believe that Charlotte Brontë, who read Wuthering Heights in manuscript while writing Jane Eyre, picked up a few tips in characterisation from her sister. The novel has, of course, suffered perhaps the most catastrophic posthumous fate ever visited upon a noble work of literature by serving as the ultimate fount of the tens of thousands of wretched “women’s gothics” of our own day. With Varney, the Vampyre we are in a different world altogether. This staggeringly immense shambles of a novel—running, by my count, in excess of 950,000 words—is the most celebrated example of the “shilling shocker”: it was in fact sold in “parts,” like Dickens’s novels, that sold for a shilling, although these “parts” actually postdate the three-volume book publication. I am hardly concerned with the debate as to whether Thomas Preskett Prest or James Malcolm Rymer was the actual author; E. F. Bleiler’s argument, in the preface to the 1972 Dover edition of the work, has convinced most scholars that Rymer is the author, but whether the one hack or the other wrote it is of no consequence. There is no doubt that the author—let us assume it is Rymer—wished to spin out his tale as long as he could purely for the added revenue it would bring. The novel has no structure, no focus, no direction, and almost nothing to recommend it. That it is somehow regarded as a “classic” of vampire literature only testifies to the relative mediocrity of most vampire literature, Dracula not excepted. As with Bulwer-Lytton’s novels, the author of Varney is clearly unaware either that Poe exists or that the Gothic movement is dead as a doornail. The temporal setting of the novel is not entirely clear, but it eventually becomes more or less clear that we are in the early eighteenth century: Sir Francis Varney, who was apparently born in the reign of Charles I (1625–49), admits to being 180 years old (771). The great majority of the action takes place in England. One of the first scenes in the book is Sir Francis Varney
invading the bedroom of a young woman, Flora Bannerworth, and sucking her blood—a sexual element that, after a fashion, shapes the entire work. Much, much later, Varney laments that “I have not been able to obtain the consent of one that is young, beautiful, and a virgin; I might then for a season escape the dreaded alternative” (686). This statement is itself unclear: it appears to account for Varney’s increasingly desperate attempts not merely to victimise a succession of young, beautiful, and (presumably) virginal women, but also to marry one of them; but what then? If some young woman were to marry him, would she voluntarily allow him to suck her blood from time to time? How is this any less awful than the “dreaded alternative” of sucking someone’s blood by force? Indeed, the central issue of how Varney became a vampire is never properly clarified. At one point he tells the tale of his early life, stating that he had once been addicted to gambling, had lost a considerable sum of money to a professional gambler, and had then killed that person. He was subsequently tried for his various crimes and hanged. At this point he is resurrected galvanically by a surgeon named Chillingworth. Later Varney meets a Hungarian nobleman who tells him about vampires, and Varney becomes convinced that he is one. But it is by no means clear whether he is or isn’t, and Rymer never explains how being revived galvanically can turn one into a vampire. Varney does introduce some curious “powers” of the vampire that the subsequent literary tradition either ignored or jettisoned. Varney experiences no difficulty in going about by day or night. Although he claims that his “horrible nature . . . forbade him any nourishment but human blood” (772), there are a few occasions where he appears to partake moderately of food and drink. But the most curious feature of all, in this regard, is Varney’s ability to be revived by moonlight—a feature that Rymer apparently lifted from H. A. Marschner’s German opera Der Vampyr (1828). One character maintains that a vampire is “tangible and destructible” (48), unlike other supernatural entities, and this indeed appears to be the case. On several occasions Varney is in fact killed—but the moonlight revives him. This is, indeed, a rather effective touch, and one of the few powerful moments in the novel is an episode where Varney is placed in a mausoleum, seemingly dead, and is slowly brought to life as the moonlight gradually creeps over him.
Otherwise, Varney, the Vampyre is a wretchedly confused and incoherent work. Its characters are all stereotypes—most notably Flora Bannerworth, the very image of the insipid Gothic heroine, who can do nothing but faint and requires her menfolk to come repeatedly to her rescue —and the novel’s dragging prolixity destroys anything remotely akin to a cumulative denouement. Varney’s increasing disgust for his anomalous condition finally leads him to commit the spectacular suicide of jumping into Mt. Vesuvius, but by this time we have lost all interest in his condition or his fate. Marginally better, at least from the standpoint of prose style and construction, is Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf by George W. M. Reynolds (1814– 1879), serialised in Reynolds’s Miscellany (6 November 1846–24 July 1847) before appearing in book form. The novel is, in an insignificant sense, a sequel to Reynolds’s earlier supernatural work, Faust: A Romance of the Secret Tribunals (serialised 1845–46; book publication 1847), a relatively straightforward retelling of Goethe’s Faust its depiction of Wilhelm Faust, who is granted twenty-four years of supernatural power by the Devil, who at the end tosses him into Mt. Vesuvius—whence the everresourceful James Rymer pillaged the culminating scene of Varney. In Wagner, Faust (not named until several chapters into the book) comes to Fernand Wagner, a ninety-year-old man leading a wretched life, and persuades him to accept an offer to become a werewolf in exchange for regained youth, power, and wealth. Wagner does so by drinking a potion. It is unclear what earlier werewolf literature or tradition Reynolds was following, but one of the curiosities of Wagner’s transformation is that it has nothing to do with the moon; rather, he becomes a werewolf on the last day of the month at sunset, so that it is the sun rather than the moon that is the governing element of his metamorphosis. This point is never explained or elaborated, merely accepted. The first time Wagner is so transformed (ch. 12) is indeed an effective and virtually self-standing horrific episode—more effective, indeed, than the corresponding chapter in Marryat’s Phantom Ship—but the fact that Wagner kills an innocent child while in his wolfish state creates a moral dilemma for readers and renders him an unwittingly unsympathetic character. But the overriding flaw in Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf is simply that, even more so than Faust (in which the central character merely engages in a succession of non-supernatural adventures, including an affair with Lucretia
Borgia), the overwhelming bulk of the action is not supernatural and has nothing to do with Wagner’s condition. Most of the work revolves around the efforts of Nisida, a determined and ruthless young woman who falls in love with Wagner, to prevent her brother, Francisco, Count of Riverola, from marrying Agnes, Wagner’s granddaughter. There is also an ancillary story of the Countess of Arestino and her affair with one Manuel d’Orsini. The end result is that Wagner and the supernaturalism inherent in his state become a virtual side issue in the dynastic fortunes of the noble families at the centre of the action. Reynolds, too, writes as if the Gothic novel were a thriving rather than a hackneyed and passé tradition. There is the obligatory dungeon scene—this time with Agnes, seized at the behest of Nisida and thrust into a convent— and the obligatory band of robbers, generally coming to the aid of the countess and her lover. Then there is the odd episode where Agnes’s brother converts to Islam and becomes the grand vizier for the Arabian Sultan. The Devil appears to Wagner on a few occasions, but to no particular effect. Wagner and Nisida are for a time stranded on an uninhabited island, creating a bizarre Crusoe-like effect. Reynolds’s prose is, to be sure, infinitely superior to that of Varney, and his talent for story construction—albeit of a slick, almost machine-made sort—is evident; but it is clear that supernaturalism as such was not his interest. His final supernatural novel, The Necromancer (serialised 1851– 52; book publication 1852), is heavily reliant on Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer in its story of a man granted the boon of 150 years of power, who can reclaim his soul if he persuades six virgins to give up theirs; but here too the thrust of the action is sensational adventure and political machinations. It has long been lamented that the werewolf theme has never produced a canonical literary work, and Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf does not come close to filling the bill.
iii. Occasional Supernaturalism A host of mid-Victorian writers in England, chiefly known for mainstream work of a very different sort, chose to dip into supernatural or non-supernatural horror in the course of a short story or a novella. The mere fact that not one of them—including the two most notable figures of the group, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins—felt the inclination to write a full-scale supernatural novel is in itself instructive: in a significant sense it constitutes an implicit repudiation of the aesthetic of the Gothic novel, which many novelists of the post-Gothic period must have recognised was seriously flawed in its attempt to engage an intrinsically fleeting emotion— the emotion of fear—over the length of a novel. While it is unclear to what extent these writers actually read the Gothic novels, their restriction of the terror tale to the short story would have long-lasting ramifications, extending in truth to the horror “boom” of the 1970s. In the case of Dickens (1812–1870)—as we have already seen in the case of Poe—this reliance on the short story for supernatural terror was in a sense making a virtue of necessity, for the increasing magazine markets for short stories of all kinds—especially the periodical he himself founded and edited, Household Words (1850–59), later All the Year Round (1859–70)— provided a ready source of income for a resolutely professional writer. And yet, it is of interest that one of Dickens’s first ghost stories (virtually all his supernatural tales are ghost stories in the strictest and most literal sense) is a parody. “The Lawyer and the Ghost” (Pickwick Papers, 1837) tells of a clever lawyer who, when encountering a ghost in his chambers, engages in disputation with the entity, pointing out the folly of returning “exactly to the very places where you have been most miserable” (35) and thereby causing the ghost to withdraw. The scepticism of ghostly phenomena that this tale implies speaks volumes for the increasing rationalism of the age. In several tales Dickens deliberately plays with the possibility that the ghostly manifestations are the result of hallucination, error, or other naturalistic causes. For example, in “The Queer Chair” (Pickwick Papers; also titled “The Story of the Bagman’s Uncle”) the protagonist, Tom Smart, staying at an inn, appears to see a chair turn miraculously into an old man—
but the narrative has made it abundantly clear that Smart has imbibed a considerable amount of alcohol and that his vision may simply be a drunkard’s dream. But the supernatural is confirmed when, through the ghost’s intercession, Smart finds a letter that shows that a man who is wooing the widow innkeeper is already married. Dickens was, indeed, not averse to using tried-and-true Gothic formulae for his own purposes, but on occasion his handling of them was not entirely sound. Consider The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848). This very long story tells of a ghost who comes to an old man, Mr. Redlaw, who gradually realises that it may well be the “evil spirit of myself” (167). The ghost offers to wipe Redlaw’s memory of all the misdeeds of his past, but on condition that he must pass on this dubious gift to another if his soul is to rest in peace. This manifest borrowing of the Melmoth the Wanderer scenario plays out in a conventional manner; moreover, the story is so staggeringly verbose, and so full of inessential details and episodes, that the overall effect is severely weakened. In other instances, Dickens chooses a supernatural framework for a conception that would probably have profited from a non-supernatural treatment. “The Ghost Chamber” (Household Words, October 1857) supplies a powerful portrayal of the brutalisation of a young woman by her tyrannical husband, who repeatedly orders her to die (he cannot be put to the trouble of actually killing her): Shut up in the deserted mansion, aloof from all mankind, and engaged alone in such a struggle without any respite, it came to this —that either he must die, or she. He knew it very well, and concentrated his strength against her feebleness. Hours upon hours he held her by the arm when her arm was black where he held it, and bade her Die! (252) The wife does die, and the husband is ultimately brought to justice and dies; but then Dickens drags in some ghostly phenomena that have no real bearing on the narrative, with the result that the grim depiction of marital hostility is diluted. As for the celebrated novella A Christmas Carol (1843), I fear the only way to salvage this work aesthetically is to assume that it is a parody—a
parody, specifically, on all the sentimental boobs over the decades who have swallowed this narrative as a pious moral exemplum. For the satire on poor Ebenezer Scrooge is so broad (“Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster” [90]), and the portrayal of the Cratchit family so preposterously saintly, that one would desperately like to see some hint of self-parody in the tale. But, alas! it is all too plain that Dickens took the tale seriously and wished others to do so. What is striking about A Christmas Carol is the extraordinarily mundane and materialistic nature of its moral. Dickens makes it clear that Scrooge’s miserliness derives from the fact that he himself was haunted by the spectre of povery in his youth; and Scrooge makes a shrewd point on this subject: “‘This is the even-handed dealing of the world!’ he said. ‘There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!’” (113). The irony is that this is very much Dickens’s own apparent position, at least as far as this tale is concerned: the loving description of the bountiful Christmas dinner that the Cratchits enjoy focuses entirely on the abundance and variety of the foodstuffs; nowhere is there the faintest appreciation of the religious nature of the holiday (aside, of course, from Tiny Tim’s formulaic “God bless us every one!” [125]). And the only thing Scrooge can do, after he has seen the various ghosts of Christmases past, present, and future, is to give Cratchit a larger turkey—and this is portrayed as some kind of moral transformation on Scrooge’s part. After reading this wretched piece of sentimentalism, one is heartily inclined to agree with Ambrose Bierce’s fiery remark in a letter: How I hate Christmas! I’m one of the curmudgeons that the truly good Mr. Dickens found it profitable to hold up to the scorn of those who take such satisfaction in being decent and generous one day in 365. Bah! how hollow it all is! Always on Christmas, though, I feel my own heart soften—toward the late Judas Iscariot. (A Much Misunderstood Man 59) Toward the end A Christmas Carol descends into transparent allegory (“This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want” [134]), a fittingly trite
conclusion to a story that is an aesthetic débâcle. But, crude and blundering as it may be, the tale does suggest as clearly as any in the history of literature how the supernatural can be used to point a moral. While it is conceivable that the visions shown by the ghosts of Christmas past and present could have been narrated non-supernaturally, the scenes revealed by the ghost of Christmas future—notably Scrooge’s own death—would have been difficult to encompass in a conventional mimetic manner, especially if these visions are, as here, meant as a means for a revision of Scrooge’s moral compass. A Christmas Carol has an obvious, and no less sorry, antecedent in “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton” (Pickwick Papers, 1837), where goblins show a sexton various allegorical scenes for his own spiritual regeneration. The moralism here is just as heavy-handed as in its successor: “. . . he saw that men like himself, who snarled at the mirth and cheerfulness of others, were the foulest weeds on the fair surface of the earth; and setting all the good of the world against the evil, he came to the conclusion that it was a very decent and respectable sort of a world after all” (78). But Dickens should be judged by his best, not his worst, specimens. Two late items stand out: “The Trial for Murder,” a.k.a. “To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt” (All the Year Round, Christmas 1865 [not cowritten with Charles Allston Collins, as frequently believed]), an effective tale of a murdered man whose ghost haunts the trial of his murderer; and, especially, “The Signalman” (All the Year Round, Christmas 1866), a poignant account of a spectral figure who appears to a railroad signalman and predicts three train disasters in succession—the third constituting the signalman’s own death. Dickens’s contemporary and sometime collaborator Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) dabbled in both supernatural and non-supernatural horror throughout his long career. Collins is, justifiably, better known for the pioneering and extraordinarily clever detective novel The Moonstone (1852) and the post-Gothic thriller The Woman in White (1860), but his ventures into terror in short form are not to be despised. It may well be the case that the best of them—“A Terribly Strange Bed” (Household Words, 24 April 1852), a compelling account of a man who, after winning a fortune at gaming, unwisely stays overnight in the gaming house and is nearly killed by a four-poster bed whose top inexorably descends upon him; “The Dead
Alive” (All the Year Round, December 1873), a clever detective story set in the United States—are non-supernatural, but others are of some interest. Two of the most effective of these fall into the category of ambiguous horror tales, where it is impossible to determine whether the supernatural has come into play or not. In “Mad Monkton” (Fraser’s Magazine, November–December 1855) we are presented with a seemingly deranged individual, Alfred Monkton (his family, as the narrator makes abundantly clear, has had a history of hereditary insanity), engages in a desperate attempt to find the body of his uncle, who had died in a duel in Italy. Only after the narrative has progressed apace do we understand the reason for this desperation: Monkton is following a family tradition whereby all members of his family must be buried at his estate, Wincot Abbey, lest the line die out. The narrator falls in with Monkton’s quest and finds the body in the outhouse of a convent; but the ship taking the body back to England springs a leak, causing it to be abandoned by the crew. Monkton wished to stay on board and go down with the ship (and the corpse), but he is saved against his wishes and forced into a lifeboat. Sure enough, he later dies in England without issue, ending the Monkton line. We are left with the unanswerable puzzle: Is the family legend (or curse) true? Moreover, was there some supernatural hand guiding the entire series of events, including the sinking of the ship? Is it the purpose of some supernatural force or entity to extinguish the Monkton family? Collins leaves these questions deliberately unanswered. As for “The Dream-Woman” (Temple Bar, November–December 1874), one might suspect that the numerous coincidences upon which this tale is built would be implausible unless the supernatural is brought into play, but again Collins refuses to tip his hat one way or the other. A man, Isaac Scatchard, at an inn seems to fancy (perhaps it is a dream) that a woman attacks him with a knife while he is lying in bed; but the next morning, the sheets are not torn, the locks are not broken, and he himself is uninjured. His mother, hearing the tale, tells him that the incident must have occurred on the anniversary of the very moment of his birth. Years later Isaac meets a woman, Rebecca Murdock, and marries her. The moment his mother meets her, she recognises her (from descriptions Isaac had given of his dream or hallucination) as the “dream-woman.” The marriage gradually deteriorates, and sure enough Rebecca attempts to stab her husband with a knife—on his birthday, exactly as in the dream. He leaves her, but is subsequently haunted
by the thought of her returning, ending his life emotionally shattered. This is a powerful tale of domestic infelicity, augmented by the possibility of supernaturalism. Other of Collins’s tales descend to Radcliffe’s “explained supernatural.” “The Dead Hand” (Household Words, 10 October 1857) tells of a man, Arthur Holliday, desperately looking for a room for the night and agreeing to stay in a room occupied by a dead man (a guest who had apparently died the previous day). While there are some effective passages dealing with the age-old human fear of close proximity with the dead, and at one point the corpse’s hand appears to move of its own accord, it is later revealed— deflatingly—that the fellow was not in fact actually dead. Collins compounds his error by making the erstwhile dead man the illegitimate half-brother of Holliday, an astounding coincidence that even the supernatural would be hard-pressed to account for. The short novel The Haunted Hotel (Illustrated London News, Christmas 1877) has occasional points of effectiveness but, overall, does not quite justify the space it occupies. Lord Montbarry marries a Countess Narona, about whom much is whispered to her discredit. While staying in a villa in Venice, he dies of bronchitis, leaving his fortune to his widow. Insurance investigators studying the case seem to find no hint of foul play; but neither they nor others can account for the sudden disappearance of one Ferrari, a courier in the lord’s employ. The villa is later turned into a hotel, and relatives of the lord staying there seem to have bad dreams and experience other possible supernatural manifestations. The countess has arranged for an old flame of the lord’s, Agnes Lockwood, stay in the exact room where the lord died. At night she sees a horrible sight—a severed head seemingly hanging in mid-air: The flesh of the face was gone. The shrivelled skin was darkened in hue, like the skin of an Egyptian mummy—except at the neck. . . . Thin remains of a discoloured moustache and whiskers, hanging over the upper lip, and over the hollows where the cheeks had once been, made the head just recognisable as the head of a man. Over all the features death and time had done their obliterating work. (113)
There is quite a bit more of this. It is an effective scene while it lasts—but it doesn’t last long. Very quickly it is shown that the severed head—that of Lord Montbarry—is a makeshift contrivance to terrify the occupants of the room. The full story is soon revealed: the countess’s brother, Baron Rivar, had desperately needed money for his alchemical experiments (the specifics of which the narrative never makes clear), and he had urged the countess to marry Lord Montbarry. They had killed him and substituted the body of Ferrari in his place. But what of the bad dreams that the relatives had suffered while in the hotel? These are casually brushed off as “delusions” (147) by Montbarry’s brother. There are, as I say, moments of power in The Haunted Hotel, and there is an emotional intensity in the narrative that contrasts with much of the rest of Collins’s work; but here, as elsewhere, even in his short stories, there is a nagging suggestion of prolixity that weakens the overall effect. Collins is manifestly more comfortable with scenarios involving crime, suspense, and adventure, and his handling of the supernatural is shaky at best. Dickens’s great contemporary, William Makepeace Thackeray (1811– 1863), dabbled in the weird far more sporadically than Dickens and Collins. Possibly his inveterate tendency toward humour and satire rendered him unwilling (it would be impertinent to suggest he was unable) to engage in the atmospheric intensity required for success in supernatural or nonsupernatural horror. It is, therefore, not surprising that what few weird tales there are in Thackeray’s repertoire are generally of a comic or deflationary type. Consider “The Painter’s Bargain” (Fraser’s Magazine, December 1838). Here a painter, trapped in an unhappy marriage, whimsically summons the Devil to escape his predicament (“Let me . . . sell myself to the Devil, I should not be more wretched than I am now!” [81]). An anomalous creature suddenly appears: “When first born he was little bigger than a tadpole; then he grew to be as big as a mouse; then he arrived at the size of a cat; and then he jumped off the palette, and, turning head over heels, asked the poor painter what he wanted of him” (83). It is significant that the painter remarks, “To tell the truth, I did not even believe in your existence” (83)—a sceptical sentiment no doubt shared by many of the educated class of the 1830s. The upshot of the story is that the painter urges the Devil to spend half a year with his wife, to see how much he likes it; at the end of that time, the Devil is happy to release the man from his contract. It is all very amusing, and the scepticism is significantly augmented by the
Devil’s casual dismissal of a document by the Pope absolving the painter from all sin (“though the Pope’s paper may pass current here, it is not worth twopence in our country” [93]). Not much is changed by the final twist that it was all a dream. “Bluebeard’s Ghost” (Fraser’s Magazine, October 1843) is a clever instance of the “explained supernatural”: Bluebeard’s widow, thinking of marrying again, is confronted by the ghost of her redoubtable husband—but this proves to be one of her suitors in disguise. The lengthy story “The Notch on the Ax” (Cornhill Magazine, April–June 1862) is full of varied supernatural phenomena, but the overall effect is insubstantial. Even George Eliot (1819–1880), whose densely written novels of domestic life would seem the polar opposite of the supernatural, indulged in the weird on at least one occasion—the lengthy novella “The Lifted Veil” (Blackwood’s, July 1859). The protagonist, a boy named Latimer, appears to have not only visions of the future, but the ability to read other people’s minds; as he memorably puts it, thoughts from others “would force themselves on my consciousness like an importunate, ill-played musical instrument, or the loud activity of an imprisoned insect” (269). He is attracted to Bertha, who is engaged to his hated brother Alfred; and although this vision depicts Bertha as married to himself and being shrewish and bitter, he nonetheless continues to long for her. Sure enough, Latimer’s brother dies in an accident and he marries Bertha; their marriage deteriorates. The novella takes a somewhat awkward turn into pseudoscience when a friend, Charles Meunier, performs an experiment on Bertha’s maid that involves reviving her after her death by an influx of blood and other procedures; she revives, accuses Bertha of planning to kill Latimer by poison, and dies again. This grim tale, told with all the skill in character portrayal and psychological insight that distinguish Eliot’s novels, shows what a competent novelist can do with a supernatural subject. Two other women who dallied with the supernatural in this period are worth a little—but only a little—notice. Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865) wrote a handful of ghost stories and mystery tales, chiefly at the urging of Dickens, but few of them amount to much. “The Old Nurse’s Story” (Household Words, Christmas 1852) is the only unequivocal supernatural tale in Gaskell’s oeuvre, and although it promises much it fails to deliver. When the old nurse who tells the story comes with her young charge, Miss Rosamund, to Furnivall Manor upon the death of Rosamund’s parents, she
hears some mysterious organ playing and is told that it is the (dead) “old lord”—for the organ itself is “broken and destroyed inside” (26). But the relation of this phenomenon to the spectral young girl who leads Rosamund out into the snow, where she almost dies, is never clarified. In the end we are given a laborious “explanation” of the supernatural events with a mechanical and twice-repeated moral tacked on: “Alas! alas! what is done in youth can never be undone in age! What is done in youth can never be undone in age!” (38). Other of Gaskell’s tales are still sorrier specimens. “The Ghost in the Garden Room” (Household Words, Christmas 1859) is a long, tedious story about a son who returns to rob his own family; but it contains an extraneous supernatural prologue that has nothing whatever to do with the actual narrative. This prologue was evidently added (and possibly written) by Dickens, who was planning a story cycle entitled “The Haunted House” in the Christmas 1859 issue of Household Words. The story has been reprinted without the prologue as “The Crooked Branch.” “Lois the Witch” (in Lois the Witch and Other Tales, 1861) is another long and tiresome story about the Salem witchcraft trial, focusing around a young Englishwoman who leaves Warwickshire to come to stay with relatives in Salem and is eventually tried and hanged as a witch. Gaskell follows the facts of the witchcraft panic faithfully enough, changing names (the Indian woman Tituba becomes Hota, and one Prudence Hickson is one of the teenagers who accuses Lois Barclay of being a witch), and along the way Gaskell utters the fairly routine sentiments of a now rationalist age regarding the appalling superstitiousness and hysteria of the Puritans; but the tale overall has little to recommend it. “Curious If True” (Cornhill Magazine, February 1860) is of slightly greater interest in suggesting that the protagonist’s dreams of coming upon a chateau in France point to his having travelled back in time. But Gaskell telegraphs the punch by an early mention of “M. de Retz” (223), which any astute reader could puzzle out as the notorious fifteenth-century nobleman Gilles de Retz. Gaskell’s work contains some fine descriptions of the rural countryside, and her interest in familial interrelations—the subject of Cranford (1853) and her other novels—is manifest; but her handling of the supernatural is clumsy and laborious, and its use in pointing elementary morals is unadventurous.
Not much more can be said of a much more significant—or, at any rate, prolific—dabbler in the supernatural, Amelia B. Edwards (1831–1892), who is of much greater interest to literature and culture by her fascination with Egypt in the 1870s, resulting in several pioneering books of Egyptian exploration. Although she spent much of her literary career writing the occasional weird tale, few rise above the level of routine ghost stories. Among these can be quickly cited such works as “An Engineer’s Story” (All the Year Round, Christmas 1866), about the ghost of a man who returns from the dead to prevent his murderer from wrecking a train as vengeance against the man who had married the woman he and his victim had fought over; and “The New Pass” (Routledge’s Christmas Annual, 1870), a tale of ghostly warning. Some of Edwards’s tales are not even well thought-out or conceived. Consider “The Four-Fifteen Express” (Routledge’s Christmas Annual, 1866), another train story. The narrator sees both the ghost of a dead man (John Dwerrihouse) and the ghost of a living person (Augustus Raikes) on a train and on the station platform. Later it is ascertained that Raikes had killed Dwerrihouse. It is never clarified how a living person can have a ghost associated with him; but since Edwards sees no reason to account for the ghost of a dead person, it seems she has no trouble envisioning the other kind of ghost. This same scenario occurs in “Was It an Illusion?” (Arrowsmith’s Magazine, Christmas 1881), where the ghost of a living person (a cleric) and the ghost of a dead person (a small boy) are manifested: the cleric had murdered the boy, his illegitimate son. Nor should much attention be devoted to the novella Monsieur Maurice (1873). The ghostly phenomenon here is the appearance of a “brown man” (251) who turns out to be the spirit of an Arab who acts as a kind of guardian or protector of M. Maurice, a state prisoner staying at the house of Johann Ludwig Bernhard. The chief focus of the tale, indeed, is not on the supernatural but on the engaging friendship of Maurice and Bernhard’s nine-year-old daughter, who narrates the tale in her old age. Only two stories by Edwards can be said to be noteworthy—and it is not insignificant that both of them eschew the already hackneyed ghost story formula. “The Discovery of the Treasure Isles” (Every Boy’s Magazine, March–July 1864) tells of the captain of a ship heading to Jamaica who hears of fabulous wealth obtainable in a mysterious realm called the Treasure Isles. Locating the island, he finds pearls, gold, and
much other wealth; but then comes upon the old wreck of his own ship. He ages twenty years in a day. The captain’s slow realisation of the true state of affairs is genuinely chilling; and his return to England, his fabled wealth turned to sand and rock, his friends and family old or dead, is quietly poignant. Even more striking is “The Recollections of Professor Henneberg” (in Miss Carew, 1865). A German professor is convinced that he has been reincarnated. Later he stumbles upon the manuscript of an old book written in his own handwriting by a German who died on the day of his birth. (It is not likely that Lovecraft borrowed this ending for “The Shadow out of Time,” since it is extremely improbable that he ever read Edwards’s story.) Edwards’s work is noteworthy only in its vivid depictions of the topography of continental Europe. The great majority of her tales are set on the Continent, and she displays a fine sense of the customs and culture of France, Germany, and especially Italy. But her handling of the supernatural is unadventurous, and her narrative skills, like those of Elizabeth Gaskell, are not up to the task of engendering a genuine sense of supernatural terror.
iv. The Americans If any writer in the nineteenth century typifies what could be called the backward-looking perspective of weird fiction—the perspective that draws its inspiration from myth, legend, and primitive superstition—it is Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864). Born during the Napoleonic wars and dying as the American Civil War was coming to an end, he lived through a period of increasing industrialisation and modernisation; and yet, his focus was chiefly directed to the past, both historically and morally. I wish to emphasise that this is not a criticism, but Hawthorne’s outlook does contrast to a notable degree with that of his great contemporary Edgar Allan Poe, whose interest in contemporary science and philosophy orients him more toward the future than many writers of his generation. I am not aware that any research has been done on Hawthorne’s reading of the Gothic novels, but it would be difficult to imagine that he was not exposed to at least some of the more notable examplars of Gothicism during his adolescence and early manhood, for the tales in all his major collections —Twice-Told Tales (1837), Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), and The Snow-Image (1852)—are replete with Gothic imagery and motifs. Much the same could be said, in lesser degree, of all his novels, although only one of them—and even that one in a highly problematical manner—is actually supernatural. His very first novel, the anonymous Fanshawe (1828), has been called a Gothic romance, although it is so chiefly by virtue of its use of the already hackneyed “woman-in-peril” motif and by the fact that one of its chief characters is a Dr. Melmoth, the origin of whose name is scarcely in question. Especially in his short stories, Hawthorne mastered the technique of creating a subtle, complex, multilayered narrative that said little and implied much, using the supernatural as a symbol for the moral, religious, and social concerns with which he was perennially concerned. On occasion his tales come close to allegory or parable; indeed, the latter term is explicitly used to characterise “The Minister’s Black Veil” (The Token, 1836), in which a minister suddenly and inexplicably dons a black veil that renders him “ghostlike from head to foot” (TT 57). While there is nothing
openly supernatural in this scenario—which, as many scholars have contended, is very likely taken from the celebrated black veil in Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho—Hawthorne creates an enormously potent sense of moral dread by this seemingly elementary device: in death the minister testifies that “I look around me, and lo! on every visage a Black Veil!” (TT 69), a particularly plangent evocation of the “we are all sinners” trope. The dominance of the notion of sin is evident in such a tale as “The Ambitious Guest” (New-England Magazine, June 1835), which I am more than a little inclined to regard as Hawthorne’s masterwork of weird fiction, although even here the supernatural is manifested—if manifested at all—in a highly ambiguous fashion. A man comes to a tavern run by a family, nestled in the lee of a towering mountain; he fervently wishes to make his mark in the world, but these ambitions are put to naught by an avalanche that kills both him and the family—while leaving the house undamaged. The cosmic awesomeness of the climax is matchless outside the pages of Lovecraft: The simplest words must intimate, but not portray, the unutterable horror of the catastrophe. The victims rushed from their cottage, and sought refuge in what they deemed a safer spot— where, in contemplation of such an emergency, a sort of barrier had been reared. Alas! they had quitted their security, and fled right into the pathway of destruction. Down came the whole side of the mountain, in a cataract of ruin. (TT 373–74) The sense of human insignificance in the face of all-powerful nature is indelible. This story is, in my judgment, much more successful than the somewhat comparable “Ethan Brand” (Boston Weekly Museum, 5 January 1850), since the latter is more strictly tied to Christian dogma and therefore has less of an impact upon those for whom the dogmas carry no weight. Brand’s search for the “Unpardonable Sin” (SI 478) leads him to conclude that he has found it in the exercise of intellect at the expense of the heart, rendering him in the most literal sense an outcast from his own species: “He had lost his hold on the magnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother-man, opening the chambers or the dungeons of our common nature by the key of holy sympathy . . . Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend” (SI
495). The supernatural is manifested not so much in Brand’s purported encounter with Satan—for, as Brand himself declares scornfully, “what need have I of the Devil?” (SI 484)—but in his horrific death, whereby he plunges into a lime-kiln, with the result that his heart is seen to be made of marble. This conclusion may be just a tad too allegorical to be properly supernatural, but it underscores the moral message of the story as emphatically as one could wish. If anything could testify to Hawthorne’s conflicted attitude toward to the scientific developments of his time, it is in his numerous tales of scientists and experimenters seeking to expand the bounds of human knowledge—and to utilise that knowledge for self-aggrandising ends. These figures seem in part to be modern-day advocates of chemical and biological advance and in part a recrudescence of the mediaeval alchemists of stock Gothic imgery; but they are saved from triteness by the heavy moral symbolism with which Hawthorne endows their every act. In “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” (Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1837) we are at once introduced to Heidegger’s “book of magic” (TT 260), but the actual elixir he has produced—one that purportedly rejuvenates its imbiber—appears to be chiefly the product of chemical manipulation. In any event, when four old friends drink the elixir, they do appear to be revivified—but are they really? As they begin dancing madly in their suddenly energised youth, we glimpse the following in a mirror: “Yet, by a strange deception, owing to the duskiness of the chamber, and the antique dresses which they still wore, the tall mirror is said to have reflected the figures of the three old, gray, withered grandsires, ridiculously contending for the skinny ugliness of a shrivelled grandam” (TT 268–69). This magnificently pungent undercutting of the supernatural scenario is found repeatedly in Hawthorne, with the result that a number of his tales and novels fall into the class of the ambiguous weird tale, where it is impossible to determine whether the supernatural has come into play or not. “The Birthmark” (Pioneer, March 1843) appears less ambiguous, for there is no question that the scientist who wishes to erase a birthmark on his wife’s face that he finds displeasing—it actually afflicts him with “horror” (M 50)—ends up killing his wife in the process. This extraordinarily complex tale—one that speaks simultaneously of the objectification of women, the hubris of science, and perhaps even of the evils of racism—also deals bafflingly with the relationship of magic and science. At the very time
that Aylmer, the scientist, is associated with mediaeval alchemy (“He gave a long history of the long dynasty of the alchemists, who spent so many ages in quest of the universal solvent by which the golden principle might be elicited from all things vile and base” [M 58]), he also shows himself an exemplar of cutting-edge science. Georgina, his wife, finds in his study “many dark old tomes” that constituted “the works of the philosophers of the Middle Ages,” but “Hardly less curious and imaginative were the early volumes of the Transactions of the Royal Society, in which the members, knowing little of the limits of natural possibility, were continually recording wonders or proposing methods whereby wonders might be wrought” (M 60–61). Already by the middle of the nineteenth century, the results of scientific advance had come to appear, in the minds of laymen, scarcely distinguishable from magic. The trope comes to full fruition in “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (United States Magazine and Democratic Review, December 1844), one of the masterworks of weird fiction in the nineteenth century. Although the moral is stated at the outset a bit bluntly—Rappaccini, the botanist, “cares infinitely more for science than for mankind” (M 116)—the execution is flawless. Rappaccini, interested in “vegetable poisons” (M 117), has planted an entire garden of such poisonous plants—the moisture from one kills a lizard instantly—but his daughter, Beatrice, is able to handle the plants without apparent harm. She has, of course, been raised among those plants since birth. Through long association with her, her lover Giovanni has slowly become infected with the deadly poison: he breathes on a spider and watches in horror as it dies. When Bagnioli, a rival of Rappaccini, fashions (somewhat conveniently) an antidote to the poison, Giovanni compels her to take it; she does so and dies, crying at the end: “Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?” (M 147). Once more, many layers of meaning are imbedded in this tale, chief of them is the inability of Giovanni to accept Beatrice for what she is and his ultimately fatal desire to transform her into something more to his heart’s desire. Toward the end of his life Hawthorne became obsessed with the elixir of life motif, which fused with two other conceptions he had long attempted to embody in fiction—the quest of an American to claim lands belonging to him in England, and the potentially bizarre notion of a man who, having committed murder, leaves a bloody footprint wherever he goes. These latter two ideas were never properly worked out; the former is found in the novel
Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret (1883) and the latter in a rough draft or series of notes entitled “The Ancestral Footstep” (1883), but the elixir of life motif did find expression in a fine, if nominally unfinished, novella, Septimius Felton (1872). In Septimius Felton the protagonist of the title bitterly laments the shortness of human life (“We live so little while, that . . . it is little matter whether we live or no” [233]), and he wishes to live forever, chiefly for the sake of knowledge (“It is none too long for all I wish to know” [234]). It transpires—as a witch-figure, Keziah, tells him—that an elixir of life can be manufactured from the flowers that grow out of a grave of a person whom one has killed; and Septimius has conveniently killed a British soldier (the novella is set during the American Revolution) who while dying conveniently hands him a manuscript that appears to contain the formula for the elixir of life. There is some faint hint that the manuscript has actually been written by the Devil (284), but not much is made of this. Septimius’s conflict is humanised by his complex relations with two women—Rose Garfield, his fiancée (in later portions of the text she becomes his sister), who seeks to reconcile him to the ordinary bounds of life and death, and Sibyl Dacy, the fiancée of the man Septimius killed. Intermingled with this triangle is the story of the bloody footprint—an English nobleman had sought (by science) to live forever, but he realised that in order to do so he would have to cause someone else’s death every thirty years—and the ongoing attempt by Septimius to decipher the manuscript. There is some doubt as to whether the manuscript tells of a simple formula to make the elixir, or is merely a kind of guide to ascetic living in order to prevent the bodily wear-and-tear that will lead to death. At one point it is stated that the manuscript chiefly consists of “certain rules of life” (337), and in the outlining of these rules it becomes evident that the extension of life in this manner will in reality rob life of all its human pleasures—to such an extent that one can scarcely call oneself human. And in spite of the fact that Septimius’s friend, Robert Hagburn, now a distinguished soldier in the war, provides a striking counter-philosophy to Septimius’s thirst for eternal life—“If there were to be no death, the beauty of life would be all tame” (393)—Septimius continues on his quest. He appears to have devised the formula—but Sibyl snatches it from him and drinks it herself. She declares that there are two elixirs, one the elixir of life, the other a poison; she has secretly helped Septimius to make the latter, and
drinks it because she is convinced that the quest for the true elixir of life is a mockery. She dies. This conclusion is not entirely satisfactory, but overall Septimius Felton is as noteworthy as any Gothic novel’s working out of the immortality motif. Toward the end there are some remarkably cosmic reflections on the visions one might see if one were to live forever (“New vistas will open themselves before us continually, as we go onward. How idle to think that one little lifetime would exhaust the world! After hundreds of centuries, I feel as if we might still be on the threshold” [410]). And, although there was earlier a suggestion that an earlier experimenter had “sold himself to Sathan” (395) to secure the elixir, Septimius emphatically takes an opposite view: This means that we have discovered of removing death to an indefinite distance is not supernatural; on the contrary, it is the most natural thing in the world,—the very perfection of the natural, since it consists in applying the powers and processes of Nature to the prolongation of the existence of man, her most perfect handiwork; and this could only be done by entire accordance and co-effect with Nature. (411–12) It is not entirely clear that we are to take this rather sophistical view at face value, but it lends intellectual weight to the work. The peculiarly historical orientation of Hawthorne’s mind compelled him to return again and again to what he must have considered a kind of American original sin—the Salem witch trials, the chief black mark on the very town of his birth. The irrationalism and Puritan fanaticism that, in Hawthorne’s mind, led to the judicial massacre of a score of accused “witches” were in such stark contrast to the sedate Protestantism that apparently constituted his own religious outlook that he could only look upon it with horror as a kind of national birthmark that could never be obliterated. It need not be emphasised here that it was Hawthorne himself who changed the spelling of his name in youth, so as to distinguish himself from the John Hathorne who was one of the most notorious of the Salem witchcraft judges.
A wealth of documents could be brought to bear on this topic, but our direct concern is with only a few key items. Of The Scarlet Letter (1850), set in seventeenth-century Salem, it is unnecessary to speak, as there is nothing supernatural in it nor any direct allusion to the witch trials, which presumably occurred after the events of the novel. Of somewhat greater relevance is “Feathertop: A Moralized Legend” (International Monthly Magazine, 1 February 1852), an unwontedly whimsical story about “one of the most cunning and potent witches in New England” (M 253–54) who fashions a scarecrow that smokes a pipe, speaks, and walks. But this halfcomic tale is little more than an obvious social satire. Of “Young Goodman Brown” (New-England Magazine, April 1835) it is again difficult to speak in small compass. The critical issue, for our purposes, is twofold: who is the stranger whom Goodman Brown meets on his trek through the dark forest, and are the visions he sees real? The first point seems pretty well settled when Hawthorne refers to the stranger as “he of the serpent” (M 91). Brown himself cries out at one point, “With heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil!” (M 98)— Faith being his wife, and this line constitutes one of the many puns on her name. For of course Brown is heading toward a meeting of witches—a matter that Hawthorne makes unusually clear at the outset in referring to his “evil purpose” (M 90)—and yet, he is himself horrified at seeing so many of his seemingly upright townspeople congregating at the same meeting, culminating with the vision of his own wife. And in the end the Devil delivers the verdict: “Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness” (M 104). So in the end, the question Brown asks himself—“Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?” (M 105)—becomes irrelevant, for he is blighted by the very possibility that those whom he took to be pious pillars of the community are themselves loathly sinners like himself. The extraordinarily brooding texture and atmosphere of “Young Goodman Brown,” where the darkness and wildness of the forest serves as a chilling echo of the spiritual darkness of Brown’s own mind, are imperishable features of a strikingly potent masterwork. And now we come to The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Whether we agree with Lovecraft that it is “New England’s greatest contribution to weird literature” (S 48), we can perhaps agree that it is a remarkable novel in that it is a work whose very foundation is (presumably) supernatural but
whose working out is, except in incidental moments, as far from terrifying as it is possible to be. Whether we are to assume that what Hawthorne calls “Maule’s curse”—the dying curse of Matthew Maule (“God will give him blood to drink” [21]), executed for witchcraft at the urging of Colonel Pyncheon, who sought Maule’s land—is real is an open question. (The curse was actually uttered by one of the accused Salem witches, although not directed at John Hathorne.) It is true that Colonel Pyncheon himself dies unexpectedly as soon as his house is completed, and it is true that the rest of his line appears blighted in various ways. Indeed, Hawthorne’s provocative remark that “the ghost of a dead progenitor . . . is often doomed to become the Evil Genius of his family” (36) makes one wonder whether the house is haunted by the ghost of Maule or by that of Colonel Pyncheon. And yet, close to the end of the novel we are suddenly given a rationalistic account of the “curse,” when the artist Holgrave (who proves to be a descendant of Maule) declares that the entire Pyncheon line is subject to the kind of malady (never specified, but apparently some kind of stroke or apoplexy) that killed both Colonel Pyncheon in the seventeenth century and Judge Pyncheon in the nineteenth: “Old Maule’s prophecy was probably founded on a knowledge of this physical predisposition in the Pyncheon race” (359). Whether this is a credible explanation, and whether Hawthorne intends us to swallow it, is a matter of debate. Even aside from all this, the actual supernatural elements in The House of the Seven Gables are fleeting and perhaps tangential. There is, firstly, the ambiguous figure of Alice Pyncheon, the great-granddaughter of Colonel Pyncheon who, if anyone, can truly be said to haunt the house. Her spectral harpsichord playing manifestly signals death—more clearly, perhaps, than the strange cat whose appearance anticipates the death of Judge Pyncheon. Holgrave tells the story of how Matthew Maule (grandson of the “wizard”) once placed her under a mesmeric trance in a failed attempt to learn the whereabouts of a key document sought by the Pyncheon clan; through this trace, the spirits of other dead Pyncheons appear. But the true acme of horror in the novel is, of course, the tour de force that constitutes chapter 18, “Governor Pyncheon.” For this is nothing less than Hawthorne’s bitter and satirical address to Judge Pyncheon himself, sitting dead in his own house, with blood all down his shirt. The very title is a pungent irony, for Pyncheon’s unbounded vainglory had envisioned his ascent to the governorship as his power and influence continued to grow.
And what we are to make of this remarkable aside, when Hawthorne urges the judge to drink a glass of Madeira to rouse himself: “It would all but revive a dead man! Would you like to sip it now, Judge Pyncheon?” (323). I know of nothing like this chapter in the entire range of horror literature, before or since: there is, to be sure, nothing supernatural about it, but this hectoring of a dead man is just about the last thing one would have expected from the mild-mannered customs officer of Salem. We have by no means exhausted the tally of Hawthorne’s supernatural works. “Edward Randolph’s Portrait” (United States Magazine and Democratic Review, July 1838) again fuses horror and history in its powerful depiction of a portrait that looks balefully down upon a lieutenant governor who signs an order to let the British army enter Boston; “Drowne’s Wooden Image” (Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book, July 1844) may or may not be supernatural in its account of a man who carves a figurehead for a ship that perhaps comes to life; “The Snow-Image” (in The Snow-Image, 1852) exhibits benign supernaturalism as snowmen become animated. The frequency with which Hawthorne returns to the supernatural in novels and tales throughout his career points to the extent to which the other world haunted his mind and imagination; and his expression of Gothic tropes in several imperishable literary works will give him as high a place in the canon of supernatural literature as it does in the realm of general literature. Fitz-James O’Brien (1828–1862), born (in Ireland) a full generation after Hawthorne, has come to be regarded as an American author, chiefly by virtue of his ten-year residence in New York City and his vivid evocation of that metropolis in the relatively modest corpus of tales he published prior to his early death while serving in the Union army in the Civil War. His arrival in the United States in 1852, shortly after his graduation from Trinity College, Dublin, seemed almost providential in its heralding of a replacement for Edgar Allan Poe. O’Brien is by no means as intense or powerful a writer as Poe, nor is he likely to have become so even if he had lived; moreover, his work is generally devoid of the textural complexity and understanding of the American character that distinguish the novels and tales of Hawthorne. But, if nothing else, he can be considered the first fully post-Gothic American writer—one who has entirely left behind both the motifs and the methodology of the Gothic novelists.
The chief point of difference with Hawthorne rests in O’Brien’s treatment of science, the focus of his two most celebrated tales, “The Diamond Lens” (Atlantic Monthly, January 1858) and “What Was It?” (Harper’s, March 1859). It is true that, in the former, the wonders of the microscope are compared to the Arabian Nights (“The dull veil of ordinary existence that hung across the world seemed suddenly to roll away, and to lay bare a land of enchantments” [2]), but O’Brien, whose knowledge of hard science was substantially superior to that of Hawthorne and probably that of Poe as well, knew whereof he spoke, even though the protagonist of “The Diamond Lens” abjures “scientific thirst” and vaunts the “pure enjoyment of a poet to whom a world of wonders has been disclosed” (3) as the driving force of his interest in the tiny worlds revealed through the microscope. The story is vitiated by two missteps: first, the fact that the unnamed first-person protagonist, although manifestly learned in science, seeks out a medium to summon the spirit of Leeuwenhoek (!) to aid him in making scientific discoveries; and second, after the spirit tells him to secure a 140-carat diamond to make a lens more powerful than any yet created, the protagonist murders a French Jew who conveniently happens to have such a lens. It is remarkable that O’Brien was unaware how damaging this act would be to the reader’s sympathy for his character, and one hopes it is not merely an indication of the author’s prejudice. (But, given the fact that in another story, “My Wife’s Tempter” [Harper’s Weekly, 12 December 1857], he seeks to create horror at the mere thought of a woman converting to the Mormon faith, one’s doubts are substantially augmented.) In any event, the upshot is that, through the wondrous lens he manufactures, he sees—and falls in love with—an infinitesimally small female creature he sees in a drop of water. Without explicitly saying so, O’Brien plangently uses the supernatural—for the scientific implausibility of the story cannot truly make it a proto-science-fiction tale—to emphasise that all-too-human longing for the unattainable, and this becomes the final impression we take from the narrative, as the creature slowly dies with evaporation of the water. Of the immensely influential “What Was It?” we can remark that its success in depicting an invisible monster—perhaps the first such tale on record, or in any event the first one of any note—rests, at least at the outset, on its lightness of touch, as the occupants of a New York apartment building that has had a history of being haunted find amusement in the scenario:
Of course we had no sooner established ourselves at No. — than we began to expect the ghosts. We absolutely awaited their advent with eagerness. Our dinner conversation was supernatural. . . . I found myself a person of immense importance, it having leaked out that I was tolerably well versed in the history of supernaturalism, and had once written a story the foundation of which was a ghost. (193) The bantering tone clearly suggests that ghost stories—and, more significantly, accounts of “real” ghosts—had long been regarded with a scepticism bordering on cynical incredulity by all but the most ill-educated individuals. But the atmosphere of the story turns suddenly grim when the monster—a roughly humanoid entity, something like a teenage boy, who can be felt but not seen—manifests itself and engages in a grotesque tussle with the narrator. A scientific explanation of sorts is indeed provided by the narrator’s friend Hammond, who (rather implausibly) suggests a parallel with glass and goes on to say that the phenomenon “is not theoretically impossible” (205); but in the end no true explanation for the origin of this creature, and why it chose to appear in an apartment building in a crowded metropolis, is provided. Other of O’Brien’s tales are less distinguished. “The Wondersmith” (Atlantic Monthly, October 1859) tells of a gipsy, Herr Hippe, who seeks to unleash an army of monsters by infusing the souls of demons into tiny soldiers he has made; he seems to succeed in doing so, but his plan of killing “Christian children” (52) goes awry when the soldiers attack him. The generally whimsical tone of the narrative suggests a fairy or folk tale rather than a story of the supernatural. “The Lost Room” (Harper’s, September 1858) is a mad narrative of a man who comes back to his apartment one night and finds it peopled by a bizarre and motley array of individuals, then, when he leaves, cannot even find the door of his room. It is a hypnotic account, but its purport eludes me. “The Pot of Tulips” (Harper’s, November 1855) is a routine tale of an apparition. “The Golden Ingot” (Knickerbocker Magazine, August 1858) may be of some significance: a man who claims to be an alchemist and desperately seeks to make gold seems to have discovered the formula to do so—but we then learn that the gold ingot he has apparently produced was surreptitiously
placed among his chemical apparatus by his daughter, who felt that he would die of frustration and disappointment if he did not think he had succeeded in his futile quest. The tale is poignant if somewhat clumsily told, and perhaps signals the final demise of the Gothic trope of the philosopher’s stone. In subsequent “mad scientist” tales, the quest is for something far more interesting—and, usually, more baleful—than the manufacture of gold. A few words should perhaps be said about the vaguely weird trilogy of novels by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894), Elsie Venner (1861), The Guardian Angel (1867), and A Mortal Antipathy (1885). The first in particular has developed a reputation as an excursion into the fantastic, but it is really nothing of the kind. All three novels are so heavily didactic— specifically, they are expressions of Holmes’s views on pre-natal influence and moral responsibility—that they rarely develop any independent aesthetic impetus; they are too clinical and heavy-handed. The premise of Elsie Venner—a woman develops snakelike qualities (although these are more mental or metaphorical than literal) after her mother was bitten by a snake while pregnant—might have made an effective novel that could have involved actual shapeshifting, but Holmes is not interested in that kind of work. The protagonist of The Guardian Angel, also a young woman, exhibits bizarre traits because she is descended from a princess of India. There is here not even the pretence of anything supernatural in the scenario. A Mortal Antipathy is merely about a man who develops a “mortal antipathy” to women because of a childhood trauma. The minor novelist George Lippard (1822–1854) is worth consideration for two works in the Gothic mode. The early The Ladye Annabel; or, The Doom of the Poisoner (1844), is a non-supernatural novel set in mediaeval Florence, featuring a sorcerer, Aldarin, who attempts to gain control of the city. Full of death, torture, alchemical experiments, and other Gothic stageproperties, it reveals both Lippard’s strengths (fertile imagination, frenetic narration, a thirst for blood-and-thunder) and his weaknesses (repetitiousness, haste in writing, and lack of focus in plot). Lippard’s friend Edgar Allan Poe, in a letter to him (18 February 1844), although finding flaws in the work, praised it as “richly inventive and imaginative” (L 243). Lippard’s literary characteristics are on full display in his best-known work, The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monks Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime (first published in 10 parts [1844–
45], then as a book [1845]). This wildly histrionic novel is also nonsupernatural but suggests the supernatural at various points. The plot is based on an actual court case that had been tried in 1843, when a Philadelphia man had been acquitted of murdering another man who had seduced his sister. Lippard transmogrifies this scenario into a Golgotha of horror, sex, and perversion: Byrnewood Arlington, finding that his friend Gus Lorrimer has seduced his own sister, hunts him down and kills him. The focus of the novel is a pseudo-Gothic castle, the mansion Monk’s Hall, the secret haven for lascivious assignations by prominent Philadelphians. It is run by a hideous one-eyed man named Abijah K. Jones, nicknamed Devil-Bug—“a wild beast, a snake, a reptile, or a devil incarnate” (106). The closest the novel comes to supernaturalism is in various bizarre or prophetic dreams on the part of the numerous characters—visions of delirium, hallucinations, drug- or alcohol-induced nightmares, and especially a cosmic vision that Devil-Bug has of the Philadelphia of 1950, when the sky is illuminated with the words “WO UNTO SODOM!” (377). Massively verbose, carelessly written, and lurid beyond belief, The Quaker City nonetheless proves to be an enormously powerful work fueled by Lippard’s ardent quest for social justice, his anticlericalism, and his feminism. It was the best-selling novel in the United States before Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
v. French and German Supernaturalism The work of Balzac, Hugo, and others in the early nineteenth century spelled only the tentative beginnings of a supernatural tradition in France. It was only in the middle decades of the century that several significant writers emerged to lay the groundwork for a substantial and self-sustaining pattern of weird writing. Prosper Mérimée (1803–1870) wrote a number of works on the borderline of the weird, but none of them amount to anything except “La Vénus d’Ille” (Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 May 1837; usually translated as “The Venus of Ille”). This tale alone, however, would be sufficient to ensure its author a worthy place in the canon of supernatural literature. The core of the plot appears to be based upon an anecdote in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), in which a man becomes unwittingly engaged to a statue after putting a ring on her finger. This is exactly what the protagonist of “The Venus of Ille” does. It is the worse for him that the copper statue of Venus that is excavated near the town of Ille reflects “malice verging on viciousness” (192) on its metallic features. Some of the supernatural touches are uncommonly fine; when the man tries to get the ring off the statue’s finger and finds himself unable to do so, he states harrowingly, “she has bent her finger” (213). The narrator, the man’s friend, is horrified to find the man killed on his wedding night: “One would have said he had been squeezed in an iron ring” (217). The bride, now driven insane, claims that the statue killed him. There is perhaps no overarching message in this tale—it is a simple account of supernatural revenge—but the skill of its execution is unmatched. Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) could be said to be the first French author who actually concentrated on the weird and supernatural. Although his best-known work is the landmark mainstream novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), he engaged in le fantastique throughout his career in works of widely varying styles, themes, and subject matter. English-speaking readers have perhaps been unduly focused on certain tales, to the detriment of others, as a result of Lafcadio Hearn’s stylish translation of One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances (1882), which in fact
contains tales that are not truly weird and omits others (probably on the grounds of length) that are, so we must cast a somewhat wider net in assessing the full range of Gautier’s supernatural work. Two dominant themes can be said to infuse these works—love (whether physical or spiritual) and time-defiance. The latter comes to the fore in a number of tales short and long. While—as Albert B. Smith (Théophile Gautier and the Fantastic 56), the most exhaustive commentator in English on Gautier’s weird work, rightly contends—it is an exaggeration to say that “Une Nuit de Cléopâtre” (Presse, 29 November–6 December 1838; “One of Cleopatra’s Nights”) is in any sense weird, it may well have contributed its mite to subsequent writers’ focus on Egypt as a locus of aeon-old horror. The tale is exactly the sort that a high Romantic like Gautier would find appealing: Cleopatra, bored by the sameness of her illustrious life, is captivated by a commoner who expends great effort to show her that he loves her, and she invites him to spend one night of lovemaking (although much of the time is apparently spent in a lavish banquet) before she lets him take poison and kill himself. Cleopatra’s sense of the horror of Egypt is vividly etched: “. . . this land is truly an awful land; all things in it are gloomy, enigmatic, incomprehensible. Imagination has produced in it only monstrous chimeras and monuments immeasurable; this architecture and this art fill me with fear; those colossi, whose stone-entangled limbs compel them to remain eternally sitting with their hands upon their knees, weary me with their stupid immobility; they trouble my eyes and my horizon.” (16–17) There is much more of this, but this will do. Later writers seized upon the notions here expressed of a land obsessed with death and crushed by the weight of the centuries. Egypt is also the focus of “Le Pied de la momie” (Musée des Familles, September 1840; “The Mummy’s Foot”), a more light-hearted tale in which a man who obtains a mummy’s foot in a shop as a paperweight finds that not only it comes to life but that its owner, an Egyptian princess, materialises and takes him back to ancient Egypt. He wakes up from what appears to be a dream—but then finds a replacement paperweight that the princess had given to him. The narrator’s expression of
irritation at his moving paperweight is amusing: “I became rather discontented with my acquisition, inasmuch as I wished my paperweights to be of a sedentary disposition, and thought it very unnatural that feet should walk about without legs, and I commended to experience a feeling closely akin to fear” (233). “Arria Marcella” (Revue de Paris, 1852) again looks to the ancient world as a source of wonder and terror. Here, three contemporary Frenchmen wander through Pompeii; one of them—named, with fairly obvious significance, Octavien—finds himself so captivated by the figure of a lava-covered woman (the actress Arria Marcella) that he goes back in time to when Pompeii was flourishing; she makes the cryptic remark, “Your desire has restored me to life” (207), as if she already knows her future. In any case, their attempt to marry is met with opposition by her father, a Christian, who “performs an exorcism” (212) and restores her to a cinder. “Le Roi Candaule” (Presse, 1–5 October 1844; “King Candaules”), which Hearn also included in his collection, is still less a weird tale than “One of Cleopatra’s Nights,” being nothing more than an artful retelling of the ancient account (found most notably in Herodotus) of the Lydian captain Gyges who, having been allowed by King Candaules to see his wife naked, is compelled by her to kill Candaules and assume the throne himself, with the queen as his bride. It is evident from the above that the themes of love and time-defiance are frequently intertwined in Gautier’s work, and it is only a matter of emphasis that allows us to distinguish them. A number of stories that focus on physical and spiritual love, however, abandon any attempts at time-travel and focus on other supernatural phenomena. The short novel Avatar (Moniteur Universel, 29 February–3 April 1856) is perhaps the most striking of these. Here, Gautier broaches—decades before Barry Pain’s An Exchange of Souls (1911) or H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1933)—the notion of personality exchange. Octave de Saville is dying of love for a Polish countess; he approaches an unscrupulous doctor who, having travelled to India and absorbed from the yogis the secret of separating the soul from the body, successfully transfers Octave’s soul into the body of the Polish count. But the countess senses the change in her purported husband at once, especially when he fails to respond after she speaks to him in Polish. At one point the count (in Octave’s body) shows up with the dramatic cry, “Thief, brigand, rogue, give me back my body!”
(149). An extraordinary duel follows in which each contestant realises that the body he is seeking to kill is his own. Octave, realising that the countess will never love him no matter what body he occupies, agrees to undergo a reversal of the soul-body switch; but when the time comes, Octave’s soul, “instead of rejoining its own [body], rose, rose as if glad to be free, and appeared indifferent to its prison” (167). The doctor, whose own body is giving out, thrusts his soul into Octave’s body. Gautier fully realises the bizarrerie of the scenario, and this novel may perhaps be the summit of his work in supernatural horror. Another tale of what might be called a detached soul is Spirite (Moniteur Universel, 17 November–6 December 1865), although terror is largely absent in the narration of the scenario. Here, Guy de Malivert senses an immaterial presence in his room. His friend, the Baron de Feroë, who appears to have a wondrous knowledge of the supernatural, states that he “had recently been visited by a spirit, or at least that the invisible world was seeking to enter into relations with you” (68). It transpires that the spirit, who is “sympatheitc, kindly, and loving” (72), is that of a young woman who admired Guy from afar but died of unrequited love in a convent. Spirite (as Guy names her) implausibly dictates this account to him in several lengthy sessions. Up to this point, the tale is really a love story that uses its supernatural premise as a not entirely convincing motivator of the plot. The only supernatural incident of any consequence is a memorable scene in which Guy sees Spirite in a sleigh—and then is horrified and amazed when the sleigh passes through a carriage crossing its path. But as the narrative proceeds, Gautier emphasises the degree to which Guy, now entirely in love with Spirite, finds his entire worldview altering (“Nature now appeared to him only in a vague, misty, splendid distance that served as a background to his fixed thoughts. The world was for him only the landscape of Spirite, and he thought even the finest prospects unworthy of this function” [240]). Spirite had prevented Guy from committing suicide, for this would separate them forever (by taking him to Hell, so we are led to believe). But when he is killed by bandits in Greece, Guy’s soul can finally unite with Spirite. The tale is intermittently effective, but perhaps not enough time is spent on a full analysis of the anomalous relations between a physical man and the immaterial spirit of a lovely young woman. Much time is also occupied by a satirical portrait of the countess d’Ymbercourt, a woman who is herself in love with Guy but whom he scorns.
If spiritual love is sufficient for Guy de Malivert, it is very much otherwise with the protagonist of “Omphale” (Journal des Gens du Monde, 7 February 1834; “Omphale: A Rococo Story”). Here the figure of the mythological Omphale detaches itself from a tapestry to become a fleshand-blood woman. She announces herself as the Marchioness de T——, the original of the figure in the tapestry. In the course of the story she makes love to the protagonist before the tapestry is taken away by his uncle and sold. There is more carnality, and much more actual terror, in “La Morte amoureuse” (Chronique de Paris, 23 and 26 June 1836; translated as “Clarimonde,” “The Dead Leman,” “The Vampire,” and other titles), a pioneering vampire tale. The narrator of the tale, a priest, speaks in anguished tones about the fascination that Clarimonde exercises over him, to the point that he almost refuses to become a priest at his ordaining ceremony. Later, when he is taken to her deathbed, he continues to be enthralled: “My arteries throbbed with such violence that I felt them hiss through my temples, and the sweat poured from my forehead in streams, as though I had lifted a mighty slab of marble” (116). He wonders whether she is a “ghoul, a female vampire” (123). After her death, she comes to him from he tomb; they go to a great castle, where Clarimonde, in failing health, avidly drinks the priest’s blood after he cuts his finger. Later, her coffin is dug up and holy water sprinkled upon it, whereupon “her beautiful body crumbled into dust, and became only a shapeless and frighful mass of cinders and half-calcined bones” (148). There is much made of the conflict of religion (specifically Christianity) and Clarimonde as the representative of the infernal powers; at one point she cries, “Ah, how jealous I am of that God whom thou didst love and still lovest more than me!” (128). But it is, of course, doubtful whether the priest really does love God more than he loves Clarimonde, and the tale is an effective parable of temptation and spiritual weakness. The short novel Jettatura (Moniteur Universel, 25 June–23 July 1856) is worth some discussion. In this story of a Frenchman, Paul d’Aspremont, his fiancée Alicia Ward, and the Count d’Altavilla, who also loves Alicia, the evil eye is apparently brought into play. At any rate, the count is convinced that Paul has the evil eye—but is this merely a means of scaring Alicia away from him? Paul himself comes to believe that he has the evil eye and looks back upon various incidents in his past that appear to confirm it. The work ends spectacularly: Paul and the count have a duel in which the
count is killed; Paul blames himself for the death and undertakes the horrible act of blinding himself; but when he comes to Alicia, he finds that she is dead, so he tosses himself into the sea. In the end, the matter of whether Paul actually had the evil eye is never confirmed, so this tale must remain one of ambiguous supernaturalism. The extensive array of Gautier’s writings in the supernatural—which to this day remain scattered (at least in English translation) over a number of volumes, many of them long out of print—is a testament to its perennial fascination for him. Gautier had a pretty broad understanding of what he meant by le fantastique, as Albert B. Smith notes after examining Gautier’s numerous articles and reviews: When Gautier uses fantastique in a general sense, it may have one of three meanings: unreal, designating either supernatural or imaginary phenomena; real, but unusual, unwonted, or exaggerated; capricious, designating a certain cast of mind or products or conduct inferred to be derivative from such a mind. He frequently qualifies as fantastique an apparently supernatural aspect which objects or situations may have. (21) For our purposes, only the first and perhaps the third are of relevance. It is also of note that Gautier did not always interpret the supernatural as a source of terror, which is largely absent in such works as Spirite. The flamboyance of Gautier’s style and imagery, typical of the Romanticism of his own temperament and of his era, even makes such non-weird specimens as “One of Cleopatra’s Nights” close cousins of his actual supernatural work. A brief discussion of Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) is warranted here. I say “brief,” not because Baudelaire isn’t worth ample study and analysis from a number of perspectives, but because his actual contribution to the literature of the supernatural is not as extensive as his reputation suggests. The dominant themes of Les Fleurs du mal (1857, 1861, 1868) appear to be—beyond, or through, their probing of the multifarious themes of love and death—the transcending of boundaries, especially the moral and social boundaries that led Baudelaire to be afflicted with unutterable weariness with the conventionality of the Parisian society of his day. That
said, Baudelaire does employ the supernatural to convey his message, as when, in “Le Revenant” (The Phantom), a lover proclaims that he will return from the dead to make love to his beloved; but he concludes, “Let others reign by love and ruth / Over thy life and all thy youth, / But I am fain to rule by fear” (127). Perhaps Baudelaire’s most concentrated horrific poem is “Les Métamorphoses du vampire” (The Metamorphoses of the Vampire), in which a seductive female vampire, “kneading her breasts against her iron stays,” tempts the narrator with lascivious words and then “suck[s] all the marrow from my bones” (291). It is no surprise that this was one of the poems that led to the book’s banning in 1857. Baudelaire, as the stylish translator of Poe and as a leading founder of the Decadents, played a role in the development of supernatural literature, but his own contributions to the form are modest. As Gautier and Baudelaire were winding down their careers, another French writer—or, rather, a pair of them—came to the fore in the writing of supernatural fiction, although it was only a relatively small segment of an output that chiefly featured historical novels. I speak of Emile Erckmann (1822–1899) and Alexandre Chatrian (1826–1890), who, as “ErckmannChatrian,” produced a surprisingly interesting array of weird fiction in the 1860s. To call them French writers is something of an oversimplification, for by birth they were the products of the disputed province of Alsace, which was a political and military football between France and Germany both before and during their lifetimes; much of their weird work is set in Germany and clearly draws upon the German Gothic fiction of the generations that preceded them. Erckmann-Chatrian’s chief weird work is the able werewolf novella “Hugues-le-loup” (in Contes de la montagne, 1860), usually translated as “The Man-Wolf.” The focus of this work is the Count of Nideck, the name of whose ancestor, Hugh Lupus, would seem to make it pretty clear why he became a werewolf. But we are led to believe that his transformation is the result of a witch known in the locality as the Black Pest. The first manifestation of his lycanthropy is of interest: “That low receding forehead, that sharp-pointed face, that foxy-looking beard, bristling off both cheeks; the long meagre figure, the sinewy limbs, the face, the cry, the attitude, declared the presence of the wild beast half-hidden, half-revealed under a human mask!” (89). This description is careful to specify that the count has not been fully metamorphosed into a wolf, but merely that he now bears
certain outward, and perhaps superficial, characteristics of a wolf. Indeed, throughout the work sympathy is extended toward the count, who is presented as a kind, honourable nobleman; and it is no surprise that, as the novella proceeds, the focus of our interest shifts to the Black Pest, who is pursued by the protagonists in a suspenseful climactic scene. Even here, though, we are told that “she is near [my emphasis] to the nature of the wolf, and some great mystery overshadowed her being” (124). In the end it is not entirely clear whether a supernatural transformation, either of the count or of the witch, has taken place. Erckmann-Chatrian’s shorter works reveal an admirable originality of conception that is not quite matched by skill in execution. A certain obvious but not ineffective moralism runs through many of these narratives, as in “L’Oreille de la chouette” (in Contes fantastiques, 1860; “The Owl’s Ear”), in which a man devises a wondrous invention—a “microacoustic ear trumpet” that acts upon the hearing as a microscope does upon the sight— but kills himself from discouragement; “L’Heritage de l’oncle Christian” (in Contes fantastiques; “Uncle Christian’s Inheritance”), a ghost story that underscores the transience of humanity and the vanity of covetousness in its portrayal of a succession of ghosts who claim ownership of a house that the protagonist has just inherited from his uncle; and “La Reine des abeilles” (Contes du bord du Rhin, 1862; “The Queen of the Bees”), a touching tale of benign supernaturalism in which a blind girl gains sight by sympathetic union with the thousands of bees she keeps. At times Erckmann-Chatrian’s tales can become quite grim. “L’Oeil invisible” (L’Artiste, 1857; “The Invisible Eye”) is the gripping tale of an old woman who appears to induce the occupants of a room in a tavern to suicide through the “evil eye” until the narrator turns the tables on her and induces her to commit suicide herself. In “L’Esquisse mystérieuse” (in Contes fantastiques; “The Mysterious Sketch”) an artist, for no reason that he can understand, draws a sketch of a woman being murdered—only the face of the perpetrator is not filled in. It transpires that just such a woman was murdered, and the artist himself is arrested for the crime after the police see the sketch; but later the artist, coming upon the actual perpetrator, is compelled to fill in that person’s face in the sketch, and the murderer is arrested and confesses. Finally, “Le Cabaliste Hans Veinland” (in Contes du bord du Rhin, 1862) tells of a professor of metaphysics who, having killed a man in a duel, flees to Paris, where he falls into poverty and misery, gaining
thereby a furious hatred of the entire human race. He then casts his astral body into the body of an Indian (with whom he shares a soul) and brings back cholera to France, which kills thousands. This last tale is particularly powerful—or would be if the development were not quite so clumsy. As for “L’Araignée crabe” (in Contes fantastiques; “The Crab Spider” or “The Waters of Death”), it has gained celebrity in recent years, but it is simply the unremarkable tale of a giant spider. As I say, the power of ErckmannChatrian’s work rests upon its novel conceptions rather than the effective working out of those conceptions; but it is, at any rate, refreshing to see work of this period extending well beyond the already hackneyed ghost or revenant. For decades Erckmann-Chatrian’s work was difficult to find in English, but Hugh Lamb remedied the problem with the compilation The Best Tales of Terror of Erckmann-Chatrian (1991), revised as The Invisible Eye (2003). Some note should be taken of the work of Paul Féval (1816–1887), although he specialised chiefly in sprawling crime and adventure novels, such as the celebrated Mystères de Londres (1844). But in two other works, La Vampire (1856) and La Ville-vampire (1875), Féval effectively made use of the vampire myth. The former anticipated Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” in its depiction of a female vampire, while the latter even more impressively anticipated Stephen King (’Salem’s Lot, 1975) and other recent writers in depicting an entire city populated by vampires. But since these novels were not translated into English until very recently, their influence upon Anglophone literature has been minimal. The only German writer of this period who need concern us is Wilhelm Meinhold (1797–1851), whose Maria Schweidler, die Bernsteinhexe (1843; usually translated as The Amber Witch) is—apparently—non-supernatural but of considerable interest. Set in the Thirty Years’ War and purporting to be a fragmentary chronicle narrated in the first person by Pastor Schweidler, Maria’s father, the novel is in essence the account of a love triangle: Maria is loved by both the ruthless Lord Wittich and the gallant Rüdiger of Nienkerten. Beneath this trite scenario, however, is the persistent fear of witchcraft among a credulous and religiously indoctrinated populace. The pastor blandly states at one point that “Witchcraft began in the village” (154) when a cow becomes sick; later a woman gives birth to what she calls a “devil’s imp” (154). When Rüdiger doubts the existence of witchcraft, the pastor thinks he is an atheist!—as, indeed, he would be if the Bible is
regarded as an infallible document. Maria herself believes in witchcraft, but pleads her innocence in vain as she is increasingly looked upon with suspicion and finally arrested, questioned, and on the verge of being tortured. This last scene is probably the most powerful in the book, evoking any number of earlier Gothic works where sadistic religious figures abuse a helpless and terrified victim: She shook like an aspen leaf when he bound her hands and feet; and when he was about to bind over her sweet eyes a nasty old filthy clout wherein my maid had seen him carry fish but the day before, and which was still all over shining scales, I perceived it, and pulled off my silken neckerchief, bgging him to use that instead, which he did. Hereupon the thumb-screw was put on her, and she was once more asked whether she would confess freely [!] . . . (205) She does in fact confess before the torture begins. Rüdiger saves Maria at the end; but the supernatural may enter in the account of another woman, Lizzie, who admits that she is a witch and was the cause of the various sicknesses that had beset the town and caused suspicion to fall upon Maria —or, rather, Lizzie claims that she has a familiar called Dudaim, who alternately appears in the form of a woodpecker, a cat, and other shapes. Possibly we are to understand all this as a hallucination on Lizzie’s part, but it is not entirely clear that all the events of the novel can be satisfactorily resolved except by appeal to this supernatural entity. Meinhold went on to write an actual supernatural novel, Sidonia von Bork, die Klosterhexe (1847; Sidonia the Sorceress), who is apparently a real witch and must be overcome only by an angel of light. This novel, however, although it was translated in 1849 by Lady Wilde, has not had anything like the influence of The Amber Witch, which for much of the nineteenth century was taken as an actual account of a witch trial.
vi. Irish Gothic: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu For the past three-quarters of a century there has been a kind of languid renaissance of the work of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873). In the fifty years following his death, his work had largely fallen out of print, and he seemed to be on the brink of lapsing into oblivion. But when M. R. James compiled Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Stories (1923), and Dorothy L. Sayers included “Green Tea” in her pioneering anthology Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror (1928), things eventually turned for the better. In the 1960s E. F. Bleiler assembled Le Fanu’s Best Short Stories (1964) and arranged for a reprint (1966) of Le Fanu’s most celebrated novel, Uncle Silas; in the next decade Bleiler issued another collection of Le Fanu’s short fiction, Ghost Stories and Mysteries (1975). W. J. McCormack wrote what is without doubt the most sophisticated critical study, Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland (1980), and in recent years a three-volume edition of his short fiction has been published by AshTree Press (2002–05), Uncle Silas has appeared (2001) in Penguin Classics (although I have been told it has sold very poorly), and the story collection In a Glass Darkly has been issued (1993) in the Oxford World’s Classics series. A bibliography by Gary William Crawford appeared in 1995, and two further critical studies were issued in 1987 and 2007. So it would appear that Le Fanu is back on the map. Is it, then, the case that he is a sadly neglected master of supernatural and mystery fiction who has now regained the canonical status he deserves? After an exhaustive rereading of his work, I regret to report that I must answer emphatically in the negative, and I will go on to say that Le Fanu’s tales have been vastly— even grotesquely—overpraised by his partisans. The brute fact is that Le Fanu’s work in the realm of supernatural or non-supernatural horror is staggeringly verbose, largely unimaginative, and unillumined by anything that can be termed distinctive prose, vivid characterisation, or compelling plot development. Le Fanu failed to advance supernatural literature beyond the tired Gothic modes he favoured, as the rapid demise of his work after his death and its corresponding lack of influence upon the subsequent supernatural tradition painfully attest.
There is little need to dwell on Le Fanu’s life. A scion of the Protestant aristocracy of Ireland, he spent the majority of his life in or around Dublin. He published his first short story in 1838, the year after graduating from Trinity College. Shortly thereafter he plunged into journalism, purchasing and editing several magazines—a career that culminated in 1861, when he became proprietor and editor of the Dublin University Magazine, a periodical that, both before and after that date, published the bulk of his short fiction. He also wrote more than a dozen novels. Le Fanu married Susanna Bennett in 1843, and her death fifteen years later reputedly shattered him with grief and turned him into a recluse—a fitting role for a writer of the supernatural. This legend of Le Fanu’s hermitry is a bit exaggerated, as he received many visitors in his Dublin home, including such prominent figures as the novelist Charles Lever. It appears that Le Fanu, following the death of his wife, simply plunged into literary labours, and a substantial proportion of his work appeared in the final decade and a half of his life, including the novels The House by the Churchyard (1863) and Uncle Silas (1864) and the story collections Chronciles of Golden Friars (1871) and In a Glass Darkly (1872). Of Le Fanu’s early work little can—and, out of charity, should—be said. A number of stories are narrated by a country priest, Francis Purcell, who has purportedly collected legends of the Irish peasantry. Several of these contain affecting depictions of the Irish countryside and of the rural denizens inhabiting it, even if on occasion (as in “The Ghost and the BoneSetter” [Dublin University Magazine, January 1838]) Le Fanu’s rendering of Irish dialect is so extreme as to render the story nearly unreadable. Oddly enough, Le Fanu himself made no attempt to collect the Purcell stories— although a few appeared in his first story collection, Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851)—and they had to be assembled posthumously in The Purcell Papers (1880). Very few of the supernatural tales amount to much. One of the most curious is “The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh” (Dublin University Magazine, March 1838), which is really two stories in one. By reputation, Sir Robert, who was fond of horse racing, had uncanny luck at choosing winners at the races, and it was suspected that he had received the assistance of the Devil in his bets. But the third-person narrator (presumably Purcell) now tells an entirely different story, one that he claims is derived from first-hand evidence and chiefly relating to the sinister presence of a mysterious valet of Sir Robert’s who may or may not have
been involved in the latter’s death. The extreme disjunction between even the basic thread of the two accounts renders the story incoherent. A substantial proportion of Le Fanu’s tales, early and late, are relatively conventional stories of ghosts and apparitions—such things as “The Drunkard’s Dream” (Dublin University Magazine, August 1838), “Ghost Stories of Chapelizod” (Dublin University Magazine, January 1851), “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street” (Dublin University Magazine, December 1853), and “Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House” (Dublin University Magazine, October 1862), a purportedly “true” narrative—and do nothing but reveal the degree to which such accounts had already become hackneyed and routine. In only a few stories does some originality of motif or treatment present itself. Consider “Schalken the Painter” (Dublin University Magazine, May 1839). Here a Dutchwoman, Rose Douw, is forced by her father to marry a strange man, Wilken Vanderhausen. His appearance is foreboding: . . . but the face!—all the flesh of the face was coloured with the bluish leaden hue, which is sometimes produced by metallic medicines, administered in excessive quantities; the eyes showed an undue proportion of muddy white, and had a certain indefinable character of insanity; the hue of the lips bearing the usual relation to that of the face, was, consequently, nearly black; and the entire character of the face was sensual, malignant, and even satanic. (B 38) Is he, indeed, one of the undead? Rose implies as much when, fleeing him, she cries, “The dead and the living can never be one” (B 42). The compactness and intensity of this tale render it one of Le Fanu’s rare early successes. Intensity is certainly a term one can use for “The Mysterious Lodger” (Dublin University Magazine, January 1850), one of the more curious specimens in Le Fanu’s body of short fiction. The basic thrust of this tale is religious doubt—and it is an impressive achievement on Le Fanu’s part that he can endow this largely philosophical conception with a powerful element of terror. Le Fanu’s own wife was reportedly beset with such doubts, and it is likely that he had first-hand knowledge of their ravaging effects upon
individual psychology and domestic felicity. “The Mysterious Lodger” is, however, not a success from a purely aesthetic point of view: its random supernatural manifestations fail to cohere, and a concluding attempt to explain the phenomena by appealing to the possible haunting of the house in which they occur weakens the overall message. Another tale that ingeniously combines religion and terror is “Wicked Captain Walshawe, of Wauling” (Dublin University Magazine, April 1864), in which a man’s soul has, by a curse, been enclosed in a holy candle; when it is burned, the revenant lives his entire life in a few minutes: His feet and legs seemed indistinctly to swell, and swathings showed themselves round them, and they grew into something enormous, and the upper figure swayed and shaped itself into corresponding proportions, a great mass of corpulence, with a cadaverous and malignant face, and the furrows of a great old age, and colourless glassy eyes; and with these changes, which came indefinitely but rapidly as those of a sunset cloud, the fine regimentals faded away, and a loose, gray, woollen drapery, somehow, was there in its stead; and all seemed to be stained and rotten, for swarms of worms seemed creeping in and out, while the figure grew paler and paler . . . (G 114–15) “Borrhomeo the Astrologer” (Dublin University Magazine, January 1862) is also worth discussing in this context. The astrologer, as an old man, is given the elixir of life and is promised that he will live a thousand years. He is, however, caught in an act of impiety and sentenced to die horribly (successively by being hanged, impaled, and buried alive)—and, of course, he will live through it all and experience the exquisite pains of a thousand years of torment. There is, however, little that can be said for other of Le Fanu’s short stories and novellas—with two exceptions. Many are seriously marred by prolixity: Le Fanu simply does not have a sufficiently distinctive prose style to carry the reader through the longueurs of the very slow-moving scenarios he generally establishes. In principle, the employment of the novelette or novella for supernatural horror can be highly efficacious: the expansion of compass can engender a powerful sense of cumulative horror while
maintaining the concision and unity that distinguish the short story. But Le Fanu is rarely successful in the form: his novellas spin themselves out far beyond the needs of the plot, as if he is hoping to be paid by the word; and his prose, lacking the manic intensity of Poe or the brooding symbolism of Hawthorne, merely spins itself out in harmless verbosity. “Squire Toby’s Will” (Temple Bar, January 1868) is such a specimen. Not only is the story conventional in basic plot—a younger son, Charles Marston, obtains a family estate illegally and is then hounded by the ghosts of his father and elder brother, so that he commits suicide—but the tale is disappointingly long-winded and unfocused. Much the same can be said of “The Familiar” (In a Glass Darkly; a revision of “The Watcher,” in Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery), a story that might otherwise have been of some minimal interest in its exploration of religious doubt and retribution, but is dissipated by unconscionable slowness of development. Le Fanu’s prolixity reaches its height in two staggeringly lengthy narratives, one supernatural, the other non-supernatural. “The Haunted Baronet” (Chronicles of Golden Friars)—an unwise rewriting of “The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh”—is merely a windy supernatural revenge tale full of inessential incidents and a glacial narrative pace. “The Room in the Dragon Volant” (In a Glass Darkly) tells the 40,000-word story of an Englishman at Versailles who is the victim of an elaborate attempt to rob him of his money. Even the concluding prospect that he might be interred alive fails to redeem this interminable narrative. The two stories by Le Fanu that genuinely amount of something, although both are flawed in various ways, are “Green Tea” (All the Year Round, 23 October–13 November 1869) and “Carmilla” (Dark Blue, December 1871–February 1872). The former by itself comes close to redeeming nearly the whole of Le Fanu’s other work: it is the one tale of his that unequivocally deserves to survive. It does so, however, not on the basis of its narrator, Dr. Martin Hesselius, a “medical philosopher” (B 186) who is featured in all the tales in In a Glass Darkly. Whether Le Fanu created this figure from the influence of Wilkie Collins’s detective work is unknown; whatever the case, Hesselius already reveals the limitations of the know-it-all detective; and, as we shall see, he comes close to ruining an otherwise haunting and powerful narrative. “Green Tea” is the well-known story of a clergyman, Jennings, who finds himself plagued by a monkey after, apparently, imbibing large
quantities of green tea. Continual glimpses of this creature finally drive Jennings to suicide. This skeletonic outline cannot come close to capturing the extraordinary skill Le Fanu exhibits in the gradual manifestation of this hideous apparition, which only Jennings sees. Some of the touches—as when Jennings sees the monkey on a bus and attempts to touch it (“I poked my umbrella softly towards it. It remained immovable—up to it—through it. For through it, and back and forward it passed, without the slighest resistance” [B 194])—are wondrously effective. There is, of course, no resolution as to whether the monkey actually existed or was merely an hallucination inspired by overwork, the tea, or some other factor. The overriding issues are: (1) What does the monkey symbolise? and (2) Did Jennings do anything to deserve the fate of being plagued by such a creature, whether real or imaginary? There is a certain amount of evidence that—in a story written only ten years after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species—the monkey represents, from a Christian perspective, the rejection (or at least the potential for the rejection) of God and the entire Christian worldview. From this perspective, it is of interest that Jennings has undertaken a study of pagan religion. Although Hesselius, when Jennings consults with him, notes that this is “a very wide and interesting field,” Jennings immediately responds: “‘Yes, but not good for the mind— the Christian mind, I mean. Paganism is all bound together in essential unity, and, with evil sympathy, their religion involves their art, and both their manners, and the subject is a degrading fascination and the Nemesis sure. God forgive me!’” (B 192). The term “degrading”—especially when one thinks of Christian criticisms of Darwin (then as now) that any relation to the primates would “degrade” human dignity—is of note. Jennings goes on to say that the monkey was “drawing me more interiorly into hell” (B 198) and even that “It won’t let me pray, it interrupts me with terrible blasphemies” (B 200). And yet, I agree with Jack Sullivan who, although to my mind unjustly downplaying the Christian substratum of the tale, declares that Jennings has done little to deserve his fate. His exploration of pagan religion does not seem sufficient to bring on the horrible fate he endures. Sullivan goes on to state: Like Joseph K., Jennings is ceaselessly pursued and tormented for no discernible reason. A persistent experience in modern fiction is a situation in which the main character wakes up one morning on a
tightrope and does not know how he got there. This is precisely the predicament Jennings finds himself in. Although S. M. Ellis calls Le Fanu a “tragic” writer, “Green Tea” is closer to modern tragicomedy. Jennings never experiences even a flash of tragic recognition; on the contrary, he never knows why this horrible thing is happening. There is no insight, no justice and therefore no tragedy. There is only absurd cruelty, a grim world view which endures in the reader’s mind long after the hairs have settled on the back of the neck. (Elegant Nightmares 18) But I think Sullivan, as with many other commentators, is guilty of overlooking some key passages in the text. Why, for example, in chapter 3 does Hesselius examine the works of Emanuel Swedenborg and quote them copiously? We need not be reminded by W. J. McCormack that Le Fanu himself converted to Swedenborgianism late in life; a number of later tales evoke the Swedish mystic and philosopher. There is no need to engage in a detailed examination of Swedenborg’s thought, especially when Le Fanu (at least for literary purposes) may not have conveyed it accurately in “Green Tea” and elsewhere. Suffice it to say that Swedenborg, although convinced that his own thinking was an elaboration of Christian thought, peopled the world with all manner of angels, demons, and other entities who are directly involved in human life. Le Fanu (or, rather, Hesselius) cites such passages (I have no idea whether they are real or fabricated) from Swedenborg as: “There are with every man at least two evil spirits. . . . The delight of hell is to do evil to man, and to hasten his eternal ruin” (B 186). My belief is that we are to interpet these statements (in the context of the story) quite literally: the monkey is one of the demons from hell whose purpose is to destroy Jennings’s hope of heaven; and it does exactly that by inducing him to kill himself. In this sense, Jennings is not morally culpable because he is the victim of an evil outside himself. As such, in contrast to both Sullivan (Jennings is manifestly not “pursued and tormented for no discernible reason”—the reason is the demon’s thirst to send Jennings to hell) and Ivan Melada, who interprets the story purely psychologically (“Jennings, the gentle bachelor and otherworldly student of the religious metaphysics of the ancients, is overcome by a private demon, an unacknowledged lust that breaks through the surface of a cultivated and civilized existence” [96–97]),
it can be seen that “Green Tea” is constructed along the lines of a Christian/Swedenborgian morality tale. And yet, Le Fanu comes close to ruining the story by tacking on a ridiculous “explanation” of the events by Hesselius. It would seem that he is mortified by the failure of his attempt to cure Jennings of his obsession, and so he devises a preposterous theory about fluid in the brain that somehow allows some people to have visions of the spirits that cluster all around us. Hesselius then compounds his folly by an obvious cop-out: Poor Mr. Jennings made away with himself. But that catastrophe was the result of a totally different malady, which, as it were, projected itself upon the disease which was established. His case was in the distinctive manner a complication, and the complaint under which he really succumbed, was hereditary suicidal mania. Poor Mr. Jennings I cannot call a patient of mine, for I had not even begun to treat his case, and he had not yet given me, I am convinced, his full and unreserved confidence. If the patient do not array himself on the side of the disease, his cure is certain. (207) This is how the tale ends. I am not quite as confident as Sullivan that “We can reasonably conclude that Le Fanu did not mean us to take this epilogue on the same level of seriousness as Hesselius assumes we do” (28). Sullivan goes on to say, in reference to this final section, “Unless seen as ironic, the ‘Word for Those Who Suffer’ becomes an aesthetic blunder” (28); but Le Fanu has committed many aesthetic blunders elsewhere, and the fact that “Green Tea” is, relatively speaking, largely free of them is no reason to think that he may not have blundered here. It may nor may not be noteworthy that Le Fanu never featured Hesselius in so active a role, either as narrator or as physician, in any other tale. As for “Carmilla,” it has become celebrated as a classic vampire tale and an important precursor to Dracula; and after these things have been noted—along with the fact that the female vampire has marked lesbian tendencies—one has said pretty much all that needs saying. The tale is not notably successful from a purely aesthetic perspective, being dogged by the same prolixity that mars almost all of Le Fanu’s other work. I daresay it will come as no surprise to even the most uninitiated reader that the young
women successively introduced to us under the names Carmilla, Millarca, and Mircalla Karnstein are all one and the same person—a woman who has lived for well over a century and is now a vampire, specifically feeding on women. But the many commentators who have casually discussed this story do not seem to have paid much attention to why Carmilla is endowed with this lesbian tendency. It is certainly no answer to point to Le Fanu’s odd discussion of the origin of vampires: “A suicide, under certain circumstances, becomes a vampire” (B 338). What circumstances may these be? And why don’t all suicides become vampires? Earlier we read: The amphibious existence of the vampire is sustained by daily renewed slumber in the grave. Its horrible lust for living blood supplies the vigour of its waking existence. The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons. In pursuit of these it will exercise inexhaustible patience and stratagem, for access to a particular object may be obstructed in a hundred ways. But it will, in these cases, husband and protract its murderous enjoyment with the refinement of an epicure, and heighten it by the gradual approaches of an artful courtship. In these cases it seems to yearn for something like sympathy and consent. (B 337) This is not very helpful either. If we are to believe this passage—the apparent paraphrase of the account of a (fictitious) authority on vampires, Baron Vordenburg—then there is no intrinsic reason why Carmilla would not have directed her vampiric tendencies toward a man. The fact that both she and her chosen victim, the nineteen-year-old Laura, had visions of encountering the other in dreams might suggest that they were meant to be attracted to each other; and we do not hear much about any other of Carmilla’s victims, so that it is not possible to know whether she is exclusively lesbian or not. In any case, the likelihood that Le Fanu was inspired in this direction by Coleridge’s Christabel strikes me as fairly strong and even obvious. There is, strictly speaking, no need to discuss any of Le Fanu’s novels, because none of them are supernatural in essence. Several are historical novels or novels about Irish domestic life; others are mystery or suspense
tales. All—even the best of them, Uncle Silas (1864)—are crippled by verbosity. The House by the Churchyard (1863) is a nearly unreadable murder tale with a seemingly incalculable number of subplots poorly harmonised with the central narrative; one segment recounting a series of unremarkable ghost stories has been reprinted as “Ghost Stories of the Tiled House” (see B 397–407). Even Uncle Silas, in spite of the nominal unity provided by its first-person narrator, Maud Ruthyn, drags. On the surface we are here concerned with a reprisal of the typical Radcliffian heroinevictim (although none of Radcliffe’s novels are told in the first person— they probably would have been minimally improved had they been), who endures a succession of supposed terrors from an evil governess (Madame de la Rougierre) and, especially, her uncle Silas, who once led a dissolute life and has been accused of murder. Silas, however, is not the customary Byronic villain; he has been crippled by illness and spends most of the novel in his bed. But the plain fact is that Uncle Silas is not in any sense a post-Gothic novel (even though Radcliffe and The Romance of the Forest are cited by name [358]); it is, fundamentally, a domestic melodrama with fleeting interludes of suspense. Le Fanu, of course, attempts to invest an artificial sense of drama and even terror into the proceedings, as in passages like this: Blessed be heaven for that deliverance! An evil spirit had been cast out, and the house looked lighter and happier. It was not until I sat down in the quiet of my room that the scenes and images of that agitating day began to move before my memory in orderly procession, and for the first time I appreciated, with a stunning sense of horror and a perfect rapture of thanksgiving, the value of my escape and the immensity of the danger which had threatened me. (342) What has inspired this hyperventilated response? Maud has, through the terms of her father’s will, been compelled to stay at Bartram-Haugh, her uncle Silas’s estate, and he is clearly pressuring her to marry his uncouth and wastrel son, Dudley; but Maud has just learned that, having been scorned by her, Dudley has married some other woman. So she is free! This is not exactly the stuff of compelling non-supernatural terror. Even if the
novel gains some momentum at the end—Silas, foiled in his attempt to gain Maud’s monetary assets through the marriage with Dudley, now forces Dudley to make an attempt on her life, although Dudley unfortunately manages to kill the redoubtable Madame de la Rougierre instead—the work overall fails to sustain interest. As I have mentioned, the work of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu did almost nothing to advance the field of supernatural literature. The themes and motifs he utilised were the stock elements of a now attenuated Gothicism, and his use of vampirism in “Carmilla” is made notable only by virtue of its influence on a more prestigious (but itself severely flawed) successor. “Green Tea” is the one story by which Le Fanu deserves to live; it would, indeed, have been a mercy had he written nothing else. The frequent comparisons made to Poe—he is sometimes referred to as the “Irish Poe”— redound entirely to Le Fanu’s disadvantage. Not only—aside from the solitary exception of “Green Tea”—do we find no meaningful or searching analysis of the psychology of his characters, but there is in general simply an absence of depth or interest in his work overall. His stories are nothing but stories, for the most part badly told; it is difficult to find any overarching symbolism or worldview expressed in his work. The effect of religious doubt upon his characters is perhaps the most interesting feature of his tales, and virtually the only one. The fact that he was afflicted with a plodding, verbose, loosely knit prose style—the very opposite of Poe’s concision and intensity—renders his longer works all but unreadable, and even his shorter tales seem plagued by verbosity. For all the enthusiasm of his past and current supporters, Le Fanu seems largely an emperor without clothes. Le Fanu’s niece by marriage, Rhoda Broughton (1840–1920), wrote a dozen or so weird tales over the course of her long literary career, but I fear that not one of them amounts to anything. Some were gathered in Twilight Tales (1879), but others remained uncollected until they were assembled by a diligent Broughton scholar, Marilyn Wood, in 1995. Broughton appears to take pride in recounting what she maintains are “true” accounts of supernaturalism, but this only goes to prove how tiresome and pointless such accounts usually are. For example, “Behold It Was a Dream” (Temple Bar, November 1872) tells of a woman who, while visiting some friends, dreams that her hosts are killed by an Irish labourer; eventually they are. It is one of several stories that seek to demonstrate the precognitive power of
dreams, most notably and tediously in “Betty’s Visions” (1886). That story was published together with another long narrative, “Mrs. Smith of Longmains,” which tells very much the same kind of story as “Behold It Was a Dream.” The upshot of Broughton’s work reveals painfully the playing out of standard supernatural tropes by the latter third of the century —something that only the most exceptional writers on either side of the Atlantic were able to overcome.
VII. The Deluge: British and European Branch The last two decades of the nineteenth century saw an immense outpouring of supernaturalism on both sides of the Atlantic. It may again be suspected that the very advance of science during this period impelled a reaction among those who felt that science was robbing the world of its reserves of awe and wonder. A character in Huysmans’s Là-Bas (1891) declares: “What a queer age . . . It is just at the moment when positivism is at its zenith that mysticism rises again and the follies of the occult begin” (239). It is no accident that the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882, with French and American branches opening in 1885. And yet, it is symptomatic that these very organisations felt obliged to use the tools of science to combat the metaphysical implications of science—namely, that the standard motifs of supernatural literature (the vampire, the werewolf, the ghost) were becomingly increasingly implausible as science increasingly probed not merely the physical universe but the human psychology that led to their widespread belief in prior ages. I am not here maintaining, in contradiction to my opening argument, that weird writers during this period were asserting the “truth” of their supernatural creations; by and large (with the possible exception of Margaret Oliphant), they were still utilising supernatural tropes for symbolic purposes. But some writers did exhibit a more aggresively hostile stance toward the domination of science as the arbiter of truth, while others (including H. G. Wells and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) were using science to extend the bounds of the weird into wider realms, whether it be the remote corners of the world, the depths of space, or the darkness of the human mind. The result is a wealth of horror literature of very wide scope, subjectmatter, and quality. We can touch only upon the highlights here.
i. Ghosts and More Ghosts It is remarkable how the ghost story in its narrow sense—that is, a story with a ghost in it—continued to attract the attention of a wide array of Victorian writers. The ghost remained by far the most common supernatural trope used during this period, and in a distressing number of instances it was used in such an unimaginative and rote manner that it gradually doomed itself to aesthetic oblivion in the following generation, when M. R. James simultaneously raised it to its aesthetic heights and, by that very act, impelled a very different type of ghost story from his successors. Those who remain enthusiastic about the “Victorian ghost story” appear to be allowing their sense of nostalgia to overcome their critical faculty. Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915) gained celebrity with the publication of Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), which Henry James, in a tart review of a later novel, characterised as “a skilful combination of bigamy, arson, murder, and insanity” (“Mary Elizabeth Braddon” [1865], 743). She and Wilkie Collins thus became the initiators of the “sensational novel” of the period—but of course no supernaturalism was involved, or, in general, even implied. Braddon did, however, write at least eighteen actual ghost stories, but only two—the first and the last—are of any consequence. “The Cold Embrace” (Welcome Guest, 29 September 1860) rests upon what had already become a stale premise—the vow of two lovers to return to each other, even after death—but is enlivened by its distinctive present-tense narration. A young woman dies, but her spirit continually gives her erstwhile lover a “cold embrace.” But Braddon’s reputation, if she has any, as a weird writer will rest on the late story “Good Lady Ducayne” (Strand, February 1896). Here a young woman named Bella becomes the companion of an anomalously aged woman, the Lady Ducayne (“I’d put her down at a hundred—not a year less” [267], a parson says). She is “good” because of her financial generosity toward her various servants and companions, even though several of these have died, requiring a constant succession of replacements. When Bella gets what appears to be a mosquito bite, a doctor (apparently in league with Lady Ducayne) states, “What a vampire!” (269)—leading the
reader to wonder, of course, whether he is referring to the mosquito or to some other entity. As Bella feels weaker and weaker, we are led to believe that something dreadful is going on; so too does a young medical student, Herbert Stafford, who ultimately rescues Bella by taking her out of Lady Ducayne’s service and conveniently marrying her. In the end it appears that Lady Ducayne is not a literal vampire, but that her doctor is bleeding Bella —and, presumably, either feeding the blood to Lady Ducayne or injecting it into her in some fashion, although this point is never directly addressed. In this sense, the story is perhaps not strictly supernatural, unless we think of it as one more reprisal of the “for the blood is the life” trope, whereby Lady Ducayne has extended her life unnaturally through ingestion of life-giving blood. Stafford appears to sense something of the sort: The eyes that looked at him out of the face were almost as bright as the diamonds—the only living feature in that narrow parchment mask. He had seen terrible faces in the hospital—faces on which disease had set dreadful marks—but he had never seen a face that impressed him so painfully as this withered countenance, with its indescribable horror of death outlived, a face that should have been hidden under a coffin-lid years and years ago. (275) It might be thought that the events of “Good Lady Ducayne” are a selfevident metaphor for the manner in which the rich victimise the poor, in this case by literally extracting their life-essence, but the progress of the tale seems to throw a few spanners in the works of this facile interpretation. Lady Ducayne really is “good” to her servants in the sense that she pays them well for doing relatively little work; and in the end she lets Bella go without much fuss and actually gives her the remarkable sum of £1000 as a kind of dowry for her upcoming marriage to Stafford. Of considerably greater interest is the supernatural work of Mrs. J. H. (Charlotte) Riddell (1832–1906), a staggeringly prolific Anglo-Irish novelist who alternated between English and Irish settings in both her supernatural work and her other writing. Riddell is, however, handicapped not merely by an unimaginative emphasis upon the ghost as her sole vehicle for supernatural terror, but more specifically by the repeated use of a house that is haunted by a ghost who has had something bad (usually murder)
happen to him or her. In one sense it is surprising how many small variations she can produce on this basic scenario, but in another sense it becomes difficult to tell her work apart after a time. The Uninhabited House (1875) is typical. A house in London is owned by an elderly woman named Miss Blake; her brother-in-law had died in the house, apparently a suicide, and thereupon it became haunted. Numerous individuals see an apparition of a man carrying a wad of money in his hands as he descends the stairs— can this be the dead Robert Elmsdale? To make a long story short, it turns out that Elmsdale did not commit suicide at all; instead, as a moneylender (mercifully, he is not Jewish), he had had trouble collecting on his loans, and a man named Harringford ultimately admits to killing him. The one interesting feature of the novel is a court case early in the narrative: Miss Blake has sued a Colonel Morris who has broken his rental contract by leaving the house after only a few days’ occupancy. His defence lawyer cleverly manages to get her and her daughter to admit on the stand that they too had seen the apparition of Mr. Elmsdale. I know of nothing quite like this scene: a classic scenario from the mystery or detective story has here been used to validate the supernatural. Other works by Riddell are of much lesser interest. Many of them are, indeed, mystery stories with a supernatural patina, and Riddell would have been better advised to leave the supernatural out of them. Consider “Nut Bush Farm” (in Weird Stories, 1882). A farmer is thought to have abandoned his wife and children and run off with a young woman, but many of his friends cannot credit that the farmer, an upstanding individual, could have done this. In the end it turns out, to no one’s surprise (certainly not the reader’s), that the farmer was murdered—and the sporadic appearance of his ghost toward the end of the narrative does not seem an integral component in the resolution of the case. “Walnut-Tree House” (in Weird Stories) is the kind of story the Victorians loved—a sentimental melodrama with a tinge of benign supernaturalism. A house in London is haunted by the spectre of a child—a small boy who, when his sister was taken away from the household by her cruel relatives, wasted away and died. But never fear! A happy ending of sorts is achieved by the convenient discovery of a missing will. Riddell’s prose is considerably more fluent and smooth-flowing than Braddon’s, but the poverty of her imagination fails to raise her work to any level of distinction. Once you’ve read one story, you’ve read them all.
The very different work of Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897) is worth more detailed study than the work of Braddon or Riddell, for, even though she too is hampered by an overreliance on the ghost as the chief figure of her supernatural tales and novels, her work is guided by a philosophy—or, more properly, a wish-fulfilment—that transforms some of her work into a kind of religious allegory. Her autobiography makes clear the crushing grief she felt at the early deaths of her husband and three children (“I am alone. I am a woman. I have nobody to stand between me and the roughest edge of grief” [94]), and it is not surprising that she was inclined toward a somewhat heterodox but ultimately Christian view of the afterlife in which the departed remain intimately connected with the world they have left: I try to realise heaven to myself, and I cannot do it. The more I think of it, the less I am able to feel that those who have left us can start up at once into a heartless beatitude without caring for our sorrow. Do they sleep until the great day? Or does time so cease for them that it seems but a matter of hours and minutes till we meet again? God who is love cannot give immortality and annihilate affection; that surely, at least, we must take for granted—as sure as they live they live to love us. Human nature in the flesh cannot be more faithful, more tender, than the purified human soul in heaven. Where, then, are they, those who have gone before us? Some people say around us, still knowing all that occupies us; but that is an idea I cannot entertain either. It would not be happiness but pain to be beside those we love yet unable to communicate with them, unable to make ourselves known. (93) It is scarcely worth analysing this passage for its theological errors and assumptions. Hampered by orthodox indoctrination into a belief in God and heaven and the afterlife, Oliphant struggles with the paradoxes this belief entails: If souls are immortal, how can the dead cease to be interested in what is going on (especially to “those they love”) in the earth below? And since common experience establishes that very few of us have any experience of the presence of the souls of the dead in our midst, then it must be very difficult, but perhaps not impossible, for those souls to communicate with us, and us with them, in some inscrutable manner. Many
of her stories—especially those collected in Tales of the Seen and the Unseen (1889)—are attempts to probe these mysteries in the guise of supernatural fiction. The short novel A Beleaguered City (1880) may be a good place to start a discussion of Oliphant’s supernatural work. The tale is narrated by one Martin Dupin, the mayor of Semur, a small town in France. One day the town is engulfed with a curious grey light. The townspeople leave the city, and after several days the sun returns—but the town itself is still engulfed in gloom. Some citizens (mostly women) declare that they have seen the dead walking in the town. Dupin and the curé venture into the town. Eventually the cathedral bells begin to ring, the darkness lifts, and the citizens return. Oliphant leaves no doubt as to the allegorical—or, at the very least, the metaphorical—nature of the overall scenario. The darkness that engulfed the town was manifestly inspired by a casual remark by several citizens that money had become their god—a belief that, in the eyes of one citizen, was “enough to bring the dead out of their graves” (4). Later, Dupin upbraids one of these crass materialists: “You good-for-nothing!” I cried, “it is you and such as you that are the beginning of our trouble. You thought there was no watch kept up there; you thought God would not take the trouble to punish you; you went about the streets of Semur tossing a grosse pièce of a hundred sous, and calling out, ‘There is no God—this is my god; l’argent, c’est le bon Dieu.’” (37–38) Dupin’s mother observes at one point: “I have long felt that the times are ripe for some exhibition of the power of God” (81). And so on and so forth. In spite of the general realism of the work, and the elaborate efforts that Dupin makes to convince us of the literal truth of the events he is narrating, there is little sense of terror in A Beleaguered City, and its function as a parable is evident from the outset. A transitional work—that is, one that constitutes a bridge between religious allegory and supernatural horror—is “Old Lady Mary” (Blackwood’s, January 1884; in Stories of the Seen and the Unseen). Here an old woman, Lady Mary, is repeatedly pestered into making a will to make sure that her goddaughter, also named Mary, is not left impoverished
at her death. She finally does make a will—but does so in secret and hides it in a secret compartment in her desk. Sure enough, she dies and no one finds the will, rendering the young Mary destitute. The spirit of Lady Mary, appalled by these developments, feels a fervent desire to rectify the wrong she has committed—but how? When, upon her death, Lady Mary wakes up, she is told that the place she now finds herself in may or may not be heaven (“That is a word . . . which expresses rather a condition than a place” [38]). She is also informed that it is exceedingly difficult—but not, apparently, impossible—for her to communicate directly with a living person. Nevertheless, she undertakes the task—and, curiously enough, it is she who is frightened when she reenters her own house (“A great panic seized the woman who was no more of this world” [65]). A baby and a young woman who now occupy her house as tenants do sense her presence—but that is all. In the end, the desk is given to the vicar and eventually the will is found there. So in the end Lady Mary was not, in the strictest sense—or perhaps in any sense—responsible for the “happily ever after” scenario that concludes the tale. Oliphant apparently realised that her hands were tied: the dead do indeed have a certain difficulty in communicating with the living, so that she could not have them taking any direct role in the resolution of affairs lest at least a certain number of sceptical readers begin to wonder why this sort of thing does not happen all the time. Oliphant’s actual supernatural tales are of a relatively mundane sort, and many of them are dogged by the same suggestions of padding and prolixity that afflict the work of Le Fanu and other Victorians. Consider “The Secret Chamber” (Blackwood’s, December 1876), a striking re-creation of the atmosphere of the old-time Gothic novels. Lord Gowrie tells his son, Lord Lindores, of a secret chamber in Gowrie Castle—a chamber that all the male members of the family are told about when they reach a certain age, and which appears to have some baleful significance in their family history. Gowrie takes his son there in the middle of the night. Inside is a curious individual, and it does not take long for Lindores to realise that it is the wicked Earl Robert, an ancient ancestor of the family: “Vaguely gleaming through his mind came the thought that to be thus brought into contact with the unseen was the experiment to be most desired on earth, the final settlement of a hundred questions; but his faculties were not sufficiently under command to entertain it” (120). But Oliphant does not waste time on the metaphysical implications of the situation. Whereas Lord Gowrie
wishes Lindores to bow down in obeisance to Earl Robert, as he himself and all his ancestors have done, Lindores wishes to fight—and does so, engaging Earl Robert in swordplay. Later, the door leading to the secret chamber cannot be found. The story is an effective allegory of the attempt by the young to defy the heavy weight of family heritage, although certain features are left unexplained. “Earthbound” (Fraser’s Magazine, January 1880) is an intermittently effective narrative mingling supernaturalism and romance. A guest staying at the home of Lady Beresford over Christmas thinks he catches glimpses of a woman wearing a white dress—a detail that other guests think must be an error, since the household is in mourning. When the man, Edmund Coventry, finally has a conversation with the woman, he finds some of her answers inscrutable: “I have been a long time here” [154], she remarks, even though she is very young, and she says that her name “was Maud” (160; my emphasis). It is no surprise that the woman is an ancestor of the home, having lived a century ago. But Coventry’s gradual infatuation with her is effectively handled. “The Library Window” (Blackwood’s, January 1896) tells of a young woman, Jeanie, who looks out across the street into the window of a house—evidently the room is a library. She sees the figure of a man there, writing; but later, when she gets into the house at a party, she finds that the window is a false window behind a bookcase. In the end we are told that a man had been killed there by the brothers of a woman who had occupied the room Jeanie had been in when she saw the figure. This is nothing but the now routine ghostly elements minimally reworked, but the cumulative build-up to the revelation is not ineffective. Oliphant’s most effective weird tale is “The Open Door” (Blackwood’s, January 1882; in Stories of the Seen and the Unseen). Here too there is no striking originality of theme or conception—a ghost appears to be haunting the area where the modern part of a large house leads to the ruins of an older part of the house, and ultimately we learn that the ghost is the son of a housekeeper who died in the old house—but the gradual accretion of a powerful atmosphere of horror is well executed. Oliphant sets the stage for our acceptance of the supernatural manifestation by putting on stage both a scientist who doubts the spectral nature of the events and a minister who immediately recognises the voice of the ghost when he first hears it. The scientist even puts forth what he believes to be a convincing natural
explanation for the events, but the course of the narration makes it clear that this explanation is not in fact sufficient to account for all the phenomena. Prolific British short story writer W. W. Jacobs (1863–1943) was best known for humorous tales, many of them about the sea or sailing, but he dabbled in both supernatural and non-supernatural horror throughout his career. He did creditable work in both modes: “The Toll-House” (Strand, April 1907) is a powerful haunted house tale, while “His Brother’s Keeper” (Strand, December 1922) is an effective tale of the fear induced by a guilty conscience. Jacobs had, however, an annoying habit of suggesting the supernatural but deflating it with mundanity. Consider “The Brown Man’s Servant” (Pearson’s, December 1896). A sailor sells an immense diamond to a Jewish pawnbroker, Solomon Hyams, for £500; it is clearly worth much more, but Hyams realises the diamond must be stolen. Sure enough, the sailor admits that he and three others contrived to pilfer the diamond; one of their party is already dead, but the other two—a person named Nosey Wheeler and a Burmese who is never named—are still alive and, as events show, intent on getting the diamond back from Hyams. The Burmese comes into the shop and claims that he will victimise Hyams with “a little artful, teasing devil” (170); he appears to be true to his word, as he effects the murder of Hyams’s cat in a mysterious fashion. But it turns out that the “devil” in question is nothing but a snake; it bites Hyams, who, fearful of dying a slow, lingering death, shoots himself. “Over the Side” (Today, 29 May 1897) is another fake supernatural story set on board a ship. On occasion, such as “Sam’s Ghost” (Strand, December 1915), Jacobs unites humour and the supernatural more or less effectively. Perhaps the most amusing specimen is perhaps “The Rival Beauties” (Million, 30 March 1895). Here a ship encounters a huge sea serpent (it appears to be about 100 yards long). The crew wishes to lure it back to New York harbour so that they can make money displaying it to audiences. The serpent appears to follow readily enough, but just as they are entering the harbour a sailor named Joe Cooper blows a foghorn and scares the serpent away. He did this because he was offended that the other sailors had jocularly claimed that his ugly face would itself scare the serpent and cause it to flee (hence the significance of the title). Jacobs’s reputation in weird fiction will of course reside chiefly, if not exclusively, upon “The Monkey’s Paw” (Harper’s, September 1902), probably the most reprinted story in the history of supernatural literature.
Whether it deserves its celebrity is, however, open to question. The plot of this well-known tale needs little description: a monkey’s paw brought back from India appears to have the power to make wishes come true—but in doing so it engenders certain highly unfortunate side-effects. For example, a man who obtains the paw wishes for £200, but the money arrives only when his son dies at work and his office pays the family the sum in question. Traumatised by this death, the boy’s mother fervently wishes that her son would come back to life—and he appears to do so, for there is a hideous banging on the door that ceases only when the father makes another (unspecified) wish—presumably that the son return to the dead. Jacobs is to be praised for restraint in this cataclysmic conclusion: is the banging on the door really being caused by the reanimated corpse of the son, and is the fact that the street is “quiet and deserted” (30) when the father, after making made his wish, opens the door an indication that the reanimated son has gone back to his grave or merely disappeared? To the extent that nothing strictly supernatural can be seen to have occurred in the course of the narrative, the tale could conceivably qualify as “ambiguous” in the sense I have previously defined. The “moral” of “The Monkey’s Paw” is, however, so elementary—be careful what you wish for, you might get it—that it seems hardly sufficient to have engendered the story’s celebrity. The man who brings the paw from India notes that the “old fakir” from whom he obtained it “wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow” (19)—another moral axiom so unimaginatively obvious that it has little to recommend it. As it is, our lasting impression is of the suggestion of gruesomeness implied in the spectacular conclusion. Several of Jacobs’s stories are of this sort: “The Well” (in The Lady of the Barge and Other Stories, 1902) features the unearthing of a murdered body from a well: “the face of a dead man with mud in his eyes and nostrils came peering over the edge” (45); but this detail does not salvage what is otherwise a predictable supernatural revenge tale. One would suppose that such a comic masterpiece as Oscar Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost” (Court and Society Review, 23 February 1887), and some others one could mention, would have put a serious dent in the enthusiasm of British and American writers for displaying one stock ghost after the other; but this does not appear to be the case. In any event, Wilde’s novelette ranks as one of the gems of comic weird fiction, and it is written
with a tinge of genial malice that only he could manage. The targets of its satire are surprisingly diverse. We are here concerned with the U.S. Minister to England, Hiram B. Otis, who with his family decides to occupy Canterville Close, notorious for being haunted by a ghost. He himself, as a sensible American, does not believe in ghosts (as he states to Lord Canterville, who declared that the ghost always appears before the death of one of his family: “But there is no such thing, sir, as a ghost, and I guess the laws of Nature are not going to be suspended for the British aristocracy” [66]), and neither, apparently, does his family. Accordingly, when Hiram’s son, Washington Otis, sees bloodstains on the floor and is told that they can never be eradicated, he says, “That is all nonsense. . . . Pinkerton’s Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent will clean it up in no time” (70). The stain remover appears to work—but, alas, the stains are back the next day. Hiram himself later sees the ghost and its rusty chains— for which he helpfully recommends “Tammany Rising Sun Lubricator” (75). And so on and so forth. Aside from wisecracks of this sort, “The Canterville Ghost” directs its satire both at the ghost itself—it flees when Hiram’s twin boys throw a pillow at it in fun—and at the stolid Americans who refuse to believe in him, or, at least, refuse to be frightened of him. In the end, fifteen-year-old Virginia Otis takes pity on the ghost and helps him to find eternal rest. (During this process the ghost admits that he himself restored the bloodstains to the floor by using Virginia’s paints—and when the red paint ran out, he used green, causing a bit of puzzlement all around.) The overall satire against both belief (either literal or aesthetic) in ghosts and on the triteness of the ghost story as a literary form is emphatic. I suspect that the American writer John Kendrick Bangs (1862–1922) borrowed heavily from “The Canterville Ghost” for his own well-known comic tale, “The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall” (in The Water Ghost and Others, 1894), similarly predicated on the conflict between ancient superstition and contemporary technology. Bangs had earlier delivered an amusing rebuke to the prevalence of spiritualism and psychical research societies in “The Amalgamated Brotherhood of Spooks” (in Over the PlumPudding, 1901). As for H. G. Wells’s “The Inexperienced Ghost” (Strand, March 1902), it is both less amusing and less generally effective than Wilde’s tale, but not unworthy of note. Here a man named Clayton meets a ghost in his club and is surprised to find that it really doesn’t know its
business (“I’ve tried to do it [i.e., haunt the club] several times, and it doesn’t come off. There’s some little thing has slipped me, and I can’t get back” [1002]). Clayton upbraids the ghost, saying it’s all a matter of the right “passes” (a series of hand motions that will presumably induce supernatural phenomena)—and Clayton’s advice seems to work. But the story ends with anomalous tragedy when Clayton does the “passes” himself and ends up dead.
ii. Horrors in the Mainstream Increasingly, during this period, a number of authors who had established themselves as writers of mainstream fiction tried their hands, either singly or on several occasions, at the supernatural. The end result is that some of these figures have established themselves as significant contributors to the weird, because of both the quality and the quantity of their work. It would take considerable space to specify exactly why these writers turned to the supernatural, but overall it can simply be stated that they found the mode particularly felicitous in embodying the aesthetic and philosophical concerns that dominate their mainstream work. The entire literary output of Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) is more intimately connected with his life than that of many other writers; in a real sense, every single work is a fragment of autobiography. The most significant things about him are his birth in Bombay and the fact that the majority of his early life was spent shuttling between England and India, with the result that he gained a powerful sense of the richness and the terror of the Indian subcontinent and of his own place as a member of the colonial ruling class. His return to India in 1882, following years of schooling in England, spelled the beginning of his literary career. The Kipling family was now settled in Lahore, in the then Indian province of the Punjab (now a part of Pakistan), and Rudyard became an assistant editor of the Civil and Military Gazette. By 1884 he was already writing short sketches for the paper; one of the earliest, “The Dream of Duncan Parrenness” (25 December 1884), is his first tale of the supernatural. This story of a doppelgänger could be read as a kind of anticipation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) in its suggestion of a “double” whose features reveal both the years and the sins of the protagonist. Another effective story, though not strictly a weird tale, is the brooding prose poem “‘The City of Dreadful Night’” (10 September 1885). The title derives from the pessimistic poem of that name by the Victorian poet James Thomson (“B. V.”)—a poem that, as Kipling admits in his autobiography, Something of Myself (1937), “shook me to my unformed core” (37) when he read it as a teenager. Kipling’s haunting account of the thousands of men
and women who sleep in the streets of Lahore because of the oppressive heat conveys much of the exoticism he found in the land of his birth. He knew India better than he knew England, and yet he was not himself an Indian: the barrier between Caucasian and “colored,” between ruler and ruled, was unbridgeable. In the winter of 1885 the Kiplings produced a family magazine, Quartette, published by the Civil and Military Gazette. It contained several more of Kipling’s weird tales, including “The Phantom ’Rickshaw” and “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes.” These stories were collected in The Phantom ’Rickshaw and Other Tales (1888). The original preface to that volume—rarely reprinted in later editions—supplies what few hints we have regarding Kipling’s intentions or purposes in writing weird tales: This is not exactly a book of downright ghost stories, as the cover makes belief. It is rather a collection of facts that never quite explained themselves. All that the collector is certain of is, that one man insisted upon dying because he believed himself to be haunted [“The Phantom ’Rickshaw”]; another man either made up a wonderful lie, or visited a very strange place [“The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes”]; while the third man was indubitably crucified by some person or persons unknown, and gave an extraordinary account of himself [“The Man Who Would Be King”]. The peculiarity of ghost-stories is that they are very seldom told first-hand. I have managed, with infinite trouble, to secure one exception to this rule [“My Own True Ghost Story”]. The other three stories you must take on trust; as I did. (ix–x) Brief and reserved as this is, it perhaps tells us more than is evident at first glance. The comment on “The Phantom ’Rickshaw” plainly suggests that a supernatural interpretation is not necessitated by the “facts” of the story. This chilling tale of a man apparently haunted by the ghost of a woman whom he jilted can be accounted for on strictly naturalistic grounds, as hallucinations engendered by the man’s consuming guilt. (One wonders, too, whether the scenario is meant in some way to echo an unrequited love affair on Kipling’s own part: he had fallen in love with an Englishwoman, Flo Gerrard, just prior to returning to India in 1882, but was prevented by
her family from marrying her.) The horror in this tale rests in the fact that the ghost, far from being vengeful, seeks only to ingratiate herself back into her loved one’s favour—an anticipation of Robert Hichens’s masterful “How Love Came to Professor Guildea” (1900). “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” is similarly a non-supernatural suspense tale; here there is not even a pretence at the supernatural. “My Own True Ghost Story” might be termed pseudo-supernatural, in that the supernatural is suggested throughout but in the end is explained away naturalistically. Are we to believe that the incident actually happened to Kipling? There is no reason to doubt it, and his preface to The Phantom ’Rickshaw explicitly asserts that it did. In the end, the most prominent feature in Kipling’s earlier weird tales is neither character nor language, but place—specifically, India. The fact that the first nine of his horror stories were written while Kipling was in India, and that thirteen of the first fourteen are set either there or in neighbouring Afghanistan, points to the consuming fascination that this exotic realm exercised upon Kipling’s imagination. In Something of Myself he provides hints of how India drew out his penchant for the strange: The dead of all times were about us—in the vast forgotten Muslim cemeteries round the Station, where one’s horse’s hoof of a morning might break through to the corpse below; skulls and bones tumbled out of our mud garden walls, and were turned up among the flowers by the Rains; and at every point were tombs of the dead. Our chief picnic rendezvous and some of our public offices had been memorials to desired dead women; and Fort Lahore, where Runjit Singh’s wives lay, was a mausoleum of ghosts. (48) The prevalence of heat, of death, of disease (chiefly cholera, typhoid, and dysentery), and of the ancient, brooding, mystical civilisation of India— these things are perhaps all we need to account for Kipling’s tendency toward the weird. His first-hand knowledge of India is evident on every page of his tales, whose realism is also enhanced by the liberal use of numerous Indian words that had so thoroughly entered the English vocabulary at this time that Kipling did not bother to define them. At the same time, the loneliness and homesickness that he must have felt, and
which were certainly felt by many of the English civil servants in India— poignantly conveyed in “At the End of the Passage” (Lippincott’s, August 1890)—are constantly in evidence. In 1891 two substantial story collections, containing several weird items, appeared: Mine Own People and Life’s Handicap. The former contained one of Kipling’s grisliest ghost stories, “The Recrudescence of Imray” (whose original title I prefer to the bland later title, “The Return of Imray”), while the latter features what is without question Kipling’s most accomplished horror tale, “The Mark of the Beast” (Pioneer, 12 and 14 July 1890). Although the “moral” of the story—an Indian magician seeks revenge upon a hapless Englishman who had wronged him—is elementary, many of the details are uncommonly fine. The gradual transformation of the man into a beast is signaled at one point by his grovelling in the dirt and his blunt assertion, “The smell of the earth is delightful” (75); and upon his complete transformation he is suddenly referred to by the narrator as “it” rather than “he.” In 1902, Kipling and his wife settled in his final home—“Bateman’s,” in Etchingham, Sussex. The bittersweet ghost story “‘They’” (Scribner’s Magazine, August 1904) was largely inspired by their drives around the English countryside—in a primitive vehicle called a “Locomobile”—while searching for a house. Again, the ghosts of the children in this story are not seeking to inspire fear, but rather love—the love they failed to receive in life. The outbreak of World War I saw Kipling write several stories about the war, including his final weird tale, “‘Swept and Garnished’” (Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, January 1915). This moving tale of the ghosts of children killed in the war manages to extend at least a modicum of sympathy toward the lonely German woman at the centre of the narrative, although Kipling’s loyalties clearly lay with the Allies. Rudyard Kipling’s horror stories are a small but distinctive facet of his diverse work. He wrote several works of pure fantasy (preeminently the Jungle Books and Just So Stories, but also Puck of Pook’s Hill) and even a few tales that might be considered early excursions into science fiction (“Wireless,” “With the Night Mail”); but his horror tales—many of them evocative of the India and England he knew so well—represent a form to which he returned again and again during the first twenty years of his literary career. They vary widely in tone, style, and subject matter—from
comic ghost stories (“Haunted Subalterns” [Civil and Military Gazette, 27 May 1887]) to grim tales of psychological terror (“The Wandering Jew” [Civil and Military Gazette, 4 April 1889]) to chilling stories of revenants (“The Lost Legion” [Strand, May 1893]). Hovering over them all is a fine sense of the psychological effects of the supernatural upon sensitive individuals, a ruggedly “masculine” prose style that enhances the nononsense realism of the scenario, and above all a sense of place that firmly grounds the tales in the distinctive locales in which they are set. Kipling never incorporated the supernatural in a novel, but two authors who did do so produced imperishable classics within five years of each other—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) and Oscar Wilde (1854– 1900). But both The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (Lippincott’s, July 1890; book publication 1891) are seriously flawed, although in almost opposite directions. Both, of course, are classic tales of doppelgängers, and both would appear to have derived some benefit from previous instances of this theme, notably Poe’s “William Wilson.” To write about both these novels now, given how familiar their plots are and how little of a surprise their purportedly cataclysmic revelations engender, is a difficult proposition; but there is every reason to believe that the initial readers of both works found both their fundamental themes titillatingly appalling and their “surprise” endings strikingly effective. Accordingly, our judgment of these works should not be affected by our familiarity with their conclusions, although Stevenson comes close to giving the game away at several points, especially when a document presumably by Hyde is found to be written in a handwriting identical to Jekyll’s. As it is, Stevenson himself lets the cat out of the bag about two-thirds the way through the novella, presenting a lengthy statement by Jekyll that constitutes the final segment of the text. It is here that whatever moral or aesthetic value exists in the work resides; for up to this point we have been merely reading a cleverly executed suspense narrative in which the apparently separate individuals Dr. Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde are becoming increasingly fused. Hyde’s nefarious actions—we are introduced to him at the very beginning of the narrative as stepping heedlessly on a child who has gotten in his way, and later he flies into a rage and kills with a cane an elderly man who proves to be no less a figure than the M.P. Sir
Danvers Carew—may seem a trifle tame in our day of serial killers and worse, but Stevenson has accomplished his overall mission in portraying the fundamental moral divergence of Jekyll and Hyde. What Jekyll states, both in elucidation and, implicitly, in exculpation of his actions, is that, having come to realise “the profound duplicity of life” (56)—that is, that every human being “is not truly one, but two”—he wonders whether these elements or facets of one’s personality could be separated by science, specifically by drugs. Jekyll’s ostensible purpose in doing so is altruistic: if the “evil” side of a person could somehow be suppressed or eliminated, only the “good” would remain. There are a number of problems with this formulation, chief of which is the naïveté of thinking that it is so easy to distinguish what is “good” and what is “evil” in man, especially when it is by no means clear whether moral “good” and “evil” have any genuine meaning aside from what is or is not socially acceptable to a given society at a given moment of its history. But Stevenson does not wrestle with moral conundrums of this kind; indeed, it could be said that his philosophically shallow presentation of human morality is a large part of the reason why Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has enjoyed such popularity over the years, since it corresponds exactly with the philosophically shallow views of the average individual. There are also problems with Stevenson’s execution of the plot. Jekyll manages to manufacture the drug—the chief component of which he refers to as “a particular salt which I knew, from my experiments, to be the last ingredient required” (58)—remarkably easily. If he had come up with this formula with such effortlessness, why had it not been discovered decades or centuries before? Only much later does Jekyll provide a lame qualification, stating that it was the “impurity” (71) of the salt in the first batch of his potion that caused his transformation into Hyde. It should be noted that Stevenson, to his credit, is not maintaining that Jekyll is all “good” and Hyde all “evil.” The latter may be the case, but the former is not. Indeed, in the earlier part of the narrative we are told that Jekyll had “sinned” (21) in youth; evidently, this is a reference (as Jekyll confesses) to a “certain gaiety of disposition” (56) that conflicted with the scholarly seriousness he wished to present to the world. All this seems to us harmless enough, but to Jekyll it is clearly a matter of concern: “I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I
laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering” (56). I suppose we are obliged to make allowances for Victorian reticence in Stevenson’s refusal to spell out exactly what “shame” Jekyll engaged in. In any event, the result is that Jekyll, even before he takes the potion, is a kind of double in himself, the “good” and “evil” elements already battling within his personality for dominance. After he begins taking the potion, he is alarmed not only at the radical transformation of his personality as represented by Hyde but by the fact that, at a later juncture, the transformation occurs without his taking the potion at all. It was, indeed, after he succumbed to the potion after two months of resisting it that he, as Hyde, killed the M.P. There may, again, be a certain logical difficulty at this point. Becoming Jekyll again, he is naturally remorseful at the death he has caused; but when, again without the potion, he becomes Hyde, he as Hyde gets in touch with a doctor, Hastie Lanyon, and asks him to bring a fresh supply of drugs to change himself back again. If Hyde, who has been consistently portrayed as entirely “evil,” is dominant in the man’s personality at this moment, why would he wish to change back to Jekyll? Is it merely to evade the authorities for the murder of the M.P., since a number of individuals had identified Hyde as the murderer and forced him to go into hiding? Whatever the case, the new potion does not work, leading Jekyll/Hyde to come up with the contrived “impurity” argument. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is, in truth, a novella that should have been a novel. Stevenson has a potentially rich and complex idea at his disposal, but he has expressed it in a disappointingly conventional and morally unadventurous manner, and the work is so compressed that the full ramifications of the concept fail to appear. Possibly Stevenson—who, quite frankly, occupies no higher than the second rank of literary greatness, his work in general aesthetically crippled by a jaunty glibness of style, an evil facility in plot construction, and a general absence of profundity—was incapable of giving the idea more detailed treatment; and even though the idea is now in the public domain, it is not clear that anyone else has done so either. The Picture of Dorian Gray suffers, conversely, from being a novella in conception that is a long-winded and meandering novel in execution. Wilde probably erred in expanding the original Lippincott’s serialisation into a longer novel, although the serialisation itself is beset by the same aesthetic
deficiencies that plague the novel. In essence, Wilde is too much the wit and satirist to buckle down to the difficult task of creating a unified supernatural novel that develops cumulative power and atmosphere. Its conclusion is spectacular, but the longueurs that the reader must endure before reaching it render the work overall an aesthetic failure. There is also a serious difficulty in ascertaining exactly why the supernatural mechanism works as it does. The painter Basil Hallward has produced a splendid portrait of the attractive young Dorian Gray; it is, indeed, a picture that, as the artist confesses, shows “the secret of my own soul” (9). As we all know, Dorian gradually deteriorates morally, but the deterioration only shows up in the picture. The question is: Why? What is it about this particular picture that has caused this result? Whether or not the secularist Wilde could have seriously envisioned, even for aesthetic purposes, the notion of a man selling his soul to the Devil to obtain his desired ends, there is virtually nothing in the novel that would lead one to believe that such a thing has occurred. At the very end, Dorian confesses, “The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and bartered away” (177), but that is all. The only other thing we are told is that the portrait “had changed in answer to a prayer” (89), specifically a prayer by Dorian that he remain eternally youthful in appearance. The matter is elaborated at the end: Ah! in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had prayed that the portrait should bear the burden of his days, and he keep the unsullied splendour of eternal youth! All his failure had been due to that. Better for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure, swift penalty along with it. There was purification in punishment. Not “Forgive us our sins” but “Smite us for our iniquities” should be the prayer of man to a most just God. (181) But if this “prayer” is the mechanism, then why don’t other portraits change in the manner in which Dorian’s does? Surely Dorian is not the only one who has fervently wished to retain his youth. This confusion—or, rather, absence of a valid accounting for the supernatural phenomenon—cripples the novel from beginning to end.
There are, however, some other redeeming elements, notably the suggestion that it is in fact the debonair Sir Henry Wotton who is the chief catalyst in Dorian’s moral degradation. It is Wotton who contends that “youth is the one thing worth having” (22)—a point that Dorian does not yet accept, but gradually comes to embrace. Then there is the issue of Sibyl Vane. This actress in a music hall inspires deep love—or infatuation—in Dorian, and he proposes to her after knowing her only three weeks. Although warned against such a mésalliance, he persists in the relationship —until the day when he sees her deliberately acting badly on stage (she did so out of love for Dorian), after which he breaks off all relations with her. It is at this juncture that Dorian first notices that the picture has altered: “there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth” (77). He later repents and vows to go ahead with the marriage—but in the meantime Sibyl has killed herself. Dorian reflects ruefully: “So I have murdered Sibyl Vane” (83). Note that at this point his moral decline has apparently not yet begun; but it is Wotton who blandly urges Dorian not to grieve over Sibyl. By this time, Basil Hallward notes with dismay: “Something has changed you completely,” going on to add significantly, “It is all Harry’s influence” (91). It is, however, only when Wotton gives Dorian a French book about a man who engages in the exploration of sin (probably an allusion to Huysmans’s A Rebours, although there is now reason to think that Wilde was not thinking specifically—or, at any rate, exclusively—of that book) that “strange rumours about his mode of life” (106) begin. Dorian is now thirty-eight years old, and his speech, full of cynical witticisms, is now virtually indistinguishable from Wotton’s. It is now that Hallward declares: “Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed” (126). Hallward then sees the altered portrait and is appalled; Dorian kills him in a fit of anger, then compounds his crime by blackmailing a chemist friend, Alan Campbell, into destroying the body. The spectacular conclusion—Dorian, appalled by his moral corruption, takes up the very knife with which he had killed Hallward and proposes to destroy the portrait; a scream is heard; Dorian is found dead, his face old and wrinkled, while the portrait has returned to its pristine condition—is a clever variant of the self-murder of “William Wilson.” But the long stretches of inessential maundering in The Picture of Dorian Gray— especially chapter 15, unwisely added for the 1891 book publication, and relating the idle chatter of Dorian and other guests at a dinner party—
destroys whatever atmosphere of terror has so far been engendered, with the result that this novel, like Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, is a work fueled by a powerful conception but marred by its bungling treatment. Wilde did not write any other weird specimens aside from “The Canterville Ghost”—his exquisite fairy tales can at best be considered contributions to the literature of fantasy—but Stevenson did produce some able shorter specimens. Probably the most central tale, from a supernatural perspective, is “The Bottle Imp” (New York Herald, 8 February–1 March 1891), a story that evokes the old-time Gothic novel in its account of a curse handed down by means of an imp in a bottle. Set in Hawaii (which Stevenson first visited in 1888), the tale deals with a bottle that has an imp from hell in it; the imp can do wondrous things for its owner, such as making him fabulously wealthy, but there is a catch: the owner must sell the bottle before he dies, and at a loss (i.e., for less than what he paid for it) or else “he must burn in hell for ever” (104). At the outset, there is no reason why we should believe this statement—made by the current owner of the bottle—and the buyer of the bottle, a Hawaiian named Keawe, is himself sceptical. But when Keawe’s uncle dies, making him wealthy, he begins to wonder. Then something dreadful happens: he finds he has leprosy. He begins to think that the bottle (like Jacobs’s monkey’s paw) brings disadvantages along with benefits. Keawe now undertakes a long search to buy the bottle back, since he feels it is his only means to cure himself; he does so at last, but finds that he can purchase it only for a single penny, thereby apparently condemning himself to everlasting perdition. His wife, Kokua, ultimately comes to his rescue. The tale is clever and suspenseful, and laced within the supernatural scenario is the self-sacrifice of both Keawe and Kokua, who are each willing to undergo an eternity in hell merely so that the other can survive and be comfortable. Other of Stevenson’s tales are either non-supernatural or tread close to the borderline of parable or allegory. Of the latter, “Markheim” (in The Broken Shaft, ed. Sir Henry Norman, 1886) is representative. Markheim kills the owner of an antique shop, apparently for money. Before he can find it, another man comes in—he knows Markheim and addresses him by name. It does not take long for both the reader and Markheim to ascertain that this is the Devil. The Devil’s offer to help Markheim to escape his difficulty is made on a very simple premise: “The bad man is dear to me; not the bad act” (107). The Devil recommends that Markheim kill the maid
who, having heard the commotion, is about to enter the shop; this will give Markheim more time to search for the shop owner’s money. But instead Markheim turns himself in. As for “The Body-Snatcher” (Pall Mall Christmas Extra, 1884), there is never any suggestion that this is anything other than an expression of loathing at the practice of unearthing the freshly dead from their graves—in this case, to supply cadavers for medical colleges. The protagonist, Fettes, finds it bad enough that economic necessity compels him to engage in purchasing cadavers in this manner; but he is horrified when one of the corpses brought to him is of a woman acquaintance who had been alive just the day before. When he consults a doctor, Wolfe Macfarlane, about the possible nefariousness of the body-snatchers, he is appalled that Macfarlane blandly advises him to pay no attention. Matters turn for the worse when another cadaver brought in proves to be that of a man named Gray, who had lorded it over Macfarlane sometime earlier. Is Macfarlane himself engaged in evil practices? The most memorable features of the story are a vivid description of the act of grave-robbing— To bodies that had been laid in earth, in joyful expectation of a far different awakening, there came that hasty, lamp-lit, terror-haunted resurrection of the spade and mattock. The coffin was forced, the cerements torn, and the melancholy relics, clad in sackcloth, after being rattled for hours on moonless by-ways, were at length exposed to uttermost indignities before a class of gaping boys. (146) —followed by a memorable tableau wherein Fettes and Macfarlane, going to a rural cemetery to disinter an elderly woman who has died, dig her up and place her between themselves as they ride back in their cart in the driving rain. (In a rather contrived trick ending, the body in question proves to be that of Gray.) “The Body-Snatcher” makes as good a case as any for regarding non-supernatural horror tales as legitimately within the purview of weird fiction. And what do we make of “Ollala” (Court and Society Review, Christmas 1885)? There is a suggestion of vampirism here, but the dénouement does not render the story supernatural. The focus is not in fact on Ollala—the daughter of a Spanish family with whom an English soldier
is recuperating from his wounds—but upon Ollala’s mother. The story is, ultimately, one of hereditary degeneration: the family was once high-born but has now fallen into a state of decadence. When the soldier cuts his finger, the mother seizes it and sucks his blood. But again there is no suggestion that the mother engages in the practice to extend her life supernaturally; it is, as Ollala at last testifies, simply the result of a decline on the evolutionary scale: “the seed passed on, it was wrapped in flesh, the flesh covered the bones, but they were the bones and the flesh of brutes, and their mind was as the mind of flies” (185). It is true that, earlier in the narrative, the soldier heard a strange cry that he thought came from a wild beast; but even here, we are not led to believe that the mother is some kind of shape-changer and has literally become an animal. We cannot leave Stevenson without touching upon “Thrawn Janet” (Cornhill Magazine, October 1881), a tour de force of sorts in being written almost entirely in Scots dialect. The device is clever in creating verisimilitude in what might otherwise be a luridly flamboyant tale of the corpse of a witch reanimated by the Devil. Stevenson mars the story, however, at the end by an implausible contrivance whereby the hand of God comes to the rescue. What exactly we are to do with Vernon Lee (pseudonym of Violet Paget, 1856–1935) is a vexing question. Although the author of two volumes of short fiction, Hauntings: Fantastic Stories (1890) and Pope Jacynth and Other Fantastic Tales (1904), that would appear to be central to the supernatural tradition, not to mention a thought-provoking essay, “Faustus and Helena: Notes on the Supernatural in Art” (Cornhill Magazine, August 1880), Lee’s work is of a curious and indefinable sort: heavily influenced by the aesthetic theories of Walter Pater, her tales to my mind are written with panache but are, from a strictly supernatural perspective, largely unsatisfactory. Many of them, in any case, are only on the borderline of the weird. Such a tale as “Pope Jacynth,” about Satan’s attempt to tempt the Pope, is merely a religious parable. “Dionea” (in Hauntings) is a meandering and not entirely coherent tale of a strange girl found floating in the sea who, as she grows up, is suspected of being a witch—or perhaps some kind of avatar of a pagan goddess. “Winthrop’s Adventure” (first published as “A Culture-Ghost,” Fraser’s Magazine, January 1881), is an interesting experiment in attempting to evoke horror from music. A man, Julian Winthrop, hears someone playing a little-known
musical composition that apparently dates to c. 1780. He recounts how, a year earlier, he had been travelling in Lombardy and come upon an old painting (dating to 1782) of a male singer holding a musical score; this singer, Ferdinanda Rinaldi, had been assassinated. Winthrop finds Rinaldi’s house and stays in it on St John’s Eve—the night when the dead arise from their graves. Sure enough, that night he sees a ghostly figure playing at the harpsichord and singing—the same song he later hears at the outset of the story. Lee will probably be remembered chiefly for “Oke of Okehurst,” first published as A Phantom Lover (1886). This is in fact not a tale of the supernatural, although there are suggestions of it. Oke of Okehurst wants the narrator, a painter, to paint portraits of him and of his wife, Alice. Alice strikingly resembles the portrait of a seventeenth-century ancestor, also named Alice. It turns out that this Alice and her husband, Nicholas, had murdered a poet, Lovelock, who had been paying too much attention to Alice. Can the present-day Alice be some kind of revenant? She is manifestly fascinated by her ancestor, and the painter himself regards her as “perverse and dangerous” (176). When someone suggests that the residents of the house hold a fancy-dress ball, Alice dresses up in a riding outfit that the seventeenth-century Alice had worn when she had helped to kill Lovelock. Oke in fact thinks he sees Lovelock here and there around the house; Alice teases him about it. In the end, Oke kills his wife when he fancies that Lovelock is sitting next to her on the couch, then kills himself. There is, as I say, nothing supernatural here, but the suggestions of it are intriguing; and the tale provides an able psychological dissection of the personalities of both occupants of the house. Another woman writer, Clemence Housman (1861–1955), the sister of A. E. and Laurence Housman, wrote one imperishable work of the supernatural—the novella The Were-Wolf (1896). It has frequently been lamented that the werewolf trope does not have a canonical literary treatment, unlike the vampire (Stoker’s Dracula) and other tropes; but The Were-Wolf comes very close to being unsurpassable. With a seriousness of treatment far beyond that of the hack George W. M. Reynolds, Housman writes a tale that dances delicately on either side of the boundary separating the supernatural from the fairy or folk tale. It is, perhaps, somewhat transparent that the werewolf, a strikingly beautiful woman who calls herself White Fell, is opposed by a man named Christian; but the work is
saved from descending into religious allegory by the tense depiction of the conflict between Christian and his brother, Sweyn, who has fallen into an infatuation with White Fell and violently opposes Christian’s attempt to reveal her true nature. The most gripping scene in the story is its climax, where we witness a mesmerising chase of White Fell (still in the form of a woman) by Christian: he cannot strike a woman, but at midnight she will turn into a wolf and at that point will be fair game for him: “You may live till midnight” (42), he tells her grimly. Her transformation is spectacular, after she herself has mortally wounded Christian with an axe: “And before the final blank overtook his dying eyes, he saw that She gave place to It; he saw more, that Life gave place to Death—incomprehensibly” (48–49). Christian has managed to kill White Fell, and he is found by his brother in the position of Christ on the cross. Housman wrote an interesting novel, The Unknown Sea (1898)—in which a sailor is torn between the placid life of his home in a coastal village and a possibly supernatural woman on an offshore island—but it pales in comparison with the pathos, delicacy, and withal the clutching horror of The Were-Wolf. Some attention should probably be given to the Scottish writer William Sharp (1855–1905). Under his own name he wrote a superb tale of a revenant, “The Graven Image,” as well as a curiously powerful novelette about religious mania, “The Gypsy Christ”; both stories are collected in The Gypsy Christ and Other Tales (1895). But Sharp deserves notice for the powerful array of tales and poems written under the female pseudonym Fiona Macleod, which he made elaborate efforts to portray as a real person. The Macleod tales, uneasy combinations of supernaturalism, fantasy, and Celtic myth and legendry (some of it perhaps invented or altered out of recognition), are unique in the literature of their time. For our purposes the most significant work is the long short story “The Sin-Eater” (in The SinEater and The Washer of the Ford and Other Legendary Moralities,1895), an evocative account of that curious Celtic myth of the sin-eater—the stranger who, coming upon a body laid out for burial, must consume the cake placed on the corpse’s body as a means of “eating” the sins of the deceased so that he or she can be properly interred. It is not clear that anything supernatural occurs in this haunting narrative, but the atmosphere of primitive morbidity is unmatched.
Toward the end of the century, perhaps under the influence of Wilde and others, a number of eccentric works emerged from the press that to this day evoke the decadence, esoteric learning, and bizarre imagination typical of one phase of the Yellow Nineties. Two such works appeared in 1894. The Stone Dragon and Other Tragic Romances by R. Murray Gilchrist (1867– 1917) is only on the borderline of the weird. Gilchrist was a prolific novelist and regional writer, but is now chiefly remembered for this single volume of tales, whose chief focus is the fusion of love and death. The supernatural rarely enters his work except in random tales such as “The Return,” about the return of a lover from the dead to reclaim his mistress. I don’t find the volume quite as piquant as its devotees apparently have, and it has nowhere near the demonic power of Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow (1895); but it is a work to be reckoned with. Somewhat more interesting is Aut Diabolus aut Nihil and Other Tales by an American, Julian Osgood Field (1852–1925), who spent most of his adult life in England. Aside from being a bit of a scoundrel—he spent some time in jail after involving Lady Ida Sitwell (mother of Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell) in a financial scandal—he seems to have enjoyed parading his learning in his tales, some of which are genuinely supernatural. Perhaps the most notable is “A Kiss of Judas,” a vampire tale that contains some striking anticipations of Dracula in its depiction of a hideous-visaged Moldavian man who may be one of the descendants of Judas and who can kill with a kiss. This Moldavian later transforms himself into a lovely woman and kisses (that is, bites) the narrator in the neck and kills him. Other tales in the volume are non-supernatural but contain their elements of charm, but Field’s verbosity and his parading of erudition tend to dilute the overall effect. Then there is The Lost Stradivarius (1895) by J. Meade Falkner (1858– 1932), a mystical novel that attempts to evoke supernatural terror from music. Although not without power, the novel is ultimately slight and ephemeral; it fails to justify the excessive praise of some of its partisans. Falkner wrote other novels, one or two of which might be considered weird, but none has survived except The Lost Stradivarius. The degree to which elements of horror entered into the literary mainstream in this and later eras is exemplified in no greater example than in Joseph Conrad’s novella “Heart of Darkness” (Blackwood’s, February– April 1899). Among the bewildering plethora of interpretations to which
this landmark tale has been subject, the claim that it constitutes a contribution to the literature of horror has not infrequently been made. E. H. Visiak, as an occasional fantastic novelist, was an early Conrad scholar particularly keen on this point; for him, “Heart of Darkness” is “the story of an appalling transformation in a man’s soul, and it is as horrific—and as symbolic—as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but it is not, as is Stevenson’s nightmare story, an extravaganza, for it is true in a realistic way and, in the general circumstances, at least, is faithful to Conrad’s own experience” (224). But in my judgment, although it draws upon the horrific tradition to some extent, it cannot be classified as a work of horror tout court. To be sure, nothing supernatural occurs in the tale, for all the hauntingly dreamlike features of Marlow’s journey into the depths of Africa to encounter the enigmatic Kurtz. And although Marlow sporadically portrays Kurtz as a kind of quasi-supernatural figure—“This initiated wraith from the back of Nowhere” (122); “an animated image of death” (135); “His was an impenetrable darkness” (147)—these comments are so manifestly meant metaphorically that their relevance to the traditions of supernatural horror are by no means clear. And as for Kurtz’s celebrated concluding utterance —“The horror! The horror!” (147)—Marlow himself provides his insight into its significance: “Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up—he had judged. ‘The horror!’” (148–49). That, on one level, “Heart of Darkness” expresses a kind of shuddering loathing of the inscrutable darkness of the cosmos certainly brings it close to the realm of horror literature; but to restrict it to that realm would be a cruel limiting of its aesthetic richness.
iii. Between the Genres This period saw the gradual emergence of two genres parallel to weird fiction—science fiction and mystery/detective fiction—in the form of its two most noteworthy early practitioners, H. G. Wells (1866–1946) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1869–1930). It cannot be said that either genre was definitively established at this juncture, but both were gathering the momentum that led to their establishment early in the next century. As for science fiction, while some overly enthusiastic historians have traced the form back to Plato’s Republic, one cannot legitimately maintain that the genre as we know it can be dated any earlier than the work of Jules Verne in the 1860s, when such works as A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) and From the Earth to the Moon (1867) appeared in French. Even these works are now regarded more as “scientific romances”—as, indeed, are many of Wells’s works. In Verne the sense of wonder surrounding the imagined invention of new technologies and the probing of either the depths of the earth or the depths of space far eclipses any sense of terror these events might generate; but with Wells it is a very different matter. The remarkable burst of writing that constitutes the first decade and a half of Wells’s literary career—chiefly from 1895 to about 1910—is virtually unparalleled in the history of imaginative fiction. Of his novels, The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and especially The War of the Worlds (1898) are laced with terror and gruesomeness, and the same can be said for his bountiful short stories, gathered in five collections from The Stolen Bacillus (1895) to The Country of the Blind (1911). If in the present discussion I focus on the latter body of work rather than the former, it is chiefly because it is only in the former that one can find occasional—and only occasional— examples of weird fiction in a relatively pure form. The difficulty in examining a writer like Wells in the context of weird fiction is precisely due to the rarity with which he presents defiances as opposed to extensions of natural law as commonly understood. If, as Lovecraft asserted, the “crux of a weird tale is something which could not possibly happen,” then virtually none of Wells’s work qualifies as weird: it
is precisely the possibility (whether in the present or the future) of the phenomena he displays in his novels and tales that makes them so breathtakingly compelling. This is, indeed, the chief distinction between weird fiction and science fiction. And yet, as Lovecraft wrote on another occasion, some of Wells’s conceptions are so inherently terrifying—the mingling of human and animal body parts in The Island of Doctor Moreau, the invisible man of that novel—that they create an emotion of terror that does not depend either upon a suspension or violation of natural law (as in supernatural fiction) or upon a sense of personal danger or of mental aberration (as in psychological horror fiction). In a letter Lovecraft captured this paradoxical sensation: “H. G. Wells is a ticklish question on my literary scales. I can’t derive a really supernatural thrill from matter which keeps my mental wheels turning so briskly; & yet when I think of some of his things in retrospect, supplying my own filter of imaginative colour, I am reduced to doubt again” (Selected Letters 2.210). Part of Lovecraft’s difficulty (and mine) rests upon the relative absence of a decisive atmosphere of weirdness. In his early work, Wells seemed so bursting with dynamic ideas that he frequently failed to vivify them in a way that brought out their full emotional resonance; his relatively dry and workmanlike prose contributed to this deficiency. Nevertheless, those ideas remain compelling both from a (proto-)science-fictional and a weird perspective. As is appropriate for an author whose first book was a textbook of biology, many of Wells’s tales focus on anomalous flora and fauna in remote corners of the globe. It may be a convenient device to unveil these oddities in places far off the beaten track, but Wells turns the trick well enough. Hence in “Empire of the Ants” (Strand, December 1905), we find giant ants in British Guiana, with a hideous possibility that they will ultimately bring about the overthrow of human domination of the earth; in “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” (Pall Mall Budget, 2 August 1894), a man buys an unusual orchid (one that may have already killed its previous owner) and, reduced to fainting by its heavy scent, awakes to find it sucking his blood; “In the Avu Observatory” (Pall Mall Budget, 8 August 1894), a scientist in Borneo is attacked in the dark by a huge black winged creature; “In the Valley of Spiders” (Pearson’s Magazine, March 1903) reveals enormous spiders in a desolate valley. The mysteries of the sea are not avoided by Wells, as witness “The SeaRaiders” (Weekly Sun Literary Supplement, 6 December 1896), about
human beings attacked by strange deep-sea creatures unknown to science. A much more compelling story on this subject is “In the Abyss” (Pearson’s, August 1896). A man goes down to the bottom of the sea (a depth of at least five miles) in a steel sphere. When he finally comes back to the surface, and he tells not only of the spectacular creatures he saw in the deep (“It was a biped; its almost globular body was poised on a tripod of two frog-like legs and a long thick tail, and its fore limbs, which grotesquely caricatured the human hand, much as a frog’s do, carried a long shaft of bone, tipped with copper” [438]), but, even more remarkably, of a city on the sea-bottom, manifestly built by some of the strange creatures he has seen. This suggestion of an entire underwater civilisation unknown to the creatures on the earth’s surface is the source of terror in this tale. Wells is surprisingly effective in comic or half-comic treatments of his imaginative conceptions. We have already seen his dynamiting of the ghost in “The Inexperienced Ghost.” A tale like “Æpyornis Island” (Pall Mall Budget, Christmas 1894) reads like a delightful self-parody. A man landing on a remote island finds huge dinosaur eggs—fresh ones—and, after eating one or two, sees the last of them hatch. A creature emerges and eventually grows to fourteen feet in stature, raised by the man for a period of years. When the creature begins fighting over food with the man, the latter reaches his limit (“I told him straight that I didn’t mean to be chased about a desert island by any damned anachronisms” [308]) and he kills it, to the irreparable loss of science but with the result that the man is eventually rescued. “The Man Who Could Work Miracles” (Illustrated London News, July 1898) tells of a man, Fotheringay, who has somehow developed the ability to make things happen merely by commanding them. It hardly matters how this wondrous trait came to be, for Wells manifestly intends a send-up of this type of narrative. There is, first of all, the awkward matter of the policeman who, having irritated Fotheringay, is commanded to go to Hades; thinking this punishment a bit harsh, Fotheringay revises his command so that the policeman finds himself in San Francisco. When he, like Joshua, wants the earth to stop its rotation around the sun, he unwittingly causes everything to be smashed up, so he takes the obvious course of wishing that everything be restored to the way it was before he made his wish—and, at the same time, that his powers be terminated. But the best story of this kind in the Wells corpus is “The Truth about Pyecraft” (Strand, April 1903). Pyecraft, a hugely fat man, takes a liking to
the narrator, a very thin man, as they meet in their club. The narrator provides Pyecraft with a formula—derived from his great-grandmother, who was from India—for “Loss of Weight” (972); but it quickly becomes clear that the wording of this formula is erroneous, for instead of shedding pounds, Pyecraft ends up floating up to the ceiling. Initially horrified and dismayed, Pyecraft eventually adjusts to his life above the ground; as the narrator reports, “it was delightful to think of Pyecraft like some great, fat blow-fly, crawling about on his ceiling and clambering round the lintel of his doors from one room to another, and never, never, never coming to the club any more” (979). Some of the stories that are definitively science fictional—and in which nothing even remotely supernatural can be said to occur—are nonetheless fraught with terror. Consider “The Star” (Graphic, Christmas 1897), about a star that appears to be approaching the Earth (it has already destroyed Neptune). Is the earth doomed? A professor seems to think so, as he utters the ponderous dictum: “Man has lived in vain” (721). Wells’s spectacular tableau of both the natural and the human cataclysms that take place around the world as the star grows larger and larger in the horizon is imperishable; it is a little unfortunate that the star does not in fact hit the earth, bypassing it instead and perhaps (in Wells’s naively optimistic view) effecting a moral regeneration of human society. In “The New Accelerator” (Strand, December 1901), in which a chemist has invented a potion to speed up mental and physical action thousands of times over, the result is not that the two characters who imbibe the potion operate at super-speed, but that they seem to see everything else around them functioning with incredible slowness: “He pointed, and there at the tip of his finger and sliding down the air with wings flapping slowly and at the speed of an exceptionally languid snail—was a bee” (1038). There is a certain half-comic treatment here also, but the phenomenon is depicted in such a hypnotic manner that for much of the narrative we are held in a state of awe and wonder. The two Wells stories that come closest to orthodox weird fiction are “The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham” (Idler, May 1896) and “Pollock and the Porroh Man” (New Budget, 23 May 1895). Both are substantial. In the former, the narrator, Edward George Eden, encounters an old man, Robert Elvesham, who wants to leave all his assets to a healthy young man—on condition that he take Elvesham’s name. In spite of his misgivings, Eden agrees, drinking a strange elixir given by Elvesham. The end result is that
his own soul or personality is ejected from his body and thrown into the decrepit body of Elvesham—who, it is suggested, has performed this nefarious act numerous times in the past, continuing his life by jumping from body to body. Eden reflects poignantly on the loss of his own life: “You who are mind and body together at your natural years, cannot imagine what this fiendish imprisonment meant to me. To be young and full of the desire and energy of youth, and to be caught, and presently to be crushed in this tottering ruin of a body” (420). But the greatest source of terror to Eden (and, no doubt, to Wells) is a philosophical one: “I have been a materialist for all my thinking life, but here, suddenly, is a clear case of man’s detachability from matter” (424). (This approximate premise is used in a later but less effective story, “The Stolen Body” [Strand, November 1898], in which a man’s soul leaves his body, at which point another soul occupies it and runs amok.) As for “Pollock and the Porroh Man,” we are taken to West Africa, where Pollock shoots in the hand a Porroh man (a witch-doctor) who had killed a native woman. Is the Porroh man then sending various curses— snakes, aching bones, and so forth—to Pollock? Or are we witnessing merely a series of coincidences? Pollock makes the mistake of having the Porroh man killed, for now the curse cannot be lifted. The Porroh man’s decapitated head keeps showing up, even when Pollock returns to England. And yet, the narrative tone suggests that many of the later incidents in the tale are the products of Pollock’s hallucinations and sense of terror that he has in fact been the victim of a dead witch-doctor’s curse. His death by suicide is no surprise. Two other stories that tread close to the weird are “The Moth” (Pall Mall Budget, 28 March 1895) and “The Red Room” (Idler, March 1896; sometimes titled “The Ghost of Fear”). In the former, are we to imagine that an entomologist’s soul has entered the body of a moth in order to plague a rival scientist? Wells leaves the matter unresolved. “The Red Room” seems to be an orthodox haunted house tale about the haunted red room of Lorraine Castle. The cumulative power of the narrative is impressive: a man lights seventeen candles all around the room but is horrified when they go out one by one, so that he is left in darkness. He can only conclude that the room is haunted, not by a conventional ghost, but by Fear: “Fear that will not have light nor sound, that will not bear with reason, that deafens and darkens and overwhelms” (512).
It is difficult to give up talking about Wells’s stories; they are, as I say, so full of potentially rich and powerful conceptions—“Under the Knife” (New Review, January 1896), about the spectacularly cosmic perceptions of a man undergoing surgery; “The Crystal Egg” (New Review, May 1897), about a crystal egg that may provide glimpses of the world on Mars; “The Magic Shop” (Strand, June 1903), about the wonders of a magic shop—that one can only regret Wells’s occasional failure to treat these conceptions with the detail and expansiveness they deserve. Some of them should have served as the basis of full-fledged novels. As for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it cannot be said that he genuinely mingles mystery or detection with the weird, except in a few instances, but his celebrity—both in his own time and in after years—as the inventor of the prototypical fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, makes his frequent ventures into both weird fiction and pseudo-scientific fiction something of an anomaly. It is well known that Poe’s three or four detective stories of the 1840s launched the form, but he had few imitators for some decades. Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) showed the boundless possibilities of the detective novel, and his example was quickly adapted by the American novelist Anna Katharine Green beginning in the late 1870s. Doyle himself first published two novels about Holmes (in 1887 and 1890) before issuing the first Sherlock Holmes collection, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), the stories of which had appeared in the Strand in 1891–92. In the various weird tales he wrote in the latter two decades of the twentieth century, Doyle generally adhered to relatively conventional supernatural conceptions—ghosts, vampires, femmes fatales, horrors out of Egypt—and also wrote a number of tales involving spiritualism. This lastnamed point is of some interest because, especially following World War I and the traumatic death of his son, Doyle became a wholehearted convert to spiritualism, spirit photography, and the like, thereby engendering a mortifying collapse in his reputation for sanity. One can sense his increasingly credulous leanings in this direction even during this period. An early story, “The American’s Tale” (London Society, Christmas 1880), is surprisingly on the verge of science fiction in its depiction of a man in Arizona who is eaten by an immense flytrap plant. But the story is poorly executed, its climax telegraphed almost from the outset. A later tale, “The Los Amigos Fiasco” (Idler, December 1892), may also be thought to have a quasi-science-fictional premise. A criminal, set to die by
electrocution, is wired up to a whole series of electrical generators in the town of Los Amigos, but the result is that he gains preternatural strength and endurance thereby: he is subsequently able to withstand prolonged strangulation and also a pistol shot. The idea, apparently, is that “Electricity is life” (230), but the whole tale is crippled by implausibility. “The Captain of the Polestar” (Temple Bar, January 1883) is a touching tale of a sea captain, recklessly hunting for whales in the ice-fields near Spitzbergen, who is plagued by inexplicable fear and sorrow. It turns out that he is mourning his dead lover, whom he then thinks he sees on the ice. He later goes out on the ice to embrace her—a “pale misty figure” (39) who is seen to be bending over the captain’s dead form to give him a kiss. Another celebrated sea story is “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” (Cornhill, January 1884), which has been credited with virtually creating the myth of the “lost” ship Mary Celeste. Doyle takes numerous liberties with the actual account of the ship, which was lost at sea in 1872–73, especially in that he gives it the erroneous name of the Marie Celeste. Jephson, the narrator, claims to have been on board the ship when it was deserted; but his tale veers off into another direction, focusing on a man named Septimius Goring, a quadroon who has “devoted my life to the destruction of the white race” (139). (Jephson, conveniently, is a rabid abolitionist.) There is also a peculiar episode about a black stone that acts as a magic talisman, as it proves to be the missing part of a statue made from the sacred black stone of Mecca. Again, the tale is unconvincing in its incidents and crude in its characterisation. Somewhat more successful is the femme fatale story “John Barrington Cowles” (Cassell’s Saturday Journal, 12–19 April 1884), about several men who fall under the spell of a cruel, domineering woman who is variously referred to as “beautiful; but the devil!” (255) and “A fiend! . . . A ghoul from the pit! A vampire soul behind a lovely face!” (269). It is not entirely clear whether there is anything actually supernatural about this person. Somewhat along the same lines is the novelette “The Parasite” (Harper’s Weekly, 10 November–1 December 1894). The thrust of the story is mesmerism, embodied in the form of a Caribbean woman named Miss Penclosa. The narrator, Austin Gilroy, becomes convinced by a series of demonstrations that Penclosa’s mesmeric powers are real and undergoes mesmerism himself. Later, however, he is disconcerted to find that Penclosa has fallen in love with him and is seeking to break up his engagement with
his fiancée, Agatha—in particular by mesmerically commanding him to throw sulphuric acid in her face. The attempt fails, Gilroy eventually finds himself able to resist Penclosa’s mesmeric powers, and—in a woeful anticlimax—she proceeds to die. “The Parasite” is sometimes referred to as a vampire story, but the term is never used in the tale and the most one can assume is that Miss Penclosa is some kind of psychic vampire. Doyle tried his hand at comic weird tales, with indifferent success. One example is “Selecting a Ghost” (London Society, December 1883), in which a man hires a “ghost-dealer” to furnish a ghost for his mediaeval castles, since of course all mediaeval ghosts must have a ghost. The dealer makes several different types of ghosts appear in succession in a kind of interview process. In reality, however, he is merely bamboozling the castle owner by drugging him and then robbing him. The tale is a bit heavy-handed and obvious, but not entirely without its chuckles. Somewhat better is “The Great Keinplatz Experiment” (Belgravia, July 1885), in which a Professor von Baumgarten, determined to prove that the soul is separable from the body, engages in a mesmeric experiment that will allow his soul to enter the body of a pupil, Fritz von Hartmann, while Hartmann’s soul enters his own body. The experiment works, although the two men aren’t immediately aware of it: incredibly, each soul fails to realise that it has entered a different body until well along in the proceedings. A second experiment reverses the process. Doyle’s reputation as a weird writer will rest on his two substantial tales of Egyptian horror, “The Ring of Thoth” (Cornhill, January 1890) and “Lot No. 249” (Harper’s, September 1892). The first might in fact constitute a genuine mystery/horror hybrid in that, at the outset, the crux of the tale is the puzzle represented by an Egyptian attendant at the Louvre who appears to be paying an unusual amount of attention to a female mummy. The narrator, the Egyptologist John Vansittart Smith, finding himself (implausibly) locked in the Louvre at night after having fallen asleep in some remote alcove, sees the attendant unwrap the mummy, whose body is remarkably well-preserved. Confronting the man, Smith finds that the attendant is one Sosra, born in 1600 B.C.E. Sosra had discovered a chemical formula that “would endow the body with strength to resist the effects of time, of violence, or of disease” (214). He had fallen in love with Atma, but she was hesitant in taking the formula (“was it not a thwarting of the will of the gods?” she wonders [215]), and she died of the white plague
before Sosra could prevail upon her to take the formula. A friend, Parmes, who had also taken the formula had found an antidote to it—because he had in fact become tired of living forever and wished to die naturally. A key ingredient of this antidote was placed in the hollow crystal of the ring of Thoth, now on the finger of the female mummy, who of course is Atma. The most memorable phase of the story is not the formula for eternal life (which a physician like Doyle must have known was ludicrously implausible) but Sosra’s cosmic reflections on his long life: “‘I have travelled in all lands and I have dwelt with all nations. Every tongue is the same to me. I learned them all to help pass the weary time. I need not tell you how slowly they drifted by, the long dawn of modern civilization, the dreary middle years, the dark times of barbarism. They are all behind me now’” (219–20). Sosra goes on to state, remarkably, that he wishes to “shake off that accursed health which has been worse to me than the foulest disease” (221). “Lot No. 249” is Doyle’s most celebrated weird tale and, on the whole, it deserves its celebrity. We are at Oxford, where Edward Bellingham has purchased a very large mummy (six feet seven inches in height) at an auction—it was lot number 249. The mystery element here is really not much of a mystery: when we learn successively that a servant hears someone walking about in Bellingham’s room when he is not there, and when a student who had a grudge against Bellingham is attacked by an apelike creature, the only likely scenario is that Bellingham has somehow managed to revive the mummy. The mummy’s pursuit of the protagonist, Abercrombie Smith, who is attempting to combat Bellingham’s nefarious scheme, is a memorable action-adventure scene, and the tale climaxes effectively with Smith compelling Bellingham to cut up the mummy and throw it in the fire, along with the papyrus that evidently contains the secret of its reanimation. Doyle worked reasonably effectively in the non-supernatural horror tale. “The Case of Lady Sannox” (Idler, November 1893) is somewhat reminiscent of “The Parasite” in its account of a man who revenges himself upon an unfaithful wife by contriving to have her doctor lover unwittingly disfigure her face. “The Brazilian Cat” (Strand, December 1898) contains some hair-raising scenes in telling of a man, Marshall King, who finds himself trapped in a room with a very large and vicious Brazilian cat but manages to redirect the cat’s ferocity against its owner, his cousin Everard,
who had sought to gain a title and inheritance by putting Marshall out of the way. We will have occasion to treat some of Doyle’s later science fiction/horror hybrids in a later chapter. For now, it can be said regretfully that most of Doyle’s early horror tales really amount to very little: they are just stories, told well or badly as the case may be, with little underlying depth or substance. They lack even the vivid play of ideas that enlivens the tales of H. G. Wells, and at best can be regarded merely as competent examples of the weird fiction of their time, no better or worse than the work of Doyle’s contemporaries.
iv. French Horror The last two decades of the nineteenth century saw the surprising emergence of Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) to prominence in the realm of supernatural and psychological horror literature. I say surprising because this master craftsman of the short story, although manifestly influenced by Poe in the construction of short fiction, appears not to have been notably attracted to the supernatural until late in life; whether the onset of paranoia and other psychological troubles, apparently the product of the syphilis that resulted in his early death, led or contributed to this attraction remains an open question. None of his six novels are supernatural. In Maupassant it is frequently difficult to make a clear distinction between supernatural and psychological horror, not only because the appearance of the supernatural frequently engenders extreme psychological reactions in the protagonists but because those protagonists themselves, often patently disturbed at the very outset of the tale, become highly unreliable narrators, so that the manifestation of the supernatural becomes a matter of doubt. Consider the celebrated “He?” (“Lui?” Gil Blas, 3 July 1883). Here a man decides to marry, even though he holds the institution of marriage in disdain, “so I shall not have to be on my own!” (18). The reasons for his terror of solitude emerge gradually in the narrative. He had once come back to his house to find someone sitting in the chair before the fire—but no one is in fact there. This kind of thing happens several times, until the man becomes terrified of seeing “him” in his residence. The result is a constant state of fear: “Well, then!” you’ll say. “What are you afraid of?” Yes, I know . . . Well . . . I’m afraid of myself! I’m afraid of fear, afraid of my panic-stricken mind, afraid of that horrible sensation of incomprehensible terror. Oh, you can laugh, if you like. But it’s terrible—and incurable. I’m afraid of the walls, of the furniture, of familiar objects, which
seem to me to take on a kind of animal life. Above all, I am afraid of the horrible confusion of my thoughts, of the way my reason becomes blurred and elusive, scattered by a mysterious, invisible anguish. (18–19) As this passage itself suggests, the entire story reads like a clinical account of madness. Similarly, in the mad narrative called “Who Knows?” (“Qui sait?” Echo de Paris, 6 August 1890), the narrator announces at the outset: “I am writing this in a private mental hospital” (145). This does not inspire confidence, especially when he tells the bizarre tale of coming home at night and finding all the pieces of his furniture marching out of the house of their own accord. Later the man finds them in an antique shop, but when he notifies the police the furniture is no longer in the shop; still later, the furniture returns to the man’s house. Did the furniture ever really walk out? Was the man mad even before he checked himself into the mental hospital? We never know, and are not meant to know. “The Dead Girl” (“La Morte,” Gil Blas, 31 May 1887; usually translated as “Was It a Dream?”), if genuinely supernatural, constitutes a spectacular use of the supernatural for the purposes of moral satire. A man loves a woman, but she dies soon after they are married. He later goes to the cemetery where she is buried and sees all the occupants of the graves rising up: they are erasing the euphemistic inscriptions written on their tombstones and instead are writing the unvarnished truth about themselves. Here is one of them: “Here lies Jacques Olivant, who departed this life at the age of 51. Through his callous behaviour he hastened the death of his father, because he wanted his money. He tortured his wife, tormented his children, deceived his neighbours, robbed people whenever he could, and died in disgrace” (136–37). In a particularly grim twist, the man’s beloved’s tombstone is revised as follows: “Having gone out one day in order to deceive her lover, she caught cold in the rain, and died” (137). The story remains just on this side of allegory. “Apparition” (in Claire de lune, 1884), uncharacteristically set in the past—the Rouen of 1827—deals with a soldier who meets an old friend who has aged hideously: this man had married but his wife had died after a year. The man asks the soldier to go to his chateau and bring back some papers from the bedroom, which has been sealed up since the wife’s death.
He does so—but sees the apparition of a woman who, in a transparently sexual gesture, asks him to comb her hair. Later the spectre disappears—but the man’s coat is covered with long black hair. Some of Maupassant’s tales are manifestly tales of crime and suspense: “On the River” (“En Canot,” Bulletin Français, 10 March 1876), in which a man in a boat, finding it difficult to pull up his anchor, finally manages to extricate the anchor from some impediment and finds that it brings up the body of a dead woman with a stone tied around her neck; “The Little Roque Girl” (“La Petite Roque,” Gil Blas, 18–23 December 1885), in which the mayor of a small town comes upon a young woman bathing and, in a fit of madness, rapes and kills her, but then finds himself overwhelmed with guilt and terror and kills himself. But even these tales are written with such a compressed tensity of expression that they become almost intolerably grim. For all the excellence of Maupassant’s other tales, his richest and most compelling supernatural tale remains “The Horla” (“Le Horla”), which was published in both a short version (Gil Blas, 26 October 1886) and a long version (as a booklet, Ollendorf, 1887). This mesmerising narrative of a man who believes himself to be haunted by an invisible creature who appears to subsist on milk and water makes one momentarily think that the events of the tale can be accounted for psychologically. At the very outset he announces that he is feverish and depressed; after his condition deteriorates, he goes on a vacation to Mont St. Michel, where he hears strange legends of monsters and asks himself whether “beings other than ourselves exist” (100). All this appears to suggest that the invisible monster may be a hallucination; but then the man conducts an experiment that seems to confirm the actual existence of the alien entity. Unless we are to assume that the narrator is so unreliable that even his bare recital of facts is in doubt, we are forced to assume that at this point the supernatural is involved. The narrator’s poignant utterance much later—“The rule of man has come to an end” (117)—is the result of his reading a book by one Hermann Herestauss, “doctor of philosophy and theogony” (114), who, it appears, has provided a kind of anthropology of the supernatural: From reading this book I have the impression that man, ever since he has had the ability to think, has had the foreboding that a new creature would appear, someone stronger than himself, who
would be his successor on earth. And, feeling that his arrival was imminent, but not being able to see what form this new master would take, man has created, out of sheer terror, a whole race of imaginary occult beings, vague ghosts born of fear. (114–15) When the narrator hears of similar creatures appearing in Brazil, he feels that the onslaught of these invisible monsters has come in earnest—so what else can he do but kill himself? “The Horla” is one of the pinnacles of that fusion of supernatural and psychological horror that Maupassant made distinctly his own: once the manifestation of the supernatural is verified beyond all doubt, the effect on the psyche of a sensitive mind is so cataclysmic that madness or suicide is the only escape. A fair number of Maupassant’s stories fail to deliver, but the best of them will give him an unassailable place in the supernatural literature of his time. It is customary to regard Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) as a significant figure in weird literature, but his actual contributions to specifically supernatural writing are slim to negligible, although this is not of course to deny the scintillating brilliance of his two chief novels, À Rebours (1884; usually translated as Against the Grain) and Là-Bas (1891; usually translated as Down There). There is, indeed, a pervasive sense of weirdness in Against the Grain and the quest of its celebrated protagonist, Jean Des Esseintes, to find some exotic phase of human activity—physical, artistic, or religious—to relieve his ineffable ennui; but it becomes plain that Des Esseintes’s quest is fundamentally aesthetic—a rejection of the bourgeois naturalism of Zola and his school. Much the same could be said of Down There, where at the very opening we are regaled with a vicious attack on Zolaesque naturalism, which “rejects every aspiration towards the supernatural and the beyond” (8). The protagonist of Down There, Durtal, does not entirely subscribe to this view, and of course nothing supernatural actually occurs. Instead, we are given highly detailed—and rather repulsive —accounts of the mediaeval black mass, the loathsome crimes of Gilles de Rais (about whom Durtal professes to be writing a treatise), and, in the novel’s most sensational (but quite brief) scene, a depiction of a modernday black mass, chiefly involving a mixture of lasciviousness and deliberate blasphemy. This scene, as well as the novel as a whole, may have influenced subsequent supernatural literature to some degree, but the overall effect of Down There is more disgust than terror.
The work of another distinguished Frenchman, Jean-Marie-MathiasPhilippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–1889), should be noted if only to make the point that they do not fall within the scope of the weird tale. His Contes cruels (1883) and Nouveaux contes cruels (1888) are masterpieces of the short story and, in their emphasis on grim twists of fate, set the stage for the later work of Maurice Level. His most celebrated tale, “The Torture by Hope” (“La Torture par l’espérance”), in which a prison official deliberately lets a prisoner escape only so that he may experience the added pain of recapture, is certainly a keen and meticulous analysis of sadism; and much of Villiers’s other work reveals keen psychological analysis of this sort. At best, his stories may venture occasionally into the realm of psychological suspense, but even here only rarely.
v. Slumming with Stoker and Others The later nineteenth century saw the true emergence of what might be called the cleavage between “high” and “low” literature. We have seen that Edgar Allan Poe was already aware of such a cleavage in the 1840s, but, as I have argued elsewhere (see Junk Fiction 16–20), the dichotomy only became pronounced around 1880 and afterward, a combined result of the increased literacy rates among the general populace in both the United States and Europe and the increase in wages and leisure time on the part of these newly literate citizens, allowing them to purchase literary works (and other “entertainment” products) in far greater numbers than before. The phenomenon of the “bestseller”—the book (almost always a novel) that sells millions, rather than merely tens of thousands, of copies—really emerges only at this time. In England, one of the most notable writers of popular fiction—notable not because of his aesthetic skill but because of his ability to write what the public wanted—was H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925). In a long career that spanned more than forty years and included nearly sixty novels along with several books of nonfiction, Haggard established a reputation as a writer of thrilling adventure stories set in exotic locales. He was himself widely travelled in the regions he wrote about, having spent significant time in South Africa, Egypt, Mexico, the Middle East, and elsewhere, either for work or for pleasure. King Solomon’s Mines (1885) was his first bestseller. Haggard rarely dealt significantly with the supernatural, and our chief concern is with the early novel She (1887). This novel, along with most of Haggard’s others, displays to the full the traits of what might be called the “page-turner” school of popular fiction: a relatively simple, easy-to-read prose style and likeable characters with whom the reader can identify; a plot full of intriguing complications that are nonetheless resolved at the end; “cliffhanger” conclusions to chapters that compel the reader to find out what happens to the hapless protagonists who appear on the verge of death or injury; a parade of pseudo-scholarly learning to impress the naive reader; and so on. It is hardly necessary to trace the convoluted plot of She; suffice it to say that it broadly concerns the
attempt by the young and strikingly handsome Leo Vincey and his guardian, Ludwig H. Holly, to find the lost kingdom of Kôr and its enigmatic ruler, the unnamed and possibly immortal woman who goes only by the name of She—or, more precisely (and preposterously), “She-whomust-be-obeyed.” In fact, She is not actually immortal, but has lived for about two millennia in a remote and nearly inaccessible area of Africa somewhere near Zanzibar (which, nevertheless, our intrepid heroes find with surprising ease). She has extended her life by means of a flame called “Pillar of Life” (37) into which she once (and only once) stepped. She is a “beautiful white woman . . . who is reported to have power over all things living and dead” (34). It would not do to have a valiant Englishman fall in love with a woman of colour. Both Vincey and Holly do fall in love with She, although her eyes are clearly for the former, who himself looks something like a Greek god. In point of fact, She comes to the realisation that Vincey must be the reincarnation of the Egyptian man she had fallen in love with two thousand years ago—something that Vincey’s father had suggested to Holly prior to his death. But, alas! things go awry at the end. She urges Vincey to step into the Pillar of Life to become immortal; he is reluctant, and so she does so herself, perhaps to rejuvenate herself for another twenty centuries— but the result is catastrophe, as she shrivels up and (apparently) dies. Haggard’s portrayal of She is not entirely incompetent, although he amusingly endows her with various traits—such as a robust belief in what would come to be called Social Darwinism, not to mention a scorn of religion that comes pretty close to atheism—that is clearly meant to make her a redoubtable figure to pious young Englishmen. Indeed, Holly, while acknowledging her transcendent beauty, plainly brands her as “evil” (187). It doesn’t help her cause, in Holly’s eyes, that She blandly and ruthlessly kills a native woman, Ustane, who had herself fallen in love with Vincey. As it is, the most dramatic and engaging scene in She is the attempt by the three protagonists to go through the ruins of the city of Kôr (a city that was built by some race now extinct), through a volcano, and toward the Pillar of Life that will presumably rejuvenate them—although there is more of adventure than the supernatural in this episode. After the dénouement where She, going into the fire, is seen “growing old before my eyes!” (355), Haggard is careful to leave room for a sequel (“we feel that it [the end of the adventure] is not reached yet” (384). But it took Haggard a number of
years to produce the sequel, Ayesha: The Return of She (1905), a lacklustre performance in which the three protagonists are revived like reanimated corpses to go through their mechanical motions one more time. Still later, in She and Allan (1921), Haggard united She and his other chief hero, Allan Quatermain (from King Solomon’s Mines and other novels), in another lifeless sequel. Haggard is of significance in virtually creating the “lost race” subgenre of adventure fiction, although this subgenre has rarely produced works of any aesthetic viability. W. Clark Russell (1844–1911), the author of sea stories, wrote two novels that may or may not be supernatural. Russell joined the British merchant service in 1858 and served for eight years, gaining the nautical background that he utilised in dozens of novels written over the next forty years. In The Frozen Pirate (1887) Russell approached the supernatural. In 1801 a shipwrecked sailor, Paul Rodney, stumbles upon an icebound pirate ship, the Boca del Dragon, near Antarctica and finds several of its crewmen apparently frozen to death. Rodney inadvertently resuscitates one of them, a French pirate named Jules Tassard, when he brings Tassard’s body close to a fire in the ship’s kitchen. He learns that Tassard has been frozen since 1754, although Tassard himself refuses to believe that so much time has passed. Shortly after his revival, Tassard suddenly ages half a century in a few hours, dying a hideously decrepit old man. The rest of the novel is a letdown, as it merely concerns Rodney’s efforts to free the ship from the ice and sail it back to England while protecting the ship’s immense stolen booty from thieves or customs agents. Russell’s next novel, The Death Ship (1888), is manifestly supernatural. It makes use of the same basic plot as Marryat’s Phantom Ship but is somewhat more compelling (or less absurd). In 1799 a sailor, Geoffrey Fenton, falls overboard and is picked up by the Braave, which proves to be nothing less than the legendary “Flying Dutchman”—a ship that set sail from Holland in 1653 and, because of the captain’s defiance of God, is compelled to sail repeatedly around the Cape of Good Hope and never return home. The ship’s crewmen, while seemingly alive, are grotesquely gray and wizened in appearance, and they are unable to realize that they have been sailing for a century and a half, believing they have been on the boat for only a few months. Much of the narrative is focused on a love interest that develops between Fenton and another living human being, Imogene Dudley, who has been on the ship for five years and despairs of
ever getting off it. Fenton believes that their only hope of escape lies not in meeting another ship—which would only flee in terror, perhaps believing that Geoffrey and Imogene are among the living dead—but in sailing into a port and hoping that they will be rescued there. At long last the Braave approaches a port, but the duo’s escape goes awry: although they manage to get into a lifeboat, Imogene is hit by a bullet fired by the captain, Cornelius Vanderdecken, and dies. Fenton rescues himself and returns to England, but is heartbroken. Both of Russell’s novels were immensely popular and were issued in numerous pirated editions in the United States, the latter sometimes appearing under the title The Flying Dutchman; or, The Death Ship. Like Russell’s other works, they are prolix and stiff in diction, and Russell’s overuse of technical nautical jargon makes for difficult reading. His characterisation is unremarkable, but his realism in depicting all aspects of sea life has rarely been matched. Another author who is more trashy than otherwise is Richard Marsh (1857?–1915), whose chief claim to fame is the sensational novel The Beetle (1897). This work is perhaps the first supernatural “thriller” of any consequence, and it is an entertaining enough read, although entirely frivolous and insubstantial. Its structure is superficially clever: it is told in four “books,” each narrated by a different character. What one concludes after reading The Beetle, however, is that this narrative device is chiefly utilised to stretch out into a full-length novel a plot that would otherwise be barely sufficient for a longish short story. In essence, we are dealing with a horror out of Egypt. Paul Lessingham, a noted British politician, ventured to Egypt when he was eighteen and was kidnapped by a member of the cult of Isis. After witnessing “orgies of nameless horrors” (253) that apparently involved human sacrifice (mostly of white women, with Englishwomen given high preference), Paul manages to escape by throttling his female captor—although as he is completing the job she apparently turns into a large beetle in front of his eyes. Twenty years later the cult is after him, for unspecified reasons: if it merely wishes to exact revenge upon him, why did it wait so long? Well, no matter. We are now dealing with the presence in London of a baleful Egyptian: whether it is a man or a woman is unclear, and whether it is the same person who kidnapped Paul two decades before or some other is also a mystery (this person does declare, however, that Paul
actually killed his/her kinswoman [132–33], leading one to think that this is some other person). There is no need to trace the complexities of the convoluted plot, which, as I have suggested, ultimately resolves into a relatively simple chain of events. Much space is spent on a tedious development of a love interest between Paul and Marjorie Lindon—and, as could have been predicted almost at the outset, the novel concludes with a thrilling chase scene in which Marjorie is seized by the Egyptian (apparently for the purpose of taking her back to Egypt to be sacrificed), and Paul and others giving chase. Naturally, they save her. The crux is whether the transformation into a beetle is genuine or merely some kind of trick—perhaps a result of hypnosis. The phenomenon occurs in front of another character, Sydney Atherton, a rival for Marjorie’s affections. Marsh apparently tips his hand when at the end of the novel— after the Egyptian has died in a train crash—a private detective notes that the following is all that is left of the entity: On the cushions and woodwork . . . were huge blotches,—stains of some sort. When first noticed they were damp, and gave out a most unpleasant smell. One of the pieces of woodwork is yet in my possession,—with the stain still on it. Experts have pronounced upon it too,—with the result that opinions are divided. Some maintain that the stain was produced by human blood, which had been subjected to a great heat, and, so to speak, parboiled. Others declare that it is the blood of some wild animal,—possibly of some creature of the cat species. Yet others affirm that it is not blood at all, but merely paint. While a fourth describes it as—I quote the written opinion which lies in front of me—“caused apparently by a deposit of some sort of viscid matter, probably the execretion [sic] of some variety of lizard.” (347) So I suppose we are to assume that this is the end of the beetle. Marsh wrote some supernatural short stories—now gathered in The Haunted Chair and Other Stories (1997)—but they don’t amount to much. It has frequently been noted that The Beetle was published in the same year as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and for a time outsold it; but this does not
signify much, for Dracula was not in fact a commercial success. Although receiving generally positive reviews, it sold poorly, and, surprisingly, there was no American edition to match the British edition published by Constable. The book soon fell out of print and would not be reissued until 1901. Although Stoker himself prepared a hasty dramatic version, chiefly to protect his copyright for such an adaptation, no actual drama of Dracula appeared until after his death. Stoker had every reason to believe that his years-long effort in researching and writing the novel had been wasted. Bram Stoker (1847–1912) would have been astounded that his novel Dracula would become the prototype of the vampire myth and the source for more adaptations—in film, theatre, television, and other media—than almost any other work in literary history. For much of his life, Stoker did not even consider himself primarily a literary man; instead, he snatched the time to write his dozen novels and a handful of short stories in the midst of a career of a very different sort. It is well known that, after working as a drama critic for some years, he became in 1878 the business manager and personal secretary to Henry Irving, one of the leading actors of the period. This work continued until Irving’s death in 1905, with the result that Stoker could only take up literary work in fits and starts, beginning with the story collection Under the Sunset (1882). Dracula has, especially in recent years, inspired a cadre of devoted— sometimes fanatical—supporters who parse its minutiae as if it were a biblical text and vaunt its literary virtues far beyond what any fair-minded critic would accept. In fact, Dracula is not a particular success from a purely aesthetic point of view. Although its first four chapters—the episode where Jonathan Harker, a solicitor, goes to Castle Dracula in Transylvania to complete the paperwork for Dracula’s purchase of a castle in Purfleet in Essex—constitute one of the most gripping and evocative set-pieces in the history of supernatural fiction, the novel subsequently gets bogged down in tedious repetition (the very slow transformation of Lucy Westenra into a vampire as a result of repeated bloodsuckings by Dracula; the glacial pace with which the madman Renfield falls under Dracula’s spell) that woefully dissipates the dramatic tensity established at the outset. Dracula’s final demise at the hands of the valiant band of Englishmen (with one American thrown in) is more than a little anticlimactic. The greatest failing of Dracula, however, may be its moral unadventurousness. The whole novel is structured along a series of
dichotomies, chief of which is the portrayal of Dracula as wholly evil and his opponents (Harker and his wife, Mina; Arthur Holmwood [later Lord Godalming], Lucy’s fiancé; Jack Seward, who runs the nearby insane asylum; and, preeminently, the saintly Dutchman Abraham Van Helsing, whose broken English resembles nothing so much as the similar linguistic clumsiness of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot or John P. Marquand’s Charlie Chan) as wholly good. The fact that Dracula alone never presents his side of the matter, after the early chapters with Jonathan Harker, and that he is scarcely even seen throughout the rest of the novel and is detected only through his baleful handiwork (chiefly the bloodsucking of Lucy and Mina Harker, with sundry murders along the way), definitively paints him as the prototypical Other. The novel is famously composed of a series of documents—diaries, letters, or memorandums by Jonathan, Mina, Seward, Van Helsing, and others—but Dracula scarcely utters a word after the opening chapters. Some other dichotomies are worth pursuing briefly. The central one in Dracula would seem to be the contrast between Christianity and Satanism. And yet, it is not entirely clear whether Dracula has in fact sold his soul to Satan to achieve his supernatural powers. There is, indeed, a perplexing lack of clarity as to how he actually became a vampire. When, in chapter 18, Van Helsing presents a history and biology of vampires, he first remarks that vampires are known throughout the world (India, China, France, Germany, etc.)—in which case it becomes a bit of a puzzle why the tokens of Christianity are so efficacious against them, especially against Dracula. Van Helsing goes on to assert that Dracula was a valiant soldier who battled the Turks: “That mighty brain and that iron resolution went with him to his grave, and are even now arrayed against us” (264–65). But surely these traits are not enough to make one a vampire, otherwise there would be thousands of them. Van Helsing also declares that some members of Dracula’s family “were held by their coevals to have had dealings with the Evil One” (265), but the purport of this remark is unclear. Indeed, much earlier it is suggested that Dracula’s ancestors worshipped Thor and Odin (32). Whatever the case, Christianity does indeed appear to be the weapon of choice against Dracula. It is in this novel that we find the now hackneyed use of the crucifix as a defence, along with the sacred wafer (Van Helsing, depositing one on Lucy’s tomb, blandly notes, “I have an Indulgence” [232]) and so forth. It is, however, never clarified why garlic is a vampire
repellent. Why, among all the flora in creation, does this particular one work so efficaciously? Stoker did not invent this tidbit, but presumably adapted it from existing superstition. The suggestion has been put forth that garlic is a mosquito repellent, and that therefore it could also work against vampires when they take the form of bats. (It is now well known that Stoker was not entirely clear-cut on whether Dracula could walk about during the day. Overall, Dracula suggests that he can, but that his powers are restricted during daylight—that is, he must remain in the human form and cannot transform himself into a bat, a wolf, or a mist, as he does at other times. It was only the film Nosferatu [1922] that definitively declared that vampires cannot walk in daylight and in fact can be killed by the rays of the sun.) Other dichotomies can be dealt with more briefly. There is an obvious contrast of past and present (Dracula, at the outset, states: “I myself am of an old family, and to live in a new house would kill me” [26]) and of East vs. West. There might be a contrast between nobility and commoners, but in fact the distinction is not clear-cut. Dracula’s opponents are by and large commoners (especially the American Quincey Morris, although he is in fact a relatively colourless character who does not figure much in the action), but one of them, Arthur Holmwood, becomes Lord Godalming upon his father’s death and uses his title at key moments to foster the group’s attempts to hunt down Dracula. Similarly, notwithstanding many critics’ claims to the contrary, there is no genuine contrast between superstition and (contemporary) science, even though Van Helsing at one point observes that “we have sources of science” (262). In fact, the weapons he and others use to combat Dracula are precisely those that derive from the legendary superstitions about the laying of vampires—the cross, the stake, garlic, and so forth. In hindsight, the sexual overtones of Dracula seem to us unmistakable; and yet, contemporary readers and reviewers—who only a few years earlier had expressed outrage at the seeming sexual perversion hinted at in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894)—appear to have overlooked them. Stoker’s horror of unconventional sexuality manifests itself on several levels: the perceived threat of sexually aggressive women is seen in the attempt of the three female vampires to seduce Jonathan Harker in the depths of Dracula’s castle, and also in the fate of Lucy Westenra, who is punished for her suggestions of sexual dalliance by becoming a vampire and suffering a hideous perversion of a bride’s deflowering when she is
staked through the heart by her fiancé, Lord Godalming. Perhaps the most dramatic scene in Dracula, from this perspective, is Dracula’s seduction of Mina at the very time she is sharing a bed with her new husband, Jonathan, as he forces her to suck blood from his own breast—a transparent metaphor both for oral sex and for the Victorian male’s ever-present fear of female infidelity. Indeed, Stoker’s portrayal of the central women in his novel is discouragingly conventional. Statements like Mina’s toward the end—“I know that all that brave earnest men can do for a poor weak woman . . . you will do” (365)—abound. Stoker can hide behind the fact that these statements are uttered by his characters and not by any omniscient narrator, but the absence of any statements or actions contradicting them bespeaks Stoker’s reactionary attitude toward women. Dracula has, as I have suggested, spawned a cottage industry tracing its sources and influences. By all accounts it is his most autobiographical novel; as his most recent biographer, Barbara Belford, has noted, “He dumped the signposts of his life into a supernatural cauldron and called it Dracula” (256). Something so trivial as the name of the hapless solicitor Jonathan Harker has been traced to one Joseph Harker, a scene painter at the Lyceum, the London theatre where Irving and his company performed. In Harker’s wife, Mina, the prototype of the pure, virginal, deferential woman whom Stoker manifestly saw as the ideal for the female sex, we perhaps see some features of the personality of the famous actress Ellen Terry, who frequently shared the stage with Irving and became one of Stoker’s closest friends. In the more disturbing character of Lucy Westenra, who appears willing to bestow her feminine charms upon a succession of willing suitors, we may perhaps see a dim echo of Stoker’s vision of his own wife, Florence, who had dallied with Oscar Wilde before agreeing to link her fate with another Irishman. The American adventurer Quincey Morris no doubt derives from the numerous colourful figures Stoker met during his American tours of the 1880s—perhaps he was thinking specifically of Buffalo Bill Cody, with whom he shared a stage in 1886. As for Abraham Van Helsing, the valiant Dutch psychic detective who finally defeats the vampire, his first name echoes that of Stoker’s own father, as is fitting for this benevolent father-figure. No doubt he also owes much, especially in his irritating know-it-all stance, to Le Fanu’s Martin Hesselius. And in Dracula himself it is difficult not to see the figure of Henry Irving,
whose performances in the roles of Hamlet and Macbeth showed him to be a master at portraying the forbidding hero-villain. Literary and historical sources for Dracula also seem to abound. The pioneering research of Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally has identified the historical Dracula as Vlad Tepes, the fifteenth-century Hungarian tyrant whose ruthless campaigns against the Turks bestowed upon him the soubriquet Vlad the Impaler. Vlad, of course, was not a vampire, nor was even rumoured to be a vampire, but he became one significant component of a manifestly composite picture. Stoker found the name Dracula in William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia: “Dracula in the Wallachian language means Devil. Wallachians were accustomed to give it as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous by courage, cruel actions or cunning.” A book by Stoker’s brother George, With the Unspeakables; or, Two Years’ Campaigning in European and Asiatic Turkey (1878), provided the background for the Transylvanian setting of Dracula’s opening chapters. The numerous parallels between Dracula and Shakespeare’s Macbeth (staged at the Lyceum in 1888–89) are noteworthy, chief among them the three “weird sisters,” echoed by the three female vampires in Dracula’s Transylvanian castle. Count Dracula’s frequent use of hypnotism may owe something to the celebrated character Svengali in George du Maurier’s novel Trilby (1894). As for previous vampire literature itself, Stoker took at least a few hints from a number of his predecessors, whether it be such potboilers as Rymer’s Varney the Vampire or more artistic works such as Polidori’s “The Vampyre” or Le Fanu’s “Carmilla.” Indeed, it is believed that Stoker omitted an early chapter of Dracula out of respect for Le Fanu; titled “Dracula’s Guest,” it later served as the lead story in the posthumous collection Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories (1914). Dracula is not the only novel of Stoker’s that merits our attention. Although he followed it up with a mediocre romance, Miss Betty (1898), he then produced the respectable witchcraft novel The Mystery of the Sea (1902) and an impressive tale of Egyptian horror, The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903). Like Dracula, it is a supernatural detective story, with elements of the locked-room mystery. No doubt Stoker had read the early Sherlock Holmes tales by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to good effect as they appeared in the Strand in the 1890s. Like Holmes in a similar situation, a character in The Jewel of Seven Stars, Dr. Winchester, makes the momentous
pronouncement: “I have exhausted all human and natural possibilities of the case, and am beginning to fall back on superhuman and supernatural possibilities” (728). There is even a quasi-science-fictional element, in that the jewel of the title has been extracted from an aerolite. Like many later Victorians, Stoker saw in the radical advancements of science during his time a means to defeat superstition once and for all. The Egyptologist Abel Trelawny suggests as much when he ponders the possibility that the ancient Egyptians might have known and used the properties of radium. His socalled Great Experiment—the magical resurrection of the mummified pharaoh-queen—constitutes some of the most impressive pages in Stoker’s entire output. The Lair of the White Worm (1911), Stoker’s last novel, was written in a scant three months in 1911, but its rapidity of composition should not lead us to devalue it; Lovecraft thought it a dreadful piece of hackwork, but it is not entirely to be despised. It is, once again, a supernatural detective story, and Stoker is careful to lay the clues that allow us to identify the sinister Lady Arabella March as something very different from the refined aristocrat she claims to be. Some of Stoker’s relatively few short stories are of note. The entire collection Under the Sunset contains some bizarre fairy tales that appear to take great relish in describing the vicious mutilation of children. His most noteworthy stories are “The Judge’s House” (Holly Leaves, 5 December 1891), a grim tale of a revenant, and “The Squaw” (Holly Leaves, 2 December 1893), a powerful supernatural revenge tale. Bram Stoker died on 20 April 1912, five days after the Titanic disaster. The story of his widow Florence’s jealous guarding of his literary properties —in particular, her lawsuit against F. W. Murnau, whose masterful film Nosferatu (1922) was loosely based on Dracula, with the result that the film was withdrawn from circulation and not seen for decades—is well known. She did permit dramatic adaptations of Dracula by Hamilton Deane (1924) and John Balderston (1930), the latter of which was famously adapted for the film starring Bela Lugosi. It is, indeed, widely acknowledged even by Stoker’s most devoted supporters that it was only the films that established the novel as the prototypical literary work on vampires. It is certainly the most exhaustive treatment of the subject up to its time, but whether it deserves the adulation it has elicited in certain quarters is very much to be questioned.
VIII. The Deluge: American Branch American writers were by no means slow in taking up the cause of supernatural fiction. The two most celebrated proponents of the form in this period, Henry James and Ambrose Bierce, embody what might be seen as a significant geographical polarisation in American weird writing. What I term the East Coast School appears to have drawn its chief inspiration from English or European models and chose predominantly East Coast or European settings for their tales, while the West Coast School, under the tutelage of Bierce, sought to transfer the sense of horror and weirdness to the “new” lands (new, of course, only in terms of Anglo-Saxon settlement) of the Pacific coast. In so doing, they generated work that is substantially more violent, grisly, and in many cases emotively powerful than their more reserved East Coast rivals, with the result that this West Coast School ultimately came to have the greater influence upon subsequent weird work in the United States. The writers of this school also departed more forcefully than the East Coast School from the hackneyed ghost story tradition, opening the way for more imaginative treatments of supernatural motifs in the generations to follow.
i. The East Coast School By general acclamation, then and now, the leader of the East Coast School was Henry James (1843–1916), in spite of the fact that he deserted the United States for England in 1876, after only the first four of his eighteen or so ghost stories were written. In truth, however, a number of the tales collected by Leon Edel and first published under the title The Ghostly Tales of Henry James (1949; later titled Stories of the Supernatural) are so marginally weird that they scarcely deserve discussion here. Indeed, the sad fact is that a great bulk of James’s ghostly writings are disappointing at best, crippled by James’s increasingly mincing and affected prose style and their general timidity in regard to the actual supernatural manifestation. Whatever value they may have as documents of psychological analysis, as weird tales they are sorry pieces of work. The early tale “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (Atlantic Monthly, February 1868), published when James was not quite twenty-five, is curiously wooden and stiff, and every plot development (including the supernatural dénouement) is telegraphed. “De Grey: A Romance” (Atlantic Monthly, July 1868) deals in lacklustre fashion with a priest who appears to be a kind of psychic vampire. “Sir Edmund Orme” (Black and White, Christmas 1891) is of slightly greater interest, speaking of an apparition—the ghost of a man who was jilted in love—who haunts his lover’s daughter, and who finally vanishes when the daughter admits to him her love for another man. As a means of emphasising the pangs of disappointed love, the supernatural is used with some effectiveness here. Of James’s shorter tales, perhaps only two are worth singling out. In “The Ghostly Rental” (Scribner’s Monthly, September 1876), an old man claims that he drove his daughter to death and that she now rents his house from him, paying him in gold and silver pieces that “are all dated before the young girl’s death” (122). This is a fascinating premise for a ghostly tale, and the narrator actually sees—or thinks he sees—the ghost of the daughter at one point. In fact, however, the daughter is alive, and she comes to her father when he is dying, whereupon she sees his ghost. “The Real Right Thing” (Collier’s Weekly, 16 December 1899), the shortest of James’s ghost
stories, powerfully etches the heavy hand of the past in the figure of a celebrated writer who, after his death, appears to haunt his widow and the man he designated to look after his estate. Ambiguity remains to the end as to whether the ghost has actually appeared, but the tale is no less powerful for that. But all James’s incompetencies and fussinesses and nebulosities can be forgiven in light of The Turn of the Screw (1898)—a tale that forms the ultimate refinement of the Christmas ghost story that is told to a group of receptive listeners. The short novel has inspired a veritable library of criticism, some of it abstruse beyond comprehension or tolerance, so I do not pretend to do more here than touch upon certain central features of the text. The chief point of dispute, of course, is the very existence of the supernatural in the tale. What has somewhat pejoratively been termed a “naive” reading sees the story as putting on stage two definite ghosts—that of the dead valet Peter Quint and that of the dead ex-governess Miss Jessel —who, either individually or in tandem, work to corrupt the “innocent” children, Miles and Flora, whom the new governess (the narrator of the bulk of the text) is charged to educate. So the query becomes: Are the ghosts “real” or are they merely hallucinations on the part of the governess? Such critics as Edna Kenton, Edmund Wilson, and Leon Edel, beginning as early as the 1920s, have pointed out the obvious fact that it is only the governess who actually “sees” the ghosts and that it is therefore highly plausible that they are products of her imagination. But since this interpretation of events cannot be definitively proven, The Turn of the Screw has been taken to be the prototypical “ambiguous” horror tale, where it is impossible to determine whether the supernatural has actually come into play or not. I presume to dispute this widely held view. The chief difficulty that the “non-apparitionists,” as they are called, must contend with is the very first (or, more precisely, the second) appearance of the ghost of Peter Quint. It is true that the governess first saw the ghost of Quint at quite a distance, on the battlements of Bly—shortly after noting that “it would be as charming as a charming story suddenly to meet some one” (454). But the second appearance of the ghost, on the other side of the window of the dining room, is so vivid that the governess not merely has no doubt that it is “real” but is able to describe the vision precisely to the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose:
“He has no hat. . . . He has red hair, very red, close-curling, and a pale face, long in shape, with straight good features and little rather queer whiskers that are as red as his hair. His eyebrows are somehow darker; they look particularly arched and as if they might move a good deal. His eyes are sharp, strange—awfully; but I only know clearly that they’re rather small and very fixed. His mouth’s wide, and his lips are thin, and except for his little whiskers he’s quite clean-shaven.” (465) Whereupon Mrs. Grose immediately recognises him: “Peter Quint—his own man, his valet, when he was here!” (466). And of course she shortly thereafter announces, to the governess’s horror, that Quint is dead. Later the governess enunciates the crux of the issue: how could she have described Quint and also Miss Jessel so precisely when she had at that time not even known of their very existence? “I found that to keep her [Mrs. Grose] thoroughly in the grip of this I had only to ask her how, if I had ‘made it up,’ I came to be able to give, of each of the persons appearing to me, a picture disclosing, to the last detail, their special marks—a portrait on the exhibition of which she had instantly recognised and named them” (478). Attempts have been made to maintain that the governess could somehow have had prior knowledge of these servants (or at least of their appearance), but there appears to be no textual evidence to support such a view. The non-apparitionists are, indeed, at this point forced to conclude that the description of Quint by the governess is not as precise as it in fact is, and that Mrs. Grose has simply jumped to the conclusion that it is Quint because she didn’t like him and, in her class-consciousness (note the touch about his wearing no hat!), felt him an inappropriate companion to little Miles. This interpretation so strains credulity as to be put out of court at once. If this apparition of Quint is taken to be “real,” then there is no reason not to assume that the apparition of Miss Jessel is also real. Accordingly, the standard interpretation of the tale—enunciated compactly by Noël Carroll: “this tale is narrated in such a way that the reader cannot tell at the end of the tale whether the house is genuinely haunted or whether the apparent haunting is the product of the hysterical imaginings of a disturbed governess” (145)—is plainly false. Indeed, it could well be that the governess’s “hysteria” (which to my mind has been much exaggerated by
critics) is the product of the increasingly frequent manifestations of the ghosts. A later passage is worth study. The governess, in the company of Flora and Mrs. Grose, sees the ghost of Miss Jessel—and naturally wonders whether her companions have seen it also. Both emphatically deny doing so —but the very harriedness of Mrs. Grose’s assertion—“She isn’t there, little lady, and nobody’s there—and you never see nothing, my sweet!” (529)— appears to be aimed at protecting Flora from the horror of the ghostly visitation. So it is at least arguable that, in this instance, someone other than the governess (either Mrs. Grose or Flora herself, or both) has seen a ghost. The non-apparitionists have one more card up their sleeve, but it is a feeble one. They have noted that James, in his notebooks, admitted that he derived the kernel of the tale from an anecdote told to him by Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury: “The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children: the children are bad, full of evil, to a sinister degree” (quoted in Edel’s introductory note to the story, 425). When, in 1908, James published a slightly revised version of the story in the New York Edition of his collected works, he made what has been taken to be a significant alteration: “The story . . . [deals] with a couple of small children in an out-of-the-way place, to whom the spirits of certain ‘bad’ servants, dead in the employ of the house, were believed [my emphasis] to have appeared with the design of ‘getting hold of them’” (427). But this introduction of apparent ambiguity in regard to the ghostly manifestation can scarcely stand up to the actual textual evidence of the story. (I should note in passing that Peter G. Beidler’s Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James also endorses the supernatural interpretation of the story, although I came to my views independently.) There also seems general confusion as to the source of the horror in the tale. It is not the mere appearance of the ghosts; it is what those ghosts did when they were alive. Various comments by Mrs. Grose about Quint and Jessel (“Poor woman—she paid for it!”; “Of her [Jessel’s] real reason for leaving? Oh yes—as to that. She couldn’t have stayed. Fancy it here—for a governess! And afterwards I imagined—and I still imagine. And what I imagine is dreadful” [477–78]) seem clearly intended to suggest that Quint and Jessel had had an affair, that Jessel had become pregnant, and that she had died as a result of a botched abortion. This is just the kind of thing to send late Victorian readers (not to mention a sexually repressed bachelor like James) into a tizzy of horror. The fact that Miss Jessel always appears
in black may suggest that she is mourning the death of her unborn child. Indeed, the governess’s pained lament that the children are “lost” (478) may stem not merely from the fact that they blandly accept the existence of the ghosts but that they also accepted their amorous relations in life, since it is plainly stated that Miles knew of these relations but said nothing to anyone (482). James therefore may be suggesting that these “innocent” children are anything but innocent—that they are, in fact, corrupt and depraved in spite of their tender years. (This point is hinted at in the splendid film adaptation of the tale, The Innocents [1961].) Whatever the case, The Turn of the Screw is a masterwork of subtlety and indirection; for once, James’s aesthetic restraint enhances rather than dilutes the horror in the narrative. The initial revelation of the fact that Quint is dead, just after the governess has seen him, is one of the more potent moments in the entire range of nineteenth-century supernatural literature; and the narrative gains steady power as the governess’s account becomes increasingly harried by the repeated appearance of the spectres. It is possible that James’s greatest contribution to the weird would have been his last, unfinished novel, The Sense of the Past (first published in 1917), a depiction of a man who falls into the past and fears that he will remain there. James has at last used a supernatural trope other than the ghost; indeed, in its rumination on the paradoxes of time travel the work could even be considered an early contribution to science fiction. The ghost stories of James Lite—that is, Edith Wharton (1862–1937)— are, on the whole, substantially more satisfying than those of James himself, since Wharton was not quite so wedded to a fussy and simpering prose style and actually sought to tell a comprehensible story. She may not have written a single work of the depth and complexity of The Turn of the Screw, and several of her tales are marred by serious aesthetic errors in judgment; but, in spite of her sedulous devotion to elegance of diction and her avoidance of anything that could be construed as violence of incident, there are genuine shudders in a number of her tales. Wharton’s membership to the East Coast School is testified by her nearly ubiquitous use of settings in New York, New England, England, or continental Europe. And even though her weird work extended to the very end of her life—her ghost stories were collected chiefly in two volumes, Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910) and Ghosts (1937), the latter of which contains one unpublished tale—and therefore extended well beyond the
period covered by this chapter, the bulk of them reveal an ambience that is resolutely late-nineteenth-century. Indeed, in her somewhat querulous preface to Ghosts, she simultaneously dismisses Osbert Sitwell’s assertion that (in her words) “ghosts went out when electricity came in” (3) and also protests that the “instinct” for perceiving ghosts is “being gradually atrophied by those two world-wide enemies of the imagination, the wireless and the cinema” (2), attesting—at least in her old age—to a sense of temporal dislocation from the era of jazz, the depression, and movies. To the end of her life she remained a fin de siècle writer. Many of Wharton’s ghost stories reveal that she has absorbed previous ghostly literature and sought to reproduce its effects in her work. “The Duchess at Prayer” (Scribner’s Magazine, August 1900) evokes a fine Gothic atmosphere in telling the tale of a duke and duchess in Italy. The former, suspecting the latter of infidelity, places a statue of her (executed by Bernini) over the entrance of a crypt, thereby sealing it off—and, by implication, sealing off the duchess’s lover (the duke’s cousin) within the crypt. The duchess takes poison and dies—whereupon the statue changes its countenance so that it now reveals “a frozen horror” (29). The tale is a nice mix of natural and supernatural horror—if, of course, we can believe the latter has actually occurred from the rambling tale of the old man who heard it from his grandmother. Domestic issues loom large in Wharton’s ghost stories, and she is manifestly determined to use the supernatural to highlight tensions within and without the family circle. “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” (Scribner’s Magazine, November 1902) is told in a highly indirect fashion, but suggests that the master of the house conducted an affair with the maid; the latter ultimately becomes a ghost. “The Eyes” (Scribner’s Magazine, June 1910) is a curious but effective moral ghost story. A man, Culwin, sees a hideous pair of eyes in his dark bedroom: They were the very worst eyes I’ve ever seen: a man’s eyes—but what a man! My first thought was that he must be frightfully old. The orbits were sunk, and the thick red-lined lids hung over the eyeballs like blinds of which the cords are broken. One lid drooped a little lower than the other, with the effect of a crooked leer; and between these pulpy folds of flesh, with their scant bristle of lashes,
the eyes themselves, small glassy disks with an agate-like rim about the pupils, looked like sea-pebbles in the grip of a starfish. (100) This is as close to physically repulsive horror as Wharton ever comes in any of her weird tales; but in the end we learn that these eyes appear only when Culwin tells a lie, even when the lie is meant well (as when he promises a homely cousin he will marry her, or when he tells another cousin that he is a good writer when he isn’t). “Kerfol” (Scribner’s Magazine, March 1916) is a bit of a novelty in displaying ghosts of dogs, although in the end the story resolves into an elementary supernatural revenge tale: the dogs are those that have been killed by Yves de Cornault to exact vengeance on his wife, Anne, for her suspected adultery. “Bewitched” (Pictorial Review, March 1925) engenders a fine atmosphere of the grimness of old New England—similar to what Wharton achieved non-supernaturally in Ethan Frome (1911)—in its account of a revenant. Wharton, however, is capable of making curious blunders in the execution of her ghost stories. This problem afflicts the most celebrated of them, “Afterward” (Century Magazine, January 1910). Set at an old house in England, it is based upon an intriguing premise—the house is indeed haunted, but one never knows one has seen a ghost until “long, long afterwards” (66). But what actually transpires is that an American couple, Mary and Ned Boyne, are plagued by the ghost of a man, Bob Elwell, whom Ned had tricked in a business deal and who had subsequently committed suicide. Not only does this tale once again employ a simple supernatural revenge motif, with every incident telegraphed and predictable, but an obvious question of logic emerges: the ghost that Mary twice sees is indeed that of Elwell, but how do these sightings justify the “long, long afterwards” premise, which is presumably attached to the house and not to these random guests? In spite of these failings, the story does have one authentic shudder. Mary had seen the ghost of Elwell twice, because he had not entirely killed himself on the first attempt: “He tried to come then; but he wasn’t dead enough—he couldn’t reach us. He had to wait for two months to die; and then he came back again—and Ned went with him” (93). A crippling flaw also besets “Miss Mary Pask” (Pictorial Review, April 1925). The narrator visits the woman of the title (the sister of his friend),
who now lives in a remote location in Britanny. It becomes—or seems to become—evident that Mary is a ghost, especially when she says, “I’ve had so few visitors since my death, you see” (185). This is an authentically shuddersome moment, but Wharton destroys it by playing a cheap trick on the reader: she later reveals that Mary did not die, but only went into a cataleptic trance. This low contrivance is surely beneath the dignity of a writer of Wharton’s stature. Some of Wharton’s ghosts are surprisingly active. In “Mr. Jones” (Ladies’ Home Journal, April 1928) a ghost of an old servant actually kills the housekeeper by strangulation: her body reveals “a circle of red marks on it—the marks of recent bruises” (239). In “Pomegranate Seed” (Saturday Evening Post, 25 April 1931), the ghost of a man’s dead first wife writes letters to him. Wharton addresses this story in her preface to Ghosts, writing that several readers had written to the Saturday Evening Post, asking “how a ghost could write a letter, or put it into a letterbox” (2; Wharton’s emphasis). It is here that she makes her remark about the wireless and the cinema, suggesting that it is only the imaginative impoverishment of the modern age that cavils over points like this. But in fact the concern is genuine, for it raises the issue of the metaphysical status of the ghost. Traditional ghosts—and Wharton’s ghosts, for the most part, are pretty traditional—have been considered immaterial, because they are the offshoots or residue of a person’s soul, which almost every orthodox religion considers immaterial. We have seen Margaret Oliphant wrestle with this issue of how a ghost can engender any physical act in the world of the living. Wharton, by dodging this issue, seems to be yielding merely to authorial convenience in having her ghosts manipulate physical objects whenever it is convenient for her narrative to do so. I should add that “Pomegranate Seed” is in fact an extraordinarily poignant tale, in which the ghost’s letters—written in ink so faded that only the husband can read them —are a symbol for the rapid oblivion that overtakes the dead, as they quickly fade from people’s memories. I would have liked a clearer resolution of the scenario: the husband, promising to take his new wife on a long trip to escape the continual missives that the first wife is sending, is gone all day from his office, and it is never clarified what happened to him. But the overall emotional impact of the narrative, told largely from the second wife’s point of view, is impressive.
Wharton’s most successful ghost story is probably “All Souls’” (first published in Ghosts). The narrator—a cousin of Sara Clayburn, the protagonist of the tale—announces at the outset that it is “not exactly a ghost story” (288), and she speaks the truth. Clayburn, a widow, lives in an old, rambling house in Connecticut. One day she twists her ankle and is advised to stay off her feet; but she is forced into action when, after a long and painful night, she discovers that none of the five servants in the house appear to be around. The atmosphere of desolation and gloom that Wharton creates as Sara wanders around her own house, trying to find some signs of life (the electricity is off, the phone doesn’t work, the radiators are cold), is masterful. (There is, however, one more cheap trick, as Sara hears a strange male voice in the kitchen, only to discover that it is the radio.) The next day everything seems to be back to normal, and no one believes Sara’s tale of her terror and isolation. Exactly a year later Sara sees a woman wandering near her property—the same woman who had come a year before, just prior to her accident. She drives the woman away. Later she realises that that day is All Souls’ Eve, “the night when the dead can walk—and when, by the same token, other spirits, piteous or malevolent, are also freed from the restrictions which secure the earth to the living on the other days of the year” (307). But there is a further suggestion: the woman—who might be “either a ‘fetch,’ or else, more probably, and more alarmingly, a living woman inhabited by a witch” (307)—may be coming to lure the servants to a witches’ coven. The matter is never resolved, and we are left with either a supernatural explanation (the woman is some kind of revenant who comes every All Souls’ Eve) or a non-supernatural explanation (the servants are part of a witch-cult)—or both. Wharton, incidentally, is surprisingly successful in two tales of nonsupernatural horror: “A Journey” (first published in the collection Greater Inclination, 1899), in which a woman travelling by train with a sick husband finds that he has died but, terrified at being asked to leave the train, conceals his death as long as she can; and, much more substantially, “A Bottle of Perrier” (Saturday Evening Post, 27 March 1926), set in the Egyptian desert and focusing on a servant who has killed his master because the latter would not allow him a vacation. This premise sounds comical, but the execution of the narrative is uncommonly fine. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930) is in many ways a prototypical representative of the East Coast School, as testified by her unremittingly
grim portrayals of dour New Englanders, both in her weird work and in her many mainstream tales and novels, and her nearly uniform adherence to the ghost as the chief motif in her supernatural tales. And yet, in spite of her relatively conventional supernaturalism, her tales occasionally generate substantial power—largely as a result of the intensity of her etching of the pinched, hardscrabble lives of her small-town protagonists. All the seven ghost stories in her landmark collection, The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural (1903), were published in Everybody’s Magazine in 1902–03, but several additional weird tales have been unearthed from her large corpus of short fiction, from as early as 1887 to 1905. That Wilkins Freeman found the supernatural a vivid vehicle for underscoring her focus on the intricacies of domestic relationships— virtually her sole concern in all her writing, but one so complex that it was capable of infinite variation—is evident in her most celebrated ghost story, “The Shadows on the Wall” (Everybody’s, July 1902). The actual supernatural phenomenon—the ghost of the deceased Edward Glynn manifests itself as a shadow on the wall of the family home—is almost childishly elementary, but the tale gains tremendous power merely from the nameless and ill-defined terror that afflicts all the inhabitants of the house, including Glynn’s three sisters and his brother, Henry, who had quarrelled with Edward before his death. Henry leaves the house abruptly, and the sisters are horrified to find that there are now two shadows on the wall—at which point a telegram arrives announcing Henry’s death. “Luella Miller” (Everybody’s, December 1902) has gained a reputation as a vampire tale, although the central figure is at most a psychic vampire. It is said of Luella Miller that all the people around her grow weak and die; she is therefore shunned and finally dies herself. The story pungently uses the supernatural as a metaphor for a woman who feigns helplessness so that others will take care of her. “The Wind in the Rose-bush” (Everybody’s, February 1902) is similar: the rose-bush that moves even though there is no wind is symbolic of a dead young woman who was neglected by her uncaring stepmother. The extent to which Wilkins Freeman restricts her use of the supernatural to elementary domestic phenomena is revealed in “The Southwest Chamber” (Everybody’s, April 1903), where a purple dress worn by the deceased Aunt Harriet keeps appearing and reappearing. Other
ghostly manifestations of an analogous sort cause the narrator to remark of the protagonist, Mrs. Simmons: “This apparent contradiction of the reasonable as manifested in such a commonplace thing as chintz of a bedhanging affected this ordinarily unimaginative woman as no ghostly appearance could have done” (148). Similarly, in “The Vacant Lot” (Everybody’s, September 1902) we find the shadow of a woman hanging shadows of clothes on a clothesline. “The Lost Ghost” (Everybody’s, May 1903) is a surprisingly gruesome tale for Wilkins Freeman, although it is told in the same bland and reserved manner as her other tales. The ghost of a little girl is shown to be the result of her death by starvation when she was locked in her room, after her mother had run off with a married man. As if this were not appalling enough, the woman’s husband then hunted his wife down and killed her. In a rather touching conclusion, one of two women currently owning the house dies and is later seen walking hand in hand with the ghost of the child. From a purely supernatural point of view, “The Hall Bedroom” (Collier’s, 28 March 1903) is Wilkins Freeman’s most imaginative tale. A man renting the hall bedroom of a lodging house comes home in the dark to find his room infinitely extended: he is unable to reach any of the walls of the room. Later his senses are assailed in turn—smell (he detects a rose— but “not the fragrance of any rose which I have ever known” [31]), taste (“I was tasting . . . some morsel of sweetness hitherto unknown” [32]), hearing (he hears a sound like “the constantly gathering and receding murmur of a river” [33]), and touch (“Then suddenly, without any warning, my groping hands to the right and left touched living beings, beings in the likeness of men and women, palpable creatures in palpable attire” [36]). By this time the narrator, who is writing a diary of his adventures, has learned that two previous tenants have disappeared from the hall bedroom. Sure enough, he then disappears—into the “fifth dimension” (38), the narrator opines. Has he somehow found his way into the landscape of a painting that hangs on the wall? Whatever the case, this strikingly original tale is perhaps the best of Wilkins Freeman’s excursions into the supernatural. Another New England writer, Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909), utilised the supernatural in several tales. Jewett’s short stories etch with delicacy and power the rugged beauty of the New England terrain, especially her native Maine, with its historical richness, its diverse topography, and especially the stone-faced but emotionally complex men and women who
grimly strive to wrest a living from the unyielding New England soil or the hazards of the sea. Throughout her career Jewett employed the supernatural as a means of adding depth to her portrayal of character and landscape. Perhaps her most successful tale in this regard is “In Dark New England Days” (Century Magazine, October 1890), in which two sisters, Betsey and Hannah Knowles, after a long, hard life, lose a fortune in silver coins and curse the right hand of the man they suspect of the crime, Enoch Holt; subsequently, three members of the Holt family, including Enoch, lose their right hands. Ambiguity is maintained to the end as to the perpetrator of the crime and whether the supernatural has genuinely come into play; but the story is an unforgettable depiction of the cheerless poverty of an ageing New England family. In “The Landscape Chamber” (Atlantic Monthly, October 1887), a traveller comes upon a middle-aged woman and her elderly father who live in a remote farmhouse in a state of apparently dire poverty, but later the man maintains that a curse from an ancestor condemned him to miserliness. “The Foreigner” (Atlantic Monthly, August 1900) is a powerful portrayal of a French-born woman who marries a New England sea captain but is never accepted by the community; on her deathbed she and her one friend see the ghost of her mother, who comes to take her spirit away. Other stories are less successful, including “Lady Ferry” (in Old Friends and New, 1879), a longwinded account of an old woman who seems to have lived for centuries, and “The Gray Man” (in A White Heron and Other Stories, 1886), about Death masquerading as a grey-looking stranger in a farming community. There is one supernatural episode in Jewett’s best-known novel, The Country of the Pointed Firs (Houghton Mifflin, 1896), when a captain reports seeing ghostly figures on an expedition to Greenland. Yet another New Englander, the feminist and social activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), wrote a solitary but transcendentally significant excursion into the weird, “The Yellow Wall Paper” (New England Magazine, January 1892), which has become one of the most frequently reprinted stories in the genre. The premise of the story—a woman suffering post-partum depression (as Gilman herself did shortly before she wrote the story) is largely confined to the attic room of a house, where she becomes obsessed with the bizarre patterns in the yellow wallpaper of the room and subsequently goes mad—is elementary, but its subtleties have frequently been overlooked by critics who have been eager
to point to the tale as a prototypical embodiment of male domination of women and society’s inclination to denigrate female emotions and female ailments. The plain fact of the matter is that, as Lee Weinstein has etablished, the story is supernatural. H. P. Lovecraft casually noted the supernatural element when he described the story as featuring “a woman dwelling in the hideously papered room where a madwoman was once confined” (S 53). The woman in question, writing the entire story in the first person, manifestly sees the figure of a woman embedded in the wallpaper; she also notices that “there are rings and things in the walls” (250)—presumably meant to restrain the madwoman, and evoking the loathsome dungeons of earlier Gothic fiction. What happens, in the course of the narrative, is that the woman (never named) becomes gradually possessed by the madwoman, until finally the possession is complete. Toward the end, as her husband knocks on the door, she writes, “It is no use, young man, you can’t open it!” (262). At this point, the woman has become the (presumably elderly) madwoman. For a time she reverts to her own self, but then she says to her husband, John, “I’ve got out at last . . . in spite of you and Jane” (263). That citation of “Jane” has baffled many critics, but it must be the woman’s own name, and it therefore spells the final and permanent possession of the woman by the previous occupant. That there is a supernatural element to the story does not in any sense refute or compromise the feminist, sociological, and other interpretations of the story; it merely shows that the supernatural has, as so many times before and since, been used symbolically to convey meaning in a particularly effective manner.
ii. The West Coast School I have suggested that the West Coast School established itself as a kind of topographical rival to the East Coast School. Ambrose Bierce, its de facto leader, not only became the mentor of a wide array of Californians who came under his influence, but harboured a certain hostility to the East Coast literary establishment for its failure to accord him the fame and recognition he felt he deserved. Accordingly, with the passing of years he and many of his disciples became resolutely resigned to being titans only on the Pacific coast, under the evident belief that celebrity, however local and contracted, was better than obscurity in the world at large. In some ways it is surprising that Bierce (1842–1914?) wrote any fiction at all. The great majority of his literary career was devoted to newspaper and magazine journalism, and his stories appear to have been written at odd moments while he was otherwise engaged in being either a humourist or a censorious lampooner of the individuals and causes he despised—chiefly political chicanery, moral hypocrisy, and the general “cussedness” of human beings that impels them to act perversely against their own, and others’, best interests. Bierce has developed the reputation as an irremediable cynic and misanthrope, but it would be fairer to say that he did not truly hate the human race but rather was disappointed by it. Bierce’s birth and upbringing in the Midwest and his service in the Civil War on the Union side are well documented—not least by himself in his “Bits of Autobiography” (published in the first volume of his Collected Works, 1909), which recount his harrowing participation in some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Shortly after the war he drifted to California, where he found ready work as a journalist. The bulk of his literary work is in fact journalism, written for such papers as the San Francisco News Letter and California Advertiser (1867–72), the Argonaut (1877–79), the Wasp (1881–86), and, most famously, the San Francisco Examiner (1887–1906), where he was William Randolph Hearst’s star editorial writer. He spent the years 1872–75 in England, hoping like Mark Twain to establish a literary reputation; he did so to some extent, but he
acceded to his wife’s request to return to California after she became pregnant with their third child. What is not generally known is that the bulk of Bierce’s fiction, especially his weird work, was written in a relatively short period between 1887 and 1893, during the first phase of his work for Hearst. He had written humorous sketches and tall tales since 1867, but it required years or decades of rumination for him to produce both his imperishable Civil War tales and his tales of supernatural horror—the former gathered in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891 [actually released in early 1892]) and the latter in Can Such Things Be? (1893). Later tales did appear in the Examiner and other papers, as well as in Cosmopolitan, where Bierce was a contributor and columnist from 1905 to 1909 after Hearst had purchased the magazine. At the urging of a young publisher, Walter Neale, Bierce assembled his own Collected Works (1909–12) in twelve volumes, in which he clearly took great care to collect his Civil War tales and his tales of psychological terror in Volume II (now retitled In the Midst of Life, after the 1892 British edition) and his tales of supernatural horror in Volume III (Can Such Things Be?). It is notoriously difficult to characterise Bierce’s work as a fiction writer, especially as the totality of his work is of such diversity, ranging from light-hearted comic ventures to political fantasies in the manner of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to grim tales of psychological suspense to poignant accounts of the Civil War to stories of the supernatural. Perhaps the overarching focus of his work is satire—a focus that unites the entirety of his work, from journalism to fiction to fables to poetry (his Collected Works includes two full volumes of poetry, most of which consists of pungent skewerings of local and national celebrities). The conventional characterisation of Bierce as a cynic and misanthrope is a crude caricature; Bierce himself denied that he was either of these things, except insofar as he embodied his own definition of “Cynic” from The Devil’s Dictionary (1906/1911): “A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.” Bierce prided himself on an unflinching view of life and humanity; on occasion this view might lapse into something approaching misanthropy, as when he wrote (in contesting the Theosophical Society’s belief in “universal brotherhood”) that “Universal brotherhood, if it means anything, means (for me) a closer relation between me and the rest of the race. As a considerable majority of the rest of the race happens to be
made up of knaves, dunces and savages, I am not seeking that kind of relations with it” (Sole Survivor 205). But a more straightforward expression of Bierce’s “relations” with his fellows can be seen in the following statement, where he is combating the views of a fellow journalist who had taken him to task for excessive harshness: John Bonner, does it really seem to you that contempt for the bad is incompatible with respect for the good?—that hatred of rogues and fools does not imply love of bright and honest folk? Can you really not understand that what is unworthy in life or letters can be known only by comparison with what is known to be worthy? He who bitterly hates the wrong is he who intensely loves the right; indifference to one is indifference to the other thing. Those who like everything love nothing; a heart of indiscriminate hospitality becomes a boozing ken of tramps and thieves. Where the sentimentalist’s love leaves off the cynic’s may begin. (Sole Survivor 215–16) It may be said that Bierce’s unrelenting emphasis on human weakness and folly implies a deeper level of misanthropy than he suggests in the above passage; but one can counter that, with the instances of human weakness and folly so prodigally abundant, there is more than a little philosophical justification for this kind of misanthropy. The element that fuses Bierce’s tales of the Civil War, his tales of psychological terror, and even many of his supernatural tales is the focus on what might be called the psychology and physiology of fear. Whether that fear is produced by a ghost (as in “The Middle Toe of the Right Foot” [Examiner, 17 August 1890]) or the false perception of danger (a supposedly animate corpse in “A Watcher by the Dead” [Examiner, 29 December 1889]; a snake that turns out to be a toy in “The Man and the Snake” [Examiner, 29 June 1890]), Bierce is relentless in dissecting the precise succession of emotions that transforms a sane, normal man (it is almost always a man) into a gibbering lunatic. Indeed, it can be seen that the Civil War tale “A Tough Tussle” (Examiner, 30 September 1888) and the “civilian” tale “A Watcher by the Dead” have, fundamentally, the same theme—the horror inspired by close proximity of the recently dead. (It is
perhaps for this reason that Bierce placed the former in Volume III of the Collected Works, even though it is obviously a Civil War narrative that should have been placed in Volume II.) One of the most notable features of Bierce’s writing is his ability to portray the harrowing terror that lurks in the deserted boom towns and other remote regions of the American West. For a land settled so relatively recently (by Anglo-Saxons, at any rate), the sense of almost mediaeval barbarism and remoteness that Bierce conveys in such tales as “The Middle Toe of the Right Foot,” “The Secret of Macarger’s Gulch” (Wave, 25 April 1891), and “The Spook House” (Examiner, 7 July 1889) is remarkable. This, in effect, is Bierce’s answer to the strictures of many critics, beginning with William Hazlitt, who maintained that the United States was too new and “rational” a land to inspire the dread that can come only with centuries of settled habitation. While Easterners like Nathaniel Hawthorne were able to draw upon America’s heritage of New England Puritanism as a kind of ersatz Middle Ages and utilise it as a source of age-old horror, Bierce found terror in the mining towns of the West, whose rapid desertion after only a few years of frenetic activity cast a pall of eeriness that served him well. At the same time, at least a few of Bierce’s tales contain conceptions so advanced that they could virtually belong to the later genre of science fiction. I refer specifically to two remarkable tales, “Moxon’s Master” (Examiner, 16 April 1899) and “The Damned Thing” (Town Topics, 7 December 1893). The former, possibly inspired in part by Poe’s essay, “Maezel’s Chess-Player” (1836), masterfully conveys the notion of an automaton slowly gaining human emotions, especially in the potent line describing the automaton’s moving of a chess piece “with a slow, uniform, mechanical and, I thought, somewhat theatrical movement of the arm” (SF 3.934). There has recently been some controversy as to whether we are to imagine Moxon’s machine as an actual instance of artificial intelligence or merely as a hoax, but I think the indications in the story point strongly to the former. “The Damned Thing,” with its breathtaking image of an invisible monster, may similarly draw in part upon such celebrated predecessors as Fitz-James O’Brien’s “What Was It?” (although Bierce explicitly denied that he had this tale in mind when he wrote his own [see SF 3.1183–84]) and Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla”; and its provocative notion that “there are colors that we cannot see. And, God help me! the
Damned Thing is of such a color!” (SF 2.863) may well point the way to H. P. Lovecraft’s use of the same idea in “The Colour out of Space” (1927). The very short tales that Bierce grouped under the collective headings “Some Haunted Houses,” “Bodies of the Dead” (first published in the original edition of Can Such Things Be? but not included, oddly enough, in his Collected Works), “Mysterious Disappearances,” “The Ways of Ghosts,” and “Soldier-Folk,” are worth some discussion. These curious vignettes— many of them can hardly be deemed short stories in any meaningful sense of the term—evidently constitute an elaborate hoax that Bierce attempted to perpetrate upon his readers. They began appearing in the Examiner in 1888 under such collective titles as “Hither from Hades,” “Behind the Veil,” and so forth; and their targets, aside from credulous readers who were all too eager to swallow the accounts of disappearances, reanimations from the dead, and so forth, were the growing numbers of spiritualists and spiritualist organisations that actively fostered such beliefs. Their original appearance in a newspaper, without any indication that they were works of fiction, no doubt enhanced the effect Bierce wished to create. Indeed, in “Behind the Veil” (later carved up into the stories “The Isle of Pines” and “A Cold Greeting”), Bierce soberly prints a letter by one Richard Hodgson, of the American branch of the Society for Psychical Research, asking for further particulars of an earlier account (the segment later entitled “‘Dead and Gone’” in “Bodies of the Dead”), to which Bierce replies in his inimitable deadpan manner: In the absence of my notes I am unable to comply with Mr. Hodgson’s request; if in my published account I did not state the source of my information with as great particularity as I am confident I did all the essentials that it embodied, it was an oversight which I promise myself the pleasure of rectifying later, for the benefit of the Society of Psychical Research. In the mean time the data that I have at hand enable me to supply the society with a few facts which it may perhaps deem worthy of its attention. (SF 1.606) This is a scarcely veiled admission that Bierce had in fact made up the whole story.
In many ways the most interesting stories of this type are those gathered under the heading “Soldier-Folk,” for it is here that, for apparently the first time, Bierce definitively fused his Civil War tales with his tales of the supernatural. These four sketches were all written quite late in his career (they were published in Cosmopolitan between 1905 and 1908), at a time when the events of the Civil War had themselves receded to such an extent that they could serve as a backdrop for the bizarre episodes Bierce recounts. (Another story of a somewhat similar type, “A Resumed Identity” [Cosmopolitan, September 1908], is an intriguing tale of a Civil War soldier who has lost his memory and only regains it when he sees a memorial to a battle he had fought in more than forty years before.) Self-parodic as they may be, the feature that unifies these apparent hoaxes with the rest of Bierce’s supernatural work is the fascination they reveal with the phenomenon of death, and the awful threshold it represents between life and the beyond. Bierce in all likelihood was an atheist who did not believe in an afterlife and who habitually ridiculed belief in ghosts, apparitions, and revenants; but he nonetheless found in death a potent and baffling conception. It is significant that he does not even provide an entry for “Death” in The Devil’s Dictionary: it was, perhaps, the one phenomenon he could not poke fun at. Many of his supernatural tales—“Beyond the Wall” (Cosmopolitan, December 1907), “A Jug of Sirup” (Examiner, 17 December 1893), even the richly evocative “The Moonlit Road” (Cosmopolitan, January 1907)—have as their “climax” merely the revelation that a ghost or revenant has in fact been seen or experienced. In many cases the ghost does nothing except manifest itself; even in the supernatural revenge tale “The Middle Toe of the Right Foot” the ghost of a woman effects her aim—the death of the man who had killed her—by her mere presence. Bierce’s most complex supernatural tale is “The Death of Halpin Frayser” (Wave, 19 December 1891). This extraordinarily rich story— whose haunting initial scene, in the wilds of Napa Valley, was taken from a dream Bierce had, as recorded in the essay “Visions of the Night” (Examiner, 24 July 1887)—is interpretable on many levels. There is, indeed, a scholarly dispute over the bare events of the tale; and Cathy N. Davidson, in The Experimental Fictions of Ambrose Bierce (1984), has maintained that it was deliberately written in such a way as to make no sense even on the level of plot. I strongly dispute this interpretation and
maintain that a coherent plot can in fact be determined. In my view, the story goes something like this: Halpin Frayser, who has an unnatural affection for his mother, Catherine, leaves for California. Some years later, Catherine, now widowed, follows him. She and Frayser marry, living under the name Larue. Frayser then murders his mother, but, overwrought by his actions, loses his memory of these events (Frayser experiences a horrible dream that he believes “was in expiation of some crime which, though conscious of his guilt, he could not rightly remember” [SF 2.805]). In accordance with the epigraph (a passage from the prophet Hali), Catherine rises from the dead, a soulless lich, and murders Frayser over her own grave in a California cemetery. Bierce leaves sufficient clues for the piecing together of this scenario; the comment by one of the two detectives tracking Frayser down—“There is some rascally mystery here” (SF 2.815)—does not indicate, as Davidson believes, that the story is inexplicable, but rather that something supernatural (and therefore not amenable to “solution” by ordinary methods of detection) has occurred. (See further my article “What Happens in Ambrose Bierce’s ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser.’”) If this reconstruction is accepted, it can be seen that the horror is engendered on numerous levels—the hideous incest implied in the cohabitation of son and mother as husband and wife, and the supernatural horror of the “lich” of the dead mother killing her own son (not through vengeance but through blind hatred) over her own grave. It is not surprising that Frederic Taber Cooper, who came close to deciphering the full scope of the plot’s tale (but failed to notice the incest aspect), wrote that “In all imaginative literature it would be difficult to find a parallel for this story in sheer, unadulterated horror” (352). “The Eyes of the Panther” (Examiner, 17 October 1897) is another provocative tale, and there is serious question as to whether the supernatural is involved. Is it the case that Irene Marlowe is a shape-changer who at times turns into a panther, or is she merely subject to hallucinations? Shortly after the story was first published, Bierce wrote a letter that may clarify the point: “My story is not a ‘wonder-story,’ and does not, I think, even pass the bounds of probability—merely an instance of pre-natal influence. The girl can see in the dark—which means gleaming eyes—and has a mania for looking into windows o’ nights. Transformation into an animal is another matter” (quoted in SF 3.912). This would seem to suggest
that Irene is not in reality a shape-changer, but the matter remains open—as perhaps Bierce intended. The two prose-poems “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” (San Francisco News Letter, 25 December 1886) and “Haïta the Shepherd” (Wave, 24 January 1891) embody some of Bierce’s most evocative prose. On the whole, following the early experiment “The Haunted Valley” (Overland Monthly, July 1871), Bierce generally wrote in such a spare, proto-Hemingwayesque manner that H. P. Lovecraft referred dismissively to his “prosaic angularity” (S 52). Bierce manifestly felt that the narration of incredible or supernatural incidents required such a degree of sobriety and restraint that all superfluous matter, including the richly textured prose of Poe and his followers, must be eliminated. Bierce was, otherwise, a devoted follower of Poe’s principles of short story writing, consciously adopting Poe’s notion of the “unity of effect” and maintaining that neither the long poem nor the novel was a viable aesthetic entity. If I have refrained from discussing Bierce’s most celebrated tale, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (Examiner, 13 July 1890), it is because it lies only on the borderline of the weird. The notion that a man facing execution by hanging can experience what appears to be hours and even days of life in the split-second between life and death is psychologically clever—and perhaps even true—but is not an inherently weird conception, for of course nothing supernatural is predicated to have occurred. And although this ingenious premise has served as the inspiration for several later literary works and even a horror film or two (Jacob’s Ladder), the power of Bierce’s story rests precisely on the very possibility of its occurrence. Other Civil War tales contain their doses of terror (terror, that is, not specifically involving the gruesomeness of war). “One of the Missing” (Examiner, 11 March 1888) is worth singling out. A hapless scout, Jerome Searing, finds himself immobilised after a deserted house collapses upon him; what is worse, his own rifle is now pointed directly at his forehead, and the least movement on his part might send a bullet through his brain. This is one of several Bierce stories where the scenario seems a bit contrived to generate a particularly ironic sense of terror; but the working out of Searing’s conflicted emotions as he struggles with his fate is masterful. Of course, he perishes of fear.
What separates Bierce from his many disciples and imitators is the unusually grim and cynical vision that underlies his tales and, indeed, the rest of his work. In this sense Maurice Lévy is not entirely in error when he asserted, “One is almost tempted to believe that one day [Bierce] decided to instill fear into his contemporaries by hatred, to gain revenge on them” (Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic 14). I have already suggested that this may be, at a minimum, an exaggeration, but the low opinion Bierce maintained of the human species and of human accomplishment is undeniable. It is significant that, in the tutorial essay “To Train a Writer” (Examiner, 27 August 1899), he declared flatly that “this is a world of fools and rogues, blind with superstition, tormented with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, cruel, and cursed with illusions—frothing mad!” (Collected Works 10.77). Such later authors of satirical horror as L. P. Hartley, A. E. Coppard, and Roald Dahl may have borrowed various elements of Bierce’s manner; but perhaps only Shirley Jackson comes close to echoing both Bierce’s jaundiced view of humanity and the rapierlike prose that lays bare the emptiness of human aspirations and the cowardice, hypocrisy, perversity, and folly that condemn our species to eternal wretchedness and misery. The sum total of Bierce’s accomplishment in supernatural and psychological horror establishes him as the most distinguished figure in weird fiction subsequent to Poe and preceding the “titans” of the early twentieth century. It is perhaps unfair to consider W. C. Morrow (1854–1923) a mere pupil of Bierce, as he has customarily been regarded. Born in Selma, Alabama, he emigrated to California around 1879. In that year he published in the Argonaut two striking tales of the Civil War, “The Bloodhounds” (13 December 1879) and “The Three Hundred” (10 January 1880), both of them set in the South. The first tale that might conceivably be termed weird was “A Glimpse of the Unusual,” appearing in the Californian for April 1880. Although purely a tale of psychological horror, it already displays the features that would come to typify much of Morrow’s later work: a crisp, tightly controlled prose style, penetrating psychological analysis of a disturbed mentality, and an unrelenting focus on the protagonist’s psychological state—tantamount, in some later works, to a kind of protostream-of-consciousness. It would be difficult to find parallels for these tales in the entire range of nineteenth-century literature—except, perhaps, in the tales of Poe (clearly a dominant influence on Morrow), some of the later
work of Guy de Maupassant (written after Morrow’s early work), and the tales of Bierce, who may well have been influenced by Morrow’s example in his own memorable Civil War tales and horror stories of the later 1880s. In 1882 Morrow published his first novel, Blood-Money (1882), a searing indictment of the rapacity of the huge railroad companies that were dominating Californian politics and economy at this time. When William Randolph Hearst took over the operation of the San Francisco Examiner from his father in 1887, one of the writers he urged to contribute (probably on Bierce’s recommendation) was Morrow. Now began a fruitful phase of Morrow’s short-story writing, and some of his best work appeared in that newspaper. Morrow resumed contributions to the Argonaut as well, writing such works as the grim non-supernatural tale of revenge “His Unconquerable Enemy” (11 March 1889), the tense detective thrillers “The Woman of the Inner Room” (12 January 1891) and “The Red Strangler” (18 May 1891), the conte cruel “The Wrong Door” (9 February 1891), and the science-fiction/horror story “The Surgeon’s Experiment” (15 October 1887), later titled “The Monster-Maker.” By 1896 Morrow evidently felt that he had enough tales to assemble a collection. In fact, by this time he had written enough to fill two or three volumes, and it is not entirely certain that he exercised sound judgment in the tales he decided to include in the celebrated collection The Ape, the Idiot and Other People (1897). Nevertheless, this volume is a landmark for all lovers of the weird, the strange, and the unusual. But because it appeared later than Bierce’s two collections, it was naturally assumed that Morrow had been influenced by Bierce. Strangely enough, after the publication of his seminal collection, Morrow appeared to lose interest in the short story as a form of expression. Only random tales—rarely in the weird or even the suspense mode— emerged from his pen over the next decade or so during which he was a practising writer. Possibly economic concerns were a factor. By no later than 1899 Morrow had begun a school for beginning writers. His relatively few book publications of the first decade of the twentieth century suggest that he was either trying to capture the tastes of a more general readership or, in fact, had declined into hackwork. No work published subsequent to 1909 has been located. It is difficult to characterise Morrow’s literary work—even his short stories—in small compass. Writing at a time when the rigid division of
literature into well-recognised “genres” was unknown, Morrow chose to experiment at will in what would only later be termed mystery, suspense, weird, or even science fiction. In many ways, it is his seamless amalgamation of several of these modes within a single tale that lends it its distinctiveness. It is worth noting that there may not be a single orthodox tale of the supernatural in Morrow’s entire corpus. His most celebrated story, “The Monster-Maker,” clearly relies upon a conjectural development of medical science—whether plausible or not—in its depiction of an anencephalous man; “The Woman of the Inner Room” advances a pseudo-scientific argument for a woman’s ability to perceive a man’s thoughts when she inserts a finger into a bullet wound in his head and touches his brain. Similar medical erudition is utilised in “The Permanent Stiletto” (first published as “A Peculiar Case of Surgery” in the Argonaut for 4 February 1889), about a man who is stabbed in the neck with a stiletto that doctors are unable to remove entirely; he spends the rest of his life a shattered man, pondering his imminent death. The bizarre story “The Queen of the Red Devils”—published in the Christmas 1892 issue of the San Francisco weekly magazine, the Wave (later known for its publication of many of the tales of Frank Norris)—is a fantasy of sorts. Morrow can now take his rightful place as a distinctive voice in the American literature of the later nineteenth century. His gripping tales—the products of a powerful and unusual imagination, a taut prose style, and an insight into aberrant psychology rarely displayed in his time—retain the power to fascinate and terrify. Another member of the West Coast group, and an early colleague of Bierce, Emma Frances Dawson (1851–1926), produced a single volume of stories, An Itinerant House and Other Stories (1897), that has some strange elements but, in my judgment, is not sufficiently weird to be worth discussing here. Dawson vividly depicts the early days of San Francisco, teeming with miners, Chinese immigrants, and other distinctive figures, and she occasionally employs the haunted house theme in a curious manner; but her work is too mannered and diffuse to produce a genuinely weird effect. Gertrude Atherton (1857–1948) might represent a kind of bridge between the East Coast and West Coast schools of weird fiction. Although a lifelong Californian, she took frequent trips to the East and also overseas, spending much time in England. As a young writer she became acquainted
with Bierce; in fact, she maliciously tells the story of how Bierce once tried to embrace her—but in her strong-minded way she eluded his grasp and mocked his clumsy attempt at lovemaking. Like Edith Wharton, her writing —including her weird writing, embodied in nine tales long and short— extends over a very long period, a partial function of her unusually long and vigorous life. And unlike Morrow and even, to some degree, Bierce, Atherton established a genuine—if, as it turns out, fleeting—popular and critical reputation, becoming a best-selling author whose work sold generally better than that of Wharton, Willa Cather, and other women writers of the period. Much of this work—chiefly in the form of a good many very long novels—has been forgotten, and probably deservedly; and, as with so many others, it may be her slim body of weird work that ensures her continuing reputation. Two of her story collections, The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories (1905) and The Foghorn (1934), contain the bulk of her weird work, although some stories remained uncollected until recently. In a scant nine tales, Atherton has effectively displayed mastery in several of the significant subdivisions of weird fiction: the fantastic allegory or parable (“The Caves of Death,” “When the Devil Was Well”), the psychological horror tale (“A Tragedy,” “The Greatest Good of the Greatest Number”), the orthodox ghost story (“Miss Markham’s Wedding Night”), the tale of supernatural realism (“The Striding Place”), the ambiguous horror tale (“Death and the Woman,” perhaps “The Bell in the Fog”), or sundry combinations of these. Her apparently casual tossing off of these stories in the course of a career devoted to very different concerns points to the truth of her own comment in “The Bell in the Fog”: “Possibly there are few imaginative writers who have not a leaning, secret or avowed, to the occult” (77). One of the central concerns in Atherton’s weird work is the awesome threshold of death. At least three of the stories utilise this topos in varying ways. “The Caves of Death” (San Francisco News Letter, 25 December 1886) is a manifest allegory of the afterlife. Atherton has used the dream or vision of an afterlife as a means for the expression of a number of cynical reflections on human foibles, for it is evident that those who have gone to the Great Beyond are afflicted with the same follies, hypocrisies, and vanities that they carried in life. The other allegory in Atherton’s work, “When the Devil Was Well,” was included as the final story in her volume of California tales, Before the Gringo Came (1894). It too is highly cynical
in its suggestion that the Devil will find in California a ready haven for his machinations. “Death and the Woman” (Vanity Fair [London], 14 January 1893) presents a straightforward expression of the fear of death, embodied here both by a dying man and the apparent presence of the actual figure of Death at the end. Is this latter merely a metaphor? Does the man’s wife, increasingly agitated by the trickling away of life from her husband, merely hallucinate the presence of Death coming up the stairs and into the deathchamber? Atherton wisely leaves the matter unresolved. “The Greatest Good of the Greatest Number” (in The Bell in the Fog), the third of Atherton’s stories focusing specifically on death, is a very different proposition. The very title speaks of its philosophical underpinnings, pointing to the central principle of the utilitarian moral philosophy as outlined by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Of course, these philosophers would by no means have advocated the withholding of medical attention from the sick, as Atherton’s physician does here: his ultimate decision that the death of the ailing woman will benefit several others in her circle, whereas her continued existence will only create a continuation or augmentation of misery, is in some senses a reflection of a Social Darwinist mentality that Atherton had adopted early in life and retained to the end. The power of this tale rests not in its display of the supernatural—for there is no supernatural phenomenon—but in its careful dissection of psychological states, both that of the physician and that of the dying woman. Atherton’s masterpiece in this regard is a previously unknown and uncollected story, “A Tragedy,” first published in the London Vanity Fair for 11 February 1893. This extraordinary account of a woman who is, at the outset, ignorant of the fact that she has been housed in an insane asylum for decades was later rewritten—not necessarily with greater effectiveness—as the long story “The Foghorn” (Good Housekeeping, November 1933). The secret of the tale’s effectiveness is the gradual manner in which the woman —and, accordingly, the reader—come to be aware that she has woken not merely from a single night’s sleep, but from decades of amnesia or madness. And because she “was a woman who revelled in her beauty, worshipped it” (18) (as Atherton’s own mother and, perhaps, Atherton herself did), the revelation of her true state is manifested largely by physical tokens: the fact that her hair has been cut (“That glorious mane, of which
she had been so proud!” [22]), the fact that her once-beautiful hands had become “large-veined [and] skinny” (21); and so forth. It is particularly ironic, given her own physical repulsiveness, that the man “who had sent her here” (presumably by jilting her) was himself “a wonderfully preserved man; sixty, probably, but looking little more than forty” (24). To some degree Atherton may be guilty of an antifeminist concentration on physical beauty and its decay; but in reality the tale underscores the “tragedy” of a wasted life in which twenty years have passed as if in a single night. Skilful as several of these tales are, Atherton’s signature piece of weird fiction remains “The Striding Place”; it has appeared in more than half a dozen anthologies of supernatural tales and is the tale by which she is chiefly recognised by devotees of the genre. The story had been rejected by the Yellow Book as too gruesome and was published in the Speaker for 20 June 1896, under the title “The Twins.” As a tale of purely physical horror, in which the grisly climax is suddenly revealed in the final line, it is difficult to surpass. It underscores the peculiarly philosophical nature of the weird tale in that it is exemplifies the “truth” of a casual utterance made by the protagonist (“I cherish the theory . . . that the soul sometimes lingers in the body after death” [40]), who little knows that he himself will verify that utterance at the end. Considerably more conventional is “Miss Markham’s Wedding Night” (Vanity Fair [London], 28 November 1895), a relatively straightforward ghost story that begins as a light-hearted social comedy but quickly turns darker. “The Dead and the Countess” (Smart Set, August 1902) appears, at the outset, rather quaintly allegorical, as we are led to believe that the dead spirits in a cemetery in Brittany find their repose disturbed by the rumbling of a new train line—a charming conceit expressing protest at the ruin of a pristine natural landscape by technological development. But although the train itself (“a brute of iron and live coals and foul smoke” [65]) in some senses suggests the fires of hell, the tale resolves into an uneasy mix of allegory and supernatural realism. “The Bell in the Fog” could qualify as an ambiguous horror tale: we can never be quite certain that the little girl at the centre of the narrative is or is not a reincarnation of the girl depicted in the painting found in the portrait gallery at Chillingsworth. But the chief focus of the tale is on the psychology of Ralph Orth, who is manifestly a Henry James stand-in: he is an American who left the United States “soon after his first successes” (67),
who focuses on portrayals of European society, and who remains single and unattached. Atherton’s passing comment about “his own famous ghost stories” (76) makes one realise that she has read them with care. The Bell in the Fog is dedicated to James. Two other stories by Atherton should be addressed. A Christmas Witch, a nearly novel-length work of about 40,000 words published in Godey’s Magazine for January 1893, suggests the supernatural in a number of features, but resolves itself into a non-supernatural Bildungsroman of an unruly and headstrong girl (clearly based on Atherton herself as she remembered her own childhood and upbringing), the daughter of a French count who has come to California to seek his fortune. “The Eternal Now,” included in The Foghorn, is a curious tale apparently involving a man who, fascinated with fourteenth-century France, somehow goes back in time to that era, but with faint recollections of his life in the twentieth century.
iii. Eccentrics This period saw the emergence of a number of writers, some of them only on the margins of the weird, who were such literary and personal eccentrics that they deserve to be in a class by themselves. We have seen that Gertrude Atherton made note of the inveterate tendency of “imaginative” writers toward the weird; Lovecraft echoed those sentiments, writing a bit flamboyantly of the “impulse which now and then drives writers of totally opposite leanings to try their hands at it in isolated tales, as if to discharge from their minds certain phantasmal shapes which would otherwise haunt them” (S 22). The career of Robert W. Chambers (1865–1933)—whether we consider only his weird writing or his output as a whole—is the sad tale of a man who, starting with a vivid and distinctive imagination and a seemingly natural gift for putting words to paper, discovered popularity too quickly and devoted the rest of his life to catering to the whims of the reading public. The best of Chambers’s work can almost be measured by its very lack of popularity. Of Chambers’s life we know little. Born in Brooklyn, he entered the Art Students’ League around the age of twenty, where the artist Charles Dana Gibson was his fellow-student. From 1886 to 1893 he studied art in Paris, at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and at Julian’s, and his work was displayed at the Salon as early as 1889. Returning to New York, he succeeded in selling his illustrations to Life, Truth, and Vogue, but for reasons still not entirely clear turned to writing and produced his first “novel,” In the Quarter (1894), really a series of loosely connected character sketches of artist life in Paris. That Chambers was not, in any case, sincerely interested in capturing his own experiences is testified by the fact that he completely dropped the “Gallic studio atmosphere” (S 52) after The Mystery of Choice (1897), presumably because it no longer proved popular. With The King in Yellow (1895) Chambers’s career as a writer was established—not because he had felt himself a born writer but because that collection of short stories was (probably in spite rather than because of the horror tales contained in it)
successful. Chambers had somehow caught the public eye; he knew what the public wanted and gave it to them. Although from time to time he returned to the weird, Chambers never did so with the gripping and almost nightmarish intensity of The King in Yellow; nor did he ever again attempt a sincere and scathing depiction of the hollowness of American social and intellectual life as he did in the unsuccessful novel Outsiders (1898), which alone of his works may be of interest to the social historian. Instead, he wrote novels and tales that, while superficially dealing with a wide range of topics—the Franco-Prussian War; the American Revolution; modern New York society; World War I; the Civil War—all contained an unending procession of pompous and dimwitted fellows (usually of independent means and attemptedly cynical temperament) falling in love at the least provocation with an equally endless parade of simpering and virtuous women who, although capable of blushing instantly at the slightest suggestion of impropriety, nevertheless give themselves body and soul to their male pursuers after what proves to be a merely token resistance. Some passages in Chambers’s works would probably have been considered salacious at the time of their writing, and the only fitting modern parallels are Harlequin romances. It is doubtful whether any of his work would serve even as raw material for historical or sociological analysis of the period, since even in his own day he was castigated for producing wooden and unrealistic characters. It is not, then, surprising that nearly the whole of his output—of which I have counted eighty-seven different volumes, including novels, tales, one volume of poems, one drama, juvenile books on nature, and even an opera libretto— has lapsed into obscurity and has yet to be resurrected by industrious academics always on the lookout for new dissertation topics. Chambers’s fantastic writing is limited principally to five volumes— The King in Yellow (1895), The Mystery of Choice (1897), In Search of the Unknown (1904), Police!!! (1915), and the novel The Slayer of Souls (1920) —while several ancillary volumes contain weird matter in lesser degrees— The Maker of Moons (1896), The Tracer of Lost Persons (1906), and The Tree of Heaven (1907). This wide scattering of his fantastic writing shows that Chambers never considered himself a fantaisiste in the tradition of Poe and Bierce (although he was influenced by both), but seems to have written fantasy whenever the mood struck him. It is, of course, to be noted that three of the eight works listed date to Chambers’s very early period; and
future generations of fantasy readers have confirmed C. C. Baldwin’s remark on Chambers’ output: “Had I my choice I’d take the first three or four [of his books] and let the rest go hang” (90). The inspiration for The King in Yellow—a collection of short stories of which only the first six are fantastic, and of these the first four are loosely interrelated—is, however, sufficiently obvious. Chambers must have read Bierce’s Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891)—or the English edition of 1892, In the Midst of Life—shortly after his return to America from France, for he adopts certain cryptic allusions and names coined in some of Bierce’s tales and appropriates them for his own. The focus of these first four tales in The King in Yellow is a mysterious drama (apparently in two acts) called The King in Yellow, which incites a peculiar fear and desperation upon reading. Chambers’s descriptions of this odd volume may rank as some of his finest moments: This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the Lake of Hali; and my mind will bear forever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth—a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow. (“The Repairer of Reputations” [9]) It has, however, not been generally noticed that Chambers has wilfully altered the components he derived from Bierce, and in any case it is not clear whether the Bierce influence really extends beyond these borrowed names. Bierce indeed created Carcosa, which he describes in “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” as some great city of the distant past. Chambers maintains this notion, but in Bierce Hali was simply a prophet who is “quoted” as the epigraphs for the tales “The Death of Halpin Frayser” and “An Inhabitant of Carcosa.” Finally, Chambers borrows the term “Hastur” from Bierce; but whereas Bierce imagined Hastur as a god of the shepherds (see “Haïta the Shepherd”), Chambers regards Hastur alternately as a place or as a person.
From the first four stories in The King in Yellow we learn a few more details about the contents of Chambers’s mythical play: there are at least three characters, Cassilda, Camilla, and the King in Yellow himself; aside from places such as Hastur and the Lake of Hali, we learn of regions called Demhe, Yhtill, and Alar; finally, there are other details such as the Pallid Mask and the Yellow Sign. It is obvious that Chambers intended to leave these citations vague and unexplained; he wished merely to provide dim hints as to the possible worlds of horror and awe to which his mythical book was a guide. Although in “The Silent Land” (in The Maker of Moons) Chambers twice makes mention of a “King in Carcosa,” he never develops this “King in Yellow mythology” elsewhere. The tales in The King in Yellow differ widely in tone, mood, and quality. The first, “The Repairer of Reputations,” is a bizarre tale of the future (its setting is New York in 1920) in which Chambers, aside from predicting a general European war, imagines a quasi-utopia with euthanasia chambers for those who wish to slough off the burden of existence, while Chicago and New York rise “white and imperial” in a new age of architecture wherein the “horrors” of Victorian design are repudiated. Nevertheless, the tale cannot be called science fiction (on which see further below), since the futuristic setting does not in the end have any role in the story line, which concerns a demented young man who imagines that he is the King in Yellow and that his cousin is vying for the throne. Such a bald description cannot begin to convey the otherworldly, nightmarish quality of the tale, where the unexplained elements of Chambers’s “King in Yellow mythology,” along with a prose style bordering upon the extravagant and an intentionally chaotic exposition, create an atmosphere of chilling horror. “The Mask,” in contrast, is an exquisitely beautiful tale set in France concerning a sculptor who has discovered a fluid capable of petrifying any plant or animal such that it resembles the finest marble. Several portions of the narration, especially toward the end, are pure poetry. “The Yellow Sign” is generally considered to be the best tale in The King in Yellow, dealing horrifyingly with the nameless fate of an artist who has found the Yellow Sign. Lovecraft in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” has well described the loathsome hearse-driver who is a harbinger for the narrator’s death—a soft, pudgy, wormlike creature who has one of his fingers torn off in a tussle and who, when found in the artist’s studio at the end, is pronounced to have been dead for months. “The Demoiselle d’Ys,”
in spite of its inclusion of Hastur as a minor character, is not part of the “King in Yellow mythology,” but is another hauntingly beautiful tale about a man who is supernaturally transplanted into the mediaeval age while hunting in the Breton countryside and falls in love with a beautiful huntress three centuries dead. The rest of The King in Yellow contains a series of fine prose-poems (“The Prophets’ Paradise”) followed by several gripping tales dealing with the Franco-Prussian War. The Mystery of Choice (1897) is an undeservedly forgotten collection and, in its more refined and controlled prose style, greater unity of theme, and exquisite pathos, ranks close to The King in Yellow in quality. The first five stories are linked by a common setting—Brittany—and some recurring characters; and although the first (“The Purple Emperor”) is an amusing parody on the detective story, the rest of the collection contains fine tales of fantasy and even science fiction. In In Search of the Unknown (1904) Chambers begins to take another tack—the mingling of weirdness, humour, and romance—and readers must judge for themselves how felicitous this union is. His conceptions are as fertile as ever: we are here concerned with a series of tales depicting successive searches for lost species of animals, including a loathsome halfman and half-amphibian called “the harbor-master,” a group of invisible creatures apparently in the shape of beautiful women, and the like; but in every tale the narrator attempts to flirt with a pretty girl, only to lose her at the last moment to some rival. Chambers reprinted “The Man at the Next Table” (from The Maker of Moons) and “A Matter of Interest” (from The Mystery of Choice) into this work; a work that, though labelled a novel, is in fact a string of tales (several published separately in magazines) stitched together into a continuous narrative. Indeed, so many of Chambers’s “novels” are of this sort that few can be termed other than episodic. A sequel to this volume is Police!!! (1915), a collection of tales where further searches are made into lost species—including mammoths in the glaciers of Canada, a group of “cave-ladies” in the Everglades, and the like. This book places still greater emphasis on humour than its predecessor, and several of the tales are quite amusing; but there also seems to be a slight decline in Chambers’s fertility of invention: the amphibian man in “The Third Eye” too closely resembles the harbour-master, while in “Un Peu d’Amour” we encounter an irascible character obviously reminiscent of a similar character in the first segment of In Search of the Unknown. But even here there are
some gripping moments: “Un Peu d’Amour” presents some horrifying glimpses of a gigantic worm burrowing beneath the fields of upstate New York, while another tale (“The Ladies of the Lake”) discloses a school of huge minnows the size of Pullman cars. The Tracer of Lost Persons (1906) is another episodic novel, somewhat more unified than many of Chambers’s others. Most of the tales are rather flippant accounts of a mysterious gentleman, Westrel Keen, who assists young men in finding their true loves; but one haunting episode about the resurrection of an Egyptian woman suspended in a state of hypnosis for thousands of years is another remarkable fusion of beauty and horror. The Tree of Heaven (1907) is similarly not exclusively fantastic, but contains some very fine moments. The construction of the “novel” is ingenious: at the outset an odd mystic utters prophecies to a group of his friends, and the subsequent episodes are concerned with their fulfilment. For once the loveelement is not extrinsic to the plot, and in several of these tales love is simply given a supernatural dimension that creates a profundity not often found in Chambers; even the non-fantastic romantic tales are handled with a seriousness and depth completely absent in other of his works. The superb atmosphere of delicate pathos and dream-fantasy maintained in some of these tales may place this volume only behind The King in Yellow and The Mystery of Choice as Chambers’s finest. With The Slayer of Souls (1920), however, Chambers reaches the nadir of his career as a supernaturalist. Even if we could swallow the tasteless premise—that “Anarchists, terrorists, Bolshevists, Reds of all shades and degrees, are now believed to represent in modern times” (39) the descendants of the devil-worshipping Yezidi sect of inner Asia, which is poisoning the minds of misguided leftists and labour unionists for the overthrow of good and the establishment of evil—there is no escaping the tedium of the whole work, which is concerned with the efforts of the U.S. Secret Service, along with a young woman who, although having lived for years with these evil Chinese, has now defected and converted to Christianity, to hunt down the eight leading figures of the sect and exterminate them. This happens with mechanical regularity, and it is no surprise that civilisation is saved in the end for God-fearing Americans. The novel—an elaboration of the title story of The Maker of Moons (1896), although that tale is handled far better and contains some delicate moments of shimmering fantasy—is further crippled by a ponderous and entirely
humourless style, and with characters so moronic that they cannot reconcile themselves to the supernatural even after repeated exposure to it. And the crowning absurdity is that the origin of all these evils is a “black planet . . . not a hundred miles” (289–90) from the earth! There is not a single redeeming element in this novel. One of the more interesting features of Chambers’s weird work is a proto-science-fictional element that emerges in some works cheek by jowl with the overt supernaturalism of other tales. We have seen that “The Repairer of Reputations” is set in the future; but “The Mask” actually makes greater use of a science-fictional principle of great importance: the scientific justification for a fantastic event. Chambers never precisely explains the nature of the petrifying fluid used in the story, but we are led to believe that it would not be beyond the bounds of chemistry to encompass it. Similarly, in “A Matter of Interest” elaborate attempts are made at the outset to establish the veracity and accuracy of the narrative, which concerns the discovery of the last living dinosaur (the “thermosaurus”). Other segments of In Search of the Unknown are even more emphatic on the point, and one of the characters vigorously denies the supernatural character of the harbour-master: “‘I don’t think that the harbor-master is a spirit or a sprite or a hobgoblin, or any sort of damned rot. Neither do I believe it to be an optical illusion’” (285). Less scientific justification is presented for the creatures in Police!!!, but even here few strain credulity beyond the breaking-point. Even The Slayer of Souls enunciates the principle: “‘We’re up against something absolutely new. Of course, it isn’t magic. It can, of course, be explained by natural laws about which we happen to know nothing at present’” (173). Unfortunately, in this case little effort is made to coordinate the bizarre events into a plausibly scientific framework. No writer typifies the appeal of weird fiction to temperaments seemingly antipodally opposed to it than Ralph Adams Cram (1863–1942), who in later life gained celebrity as a world-renowned architect and proponent of the neo-Gothic style in architecture, but who in his youth produced a very slim collection of horror tales, Black Spirits and White (1895), which has gained a certain cachet among collectors of the weird, for all that Cram himself in later years dismissed it as an indiscretion of his youth. Containing only six stories and no more than 25,000 words, the little book is worth remembering if only for a single classic tale.
Why Cram took to the supernatural in these early pieces does not seem apparent from the surviving documentary evidence. He wrote a few other works of fiction aside from the stories in Black Spirits and White, but they are not weird. What is, however, clear is that he used these narratives as expressions of his taste in both architecture and European travel. The six tales are set, successively, in Paris, Germany, Italy, Sicily, Brittany, and Sweden. Cram had visited these locales on several European trips, including one in the company of a friend, T. Henry Randall, who appears to be “Tom Rendel” cited by the first-person narrator in several tales. Cram is, however, not always felicitous in the specific supernatural manifestations he stages. In “No. 252, Rue M. le Prince,” we are given an array of weird phenomena in a Paris hotel room formerly occupied by a suspected witch, but the precise nature of the phenomena—in other words, why the manifestations took the exact form they did—is never clarified. Another tale, “The White Villa,” is a routine tale of ghosts in an Italian villa. More successful is “In Kropfsberg Keep,” where two young men, Rupert and Otto, make bold to stay in a German castle that is reputed to be haunted by the ghost of Count Albert. Forty years previously, the count gave a party during which he set the place ablaze and killed all the guests. Sure enough, Rupert sees a reenactment of this party: Around the long, narrow hall, under the fearful light that came from nowhere, but was omnipresent, swept a rushing stream of unspeakable horrors, dancing insanely, laughing, gibbering hideously; the dead of forty years. White, polished skeletons, bare of flesh and vesture, skeletons clothed in the dreadful rags of dried and rattling sinews, the tags of tattering grave-clothes flaunting behind them. These were the dead of many years ago. Then the dead of more recent times, with yellow bones showing only here and there, the long and insecure hair of their hideous heads writhing in the beating air. Then green and grey horrors, bloated and shapeless, stained with earth or dripping with spattering water; and here and there white, beautiful things, like chiselled ivory, the dead of yesterday, locked it may be, in the mummy arms of rattling skeletons. (28)
Rupert, in alarm, shoots his revolver in what he believes to be the face of Count Albert—only to find, in the morning, that his friend Otto has been killed by a gunshot. “Sister Maddelena” is the grim story of a nun who had fallen in love with a man and was killed by her own mother superior, her body secreted within a recess of the immensely thick wall of her room. Her ghost naturally haunts the place until it is discovered. “Notre Dame des Eaux” is an interesting non-supernatural specimen. A man, crazed and disappointed in love, traps his erstwhile lover Héloïse in a church, whereupon she keeps him at bay by singing all night until help can arrive. But Cram’s reputation as a weird writer will probably continue to rest largely on “The Dead Valley,” a magnificently atmospheric tale set in Sweden. The valley in question—“a level plain of ashy white, faintly phosphorescent, a sea of velvet fog that lay like motionless water, or rather like a floor of alabaster, so dense did it appear, so seemingly capable of sustaining weight” (80)—is a notable triumph of the imagination. The two boys who skirt this valley later seek it out again: “There lay the Dead Valley! A great oval basin, almost as smooth and regular as though made by man. On all sides the grass crept over the brink of the encircling hills, dusty green on the crests, then fading into ashy brown, and so to a deadly white, this last colour forming a thin ring, running in a long line around the slope. And then? Nothing. Bare, brown, hard earth, glittering with grains of alkali, but otherwise dead and barren. Not a tuft of grass, not a stick of brushwood, not even a stone, but only the vast expense of beaten clay.” (83) This would be bad enough, but when a falcon, flying above the valley, cries out and falls dead at a tree—a tree surrounded by the bones of thousands of creatures—the boys understand why they had heard a hideous shriek on their first visit to the valley. This notion of biological deadness might conceivably have a natural or science-fictional explanation, but Cram provides none, so the supernatural is the only alternative. The story was thought to have inspired the “blasted heath” in Lovecraft’s “The Colour out of Space,” but he read Cram’s story after writing his own.
Of the voluminous work of F. Marion Crawford (1854–1909), the American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and historian, sadly little is read today. The writer who in his day was compared favourably to William Dean Howells and Henry James, and who may have been the most popular American novelist of the late nineteenth century, is now remembered for a few powerful weird tales and some novels where the weird enters fitfully; oblivion has—probably justifiably—overtaken his dozens of other historical and romantic novels, although the F. Marion Crawford Society tries valiantly to perpetuate the memory of his entire work. Although supernaturalism is tangentially involved in several works— including Mr. Isaacs: A Tale of Modern India (1882) and With the Immortals (1886)—Crawford’s weird work can rightly be restricted to four volumes, the novels Zoroaster (1885), Khaled (1891), and The Witch of Prague (1891), and, above all, the landmark posthumous story collection Wandering Ghosts (1911; published in England as Uncanny Tales). This is all that anyone with an interest in the weird need read of Crawford’s work. Zoroaster and Khaled would nowadays be considered fantasies, so there is no need to spend much time on them, although both are worthy short novels. The former is, as the title proclaims unambiguously, a novel about the life of Zoroaster (the Greek name for Zarathustra), founder of Zoroastrianism. This description would seem to imply that the work is more properly to be categorised among Crawford’s many historical novels; and although it is true that only the faintest touches of the supernatural are found in this novel, it is really what one might call an historical fantasy. The great strength of Zoroaster is its prose style. It is really a novel-length prose poem, and it is this that raises the otherwise conventionally romantic events of the tale close to the realm of fantasy. Crawford here approaches Oscar Wilde, Lord Dunsany, and Clark Ashton Smith as a wielder of poetic prose. Khaled: A Tale of Arabia is in many ways a pendant to Zoroaster, although here there is not even the pretence of giving the work an historical foundation. We are here concerned with Khaled, “one of the genii converted to the faith on hearing Mohammed read the Koran by night in the valley of Al Nakhlah” (1). Because of some misdeed, Khaled is made a human being and is wedded to the princess Zehowah; and before his mortal death, whenever that shall be, he must persuade his bride to love him so that he can gain an immortal soul. Through a long series of events involving battles and political uprisings in the domain Khaled now rules, he finally wins the
love of the cold and indifferent Zehowah. I have no idea whether this tale is an actual fable, either from the Koran or anywhere else; but it has all the earmarks of a fairy tale similar to the one that La Motte-Fouqué so poignantly transformed into the story of Undine. The Witch of Prague, written slightly before Khaled in the winter of 1889–90, is Crawford’s most ambitious work of weird fiction; it is subtitled “A Fantastic Tale.” The plot is considerably convoluted, but its principal weird element is the quest of Unorna, the witch of Prague, and her sardonic partner Keyork Arabian to extend the bounds of human life, perhaps indefinitely, through the power of hypnotism. The two have kept an aged man under hypnosis for years in the hope that this process, plus the replacement of his old blood with the blood of a younger man, Israel Kafka, will rejuvenate him. What makes the novel interesting is the everunresolved tension as to whether Unorna’s hypnotic powers are natural or supernatural. Crawford was writing just at the time when the science of psychology was making startling advances in charting the functions of the mind; in a footnote Crawford even cites the leading psychologist prior to Freud, Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902). The mere fact that Unorna has come to be called the “witch of Prague” suggests the uneasiness with which her contemporaries regard her strange power of will. But like Zoroaster and Khaled, The Witch of Prague is not so much a weird tale as a love story. Much of the action again centres on a very complicated love triangle. A mysterious man designated only as the Wanderer is seeking his lost love Beatrice, who is being dragged across Europe by her father because he opposes her marriage to the Wanderer; the father dies, and the Wanderer spots Beatrice in a church in Prague, but loses her again. He approaches Unorna for help in finding Beatrice, but Unorna falls in love with the Wanderer herself. She hypnotises him and strives to make him forget Beatrice; apparently she succeeds, but is no closer to being loved herself by the Wanderer for all that. The novel proceeds with many intense emotional episodes, until at last Unorna yields and unites the Wanderer with Beatrice. The fundamental metaphor behind the whole hypnotism issue is loss of identity or individuality. It is this phenomenon that links hypnotism to oldtime effects of demonic possession. When Unorna first hypnotises the Wanderer, he senses his personality ebbing away. Keyork Arabian, on the other hand, is impervious to Unorna’s powers because he is the prototypical
individualist and egotist: “‘Autology is my study, autosophy my ambition, autonomy my pride. I am the great Panegoist, the would be Conservator of Self, the inspired prophet of the Universal I. I—I—I! My creed has but one word, and that word but one letter, that letter represents Unity, and Unity is strength. I am I, one, indivisible, central!’” (36). And yet, Unorna herself, when lost in love for the Wanderer, “seemed to have no individuality left” (227). It is in passages like this that Crawford unites the fantasy and love elements in this novel. Keyork Arabian is as invulnerable to love as he is to hypnosis; in one remarkable scene toward the beginning he claims to profess his love for Unorna in heart-rending tones but shatters the pretence with devilish cynicism. Indeed, as the novel progresses Keyork develops into an increasingly evil figure, as his singleminded quest to triumph over death becomes more and more ruthless and self-serving. As a weird tale the novel is, however, only of intermittent interest; for in spite of the subtitle, it is clear that the romantic entanglement is at the heart of the novel. The moments of horror are scattered: a prose-poetic paean to death (84–91), the display of Keyork Arabian’s studio, filled with specimens from his previous attempts to conquer death (106–11); and, most gripping of all, a hallucination by Israel Kafka induced by Unorna, wherein he is made to experience the torture of Simon Abeles, a seventeenth-century Jew punished by his father for converting to Christianity (188–96). This allows Crawford to indulge not only in loathsome descriptions of physical torment but some equally repulsive anti-Semitism. Ultimately, however, The Witch of Prague is a disappointment for not delivering upon its fantastic premise: aside from its great length (it was first published, in good Victorian fashion, in three volumes), the hypnotism issue is unsatisfactorily and hastily resolved at the end, as the old man is suddenly resuscitated in health and vigour. Crawford is simply not a profound or subtle enough novelist to keep the reader’s interest on the basis of the love element alone, and he would have done better to have written more concentratedly on the distinctively horrific theme of the novel. But Crawford will hold a worthy niche in weird fiction merely for the seven stories in Wandering Ghosts. These stories were written over at least a twenty-year span, “The Upper Berth” dating to as early as 1886 and “The Screaming Skull” to around 1908; the impression is that Crawford wrote these tales whenever mood and opportunity arose. Perhaps he himself did
not put much stock in them; it is significant that they were collected only posthumously. There is no especial progression or development of technique in these stories, and accordingly no virtue to studying them chronologically. A thematic approach will be more revealing and illuminating. “The Dead Smile” (Ainslee’s, August 1899) is one of the most grippingly horrifying tales ever written, although Crawford could not have thought that the supposed surprise ending—that Gabriel Ockram and Evelyn Warburton, engaged to be married, turn out to be brother and sister —was really much of a surprise. Crawford fills his story with references to “their strangely-like eyes” (6) and “their faces, that were so strangely alike” (9); all this is a little too obvious, but fortunately the story’s effectiveness does not depend on the concealing of the plot’s outcome. The very title signals the loathsome perversion of the good that is at the heart of the tale: just as a smile is ordinarily an indication of happiness, so a “dead smile” is not merely suggestive of the grinning of a skeleton but a symbol for the near-incest that is warded off at the story’s conclusion. The atmosphere of horrific gloom hovering over the entire narrative is almost oppressive; and when Gabriel descends into the family crypt (“There was a frightful stench of drying death” [36]) to discover the secret of Evelyn’s birth, the culmination of horror is reached: The dead face was blotched with dark stains, and the thin, grey hair was matted about the discoloured forehead. The sunken lids were half open and the candle light gleamed on something foul where the toad eyes had lived. But yet the dead thing smiled, as it had smiled in life; the ghastly lips were parted and drawn wide and tight upon the wolfish teeth, cursing still, and still defying hell to do its worst—defying, cursing, and always and for ever smiling alone in the dark. (38) The extravagance of the tone and language throughout this tale is strangely effective; and although Crawford was more restrained in his other works, we miss the luridness of what might be called the “oh-my-God” school of horror embodied in this story.
“For the Blood Is the Life” (written in 1905) was praised by Lovecraft, but is in reality a confused story of vampirism. It is one of several stories in which Crawford uses the framework of two individuals chatting idly over drinks, with one of them eventually supplying a casual narration of a ghost story; this device can be effective in allowing the horrific atmosphere to build gradually, but here it is the logic of the tale that is at fault. A young woman in Italy is killed by two robbers as she sees them burying their treasure on a mound, and they hurl her body into the pit along with their illgotten prize; but in some inexplicable fashion this woman becomes one of the undead and repeatedly drains the blood of her still-living lover. How this transition occurred is never clarified. It might not occur to us to rank Crawford among the great practitioners of the sea-horror tale, but at least three of his short stories directly or indirectly involve the sea, and do so with great effectiveness. The least interesting, perhaps, is “The Screaming Skull” (Red Magazine, December 1908), where an old sea-captain tells to a friend the story of a strange murder and its supernatural revenge. However, the offhand manner of the narration here results merely in flatness and a failure to realise the atmospheric potential of the situation. In an author’s note at the end Crawford informs us that the core of the plot is based on an actual English legend; this is perhaps one more piece of evidence that the best weird tales are ordinarily based on ersatz, not real, myths. “‘Man Overboard!’” (1903), a novelette first published as a booklet, is one of Crawford’s subtlest works. Here, in a story that displays nautical erudition rivalling anything in William Hope Hodgson, the actual supernatural manifestation—the ghost of one of a pair of twins, Jim and Jack Benton, who either fell overboard during a storm or was deliberately murdered by his brother—is not displayed until the very end: throughout the story we see the ghost only indirectly, and the cumulative power and suspense are compelling. We first learn that, although Jim Benton has been lost from the crew, the cook still finds the same number of plates used after every meal; then we see the dead man’s brother holding two pipes in his hand, one of them waterlogged; then the cook appears to go mad and stabs at something near the surviving brother, Jack, shouting: “There were two of them! So help me God, there were two of them!” (135). The tale gives the impression of winding down when the ship ends its journey with no further
mishaps; but then we learn that the narrator has been asked by Jack Benton to attend his wedding. After the ceremony the narrator sees this: I looked after the couple in the distance a last time, meaning to go down to the road, so as not to overtake them; but when I had made a few steps I stopped and looked again, for I knew I had seen something queer, though I had only realised it afterwards. I looked again, and it was plain enough now; and I stood stock-still, staring at what I saw. Mamie was walking between two men. The second man was just the same height as Jack, both being about a half a head taller than she; Jack on her left in his black tail-coat and round hat, and the other man on her right—well, he was a sailor-man in wet oil-skins. I could see the moonlight shining on the water that ran down him, and on the little puddle that had settled where the flap of his sou’wester was turned up behind; and one of his wet shiny arms was round Mamie’s waist, just above Jack’s. The quiet narration of this tale renders this climactic moment the more effective, and “‘Man Overboard!’” must rank as one of Crawford’s great triumphs. In spite of the merits of some of Crawford’s other tales, there is little reason to contradict the standard affirmation that “The Upper Berth” (in The Broken Shaft, ed. Sir Henry Norman [1886]) is his best weird tale. Here again it is the narrative voice that is the secret to the tale’s power. We are dealing with a hardy, gruff, no-nonsense figure named Brisbane, one who is not easily rattled. This trait inspires confidence in the reliability of Brisbane’s story. The gradual accumulation of horrific details—the porthole that refuses to stay closed; the air of musty dampness in the room; the fact that we never get a good look at the doomed occupant of the upper berth, who leaps to his death on the first night out—creates an intensely potent atmosphere, and prepares us for the actual confrontation with the loathsome: I remember that the sensation as I put my hands forward was as though I were plunging them into the air of a damp cellar, and from behind the curtains came a gust of wind that smelled horribly of
stagnant sea-water. I laid hold of something that had the shape of a man’s arm, but was smooth, and wet, and icy cold. But suddenly, as I pulled, the creature sprang violently forward against me, a clammy, oozy mass, as it seemed to me, heavy and wet, yet endowed with a sort of supernatural strength. I reeled across the state-room, and in an instant the door opened and the thing rushed out. (219) Even here, however, Brisbane immediately discounts the supernatural (“It was absurd, I thought. The Welsh rare-bit I had eaten had disagreed with me” [220]), thereby setting the stage for another encounter with the cold, dead thing in the upper berth. The tale ends in Brisbane’s usual clipped manner: “It was a very disagreeable experience, and I was very badly frightened, which is a thing I do not like. That is all. That is how I saw a ghost—if it was a ghost. It was dead, anyhow” (233). The two remaining stories in Wandering Ghosts, “By the Waters of Paradise” (in The Witching Time, ed. Sir Henry Norman [1887]) and “The Doll’s Ghost” (date of first publication unknown), are very different from the clutching horror of Crawford’s other tales. Here Crawford skirts close to a major danger in weird fiction, something that Lovecraft (in reference to Algernon Blackwood) aptly termed “the flatness of benignant supernaturalism” (S 66). The cheerful or wistfully happy ghost story always runs the risk of seeming blandly innocuous and unreasoningly optimistic; and although “By the Waters of Paradise,” which may not even be supernatural, probably fails for this reason, “The Doll’s Ghost” surmounts the difficulty and becomes a poignant little vignette. The former is nothing but a love story, in which a man sees in his garden a vision of a lovely young woman, finally tracks her down, marries her, and saves her from death by drowning, robbing the “Witch of the Water” of a new victim. It is all elegantly told, and the courtship of the couple is handled with genial wit, but we have heard too many such tales before. “The Doll’s Ghost” portrays an aged doll-repairer who falls in love with a doll brought to his shop and lovingly repairs it; in return the doll helps him to locate his lost daughter, ultimately found in a hospital after being attacked by young boys. It is a charming work where, for once, the happy ending does not seem forced or contrived.
There is also an eighth, uncollected tale by Crawford, “The King’s Messenger” (Cosmopolitan, November 1907). This story, too, is impressive in its narrative subtlety. At an elaborate dinner party the narrator notices one unoccupied seat, but is informed by the young woman, Miss Lorna, sitting next to him that the final guest shall shortly arrive. The guest is Death. The whole story becomes a double entendre, as everything Lorna says about the expected guest takes on another meaning under the bland conventionality of her words. Lorna will run away with the guest that night; the narrator thinks it merely an elopement, but we begin to suspect something more sinister when she confesses her love for “the King’s Messenger”: “Oh, I don’t pretend that I fell in love with him at first sight; I went through a phase of feeling afraid of him, as almost everyone else does. You see, when people first meet him they cannot possibly know how kind and gentle he can be, though he is so tremendously strong. I’ve heard him called cruel and ruthless and cold, but it’s not true. Indeed it’s not! He can be as gentle as a woman, and he’s the truest friend in all the world.” (157) In fact, the woman will commit suicide. The narrator later finds that he has been dreaming (thereby accounting for the otherwise anomalous fact that all the other guests save himself seem to know the missing man’s identity), but he receives a telegram shortly afterward telling of Lorna’s death. “The King’s Messenger” is an unrecognised jewel of weird fiction. In the history of the weird tale F. Marion Crawford occupies roughly the same place as Robert W. Chambers. Both wrote tales of horror and the supernatural sporadically over their lifetimes, although Chambers did so principally at the beginning of his career and Crawford, if anything, toward the end; both will be remembered primarily for their scattered weird work rather than their voluminous mainstream work; and both exercised only a marginal influence on later writers in the field. The supernatural was, for both writers, a diversion or a recreation; and both were under the impression that their lasting work would be their many novels of romance —an impression, to be sure, apparently justified by the tremendous popular and (for Crawford) critical success they enjoyed during their lifetimes, but one which subsequent readers and critics have not sustained. Let us not be
unfair to Crawford: his mainstream work is not nearly as ephemeral or insubstantial as Chambers’s, and he will occupy a markedy more significant place in American literature than Chambers ever will; but it is as unlikely that such of his works as Paul Patoff (1887) or Via Crucis (1899) will ever be resurrected, even by industrious doctoral candidates, as it is that Chambers’s endless series of frivolous romances will ever again be held in much esteem. The small and restricted domain of weird fiction is often kinder to its practitioners—even those, like E. F. Benson, John Buchan, or Ralph Adams Cram, who do not make it their exclusive literary focus— than mainstream fiction tends to be; and in this domain the work of F. Marion Crawford will not go unappreciated. Finally, there is the case of Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904). Hearn’s reputation as a weird writer is perhaps exaggerated, since it is not at all clear that he made any original contributions to the supernatural in the strictest sense of the term; but the gorgeousness of his prose, and his work as translator, lecturer, and folklorist has perhaps understandably led to his high reputation in the field. Perhaps his most signal accomplishment is his work as a translator—both of Gautier’s One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances (1882) and of Flaubert’s Temptation of St. Anthony (posthumously published in 1910), the latter of which, in its vivid hallucination scenes, occupies a kind of borderland of the weird. Otherwise, Hearn’s work in the supernatural is restricted to such books as Some Chinese Ghosts (1887), In Ghostly Japan (1899), Kwaidan (1904), and the posthumous Fantastics and Other Fancies (1914). The last-named, reprinting selections of a column called “Fantastics” that he wrote during his years as a journalist in New Orleans (1877–87), are chronologically the earliest of these writings. They are all exquisite prose-poems, but if anything they belong to the realm of fantasy rather than supernatural horror. Their dominant theme is the fusion of love and death—a fusion that Hearn handles with both poignancy and terrifying intensity. In “The Ghostly Kiss,” a man believes he is in a theatre, where he kisses a lovely woman— but in fact he is in a cemetery. “The Vision of the Dead Creole,” which is more of a connected narrative than most of the other items in the book, speaks plangently of a man whose lover rises from the tomb. Then there are such delicacies as “When I Was a Flower,” a gorgeous tale of a flower’s life and death, told in the first person. Hearn reported that these little sketches “are my impressions of the strange life of New Orleans” (3), and he has
certainly accomplished his purpose of vividly portraying the curious sense of life-in-death that continues to pervade that metropolis. Whether we should consider any of the books that Hearn wrote after his emigration to Japan in 1890—where he ultimately took a Japanese name, Koizumi Yakumo, married a Japanese woman, and apparently converted to Buddhism—as contributions to the weird (or, at any rate, to weird fiction) is greatly open to question; for of course all the books in question record ageold legendry from the Orient and cannot be considered original except in certain elements of narration. Some Chinese Ghosts was written while Hearn was still in New Orleans, but it heralds his fascination with the culture of the Far East. Both In Ghostly Japan and Kwaidan are collections of Japanese folklore and legend, some of which is deliciously gruesome (“Jikininki,” in Kwaidan, tells of a corpse-eating goblin in the shape of a priest), but they constitute the raw material of weird fiction rather than finished instances of it. Hearn occupied a curious position in his time: as a professor at Imperial University in Tokyo, he taught English literature to his Japanese pupils while writing books that artfully elucidated Japanese culture to European readers. His undated lecture “The Value of the Supernatural in Fiction” is still worth reading as a defence of the literary value of the weird tale.
Epilogue I appear to have suggested that the history of weird fiction—at least the portion of that history covered in this volume—is a series of anticipations: the quasi-weird writing stretching from Gilgamesh to the middle of the eighteenth century was an anticipation of the Gothic novels; the Gothic novels themselves, along with such of their successors as Sir Walter Scott and Washington Irving, was an anticipation of the work of Edgar Allan Poe, who to my mind was the true founder of weird fiction as a viable literary mode. I now make bold to state that the entire history of weird fiction down to the end of the nineteenth century was in a certain sense an anticipation of what has come to be called the golden age of weird writing—roughly extending from 1880 to 1940, and encompassing such titans (some of them hardly regarded as titans except in the realm of supernatural fiction) as Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, and H. P. Lovecraft. It was this second phase of the “deluge” of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that saw the full flower of weird writing, in novels and tales alike. While it may seem uncharitable to regard such immemorial works as Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Stoker’s Dracula as mere anticipations of what came after, it must be stated—and I trust my analysis has shown—that in these works the supernaturalism is either so attenuated or so marred by aesthetic blunders that they are flawed masterworks of the weird at best (Hawthorne’s novel, it hardly need be stated, is a masterwork on any level, but its relation to weird fiction is highly tenuous). Always leaving aside the unsurpassable master Poe, the work of Le Fanu, Henry James, and even Ambrose Bierce does not constitute the absolute pinnacle of weird writing; but all these writers and
others laid the groundwork for the attainment of that pinnacle by others— not merely the titans named above but such of their successors as Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson, Ramsey Campbell, and Thomas Ligotti, all of whom occupy the upper ranges of the canon of weird writing. The supernatural work of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries will see a definitive break from the motifs of old-time Gothicism, as the wonders and terrors of a new age of scientific advance, atomic warfare, and social and political upheaval bring to the fore new concerns and new approaches to treating them. Media such as film and television will also increasingly colour the manner and even the matter of weird fiction, as writing from as early as the 1920s becomes increasingly visual and even cinematic while at the same time reflecting a deeper awareness of the philosophy of terror and the physiology of fear. Many of the above-named authors became important theoreticians of the tale of terror, and from their perspective as practising writers they generally evolved more cogent analyses of the nature and functions of supernatural horror than their more academic colleagues among literary critics and theorists. At the same time, the sheer quantity of weird writing—especially during the short, twodecade period (roughly 1970 to 1990) when supernatural horror became a best-selling phenomenon—led to the production of a fearsome amount of rubbish, much of which has mercifully descended into the maw of oblivion. As I stated at the outset, there is good reason for thinking that the best weird fiction is generated when written for a relatively small circle of sensitive readers; and in our own day, as I hope to show in the next volume, we appear to be experiencing an unprecedented revival of weird writing on the part of a number of writers who, while drawing upon the rich heritage of the past, have the skill to direct their work to a present-day audience with present-day concerns. I do not maintain that I have said the last word on the history of weird fiction, or that the last word can ever be said. But I trust I have provided a broad outline of the genre and made some suggestive comments on some of the leading authors and works that will generate continuing discussion on exactly what this literary mode seeks to do and whether it is successful in doing it.
Bibliographical Essay Space restrictions prevent my supplying, in my bibliography, anything approaching an exhaustive bibliography of primary and secondary sources pertaining to the authors, works, and topics discussed in this book. However, an array of reference works should assist the reader interested in pursuing additional research on any of the subjects I have broached. Criticism and analysis of supernatural literature may not, in some respects, have progressed very far, but bibliographical charting of the field has made considerable headway. One of the pioneering reference works in the field was E. F. Bleiler’s Checklist of Fantastic Literature (Shasta, 1948; rev. ed. as Checklist of Science Fiction and Supernatural Fiction [Firebell, 1978]), and it retains usefulness. More recently, Bleiler has made good use of his exhaustive knowledge of the field to compile Guide to Supernatural Fiction (Kent State University Press, 1983), a bibliography (with plot synopses) of thousands of novels and tales of supernatural horror. Mike Ashley and William G. Contento’s The Supernatural Index (Greenwood Press, 1995) is a comprehensive and immensely helpful index to anthologies of supernatural fiction. Ashley is contemplating the compilation of an analogous volume for single-author collections, but the pressure of other work may delay completion of this project for some years. In the meantime, readers can make do with Donald H. Tuck’s still useful Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy through 1968 (Advent, 1974–82; 3 vols.), although of course it is very much out of date. The Locus Index to Science Fiction (http://www.locusmag.com/index) has fair coverage of weird writers. Several encyclopedias that contain both bibliographies and brief critical discussions of a wide array of weird writers can be cited. The Penguin
Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural, ed. Jack Sullivan (Viking Penguin, 1986), although somewhat limited and idiosyncratic in its selection of topics, features articles written by leading critics. David Pringle’s Horror, Ghost and Gothic Writers (St. James Press, 1998) is of considerable value, as is Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographical Guide, ed. Douglass H. Thomson, Jack G. Voller, and Frederick S. Frank (Greenwood Press, 2002). (The title of this book is somewhat misleading, as it covers writers from the eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries.) Primary and secondary sources for many leading authors of supernatural fiction can be found in Horror Literature, ed. Marshall Tymn (Bowker, 1981), and Horror Literature, ed. Neil Barron (Garland, 1990), the latter revised and fused with another volume as Fantasy and Horror (Scarecrow Press, 1999). Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia, ed. S. T. Joshi and Stefan Dziemianowicz (Greenwood Press, 2005; 3 vols.), has the virtues of comprehensiveness and recency. H. W. Hall’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Reference Index, 1785–1985 (Gale Research Co., 1987) is an extensive listing of secondary sources, but without annotation or commentary. Hall has followed up this work with supplements covering the years 1985–91 (Libraries Unlimited, 1993) and 1992–95 (Libraries Unlimited, 1997). More recently, he has taken his work online: see his Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database (http://sffrd.library.tamu.edu). Of more specialised reference works there are a fair number. Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Weird Fiction Magazines, ed. Marshall B. Tymn and Mike Ashley (Greenwood Press, 1985), is enormously useful for discussions of magazines devoted to supernatural fiction. Along the same lines, Frank H. Parnell and Mike Ashley’s Monthly Terrors (Greenwood Press, 1985) provides issue-by-issue indexes to hundreds of important periodicals devoted to the supernatural, including Weird Tales. My own compilations, Icons of Horror and the Supernatural (Greenwood Press, 2006; 2 vols.) and The Encyclopedia of the Vampire (Greenwood Press, 2010), benefited from strong work by a variety of contributors. The latter volume in no way supersedes J. Gordon Melton’s The Vampire Book (Visible Ink Press, 1994; rev. ed. 1999), which discusses several topics not covered in my own work. I have suggested in my introduction that I am disappointed with most of the standard histories of supernatural fiction. The first, chronologically
speaking, is Dorothy Scarborough’s The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (Putnam’s, 1917). H. P. Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927; rev. 1933–35) may still be the soundest general historical treatment, although of course it is now nearly a century out of date. Peter Penzoldt’s The Supernatural in Fiction (Peter Nevill, 1952), has some penetrating discussions of early twentieth-century writers. Les Daniels’s Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media (Scribner’s, 1975) is a sound study written by a critic who later became a distinguished horror novelist. I do not find much value in Glen St. John Barclay’s Anatomy of Horror (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978), David Punter’s The Literature of Terror (Longmans, 1980; rev. ed. 1996), or Walter Kendrick’s The Thrill of Fear (Grove Weidenfeld, 1991). Some studies of more limited scope are much more useful, such as Julia Briggs’s Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (Faber & Faber, 1977), Jack Sullivan’s Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (Ohio University Press, 1978), José B. Monleón’s A Specter Is Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical Approach to the Fantastic (Princeton University Press, 1990), and Faye Ringel’s New England’s Gothic Literature (Edwin Mellen Press, 1995). I hope that my studies, The Weird Tale (University of Texas Press, 1990), The Modern Weird Tale (McFarland, 2001), The Evolution of the Weird Tale (Hippocampus Press, 2004), and Classics and Contemporaries: Some Notes on Horror Fiction (Hippocampus Press, 2009), are of some use. My Emperors of Dreams: Some Notes on Weird Poetry (P’rea Press, 2008) is a brief treatment of a topic that demands much greater discussion. Some collections of essays are useful, among them The Haunted Dusk: American Supernatural Fiction, 1820–1920, ed. Howard Kerr, John W. Crowley, and Charles L. Crow (University of Georgia Press, 1983); Discovering Modern Horror Fiction, ed. Darrell Schweitzer (Starmont House, 1985–88; 2 vols.); Discovering Classic Horror Fiction, ed. Darrell Schweitzer (Starmont House, 1992); Discovering Classic Fantasy Fiction, ed. Darrell Schweitzer (Borgo Press, 1996); and American Supernatural Fiction: From Edith Wharton to the Weird Tales Writers, ed. Douglas Robillard (Garland, 1996). Survey of Fantasy Literature, ed. Frank N. Magill (Salem Press, 1983; 5 vols.), has a number of essays on supernatural writing. Supernatural Fiction Writers, ed. E. F. Bleiler (Scribner’s, 1985; 2 vols.), and Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and
Horror, ed. Richard Bleiler (Scrbner’s, 2003; 2 vols.) are more useful compilations of the same approximate sort. “A Hideous Bit of Morbidity”: An Anthology of Horror Criticism from the Enlightenment to World War I, ed. Jason Colavito (McFarland, 2008), is useful and entertaining, although some of the selections are rather slight.
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Seneca. The Tragedies. Ed. David R. Slavitt. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. [Volume 1 includes Thyestes, Medea, Agamemnon; Volume 2 includes The Madness of Hercules, A Cloak for Hercules.] Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. Gen. Ed. Alfred Harbage. (The Complete Pelican Shakespeare.) New York: Viking, 1977. Shelley, Mary. Collected Tales and Stories. Ed. Charles E. Robinson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. ———. Frankenstein. In Three Gothic Novels. Ed. Peter Fairclough. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. ———. The Last Man. Ed. Hugh J. Luke, Jr. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson (rev. G. M. Matthews). London: Oxford University Press, 1970. ———. Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne. Ed. Stephen C. Behrendt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Sophocles. [Plays.] Tr. F. Storr. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1913. [Volume 2 includes Trachiniae.] Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables. New York: Worthington, 1889. [Includes “Markheim,” “Thrawn Janet.”] ———. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories. New York: Dell, 1966. [Includes The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, “The Bottle Imp,” “The Body-Snatcher,” “Olalla.”] Stoker, Bram. Best Ghost and Horror Stories. Ed. Richard Dalby, Stefan Dziemianowicz, and S. T. Joshi. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997. ———. Dracula. New York: Modern Library, [1950]. ———. The Jewel of Seven Stars. In Stoker’s Five Novels. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2006. Thackeray, William Makepeace. “The Painter’s Bargain.” In The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray. Kensington Edition. New York: Scribner’s, 1904. 17.79–97. Virgil. The Poems of Virgil. Tr. James Rhoades. London: Oxford University Press, 1921. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. In Three Gothic Novels. Ed. Peter Fairclough. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Wells, H. G. The Short Stories of H. G. Wells. London: Ernest Benn, 1927. 2 vols. (paginated continuously).
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Conger, Syndy M. Matthew G. Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin and the Germans. Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1977. Cooper, Frederic Taber. “Ambrose Bierce.” In Cooper’s Some American Story Tellers. New York: Henry Holt, 1911. 331–53. Davidson, Cathy N. The Experimental Fictions of Ambrose Bierce. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. deFord, Miriam Allen. Thomas Moore. New York: Twayne, 1967. Drake, Nathan. Literary Hours. Vol. 1. 1798. Rev. ed. 1800. New York: Garland, 1970. Frank, Frederick S. “The Gothic Vathek: The Problem of Genre Resolved.” In Kenneth W. Graham, ed. Vathek and the Escape from Time: Bicentenary Revaluations. New York: AMS Press, 1990. 157–72. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In The Standard Edition of the Complte Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Tr. James Strachey et al. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. 17.219–52. Gruener, Gutav. “Notes on the Influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann upon Edgar Allan Poe.” PMLA 19 (1904): 1–25. Haggerty, George E. Queer Gothic. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Hartley, L. P. “Introduction.” In The Third Ghost Book, ed. Cynthia Asquith. New York: Beagle, 1970. vii–ix. Hawkins, Peter S. Dante: A Brief History. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Heller, Terry. The Delights of Terror: An Aesthetics of the Tale of Terror. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen, 1981. James, Henry. “Mary Elizabeth Braddon.” In James’s Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature; American Writers; English Writers. New York: Library of America, 1984. 741–46. Joshi, S. T. Junk Fiction: America’s Obsession with Bestsellers. Rockville, MD: Borgo Press, 2009. ———. The Weird Tale. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. ———. “What Happens in Ambrose Bierce’s ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser.’” Studies in the Fantastic No. 2 (Winter 2008/Spring 2009): 94– 101.
Kaske, R. E. “[The Governing Theme of Beowulf.]” In Beowulf: The Donaldson Translation. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. 118–31. Kiely, Robert. The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972. Kipling, Rudyard. Something of Myself. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1937. Lévy, Maurice. Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic. Trans. S. T. Joshi. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988. Lonsdale, Roger. “Introduction” to Vathek by William Beckford. London: Oxford University Press/World’s Classics, 1970. vii–xxxi. Lovecraft, H. P. “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” 1927. In The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Ed. S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2000. ———. Selected Letters. Ed. August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, and James Turner. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965–76. 5 vols. McCormack, W. J. Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Mahmoud, Fatma Moussa. “Beckford, Vathek and the Oriental Tale.” In Fatma Moussa Mahmoud, ed. William Beckford of Fonthill: Bicentenary Essays. 1960. Rpt. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1972. 63–122. Mehrotra, K. K. Horace Walpole and the English Novel. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1934. Melada, Ivan. Sheridan Le Fanu. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Page, Denys. The Homeric Odyssey. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955. Peeples, Scott. Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Twayne, 1998. Pollin, Burton R. “Godwin and Poe.” In Pollin’s Discoveries in Poe. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970. 107–27. Radcliffe, Ann. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” New Monthly Magazine 16 (1826): 145–52. Railo, Eino. The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism. London: George Routlege & Sons, 1927. Redding, Cyrus. Memoirs of William Beckford. London: Charles J. Skeet, 1859. 2 vols. Robert, Marie. Gothic Immortals: The Fiction of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. London: Routledge, 1990. Sage, Victor. Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.
Scott, Sir Walter. “Introduction to The Castle of Otranto.” In Three Gothic Novels. New York: Dover, 1966. 3–15. ———. The Lives of the Novelists. London & New York: Dent/Dutton (Everyman’s Library), 1928. ———. “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition.” In Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Fiction. Ed. Ioan Williams. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968. 312–53. Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar Allan Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Simpson, Louis. James Hogg: A Critical Study. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1962. Smith, Albert B. Théophile Gautier and the Fantastic. University, MS: Romance Monographs, 1977. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. The Insistence of Horror: Aspects of the Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. Stovall, Floyd. “Poe’s Debt to Coleridge.” In Stovall’s Edgar Poe the Poet. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969. 126–74. Sullivan, Jack. Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978. Thompson, G. R. Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973. Thornton, Weldon. D. H. Lawrence: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Tr. Richard Howard. Cleveland: Press of Case Western University, 1973. Visiak, E. H. The Mirror of Conrad. London: T. Werner Laurie, 1955. Weinstein, Lee. “‘The Yellow Wallpaper’: A Supernatural Interpretation.” Studies in Weird Fiction no. 4 (Fall 1988): 23–25.
Volume 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries
. . . I wondered for a second what icy and intolerable weight oppressed my heart and suffocated me with the unutterable horror of the coffin-lid nailed down on the living. —Arthur Machen, “Novel of the White Powder” . . . for the next three hours I was immersed in a gulf of unutterable horror. —H. P. Lovecraft, “The Whisperer in Darkness”
Preface Anyone with a knowledge of the extent of supernatural literature during the period covered by this volume will understand that nothing approaching comprehensiveness of discussion can be achieved short of a book two or three times the length of this one, so I trust I will be pardoned for focusing on what I believe to be the most notable authors and works of this period and, specifically, those authors and works who are central to the supernatural tradition. Certain authors who have attained celebrity or critical acclaim—such as Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, and Tim Powers, to name only three—have been regretfully omitted in the realisation that their work lies largely outside the realm of supernatural literature as somewhat narrowly understood, and that space restrictions required a clear focus on those authors who have addressed themselves to the supernatural as opposed to fantasy, alternate-world history, and other adjacent literary modes. I have also, with great regret, decided to eschew discussion of two other subgenres that many critics have regarded as a branch of weird fiction. One of these is Southern Gothic, typified by the work of Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and others. But to my mind this subgenre—which is almost entirely non-supernatural—is only remotely related to the Gothic novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and is more vitally allied to mainstream fiction with its concern for the portrayal of characters and the interplay of character and history in the culture of the American South. I may perhaps be more subject to censure for ignoring magic realism, embodied in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Marquez, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende, and many others; but I believe this subgenre is really a branch of fantasy, since the display of the supernatural in an objectively real environment is rarely the focus, nor is terror a central component.
There is an added difficulty in discussing contemporary writers, in that it is impossible to know how many of these, even among those who are currently popular or eminent, will endure for any foreseeable period of time. Posterity is a ruthless winnower of the mediocre and the transient, although on occasion it can also brush the genuinely meritorious under the rug; but posterity has, necessarily, yet to act in regard to contempoary writers, so my own critical judgment as to the aesthetic supremacy of any given writer must be my guide to what might be called tentative canonisation. As in the previous volume, my bibliography lists only those works and editions that I have actually quoted in the text. In this volume, unlike its predecessor, I have not seen the need to supply the actual first publication of short stories and poems; in many cases, only the year of first publication is cited. It would seem that I have cited secondary sources even more rarely than in the first volume, but that does not mean that I have not benefited from the pioneering critical work of those many critics and reviewers who have addressed the authors and works I have discussed here. My bibliographical essay gives some suggestions as to further reading about the subjects covered in this book. —S. T. J. Seattle, Washington January 2012
IX. The Titans The late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw the emergence of four titanic figures—Arthur Machen (1863–1947), Algernon Blackwood (1869– 1951), Lord Dunsany (1878–1957), and M. R. James (1862–1936)—who, with their great disciple, H. P. Lovecraft, transformed supernatural literature in as profound a way as Edgar Allan Poe had done a half-century earlier. Their simultaneous appearance was in some senses an accident, but in other senses was the manifest product of a century or more of weird writing— from the Gothic novels through Poe to the Victorian ghost story writers— whereby the supernatural had become a literarily viable mode that could serve to express a writer’s deepest moods, images, and conceptions in a manner that could not be accommodated by mimetic realism. It is not simply that these four writers produced work that is of transcendent merit; it is that each endowed his work with a philosophical and aesthetic vision that causes it to cohere as a tightly woven unity, thereby expressing a compelling worldview that allows it to become more than the sum of its parts. These writers also expanded the range of supernatural writing beyond mundane ghosts and goblins—tropes that were already becoming hackneyed through overuse—and thereby lent supernatural literature a renewed lease of life that carried it boldly into the new century.
i. Arthur Machen: The Evils of Materialism Arthur Machen’s own life is perhaps his greatest creation; for it is exactly the life we might expect a poet and a visionary to have lived. Born in 1863 in the village of Caerleon-on-Usk in Wales (the site, two millennia earlier, of the Roman town of Isca Silurum and the base of the Second Augustan Legion), Machen was fascinated since youth by the Roman antiquities in his region as well as the rural Welsh countryside. He attended Hereford Cathedral School, but in 1880 he failed an examination for the Royal College of Surgeons; he felt he had no option but to go to London to look for work, where he hoped that his ardent enthusiasm for books might land him some literary work. But only poverty and loneliness were his portion. Dragging out a meagre existence as a translator (his translation of the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre [1886] long remained standard, as did his later translation of Casanova’s memoirs), tutor, and cataloguer, he knew at first hand the spiritual isolation that his alter ego, Lucian Taylor, would depict so poignantly in The Hill of Dreams (1907). In his first autobiography, Far Off Things (1922), he speaks of this period with a wistfulness that scarcely conceals his anguish. Although Machen published a few works during this period—The Anatomy of Tobacco (1884), an owlishly learned disquisition on various types of tobacco; the picaresque novel The Chronicle of Clemendy (1886)—they were commercially unsuccessful and are today not highly regarded. But the death of Machen’s father in 1887 suddenly gave him, for the next fourteen years, the economic independence he required to write whatever he chose, without thought of markets or sales. And yet, one of his first works of fiction of this period—“The Great God Pan” (1890)—created a sensation, especially when it appeared in book form in 1894. It shocked the moral guardians of an enfeebled Victorian culture as the diseased outpourings of a decadent mind; but the reviewers who condemned it as sexually offensive could not know that Machen shared the very inhibitions he seemed to be defying. This tale—as well as the infinitely superior “The White People” (1899)—succeeds largely because Machen himself, as a
rigidly orthodox Anglo-Catholic, crystallised his horror of aberrant sexuality by giving it a supernatural dimension. In “The Great God Pan” we are asked to believe that a scientific experiment performed upon a young woman of seventeen results in her “seeing” the Great God Pan; she instantly loses her mind and becomes an idiot. Some years thereafter a strange woman named Helen Vaughan plagues London society, causing a rash of suicides and destroying the lives of several prominent men about town. In the end we learn that Helen is in fact the daughter of the young woman, born nine months after the fateful experiment. Without so much as hinting it, Machen has conveyed to astute readers that the young woman had done more than merely “see” Pan; she had been (somehow) impregnated by the great god of Nature. (This is the point of the Latin inscription at the end of the second section: “And a devil was made incarnate. And a human being was produced” [Three Impostors 14].) But the way in which Machen portrays Pan—and, by extension, Nature itself— is interesting, especially in contrast to his great contemporary Algernon Blackwood, a pantheist for whom Nature was pure, uncorrupt, and unadulterated by the pollution of human civilisation. Machen takes a precisely opposite view. For him, the life-principle itself was inherently horrific, and can be made acceptable only by the rigid repression of civilised society This is why Helen Vaughan’s activities cause the greatest disturbance among the refined aristocrats of London. The scientist, Raymond, confesses toward the end that “I broke open the door of the house of life” (Three Impostors 50)—in other words, that he has broken down the barriers that separate human life from all other life on the earth. But the result is only horror; and Helen Vaughan’s death-throes—whereby she transmogrifies “from woman to man, from man to beast, and from beast to worse than beast” (Three Impostors 50)—convey Machen’s own horror of untamed, uncontrolled, uncivilised life. Throughout the novella Machen hints at illicit sex in a way that to us seems coy but to his original readers would have appeared suggestive to the point of obscenity. The young Helen is once seen in the company of a “strange naked man” (no doubt Pan himself, perhaps in his traditional guise as a man with the legs of a goat). Another young woman, Rachel, is found weeping and “half undressed” (Three Impostors 13) in her room: clearly she has been raped by Pan. Mercifully, she dies shortly thereafter. Helen herself,
a young woman in London, is said to be guilty of “nameless infamies” (Three Impostors 41)—no doubt of a sexual nature. All this would have titillated Machen’s Victorian audience, and indeed did so. All this makes Machen sound like the Erica Jong of his day, but this reaction was only to have been expected in the final decade of Queen Victoria’s reign. H. P. Lovecraft, although at one point heaping scorn on Machen’s horror of sex—“The filth and perversion which to Machen’s obsoletely orthodox mind meant profound defiances of the universe’s foundations, mean to us only a rather prosaic and unfortunate species of organic maladjustment—no more frightful, and no more interesting, than a headache, a fit of colic, or an ulcer on the big toe” (Selected Letters 4.4)— was himself highly reserved and puritanical in matters of sex, so it is no surprise that he adapted Machen’s notion of a “god” impregnating a mortal in his own tale, “The Dunwich Horror” (1928). Another scientific experiment is at the focus of “The Inmost Light,” written in 1892 and first published in 1894. Here we find that a doctor has persuaded his own wife to allow him to extract her soul and place it in a gem—the “inmost light” in that gem is her soul. The result is that the woman continues to live, but presents—like Helen Vaughan—a visage of mingled beauty and horror. One man who sees her in a window thinks of her as a “satyr” (Three Impostors 56). To one of Machen’s conventional religiosity, a person without a (Christian) soul can only appear as a figure of pagan antiquity. “The Shining Pyramid” (1895), aside from continuing the adventures of Mr. Dyson, the pseudo-detective who was introduced to us in “The Inmost Light,” is one of Machen’s first expositions of what might be called his “Little People mythology.” Although it features a spectacularly potent scene in which the stunted, primitive denizens of Britain—now dwelling in caves, having been driven out by successive waves of fully human peoples— perform a hideous ritual around a pyramid of fire, “The Shining Pyramid” is perhaps too much of a detective story to be fully effective as a weird tale. But the “Little People mythology” is of some interest in itself. Machen makes it clear that he himself believed in the former existence of just such a race of creatures as he depicts in these stories: Of recent years abundant proof has been given that a short, nonAryan race once dwelt beneath ground, in hillocks, throughout
Europe, their raths have been explored, and the weird old tales of green hills all lighted up at night have received confirmation. Much in the old legends may be explained by a reference to this primitive race. The stories of changelings, and captive women, become clear on the supposition that the “fairies” occasionally raided the houses of the invaders. (“Folklore and Legends of the North” [1898], Line of Terror 31) This was written more than two decades before the publication of Margaret A. Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), which gave a momentary stamp of approval to the thesis. But Machen knew that the really adventuresome aspect of his theory—or, rather, the radical extension of it which he made for fictional purposes—was that “the people still lived in hidden caverns in wild and lonely lands,” something he maintained was “wildly improbable” (“On Re-reading The Three Impostors and the Wonder Story” [unpublished ms.], cited in Three Impostors xv). But behind all this speculative anthropology is the symbolism of the Little People. They are horrible and loathsome, to be sure, but they have at least one advantage over modern human beings: they have retained that primal sacrament (perverted, of course, by bestiality and violence) which links them with the Beyond. There is something of awe mingled with the horror experienced by the narrators when they witness the “Pyramid of fire” (Three Impostors 94) summoned by the Little People in “The Shining Pyramid,” and this signals the truth uttered by the protagonist of “The White People”: “Sorcery and sanctity . . . these are the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life” (White People 62). Probably Machen’s most sustained weird work is The Three Impostors, published in 1895. Also poorly received, it was criticised for being excessively imitative of Robert Louis Stevenson. It is commonly believed that the model for the novel—both in its episodic structure and in its flippant and jaunty style—is Stevenson’s The New Arahian Nights (1882); but the true model is that novel’s sequel, The Dynamiter (1885), written by Stevenson in conjunction with his wife, Fanny van de Grift Stevenson. Machen ultimately acknowledged this criticism, and for the next two years he worked with difficulty, even agony, to hammer out his own style; the result is that luminous novel of aesthetic sincerity, The Hill of Dreams.
What is The Three Impostors? On the surface, it appears to be a random collection of episodes strung together with the flimsiest kind of narrative thread. One episode—“Novel of the Iron Maid”—had in fact been written and published in 1890, and for copyright reasons it and its introductory segment (“The Decorative Imagination”) do not appear in many American editions of the novel. Other episodes—notably the celebrated “Novel of the Black Seal” and “Novel of the White Powder”—have been abstracted from the narrative fabric and reprinted as self-standing stories. This occurred on several occasions during Machen’s lifetime, and he appears to have registered no great complaint; but Machen was scarcely in a position to do so, as the period between 1901 and 1932 (when he received a Civil List pension of £100 a year) was of considerable poverty for him, and he could ill afford to pass up any revenue his writings yielded. Both the title of The Three Impostors and its subtitle (“or, The Transmutations”—frequently omitted from reprints) may provide the clue to the interpretation of the novel. Who are the “three impostors” of the title? Who can they be but the two men and a woman we encounter in the prologue, who have at last captured and perhaps killed the “young man with spectacles” they have evidently been pursuing? For it is they who, under a series of guises, tell the various “novels” (from the French nouvelle, or tale, especially one of a romantic or fantastic character) scattered throughout the work. Their sole audience is a pair of friends, Mr. Dyson and Charles Phillipps, who wage an ongoing philosophical battle on the nature of reality and the nature of fiction, and it becomes gradually clear that the tales spun by the “three impostors” may be entirely fictitious, being instead somewhat laborious contrivances meant to dupe Dyson and Phillipps into leading them to the spectacled young man. Toward the end it begins to dawn upon the two gentlemen that the stories they are hearing are perhaps not entirely reliable; Dyson finally resolves to “abjure all Milesian and Arabian methods of entertainment” (Three Impostors 213)—a reference to the Milesian tale (the Greek version of the tall tale) and, of course, to the Arabian Nights. This connects with a theme that runs throughout The Three Impostors and Machen’s work as a whole—the fantastic nature of the metropolis of London. A Fragment of Life (1904), a pensive short novel on the borderline of the weird, conveys this conception poignantly: “London seemed a city of the Arabian Nights, and its labyrinths of streets an enchanted maze; its long avenues of lighted
lamps were as starry systems, and its immensity became for him an image of the endless universe” (White People 168). But what purpose could Machen have in seemingly dynamiting the seriousness and power of the episodes in The Three Impostors by putting them in the mouths of dubious characters? There may be no clear answer to this question, but perhaps some clues can be provided by considering Machen’s general philosophy. I hesitate to call his view of the world a philosophy, for really it was a set of dogmatic prejudices that changed little through the whole of his long life; but at its essence was a violent hostility and resentment at what he perceived to be the growing secularism and “scientism” of the modern world. To Machen, the religious mystic, the triumphs of nineteenth-century science were anything but victories; instead, it seemed to him that science was coming to rule all aspects of life, even those aspects—the spiritual life and its corollary, art—where it had no place. In The Three Impostors, Phillipps clearly espouses the hard-headed scientific scepticism Machen wishes to combat. It is no surprise that the woman who calls herself Miss Lally tells him the “Novel of the Black Seal”; for in this story it is Professor Gregg who embodies what Machen believes to be the genuinely scientific attitude of open-mindedness to unusual phenomena: “Life, believe me, is no simple thing, no mass of grey matter and congeries of veins and muscles to be laid naked by the surgeon’s knife; man is the secret which I am about to explore, and before I can discover him I must cross over weltering seas indeed, and oceans and the mists of many thousand years” (Three Impostors 143). Indeed, it seems quite likely that Miss Lally tells Phillipps this story only in order to overcome his innate scepticism; for Phillipps “required a marvel to be neatly draped in the robes of Science before he would give it any credit” (Three Impostors 131). Perhaps the subtitle of The Three Impostors provides a further clue. Exactly what transmutations are in question? To be sure, on a superficial level the various “novels” and other episodes transmute scenery, as we flit from the suburbs of London (“Novel of the Iron Maid,” “Novel of the White Powder”) to the wilds of the American West (“Novel of the Dark Valley”) to the “wild, domed hills” of Wales (“Novel of the Black Seal”). Miss Lally casually notes that “I looked out of my window and saw the whole landscape transmuted before me” (Three Impostors 149). But the
reference here is merely to topography; elsewhere there are much more profound transmutations going on. When Professor Gregg finally decodes the cryptic black seal that appears to confirm his theory of the “Little People,” he states with awed solemnity: “I read the key of the awful transmutation of the hills” (Three Impostors 172). Here it is not landcape but Gregg’s entire outlook on life that has been transmuted. The “Novel of the White Powder” confirms this view. Miss Leicester, who tells the tale (and who is presumably identical to the Miss Lally of the earlier narrative), speaks offhandedly of “the transmutation of my brother’s character” (Three Impostors 198) after he begins taking the strange drug from a careless apothecary’s shop. But what really happens to the hapless student is the transmutation of his very being, physically and morally, leading a doctor to write harriedly, “my old conception of the universe has been swept away” (Three Impostors 208). This is the ultimate transmutation. That doctor, in effect, gives voice to Machen’s own view of the world: “The whole universe . . . is a tremendous sacrament; a mystic, ineffable force and energy, veiled by an outward form of matter; and man, and the sun and the other stars, and the flower of the grass, and the crystal in the test-tube, are each and every one as spiritual, as material, and subject to an inner working” (Three Impostors 209). It was this view that Machen was determined to convey to his audience over a lifetime of writing. The final years of Machen’s “great decade” of fiction writing produced several of the works for which Machen is known today. Even excluding the marginally weird novel The Hill of Dreams (written in 1895–97 but not published until 1907), we are faced with such works as “The Red Hand” (1897), the prose poems collected in Ornaments in Jade (1924), “The White People” (the second-greatest horror tale ever written, according to Lovecraft, next to Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows”), and the unclassifiable short novel A Fragment of Life. Had Machen written nothing else, these works alone would be sufficient to grant him a place in weird literature—or in literature as a whole. “The Red Hand” (written in 1895) is a pendant to The Three Impostors, resurrecting the two central figures in that novel, Phillipps and Dyson, as they continue their intellectual dispute over the nature of reality while becoming involved in what proves to be an exceptionally clever supernatural detective story. Dyson, the mystic (hence the stand-in for Machen), evokes a “theory of improbability” (White People 18) to account
for the remarkable series of coincidences that leads him to the solution of the case; but this is less interesting than the overall philosophical thrust of the tale, in which Machen utilises the tools of rationalism (specifically, the forensic analysis of evidence in regard to the murder at the heart of the case) to undermine rationalism and thereby to “prove” to his satisfaction that the matter can only be accounted for by appealing to the supernatural— in this case, the continued existence of “little people.” Of the prose-poems in Ornaments in Jade it is difficult to speak in detail. These delicate vignettes may in some sense be pendants to The Hill of Dreams—not in terms of plot, but in terms of style and substance. Comparable only to those of Clark Ashton Smith as the finest in English, they complete Machen’s transformation from clever imitator to independent artist. If there is any dominant theme that unites them, it is the constant contrast between mundane modernity and the hoary past—a past that is simultaneously terrifying in its primitivism and awesome in its suggestions of intimate, symbolic connexions with the essence of life and Nature. However brutalised modern people are by the dominant materialism of the age, their sense of spirituality can well up in spite of themselves in the practice of ancient rituals. As for “The White People,” in a sense it returns to the theme of “The Great God Pan” (1890) in its emphasis on illicit sex. For Machen, the orthodox Anglo-Catholic, sexual aberrations represented a kind of violation of the entire fabric of the universe. This is the substance of the remarks by Ambrose at the beginning of the tale, especially his comment that sin is “the attempt to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a forbidden [my italics] manner” and “the effort to gain the ecstasy and knowledge that pertain alone to angels” (White People 65). This story—in which a young girl unwittingly reveals in her diary her inculcation into a witch-cult and, evidently, her impregnation by some nameless entity—transmogrifies illicit sex into a cosmic sin that will either lift us up into the ranks of the angels or plunge us down into the company of demons. And yet, Machen’s exposition of the details of the matter (especially the sexual element) are so indirect that many readers have been puzzled as to the exact nature of the scenario. One such reader was the young J. Vernon Shea, who asked his friend H. P. Lovecraft to elucidate the tale. Lovecraft did so, concluding: “On account of a sympathetic action like that described in the prologue, the nowadolescent child—though without contact with any creative element—
became pregnant with a Horror, to whose birth (knowing what she did of dark tradition) she could not look forward without a stark frenzy far beyond the fear of mere disgrace. Thus she killed herself” (Selected Letters 3.439). In the absence of contrary evidence, this interpretation must be accepted. Machen’s single sentence at the end (“She had poisoned herself—in time” [White People 97]) is the only clue this repressed Victorian writer can provide to the sexual anomalies of the situation. And yet, Lovecraft was manifestly inspired not by the mechanics of the plot of “The White People,” but by its magnificent allusiveness and subtlety. The diary in which the girl tells of her initiation into the witch-cult is a masterstroke: we know what is happening, but she in her naïveté does not. And those chilling hints of nameless rituals that the girl provides (“I must not write down . . . the way to make the Aklo letters, or the Chian language, or the great beautiful Circles, nor the Mao Games, nor the chief songs” [White People 70]) carries hints of hideous suggestion that are the more potent for their being so ill-defined. A Fragment of Life is an altogether different proposition. If this short novel is only on the very edge of the weird, it deserves far wider recognition as one of Machen’s most finished works. The exquisitely gradual way in which the stolid bourgeois couple, Edward and Mary Darnell, slowly awaken to their sense of wonder and abandon London for their native Wales is one of Machen’s great literary accomplishments. Amidst all the mundane details of the small-scale social life of the Darnells, we receive hints that their love of beauty has not been entirely destroyed, as it has for so many who live too fully in the modern world. Machen delivers an unanswerable criticism of the narrowing of vision that such a life engenders: “So, day after day, he lived in the grey phantasmal world, akin to death, that has, somehow, with most of us, made good its claim to be called life” (White People 121). And yet, something so simple as birdsong heard by Edward (“That night was the night I thought I heard the nightingale . . . and the sky was such a wonderful deep blue” [White People 117]) provides an anticipation of the coming change. Mary, too, although seemingly more hard-headedly practical than Edward, senses the alteration in her being (“one would have almost said that they were the eyes of one who longed and half expected to be initiated into the mysteries, who knew not what great wonder was to be revealed” [White People 132]). The entire novel is a kind of instantiation of the critical theories in Machen’s
idiosyncratic treatise, Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature (1902), in which he criticised such writers as Jane Austen and George Eliot for being too closely tied to mundane reality and failing to include that modicum of “ecstasy” which ought, in Machen’s eyes, to inform all literature. We may well believe that Machen was insufficiently attuned to the “ecstasy” that is in fact present in the work of the social realists he disdains, but we can hardly gainsay that he himself has flawlessly embodied his own principles in A Fragment of Life. After writing this novel (which was itself worked on sporadically over five years, 1899–1904), Machen appeared to lose focus as far as fiction writing was concerned. In 1907 he wrote the curious novel The Secret Glory (a satire on the British school system that was not published until 1922), but that was the extent of his creative output between 1904 and 1914. With his inheritance gone, Machen was forced to produce mountains of journalism; the book publications of his fiction—specifically The House of Souls (1906) and The Hill of Dreams (1907)—brought him fleeting attention, but not much in the way of income. It was only in 1914 that he resumed fiction writing—but he did so in a peculiar way. Machen had, since 1910, been serving on the staff of one of the leading newspapers in London, the Evening News, as reporter and columnist. At least two of the four stories that comprised The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (1915)—“The Bowmen” (29 September 1914) and “The Soldiers’ Rest” (20 October 1914)—appeared in the Evening News. The well-known story of how “The Bowmen”—a tale about the ghosts of mediaeval British soldiers who come to the aid of a beleaguered British unit at the battle of Mons in late August 1914—came to be regarded as a real occurrence, with angels rescuing the soldiers and supposedly first-hand accounts by the soldiers themselves testifying to the miracle—need not be discussed in detail; Machen himself recounts the matter in the introduction to The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War. His repeated protestations that the story was entirely a product of his imagination went for naught; the outbreak of the European war—which had commenced less than two months prior to the publication of “The Bowmen”—was so traumatic that the emergence of such legendry was inevitable. Machen himself alludes to Kipling’s “The Lost Legion” as a central literary influence on the tale, although other literary sources reaching back to Herodotus’ Histories have recently been postulated. But what is more significant is Machen’s own
attempt to pull off a kind of hoax with “The Bowmen.” The mere fact that it was published in a newspaper—even though newspapers at this time published more fiction than they do now—and the fact that it was written with the plain-spoken sobriety expected of factual articles, suggest that Machen is not wholly blameless in the subsequent furore caused by his little tale. Much the same could be said for “The Great Return,” which also appeared in the Evening News (21 October–16 November 1915) and was subsequently published in book form by a religious publisher, the Faith Press. Here Machen seeks no more than to present, in the most orthodox repertorial manner, a series of curious incidents in Wales that, to his mind, suggest the actual rediscovery of the Holy Grail. Once again, as in “The Red Hand,” although in a somewhat cruder way, Machen seeks to use the tools of rationalism to undermine rationalism: here the outwardly sceptical newspaper reporter—who is none other than Machen himself, with no attempt made to establish a distance between author and persona—becomes gradually convinced of the reality of the phenomena described. Machen is content to present a scenario whereby something miraculous might have happened: this is sufficient for his current purpose of attacking the godless materialism of his age. The European war was obviously a highly disturbing event to Machen. Already alienated from his time by his religious mysticism, so much in contrast with the prevailing scientific rationalism of the later nineteenth century, he found his own faith shaken by a war in which Christians were killing other Christians with great gusto. Toward the end of the conflict he wrote a series of sophistical articles attempting to justify the ways of God to man; they were collected as War and the Christian Faith (1918). But Machen’s work of fiction revolving around the war is of course The Terror, a short novel that has inspired a host of imitations of its basic plot—animals turning against human beings. The Terror reveals several features characteristic of Machen’s later fiction. The first, perhaps, is frank autobiography. Not only does the firstperson narrative voice seem to be Machen himself, but he plays upon his own role as a journalist and reporter—something we will find again in the later tale “Out of the Picture.” Indeed, it is not insignificant that The Terror was also first published as a serialisation in the Evening News (16–31 October 1916), under the title “The Great Terror.” Is Machen attempting to
pass off the narrative as a “true” story? To be sure, there is no deliberate intent to deceive; but the circumstantiality of his account, and its generally reportorial tone, make one wonder whether Machen is hoping to convey a deeper truth—the truth that the brief, fitful, and ultimately temporary “revolution” of the animals against humanity’s reign over the earth is a signal that human morals are collapsing as a result of the hideous and unprecedented warfare that had broken out two years earlier. Machen wrote relatively few actual works of fiction in the 1920s, aside from a few stories for anthologies edited by Cynthia Asquith. In the 1930s he resumed somewhat greater productivity in fiction-writing and published two late collections, The Cosy Room and The Children of the Pool, in 1936. The former volume contains stories written over a wide period, but the latter is an original collection of previously unpublished tales. They are, however, a sadly uneven mix, and some stories—such as “N,” “The Exalted Omega,” and “The Tree of Life”—are among his poorest work. But Machen could on occasion still wield the magic that makes his earlier works so shuddersomely memorable. In particular, “Out of the Picture” and “Change” seem to be among the final instalments of the “Little People mythology”; it is possible that “The Bright Boy” also belongs to this cycle. Then there is The Green Round (1933), a short novel later reprinted by Arkham House. But this insubstantial account of a man who goes to a quiet resort in Wales, only to be plagued by a strange, stunted being whom others can see but he cannot, is a disappointment in more ways than one. It is, really, a novella or even a short story stretched out to novel length, and its thinness of inspiration, verbosity, and failure to come to a satisfying conclusion must condemn it as a false start. Machen himself dismissed The Terror as a “shilling shocker,” but that short novel stands leagues higher than the only other novel-length work of the supernatural that emerged from his pen. In a career that spanned more than six decades, Arthur Machen produced some of the most evocative weird fiction in all literary history. Written with impeccably mellifluous prose, infused with a powerful mystical vision, and imbued with a wonder and terror that their author felt with every fibre of his being, his novels and tales will survive when works of far greater technical accomplishment fall by the wayside. Flawed as some of them are by certain crotchets—especially a furious hostility to science and secularism—that disfigure Machen’s own philosophy, they are
nonetheless as effective as they are because they echo the sincere beliefs of their author, whose eternal quest to preserve the mystery of the universe in an age of materialism is one to which we can all respond.
ii. Algernon Blackwood: Nature as God and Refuge Algernon Blackwood lived his work as few authors have ever done. On the most superficial level, this means that he incorporated abundant autobiographical elements into his tales and novels, especially from his wide-ranging travels—from the wilds of the Canadian backwoods to the parched sands of Egypt; from the snowy crags of the Alps to the forbidding remoteness of the Caucasus Mountains. But there is far more to it than that. Virtually every one of the central figures in Blackwood’s fiction is a thinly disguised self-portrait, and of the most intimate sort—a self-portrait that probes the depths of his own complex and mystical temperament at the same time that it depicts the interaction of that temperament with the people and lands he encountered over a lifetime of unceasing wandering. What is more, Blackwood writes with so powerful a belief in what he is saying that he inexorably induces belief in the reader as well. However fantastic his imaginings, one gains the impression that Blackwood always means exactly what he says. Algernon Blackwood was born on March 14, 1869, at Wood Lodge, Shooter’s Hill, Kent. He was the son of Stevenson Arthur Blackwood, who served in the Crimean War and subsequently became permanent secretary to the Post Office; he received a knighthood in 1887. Stevenson had become a fervent and evangelical Christian in 1856 and devoted much of his time to lay preaching; accordingly, young Algernon—whose family moved several times in his early childhood, finally settling at Shortlands House, Beckenham, Kent—grew up in a household of extreme religious strictness, with an emphasis on personal salvation and the heavy burden of sin. Matters were not helped by the year (1885–86) Blackwood spent in the overly strict discipline of the School of the Moravian Brotherhood in the Black Forest of Germany, a period he would later depict vividly in the John Silence story “Secret Worship.” Blackwood escaped the oppressive religiosity of his family environment in a number of ways. Chief among them was his discovery, in 1886, of
Buddhism, as embodied in Patanjali’s Yogi Aphorisms; shortly thereafter he was absorbing books on spiritualism and theosophy. But these rebellions were only preliminary to his discovery of Nature (always with a capital N in Blackwood), a discovery that ultimately formed the core of his entire outlook on life: By far the strongest influence in my life . . . was Nature; it betrayed itself early, growing in intensity with every year. Bringing comfort, companionship, inspiration, joy, the spell of Nature has remained dominant, a truly magical spell. Always immense and potent, the years have strengthened it. The early feeling that everything was alive, a dim sense that some kind of consciousness struggled through every form, even that a sort of inarticulate communication with this “other life” was nossible, could I but discover the way— these moods coloured its opening wonder. (Episodes Before Thirty 36–37) In a sense, Nature subsumed or incorporated all his other interests in occultism and spiritualism; for all these were merely vehicles toward the achieving of an “extended or expanded consciousness” (“Author’s Preface” to Selected Tales 8) that would lend to a kind of mystical bond with Nature. As Blackwood’s narrator describes Terence O’Malley in The Centaur (1911): For the moods of Nature flowed through him—in him—like presences, potently evocative as the presences of persons, and with meanings equally various: the woods with love and tenderness; the sea with reverence and magic; plains and wide horizons with the melancholy peace and silence as of wise and old companions; and mountains with a splendid terror due to some want of comprehension in himself, caused probably by,a spiritual remoteness from their mood. The Cosmos, in a word, for him was psychical, and Nature’s moods were transcendental cosmic activities that induced in him these singular states of exaltation and expansion. She pushed wide
the gateways of his deeper life. She entered, took possession, dipped his smaller self into her own enormous and enveloping personality. (10) The spell of Nature was not long in asserting itself: brief trips to Switzerland and Canada in 1887 and a walking tour in northern Italy in 1889 were only foretastes of what was to come. By the early 1890s Blackwood found himself in New York. It might be thought that the American megalopolis would be just about the last place for such a Nature worshiper as Blackwood, but he felt confident in his ability to secure work and even to find happiness of a sort. But the inevitable occurred: although, by the fall of 1892, he had become a reporter for the New York Sun, the cumulative effect of his stay in New York could only be called psychologically devastating: I seemed covered with sore and tender places into which New York rubbed salt and acid every hour of the day. It wounded, not alone because I felt unhappy, but of itself. It hit me where it pleased. The awful city, with its torrential, headlong life, held for me something of the monstrous. Everything about it was exaggerated. Its racing speed, its roofs amid the clouds with the canyon gulfs below, its gaudy avenues dripping gold that ran almost arm in arm with streets little better than sewers of human decay and misery, its frantic noise, both of voices and mechanism, its lavishly organized charity and boastful splendour, and its deep corruption in the grip of a heartless and degraded Tammany—it was all this that painted the horror into my imagination as of something monstrous, non-human, almost unearthly. It became, for me, a scab on the skin of the planet, brilliant with the hues of fever, moving all over with its teeming microbes. I felt it, indeed, but half civilized. (Episodes Before Thirty 124–25) One suspects that Blackwood would have had this reaction even if a number of other events had not conspired to render his early days in New York even more wretched: a painful illness that incapacitated him for weeks; extreme poverty that compelled him to subsist largely upon dried
apples (when eaten with water they would expand in his stomach and thereby ease his pangs of hunger); and, most phantasmagoric of all, his tortuous relationship with a thief and scoundrel, Arthur Bigge (disguised as “Boyde” in Episodes Before Thirty), who robbed Blackwood of what little money he had and whom Blackwood ultimately hunted down like an animal and had arrested. By early 1899 Blackwood felt a yearning to return to his homeland, and by March he had resettled in England. But the wanderlust that remained an essential part of his nature was not slow to exert itself: in 1900 and 1901 he spent much of the summer canoeing down the Danube—trips that would ultimately be transmogrified into his most memorable weird tale, “The Willows.” Blackwood’s travels for the period 1902–05 are not entirely clear; he appears to have gone to France, returned to the Black Forest and the school of the Moravians, and travelled throughout England, again absorbing impressions that would find their way into his later tales. Blackwood’s first published volume, The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories, appeared in late 1906 and was well received. The Listener and Other Stories—containing several of Blackwood’s most notable tales, including the title story, “The Willows,” “Max Hensig,” and “The Woman’s Ghost Story”—came out the following year. But it was John Silence—Physician Extraordinary (1908) that definitively launched Blackwood on a literary career. Thanks to a clever advertising campaign, the volume became a bestseller and allowed Blackwood the freedom to devote the next six years to writing, without the need to worry about an income. He decided to settle in Switzerland, and in the next half-decade produced some of the most remarkable work in the history of weird fiction: the collections The Lost Valley and Other Stories (1910), Pan’s Garden (1912), and Incredible Adventures (1914); the novels The Human Chord (1910) and The Centaur (1911); and the children’s fantasies Jimbo (1909) and The Education of Uncle Paul (1909). It is difficult to generalise about these very diverse works; suffice it to say that they all tread the nebulous borderland between fantasy, awe, wonder, and horror. Awe is perhaps the dominant motif; Blackwood is somehow able to invest the simplest events—or even his characters’ psychological reactions to those events—with a portentous grandeur, as if the very fabric of the universe is involved. That, indeed, is exactly what is involved in The Human Chord, a novel with one of the most distinctive
premises in all weird fiction: the possibility that a “human chord” sung by four seemingly ordinary individuals could somehow reorganise all the matter in the cosmos. Or consider the several tales that Blackwood wrote after his 1912 visit to Egypt, among them “Sand” (in Pan’s Garden) and “A Descent into Egypt” (in Incredible Adventures). The latter’s climactic scene is nothing more than the tableau of three characters sitting around waiting for the dawn; and yet, few tales have ended more grippingly, as we see two hapless figures literally subsumed by the spell of Egypt: I witnessed the disappearance of George Isley. There was a dreadful magic in the picture. The pair of them, small and distant below me in that little sandy hollow, stood out sharply defined as in a miniature. I saw their outlines neat and terrible like some ghastly inset against the enormous scenery. Though so close to me in actual space, they were centuries away in time. And a dim, vast shadow was about them that was not mere shadow of the ridges. It encompassed them; it moved, crawling over the sand, obliterating them. Within it, like insects lost in amber, they became visibly imprisoned, dwindled in size, home deep away, absorbed. (331) And who can forget the imperishable climax of “Sand,” where we learn that “the desert stood on end” (329)? John Silence is to some extent based on a schtick—the fusion of detective fiction and supernatural fiction, as John Silence becomes a “psychic detective” probing cases beyond the bounds of natural law—but a few of the segments represent Blackwood at his height. Whether he was much inspired by E. and H. Prichard’s Flaxman Low (for which see the next chapter) is unclear; probably he merely adapted the Sherlock Holmes formula to his own purposes, and in so doing laid the groundwork for a multitudinous progeny of psychic detectives, by William Hope Hodgson, Margery Lawrence, and many others. But such a tale as “Ancient Sorceries”—where a man stumbles into a small French town where all the inhabitants turn into cats at night—is a masterwork of subtlety and cumulative horror; the fact that John Silence remains offstage for most of the tale is a great benefit. Unfortunately, he acts as a simple deus ex
machina in “Secret Worship,” rescuing the protagonist from the ghostly phenomena at the last moment. As it is, “The Willows” and “The Wendigo” (in The Lost Valley) will remain the pinnacles of Blackwood’s work in supernatural horror. Nature is, manifestly, the true hero of both these narratives—but it is a Nature that appears malevolent to humankind only from our limited perspective. The narrator of “The Wendigo” becomes aware of “that other aspect of the wilderness: the indifference to human life, the merciless spirit of desolation which took no note of man” (84). And consider the Swede’s comment in “The Willows”: “There are forces close here that could kill a herd of elephants in a second as easily as you or I could squash a fly. Our only chance is to keep perfectly still. Our insignificance perhaps may save us” (53). It would require a laborious analysis to specify the exact manner in which Blackwood builds cumulative suspense and terror in these long stories; but his capturing of the mingled horror and wonder of the Danube (“The Willows”) and of the Canadian backwoods (“The Wendigo”) is imperishable. It is, indeed, interesting that pure horror is as prevalent as it is in these works. In “The Regeneration of Lord Ernie” (in Incredible Adventures), a character remarks of a sinister forest along a mountainside: “There’s evil thinking up there, but by heaven it’s alive; it’s positive, ambitious, constructive.” He immediately qualifies this by saying: “Evil? . . . How can any force be evil? That’s merely a matter of direction” (21, 23). Horror turns to awe in the four long tales in this volume, although the former is by no means absent. The horror of “The Damned” comes not from the damnation of the souls of the wicked—but precisely from the conventional religious belief in such damnation. The hideous multitude of ghosts that haunt a house in England—with “yearning yet hopeless eyes, lips scorched and dry, mouths that opened to implore but found no craved delivery in actual words, and a fury of misery and hate that made the life in me stop dead,m frozen by the horror of vain pity” (207)—are those damned by the bigoted religion of the house’s previous occupant. Pan’s Garden, with its deceptively bland subtitle—“A Volume of Nature Stories”—also contains some powerful tales of awe, none greater than the short novel “The Man Whom the Trees Loved,” in which a man quite literally is subsumed into the forest of trees that surround his country house. This tale, along with the earlier “The Eccentricity of Simon
Parnacute” (in The Lost Valley), reveal a delicacy of touch that brings Lord Dunsany to mind. Parnacute is a prototypical Blackwood character who burns with indignation at seeing birds locked in a cage: this perversion of Nature is deeply offensive to his spirit. His freeing of the birds becomes a deeply symbolic act, for when he himself dies, this is what we are told of him: “The human cage was empty. Someone had opened the door” (328). The Centaur, whose poignant and delicate evocation of the vitality of Nature makes it the centrepiece of Blackwood’s work, is the key to the understanding of both his oeuvre and his philosophy. What does the mysterious Russian (never named), whom O’Malley encounters on a steamer heading from Marseilles to the Caucasus Mountains, symbolise? He is a “Cosmic Being” (209), one so close to Nature that his very presence in this civilised company of tourists seems anamalous and even vaguely frightening. He leads O’Malley into the Caucasus—exactly as Blackwood himself went on a trip there in the summer of 1910—to what appears to be a herd of centaurs; more, not only the Russian but O’Malley himself seem, momentarily, to become centaurs. For O’Malley it is a moment of spiritual transformation: “The Garden now enclosed him. He had found the heart of Earth, his mother. Self-realization in the perfect union with Nature was fulfilled. He knew the Great At-one-ment” (214–15). Blackwood spent much of the first two years following the outbreak of World War I in adapting his children’s fantasy A Prisoner in Fairyland (1913) into a musical, The Starlight Express, with music by Edward Elgar. Although he wrote a number of works for or about children, only Jimbo, The Education of Uncle Paul, and the much later novel The Fruit Stoners (1934) are notably successful. It is clear that he himself was a genial “Uncle Paul” to a variety of nieces and nephews, as well as to the children of some of his friends. Children, like animals, had an instinctive psychological bond with Nature that rendered their world of imagination immediately comprehensible to Blackwood. Consider the nature metaphors used to describe the child Nixie in The Education of Uncle Paul: . . . . the name fitted her like a skin, for she was the true figure of a sprite, and looked as if she had just stepped out of the water and her hair had stolen the yellow of the sand. Her eyes ran about the room like sunshine from the surface of a stream, and her movements instantly made Paul think of water gliding over pebbles or ribbed
sand with easy and gentle undulations. Flashlike he saw her in a clearing of his lonely woods, a creature of the elements. (52–53) Blackwood was rarely able to reach this level of unsentimental pathos in his later works for children. In a sense, the war marked the definite end of one stage—and, perhaps, the most vital and significant stage—of Blackwood’s career. The hostility to science and material civilization that Blackwood revealed through O’Malley (“And I loathe, loathe the spirit of to-day with its cheap-jack inventions, and smother of sham universal culture, its murderous superfluities and sordid vulgarity, without enough real sense of beauty left to see that a daisy is nearer heaven than an airship” [40]) was only augmented by the war, a product of the destructive forces that were taking all humanity farther and farther away from Nature. Julius LeVallon (1916), a novel of reincarnation, is confused and unfocused, and its sequel, The Bright Messenger (1921), is still more so, made interesting only by an increasing strain of pessimism: “The recent upheaval has been more than an intertribal war. It was a planetary event. It has shaken our nature fundamentally, radically. The human mind has been shocked, broken, dislocated” (166). In Blackwood’s short story writing, inspiration appears to have been drying up. The tales in Day and Night Stories (1917) are, on the whole, slight; The Wolves of God and Other Fey Stories (1921) consists of stories whose plots were in large part derived from Blackwood’s shared experiences with his old friend Wilfrid Wilson, who is listed as a coauthor; Tongues of Fire and Other Sketches (1924) is also disappointing. This was his last original collection of stories until Shocks (1935). In the latter half of the 1920s, Blackwood returned to writing for children. A multifarious array of works were produced during this period, but none are particularly distinguished aside from Dudley and Gilderoy: A Nonsense (1929), a delightful fable about the adventures of a parrot and a cat as they stray out of their home, board a train, and perform other surprising antics. Several stories in Shocks, inspired by his absorption of the mystical philosophy of Georgi Gurdjieff and his disciple Pyotr Ouspenskii, show that Blackwood had not entirely finished having his say in the realm of supernatural horror, while other tales in that volume, notably “Elsewhere and Otherwise” and “The Man Who Lived Backwards,” both inspired by J.
W, Dunne’s theories of serial time, could be almost classified as science fiction. In The Centaur O’Malley, after his transcendent experience in the Caucasus, yearns to tell the world of what he has felt and learned—he thinks it will save humanity from sinking into an imaginationless morass of materialism and cynicism. His sympathetic but sceptical friend, Stahl, warns him: “You will reach no men of action; and few of intellect. You will merely stuff the dreamers who are already stuffed enough. What is the use, I ask you? What is the use?” (267–68). But O’Malley is determined to persevere. And so was Blackwood. Perhaps in his later years he felt that the cause was lost; that science and material comforts had advanced so far that the awe and wonder of Nature were things of the past. In the essay “Dreams and Fairies” (1929) he nevertheless held out a faint hope that technology might not entirely crush our perception of the mysteries of the cosmos: Ariel as a personified wave-length we listen to in our drawingrooms, the “sightless couriers of the air” as waves of ether bringing us sound or pictures through a machine costing so many pounds— these, though wonderful, hold no wonder of the spirit. The wonder of the spirit is not the wonder of the well-read mind. The purchaser questions, but he does not tremble with delicious and unearthly awe. To-day our winds seem thin of voices, our woods and forests emptying, our glens feed streams where dance no flashing feet. The haunting music of that older world is stilled and no wings dart across the moonlight that once was populated with haunting glory. It may be, however, that the glamour is but changing and that the poet’s creative heart will extract a more stimulating Wonder from the newer “facts” of life. Mystery, of course, there must always be. The change is worth underlining: it will be a Wonder that instructs; a Wonder that teaches before it beautifies. (175) It is not entirely clear what is meant by that last remark; it could almost be seen as a justification for science fiction, a literary mode Blackwood never approached save in a few late works. Nevertheless, it is evident that he himself retained his sense of wonder to the end, and sought to convey it to
others in as earnest and powerful a fashion as he could. Even if his best works were written in a relatively short period encompassed by the first two decades of the twentieth century, every one of his novels, tales, plays, and even essays and reviews seeks to uncover those layers of mystery that lurk behind the façade of the known—the mystery of forests, of deserts, of snow-capped peaks, and, most significant of all, of the human psyche.
iii. Lord Dunsany: Fantasy and Terror It may seem an anomaly to treat the work of Lord Dunsany in this book, but his work came at a critical juncture in the history of supernatural fiction. By the end of his long career, it could be said that Dunsany had effected the definitive separation of pure fantasy from supernatural horror, so that the former was carried on by such of his successors as Mervyn Peake and J. R. R. Tolkien; the latter’s The Lord of the Rings (1954–55) emerged before Dunsany’s passing and was clearly influenced by his early work. And yet, Dunsany remains integral to the tradition of the supernatural in literature as well, and not only for his decisive influence on the work of H. P. Lovecraft, his most notable disciple; his own work possesses a richness of texture that makes it inexhaustibly rewarding. The notion that Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, who became the eighteenth Baron Dunsany (pronounced Dun-SAY-ny) upon his father’s death in 1899, would become a central figure in twentieth-century fantasy would have struck the author himself as little short of fantastic. Certainly there was little in his background or early upbringing to suggest that Dunsany would be anything other than an average scion of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. His birth in London on July 24, 1878, is not insignificant, for it highlighted the fact that Dunsany would remain Anglo-Irish to the end of his days, with perhaps a slightly greater emphasis on the first element of that compound. A devoted Unionist who loathed the Nationalists who wished to tear Ireland away from Great Britain (in later years he would speak bitterly of the “Disunited Kingdom”), Dunsany regularly alternated his living quarters from Dunsany Castle in County Meath to his home at Dunsall Priory, Shoreham, Kent. During his early education, at Eton and Sandhurst, he showed no particular literary bent; and his first published work, a mediocre poem in the Pall Mall Magazine for September 1897, did little to indicate that Dunsany would, in the course of a fifty-year career, produce dozens of novels and plays and hundreds of short stories and poems, and would receive accolades from both sides of the Atlantic and from critics ranging from Rebecca West and Graham Greene to H. L. Mencken and William Rose Benét.
But then, in 1904, Dunsany took it into his mind to write The Gods of Pegana. Because he had no literary reputation, he was forced to subsidise its publication by Elkin Mathews the next year; but never again would Dunsany have to pay for the issuance of any of his work. This very slim volume, scarcely 20,000 words in length, created a sensation among both readers and critics—especially after a favourable review by the poet Edward Thomas in the London Daily Chronicle—and could well be said to have introduced something quite new in literature. What Dunsany had done was to create an entire cosmogony, complete with a pantheon of ethereal but balefully powerful gods—a cosmogony, however, whose aim was not the fashioning of an ersatz religion that made any claim to metaphysical truth, but rather the embodiment of Oscar Wilde’s immortal dictum, “The artist is the creator of beautiful things” (preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray). For Dunsany, who was probably an atheist, the creator god ManaYood-Sushai was not a replacement for either the jealous god of the Old Testament or the loving god of the New, but a symbol for the transience and ephemerality of all creation: it is not through any conscious act that Mana brought the worlds into existence; those worlds are, instead, merely the dreams that arise in his mind, ruled over by “small gods” who, nevertheless, exercise awesome power over their little realms. One day Skarl, whose continual drumming keeps Mana asleep and dreaming, will cease to pound his drum, and Mana will wake, and the worlds will vanish like bubbles in the air. . . . What could possibly have led Dunsany to fashion such an extraordinary universe of pure imagination? The literary influences operating on his work are difficult to specify, especially since Dunsany, although the author of three substantial autobiographies, is himself rather cagey in speaking of his literary antecedents. It has long been recognised that both the archaic cast and the stately cadences of Dunsany’s prose style derive from his thorough familiarity with the language of the King James Bible. But the multiplicity of gods in Dunsany’s pantheon, as well as their creation in a spirit of tenuous beauty rather than cosmic truth, may also suggest the influence of Graeco-Roman mythology, and Dunsany himself admits as much. His inability to master Greek in youth left me with a curious longing for the mighty lore of the Greeks, of which I had had glimpses like a child seeing wonderful flowers
through the shut gates of a garden; and it may have been the retirement of the Greek gods from my vision after I left Eton that eventually drove me to satisfy some such longing by making gods unto myself, as I did in my first two books. (Patches of Sunlight 30) But a philosophical influence can also be conjectured. Dunsany read Nietzsche in 1904, just around the time he wrote The Gods of Pegana, and we can detect the presence of the German iconoclast in numerous conceptions and perhaps even in its ponderous phraseology, so similar to the prose-poetic rhythms of Thus Spake Zarathustra. In effect, Dunsany was seeking to fuse the naïveté and spirit of wonder that had led primitive humanity to invent its gods with a very modern sensibility that recognised the insignificance of mankind amidst those incalculable vortices of space and time that modern science had uncovered. Dunsany went on to produce, over the next decade and a half, perhaps the most remarkable body of fantasy literature that the twentieth century can claim: the story collections Time and the Gods (1906), The Sword of Welleran (1908), A Dreamer’s Tales (1910), The Book of Wonder (1912), Fifty-one Tales (1915), The Last Book of Wonder (1916), and Tales of Three Hemispheres (1919), and two collections of plays, Five Plays (1914) and Plays of Gods and Men (1917). These volumes are, however, far from constituting a uniform or monolithic body of work. It is true that Time and the Gods is an avowed sequel to The Gods of Pegana, elaborating upon the Pegana mythology and emphasising the transience of the gods themselves in the face of the unrelenting scythe of Time; and several tales in other volumes—notably “The Sword of Welleran” and “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth”—could be said to have initiated the subgenre of sword and sorcery, in which heroic battles in fantastic lands are the focus. But in a substantial proportion of other tales the “real” world begins to encroach insidiously upon the realm of pure imagination, and it is this dynamic fusion of reality and fantasy that frequently engenders some of the most evocative and and poignant moments in Dunsany’s early work. And yet, that “real” world was never absent from Dunsany’s imagination, if we are to take him at his own word. In noting how, at an early age, he saw a hare in the garden of Sir Joseph Prestwich, Dunsany goes on to remark in his first autobiography, Patches of Sunlight (1938):
If ever I have written of Pan, out in the evening, as though I had really seen him, it is mostly a memory of that hare. If I thought that I was a gifted individual whose inspirations came sheer from outside earth and transcended common things, I should not write this book; but I believe that the wildest flights of the fancies of any of us have their homes with Mother Earth. (9) A little later he writes more generally: The source of all imagination is here in our fields, and Creation is beautiful enough for the furthest flights of the poets. What is called realism only falls far behind these flights because it is too meticulously concerned with the detail of material; mere inventories of rocks are not poetry; but all the memories of crags and hills and meadows and woods and sky that lie in a sensitive spirit are materials for poetry, only waiting to be taken out, and to be laid before the eyes of such as care to perceive them. (20–21) Many of Dunsany’s devotees, who have cherished his early work precisely because of its otherworldly remoteness, will be startled by these passages; but these words will gain still more relevance when we consider the long course of Dunsany’s later writing. The most remarkable feature of Dunsany’s early tales and plays is their prose style; but the essence of that style has frequently been misconstrued. Dunsany’s style is not nearly as dense or adjective-laden as of other writers of poetic prose—John Lyly, Sir Thomas Browne, William Morris, Oscar Wilde (especially in his fairy tales), Arthur Symons, Clark Ashton Smith, and others. Instead, Dunsany’s most powerful effects are engendered by a daring use of symbol, metaphor, and simile. In “In the Land of Time,” an army quixotically seeks to beard Time in his lair, but Time hurls a handful of years at them—“and the knees of the army stiffened, and the beards grew and turned grey” (In the Land of Time 66). In this sense much of Dunsany’s work aligns itself with the tradition of the fable, especially in its use of a transparent moral and its paring away of all extraneous narrative features (including, in many cases, character or landscape description) that do not bear upon the tale’s outcome. An important feature of Dunsany’s style is his
singularly felicitous invention of imaginary names—names not devised at random, but carefully coined to create dim echoes of Greek, Arabic, Asian or other mythologies, and so to convey implications of antiquity, holiness, and exotic beauty. Although the books of Dunsany’s first fifteen years as a writer established his fame throughout the English-speaking world—especially after his tales began appearing in the London Saturday Review and in H. L. Mencken’s Smart Set—one can also detect a certain shift in Dunsany’s own attitude toward his work. This shift becomes most evident in The Book of Wonder. The stories in this volume—inspired by paintings by Sidney H. Sime, whose imaginative illustrations to Dunsany’s early books were in no small part responsible for their popularity—reveal a wry, owlish humour that constitutes a virtual parody of the “gods and men” scenarios that had enraptured his early readers. In story after story, characters of dubious honesty receive a fitting comeuppance at the hands of the gods. It is a matter of taste whether one likes this development in Dunsany’s manner. One of those who did not was H. P. Lovecraft, whose appreciation for Dunsany’s work generally bordered upon the idolatrous. In a letter he commented astutely: As he gained in age and sophistication, he lost in freshness and simplicity. He was ashamed to be uncritically naive, and began to step aside from his tales and visibly smile at them even as they unfolded. Instead of remaining what the true fantaisiste must be—a child in a child’s world of dream—he became anxious to show that he was really an adult good-naturedly pretending to be a child in a child’s world. This hardening-up began to show, I think, in The Book of Wonder. (Selected Letters 5.354) It is also possible that the outbreak of World War I had something to do with this evolution. The preface to The Last Book of Wonder suggests that Dunsany—who had already seen action in the Boer War at the turn of the century and had enlisted in the Coldstream Guards—did not expect to survive the conflict. He did indeed have a close brush with death, but it occurred during the Dublin riots of 1916, when his car was ambushed and he was hit in the face by a rebel’s bullet. In the end Dunsany did not get
sent overseas, but his visits to some of the battlefields in France were recorded in the poignant and lugubrious volume Unhappy Far-Off Things (1919). After the war, a change seemed to be in order. Following Tales of Three Hemispheres Dunsany wrote almost no short stories for the next five or six years. A spectacularly successful American lecture tour in 1919–20 cemented his reputation—a reputation, incidentally, that now rested largely on his plays. His early dramas had been staged in both Ireland and England to great success, and in 1916 a Dunsany craze swept the United States, as each one of the Five Plays was simultaneously produced in a different offBroadway theatre in New York. The Gods of the Mountain remained Dunsany’s most popular play, and it may well be his greatest; in its depiction of seven beggars who boldly strive to pass themselves off as the green jade gods on the top of a mountain, it comes close to capturing the gravity of Greek tragedy, but not without a certain Nietzschean awareness of the passing of the divine from human affairs. If (1921), his only fulllength play, is an exhilarating meditation on time and chance. Later volumes—Plays of Near and Far (1922), Alexander and Three Small Plays (1925), and Seven Modern Comedies (1928)—also contain outstanding work. But Dunsany himself felt the need to strike out in new directions. He abandoned the short story for a time and turned to novel writing. After producing a charming but insubstantial picaresque tale, The Chronicles of Rodriguez (1922), he wrote the gorgeous otherworldly fantasy, The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924), in a splendid return to his early manner. Both The Charwoman’s Shadow (1926) and The Blessing of Pan (1927) have their distinctive charms; the latter in particular is a lost jewel of fantastic literature in its simultaneous depiction of the triumph of nature over modern civilisation and the triumph of paganism over Christianity. These novels constitute, in their greater emphasis on character portrayal and the complexities arising out of a sustained narrative, a development from his early fantasy work. One particular concern that began to develop around this time was what might be termed the conflict of humanity and nature. Even his early, otherworldly fantasies could be said to have as their focus the need for humanity’s reunification with the natural world; but with the passing of the years Dunsany felt he had to convey the message more forcefully. Mankind
in the twentieth century was heading in the wrong direction—a direction that might, in the end, lead to its destruction, or what is worse, its merited overthrow by the rest of the natural world. Industrialisation and commerce (with its accompanying prevalence of advertising, one of Dunsany’s bêtes noires) were threatening to rob the world of its stores of wonder and fantasy, and both the animal and the plant kingdom were within their rights to throw off the shackles that subjugated them to a race that no longer merited its superiority. One of the chief ways Dunsany conveyed this topos was by the use of a nonhuman perspective. At its most innocuous, this means the attempt to capture the world as viewed through the eyes and minds of an animal; hence we have the delightful short novel My Talks with Dean Spanley (1936), in which a clergyman, when sufficiently plied with wine, speaks of his firm belief that in a past life he was a dog. Years later this novel was writ large in another lost classic of fantasy, The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders (1950), in which a bluff, no-nonsense British officer, having offended an Indian swami in his club, finds his spirit lodged in a bewildering succession of nonhuman bodies—a fox, an eel, a cat, a mountain goat, even a jinn. The wondrous felicity with which Dunsany seems to capture the exact sentiments of the animals in question makes this work a delight in spite of its seemingly random structure. A sharper edge, however, is found in many other of Dunsany’s works of this kind. In the play The Old Folk of the Centuries (1930) a butterfly who is magically turned into a little boy quickly finds the life of a human being far too constricting for comfort, and he finds a convenient witch to transform him back into a butterfly. Another play, Lord Adrian (written in 1922–23 but not published until 1933), comes close to misanthropy. Here an elderly nobleman is injected with the glands from an ape and, rejuvenated, produces an offspring, Lord Adrian; but Adrian’s partial animal ancestry leads him to plan an overthrow of the human race, since “I regard the domination of all life by man as the greatest evil that ever befell the earth” (Ghosts of the Heaviside Layer 336). Even the otherwise mildmannered Colonel Polders, like Gulliver, gradually gains a “distiaste for the human race” (13) after repeated deadly encounters with humans. Perhaps the greatest of all instances of this misanthropy occurs in a short play, The Use of Man (in Plays for Earth and Air, 1937). Here the spirit of a not very bright young man is summoned to a council of the spirits of animals
somewhere in space, and he has an extraordinarily difficult time justifying the “use” of the human race in the natural scheme of things. He finds that no animal, aside from the slavishly devoted dog, will stand up for his species: the crow doesn’t like man’s guns; the bear resents the fact that he is locked up in zoos; the mouse hates man’s traps. At the very last a single animal comes to man’s rescue: the mosquito finds a “use” in man—he is its food. From the very earliest of his works, Dunsany occasionally took pleasure in envisioning the eventual extirpation of the human race. Several of the exquisite prose poems in Fifty-one Tales have this as their focus, although in many cases it seems part and parcel of the “cosmic” perspective that Dunsany had adopted at this juncture. In later works it is industrialism that will bring a fitting doom to our race, ridding the world of a dangerous menace and leaving the earth free for the animals to resume their sway. The potent one-act play The Evil Kettle (in Alexander and Three Small Plays) may be Dunsany’s most effective embodiment of this idea. Here the wellknown anecdote of the young James Watt looking at a steaming teakettle and envisioning therefrom the awesome power of steam is given a nightmarish twist: at night the Devil comes to Watt and forces him to glimpse a hideous vision of the future with its “dark, Satanic mills” and the earth’s natural beauty corrupted by mechanisation. But the Devil casts a spell over him and makes him forget what he has just seen, and we are left with a haunting sense of historic inevitability. Dunsany’s later treatments of this theme—notably his late novel The Last Revolution (1951), which depicts machines revolting from humanity’s control—are, regrettably, much inferior to this concentrated bit of venom. One of the subtlest of Dunsany’s treatments of the man-versus-nature theme occurs in what is probably his finest novel, The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933). This work is his first novel set entirely in Ireland. Although some of his early stories had appeared in such Irish periodicals as the Shanachie and the Irish Homestead, Dunsany himself frequently admitted that he preferred to invent his myths out of whole cloth rather than to adapt existing ones. And yet, he could hardly be unaware that a literary revival was going on in Ireland at exactly the time he began writing. His early plays had been produced at the Abbey Theatre, and he himself was enthusiastic about the plays of J. M. Synge and others. He was well acquainted with James Stephens, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and other prominent figures in
Irish literature. Yeats assembled a slim volume, Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsany, for publication by the Cuala Press in 1912, in the introduction to which he expressed the following pensive regret: When I was first moved by Lord Dunsany’s work I thought that he would more help this change [i.e., the Irish literary revival] if he could bring his imagination into the old Irish legendary world instead of those magic lands of his with their vague Eastern air; but even as I urged him I knew that he could not, without losing his rich beauty of careless suggestion, and the persons and images that for ancestry have all those romantic ideas that are somewhere in the background of all our minds. He could not have made Slieve-naMon nor Slieve Fua incredible and phantastic enough, because that prolonged study of a past age, necessary before he could separate them from modern association, would have changed the spontaneity of his mood to something learned, premeditated, and scientific. (Prefaces and Introductions 140) This is remarkably perspicacious, and it turned out to have been prophetic: Yeats seems to have sensed that Dunsany would have to renounce his devotion to otherworldly fantasy before he could treat the real world of Ireland in his fiction. There is a gradual decline of the purely fantastic element throughout the entiire course of his work, to the point that such later novels as Up in the Hills (1935), Rory and Bran (1936), Guerrilla (1944), and His Fellow Men (1952) have nothing fantastic or supernatural in them, although they nonetheless retain that ethereal delicacy that remained Dunsany’s keynote. The Curse of the Wise Woman is a poignant novel that explores the numerous conflicts in Irish life—Catholic and Protestant, city and country, progress and tradition, political stability and violence—in a scenario in which the supernatural is reduced to the vanishing point, and may not come into play at all: a “wise woman” (witch), enraged at the threatened destruction of a bog by a development company, seems to summon up the power of nature and bring about a ferocious storm that wipes out the company’s machines and saves the bog. Dunsany wisely neglects to clarify
whether the wise woman actually summoned the storm of whether the storm came by a lucky accident. The Story of Mona Sheehy (1939) is another superb Irish novel, touchingly describing the fate of a young woman who thinks she is a child of the fairies and finds herself working unhappily in a factory far from the fields and bogs she loves. It is perhaps the chief example of what might be called Dunsany’s late renunciation of fantasy. At the very outset we know clearly that Mona is not a child of the fairies but the offspring of an illicit sexual encounter between Lady Gurtrim and an Irish labourer; but the strength of Mona’s belief creates a kind of ersatz fantasy atmosphere as distinctive as it is compelling. Other tales written around this time— including numerous short skits written for Punch in the 1940s—are much less flattering to Irish self-esteem, and may have had some role in what appears to be a deliberate avoidance of Dunsany’s work on the part of Irish writers and critics. The culmination is reached in “Helping the Fairies” (Strand Magazine, May–June 1947), in which an Englishman casually cuts down a thorn tree that the local residents believe was sacred to the fairies; when no disaster falls upon the Englishman’s head, the locals take matters into their own hands and kill him. How did a writer so well known in his time, and so showered with critical acclaim, lapse so far into obscurity? A number of factors having nothing to do with the merit, or lack of it, of Dunsany’s work conspired against him. First, fantasy has always been relatively restricted in its appeal, and in the course of the twentieth century it gradually dropped out of mainstream fiction and became a narrow “genre” somewhere between science fiction and horror fiction, and incurring the critical disdain that those literary modes suffered. Second, Dunsany’s ambiguous involvement with his Irish literary compatriots—to say nothing of his Unionist sympathies at a time when most leading Irish writers were Nationalists— caused his work to be either scorned or deliberately ignored by those who should have been acknowledging it as a distinctive contribution to the national literature. And third, Dunsany, like so many writers, wrote too much. Although to my mind he maintained a remarkably high consistency over a lifetime’s work, he had the misfortune to write what many regarded as his best work quite early in his career—those tales of bejeweled fantasy that we designate by the adjective “Dunsanian”—so that even his devotees,
such as H. P. Lovecraft, found his later work not entirely to their taste and failed to champion it. But Dunsany’s presence as an influence upon contemporary literature is not entirely insignificant. His plays may have fallen out of fashion, but they were appreciated by no less a figure than Pirandello; as late as 1950 Brooks Atkinson, reviewing a New York revival of The Gods of the Mountain, was noting that Dunsany’s dramatic work was by no means deserving of the oblivion that had overtaken it. The sword-and-sorcery tradition he had initiated was developed by Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber. And Lovecraft’s worshipful discussion of Dunsany in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” did much to inspire interest in his work among later devotees of Lovecraft, so that such editors as Lin Carter and Darrell Schweitzer strove to bring some of the best of it back into print. Dunsany was, however, not one to confuse popularity with merit. To the end of his life he remained convinced of the high calling of the genuine artist, and he knew that artists must sometimes toll in obscurity, and in the face of prevailing public opinion. In the early essay “Nowadays” (1918) he speaks of the poet’s function: It is to see at a glance the glory of the world, to see beauty in all its forms and manifestations, to feel ugliness like a pain, to resent the wrongs of others as bitterly as one’s own, to know mankind as others know single men, to know Nature as botanists know a flower, to be thought a fool, to hear at moments the clear voice of God. (Ghosts of the Heaviside Layer 138) By these criteria, Dunsany, although doing his best work in prose, was a poet indeed.
iv. M. R. James: The Pinnacle of the Ghost Story In one sense, it is exceptionally odd that M. R. James would become the leading twentieth-century author of ghost stories; in another sense— especially when we consider the sort of ghost stories James came to write— it seems eminently natural and inevitable. James led a double, perhaps a triple, life—first as one of the most distinguished scholars of mediaeval manuscripts and early Christianity of his time, second as a noted professor and administrator at Cambridge University and then at Eton College, and finally as a writer of ghost stories. It is no surprise that only that last body of work continues to attract the attention and fascination of readers worldwide: James’s scholarship, although fundamentally sound, has now been largely superseded, and in any event its audience is necessarily limited to a small cadre of the learned, whereas the ghost stories are of universal appeal and have never been surpassed by those many authors who have chosen to pay them tribute by imitation. James’s ghost stories were manifestly an amusement of his lighter hours, although they need not be esteemed lightly on that account. We may date the commencement of his supernatural writing to the rather frivolous tale “A Night in King’s College Chapel” (probably written in 1892), but it was not long before he produced weightier work. A celebrated meeting of the Chitchat Society (a literary and social group at Cambridge) on October 28, 1893, saw James read his two earliest ghost stories, “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book” and “Lost Hearts.” Thus began a long tradition, extending well in the 1920s, when James would read drafts of his tales to a succession of friends, collegians, and other groups, usually at Christmastime. Although these first two stories were published in magazines in 1895, James would very likely not have considered book publication of his tales had not a close friend, James McBryde, undertaken the task of illustrating several of them. McBryde’s sudden death in 1904, after completing only four illustrations, appears to have led James to issue Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary (1904) as a tribute to his friend’s memory. His next collection, More Ghost Stories of
an Antiquary (1911), appeared during his relatively unhappy tenure as Provost of King’s College. It was at this time that a struggle between the “pious” and the “ungodly” began to emerge for control of Cambridge’s intellectual culture; James, manifestly on the side of the “pious,” was notably uncharitable toward such of his “ungodly” Cambridge colleagues as James George Frazer and Bertrand Russell. The war years were particularly stressful: Cambridge seemed emptied of its finest youths, many of whom (such as Rupert Brooke, whose participation in Cambridge theatricals had attracted James’s admiration) left their bodies on the battlefields of France. The return to Eton in 1918, this time as Provost, could only have been a relief. As Provost of King’s, James had been criticised for failing to be an intellectual pioneer; his scholarship seemed increasingly remote and unrelated to present-day concerns. A close friend, A. C. Benson, who had known James since his Eton days, wrote somewhat uncharitably in his diary: “his mind is the mind of a nice child—he hates and fears all problems, all speculation; all originality or novelty of view. His spirit is both timid and unadventurous” (Cox 125). Eton was, however, exactly the place for James: his instinctive empathy with the enchantments and travails of schoolboy life, the unaffectedly avuncular or even grandfatherly air he exhibited, and the prodigious learning that he carried so unassumingly were perfectly suited to the education of British youth. Administrative mundanities were safely in the hands of a Head Master; James, although he faced the terror of dining with the King and Queen once every year, could devote himself wholly to nurturing his charges with quiet encouragement. It was during his provostship that his two final collections of ghost stories, A Thin Ghost (1919) and A Warning to the Curious (1925), appeared, followed by the gathering of all four volumes, plus a few additional tales, as The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1931). Such important works of scholarship as The Apocryphal New Testament (1924), and such popular works as The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts (1919) and Abbeys (1925), also appeared. James’s learning of the Danish language paid dividends when he translated some of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales into English in 1930. It would be easy to pass off James’s ghost stories as light-hearted amusements; James himself lends some credence to this view in many of his own remarks. Indeed, many scholars on James have unwittingly belittled his work by asserting that “His stories are straightforward tales of
terror and the supernatural, utterly devoid of any deeper meaning” (Penzoldt 191), or that “his fiction . . . was simply the bagatelle for an idle hour, the construction of a delicate edifice of suspense with which to entertain the young people whose company he so much enjoyed” (Briggs 125). To be sure, a more exhaustive study of James’s life and scholarly work will shed additional light on some of the telling autobiographical elements in the stories—his wide-ranging travels as the source of the authentic local colour in such stories as “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book” and “Number 13”; his pathological fear of spiders in “The Ash-Tree”; the extraordinary re-creation of mediaeval Latin in the opening of “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” and of a seventeenth-century trial in “Martin’s Close”—but even this does not get us close to the philosophical thrust of the ghost stories. Richard William Pfaff maintained, correctly, that “Writers on ghost stories . . . fail not so much in praising MRJ’s stories too little—indeed, it might be argued that if anything the tendency is to overpraise them as a whole—but in paying little or no attention to the really remarkable thing about them, the brilliance of the antiquarian background” (415). But Pfaff himself may not have been quite as precise in this formulation as one might wish; for it is not merely the “antiquarian background” (which, in one sense, is merely utilised to create a patina of verisimilitude) that is remarkable, but the purpose to which James puts it. James was sufficiently well-read in the traditions of supernatural fiction to know that terror is most effective when emerging from the depths of history. Where he differed from his predecessors—especially the Gothic novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who actually set their works in the mediaeval era in order to enhance the reader’s suspension of disbelief in the supernatural manifestations they exhibited—was in suggesting the pervasiveness of the past’s influence upon the present: his tales, generally set only a few decades prior to their date of writing, establish a continuity between past and present in which the present is entirely engulfed and rendered fleeting and ineffectual in the face of the heavy cultural burden of prior centuries. Martin Hughes gets close to this idea when he writes: “the premiss of antiquarian stories is that records and relics are very important: when properly studied they are extremely revealing of all aspects of life in the past; moreover what they reveal is still important now” (81).
In conveying this conception, James’s protagonists are of central importance. It is a truism to say that James never engages in any detailed psychological analysis of the antiquarians who are the driving force of his tales: they are, in one sense, merely stand-ins for himself—uniformly male, scholarly, somewhat unworldly, and engaged in investigating the past largely to satisfy curiosity. Jack Sullivan has remarked of these figures: The characters are antiquaries, not merely because the past enthralls them, but because the present is a near vacuum. They surround themselves with rarefied paraphernalia from the past—engravings, rare books, altars, tombs, coins, and even such things as doll’s houses and ancient whistles— seemingly because they cannot connect with anything in the present. (75) There may not be sufficient textual evidence to support this interpretation, but it is provocative nonetheless. What has, however, gone largely unnoticed is that there is a subtle but unmistakable progression between these seemingly “innocent” characters (all of whom bring doom upon themselves by actively seeking to probe into ancient secrets that they know full well may be dangerous) and the avowedly “evil” figures who people some of James’s most memorable tales. The redoubtable Mr. Abney in “Lost Hearts,” who seeks prolonged life by eating the still-beating hearts of little children, is described as “a man wrapped up in his books” (Count Magnus 15), while Karswell, in “Casting the Runes,” is merely a scholar gone wrong—one who is so embittered at his failure to gain recognition as a man of learning that he turns to occultism as an act of revenge. It may be worth noting that the motif of supernatural revenge, very common in James’s stories, may itself have been a product of his own scholarly interests, specifically his interest in apocalyptic literature. Early in his career he had noted that this literature “operates on the principle that the punishment should fit the crime, with much attention to the often gory details by which this principle is worked out” (cited in Pfaff 109). It is here, I believe, that James’s ghost stories, his antiquarian scholarship, and his religion become inextricably fused. Shane Leslie, a longtime friend of James, made the seemingly startling remark that “his belief in ghosts marched parallel with his religion” (45), although he does not elucidate the statement. Another friend, Stephen Gaselee, has portrayed James’s religion as follows:
He was a man of simple and deep religious feeling. Learned biblical scholar as he was, he did not think much of the “higher criticism”, at any rate when it was destructive; and I have heard him say that the biblical documents were subjected to criticism not only unfair in itself, but of a kind that no one would ever have dreamed of applying to the secular literary remains of antiquity. (429–30) That last sentence is of the highest importance; for although James may not have been a dogmatic or fundamentalist Christian, his hostility to the intellectual ferment of his time in matters of religion—the shock-waves following Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859); the “Higher Criticism” that showed the evolution of Biblical texts over centuries and made it increasingly unlikely that they were direct revelations from God; the gradual but inexorable shift of intellectual opinion from unquestioned piety to agnosticism and even atheism—is evident. In his ghost stories, James uses such devices as occultism (the perversion of religion into impious magic and sorcery) and the misuse or misconstrual of Biblical passages as a warning on the dangers of straying from orthodoxy. The Bible’s own warnings on the dangers of being tempted by Satan are so frequent that it can easily lead the weak or the vicious—such as James Wilson, the redoubtable landowner of “Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance”—into becoming one of the Devil’s party. So much attention has been given to the technique of James’s ghost stories that insufficient attention has been paid to their deeper meanings. This is particularly the case with James’s ghosts. H. P. Lovecraft wrote pungently: In inventing a new type of ghost, he has departed considerably from the conventional Gothic tradition; for where the older stock ghosts were pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly through the sense of sight, the average James ghost is lean, dwarfish, and hairy—a sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt beast and man —and usually touched before it is seen. (S 86) All this is very entertaining and, indeed, by no means off the mark; but Lovecraft fails to probe the true symbolism of James’s ghosts. They are “lean, dwarfish, and hairy” because they thus embody the primitivism that
stands in stark contrast to the learned, rational, sceptical antiquarians who, for James, represented the pinnacle of human achievement. It is not insignificant that Somerton, in “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,” “screamed out . . . like a beast” (Count Magnus 118) when encountering the horror in the well: contact with the primitive reduces even the most civilised to the level of the subhuman. Related to this whole motif is James’s array of lower-class characters. The fractured and dialectical English in which these characters speak or write is, in one sense, a reflection of James’s well-known penchant for mimicry; but it cannot be denied that there is a certain element of malice in his relentless exhibition of their intellectual failings. The illiteracy of Somerton’s valet in “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”; the malapropisms of the bailiff, Mr. Cooper, in “Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance”; the ignorance of the hapless librarian in “The Tractate Middoth”—all these and other characters are made figures of fun, the butt of jests from a man whose own learning is unassailable. And yet, they frequently occupy pivotal places in the narrative: by representing a kind of middle ground between the scholarly protagonists and the aggressively savage ghosts, they frequently sense the presence of the supernatural more quickly and more instinctively than their excessively learned betters can bring themselves to do. Another aspect of James’s characterisation is his women characters—or, rather, their virtual absence from his tales. Even in his own lifetime James, the lifelong bachelor, suffered from accusations of misogyny: in 1896 he opposed the granting of degrees to women at Cambridge, and in 1916–17 he attacked with unwonted viciousness a paper on comparative religion by Jane Harrison in the Classical Review that he regarded as disrespectful to Scripture. Several women appear to have pursued James for his hand in marriage, but he resisted each time. James’s defenders point to his cordial friendships with any number of women, notably Gwendolen McBryde, the widow of his friend James McBryde; but the world of James’s fiction is as devoid of significant female characters as H. P. Lovecraft’s. This need not be regarded as a flaw: James was not writing mimetic fiction that claimed to present a well-rounded portrayal of society at large. He was writing of what he knew—the world of (male) antiquarian scholarship. And yet, the sardonic view of marriage that we find in such a story as “The Rose Garden,” or the annoying Lady Waldrop in “Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance,” seems to go a bit beyond mere whimsy. What, then, are we to
make of the fact that several of the ghosts in James’s tales create fear through a hideous parody of affection? Who can forget the thing in the well in “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,” which “slipped forward on to my chest, and put its arms round my neck” (Count Magnus 117; James’s emphasis)? And yet, it may well be said that for James, as Austin Warren has observed, “It is places, not persons, which are hauntable” (98). In this sense, “Number 13,” otherwise as far as possible from the standard “antiquarian ghost story” that James initiated, is prototypical in its display of a haunted hotel room. Although the locus of horror in James is chiefly situated in cathedrals, abbeys, and other sites where centuries of religious tradition have engendered an inevitable backlash of unorthodoxy among a select band of heretics, horror can also manifest itself in any locale where the long reach of history has had free play—a rose garden, a hedge maze, even a library. The mundanity of these settings is vital to James’s methodology of the ghost story, which (as he wrote in the preface to his second collection) is designed to elicit the reader’s awareness that “If I’m not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!” (Count Magnus 255). It is generally agreed that the tales in M. R. James’s final two collections of ghost stories, A Thin Ghost and Others (1919) and A Warning to the Curious (1925), to say nothing of the stories that he gathered only in his Collected Ghost Stories (1931) or did not collect at all, are generally inferior to those of his earlier volumes. And yet, for a writer as accomplished as James, even his lesser work—and this includes essays, fragments, and even letters—remains of compelling interest. A Thin Ghost and Others appeared shortly after James became Provost of Eton in 1918. The war was over, much to James’s relief; there is some evidence that he felt a certain guilt at pursuing arcane scholarship at King’s College, Cambridge, while others were dying in the battlefields of Europe. Unlike the stories in his first two collections, which take for their settings a large segment of the European continent, from France and Germany to Sweden and Denmark, his later tales stay pretty close to home. All are set in England, most of them in out-of-the-way rustic sites where disproof of the supernatural phenomena on display is difficult. It is as if James himself, after spending much of his youth and early adulthood in wide-ranging travels for scholarly and antiquarian purposes, felt the need to re-establish his roots with the country of his birth—especially with the rural
countryside, where he manifestly felt far more at home than in the frenetic megalopolis of London. The extraordinary felicity that James displayed in devising fictitious names for his settings is enviable: it requires a careful consultation of a gazeteer of England to determine that none of the sites mentioned in “A View from a Hill”—Fulnaker Abbey, Oldbourne Church, Lambsfield, Wanstone, Ackford, and Thorfield—have any existence except in James’s imagination. But to say that the names of James’s locales are fictitious is one thing; it is a very different thing to say that they are purely imaginary. His extensive travels, by foot and by bicycle, throughout his native land had rendered every county familiar. It does not, perhaps, take much effort to determine that Seaburgh, in “A Warning to the Curious,” is a thin disguise for Aldeburgh, in Suffolk, or that, in “The Uncommon Prayer-book,” the imaginary towns of Stanford St. Thomas and Stanford Magdalene are probably based upon Stanford on Teme and Stanford Bridge, in Hereford and Worcester. What all this suggests is that James was becoming increasingly disinclined to mask the autobiographical details that form the core of genuine experience at the foundation of many of his tales. This feature may be exhibited most clearly in some of the tales he gathered only in his Collected Ghost Stories or did not collect, or publish, at all. It is scarcely to be denied that James himself is the narrator of “Wailing Well,” a tale that sent shivers through the Boy Scout troop to whom he read it in 1927. “The Fenstanton Witch,” although set in the eighteenth century, draws clearly upon James’s intimate familiarity with the history and topography of King’s College, where he was successively a King’s Scholar, Fellow, Dean, and Provost. James’s later tales appear to display a fascination with the technique of the ghost story—specifically, with the attempt to render the supernatural plausible in light of the increasingly militant materialism and secularism that was dominating intellectual thought in his day. Naïve exhibitions of ghosts and vampires were clearly out of the question; extreme indirection now had to be employed. This focus on technique perhaps reaches its apex in “Two Doctors,” which even so devoted a partisan as Michael Cox calls “one of Monty’s least successful stories” (143). And yet, this story hardly deserves the bad press it has received, for it proves to be an extraordinarily clever supernatural detective story (James was devoted to mystery and detective tales, to the extent that in one of his articles on ghost stories he
makes a casual and unexplained reference to Captain Hastings, the sidekick of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot) in which all the pieces of the puzzle are laid out for the reader clever enough to place them in their correct sequence and bestow upon them their correct significance. (For a plausible reconstruction, see Lance Arney’s article in Warnings to the Curious.) Another device much used by James in his later tales to create verisimilitude, and to overcome the hard-headed sceptic’s natural incredulity in the face of the supernatural, was narrative distancing. This device is carried perhaps to excess in such a tale as “The Residence at Whitminster,” in which a first-person narrator, acting as a kind of editor, redacts the notes of a Dr. Ashton, letters by Mary Oldys (the niece of Henry Oldys, Dr. Ashton’s successor at the collegiate church at Whitminster), the diary of a Mr. Spearman (Mary’s fiancé), and other documents, all in the effort to present with the utmost indirectness, and with what politicians might later term plausible deniability, the supernatural phenomena on display. It is possible that this obsession with technque was the result of James’s exhaustive study of the history and theory of the ghostly tale, a work chiefly undertaken in the 1920s as a concomitant to his fascination with one of the leading Victorian practitioners of the weird tale, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. James testifies that he pored through entire runs of such periodicals as the Dublin University Magazine and All the Year Round in the hunt for previously unattributed works by Le Fanu; and although he erred in a few cases, his work did result in the addition of several tales to the Le Fanu corpus, as exemplified by James’s landmark edition of Le Fanu’s Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery (1923). It is very likely that this work led James to reformulate, or at any rate refine, his own nebulous views on what constitutes a ghost story and how it should best be told. His first words on the matter occur in the brief preface to More GhostStories of an Antiquary. Here, in a very short space, he manages to outline three principles of ghost story writing: 1) “the setting should be fairly familiar and the majority of the characters and their talk such as you may meet or hear any day”; 2) “the ghost should be malevolent or odious”; 3) “the technical terms of ‘occultism’ . . . tend to put the mere ghost story . . . upon a quasi-scientific plane, and to call into play faculties quite other than imaginative” (Count Magnus 244). In his later writings on the ghost story— such as his introduction to V. H. Collins’s Ghosts and Marvels (1924),
“Some Remarks on Ghost Stories” (1929), and “Ghosts—Treat Them Gently!” (1931)—James does not so much revise as lend further nuance to these principles. And yet, there is a question as to how faithfully James himself adhered to his own dicta when writing ghost stories. The notion of “familiarity,” especially as regards characterisation and setting (both of time and of place), was for James a matter of some elasticity. Although he remarks that a setting as remote as the twelfth or thirteenth century is not likely to induce a reader to remark, “If I’m not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!,” we quickly see that any number of James’s tales are set, or at least begin, in the seventeenth, eighteenth, or early nineteenth century. James of course does not require absolute contemporaneity: he does remark in the introduction to Ghosts and Marvels that For the ghost story a slight haze of distance is desirable. “Thirty years ago,” “Not long before the war,” are very proper openings. If a really remote date be chosen, there is more than one way of bringing the reader in contact with it. The finding of documents about it can be made plausible; or you may begin with your apparition and go back over the years to tell the cause of it; or . . . you may set the scene directly in the desired epoch, which I think is hardest to do with success. (Haunted Dolls’ House 248) It can readily be seen that James has adopted each of these options in his various tales. And yet, I believe that James’s own antiquarianism allowed him to believe that even the seventeenth century was a period of relative recency that requires only the citing of certain telling historical details to elicit the reader’s sense of vital reality. Whether the passing of another full century since the writing of James’s earliest ghost stories—and, perhaps more significantly, the collapse of historical learning even on the part of many readers who claim to be well educated—has rendered this conception a bit more dubious is something for which James cannot be held responsible. But James exemplified brilliantly in his own work his corresponding principles of “atmosphere and a nicely managed crescendo.” He goes on to state: “Let us be introduced to the actors in a placid way; let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings, and into this calm environment let the ominous
thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage” (Haunted Dolls’ House 248). Here James may have been combating the luridness that he censured in many of the Gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—a luridness whose recrudescence he would also censure in some of the pulp magazine fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. Aside from Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, no writer of supernatural fiction has achieved such celebrity on such a relatively small body of work as M. R. James. Even the least of his ghost stories exhibits a craftsmanship and attention to detail that must be the envy of more hasty and prolific scriveners, while the fertility of conception that allowed him to ring so many ingenious changes upon the one topos of the ghost or revenant can only elicit our admiration. James and his disciples have attracted a small cadre of devotees intent on preserving their work, if only by means of the small press, and, more valuably, on explicating its smallest particulars. But James’s ghost stories are far more than the property of a coterie: by revealing to the full the possibilities of aesthetic achievement in the tale of supernatural horror, they become a contribution to the literature of the ages. James would no doubt have been surprised at the literary legacy he fostered. This legacy is exhibited not so much in the work of those friends and colleagues of James who tended to produce uninspired pastiches of his style and manner as in certain other writers who used the antiquarian ghost story as the springboard for imaginative creations of their own. The three Benson brothers—A. C., E. F., and R. H.—all wrote supernatural tales, and E. F. was present at the legendary meeting of the Chitchat Society in 1893 when James read his first tales; but the tales of E. F. Benson, the best of the three, although not written with quite the meticulous precision of James’s, tend to be of broader range and theme. It can by no means be claimed that such writers as Walter de la Mare, L. P. Hartley, Oliver Onions, L. T. C. Rolt, Russell Kirk, or Robert Aickman are in any sense merely imitators of James; indeed, one suspects that the greater emphasis that many of these writers place upon the psychological analysis of ghostly phenomena, especially as they affect the victim of them, is a direct result of James’s apparent lack of interest in this regard. In any event, one would like to think that James—whose views of his predecessors and contemporaries in the realm of supernatural fiction were not always charitable—would have taken some pride in the tradition he instigated, for all his deprecation of his own
work as merely an exercise in pleasant shudder-coining. There is much to be said for the scholarly reserve, indirection, and subtlety of James’s tales, so strikingly in contrast to the loud, brash, and frequently vulgar effusions that clutter the supernatural field today. That his stories have survived a century or more while those of his noisier successors seem destined to lapse into merited oblivion should itself be regarded as “a warning to the curious.”
X. Other Early Twentieth-Century Masters Machen, Dunsany, Blackwood, and James were only the pinnacles of a remarkable outpouring of weird writing in the first four decades of the twentieth century—a period that, even more than the later nineteenth century, can qualify not merely as a “deluge” of supernaturalism but, in many ways, a high-water mark such as the field never saw before or since. The number of authors who extensively addressed the weird, and the bewideringly wide array of their work, make it difficult to summarise or classify beyond the broadest parameters. It is possible that new markets, both among book publishers and among magazine outlets, had something to do with this efflorescence, although in my judgment a more significant factor was merely the accumulated heritage of weird fiction—a heritage in which the centrality of Poe’s conception of the short story, to say nothing of his dynamism in the use of supernatural tropes, was finally realised. Still, markets had some bearing on the matter. In the United States, the Munsey magazines—notably the Argosy (founded in 1882 as the Golden Argosy)—as well as other magazines such as the Black Cat (1895–1922) provided occasional havens for weird matter; in England, the Strand pioneered the publication of both weird and detective fiction. And yet, it is surprising to note that the prodigality of weird writing in this period was very largely a British phenomenon; so many British writers, from D. H. Lawrence to Walter de la Mare, contributed to the form that Americans were left in the dust; when they finally began producing their own work, they chiefly did so in Weird Tales (1923f.) and other pulp magazines—a phenomenon we shall take up in chapters XII and XIII.
A sign of the definitive arrival of weird fiction as a recognised genre may be found in the prevalence of noteworthy anthologies during this period. Such landmark compilations as Julian Hawthorne’s Lock and Key Library (1909), Joseph Lewis French’s Masterpieces of Mystery (1920), and Dorothy L. Sayers’s three volumes of Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror (