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Week 1 article: 'Shakespeare and the Gothic'.

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Week 1 article: 'Shakespeare and the Gothic'.

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Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) is widely regarded as the first gothic novel in English. Curiously, as Anne Williams and Christy Desmet have observed, the origins of gothic literature roughly coincided with the elevation of Shakespeare to the status of Britain's national poet in the late eighteenth century, such that 'Shakespeare' and the gothic were 'born together'.

From a twenty-first-century perspective the gulf between the cultural capital of Shakespearean drama and the ostensibly cheap thrills of the gothic may seem wide. But as an actor and shareholder in his company (as well as its principle dramatist) Shakespeare was primarily a crowd-pleaser in his own day, not an elitist, and he too was fascinated by the potential of accentuating the supernatural in his work.

The theatres of Shakespeare's London dabbled in the diabolical more frequently than we sometimes think. In John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (c.1613), the eponymous hero's twin brother Ferdinand descends into a lycanthropic madness and is identified as one of those who 'imagine / Themselves to be transformed into wolves', ² digging up dead bodies in churchyards at midnight. He is seen 'with the leg of a man / Upon his shoulder' and claims to be a werewolf, except that whereas 'a wolf's skin was hairy on the outside', his was hairy 'on the inside'. ³ 'Vayvode', a lost play in the repertory of the Admiral's men in 1598, apparently took for its subject matter a local ruler or official from south-eastern Europe, possibly Transylvania; it has been suggested that the protagonist might even have been Vlad the Impaler - the historical Dracula. ⁴

Devils and demons titillated early modern audiences and were responsible for some of the more sensational anecdotes of the period, including (most famously) at a 1580s performance of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus - a play in which the protagonist first summons, then makes a pact with the devil - where audiences at the Belsavage Inn (or perhaps in Exeter; the seventeenth-century accounts differ in key details) were alarmed to discover more devils on stage than could be personated by the number of actors in the company. Stage devilry had become a vehicle for social satire by the second decade of the seventeenth century, however, when both Thomas Dekker (in the play with the longest title of the period, If This Be Not A Good Play, The Devil Is In It) and Ben Jonson (in his The Devil Is An Ass) played with the trope of devils disguising themselves as humans to lure Londoners to the underworld, only to find that life in London is more sinful and oppressive than they can bear, forcing an abrupt retreat to hell.

Ghosts, of course, frequently hovered above the boards of early modern theatres. In 1596, the playwright Thomas Lodge made reference to a 'Ghost who cries so miserably at the theatre, like an oyster wife, Hamlet, revenge!'. ⁵ Lodge was referring to the 'Ur-Hamlet', ⁶ a lost precursor to Shakespeare's more famous tragedy, but a play which nevertheless shared the intriguing feature of a ghost providing the impetus for revenge: 'Instead of merely a debate upon the ethics of revenge we have something much more exciting. We have revenge commanded by a ghost; and whether the ghost is good or bad is a matter of much concern in the early part of the play'. ⁷ As this wonderful picture, "Hamlet shows his mother the Ghost of his Father", shows, the ghost provides new cause for delay, Hamlet must check its truthfulness:

Shakespeare experimented again with ghostly apparitions some years later in his Macbeth. An early eyewitness account of the play in performance offers unique insight into the presentation of ghosts on stage. When the quack doctor Simon Forman saw the play at the Globe in April, 1611, he recorded his thoughts in his diary. In particular he noted how Macbeth contrived the murder of his friend Banquo, and that when Macbeth longed for Banquo at the banquet scene,

the ghost of Banquo came and sat down in his chair behind him. And he turning about to sit down again saw the ghost of Banquo, which fronted him so, that he fell into a great passion of fear and fury, uttering many words about his murder, by which, when they heard that Banquo was murdered, they suspected Macbeth.⁸

The Puritans succeeded in closing the public playhouses in 1642, and when the theatres were reopened in 1660, Shakespeare's Macbeth was freely adapted by William Davenant, who cut the Porter and the Doctor, but made numerous operatic additions. Davenant's Restoration rewriting was described by Samuel Pepys in glowing terms for its 'variety of dancing and music' (19 April 1667).

Although this musical dimension reigned supreme for a time, the eighteenth-century interest in the gothic proved sympathetic to the supernatural elements of Macbeth. Significantly, and unlike the production that Simon Forman saw in 1611, famed English actor John Philip Kemble did not bring Banquo's ghost onto the stage, making him a figment of Macbeth's imagination.

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Week 2 article: 'Manuscript Ghosts: Reader and Writer in Romantic Gothic Fiction'

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Week 2 article: 'Manuscript Ghosts: Reader and Writer in Romantic Gothic Fiction'

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In Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen's affectionate parody of late 18th-century gothic novels, the unlikely heroine, Catherine, discovers what she believes is a manuscript in an 'old-fashioned black cabinet.' 1) After struggling with the locks and searching through a series of empty drawers, the reader's suspense and Catherine's curiosity are rewarded by 'a roll of paper...[on which] half a glance sufficed to ascertain written characters.'2)

Unfortunately, the accidental snuffing of her candle leaves her to a restless night agonising over the unknown contents of the manuscript until the cold light of day finally reveals it to be merely a list of items for washing. The materiality of the manuscript (its physical qualities) is essential to the comedy of this scene. The unclear 'written characters' found on the 'precious manuscript' cause a thrill of suspense and excitement which is quickly deflated when they are revealed to be the 'coarse and modern characters' of a neglectful servant. ³

Austen is directly referencing a key trope of Romantic-era gothic fiction in which the protagonist discovers a mysterious manuscript which reveals terrible secrets about the past. In these scenes of discovery and reading the ghostly presence of the manuscript's writer is central to the production of the gothic atmosphere of suspense and terror for both the heroine and the reader of the novel itself. To bring this presence into being, authors such as Austen, Ann Radcliffe and Emily Brontë use the materiality of manuscripts in their novels to call attention to the act of reading and give corporeal form to the ghosts of their manuscript writers. Laura Baudot suggests that material qualities of texts create an awareness of the act of reading which vies with the reader's absorbed imagination and 'reveals the extent to which fictional outcomes are deduced from the physical appearance and tactile reality of the novel.' ⁴ In this way, the materiality of the manuscript can be seen to produce a gothic reading experience for both protagonist and novel reader by reproducing the emotions of the writer.

Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest 1791

Catherine's encounter with the washing-bills was very likely inspired by another famous discovered manuscript scene from Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest. In this novel, the heroine, Adeline, discovers a manuscript in a secret passage below the Abbey where she is living. Unlike Catherine's washing-bill, this more serious novel presents a manuscript which fulfils Gothic expectations. It is old, worn and so 'decayed with damp' as to be almost 'totally illegible.' ⁵ This decay reproduces the sorrows of the man who wrote the manuscript and physically fragments the narrative, drawing Adeline and the reader's attention to the manuscript's materiality. The earliest editions of The Romance of the Forest represented physical damage to the manuscript with a collection of asterisks which appear in large groups, almost as paragraphs, on the pages of the novel. In attempting to render visible the fictional manuscript, these asterisks draw the reader's focus to the type on the printed text in their hands. In doing so, they interrupt the reader's absorption in the narrative in a similar way that the damage in the fictional manuscript interrupts Adeline's reading. These interruptions recall the production of the manuscript and novel and produce a gothic encounter with the ghost of the writer: "By a strong illusion of fancy, it seemed as if his past sufferings were at this moment present ... and, turning her eyes, a figure, whose exact form she could not distinguish, appeared to pass along an obscure part of the chamber." ⁶ This ghostly presence of the writer has been called forth by Adeline's reaction to the material remnants of his manuscript.

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Manuscript Ghosts: Reader and Writer in Romantic Gothic Fiction

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Manuscript Ghosts: Reader and Writer in Romantic Gothic Fiction

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Dr Eric Parisot, Lecturer in English, Flinders University.

Graveyard poetry is, first and foremost, a devotional mode of poetry. Popular in the early to mid-eighteenth century-that is, in the decades immediately preceding Horace Walpole's seminal Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764)-it is a mournful brand of poetics designed to facilitate Christian meditation on dying, death and the afterlife by way of the affective imagination.

Although the most prominent examples-Thomas Parnell's 'Night-Piece on Death' (1721), Robert Blair's The Grave (1743), Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1742-45), and Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751)-vary quite considerably in their respective emphases, the poetic mode's imperfect label superficially draws specific attention to its defining imaginative locale, the graveyard, and all of its gloomy, nocturnal trappings: the abundant graves and tombs; the dead, whether inanimate or spectral; screeching owls or squawking rooks; the local church, a steadfast spur to faith; the cool glow of a silver moon; the seemingly sentient yews and elms; the flickering flame of a taper that seems to enliven the shadows; and, crucially, a solitary poetic speaker or narrator, highly attuned to the sights and sounds of the dreadful scene. These are the kinds of Gothic trappings that would be familiar to the avid reader of Gothic fiction, or any fan of horror film.

But the relation of graveyard poetry to the Gothic is a lot more complex than this, precisely because of its pious objectives. As an elaborate memento mori, a graveyard poem might encourage the reader to pause and contemplate the brevity and vanity of life, the physical and spiritual fate of those departed (for better or worse), and perhaps, at the most melancholic end of the spectrum, serve as a reminder of the futility of human endeavour in this post-lapsarian world. Fear and melancholy are strategically cultivated as a prompt to faith, as a reminder to prepare the soul for death, where, for the righteous, the ecstasy of the afterlife awaits. Such beatific visions-of soaring, melodious birds bathed in holy light-are often invoked as the rewarding consolation for the devout reader at the end of the poem, to counter the foreboding gloom of the earthly scene.

Take, for example, Parnell's 'Night-Piece,' often regarded as the original graveyard poem. Parnell's poetic narrator conducts his tour of the graveyard by 'the blue trembling taper's light' (1), while the poem invites imaginative participation by prescribing befitting solemnity-'think, as softly-sad you tread / Above the venerable dead' (25-6). All in all, there is little to fear up to this point. But in the fading moonlight, and with the narrator's exclamation of surprise-'Ha!' (47)-comes the supernatural machinery; the 'visionary crouds' of the dead, 'All slow, and wan, and wrap'd with shrouds' (49-50), are accompanied by a cacophony of tolling bells, croaking ravens, and hollow groans from the charnel-house, before the voice of Death himself commands the reader's attention:

When men my scythe and darts supply,
How great a King of Fears am I!
They view me like the last of things:
They make, and then they dread, my stings.
Fools! If you less provok'd your fears,
No more my spectre-form appears.
Death's but a path that must be trod,
If a man would ever pass to God;
A port of calms, a state of ease,
From the rough rage of swelling seas. (61-70)

The spectral imaginings of the narrator, designed to pique the reader's dread, are swiftly undercut by Death's own consoling sense of reason. Fear is elicited only briefly by Parnell before it is attenuated, firstly, by a voice of reason, and secondly, by the promise of heavenly rapture, when our souls 'tow'r away' to 'mingle with the blaze of day' (89-90).

What happens, though, when the consolation of rapture is withdrawn? Nothing but fear, anxiety and melancholy remains-the reader is left in a liminal state. These emotional states, dwelling within them, are central to graveyard poetry's affective power, and to the Gothic's enduring power and appeal. The best example of this is Blair's The Grave, a poem that invests so heavily in the 'supernumerary horror' (19) of the scene that the concluding vision of salvation shines dimly in comparison. Blair assaults the senses much more vigorously than his predecessors: 'low-browed misty Vaults' are 'Furr'd round with mouldy Damps, and ropy Slime' (17-18) to invite touch; 'See yonder hallow'd fane!' (28), our poetic guide exclaims, commanding our visionary sight; 'Doors creak, and windows clap' (34), while 'night's foul bird / ... screams loud' (34-35) to arrest the imaginary ear, as do the groans of the dead; and we are even reminded of the putrefying 'Carcase / That's fall'n into disgrace, and in the nostril / Smells horrible' (169-71). Blair's poem is vivid and sensory, paving the way to the more confronting and chaotic horrors of late-eighteenth-century Gothic fiction such as Matthew Lewis' The Monk (1796) and German Schauerromantik. But this is not to say that Blair abandoned religious intent for aesthetic frisson: the relative absenceof consolation, both within this poem and, as it argues, within earthly life, creates a powerful yet paradoxical yearning that cannot be fulfilled by human means. This lacuna is where faith may enter, and where salvation begins.

As a label, 'graveyard poetry' encourages us to view this mode as an aesthetic precursor to the Gothic tradition. While there is some merit in this, it overlooks the pivotal role of religion, and the various ways graveyard poetry exploited the aesthetics of the night and of death for theological objectives via the psychology of fear and melancholy. Only with this in mind in mind we can fully grasp graveyard poetry's enduring contribution to the Gothic, from Walpole, to Radcliffe and Lewis, and beyond.

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Week 4 article: 'Ghosts of the Past: Contemporary Australian Gothic Theatre'

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Week 4 article: 'Ghosts of the Past: Contemporary Australian Gothic Theatre'

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Stories of inexplicable disappearance, of violent death, of the intolerable trauma of separation from homeland, of the hostility of the extreme climate, and of those driven mad by deracination, loneliness and the struggle to survive were passed on and became the subject of bush ballads, poetry, fine art work, early Gothic theatre and melodrama and latterly, film and television. Contemporary Australian Gothic Theatre, on the other hand, has emerged since the 1960s and is as much connected with a postcolonial search for new identities and a political and cultural repositioning of Australia within the Asia Pacific, as it is with innovations in dramatizing stories and inventing new ways of making theatre.

In the last ten years Australian Gothic Theatre has boomed in every state. In a platform discussion at the Arts Centre in Melbourne in 2016, performer and artistic director, Lydia Miller, even went as far as suggesting that 'our national genre is horror Gothic'. Australian re-visionings of European monsters such as Frankenstein and Dracula have proliferated on stages and sit alongside new Australian plays and devised works examining a range of cultural anxieties about the violence and trauma connected with white settlement, place, land and the denial of indigenous rights. Stagings of Night on Bald Mountain, The Secret River, The Bleeding Tree, Children of the Black Skirt, Jasper Jones and Picnic at Hanging Rock have all been framed as Australian Gothic. Individual states are even beginning to identify localised Gothic features in their performance, as the term 'Tasmanian Gothic' and the annual Dark Mofo Festival demonstrate. Such theatre and performance works draw their politics and aesthetics from a range of influences, including the more established tradition of Australian Gothic film championed by Peter Weir ( Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Cars that Ate Paris) and Jocelyn Moorhouse ( The Dressmaker), from the horror film genre, from the abundant ghostly myths and legends associated with bush, desert and coastal landscapes, and from oral storytelling and musical traditions that focus on violent and spectral events.

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Ghosts of the Past: Contemporary Australian Gothic Theatre

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Ghosts of the Past: Contemporary Australian Gothic Theatre

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Week 5 article: 'Mezzotints and their Dark Affair with Science and Literature'

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Week 5 article: 'Mezzotints and their Dark Affair with Science and Literature'

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Mezzotint might just be the perfect medium for gothic imagery as the artist begins with a completely dark, almost terrifying, surface and gives their image life by drawing with light. Renowned English examples of this luminous art form hang in the exhibition Dark imaginings.

The technique of mezzotint first emerged in the 17 th century in the Netherlands and was embraced by English printmakers where it rose to great prominence in the 18 th century.[1] It was the evolution of experimentation with marks on a plate, and it broke with traditional printed image making as it is not based in line work, but rather tones. A mezzotint is created by abrading a metal plate, usually with a special tool called a rocker. When the plate is inked, this burred surface provides the rich velvet black so characteristic of the medium. To draw the image, the artist works with another tool, often a burnisher to smooth out the pitted areas of the plate thereby creating tones which form the image. In the current century, it still used by artists, but more as a technical marvel than as it once was: a leading national mode of expression.

Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797), an artist renowned for candle-lit subjects, selected this pioneering technique to reproduce his atmospheric paintings. Wright was working in the grip of the scientific revolution, yet has chosen to represent a branch of pseudo-science in An Alchymist. These early styled chemists were driven to discover the philosopher's stone, or in other words, the secret to transforming base metals into gold. On a moonlit night, we find Wright's archaic alchemist kneeling transfixed before a heating flask of urine at the moment it emits a jet of vapour. This scene has come to be the model for the night in 1669 when Henning Brand, the German alchemist, probed urine for the philosopher's stone and unexpectedly discovered phosphorus.[2] Rather like a mezzotint, phosphorus trades in light and it emanates a beguiling glow. Phosphorus is an important and dangerous scientific element, playing a role in medicine, match invention and war, but it also a suspect in more mysterious phenomena, including ghosts. This picture eerily projects a moment of the past, and a gothic persona: in his lair on the fringe of mainstream society, working at his foul experiments.

As the century gave way to a more romantic rendering of gothic archetypes, such as Victor Frankenstein in the 19 th century, further settings and characters were drawn by literature. In rather arresting terminology, one scholar classified John Martin's (1789-1854) mezzotint illustrations for the pulsating epic Paradise Lost as 'apocalyptic romanticism.'[3] The Baillieu Library is very fortunate to hold a complete set of the 24 proof images for this project,[4] made between 1824 and 1825, and six of these mezzotints are on display in the exhibition. While neither the illustrations nor the text sit comfortably in any one genre, Martin's images are mesmerising exemplars of the art and they sprang directly from his imagination onto the soft steel printing plate.

The Fall of the Rebel Angels is the opening image for the series and the first to exploit the potentials of the medium, which may be seen through Martin's use of black to convey infinite space. So, that: 'The viewer is left to his own imagination to create the "bottomless perdition" of the depths of Hell from the blackness into which Satan and his legions fall.'[5]

If Martin could wield blackness so effectually, then it will come as no surprise that he was also a master of the application of light. The fundamental role of the image Creation of Light was to visually capture the moment in the Bible when light is brought forth from darkness. Martin achieved this objective so well that this image is regarded as one of his greatest and best known achievements in printmaking.

If Satan and his accomplices are condemned to the darkness the viewer, by contrast, is like a good angel, seduced toward the light in these prints. As Wright used a candle for a light source, it is almost as if Martin's apertures of light open from an omnipotent source beyond the sheet. They are executed with a technical valour which draws us into their fathoms.

Romance in visual art and literature was often inhabited by ominous forests, architecture or other dark locations such as graveyards, but romance took on more risqué associations through the development of 'Romantic Science.' When the botanist Carl Linnaeus developed a system of taxonomy and began to discuss plants in terms of their sexuality, then nature became animated and the academy became enlightened.[6] These ideas are rapturously embodied through Robert Thornton's book, Temple of Flora (1799) which lavishly illustrates this new, romantic nature.

The Dragon Arum or Dracunculus vulgaris is a dangerous bloom designed to lure insects into its maw of death. As a mezzotint, it layers the versatility of the medium through the introduction of colour, and by placing the specimen before a heaving backdrop from the natural world.

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Mezzotints and their Dark Affair with Science and Literature

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Mezzotints and their Dark Affair with Science and Literature

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Week 6 article: 'Gothic Veils: A Critique of the Sentimental Feminine Ideal in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho'

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Week 6 article: 'Gothic Veils: A Critique of the Sentimental Feminine Ideal in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho'

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By Michelle Landauer, PhD student, University of Melbourne.

Gothic novels descended from the sentimental tradition. In fact, female Gothic fiction could be described as a sentimental novel with a twist, the twist of course being intimations of the supernatural. The Gothic is often studied through an interpretation of its motifs. One of the most prominent motifs, the image of the veil, was made popular by Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and has its roots in the sentimental tradition.

In his seminal sentimental text, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously utilises veiling to help define the image of ideal femininity that would influence generations of sentimental and Gothic texts. Throughout this novel the heroine, Julie, fights the passion she feels for her tutor in order to become the ideal wife to the man she was arranged to marry. Unable to conquer her desire, Julie gladly gives her life to save her child from drowning and to protect herself from temptation. Upon dying, the site of Julie's unruly passion, her body, is covered by a veil, where a stable image of feminine purity emerges. The biggest best-seller in the eighteenth century, Rousseau's novel was so successful it had a cult following and was responsible for popularising the spectacle of death, particularly the death of a beautiful woman. These themes influenced The Mysteries of Udolpho where a veiled image and two female ghosts comprise the central mysteries of the title. The ghosts of Signora Laurentini and the Marchioness de Villeroi form extreme aspects of sentimental feminine identity that Emily, the heroine, must learn to manage, and the veil at the heart of the story represents the site for negotiation.

Signora Laurentini embodies the dangers associated with emotional excess, a potential side effect of the cult of sensibility, and the Marchioness represents the opposite, the limitations of the repression required of the sentimental feminine ideal as outlined in sentimental texts like Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse. The representation of reason (repressed passion) and desire-as expressed through Signora Laurentini and the Marchioness de Villeroi-symbolises the psychological battle which rages within Emily. After all, the story is about Emily's entrance into the adult world, where she must learn to define herself through (largely) male-defined sentimental codes for feminine identity in order to achieve a more well-rounded and sustainable subject-position. For example, Montoni forces Emily to renounce her lover and leave him behind in France. She is torn between duty and desire-between the innocent and virginal role of daughter, and her womanly passions for her lover. Emily is therefore at a crossroads. If she marries the man Montoni would choose for her, then she must repress her own passion and identity, just as the Marchioness de Villeroi did in order to masquerade as the sentimental feminine ideal. On the other hand, if she chooses to defy her guardians, she is in danger of giving in to the 'madness' of her passions and thus becoming like Signora Laurentini. These two women embody aspects of female identity promoted by the discourse of sensibility that Emily must learn to negotiate-a fact that is highlighted by the narrator's description of Emily as having 'the contour of a Madona [sic], with the sensibility of a Magdalen.'

The Mysteries of Udolpho thus presents a search for unity where Emily must attempt to suture a subject position that is fragmented by sentimental extremes. Veils symbolize this sense of fragmentation. Similar to Rousseau's Julie, the veil emerges in The Mysteries of Udolpho as a dominant image, functioning as a supplement or sign for feminine identity. Radcliffe exposes the limitations of the sentimental model for feminine identity formation through this image of the veil by highlighting its corporeal nature. She does so in a scene where Emily and the servant, Dorothée, examine the Marchioness' room. The Marchioness' absence is signified by the many items that recall her image after her death. One of these is a long black veil: [next bit is a quote]

which, as Emily took it up to examine, she perceived was dropping to pieces with age. 'Ah!' said Dorothée, observing the veil, 'my lady's hand laid [it] there; it has never been moved since!' Emily, shuddering, immediately laid it down again. 'I well remember seeing her take it off', continued Dorothée, 'it was on the night before her death' . . . Dorothée wept again, and then, taking up the veil, threw it suddenly over Emily, who shuddered to find it wrapped round her, descending even to her feet, and, as she endeavoured to throw it off, Dorothée intreated that she would keep it on for one moment. 'I thought,' added she, 'how like you would look to my dear mistress in that veil;-may your life, ma'amselle, be a happier one than hers!'

In this scene, Emily is defined by and linked with the Marchioness through the veil. The description of the veil focuses on its corporeal nature, highlighting how it is 'dropping to pieces with age.' Dorothée states that the last time that veil was touched was by the Marchioness on the night she died. The veil is thus linked with corporeality, decay and death. Emily 'shudders' to hear this and immediately puts the veil down, wanting to distance herself from it. However, Dorothée, against Emily's will, throws the veil over Emily. Dorothée does this to see the resemblance between Emily and the Marchioness-an odd way to judge a resemblance, when one is completely covered. In this process the veil objectifies the body, allowing it to become a commodity that can be exchanged-one for the other, the Marchioness for Emily. Symbolising resignation and repressed passion, the veil becomes the blank slate onto which ideal femininity can be grafted in the tradition of Rousseau's Julie, and thus emerges as a supplement for feminine identity. In this way the veil separates image from body, outward appearances from inner emotions, underscoring the fragmented nature of feminine identity. These divisions lead to mis-representations, mis-interpretations and, at base, an eternal divide between surface and interior, sign and referent. Emily's rejection of the veil in this scene signals a rejection of the division required of the sentimental model of identity formation for women-a point more forcefully made by the iconic veil in Udolpho.

While, in La Nouvelle Héloïse, Julie's closest friend covers her body saying 'curs'd be the wretched hand that ever lifts this veil,' Radcliffe suggests that the veil should be lifted, stating that it was too bad Emily did not dare 'to look again, her delusion and her fears would have vanished together, and she would have perceived that the figure before her was not human, but formed of wax.' During her stay at Udolpho, Emily repeatedly lifts veils imagining that they cover the physical remains of a passionate woman (either her aunt, or Signora Laurentini). In La Nouvelle Héloïse the veil covers Julie's decomposing body which is depicted as having 'worms . . . gnaw [at her] face.' In a similar fashion, Radcliffe describes the waxen figure at Udolpho by saying that it had a 'face' that 'appeared partly decayed and disfigured by worms.' However, what is particularly important to note in The Mysteries of Udolpho is that the figure behind the veil is androgynous and, therefore, what lies beyond Radcliffe's version of the veil is not Signora Laurentini, or the long-imagined, passionate, feminine body in an advanced state of decay (an extreme form of the 'real'), but a waxen figure or the supplement of the supplement in an endless chain of signification. Clery describes this 'trademark device' of the explained supernatural, stating that Radcliffe 'withdrew with one hand what [she] offered with the other.' But this device for textual closure is more than just a simple sleight of hand. Throughout the novel, Radcliffe exposes how Laurentini's passionate exploits mix with superstition to create a 'story' about what might lie behind the veil at Udolpho. She then provides various hints about the Marchioness' strange fate, conflating their stories and even, at times, their identities. As representations of the extremes of sentimental feminine identity, both women are, at one point, presumed to be the decomposing body behind the veil at Udolpho. To deny these assumptions by exposing an unconnected, androgynous waxen figure at the heart of this mystery is to undermine the sentimental model that, in the tradition of Rousseau, places the unruly excesses of feminine passion behind the veil.

Works Cited

Clery, E.J. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction: 1762-1800. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Julie, or the New Heloise. Letters of Two Lovers Who Live in a Small Town at the Foot of the Alps. Trans. Philip Stewart; Jean Vaché. London: University Press of New England, 1997.

1. Radcliffe Mysteries p. 184

2. Radcliffe Mysteries pp. 533-534

3. Radcliffe Mysteries p. 533

4. Rousseau Julie p. 606

5. Radcliffe Mysteries p. 662

6. Rousseau Julie p. 610

7. Radcliffe Mysteries p. 662

8. 'It may be remembered, that, in a chamber of Udolpho, hung black veil, whose singular situation had excited Emily's curiosity, and which afterwards disclosed an object, that had overwhelmed her with horror; for, in lifting it, there appeared, instead of the picture she had expected, within a recess of the wall, a human figure of ghastly paleness, stretched at its length, and dressed in the habiliments of the grave', Radcliffe p. 662.

9. The waxen figure is a supplement for the body which in turn is a supplement for the soul.

10. Clery Rise p. 105.

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Gothic Veils: A Critique of the Sentimental Feminine Ideal in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho

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Gothic Veils: A Critique of the Sentimental Feminine Ideal in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho

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Week 7 article: 'Feminism and the Gothic: A Brief History'

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Week 7 article: 'Feminism and the Gothic: A Brief History'

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Week 8 article: 'Gothic Realities: Tabloid Coverage of the Macabre in the Nineteenth Century'

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Week 8 article: 'Gothic Realities: Tabloid Coverage of the Macabre in the Nineteenth Century'

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Gothic Realities: Tabloid Coverage of the Macabre in the Nineteenth Century

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Gothic Realities: Tabloid Coverage of the Macabre in the Nineteenth Century

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Week 9: 'Galvanising George Foster, 1803'

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Week 9: 'Galvanising George Foster, 1803'

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Helen MacDonald
Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne

Until 1832 the corpses of every person hanged for murder in London were carted to the College of Surgeons to be dissected. These were the only bodies legally available to medical men, under An Act for better preventing the horrid Crime of Murder (1752), which made dissecting or gibbeting the corpse a secondary punishment for this crime alone. The dissections carried out at the College were public events, theatrically performed. Then the bodies were experimented upon, or turned into gifts for well-connected surgeons elsewhere.

Social anxieties about the boundary between life and death were common in Europe at this time, expressed in novels and poems and also circulating in dark tales of people having been erroneously declared dead then buried alive.

Experiments on murderers at the College of Surgeons aimed to determine the fact of death with certainty. Some were so violently crude that William Clift, who performed them, found his job distressing. In an uncharacteristically stumbling hand, in 1814 he recorded what he was instructed to do to one body as it lay on the dissecting table, which was to thrust a needle into each eye to see if that produced an effect. Other investigations were undertaken in a more systematic way as College men sought to understand whether an absence of obvious animation was a sign that the life force had merely been suspended or was irretrievably extinguished. And although this was never stated in the context of the College's work on murderers, they were also wondering whether it was in the power of medical men to return life to the dead.

In 1803 the College invited Professor Giovanni Aldini to carry out galvanic experiments on the body of George Foster, who had been found guilty of murdering his wife and child by drowning them in the Paddington Canal. Aldini required access to the bodies of people who had died very recently, in the belief that these still held their 'vital powers'. In contrast, those who had died of disease might have 'humours' which would resist his experiments. Later, writing up his London work, Aldini admired England's 'enlightened' laws, which provided murderers with an opportunity to atone for their crimes by such uses of their bodies after death. He argued that galvanic experiments were especially in the interests of a British public, for Britain was a commercial and maritime nation filled with rivers and canals. When people drowned there, he wrote, galvanism might provide the necessary 'means of excitement' to return them to life. 1 Dealing with the dead in controversial ways always requires some form of rationalisation. It is part of the process through which access to bodies is socially negotiated.

Reading the records of this scientist's work at the College in 1803, it is not difficult to see why others believed such men liked to play at being God. Always conscious of his audience, Aldini made the dead perform tricks. He boasted that in Europe he had once placed the heads of two decapitated criminals on separate tables, then connected them with an arc of electricity to make them grimace to such an extent as to frighten spectators. He had also made the hand of a headless man clutch a coin and throw it across a room.

The College provided Aldini with an opportunity to undertake some new experiments on George Foster, whose body had been left hanging for an hour in temperatures two degrees below freezing point. Aldini applied arcs to various parts of the corpse to make George Foster perform. His jaw quivered, his left eye opened, and his face convulsed. When conductors were applied to his ear and rectum, the resulting muscular contractions 'almost [gave] an appearance of reanimation'. ² One hand clenched and the heart's right auricle contracted, amazing Aldini's audience.

The experiments continued for more than seven hours after the execution. Aldini denied any intention to reanimate the corpses upon which he went to work, but everyone in that room would have considered it a triumph had he managed to do so. The Times noted that a principle had been discovered 'by which motion can be restored to Dead Bodies.' ³

Such possibilities had not been on the minds of England's legislators when they had worded the Murder Act. Dissection was meant to mutilate the dead, not resurrect them. Bringing murderers back to life might have been a matter of congratulations for the man who achieved it, but it would have been a complicated problem for the law. Aldini himself spoke ambiguously about his intentions. He said the object of his experiments 'was not to produce re-animation, but merely to obtain a practical knowledge how far Galvanism may be employed ... to revive persons under similar circumstances'. ⁴

This is an edited excerpt from Helen MacDonald, Human Remains (Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2005 and Yale University Press, London, 2006).

1. Aldini, John, An Account of the Late Improvements in Galvanism, with a series of various and interesting experiments performed before the Commissioners of the French National Institute, and repeated lately in the Anatomical Theatres in London (to which is added an Appendix, containing the author's experiments on the body of a malefactor executed at Newgate, etc etc), Cathell & Martin, London, 1803, pp. 67-8, 189-90, 191.

2. Aldini, An Account of the Late Improvements in Galvanism, p. 194.

3. Times, 24 January 1803.

4. Aldini, An Account of the Late Improvements in Galvanism, p. 201.

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Week 10: 'The Vampire in Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy'

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Week 10: 'The Vampire in Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy'

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The Vampire in Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy

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The Vampire in Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy

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During the Romantic period in the early nineteenth century, Switzerland and its Alps were most often portrayed as a kind of utopian alpine idyll, stocked with idealised democratic peasant republicans in harmony with nature. This was thanks firstly to the Swiss Confederation's long history of independent republicanism and direct democracy, which appealed to both radical and conservative writers alike.

Added to this was a growing aesthetic appreciation of the country's physical environment, the Swiss Alps providing perhaps the ultimate experience of the awe-inspiring natural sublime available to European writers of the period. This natural sublimity helped underwrite Switzerland's political traditions, making that country-with its stunning mountain vistas, juxtaposed against its picturesque valleys-a place to bring together political and aesthetic longings, somewhere that could embody millenarian hopes for a new heaven and a new earth, for personal redemption, for the reconciliation of humankind with the natural world and the perfecting of human society.

At the same time, however, there was an older, shadow side associated with the Alps. For centuries, they had been feared as the abode of demons and dragons; a diabolical wilderness to pass through as swiftly as possible on the way to the more welcoming landscapes of the Italian peninsula. These Satanic Alps were the ideal setting for Gothic works written during this period.

Mary Shelley wrote two major novels which make use of Switzerland's natural environment, in both its utopian and dystopian forms. The Last Man, published in 1826, presents of a vision of Switzerland as a utopian alpine refuge, clearly inspired by the author's time in that country ten years earlier. In 1816, she and her future husband, Percy Shelley, spent the summer on the shores of Lake Geneva, along with her half-sister, Claire Clairmont, and the poet Lord Byron and his physician John Polidori. A rather different vision of the Alps helps infuse Shelley's much better-known work from 1818, Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus, with a menacing, diabolical presence, as it does other Gothic works produced by this celebrated group of writers, such as Byron's Manfred (1817), Polidori's Ernestus Berchtold (1819) and Percy Shelley's St. Irvyne, or, the Rosicrucian (1811).

Mountains had been viewed in both positive and negative terms throughout human history, but by the late seventeenth century in Europe, a more negative appraisal had become dominant, which saw mountains as not having been part of the original creation, only coming into existence after the Fall, or the Flood, and therefore being a result of divine punishment of the earth for the sins of humankind. Thomas Heyrick in 1691 described mountains as the 'broken Ruines of the former World'. ¹ Mountains-and for Heyrick and many other poets of his time, this especially meant the Swiss Alps-were therefore prominent reminders of the fallen state of the world. There are also countless instances of traditions and superstitions linking not only Satan but demons, goblins, giants and dragons to various locations throughout the mountainous regions of Switzerland. These sorts of associations naturally made entering mountainous areas, such as the Swiss Alps, a doubly terrifying prospect to many travellers-not only were the landscapes intimidating and filled with physical danger, they were also closely connected with divine retribution and home to all kinds of evil. Many travellers' accounts of crossing the Alps, well into the eighteenth century, bear this out.

The poet William Wordsworth expressed a degree of exasperation with the Swiss regarding their obsession with all things diabolical following his visit to the country in 1790. Writing in a footnote to his 1793 poem, Descriptive Sketches, he notes that 'the Devil with his horns, etc., seems to be in their idea, the principal agent that brings about the sublime natural revolutions that take place daily before their eyes'. ² These Satanic associations are still strong in many parts of the Alps. Most famously, in the Lötschental valley in Canton Valais in the south of Switzerland, the locals dress up as demonic-looking creatures known as Tschäggättä for the carnival season, to see off the end of winter.

The Satanic presence in Frankenstein is expressed in a variety of ways. Central to this is an 'autonomy of consciousness' exhibited by the creature; an independence of mind typically associated with the Satan of the Romantics, based on but not limited to John Milton's portrayal of Satan in his seventeenth-century epic poem, Paradise Lost. Milton's epic is cited by the creature as one of the most influential works he has read during his conversation with Victor, his creator, in a wooden hut on the side of Mont Blanc. The creature says that 'many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me'. ³ The relationships between God and Satan, God and Man, Satan and Man from Paradise Lost are thoroughly 'satanised' in Shelley's work, becoming monstrous caricatures of the originals. Elsewhere in the novel, Victor refers to his creature in satanised terms, calling him 'the filthy daemon' when he encounters him on his return to Geneva, 'daemon' being a term used sixteen times throughout the novel to refer to the creature, along with 'devil' around twelve times and 'fiend' close to forty times. One of the first theatrical productions of Shelley's novel opened on the eighteenth of August 1823 at the Royal Coburg Theatre in London, a play by Henry M. Milner titled Frankenstein, or the Demon of Switzerland. Switzerland and the Alps were a fitting home for Frankenstein's creature and he is able very effectively to embody some of the diabolical presence inhabiting the Swiss mountains.

Peter Schock, in his influential study, Romantic Satanism (2003), demonstrates how the Romantics used Satan to 'mythicize the human struggle against various forms of oppression and limitation' thereby gaining a 'mythic medium for articulating the hopes and fears their age aroused, for prophesying and inducing change'. ⁴ Before them, in the 1790s, Mary Shelley's father, William Godwin, amongst others, identified Milton's Satan as 'an embodiment of the fully autonomous intellect that discerns and rejects the radical injustice of a "despotic" and "assumed" power analogous to the arbitrary authority of prescription and precedent that governed England'. ⁵ This understanding of Satan as an autonomous force, opposed to the established power of a despotic, divinely-approved ruler, finds expression in Frankenstein, and, more than once, Shelley frames this opposition within the Swiss landscape, by making a contrast between the Jura mountains on Switzerland's western border with France, and Mont Blanc to the southeast.

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Week 12: 'The Vampire in Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy'

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Week 12: 'The Vampire in Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy'

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The Vampire in Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy

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The Vampire in Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy

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Week 13: 'Gothic bluebooks: The popular thirst for fear and dread'

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Week 13: 'Gothic bluebooks: The popular thirst for fear and dread'

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Susan Thomas, co-curator, Dark Imaginings: Gothic tales of wonder

Visitors to the Dark Imaginings exhibition may find themselves drawn to two hand-sized books, immediately distinguishable by their melodramatic titles, and exaggerated illustrations in splashes of bright colour.

In counterpoint to the wave of classic gothic novels published in the period 1764-1820, a lively ancillary trade in shorter gothic fiction arose in the 1790s to 1830s, most successfully by publishers Ann Lemoine and Thomas Tegg. Bluebooks evolved from the tradition of popular street literature, including single-sheet ballads and broadsides, and political libels (little books) and chapbooks (cheap books) issued in pamphlet form.[1] Of these, chapbooks had the broadest appeal with their tales of bravery and adventure, and accounts of dastardly crimes interspersed with practical household advice. During the 1790s bluebooks emerged as a specialist offshoot of the chapbook tradition, containing short versions of gothic romances, which were then at their height of popularity.[2]

The typical bluebook was printed on low-cost paper, 24-72 pages in length, and sold for sixpence or a shilling at book stalls. Early examples were illustrated with rudimentary woodcuts (though their sophistication evolved over time), usually depicting a scene featuring the hero-villain or heroine in one of the more agitated episodes from the storyline. As well as being affordable to the labouring classes, the relative brevity of bluebooks made them quicker to read, an important factor when there was little leisure in the working day.

By the early 1800s, the production of gothic fiction had segmented in three broad areas: full-length novels published in standard three or four volume sets (affordable only to the wealthier middle and upper classes); serialised stories published in monthly periodicals (also priced for mainstream audience); and the inexpensive bluebook trade (within reach of the working class). A fourth option was also available to those who could afford it: borrowing novels from one of the many subscription libraries, by paying annual or overnight fees. Bluebooks were stocked by some of these private lending libraries and could be rented overnight for one penny.[3] Despite the stratification of the market, evidence suggests that bluebooks were readily consumed by the middle and upper classes, providing the same lighter entertainment as they did for a humbler readership.[4]

A large proportion of bluebook stories were unapologetic re-workings of standard-length fashionable novels, with titles and authors names altered to avoid copyright breaches. For instance, Tegg's 1810 version of The Daemon of Venice is a redaction of Zofloya by Charlotte Dacre (1806), with many of the major characters' names changed: the heroine Victoria di Loredini is renamed Arabella di Lenardi, and her brother Leonardo becomes Orlando.[5] In other instances the proper attributions were retained where copyright had expired, as in the case of Mary Robinson's Vancenza: or The Dangers of Credulity (another Tegg 1810 bluebook), to take advantage of the continued popularity of the original novel (published in 1792).[6]

Although bluebooks as a genre were disregarded as serious literature, it is important to recognise that the short format allowed for a measure of creativity and many new titles were written specifically for the bluebook trade, including some by Lemoine and (possibly) Tegg. As Potter observes 'new evidence suggests that the gothic bluebook industry was itself a large secondary market for the gothic, and not merely a passive inheritor of gothic subjects and styles from legitimate novels, but instead was a developer and producer of gothic material that had particular patterns of inflection'.[7]

Lemoine's birth place and date are unrecorded, but she married the writer and chapbook seller Henry Lemoine in London in January 1786. After assisting her husband to build a successful publishing enterprise, they became estranged in 1795 when the business faltered and he was incarcerated in debtor's prison. This timing proved fortuitous for Ann as it coincided with a spike in popularity of gothic reading spurred by Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and M.G. Lewis's The Monk (1796), providing a ready market for her fledging publishing concern.

1. Milbank, Alison. Gothic Satires, Histories and Chap-Books, p.2.

2. Potter, Franz. The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800-1835: Exhuming the Trade, p. 43.

3. Ibid, p. 37.

4. Milbank, Alison. Op cit, p. 3.

5. Summers, Montagu. The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel, p. 84.

6. Summers, Montagu. The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel, p. 84.

7. Potter, Franz. Op cit, p. 10.

8. Bearden-White, Roy. 'A History of Guilty Pleasure: Chapbooks and the Lemoines', p. 292.

9. Ibid, p. 310.

10. Barnes, James J. & Patience P. Barnes. 'Reassessing the Reputation of Thomas Tegg, London Publisher, 1776-1846', pp. 45-46.

11. Summers, Montagu. Op cit, p. 83.

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Gothic bluebooks: The popular thirst for fear and dread

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Gothic bluebooks: The popular thirst for fear and dread

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Week 14: 'Gothic Doubles: Feminine Identity Formation in Mrs. Isaac's Ariel, or The Invisible Monitor (1801)'

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Week 14: 'Gothic Doubles: Feminine Identity Formation in Mrs. Isaac's Ariel, or The Invisible Monitor (1801)'

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Michelle Landauer, PhD student, University of Melbourne

Ann Radcliffe popularized the technique of exploring the heroine's internal, psychological states of mind through the creation of an external double. She did this through the missing mother in The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Italian (1797), and the mysterious spectres that haunt the text in A Sicilian Romance (1790) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).

This duality in feminine identity became one of the most popular tropes in first-wave Gothic fiction. It is often employed as a vehicle through which to explore the limitations placed on women by patriarchal imperatives and to promote sentimental values, particularly sentimental codes of identity formation for women, highlighting the manner in which female Gothic novels were influenced by the sentimental tradition. The Gothic double typically presents in these novels as a ghost, or as a ghostly figure, the other-worldly nature of her identity embodying the marginalized position she typically holds, and representing the heroine's own disjointed subjectivity. Often the mystery inherent to the text is the need to uncover the identity or story behind this seemingly supernatural figure. A sense of unity is then achieved through the truth that emerges. Mrs. Isaac's Ariel, or The Invisible Monitor (1801) exemplifies the significant role these ghostly doubles play in the Gothic.

Ariel recounts the trials experienced by the heroine, Rosaline-a penniless orphan who has been exiled without adequate protection from her adopted home when it is discovered that she and the second son (Adolphus) are in love. Throughout the novel Rosaline must fight the attentions of unwanted suitors, especially those of the libertine, the Count de Pollini, who lacks the ability to properly respond to Rosaline's entreaties or the image of feminine purity that she represents. Thus, her Gothic-like flight and other Gothic happenings occur because of the pride, vanity and uncontrolled sexual passions of men. While attempting to escape Pollini, Rosaline meets other women who are victims of a similar fate: both the prejudices of patriarchal tyrants who want their sons to marry heiresses, and the evil machinations of libertines like Pollini. In each case, the female character is introduced into the novel in a Gothic manner-described as a spectre-like image that seemingly hovers between this world and the next. They are Gothic visions of ideal femininity - women who have been abused by dominant male figures who refuse to recognize or respect the sentimental values that these women embody. While the spectral nature of their identity serves to highlight the marginalization these young women experience, it also serves to draw attention to them and position them more forcefully as signs to be read. One example of this can be found in the character Adila, who is introduced into the text as an ephemeral image bent over a grave. Rosaline is drawn to this mysterious figure (as are we, the reader), encouraging her to learn about Adila's story which directly parallels Rosaline's, including the fact that she, too, is being harassed by Pollini. The difference is in the ending: Adila's lover is killed by Pollini in a duel, whereas Rosaline and Adolphus are allowed to marry when Adolphus' father, Sir Walter, repents his vain actions.

Another example of a gothicized version of the feminine ideal is when Rosaline is confronted by Angelina St. Alvars. Interestingly, Rosaline's first encounter with this tortured woman mirrors Jane's introduction to Bertha Mason in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847), suggesting that Bronte was familiar with Isaac's text:

"[Rosaline] suddenly awoke, and perceived a light in her chamber. The confusion of first waking would not for some minutes allow her to recollect herself, till, convinced the light proceeded from a candle, and that it was not yet daylight, she listened, and heard steps close by her bed. An impulse of fear would not at first let her move; but, reproaching herself for so readily giving way to alarm, and hearing the steps continue, she at length pushed aside the curtain, and beheld a female figure in a long white wrapping gown, standing at a little distance from the bed, holding a lamp in her hand, and staring wildly around the room. . . when her eye caught the countenance of Rosaline, who, holding back the curtain with her hand, though deprived by amazement of the power of speech, watched in silence the motions of her midnight visitor. At the sight of her face the stranger started, and for an instant stopped, but again hurried on and precipitately left the chamber."

Like Bertha, Angelina suffers from a "derangement, to which she has for many years been subject" and, until several seemingly supernatural encounters are explained by a proper introduction, Angelina initially holds a dubious position within the text, described as a "beautiful shadow", "no earthly being" and a "fair spectre." The emphasis on her phantasmic beauty combined with descriptions of her piety serve to enlist her as a gothicized version of ideal femininity; as such she is both a source of inspiration and fear: "[Rosaline] beheld the sweet form of [Angelina] kneeling before the sofa, with her hands clasped, and her eyes cast upwards; but the horror and despondence her look betokened, made Rosaline shudder." As this and other passages attest, Angelina enacts an injured sentimental subject position and is thus defined largely through the process of objectification: most of what we learn about her is through second-hand narratives and repeated descriptions of how others (mainly Rosaline) interpret the striking sentimental poses she presents. This positions Rosaline as a primary reader within the text whose identity is being defined through the act of interpretation, and Angelina emerges as a sign, one that is both enticing and repulsive - representing the passive power and beauty of the sentimental feminine ideal while simultaneously embodying the rejected nature of those ideals. Rosaline "shudder[s]" because she recognizes the traits that bind her to Angelina, a connection that is made apparent through repeated comparisons of the two women:

'Poor Angelina!' said Lady Delford; 'you see in her, Rosaline, a melancholy picture of insanity, which no art or medicine has been able to remove ... You will hardly credit, from her present dreadful appearance, that Miss St. Alvars was once one of the most lively girls I ever saw. When I was first introduced to you ... you struck me as greatly resembling her, and I find the likeness has been observed by all this family.'

Angelina thus serves as a double for Rosaline. Like Adila and Rosaline, Angelina is unable to marry the man she loves. Her lover, Henry, is later killed in a duel by the man she is being forced to marry. This leads to Angelina's insanity and early demise.

In Isaac's text this doubling happens several times through various characters. All of these women emerge as ghostly figures because they are victims of unrefined masculine passion; the repetitious nature in which Isaacs introduces these marginalized characters allows for a reassessment to be made in the master narrative dominated by Rosaline, for it is through repetition that the limitations of ignoring sentimental values can be more fully exposed and subverted. In fact, this type of repetition is common in female Gothic fiction where the heroine often becomes the vehicle through which the cycle of abuse and repression is finally broken. In this way the Gothic double does not just represent a repressed and unrecognized sentimental subject position, but she often also functions in female Gothic fiction as the site of negotiation -- the symbol through which attempts to implement, refine and sometimes redefine the sentimental feminine ideal are enacted. The result is almost always the triumph of sentimental values over patriarchal restrictions, ensuring a unified subject position for the heroine-in this case by validating the heroine's passions through her celebrated nuptials to Adolphus.

Works Cited

Isaacs, Mrs. Ariel, or The Invisible Monitor. London: Minerva Press, 1801.

Smith, Charlotte. Marchmont: A Novel. Ann Arbor, MI: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, (1796) 1989.

1. The notion that the ghosts serve as a double for feminine identity is highlighted by the many references, like the one found in Smith's Marchmont (1796), where the heroine compares her own image to that of a revenant: "chilled by the profound and dead silence around her; while her single candle ... threw over her own figure, as she saw it in the glass, a dim obscurity. 'I look,' said she, hardly trusting her eyes to survey it, 'surely I look like a ghost myself.'" (Smith, Marchmont 67-68)

2. Isaacs, Ariel I.150-151

3. Isaacs, Ariel I.158

4. Isaacs, Ariel I.159

5. Isaacs, Ariel I.157

6. Isaacs, Ariel I.175

7. Isaacs, Ariel I.163-164

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Gothic Doubles: Feminine Identity Formation in Mrs. Isaac's Ariel, or The Invisible Monitor (1801)

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Gothic Doubles: Feminine Identity Formation in Mrs. Isaac's Ariel, or The Invisible Monitor (1801)

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Week 15: 'For Gothic Heroines, Haunted Houses Are Always Too Big'

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Week 15: 'For Gothic Heroines, Haunted Houses Are Always Too Big'

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When I tried and failed to draw an accurate floorplan of the fictional gothic country manor at the heart of my novel, I blamed my own poor draftmanship and research nous-I'd heard it said, after all, that a historical novelist should know every object inside a room her character enters, even if she doesn't describe them, and surely the same should be said of the walls themselves. But it was only during the copyediting of my novel that I realized my struggle was mirrored by my characters, and by many other heroines of gothic novels who find that the houses they live in confound any attempt to be known and mapped, understood.

I made a rudimentary floorplan while writing a first draft, gluing down card squares to represent rooms on four sheets of paper for the four stories of the house but as I redrafted the novel, removing characters, switching the location of scenes, sending my characters hurrying down darkened corridors looking for intruders and ghosts, the floorplan became inaccurate. And when I tried to fix it, and to make the squares more like rooms, the jigsaw puzzle of the interior didn't work, walls bulged outwards, staircases disappeared, doors slid into impossible locations.

"This house is bigger than you know" one of the preternatural twins living in the malevolent haunted house in Helen Oyeyemi's postmodern gothic White is For Witching declares to the troubled heroine, who disregards their warning, only to later find herself trapped forever in just such an unknown place, a hidden "trapdoor-room". In Rebecca, as for many heroines of gothic romances, the second Mrs. de Winter experiences the house at first like a maze, losing her way, stumbling into servants' corridors and dust-sheeted rooms.

Earlier on in their courtship, she had pondered Maxim's silence on his infamous estate-"Maybe there was something inviolate about Manderley that made it a place apart, it would not bear discussion" she considered, and elsewhere describes Manderley as a "fairyland", and "an enchanted house", "a house bewitched, carved out of the dark woods".

Many gothic heroines come upon hidden rooms which hold within them secrets of the women that came before them, their husband's first wives or their mothers-Bluebeard's chambers, secret libraries, haunted attics-but in Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette emerges from her tower room to find an entire house waiting beyond her locked door, "their world [...] made of cardboard," where the signs of life are like the signs of ghosts, "lights on the floor beneath" and laughter, a mirror of Bertha's laughter that Jane had heard in Charlotte Brontë's novel. On her dream walk through the house, Antoinette sees Jane and thinks her a ghost, just as she does her own reflection "surrounded by a gilt frame" like a painting of someone else.

In the act of wandering long hushed corridors, and divorced from the practiced rhythms of its servants, gothic heroines often become ghostlike themselves, haunting the house. "Perhaps I haunted her as she haunted me," Mrs. de Winter says of Rebecca, whose presence she feels in every room and who seems more at home at Manderley after her death than the narrator is while living. In Rebecca, house and first wife are indivisible, both drenched in the scent of Azaleas, and both equally seductive and maddening to the narrator.
Many gothic heroines come upon hidden rooms which hold within them secrets of the women that came before them.
The gothic house is often synonymous with a person or a mind. "One need not be a house" to be "haunted," Emily Dickinson reminds us; "The brain has corridors surpassing/ Material place", and in Wide Sargasso Sea Antoinette opens "doors" in her mind to be "somewhere else, something else. Not myself any longer."

"She herself is a haunted house" states the epigraph of my novel, taken from "The Lady of the House of Love" by Angela Carter. One of my two protagonists, Lucy Lockwood, the haunted adult daughter of the Lord of the manor, sees herself as intertwined with the house she will inherit, and the troubling events that occur inside it come to be mirrored by her faltering mental state. In the prologue, Lucy speaks of a trick her childhood nurse taught her to get to sleep, that she should picture herself gliding through room after room of Lockwood Manor and by the time she has finished even one floor, she would be asleep.

But after the sudden death of her mother, whose own "bad nerves" were related to her compulsion to know what was happening in each room of the house at all times, and her conviction that something was lurking in a room out of sight, Lucy's insomniac game, her mental map, becomes an impossible task that threatens her sanity, and follows her into her nightmares where she is taunted by a blue-wallpapered room that does not exist in the day, in which a beast waits for her and scratches at the walls.

My second protagonist, Hetty Cartwright, arrives at Lockwood Manor with trucks laden with her charges, the evacuated collections of a natural history museum. Early on, several of the taxidermied animals go missing and Hetty roams the house obsessively searching for them and their thief. While Hetty maps the house physically then, Lucy does so psychically and slips forward and backwards through time through her hazy memories of events that took place in different rooms.

On one occasion as she ventures out of her room one night to search for a lost animal, Hetty comes across Lucy sleepwalking through the house as she walks through the dream house of her mind-a convergence of the two quests to map the house, and of dreams and reality, and a confluence of the two protagonists, who are, in some ways, descendants of the spirited gothic heroine and the madwoman in the attic.

As a neat addendum, and in the fashion of many gothic novels to have self-referential moments (my favorite of which is the opening page of "The Yellow Wallpaper," where the heroine muses that she might call the mansion where her husband has taken her to convalesce "a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity"), I had idly given one of my characters the very document I was struggling to create.

Hetty speaks of a floorplan she had seen back in London while the museum was planning their evacuation, confidently stating that she has no need of a tour of the real house since she already knows the exact layout. But of course, that floorplan only had 92 rooms on it and, if the rumors at Lockwood are true, there might just be a 93rd lurking somewhere, waiting to be found.

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Jane Healey's novel The Animals at Lockwood Manor is available now.

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For Gothic Heroines, Haunted Houses Are Always Too Big

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When I tried and failed to draw an accurate floorplan of the fictional gothic country manor at the heart of my novel, I blamed my own poor draftmanship and research nous-I'd heard it said, after al...

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Week 16: 'The Original Goths: Why Women Write Gothic Horror'

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Week 16: 'The Original Goths: Why Women Write Gothic Horror'

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The Original Goths: Why Women Write Gothic Horror

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One of my first introductions to the history of women in the world was through the anti-suffrage propaganda poster ‘A Woman’s Mind Magnified’. A mind-bendingly offensive insight i…

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Week 17: 'THE GOTHIC LITERARY COMPLEX IN EMILY BRONTË'S 'WUTHERING HEIGHTS''

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Week 17: 'THE GOTHIC LITERARY COMPLEX IN EMILY BRONTË'S 'WUTHERING HEIGHTS''

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Week 18: 'Angela Carter, Gothic literature and The Bloody Chamber'

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Week 18: 'Angela Carter, Gothic literature and The Bloody Chamber'

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Angela Carter, Gothic literature and The Bloody Chamber

The Bloody Chamber is a collection of modern fairy tales, many of which incorporate elements of Gothic literature. Greg Buzwell traces the Gothic influence on Carter's stories, from the Marquis de Sade to Edgar Allan Poe.

Introduction

Like every great author of Gothic fiction, Angela Carter was blessed with an intensely vivid and extremely dark imagination. Gothic imagery permeates all of her work but nowhere more so than in The Bloody Chamber (1979), a collection of tales that delights in moonlit forests, graveyards, isolated castles, locked rooms, guttering candles and the howling of wolves in the night. The stories in The Bloody Chamber primarily have their origins in fairy tales, but Carter gave these old and much-loved narratives a radical twist, providing a feminist perspective to stories in which the female characters were young, demure and helpless or else old, haggard and witch-like. As Carter commented in her essay 'Notes from the Front Line', 'I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode'. Carter also took inspiration from Gothic literature's rich heritage, adapting themes and motifs from classic tales of terror and giving them her own uniquely individual slant.

Influences and inspirations

One of the most important influences on Angela Carter's work was the American author Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). Carter's afterword to her first collection of short stories Fireworks (1974) includes the observation: 'I'd always been fond of Poe and [Ernst] Hoffmann - Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious - mirrors; the externalized self; forsaken castles; haunted forests; forbidden sexual objects'. Poe himself even features as a character in one of her short stories - 'The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe' - included in the collection Black Venus (1985). The tale visualises Poe's imagination being shaped by his troubled childhood and in particular by the hours he spent watching his mother acting on the stage, playing roles in which she died, often violently, night after night only to return to life when the curtain came down and the lights went up. The story doesn't attempt to explain Poe's talent, but it does offer a suggestion as to why his imagination so frequently embraced the grotesque and bizarre:

Now and then, as a great treat, if he kept quiet as a mouse, because he begged and pleaded so, he was allowed to stay in the wings and watch; the round-eyed baby saw that Ophelia could, if necessary, die twice nightly. All her burials were premature.

It is easy to imagine how a story such as Poe's 'The Oval Portrait' (1842), in which a male artist's painting of his female model becomes increasingly lifelike as the model herself fades towards death, could have been an influence on The Bloody Chamber, a collection of tales in which any woman who remains passive under the male gaze invariably finds herself in peril. In a similar fashion Carter's 'The Loves of Lady Purple', published in Fireworks, in which a male puppet-master grows frail while his female puppet becomes ever more animated plays out the artist/subject relationship of 'The Oval Portrait' in reverse. Another example of Poe's influence on Carter's work can be found in her novel Love (1971), which includes a psychologically unstable woman, Annabel, and her husband Lee, an echo of Poe's poem 'Annabel Lee' which deals with that most morbidly Gothic of all themes - the beautiful but fragile woman, doomed to die young.

Poe's Tales of Mystery & Imagination, illustrated by Arthur Rackham

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'The Oval Portrait' by Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated by Arthur Rackham and published in Tales of Mystery & Imagination, 1935.

Manuscript drafts of 'Alison's giggle' and an article on Edgar Allan Poe by Angela Carter

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'His mind was a cabinet of marvels': from a draft essay by Angela Carter on Edgar Allan Poe and his short story, 'The Fall of the House of Usher'.

Usage terms © Displayed with the permission of the Estate of Angela Carter c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. Angela Carter's work is published in the UK by Vintage, Virago, Penguin Classics. You may not reuse the material for commercial purposes.

The main inspiration for the stories in The Bloody Chamber, however, comes from the French author Charles Perrault (1628-1703) and his versions of tales such as 'Little Red Riding Hood', 'Puss in Boots' and 'Bluebeard', along with Beauty and the Beast by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve (c. 1695-1755). Many of these tales had their origins in folklore and myth. Fairy tales and Gothic are closely entwined and a fairy tale's basis in folklore provides a traditional framework upon which modern fears can be explored. Just as Bram Stoker had taken East European folk tales about vampirism and used them in Dracula (1897) to highlight the anxieties that assailed the Victorian fin de siècle, so did Carter take the fairy tales of the 18th and 19th centuries and use them as a framework to address modern issues. In particular, Carter utilised fairy tales as a basis from which to explore contemporary attitudes towards sex and gender in what was still largely a patriarchal society.

Angela Carter's translation of The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault

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In 1977, two years before The Bloody Chamber was published, Angela Carter published a book of fairy tales by Charles Perrault that she translated from the original French.

Usage terms Charles Perrault: This material is in the Public Domain. Angela Carter: © Displayed with the permission of the Estate of Angela Carter c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. Angela Carter's work is published in the UK by Vintage, Virago, Penguin Classics. You may not reuse the material for commercial purposes. Martin Ware: © Estate of Martin Ware. Published under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Licence.

Angela Carter also took inspiration for The Bloody Chamber, perhaps surprisingly, from the work of the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), and especially his novels Justine (1791) and Juliette (1797). In the former, a virtuous woman is continually taken advantage of by men and ultimately dies in despair, while in the latter an amoral nymphomaniac achieves considerable influence, success and happiness by exploiting her sexuality. From de Sade's sexual fantasies Carter noted the lesson that passivity in a heroine was not merely undesirable, it was also likely to result in her death. Spirited women meanwhile might well be able to turn the tables on their lascivious admirers and beat them at their own game. Carter explored these ideas much further in The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, published, like The Bloody Chamber, in 1979. The Sadeian Woman met with criticism from feminists, unsurprisingly given the sexually exploitative nature of de Sade's work, and Carter's refusal to vilify him; and yet the very same conclusions Carter reached when presented as variations on fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber achieved both popularity and critical acclaim - an example of how Gothic fiction can explore unpalatable subjects and challenging ideas in a fashion that people are willing to accept.

Typescript draft of The Sadeian Woman by Angela Carter

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Angela Carter composed The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories during the same period as she worked on The Sadeian Woman, a long essay examining pornography, power and sexuality through the work of the 18th century French aristocrat, the Marquis de Sade.

Usage terms © Displayed with the permission of the Estate of Angela Carter c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. Angela Carter's work is published in the UK by Vintage, Virago, Penguin Classics. You may not reuse the material for commercial purposes.

'The Bloody Chamber': fairy-tale Gothic for a new age

'The Bloody Chamber' is based on Charles Perrault's fairy tale 'Barbe Bleue' ('Bluebeard', in English), the story of a French nobleman who murders his successive wives and keeps their bodies in a locked room within his castle. Carter called her variation on this story 'The Bloody Chamber', a title laden with significance. In Perrault's tale, a 'bloody chamber' could indicate the blood-spattered room in which Bluebeard keeps the corpses of his butchered brides. Alternatively, the bloody chamber could be a reference to the womb - seat of life, but also a frequent source of death. And when viewed from the present day, and in the light of Carter's version of the tale, the bloody chamber could refer to the marital bedroom and the sadomasochistic sexual desires of the heroine's husband, named in Carter's version 'the Marquis', which inevitably puts the reader in mind of the Marquis de Sade. Sex in 'The Bloody Chamber' is, after all, often couched in terms of exploitation, violence and murder. At one point the heroine, never named, watches her reflection in a dozen mirrors as her husband takes her virginity:

A dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides while the mewing gulls swung on invisible trapezes in the empty air outside.

The link between the marital bedroom, death and her husband's murderous intentions are made explicit a few lines later:

My husband, who, with so much love, filled my bedroom with lilies until it looked like an embalming parlour.

Manuscript notes and drafts of The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

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'A long, a winding corridor, as if I were in the viscera of the castle, proceeding towards an unnamed & unconverted dungeon': Angela Carter heightens the Gothic setting and atmosphere as the heroine of 'The Bloody Chamber' approaches the locked chamber. From an undated manuscript draft of the short story.

Usage terms © Displayed with the permission of the Estate of Angela Carter c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. Angela Carter's work is published in the UK by Vintage, Virago, Penguin Classics. You may not reuse the material for commercial purposes.

The story also makes use of quintessentially Gothic settings and props. The castle to which the Marquis takes his virginal bride, for example, is isolated and mysterious, like something straight from a tale by Ann Radcliffe or Edgar Allan Poe:

The faery solitude of the place; with its turrets of misty blue, its courtyard, its spiked gate, his castle that lay on the very bosom of the sea with seabirds moving about its attics ... cut off by the tide from land for half a day...

Another quintessentially Gothic touch lies in the way a threat to the heroine is foreshadowed by something seemingly innocent, such as the jewellery worn by the young bride: 'His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two-inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat'.

Having set the scene with the trappings of a dark Gothic fairy tale, Carter defies our expectations by ensuring the nameless heroine of the story is not simply going to wait for rescue. Carter's women are much more dynamic and resourceful. In the original story of 'Bluebeard' the last in the succession of brides survives when her brothers rescue her. In 'The Bloody Chamber' salvation comes not in the form of dashing brothers, and nor does it come in the form of a heroic father or a handsome prince. Here, salvation comes in the shape of the heroine's mother, riding to the rescue and toting a pistol. The story concludes with the final triumph of dynamic matriarchy over the traditional patriarchy of the fairy tale. It is quite fitting, perhaps, that in this modern variation on the fairy tale the sexually aggressive and murderous Marquis should meet his end at the hands of his own mother-in-law. Between Perrault's 17th-century fairy tale and Angela Carter's late 20th century variation the men have found themselves out-manoeuvred, and the stereotypes of dominant male, fey heroine and rescuing prince have all been overturned.

Greg Buzwell is Curator of Contemporary Literary Archives at the British Library. He has co-curated three major exhibitions for the Library - Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination; Shakespeare in Ten Acts and Gay UK: Love, Law and Liberty. His research focuses primarily on the Gothic literature of the Victorian fin de siècle. He has also edited and introduced collections of supernatural tales by authors including Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edgar Allan Poe and Walter de la Mare.

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gothic literature and the bloody chamber

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Angela Carter, Gothic literature and The Bloody Chamber | The British Library

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The Bloody Chamber is a collection of modern fairy tales, many of which incorporate elements of Gothic literature. Greg Buzwell traces the Gothic influence on Carter's stories, from the Marquis de Sade to Edgar Allan Poe.

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Week 19: 'Femme fatale: Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber''

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Week 19: 'Femme fatale: Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber''

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The Bloody Chamber is often wrongly described as a group of traditional fairy tales given a subversive feminist twist. In fact, these are new stories, not re-tellings. As Angela Carter made clear, "My intention was not to do 'versions' or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, 'adult' fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories and to use it as the beginnings of new stories." She knew from the start that she was drawn to "Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious". She drew a sharp distinction between what she described as "those fragments of epiphanic experience which are the type of the 20th-century story", and the "ornate, unnatural" style and symbolism of her favoured form, the tale. When, in her second collection, The Bloody Chamber, she continued in this Gothic mode but with narratives suggested by traditional west European fairy tales, she found she had conjured up an exotic new hybrid that would carry her voice to a wider audience than it had reached before.

The Bloody Chamber is like a multifaceted glittering diamond reflecting and refracting a variety of portraits of desire and sexuality - heterosexual female sexuality - which, unusually for the time, 1979, are told from a heterosexual female viewpoint. This was the year, remember, that Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshorewon the Booker prize, and Penelope Lively's Treasures of Time won the National Book Award. Anita Brookner's first novel, A Start in Life, would not appear for another two years. Margaret Thatcher, 53, had just been elected Britain's first prime minister. Angela Carter, 39, had seven novels to her name, none of which had so far received more than marginal recognition.

Carter was later to come under attack for not busting more taboos than she did ("She could never imagine Cinderella in bed with the Fairy God-mother," wrote Patricia Duncker, for example). But such criticisms seem wide of the mark. Her work caused shock waves when it appeared, and it continues to shock. The Bloody Chamber, which has been extensively studied in universities over the past decade, apparently elicits furious hostility from a significant number of students, who are outraged when they recognise the bedtime stories of their childhood newly configured as tales of sex and violence. But as Carter said, "I was taking ... the latent content of those traditional stories and using that; and the latent content is violently sexual." It is also true that her imagination had a fierce and appetitive quality, turbofuelled by Gothic themes, particularly in her youth. (Later, after she had published Nights at the Circus, she was to comment, "You know, sometimes when I read my back pages, I'm quite appalled at the violence of my imagination. Before I had a family and stuff.")

Fairy tales have been usefully described as the science fiction of the past; certainly Carter regarded them in this light, using them as a way of exploring ideas of how things might be different. She admired much science fiction with its utopian perspectives and speculative thinking - "It seemed to me, after reading these writers a lot, that they were writing about ideas, and that was basically what I was trying to do." Also, as dissident writers have so often found, the indirection and metaphor of fantasy can be helpful when airing controversial subject matter; not that Carter would have minded about causing offence, but, whether she minded or not, by using the timesanctioned form of fairy tales she acquired readers who would not otherwise have read her. And she was using the forms of fantasy and fairy tales with conscious radical intent; in a letter to her friend Robert Coover, she wrote: "I really do believe that a fiction absolutely self-conscious of itself as a different form of human experience than reality (that is, not a logbook of events) can help to transform reality itself."

All this makes her writing sound over-schematic; but while she used fantasy to discuss ideas, it is also obvious that it was the landscapes and imagery of fairy tales and legends that fired her imagination - bloodstains and ravens' feathers on snow, moonlight on a dust-grimed mirror, graveyards on Walpurgisnacht. The stories in The Bloody Chamber reverberate with deep and unmistakable imaginative pleasure. There is an astonishing extravivid materiality to this alternative world she invented, down to the last sensuous detail, like the candle which drops hot wax on to the girl's bare shoulders in "The Tiger's Bride". She loved to describe the trappings of luxury, to display rich scenery in rich language. Dialogue came less naturally to her and she avoided it for years, joking that the advantage of including animal protagonists in her work was that she did not have to make them talk. Naturalism or realism, the low mimetic as she called it, was not her mode. Not that she wasn't observant - nothing could have been sharper than her journalism with its gimlet anthropological eye - but in the end her genius did not actually lend itself to the "low mimetic" (see "The Quilt Maker", an uncollected story in this mode, which is interesting but possibly her least successful).

Carter was an abstract thinker with an intensely visual imagination. What she liked about the short story form was (as she wrote in the Afterword to her first collection Fireworks) that "sign and sense can fuse to an extent impossible to achieve among the multiplying ambiguities of an extended narrative". She found that "though the play of surfaces never ceased to fascinate me, I was not so much exploring them as making abstractions from them". It comes as no surprise to find that she particularly admired Baudelaire and the 19th-century Symbolist poets, and also much 20th-century French surrealist and structuralist writing. The Bloody Chamber is packed with signs, symbols and signifiers. Ironically, though, the two Frenchmen who stand as true fairy godfathers to this collection lived in earlier centuries.

First there is Charles Perrault (1628- 1703), a translation of whose collection of traditional fairy stories, Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé, Carter had published in 1977. She praised his "consummate craftsmanship and his good-natured cynicism" in her preface, adding that "from the work of this humane, tolerant and kind-hearted Frenchman, children can learn enlightened self-interest ... and gain much pleasure besides".

And then there is the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814). Carter's reading of De Sade, and her decade-long argument with him, colour two earlier novels, The Infernal Desire Machine of Dr Hoffman (1972) and The Passion of New Eve (1977), while her white-hot aphoristic account of his pornographic writings, The Sadeian Woman, appeared alongside The Bloody Chamber in 1979. "I really can't see what's wrong with finding out about what the great male fantasies about women are," she declared, reasonably enough, when The Sadeian Woman came under attack. It is a difficult, provocative book whose Polemical Preface is subtitled "pornography in the service of women" - and a continuing bone of contention for contemporary readers.

One shining aperçu that emerges from its pages to spread light through the stories of The Bloody Chamber is that passivity is never a virtue, in fact, even - especially not - in women. "Justine marks the start of a kind of self-regarding female masochism, a woman with no place in the world, no status, the core of whose resistance has been eaten away by self-pity," wrote Carter, tracing the descendants of De Sade's heroine Justine down to Marilyn Monroe. Another passage might have been written specifically as an epigraph for The Bloody Chamber: To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case. To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case - that is, to be killed. This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman.

The stories in The Bloody Chamberare fired by the conviction that human nature is not immutable, that human beings are capable of change. Some of their most brilliant passages are accounts of metamorphoses. Think of "The Courtship of Mr Lyon", which ends with Beast transformed by Beauty - "When her lips touched the meathook claws, they drew back into their pads and she saw how he had always kept his fists clenched, but now, painfully, tentatively, at last began to stretch his fingers"; or of the story with which it is twinned, "The Tiger's Bride", where this time Beauty is transformed by Beast - "And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shiny hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur". The heroines of these stories are struggling out of the straitjackets of history and ideology and biological essentialism. "There's a story in The Bloody Chamber called 'The Lady and the House of Love'," said Carter, "part of which derives from a movie version that I saw of a story by Dostoevsky. And in the movie ... the woman, who is a very passive person and is very much in distress, asks herself the question, 'Can a bird sing only the song it knows, or can it learn a new song?' Have we got the capacity at all of singing new songs? It's very important that if we haven't, we might as well stop now."

The unnamed first-person heroine of The Bloody Chamber's title story appears at first to be a Justine-like sacrificial virgin in a white dress, routinely destined for immolation; however, she changes during the narrative, and finishes by escaping her inheritance - female masochism as a modus vivendi (and morendi) - after a full-scale survey of its temptations. The story is set in a castle on sea-girt Mont St Michel in fin-de-siècle France, with more than a nod to De Sade's cannibal Minski and his lake-surrounded castle with its torture chamber and captive virgins.

This story is also a version of the Bluebeard fairy tale that appeared in Perrault's collection, where a new bride unlocks the forbidden room in her husband's castle to find the murdered corpses of his former wives. Perrault drew the moral that female curiosity leads to retribution, though in the France of his time, where death in childbirth was commonplace and four-fifths of the resultant widowers remarried, the bloody chamber might surely have been seen as the womb. In Carter's 20th-century version, the menace is located not in the perils of childbirth, but in the darker side of hetero-sexuality, in sadomasochism and the idea of fatal passion.

As well as all this, The Bloody Chamber is a tour de force in its recreation of late- 19th-century France. Carter claimed the stories in this collection could not have existed the way they did without the example of Isak Dinesen - "because in a way they are imitation 19th-century stories, like hers"; such stories are (she described elsewhere) "highly structured artefacts with beginnings, middles, and ends and a schematic coherence of imagery". Certainly this is an accurate description of The Bloody Chamber's title story, which, like each of the highly wrought stories in Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales, reads almost like a novella.

"I wanted a lush fin-de-siècle décor for the story," wrote Carter in a letter to a friend, "And a style that ... utilises the heightened diction of the novelette, to half-seduce the reader into this wicked, glamorous, fatal world." It was, she added, "a deliberate hommage to Colette". Its unnamed 17-year-old heroine wears a schoolgirl's serge skirt and flannel blouse, just like the eponymous heroine of Colette's Claudine novels, and there is more than a little of Colette's first husband, that cliché of a roué, Monsieur Willy, in the unnamed Husband character.

Nearly all her writing is strikingly full of cultural and intertextual references, but this story is extremely so. It is an artfully constructed edifice of signs and allusions and clues. The Marquis, as he is called (suggesting, of course, the Marquis de Sade), is a parodic evil aesthete and voluptuary with his monocle and beard, his gifts of marrons glacés and hothouse flowers, and his penchant for quoting the juicier bits of Baudelaire and De Sade. On the walls of his castle hang paintings of dead women by Moreau, Ensor and Gauguin; he listens to Wagner (specifically "Liebestod" - "love-death" - in Tristan und Isolde); he smokes Romeo y Julieta cigars "fat as a baby's arm"; his library is stocked with graphically- described sadistic pornography and his dungeon chamber with mutilated corpses and itemised instruments of torture.

In this heavily perfumed story, the Marquis' smell of spiced leather, Cuir de Russie, is referred to more than half a dozen times, reverting at the end "to the elements of flayed hide and excrement of which it was composed". Descriptions of scented lilies, "cobraheaded, funereal", smelling of "pampered flesh", appear nine times, their fat stems like "dismembered arms". The words "immolation," "impalement", "martyr" and "sacrifice" occur, motif-like, at regular intervals but, abruptly - rather too abruptly for some critics - on the last two pages of this novella-length story the heroinevictim is rescued from decapitation by the sudden arrival of her pistol-toting maman, who puts a bullet through the Marquis' head. Her fate is not immutable after all; she discovers that her future looks quite different now that she has escaped from the old story and is learning to sing a new song.

There follow three cat tales. The first two are Beauty and the Beast transformations, as described earlier. Carter writes with tremendous relish when describing skin, fur, fabric and snowcovered landscapes. To say she is wonderful at surfaces sounds a little disparaging, as if to say she is superficial. No; she is good at surfaces as the Gawain poet is good at surfaces. "I do put everything in to be read - read the way allegory was intended to be read," she declared; but also, "I've tried to keep an entertaining surface ... so that you don't have to read them as a system of signification if you don't want to." And it is true that you could ignore the ideas in these stories if you wanted to, and still enjoy the colour, beauty and vivid sensuousness of the language, the densely allusive prose alight with sly verbal jokes, cross-cultural references and dandified wit.

The third cat story, "Puss-in-Boots", is utterly different from its predecessors. It is "the first story that I wrote that was supposed to be really funny, out-and-out funny", said Carter. It is a precursor in its ribald cynical tone to her last two novels, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children, and in its turningaway from the Gothic mode towards the determinedly benign. In this story, set in the northern Italian town of Bergamo, all the stock types and jokes of the commedia dell'arte are used to pantomimic effect, and sex is bawdy and farcical, the young lovers "at it, hammer and tongs, down on the carpet since the bed is occupé", with the corpse of Signor Pantaleone the dotard husband, who has broken his neckfalling downstairs after tripping over the cat. The first-person narrator, the cat himself, is a witty raconteur and master of innuendo, proceeding mainly by rhetorical questions and exclamations. His language is a vivid mixture of Latinate elaboration and Anglo-saxon bluntness: "I went about my ablutions, tonguing my arsehole with the impeccable hygienic integrity of cats, one leg stuck in the air like a ham bone."

The next three stories, at the centre of the book, fit less easily into this collection. In each one of them, lovers are lethal, traditional romantic patterns kill, and sex leads to death. "The Erl-King" is based not on a fairy tale but on a German legend where a malignant goblin haunts the Black Forest and lures wanderers to their doom. "The Snow Child" is only a page long, just a few hundred words, and yet in some ways it is the most shocking piece of all, with its incestuous rape and murderous sexual rivalry. It is based on a variant of "Snow White", which the brothers Grimm collected but chose not to publish, in which Snow White's birth is a result of her father's desire (rather than her mother's, as in the more familiar version of the story). "The Lady of the House of Love" is different again, being a Transylvanian vampire tale rather than a fairy story. It started life as a radio play, Vampirella (first broadcast in 1976, so probably written well before the rest of this collection, which Carter said she wrote mostly during her time in Sheffield, where she was Arts Council Fellow from 1976-78). Carter, an avid reader of Anne Rice's vampire novels, said the idea for the radio play came to her when she was sitting idly trying to work and ran a pencil along the top of a radiator - "It was just the noise that a long, pointed fingernail might make if it were run along the bars of a birdcage."

Finally, three disparate werewolf tales work and rework the story of Red Riding Hood, borrowing variants from different centuries, compulsively circling the figures of the werewolf, the old woman and the young girl. "The Werewolf" is brutal and short, its tone chillingly laconic. The girl cuts off the wolf's paw, but finds that it is really her grandmother's hand. The old woman is stoned to death as a witch. "Now the child lived in her grandmother's house; she prospered," reads the last sentence of this story, which is less concerned with sexuality than with survival.

"The Company of Wolves" is longer, less bleak, and far more luxuriant in style. Its first pages are given to a zestful atmospheric essay on the wolf, "carnivore incarnate", with vivid werewolf anecdotes. Not until over a third of the way into the story does the Red Riding Hood narrative begin. "The Company of Wolves" grew into a film, after much rewriting and inclusion of additional material. The filmmaker Neil Jordan remembered: "What she had written - the adaptation of the story basically - was too short for a feature film. I suggested to her that we develop it into a Chinese box structure ... thereby enabling us to integrate other stories and themes of Angela's own." So, a third of the way in, Red Riding Hood is introduced to "The Company of Wolves". At the end of Perrault's familiar version of the story, she gets into bed with the wolf and is gobbled up. "'What else can you expect if you talk to strange men,' comments Perrault briskly," (wrote Carter in the preface to her translation of his stories), "Let's not bother our heads with the mysteries of sado-masochistic attraction. We must learn to cope with the world before we can interpret it." But, of course, interpreting these mysteries is just what Carter does attempt in "The Company of Wolves", at the end of which Red Riding Hood refuses to feel fear (she "burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody's meat") or disgust (she will delouse the wolf and eat the lice "in a savage marriage ceremony"), and ends sleeping "sweet and sound" in bed with the now "tender wolf".

Last of all, "Wolf-Alice" returns to Gothic territory and the gloomy mansion of a werewolf-duke. The story also borrows from an early medieval Red Riding Hood analogue, De puella a lupellis servata, which tells the story of a feral child suckled by wolves. Again, there is a lice-borne rejection of disgust at animal nature in an evocation of "the Eden of our first beginnings where Eve and grunting Adam squat on a daisy bank, picking the lice from one another's pelts". When the werewolfduke is shot and wounded, Wolf-Alice saves him by tenderly licking the blood and dirt from his face.

This image of blood being licked away returns the reader to the moment in "The Lady of the House of Love" where the young man kisses better the vampire's wound and so, inadvertently, kills her; it also recalls the ending of "The Tiger's Bride", where the licking leads to new life and animal fur; which in turn refers on to the man who is "hairy on the inside" in "The Company of Wolves". There are a myriad such musical echoes in this collection - herbivores and carnivores, death and the maiden, the image of a system of Chinese boxes opening one into another - while certain phrases like "pentacle of virginity" or indeed "the bloody chamber" crop up repeatedly from story to story. Images of meat, naked flesh, fur, snow, menstruation, mirrors and roses (fanged or otherwise) recur fugue-like throughout, giving these stories an unmistakable family resemblance, different though they are from each other in approach and register.

In 1980, the year following publication of The Bloody Chamber, Carter said in an interview, "The short story is not minimalist, it is rococo. I feel in absolute control. It is like writing chamber music rather than symphonies." Her tone reveals elation and a sense of mastery. This story collection is attracting a new, wider audience of readers. With The Bloody Chamber she has uncovered fresh folkloric fields and a new literary hybrid admirably suited to her uncategorisable genius.

·Buy The Bloody Chamber at Guardian bookshop.

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Helen Simpson on Angela Carter's Bloody Chamber

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A darkly erotic reworking of Bluebeard's Castle, a bawdy Puss in Boots and a sado-masochistic version of Little Red Riding Hood - Angela Carter's subversive take on traditional fairy stories in The Bloody Chamber is as shocking today as when the collection first appeared in 1979, writes Helen Simpson.

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The gothic novel is a living tradition, a form that enjoys great popular appeal while provoking harsh critical judgments. It began with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1765), then traveled through Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Brockden Brown, Bram Stoker, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and many others into the twentieth century, where it surfaced, much altered and yet spiritually continuous, in the work of writers such as William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, Iris Murdoch, John Gardner (1933-1982), Joyce Carol Oates, and Doris Lessing and in the popular genres of horror fiction and some women's romances.

The externals of the gothic, especially early in its history, are characterized by sublime but terrifying mountain scenery; bandits and outlaws; ruined, ancient seats of power; morbid death imagery; and virgins and charismatic villains, as well as hyperbolic physical states of agitation and lurid images of physical degradation. Its spirit is characterized by a tone of high agitation and unresolved or almost-impossible-to-resolve anxiety, fear, unnatural elation, and desperation.

The first gothic novel is identifiable with a precision unusual in genre study. Walpole (1717-1797), the earl of Orford, began writing The Castle of Otranto in June, 1764,; he finished it in August and published it in an edition of five hundred copies in early 1765. Walpole was a historian and essayist whose vivid and massive personal correspondence remains essential reading for the eighteenth century background. Before writing The Castle of Otranto, his only connection with the gothic was his estate in Twickenham, which he called Strawberry Hill. It was built in the gothic style and set an architectural trend, as his novel would later set a literary trend.

Walpole did not dream of what he was about to initiate with The Castle of Otranto; he published his first edition anonymously, revealing his identity, only after the novel's great success, in his second edition of April, 1765. At that point, he no longer feared mockery of his tale of a statue with a bleeding nose and mammoth, peregrinating armor, and an ancient castle complete with ancient family curse. With his second edition, he was obliged to add a preface explaining why he had hidden behind the guise of a preface proclaiming the book to be a "found manuscript," printed originally "in Naples in the black letter in 1529." The reader of the first edition was told that The Castle of Otranto was the long-lost history of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. The greater reading public loved it, and it was reprinted in many editions. By 1796, it had been translated into French and Spanish and had been repeatedly rendered into dramatic form. In 1848, the novel was still active as the basis for successful theatrical presentations, although the original gothic vogue had passed.

Close upon Walpole's heels followed Radcliffe, Lewis, and Maturin. These three authors, of course, were not the only imitators ready to take advantage of the contemporary trend (there were literally hundreds of those), but they are among the few who are still read, for they made their own distinctive contributions to the genre's evolution. Radcliffe (1764-1823) was born just as Walpole's The Castle of Otranto was being published. She was reared in a middle-class milieu, acquainted with merchants and professionals; her husband was the editor of The English Chronicle and a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. She lived a quiet life, was likely asthmatic, and seems to have stayed close to her hearth. Although she never became a habitué of literary circles and in her lifetime only published a handful of works, she is considered the grande dame of the gothic novelists and enjoyed a stunning commercial success in her day; she is the only female novelist of the period whose work is still read.

Radcliffe's works include The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian: Or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797), and Gaston de Blondeville (1826). She also wrote an account of a trip through parts of northern Europe, A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795). Her remarkably sedate life contrasts strikingly with the melodramatic flamboyance of her works. Her experiences also fail to account for her dazzling, fictional accounts of the scenery of Southern Europe, which she had never seen.

Lewis, called Monk Lewis in honor of his major work, conformed in his life more closely to the stereotype of the gothic masters. Lewis (1775-1818) was a child of the upper classes, the spoiled son of a frivolous beauty, whom he adored. His parents' unhappy marriage ended when he was at Westminster Preparatory School. There was a continual struggle between his parents to manage his life-his father stern and aloof, his mother extravagant and possessive.

Lewis spent his childhood treading the halls of large, old manses belonging both to family and to friends. He paced long, gloomy corridors-a staple of the gothic- and peered up at ancient portraits in dark galleries, another permanent fixture in gothic convention. Deeply involved with the literati of his day, Lewis (also homosexual) found an equivocal public reception, but his novel The Monk: A Romance (1796; also known as Ambrosio: Or, The Monk), an international sensation, had an enormous effect on the gothic productions of his day. Lewis died on board ship, a casualty of a yellowfever epidemic, in the arms of his valet, Baptista, and was buried at sea.

Lewis's bibliography is as frenetic as his biography. Although his only gothic novel is the infamous The Monk, he spent most of his career writing plays heavily influenced by gothic conventions; he also translated many gothic works into English and wrote scandalous poetry. Among his plays are Village Virtues (pb. 1796), The Castle Spectre (pr. 1797), The East Indian (pr. 1799), Adelmorn the Outlaw (pr., pb. 1801), and The Captive (pr. 1803). He translated Friedrich Schiller's The Minister (1797) and August von Kotzebue's Rolla: Or, The Peruvian Hero (1799). He became notorious for his poetic work The Love of Gain: A Poem Initiated from Juvenal (1799), an imitation of Juvenal's thirteenth satire.

Maturin (1780-1824) is the final major gothic artist of the period. He was a Protestant clergyman from Dublin and a spiritual brother of the Marquis de Sade. He also was a protégé of Sir Walter Scott and an admirer of Lord Byron. His major gothic novel is Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), as shocking to its public as was Lewis's The Monk. An earlier Maturin gothic was Fatal Revenge: Or, The Family of Montorio (1807). His other works include the novel The Milesian Chief (1812); a theological novel, Women: Or, Pour et Contre (1818); a tragedy, Bertram: Or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand (pr., pb. 1816), produced by Edmund Kean; and the novel The Albigenses (1824).

Among the legions of other gothic novelists, a few writers (especially the following women, who are no longer generally read) have made a place for themselves in literary history. These writers include Harriet Lee, known for The Canterbury Tales (1797-1805), written with her sister, Sophia Lee, author also of The Recess: Or, A Tale of Other Times (1783); Clara Reeve ( The Champion of Virtue: A Gothic Story, 1777; also known as The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story); Regina Maria Roche ( The Children of the Abbey, 1796); Charlotte Smith ( Emmeline: Or, The Orphan of the Castle-A Novel, 1788); Charlotte Dacre ( Zofloya: Or, The Moor- A Romance of the Fifteenth Century, 1806); and Mary Anne Radcliffe ( Manfroné: Or, The One Handed Monk- A Romance, 1809).

Critics generally agree that the period gothics, while having much in common, divide into relatively clear subclassifications: the historical gothic, the school of terror, and the Schauer-Romantik school of horror. All gothics of the period return to the past, are flushed with suggestions of the supernatural, and tend to be set amid ruined architecture, particularly a great estate house gone to ruin or a decaying abbey. All make use of stock characters. These will generally include one or more young and innocent virgins of both sexes; monks and nuns, particularly of sinister aspect; and towering male and female characters of overpowering will whose charismatic egotism knows no bounds.

Frequently the novels are set in the rugged mountains of Italy and contain an evil Italian character. Tumultuous weather often accompanies tumultuous passions. The gothic genre specializes in making external conditions metaphors of human emotions, a convention thought to have been derived in part from the works of William Shakespeare. Brigands are frequently employed in the plot, and most gothics of the period employ morbid, lurid imagery, such as a body riddled with worms behind a moldy black veil.

The various subdivisions of the gothic may feature any or all of these conventions, being distinguished by relative emphasis. The historical gothic, for example, reveals the supernatural against a genuinely historical background, best exemplified by the works of the Lee sisters, who, although their own novels are infrequently read today, played a part in the evolution of the historical novel through their influence on Sir Walter Scott. The school of terror provided safe emotional titillation- safe, because the morbidity such novels portray takes place not in a genuine, historical setting, but in some fantasy of the past, and because the fearful effects tend to be explained away rationally at the end of the respective work. Radcliffe is the major paradigm of this subgroup. The Schauer-Romantik school of horror, best represented by Lewis and Maturin, did not offer the reassurance of a moral, rational order. These works tend to evoke history but stir anxiety without resolving or relieving it. They are perverse and sadistic, marked by the amoral use of thrill.

There are very few traditional gothic plots and conventions; a discrete set of such paradigms was recycled and refurbished many times. Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, Lewis's The Monk, and Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer represent the basic models of the genre.

The

Castle of Otranto

The Castle of Otranto, emphatically not historical gothic, takes place in a fantasy past. It is not of the school of terror either; although it resolves its dilemmas in a human fashion, it does not rationally explain the supernatural events it recounts. This earliest of the gothics trembles between horror and terror.

The story opens with Manfred, Prince of Otranto, ready to marry his sickly son, Conrad, to the beautiful Isabella. Manfred, the pattern for future gothic villains of towering egotism and pride, is startled when his son is killed in a bizarre fashion. The gigantic statuary helmet of a marble figure of Alphonse the Good has been mysteriously transported to Manfred's castle, where it has fallen on and crushed Conrad.

Manfred precipitously reveals that he is tired of his virtuous wife, Hippolita, and, disdaining both her and their virtuous daughter, Mathilda, attempts to force himself on the exquisite, virginal Isabella, his erstwhile daughter-in-law elect. At the same time, he attempts to blame his son's death on an individual named Theodore, who appears to be a virtuous peasant lad and bears an uncanny resemblance to the now helmetless statue of Alfonso the Good. Theodore is incarcerated in the palace but manages to escape. Theodore and Isabella, both traversing the mazelike halls of Otranto to escape Manfred, find each other, and Theodore manages to set Isabella free. She finds asylum in the Church of St. Nicholas, site of the statue of Alfonso the Good, under the protection of Father Jerome, a virtuous friar. In the process of persuading Jerome to bring Isabella to him, Manfred discovers that Theodore is actually Jerome's long-lost son. Manfred threatens Theodore in order to maneuver Jerome into delivering Isabella. The long-lost relative later became a popular feature of the gothic.

Both Isabella and Theodore are temporarily saved by the appearance of a mysterious Black Knight, who turns out to be Isabella's father and joins the forces against Manfred. A round of comings and goings through tunnels, hallways, and churches ensues. This flight through dark corridors also became almost mandatory in gothic fiction. In the course of his flight, Theodore falls in love with Mathilda. As the two lovers meet in a church, Manfred, "flushed with love and wine," mistakes Mathilda for Isabella. Wishing to prevent Theodore from possessing the woman he thinks is his own beloved, Manfred mistakenly stabs his daughter. Her dying words prevent Theodore from revenging her: "Stop thy impious hand . . . it is my father!"

Manfred must now forfeit his kingdom for his bloody deed. The final revelation is that Theodore is actually the true Prince of Otranto, the direct descendant of Alfonso the Good. The statuary helmet flies back to the statue; Isabella is given to Theodore in marriage, but only after he completes a period of mourning for Mathilda; and order is restored. The flight of the helmet remains beyond the pale of reason, as does the extraordinary, rigid virtue of the sympathetic characters, but Manfred's threat to the kingdom is ended. Here is the master plot for the gothic of the Kingdom

The Mysteries of Udolpho

Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho presents apparently unnatural behavior and events but ultimately explains them all. Not only will the sins of the past be nullified, but also human understanding will penetrate all the mysteries. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, the obligatory gothic virgin is Emily St. Aubert; she is complemented by a virginal male named Valancourt, whom Emily meets while still in the bosom of her family. When her parents die, she is left at the mercy of her uncle, the villainous Montoni, dark, compelling, and savage in pursuit of his own interests. Montoni whisks Emily away to Udolpho, his great house in the Apennines, where, desperate for money, he exerts himself on Emily in hopes of taking her patrimony while his more lustful, equally brutal friends scheme against her virtue. Emily resists, fainting and palpitating frequently. Emily's propensity to swoon is very much entrenched in the character of the gothic heroine.

Emily soon escapes and, sequestered in a convent, makes the acquaintance of a dying nun, whose past is revealed to contain a murder inspired by lust and greed. Her past also contains Montoni, who acquired Udolpho through her evil deeds. Now repenting, the nun (née Laurentini de Udolpho) reveals all. The innocent victim of Laurentini's stratagems was Emily's long-lost, virtuous aunt, and Udolpho should have been hers. Ultimately, it will belong to Emily and Valancourt.
This novel contains the obligatory gothic flights up and down dimly lit staircases and halls and into dark turrets; there are also fabulous vistas of soul-elevating charm in the Apennines, which became a hallmark of gothic, and blood-chilling vistas of banditti by torch and moonlight. There is also mysterious music that seems to issue from some supernatural source and a mysterious disappearance of Emily's bracelet, both later revealed to be the work of Valancourt. A miniature picture of the first marchioness of Udolpho, who looks unaccountably like Emily, threatens to reveal some irregularity about pure Emily's birth but in the end reveals only that the poor, victimized marchioness was Emily's aunt. In Udolpho, in a distant turret, Emily finds a body being devoured by worms. Emily is thrown into a frenzy, fearing that this is the corpse of her deluded aunt, Montoni's wife, but it is revealed to be merely a wax effigy placed there long ago for the contemplation of some sinning cleric, as a penance. The dark night of the soul lifts, and terror yields to the paradise that Emily and Valancourt will engender. This is the master plot for personal gothic: the gothic of the family.
Radcliffe was known to distinguish between horror and terror and would have none of the former. Terror was a blood-tingling experience of which she approved because it would ultimately yield to better things. Horror she identified with decadence, a distemper in the blood that could not be discharged but rendered men and women inactive with fright. Lewis's The Monk demonstrates Radcliffe's distinction.

The Monk

Lewis's The Monk concerns a Capuchin friar named Ambrosio, famed throughout Madrid for his beauty and virtue. He is fervent in his devotion to his calling and is wholly enchanted by a picture of the Virgin, to which he prays. A young novice of the order named Rosario becomes Ambrosio's favorite. Rosario is a beautiful, virtuous youth, as Ambrosio thinks, but one night Ambrosio perceives that Rosario has a female breast, and that "he" is in fact "she": Mathilda, a daughter of a noble house, so enthralled by Ambrosio that she has disguised herself to be near him.

Mathilda is the very image of the picture of the Virgin to which Ambrosio is so devoted, and, through her virginal beauty, seduces Ambrosio into a degrading sexual entanglement that is fully described. As Mathilda grows more obsessed with Ambrosio, his ardor cools. To secure him to her, she offers help in seducing Antonia, another virginal beauty, Ambrosio's newest passion. Mathilda, the madonna-faced enchantress, now reveals that she is actually a female demon. She puts her supernatural powers at Ambrosio's disposal, and together they successfully abduct Antonia, although only after killing Antonia's mother. Ambrosio then rapes Antonia in the foul, suffocating stench of a charnel house in the cathedral catacombs. In this scene of heavy breathing and sadism, the monk is incited to his deed by the virginal Antonia's softness and her pleas for her virtue. Each tear excites him further into a frenzy, which he climaxes by strangling the girl.

Ambrosio's deeds are discovered, and he is tried by an inquisitorial panel. Mathilda reveals his union with Satan through her. The novel ends with Satan's liberation of Ambrosio from the dungeon into which the inquisitors have thrown him. Satan mangles Ambrosio's body by throwing him into an abyss but does not let him die for seven days (the de-creation of the world?). During this time, Ambrosio must suffer the physical and psychological torments of his situation, and the reader along with him. The devil triumphs at the end of this novel. All means of redressing virtue are abandoned, and the reader is left in the abyss with Ambrosio.

Melmoth the Wanderer

The same may be said of Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, a tale of agony and the failure of redemption. The book may be called a novel only if one employs the concept of the picaresque in its broadest sense. It is a collection of short stories, each centering on Melmoth, a damned, Faust-like character. Each tale concerns Melmoth's attempt to find someone to change places with him, a trade he would gladly make, as he has sold his soul to the devil and now wishes to be released.

The book rubs the reader's nerves raw with obsessive suffering, detailing scenes from the Spanish Inquisition that include the popping of bones and the melting of eyeballs. The book also minutely details the degradation of a beautiful, virginal island maiden named Immalee, who is utterly destroyed by the idolatrous love of Melmoth. The last scene of the book ticks the seconds of the clock as Melmoth, unable to find a surrogate, awaits his fall into Satan's clutches. The denouement is an almost unbearable agony that the reader is forced to endure with the protagonist. Again the horror is eternal. There will never be any quietus for either Ambrosio or Melmoth, or for the reader haunted by them. These are the molds for the gothic of damnation.

The Modernization of the Gothic

The reading public of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was avid for both horror and terror, as well as for supernatural history. Such works were gobbled greedily as they rolled off the presses. Indeed, the readers of the gothic may have begun the mass marketing of literature by ensuring the fortunes of the private lending libraries that opened in response to the gothic binge. Although the libraries continued after the gothic wave had crested, it was this craze that gave the libraries their impetus. Such private lending libraries purchased numerous copies of long lists of gothic works and furnished subscribers with a list from which they might choose. Like contemporary book clubs, the libraries vied for the most appetizing authors. Unlike the modern clubs, books circulated back and forth, not to be kept by subscribers.

William Lane's Minerva Public Library was the most famous and most successful of all these libraries. Lane went after the works of independent gothic authors but formed the basis of his list by maintaining his own stable of hacks. The names of most of the "stable authors" are gone, and so are their books, but the titles linger on in the library records, echoing one another and the titles of the more prominent authors: The Romance Castle (1791), The Black Forest: Or, The Cavern of Horrors (1802), The Mysterious Omen: Or, Awful Retribution (1812).

By the time Melmoth the Wanderer had appeared, this trend had run its course. Only hacks continued to mine the old pits for monks, nuns, fainting innocents, Apennine banditti, and Satanic quests, but critics agree that if the conventions of the gothic period from Walpole to Maturin have dried out and fossilized, the spirit is very much alive. Many modern novels set miles from an abbey and containing not one shrieking, orphaned virgin or worm-ridden corpse may be considered gothic. If the sophisticated cannot repress a snicker at the obvious and well-worn gothic conventions, they cannot dismiss the power and attraction of its spirit, which lives today in serious literature.

Modern thinking about gothic literature has gravitated toward the psychological aspects of the gothic. The castle or ruined abbey has become the interior of the mind, racked with anxiety and unbridled surges of emotion, melodramatically governed by polarities. The traditional gothic is now identified as the beginning of neurotic literature. In a perceptive study of the genre, Love, Misery, and Mystery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction (1978), Coral Ann Howells points out that the gothic literature of the eighteenth century was willing to deal with the syntax of hysteria, which the more prestigious literature, controlled by classical influences, simply denied or avoided. Hysteria is no stranger to all kinds of literature, but thinking today seeks to discriminate between the literary presentation of hysteria or neuroticism as an aberration from a rational norm and the gothic presentation of neuroticism as equally normative with rational control, or even as the dominant mode.

The evolution of the modern gothic began close to the original seedbed, in the works of Edgar Allan Poe. In "The Fall of the House of Usher," for example, the traditional sins of the gothic past cavort in a mansion of ancient and noble lineage. A young virgin is subjected to the tortures of the charnel house; the tomb and the catacombs descend directly from Lewis. So, too, do the hyperbolic physical states of pallor and sensory excitement. This tale is also marked, however, by the new relationship it seeks to demonstrate between reason and hysterical anxiety.

Roderick Usher's boyhood friend, the story's narrator, is a representative of the normative rational world. He is forced to encounter a reality in which anxiety and dread are the norm and in which the passions know no rational bounds. Reason is forced to confront the reality of hysteria, its horror, terror, and power. This new psychological development of the gothic is stripped of the traditional gothic appurtenances in Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," where there are neither swooning virgins nor charnel houses, nor ruined, once-great edifices, save the ruin of the narrator's mind. The narrator's uncontrollable obsessions both to murder and to confess are presented to stun the reader with the overwhelming force of anxiety unconditioned by rational analysis.

Thus, a more modern gothic focuses on the overturning of rational limits as the source of horror and dread, without necessarily using the conventional apparatus. More examples of what may be considered modern gothic can be found in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864). Although Hawthorne was perfectly capable of using the conventional machinery of the gothic, as in The House of the Seven Gables (1851), he was one of the architects of the modern gothic. In Hawthorne's forward-looking tales, certain combinations of personalities bond, as if they were chemical compounds, to form anxiety systems that cannot be resolved except by the destruction of all or part of the human configuration. In The Scarlet Letter (1850), for example, the configuration of Hester, Chillingsworth, and Dimmesdale forms an interlocking system of emotional destruction that is its own Otranto. The needs and social positions of each character in this trio impinge on one another in ways that disintegrate "normal" considerations of loyalty, courage, sympathy, consideration, and judgment. Hester's vivacity is answered in Dimmesdale, whose violently clashing aloofness and responsiveness create for her a vicious cycle of fulfillment and rejection. Chillingsworth introduces further complications through another vicious cycle of confidence and betrayal. These are the catacombs of the modern gothic.

Another strand of the modern gothic can be traced to Frankenstein (1818), by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1979-1851). The novel was published just as the gothic genre was on the wane. Shelley's story represents an important alternative for the gothic imagination. The setting in this work shifts from the castle to the laboratory, forming the gothic tributary of science fiction. Frankenstein reverses the anxiety system of the gothic from the past to the future. Instead of the sins of the fathers-old actions, old human instincts rising to blight the present-human creativity is called into question as the blight of the future. Frankenstein's mind and laboratory are the gothic locus of "future fear," a horror of the dark side of originality and birth, which may, as the story shows, be locked into a vicious cycle with death and sterility. A dread of the whole future of human endeavor pursues the reader in and out of the dark corridors of Frankenstein.

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) may be considered an example of a further evolution of the gothic. Here one finds a strong resurgence of the traditional gothic: the ruined castle, bandits ranging over craggy hills, the sins of the past attacking the life of the present, and swooning, morbidly detailed accounts of deaths. The attendant supernatural horror and the bloodletting of the vampires, their repulsive stench, and the unearthly attractiveness of Dracula's vampire brides come right out of the original school of Schauer-Romantik horror. The utterly debilitating effect of the vampire on human will is, however, strong evidence for those critics who see the gothic tradition as an exploration of neurosis.

Stoker synthesizes two major gothic subclassifications in his work, thereby producing an interesting affirmation. Unlike the works of Radcliffe and her terror school, Dracula does not ultimately affirm the power of human reason, for it never explains away the supernatural. On the other hand, Stoker does not invoke his vampires as totally overwhelming forces, as in the horror school. Dracula does not present a fatalistic course of events through which the truth will not win out. Humankind is the agency of its salvation, but only through its affirmation of the power of faith. Reason is indeed powerless before Dracula, but Dr. Van Helsing's enormous faith and the faith he inspires in others are ultimately sufficient to resolve gothic anxiety, without denying its terrifying power and reality.

The Gothic in the Twentieth Century and Later

Significantly, in the contemporary gothic, reason never achieves the triumph it briefly found through the terror school. Twentieth and twenty-first century gothic tends toward the Schauer-Romantik school of horror. Either it pessimistically portrays an inescapable, mindforged squirrel cage, or it optimistically envisions an apocalyptic release through faith, instinct, or imagination, the nonrational human faculties. For examples of both twentieth century gothic trends, it may be instructive to consider briefly William Faulkner (1897-1962), whose works are frequently listed at the head of what is called the southern gothic tradition, and Doris Lessing (1919 - 2013), whose later works took a turn that brought them into the fold of the science-fiction branch of gothic. If there remains any doubt about the respectability of the genre and its writers, it may be noted here that both Faulkner and Lessing are winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Faulkner's fictions have all the characteristic elements of the southern gothic: the traditional iconography; decaying mansions and graveyards; morbid, deathoriented actions and images; sins of the past; and virgins. The Sound and the Fury (1929) is concerned with the decaying Compson house and family, the implications of past actions, and Quentin's morbid preoccupation with death and virginity; it features Benjy's graveyard and important scenes in a cemetery. As I Lay Dying (1930) is structured around a long march to the cemetery with a stinking corpse. Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is full of decaying houses and lurid death scenes and features prominently three strange virgins-Rosa Coldfield, Judith Sutpen, and Clytie-or five if Quentin and Shreve are to be counted. In this work, the past eats the present up alive and the central figure, Thomas Sutpen, is much in the tradition of the charismatic, but boundlessly appropriating, gothic villain.

These cold gothic externals are only superficial images that betray the presence of the steaming psychological modern gothic centers of these works. Like Hawthorne, Faulkner creates interfacing human systems of neurosis whose inextricable coils lock each character into endless anxiety, producing hysteria, obsession, and utter loss of will and freedom. The violence and physical hyperbole in Faulkner reveal the truly gothic dilemmas of the characters, inaccessible to the mediations of active reason. As in Hawthorne, the combinations of characters form the catacombs of an inescapable though invisible castle or charnel house. Through these catacombs Faulkner's characters run, but they cannot extricate themselves and thus simply revolve in a maze of involuted thought. The Compsons bind one another to tragedy, as do the Sutpens and their spiritual and psychological descendants.

There is, however, an alternative in the modern gothic impulse. In her insightful, imaginative study of the modern evolution of the gothic, Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence (1980), Judith Wilt assigns Lessing a place as the ultimate inheritor of the tradition. Lessing does portray exotic states of anxiety, variously descending into the netherworld ( Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 1971) and plunging into outer space (the Canopus in Argos series), but Wilt focuses on The Four-Gated City (1969). This novel has both the trappings and the spirit of the gothic. The book centers on a doomed old house and an old, traditional family succumbing to the sins of the past. These Lessing portrays as no less than the debilitating sins of Western culture, racist, sexist, and exploitive in character. Lessing does indeed bring down this house. Several of the major characters are released from doom, however, by an apocalyptic World War III that wipes away the old sins, freeing some characters for a new, fruitful, life without anxiety. Significantly, this new world will be structured not on the principles of reason and logic, which Lessing excoriates as the heart of the old sins, but on the basis of something innately nonrational and hard to identify. It is not instinct and not faith, but seems closest to imagination. Lessing's ultimately hopeful vision, it must be conceded, is not shared by most contemporary practitioners of the genre. The gothic enjoyed a resurgence in the 1980's that critics identified as a significant literary trend. Typical of the diversity of writers mentioned under this rubric are those represented in a collection edited by Patrick McGrath (born 1950): The New Gothic: A Collection of Contemporary Gothic Fiction (1991; with Bradford Morrow). McGrath, himself a writer of much-praised gothic fictions, assembled work by veteran novelists such as Robert Coover and John Hawkes as well as younger (now established) writers such as Jamaica Kincaid and William T. Vollmann; the group includes both the best-selling novelist Peter Straub and the assaultive experimental novelist Kathy Acker. These works were first collected by McGrath in the journal Conjunctions (1989), in which he contributed an essay outlining some of the characteristics of the new gothic. While resisting any attempt at rigid definition (the gothic, he says, is "an air, a tone, a tendency"; it is "not a monolith"), he acknowledges that all the writers whom he places in this group "concern themselves variously with extremes of sexual experience, with disease and social power, with murder and terror and death." That much might be said about most gothic novelists from the beginnings of the genre. What perhaps differentiates many of the writers whom McGrath discusses from their predecessors-what makes the new gothic new-is a more self-consciously transgressive stance, evident in McGrath's summation of the vision that he and his fellow writers share.

Common to all is an idea of evil, transgression of natural and social law, and the gothic, in all its suppleness, is the literature that permits that mad dream to be dreamt in a thousand forms.

Among popular-fiction writers, the gothic split into two main genres, one based on supernatural or psychological horror and the other based on women's fiction, featuring romance and, often, historical settings. Moreover, combinations of the two traditions most approach the hyperreal intensity and blend of fear and passion seen in the original gothic: for example, the saga of the Dollanganger family by V. C. Andrews (1923-1986) or the Blood Opera series- Dark Dance (1992), Personal Darkness (1993), and Darkness, I (1994)-by Tanith Lee (1947-2015). While horror writers often substitute the suburbs or small town for the isolated castle-and sometimes psychic abilities, deranged computers, or psychotic killers for ghostly nuns and predatory villain-heroes-they continue to explore the intense feeling, perilous world, tense social situations, and alluring but corrupt sexuality of the original gothic. Unlike the romantic gothic, which has seen periods of quiescence and revival, an unbroken line of the horror gothic persisted from The Castle of Otranto through Dracula and into the twentieth century with books such as Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), by M. R. James (1862-1936), and the works of Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) and H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). These stories continue the trend-seen in Poe, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and others-of maintaining morbid and sensational gothic elements while rooting the terror in psychology and even epistemology. Often, hauntings reveal, or are even replaced by, obsession and paranoia. Before the burgeoning of the modern commercial horror novel, Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), in two eerie and lyrical novels, The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), uses the traditional gothic form and many of its motifs, with both psychological sophistication and true terror. Robert Bloch (1917-1994), with his novel Psycho (1959), also updates and psychologizes gothic conventions, substituting an out-of-the-way motel for a castle and explicitly invoking Sigmund Freud. The horror genre grew with the (arguably) gothic novel The Exorcist (1971), by William Peter Blatty (1928-2017), and with Rosemary's Baby (1967), by Ira Levin (1929-2007). The novel transplants to a New York City apartment building the hidden secret, supernatural menace, and conspiracies against the heroine of early gothics. Although the horror market withered in the 1990's, four best-selling authors continued in the gothichorror vein: Dean R. Koontz (born 1945), Straub, Stephen King (born 1947), and Anne Rice (born 1941). While much of Koontz's horror is better classified as horror-adventure, lacking the brooding neuroses and doubts about rationality prevalent in gothic fiction, gothic aspects do dominate his novels Whispers (1980), Shadowfires (1987), Dean Koontz's Frankenstein: Prodigal Son (2005; with Kevin J. Anderson), Dean Koontz's Frankenstein: City of Night (2005; with Edward Gorman), and Dean Koontz's Frankenstein: Dead or Alive (2007; with Gorman). Koontz's Demon Seed (1973) exemplifies the techno-gothic: A threatening setting and pursuing lover combine in a robot intelligence, which runs the house and wants to impregnate the heroine. Rice explores the gothic's lush, dangerous sexuality and burden of the past in the novels of the Vampire Chronicles, including Interview with the Vampire (1976), The Vampire Lestat (1985), The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), Memnoch the Devil (1995), Blood and Gold: Or, The Story of Marius (2001), and Blood Canticle (2003).

Straub's Julia (1975; also known as Full Circle), is a drawing-room gothic novel, focusing on the haunting- supernatural, mentally pathological, or both-of a woman dominated by her husband and his disturbing, enmeshed family. In Ghost Story (1979), Shadowland (1980), and others, Straub widens the focus, exploring and critiquing the small town, boys' school, or suburban setting while developing gothic themes, including dangerous secrets, guilt, ambivalent eroticism, and a threat from the past. In Lost Boy, Lost Girl (2003), the threats include a pedophile serial killer, a haunted house, and a missing man's obsession with his dead mother. Straub explores other genres as well, especially the mystery, but maintains a gothic tone and intensity.

Similarly, King's early work is more strictly gothic, such as 'Salem's Lot (1975), in which vampires spread through a small town in Maine, and The Shining (1977), a story of madness and terror in an isolated, empty hotel. However, many later works, even mimetic ones such as Gerald's Game (1992), Dolores Claiborne (1993), Bag of Bones (1998), From a Buick Eight (2002), and Cell (2006), continue gothic themes and often a gothic tone. King is the undisputed best-selling author of the genre, having sold more than 330 million copies of his novels. Straub and King, admirers of one another's work, have collaborated on two fantasy novels, The Talisman (1984), and a sequel, Black House (2001).

The prolific Joyce Carol Oates (born 1938), author of more than fifty novels, has created several memorable gothic works, including a Gothic Saga series comprising Bellefleur (1980) and its sequels. Another memorable work is Zombie (1995), an exploration of the mind of a serial killer, based on the life of Jeffrey Dahmer. New voices on the gothic-novel scene include Donna Tartt (born c. 1964), author of The Secret History (1992) and The Little Friend (2002), and Elizabeth Kostova (born 1964), whose first novel, The Historian (2005), became a best seller and was translated into close to thirty languages.

Along with terror and horror, sentimental and romantic elements were established in the original gothic in the works of Ann Radcliffe, Clara Reeve, Susanna Rowson (1762-1824), and the Brontë sisters. In 1938, Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989), the story of a young woman's marriage to a wealthy English widower with a secret, conveyed many gothic conventions to a new audience, paving the way for the genre of gothic romance. Combining mystery, danger, and romantic fantasy, such books tend to feature innocent but admirable heroines, a powerful male love interest and his isolated estate, ominous secrets (often linked to a woman from the love interest's past, as in Rebecca), and exotic settings that are remote in place and time.

In the early 1960's, editor Gerald Gross of Ace Books used the term "gothic" for a line of paperbacks aimed at women, featuring primarily British authors such as Victoria Holt (pseudonym for Eleanor Alice Burford Hibbert, 1906-1993), Phyllis A. Whitney (1903-2008), and Dorothy Eden (1912-1982). The mystery and love plots are inextricable, and the novels feature many gothic elements, including besieged heroines; strong, enigmatic men; settings that evoke an atmosphere of tension and justified paranoia; heightened emotional states; doubled characters (including impersonation); and lurid, sometimes cruel, sexuality. In the 1970's and later, erotic elements flourished and became more explicit, resulting in the new category of the erotic gothic.

Vampire Narrative

Postmodern Gothic

Source: Rollyson, Carl. Critical Survey Of Long Fiction. 4th ed. New Jersey: Salem Press, 2010.
Bibliography
Brown, Marshall. The Gothic Text. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Ellis, Markman. The History of Gothic Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
Frank, Frederick S. Guide to the Gothic. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1984.
_______. Guide to the Gothic II. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1995.
Geary, Robert F. The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction: Horror, Belief, and Literary Change. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992.
Haggerty, George E. Queer Gothic. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Jackson, Anna, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis, eds. The Gothic in Children's Literature: Haunting the Borders. New York: Routledge, 2007.
Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. Reprint. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Mussell, Kay. Women's Gothic and Romantic Fiction: A Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981.
Norton, Rictor, ed. Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764-1840. Reprint. New York: Leicester University Press, 2006.
Punter, David, and Glennis Byron. The Gothic. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004.
Punter, David, ed. A Companion to the Gothic. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000.
Varma, Devendra P. The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England-Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1987.
Wright, Angela. Gothic Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Categories: Gothic Literature, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Literature, Novel Analysis, Vampire Narratives

Tags: (born 1938), A Sicilian Romance, an exploration of the mind of a serial killer, Analysis of Lewis's The Monk, Analysis of Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, Analysis of Melmoth the Wanderer Novel, Analysis of The Castle of Otranto, Analysis of The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, Analysis of The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Elizabeth Kostova (born 1964), Ann Radcliffe, Anne Rice, As I Lay Dying, author of more than fifty novels, author of The Secret History (1992) and The Little Friend (2002), based on the life of Jeffrey Dahmer. New voices on the gothic-novel scene include Donna Tartt (born c. 1964), Bram Stoker, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, Charles Brockden Brown, Charles Dickens, Charles Robert Maturin, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë, Clara Reeve, D. H. Lawrence, Daphne du Maurier, Dean R. Koontz, Demon Seed Novel, Donna Tartt, Doris Lessing, Dorothy Eden, Edgar Allan Poe, erotic gothic, Frankenstein, Frankenstein: Dead or Alive, Frankenstein: Prodigal Son, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, Gothic Fiction Analysis, Gothic motifs, gothic novel The Exorcist, has created several memorable gothic works, Henry James, Horror Novels, including a Gothic Saga series comprising Bellefleur (1980) and its sequels. Another memorable work is Zombie (1995), Iris Murdoch, John Gardner, Joyce Carol Oates, Judith Wilt, Lewis's The Monk, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Melmoth the Wanderer, Melmoth the Wanderer Novel, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Notes of Lewis's The Monk, Notes of The Mysteries of Udolpho, Patrick McGrath, Phyllis A. Whitney, Psycho Novel, psychologizes gothic novels, Robert Bloch, Rosemary's Baby, Schauer-Romantik, Shadowfires, Study guide of The Mysteries of Udolpho, Susanna Rowson, Tanith Lee, techno-gothic, Terror Novels, The Castle of Otranto, The Castle of Otranto Notes, The Castle of Otranto Study Guide, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Fall of the House of Usher Analysis, The Four-Gated City, The Haunting of Hill House, The Historian (2005), The House of the Seven Gables, The Monk, The Monk Gothic Novel, The Monk Novel, The Monk Novel Analysis, The Monk: A Romance, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Mysteries of Udolpho as a Gothic Novel, The New Gothic: A Collection of Contemporary Gothic Fiction, The Romance of the Forest, The Scarlet Letter, The Schauer-Romantik school of horror, The Secret History, The Sound and the Fury, The Tell-Tale Heart, Thomas Hardy, Victoria Holt, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Whispers, whose first novel, William Faulkner

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The gothic novel is a living tradition, a form that enjoys great popular appeal while provoking harsh critical judgments. It began with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1765), then traveled through Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Brockden...

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Week 22: 'Was there ever a “Female Gothic”?'

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Week 22: 'Was there ever a “Female Gothic”?'

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Week 24: 'Disturbing Insights: Revealing Hidden Fears in Gothic Literature'

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Week 24: 'Disturbing Insights: Revealing Hidden Fears in Gothic Literature'

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Week 25: ''Frankenstein' and the Gothic novel'

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Week 25: ''Frankenstein' and the Gothic novel'

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Dr Daniel Cook from the University of Dundee talks about the birth of the Gothic novel and its influences on Shelley's conception and creation of the Creature in 'Frankenstein'.

Fittingly, for a dark and foreboding genre, the origin of the Gothic in English was highly dubious. The first novel to wear the label 'A Gothic Story' - here with pantomime-like glee - was the second edition of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). Walpole pretended that the story was no more than a trashy antique relic first published in medieval Italian. Indeed, the book is a farce: a giant helmet squashes the sickly son of a domineering tyrant, and the characters are stupefied by superstition.

By the 1790s, Gothic fiction had not only become one of the most popular genres around, it had developed many of the tropes we now associate with it: emotional extremes, desolate or dilapidated environments, the supernatural, and murderous loners, among other things. The leading practitioner was without doubt Ann Radcliffe, whose most famous novel remains The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Favouring psychological terror, she fell into a rivalry with Matthew Lewis, whose novel The Monk (1796) more obviously revels in bodily horror. By 1818 the Gothic genre had become too popular for its own good. Jane Austen openly mocked young readers of the form in her deviously funny parody Northanger Abbey (written in 1803; first published in 1817).

Part of a new wave of serious Gothic novels in the early 19th-century, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) sought a return to the heyday of the 1790s: she combined Radcliffe's terror (seen in Victor's disturbed dreams, for instance) and Lewis's horror (seen in the murderous rampaging of the Creature). She also radically revised the supernatural formula of the Gothic tradition - in a formal sense Frankenstein augurs a turn to what we now recognise as Science Fiction. Victor gathers inert body parts and infuses life into a stitched-up cadaver, using the teachings of Cornelius Agrippa and the mysterious branches of ancient science as well as more recent experiments in physics and biochemistry.

If knowledge is enlightening (en- light-ening), then Gothic fiction glories in darkness: dimly lit laboratories, graveyards in the dead of night, and gloomy landscapes. It is also associated with violent weather: cloying fog, icy blizzards, or relentless rain. Frankenstein is full of such things, though Shelley brings the lightning into the laboratory. The scientist conquers nature; or, so he thinks, for the undead Creature enacts his revenge on the man who rejects him by taking the lives of his loved ones. Like a new mother struck with postnatal depression, he cannot face the jaundiced body he has brought into the world. But Victor and the Creature are not so different: they vow to destroy each other. Both seek deeper knowledge about humanity: Victor in arcane science books, the Creature in Paradise Lost and the Bible. Equally isolated from society, they nevertheless seek inclusion. That is the tragic legacy of Frankenstein. Victor thinks that by creating life he will " pour a torrent of light into our dark world ": all he brings is a new darkness.

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Frankenstein and the Gothic novel - Living Literature

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Dr Daniel Cook from the University of Dundee talks about the birth of the Gothic novel and its influences on Shelley's conception and creation of the Creature in 'Frankenstein'. Fittingly, for a dark and foreboding genre, the origin of the Gothic in English was highly dubious.

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Week 26: ''Frankenstein' and the Gothic Sublime'

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Week 26: ''Frankenstein' and the Gothic Sublime'

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Week 27: 'Gothic Horrors and the Double in 'Frankenstein'

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Week 27: 'Gothic Horrors and the Double in 'Frankenstein'

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Week 28: ''The face at the window': Gothic thematics in 'Frankenstein', 'Wuthering Heights', and 'The Turn of the Screw''

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Week 28: ''The face at the window': Gothic thematics in 'Frankenstein', 'Wuthering Heights', and 'The Turn of the Screw''

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Week 29: 'The Angel in the House: A Victorian Ideal of Domesticity'

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Week 29: 'The Angel in the House: A Victorian Ideal of Domesticity'

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YOU MUST ALSO READ THE FULL POEM HERE: http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/novel_19c/thackeray/angel.html

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The Angel in the House: A Victorian Ideal of Domesticity | The Cultural Me

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Man must be pleased; but him to pleaseIs woman's pleasure; down the gulfOf his condoled necessitiesShe casts her best, she flings herself... With these lines, the Victorian writer Coventry Patmore describes his perfect woman. His extensive narrative poem, The Angel in the House, published in instalments from 1854 to 1862, affirms traditional Victorian values regarding domesticity and gender roles.

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Week 30: 'THE FEMALE GENDER AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE IN MARY SHELLEY’S 'FRANKENSTEIN''

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Week 30: 'THE FEMALE GENDER AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE IN MARY SHELLEY’S 'FRANKENSTEIN''

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The Female Gender and Its Significance in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

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In this essay, Wayne Tan explores critical issues of gender identity set within a parable of humanity's confrontation and breaching of the limits of nature. Conventionally regarded as a conformist text to patriarchal themes, Tan offers new insights into Frankenstein's construction of gendered roles. Here, Shelley rears contemporary gender doctrine on its head - far...

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Week 31: 'ANGELS AND DEVILS IN THE HOUSE: THE EVOLUTION OF WOMEN IN GOTHIC VAMPIRE FICTION – BRAM STOKER’S MINA HARKER'

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Week 31: 'ANGELS AND DEVILS IN THE HOUSE: THE EVOLUTION OF WOMEN IN GOTHIC VAMPIRE FICTION – BRAM STOKER’S MINA HARKER'

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Monkey's Paw, by W.W. Jacobs

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
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Title: The Monkey's Paw
       The Lady of the Barge and Others, Part 2.

Author: W.W. Jacobs

Release Date: April 22, 2004 [EBook #12122]

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MONKEY'S PAW ***




Produced by David Widger

By W. W. Jacobs

BOOK 2

THE MONKEY'S PAW

I.

Without, the night was cold and wet, but in the small parlour of Laburnam Villa the blinds were drawn and the fire burned brightly. Father and son were at chess, the former, who possessed ideas about the game involving radical changes, putting his king into such sharp and unnecessary perils that it even provoked comment from the white-haired old lady knitting placidly by the fire.

"Hark at the wind," said Mr. White, who, having seen a fatal mistake after it was too late, was amiably desirous of preventing his son from seeing it.

"I'm listening," said the latter, grimly surveying the board as he stretched out his hand. "Check."

"I should hardly think that he'd come to-night," said his father, with his hand poised over the board.

"Mate," replied the son.

"That's the worst of living so far out," bawled Mr. White, with sudden and unlooked-for violence; "of all the beastly, slushy, out-of-the-way places to live in, this is the worst. Pathway's a bog, and the road's a torrent. I don't know what people are thinking about. I suppose because only two houses in the road are let, they think it doesn't matter."

"Never mind, dear," said his wife, soothingly; "perhaps you'll win the next one."

Mr. White looked up sharply, just in time to intercept a knowing glance between mother and son. The words died away on his lips, and he hid a guilty grin in his thin grey beard.

"There he is," said Herbert White, as the gate banged to loudly and heavy footsteps came toward the door.

The old man rose with hospitable haste, and opening the door, was heard condoling with the new arrival. The new arrival also condoled with himself, so that Mrs. White said, "Tut, tut!" and coughed gently as her husband entered the room, followed by a tall, burly man, beady of eye and rubicund of visage.

"Sergeant-Major Morris," he said, introducing him.

The sergeant-major shook hands, and taking the proffered seat by the fire, watched contentedly while his host got out whiskey and tumblers and stood a small copper kettle on the fire.

At the third glass his eyes got brighter, and he began to talk, the little family circle regarding with eager interest this visitor from distant parts, as he squared his broad shoulders in the chair and spoke of wild scenes and doughty deeds; of wars and plagues and strange peoples.

"Twenty-one years of it," said Mr. White, nodding at his wife and son. "When he went away he was a slip of a youth in the warehouse. Now look at him."

"He don't look to have taken much harm," said Mrs. White, politely.

"I'd like to go to India myself," said the old man, "just to look round a bit, you know."

"Better where you are," said the sergeant-major, shaking his head. He put down the empty glass, and sighing softly, shook it again.

"I should like to see those old temples and fakirs and jugglers," said the old man. "What was that you started telling me the other day about a monkey's paw or something, Morris?"

"Nothing," said the soldier, hastily. "Leastways nothing worth hearing."

"Monkey's paw?" said Mrs. White, curiously.

"Well, it's just a bit of what you might call magic, perhaps," said the sergeant-major, offhandedly.

His three listeners leaned forward eagerly. The visitor absent-mindedly put his empty glass to his lips and then set it down again. His host filled it for him.

"To look at," said the sergeant-major, fumbling in his pocket, "it's just an ordinary little paw, dried to a mummy."

He took something out of his pocket and proffered it. Mrs. White drew back with a grimace, but her son, taking it, examined it curiously.

"And what is there special about it?" inquired Mr. White as he took it from his son, and having examined it, placed it upon the table.

"It had a spell put on it by an old fakir," said the sergeant-major, "a very holy man. He wanted to show that fate ruled people's lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow. He put a spell on it so that three separate men could each have three wishes from it."

His manner was so impressive that his hearers were conscious that their light laughter jarred somewhat.

"Well, why don't you have three, sir?" said Herbert White, cleverly.

The soldier regarded him in the way that middle age is wont to regard presumptuous youth. "I have," he said, quietly, and his blotchy face whitened.

"And did you really have the three wishes granted?" asked Mrs. White.

"I did," said the sergeant-major, and his glass tapped against his strong teeth.

"And has anybody else wished?" persisted the old lady.

"The first man had his three wishes. Yes," was the reply; "I don't know what the first two were, but the third was for death. That's how I got the paw."

His tones were so grave that a hush fell upon the group.

"If you've had your three wishes, it's no good to you now, then, Morris," said the old man at last. "What do you keep it for?"

The soldier shook his head. "Fancy, I suppose," he said, slowly. "I did have some idea of selling it, but I don't think I will. It has caused enough mischief already. Besides, people won't buy. They think it's a fairy tale; some of them, and those who do think anything of it want to try it first and pay me afterward."

"If you could have another three wishes," said the old man, eyeing him keenly, "would you have them?"

"I don't know," said the other. "I don't know."

He took the paw, and dangling it between his forefinger and thumb, suddenly threw it upon the fire. White, with a slight cry, stooped down and snatched it off.

"Better let it burn," said the soldier, solemnly.

"If you don't want it, Morris," said the other, "give it to me."

"I won't," said his friend, doggedly. "I threw it on the fire. If you keep it, don't blame me for what happens. Pitch it on the fire again like a sensible man."

The other shook his head and examined his new possession closely. "How do you do it?" he inquired.

"Hold it up in your right hand and wish aloud," said the sergeant-major, "but I warn you of the consequences."

"Sounds like the Arabian Nights," said Mrs. White, as she rose and began to set the supper. "Don't you think you might wish for four pairs of hands for me?"

Her husband drew the talisman from pocket, and then all three burst into laughter as the sergeant-major, with a look of alarm on his face, caught him by the arm.

"If you must wish," he said, gruffly, "wish for something sensible."

Mr. White dropped it back in his pocket, and placing chairs, motioned his friend to the table. In the business of supper the talisman was partly forgotten, and afterward the three sat listening in an enthralled fashion to a second instalment of the soldier's adventures in India.

"If the tale about the monkey's paw is not more truthful than those he has been telling us," said Herbert, as the door closed behind their guest, just in time for him to catch the last train, "we sha'nt make much out of it."

"Did you give him anything for it, father?" inquired Mrs. White, regarding her husband closely.

"A trifle," said he, colouring slightly. "He didn't want it, but I made him take it. And he pressed me again to throw it away."

"Likely," said Herbert, with pretended horror. "Why, we're going to be rich, and famous and happy. Wish to be an emperor, father, to begin with; then you can't be henpecked."

He darted round the table, pursued by the maligned Mrs. White armed with an antimacassar.

Mr. White took the paw from his pocket and eyed it dubiously. "I don't know what to wish for, and that's a fact," he said, slowly. "It seems to me I've got all I want."

"If you only cleared the house, you'd be quite happy, wouldn't you?" said Herbert, with his hand on his shoulder. "Well, wish for two hundred pounds, then; that 'll just do it."

His father, smiling shamefacedly at his own credulity, held up the talisman, as his son, with a solemn face, somewhat marred by a wink at his mother, sat down at the piano and struck a few impressive chords.

"I wish for two hundred pounds," said the old man distinctly.

A fine crash from the piano greeted the words, interrupted by a shuddering cry from the old man. His wife and son ran toward him.

"It moved," he cried, with a glance of disgust at the object as it lay on the floor.

"As I wished, it twisted in my hand like a snake."

"Well, I don't see the money," said his son as he picked it up and placed it on the table, "and I bet I never shall."

"It must have been your fancy, father," said his wife, regarding him anxiously.

He shook his head. "Never mind, though; there's no harm done, but it gave me a shock all the same."

They sat down by the fire again while the two men finished their pipes. Outside, the wind was higher than ever, and the old man started nervously at the sound of a door banging upstairs. A silence unusual and depressing settled upon all three, which lasted until the old couple rose to retire for the night.

"I expect you'll find the cash tied up in a big bag in the middle of your bed," said Herbert, as he bade them good-night, "and something horrible squatting up on top of the wardrobe watching you as you pocket your ill-gotten gains."

He sat alone in the darkness, gazing at the dying fire, and seeing faces in it. The last face was so horrible and so simian that he gazed at it in amazement. It got so vivid that, with a little uneasy laugh, he felt on the table for a glass containing a little water to throw over it. His hand grasped the monkey's paw, and with a little shiver he wiped his hand on his coat and went up to bed.

II.

In the brightness of the wintry sun next morning as it streamed over the breakfast table he laughed at his fears. There was an air of prosaic wholesomeness about the room which it had lacked on the previous night, and the dirty, shrivelled little paw was pitched on the sideboard with a carelessness which betokened no great belief in its virtues.

"I suppose all old soldiers are the same," said Mrs. White. "The idea of our listening to such nonsense! How could wishes be granted in these days? And if they could, how could two hundred pounds hurt you, father?"

"Might drop on his head from the sky," said the frivolous Herbert.

"Morris said the things happened so naturally," said his father, "that you might if you so wished attribute it to coincidence."

"Well, don't break into the money before I come back," said Herbert as he rose from the table. "I'm afraid it'll turn you into a mean, avaricious man, and we shall have to disown you."

His mother laughed, and following him to the door, watched him down the road; and returning to the breakfast table, was very happy at the expense of her husband's credulity. All of which did not prevent her from scurrying to the door at the postman's knock, nor prevent her from referring somewhat shortly to retired sergeant-majors of bibulous habits when she found that the post brought a tailor's bill.

"Herbert will have some more of his funny remarks, I expect, when he comes home," she said, as they sat at dinner.

"I dare say," said Mr. White, pouring himself out some beer; "but for all that, the thing moved in my hand; that I'll swear to."

"You thought it did," said the old lady soothingly.

"I say it did," replied the other. "There was no thought about it; I had just-- What's the matter?"

His wife made no reply. She was watching the mysterious movements of a man outside, who, peering in an undecided fashion at the house, appeared to be trying to make up his mind to enter. In mental connection with the two hundred pounds, she noticed that the stranger was well dressed, and wore a silk hat of glossy newness. Three times he paused at the gate, and then walked on again. The fourth time he stood with his hand upon it, and then with sudden resolution flung it open and walked up the path. Mrs. White at the same moment placed her hands behind her, and hurriedly unfastening the strings of her apron, put that useful article of apparel beneath the cushion of her chair.

She brought the stranger, who seemed ill at ease, into the room. He gazed at her furtively, and listened in a preoccupied fashion as the old lady apologized for the appearance of the room, and her husband's coat, a garment which he usually reserved for the garden. She then waited as patiently as her sex would permit, for him to broach his business, but he was at first strangely silent.

"I-was asked to call," he said at last, and stooped and picked a piece of cotton from his trousers. "I come from 'Maw and Meggins.'"

The old lady started. "Is anything the matter?" she asked, breathlessly. "Has anything happened to Herbert? What is it? What is it?"

Her husband interposed. "There, there, mother," he said, hastily. "Sit down, and don't jump to conclusions. You've not brought bad news, I'm sure, sir;" and he eyed the other wistfully.

"I'm sorry-" began the visitor.

"Is he hurt?" demanded the mother, wildly.

The visitor bowed in assent. "Badly hurt," he said, quietly, "but he is not in any pain."

"Oh, thank God!" said the old woman, clasping her hands. "Thank God for that! Thank-"

She broke off suddenly as the sinister meaning of the assurance dawned upon her and she saw the awful confirmation of her fears in the other's averted face. She caught her breath, and turning to her slower-witted husband, laid her trembling old hand upon his. There was a long silence.

"He was caught in the machinery," said the visitor at length in a low voice.

"Caught in the machinery," repeated Mr. White, in a dazed fashion, "yes."

He sat staring blankly out at the window, and taking his wife's hand between his own, pressed it as he had been wont to do in their old courting-days nearly forty years before.

"He was the only one left to us," he said, turning gently to the visitor. "It is hard."

The other coughed, and rising, walked slowly to the window. "The firm wished me to convey their sincere sympathy with you in your great loss," he said, without looking round. "I beg that you will understand I am only their servant and merely obeying orders."

There was no reply; the old woman's face was white, her eyes staring, and her breath inaudible; on the husband's face was a look such as his friend the sergeant might have carried into his first action.

"I was to say that 'Maw and Meggins' disclaim all responsibility," continued the other. "They admit no liability at all, but in consideration of your son's services, they wish to present you with a certain sum as compensation."

Mr. White dropped his wife's hand, and rising to his feet, gazed with a look of horror at his visitor. His dry lips shaped the words, "How much?"

"Two hundred pounds," was the answer.

Unconscious of his wife's shriek, the old man smiled faintly, put out his hands like a sightless man, and dropped, a senseless heap, to the floor.

III.

In the huge new cemetery, some two miles distant, the old people buried their dead, and came back to a house steeped in shadow and silence. It was all over so quickly that at first they could hardly realize it, and remained in a state of expectation as though of something else to happen -something else which was to lighten this load, too heavy for old hearts to bear.

But the days passed, and expectation gave place to resignation-the hopeless resignation of the old, sometimes miscalled, apathy. Sometimes they hardly exchanged a word, for now they had nothing to talk about, and their days were long to weariness.

It was about a week after that the old man, waking suddenly in the night, stretched out his hand and found himself alone. The room was in darkness, and the sound of subdued weeping came from the window. He raised himself in bed and listened.

"Come back," he said, tenderly. "You will be cold."

"It is colder for my son," said the old woman, and wept afresh.

The sound of her sobs died away on his ears. The bed was warm, and his eyes heavy with sleep. He dozed fitfully, and then slept until a sudden wild cry from his wife awoke him with a start.

"The paw!" she cried wildly. "The monkey's paw!"

He started up in alarm. "Where? Where is it? What's the matter?"

She came stumbling across the room toward him. "I want it," she said, quietly. "You've not destroyed it?"

"It's in the parlour, on the bracket," he replied, marvelling. "Why?"

She cried and laughed together, and bending over, kissed his cheek.

"I only just thought of it," she said, hysterically. "Why didn't I think of it before? Why didn't you think of it?"

"Think of what?" he questioned.

"The other two wishes," she replied, rapidly. "We've only had one."

"Was not that enough?" he demanded, fiercely.

"No," she cried, triumphantly; "we'll have one more. Go down and get it quickly, and wish our boy alive again."

The man sat up in bed and flung the bedclothes from his quaking limbs. "Good God, you are mad!" he cried, aghast.

"Get it," she panted; "get it quickly, and wish-Oh, my boy, my boy!"

Her husband struck a match and lit the candle. "Get back to bed," he said, unsteadily. "You don't know what you are saying."

"We had the first wish granted," said the old woman, feverishly; "why not the second?"

"A coincidence," stammered the old man.

"Go and get it and wish," cried his wife, quivering with excitement.

The old man turned and regarded her, and his voice shook. "He has been dead ten days, and besides he-I would not tell you else, but-I could only recognize him by his clothing. If he was too terrible for you to see then, how now?"

"Bring him back," cried the old woman, and dragged him toward the door. "Do you think I fear the child I have nursed?"

He went down in the darkness, and felt his way to the parlour, and then to the mantelpiece. The talisman was in its place, and a horrible fear that the unspoken wish might bring his mutilated son before him ere he could escape from the room seized upon him, and he caught his breath as he found that he had lost the direction of the door. His brow cold with sweat, he felt his way round the table, and groped along the wall until he found himself in the small passage with the unwholesome thing in his hand.

Even his wife's face seemed changed as he entered the room. It was white and expectant, and to his fears seemed to have an unnatural look upon it. He was afraid of her.

"Wish!" she cried, in a strong voice.

"It is foolish and wicked," he faltered.

"Wish!" repeated his wife.

He raised his hand. "I wish my son alive again."

The talisman fell to the floor, and he regarded it fearfully. Then he sank trembling into a chair as the old woman, with burning eyes, walked to the window and raised the blind.

He sat until he was chilled with the cold, glancing occasionally at the figure of the old woman peering through the window. The candle-end, which had burned below the rim of the china candlestick, was throwing pulsating shadows on the ceiling and walls, until, with a flicker larger than the rest, it expired. The old man, with an unspeakable sense of relief at the failure of the talisman, crept back to his bed, and a minute or two afterward the old woman came silently and apathetically beside him.

Neither spoke, but lay silently listening to the ticking of the clock. A stair creaked, and a squeaky mouse scurried noisily through the wall. The darkness was oppressive, and after lying for some time screwing up his courage, he took the box of matches, and striking one, went downstairs for a candle.

At the foot of the stairs the match went out, and he paused to strike another; and at the same moment a knock, so quiet and stealthy as to be scarcely audible, sounded on the front door.

The matches fell from his hand and spilled in the passage. He stood motionless, his breath suspended until the knock was repeated. Then he turned and fled swiftly back to his room, and closed the door behind him. A third knock sounded through the house.

"What's that?" cried the old woman, starting up.

"A rat," said the old man in shaking tones-"a rat. It passed me on the stairs."

His wife sat up in bed listening. A loud knock resounded through the house.

"It's Herbert!" she screamed. "It's Herbert!"

She ran to the door, but her husband was before her, and catching her by the arm, held her tightly.

"What are you going to do?" he whispered hoarsely.

"It's my boy; it's Herbert!" she cried, struggling mechanically. "I forgot it was two miles away. What are you holding me for? Let go. I must open the door."

"For God's sake don't let it in," cried the old man, trembling.

"You're afraid of your own son," she cried, struggling. "Let me go. I'm coming, Herbert; I'm coming."

There was another knock, and another. The old woman with a sudden wrench broke free and ran from the room. Her husband followed to the landing, and called after her appealingly as she hurried downstairs. He heard the chain rattle back and the bottom bolt drawn slowly and stiffly from the socket. Then the old woman's voice, strained and panting.

"The bolt," she cried, loudly. "Come down. I can't reach it."

But her husband was on his hands and knees groping wildly on the floor in search of the paw. If he could only find it before the thing outside got in. A perfect fusillade of knocks reverberated through the house, and he heard the scraping of a chair as his wife put it down in the passage against the door. He heard the creaking of the bolt as it came slowly back, and at the same moment he found the monkey's paw, and frantically breathed his third and last wish.

The knocking ceased suddenly, although the echoes of it were still in the house. He heard the chair drawn back, and the door opened. A cold wind rushed up the staircase, and a long loud wail of disappointment and misery from his wife gave him courage to run down to her side, and then to the gate beyond. The street lamp flickering opposite shone on a quiet and deserted road.

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THE LADY OF THE BARGE AND OTHERS, Book 2

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Monkey's Paw, by W.W. Jacobs This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: The Monkey's Paw The Lady of the Barge and Others, Part 2.

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The play of fear and laughter has been inscribed in Gothic texts since their inception, an ambivalence that disturbs critical categories that evaluate their seriousness or triviality. The uncertainty perpetuates Gothic anxieties at the level of narrative and generic form, and affects all categories and boundaries from the generic to the social. Producing powerful emotions rather than aesthetic judgments, effects on audiences and readers rather than instructions for them, narrative forms and devices spill over from worlds of fantasy and fiction into real and social spheres. Exacerbated rather than resolved by the artificial assemblages of Gothic forms, the excess contaminates all distinctions in the way it highlights the function of forms and conventions in the everyday as well as fictional world. The hybrid mixing of forms and narratives has uncanny effects, effects which make narrative play and ambivalence another figure of horror, another duplicitous object to be expelled from proper orders of consciousness and representation.

The twentieth century's escalating anxiety regarding modernity as a combination of civilisation, progress and rationality has become focused on the way that social, historical and individual formations are bound up with the organising effects of narratives. Perceived as a condensation of grand narratives, the legitimacy, universality and unity of modernity is put in question. Part of the challenge to modernity's assumptions, meanings, exclusions and suppressions has emerged in fictions that juxtapose, and thereby reorganise, narrative styles and relations. The stories of Robert Coover's Pricksongs and Descants (1969), mixing fragments of myth, fairytale and everyday realism, expose the violence and the violent structures of fantasy that are inscribed in and between the different narratives composing a culture, an uncanny narrative shadow that subverts distinctions between fictional forms and the narratives shaping reality, family and identity. Angela Carter's fiction, self-consciously mixing different forms, including fairytale, legend, science fiction and Gothic, shows the interplay of narratives shaping reality and identity, particularly in relation to the production of meanings for sexuality. Her Heroes and Villains (1969) uses the future to reflect on distinctions between civilisation and barbarity. 'The Bloody Chamber' (1979), like the other stories in the collection of the same name, plays with the ways fairytales, legends and Gothic fictions construct identities, fantasies, fears and desires, particularly in terms of female sexuality and desire: a young female speaker casts herself as a Gothic heroine on her marriage to an aristocratic libertine and voluptuary in the Sadeian mould. In echoes of Rebecca, the heroine discovers letters of the Marquis's first wife. She turns out to have been a relation of Dracula. Further explorations through the Marquis's precipitously situated castle lead to Radcliffean terrors in dark vaults, amid macabre instruments. Threatened by imminent death at the hands of her husband, a spectral and knightly figure rides to her rescue: the romantic hero is her mother. The play of absurdity and horror interrogates the narrative forms that structure fantasies and have real effects. In her novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman (1972), Carter looks at the play of reality and fantasy by using Freud's notion of the uncanny, but written over the entire social formation. The mysterious villain of the title has stretched the unconscious over the surface of the world so that all perceptions are transformed and mutated along the paths of desire and, more important, the physical laws supposed to govern concrete reality no longer apply. The narrator's picaresque travels through worlds in which conventional distinctions of space and time, matter and spirit, reality and fantasy are irrelevant present different stories, myths and social and scientific principles to suggest that the world is fictional in its broadest sense, an effect of narratives, identifications, fantasies and desires that no longer bow to the grand narrative dominated by the reality principle. Encounters with strange peoples, with different customs, assumptions and attributes, open up singular notions of narrative, reality and identity to heterogeneous possibilities.

Throughout Gothic fiction terror and horror have depended on things not being what they seem. In encouraging superstitious interpretation in, and of, novels by means of narrative devices and generic expectations, Gothic texts have always played along the boundaries between fictional forms and social rules. In the complex assemblage of different stories within early Gothic novels, the labyrinthine complexity ultimately delivers its secret and produces the horror that expels the object of fear, restoring properly conventional boundaries. An uncanny and disturbing uncertainty none the less shadows this process with an ambivalence and duplicity that cannot be contained. In Gothic fictions and films it is this ambivalence and duplicity that has emerged as a distinctly reflexive form of narrative anxiety. It involves a pervasive cultural concern-characterised as postmodernist-that things are not only not what they seem: what they seem is what they are, not a unity of word or image and thing, but words and images without things or as things themselves, effects of narrative form and nothing else. Unstable, unfixed and ungrounded in any reality, truth or identity other than those that narratives provide, there emerges a threat of sublime excess, of a new darkness of multiple and labyrinthine narratives, in which human myths again dissolve, confronted by an uncanny force beyond its control.

The horror of textuality is linked to pervasive terrors of anarchic disintegration or psychotic dissolution. In an impressive example of Gothic fiction, The Name of the Rose (1980), Umberto Eco displays its sublimely textual form. With selfconsciously Gothic features like the narrative detailing the discovery of a medieval manuscript, the gloomy settings, dark vaults, mysterious deaths and the medieval architecture and history that run through it, the novel rearticulates distinctions between enlightenment rationality and religious superstition. The arrival of a monk, William of Baskerville, and his novice, the narrator, Adso, at a fourteenth-century Abbey dominated by a great octagonal library coincides with a series of mysterious and macabre deaths. Interpreted as signs of divine apocalypse or diabolical machination, the deaths foretell greater terrors for the superstitious monastic community. Baskerville, as his name suggests, has powers of deduction like those of Sherlock Holmes and sets out to provide a rational explanation of supposedly supernatural terrors.

The conventional disingenuity of the 'editor's' preface to the story, stating its absolute distance from concerns of the present, ironically focuses attention on the relation of history and contemporaneity. The novel is full of modern as well as historical allusions: important contemporary antecedents signal a concern with literary and theoretical issues, the writings of Jorge Luis Borges being particularly significant in that the mystery centres on the library constructed in the form of a labyrinth. The novel's mystery is a mystery in and about texts, its object and cause being a text itself, a missing philosophical work whose knowledge and power is feared and desired. Baskerville, monk and detective, is also slightly different from his conventional fictional forebears; his rational and detective skills are presented as critical and analytic abilities: he is an excellent reader of signs and narrative conventions (pp. 24-5). Superstition appears as an effect of misreading, of the mislocation of signs and narratives. Following the clues through the dark corridors and vaults of the Abbey, Baskerville uncovers the textual and fragmented trail of signs and secret codes that both conceal and cause the crimes, arriving at the horror and the explanation in the hidden chamber of the labyrinthine library. The horror is not a bloody spectre or corpse but takes the form of Baskerville's double, an old librarian named Jorge, possessed of religious dogmatism and callous and diabolical cunning, perfect foils for the former's intellectual pride. The murders are explained as the attempt to prevent monks reading a book that was believed lost: Aristotle 's second book of the , on comedy. Jorge, to Baskerville's horror, explains the motive for murderous censorship. Such a book by the philosopher would undermine the power of ecclesiastical order by celebrating laughter, legitimating its refusal to respect any law and authority, its rebellious energy threatening the 'dismantling and upsetting of every holy and venerable image' (p. 476). Laughter, activating a diabolical play that exceeds the attempts of sacred horror to expel or control it, is associated with the play of signs, narratives and interpretations, a play that is itself ambivalent in the way it is constructed as either rationally open and liberating or devilishly, anarchically irreverent.

For the order Jorge represents laughter is reviled as the enemy of truth and power. His fear of laughter, however, produces his own acts of irrational and intolerant suppression. The violence that Jorge's dogmatic and restricted order sanctions is, from the narrator's identification with Baskerville's position, shown to be the true object of horror, associated with the superstitious and tyrannical oppression that, throughout Gothic fiction, is linked to the injustice and cruelty of the Catholic Inquisition. Arbitrary, irrational and restrictive power is opposed by Baskerville's enlightened and rational humanism. The invocation of enlightenment values that are produced and contested throughout Gothic fiction is made with a significant difference: truth and reason are no longer seen as absolutes or agents of systems of power. They are, instead, ways of reading in which texts are left open and plural, their play not subjected to a singular, restricted and partial-politically interested-meaning. Adso's concluding reflections remain uncertain about his mentor's motivations and ideas as well as the message that his own manuscript holds. The uncertainty, presented throughout the novel in textual terms, is repeated in a last anecdote of Adso's later return to the Abbey whose library was destroyed in a great conflagration occurring as a result of Jorge's and Baskerville's confrontation. Amid the library's ruins, Adso collects and catalogues some of the tiny fragments of books that remain: 'at the end of my reconstruction, I had before me a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one: a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books' (p. 500).

While The Name of the Rose advances this vision of the fragmentary forms of textual, individual and social bodies, whose meanings and identities are effects of patient and partial reconstruction, the image of disintegration that it implies is a shocking one for positions that have been fostered by narratives of individual, social and natural unity, homogeneity and totality. The shadows of narrative duplicity, ambivalence and play that open on to a fragmented glimpse of textuality are, in Alan Parker's film, Angel Heart (1986), rendered spectral and threatening objects of terror. Beginning in the manner of a 1950s detective thriller, with a corpse, the film's opening image cedes to an apparently different narrative in which a down-at-heel private eye, Harry Angel, is hired to find a missing person by a mysterious client called Louis Cyphre. The investigation leads Angel away from a grubby New York: it takes him south to a world dominated by religious ritual and voodoo. In the course of the investigation Angel becomes the chief suspect for the murders that shadow it.

Punctuated by flashbacks of mysterious shrouded figures, blood-filled bowls and blood-stained walls, the film suggests another story: one narrative, the detective story, is gradually supplanted by a Faustian tale of diabolical repossession. This is marked by a complete reversal of narrative expectations, a narrative twist that, though characteristic of the detective genre, in this case undermines it. Angel discovers that he is the criminal he has been pursuing. For, in the arcane ritual alluded to in the flashbacks, the heart of an innocent victim, Angel, was torn out and eaten by the criminal who then assumed Angel's appearance. This was done so that the villain could renege on a contract with the devil, substituting another's soul for his own. Satan-'Lucifer' in the shape and name of 'Louis Cyphre'-returns to claim his due, hiring 'Angel' for the purpose. The word-play reveals the secret of the film, a fact that, in horror, is recognised by Angel'. New flashbacks, replicating scenes from earlier in the film, show Angel' committing the murders that have shadowed his investigation. The first narrative, it appears, has constructed a false identity: like the shots of mirrors, identity cards and dog tags throughout the film, it is also duplicitous. Angel is detective and criminal, hero and villain, pursuer and pursued, deceiver and dupe. In the play of narrative deceptions bodies, souls, identities and roles are substituted for each other. In the movement between genres there is a diabolical process of deception displayed and performed, a process that multiplies meanings and identities to the point where nothing is what it seems but an effect of narrative appearances. The audience is drawn into this process, duped by the narrative play and robbed of a proper ending and solution to the mystery. The play of narratives is also a game of signs: Louis Cyphre is not only Lucifer, but Lu-cipher, the name that cracks the Faustian narrative's code. The deciphering of the name draws the audience further into the narrative's play of codes, signs and images. The play of words, of codes and ciphers, also encodes the film as a narrative game of ciphers and signs: it is just a matter of word-play. Signs and images are thus presented as diabolical and excluded, cast out in horrified recognition of the empty and superficial word-play that ends the film. Angel, the figure of duplicity, described as the closest thing to 'pure evil', is a transgressor who is simultaneously punished by diabolical law, for breaking the contract, and by secular law, for murder, condemned to burn in hell's flames and the electric chair. Evil, presented in and as a duplicitous play of words, is thus displayed and cast out.

Enmeshed, however, in processes of doubling that its attempt to join its parallel narratives never closes, Angel Heart, as a film, as a set of narrative images itself, also signifies the opposite: that identity, meaning and unity are spectral illusions of signs. It cannot expunge this horror, cannot take an external and fixed position. The invocation of evil, however, signals a return to romantic patterns of organising the significance on a global and binary scale. In the films of David Lynch a similar interplay of good and evil, light and dark, is manifested as an uncanny and unavoidable duplicity. In Blue Velvet (1986), the play of visual allusions also absorbs the American Gothic tradition in which the uncanny proximity of good and evil is seen to be very close to home, within the boundaries of community life. Lynch's television series, (1990-2), uses similar Gothic contrasts in a visual text whose network of allusions, quotations, stylistic parodies and pastiches was as broad as it was reflexive. Playing with various narrative conventions the series followed the investigation of a terrible murder of a girl in the small-town community to uncover evils multiple sources in primordial, individual, cultural and narrative locations: deep in the woods, in human fears, selfish desires and sexual repressions, in the community and within the family. The evil in the woods alludes to Hawthorne; the evil father resonates throughout Gothic, as does the identification with psychopathology. The figure of evil, the vagrant face of Bob, appears as the mirror image of the paternal perpetrator, a reflection that haunts the series. Evil, also, is located in outer space, an echo of the Cold War threat of communism that had just disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Evils place is multiplied in the dense network of cultural and narrative allusion. Evil is also identified, in the self-conscious use of romance forms, with myths and fictions.

The final battle of good and evil is staged when the detective enters the deceptive Black Lodge-a place of reversals and evil doubles-to save the woman he loves. They both return. But the romantic happy ending is undermined by the final scene. Washing in his hotel bathroom, the detective looks in a mirror. Staring from it is the dishevelled face of Bob, the evil image and sign of diabolical possession. The turning of one into the other, good into evil, forms a doubly self-conscious and banal inversion of the conventional romantic ending. The camera returns from the mirror to focus on the detective's features, now distorted in a malevolent grin that is itself a reflection of the mirror image's evil face. Not so much a conventional display of the truth of interiority, of the evil within, the double reflection presents evil as an effect of images and narrative surfaces, another device of diabolical duplicity. Having turned the figure of good, unity, coherence, identity and cleanliness into evil's double, another alluring figure in a diabolical repertoire of signs, the series' playfulness evokes both laughter and horror: it just plays games, and yet, there seems to be nothing but narrative games, no position outside or determining them, no frame that is not, itself, caught up in a web of duplicity and ambivalent effects that contaminates all cultural boundaries and distinctions.

Source: Botting, Fred, and Dale Townshend. Gothic. London: Routledge, 2004.
Prawer, S.S., Caligari's Children: The Film as Tale of Terror, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 1980.

Categories: Vampire Narratives

Tags: Angela Carter, Baskerville, Blue Velvet, David Lynch, Fragmentation in Postmodern Novels, Gothic, Gothic Fiction, Gothic Literature, Heroes and Villains, Jorge Luis Borges, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, parody, pastiche, Postmodern Gothic, Postmodernism, Postmodernism and Gothic, Pricksongs and Descants, Robert Coover, The Bloody Chamber, The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman, The Name of the Rose, Twin Peak, Vampire Narrative, William of Baskerville

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The play of fear and laughter has been inscribed in Gothic texts since their inception, an ambivalence that disturbs critical categories that evaluate their seriousness or triviality. The uncertainty perpetuates Gothic anxieties at the level of narrative and generic form, and affects all categories and boundaries from the generic to the social.

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One hundred years ago, Sigmund Freud wrote his paper on 'The Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche). His theory was rooted in everyday experiences and the aesthetics of popular culture, related to what is frightening, repulsive and distressing.

The paper tackles the horrific concepts of inanimate figures coming to life, severed limbs, ghosts, the image of the double figure (doppelgaengers) and lends itself to art, literature and cinema.

Essay In Two Parts

Freud's essay is written in two parts. The first part explores the etymology of the words 'heimlich' and 'unheimlich' (or 'homely' and 'unhomely', as it directly translates into English), their uses in the German dictionary and how these words are used in other languages. This must have been an unimaginable challenge for the translator!

In the second part, Freud begins to tackle people, things, self-expressions, experiences and situations that best represent the uncanny feeling.

Freud's paradigm example is the short story of E.T.A. Hoffmann's 'The Sandman', a tale that parents would tell their children to encourage them to go to sleep. The story goes that the child must be asleep for the Sandman to put sand in the child's eyes - if they are not asleep, the Sandman will take out their eyes. The protagonist is a boy named Nathaniel whose fate eventually does fall to the Sandman, losing not only his sight but his sanity, then his life. Freud asserts that the removal of the eyes alludes to an infantile fear of castration, but the castration complex is masked by a fear of losing a different sensitive organ: the eyes. This same theme is present in the tragedy of Oedipus.

Doppelgaenger

Freud also touches upon the notion of 'the double' or, as it is better known, the doppelgaenger, first explored in the psychoanalytic literature by Otto Rank in 1914. Freud writes that doppelgaengers can be found in:

Mirrors, shadows, guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and the fear of death. The idea of the eternal soul allows us an energetic denial of the power of death. This was the first double of the body. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death. (p. 235)

"Uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression."Sigmund Freud

One only needs to think of Stanley Kubrick's cinematic horror adaptation of Stephen King's 'The Shining'. An eerie mansion, haunted by people known to have died, whose mutilated figures still appear in the grounds where they were murdered. These are doubles, other versions of themselves. We see them moving, but are they alive or dead? Many people experience the uncanny to its highest degree with death, dead bodies and the return of the dead. This fear stems from the fact that nobody can truly grasp their own mortality.

Freud writes:

We can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche into its opposite, das Unheimliche; for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression. (p. 241, SE XVII)

Through this process, we can see that the nature of the uncanny is entirely subjective, based upon our own experiences but haunts each of us to varying degrees.
By Jamie Ruers, Freud Museum Researcher
Buy The Uncanny by Sigmund Freud from the museum shop now.

Examples of the Uncanny

Examples of situations that can provoke an uncanny feeling include inanimate objects coming alive, thoughts appearing to have an effect in the real world, seeing your double (the doppelgänger effect), representations of death such as ghosts or spirits, and involuntary repetitions. The uncanny arises when childhood beliefs we have grown out of suddenly seem real. Freud called it 'the return of the repressed'.

The Uncanny in Art

Waxwork dolls, automata, doubles, ghosts, mirrors, the home and its secrets, madness and severed limbs are mentioned throughout The Uncanny, influencing painters and sculptors to explore these themes and blur the boundaries between animate and inanimate, human and non-human, life and death.

Podcast: Freud in Focus 2

Listen to the Second Series of our podcast 'Freud in Focus '. We discuss Freud's fascinating foray into the field of Aesthetics, 'The Uncanny'. The series is presented by Tom DeRose and Jamie Ruers.

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The Uncanny. Sigmund Freud wrote his paper on 'The Uncanny', a theory rooted in the everyday, related to what is frightening