The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins 3030845613, 9783030845612

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The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins Edited by Clive Bloom

The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins

Clive Bloom Editor

The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins

Editor Clive Bloom Hull University Hull, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-84561-2 ISBN 978-3-030-84562-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: agefotostock/Alamy Stock Photo Cover design by eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Everything, the whole of life, had become for him a dream and feeling of foreboding … E.T.A Hoffmann, Der Sandmann (The Sand Man, 1816)

Acknowledgements

The editor would like to thank the gothic community for its support in finishing this book and its two other accompanying volumes, Samantha George and Joanna Neilly for helpful suggestions, Lina Aboujieb, Emily Wood, Zobariya Jidda and team for their help in getting everything finalised at Palgrave and Lesley Kacher for her dedication to the project. This editing of this volume was made possible by a Fellowship from New York University.

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Contents

From Horace Walpole to the Divine Marquis de Sade Clive Bloom

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Gothic Ancestors Shakespeare, Influence and Appropriation Giles Whiteley

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Jacobean Drama and the Macabre Cecilia Lindskog Whiteley

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Gothic Style The Grammar of a Genre Beatriz Sánchez-Santos and Manuel Aguirre

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Formulaic Language Manuel Aguirre

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Sentimental Gothic Ann Radcliffe’s Influences and Legacies Joan Passey

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Ann Radcliffe and the French Revolution Fanny Lacôte

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Forms and Feeling in the Genre Kaley Kramer

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The Re-Discovery of Eleanor Sleath J. S. Mackley

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CONTENTS

Gothic Science Victor Frankenstein Sullies The Book of Splendour Robert K. Shepherd

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The Myth of Frankenstein Marta Vega Trijueque

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Graveyard Gothic Graveyard Poetry and the Aesthetics of Horror Eric Parisot

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The Necropolitan Gothic Roger Luckhurst

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Writing the City and Loss in the Work of Thomas De Quincey Nicola Bowring

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Gothic Poetry The Dark Poetry of Charlotte Dacre Maria Giakaniki The Poetics of Space, the Mind, and the Supernatural in S. T. Coleridge Kirstin A. Mills

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Visual Gothic Gardens and Designed Landscapes James Rattue

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Metaphor and Revivalist Architecture at Strawberry Hill Peter N. Lindfield and Dale Townshend

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The Art of Ghostly Projections David Annwn Jones

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The Nightmare and Proto-Vampires Simon Bacon

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Gothic Exoticism John Polidori’s Mesmerising Vampire Martina Bartlett

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The Cabinet of Orientalisms Naomi Simone Borwein

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CONTENTS

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Gothic Theology and the Mystical Gothic Theologies of the Supernatural Holly Hirst

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Imagining the Occult in the Age of Enlightenment Miranda Corcoran

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Materialism and The Monk Cleo Cameron

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Between the Nation and the Dark Recesses of the Soul in Charles Maturin Charlie Jorge

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Charles Maturin Revisited Joakim Wrethed

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The Vrykolakas, the Wandering Jew, and the Flying Dutchman Simon Bacon

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The Body, Materiality, and Damnation in Charles Maturin Madeline Potter

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Index

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List of Contributors

Manuel Aguirre Independent scholar, Madrid, Spain Simon Bacon Poznan, ´ Poland Martina Bartlett University of Winchester, Winchester, UK Clive Bloom Hull University, Hull, UK Naomi Simone Borwein The University of Windsor, Windsor, ON, Canada Nicola Bowring Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK Cleo Cameron University of Northampton, Northampton, UK Miranda Corcoran University College Cork, Cork, Ireland Maria Giakaniki Athens, Greece Holly Hirst University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK David Annwn Jones The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK Charlie Jorge Universidad Camilo José Cela, Madrid, Spain Kaley Kramer Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK Fanny Lacôte Oxford University, Oxford, UK Peter N. Lindfield Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK Cecilia Lindskog Whiteley Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden Roger Luckhurst Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK J. S. Mackley University of Northampton, Northampton, UK Kirstin A. Mills Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia Eric Parisot Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia xiii

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Joan Passey University of Bristol, Bristol, UK Madeline Potter University of York, York, UK; Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, England James Rattue Godalming, UK Beatriz Sánchez-Santos Independent scholars, Madrid, Spain Robert K. Shepherd Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain Dale Townshend Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK Marta Vega Trijueque Madrid, España Giles Whiteley Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Joakim Wrethed Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

List of Figures

Shakespeare, Influence and Appropriation Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Richard Westall, ‘Brutus and the Ghost of Caesar’ (1802), engraving by Edward Scriven. Image in the public domain, reproduced from commons.wikimedia.org Henry Fuseli, ‘Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus and the Ghost’ (1796), engraving by Robert Thew. Image in the public domain, reproduced from metmuseum.org

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Jacobean Drama and the Macabre Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Michael Wolgemut, ‘Dance of Death (CCLXIIIIv)’ (1493), illustration from Liber Chronicarum [Nuremberg Chronicle]. In the public domain Jan Cornelisz. van ‘t Woudt, ‘Theatrum Anatomicum’ (1610), engraving by Willem Swanenburgh. Photograph of engraving by Museum Boerhaave. In the public domain

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Ann Radcliffe and the French Revolution Fig. 1

Graph of the number of British gothic novels in French translations and French gothic novels published per year, 1789–1822

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Metaphor and Revivalist Architecture at Strawberry Hill Fig. 1

Fig. 2

J.H. Müntz, East view of Strawberry Hill near Twickenham in Middlesex, 1758. SH Views M92 no. 5 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT) Horace Walpole, Front of Strawberry Hill to the Garden as it was in 1747, before it was altered, and as altered. 49 2523, f. 121,11 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT)

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LIST OF FIGURES

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Fig. 4 Fig. 5 Fig. 6 Fig. 7

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John Carter, The Great North Bedchamber. 33 30 Copy 11 Folio, f. 204 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT) James Gibbs, The Temple of Liberty, Stowe, Buckinghamshire. 1741 (© Peter N. Lindfield) John Carter, The Library at Strawberry Hill. 49 3582. f. 74 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT) Paul Sandby, Strawberry Hill. c.1769. SH Views Sa5 no. 2 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT) John Chute, Design for the Gallery & Round Tower at Strawberry-Hill. c.1759. 49 3490 Folio, f. 17 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT) Screen of Prince Arthur’s tomb in Winchester Cathedral, in Francis Sandford, A Genealogical History of The Kings of England (1677), p. 447. Quarto 49 581 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT) John Carter, View in Red Hall, at Strawberry Hill. 33 30 Copy 11 Folio, f. 24 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT) John Chute, Design for the Library Presses at Strawberry Hill. 1753. 49 3490 Folio, f. 5 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT) Wenceslaus Hollar, Detail of the Screen at Old St Paul’s Cathedral, London, in William Dugdale, The History of St Paul’s Cathedral in London (1658), p. 168. DA687 S14 D8 1658 + Oversize. Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art Chimney Piece of the Holbein Chamber at Strawberry Hill, in Horace Walpole, A Description of the Villa of Mr Horace Walpole (1784). 49 3582 Folio (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT) Tomb of Archbishop Warham, in John Dart, The History and Antiquities of the Cathedral Church of Canterbury (1726). From 49 3582, f. 201 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT) Tomb of John of Eltham, Earl of Cornwall, in John Dart Westmonasterium. Or the History and Antiquities of the Abbey Church of St. Peters Westminster (1723), p. 106. Folio 646 742 D25 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT) Richard Bentley, Library Chimneypiece at Strawberry Hill. 1754 (© Peter N. Lindfield) Thomas and Paul Sandby, The Gallery at Strawberry Hill. 1781. D.1837–1904 (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

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The Nightmare and Proto-Vampires Fig. 1 Fig. 2

The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli painted in 1781 ‘The sleep of reason produces monsters’ by Francisco Goya (1797)

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From Horace Walpole to the Divine Marquis de Sade Clive Bloom

The term ‘gothic’ (spelt in numerous ways) as a designation for an art movement goes back to the eighteenth century when British antiquarians became dissatisfied with the fashion for neo-classical architecture and all things Italianate and classical. Instead, they searched for the ruins of ‘Celtic’ history in iron-age barrows and in the pre-Roman ‘druidic’ grandeur of Stonehenge. In the eighteenth century to be called a goth was to be called a barbarian lacking cultured taste, but some wealthy aristocratic eccentrics linked the term to an emerging individuality based on emotion rather than reason. This select group of aristocrats looked for a new way to express themselves in bricks and mortar which celebrated a past untainted by classical values. They found this not only in ancient ruins, themselves now seen as sublime and ethereal, but also in the ‘gothic’ medieval architecture of the middle ages. Horace Walpole, youngest son of the first British prime minister, Robert Walpole, built the confection of Strawberry Hill House, a gleaming white castle on the banks of the Thames, and created new words to describe the experience of gothic lifestyle such as ‘gloomth’ for its interior decoration and ‘serendipity’ for its eclectic taste. The house was a sensation and started a craze for gothic design that carried on into the nineteenth century and affected every type of building from the Palace of Westminster to Tower Bridge, from the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool to Tate Modern in London and from the humblest home to restored churches, furniture, artworks and imperial C. Bloom (B) Hull University, Hull, UK

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_1

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symbolism to be found from India to Australia. The gothic lays claim to being the British style, standing for Christianity, democracy, imperial order and Victorian values. Nevertheless, there was another side to the gothic imagination. Walpole’s house and its armoury produced nightmares and his novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764) was the first truly gothic novel with supernatural, sensational and Shakespearean elements challenging the emergent fiction of social relationships. The novel’s themes of violence, tragedy, death, imprisonment, castle battlements, dungeons, fair maidens, secrets, ghosts and prophecies led to a new genre incorporating prose, theatre, poetry and painting, influencing creative minds from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to the Marquis de Sade and from Friedrich Schiller to Amadeus Mozart, whilst opening up a whole world of imagination for entrepreneurial female writers such as Mary Shelley, Joanna Baillie (the playwright) and Ann Radcliffe (the JK Rowling of her day), whose immensely popular books led to the intense inner landscapes of the Bronte sisters. Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), created a new gothic: atheistic, decadent, perverse, necrophilic and hellish. The book was banned as blasphemous for over a hundred years, but its influence was everywhere. The social upheaval of the French Revolution and the emergence of the Romantic movement with its more intense (and often) Godless self-absorption led the gothic into darker corners of the human experience with a greater emphasis on the inner life, hallucination, delusion, drug addiction, mental instability, perversion and death, and the emerging science of psychology. The intensity of the German experience led to an emphasis on doubles and schizophrenic behaviour, ghosts, spirits, mesmerism, the occult and hell. From the twin sources of British and German romantic neuroses emerged the works of American gothic writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce and H. P. Lovecraft, and the French gothic of Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant and Gaston Le Roux. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), written right at the end of the nineteenth century gave the world the modern vampire, a character both repulsive and compelling, but sufficiently comic to appear in Sesame Street. Dracula remains a bestseller. By the twentieth century the Gothic was a world-wide phenomenon, influencing the film industry from Expressionism to Italian gialli and to be found both at the centre of American and European culture as well as influencing the emergent film industries of Japan and Korea. Gothic culture influences detective fiction, television programmes, Cosplay events, fashion catwalks, music styles, musical theatre, ghostly tourism and video gaming, as well as being constantly reinvented on the Internet. It is no longer a barbarian pursuit, but the longest lasting influence in popular culture, reworked and re-experienced by each new generation looking for meaning in a world that devalues the individual. So, what is the gothic sensibility? A minor novel of 1806 gives a hint.

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In the west of England are yet to be seen the ruins of Berry Pomeroy Castle, formerly a place of great strength, but now, like the proud ancient possessors, almost forgotten, and daily mingling with the dust. Many are the dark deeds said to have been perpetrated within its walls, as the yet blood-stained stones and flitting shades that nightly hover over their sad remains, entombed amongst the ruins, or buried without sepulchral rites, are sad mementos of [sic]. Often do their wailing shrieks vex the nocturnal breeze, that else would sleep in the quiet amidst the shady branches of the surrounding woods. But more horrible than all, dwell on the affrighted air the dreadful groans of the blood-stained Sir Ethelred de Fortebrand, cut off by the just decree of an avenging Power, in the prime of his years, by the keen dart of the assassin. Soon as the vapours of the night condense upon the earth, appears his melancholy form wandering amidst the ruins, under whose cumbrous weight, in the silent vaults beneath the chapel, are his murdered remains. Close by his side, condemned for ever to wander on the earth, restless and miserable, stalks the shade of the guilty Lady Elinor de Fortebrand: and when the gale brings on its broad pinions the hollow sounds of the distant Abbey clock of Ford, when it tolls for midnight prayer, then do the furies arise, armed with writhing serpents, whose death-darting tongues glisten with poisonous venom, and whose pestiferous breath instantly blasts each herb and flower: with these they lash with horrible yells the shrieking shade of the Lady Elinor, and then lay her beside the murdered Sir Ethelred, on sharp quick-piercing brambles. Thus is her guilty spirit condemned to endless tortures, the due punishment for her horrible deeds. Silent, solitary, and restless, glides among the hanging woods, the pale, ghastly form of the Abbot Bertrand, the cruel and deadly instrument of the Lady Elinor de Fortebrand, cut off, when he least expected it, by a most horrible death, the just reward of his atrocious actions. (Chapter 1. The Castle of Berry Pomeroy)

Thus begins The Castle of Berry Pomeroy published in two volumes in 1806 by a writer calling himself Edward Montague, the author of other works including poetry and the gothic sounding The Demon of Sicily (1807). The Castle of Berry Pomeroy is a novel telling the tale of the inhabitants of an actual romantic ruin associated with ghostly happenings in South Devon. The author himself remains as mysterious as his book. The frontispiece for the second volume attributes to him a whole novel published in 1807, a year after the first volume was itself published, implying either an editorial mistake or suggesting the author poured out such books at an alarming rate. It certainly seems clear the name is a nom de plume disguising a writer who probably wrote for money and had the pleasure of being one of the first professional writers of fiction. The author may indeed have been more than one person whose combined talents speeded the production process.

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Either way, the book was produced by James Fletcher Hughes for Lane, Newman and Co of Leadenhall Street in London, the important sounding company credited with printing books for the Minerva Press, notorious for its output of sleazy pornography and cheap gothic plagiarisms written by the likes of ‘Mrs Edgeworth’ and ‘Mary Ann Radcliffe’. The press was created by William Lane around 1790 and included a circulating library of the books for which were mainly written by women: Regina Maria Roche; Mrs Eliza Parsons; Eleanor Sleath. Six of the seven horrid novels that Jane Austen includes in Northanger Abbey (completed 1803 and published 1817) were Minerva titles. This did not mean that Austen disparaged gothic novels, in fact, almost certainly quite the opposite if hints are taken as confirmation of an ironic embarrassment. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works [says one character], and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again;—I remember finishing it in two days—my hair standing on end the whole time.

Such sentimental gothic writers flourished until the early nineteenth century when Lane’s partner Anthony King Newman took over the business and such publications fell away in interest until the press ceased production during the 1820s when Newman renamed the company AK Newman & Co. The age of quickly written anonymous gothic sagas was coming to an end, but not before another publisher saw an opportunity to re-publish The Castle of Berry Pomeroy as a smutty read, something never suggested in the original. Pornographic publisher William Dugdale reissued the book around 1841 adding lurid and irrelevant illustrations. This is typical of much gothic writing, plagiarised, rewritten and adapted and with new hands working the text, the gothic popular novel was never the possession of one writer. John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and Frankenstein (1818) were rewritten several times by other hands, both for the theatre, magic lantern shows, serialisations and, in the twentieth century, for the cinema. The Castle of Berry Pomeroy is typical of the many hackneyed gothic romances produced from the 1790s to the 1830s, when the taste for medieval monstrosities (but not the medieval itself) had fizzled out, only to give rise to a new and more fearful psychological gothic and a taste for German supernaturalism and conspiracy. Of, perhaps four to five thousand gothic novels of which we have only the title, some few hundred still exist in readable form and of those less than a handful are still available commercially outside of research libraries where mouldering copies await a very occasional scholarly reader. Frederick Frank in 1987 had sourced 449 titles.1 He followed earlier researchers such as Jakob Brauschli whose Der Englische Schauerroman um 1800 was published in 1928, Montague Summers important, A Gothic Bibliography published in 1941 and, Maurice Levy’s Bibliographie Chronologique du Roman ‘Gothique’ from 1968. Others such as Michael Sadlier, Christopher

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Frayling and David Punter (and numerous modern scholars) have continued an archeological bibliophilic tradition that has unearthed much of this partially lost body of writing. Nevertheless, Summers’s book remains the classic account in English on the subject. Interestingly the evidence suggests that gothic literature was a democratic form allowing women to become some of the earliest professional authors. Apart from Ann Radcliffe, the first and perhaps most famous international writer and Mary Shelley who certainly had the greatest longevity, there is Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron published in 1778, itself a homage and answer to Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Eliza Parsons whose Mysterious Warning was published in 1796 and The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) which were favourites with a wide readership of the circulating libraries; also included were Eleanor Sleath’s German tale, The Orphan of the Rhine from 1798, Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya or the Moor, a story of inter-racial desire and Satanism published in 1806 as well as Joanna Baillie’s little performed, but avariciously read dramas produced between 1798 and 1836 in which the gothic is the epicentre of social, moral and historical dysfunction. Greatest of all the more minor writers was Regina Maria Roche whose publications such as Clermont were as popular as anything by Radcliffe. Indeed Roche’s third novel, Children of the Abbey published in 1796 ran through numerous editions right up to 1832 and was said to have temporarily eclipsed Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) in sales and circulation. Roche’s popularity continued amongst younger readers until the brink of the First World War, after which she seems to have been almost completely expunged from popular memory. Roche was one of the Minerva Press’s most significant authors. Only four or five novels and one short story from the period are now generally read amongst English speakers: The Castle of Otranto by Walpole; The Monk by Lewis; Frankenstein by Shelley, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Maturin, John Polidori’s invention of the literary vampire in his short tale The Vampyre and the oriental novel Vathek (published in French 1782; republished in English 1986) by the eccentric and ridiculously wealthy William Beckford—a poor harvest. The history of gothic sensibility required dedicated literary archeologists to catalogue and then revive a genre that was immensely popular in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth; the fact that the genre mutated into something with tenuous links to its origins after the French Revolution obscured the writers of this early period and put all of them (with the exception of Frankenstein) in the shadow of later ‘horror’, ‘shudder’, psychological and melodramatic domestic gothic. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the very notion of gothic become a word to avoid in print as hackneyed and out of date, whilst later authors actually retained or developed the tropes of terror writing invented by their literary antecedents. The gothic in its original flourish of over seventy years was able to produce a remarkable variety in its writings and allow mutations to occur whilst retaining the basic building blocks of the genre. Horace Walpole’s creation of the

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castle mystery in The Castle of Otranto (the first true gothic tale) gave rise to stories of other castles, of dungeons and secret passages, trapdoors and torture chambers, moving portraits and bleeding statues, or ruins, animated skeletons, curses, prophesies, murder and retribution. The Monk by Lewis introduced ‘German’ thrills to the genre including scheming monks, cloistered and sadistic nuns, erotic supernaturalism, necrophilia, the occult and Satanism. Beckford’s Vathek introduced the exotic terrors of oriental misdeeds, the first mad scientist in Vathek’s scheming mother the necromancer Carathis, and above all invented that black humour that infuses some of the best horror tales. Polidori’s The Vampyre took the disdainful aristocratic predator out of the Middle European farmyard and into the centre of aristocratic society: bloodsucking, parasitic and mesmeric. Frankenstein brought the scientific world, and more essentially the contemporary, within the gothic purview. Melmoth the Wanderer introduced the horrors of bureaucracy and continued a fascination with Spain and Catholicism that is present in modern films such as Luis de la Madrid’s The Nun (2018). German, and Polish writers brought continental themes of Illuminati and conspiracy as well as a surreal supernaturalism quite foreign to British writers, although quickly adapted to British taste by writers such as Lewis. The German version of the gothic came out of a fascination with its British cousin and was confirmed when August Burger’s Lenore (1796) was translated into English and had an impact out of proportion to its quality as literature. The poem fertilised a British tradition of terror poems and tales that was quickly becoming barren. Nevertheless, the German gothic, as it emerged, was not simply a copy of British attitudes and tropes, although both took their origins from Shakespeare. For the German speaking heartland of Europe, the genre had philosophic and nationalistic importance as a unifying agent of volkische sentiment, culminating in the first twenty years of the nineteenth century between Goethe’s first part of Faust (final version 1808) and the folk tales of the Grimm brothers: Die Kinder-und Hausmarschen gesammelt durch die Bruder Grimm (1812). The German ‘horror’ novel or Schauerroman may be neatly divided into the Ritterroman or novel of chivalrous knights, the Rauberroman, or novel of bandits and heroic outlaws and the Geisterroman or novel of spirits and the supernatural. In practice the three incarnations were often combined. German novels quickly influenced both the style and the readership of British gothicism. It was Friedrich Schiller who introduced the noble bandit in the play The Robbers (1780), a tale of mistrust and murder but also of nationalistic revolutionary fervour ending in self sacrificial martyrdom. It was followed in 1795 by his strange and awkward Geisterseher or The Ghost-seer, a book of hauntings, secret societies and demonic Armenians, told in the spirit of the debate regarding spirits and visitations taken up by Emmanual Kant and in which the nature of uncanny presences and ‘disembodied centres of conscience’ were discussed.2 The peculiar ‘dialogue’ of philosopher and artist is further

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confused by the presence of Swedenborgian theology, our hero, ‘locked up in his fantasy world;…a stranger in the real one’.3 This is one key to German gothic, a confusion between reality and dream or hallucination, however many cabbalistic necromancers, secret societies or rationalised explanations might follow. Whilst the full panoply of gothic tropes might be utilised In the work of E. T. A. Hoffman we are introduced to the powerful concept of an unstable and constantly shifting uncanniness of doubles, problematized identities and automata, taken to extremes of unresolvability in what might be called magic realism. The tradition of this complex confusion continues in Gustav Meyrink’s Der Golem ( in book form 1915), Werner Krause’s Das Kabinet Der Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari [1919]) and in Karl Dreyer’s film The Vampyre (1931). The attitudes present in purely German literature were also invasive as might be seen in such as in the mysterious Polish author Jan Potocki whose Tales from the Saragossa Manuscript (Ten Days in the Life of Alphonse Van Worden) includes a strange manuscript describing a haunted inn and a gallows tree which becomes the setting for an erotically charged tale of demonism, exoticism and transsexualism. The most famous of the Schauerromantik novelists was Alois Gleich who used the pseudonym ‘Dellarosa’ and wrote books with exciting titles such as Die Totenfackel: oder, DieHohle der Siebenschlafer (The Torch of Death; or the Seven Sleepers) and Udo der Stahlerne: oder, die Ruinenvon Drudenstein (Udo the man of Steel or, the Ruins of Drudenstein), but any books sounding German were eagerly taken up in Britain. There was The Necromancer, or the Tale of the Black Forest (1794) by Peter Teuthold, supposedly ‘founded on facts’ and published in translation by William Lane at the Minerva Press. Teuthold may disguise the name of Karl Friedrich Kahlert who wrote under the name ‘Lorenz Flammenberg’ and who was further confused with the translator Peter Wills, a writer influential on Matthew Lewis. Either way the book is a long red herring in which the occult is finally rationalised. There is Carl Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries translated into the English title by Peter Wills also for the Minerva Press and taken from a book supposedly written by a ‘Marquis de Grosse’, who had himself plagiarised a work by Cajetan Tschink. The novel includes pages of pure Radcliffe-like thrills with more ominous passages such as ‘a spectre haunts me every where [sic]’ (chapter III) These novels purport to offer more than they deliver. The painter Johann Heinrich Fussli, was a Swiss German destined to become a clergyman, but who swapped his clerical cloth for a painter’s smock, Anglicised his name to Fuseli and settled in England in 1779, displaying his painting The Nighmare to great critical applause at the Royal Academy in 1782 and continuing in a career that included pornography. Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni, performed in 1787, has a version of Walpole’s ‘living’ stone statue, as its climax when Don Giovanni is carried off to the hell surrounded by demons, in an ending that is pure retributive gothic morality.

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If German novels were lacking, British authors filled the gap with Germanic sounding titles such as Eliza Parson’s The Castle of Wolfenbach: a German Story and Eleanor Sleath’s The Orphan of the Rhine (1798), one of Jane Austen’s ‘horrid’ (that is, excitingly and titillating) gothic reads (the above books by Parsons, Teuthold and Grosse) included in Northanger Abbey. Yet the reach of German gothic sensibility was wider and lasted longer than the purely British tradition with which it melded; in America, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), by its very title gives away its German influences, and Edgar Allan Poe would take and mould German tropes of mental disintegration and work then anew for an international readership; Dr Heinrich Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter (Straw-headed Peter [1844]) with its original ‘pretty stories and funny pictures’ remains a disturbing classic of the more bizarre limits of children’s literature. Nevertheless, British writing remained the original and dominant strain of the gothic throughout the period. Without Ann Radcliffe, the author of the most significant gothic titles of the eighteenth century, including The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), we would not have Wuthering Heights (1848) or the dark vampiric romances which are so popular in modern bookshops. Although eclipsed as a writer by Jane Austen, Radcliffe’s influence was universal and central to sentimental fiction throughout the nineteenth century, all her works devoured by both sexes and her scenarios relentlessly copied or pastiched, in books like The Monk where her erotic (but very conservative) bedroom scene from The Mysteries of Udolpho is converted into the riotous appearance of a love sick spectral nun—the corpse bride.. In Radcliffe we see the origin of the thriller (with its fear, anticipation and denouements) as well as the novel of female sentiment, in Charles Maturin we find a writer who anticipates the hell of institutional bureaucracy (as was recognised by George Orwell) and in Shelley we find the beginnings of science fiction. Repetition with difference is everything and so Shelley copied Lewis’s Satanic dream sequence after Frankenstein has created his creature. The genre was, however, vulnerable to hostile satire. The New Monk by ‘JR’ satirised The Monk’s extremes by turning the tale into a farcical tales on modern manners. Yet it was the correspondent ‘Jacobin’ (possibly Coleridge) writing in the Monthly Review of 19 August, 1797 who satirised the Radcliffe School of terror (and by implication the whole genre) to best effect. In the first place, then, trembling reader, I would advise you to construct an old castle, formerly of great magnitude and extent, built in the Gothic manner, with a great number of hanging towers, turrets and pinnacles. One half, at least, of it must be in ruins; dreadful chasms and gaping crevices must be hid only by the clinging ivy; the doors must be so old, and so little used to open, as to grate tremendously on the hinges; and there must be in every passage an echo, and as many reverberations as there are partitions. As to the furniture, it is absolutely necessary that it should be nearly as old as the house, and in a more decayed

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state, if a more decayed state be possible. The principal rooms must be hung with pictures, of which the damps have very nearly effaced the colours; only you must preserve such a degree of likeness in one two of them, as to incline your heroine to be very much affected by the sight of them, and to imagine that she has seen a face, or faces, very like them, or very like something else, but where, or when, she cannot just now remember. It will be necessary, also, that one of those very old and very decayed portraits shall seem to frown most cruelly, whilst another seems to smile most lovingly.

Great attention must be paid to the tapestry hangings. They are to be very old, and tattered, and blown about with the wind. There is a great deal in the wind. Indeed, it is one of the principal objects of terror, for it may be taken for almost any terrific object, from a banditti of cut-throats to a single ghost. The tapestry, therefore, must give signs of moving, so as to make the heroine believe, there is something behind it, although, not being at that time very desirous to examine, she concludes very naturally and logically, that it can be nothing but the wind. This same wind is of infinite service to our modern castle-builders. Sometimes it whistles, and then it shows how sound may be conveyed through the crevices of a Baron’s castle. Sometimes it rushes, and then there is reason to believe the Baron’s great grandfather does not lie quiet in his grave; and sometimes it howls, and, if accompanied with rain, generally induces some weary traveller, perhaps a robber, and perhaps a lover, or both, to take up their residence in this very same castle where virgins, and virtuous wives, were locked up before the invention of a habeas corpus. It is, indeed, not wonderful, that so much use is made of the wind, for it is the principal ingredient in that sentimentality of constitution, to which romances are admirabl[y] adapted. Having thus provided such a decayed stock of furniture as may be easily affected by the wind, you must take care that the battlements and towers are remarkably populous in owls and bats. The hooting of the one, and the flitting of the other, are excellent engines in the system of terror, particularly if the candle goes out, which is very often the case in damp caverns. And the mention of caverns brings me to the essential qualities inherent in a castle. The rooms upstairs may be just habitable, and no more; but the principal incidents must be carried on in subterraneous passages. These, in general, wind round the whole extent of the building; but that is not very material, as the heroine never goes through above half without meeting with a door, which she has neither strength nor resolution to open, although she has found a rusty key, very happily fitted to as rusty a lock, and would give the world to know what it leads to, and yet she can give no reason for her curiosity. The building now being completely finished, and furnished with all desirable imperfections, the next and only requisite is a heroine, with all the weakness of body and mind that appertains to her sex; but, endowed with all the curiosity of a spy, and all the courage of a troop of horse. Whatever

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she hears, sees or thinks of, that is horrible and terrible, she must enquire into it again and again. All alone, for she cannot prevail on the timid Janetta to go with her a second time; all alone she sets out, in the dead of night, when nothing but the aforesaid owls and bats are hooting and flitting, to resolve the horrid mystery of the moving tapestry, which threw her into a swoon the preceding night, and in which she knows her fate is awfully involved, though she cannot tell why. With cautious tread, and glimmering taper, she proceeds to descend a long flight of steps, which bring her to a door she had not observed before. It is opened with great difficulty; but alas! A rush of wind puts out the glimmering taper, and whilst Matilda, Gloriana, Rosalba, or any other name, is deliberating whether she shall proceed or return, without knowing how to do either, a groan is heard, a second groan, and a fearful crash. A dimness now comes over her eyes (which in the dark must be terrible) and she swoons away. How long she may have remained in this swoon, no one can tell; but when she awakes, the sun peeps through the crevices, for all subterraneous passages must have crevices, and shows her such a collection of skulls and bones as would do credit to a parish burying-ground. She now finds her way back, determined to make a farther search next night, which she accomplishes by means of a better light, and behold! Having gained the fatal spot where the mystery is concealed, the tapestry moves again! Assuming courage, she boldly lifts up a corner, but immediately lets it drop, a cold sweat pervades her whole body, and she sinks to the ground; after having discovered behind this dreadful tapestry, the tremendous solution of all her difficulties, the awful word HONORIFICABILITATUDINIBUSQUE!!! Mr. Editor, if thy soul is not harrowed up, I am glad to escape from this scene of horror, and am, Your humble servant, A JACOBIN NOVELIST.4 The acidity of the critique may have been acute and it was long remembered, but it did little to diminish the public’s taste for the gothic which survived quite happily, especially with the young, Lewis writing The Monk when he was nineteen and Frankenstein being composed when Shelley was also nineteen; her husband Percy Shelley wrote two gothic novellettes: Zastrozzi written whilst still at Eton at the age of seventeen, but published in 1810 when he was at Oxford University and St Irvyne published whilst at university). George Soane, the dramatist son of the neo-classical architect John Soane, was twenty two when he began the serialisation of the gothic tale The Stranger Knight (1812 to 1815) for the Theatrical Inquisitor, a journal he edited. Thomas Love Peacock found the whole kit and caboodle of gothicism an excuse for a good laugh in Nightmare Abbey (also published by the Minerva Press in 1817), pastiching the revival of taste for Walpole’s writing in the early nineteenth century.

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MARIONETTA

My cousin Scythrop has of late had an air of mystery about him, which gives me great uneasiness. MR FLOSKY That is strange: nothing is so becoming to a man as an air of mystery. Mystery is the very key-stone of all that is beautiful in poetry, all that is sacred in faith, and all that is recondite in transcendental psychology. I am writing a ballad which is all mystery; it is ‘such stuff as dreams are made of’, and is, indeed, stuff made of a dream; for, last night I fell asleep as usual over a book, and had a vision of pure reason. I composed five hundred lines in my sleep (chapter VII). The ability to adapt to changing social mores over a considerable period kept the flow of books going and the security and employment of numerous writers from successful entrepreneurs like Ann Radcliffe to single book geniuses like Mary Shelley (who could never reach the heights of her first book) to humble scribes whose real names are lost to us. Here all the tropes are invented and exhausted from the mysterious stranger, to the forbidding wood, the lurking banditti to the sky alight with lightning bolts (the sure sign of human distress). New tropes emerged such as the double and the ventriloquist, the lonely inn, the shadow and the heavenly music, the burial vault and the corpse bride, all used and reused until near exhaustion and inevitable re-invention for another generation; Fuseli’s painting, The Nightmare is probably the most reused picture in modern history, cropping up in copycat efforts, literary references, satirical pamphlets and twentieth-century films. Repetition reinforced the genre for succeeding generations but once the language had been repeated and not altered it become hackneyed and clichéd and it could not be sustained. The Castle of Berry Pomeroy (which contains almost every generic trope) had already gained the limit of acceptability with its character names borrowed from Walpole and its scenarios borrowed from Radcliffe and with its tropes trotted out pat for a jaded readership. By 1806, when the book was published it had, nevertheless, gained one important thing over Walpole’s original effort in The Castle of Otranto. In Walpole’s preface to the first edition, so fearful of the reception of his work on the educated, and largely classically minded middle-class and aristocratic patrons of the work, he had to create an elaborate charade whereby he pretended that the work was a translation of an Italian original written at the time of the Crusades and lately discovered in ‘the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England’, the manuscript having been printed ‘in the year 1529’. This new translation offered to the public as an authentic relic was supposedly created by Walpole’s alter ego, ‘William Marshal, gent[leman]’. To avoid the accusation of vulgarity (that is debasement of contemporary ideas of the domestic, social and rational proprieties) Walpole is forced to offer and elaborate excuse for his new form of ‘terror’ writing.

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The solution of the author’s motives is however offered as a mere conjecture. Whatever his views were, or whatever effects the execution of them might have, his work can only be laid before the public at present as a matter of entertainment. Even as such, some apology for it is necessary. Miracles, visions, necromancy, dreams, and other preternatural events, are exploded now even from romances. That was not the case when our author wrote; much less when the story itself is supposed to have happened. Belief in every kind of prodigy was so established in those dark ages, that an author would not be faithful to the manners of the times who should omit all mention of them. He is not bound to believe them himself, but he must re-present his actors as believing them. If this air of the miraculous is excused, the reader will find nothing else unworthy of his perusal. Allow the possibility of the facts, and all the actors comport themselves as persons would do in their situation. There is no bombast, no similies [sic], flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions. Everything tends directly to the catastrophe. Never is the reader’s attention relaxed. The rules of the drama are almost observed throughout the conduct of the piece. The characters are well drawn, and still better maintained. Terror, the author’s principal engine, prevents the story from ever languishing; and it is so often contrasted by pity, that the mind is kept up in a constant vicissitude of interesting passions.

In his preface to the second edition in which he unveils himself as the actual author of a work of pure fiction—a romance-, he explains the rationale behind the ruse he perpetuated in the first edition, It was an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometime has been, copied with success. Invention has not been wanting; but the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life. But if in the latter species Nature has cramped imagination, she did but take her revenge, having been totally excluded from old romances. The actions, sentiments, conversations, of the heroes and heroines of ancient days were as unnatural as the machines employed to put them in motion. The author of the following pages thought it possible to reconcile the two kinds. Desirous of leaving the powers of fancy at liberty...

Thus Walpole created a new type of hybrid fiction, for which there was no real name. By the time of The Castle of Berry Pomeroy, the publisher may proclaim without fear of contradiction that it is ‘a novel ’. This revolution in thinking allowed to gothic form to legitimise itself, but it brought to the genre accompanying dangers of imaginative exhaustion. Indeed, since its invention by Walpole the gothic form, which at its heart encapsulated social, familial, imaginative, religious and often sexual disturbance, had to be rigorously defended by its advocates, against the hostile accusations of critics who

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simply saw impropriety, especially so in the case of The Monk, which became a cause celebre for both sides as morality in the later Georgian era became more conservative. It was the publication of The Monk that was said to have pushed Ann Radcliffe into rejecting the genre that had made her the most famous author in Europe and that led to her retirement, which the reading public interpreted as her being driven insane by the genre she helped to create. It was Radcliffe, herself who realising the inherent moral conundrum posed by putting her heroines in mortal and moral peril and who theorised the first definition of the genre in which she excelled: a conservative, recuperative and above all Christian moral universe where her female versions of John Bunyan’s Christian could face deadly perils and escape with their virtue intact. In The Supernatural in Poetry published three years after her death in 1826, she justifies her form of ‘terror’ writing as giving the frisson of anticipation without its dangers and in this she followed Edmund Burke in his earlier pursuit of the sublime (a word she uses continuously), but with the caveat that the dangers of extreme sublimity (whose logical end is madness) may be recuperated with Christian faith; in contrast ‘horror’ writing froze the blood, disabled action and defeated moral sensibility. Radcliffe’s embattled heroinesin-distress are always central to her vision and her pages, villains are secondary characters who menace but do no harm; her young women have to encounter veiled portraits, secret letter and uncanny music, imprisonment, secret passageways, bedroom encounters and mental torture, but they keep safe, ironically, precisely because their mental universe is completely prepared for the gothic, a milieu in which they thrive, rather than the rational world outside from which they are excluded. Nevertheless, the publication of her essay came too late to save the genre from becoming more daring. The Monk heralded what Radcliffe feared—the actual limit of moral propriety which it superseded. The gothic novel split between the conservatives and the radicals. The radicals embraced a world where moral certitude had receded and religious belief or common sense were no guarantors of a happy ending. The gothic did not revert to tragedy, it reverted to nihilism, its strong medicine reinforced with images of a Godless world at the mercy of perverse desire, incest, murder, occultism, hallucination, monstrosity and atheism; ‘there is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself’ as the Abbot admonishes the heroine in De Sade’s Justine (1791). It was a world that anticipated the actual terror of the French Revolution and fed from the new emphasis on a Godless libertarian democracy of extreme taste. This is what later scared Mary Shelley into re-editing the first edition of Frankenstein, which itself was nevertheless, well received by critics such as Walter Scott, but which hid the author’s guilt over the influence of both her parents’ anarchism, her husband’s revolutionary and atheistic politics and the incestuous ideas around family relationships which concealed the worry over her own life choices; Mary Shelley remained mentally conflicted over these aspects of her novel even after the publication of the revised 1838 edition.

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Critics continued to worry about the excesses of a genre that dwelt increasingly on marginal and threatening subject matter, matter that at times appeared far too jacobinical. One critic, however, took the opposite view and he certainly would be truly authoritative on the subject. Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade’s little known piece of literary criticism ‘Reflections on the Novel’, which he aimed as an answer to a rival and in which he attempted, by looking at the modern history of English literature, to come to a definition of modern writing. In so doing he makes much of the new gothic. Perhaps at this point we ought to analyse these new novels in which sorcery and phantasmagoria constitute practically the entire merit: Foremost among them I will place The Monk, which is superior in all respects to the strange flights of Mrs. Radcliffe’s brilliant imagination, But that would take us too far afield. Let us concur that this kind of fiction, whatever one may think of it, is assuredly not without merit: ‘twas the inevitable result of the revolutionary shocks which all of Europe has suffered. For anyone familiar with the full range of misfortunes wherewith evildoers can beset mankind, the novel became as difficult to write as monotonous to read. There was not a man alive who had not experienced in the short span of four or five years more misfortunes that the most celebrated novelist could portray in a century. Thus, to compose works of interest, one had to call upon the aid of hell itself, and to find in the world of makebelieve things wherewith one was fully familiar merely by delving into man’s daily life in this age of iron. Ah! But how many disadvantages there are in this manner of writing! The author of The Monk has avoided them no more than has Mrs. Radcliffe. Here, there are perforce two possibilities: either one resorts increasingly to wizardry – in which case the reader’s interest soon flags – or one maintains a veil of secrecy, which leads to a frightful lack of verisimilitude.5

De Sade’s point is that the gothic, in attempting to chronicle the perverse and its relationship with the jaded imagination has missed ‘the verisimilitude’ (a word he repeats numerous times) needed to create works that accurately record the real world and its ‘gothic’ heart. De Sade’s Justine was the only novel he managed to get published in his lifetime, and it records exactly what happens to virtue in a world wholly organised by the rule of Nature’s laws, devoid of God and salvation and divine retribution. The book ends with no happy ever after, but climaxes (literally) as the heroine is transfixed by a lightning bolt. This is Gothicism almost devoid of gothic tropes (there are some very wicked monks). It influenced a generation of younger writers including Lewis, and I suggest, Shelley. One critical review of one of De Sade’s tales in Eugenie and Franval noted its ‘tissue of horrors’ and elaborated on its, Nor should the reader believe for a moment that a single crime for every story is sufficient for the author, for such is not the case; he crams them in …. In one tale, a woman is violated by her son, she kills him, subsequently she sends her own mother to the gallows and marries her father. In another we observe a father who raises his daughter according to the most despicable principles, lives

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in sin with her, persuades her to poison her mother, etc. And these are examples of what the author is so bold as to term ‘perfecting the art of writing’.6

Such comments that are not far off reflecting on the direction of gothic writing in general, especially of the European variety. More significantly, De Sade’s The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, chronicles that gothic coupling of desire and disgust in a universe of perverse cravings, paedohilia, coprophilia, coercion, torture and murder which is the normal fare of the strange games played out in the gothic confines of the Chateau de Silling, where every crime is permitted and none punished. The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom is one of the greatest gothic novels, unpublished in the age of gothic ascendency. In the complex chronicle of ritualised and theatrical debasements the novel described in exact detail the ultimate direction of all gothic books—the disintegration of the body at the behest (supernatural, psychological or physical) of uncontrollable and all powerful forces, or indeed the forces merely repressed in human desire bereft of moral rectitude. In any other case, shame would act as a deterrent and incline him away from the vices to which his mind advises him to surrender, but here that possibility has been eliminated altogether: ‘tis the first token of shame he has obliterated, the initial call he has definitively silenced, and from the state in which one is when one has ceased to blush, to that other state wherein one adores everything that causes others to blush, there is no more, nor less, than a single step. All that before affected one disagreeably, now encountering an otherwise prepared soul, is metamorphosed into pleasure, and from this moment onward, whatever recalls the new state one has adopted can henceforth only be voluptuous. (Chapter, The 23rd Day)

Just before this passage, in an anecdote regarding himself, De Sade has one of his participants ruminate on the disintegration of the body, Nothing more[is] logical than to adore degradation and to reap delight from scorn. … One loves to hear oneself called what one wishes only to merit being, and it is truly impossible to guess how far a man may go in this direction, provided he be ashamed of nothing. ‘Tis once again the story of certain sick persons whom nothing delights like the disintegration of their body’. (Chapter, The 23rd Day)

All such unconstrained urges, says De Sade tend towards one goal: murder and death, the very essence and heart of the gothic sensibility, but its authorial advocates, according to De Sade, are too weak willed to write with verisimilitude in the very area they have chosen as their subject matter. Gothic literature, stories, plays and poetry flourished between the years 1764, the year of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and 1820, the date of Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, but as it began to languish another branch

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of gothic culture arose which would have consequences far more significant than tales of vampires or ruined castles. This was the extraordinary vogue for medievalism and the English folk tradition that began in Britain in the middle eighteenth century and flourished between the 1830s and the 1850s, and continued to exist in everything from the politics of Young England to church architecture, domestic furniture, village pageants and the vogue for archery and toxophilist clubs, until the First World War broke the spell of chivalrous knighthood. The architectural attitudes of the Victorian and Edwardian builders may have been superseded by the modernism of the twentieth century, but the cultural interest in the medieval and medievalism lasted into the age of television and the atomic bomb. The vogue for the medieval in architecture started before the gothic was a literary style. It begins when the architect John Vanbrugh designed a house for his family on Maze Hill adjacent to Greenwich Park in London. The building was finished in 1719 and included castellations, arrow slits and a tower, forming a miniature version of a castle, quite in contrast to the baroque style of his work on Blenheim Palace. In contrast to the stern baroque employed elsewhere, his house, with its ‘castle air’ was completed with an asymmetrical wing quite unlike anything else in Europe. Thirty years later Walpole produced his own version of a fairy castle in his remodelling of Strawberry Hill House, with its nods towards a mixture of cloistered monastery and crusader dwelling, complete with battlements, a tower, ogee windows, circular rooms, fake stained glass created from Flemish fragments of real sixteenth century glass, painted library ceiling and references to the tombs of bishops in Salisbury Cathedral converted into fireplaces—and suits of armour deposited in the armoury on the first floor. The house was a froth and a gleaming white fantasy seen from the Thames at Richmond as a mirage of feudal splendour. It was an instant hit with those who could afford to remodel older classical houses or put back medieval splendour in interiors ripped out from real castles when those authentic interiors were becoming antiquated and tastes had turned against the barbarism of gothic taste towards the classicism of Palladian monumentality. Walpole’s letters express his pleasure in his imaginative medieval ‘toy’ which was so successful because it was the product of historical vision rather than mere repetition, ‘every Goth must perceive that [my rooms] are more the works of fancy than imitation’.7 Strawberry Hill House began a reaction to the prevailing designs of neoclassicism, that quietly waited for other medievalised fabrications, one of which, William Beckford’s Fonthill was so grand that its tower actually rivalled a medieval cathedral, only to collapse in 1825 as a symbol of the builder’s hubris. The building’s tower was 276 feet high and topped a hall 120 feet in height with wings stretching 400 feet in either direction. Five hundred to six hundred labours worked day and night in often freezing conditions to get the structure built in time. The whole was poorly finished in a rush. Beckford thought Strawberry Hill House ‘a Gothic mouse-trap’. Beckford did not demand any of Walpole’s refined ideals of chivalry or invented ancestry.

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Instead, he wanted grandeur, immensity, theatricality and mystery. His house was wrapped in secret and half-hidden gothic sin. James Wyatt, the architect of Fonthill, the model for every 1930s horror film interior, died after his coach turned over in 1813, but the style he helped create went on and gained in followers and in authenticity. Meanwhile, gothic architecture slumbered until revived in the early nineteenth century by the apotheosis of historical gothic taste, Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819). Scott had already delved into the romantic past with his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802), following a tradition of folk revival stretching back to Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and the faux ballads of Coleridge (1795) and James Mapherson’s ‘Ossian’ poems (1760). Scott’s medievalism, however was, apparently, authentic and researched. It was Ivanhoe alone that revived and sustained the gothic revival. Scott’s tale was set in the days of Prince John and included ‘historical’ detail of scheming Templars, sieges, tournaments, beautiful and wise exotic Jewish characters (Rebecca modelled on an American Jewish friend), medieval trials, old hags and, of course the monumentally significant re-invention of Robin Hood and his ‘merrie men’. The pageant of Saxon against Norman proved irresistible in every area of English cultural life, especially in an age increasingly threatened by political agitation brought on by the French Revolution, including demands for political representation amongst growing numbers of the newly emerging urban middle and working classes, agricultural and industrial unrest and the advent of steam driven travel both by sea and land. The medieval past, reimagined as a glorious present allowed aristocrats and the wealthy to exist in a sealed bubble of paternalistic stability that replaced the contemporary world of rapid change and impending chaos. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the creation of the Eglinton Tournament of 1839, dreamt up in St. John’s Wood by Archibald Montgomerie, 13th Earl of Eglinton, a man steeped in medieval romance and made practical in his estate surrounding his ‘modern’ gothic castle in Ayrshire. Complete with it tournament, banquet and Queen of Beauty the whole concoction, which ended up with only nineteen Victorian gentlemen accoutred for the joust, nevertheless attracted thousands of onlookers (one who had travelled all the way from America having seen the tournament advertised) and a large contingent from the press eager to report the spectacle. This peculiar event, spoiled on the first day by a gothic thunderstorm long remained in the collective memory and is the origin of the Victorian concept of the chivalrous gentleman. It was the first modern media event, the reason for its cultural influence. Lord Eglington was one of a new breed of men eager to medievalise their names in order to claim ancient ancestry and long forgotten titles. By the late 1830s there were numerous claimants for long forgotten titles ad heraldic devices. Eglington was brought up in the heady atmosphere of Ivanhoe, which story was soon translated into spectacular theatre, and a taste for medieval painting and displays of armour at the newly opened Queen Elizabeth Gallery

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at the Tower of London; for those rich enough an ‘authentic’ suit might be purchased at Samuel Pratt’s shop in Bond Street, London. Pratt was no dilettante, but he too was enthralled by the magic of the medieval world. Pratt enthused in his first catalogue of 1838. To gaze on the plumed casque of the Mailed Knight equipped for the tournament, and to grasp the ponderous mace, yet encrusted with the accumulated rust of centuries, cannot fail to inspire admiration for the chivalrous deeds of our ancestors.8 Walter Scott had built Abbotsford in what became known as the Scottish baronial style and others rushed to find the latest goth architect to construct their fake medieval piles, crammed with bought armour and fake heraldry. One enthusiast and the creator of the Queen Elizabeth Gallery was Sir Samuel Meyrick, the leading expert in medieval armour who used Edward Blore, the creator of Abbotsford to buy and restore a real ruin at Goodrich Castle. Unable to purchase a real castle for his collection of armour, he built his own in the style of Edward II, complete with drawbridge and ‘hastilude chamber’ where he displayed a complete tournament, opposite the actual picturesque ruin, completely spoiling the original romantic view and infuriating poets such as Wordsworth who wished to ‘blow away’ the pile. The mania for the gothic and the romantic medieval flowed through the numerous grand domestic buildings built between 1819 and the 1850s; if you couldn’t afford to build your dream castle you might remodel by catellating your frontage or adding gothic ornaments or pointing your windows as was done at Jane Austen’s house in Chawton. The climax came with the rebuilding of Parliament after the disastrous fire of 1834 when the gothic style was given its final seal of approval, and Sir Charles Barrie and Augustus Pugin erected their medievalised monument to Christianity, English ness, the constitution and national destiny. To re-inforce the message, Pugin decorated the chamber of the House of Lords with a medieval throne and an ecclesiastical interior, complete with rood screen, emphasising the sacred nature of the Union and the permanence of its constitution.9 Such a national destiny had been debated since the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century as constitutional and judicial experts created arguments from gothic origins to justify either a Whig or Tory version of history—you were a Saxon or a Norman in outlook. Either way, the debate centred on the inviolable nature of the constitution and its sacred foundations around the time of Henry III. This political debate emerges in Ivanhoe when Scott stops to remind his readers about the need to reconcile plebeian demands with the frivolity and glamour of Royalty; the meeting and friendly alliance of Norman and Saxon in a new constitutional arrangement which is the permanent and inviolable nature of Englishness itself. In the lion-hearted king, the brilliant, but useless character of a knight of romance was in a great measure realised and revived; and the personal glory which he acquired by his own deeds of arms was far more dear to his excited

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imagination than that which a course of policy and wisdom would have spread around his government. Accordingly, his reign was like the course of a brilliant and rapid meteor, which shoots along the face of heaven, shedding around an unnecessary and portentous light, which is instantly swallowed up by universal darkness; his feats of chivalry furnishing themes for bards and minstrels, but affording none of those solid benefits to his country on which history loves to pause, and hold up as an example to posterity. But in his present company Richard showed to the greatest imaginable advantage. He was gay, good humoured, and fond of manhood in every rank of life. Beneath a huge oak-tree the silvan repast was hastily prepared for the King of England, surrounded by men outlaws to his government, but who now formed his court and his guard. (Chapter XL)

At the centre of Richard’s Norman ’court’ stands not a Frenchman but the Saxon, ‘Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest. ‘King of Outlaws, and Prince of good fellows’ (Chapter XL). From gothic horror and disturbance and the conservatism of gothic medievalism would arise a new world of gothic reconciliation. This world would have to withstand the buffets of evolutionary science, industrial and social upheaval, psychological dysfunction, occult terrors, grisly murders and imperial neuroses. The ghost in Walpole’s castle was about to be reanimated for one more glorious haunting.

Notes 1. See Frederick S. Frank, The First Gothics: A Critical Guide to the English Eighteenth Gothic Novel (Gould Publishing Inc., New York, 1987). 2. Friedrich Schiller, The Ghost-seer translated by Andrew Brown (Hesperus Press, London, [1798] 2003), xi. 3. Ibid., p. 5. 4. Richter Norton, Gothic Readings: The First Wave 1764–1840 (Leicester University Press, London, 2000), pp. 347–348. 5. Marquis De Sade, ‘Reflections on the Novel’ in The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom translated by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver (Arrow Boks, London, 1990), pp. 109–109. 6. Villeterque’s Review of ‘Les Crimes de l’Amour’ in De Sade, p. 119. 7. Kenneth Clarke, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (John Murray, London, 1962), p. 61. 8. Anstruther, Ian, The Knight and the Umbrella: An Account of the Eglinton Tournament 1839 (Geofferey Bles Ltd, London, 1963), p. 8. 9. See, R.J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688–1863 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987).

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Bibliography Anstruther, Ian, The Knight and the Umbrella: An Account of the Eglinton Tournament 1839 (Geofferey Bles Ltd., London, 1963). Bloom, Clive, Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present (Continuum, London, 2010). Bottigheimer, Ruth B., Grimms’ Bad Girls & Bad Boys: The Moral & Social Vision of the Tales (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1987). Bulwer Lytton, Edward, The Last of the Barons (Everyman’s Library, London & Toronto, 1923). Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990). Clark, Kenneth, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (John Murray, London, 1962). Dougan, Andy, Raising the Dead: The Men Who Created Frankenstein (Birlinn Limited, Edinburgh, 2008). Faber, Richard, Young England (Faber and Faber, London, 1987). Fothergill, Brian, Beckford of Fonthill (Nonsuch Publishing Limited, Gloucestershire, 2005). Fothergill, Brian, The Strawberry Hill Set: Horace Walpole and His Circle (Faber and Faber, London, 1983). Frank, Frederick S., The First Gothics: A Critical Guide to the English Eighteenth Gothic Novel (New York: Gould Publishing Inc., 1987). Girouard, Mark, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1981). Lines, Richard, A History of the Swedenborg Society: 1810–2010 (The Swedenborg Society, London, 2011). Lyle, Lawrence & Marjorie, Canterbury and the Gothic Revival (The History Press, Gloucestershire, 2013). Martineau, Jane, Ed., Victorian Fairy Painting (Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1997). Mowl, Timothy, William Beckford: Composing for Mazart (John Murray, London, 1998) Norton, Richter, Gothic Readings: The First Wave 1764–1840 (London: Leicester University Press, 2000) Powell, Nicolas, Fuseli The Nightmare: Art in Context (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, London, 1973) Sadleir, Michael, The Northanger Novels: A Footnote to Jane Austen (The English Association, Pamphlet No. 68, London, November 1927). Sage, Victor, Ed., The Gothick Novel: A Selection of Critical Essays (Macmillan Education Ltd., Basingstoke, 1990). Silver, Carole G. Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999) Smith, R.J. The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688–1863 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987) Summers, Montague, A Gothic Bibliography: A Guide to the Work of the Literary Movement That Provided the Foundations for the Work of Shelly, Scott, Coleridge and Many Others (The Fortune Pres, London, n.d.). Williams, Ioan, Ed., Sir William Scott on Novelists and Fiction (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1968).

Gothic Ancestors

Shakespeare, Influence and Appropriation Giles Whiteley

Apparitional daggers, portentous storms, covens of witches, ghosts stalking mediaeval castles: the plays of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) represent funds of the gothic imaginary. There are even Irish (were)wolves, as when Rosalind tries to calm down Orlando in As You Like It (c. 1599–1600): ‘Pray you, no more of this; ‘tis like the howling / of Irish wolves against the moon’.1 Alongside such supernatural staples of the gothic, Shakespeare’s plays are also bristling with images of horrific violence, replete with decapitations, dismemberments, rapes and all manner of mutilations. In King Lear (c. 1605–1606), Gloucester is tortured, his eyes gouged out and stamped underfoot, all performed before a delighted public. But like Sophocles before him, Shakespeare understands that the performance of such violence on the stage is spectacular, the audience at once appalled and fascinated, with the dramatist productively playing on this divided experience. ‘Out, vile jelly’, Cornwall cries, ‘Where is thy lustre now’?2 The world of Shakespeare’s theatre, or at least of that which is most gothic in it, is like that of Gloucester following his enucleation, ‘all dark and comfortless’.3 Yet Shakespeare’s plays themselves are not gothic. To be sure, they anticipate the gothic, make possible the gothic, originate the gothic in different ways. But Shakespeare’s theatre predates the gothic, if we accept the standard dating of the genre beginning with Horace Walpole’s (1717–1797) naming of G. Whiteley (B) Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_2

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the second edition (1765) of The Castle of Otranto (1764) a ‘Gothic Story’.4 Nevertheless, scholarly interest in Shakespeare and the gothic has increased in recent years.5 In view of this, there are at least three important, and to some degree interrelated, ways in which the various phrases current in scholarship on the subject—Shakespeare’s Gothic, Shakespearean Gothic, Gothic Shakespeare(s)—may be conceived. Firstly, we must consider what the role played by Shakespeare was in the early gothic of writers such as Walpole and Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823). As we will see, this question also means considering Shakespeare’s role in mid-eighteenth-century nationalist political debates. Here, a different meaning of the term ‘gothic’ comes into relation with the one bound up with the literary and aesthetic movement with its focus on the supernatural, in which Shakespeare’s ‘gothic’ implies the ways in which his break with classical tradition can be conceived as formative in the creation of a specifically British or ‘gothic’ identity. Secondly, given his role in the development of early gothic literature, we must consider the topic and imagery in Shakespeare which would fascinate later writers of the gothic, including his representation of the supernatural and ‘unnatural’, dreams, ghosts and madness, while also remaining mindful that his work cannot itself be called gothic, except through a kind of anachronism. Thirdly, and finally, we must consider the ways in which Shakespeare would be appropriated by later writers of the gothic tradition in the nineteenth century and beyond. As Dale Townshend puts it, ‘Shakespeare becomes “Gothic” in any modern sense of the word only in and through the act of appropriation’.6 To begin with the obvious: Shakespeare predates the gothic, precisely insofar as his theatre dates from the early modern, rather than the modern period. One way to conceptualise the modernity of the gothic is to think of it as a reaction to that modernity. According to this kind of idea, modernity or the ‘Enlightenment’—a period difficult to date precisely, with historians giving dates for its beginnings variously from René Descartes’ (1596–1650) Discours de la Méthode (1637) through to the death of Louis XIV in 1715—marks what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) would later call ‘man’s emergence from his self-imposed infancy’.7 In Britain, the beginnings of the Enlightenment may be said to date to around the time of the Restoration. In 1660, Charles II, newly restored, reopened the theatres, closed since an Act of 1642, under a new licence, a key moment in the history of Shakespeare’s gradual establishment as what Michael Dobson calls Britain’s ‘National Poet’.8 The same year, the King granted a charter for the establishment of The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, a London-based institution which helped power the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Enlightenment, driven methodologically by empiricism, sought to replace the superstitions of earlier ages with a rationalist ontology. But as in Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) definition of the idea of the ‘uncanny’,9 one can argue that gothic literature, emerging at precisely the moment of the Enlightenment, constitutes a return of the repressed. It represents those nightmares which modern man is supposed to have transcended,

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the transcending of which was supposed to be found precisely ‘modernity’. The gothic is the revival of horrors which rational thought cannot explain, experiences which it cannot account for. In view of the intellectual history of the eighteenth century, which prided itself so much on its narrative of enlightened ‘progress’, the emergence of the ‘gothic’ with Walpole in 1764–65 may be considered symptomatic. Shakespeare, then, cannot be gothic. As an early modern writer, even of extraordinary power and anticipation, Shakespeare was writing in a period where the scientific revolution was yet in its infancy, predating Francis Bacon’s (1561–1626) foundational contributions in the Novum Organum (1620). Of course, the ‘enlightenment’ was a gradual process: for instance, while witch trials had their heyday across Europe 1580–1630, it was only with the passing of the Witchcraft Act in 1735 that the summary execution of persons accused of witchcraft was made illegal in Britain,10 and relatively widespread belief in the reality of supernatural forces among certain parts of the general public survived long into the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Likewise, not all of Shakespeare’s audience would have believed in the supernatural. Nevertheless, we can suggest that Shakespeare was writing when belief in the supernatural was more widespread than during Walpole’s time, so that when figures which we today associate with the gothic, such as witches and ghosts, were portrayed on the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century stage, the audience would not have dismissed the idea out of hand. For instance, at around the time when Shakespeare was beginning his career, his precursor Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) was making a stir on the London stage with Doctor Faustus (c. 1589–1592). A morality play in which the eponymous doctor, ‘surfeit[ing] upon cursèd necromancy’,11 sells his soul to the devil for four-and-twenty years of knowledge and power, people went to the play for the scares, at least if we are to believe the account of William Prynne (1600– 1669). In his admittedly unreliable Histrio-Mastix (1632), a Puritan diatribe against the immoralities of the early modern stage, Prynne claims that one performance of the play witnessed ‘the visible apparition of the Devill on the Stage’.12 Likewise, Thomas Middleton (1580–1627) in his Black Book (1604) claimed that Marlowe’s audience were ‘frighted’ and the theatre ‘cracked’ by the appearance of devils on the stage.13 For the early modern mind, not only were devils real things, but they could appear to wreck havoc in the real world, ‘cracking’ the physical stage through their mischievous manifestation. So too witches, as in Macbeth (c. 1606), in which Shakespeare seems to have assumed his audience was well aware of contemporary reports of witchcraft abroad in the north of the land. Written after the 1603 accession of the Scot James I to the English throne, an act which united the crowns, the ‘Scottish Play’ depicts the northern country as a world of violence and darkness, prone to supernatural interventions: as with As You Like It ’s Irish (were) wolves, Macbeth’s Scottish witches play on English national fears. Audience members may have recalled hearing of the North Berwick Witch Trials of 1590, for instance. In this incident, supposed witches such as Agnes Sampson (?–1591)

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were tortured until they confessed, brought before King James (then James VI of Scotland). Their testimonies, and the background to and events of the Trials were discussed in print in the pamphlet Newes from Scotland (1592), possibly written by James Carmichael (1568–1628), minister of Haddington, East Lothian, who also had the King’s ear. This pamphlet would, in turn, be relied upon by James in his Daemonologie (1597), in which the King affirms his own belief in witchcraft.14 In it, he famously claimed that witches could ‘rayse stormes and tempestes in the aire, either upon Sea or land’, storms which could be easily ‘discerned from anie other naturall tempestes’.15 And it is precisely such an ‘unnatural’ raising which the Second and Third Witches promise in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the former telling the First Witch, ‘I’ll give thee a wind’.16 When the ‘weïrd sisters’ appear on the Shakespearean stage, in the manner which has so captured the imagination of later generations of writers, with their cauldron full of ‘toil and trouble’,17 songs and devilish conspiracies, Shakespeare’s early modern audience would have taken these figures as ones not impossible to meet somewhere in the wild, foreign and, from the perspective of Londoners, ‘strange’ heaths of the north. Indeed, the work of Shakespeare is full of figures and incidents, be they supernatural manifestations or images of horror and violence, many of which take place in mediaeval settings, which today might be considered ‘gothic’. Of course, as we have seen, this is an anachronistic label, precisely since Shakespeare cannot be gothic. However, if Shakespeare’s theatre was written and performed at a time when audiences still gave credence to the idea that the devil may be invoked and appear in the flesh through little more than a few Latin incantations (clearly in part a Protestant fear of Catholic ‘ritualism’),18 what is less in dispute is its significance for the gothic tradition. As John Drakakis has argued, The Castle of Otranto, with its ‘secret passageways, ghosts and general atmosphere of foreboding’, can be conceived of as ‘a version of Hamlet ’.19 Likewise, Anne Williams has noted the central oedipal struggle of the novel, recalling Hamlet’s own much commented upon complex,20 as well as the consistent subtle allusive structure running through The Castle of Otranto, which makes Shakespeare a spectral presence haunting the text.21 As Walpole made clear in the preface to the second edition of the novel, the gothic is to be conceived of as ‘an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern’, and in this, follows in the footsteps of ‘that great master of nature, Shakespeare’.22 Shakespeare, then, stands as an inspiration for the modern gothic. In considering the gothic a question of (Shakespearean) ‘romance’, Walpole’s point anticipates the comments of the critic Nathan Drake (1766–1836), writing in 1798, calling Radcliffe ‘the Shakespeare of Romance Writers’.23 And as with Walpole, so too Radcliffe deployed references to Shakespeare’s example as an explicit authority to stand for and behind her own fiction,24 taking quotations from his work as epigraphs in a number of her novels. On the title page of A Sicilian Romance (1790), for instance, the Ghost’s line in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601) appears: ‘I could a Tale unfold’!25 Shakespeare here is unnamed, but, by extension, his presence

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stands as an authority for such a tale, one which promises to ‘harrow up’ the reader’s soul and ‘freeze’ their blood.26 Moreover, standing as an authority for A Sicilian Romance, just as Shakespeare’s example stands as an authorising presence behind The Castle of Otranto (which is to say, as an authority for the ‘gothic story’ itself), the tale Radcliffe spins gains gravity through the reflected glory of the Bard. Still, the role played by Shakespeare in the development of the gothic is not simply reducible to ‘influence’. It is also related to Shakespeare’s own burgeoning status as a national writer which developed during the period. There is, in other words, not simply an aesthetic but a political motive at work in ‘Shakespearean Gothic’. Frederick Burwick notes that the birth of the gothic novel ‘coincided with the era of Shakespearean Bardolatry’,27 and as Anne Williams and Christy Desmet put it, ‘Shakespeare and the Gothic were born together in the eighteenth century’.28 Walpole’s comments in the preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto, justifying his own blending of styles, are predicated on defending Shakespeare from the attacks to which he had been subjected by Voltaire (1694–1778). It is a national defence of Shakespeare against French Enlightenment criticism. Voltaire had charged Shakespeare with violating the classical unities; as Dale Townshend puts it, he found ‘the English Bard […] nothing short of barbarous’.29 Commenting on Hamlet , for instance, in his preface to Sémiramis (1748), Voltaire remarked of the plot that ‘one would take this performance for the fruit of the imagination of a drunken savage’.30 Replying to these affronts, Walpole writes that ‘Voltaire is a genius—but not of Shakespeare’s magnitude’,31 the latter’s genius lying in his mixing of styles. In practice, Walpole understands by this not simply an Auerbachian idea of a new form of ‘realism’ being born with Shakespearean theatre, but of Shakespeare as developing a specifically ‘gothic’ style of writing. Walpole was not alone in making these kinds of associations. Five years later in An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear (1769), a selfprofessed reply to ‘the Misrepresentations of Mons. de Voltaire’, Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800) called Shakespeare ‘our Gothic bard’.32 As Kathryn Prince has argued, Montagu’s argument ‘associated Shakespeare with a Whig sensibility’: ‘To defend Shakespeare in the eighteenth century was not only to be a patriotic Englishman, but also, implicitly, […] to be a Patriotic Whig’.33 Indeed, that Walpole would feel keenly the political importance of defending Shakespeare against Voltaire is little wonder: his father Robert Walpole (1676–1745) was a Whig politician and served as Prime Minister, 1721–1742. According to Whig historicism, it was precisely parliamentary democracy itself which represented the pinnacle of British culture and its values, and which testified to the superiority of Britain over and against its European rivals. Moreover, this narrative of a progression which led apparently irresistibly towards the Glorious revolution of 1688 and successive Whig governments of 1715–1760, was traced teleologically back through the early modern period, highlighting Henry VIII’s break with Rome of 1533 as a

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key moment of this story. His casting off of the Catholic yoke was read, against the historical evidence, as a proleptic emancipatory gesture, rejecting foreign influence over British national self-determination. Moreover, as an act of iconoclasm, Henry’s Protestant Reformation was linked imaginatively with the Sack(s) of Rome, when the Gauls, Visigoths, Vandals and Ostrogoths successively revolted against Roman rule. From the classical perspective, these Goths were indeed vandals, barbarians (etymologically, people unable to speak Greek), with the European north figured as a cultural wilderness in the Roman imagination. It is an idea to which Shakespeare alludes when Touchstone remarks, ‘I am here with thee and thy goats, as the most capricious poet, honest Ovid, was among the Goths’.34 Referring to the poet’s banishment for immorality, the joke picks up the homophony, with ‘Goths’ pronounced ‘goats’ in early modern English. But it was precisely the cultural legacy of these same ‘barbarians’ which was actively being revalued during the eighteenth century in a patriotic act of Whiggish anachronism. Gothic architecture, gothic social structure, gothic culture and gothic mythology were alike reread, no longer reduced to ‘barbarism’. Or rather, indicative of a kind of barbarism which was both politically revolutionary and aesthetically pleasing, the Goths had become symbols of Britain’s national and international supremacy. Little wonder, then, that Montagu notes the revolutionary tenor and democratisation of the stage of the Shakespearean history plays. Focussed on late mediaeval—which is to say, gothic—English national history, Montagu sees in them evidence that ‘the Gothic muse’, Shakespeare, ‘had a rude spirit of liberty’.35 Nor should Shakespeare’s breaking with the classical unities be regarded as a weakness. For Montagu, it was precisely insofar as he was not yet modern that Shakespeare was ‘gothic’: Shakespear, in the dark shades of Gothic barbarism, had no resources but in the very phantoms that walked the night of ignorance and superstition: or in touching the latent passions of civil rage and discord; sure to please best his fierce and barbarous audience, when he raised the bloody ghost, or reared the warlike standard. His choice of these subjects was judicious, if we consider the times in which he lived; his management of them so masterly, that he will be admired in all times.36

His barbaric art reflected his barbaric audience: the early modern period was one which was still shrouded in the ‘night of ignorance and superstition’, yet to be ‘enlightened’. It seems teleological to suggest that Shakespeare himself was aware of and actively attempting to promote a ‘gothic’ culture in opposition to the classical model. This, however, is the idea at least being teased by Jonathan Bate in his controversial reading of Titus Andronicus (c. 1591–1592) in his introduction to the Arden third edition (1995). It is worth pausing with this play briefly, both on the grounds of its ‘gothic’ qualities—which, in their extreme violence at once anticipate the revenge tragedy and the macabre of the Jacobean stage

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and foreshadow so much later gothic horror—and owing to the implications of his argument. The plot finds Shakespeare breaking from clear classical precedent in telling the story of Titus, a decorated Roman general, returning victorious from a war with the Goths. Their queen Tamora is his captive, but on arriving in the city, she is married to Saturninus, the new Roman Emperor, who prefers her to an arranged marriage with Lavinia, Titus’ daughter. Now in power, the Goths are vicious, with her sons, Chiron and Demetrius, killing Bassianus and raping Lavinia, cutting out her tongue and cutting off her hands. Titus’ sons Martius and Quintus are accused of the murder; Aaron, in league with Tamora and her lover, tells him their lives will be spared if he cuts off his hand—but to no avail, his sons Martius and Quintus decapitated, their heads returned to Titus along with his severed hand. Titus presses his other son Lucius to go to the remaining Goths and raise an army. Back in Rome, Titus begins to act strangely and Tamora, Chiron and Demetrius, ‘suppos[ing] him mad’, appear to him in costume, ostensibly as manifestations of Revenge, Murder and Rape. Titus, however, recognises them and determines to ‘o’erreach them in their own devices’.37 He agrees to invite Lucius to a feast with Saturninus, and Tamora leaves to tell her husband to make preparations, only for Titus to cut the throats of her two sons, ‘While that Lavinia ‘tween her stumps doth hold / The basin that receives [their] guilty blood’.38 He determines his exquisite revenge: I will grind your bones to dust, And with your blood and it I’ll make a paste, And of the paste a coffin I will rear, And make two pasties of your shameful heads, And bid that strumpet, your unhallowed dam, Like to the earth swallow her own increase.39

At the feast, Titus feeds the pie to Tamora, ‘Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred’,40 before killing her, with Saturninus returning the favour, and Lucius replying in kind. As the last of the Andronicii, the Gothic army Lucius had mustered and brought with him to the city gates enters, and assures that he takes power. As such, one group of Goths—cruel and evil—are defeated in part through the assistance of another group of Goths—‘a very civilized lot in comparison’, as Bate puts it41 —precisely as the moment of Rome’s decadence, its fall from power. For Bate, the play sees Shakespeare ‘interrogating Rome, asking what kind of an example it provides for Elizabethan England’.42 As Heather James puts it, Titus Andronicus performs ‘a critique of imperial Rome on the eve of its collapse and, in so doing, glance[s] proleptically at Elizabethan England as an emergent nation’.43 Crucial to Bate’s argument are the anachronisms in the text of Shakespeare’s play itself, as when the second Goth tells Lucius he had ‘strayed’ on their march towards Rome ‘To gaze upon a ruined monastery’.44 Seemingly an allusion to Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries, 1536–1541,

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Bate also notes other Catholic references in the text, reading contemporary religious drama at work behind the surface of Titus Andronicus . For Bate, the ‘bad’ Goths are associated with the Catholics, the ‘good’ Goths with the Protestants, so that those supporting Lucius at the play’s conclusion may be read as being ‘there to secure the Protestant succession’.45 By extension, Bate’s reading of the play confirms to Whiggish type. But in so doing, he is selective in his treatment of seventeenth-century sources, as Steven Craig has argued. Bate’s reading ‘elides entirely the issues of racial othering that are central to Shakespeare’s construction of the Goths’, even going so far as to ‘inflect […] his editorial decisions’.46 For Craig, Bate’s ‘moral reading’ of the play bears witness to the ways in which ‘the semantic appropriation of the word “Gothic” is potentially fraught with the dangers that tend towards anachronism’.47 Even if we pass over this particular case of anachronism, then there are other issues with Bate’s claims. For instance, just because Shakespeare may not have intended Titus Andronicus to stand as a nationalist statement in favour of the British ‘gothic’ project, this is not to have stopped seventeenth- and eighteenth-century critics from taking the text in that way had they wanted to. But in point of fact, as Dobson and others have noted, Titus Andronicus was rarely performed during the period when the idea of the ‘gothic’ was most in vogue, either as a nationalist project or when Walpole and Radcliffe were creating their new aesthetic genre. The play was regarded as being too extreme in its violence, to the extent that many commentators even doubted Shakespeare’s authorship, thinking it unbecoming of the Bard. Indeed, even those who did accept Shakespeare’s authorship thought Titus Andronicus among his weakest plays: Craig quotes Elizabeth Griffin (1720?–1793) in The Morality of Shakespeare’s Drama Illustrated (1775) commenting that it ‘is so very barbarous, in every sense of the word’.48 But it is perhaps precisely these aspects of barbarity that we consider to be its most ‘gothic’ elements when rereading the play today. In this sense, if Titus Andronicus is not ‘gothic’ in the sense of Montagu’s project of Whiggish teleology, it anticipates not only the Jacobean taste for the ‘macabre’ (the subject of another chapter in this volume), but the ‘gothic’ more widely in its foregrounding of acts of violence which are performed at once to horrify and for the lascivious pleasure of its audience. Without Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus , there would likely be no Arya Stark, for instance, killing and cooking the Frey brothers and feeding them to their father, Walder in the HBO adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s (1948–) Game of Thrones (2011–2019). It is the scene of the rape and mutilation of Lavernia which is perhaps most extraordinary in the ways in which Shakespeare anticipates the modern gothic in his treatment of erotic violence. Describing the site of the ambush of Bassianus and Lavinia, Tamora calls it ‘A barren detested vale’, where the sun does not shine, where ‘nothing breeds’, an ‘abhorred pit’ filled with ‘A thousand fiends, a thousand hissing snakes’.49 When Aaron leads Martius and Quintus to the spot, the latter remarks:

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What subtle hole is this, Whose mouth is covered with rude-growing briers Upon whose leaves are drops of new-shed blood[?]50

Psychoanalytically, the phrasing is suggestive, as Bate rightly notes,51 so that the space stands as a misogynistic image of ‘the swallowing womb’.52 While Lavernia’s rape and torture occur off-stage, with the Goths throwing Bassanius’ body into the pit (presumably through the trap-door), such phrasing is doubly uncomfortable in light of her mutilation. It suggests a hidden, as much as an open, form of violence as being at work in eroticism. Shakespeare was hardly the first writer to make these kinds of links, but the topic would be a productive one in later gothic literature and art, a point which can be claimed without risk of anachronism. This is not to say that Shakespeare’s treatment of either violence or the supernatural is gothic itself, but rather to see the ways in which, as Jerrold E. Hogle puts it, ‘the Gothic can help us retroactively define some of Shakespeare’s own dramatic and symbolic choices’.53 In other words, it is to read Shakespeare’s theatre for the ways in which it anticipates themes which will become crucial to the gothic. Take King Richard III (c. 1592–93), for instance, in which the protagonist’s physical disfigurement figures for Richard’s moral flaws. The theme will be crucial to the gothic tradition, as in the person of the creature of Mary Shelley’s (1797– 1851) Frankenstein (1818), or in Victor Hugo’s (1802–1885) Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), where Quasimodo’s body passes comment on that defacement which modernity had enacted upon the Cathedral in which he resides. Richard, considering that he has been Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature, Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,54

figuring as what Henry VI calls ‘an undigested and deformed lump’,55 or Anne a ‘lump of foul deformity’,56 takes this as his cue to action, becoming ‘determined to prove a villain’.57 Queen Margaret links this deformity in both body and spirit to the bestial, to spiders and toads, two canonically gothic animals.58 Shakespeare consistently associates these animals with horror and the supernatural, as in the witches cauldron of Macbeth.59 And if these animals symbolise Richard’s evil, precisely as his deformity would have to Shakespeare’s audience, then his actions later confirm such suspicions, most notably his murder of the princes in the tower. In his scheming, his predation, his uncompromising use of violence, Richard foreshadows the gothic anti-hero. When Anne, proceeding from St. Paul’s Cathedral with the corpse of the dead Henry VI, comes across Richard, she calls him a ‘dreadful minister of hell’ and considers his appearance diabolical: ‘What black magician conjures up this fiend[?]’60 But Richard is not the only figure who is characterised by devilry in the play. He calls Queen Margaret a ‘Foul wrinkled witch’,

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and accuses Queen Elizabeth (Woodville, rather than Tudor) of ‘damned witchcraft’ and ‘hellish charms’.61 Strong women who transgress their ‘proper’ gender roles are often accused of witchcraft in Shakespeare, as in King Henry VI, Part 1 (c. 1591–92) when Joan de Pucelle (Joan of Arc) is caught by York in the battle, her powers of vision and foresight having seemingly deserted her. ‘See how the ugly witch doth bend her brows’, York comments in triumph, ‘As if with Circe she would change my shape’.62 It links gender and transgression, as with Lady Macbeth, the archetype who prefigures the various femme fatales of later gothic literature. Eschewing the ‘proper’ feminine role, driven by ambition, she calls on the supernatural to give her powers: Come you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full Of direst cruelty.63

‘Unsexing’ herself means losing her feminine qualities of empathy, becoming ‘manly’, which is to say, opening herself up to violence, ‘thickening’ her blood in order to ‘Stop up th’access and passage to remorse’.64 But if ‘unsexing’ herself troubles gender, it also means becoming a monster, turning Lady Macbeth into a perversion of the feminine. She invites the spirits to ‘Come to my women’s breasts, / And take my milk for gall’,65 an image of an unholy covenant with dark powers, Lady Macbeth suckling devils. But such imaginative imagery of she-devils is not limited to Shakespeare’s tragedies; it is also encountered in his mediaeval or ‘gothic’ history plays. In these plays, fact is impossible to fully extricate from fiction, history from myth. Thus in King Henry VI, Part 2 (c. 1591), Duchess Eleanor becomes fascinated with necromancy. Attended by Hume, Bolingbroke and Margery Jourdain (Jourdemayne) (?–1441), who was known as the ‘Witch of Eye’ for her ability to prophesy the future and was burned at the stake, the four meet at ‘Deep night, dark night, the silent of the night, / […] / The time when screech owls cry and bandhogs howl, / And spirits walk, and ghosts break up their graves’,66 and invoke a spirit who duly appears on stage. The spirit’s entrance and exit is attended by ‘thunder and lightening ’, meteorological disturbances which, as in Macbeth, would have been associated with the otherworldly by an early modern audience.67 The existence of other worlds, and the dramatisation of their reality on the stage, suggests that the boundaries between real and supernatural are porous, and that the two realms can effect one another, or allow figures such as Marlowe’s Faustus or Joan of Arc to access to diabolical secrets beyond the ken of the layman. This in part explains why prophecy is so powerful in Shakespeare’s theatrical world. In Julius Caesar (c. 1599), Cassius sees clearly the significance of rumours of ‘gliding ghosts’ abroad, and the strange actions of birds and beasts (a theme which would later be developed in Macbeth):

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Why all these things change from their ordinance Their natures and preformed faculties To monstrous quality[.]68

For Cassius, such monstrosity serves as a ‘warning / Unto some monstrous state’.69 Calphurnia, likewise sensing this warning, speaks of ‘most horrid sights seen by the watch’, witnessing the ‘graves […] yawn[ing] and yield[ing] up their dead’, when ‘ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets’.70 It is millenarian imagery, and if it would have recalled the book of Revelations for an early modern audience, Shakespeare’s treatment is not solely consistent with a Christian one, as Bolingbroke’s allusion makes clear in King Henry VI, Part 2.71 If the gothic mode is born precisely in Walpole’s displacement of the figure of the ghost from the realm of theology into the realm of entertainment, as Emma Clery has influentially argued,72 this is not to ignore the significant potential that such spectacles would have had as entertainment on the early modern stage. In Hamlet , the passage from Julius Caesar is recalled during Horatio’s ‘watch’ with Marcellus and Bernado, speaking of these classical events when ‘The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead / Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets’.73 Disturbances such as these highlight that ‘Something is rotten in the state’.74 So too do those dreams which haunt those about to transgress moral boundaries. In Julius Caesar, Brutus is unable to sleep, commenting that: Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma or a hideous dream[.]75

For Brutus, reality itself becomes destabilised by an action, premeditated but as yet unrealised; it turns the ‘interim’ into a waking nightmare, risking madness. Likewise, dreams can be strangely prophetic in Shakespeare, as in Richard III , where Clarence, imprisoned and soon to be murdered, recounts his ‘fearful dreams’ of his drowning.76 He sees beneath the waves ‘a thousand fearful wracks, / A thousand men that fishes gnawed upon’, horrific sights, but alongside them, unimaginable riches ‘scattered in the bottom of the sea’.77 The passage acts as a memento mori, reminding the audience of the vanity of human avarice, Clarence seeing ‘reflecting gems’ ‘in the holes / Where eyes did once inhabit’ of ‘dead men’s skulls’, mirroring the subject’s own desire, and ‘woo[ing] the slimy bottom of the deep’.78 The passage also expresses a thanatic desire, as in Freudian theory, a key driver of modern gothic fiction.79 Here, it functions as a wish-image, in practice prophetic, and swiftly coming to ironic realisation when the murderers drown Clarence in a butt of malmsey wine.80 The ‘unnatural’ is a key word in Richard III . Anne curses Richard, willing that any future child of his be ‘untimely brought to light’, with ‘ugly and

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unnatural aspect’.81 As with the millenarian resurrections of Julius Caesar, Anne links Richard’s ‘unnaturalness’, physical and moral, with ‘unnatural’ events which disrupt the affairs of the state and the natural order of the world. ‘Thy deeds, inhuman and unnatural’, Anne exclaims, ‘Provokes [a] deluge most unnatural’,82 referring to the wounds of the corpse of Henry VI which ‘open their congealed mouths, and bleed afresh’.83 The wounds here are real, even if their reopening may be a figment of Anne’s trauma, but ‘unnatural’ wounds may also be metaphoric, as in Henry VI, Part 1, where Joan bemoans the damage wrecked on France: ‘Behold the wounds, the most unnatural wounds, / Which thou thyself hast given her woeful breast.’84 The traumatised earth mirrors the traumatised body, and both the body politic they sustain. Little wonder that the ‘unnatural’ also signifies the taboo, or a violence which breaks supposedly familial, as much as political, bonds. In Coriolanus (c. 1608), the ‘unnatural’ is cannibalistic, with Rome figured as eating up own children.85 In Titus Andronicus , Titus kills his daughter Lavinia, an action which Saturninus calls ‘unnatural’.86 Likewise, Lear, having been betrayed by his own daughters, calls Goneril and Regan ‘unnatural hags’,87 again implying witchcraft, as in the ‘filthy hags’ of Macbeth.88 Lear seeks revenge on them, vowing to unleash ‘The terrors of the earth!’89 His violent speech, expressing emotional and promising real violence, is interrupted by ‘Storm and tempest ’ in the Folio, which completes his half-line, as though the violent weather replies to, and reflects, violent thought.90 In Shakespeare’s theatre, the unnatural disrupts the supposedly godordained order, the great chain of being, but also, and by extension, our understanding of the given structure of reality, precisely as the ‘weird’ does in later gothic; indeed, even the adjectival form in ‘weird fiction’ owes a debt to Shakespeare—the OED credits Macbeth as a formative use.91 In that play, the murder of Duncan is accompanied by weird disturbances of various kinds. Lennox tells Macbeth ‘The night has been unruly’, the chimneys ‘blown down’ in the storm.92 There are rumours of Lamentings heard i’ th’ air, strange screams of death, And prophesying, with accents terrible, Of dire combustion, and confused events New hatched to th’ woeful time.93

The moment was apparently marked by an earthquake: ‘the earth / Was feverous and did shake’.94 Such reports are confirmed by the Old Man in conversation with Ross, the latter remarking on an eclipse: Is’t night’s predominance, or the day’s shame, That darkness does the face of earth entomb When living light should kiss it?95

The whole environment of Macbeth, from the ‘blasted heath’ of the witches through to its haunted mediaeval castles are ‘gothic’.96 Like the hell-scapes of

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King Lear, ravaged by elements which take their toll on both the body and mind of Lear, descending further into madness, the Shakespearean gothic is a world defined by ‘darkness’ and looming catastrophe. ‘’Tis unnatural’, says the Old Man, a time when even the animal kingdom no longer knows its place, or abides by the natural order of things. ‘A falcon towering in her pride of place / Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed’, the Old Man reports, while Duncan’s horses ‘broke their stalls’, making ‘war with mankind’ and, in another motif of cannibalism, turned to eating each other.97 As the Doctor puts it, attempting to treat Lady Macbeth’s madness, ‘Unnatural deeds / Do breed unnatural troubles’.98 Unnaturalness also implies untimeliness, and both evoke the uncanny, that key driving motif of gothic literature and art. The presence of the ‘unnatural’ defamiliarises the natural, tearing apart the order of things and chronological relations. Thus, in Macbeth the prophecy splits time for both Macbeth and his wife. Receiving a letter from her husband and anticipating his return, Lady Macbeth announces that Thy letters have transported me beyond This ignorant present, and I feel now The future in the instant.99

It derealizes the current moment, so that present and future tangibly co-exist, forking it in the ‘instant’: as with Brutus in Julius Caesar, anticipated events have the power to unravel time. Macbeth himself is split as a subject precisely at this moment of temporal rupturing. ‘This supernatural soliciting / Cannot be ill; cannot be good’,100 he comments, the caesura and ploce marking his self-division: My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man That function is smothered in surmise, And nothing is, but what is not.101

This future conditional (‘yet […] but’) is ‘fantastical’, subject to, but simultaneously only realisable in, a moment of ‘fantasy’, so that Macbeth is no longer possessed of a ‘single state’, the ‘subject’ ripped apart and fractured. At the play’s conclusion, Macbeth is killed by Macduff, who was ‘from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped’.102 The point recalls Anne in Richard III and her desire that Richard’s future child be ‘untimely’. This in turn echoes Anne’s lamentation of ‘Th’ untimely fall of virtuous Lancaster’, seventeen lines earlier.103 Death may be untimely when it comes out of order, registering the presence of an unfamiliar troubling of the world. This theme is most obviously manifested in the text of the play which stands as the grandfather of Walpole’s gothic imagination: Hamlet . There, the Ghost speaks of his murder as ‘foul, strange, and unnatural’, virtually an autocitation of his comment three lines

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prior, that his murder was ‘foul and unnatural’.104 Repetition here emphasises not only the ‘unnatural’, but marks both the subject (the murder) and the speaking of it as uncanny.105 The unnaturalness of this murder, interrupting the order of succession by promoting Claudius over Hamlet himself, is figured then by the presence of the Ghost, whose appearance registers that ‘Time is out of joint’.106 This Ghost is ‘real’, insofar as it is seen by all three on the watch, and later by Hamlet himself, to whom it speaks. But later in the play, during Hamlet’s confrontation with Gertrude in the Queen’s bedroom, the reality of the ghost is precisely in question. Indeed, ghosts and spectral manifestations in Shakespeare’s other plays sometimes capitalise on the uncertainty of the reality of what is staged, teasing the ways in which the ghosts may be projections of the damaged psyches of those who see them. Brutus sees the Ghost of Caesar appear before him, but questions what he sees: Ha! Who comes here? I think it is the weakness of mine eyes That shapes this monstrous apparition. It comes upon me: art thou any thing? Art thou some god, some angel, or some devil, That mak’st my blood cold, and my air to stare?107

The scene would be painted by Richard Westall (1765–1836), famous for his portraits of Lord Byron (1788–1824), in Brutus and the Ghost of Caesar (1802) (Fig. 1). Part of the Romantic period’s gothic appropriation of Shakespeare, Westall’s Ghost stands above Brutus, dominating the space, his ethereal toga flowing over the floor and off the canvas, his arms raised as though invoking the heavens, his face jagged, his brows pointing down in judgement. Westall’s painting was commissioned for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery in London, conceived by John Boydell (1720–1804) as part of a nationalist effort to promote English painting, simultaneously an element of the nationalist rereading and appropriation of Shakespeare’s ‘gothic’ legacy. It was joined there by some of Henry Fuseli’s (1741–1825) influential paintings, including his depictions of Hamlet ’s Ghost (Fig. 2) and the witches of Macbeth, all angles and mediaeval energy. In these later Romantic imaginations, Shakespeare’s ghosts are markedly, and now clearly identifiable as, ‘gothic’. While the Ghost in Julius Caesar speaks to Brutus, as it will in Hamlet , he is aware enough that it may not be a ‘thing’, material and with substance. From the first moments of the conspiracy, as we have seen, Brutus has felt the bleeding of dream into reality. That key gothic trope of insanity, and particularly the mad young woman, is another keynote of Shakespeare’s theatre. To some degree, we might justly claim that behind every madwoman in the attic lies the figure of Ophelia. Lady Macbeth goes mad too, crying ‘Out, damned spot’,108 seeking to purge her flesh of the imaginary symbol, the symptom which would lay bare her inner corruption. But if seeing spectres suggests

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Fig. 1 Richard Westall, ‘Brutus and the Ghost of Caesar’ (1802), engraving by Edward Scriven. Image in the public domain, reproduced from commons.wikime dia.org

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Fig. 2 Henry Fuseli, ‘Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus and the Ghost’ (1796), engraving by Robert Thew. Image in the public domain, reproduced from metmuseum.org

one is mad, then even ‘real’ ghosts, which might dissemble (pretending to be friendly rather than disguised devils), may precipitate madness. When Hamlet speaks to the Ghost, it is against the advice of Horatio: What if it tempt you towards the flood, my lord, Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff That beetles o’er the base unto the sea, And there assume some other horrible form Which might deprive you of your sovereignty of reason And draw you into madness?109

The passage foreshadows King Lear and Gloucester’s failed suicide, which Edgar explains by a devilish presence,110 but the question of Hamlet’s sanity is one which has long enticed the play’s critics. ‘Though this be madness yet there is method in’t’, Polonius remarks,111 anticipating Edgar on Lear: ‘O matter and impertinency mixed, / Reason in madness’.112 Is Hamlet mad or, like Titus, and being ‘but mad north-north-west’,113 does he merely play the role? Such questions are moot when it comes to Macbeth. True, like Brutus, Macbeth initially questions the reality of what lies before his vision. ‘Is this a

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dagger I see before me[?]’, he famously asks.114 Already spilt but having yet to commit the murder, he continues: I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feelings as to sight? Or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?115

The presence of the impalpable thing here appears to be recognised as what would later be called a manifestation of the unconscious, a traumatic irruption. In the terms of Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), it gives Macbeth a glimpse into the ‘real’, although this is precisely not the reality of the world in which the action itself takes place.116 Thus the banquet scene, where the Ghost of Banquo, carrying a look ‘Which might appal the devil’,117 enters to torment Macbeth, and where he is the only one who can see its apparition. It is his ‘strange infirmity’, as he notes, and one which makes him ‘strange’.118 Likewise, language in Macbeth is ‘strange’,119 and cannot approximate the violence of the murder nor the loss it produces. Hence Macduff: ‘Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee’.120 The apophatic here mimes the split or fracture in reality, marking the space of the absence it seeks to remark only through the presence of negation. ‘O horror, horror, horror’,121 Macduff cries, his epizeuxis reflecting a lack in the symbolic order itself. In an anticipation of Joseph Conrad’s (1857–1924) Kurtz, Shakespeare shows how gaining insight into the heart of darkness means being ‘lost’, but his gothic trope also demonstrates that irrespective of such horrors, the subject is itself always already lost regardless. In other words, it shows that we are all, to some degree, haunted by the other. Little wonder, then, that figures such as Walpole and Radcliffe found a powerful precursor for their own gothic in the work of Shakespeare. Little wonder, too, that Shakespeare’s work has proven so influential on later gothic imaginaries. Recent research has productively mined the gothic canon for the traces of its Shakespearean heritage, from Shelley’s Frankenstein to Oscar Wilde’s (1854–1900) The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and Bram Stoker’s (1847–1912) Dracula (1897).122 In Charles Dickens’ (1812–1870) unfinished urban gothic novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), the moment of the (presumed) murder of Drood is signified by the ‘unusual’ darkness, which is ‘augmented and confused, by flying dust from the earth, […] and great ragged fragments from the rooks’ nests up in the tower’.123 These ‘rooks’, who congregate at Cloisterham (Rochester) Cathedral, have already been made to recall Macbeth, in which rooks augur ‘The secret’st of blood’.124 Dickens’ narrator describes them ‘wing[ing their] way homewards towards nightfall’,125 echoing Macbeth’s planning Banquo’s demise: ‘Light thickens, / And the crow makes wing to th’ rooky wood’.126 In this sense, the moment of uncommon darkness and unprecedented wind, in which ‘chimneys topple’

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in another Dickensian reverberation of Macbeth,127 turns the moment of Drood’s disappearance into an echo of the moment of Duncan’s murder. In the interests of space, I will pause briefly with one final example: Byron’s Manfred (1816–1817). After Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749–1832) two-part play, Faust (1808, 1832), this closet drama perhaps represents the most significant appropriation of the Faust myth in Romantic gothic; moreover, it also constitutes a fascinating gothic appropriation of Shakespeare. If Marlowe’s early modern version of the Faust story figured its protagonist as a Renaissance humanist whose hamartia lay in his status as an ‘overreacher’, ‘swoll’n with cunning of a self-conceit’,128 then Byron’s version re-situates the action, so that it can be seen to comment on Romanticism’s response to modernity. By extension, it charges the Enlightenment, with its doctrine of rationality, with passing over in silence deeper, more sublime mysteries, ones which Manfred seeks to explore. But Byron also makes Manfred into a Hamlet-figure.129 Moreover, Manfred stands as a version of the Byronic hero, whose Romantic striving and a keen desire to self-determinacy, alongside the figure’s erotic energy and dark, morally dubious actions, become key characteristic traits in the gothic literature that Byron inspired. In this sense, insofar as Manfred stands as a Byronic Hero, and insofar asthis figure was itself in some way a representation of Byron, then the allusions to Hamlet suggest that both the archetype and the figure of the author who produced it are to some degree haunted by the ghost of Shakespeare. It is in this context, then, that we can unpack Byron’s allusions to Hamlet , often alongside other Shakespearean touchstones, that abound throughout Manfred. After Manfred makes his devilish pact, the Abbot remarks, in echoes of both Hamlet and Macbeth: Rumours strange, And of unholy nature, are abroad, And busy with thy name.130

Likewise, later in the same scene, and the Abbot’s summary of Manfred: This should have been a noble creature: he Hath all the energy which would have made A goodly frame of glorious elements, Had they been wisely mingled[.]131

Earlier in the drama, the Chamois Hunter accuses Manfred of being a ‘Man of strange words, […] / Which makes thee people vacancy’.132 Again, the lexical echo recalls Hamlet .133 Like the Prince of Denmark, Manfred is suspected of being mad, the spirits he claims to commune with fantasies. In this sense, it is important that when Manfred finally dies, he is not, as Faustus was, dragged below by the spirits, but instead ‘expires ’, the body remaining after ‘his soul hath ta’en its earthless flight’. ‘Whither?’, the Abbot asks, ‘I dread to think’,134

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but it is precisely the unknown here which marks the text’s Romanticism, and differentiates the early modern perspective from the modern one, which itself produces the gothic as its other. In this sense, if Manfred is a Hamletfigure more than a Faustian one, he is precisely the kind of ‘gothic’ Hamlet that inspired Walpole half a century beforehand; indeed, Manfred’s name even recalls that of the protagonist of The Castle of Otranto. To consider Shakespeare and the gothic, then, means thinking about the ways in which the gothic appropriates its Shakespearean heritage. From 1765, when Walpole published the second edition of The Castle of Otranto (and in so doing cast off the paratextual ruse of the first edition that it constituted an English translation by William Marshall of an original Italian work by Onuphrio Muralto, one which dated, as its preface disingenuously claimed, to the middle ages—which is to say, cast off the cover of the text’s purported status as a translation of a historical document of the gothic period as that which would justify its supernatural elements),135 then it has been Shakespeare, to a greater or lesser extent, who has been invoked consistently as an authorising presence for the genre. From the innovators in the mid to late eighteenth century, through the Romantic and Victorian gothic of the nineteenth century, and on into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Shakespeare’s theatre has proven a boundless resource for the literature and art of modern horror. If such acts of appropriation always involve some degree of anachronism in how they read Shakespeare, then the gothic may also allow for productive rereadings. His presence continues to haunt the gothic, and to haunt the ways in which the gothic is read and theorised today, from Freud’s theories on Hamlet’s oedipus complex through Lacan’s reading of Ophelia as objet.136 As with Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) in Spectres de Marx (1993), taking Hamlet’s ‘Time is out of joint’ as its epigraph, Shakespeare can be conceived of as modernity’s gothic revenant.137 In this sense, what is uncanny is not simply the echo of Shakespeare which we can hear reverberate throughout the gothic canon, but the ways in which Shakespeare himself seems to uncannily anticipate every possible appropriation. As in Macbeth, Shakespeare’s meditations on those ‘black and deep desires’ which humanity has struggled to contain remain as relevant today as to the gothic of the past few centuries.138

Notes 1. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Juliet Dusinberre (London, Bloomsbury, 2009), 5.2.105–6. I quote Shakespeare throughout from the texts prepared for the Arden third series, and accept the standard dating of the plays: see Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (New York, Norton, 1997), 69– 144. For more on this allusion to Irish werewolves and Shakespeare’s sources, see Brett D. Hirsch, ‘An Italian Werewolf in London: Lycanthropy and The Duchess of Malfi’, Early Modern Literary Studies vol.

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11, issue 2 (2005), 1–43, and Sam George, ‘Shakespeare’s Irish Werewolves’, https://www.opengravesopenminds.com/critical-thoughts/ shakespeares-irish-werewolves/, accessed 10 October 2020. 2. William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R.A. Foakes (London, Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd., 1997), 3.7.82–83. 3. Ibid., 3.7.84. 4. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. Nick Groom (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014), 3. 5. See for instance the essays collected by John Drakakis and Dale Townshend in Gothic Shakespeares (London, Routledge, 2008), and by Christy Desmet and Anne Williams in Shakespearean Gothic (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2009). 6. Dale Townshend, ‘Gothic Shakespeare’, in A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (London, Blackwell, 2012), 38–63, 43. 7. Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11–22, 11. 8. See Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaption and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992). 9. Sigmund Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’, in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Anna Freud, 18 vols (London, Imago, 1940–1952), 12: 229–70; ‘The “Uncanny”’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols (London, Vintage, 2001), 17: 217–51. 10. The Act is handily reproduced in Marion Gibson, ed., Witchcraft and Society in England and America, 1550–1750 (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2003), 7–9. 11. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus: A- and B- texts, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1993), Prologue l. 24. 12. William Prynne, Histrio-mastix The players scourge, or, actors tragædie (London, 1633), 556; accessed online through EEBO. See also Bevington and Rasmussen’s introduction to their edition of Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 49. 13. Ibid., 49. For more on these myths, and the ways in which they relate to contemporary theological debates between Protestants and Catholics, see Genevieve Guenther, ‘Why Devils Came When Faustus Called Them’, Modern Philology vol. 109, issue 1 (2011), 46–70. 14. For a contextual reading of James’ treatise, see Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts, Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: James VI’s Demonology and the North Berwick Witches (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2000). 15. James Stewart, Daemonologie in Forme of a Dialogue (Edinburgh, Robert Walde, 1597), 46; accessed online through EEBO. On James’

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treatise in the context of Macbeth, see Gwilym Jones, Shakespeare’s Storms (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2015), 89–92. 16. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason (London, Bloomsbury, 2015), 1.3.11. 17. Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.3.32, 4.1.10. 18. See for instance Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 1.3.9. 19. John Drakakis, ‘Introduction’, in Gothic Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis and Dale Townshend (London, Routledge, 2008), 1–20, 4. 20. See Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung, Gesammelte Werke, 2: 270– 72; The Interpretation of Dreams, Standard Edition, 4: 263–65. 21. Anne Williams, ‘Reading Walpole Reading Shakespeare’, in Shakespearean Gothic, ed. Christy Desmet and Anne Williams (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2009), 13–36, 14, 30. 22. Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 9, 10. 23. See Rictor Norton, ‘Ann Radcliffe, “The Shakespeare of Romance Writers”’, in Shakespearean Gothic, ed. Desmet and Williams, 37–59, 37. 24. The significance of Shakespeare in her own gothic is also testified to by her discussion of his work in ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ (written 1811–15; published 1826), for instance. See Ann Radcliffe, ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, in The Italian, ed. Nick Groom (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017), 395–406, and see also Norton, ‘Ann Radcliffe’, 37–42. 25. Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance, ed. Alison Milbank (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008), 1, quoting Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London, Bloomsbury, 2016), 1.5.15. Norton gives a number of further examples of Shakespearean epigraphs which appear at the head of chapters in Radcliffe’s other novels, The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and notes the debt to Shakespeare in The Italian (1797) (‘Ann Radcliffe’, 43–44, 46, 49). 26. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.5.16. 27. Frederick Burwick, ‘Afterword: Shakespearean Gothic’, in Shakespearean Gothic, ed. Desmet and Williams, 240–56, 240. 28. Anne Williams and Christy Desmet, ‘Introduction’, in Shakespearean Gothic, ed. Desmet and Williams, 1–10, 1. 29. Dale Townshend, ‘Gothic and the Ghost of Hamlet ’, in Gothic Shakespeares, ed. Drakakis and Townshend, 60–97, 62. 30. Quoted by Kathryn Prince, ‘Shakespeare and English Nationalism’, in Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012), 277–94, 279. 31. Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 11. 32. Elizabeth Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear (London, J. Dodsley, 1769), 147; accessed online through ECCO.

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The significant role played by Montagu is discussed by Townshend in ‘Gothic and the ghost of Hamlet ’, 67–68. 33. Prince, ‘Shakespeare and English Nationalism’, 280. 34. Shakespeare, As You Like It, 3.3.5–7. 35. Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear, 66. 36. Ibid., 150–51. 37. William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (London, Bloomsbury, 2015), 5.2.143, 142. 38. Ibid., 5.2.182–83. 39. Ibid., 5.2.186–91. 40. Ibid., 5.3.61. 41. Jonathan Bate, ‘Introduction’, in William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (London, Bloomsbury, 2015), 1–121, 19. 42. Bate, ‘Introduction’, 17. 43. Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997), 42. 44. Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, 5.1.21. 45. Bate, ‘Introduction’, 21. 46. Steven Craig, ‘Shakespeare among the Goths’, in Gothic Shakespeares, ed. Drakakis and Townshend, 42–59, 51, 52. Craig compares Bate’s rendition of the stage directions, reading ‘He kills Saturninus. Uproar. The Goths protect the Andronici, who go aloft ’ (Titus Andronicus, 5.3.65), with that of Stanley Wells in the Oxford Edition, which reads instead: ‘He kills Saturnine. Confusion follows. Enter Gothes. Lucius, Marcus and Others goe aloft.’ The difference means that Bate situates the ‘good’ Goths alongside Lucius as being part of the new ‘good’ Roman state at the end of the play, which compares implicitly with Saturninus’ elevation of the Tamora and the ‘evil’ Goths to such a position earlier in the play at 1.1.304. Compare Bate, ‘Introduction’, 15. 47. Craig, ‘Shakespeare among the Goths’, 53. 48. Ibid., 55. 49. Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, 2.2.93, 96, 98, 99. 50. Ibid., 2.2.198–200. 51. See Bate, ‘Introduction’, 36. 52. Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, 2.2.239. 53. Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘Afterword: The “Grounds” of the ShakespeareGothic Relationship’, in Gothic Shakespeares, ed. Drakakis and Townshend, 201–20, 201. 54. William Shakespeare, King Richard III , ed. James R. Siemon (London, Bloomsbury, 2013), 1.1.19–21. 55. William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 3, ed. John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen (London, Methuen, 2001), 5.6.51. 56. Shakespeare, Richard III , 1.2.57.

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57. Ibid., 1.1.30. 58. Ibid., 1.3.240–45. 59. Shakespeare, Macbeth, 4.1.6–9, 14–15. For more on the motif of the toad in particular, see Joel Elliot Slotkin, ‘Honeyed Toads: Sinister Aesthetics in Shakespeare’s “Richard III”’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies vol. 7, issue 1 (2007), 5–32. 60. Ibid., 1.2.46, 34. 61. Ibid., 3.4.163, 60, 61, 69. 62. William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 1, ed. David Scott Kastan (London, Thomson, 2002), 5.3.34–35. 63. Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.5.40–43. 64. Ibid., 1.5.43–44. 65. Ibid., 1.5.47–48. 66. William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 2, ed. James C. Bulman (London, Bloomsbury, 2016), 1.4.18–21. 67. See Leslie Thomson, ‘The Meaning of Thunder and Lightning: Stage Directions and Audience Expectations’, Early Theatre vol. 2 (1999), 11–24. Thunder and lightening attends the witches whenever they appear in Macbeth. 68. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell (London, Bloomsbury, 2014), 1.3.66–69. 69. Ibid., 1.3.70–71. 70. Ibid., 2.2.16, 18, 24. 71. Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 2, 1.4.21. 72. See Emma Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995). 73. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.1.114–15. 74. Ibid., 1.4.90. 75. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 2.1.62–65. 76. Shakespeare, Richard III , 1.4.4. 77. Ibid., 1.4.24–25, 28. 78. Ibid., 1.4.29–32. 79. See Freud’s comments on water-dreams in Die Traumdeutung, Gesammelte Werke, 2: 403–404; The Interpretation of Dreams, Standard Edition, 4: 398–99. 80. Shakespeare, Richard III , 1.4.269. 81. Ibid., 1.2.22, 23, 24. 82. Ibid., 1.2.34, 60–61. 83. Ibid., 1.2.56. 84. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 1, 3.3.50–51. 85. William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. Peter Holland (London, Bloomsbury, 2013), 3.1.294. 86. Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, 5.3.47. 87. Shakespeare, King Lear, 2.4.467.

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88. Shakespeare, Macbeth, 4.1.114. Compare, for instance, Henry VI, Part 1, 5.3.42: ‘Fell banning hag’; Henry VI, Part 2, 4.1.70: ‘hags of hell’; Richard III , 1.3.214: ‘hateful withered hag’. 89. Shakespeare, King Lear, 2.4.471. 90. Ibid., 2.4.472. On this point, see Giles Whiteley, ‘Shakespeare’s Dark Ecologies: Rethinking the Environment in Macbeth and King Lear’, in Shakespeare’s Things, ed. Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky (London, Routledge, 2019), 134–49, 141–42. 91. OED, ‘weird’, adj. 1, citing Macbeth, 1.3.32. 92. Shakespeare, Macbeth, 2.3.54, 55. 93. Ibid., 2.3.56–59. 94. Ibid., 2.3.60–61. 95. Ibid., 2.4.8–10. 96. Ibid., 1.3.77. 97. Ibid., 2.4.12–13, 16, 18. 98. Ibid., 5.1.72–73. 99. Ibid., 1.5.456–58. For a philosophical approach to the ‘instant’ in Macbeth on which I draw in this discussion, see Jeremy Tambling, ‘Levinas and Macbeth’s “Strange Images of Death”’, Essays in Criticism vol. 54, issue 4 (2004), 351–72, 364–65. 100. Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.3.132–33. 101. Ibid., 1.3.141–44. 102. Ibid., 5.8.15–16. 103. Shakespeare, Richard III , 1.2.22, 4. 104. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 4.1.? 105. See Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’, Gesammelte Werke, 12: 246, 248–50; ‘The “Uncanny”’, Standard Edition 17: 233, 235–37. 106. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.5.186. 107. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 4.3.273–79. 108. Shakespeare, Macbeth, 5.1.35. 109. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.4.69–74. 110. Compare King Lear, 4.6.67–72. 111. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2.202–203. 112. Shakespeare, King Lear, 4.6.170–71. 113. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2.315. 114. Shakespeare, Macbeth, 2.1.33. 115. Ibid., 2.1.35–39. 116. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (London, Routledge, 2018), 53–56. 117. Shakespeare, Macbeth., 3.4.57. 118. Ibid., 3.4.84, 110. 119. Ibid., 1.2.47. 120. Ibid., 2.3.64. 121. Ibid., 2.3.63.

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122. See for instance Robert Sawyer, ‘Mary Shelley and Shakespeare: Monstrous Creations’, South Atlantic Review vol. 72, issue 2 (2007), 15–31, Kostas Boyiopoulos, ‘Simulation in The Picture of Dorian Gray: Echoing Hamlet, Anticipating Baudrillard, and the Comparative’, Comparative Critical Studies vol. 11, issue 1 (2014), 7–27, and Christy Desmet, ‘Remembering Ophelia: Ellen Terry and the Shakespearizing of Dracula’, in Shakespearean Gothic, ed. Desmet and Williams, 198–216. 123. Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ed. Margaret Cardwell (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009), 130. 124. Macbeth, 3.4.124. 125. Dickens, Edwin Drood, 3. 126. Macbeth, 3.2.51–52. 127. Dickens, Edwin Drood, 131; compare Macbeth, 2.3.55. 128. Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, Prologue l. 20. The key term ‘overreach’ appears in the B-text only: ‘[H]is labouring brain / Begets a world of idle fantasies / To overreach the devil’ (5.2.13–15). 129. The link is perhaps implied in Shakespeare’s text too: like Faustus, Hamlet had been educated at Wittenberg, the humanist centre where Martin Luther (1483–1546) had nailed the Ninety-five Theses to the door of All Saint’s Church in 1517, an act which precipitated the Protestant Reformation. 130. Byron, Manfred, 3.1.29–31, in The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008), 274–314; compare Marcellus in Hamlet, 1.1.156–63, and the Doctor in Macbeth, 5.1.71: ‘Foul whisperings are abroad.’. 131. Byron, Manfred, 3.1.160–63; compare Hamlet’s famous speech to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the earth as a ‘goodly frame’ and the ‘noble’ reasoning of humanity, Hamlet, 2.2.61–76. 132. Byron, Manfred, 2.1.31–32. 133. Compare Gertrude to Hamlet: ‘Alas, how is’t with you, / That do bend your eye upon vacancy / And with th’ incoporeal hold discourse?’ (Hamlet, 3.4.112–114). 134. Byron, Manfred, 3.1.160–63; compare Hamlet to the Ghost, Hamlet, 1.5.1. 135. Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 5. 136. See Jacques Lacan, ‘Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet ’, trans. James Hulbert, Yale French Studies vol. 55/56 (1977), 11–52. 137. See Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London, Routledge, 1994). For a reading of the ways in which twentiethcentury French thought appropriates and reads Shakespeare, see Richard Wilson, Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows (London, Routledge, 2007), and especially 68–73 on Derrida’s ‘Gothic Shakespeare’.

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138. Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.4.51.

Bibliography Bate, Jonathan, ‘Introduction’, in William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (London, Bloomsbury, 2015), 1–121. Boyiopoulos, Kostas, ‘Simulation in The Picture of Dorian Gray: Echoing Hamlet, Anticipating Baudrillard, and the Comparative’, Comparative Critical Studies vol. 11, issue 1 (2014), 7–27. Burwick, Frederick, ‘Afterword: Shakespearean Gothic’, in Shakespearean Gothic, ed. Christy Desmet and Anne Williams (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2009), 240– 56. Byron, Lord George Gordon, The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008). Clery, Emma, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995). Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales, ed. Cedric Watts (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008). Craig, Steven, ‘Shakespeare among the Goths’, in Gothic Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis and Dale Townshend (London, Routledge, 2008), 42–59. Derrida, Jacques, Spectres of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London, Routledge, 1994). Desmet, Christy, ‘Remembering Ophelia: Ellen Terry and the Shakespearizing of Dracula’, in Shakespearean Gothic, ed. Christy Desmet and Anne Williams (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2009), 198–216. ———, Shakespearean Gothic (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2009). Dickens, Charles, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ed. Margaret Cardwell (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009). Dobson, Michael, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaption and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992). Drakakis, John, and Dale Townshend, eds., Gothic Shakespeares (London, Routledge, 2008). Freud, Sigmund, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Anna Freud, 18 vols (London, Imago, 1940– 1952). ———, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols (London, Vintage, 2001). George, Sam, ‘Shakespeare’s Irish Werewolves’, https://www.opengravesopenminds. com/critical-thoughts/shakespeares-irish-werewolves/. Gibson, Marion, ed., Witchcraft and Society in England and America, 1550–1750 (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2003). Guenther, Genevieve, ‘Why Devils Came When Faustus Called Them’, Modern Philology vol. 109, issue 1 (2011), 46–70. Hirsch, Brett D., ‘An Italian Werewolf in London: Lycanthropy and The Duchess of Malfi’, Early Modern Literary Studies vol. 11, issue 2 (2005), 1–43. Hogle, Jerrold E., ‘Afterword: The “grounds” of the Shakespeare-Gothic Relationship’, in Gothic Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis and Dale Townshend (London, Routledge, 2008), 201–20.

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James, Heather, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997). Jones, Gwilym, Shakespeare’s Storms (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2015). Kant, Immanuel, ‘An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11–22. Lacan, Jacques, ‘Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet ’, trans. James Hulbert, Yale French Studies vol. 55/56 (1977), 11–52. ———, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (London, Routledge, 2018). Marlowe, Christopher, Doctor Faustus: A- and B- texts, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1993). Montagu, Elizabeth, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear (London, J. Dodsley, 1769). Accessed online through ECCO. Normand, Lawrence, and Gareth Roberts, Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: James VI’s Demonology and the North Berwick Witches (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2000). Norton, Rictor, ‘Ann Radcliffe, “The Shakespeare of Romance Writers”’, in Shakespearean Gothic, ed. Christy Desmet and Anne Williams (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2009), 37–59. Prince, Kathryn, ‘Shakespeare and English Nationalism’, in Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012), 277–94. Prynne, William, Histrio-mastix The players scourge, or, actors tragædie (London, 1633). Accessed online through EEBO. Radcliffe, Ann, ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, in The Italian, ed. Nick Groom (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017), 395–406. Sawyer, Robert, ‘Mary Shelley and Shakespeare: Monstrous Creations’, South Atlantic Review vol. 72, issue 2 (2007), 15–31. Shakespeare, William, As You Like It, ed. Juliet Dusinberre (London, Bloomsbury, 2009). ———, Coriolanus, ed. Peter Holland (London, Bloomsbury, 2013). ———, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London, Bloomsbury, 2016). ———, Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell (London, Bloomsbury, 2014). ———, King Henry VI, Part 1, ed. David Scott Kastan (London, Thomson, 2002). ———, King Henry VI, Part 2, ed. James C. Bulman (London, Bloomsbury, 2016). ———, King Henry VI, Part 3, ed. John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen (London, Methuen, 2001). ———, King Lear, ed. R.A. Foakes (London, Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd., 1997). ———, King Richard III , ed. James R. Siemon (London, Bloomsbury, 2013). ———, Macbeth, ed. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason (London, Bloomsbury, 2015). ———, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (London, Bloomsbury, 2015). Slotkin, Joel Elliot, ‘Honeyed Toads: Sinister Aesthetics in Shakespeare’s “Richard III”’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies vol. 7, issue 1 (2007), 5–32. Stewart, James, Daemonologie in Forme of a Dialogue (Edinburgh, Robert Walde, 1597). Accessed online through EEBO. Tambling, Jeremy, ‘Levinas and Macbeth’s “Strange Images of Death”’, Essays in Criticism vol. 54, issue 4 (2004), 351–72, 364–65.

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Thomson, Leslie, ‘The Meaning of Thunder and Lightning: Stage Directions and Audience Expectations’, Early Theatre vol. 2 (1999), 11–24. Townshend, Dale, ‘Gothic and the ghost of Hamlet ’, in Gothic Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis and Dale Townshend (London, Routledge, 2008), 60–97. ———, ‘Gothic Shakespeare’, in A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (London, Blackwell, 2012), 38–63. Walpole, Horace, The Castle of Otranto, ed. Nick Groom (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014). Whiteley, Giles, ‘Shakespeare’s Dark Ecologies: Rethinking the Environment in Macbeth and King Lear’, in Shakespeare’s Things, ed. Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky (London, Routledge, 2019), 134–49. Williams, Anne, ‘Reading Walpole Reading Shakespeare’, in Shakespearean Gothic, ed. Christy Desmet and Anne Williams (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2009), 13– 36. ———, and Christy Desmet, ‘Introduction’, in Shakespearean Gothic, ed. Christy Desmet and Anne Williams (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2009), 1–10. Wilson, Richard, Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows (London, Routledge, 2007). Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (New York: Norton, 1997).

Jacobean Drama and the Macabre Cecilia Lindskog Whiteley

The word ‘macabre’ in its original English formulation denotes a twin preoccupation with mortality and performance. It derived from the idea of ’the Dance Macabre’ (spelled in a number of ways), a popular allegorical conceit in the later medieval period, seen for instance in Michael Wolgemut’s (1434– 1519) famous woodcut of dancing skeletons for the Liber Chronicarum [Nuremberg Chronicles ] (1493) (Fig. 1). In A Survay of London (1598), John Stow (1525–1605) describes how the cloister on the north side of the old St Paul’s Cathedral (destroyed in the Fire of 1666) was ‘artificially and richly painted [with] the Dance of Machabray […] with the picture of death leading all estates’.1 This ubiquity was key to the medieval formulation of the macabre, a religiously inflected memento mori in which death ‘ne spareth hye ne lowe degre’.2 ‘All estates’ are subject to death in these Christian imaginings, ‘all that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity’, as Gertrude reminded Hamlet.3 The Danish queen’s platitude is rich with dramatic irony: it registers the socially equalising connotations of death in the medieval understanding, while reminding the audience that Old Hamlet’s ‘murder most foul’ is a contradiction of this comforting concept.4 In this sense, while the medieval dance of death was an often grotesque manifestation of mortality, images of revived skeletons dancing through the streets with rictus grins were at once celebratory and consoling, figuring death as simultaneously

C. Lindskog Whiteley (B) Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_3

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Fig. 1 Michael Wolgemut, ‘Dance of Death (CCLXIIIIv)’ (1493), illustration from Liber Chronicarum [Nuremberg Chronicle]. In the public domain

universalising and liberating. By the time that William Shakespeare (1564– 1616) composed Hamlet (c. 1601), the valencies of mortality were undergoing a shift, a transition that would come to inform later understandings of the macabre. The medieval idea of the macabre as a basic tenet of existence, an equalising and irresistible force, is not the sense which prevails today. Instead, as the OED notes, the modern macabre is something both baroque and exceptional.5 The OED dates this modern usage to 1889 and the fin de siècle, a period which witnessed the second major explosion of gothic literature, following the early development of the genre in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One of the indicative quotations cited is an 1892 article published in The Speaker, in which the macabre is defined as the ‘material representation of something grim, horrific, repulsive’.6 Signed only ‘A.B.W.’, this article was a review by Arthur Bingham Walkley (1855–1926) of a recent London performance of John Webster’s (c. 1580–1632) The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1614) by the Independent Theatre company. In other words, the modern use of the macabre can be explicitly situated as a reflection upon earlier incarnations of the phenomenon, dating back to the early modern period. In such a lineage,

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Webster’s Duchess, with its ‘severed hand, the screams of the maniacs, the coffin and pall, the cowled executioners, and the skeleton dance’ (the latter seemingly a modern addition),7 stands as the crowning glory of Jacobean macabre. Seeing Webster in a late-Victorian setting, Walkley comments that while he could ‘smile’ at some of the staging from his modern vantage point, ‘the dance of death—a Holbein in action—haunts me even now’.8 Indeed, Walkley considers ‘the silent entry of the mad folk’ in the fourth act a spectacle that ‘gave me a fellow feeling with Peer Gynt beset by the maniacs at Cairo’. ‘These things were distinctly uncanny’, Walkley wrote,9 and it is precisely such an uncanniness which critics such as Alison Milbank have considered a primary motor of the modern macabre, with its juxtaposition of ‘disparate and opposite elements: ugliness and beauty, life and death’.10 As Walkley concludes, while he ‘did not believe in any of the horrors of the Duchess of Malfi, [he] was a little bit afraid of them’.11 As the OED citation indicates, the modern understanding of the macabre is intimately related to a tradition of drama spanning from the late Elizabethan to the late Jacobean and early Carolingian period. While Webster predates the Gothic itself by some hundred and fifty years, his and other nearcontemporary tragedies provide important touching points for later writers preoccupied with violence, insanity, deviant and threatening sexuality, and the juxtaposition of life with death. With its intricate, dramatically ironic plotting, spectacular violence, subversion of familial and hierarchical relationships, and emphasis on physical manifestations of spiritual and social decline, The Duchess of Malfi represents a culmination of a dramatic tradition that began with The Spanish Tragedy (1588). Thomas Kyd’s (1558–1594) play provided the basic ingredients for many similar plots: court intrigue, revenge, violence and at least one ghost. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, his successors began to turn up the gore factor onstage, while plots and settings became increasingly ‘baroque’: grotesque, excessive, ornamental and revelling in this artificiality.12 It is in this context of the modern macabre as baroque that this chapter reads Jacobean drama, highlighting its formative role in developing a language and imagery which later gothic writers would mine. These plays lay a groundwork for the macabre in a modern sense by initiating a shift in the understanding of the concept, from a macabre which is equalising, with a clearly religious emphasis accentuating a sense of divine justice, to a manifestation of the unsettling and morbid, depicting a world which seems capricious, and in which the morally justifying framework of vengeance gradually fades to leave only the thrill of violence. In this tradition, characters die in ever more elaborate and bloody fashions, their agony and anguish, mental, emotional and physical, becoming spectacles for the vicarious pleasures of the paying public. The macabre shifts from a medieval and early modern memento mori to a genre of horror. As Nick Groom notes, ‘Jacobean revenge tragedy is […] awash with blood and bloody symbolism, littered with corpses and haunted by avenging ghosts and other supernatural beings’.13 This chapter begins by offering a brief

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history of the development of the Jacobean tradition of macabre, situating it both with reference to its Elizabethan forebears and within the socio-historical conditions of playgoing during the early years of the seventeenth century, showing how the development of the Jacobean macabre as a form of popular culture went hand in hand with a milieu in which the playhouses were figured socially as spaces of spectacle and excess. The chapter then considers some of the central tropes of the Jacobean macabre which have come to infuse the Gothic tradition, the analysis focusing predominantly on The Duchess of Malfi, and a triumvirate of plays about filial revenge for a father’s murder from the turn of the seventeenth century, Shakespeare’s Hamlet , John Marston’s (1576–1634) Antonio’s Revenge (c. 1600) and Henry Chettle’s (c. 1564– 1606) The Tragedy of Hoffman: or a Revenge for a Father (c. 1602), as well as discussing Cyril Tourneur’s (?–1626) The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611), John Ford’s (1586–1639) ’Tis a Pity She’s a Whore (1631), and Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, the latter of which predates the Jacobean era but is considered foundational for the genre. There is a discussion of gothic tropes, in particular noting the ways in which the settings of these plays invoked certain nationalist ideas of the foreign as strange, other and sacrilegious; and the macabre’s use of characterisation, and particularly its gendered violence and figuration of the mad young woman, so influential on later gothic traditions, as well as its construction of cruel male anti-heroes, figures who developed from the justified avengers of earlier plays into sadistic killers in later ones. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the bloody spectacles presented to the Jacobean audience, linking these historically to other contemporary macabre spectacles, such as the public anatomy theatres that sprang up during the same period, and the use of discovery spaces on the stage to heighten the experience of the audience’s horror, a forerunner of the jump-scares of later gothic fiction. The Jacobean macabre was not an immediate reevaluation of the medieval macabre, but rather the evolution of a dramatic tradition. Its origins can be traced back to Kyd, whose most famous play, The Spanish Tragedy, about a father’s bloody revenge for the murder of his son, enjoyed several runs in the decades following its first performance, including an early seventeenth-century tour on the Continent. Around the same time, a spate of new revenge plays inspired by The Spanish Tragedy appeared in which the familial relationship was reversed, the most famous of which being Hamlet (discussed elsewhere in this volume). Likewise Antonio’s Revenge and Hoffman: appearing within a very short space of time, all three plays deal with a son’s revenge for the death of his father through elaborate plots, in the pursuit of which the social order of the play world is destabilised and the body count high.14 Also following the pattern established by Kyd, they feature ghostly apparitions, skeletons, and that common trope of later Gothic fiction, mad young women. Whereas Hamlet was relatively restrained in terms of explicit gore, the same cannot be said for either Antonio’s Revenge or Hoffman, both of which revelled in blood. While Hamlet ponders the justness of his cause, neither Hoffman nor Antonio pause to think or hesitate to act, and their audiences are

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given licence to enjoy their audacious actions through the revenge framework. In Hoffman, for instance, after his father’s execution for piracy (a sentence he deems unfair), Claus Hoffman takes his vengeance with conviction as solid as the bleached skeletal remains of his father’s corpse, which is positioned behind him onstage, overseeing the action as a horrific reminder of the urgency of his quest. Antonio’s Revenge, meanwhile, opens with the evil conspirators entering the stage following their murder of Feliche, for which Antonio will later demand vengeance. In ‘dead night’, Strotzo and Piero, ‘arms bare, smeared in blood, a poniard in one hand bloody, and a torch in the other’,15 recount their crime with glee and lack of remorse. The original sin here is not recounted by a ghost, but its results painted on the perpetrator’s hands. This first killing is only one step in an elaborate plot by Piero to exact his own vengeance for losing the woman he loved to Andrugio many years before. In accordance with generic convention, Piero, who had conspired to ‘Poison the father, butcher the son, and marry the mother’,16 eventually meets his fate at the hands of Antonio, Andrugio’s avenging son. But Piero’s downfall, like the vengeance extracted by Hoffman, takes a form far more gruesome than Claudius’ death in Hamlet , with the final scene of Antonio’s Revenge reminiscent of Shakespeare’s earlier Titus Andronicus (c. 1591–1592). Marston’s bloody resolution is set at a banquet at court, where Piero is served ‘a dish to feast thy father’s gorge’,17 a platter with the dismembered limbs of his son— recalling Tamora being presented with a pie made out of her dead sons in Titus Andronicus —before he is stabbed by multiple assailants. Such excessive violence could be perpetrated and celebrated on stage almost without condemnation because the genre explored the moral ambiguity afforded by the revenge motive, making the Jacobean macabre an important stepping stone in the development of a dramatic tradition of violence for violence’s sake, in something of an aestheticism. In spite of their excesses, Antonio and (to a lesser extent) Hoffman are in some measure excused by their imperative to take vengeance. ‘Sons that revenge their father’s blood are blest’, Antonio exclaims when he completes his vengeance, and when asked who is responsible for the ‘gory spectacle’ of Piero’s murder, several characters claim ‘the glory of the deed’.18 There is no culpability, only celebration. Moreover, the revenge motive also functions to some degree as a permissive structure for the audience, who are invited to revel along with the characters in the ‘sluic[ing] out’ of Piero’s ‘life-blood’.19 This laid the foundation for a tradition of bloody spectacle enacted in plays such as Thomas Middleton’s (1580–1627) The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606) and beyond. Eventually the avenging aspect disappeared while the blood remained and spread, leaving behind baroque tragedies with similarly elaborate plotting and spectacular and metatheatrical stagings of violence, but without the avenging framework as a means of negotiating the transgressions. The ostensible justifications for the violence dwindled. In The Duchess of Malfi, for instance, there is no murder to avenge, and Webster offers no nominally acceptable motivation for the persecution of the Duchess and her family, the kindling for the violence being the

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protagonist’s clandestine marriage to her steward, which provoked her brothers’ ire and (in the case of Ferdinand) incestuous jealousy. Yet later still, Ford’s blood-soaked ’Tis a Pity She’s a Whore does even less to provide an acceptable framework for its violence. The tale of the incestuous relationship between Annabella and her brother Giovanni and the violence caused by the breach of this taboo offers not a single redeemable character or morally pure motive, but plenty of hyper-violent spectacle. By this stage in its development, revenge tragedy had turned into horror, plain and simple. The spectacular is a marker of the Jacobean macabre. Andrew Gurr has noted the gradual abandonment of ‘hearing’ a play in favour of ‘seeing’ one, beginning at the end of the 1590s.20 By 1610, the phenomenological act had shifted from aural to visual, a development likely not unrelated to the increased emphasis on spectacle in the plays performed in the early years of the seventeenth century. The atricality, often embodied in the excess of the blood and gore portrayed onstage, was essential to dramatic expression and the Jacobean macabre as a mode, and was, moreover, a spectacle that sold. At the same time, the very space of the theatre was somewhat transgressive. Permanent playhouses had only been a feature of the London scene for a few decades, the first believed to have been the Red Lion, established in 1567 (only to close shortly afterwards). By the early seventeenth century, there had been an explosion of venues, with outdoor theatres concentrated to Southwark, home to the Rose, the Swan and Shakespeare’s Globe. South of the Thames, Southwark was outside of the city of London proper; other early outdoor theatres had been established in Shoreditch, north of the walls, with indoor playhouses located in so-called ‘liberties’, semi-independent districts of intra-mural London. All early playhouses shared an independence from London’s city government, which was broadly suspicious of the theatre. Put simply, Jacobean theatres were located in what can be termed sites of exceptionalism. Attending a play was in itself an act of somewhat illicit or subversive pleasure, a public flouting of the concerns of puritanical anti-theatricalists, the journey to the playhouses allowing playgoers to step out of their supervised, regulated existence. When it came to the blood-soaked plays on the Jacobean stage, the physical movement to attend them in the first place enlisted spectators in a public participation in a communal rite of excess. Moreover, as with the later Gothic, which from humble beginnings has grown to become one of the most dominant and versatile cultural products of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the macabre was quintessentially a genre of popular culture. Southwark was a vibrant and diverse entertainment district of which the playhouses were only one offering. Visitors could also attend bear-baiting venues, cockfighting rings, brothels, pubs and inns. Competition from other types of entertainment as well as from rival acting companies may provide part of the explanation for the excess of Jacobean revenge tragedies: it is easy to imagine a succession of playwrights competing to draw playgoers and their pennies by attempting to outdo one another in intricate scenes ever more violent.

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Outdoing one another, building on and exceeding their forebears, also meant that the Jacobean macabre developed a body of theatrical tropes, ones which have proved influential on later Gothic writing. One of those tropes was locational. As Massimiliano Demata has argued, The Duchess of Malfi was a precursor of the Gothic’s ‘stereotypical Italianate tropes of court intrigues, unfaithful women, and lustful priests’.21 Just as Horace Walpole (1717–1797), Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) and Matthew Lewis (1775–1818) chose to set their tales of horror at an exotic remove from England, so Jacobean tragedies primarily take place in Southern European locations, a preferred setting for tales of baroque violence. Following Henry VIII’s break with Rome in 1533, early modern dramatists often chose to locate lurid tragedies in Catholic countries. Italian settings in particular connoted a ‘rich cultural and historical heritage stretching from the Roman Empire to the Renaissance’, with later British Gothic literature exploiting such connotations, figuring Italy as ‘a symbolical and de-domesticised reality, in which a sense of diversity, or even a set of radical or transgressive discourses, could be elaborated in opposition to Britain and its cultural, moral, and aesthetic values’.22 In Webster’s tragedy, Italian courts are shown to be like poisoned fountains from which ‘Death, and diseases through the whole land spread’,23 and Italian rulers are subject to innate corruption: as Ferdinand observes when lucidity returns to him in the moment before his death, ‘Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, / Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust’.24 Moreover, Italian settings also carried religious connotations. Just as in Lewis’s The Monk (1796), Webster and Ford exploit anti-Catholic feeling in their tragedies. The suspicion of ritualism and the bloody connotations of transubstantiation left a worrying taste in Protestant mouths, and the Jacobean macabre is part of a rich tradition of Catholic-infused Gothic running to the nineteenth century and beyond.25 In The Duchess of Malfi, Rome, the seat of the papacy, is figured as a place of iniquity in which the Duchess’ brother, the Cardinal of Aragon, can co-habit with his mistress Julia because his vocation conceals their sin. He uses religion to cloak corruption, and later in the play, its trappings even provide the means by which the Cardinal murders Julia, making her kiss a poisoned Bible. Webster’s religious meditation also anticipates later Gothic writers by melding commentary on Catholic corruption with the supernatural. When Antonio is lured into a trap by the false promise of reconciliation with the Cardinal, the meeting is intended to take place in the Cardinal’s residence, a former monastery described by Antonio’s companion Delio: This fortification Grew from the ruins of an ancient abbey, And to yond side o’th’ river lies a wall, Piece of a cloister, which in my opinion Gives the best echo that you ever heard. So hollow, and so dismal, and withal So plain in the distinction of our words, That many have supposed it is a spirit That answers.26

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Explicit description would have been necessary for a form of theatre which relied on dialogue over elaborate onstage scenery, but Delio’s speech also serves as a kind of shorthand for the Gothic. These ruins of an ‘ancient abbey’ are symptomatic of decay and decadence, and the destruction of this formerly religious structure facilitates the creation of an ‘echo’ which Delio interprets as a natural phenomenon. But ‘hollow’ and ‘dismal’, this echo has apparently given rise to a popular belief that the sound emanates from a ghost. While Delio’s words imply his own incredulity towards such superstition, the rest of the scene is rendered eerie by the echo recalling key phrases of the conversation between Delio and Antonio—‘Like death that we have’, ‘Deadly accent’, ‘A thing of sorrow’—before seemingly attempting to caution Antonio.27 When he remarks that ‘’Tis very like my wife’s voice’, it breaks from repetition by responding ‘Ay, wife’s voice’, and another emendation follows a few lines later, where Antonio’s ‘impossible / To fly your fate’ is recalled as ‘O, fly your fate’.28 The echo has become conscious, the natural supernatural. The permission to doubt and wonder, to allow both natural and supernatural to co-exist in the echo of the Duchess’ voice in the ruins of the ancient abbey, is not extended by Webster to the religious domain itself, which is figured as decidedly decadent. In response to Delio’s gothic scene-setting, Antonio meditates on the similarities between men and the Catholic church in their mutual corruptibility and eventual loss of potency, noting that here in this open court, Which now lies naked to the injuries Of stormy weather, some men lie interred Loved the church so well, and gave so largely to’t, They thought it should have canopied their bones Till doomsday. But all things have their end: Churches and cities, which have diseases like to men, Must have like death that we have.29

For Webster’s early modern audience, the resonance of spiritual decay in Antonio’s words must have been even more overt. The Duchess of Malfi was first performed in the second Blackfriars Theatre, an indoor playhouse in one of the ‘liberties’. It was located partly in an ‘ancient abbey’, the Dominican priory which had been disbanded less than a century earlier and repurposed following the break with Rome into an area of courtly activity. Blackfriars had been the site for the divorce hearing of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon (the event that immediately precipitated the English Reformation), and after the disbandment of the priory, wealthy and well-connected families owned or rented property in the area, which also housed the Royal Wardrobe. Since the 1570s, the site’s independence from civic authorities (a heritage of its religious past) had also been exploited by theatre entrepreneurs, so that the very existence of the playhouse in which the audience witnessed Antonio meditating upon the corruption and resulting demise of religion was enabled by the twin facts of the Catholic church’s former privilege and the fall of that church. This

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historical context surrounded the play’s original audience: as Antonio suggests that ‘diseases’ lead to corruption without redemption, the bones of the rich and faithful believers are no longer ‘canopied’ by the church, safeguarded until resurrection, but left exposed by the institution’s own demise. Similarly, the abbey itself is ‘naked to the injuries / Of stormy weather’, dissolute religious practice engendering similar physical characteristics as the skeletal remains of its believers. In this gothic setting, the Duchess’ disembodied voice must have taken on an eerie quality within and without the play world. Delio’s explanation that the echo is caused by the river and the remnants of a cloister wall would have been another particularly poignant line for a Blackfriars audience given the site’s proximity to the Thames. However, at this point in the play, the audience (unlike Delio and Antonio) know that the Duchess is ‘a dead thing’,30 so that they may interpret the echo as a supernatural manifestation attempting to save Antonio. Such an exertion might have been expected of a character who displays remarkable resilience throughout the play. The Duchess never succumbs to madness, in spite of her tribulations: separated from her husband and children, incarcerated, serenaded by madmen, and presented with a tableaux of waxworks which she takes for her family, she remains, until her own death, in command of herself: ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still’.31 Not only is this a significant contrast with Ferdinand, her twin, whose descent into madness reverses the Duchess’ fate, but it also represents a divergence from the common treatment of vulnerable female characters in Jacobean theatre. Earlier tragedies abound with virginal figures who, when threatened, lose either their mind or their virtue (or both), and most often also their lives. Perhaps part of the explanation for the Duchess’ ability to maintain her sanity lies in the fact that she is neither virgin nor whore: as a remarried widow, she occupies a rare space that affords her more freedom and agency. In spite of her brothers’ attempts to curb and control her sexuality, the Duchess maintains a sense of herself, even until her inevitable murder. The Duchess is an outlier, however, in the macabre tradition. The vulnerable virgin remained a trope of Gothic pulp fiction and genre cinema long into the twentieth century. On the early modern stage, virginity had a totemic quality, but the dramatic treatment of it shifted in the Jacobean period. This shift can be traced over the course of several decades against the historical backdrop of the increased political uncertainty brought about by the end of Elisabeth I’s reign. Some forty-four years of relative stability, national expansion and mercantile prosperity, this reign had been dominated by the myth of the Virgin Queen, a courtly and cultural construct encouraged by the queen as a means of holding on to power and crafting a strong yet feminine persona. This myth reached its zenith in the 1580s, but with Elizabeth’s ageing, virgins on stage increasingly became victims of (sexualised) violence and premature death. Virginity, in other words, was topical, as were its potential political valencies. It is no coincidence that the most famous, and famously victimised, virgin in literary history, Shakespeare’s Ophelia, made her appearance at this

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politically sensitive time. Her treatment can be read as a cipher for a renegotiation of national myth. But Ophelia was not alone, with fellow sacrificial virgins appearing around the same time in the persons of Marston’s Mellida and Chettle’s Lucibella. Threatened, victimised, locked up, driven mad, murdered: the roots of another common gothic trope in the increasingly macabre theatre of the period coincided with the end of the Virgin Queen. Alongside its violated virgins, the Jacobean macabre produced increasingly bloodthirsty and callous male protagonists. With the revenge framework affording moral lassitude to avengers in the early Jacobean era, perpetrators of extreme violence were sometimes even celebrated, as when Antonio is offered ‘What satisfaction outward pomp can yield’ as a reward for masterminding and executing the plot against Piero.32 As Groom writes, Jacobean revenge tragedies ‘twisted the hopeless caprice and senseless killings […] into a morality’ of sorts, while ‘[t]he extreme forms of vengeance within these plays exaggerated and repeated death until the entire social fabric collapsed’.33 Shedding the revenge framework, later tragedies preserved their male killers’ astonishing capacity for violence and cruelty, but in a manner which was figured as beyond morality, baroque or monstrous. In The Duchess of Malfi, for instance, Ferdinand is reported to suffer from lycanthropy. Although no werewolf appears in its animal form on stage, there are (increasingly frequent and overt) references to wolves in Ferdinand’s speech and actions. Diagnosing his condition, Ferdinand’s doctor maintains that while ‘a wolf’s skin was hairy on the outside’, Ferdinand’s illness lies ‘on the inside’.34 Werewolfism is not visible, but a behavioural deviation, so that persistent lupine motifs comport with the character’s general lack of control and moral compass in a way that could indicate either that he is indeed monstrous or mad, like the Bedlam inmates he brings to terrorise his sister. In the play world, the difference is slight, due to its ‘conflation of disability, monstrosity, and illicit sexuality’,35 and Webster plays on the potential ambiguity through which audiences may deem Ferdinand’s condition either real or a symptom of insanity. In later literature and popular culture, werewolves, whether figures of horror or of sympathy, are remarkable for their loss of humanity. Shedding their human skin, they also shed their powers of higher reasoning, succumbing to base instincts and ungovernable appetites: id alone. In Ferdinand’s case, if symptoms return, his doctor promises to ‘buffet his madness out of him’.36 In common with scientific understanding of the time, the doctor considers lycanthropy caused by an overflow of melancholia, echoing James I’s Daemonologie (1597), in which King James states that lycanthropy ‘proceeded but of a naturall super-abundance of Melancholie’.37 The king explains that those afflicted with such excessive melancholy ‘haue thought themselues verrie Woolfes […] and so haue counterfeited their actiones in goeing on their handes and feete, preassing to deuoure women and barnes, fighting and snatching with all the towne dogges, and in vsing such like other bruitish actiones, and so to become beastes’.38 Again, there is an echo in Webster’s play when the doctor narrates Ferdinand’s discovery ‘with the leg of a man / Upon his shoulder’ at midnight

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in the cemetery, having dug up and supposedly ‘devoured’ the rest of the corpse.39 This story may have been believed by many of Webster’s audience: in a real-life parallel from early modern France, Jacques Roulet, known as the Werewolf of Caud, confessed to having the ability to partially transform into a wolf after he had been found naked with pieces of human flesh in his hands; the court sentenced Roulet to death, a penalty changed to incarceration in an asylum after Roulet was ruled insane.40 But as a result of ‘melancholia’, an overflow of ‘black bile’, Ferdinand’s lycanthropy is considered a natural condition which caused effects that verged on the supernatural, or evil. In this sense, the diagnosis becomes another means of excusing the cruelty of male violence within the play world. Just as Hamlet, Antonio and Hoffman were exempt from moral conduct because of their vengeful duty, so too Ferdinand’s behaviour is beyond simple moral reproach, because it is beyond his control. The lurid details of Ferdinand’s dismemberment and devouring of corpses were descriptive only, rather than staged by Webster, but the Jacobean macabre would become even more invested in the ‘material representation of something grim, horrific, repulsive’.41 This development went alongside with the popularity of a relatively new form of entertainment which offered bloody spectacles to rival those of the revenge tragedies: the anatomy theatre. Springing up across Europe as the humanist thirst for empirical knowledge spread in the wake of the Renaissance, early Continental anatomical theatres had been temporary structures attached to universities, operating at least ostensibly as sites of learning. The first permanent anatomy theatre in Europe opened in London with an extravagant feast in 1638, after almost a century of public dissections in the English capital (Fig. 2). Most likely designed by Inigo Jones (1573–1652), who also redesigned the indoor Phoenix playhouse, this anatomical theatre had a central performance area and galleries of seats around it, in a design remarkably similar to the contemporary theatrical playhouses.42 Jonathan Sawday has noted that the rise of this new form of entertainment coincided with a vogue for anatomisation as a literary device which seized English writers from the second half of the sixteenth century, arguing that the early modern period saw a co-mingling of desire and death, ‘a union of Eros and Thanatos, which […] was not named until the “clear-cut moralities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” began to look more closely at the underlying psychological impulses’.43 This union is what drew spectators to public dissections and bloody tragedies at public playhouses alike, and also lends much of its potency to the Gothic tradition. From 1540, an Act of Parliament guaranteed a supply of dead bodies of criminals executed by hanging for use in dissections by the barber surgeons. Medical historian William Brockbank even notes cases in which, ‘so slight was the injury inflicted at Tyburn [where the executions took place], that the subjects sometimes recovered when they were brought to the Hall’ where they were to be dissected44 : the dead coming to life at the moment of their own dismemberment would have been a macabre spectacle indeed. The Royal College of Physicians were also authorised to perform autopsies, but early

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Fig. 2 Jan Cornelisz. van ‘t Woudt, ‘Theatrum Anatomicum’ (1610), engraving by Willem Swanenburgh. Photograph of engraving by Museum Boerhaave. In the public domain

anatomy theatres struggled to obtain sufficient corpses to satisfy demand.45 Practical limitations on stagecraft may have placed similar restrictions on Jacobean dramatists’ ambitions to visualise stage violence and dismemberment. However, ambition was not bound by practical limitations and the first half of the seventeenth century saw changes. One example of this overreaching of early modern stagecraft can be found in The Tragedie of Claudius Tiberius Nero, Romes Greatest Tyrant (1607), an anonymously authored play sharing a topic and location, as well as several tropes, with Titus Andronicus. But once again, the Jacobean macabre outdid the Bard: in the play’s final act, the evil emperor’s nephews starve in prison, unsuccessfully attempting to stave off their deaths through mutual cannibalism. This horrific spectacle was intended to be performed: a stage direction in the printed quarto from 1607 specifies that ‘They eate each other’s armes’.46 As Lucy Munro notes, it is not clear some four hundred years later how this scene was intended to be staged, but ‘it is probable that something […] complex and spectacular was envisaged, involving false limbs of the kind that appear in plays such as Christopher

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Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus ’.47 By 1607, stage craft had become confident enough to aspire not just to bloody deaths through the use of pigs bladders filled with animal blood—the means by which for instance the duelling deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet (1597) would have been managed—but to the staging of baroque acts of violence and mutilation that approached the transgressions of bodily inviolability offered at the anatomical theatres. Anatomy theatres were not simply competition for the playhouses, but also provided inspiration. Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy features a villain who calls for his enemy’s ‘body when ’tis dead for an Anatomie’.48 The performance of this rite of dismemberment is dramaturgically prevented by the anti-hero mistakenly causing his own death with the axe meant to cleave his enemy’s body: perhaps the practical and philosophical obstacles to the performance of a fraudulent autopsy on stage were still too great to be overcome. Christian Billing argues that while The Atheist’s Tragedy represents an early example of dramatic engagement with dissection culture, this engagement would come to full fruition with Ford’s plays of the late 1620s.49 Famously misogynistic, Ford’s blood-soaked gore-fests technically date to after the Jacobean period, but can be seen as the apex of the dramatic trajectory traced in this chapter. ’Tis a Pity She’s a Whore offers many of the tropes found in Webster and in earlier revenge tragedies, but the mystery is largely missing from the macabre in Ford’s play. Whereas The Duchess of Malfi offers (strong) suggestions that incestuous desire is part of the motivation for Ferdinand’s relentless persecution of his sister, they remain at the level of suggestion; ’Tis a Pity She’s a Whore, by contrast, begins with Giovanni’s open confession of his passion for his sister. This desire is not only acknowledged, but also reciprocated and consummated, another example of Ford turning Webster up to eleven. There are similar motifs of secrecy and dissembling, court intrigue, religious and secular pageantry, and of strongly gendered violence in both plays, but Ford exceeded the already excessive Webster at every turn. The Duchess’ female confidante Cariola meets her death quickly on stage, where she was allowed the grace of protesting her innocence and saying her prayers in front of the audience. Cariola’s parallel of sorts, Ford’s Putana, on the other hand, is dragged off stage by banditti to have her eyes put out in punishment for having witnessed the siblings’ incestuous relationship; attempting to plead for mercy, she is gagged, prevented from speaking. In ordering this punishment, Vasques calls Putana a ‘Damnable hag’ and a ‘Toad-bellied bitch’, gendered slurs, and orders that ‘if she roars, slit her nose’.50 Significantly, her punishment is to take the form of partial dismemberment. While Putana’s punishment is perpetrated off stage, this serves only to whet the audience’s appetite for the main event: the murder of Annabella. She is stabbed to death by her own brother, the penetration of the knife into the heart later emphasised by Giovanni proudly displaying the disembodied organ

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at a state banquet; the violation of the taboo of incest is joined by the violation of the body. Giovanni’s address may have been aimed at the incredulous audience as well as at the other characters: ’Tis Annabella’s heart,’tis; why d’ee startle? I vow ’tis hers, this Dagger’s point plowed up Her fruitful womb, and left to me the fame Of a most glorious executioner.51

Leaving aside the hint that the stabbing was not effected through the chest, but by ‘plowing up’ her womb (a gendered fixation in the treatment of the dead body), the effect of this statement is to draw attention to, and bestow credence on, the dripping heart being displayed by the actor. Rather than being content to intimate at unseen horrors, the heart of the matter is literally ripped out and displayed. In this fashion, Ford embraced and emphasised the performative links between anatomical and dramatic theatres. While the act is extreme, the spectacular nature of Giovanni’s proud presentation of the heart of his dead sister and mistress is typical of the Jacobean macabre. As far back as The Spanish Tragedy, the mode had celebrated and highlighted its theatricality. There is a baroque artificiality to death which goes hand in hand with the metatheatrical nature of the plays themselves. Since Hieronimo’s use of a play within the play to enact his revenge in The Spanish Tragedy, self-referential commentary and overtly performative stagings had been a feature, as when Shakespeare followed Kyd in Hamlet’s staging of a play ‘to catch the conscience of the king’.52 In the murder of Polonius, hiding behind an arras in Gertrude’s chambers, Shakespeare also capitalised on the dedicated discovery space which was an architectural feature of early modern playhouses. A small recessed area set into the back (or tiring) wall of the stage, the discovery space was hidden from view with curtains or doors. By the Jacobean period, its use to stage shocking or fortuitous moments of discovery became increasingly baroque. In The Spanish Tragedy, the space vacillates between being one of concealment and of discovery. It houses several corpses, which are alternately discovered and hidden. While playing with the use of this space, Hieronimo invites the audience to reflect on the metatheatricality of events, to consider the nature of the space as a setting and his own performance as a kind of act. At one point, he closes the curtain to make preparations for the ‘strange and wondrous show besides / That I will have behind this curtain’,53 hinting at his baroque vengeance to come (this being the play within the play). Following the bloody deaths of Lorenzo, Balthazar and Bel-Imperia, Hieronimo opens the curtains again and urges courtly and playhouse audiences alike to ‘See here my show, look on this spectacle’, his son’s corpse.54 Kyd’s metatheatrical self-referentiality set the standard for those who followed. Chettle, for instance, uses the discovery space for the staging of a number of morbid tableaux. Having killed Otho, Hoffman opens up the

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discovery space to reveal his dead father’s skeleton. The potential for memento mori is immediately refigured through the baroque, in yet another metatheatrical moment of the Jacobean macabre. Hoffman proceeds to speak to Otho’s fresh corpse as he hangs it alongside the first cadaver: You shall hang by him, And hang afore him too, for all his pride, Come, image of bare death, join side to side With my long-injured father’s naked bones. He was the prologue to a tragedy.55

The physical juxtaposition of Otho’s fresh corpse with the bleached skeleton is the stuff of which macabre stagecraft is made. It is also the first revelation in a play which thrives on them, and which stages them to maximum morbid effect. Characters’ deaths are gruesome, and their corpses utilised for the perpetuation of complicated plots, as when Mathias and the Duke of Saxony ‘set [Lorrique’s] body like a scarecrow’ to bring about Hoffman’s demise.56 That demise, in turn, is itself spectacular: Hoffman is coronated with a blazing hot crown and dies in agony, in a repetition of the ritual by which his father had been executed, and which he himself had perpetrated on Otho. This ironic coronation of the condemned would have been an eye-catching spectacle redolent with symbolism in an age when public executions and courtly pageantry were two complementary forms of state-sanctioned entertainment: executing Hoffman in this way neatly wraps up the play’s cycle of violence, but also suggests the potential for new outbreaks, and that the distinction between the rules of law and blood is slim. Hoffman may have been transgressive, but his transgressions were perpetrated in response to overreaching transgressions from the crown. Webster also made use of the discovery space in The Duchess of Malfi‚ in a way which recalls the dreaded yet desired moment of discovery expertly exploited by Radcliffe in several novels, a motif which was memorably satirised in Catherine’s bathetic discovery of the laundry list in Jane Austen’s (1775–1817) Northanger Abbey (1818). Webster gradually increases audience suspense through a series of foreshadowings. In a scene capitalising on the performance conditions at Blackfriars (where plays were lit by torches and candlelight), Ferdinand orders the lights dimmed before handing the Duchess what he claims is Antonio’s hand to kiss. Noticing its coldness, the Duchess calls for lights, so that she and the audience alike discover she is holding a severed hand. This shock is quickly surpassed by another when Bosola pulls back a curtain to show ‘the piece from which ’twas ta’en’,57 a tableaux of waxworks standing in for the Duchess’ family. The dramatic irony rests on the audience’s knowledge that Antonio and the children are alive, conscious that the revelation—while shocking—is another show intended to drive the Duchess insane. The scene was so affecting that it led to one of Walkley’s

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late-Victorian contemporaries, George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), to dub Webster ‘the Tussaud laureate’.58 Waxworks as artificial representation of life—life-like, yet dead—are a perfect embodiment of the juxtaposition of life and death which can be seen as symptomatic of the macabre. The inability to distinguish between death and life may be one symptom of madness, and the macabre consistently explores and blurs those boundaries in a fashion which we would today term a quintessential characteristic of the Gothic. In his seminal essay on ‘The “Uncanny”’ (1919), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) exemplifies the phenomenon by ‘the impression made by wax-work figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata’, quoting Ernst Jentsch (1867–1919); for Freud, the crux lies in the ‘doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate’.59 This returns us to Walkley’s review with which we began and to his feelings of ‘uncanniness’ when viewing Webster’s Duchess: in offering this early definition of the modern macabre, he recognises that its power lies precisely in the uncanny nature of the spectacles that the Jacobean tradition had pioneered. The constant juxtaposition of existential opposites is unsettling, yet also seductive, in much the same way that the viewing of an autopsy or an extreme act of fictional violence might be. In the blood-soaked tragedies of Webster and his contemporaries, boundaries are transgressed and renegotiated in a way which allowed the audience to face the madness. In this, the Jacobean macabre makes possible the conditions which inform the modern one, and stands as an important precursor for the later Gothic tradition which it anticipates.

Notes 1. John Stow, A Survay of London Contayning the originall, antiquity, increase, moderne estate, and description of that citie, second edn. (London, John Wolfe, 1598), 264–65. Accessed via Early English Books Online. 2. John Lydgate, Daunce Machabree (c. 1430), quoted in OED, ‘Macabre’, n.1 . 3. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London, Bloomsbury, 2006), 1.2.72–73. 4. Ibid., 1.5.27. 5. OED, ‘macabre’, adj. and n.2 . 6. A.B.W. [Arthur Bingham Walkley], ‘The Drama’, The Speaker (29 October 1892), 528. 7. Ibid., 528. 8. Ibid., 528, referring to another famous artistic iteration of danse macabre in Hans Holbein’s (1497–1543) woodcuts (1526). 9. Ibid., 528.

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10. Alison Milbank, ‘The Macabre’, in The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, ed. David William Hughes and Andrew Smith Punter (Chichester, WileyBlackwell, 2016), 408–9, 409. 11. [Walkley], ‘The Drama’, 528. 12. Indeed, the ‘baroque’ is itself in a sense coterminous with the development of the Gothic in its modern form. The OED gives 1765, the year of the second edition of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764/1765) with its subtitle ‘A Gothic Story’, for the first use in English of ‘baroque’, notably in an English translation of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) by Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), whose own paintings, such as The Nightmare (1781), were influential on the development of late-eighteenth-century gothic. 13. Nick Groom, The Vampire: A New History (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018), 8. 14. Early modern plays are notoriously difficult to date, but scholars broadly concur that these three plays appeared within a short space of time, and share a relationship either with each other or with the putative Ur-Hamlet. 15. John Marston, Antonio’s Revenge, in Five Revenge Tragedies, ed. Emma Smith (London, Penguin Classics, 2012), 1.1.0 SD. 16. Ibid., 1.1.105. 17. Ibid., 5.2.80. 18. Ibid., 5.2.115, 116, 120. 19. Ibid., 5.2.125. 20. Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, second edn. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987), 86–98. 21. Massimiliano Demata, ‘Italy and the Gothic’, Gothic Studies, vol. 8, issue 1 (2006), 1–8, 5. 22. Ibid., 3. 23. John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, in The Duchess of Malfi and Other Plays, ed. René Weis (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009), 1.1.15. 24. Ibid., 5.5.72–73. 25. On these later traditions, see Maria Purves, The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular Novel, 1785– 1829 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2009), and Patrick R. O’Malley, Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006). 26. Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, 5.3.1–9. 27. Ibid., 5.3.19, 21, 24. 28. Ibid., 5.3.26, 34. 29. Ibid., 5.3.12–19. 30. Ibid., 5.3.39. 31. Ibid., 4.2.134. 32. Antonio’s Revenge, 5.2.139.

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33. Nick Groom, The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012), 38. 34. Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, 5.2.17–18. 35. Sonya Freeman Loftis, ‘Lycantrophy and Lunacy: Cognitive Disability in The Duchess of Malfi’, in Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World, ed. Richard S. Godden and Asa Simon Mittman (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 209–226, 210. 36. Ibid., 5.2.26. 37. James Stewart, Daemonologie in Forme of a Dialogue, Diuided into Three Bookes (Edinburgh, Robert Walde, 1597), 61. Accessed via Early English Books Online. 38. Ibid., 61; my emphasis. 39. Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, 5.2.14–15. 40. See Matthew Beresford, The White Devil: The Werewolf in European Culture (London, Reaktion Books, 2013), 149. 41. [Walkley], ‘The Drama’, 528. 42. The Phoenix or the Cockpit (both names are used) was the first theatre on Drury Lane, the heart of London’s current theatre district, another location outside the city authorities’ purview. This playhouse was originally a cockfighting venue (another link between dramatic theatre and bloodsports during the period), repurposed into a theatrical space. See Christian Billing, ‘Modelling the anatomy theatre and the indoor hall theatre: Dissection on the stages of early modern London’, Early Modern Literary Studies vol. 13, issue 3 (2004), 1–17. 43. Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (Routledge, London, 1995), 43, quoting Philippe Ariès. 44. William Brockbank, ‘Old Anatomical Theatres and What Took Place Therein’, Medical History vol. 12, issue 4 (1968), 371–84, 376. 45. Billing, ‘Modelling the anatomy theatre’, 4. 46. Anonymous, The Tragedie of Claudius Tiberius Nero, Romes Greatest Tyrant (London, Francis Burton, 1607), n.p. [47]. Accessed via Early English Books Online. 47. Lucy Munro, ‘“They Eate Each Other’s Armes”: Stage Blood and Body Part’, in Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance, ed. Farah Karim Cooper and Tiffany Stern (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 73–93, 73–74. 48. Cyril Tourneur, The Atheist’s Tragedie: Or The Honest Man’s Reuenge (London, John Stepneth, 1611), n.p. [39]. Accessed via Early English Books Online. 49. See Billing, ‘Modelling the anatomy theatre’. 50. John Ford, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, ed. Simon Barker (London, Routledge, 1997), 4.3.224, 229, 230–31. 51. Ibid., 5.4.31–34.

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52. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2.540. 53. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Clara Calvo and Jesús Tronch (London, Bloomsbury, 2017), 4.1.177–78. 54. Ibid., 4.4.88. 55. Henry Chettle, The Tragedy of Hoffman, in Five Revenge Tragedies, ed. Smith, 1.3.14–18. 56. Ibid., 5.3.58. 57. Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, 4.1.56. 58. On this, and for more on the subject, see Maragret E. Owens, ‘John Webster, Tussaud Laureate: The Waxworks in The Duchess of Malfi’, English Literary History vol. 79, issue 4 (2012), 851–77. 59. Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols (London, Vintage, 2001), 17: 217–51, 225.

Bibliography A.B.W. [Arthur Bingham Walkley], ‘The Drama’, The Speaker (29 October 1892), 528. Anonymous, The Tragedie of Claudius Tiberius Nero, Romes Greatest Tyrant (London, Francis Burton, 1607). Accessed via Early English Books Online. Beresford, Matthew, The White Devil: The Werewolf in European Culture (London, Reaktion Books, 2013). Billing, Christian, ‘Modelling the Anatomy Theatre and the Indoor Hall Theatre: Dissection on the Stages of Early Modern London’, Early Modern Literary Studies vol. 13, issue 3 (2004), 1–17. Brockbank, William, ‘Old Anatomical Theatres and What Took Place Therein’, Medical History vol. 12, issue 4 (1968), 371–84. Chettle, Henry, ‘The Tragedy of Hoffman’, in Five Revenge Tragedies, ed. Emma Smith (London, Penguin Classics, 2012), 243–324. Demata, Massimiliano, ‘Italy and the Gothic’, Gothic Studies, vol. 8, issue 1 (2006), 1–8. Ford, John, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore ed. Simon Barker (London, Routledge, 1997). Freud, Sigmund, ‘The “Uncanny”’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols (London, Vintage, 2001), 17: 217–51. Groom, Nick, The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012). ———, The Vampire: A New History (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018). Gurr, Andrew, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, second edn. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987). Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Clara Calvo and Jesús Tronch (London, Bloomsbury, 2017). Loftis, Sonya Freeman, ‘Lycantrophy and Lunacy: Cognitive Disability in The Duchess of Malfi’, in Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early

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Modern World, ed. Richard S. Godden and Asa Simon Mittman (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 209–26. Marston, John Antonio’s Revenge, in Five Revenge Tragedies, ed. Emma Smith (London, Penguin Classics, 2012), 169–241. Milbank, Alison, ‘The Macabre’, in The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, ed. David William Hughes and Andrew Smith Punter (Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 408–9. Munro, Lucy, ‘“They Eate Each Other’s Armes”: Stage Blood and Body Part’, in Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance, ed. Farah Karim Cooper and Tiffany Stern (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 73–93. O’Malley, Patrick R., Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006). Owens, Maragret E., ‘John Webster, Tussaud Laureate: The Waxworks in The Duchess of Malfi’, English Literary History vol. 79, issue 4 (2012), 851–77. Purves, Maria, The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular Novel, 1785–1829 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2009). Sawday, Jonathan, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (Routledge, London, 1995). Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London, Bloomsbury, 2006). Stewart, James, Daemonologie in Forme of a Dialogue, Diuided into Three Bookes (Edinburgh, Robert Walde, 1597). Accessed via Early English Books Online. Stow, John, A Survay of London Contayning the originall, antiquity, increase, moderne estate, and description of that citie, second edn. (London, John Wolfe, 1598). Accessed via Early English Books Online. Tourneur, Cyril, The Atheist’s Tragedie: or The Honest Man’s Reuenge (London, John Stepneth, 1611). Accessed via Early English Books Online. Webster, John, The Duchess of Malfi, in The Duchess of Malfi and Other Plays, ed. René Weis (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009), 103–200.

Gothic Style

The Grammar of a Genre Beatriz Sánchez-Santos and Manuel Aguirre

The presentation of emotion and aesthetics on the page has a cognitive function for Gothic characters and readers (it is one way of informing us about the world we exist in) but also constitutes a perlocutionary act designed to move them, and us, and so to change us and them, if only emotionally, if only for the duration of the reading. And since it is all done with language, the forms of Gothic must be carefully attended to. However, the textual mechanisms that account for feeling, emotion, and morality remain to be studied in Gothic fiction. In this article, we propose to examine some of the linguistic conventions that underpin the presentation and triggering of emotion and aesthetic sentiment. We believe that these conventions can be systematised into what we might want to call a ‘grammar’ of the Gothic genre. After discussing the special nature of Gothic forms and the surficial nature of the genre, we will examine four aspects of the ‘grammar’: its ‘rules’, ‘formulaicity’, characterisation, and rhetoric. The conclusion will argue that liminality is to be seen as a key to an understanding of Gothic. A popular view has it that at the centre of the literary system certain key innovative figures—the great canonical writers—impel the system forward, while the peripheries are the repository of conservatism or imitation, when not backwardness. This essentially romantic view still bedevils approaches to the Gothic field, for innovation just as often belongs on the peripheries and the interstices, the transitional areas. Whereas the canon exerts pressure on the B. Sánchez-Santos · M. Aguirre (B) Independent scholars, Madrid, Spain

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_4

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edges of the system to conform to its norms, and condemns the dissident to ostracism or irrelevance, genres on the periphery tend to resist this pressure, and to do so by setting up formal devices that can withstand the gravitational pull of the centre because their very identity and survival as genres is at stake. Whether we speak of transgression, subversion, or interrogation, it makes sense to say that Gothic engages in resistance in the face of the novelistic canon. To countermand canonical pressures, it resorts to strong forms which cater less to the success of the individual text than to the survival of the genre‚ and do so partly by making it visible. The strong forms are neither accidents nor the outcome of poor writing, rather they are programmatic, to the extent that ignoring them threatens the Gothic aspirations of the text.1 A point often neglected by critical traditions bent on delving into the ‘depths’ of the book and the psyche is that the culture of the eighteenth century was intensely preoccupied with representing what was being told2 ; telling consisted in showing, and this was as valid a principle for Gothic fiction as it was for drama. Books were ‘part of the way in which one displayed a self for the world’.3 Great emphasis was placed on ‘the embodied nature of emotion and the notion that feeling was translated through an established vocabulary of gesture and pose’.4 Experience, one might say, was a spectacle, and readers expected all reality—both the outer and the inner worlds—to be visible surface. To use an adjective that avoids the trivialising quality of ‘superficial’, Gothic was an intensely surficial genre.5 In a surficial text, the world of the ordinary is accessible to the viewer, reader, or listener, while the extra-ordinary is located not ‘below the surface’ or ‘in the depths’ but in that most neglected of surficial elements, the threshold. Horner and Zlosnik make reference to the surface of the genre in their study of the comicity of Gothic: Whilst emphasising slightly different aspects of the Gothic, critics such as Victor Sage and Philip Stevick seem to agree that the “surface” element of Gothic fiction allows for an easy dialectic between the rational and the irrational, emotion and intellect, artificiality and authenticity and, above all, between horror and laughter. Indeed, it is the Gothic’s preoccupation with “surface” that enables it so easily to embrace a comic as well as a tragic perspective.6

What Sage and Stevick may have found is that this ‘easy dialectic’ emerges from the centrality of the liminal in Gothic texts, and that the ‘surface’ element is so conducive to that dialectic because techniques of the surface, particularly formulaicity and the rhetoric of binaries, are means of threshold formation.7 Thresholds are central to our analysis of Gothic. According to anthropologist Victor Turner, who first laid down the basis for a theory of the limen, three stages can be differentiated in a rite of passage: the pre-liminal stage (in which initiands are detached from their ordinary environment, divested of status, habits, etc.), the liminal (during which they exist in ‘a place that is not a place, and a time that is not a time’, a paradoxical, contradictory, disorientating condition), and the post-liminal (where they are returned, albeit

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changed, to their ordinary world). The liminal stage of the rite is characterised by anti-structural elements (stylisation, stereotyping, repetition, and fixity) the function of which is to level ordinary forms or to introduce forms antithetical to those commonly accepted.8 Material thresholds are part and parcel of the surface, and yet signal a discontinuity. In a metaphor of Gothic narrative ‘surfaces’, thresholds provide an anti-structural element and constitute the location of the extra-ordinary. Spatially, they translate into, e.g., haunted castles, sites of detention (whether or not subterranean), forests, or mountain ranges, but equally quandary moments, double-bind situations, or states of mental agony. Spaces, events, or situations that perform a detaining or disorientating function become liminal for the duration. But besides these thematic aspects, research must also focus on the language of fiction: ambiguity, iteration, formulaicity, inversion, or distortion of linguistic or textual rules, narrative delay, character construction. We argue that the grand emotions of Gothic are generated in liminal space— the interstices of reality, in-between and interim zones, places indeed which are ‘not places’. And we will show that Gothic fiction creates characteristic threshold formations by means of techniques of the surface. We speak of techniques (and not mere blunders) because they are strongly codified. The first thing about a grammar is that it contains rules . A rule is simply a description of the observed regularities in a system. The strong forms of Gothic easily lend themselves to a codification in terms of conventions or ‘rules’ of composition. They are constraints authors take upon themselves when they choose to write a Gothic work. They are not techniques but the ground that generates possible writing techniques. An assumption of the grammar of Gothic is that the genre is not just a debased echo of sophisticated canonical fiction and drama but also constitutes a modified version of the folktale—it is actually a successful hybrid form—and its grammar accordingly offers a set of conventions indebted to (yet divergent from) those that obtain in folk narrative.9 Analysis of Gothic has yielded so far 16 rules. R1

R2

R3

R4

Gothic constructs a world consisting of two ontological zones or dimensions. The one is the human cosmos, a domain of rationality and relative order. The other is the realm of the Numinous (whether or not supernatural), characterised by its incognoscibility. A ‘crossover’ takes place whereby either characters enter the Numinous domain or else their ordinary world acquires numinous traits (or both). The (literal or figurative) crossing of the threshold is perhaps the prototypical deed in Gothic fiction. Gothic fiction applies a cause-effect pattern to the crossover and gives it a moral slant: regardless of characters’ intentions, Gothic presents the cause as a transgressive move into or against the Other, its effect as a corresponding move by the Other by way of retribution. Our inability to grasp the Other makes it disorientating, hence terrifying; and not least among its terrors is the fact that we cannot

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R5

R6

R7

R8

R9

R10

R11

R12

R13

R14

R15

quite tell it from our own world: the Numinous is part of and yet profoundly alien to the human realm. Inherently ambiguous, its position vis-a-vis us is best viewed as liminal; that we cannot determine its boundaries is congruent with the fact that the Gothic Other partakes of the nature of boundaries: it is a threshold area or a threshold quality, and as such it introduces a profound disorder into the human world. In the course of the ‘passage’ that all adventure consists in, Gothic characters are detained in the liminal stage, the victims of an incomplete or perverted passage (see Rule 7). The Gothic ghosts are direct heirs to the ghosts of folktales and represent variations on the folklore figure of the Threshold Guardian. As such they are liminal entities. Gothic plots revolve around a contradiction—a dangerously drawn-out sojourn in a supposedly transitional stage. Delay is hence an essential strategy in this genre. Gothic fiction centres upon the flawed type rather than upon the paradigmatic hero of traditional narrative. This creates equivocal, liminal figures—peripheral yet central, evil yet appealing, ineffectual yet burdened with the responsibility of heroes. Gothic Characters, objects, actions, environments are regularly flawed or diminished with respect to an often implicit yet always compelling standard. Gothic posits an overarching power—both constraining and inimical, often identified with Providence, more often with Fate—which its failed heroes strive against but cannot overcome, and which reintroduces a measure of order into the human world (see R4). Gothic destabilises the characters’ present and reveals it to be a deceptive lull in a long-enduring turmoil. Fate is in Gothic texts often an entailment of narrative structure. False beginnings are the rule, for some secret event (murder, curse, birth, etc.) turns out to have conditioned the narrative from the outset. Being sites of power (see R10), the liminal regions in Gothic fiction draw in, imprison or, in a frequent metaphor of descent, engulf those who venture into or near them. The journey of transformation (the anthropologist’s ‘passage’) acquires the lineaments of a moral, ontological, social (sometimes even physical) fall. Gothic heeds and simultaneously subverts the standards of balance and moderation prevalent in Neoclassical diction, and dons a language of intensity, hyperbole or excess (and their opposite, lack; see R9). Gothic dwells on the liminality of the human condition. Caught in the threshold regions, Gothic characters risk being destroyed, or else transformed into such denizens of the limen—ghosts, monsters, demons—as exhibit a non-rational (compulsive, excessive, repetitive, mindless, bestial) behaviour.

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R16

77

One major theme that arises from the very forms of the Gothic genre is the exploration of the liminal experience, which often amounts to an exploration of the condition of the lost.10

It is vital to understand that these rules simply codify conventions which in many cases have long been recognised as central to the genre. It will transpire that they gravitate around a central concept—liminality—and shape a liminal poetics (see our conclusion below). One key manifestation of strong forms is formulaicity. In what follows we will concentrate on the formulaic as it manifests itself in diction, characterisation, and rhetoric. It must be noted, first and foremost, that the use of the word ‘formula’ does not refer to a mere rewording of the infamous ‘recipe’ of motifs to compose Gothic volumes11 ; and that the Gothic genre has been defined as ‘formulaic’, with slight differences in the meaning of the word itself, by several authors.12 Despite variations, the term ‘formulaicity’ tends to conjure up images of repetition and convention. From the canonical standpoint, these are traits that define genres in the fringes; from our own perspective, they are devices of resistance against the centre’s demand for originality, uniqueness, or innovation. For the criticism of a formulaic genre like the Gothic, this has traditionally resulted in two reactions: first, a strong correlation between the repetitive and the peripheral, which consequently has been assigned a lower stylistic value; additionally, interpreting ‘formulaic’ as nothing more than ‘repetitive’ or ‘unoriginal’ has led to an under-examination of formulaicity as a productive technique, and an under-appreciation of its mechanisms and objectives. Addressing both issues and speaking of the imitative quality of Gothic production ‘in the boundaries’, Potter complained of the oversimplifications derived from distinguishing between ‘art’ and trade: much is lost, he pointed out, if we overlook aspects like the genre’s moralistic teachings and the familiarity of conventions.13 Crucially, however, it is not as well as or despite formulaicity that these redeeming qualities of the Gothic exist, but rather thanks to the threshold formations produced by formulaic diction and its recognisability. Formulaicity is pivotal in the construction and perception of character, emotion, and didactic purpose in the genre. There have been notable attempts to delve deeper into the iterations and the formulas of the Gothic; in such analyses of repetition as provided by BayerBerenbaum or Grove, we detect the manifestation of a system, one where both the unpredictability of semiotic complexity and the ritualisation of language can come together within the same frame.14 To the literal meaning of ‘complex’ as complicated, productive of confusion or paradox, we must add the mathematical denotations of nonlinearity and sensitivity to initial conditions, qualities that are closely related and characteristic of mathematical complexity: they both indicate that the growth of meaning is not proportional to the sum of its component elements, and therefore, that small changes in a variable give rise to disproportionate outcomes. Dealing with complexity, then, means

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facing a space between order and disorder (see R4, R10), which again underscores the centrality of liminality for an understanding of the genre’s rhetoric. Metaphoric analogies between literary texts and chaotic systems have been employed for some time with success15 ; this has led its main proponent, N. Katherine Hayles, to define a ‘multi-disciplinary space’ for ‘the study of the cultural and scientific implications of chaos’.16 The definitions of formulaicity that we have provided also support an application of the concepts from mathematical complexity and chaos theory to Gothic fiction. We face iteration rather than mere repetition, with variation within paradigms taking precedence over fixity. Grove (2000: 115–18) already observed that each occurrence of a Gothic motif or character accumulates connotations in its appearance across novels, enabling complex intertextual dialogues. This view is entirely compatible with different strands of criticism that involve reader reception theories, such as Jo Alyson Parker’s links between traditional narratology and reader-produced meaning.17 The concept of iteration implies that the meaning of the iterated item will depend substantially on previous occurrences: in a chaotic system, the result of an iteration of the function is fed back into the system to condition subsequent iterations. Likewise, the repetition of formulas at different levels ensures that these acquire different connotations based on previous occurrences and frames of reference, whether within the text or within our own reading history. This is the quality of chaotic systems known as feedback mechanisms. In an extraordinarily prolific genre like Gothic fiction, the multiplicity of variables feeding into the system can seem frustrating; at the same time, such richness makes features like repetition and iteration become synonymous with productivity and many-sidedness. No longer devoid of meaning, formulas convey a significant amount of information—they can be viewed as points in a network of meaning that is built intra- and inter-textually and which is virtually inexhaustible. Distinguishing between variation and fixity in formulaicity is central: just like in oral epic poetry, construction along these two axes is the basis for composition and performance. Consequently, building variation into our definition of the formulaic allows for greater accuracy in the analysis than would emphasis on mere repetition, making it possible to distinguish nuances of meaning between, for instance, ‘she shed a flood of tears’ and ‘a friendly flood of tears preserved her from fainting’, and places the focus not on the occurrence of a specific formula itself, but on the formulaic character of the system at large. By appearing at different scales, formulaicity reveals itself as a compositional technique, one that ensures the liminal experience. The selfsimilarity of the formulaic pattern in the genre is another trait that supports its characterisation as a chaotic system. We will accordingly distinguish the invariable formula—consisting of a fixed set of words—from the flexible formulaic pattern—a system of lexical fields arranged within syntactic and phonological fields—and concentrate on the latter as a compositional strategy. We analyse the mechanisms of variation (self-similarity) rather than harp on the fixity of the construct (self-identity).

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Fielding , understood as the strategy of grouping items into paradigms, seems to be a major construction principle that clusters words, clauses, and phrases into so many lexical and syntactic fields, these into formulaic patterns, and so on in gradual ascent. The application of this single principle to the construction of progressively more complex groupings yields a textual architecture that regularly resembles itself—a fractal. One way to describe a formulaic pattern is to present it as a syntagma that engages a number of lexical paradigms. In Peter Teuthold’s The Necromancer (1794), the words ‘The dismal howling arose again’ seem to shape an ordinary clause, until we correlate them with other groupings in the book. Here is a sample (the number indicates volume and page): • • • • • •

a whispering arose (2.220) a sudden hollow noise arose (1.214) at once a sudden hollow noise struck our ears (1.103) a frightful howling filled our ears (2.97) no sound was heard except the dismal dirge of the screech-owl (1.217) no sound was heard except the hollow echo repeating our shouts […] in a dismal accent (1.107)

Just five lexical fields: AGENT, EXPERIENCER, SOUND WORD, SOUND VERB, and QUALIFIER, in various combinations, suffice to generate 15 different tokens in the book (and further combinations could easily treble that number). We do not truly have different events, we have variations on one ‘single’ linguistic structure conveying one single basic idea—the frightful noise motif. With (variations on) this and other formulaic patterns in predictable combinations, the novel erects a tableau, the striking moment of a ghostly apparition. In our example, double underline identifies a formula; single underline, a formulaic pattern: A few moments more of profound silence, and then the dismal howling arose again with redoubled force; a sudden violent gust of wind threw the windows open, and the door from its hinges, extinguishing all the candles; a tremendous clap of thunder shook the house, a terrible flash of lightning hissed through the room, and prostrated us to the ground; an hideous lamenting noise assailed our ears, and lifting up my head I beheld the phantom that once had frightened me, advancing with a threatening grin; grisly was its shape, and its eyes rolling like two flaming comets.18

Formulas properly so-called amount to 21 out of 98 words, or 21.4% of the passage. Counting both these and formulaic patterns, 69 words belong in formulaic groupings‚ or 70.4% of the whole. The excerpt is mostly made up of formulaic diction. ‘Extinguish’ generates 13 clauses in the book, including ‘The light in the lamp was now extinguished’ (1.94); ‘A gust of wind had extinguished our

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torches’ (1.200) and, figuratively, ‘the few remaining sparks of honesty and virtue were extinguished by degrees’ (2.146). ‘Thunder’ (including ‘thundering’ and ‘thunderstruck’) occurs 42 times. ‘A tremendous clap of thunder’ appears five times as a formula, but also displays variants, betokening a formulaic pattern: ‘a tremendous peal of thunder’ (1.97); ‘roaring claps of thunder’ (1.97); ‘the roaring of thunder’ (1.97); ‘as if roused by a sudden clap of thunder’ (2.97) (mark the substitutive alliteration ‘roaring’- ‘roused’); ‘roared my friend with a thundering voice’ (1.200). Lightning, physical, or figurative, appears 24 times: ‘a sudden flash of vivid lightning illuminated my prison’ (2.230), ‘His eyes darted flashes of lightning’ (2.18)‚ ‘[They] rushed like lightning into my chamber’ (2.46–47). Similarly, all the groupings underlined recur in codifiable variations elsewhere in the novel. But this is no isolated tableau: it, too, recurs. What we are discussing here is not a motif tout court (something that could immediately be reduced to thematics) but the linguistic foundations of a motif—the formulaic pattern it is made of—a phenomenon of the surface (the language) of the text. On no less than ten occasions do various characters witness the summoning and/or laying of different ghosts, and always the ‘same’ formulaic patterns are used. The frequency of this topos means that time and again characters and readers are forced to halt at this situational crossroads, fleetingly short-circuiting narrative progression. Nor do tableaux exist singly but geminate replicas of themselves. When this happens—when we have an aggregate of tableaux—we obtain a higher-level narrative unit, a type-scene which—like the banquet, recognition, or battle scenes in epic—consists in an aggregate of tableaux, themselves built out of recurrent formulaic patterns. The formulaic pattern is self-similar rather than (as the formula) selfidentical. Recurrence sets up a constant, but variation is crucial here: true unflinching repetition (rather than a system of oscillatory ‘echoes’) would dispel the illusion of narrative time. Thanks to variation, the text seems to advance as a novel should; but because of recurrence—lexical, syntactic, even phonological—characters (and readers) are regularly stalled at junctions of extreme intensity, intimating each time that we are back to the ‘same’ frightful moment. Linear narrative progression is compromised by systematic detours and loops, and acquires the structure of the labyrinth. One function of formulaicity, then, is to liminalise physical and narrative space (R15). By freezing or slowing down the course of events (R5) and delaying resolution (R7), all space turns into that interim region where ‘enterprises of great pitch and moment’, as Hamlet puts it, ‘lose the name of action’. On the one hand, formulaicity conduces to narrative determinism precisely by means of what students of religion have called ‘eternal returns;’19 it therefore establishes an extradiegetic narrative order (R10). Simultaneously, its anti-structural, defamiliarising quality disrupts human order and ushers in the Numinous, creating disorientation and terror (R4). Basically, then, formulaic diction serves the ambivalent function of both creating and containing chaos.

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Formulaicity is a technique of the surface: it foregrounds and defamiliarises language—a precise equivalent of the ‘anti-structure’ Turner detected in ritual. In the context of reader reception and didacticism, the technique serves to induce ‘excessive’ feeling and to construct, at the same time, mediating devices that contain that same excess, instructing the reader in the proper moral and sympathetic response. As we will now show, the iteration of extremes and exceptionality in characters‚ scenes, and plots makes a rule of the extraordinary, leading to the paradoxes and instabilities of what we call ‘conventional uniqueness’. The peculiarities of complex systems are also observable in the process of characterisation, where recursive symmetries come to light. The iteration of formulaic patterns in characterisation is, again, a symptom and a consequence of the genre’s liminality: while it helps to construct a somewhat ‘rigid’, heightened, overpatterned array of characters, it also yields greater instability as a result of its complexity and of the paradoxes caused by a discourse based on extremes and excess. A close reading of the ‘techniques of the surface’ in general, and of formulaic diction in particular, uncovers unpredictable or divergent outcomes in meaning. One such perplexing outcome is the complication of seemingly strong positions about mimesis, identification, and morality in the genre. The argument was strong at the time that by identifying with the fictional victims (including lowly and comical ones) of various vicissitudes, the audience could engage in some sort of moral improvement. But in the Gothic, how are the rule of nature and the presence of the supernatural reconciled? How could the extremes of sensibility that are supposed to excite sympathy, the motor for the betterment of society, ultimately be read as excessive, and therefore pernicious, affectivity? The characters, it follows, stand at the centre of the text’s propriety and usefulness, since it is through them that morality and feeling are mediated. Formulaicity, we contend, leads to a central tension in characterisation: the ordinary versus the extraordinary (R1). Through iteration of formulaic patterns, such as those with superlative constructions, or those featuring phrases like ‘uncommonly interesting’ or ‘uncommon beauty’, the unconventional aspects of a character are brought to the fore, while at the same time they will be made frequent enough to be recognisable as the standard, within the novel or the genre at large. This paradox is one of the best examples of complexity (understood as unexpected outcomes of iteration) at different scales in Gothic fiction. And while events and incidents are also very often extraordinary, the formulaic patterns that reflect exceptionality are most evident in the characterisation of heroes/heroines and villains. Thus, for instance, Julia, in A Sicilian Romance, is ‘uncommonly susceptible of the charms of harmony’, and the nuns she has the chance to converse with were ‘uncommonly amiable’.20 Several characters in The Mysteries of Udolpho furnish us with more instances, such as Emily’s ‘uncommon delicacy of mind’.21 The minute, loosely formulaic description of some characters’

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countenances further qualifies their uniqueness: the Marchioness’s countenance of ‘uncommon beauty’ (ibid., p. 104), and M. Bonnac’s ‘uncommonly interesting’ countenance (ibid., p. 649) share a shade of sorrow and melancholy brought about by the endurance of misfortune. Two of the most paradigmatic Gothic villains, Ambrosio and Montoni, are equally ‘uncommonly handsome’.22 The use of this pattern manifests the tendency to accentuate the extreme in the character, to overemphasise beyond what the actions of the characters can tell about either their incorruptible or their monstrous nature. Highlighting the unconventional and extraordinary in the novels is a function also performed by a plethora of superlative constructions. To give some quantitative examples, Radcliffe’s The Italian contains 47 instances of ‘the most’, 23 of ‘utmost’, 7 of ‘more than usual(ly)’, and 4 of ‘more than ever;’23 while Lewis’s The Monk teems with superlative expressions: those with the suffix ‘–est’ amount to 127 occurrences, while ‘the most’ appears 114 times. It is easy to see how this propensity for the extreme will also affect the themes and levels of the narrative: such extraordinary characters can only excite the most extraordinary feelings in those who know them. In consequence, passions grow inordinately, bringing about the most exceptional events. This emphasis placed upon the unconventional shares with characterisation in the fairytale an aim at ‘shaping … the Marvellous through enhancement’, in Aguirre’s words, a technique that ‘sets up patterns which abstract these characters from the ordinary and raise them to the level of the archetypal’.24 With the reiteration of notions of excess, of extremity, the language of Gothic repeats, restates, retells, with the aim of maintaining the character within the confines of the stereotype. This strategy, particularly in the case of a heroine, determines our interpretation of her actions, as it helps to configure what we have termed ‘a discourse of determinism’ opposed to a ‘discourse of free will’, that is, a sense of predestined denouement that is set in opposition to the emphasis placed on the character’s choice.25 Such a sense of predestination is often the result of robust frames of reference in genres that the Gothic novel intersects with: the wondertale, the sentimental novel or the conduct book. Formulaic traits like a heroine’s orphaned condition or exceptional beauty and virtue summon up a certain adventure for that character (as in the typical wondertale plot); consequently, the course of events can be anticipated by the reader that recognises the reference.26 Acknowledging a clear influence of the folktale in characterisation also means that the extraordinary in the Gothic narrative represents, first of all, a stylistic quality. Extremes are in the wondertale a matter of ‘formal completion’, the practical application of an aesthetic principle that favours beauty ‘in its entire narrative form, stylistically and structurally’.27 Like wondertales, the Gothic genre tends to a consistency of composition, with a presence of the extreme and the hyperbolical that surfaces at different levels, from the very ‘excess’ of wording provided by iteration, to other various notions of extremity: in the character, in the feelings described, in the plot itself. And yet

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the Gothic character is not simply a copy of the fairytale hero or heroine: it is placed in a liminal position between the exceptional and the typical, and particularly so regarding those traits that define the character’s aesthetic or moral position, whose weight in formulaic frequency betrays the genre’s didactic purpose. The character’s attitude to truth and concealment, for instance, gives us multiple formulaic patterns with ‘countenance’, ‘air’, or ‘manner’ that play into the convention of transparency as virtue, while engaging in the rhetoric of binary constructions that we will develop later. The notions of the countenance as a mirror of inner feeling, or as a record of a life of vice or misfortune, are also sources of formulaic construction: feelings spreading, overspreading, or diffusing themselves over a countenance (often adopted by Radcliffe and Lewis), countenances being softened or soothed by the effect of a warm sentiment, feelings fixing a countenance, and the effects of death on a countenance. In a prominent example of the semantic implications of formulaicity, Ann Radcliffe almost unfailingly pairs countenance and manner, indicating the congruity between inward and outward qualities: ‘[t]he innocent countenance of the woman, and the simplicity of her manner (…), inclined St. Aubert to believe her story’ (Udolpho, p. 52); ‘his countenance and manners would have won him the acquaintance of St. Aubert’ (Udolpho, p. 56); ‘though his countenance and manner had continually expressed his admiration of her …’ (Udolpho, p. 89); ‘[t]he haughty sullenness of her countenance and manner’ (Udolpho, p. 183); ‘[her] gentle countenance and manners soothed her more than any circumstance she had known for many months’ (Udolpho, p. 418); ‘[t]he countenance, the manners and the recollected words of Barnardine (…) confirmed her worst fears’ (Udolpho, p. 347); ‘whose countenance and manners announced so fair a mind’ (The Italian, p. 97); ‘his manner and countenance assumed a calm dignity’ (The Italian, p. 198). This points to a theory that manners were in the eighteenth century a further field for the display of virtue; as such, they were susceptible of manifesting either inner beauty or mere superficiality.28 For descriptions of heroines and virtuous characters in general (such as helpers of the heroine, her love interest, certain relatives, etc.), manners invariably reinforce all the attributes heralded by countenances, and so they display inner qualities without any hints of dissimulation, a talent which is exclusive to base characters. And still, in this seemingly consistent construction of stereotypes and conventions, it is the excess reiterated by means of formulaic composition that leads to areas of paradox and ambiguity—mostly in relation with virtue and thus, with moral improvement. In this particular example, the iterated formulae shape a discourse that will later make the reader, or the character, question the boundaries of virtue. Built around the vast amount of information provided by countenances and, in general, by the observation of appearance, this discourse is completed with references to judgment. The reliability of countenances to read character and inner feeling is understood as a moral

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subject not only insofar as it distinguishes the transparent, innocent character from the deceitful one, but also as it determines a character’s judging skills: noble, exemplary characters have the ability to ‘read countenances’. In Parsons’s The Castle of Wolfenbach, the insistence on the fact that Matilda’s face ‘needs no recommendation’ is meant to emphasise that her goodness transpires to her very face, but it also implies that her new family do not need further proof of her worthiness once they have perceived her virtue by looking at her. Paradoxically, she still manages to astonish those who know her. Also paradoxically, her extreme standards of virtue will make of her the opposite of a good judge of character, as she considers herself little more than a contemptible impostor. Such extreme characters, as well as the unlikely events befallen to them and the uncontrollable passions they arouse, were often condemned as questionable examples, despite the didactic value of even the most extreme and theatrical type-scenes and tableaux, which we have analysed elsewhere as complex examples of sensibility and sympathetic response.29 As shown in the previous section, formulaicity imbues the reader with a sense of the liminal while it foregrounds the surface elements of the text, defamiliarising language. In formulaic scenes of excess feeling or sentimentality, or those of encounter with the Numinous, iteration and conventionalisation work both to direct the reader’s response towards unmediated identification (mirroring the character’s feelings), and to contain the force of the passions, including the contact with the unknown, by giving the reader an advantage of awareness vis-à-vis the character. The impulse to identify with the character’s extreme distress, then, is checked by the visibility of conventions in the narrative. A related aspect of the grammar of Gothic concerns what we have called a rhetoric of binaries , and which we find pervading the bulk of Gothic fiction.30 This is a metonymic strategy that makes sense of any given item by correlating it with a second. It plays with pairs of terms that stand in a relation of antithesis, reciprocity, complementarity, parallelism, or oxymoron. Straightforward examples of this binary technique in Radcliffe’s first novel are a mixed delight of hope and fear (30); [he] sat down to consider the past, and anticipate the future (54); the united talents of the soldier and the philosopher (60); the graces of his person, and of his mind (60); his prudence formed resolutions, which his passion as quickly broke (92).31 Their value is cumulative mainly: they lull us into an easy rhythm of two-place structures and prepare us for wholesale subversion. In eighteenth-century texts this rhetoric favours plots that involve crossover, shift, or transformation; conceptual oppositions (accident/design, passion/reason, appearance/reality); echo- and mirror-effects. It exploits strategies such as juxtaposition, alternation and parallelism, iteration, ambiguity, and ambivalence. It thrives on symmetry, on the double voice of free indirect style, and on the plurality of narratives that result from framing and embedding. It demands that a thing should exist as part of a pair or exhibit two aspects; that appearance should correspond to reality (where this is not

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the case, readers tuned to the rhetoric know something is amiss); and that thought and feeling manifest themselves in setting, atmosphere or bodily stance. Tension at the expense of the reader’s expectations is central to the technique. The physical display of emotions is here a means of establishing innerto-outer correspondences and of making emotion tangible to readers. This yields two principles of Gothic composition: equivalence, and visibility. By the one, everything mirrors something else; by the other, this mirroring is readeroriented so that meaning will be displayed rather than just told of. The first demands resemblance and difference, resonance, harmony or conflict as part of the structure of the text; the second privileges image over narration, scene over plot, surface over depth.32 The rhetoric of binaries is also a formulaic device, and as such it partakes of the characteristics of a chaotic nonlinear system that we have noted earlier: iteration, self-similarity, and complexity at different levels of the text—lexical, syntactic, thematic, etc. Iteration of binary relations reveals undecided or extremely complex meanings: ambiguity, tension between opposites, conflict as well as harmony; in sum, it brings the reader to threshold territories (as we have seen in the previous section in relation to characterisation). At the scale of the word and formulaic pattern, this rhetoric correlates the thematic interest in the binary with a pervasive two-beat structuring of discourse. In this section, we will concentrate on those elements of the textual surface that can be argued to bear relation to rhythm, structure, and sound. Upon reading a passage like the following introduction of Vivaldi, the protagonist of The Italian, we perceive that the articulation—the syntax— gives this style a very particular musicality to which the ear/eye is quickly attuned: Vincentio di Vivaldi was the only son of the Marchese di Vivaldi, a nobleman of one of the most ancient families of the kingdom of Naples, a favourite possessing an uncommon share of influence at court, and a man still higher in power than in rank. His pride of birth was equal to either, but it was mingled with the justifiable pride of a principled mind. It governed his conduct in morals as well as in the jealousy of ceremonial distinctions, and elevated his practice as well as his claims. His pride was at once his vice and his virtue, his safeguard and his weakness. (The Italian, p. 7)

In Radcliffe’s prose, as it is illustrated by this passage, the presence of binaries goes beyond the motivic: it pervades the diction of the text, from the formulaic pattern to the seemingly endless subordination with which Radcliffe shapes her writing. It is indeed a characteristic of textual surface and texture, a metonymic rhetoric that structures meaning according to semantic textual contiguity, apparent in the syntax of the paragraph. In this excerpt, twoplace clauses fill the description with a quick succession of logical connections: comparison (‘still higher in power/than in rank’; ‘in morals/as well as in

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the jealousy…’; ‘his practice/as well as his claims’), addition (‘a favourite possessing…/and a man still higher…’; ‘his vice and his virtue, /his safeguard and his weakness’), contrast (‘his pride of birth was equal to either, /but it was mingled with…’), in coordinated or parallel constructions, emphasised by alliteration (‘Vincentio/Vivaldi’; ‘pride/principled’, ‘vice/virtue’). Postmodification with ‘of’ is clearly preferred to the Saxon genitive, particularly when symmetrical groupings with a defined rhythm result from it (‘the only son | of the Marquese | di Vivaldi’; ‘an uncommon share | of influence at court’; ‘the justifiable pride | of a principled mind’). Radcliffe’s style exhibits a high degree of consistency, which suggests that, if the purpose is to look for harmony or disruptions of harmony in the characters, their very description will respond with visibility of binary structures in the text. Being everywhere, in a way so difficult to pin down and at the same time so easily observable, we may legitimately wonder whether this omnipresence of the binary reveals itself as a principle of composition common to different artistic expressions. Following that reasoning, we have argued elsewhere that threshold formation can inform an analogy of the rhetoric of binaries with musical periodicity, as binary structures generate successive ‘nodes’ of tension and release.33 The passage immediately following the previous one could be read with this structuring in mind: The mother of Vivaldi, descended from a family as ancient as that of his father, was equally jealous of her importance; but her pride was that of birth and distinction, without extending it to morals. She was of violent passions, haughty, vindictive, yet crafty and deceitful; patient in stratagem, and indefatigable in pursuit of vengeance, on the unhappy objects who provoked her resentment. She loved her son, rather as being the last of two illustrious houses, who was to re-unite and support the honour of both, than with the fondness of a mother. (ibid., pp. 7–8)

The opening sentence in this paragraph can serve as an example of the never-ending gemination of binary relationships that Radcliffe often resorts to: the ancestry of Vivaldi’s mother is placed on a footing with that of his father by means of the embedded reduced relative clause, but the differences between them are stressed immediately after: the contrast is to be found in the pride of social rank—again divided into a twosome (‘birth and distinction’)—pitted against moral stature. In that sentence alone there are five heads modified by prepositional phrases. The description that ensues is no less rich in binary constructions: her passionate nature is again expressed with a noun modified by a prepositional phrase (‘she was of violent passions’), and further defined by two pairs of adjectives (‘haughty, vindictive, yet crafty and deceitful’), and by two adjective phrases that initially seem parallel (adjective plus prepositional phrase: ‘patient in stratagem and indefatigable in pursuit…’), the second of which, however, stretches progressively with further post-modification (‘pursuit of vengeance/on the unhappy objects/who provoked her resentment’).

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The last sentence, where her motherly love, close to mere pride, is presented as opposed to a more affectionate feeling, introduces the character of her son as a binary figure himself: the last heir of two families, with a twofold purpose in life (‘to re-unite and support the honour of both [houses]’). In terms of structure and sonorous quality, there is certainly a penchant for delaying the end of the sentence as much as possible, and in reading the passage aloud, our voice would naturally have to pitch itself to rising intonations several times, including several commas that would be unnecessary for the syntax but which are needed to keep the short phrasing symmetrical (‘[t]he mother of Vivaldi, descended…;’ ‘in pursuit of vengeance, on the unhappy objects…’). While the meaning of sentences becomes repetitive, sometimes difficult to follow or even ambiguous—consider, for example, the awkward construction of the first sentence—the very rhythm of this periodic phrasing articulates the sound of the paragraph clearly, giving presence by defamiliarisation to the narrator’s voice, even in the minimal act of performance that takes place in the written text, which is our own voice reading to us in silence (the inescapable internal dialogue that Parks attributed to any instance of language use).34 This also suggests further links with oral literature, where devices of repetition such as rhyme, formula, alliteration, etc., according to Aguirre’s study of the folktale, place the narrative at a border with the ritual: they signal that we are entering a world of exemplary characters and deeds.35 As we suggested in the previous section, it is precisely in its characters that Gothic fiction presents more similarities with the oral tradition and the folktale, and so it is not surprising that the clearest examples of these binary constructions appear in passages where characters are introduced. More importantly, this delay of the point of arrival and ‘rest’ of the sentence displays the same effects, at the level of sound and structure, as the ‘ritualising’ phasing of form in Aguirre’s study of the folktale: namely, increased tension and creation of climaxes. For wondertales, Aguirre enumerates these ‘ritualising narrative strategies:’ periodicity, formulaic language, phasing, selfsimilarity, and overpatterning (a self-conscious emphasis on form), which all work together to construct ‘a mechanics of transmission’.36 In the novel, however, transmission is ensured, and so repetition and formula—overpatterning of the text—tend to be interpreted either as superficial recreation or as careless composition.37 In contrast to this claim of compositional negligence, Aguirre contends that successive phases, be it in ‘space, motion, objects, or characters in ritual and narrative (…) amount to a phasing of action’, concurrent with a creation of thresholds.38 While in the study of fairytales phasing was pertinent to describe the dynamics of plot and not so much of language, we argue here that phasing may be one raison d’être of the rhetoric of binaries as a compositional device, that is, one that dominates different aspects of the narrative—including language. In the example we have analysed, the introduction of Vivaldi’s character is phased into the descriptions of his father and his mother, and then his own character as a product of both his progenitors. Linguistically, too, the presence of binary constructions contributes to the

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impression of successive steps to achieve a goal, and as a result, the effects of phasing are observable in passages with binary constructions: the first and most obvious function is a lengthening of the story; secondly, it provides rhythm, as the succession of steps marks the beat of progress; thirdly, it delays that same progress, creating tension; finally, when that tension is released, a climax is reached, and with it, a sense of resolution.39 The conclusions to be drawn from this preliminary analysis of the grammar of Gothic can best be formulated as five additional ‘rules’: R17 Emerging at the confluence between folklore and literature, the Gothic is a liminal genre that exists in the tension between two different poetics. To withstand pressures to conform to the literary mainstream, it resorts to ‘strong’, highly conventionalised forms that will ensure its visibility and survival as a genre. R18 Among the strong forms of Gothic, a rhetoric of binaries assumes that every object is complete only when considered under two aspects, as consisting of two complementary or contrastive parts of itself, or as compared to another object. R19 A principle of equivalence demands that X be always defined par rapport with Y, making of resemblance and difference, harmony, resonance, or conflict central concerns in the organisation of the text. R20 A principle of visibility requires that an unfamiliar thing be represented by a familiar one, and privileges image over narrative, the explicit over the tacit, surface over depth. The inner must be given an outward expression; the motions of the soul must be embodied. R21 A principle of formulaicity governs the patterning of language, characters, diction, and plot (‘formula writing’). It foregrounds the surface— the language of the text—and endows it with intensity (R14), creates a liminal space–time of impasses and labyrinths, and thereby renders the experience of the Numinous visible while subjecting it to control. One way to make sense of the rules is to say that they gravitate around that essential trait of the genre, its liminality. Gothic’s situating itself on the edge of the literary system and its exploring—often critically—the borders of the rationalist universe endow it with a liminal quality which in turn manifests itself on both formal and thematic levels. It constructs plots of loss in threshold regions or in nets of deception that appear inextricable; it creates flawed or inhibited characters that straddle the line between rectitude and debasement, or between authenticity and servitude; it uses a formulaic diction that generates the unfamiliar, chaos, and horror, yet, paradoxically, through the very familiarity and predictability of its language prevents horror from truly spilling out. Wherever we move in Gothic landscapes we traverse imprisoning loci of physical or mental desolation which nevertheless make heightened experience possible. Everywhere Gothic tends to liminalise world, character, mood, certainty, and

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morality. Its strong ‘grammar’ is the natural outcome of this tendency, for two reasons. On the one hand, a principle of formulaic construction replicates itself on every level of composition, from phrase, clause, and character through plot, book, and genre. On the other hand, this tendency towards liminalisation runs against the grain of a rationalist worldview bent on laying down clear categories and either-or choices, as well as against the dictates of a novelistic canon founded on this worldview. Its hybrid nature as a graft between folklore and literature mandates a grammar of anti-structural forms that differentiate it from the prevailing canon. And, while generating multiple redundancies which might offend canonical tastes, it ensures its own preservation and transmission. Its success as a genre is undeniably before us: The Gothic genre and its aftermaths have afforded us over 250 years of fascination. The price paid for it was, perhaps, high—most Gothic was zealously consigned to the periphery of the cultural system; with hindsight, however, this is probably where the genre belongs—on the threshold of the canon. We believe that the exploration of this grammar adumbrates a key trait of its liminal poetics.

Notes 1. See Aguirre, “Thick Description and the Poetics of the Liminal in Gothic Tales”, in Orbis Litterarum Universarum 72:4 (2017), pp. 294– 317. 2. Henry Home, Lord Kames (1762) Elements of Criticism, 6th edn, ed. Peter Jones (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005). 3. Abigail Williams, The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home (New Haven, CT, Yale UP, 2017), p. 63. 4. Williams, 2017: 18. 5. On the theatricality of Gothic see, Coral Ann Howells, Love, Mystery, and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction (London, Athlone Press, 1978); Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, Gothic and the Comic Turn (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). On the “surficial”, see S. Yahya Islami, “What Is Surficial Thought in Architecture?”, in Architectural Research Quarterly 18:1 (2014), pp. 39–46; Aguirre, “‘Dreary Abodes:’ Gothic Formulaic Discourse as a Technique of the Surface”, in Neophilologus 104:1 (2020), pp. 1–18. 6. Horner and Zlosnik, 2005: 9. 7. On ‘techniques of the surface’ see Elizabeth Napier, The Failure of Gothic: Problems of Disjunction in an Eighteenth-Century Literary Form (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987). 8. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1969). 9. On “laws” of folklore see Axel Olrik, Principles for Oral Narrative Research, trans. Kirsten Wolf and Jody Jensen (1921; Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1992); on structural forms, see Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott, revised Louis A. Wagner (1928;

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Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968). The Gothic debt to folktale has been analysed in detail in Aguirre, “A Gothic-Folktale Interface”, in Gothic Studies 21:2 (2019), pp. 159–75. 10. The rules were first published in “A Grammar of Gothic: Report on a Research Project on the Forms of the Gothic Genre”, in Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840, 21 (2013), pp. 124–34. 11. Anon, The Age; A Poem: Moral, Political and Metaphysical. With Illustrative Annotations. In Ten Books (London, Vernor, Hood, and Sharpe, 1810). 12. John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1977); Napier (1987); Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London and New York, Methuen, 1986); Elizabeth MacAndrew, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (New York, Columbia University Press, 1979); Grove (2000); Emma J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995). 13. Franz J. Potter, The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800–1835: Exhuming the Trade (Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 10. 14. Linda Bayer-Berenbaum, The Gothic Imagination: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art (London and Toronto, Associated University Presses, 1982); Allen W. Grove, “Sexual Chaos: The Gothic ‘Formula’ and the Politics of Complexity”, in Disrupted Patterns: On Chaos and Order in the Enlightenment, ed. Theodore E. D. Braun and John Aloysius McCarthy (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA, Rodopi, 2000), pp. 107–18. 15. See N. Katherine Hayles, “Chaos as Orderly Disorder: Shifting Ground in Contemporary Literature and Science”, in New Literary History 20:2 (1989), pp. 305–22; Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1990); ed., Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1991); Patrick Brady, “Chaos Theory, Control Theory, and Literary Theory, or: A Story of Three Butterflies”, in Modern Language Studies 20:4 (1990), pp. 65– 79; Theodore E.D. Braun and John A. McCarthy (eds.), Disrupted Patterns: On Chaos and Order in the Enlightenment (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2000); Jo Alyson Parker, Narrative Form and Chaos Theory in Sterne, Proust, Woolf, and Faulkner (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 16. Introduction to Braun and McCarthy 2000: 2. 17. Parker, 2007: 2.

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18. Peter Teuthold, The Necromancer, or The Tale of the Black Forest: Founded on Facts. Translated from the German of Lawrence Flammenberg, 2 vols. (London, Minerva Press, 1794), vol. 1, p. 215. 19. The locus classicus is Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (London, Penguin/Arkana, 1989). 20. Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance, ed. Alison Milbank (Oxford, World’s Classics, 1998), pp. 4, 113. 21. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (Oxford, World’s Classics, 1980), p. 5. 22. Matthew G. Lewis, The Monk, ed. Howard Anderson (Oxford, World’s Classics, 1995), p. 18; Udolpho, p. 23. 23. Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, ed. Frederick Garber (Oxford, World’s Classics, 1981). 24. M. Aguirre, The Thresholds of the Tale: Liminality and the Structure of Fairytales (Madrid, The Gateway Press, 2007), p. 120. 25. Sánchez Santos, introduction to Eliza Parsons’ The Castle of Wolfenbach (The Northanger Library. Madrid, The Gateway Press, 2009), https://www.northangerlibrary.com/productos.asp?IdCategor iaPral=28, pp. xlix–xcvii. 26. Ibid.: lxxv. 27. Max Lüthi (1975) The Fairytale as Art Form and Portrait of Man, trans. Jon Erickson (Bloomington‚ Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 57. 28. Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London, Routledge 1996), pp. 42–54. 29. Beatriz Sánchez-Santos, A Grammar of Gothic Characters: A Study of Characterisation in Eighteenth-Century Gothic Fiction (unpublished PhD dissertation; Spain, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2017). 30. See Sánchez-Santos‚ 2017, pp. 65–81; Aguirre, “Gothic Castles and the Rhetoric of Binaries: The Case of Ann Radcliffe’s The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne”, in At the Interface, ed. Beatriz Sánchez-Santos (Madrid, The Gateway Press, forthcoming), pp. 41–64. 31. The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, edited by Alison Milbank (Oxford, World’s Classics, 1995). 32. Aguirre, 2019. 33. B. Sánchez-Santos, 2017: 65–81. 34. Ward Parks, “The Textualization of Orality in Literary Criticism”, in Vox Intenta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages, ed. A.N. Doane and Carol Braun Pasternack (Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 56. 35. Aguirre, 2007: 96. 36. Aguirre, 2007: 164.

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37. Ward Parks, “Orality and Poetics: Synchrony, Diachrony, and the Axes of Narrative Transmission”, in Comparative Research on Oral Traditions: A Memorial for Milman Parry, ed. John Miles Foley (Columbus, OH, Slavica, 1987), p. 523. 38. Aguirre, 2007: 132. 39. Aguirre, op. cit.: 132.

Bibliography Aguirre, Manuel, “A Gothic-Folktale Interface”, in Gothic Studies 21:2 (2019), 259– 75. ———, “‘Dreary Abodes’: Gothic Formulaic Discourse as a Technique of the Surface”, in Neophilologus 104:1 (2020), pp. 1–18. ———, “Gothic Castles and the Rhetoric of Binaries: The Case of Ann Radcliffe’s The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne”, in At the Interface, ed. Beatriz Sánchez-Santos (Madrid, The Gateway Press, forthcoming), pp. 41–64. ———, The Thresholds of the Tale: Liminality and the Structure of Fairytales (Madrid, The Gateway Press, 2007). ———, “Thick Description and the Poetics of the Liminal in Gothic Tales”, in Orbis Litterarum Universarum 72:4 (2017), pp. 294–317. Anon, The Age; A Poem: Moral, Political and Metaphysical. With Illustrative Annotations. In Ten Books (London, Vernor, Hood, and Sharpe, 1810). Bayer-Berenbaum, Linda, The Gothic Imagination: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art (London and Toronto, Associated University Presses, 1982). Brady, Patrick, “Chaos Theory, Control Theory, and Literary Theory, or: A Story of Three Butterflies”, in Modern Language Studies 20:4 (1990), pp. 65–79. Braun, Theodore E.D., and John A. McCarthy (eds.), Disrupted Patterns: On Chaos and Order in the Enlightenment (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2000). Cawelti, John G., Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1977) Clery, Emma J., The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995). Cohen, Michèle, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London, Routledge, 1996). Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (London, Penguin/Arkana, 1989). Grove, Allen W., “Sexual Chaos: The Gothic ‘Formula’ and the Politics of Complexity”, in Disrupted Patterns: On Chaos and Order in the Enlightenment, ed. Braun and McCarthy (2000), pp. 107–18. Hayles, N. Katherine, “Chaos as Orderly Disorder: Shifting Ground in Contemporary Literature and Science”, in New Literary History 20:2 (1989), pp. 305–22. ———, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1990). ———, ed., Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1991).

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Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik, Gothic and the Comic Turn (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Howells, Coral Ann, Love, Mystery, and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction (London, Athlone Press, 1978). Islami, S. Yahya, “What Is Surficial Thought in Architecture?”, in Architectural Research Quarterly 18:1 (2014), pp. 39–46. Kames, Henry Home, Lord, (1762) Elements of Criticism, 6th edn, ed. Peter Jones (Indianapolis‚ Liberty Fund, 2005). Lewis, Matthew G., The Monk, ed. Howard Anderson (Oxford, World’s Classics, 1995). Lüthi, Max, (1975) The Fairytale as Art Form and Portrait of Man, trans. Jon Erickson (Bloomington‚ Indiana University Press, 1987). MacAndrew, Elizabeth, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (New York, Columbia University Press, 1979). Napier, Elizabeth, The Failure of Gothic: Problems of Disjunction in an EighteenthCentury Literary Form (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987). Olrik, Axel, Principles for Oral Narrative Research, trans. Kirsten Wolf and Jody Jensen (1921; Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1992). Parker, Jo Alyson, Narrative Form and Chaos Theory in Sterne, Proust, Woolf, and Faulkner (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Parks, Ward, “Orality and Poetics: Synchrony, Diachrony, and the Axes of Narrative Transmission”, in Comparative Research on Oral Traditions: A Memorial for Milman Parry, ed. John Miles Foley (Columbus, OH, Slavica, 1987). ———, “The Textualization of Orality in Literary Criticism”, in Vox Intenta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages, ed. A.N. Doane and Carol Braun Pasternack (Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). Parsons, Elizabeth, The Castle of Wolfenbach, see Sánchez Santos, ed. (2009). Potter, Franz J., The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800–1835: Exhuming the Trade (Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Propp, Vladimir, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott, revised Louis A. Wagner (1928; Austin, University of Texas Press, 1968). Radcliffe, Ann, A Sicilian Romance, ed. Alison Milbank (1790; Oxford, World’s Classics, 1993). ———, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, ed. Alison Milbank (1789; Oxford, World’s Classics, 1995). ———, The Italian, ed. Frederick Garber (Oxford, World’s Classics, 1981). ———, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (Oxford, World’s Classics, 1980). Sánchez Santos, Beatriz, ed., Eliza Parsons’ The Castle of Wolfenbach (The Northanger Library. Madrid, The Gateway Press, 2009). https://www.northangerlibrary.com/ productos.asp?IdCategoriaPral=28. ———, A Grammar of Gothic Characters: A Study of Characterisation in Eighteenth-Century Gothic Fiction (unpublished PhD dissertation, Spain, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2017). ———, ed., At the Interface (Madrid, The Gateway Press, 2020). Teuthold, Peter, The Necromancer, or The Tale of the Black Forest: Founded on Facts. Translated from the German of Lawrence Flammenberg, 2 vols. (London, Minerva Press, 1794).

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Todd, Janet, Sensibility: An Introduction (London, Methuen, 1986). Turner, Victor, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York, Aldine de Gruyter, 1969). Williams, Abigail, The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth Century Home (New Haven, CT, Yale UP, 2017).

Formulaic Language Manuel Aguirre

This article examines the use and function of certain formulaic clusters in a Gothic text, and argues that one single principle guides its construction through at least four different levels, from that of the bare formula through that of redaction; on the strength of this analysis, the claim will be advanced that Gothic exhibits a fractal composition. I will argue that formulaic language denotes neither ‘faulty writing’ nor ‘mere technique’, rather it can be shown to constitute a productive system for generating text. Although the analytical strategies resorted to in these pages were developed in the course of studying novels, it is much easier to illustrate the approach by means of a short tale; it is surmised that the conclusions offered here should be applicable to the bulk of Gothic. The text chosen is the tale ‘Raymond; A Fragment’.1 Anonymously authored by Juvenis (Latin for ‘a young person’), it has never been subjected to detailed study, let alone analysed from the perspective taken here. The story tells how Raymond sits moping by the entrance of his solitary dwelling; he misses his ‘much lamented and adored wife’, alternately exulting with hope and sinking into depression. Suddenly, as the mild weather turns, he hears distant shrieks and rushes to the source of the sound. Twice he hesitates about the propriety of turning back, but ultimately, paying no heed to the fury of the storm, he reaches a ruinous castle. He enters it sword in hand, crosses the court, climbs the stairs to a tower, enters a Gothic chamber and crosses to M. Aguirre (B) Independent scholar, Madrid, Spain

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_5

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another room where he finds a man in the act of slaughtering a young woman. He slays the villain, but when he turns to the unfortunate fair he discovers she is his lost wife. For ease of commentary (and in keeping with the practice in my edition), paragraphs are identified by a number between square brackets; ‘[R1]’ stands for [‘Raymond’, paragraph 1]. A formula will be defined here as a construct which (1) consists of two or more words held together by a fixed syntactic form, (2) occurs at least twice within a given text or corpus of texts‚ and (3) expresses a stable idea; this definition is in part indebted to that proposed by Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord for epic.2 The formula is repeated verbatim or nearly so, and so is fundamentally identical to itself . There is much sense in viewing the formula as an instance of what linguists call a collocation—the significant co-occurrence of two or more terms in a stretch of discourse—with a caveat: this is a collocation in the literary language of a text or corpus; it is therefore not a thing that just happens but a literary technique. With this proviso, we may resort to the terminology linguists employ to analyse collocations and identify one of the elements of the formula as the node (in bold), the others as its collocates. Let us consider an example: 1) A shriek assailed his ears [R4] 2) Another shriek, much louder than either of the former, assailed his ears [R8] In this three-place formula (Subject NP + NODE VERB + Object NP), none of the basic elements are altered and only a peripheral item, the determiner, varies; the basic syntax remains the same, though it is important to note that the formula is sundered in (2) by an appositive phrase. Technically, (1)–(2) constitute a collocation if they recur in a statistically significant manner in the corpus of English3 ; writers take advantage of such formulaic tendencies in the language, to which they add their own system of intra- or inter-textual ‘collocations’. We need not look for statistical import here: that a given syntagma occurs twice suffices to make it significant in literary language; thus Lord (Singer, 46) discusses as formulas ‘phrases found more than once in the perusal of 12,000 lines from the same singer’. A more complex type of formulaic construct may be termed an inflected formula. At least one of the collocates in this type is variable and can be replaced with another on the strength of functional equivalence (often synonymy). Parry and Lord called this construct a ‘substitution system’ (ibid., 35) and identified the variable element as the ‘key word’ (obviously the key may contain more than just one word). I propose to differentiate the node (in bold) from the key: 3) The dull aspect [R4] 4) The dreadful aspect [R6]

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5) The shock it had occasioned [R8] 6) The dread it occasioned [R10] 7) the agitation of his soul [R1] 8) his agitated frame [R2] In the first of these inflected formulas, ‘dull’ and ‘dreadful’ replace identity with synonymy (homophony matters here too; substitutive alliteration binds different tokens of the key word). In the second, the verb of (5) is retained in (6) but its tense varies from pluperfect to simple past. In the third, the node noun in (7) changes to an adjectival form in (8) with the corresponding syntactic modification. The self-identity of the formula is thus compromised to varying degrees by any of the following: a) insertion of a phrase or clause in between the terms of the formula—the case of (1)–(2); b) change in the verb form—as in (5)–(6); c) replacement of the key word—as in (3) through (8); d) morpho-syntactic variation in the node word—as in (7)–(8). Such variations (others are possible) presuppose systems of choices at the lexical, morphological and syntactic levels; this challenges the kind of fixity or near-fixity that is the mark of the formula proper—at best, we can only speak of partial repetition here. Given this complexity, the concept of formula becomes unwieldy not only because of the variety of factors and permutations involved but, fundamentally, because we begin to operate with paradigms rather than fixed terms. This raises the question of how much inflection we can admit into the system before the very concept of the formula—as something that fully or partially repeats itself—disintegrates under the weight of so many variables: might we not end up having to acknowledge that no structure is discernible in such diction? This, however, is the counsel of despair; between total order and mere chaos—between the formulaic and the unique—there will be found degrees of formulaicity, and this is where a third concept, that of formulaic pattern, becomes useful. A formulaic pattern can be defined as a flexible system of lexical paradigms or fields that gravitate around a node field; the fields, rather than individual lexemes, are inserted into a flexible set—itself a field—of syntactic structures.4 This system exhibits self-similarity rather than self-identity; if, for example, we contextualise (3) and (4) and look at the full noun phrase they are part of, we will notice that further tokens of this group occur in the text:

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DETERMINER

QUALIFIER

VIEW

ENVIRONMENT

9) the 10) the 11) the 12) the 13) What a

dull dreadful dreary dreary dreadful

aspect aspect prospect expanse spectacle…!

of the heavens [R4] of the elements [R6] before him [R7] [R1] [R12]

(11)–(13) differ from (9)–(10) only in that the two lexical fields for VIEW and ENVIRONMENT are fused into one. These instances distinguish themselves from the formula in that all the terms are subject to morpho-syntactic and/or lexical variation; we could say that both node and collocates are ‘key words’. Broadening our scope allows us to see that what seemed a formula in (3)–(4) was actually a fragment of a more complex construct where variation affects potentially all elements. Another way of putting this is to say that what we call a formula is simply a ‘crystallised’ or ‘solidified’ segment of a formulaic pattern. (9)–(13) retain a general shared meaning (some uninviting quality clings to the view in all five examples), and this semantic congruence is part of the glue that holds the pattern together; so are the alliteration binding all three qualifiers, the invariant form of the determiner in most instances, and the spect- root in three of the four lexemes for VIEW. The formulaic pattern does not consist of fixed terms but of lexical, phonological, phrase and clause fields; and fielding —understood as the handling of all units as if they were members of paradigms or fields—turns out to be a dominant construction strategy. Of course, establishing that formulaic patterns are at work in the text or that they display such and such structures does not, by itself, help us to understand the story better. However, by means of the relatively simple framework outlined above we may now approach the study of formulaic language and its textual function. We must first consider it in two distinct dimensions: intertextual and intra-textual. In the first, the text uses linguistic forms which are significantly similar to those employed in other texts; in the second, the text makes recursive use of its own linguistic forms. ‘Raymond’ abounds in both. By now, it should be obvious that the word ‘repetition’ is suspect—to be used, if at all, between scare quotes. Let us take the first 105 words of paragraph [R1] (formulas are italicised): Night had diffused her darkness o’er the earth, and the moon darted her pale rays on the murmuring rivulet, which twined its narrow road through the fertile meads that surrounded the humble cottage of the unhappy Raymond, who was pensively reclined on a bench at the door of his cot. The melodious harmony of the nightingale, which at intervals floated with dulcet sweetness on the evening air; the universal silence which prevailed, and seemed (if I may so say) “to waft the soul to realms unknown!” together with his own melancholy

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thoughts, inspired Raymond with a degree of enthusiasm which he had never before experienced.

Taken one at a time, there is no difficulty in acknowledging that the phrases italicised constitute formulas, typically two elements appearing together regularly in the same or nearly the same syntactic configuration. The interesting thing is their density: at least 28 lexical words occur in formulaic arrangements over 105 words of text, or: every fourth word is part of some formulaic group (counting grammatical words implicated in formulaic diction would yield a higher density).5 Each of these formulas appears only once in our story, but they recur from one text to another in the period under study. Consider, for instance, the following tokens of ‘murmuring rivulet’, all dating back to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: a) Where a murmuring rivolet stray’d6 b) by the murmuring rivulet’s shady side7 c) the woods, through which winds a murmuring rivulet,8 d) watered by a pure murmuring rivulet9 Though an obvious formula, ‘murmuring rivulet’ is variously preceded by a or the, and by an additional adjective pure. It is also encased in variable syntax: it is subject of stray’d and winds in (a) and (c), passive agent of watered in (d), part of a nominal complement group in (b)‚ and object of place in our story. Predictably, as soon as we enlarge our scope we detect multiple variations; it is this constant modulation that justifies our going beyond the concept of formula (whether or not inflected) and adopting that of formulaic pattern instead, the first being but a special case of the latter. Of course it is the latter that is going to be more productive of meaning, precisely because variation and so choice are built into it. Googling the other groups will reveal that they, too, are formulaic. Faced with so much inter-textual formulaicity in the first paragraph, one may certainly suppose that the writer did not want to think hard and resorted to clichés, and this would be congruent with the stereotypical quality of the entire story. But the use of strongly codified diction may not be indicative solely of a way out for the writer but also, or mainly, of a ‘way in’ for the reader: so much stereotypical language lulls us into a sense of the familiar and makes us feel we are in known territory. Such a start powerfully contrasts with the violent changes we are to witness soon enough. Seen in this light, formulaic diction is needed here for destabilisation to be effective later. Consider a different example, the formula ‘his much lamented and adored wife’ [R1]. That it is an inflected formula is proven by its recurrence in epitaphs of the period: a) Here lyeth … the much lamented Wife of … (1731)10

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b) Sacred to the memory of Eliza, the much loved and much lamented wife of … (1818)11 c) To the memory of his much beloved and much lamented wife, Jane Elliot (1846)12 The use of this formula invites the assumption that Raymond mourns his wife’s death. We soon learn that what he bemoans is his social ruination should she return polluted, but his subsequent appeal to God’s omnipotence (‘Yet, hold! there is an almighty being above, to whom nothing is impossible’ [R2]) stresses the improbability of such a return and, so, the presumption of her demise. Knowing that this is only a decorous formula casts light on the story as a modest harbinger of the nineteenth century’s literary obsession with adultery. The text does not simply echo formulaic groups in circulation at the time, it also creates its own system of resonances. Four formulaic patterns (FP1–FP4) will illustrate the point. FP1 AGENT

IMPINGEMENT

EXPERIENCER

14) The sight 15) A clap of thunder 16) a sudden shivering 17) His agitated frame 18) a sensation within him which 19) a peculiar something within his breast

sickened appalled seized would not permit prompted prompting

him him him him him him

[R11] [R12] [R13] to proceed [R2] to proceed [R6] to [proceed] [R8]

In this three-place pattern, Raymond is an experiencer passively undergoing an emotional onslaught which affects him physically (14)–(16), prevents him from acting (17) or, conversely, impels him to action (18)–(19). It appears that the same kind of pressure is exerted on the man by external events (14)–(15)— in which case the emotion is built into the verb (‘sickened’, ‘appalled’)—and by his own emotions (all other tokens). We shall return to this parallelism below. Once a pattern has been identified, it is often easy to detect further tokens of it in the text. Consider the following: 20) never had dread seized him in so powerful a degree before [R8] 21) the dread it [the violent crash] occasioned in the mind of Raymond can better be conceived than described [R10] 22) he had scarcely recovered from the shock it [the lightning] had occasioned, when… [R8]

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Variation in lexicon, syntax and word-order obscures the pattern, but as soon as we isolate the lexical fields involved we see that the three tokens belong in FP1 with some adjustments, as shown in the following pattern schema: EMOTION

AGENT

Dread

IMPINGEMENT

EXPERIENCER

EXTREME DEGREE

had seized

him

never in so powerful a degree before can better be conceived than described had scarcely recovered from

The dread

it

occasioned

in his mind

the shock

it

had occasioned

he

Main-verb status shunts from the third field in (20) to the fifth in (21)– (22). The IMPINGEMENT field recaps the verb ‘seize’ found in (16) and adds the causative ‘occasion’, equivalent to ‘prompt’ in (18)–(19). The writer only needs to disengage EMOTION from AGENT in (21)–(22) and to add a phrasal field for DEGREE: the emotion or its effect are said to be absolute or beyond words, or else most hard to overcome (‘scarcely’ in (22) denotes touching a lowest margin or degree of factuality). The result expands FP1 into a five-place pattern that conveys a hyperbole for the emotion (while tokens (14)–(17) simply transmit a lesser degree of hyperbole). FP2 The following instances shape a formulaic pattern consisting of three lexical fields variously structured into a noun- or verb-phrase: 23) the heart-piercing thought [R2] 24) in a more heart-rending sound [R5] 25) The thought rends my very soul [R2] 26) Be calm, my soul! Tear not my heart-strings thus [R2] Lexical fields are (a) an AGENT either coming from outside (‘sound’) or found within the experiencer himself (‘thought’, ‘soul’), (b) a verb of impingement conveying WOUNDING ACTION and (c) a synecdoche for the EXPERIENCER. The syntax oscillates between nominal compounds (23)–(24), a statement (25) and a negative imperative (26): AGENT

IMPINGEMENT

EXPERIENCER

Thought Sound Thought Soul

piercing rending rends tear not

(my) heart (my) heart my soul my heart-strings

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By adding new terms to these fields, further combinations can be produced that remain faithful to the pattern, as evidenced by the following (items (27)–(28) are in fact our initial examples (1)–(2); this confirms that seeming formulas are best seen as crystallised fragments of formulaic patterns): AGENT

IMPINGEMENT

EXPERIENCER

27) A distant and faint shriek 28) Another shriek […] 29) It [the shriek]

assailed assailed froze

his ears [R5] his ears [R8] the soul of Raymond [R5]

Clearly, the story abounds in constructions intimating that the individual, or a part of him, is violently affected or assaulted by events outside him or within his own psyche—essentially what we found in FP1. Further terms may be added to these lexical fields; for instance, the event may impinge upon the character’s environment rather than upon him, with no alteration to the pattern: AGENT

IMPINGEMENT

ENVIRONMENT

30) two successive shrieks

resounded through

31) the hoarse thunder

resounded […] along

the tottering edifice [R10] the perturbed vault of heaven [R8]

32) a vivid flash of lightning [and] a dreadful clap of thunder

burst over

and 33) a tremendous clap of thunder 34) A peal of thunder 35) A violent crash

seemed to rend burst over shook broke upon

and

seemed to convulse

the spot on which he was standing the firmament [R8] the edifice [R12] the hoary pile [R9] the prevailing silence the earth [R10]

(32) recaps the verb ‘rend’ of (24)–(25). Other verbal phrases are re-used: ‘resounded’, ‘burst over’‚ ‘and seemed to rend/convulse’. Notice, furthermore, that twice the same consequence follows: after (32), ‘he stood appalled’; after (33), ‘and appalled him’. These, to be sure, are of a piece with tokens (14)–(19) and (23)–(29). The evidence suggests that the same formulaic pattern is being used to describe emotional impact on an individual and physical impact on his environment. Now consider the following:

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FP3 36) an ancient tower, whose walls were tottering under the decay of time [R9] 37) through the tottering edifice [R10] 38) he tottered a few paces back [R13] The key field (ENVIRONMENT/EXPERIENCER) contains two clearly distinct elements (‘walls’/ ‘edifice’, ‘he’); by contrast, the pattern is anchored to forms of one unchanging node (‘tottering’). The same intransitive verb twice depicts the near collapse of the tower and then, in the last paragraph, the unsteadiness of the character, establishing a metonymic correspondence between Raymond and the building; traits of the one are transmitted to the other by contiguity, just as happens between (23)–(29) and (30)–(35). This is important because statements about the environment may be one way of wording that which the literature of the eighteenth century strives for but finds difficult to convey: this is part of a diction which the Romantics took over from Gothic writers, a diction not available elsewhere for the expression of inner states, particularly emotions.13 Such events as a character’s psychic collapse may be arduous to describe for an incipient philosophy of the mind, but can be intimated by the crumbling condition of a nearby ruin, particularly if the same predicate is used of both. With this understanding of the mechanics of formulaic patterns we may return to inter-textuality; for there, too, formulaic patterns can be shown to operate. Let us consider the following: The sky was so overshadowed with black vapours and impenetrable mists that they obscured every object, except when at intervals the moon-beams, darting between a cavity in the clouds, gave Raymond a melancholy opportunity of beholding the dreary prospect before him. [R6]

This is a unique occurrence in ‘Raymond’, but constructions of a strikingly similar nature appear in other Gothic texts: FP4 a) Now and then she [the moon] suddenly emerged in full splendour from her veil; and then instantly retired behind it, having just served to give the forlorn Sir Bertrand a wide extended prospect over the desolate waste. (Barbauld, ‘Sir Bertrand’)14 b) The small gratings above admitted the lightning in so faint a degree, as only to render the obscurity of the place still more horrible. (Anon, ‘Sir Edmund’)15 c) The moon, which was now up, glancing through the trees, served to shew the dreary aspect of the place. (Radcliffe, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne)16

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d) […] a sudden blaze of light illumining the fabric, served to exhibit more forcibly its striking horrors. (Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance)17 e) the faint glimmering of a lamp heightened the horrors of my dungeon. (Teuthold, The Necromancer)18 It is a simple thing to work out the formulaic quality of these examples; seven major lexical fields are involved: LIGHT SOURCE (AGENT): the moon-beams; the moon; lightning; a blaze of light; the faint glimmering of a lamp EMERGENCE: darting; emerged; admitted; glancing; sudden…illumining PLACE THROUGH: between the clouds; through the trees; from her veil; the gratings DISPLAY: gave an opportunity of beholding; having just served to give; only to render; served to shew; served to exhibit; heightened PLACE: the dreary prospect before him; the desolate waste; the obscurity of the place; the dreary aspect of the place; the striking horrors [of the fabric]; the horrors of my dungeon DEGREE: just; so faint a degree, only, still more; more forcibly; heightened VALUE JUDGMENT: melancholy; dreary; desolate; horrible; horrors

In all six examples, a source of light allows perception of the environment; but it is made plain that the quality of light is deficient, so that, rather than truly illuminate or show the way, it can, paradoxically, only enhance the bleakness of the view. This persistent (qua formulaic) failure of light to do its proper job results in a veritable darkness visible—a standard motif in Gothic with farreaching implications for the culture of the Enlightenment. This is one of several phenomena that characteristically obtain, as will be argued later, in liminal zones.19 But formulaicity does not stop at the level of formulaic patterns; these may cluster into yet more complex narrative units, tableaux, and here—after formula and formulaic pattern—we reach a third level of analysis. A tableau may be defined as a critical moment in the narrative—a moment, for instance, when the character reaches an impasse or a crossroads and must halt to ponder. Characteristically, tableaux in our genre are composed of clusters of formulaic patterns. Items A and B offer two takes on a moment of indecision—let us call this a ‘Quandary Tableau’ (I have italicised and numbered the relevant formulaic patterns):

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A) (1) He found himself to be entangled in an unknown path, and (2) knew not how to proceed. (3) He stopped to consider what he should do, and, after some conflict between his regard for his safety and his humanity, (4) he determined to make the best way he could back to his mournful cottage, rather than still farther (1) bewilder himself in an unknown place. He was turning round, in order to prosecute his intention, (5) when a vivid flash of lightning, succeeded by a dreadful clap of thunder, burst over the spot on which he was standing [R8] B) (2) He knew not which track to pursue; and (1) was bewildered in a place, the labyrinths of which he was totally unacquainted with. His senses were confounded; and he, a second time, (3) questioned himself whether it would be more advisable to proceed or return […]; and, (4) scarcely had he determined to proceed, (5) when he perceived a light burst from a place at no great distance [R8] (Compare Walpole: ‘Isabella, […] hesitated whether she should proceed’20 ; Lewis: ‘He stood irresolute to which side he should address his steps. At all events he determined to proceed’21 ; Radcliffe: ‘he stood for a moment, undetermined whether to proceed’).22

The same five steps can be identified in these two tableaux, each step consisting of a formulaic pattern (FP5–FP9; the relative order of FP5 and FP6 may vary): • FP5 The character feels lost: (A) He found himself to be entangled in an unknown path; (A) bewilder himself in an unknown place; (B) was bewildered in a place, the labyrinths of which he was totally unacquainted with (the relative clause constitutes a periphrasis for ‘unknown’). • FP6 He hesitates as to the way to follow: (A) knew not how to proceed; (B) he knew not which track to pursue • FP7 He confronts the two options available to him: (A) he stopped to consider what he should do; (B) questioned himself whether it would be more advisable to proceed or return • FP8 He decides on one course of action (in (A) he opts for going back, in (B) for pushing on): (A) He determined to make the best way he could back; (B) Scarcely had he determined to proceed • FP9 His decision is straightaway (when-clause) punctuated by a sudden light: (A) when a vivid flash of lightning…burst over the spot on which he was standing; (B) when he perceived a light burst from a place. In both passages the same sequence of events is presented through the same five formulaic patterns involving recurrent lexical and syntactic fields. An initial decision to abandon the quest (A) is marked by lightning and thunder, which ‘burst over the spot’; his subsequent resolution to advance (B) is rewarded by a light which ‘burst from a place’. Variations on the sequence (including a

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when- clause introducing a special effect) are formulaic in Gothic. Consider Walpole: ‘she was going to advance, when a door that stood a-jar, at some distance to the left, was opened gently.’ 23 Reeve: ‘he thought he saw a glimmering light upon a staircase before him […] He was preparing to descend the staircase, when he heard several knocks at the door’.24 Parsons : ‘on looking round, she saw the door that opened from the bed room into the garden was a jar […] She came in and was about to shut the garden door, when she thought the sound of footsteps reached her ears—she trembled and stopt ’.25 A related set of formulaic patterns cluster to shape an ‘Entrance Tableau’ in which some external event punctuates Raymond’s reaching a doorway: C) He traversed around the moss-covered walls in order to find an entrance. It was not long before he perceived one, to his great joy, open. As he was about to enter, a loud peal of thunder shook the hoary pile to its foundation; and he […] entered with firm step the massy portal [R9]. D) by the assistance of a sudden flash of lightning, he perceived a small door situated at the extremity of the place in which he was. […] He advanced firmly towards it, and found it fast; but on applying his strength, it flew open [R10]. E) But upon his entrance into this gloomy chamber, a tremendous clap of thunder burst over the edifice, and appalled him. A secret impulse directed his attention to a small door at the further end of the room. He distinctly heard footsteps from within, and a faint voice exclaim, “Oh spare me! spare me!” which was succeeded by a deep and convulsive groan. He sprang towards the door, which being only a-jar permitted him to enter [R12]. The moment of entrance is every time preceded, accompanied or followed by light or sound effects that, precisely as in (A) and (B), impart a transcendental significance to his decision. Again, five formulaic patterns are involved in all three tokens of this tableau: FP10 PERCEPTION (C) he perceived one [an entrance] open; (D) he perceived a small door (E); a secret impulse directed his attention to a small door (and cf. (B) he perceived a light ). FP11 ENTRANCE (C) as he was about to enter; (E) upon his entrance; (C) he entered with firm step; (D) he advanced firmly; (E) he sprang. FP12 LIGHT/SOUND EFFECTS (C) a loud peal of thunder; (D) a sudden flash of lightning; (E) a tremendous clap of thunder; (E) footsteps … voice … groan (and cf. (A) a dreadful clap of thunder succeeded by a vivid flash of lightning, (B) a light ).

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FP13 THEIR ACTION (C) shook the hoary pile; (E) burst over the edifice; (and cf. (A) burst over the spot, (B) burst from a place). FP14 THE THITHER PLACE (D) at the extremity of the place in which he was; (D) towards it [the door]; (E) at the further end of the room; (E) into this gloomy chamber; (E) towards the door (and cf. (B) (a place) at no great distance). Each time he reaches an opening, an act of perception is involved, variously conveyed; lightning, thunder or some other sound mark the site in a violent manner; he moves decisively (‘with firm step’, ‘firmly’, ‘sprang’) and a sense of depth is created by the reference to a spot beyond. Every crossing becomes a daunting step to take, and every doorway therefore presents itself as a test. This phasal construction of the hero’s advance ritualises his negotiation of an entrance, magnifying the import of the thresholds he must overcome.26 The plot thus becomes one of recurrent acts of valour which generate a sense of gradual tension and prepare us for a climax. After formula, formulaic pattern and tableau, we may ask ourselves whether a further level of formulaicity is possible: does the progression stop when we reach the limit of the form—the text—and enter a different medium—the genre? I have so far uncovered five re-writings of ‘Raymond’ which I suggest constitute formulaic ‘versions’ (Pitcher mentions version 2 below, but is not aware of the other four; he also cites two further versions which I have been unable to consult: The Hibernian Magazine (Dublin, March 1799) and the anthology The Gem (London, 1821) 3:97–104).27 1. A straightforward reprint of our story appeared in a New York magazine in 1810. The text is practically identical but, unaccountably, the lady’s name is given as ‘Louisa’.28 Differences are limited to variations in punctuation, a few misprints, a division of paragraph [R1] into two‚ and a fusion of [R5] with [R6] and of [R8] with [R9]. ‘Ignorant’ replaces ‘unacquainted with’ in [R8] (causing a grammatical anomaly). The word ‘only’ is omitted in ‘only a-jar’ at [R12]. 2. Ten months after publication, ‘Raymond’ was reprinted under the title ‘Albert and Albina. A Fragment’, as part of a bluebook.29 There are only minor differences between the two texts: the bluebook prints ‘heartrending manner’ in lieu of ‘heart-rending sound’ [R5]; ‘massy portal’ [R9] becomes ‘mossy portal’‚ etc. Punctuation marks change here and there, occasional misprints occur and, of course, the names ‘Albert’ and ‘Albina’ replace ‘Raymond’ and ‘Miranda’. The simple title change might have been intended to persuade readers that this was a never-beforepublished narrative. Pitcher (1996: 42) holds that ‘[t]hese names implied the closeness, or oneness, which is only finally revealed in the original’; the logic of this statement depends on his central claim that the story is

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a récit à clef purporting to encode the transports of orgasm. This is an argument I am not prepared to follow. 3. ‘Raymond: Or The Revenge’ surfaced in an Indiana weekly in 1824.30 Aside from the title change, it reproduces the tale faithfully if with a sprinkling of errata and omissions. 4. A story titled ‘St. Aubin and Angelina’ appeared in London in an 1826 Christmas book, with a plot rather different from that of ‘Raymond’; at one point, however (and only at that point), it brazenly borrowed from paragraphs [R4]–[R7] of the latter (I italicise the borrowed segments): The evening set in rough. The air became tremulous, and the dull aspect of the heavens seemed to portend an approaching storm. Thick clouds were rapidly collecting, and the horizon was overcast. The nightingale affrighted fled for shelter within her leafy nest; and the owlet uttered a dismal note of terror. The thunder now began awfully to murmur from a distance, and the lightnings streaked the heavens with fire, and the heavy clouds, ere long, rolled over the head of St Aubin; and as if in the array of battle, thundered in awful note, and soon on him came down the pelting shower.31

Sixty out of 103 words are retained in the same constructions and positions. The original segment from ‘Raymond’ has been redacted and shortened but its diction is unmistakeable. 5. In 1830 or 1831, the Philadelphia magazine The Irish Shield printed a narrative titled ‘Arthur Kavanagh’. I have so far been unable to consult this source, but the story was reprinted in a Boston weekly in 1832 (see my edition in ‘A Gothic Tale and Its Hypertext’, note (1). This is the story of Arthur Mc Murrough Kavanagh, prince of Leinster, whose wife has been captured by the English Lord Mortimer; she is given in custody to one Birmingham, who plans to ravish her. Kavanagh is apprised of this and, deeming his wife dead, decides to storm Birmingham’s castle singlehandedly. Here is a sample (I italicise the borrowings): He was awoke by a loud peal of thunder, accompanied by vivid flashes of lightning, which burst over his head and seemed to rend the firmament. When the tremendous roar of the elements had ceased, Arthur heard a distant and faint shriek. He started up, and laying his hand on his sword rushed in to an adjoining wood, in the direction from whence he imagined the sound proceeded. He had not gone far before the dismal cry was repeated in a more imploring and heart rending voice, that seemed to be uttered by a hapless female on the verge of despair.32

Sixty-seven out of 101 words from ‘Raymond’ are retained in the ‘Kavanagh’ fragment in the same syntactic configurations. The Boston narrative uses the full 1799 text as a palimpsest source into which to inscribe most of the tale of Kavanagh, retaining the events and most of the diction, but adding and varying freely to accommodate the new tale.

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As lexicon, phrase and clause are gathered into fields, fields into patterns and patterns into tableaux, so it appears that the text, in true formulaic fashion, was variously modulated, at least five times in the space of 33 years, while retaining a recognisable identity—an instance of selfsimilarity (often, self-identity) on the inter-textual level. This means that its transmission follows a principle akin to that which governs the use of formulaic patterns in ‘Raymond’: the text generates other versions of itself. We know that various forms of plagiarism were common practice in the eighteenth century33 ; in Gothic, multiple piratical editions, abridgments and imitations became a logical extension of the genre’s internal organisation. Four major conclusions can be extracted from the above analysis. In the first place, formulaic diction enables a symbiosis between character and setting, inscribing the man in his surroundings or making the latter a projection of the former; such a metonymic correlation gives visibility to the more intangible aspects of the individual. A measure of predictability is also fostered by these identifications: as with the tower, so with the hero himself. Secondly, the formulaic diction of ‘Raymond’ consistently depicts the protagonist as an Experiencer rather than an effective Agent: he undergoes the onslaught of powerful forces, whether emanating from outside or from within himself, illustrating the curtailment of individual autonomy practiced by Gothic.34 This is due, at least in part, to the fact that his grasp of the situation is sketchy at best: he sees the landscape only by the fitful help of lightning, views his surroundings as bewildering or chaotic and is mystified by the whole adventure; his capacity for agency is limited by fragmentary perception and a pervasive sense of loss. That Raymond is passively affected not only by external events but equally by his own emotions and thoughts is the result of a diction whereby parts or aspects of the character—his heart, soul and mind—seem to detach themselves from him and thereafter to ‘prompt’, ‘seize’ or ‘tear’ him (see [16]–[17] and [23]–[26]).35 This confirms Robert Miles’ claim that the Gothic subject is ‘dispossessed in its own house, in a condition of rupture, disjunction, fragmentation’.36 This fragmentation of the subject is one of the ways in which Gothic queries the efforts of Rationalism towards obtaining a unified view of the human mind. Here, however, the regularity of formulaic diction is to be stressed. All instances of formulaicity point to one strategy: stability of form. The principle that to one idea there naturally corresponds one form provides a narrative anchor, as it were; we are made to feel we navigate familiar waters. By contrast, we read of a man in the grip of indecision, of the mutability of landscape, mood and fortunes, of a tottering tower and a tottering hero. The contrast is particularly telling in the way extreme or unique experiences (consider the use of superlatives, intensifiers and hyperbole: ‘rend’, ‘convulse’, ‘freeze’, etc.) are multiplied by formulaic diction until paradoxically they become stereotypes,

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instances of what Sánchez-Santos has called ‘conventional uniqueness’.37 The notion of a fragmentation of the subject is to be tempered with the realisation that everything in this language tends towards providing a measure of order and wholeness, offering a safe frame for the depiction of disorder. The ‘bewildering’ or ‘entangling’ labyrinth which—in the guise of irregular castles, disorientating landscapes, heinous ploys or distraught minds—takes pride of place in Gothic fiction is both created and contained by a formulaic structure which, through recurrence, reintroduces the lineaments of the conventional. Readers are led to surmise that the female voice belongs to Miranda and that Raymond will reach her in time. When he fails to do so, the disorder that was intimated by the storm and the ruin spills into the denouement and wreaks havoc with reader expectations; and yet, the formulaic principle applied on every scale ‘contains’ the chaos in as much as it makes it familiar. In the third place, the Gothic flair for producing self-similar ‘versions’ of itself on different levels intimates a fractal quality in the genre insofar as it generates structure through the application of the same construction principle on different scales.38 While fractal forms have been mostly studied in mathematics and the sciences, they have been detected in both nature (clouds, waves, ferns, mountains and organisms) and literature.39 Characteristically, fractality occurs on edges, surfaces and interfaces, in the threshold regions between different, perhaps incompatible orders—in other words, on liminal ground—and counts as, among other things, a strategy for resistance and selfpreservation.40 This is particularly obvious in a genre which from the start had to contend with intense pressures to conform to established—canonical—criteria in narrative and was exposed to much criticism on the part of the cultural establishment.41 Formulaicity—a fractal organisation characterised by multiformity and self-similarity—is part of the strong forms the genre developed in order to resist such pressures.42 Lastly, given that fractality is a liminal trait of edges and interfaces, if it can be confirmed that formulaicity is part and parcel of the Gothic genre and if, in consequence of this, Gothic is to be viewed as occupying liminal ground, it will be needful to ask, at what specific interface does Gothic occur? My best guess is that the genre emerged at the juncture of two distinct poetics—on the one hand, eighteenth-century novelistic practice; on the other, oral narrative—and that its formulaic diction and fractal structure align our story with a narrative domain largely unexplored by students of the Gothic: I refer to folklore, where formulaicity and multiformity seem to rule. Not that ‘Raymond’ reads like a folktale: its cultural value for us rather resides in how precisely it exploits folktale structures and diction to transform folk narrative into Gothic narrative.43 The apparatus and methodology proposed in these pages for the analysis of formulaicity seem to strengthen the hypothesis of a Gothic debt to oral literature.

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Notes 1. The Lady’s Magazine Vol. 30, February 1799, 57–59, https://books. google.es/books?id=l01GAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=es& source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=true. Edited in Aguirre, ‘A Gothic Tale and Its Hypertext: “Raymond; A Fragment” (1799) and “Arthur Kavanagh” (1832)’, in The Northanger Library (Madrid, The Gateway Press 2019), https://www.northange rlibrary.com/Documentos/RAYMOND%20AND%20KAVANAGH. pdf; all references will be to this edition. An earlier edition is found in Chris Baldick, ed., The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992), 23–26. 2. Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1960), 30. 3. John Sinclair, Corpus, Concordance, Collocation (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991), Chapter 8. 4. Manuel Aguirre, ‘“The Tranquillity of the Mansion”: Fields and Formulaic Diction in a Gothic Novel’, in Journal of Language, Literature and Culture 62:3 (2015), 141–156. 5. On ‘density’ see Aguirre, ‘“A Dismal Howling”: Formulaic Density and the Gothic Tableau’, forthcoming in Studia Anglica Posnaniensia. 6. James Arbuckle, ‘Horace’s Ode IX, Book III’ (1720), lines 5– 6, in David H. Radcliffe, ed., Spenser and the Tradition: English Poetry 1579–1830, http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/TextRecord.php?act ion=GET&textsid=7799 (accessed 19 December 2019). 7. Richard Payne Knight, The Landscape: A Didactic Poem in Three Books, 2nd edn. (London, W. Bulmer, 1794), Book I, l. 31, https://archive. org/details/landscapedidacti00knig/page/92 (accessed 19 December 2019). 8. Sir Nathaniel William Wraxall, Tour Through the Western, Southern, and Interior Provinces of France (London, Charles Dilly, 1784), 165, https://books.google.es/books?id=JQcwAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA165& lpg=PA165&dq=%22murmuring+rivulet%22&source=bl&ots=Mbe LJVvRl2&sig=2gAIGOaU0XTWhlfb2MO24CKP1KI&hl=en&sa=X& ei=jc5bUp-EK8rT7Ab30IGYAw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22m urmuring%20rivulet%22&f=false (accessed 19 December 2019). 9. John D’Alton, The History of the County of Dublin (Dublin, Hodges & Smith, 1838), 711, http://books.google.es/books?id=-6oNAAA AIAAJ&pg=PA711&lpg=PA711&dq=%22murmuring+rivulet%22& source=bl&ots=gqji2BjKh6&sig=VGQnamVC7e4AM1FGlQtOAs6e Mvs&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dc9bUuKtLuPe7Aby6ICoCQ&redir_esc=y# v=onepage&q=%22murmuring%20rivulet%22&f=false (accessed 19 December 2019).

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10. Robert Seymour, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, vol. II (London, J. Reed, 1735), 861, https://books.google.es/books? id=7nBZAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA861&lpg=PA861&dq=%22much+lam ented+wife%22&source=bl&ots=0XXBvSqe-d&sig=p49EM8tOY1EC ujhEdvDKNrIbX0Y&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjLkPqr4sTeAhUD xoUKHXyMDpcQ6AEwBnoECAMQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22much% 20lamented%20wife%22&f=false (accessed 19 December 2019). 11. A. Anderson, History and Antiquities of Kingston Upon Thames (Kingston, C. Yarrow, 1818), 97, https://books.google.es/books?id= ZbEHAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA97&lpg=PA97&dq=%22much+lamented+ wife%22&source=bl&ots=wBom_ZjDso&sig=3DihB2D346T-p9b7nQ k2iFV72JM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjLkPqr4sTeAhUDxoU KHXyMDpcQ6AEwBHoECAQQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22much%20l amented%20wife%22&f=false (accessed 19 December 2019). 12. John R. Walbran, The Antiquities of Gainford (London, J. B. Nichols and Son, 1846), 45, https://books.google.es/books?id=KvkGAA AAQAAJ&pg=PA45&lpg=PA45&dq=%22much+lamented+wife%22& source=bl&ots=UE1_4hTlG5&sig=7GgMtkLzc8F_0MNxIeTHwUbg 8Do&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjLkPqr4sTeAhUDxoUKHXyMD pcQ6AEwA3oECAIQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22much%20lamented% 20wife%22&f=false (accessed 19 December 2019). 13. Stephen Prickett, ‘Gothic’, in Iain McCalman, ed., An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1773–1832 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001), 526, 527. 14. Anne Laetitia Aikin (Barbauld), ‘Sir Bertrand: A Fragment’, in Manuel Aguirre and Eva Ardoy, eds., ‘Narrative Morphology in Barbauld’s “Sir Bertrand: A Fragment”’, in The Northanger Library (Madrid, The Gateway Press, 2009), http://www.northangerlibrary.com/Doc umentos/Sir%20Bertrand.pdf. 15. Anon. 1796, ‘Sir Edmund, A Gothic Fragment’, http://limenandtext. com/images/8.pdf. 16. Ann Radcliffe, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, ed. Alison Milbank (1789; Oxford, World’s Classics, 1995), 102. 17. Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance, ed. Alison Milbank (1790; Oxford, World’s Classics, 1993), 112. 18. Peter Teuthold, The Necromancer (London, Minerva Press, 1794), vol. 2, 57. 19. See my ‘“Dreary Abodes”: Gothic Formulaic Diction as a Technique of the Surface’, in Neophilologus 104:1 (2020), 1–18, https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s11061-019-09617-6. 20. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, in Three Gothic Novels, ed. Peter Fairclough (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968), 37–148, p. 62. 21. Matthew G. Lewis, The Monk (1795; New York, Grove Press, 1959), 354.

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22. Radcliffe, Athlin and Dunbayne, 52. 23. Walpole, Otranto, 62. 24. Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron, ed. James Trainer and James Watt (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003), 37. 25. Eliza Parsons, The Castle of Wolfenbach, ed. Beatriz Sánchez-Santos (1793; The Northanger Library (Madrid, The Gateway Press, 2007), 14, https://www.northangerlibrary.com/productos.asp?IdCategoriaP ral=28. 26. On phasal structures see my ‘Liminal Terror: The Poetics of Gothic Space’, in The Dynamics of the Threshold: Essays on Liminal Negotiations, ed. Jesús Benito and Ana Ma Manzanas (Madrid, The Gateway Press, 2006), 13–38. 27. E. W. Pitcher, ‘Eighteenth-Century Gothic Fragments and the Paradigm of Violation and Repair’, in Studies in Short Fiction 33:1 (1996), 35–42. 28. The Weekly Visitor 2:1. New York. Saturday, November 10 (1810), 277– 282, https://books.google.es/books?id=PbMRAAAAYAAJ&pg= PA279&lpg=PA279&dq=%22The+nightingale,+affrighted,+fled+for+ shelter%22&source=bl&ots=xywun9oanc&sig=ACfU3U1kTk46NdC HNKcummAOZ-63BX0zDA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjd-aL0 jLvhAhUNDxQKHRioDKEQ6AEwAXoECAIQAQ#v=onepage&q=% 22The%20nightingale%2C%20affrighted%2C%20fled%20for%20shel ter%22&f=false (accessed 29 January 2020). 29. Kilverstone Castle; or, The Heir Restored: An English Gothic Story (London, Ann Lemoine, 4 December 1799), 41–46, https://books. google.es/books?id=NTGB92IvwUgC&printsec=frontcover&sou rce=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false (accessed 29 January 2020). 30. Western Sun & General Advertiser 15:8 (Vincennes, Knox County, Indiana, 3 April 1824), 4, https://newspapers.library.in.gov/?a=d&d= WSGA18240403.1.4&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN------- (accessed 29 January 2020). 31. ‘St Aubin and Angelina, by Miss Sylvia Thornton’, in Remember Me! A New Years Gift, or Christmas Present (London, 1826), 1–11, p. 6, https://books.google.es/books?id=8N9qsulZOfYC&pg=PA6& lpg=PA6&dq=%22The+nightingale,+affrighted,+fled+for+shelter%22& source=bl&ots=tZyaDX5Jzv&sig=ACfU3U0m04k10wJiF5skUOMf H3lOf7y8Gw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjd-aL0jLvhAhUNDxQK HRioDKEQ6AEwAHoECAAQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22The%20nigh tingale%2C%20affrighted%2C%20fled%20for%20shelter%22&f=false (accessed 29 January 2020). 32. The Boston Masonic Mirror, New Series, 3:32, Saturday, February 4 (1832), 253, and nº 34, Saturday, February 18 (1832), 268,

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https://books.google.es/books?id=QHg-AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA268& lpg=PA268&dq=%22an+old+suit+of+armour+lying%22&source=bl& ots=EDylQhJ2ef&sig=ACfU3U0jbTvfEhAfM_7KrtcIn9g1MroHng& hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiWpfzxmLvhAhVCCxoKHSkWC8cQ 6AEwAXoECAMQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22an%20old%20suit%20of% 20armour%20lying%22&f=true (accessed 29 January 2020). 33. Jack Lynch, ‘The Perfectly Acceptable Practice of Literary Theft: Plagiarism, Copyright, and the Eighteenth Century’, in Colonial Williamsburg 24:4 (2002), 51–54. 34. Deidre Shauna Lynch 2008, ‘Gothic Fiction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period, ed. Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008), 47–63, p. 61. 35. See my ‘“The Hollow Echo”: Gothic Fiction and the Structure of a Formulaic Pattern’, in European Journal of English Studies 20:1 (2016), 95–110. 36. Robert Miles 1993, Gothic Writing 1750–1820: A Genealogy, 2nd edn (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1993, 2002), 3. 37. Beatriz Sánchez-Santos, A Grammar of Gothic Characters: A Study of Characterisation in Eighteenth-Century Gothic Fiction (unpublished PhD dissertation; Spain, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2017). 38. Manuel Aguirre, ‘Narrative Structure, Liminality, Self-Similarity: The Case of Gothic Fiction’, in Isabel Soto, ed., A Place That Is Not a Place: Essays on Liminality and Text (Madrid, The Gateway Press, 2000), 133–151; reprinted in Clive Bloom, ed., Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers (2nd edn) (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 226–246. 39. Michael Baranger, ‘Complexity, Chaos, and Entropy, A Physics Talk for Non-Physicists’, New England Complex Systems Institute (April, 2000), https://necsi.edu/chaos-complexity-and-entropy (accessed 27 November 2019). Stanislaw Drozdz et al. (2016), ‘Quantifying Origin and Character of Long-Range Correlations in Narrative Texts’, in Information Sciences 331 (20 February 2016), 32–44, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/ S0020025515007513?via%3Dihub (accessed 5 November 2019). 40. Ary L. Goldberger, David R. Rigney and Bruce J. West (1990), ‘Chaos and Fractals in Human Physiology’, in Scientific American 262–263 (February 1990), 34–41; see Aguirre, The Thresholds of the Tale: Liminality and the Structure of Fairytales (Madrid, The Gateway Press, 2007), Chapter 6. 41. See Victor Sage, ed., Introduction to The Gothic Novel: A Casebook (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1990), 8–28.

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42. See Aguirre, ‘Thick Description and the Poetics of the Liminal in Gothic Tales’, in Orbis Litterarum 72:4 (2017), 294–317. 43. See Aguirre, ‘A Gothic-Folktale Interface’, in Gothic Studies 21:2 (2019), 259–275.

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Anon. 1796, ‘Sir Edmund, A Gothic Fragment’, in The European Magazine and London Review 29 (May 1796), 372–374, http://goo.gl/rsfpH5; edited in Gothic Bournes nº 8, LIMEN & TEXT, http://limenandtext.com/images/8.pdf. ———, ‘Albert and Albina. A Fragment’, in Kilverstone Castle; or, The Heir Restored (London, Ann Lemoine, 4 December 1799), 41–46, https://books.google.es/ books?id=NTGB92IvwUgC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r& cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false (accessed 29 January 2020). ———, ‘Raymond, A Fragment’, in The Weekly Visitor 2:1. New York. Saturday, November 10 (1810), 277–282, https://books.google.es/books?id=PbMRAAAAY AAJ&pg=PA279&lpg=PA279&dq=%22The+nightingale,+affrighted,+fled+for+she lter%22&source=bl&ots=xywun9oanc&sig=ACfU3U1kTk46NdCHNKcummAOZ63BX0zDA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjd-aL0jLvhAhUNDxQKHRioDKEQ6 AEwAXoECAIQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22The%20nightingale%2C%20affrighted% 2C%20fled%20for%20shelter%22&f=false (accessed 29 January 2020). ———, ‘Raymond: Or The Revenge’, in Western Sun & General Advertiser vol. 15, Nº 8 (Vincennes, Knox County, Indiana, 3 April 1824), 4, https://newspapers. library.in.gov/?a=d&d=WSGA18240403.1.4&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN------(accessed 29 January 2020). ———, ‘Arthur Kavanagh’, in The Boston Masonic Mirror, New Series, 3:32, Saturday, February 4, 1832, 253, and nº 34, Saturday, February 18, 1832, 268, https://books.google.es/books?id=QHg-AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA268&lpg=PA268& dq=%22an+old+suit+of+armour+lying%22&source=bl&ots=EDylQhJ2ef&sig=ACf U3U0jbTvfEhAfM_7KrtcIn9g1MroHng&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiWpfzxmL vhAhVCCxoKHSkWC8cQ6AEwAXoECAMQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22an%20old% 20suit%20of%20armour%20lying%22&f=true (accessed 29 January 2020). Arbuckle, James, ‘Horace’s Ode IX, Book III’ (1720), in David H. Radcliffe, ed., Spenser and the Tradition: English Poetry 1579–1830, http://spenserians.cath.vt. edu/TextRecord.php?action=GET&textsid=7799 (accessed 19 December 2019). Baldick, Chris, ed., The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992), 23–26. Baranger, Michael, ‘Complexity, Chaos, and Entropy, A Physics Talk for NonPhysicists’, New England Complex Systems Institute (2000), https://necsi.edu/ chaos-complexity-and-entropy (accessed 27 November 2019). Child, Francis James, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols. (Boston, Houghton, Mifflin & Cº, 1882–98). D’Alton, John, The History of the County of Dublin (Dublin, Hodges & Smith, 1838), 711, http://books.google.es/books?id=-6oNAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA711& lpg=PA711&dq=%22murmuring+rivulet%22&source=bl&ots=gqji2BjKh6&sig= VGQnamVC7e4AM1FGlQtOAs6eMvs&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dc9bUuKtLuPe7Ab y6ICoCQ&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22murmuring%20rivulet%22&f=false (accessed 19 December 2019). Drozdz, Stanislaw et al., ‘Quantifying Origin and Character of Long-Range Correlations in Narrative Texts’, in Information Sciences 331 (20 February 2016), 32–44, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0020025515007513? via%3Dihub (accessed 5 November 2019).

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Goldberger, Ary L., David R. Rigney and Bruce J. West, ‘Chaos and Fractals in Human Physiology’, in Scientific American 262–263 (February 1990), 34–41. Iuvenis, ‘Raymond; A Fragment’, in The Lady’s Magazine Vol. 30, February 1799, 57–59, https://books.google.es/books?id=l01GAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover& hl=es&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=true; re-edited in Baldick 1992, Aguirre 2019. Kahlert, Karl Friedrich, The Necromancer, trans. Peter Teuthold (London, Minerva Press, 1794). Knight, Richard Payne, The Landscape: A Didactic Poem in Three Books, 2nd edn. (London, W. Bulmer, 1794), Book I, l. 31, https://archive.org/details/landscape didacti00knig/page/92 (accessed 19 December 2019). Lewis, Matthew G., The Monk (1795; NY, Grove Press, 1959). Lord, Albert B., The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1960). Lynch, Deidre Shauna, ‘Gothic Fiction’, in Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008), 47–63. Lynch, Jack, ‘The Perfectly Acceptable Practice of Literary Theft: Plagiarism, Copyright, and the Eighteenth Century’, in Writing-World.com 2006, https://www.wri ting-world.com/rights/lynch.shtml (accessed 20 December 2019). Miles, Robert, Gothic Writing 1750–1820: A Genealogy, 2nd edn (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2002). Parsons, Eliza, The Castle of Wolfenbach, ed. Beatriz Sánchez Santos (1793; The Northanger Library, Madrid, The Gateway Press, 2007), https://www.northangerli brary.com/productos.asp?IdCategoriaPral=28. Pitcher, E. W., ‘Eighteenth-Century Gothic Fragments and the Paradigm of Violation and Repair’, in Studies in Short Fiction 33:1 (1996), 35–42. Prickett, Stephen, ‘Gothic’, in Iain McCalman, ed., An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1773–1832 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001), 526–527. Radcliffe, Ann, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, ed. Alison Milbank (1789; Oxford, World’s Classics, 1995). Radcliffe, Ann, A Sicilian Romance, ed. Alison Milbank (1790; Oxford, World’s Classics, 1993). Reeve, Clara, The Old English Baron (1778; Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003). Sánchez-Santos, Beatriz, A Grammar of Gothic Characters: A Study of Characterisation in Eighteenth-Century Gothic Fiction (unpublished PhD dissertation, Madrid, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2017). Seymour, Robert, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, vol. II (London, J. Reed, 1735), 861, https://books.google.es/books?id=7nBZAAAAY AAJ&pg=PA861&lpg=PA861&dq=%22much+lamented+wife%22&source=bl&ots= 0XXBvSqe-d&sig=p49EM8tOY1ECujhEdvDKNrIbX0Y&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ah UKEwjLkPqr4sTeAhUDxoUKHXyMDpcQ6AEwBnoECAMQAQ#v=onepage& q=%22much%20lamented%20wife%22&f=false (accessed 19 December 2019). Sinclair, John, Corpus, Concordance, Collocation (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991).

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‘Thornton, Miss Sylvia’, ‘St Aubin and Angelina’, in Remember Me! A New Years Gift, or Christmas Present (London, 1826), 1–11, https://books.google.es/ books?id=8N9qsulZOfYC&pg=PA6&lpg=PA6&dq=%22The+nightingale,+affrighte d,+fled+for+shelter%22&source=bl&ots=tZyaDX5Jzv&sig=ACfU3U0m04k10wJiF5 skUOMfH3lOf7y8Gw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjd-aL0jLvhAhUNDxQKHRi oDKEQ6AEwAHoECAAQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22The%20nightingale%2C%20affr ighted%2C%20fled%20for%20shelter%22&f=false (accessed 29 January 2020). Walbran, John R., The Antiquities of Gainford (London, J. B. Nichols and Son, 1846), 45, https://books.google.es/books?id=KvkGAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA45& lpg=PA45&dq=%22much+lamented+wife%22&source=bl&ots=UE1_4hTlG5&sig= 7GgMtkLzc8F_0MNxIeTHwUbg8Do&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjLkPqr4sTeA hUDxoUKHXyMDpcQ6AEwA3oECAIQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22much%20lame nted%20wife%22&f=false (accessed 19 December 2019). Walpole, Horace, The Castle of Otranto, in Three Gothic Novels, ed. Peter Fairclough (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968), 37–148. Wraxall, Sir Nathaniel William, Tour Through the Western, Southern, and Interior Provinces of France (London, Charles Dilly, 1784), 165, https://books.google. es/books?id=JQcwAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA165&lpg=PA165&dq=%22murmuring+riv ulet%22&source=bl&ots=MbeLJVvRl2&sig=2gAIGOaU0XTWhlfb2MO24CKP 1KI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jc5bUp-EK8rT7Ab30IGYAw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=% 22murmuring%20rivulet%22&f=false (accessed 19 December 2019).

Sentimental Gothic

Ann Radcliffe’s Influences and Legacies Joan Passey

There is no Gothic without Ann Radcliffe. Radcliffe is so central to the Gothic that ‘“Radcliffean Gothic” is almost a tautology’.1 The motifs established in her body of work have come to shape our understanding of the Gothic— castles and ruins, fraught ancestries, tyrannical lords and vulnerable women, terrifying convents, and secrecy and concealment. Radcliffe may not have been the first or last author to employ Gothic veils, haunting sonic effects, and spectral returns, but her work solidified them within a burgeoning Gothic imaginary. Ann Ward, later Ann Radcliffe, was born in Holborn, London, in 1764 and died in London in 1823 at age 58. She was an English author of romance novels, a pioneer of the Gothic, a travel writer, and an essayist. She was the most popular author of her time and her fame continued well into the nineteenth century and beyond. She was considered to be the ‘Shakespeare of romance-writers’ and ‘the mighty enchantress’. Radcliffe was a deeply private person and little is known about her life, especially about the period of seclusion following the publication of her five novels. She was born in London to William Ward and Ann Oates and the family moved to Bath in 1772. Ward was a haberdasher and Radcliffe would have moved in distinguished circles as a young woman. In 1787 she married William Radcliffe, editor of the English Chronicle. She began writing following her marriage and earned enough from J. Passey (B) University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_6

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her career to travel extensively with her husband. She stopped writing after the publication of her fifth novel, The Italian (1797), and there is little information about her life for the subsequent reclusive 26 years until her death. Why she stopped writing at the height of her fame remains a mystery. Some have theorised that she became mentally ill later in life, but there is no evidence to support this and it is likely part of a larger Gothic mythologisation of Radcliffe’s life. She died in 1823, potentially from a chest infection. Even at the height of her fame she never appeared in public. Her sixth novel, Gaston de Blondeville, was published posthumously in 1826, accompanied by a necessarily brief biographical piece entitled A Memoir for the Authoress. Further attempts at a biography of the author were foiled by a dearth of information. The poet Christina Rossetti attempted and abandoned the project in 1883 and a cohesive (though still limited) account of her life and works was not produced until the release of Rictor Norton’s Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe in 1999. Radcliffe’s novels were not only immensely successful at the time but hugely influential on the development of the Gothic as we understand it today. This chapter will provide an overview of Radcliffe’s contribution to the Gothic genre, including a summary of her writings and her use of the Gothic. I will begin with an overview of the historical and cultural context of the production and dissemination of Radcliffe’s work before moving on to summarising the Gothic elements of her novels chronologically. I will also touch upon her nonfiction works before considering the reception and lasting influence of her work. This chapter will culminate by positing the new relevance of Radcliffe’s Gothic landscapes to a twenty-first-century readership in consideration of new ecocritical (or ecoGothic) anxieties. Ann Radcliffe is regarded as a founding mother of the Gothic and an originator of the Female Gothic.2 The Gothic had long been seen in popular discourse (and in academic opinion) as a frivolous genre, preoccupied with surface, extremity of feeling, and stylistic and narrative excess. This subjugation of the genre can be attributed, in no small part, to its construction and reception as a feminised form, written and consumed by women. The Gothic, in its appeal to the emotional and its centring of marginalised experience has been read as feminine not only in its audience and authors but in its very form. It has been argued that Radcliffe played a significant role in elevating the Gothic Romance—she was referred to, after all, as ‘the Shakespeare of Romance writers’.3 Yet, this runs the risk of using Radcliffe’s work to oversimplify the relationship between the Gothic, the highbrow, and the low brow across its long and fractured history. There is immense silliness, humour, and satirical bite in Radcliffe’s work, and to elevate it above other Gothic manifestations is to legitimise the arbitrary canonical hierarchies oft imposed upon genre fiction and ‘women’s fiction’ in particular (whatever that may be). The low cultural status of the Gothic novel provided opportunities for women to contribute to its formation, while the dominance of women in the genre perpetuated its low cultural status. Yet, this gendered dynamic

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provided an opportunity for the Gothic to respond to the interests and experiences of women. While many of these images of Gothic women have become entrenched as archetypes and cliches—the swooning waif, the crone, the monstrous mother—they nonetheless centred women’s narratives. The Female Gothic illuminates gendered experience through its evil patriarchs, vivid depictions of injustice, and sexualised violence. Indeed, Radcliffe’s spectres are female terrors, often centred on physical assault.4 Radcliffe’s political views may often have been veiled, or confined to the shadows, but they are consistently present throughout her body of work. One example of Radcliffe’s employment of the Female Gothic is the ways in which her narratives are often motivated by complicated relationships between women. Women are given a depth of psyche and an emotional complexity contrary to the Gothic’s assumed interest in surface. This psychological Gothic significantly precedes the psychoanalytical preoccupations of the return of the Gothic in the nineteenth century. Radcliffe’s Gothic often centres on the monstrosity of gendered power dynamics. Power is seen as a corruptive force, and patriarchs and the titled aristocracy are shaped into maniacal beasts. Terror is located in the vulnerability of marginalisation and the exploitation of power—its mindlessness, its irrationality, and the delectable, sadistic pleasures taken in its violence. Ann Radcliffe’s first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne: A Highland Story (1789), was published in London by Thomas Hookham. It is set in the Scottish Highlands and centres on the titular castles and clans of Athlin and Dunbayne. The novel pitches the civilised and gentil inhabitants of Athlin against the villainous and barbarous Baron Malcolm of Dunbayne. It is centred on vengeance, confused ancestry, and familial responsibilities and debts. Ultimately, it is a narrative orientated around blood. Osbert, the Earl of Athlin, seeks vengeance on Baron Malcolm, who murdered his father. He is aided in his mission by a peasant who, in Radcliffean fashion, is revealed to be not all that he seems—indeed, he is the lost, true heir to Dunbayne. The narrative is motivated by the blood of violence, the revenant return of past horrors, and the significance of inheritance and legacy. Significantly, as a Romance, the novel has a happy ending and culminates in a double marriage, akin to a Shakespearean comedy. While Radcliffe’s Highlands are initially riddled with anger, chaos, and injustice, it is a world that rights itself through justice and rationality. In the end everyone is exactly where they need to be. In this vein Radcliffe’s Gothic has been received as a conservative Gothic focussed on imposing order onto chaos and motivated by the desire to retain and repair foundational hierarchies. This conservative interpretation of Radcliffe’s plots can be mapped onto her aesthetics—or, rather, the difficulty of categorising her work in relation to genre. Radcliffe has, historically, been read as traditional and staid, lacking in stiff upper lip of the Enlightenment as well as the furore of Romanticism.5 In comparison to Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Godwin, and Samuel

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Taylor Coleridge’s use of the high Germanic Gothic at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth, Radcliffe provides a relatively middle-brow, Anglican sense of resolution and tidiness. In Radcliffe’s Gothic imagination and fantasy are both explained and restrained.6 This posits problems for the delineation between the Gothic and Romanticism, rejecting the historical insistence on their strict antagonism. Radcliffe’s use of conservativism, of landscapes, of excess of feeling alongside restraint, gestures to the more complex and insidious interdependence of the Gothic, the Romance, and the Romantic. The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne opens with the retelling of the death of the Earl of Athlin at the hands of Malcolm of Dunbayne and Matilda of Athlin’s retreat from public life to protect her family and her people. This historical recollection somewhat prefaces the tale, which opens 12 years later with the Earl’s son and daughter—Osbert and Mary—now teenagers. Osbert, wandering the Highlands in a rage, encounters a peasant called Alleyn, who offers to guide him through the tempestuous, unpredictable landscape. This establishes motifs which recur throughout Radcliffe’s novels—an overwhelming sense of profound obligation to another; the historical secrets that lurk within families and haunt the present; the tourist or ‘outsider’ traversing an unforgiving landscape; the importance of the guide, whether to lead the protagonist through the landscape, rescue them, or provide key fragments of narrative or historical detail. The young Earl launches an unsuccessful vengeful attack on Dunbayne and is captured along with Alleyn. Matilda attempts to arrange a ransom but is rejected and Malcolm hatches a plot to kidnap the famously beautiful Mary. Malcolm’s henchmen are repelled by the escaped Alleyn who falls in love with Mary. Malcolm, enraged, threatens to execute Osbert if he is not granted Mary’s hand in marriage. Meanwhile, Osbert meets two other prisoners—the widow and the daughter of Malcolm’s brother, the former Earl, another of his victims. A final battle ensues, Malcolm is slain, but not before confessing his failure kill his nephew—later revealed to be Alleyn, the rightful heir to Dunbayne. Radcliffe, here, borrows heavily from Walpole in her commitment to the medieval and cases of mistaken identity. She draws from Greek tragedy with the inevitable return of the son thought to be slain. Further, Malcolm’s villainous plots in the Highlands draw direct inspiration from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Rictor Norton points out that Radcliffe was heavily inspired by Shakespeare throughout her career and that her use of ghosts and the explained supernatural owes a tremendous debt to Hamlet.7 Radcliffe used Shakespearean quotations as chapter headings and her essay, ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ (1826) reflects on the efficacy of Shakespeare’s literary techniques, which will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter. A Sicilian Romance (1790), Radcliffe’s second novel, was first published anonymously. Set on the northern shores of Sicily it, like The Castle of Athlin and Dunbayne, is concerned with anxieties surrounding nobility, a fall from grace, and re-emergent histories. Significantly, it is part of a travel narrative, of sorts, as it opens with a history related to a tourist at the ruins of the castle

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of the Mazzini family. Radcliffe herself used her significant earnings from her publications to travel widely and published her subsequent travel narratives. Travel narratives recur in Gothic fiction—for instance, as a key part of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Travel narratives, like Gothic fiction, feature the outsider’s encounter with the strange and alien. The monk’s retelling acts as a framing narrative, later seen in Gothic texts such as Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), and the antiquarian interest in a haunted past doubtless influence the twentieth-century works of M. R. James. The format of a retold history also refers back to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) which is introduced as a found manuscript. Like Walpole, Radcliffe is tapping into the unreliability of histories as texts and narratives to generate uncertainty. The notion of these tales being ‘real’—if historical—threatens the safe distance between the reader and the terrors contained therein. A Sicilian Romance’s plot concerns the house of Mazzini and their tragic fall from nobility following a love match gone awry. Marquis Mazzini plans for his daughter, Julia, to marry the Duke de Luovo, unaware that she has already fallen in love with the count Hippolitus. Julia and Hippolitus attempt to elope to escape her father’s tyrannical wishes, but the Marquis foils their plan and appears to kill Hippolitus. Devastated, Julia escapes, pursued by her intended and her father. She ends up in the labyrinthine tunnels beneath the castle and is horrified to discover her mother, supposed dead, but in fact alive and imprisoned by her father. In an increasingly convoluted series of events the Marquis is poisoned by his new wife who then stabs herself. On his death bed the Marquis admits to his son, Ferdinand, that the boy’s ‘dead’ mother is in fact alive in the tunnels. However, Hippolitus has already rescued Julia and her mother, and the family reunite at the coast, by the symbolically loaded lighthouse. Much like Athlin and Dunbayne the novel revolves around the insidious secrets of families and their inevitable return. In Radcliffe’s Gothic worlds truth continuously reigns supreme and can only be buried for so long. The secret of Julia’s mother is ‘buried’ beneath the property and inevitably disinterred on multiple fronts, with Radcliffe’s secrets tending towards multiple points of leakage. Further, like Radcliffe’s first novel, A Sicilian Romance features a woman on the run from malicious men forced to rely entirely on her own wits. These are not waifs swooning over their fate—instead, they take an active role to escape the horrors forced upon them. The image of the Marquess concealed beneath the castle lays the blueprint for Bertha locked in Thornfield’s attic in Jane Eyre (1847). Further, it borrows from Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard folktale, first published in 1697. In this way, it demonstrates a tradition of Gothic influence and inspiration as repeated motifs return, revenant, in different modes at different times. Further, the underground network of tunnels refers to Walpole’s Otranto and cements the subterranean as a Gothic image. Through Walpole, Radcliffe, their influences, and successors, the Gothic becomes saturated with labyrinths, crypts, tunnels, graveyards, and mines, which over time morph into haunted subways and metros and terrifying basements and sewers. The underground space represents that which is

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buried, whether that be people, secrets, or histories. It can also represent the stratification of social hierarchies and the invisible labour of the underclasses, shunted into the darkness by the nobles lording it up above. It can also become a mythological hellscape below our feet—and certainly is for Julia’s mother, who is conceptually buried alive. Radcliffe’s third novel, The Romance of the Forest, was published in 1791. It was her first major success and was released in four editions within three years of publication. It is another narrative of escape and pursuit, opening with Monsieur and Madame de la Motte on the run from debtors. Radcliffe again switches location, though sticks to Western Europe, this time setting her chase outside of Paris. Like A Sicilian Romance, this narrative opens with ruins. The de la Mottes, along with their servants and a strange girl, Adeline, who has been thrust into their care, take up residency in a ruined abbey, otherwise only occupied by bats and mice. Following the found manuscript tradition, Adeline finds a barely legible manuscript in the abbey written by a captive from 1642. This novel, too, is about a foiled marriage plot, as the Marquis claiming to own the abbey returns to his property and plans to wed Adeline. It also centres on the roles of servants, their knowledge, and their usurpation of their subservient roles. This lays the foundation for the Gothic servant, such as the staff of The Turn of the Screw, Jane Eyre and Agnes Grey as governesses, the devoted Mrs. Danvers of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), and even Magenta and Riff Raff of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1875). The Gothic servant has access to privileged information and uses this to aid or confound their master or mistress. The Gothic servant often functions as a commentary on power relations, hierarchy, agency, and liberty. Further, the servant (or peasant) is often revealed to be of noble or significant birth. Their inevitable return to their rightful seat of power suggests a fundamentally conservative predetermined social order. This sense of an ordered universe is amplified by the novel’s culmination, where it is revealed that many of the characters have had previous dealings with each other and are entangled in unlikely ways. Further, the Marquis conveniently confesses all his wrongdoings before taking his own life. This creates the format for the villain’s unlikely confession later followed by everything from Agatha Christie novels to Scooby Doo cartoons. While the events up to that moment have been tumultuous and terrifying, justice wins out and truth prevails. The threads are neatly tied, families are reunited, and inheritances are returned. Crucially, economic balance is restored, and economic entitlement is fulfilled. Radcliffe’s use of the inevitable resurgence of the past—through a haunted abbey, fragmented manuscript, or skeleton hidden in a chest—underscores the futility of the modern quest towards progress. The ruins themselves become a hub for anxieties over religious and societal change. Our pasts, personal, familial, or national haunt the present. Ruins serve a multitude of functions in the Gothic, standing for the inevitability of degeneration and decay, responding to iconoclasm and religious conflict, and suggesting both the

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fragility and perseverance of the past. In The Romance of the Forest attempts to understand the abbey and its origins are mapped onto attempts to decipher the manuscript, and thus the found text and the found abbey become the embodiment of attempts to articulate and interpret reality and histories. Abbeys, nuns, monks, and convents recur in Radcliffe’s work, alongside a rich tapestry of religious and specifically Catholic imagery. Adeline has been read as a ‘proto-Protestant’ character who eschews ‘Catholic superstitions’.8 The semi-fantastical aspects of Radcliffe’s texts provide license for religious discourse amidst revolutionary anxiety over the relationship between church and state. The construction of the eighteenth-century Gothic novel is irrevocably entangled with the politics of and responses to the French Revolution. The Gothic arises as a response to trauma—social, cultural, personal, and national—and the Revolution provided fuel for the Gothic flames. Through Revolutionary imagery we get the monstrous aristocracy of the Gothic; the castle as imprisonment in response to the Bastille; the questioning of Enlightenment ideas of rationality; the transgressing of boundaries; and the challenging of authority. Radcliffe is directly responding to Revolutionary thought through the radical, active heroines born forth from the same zeitgeist as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) and argument for women’s role in societal upheaval. Ronald Paulson argues that Revolutionary energies can be read into the Gothic, and Radcliffe’s, use of a sense of disorientation.9 This ‘puzzlement’ of radical social change motivates Gothic mysteries. Though Radcliffe’s novels always ‘solve’ the puzzle and order wins out in the end. The Mysteries of Udolpho, arguably Radcliffe’s most recognisable novel, was her fourth and published in 1794 by G. G. and J. Robinson, London. Like her previous works Udolpho is replete with ruins, a tyrannical villain, and a relentlessly pursued heroine. The novel is set in 1584 and covers vast swathes of Europe, from South France to the Apennines and from the Pyrenees to Venice. The heroine in question is Emily St. Aubert, recently orphaned by the death of her father and imprisoned by the merciless Signor Montoni following his marriage to her guardian, the Marcioness de Villeroi. Like the earlier novels, the mechanics of Udolpho is, in part, enabled by a maternal substitute with misplaced priorities. Further, it takes a damning view of marriage as entrapment. Aside from the happily married couples Radcliffe’s novels occasionally culminate in, marriage is a site for manipulation and murderous intent. Plots are often motivated by attempts to escape marriage and villainous ploys are conjured in response to romantic rejection. Radcliffe’s novels take the marriage as a foundation of family, the home, and society (everything familiar and safe) and renders it a hellish, claustrophobic prison engineered by devils. Marriage is recurrently entwined with property and legislation and many of Radcliffe’s terrors are bound up in paperwork. Greed and entitlement are often the motivators of Radcliffe’s Machiavellian puppet masters. The feudal system is often used as a veiled attack against the patriarchy (through undermining patrilineal inheritance), authority, and ownership.

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The Mysteries of Udolpho has had a lasting cultural impact. Even before its send-up in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (completed in 1803 and published in 1817) the novel was abridged in chapbooks, including one entitled The Veiled Picture or The Mysteries of Gorgono in 1802. The Castle of Udolpho is mentioned in William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) and Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage (1860). Further, ‘a mystery of Udolpho’ is referenced in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) which reflects upon many of Radcliffe’s Gothic conventions, including the fatal consequences of thwarted romance. Radcliffe even enjoyed a transatlantic reception and Edgar Allan Poe references a ‘Mrs. Radcliffe’ in ‘The Oval Portrait’ (1842). Her works were adapted for the stage throughout the nineteenth century as playwrights attempted to capitalise on her enduring popularity. Gothic novels had a huge impact on the theatre, and The Romance of the Forest was adapted into Fountainville Forest by the celebrated James Boaden. Boaden also adapted The Italian and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk. The success of these plays on stage demonstrates the public’s enduring fascinating with Radcliffe and eighteenth-century Gothic Romances. Further, it illustrates the theatricality and visuality of Radcliffe’s novels. Theatres were expanded to accommodate the machinery required for the special effects needed to stage such plots, as a neat corollary to Radcliffe’s preoccupation with illusion, misdirection, and the rationality of the explained supernatural. The camp villains and impassioned heroines of Radcliffe’s narratives, too, lent themselves to the stage and appealed to the sympathies of the audience. These tales of excess and on-stage ghosts doubtless influenced later adaptations of Victorian Gothic texts, such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White which was staged in London in 1871 and ran for over 100 performances. Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1983) takes inspiration from Collins and its stage play adaptation is the second longest-running play in the history of the West End— second only to The Mousetrap, another adaptation from a novel centred on fittingly Radcliffean resolved mysteries. While Radcliffe’s Gothic imaginary has had influence—conscious or otherwise—on subsequent Gothic literature, it is possible, too, that the staging of Radcliffe’s Gothic works feeds into the tradition from which other Gothic stage adaptations draw, such as the contemporary hits Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera, both adapted from somewhat Gothic novels themselves. Radcliffe followed the success of The Mysteries of Udolpho with her fifth novel, The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents in 1797. It was the last book published in her lifetime. While her earlier novels deal with persecution, tyranny, and revolutionary sentiments, The Italian deals with French Revolutionary ideas more intimately in its use of the Holy Inquisition as a setting. While A Sicilian Romance began with a tourist being told the history of ruins by a monk, The Italian opens with an English tourist talking to an Italian friar and being given an older narrative by a friend. Again, the novel begins with a traveller, a framing narrative, and a ‘found’ (or in this case, sent) manuscript. Radcliffe is engaging with Walpole’s ‘found manuscript’ tradition

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which eventually leads to the ‘found footage’ horror tradition of The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007). The English traveller reads the terrific narrative from the safety of his hotel room—a metafictional stand-in for the reader. Radcliffe, then, cements the Gothic preoccupation with readers and acts of reading, with the materiality of the text, and with the haunting qualities of confessional writings. Radcliffe’s The Italian can be seen as a response to Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), as The Monk was a response to The Mysteries of Udolpho. Both The Italian and The Monk borrow tortured, star-crossed lovers from Romeo and Juliet, and the former reworks some of the conventions of Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782).10 Radcliffe’s threatened women, pursued by monstrous aristocrats, further hark back to Samuel Richardson’s doomed Clarissa (1748). Radcliffe wears her reading heavily and uses her novels to engage in a discourse surrounding literary tropes, conventions, and morality. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) has been noted as a primary influence on Udolpho, beyond title alone, though The Italian takes Walpole’s Manfred and transforms him into the conflicted Schedoni. Ellena’s flights take inspiration from Walpole’s Matilda and Isabella. Ellena sees a miniature of herself as a reference to the moving portrait of Otranto and as a response to the portrait of Matilda in The Monk. Like those uncanny portraits Radcliffe’s work draws from sources both agreeable and disagreeable to create something both mimetic and dynamic. While Radcliffe’s work has been celebrated for its mastery of the visual it has also been noted as being replete with sonic Gothic effects. Much of the ‘terror’ of Radcliffe’s work is reliant upon the nebulous quality of sound—of whispers, shifting winds, footsteps where footsteps should not be, and attempts to navigate the darkness through sound alone. Sound, perhaps, has a capacity for terrifying sublimity in the fact that it is not seen. It can be dislocated from its source. Like a spectre it glides through the air, intangible, and penetrates the body. The Italian, for example, revolves around understanding, recognising, and being drawn, impossibly, to voices. Connection is forged and plots resolved through sound. This lends itself to the subsequent sensory excesses of the Gothic and its preoccupation with sensual experience. Radcliffe’s fifth and final novel, Gaston de Blondeville: Or, The Court of Henry III. Keeping Festival in Ardenne, A Romance (1826) was published posthumously following Radcliffe’s death in 1823. It was her last published novel and the last she wrote circa 1802. Radcliffe again reaches back to the medieval period (in this case, the thirteenth century) following the relatively contemporary setting of The Italian, and this is her only novel set in England. A wedding is usurped in action this time, by a man who claims the titular Gaston murdered his kinsman. King Henry holds a trial to ascertain the truth which is confounded by a dastardly abbot. The novel is prefaced by A Memoir of the Author, with Extracts from her Journal, which is the first known biography of the author. The accuracy of the biography has been criticised—it was

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constructed years after her death, by a man she never knew, using sources curated by her husband. Radcliffe’s A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany, with a Return Down the Rhine: To Which Are Added Observations During a Tour of the Lakes of Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland was released in 1795 and unlike her early biography is more directly from her own pen. It is based on a trip funded by the proceeds from her The Mysteries of Udolpho. Travel writing was important to the development of Radcliffe’s oeuvre as she often researched travel narratives to provide details for her foreign climes (leading, at times, to the reproduction of inaccuracies). While a nonfiction travel narrative, A Journey should be read alongside Radcliffe’s wider body of Gothic work, as it concerns the same key preoccupations with agency and authority, as well as key images of travellers, guides, and the central importance of landscape and natural imagery. Radcliffe’s complementary interests in Gothic fiction and travel writing—and the way travel writing informed her fiction and vice versa—inform a complex entanglement between the two genres across the centuries. Dracula can be read as a travel narrative, as can Frankenstein’s journey across the arctic. The Gothic often features tales of quests, pursuits, escapes, and journeys and is influenced by developments in transportation technologies and emergent anxieties surrounding place, space, globalisation, the foreign, and the alien. To be a traveller is to be dislocated, a voyeur, to be vulnerable, as well as to be an invader. Aside from contributing several foundational Gothic texts to the canonical pool, Radcliffe is responsible for one of the germinal pieces of literary criticism on the Gothic and affect. ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ (1826) was intended as a preface to her final novel, but the publisher decided to publish it separately in The New Monthly Magazine. This piece takes the form of a dialogue between Willoughton, ‘apostle of Shakespeare’, and Simpson, ‘representative of Philistine common sense’. Radcliffe uses this dialogue to engage with Edmund Burke’s theories on sublimity described in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). In the essay Radcliffe posits Shakespeare’s works as emblematic of sublimity. Further, she delineates between the different responses to frightful content— terror and horror. Terror is tranquil, obscure, a tinge, a gesture. Terror is high and horror low. Horror is a thrill but not necessarily sublime. Vitally, ‘terror and horror are so far opposite that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them’.11 Horror belongs to the realms of bodily gore and vulgarity, of abject, physical manifestation, and tangibility. Terror, on the other hand, is located in subtlety—in whispers and glimpses from the corner of one’s eye. Terror is conjured through craft, whereas horror is a basic form of emotional exploitation. Horror is gratuitous, but terror is an elegant expanding of the consciousness and heightening of feeling. ‘Horror’ can be emblematised by the thrills and chills of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk. Gothic

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criticism has often simplified the relationship between Lewis and Radcliffe’s work through the seeming dichotomy between terror and horror, whereby Radcliffe is a proponent of terror, the female Gothic, and the explained supernatural, whereas Lewis is the poster boy for horror, the male Gothic, and the unexplained supernatural. These categories, however, are far from contained or coherent, and later interpretations of Radcliffe and Lewis’s work have noted their interdependencies in creation and reception. Interest in Radcliffe’s work (and Gothic Romances on the whole) was piqued by the success of Jane Austen’s parody Northanger Abbey (1817) which listed The Mysteries of Udolpho as one of the ‘horrid novels’ on the list given to the Gothic-loving heroine. Yet, many of the other novels on the list are not even available in print, while Radcliffe has recently enjoyed re-releases under Oxford University Press’s Classics imprint with introductions justifying her inclusion in the eighteenth-century canon. The hero of Udolpho even gives his name to Valancourt Press, a modern publisher of Gothic reprints—fitting, perhaps, for an author so intrigued by the possibilities of the lost and found narrative. Further interest in Radcliffe was spurred by her 250th anniversary in 2014, and perhaps new attentions will emerge in 2023, 200 years after her death. Many of Radcliffe’s concerns—inequality, persecution, gendered violence, the repression of the past—still have resonance for contemporary readers. Her use of landscape and the natural world as a source of both comfort and horrors strikes a different chord amidst the climate crises of the Anthropocene age. Alison Milbank argues that Radcliffe’s use of natural and ruinous imagery anticipates Romanticism.12 Like Radcliffe, Romantic poets and authors focussed on the landscape as key to the intricacies of plot, the articulation of feeling, and the generation of atmosphere. However, Radcliffe’s landscapes can be considered ‘Gothic’ rather than ‘Romantic’ due to her use of fragmentation and incoherence as opposed to a more Romantic sense of unity and harmony, within the landscape and between the natural world and the human psyche. Radcliffe recurrently engages with the sublimity of the seascape. The sea, tumultuous, unfathomable, beautiful yet violent, provides scope for reflection on the awesome terror of the sublime. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, upon a clifftop, St. Foix reflects on the James Beattie poem ‘The Minstrel’: ‘What dreadful pleasure! there to stand sublime, / Like the shipwreck’d mariner on desert coast’.13 This precedes Coleridge’s own hallucinogenic, Gothic shipwrecked mariner by three years. Shipwrecks crop up again in her poetical works. In her poem, ‘The Shipwreck’, Death shrieks upon the gale, ending on ‘the Note of Fear’.14 In ‘The Fishers’ Radcliffe ruminates on the outposts of shores ‘Whose eyes look down on desolation, pain, / Shipwreck and death’.15 ‘Shakespeare’s Cliff’, too, looks out from a precipice and marvels at the sublimity of the ocean’s depths—‘For fearful-sweet it is to stand / On some tall point ‘tween earth and heaven’.16 For Radcliffe the coast becomes a liminal threshold—a space between life and death, a portal unto the fantastical, and

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imaginative gap ripe for terrific reflection. The sea is specifically sonic, imagined as shrieks, whispers, blusters, and cries. The liquidity of the landscape and its resistance to the seascape is, seemingly, best articulated through the nebulousness of sound. A Sicilian Romance, too, considers the splendour of the sea, ‘the vast expanse of the ocean’, the ‘striking and sublime magnificence of the scenery’.17 The sea conjures sublimity due to its unknowableness—its unseen depths, stretching from one land to the next. It brings to mind the borders between land and sea as well as between surface and depth. The shimmering surface of the sea serves the same function as Radcliffe’s many veils—a faint membrane separating one world from another, fantasy from reality, truth from lies. The uncontrollable waters come to embody Radcliffe’s subtle undermining of structures of authority. The ship represents humankind’s dominion over nature, the triumph of technology, and rationality. It is a floating emblem of the Enlightenment conquest over the tumultuous as the uninhabitable abysses of the world are subdued, enabling war, a conduit to the spread of empire, a vehicle for patriarchal, and nationalist domination—especially for an island surrounded by water and defined and delimited by its seas. The shipwreck is a counter to this and illuminates the fallibility of rationality and the ultimate victory of irrational and irrepressible natural forces. For Radcliffe, the shipwreck becomes a Gothic motif of ultimate terror as it threatens order with chaos. While Romantic impressions of nature privilege order and harmony, Gothic descriptions of the natural world shine light (or cast shadow) on its antagonistic, fearful qualities, disrupting the anthropocentrism of Romantic ideals. An ecofeminist reading of Radcliffe challenges the hierarchies of anthropocentrism, thus confronting the interlocking oppression of misogyny. There is a reason, perhaps, why Radcliffe’s maidens on the run flee into the embrace of the Gothic forest. This chapter has gestured towards Radcliffe’s body of work but, by necessity, it cannot be exhaustive. While only publishing five novels, and four in her lifetime, the density and complexity of Radcliffe’s work, despite consistent critical attention, continues to invite further investigation and new interpretations. This chapter can only serve as an overview of the many motifs popularised by Radcliffe and the way she was influenced by and went on to influence a significantly wider body of literature. We see Radcliffe’s ghosts everywhere— in Buffy the Vampire Slayer rejecting the patriarchal authority of the Watchers Council; in the trope of the ‘final girl’; in found footage horror and the threatening forests of folk horror. Radcliffe is immortalised in haunted houses with secret compartments. She is made eternal by the vicious rich of Bon Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019). This hopefully goes some way to demonstrating the rich intertextuality of the Gothic, the diversity of its socio-political engagements and impacts, and its enduring legacy. Radcliffe’s castles, waifs with agency, tyrannical patriarchs, and swashbuckling heroes continue to haunt the Gothic, and her popularisation and, crucially, legitimisation of the mode laid the foundations for volumes such as this to exist today.

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Notes 1. Richard S. Albright, ‘No Time Like the Present: The Mysteries of Udolpho’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 5.1 (2005): 49. 2. Carol Margaret Davison, History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764– 1824 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009): 4. 3. Davison, 4. 4. Annette Wheeler Cafarelli, ‘How Theories of Romanticism Exclude Women: Radcliffe, Milton, and the Legitimisation of the Gothic Novel’, Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism, ed. by Lisa Low and Anthony John Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 86. 5. Robert Miles, ‘Popular Romanticism and the Problem of Belief’, Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, ed. by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): 117. 6. Miles, 117. 7. Rictor Norton, ‘Ann Radcliffe: “The Shakespeare of Romance Writers”’, Shakespearean Gothic, ed. by Christy Desmet and Anne Williams (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009): 37–59. 8. Diane Long Hoeveler, ‘The Heroine, the Abbey and Popular Romantic Textuality: The Romance of the Firest (1791)’, Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, ed. by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): 101. 9. Ronald Paulson, ‘Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution’, ELH 48.1 (1981): 542. 10. Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘Recovering the Walpolean Gothic: The Italian: Or, the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1796–1797)’, Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, ed. by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): 152. 11. Ann Radcliffe, ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, Gothic Readings: The First Wave, ed. by Rictor Norton (London: Continuum, 2000): 315. 12. Alison Milbank, ‘Ways of Seeing in Ann Radcliffe’s Early Fiction: The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) and A Sicilian Romance (1790)’, Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, ed. by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): 86. 13. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolfo: A Romance Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry, Vol. 4 (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1795): 238. 14. Ann Radcliffe, The Poems of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (London: J. Smith, 1816): 87. 15. Ann Radcliffe, The Poetical Works of Ann Radcliffe: St. Albans Abbey, Continued. Miscellaneous Poems (London: H. Colburn, 1834): 170. 16. Ibid., 164.

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17. Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998): 151–152.

Bibliography Albright, Richard S. ‘No Time Like the Present: The Mysteries of Udolpho.’ Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 5.1 (2005): 49–75 Cafarelli, Annette Wheeler. ‘How Theories of Romanticism Exclude Women: Radcliffe, Milton, and the Legitimisation of the Gothic Novel.’ Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism. Ed. by Lisa Low and Anthony John Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 84–111 Davison, Carol Margaret. History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764–1824 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009) Hogle, Jerrold E. ‘Recovering the Walpolean Gothic: The Italian: Or, the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1796–1797).’ Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic. Ed. by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): 151–167 Long Hoeveler, Diane. ‘The Heroine, the Abbey and Popular Romantic Textuality: The Romance of the Firest (1791).’ Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic. Ed. by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): 100–116 Milbank, Alison. ‘Ways of Seeing in Ann Radcliffe’s Early Fiction: The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) and A Sicilian Romance (1790).’ Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic. Ed. by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): 85–99 Miles, Robert. ‘Popular Romanticism and the Problem of Belief.’ Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic. Ed. by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): 117–134 Paulson, Ronald. ‘Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution.’ ELH 48.1 (1981): 532–554 Radcliffe, Ann. A Sicilian Romance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998): 151– 152 ———. ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry.’ Gothic Readings: The First Wave. Ed. by Rictor Norton (London: Continuum, 2000): 315 ———. The Mysteries of Udolfo: A Romance Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry, Vol. 4 (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1795) ———. The Poems of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (London: J. Smith, 1816) ———. The Poetical Works of Ann Radcliffe: St. Albans Abbey, Continued. Miscellaneous Poems (London: H. Colburn, 1834)

Ann Radcliffe and the French Revolution Fanny Lacôte

In the French periodical Courrier des spectacles for 1800, readers would have found a review deploring the dark literary trend coming from across the Channel and invading the French literary market: ‘It seems that Anne Radcliff’s [sic] pen has passed through the hands of all recent novelists: thefts, murders, castle ruins, recesses, spectres and ghosts […].1 ’ In addition to listing the ingredients to a standard gothic novel, the reviewer also points at the figurehead of the genre, Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), one of the most popular female gothic novelists at the end of the eighteenth century. In France, her novels were quickly translated, and they enjoyed significant success at the time of the French Revolution (1789–1799) and during the First French Republic (1792–1804). The first French translation of Ann Radcliffe’s novels is that of The Romance of the Forest (1791). It is published in 1794, during the Reign of Terror. Spanning from 1793 to 1794, the Terror during the French Revolution is associated with the figure of Robespierre, the Jacobin political party, with numerous imprisonments and public guillotine executions, and with this infamous declaration of the National Convention on the 5th September 1793: ‘La Terreur est à l’ordre du jour’ (‘Terror is the order of the day’). Terror is understood, during the events, as a form of violence exercised by the state and

F. Lacôte (B) Oxford University, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_7

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Fig. 1 Graph of the number of British gothic novels in French translations and French gothic novels published per year, 1789–1822

its representatives in response not only to revolutionary fervour and anticlerical sentiment but also in an attempt to control rebellion and acts of treason against the new regime. During the Terror, the newly formed First French Republic was at war against England, and the majority of the literary production came to a standstill in France. Only 16 novels were published in 1794. This number comprises two translations, both from the English, and one of which was Radcliffe’s novel. By 1798, each of Radcliffe’s novels already published in English, that is, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian; or, the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797), was translated into French.2 Although Radcliffe’s debut novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, was initially published in 1789, it had only been translated into French in 1797, along with Udolpho and The Italian. That same year, two French translations of Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796) were also published.3 According to our graph of the production of gothic novels per year in France (Fig. 1), the Gothic in France reached its peak during the period 1797– 1800, with 1798 being its most flourishing year, following the success of Ann Radcliffe’s Matthew Gregory Lewis’s novels in French translation. In 1798, according to French literary critics, Ann Radcliffe’s novels had the reputation of being unparalleled and unequalled: ‘the Mysteries of Udolpho are, so far, the first work in the [gothic] genre, I have not seen that any Frenchman has yet made a passable copy of the English model’.4 This unparalleled reputation continued until at least 1821, when, according to the publisher and bookseller Nicolas-Alexandre Pigoreau (1765–1851), ‘no one has yet been able to match Mrs. Radcliffe in her [gothic] genre.5 ’ In France,

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the popularity of the nicknamed ‘Mistress of Udolpho6 ’ was such that her works were imitated and subjected to literary forgery. The present chapter will focus on the translation, reception and the legacy of the ‘Mistress of Udolpho’. Its objectives are threefold. Firstly, it will explain Ann Radcliffe’s success across the Channel in the light of the values of the new republican and revolutionary society in which her novels are translated. Secondly, it will demonstrate the influence of the British gothic novel on the French literary scene at the start of the nineteenth century and will argue that Ann Radcliffe’s name, in itself was enough to guarantee good sales, became the means by which a number of writers earned their living during and after the French Revolution. In the process, it will also demonstrate that, though political relations between France and England were troubled, literary exchanges between the two nations never ceased, and that translating Ann Radcliffe in French served as a means of addressing topical French political concerns behind a façade of Englishness. Ann Radcliffe’s novels can be qualified as belonging to the ‘female gothic’ subgenre. Initially defined by Ellen Moers in 1976,7 the qualification applies to a type of gothic novel written by women for a female readership and featuring the adventures of a female protagonist. More recently, for Diane Long Hoeveler, the female Gothic is to be found in novels subtly denouncing public institutions authorising the oppressive treatment of women. In fact, and in many regards, Ann Radcliffe can be considered the figurehead of the female Gothic in France. Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline; or, the Orphan of the Castle (1788) is an early gothic novel which prefigures the vogue of the female gothic subgenre, and which may have inspired Ann Radcliffe for her own novels. Although Emmeline was originally published the year before Radcliffe’s first novel, and a decade before her bestsellers, on the other side of the Channel, Emmeline was not translated until 1799, that is to say, following the popularity of Radcliffe’s novels in French translation. ‘Radcliffean’ heroines are generally confronted by the dilemma of either having to marry a despotic man, usually chosen by their father or guardian, or being confined in a convent. By denouncing tyranny and lack of freedom, these novels echo the values of the French newly born First Republic, with its motto ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’. In addition, the female gothic plot enables Radcliffe and her imitators to tackle themes such as the importance of female education and that of female emancipation. The Mysteries of Udolpho particularly testifies to this, especially in the quality of education given to the heroine Emily by her father, St. Aubert. Emily’s education is based on the principle that one must acquire command over one’s emotions and feelings, as shown in St. Aubert’s recommendation: ‘Above all, my dear Emily,’ said he, ‘do not indulge in the pride of fine feeling, the romantic error of amiable minds. Those, who really possess sensibility, ought early to be taught, that it is a dangerous quality, which is continually extracting the excess of misery, or delight, from every surrounding circumstance.’8

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St. Aubert thus seeks to counterbalance his daughter’s intrinsically feminine characteristics with almost ‘masculine’ qualities. It is her education that enables Emily to oppose and resist Montoni, the villain holding her prisoner in his Castle Udolpho, until she accepts to sign off her inheritance to him. Refusing to yield to his tyranny, she declares to him: I am not so ignorant, Signor, of the laws on this subject, as to be misled by the assertion of any person: the law, in the present instance, gives me the estates in question, and my own hand shall never betray my right.9

Although Radcliffe’s heroines do conform to contemporary conceptions of femininity and sensibility, they also transcend stereotypical representations of heroines in sentimental fiction, by displaying courage and determination, as well as an almost ‘masculine’ behaviour. These qualities, which Emily possesses, surprise even villain Montoni, as he exclaims: [Y]ou possess an understanding superior to that of you sex; and […] you have none of those contemptible foibles that frequently mark the female character […]. I understand your disposition and your mind, you hold in sovereign contempt these common failings of your sex.10

In female gothic novels, the representation of women as victims of oppression is used to comment more generally on the inequalities of a society which unevenly distributed power, inheritance and money, that is to say, an old regime type of society.11 First victims of a corrupt patriarchal society, ‘Radcliffean’ heroines end up climbing the social ladder, from being orphans to becoming rich heiresses. In the process, they usually succeed in getting rid of the gothic villain, an extreme, tyrannical male, and rightly taking possession of a legacy that enables them to live independently. If they do marry at the end of the novel, it is to a sensitive, almost feminised man, whom they regard as an equal, rather than a superior. This particular motif further echoes the French republican motto and its second value, that of ‘Égalité’. The female gothic ideology is indeed indebted to proto-feminist and radical works such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Right of Woman, published in 1792. This work is itself inspired from early women’s rights advocate Olympe de Gouges (1748–1793), and more specifically to her Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne (1791) [Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen], itself a rewriting of the famous 1789 human civil rights Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen [Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen]. In her Déclaration, Olympe de Gouges challenged oppressive patriarchal authority and the notion of male– female inequality, and she demanded that French women be given the same rights as French men. She was publicly executed by guillotine in 1793, during the Terror, for attacking the revolutionary regime.

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Female gothic novels can therefore be regarded as the heirs of revolutionary thinking,12 and by resisting tyranny and by speaking out for their rights, the ‘manly women’, or amazon heroines, like Emilie, Adeline, and their female gothic affiliates, become fictional echoes of revolutionary women such as Olympe de Gouges, Théroigne de Méricourt (1762–1817), Charlotte Corday (1768–1793), Rose Lacombe (1765–c.1798) and Elisabeth Cazotte (1775?–1800?). Such comparison was made, in 1798, during the apex of the gothic novel, by British Tory satirist Thomas James Mathias (c.1754–1835), who accused British female gothic novelists with being ‘asexual’ creatures, instructing their readers ‘in the labyrinth of politicks’, and turning them ‘wild with Gallick frenzy13 ’ via novels mingling with politics and tinged with democratic and French revolutionary ideas: Mrs Charlotte Smith, Mrs Inchbald, Mrs Mary Robinson, Mrs &c. &c. though all of them are very ingenious ladies, yet they are too frequently whining or frisking in novels, till our girl’s heads turn wild with impossible adventures, and now and then are tainted with democracy.14

The link between gothic fiction and the French Revolution has been subjected to abundant critical discourses by contemporaries of the events on both sides of the Channel. While novelists were competing in inventing the most terrifying plots, critics of all political orientations were comparing gothic novelists’ art of terror with that of Robespierre, thus drawing a parallel between the horrors contained within gothic fiction and the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. While in England, in 1797 and 1798, the gothic novel was also called ‘novel of terror’ or ‘terrorist novel’,15 in France, the earliest literary review to draw a parallel between the historical events and the literary genre also dates from 1797. It was published in a periodical titled Magasin encyclopédique, and refers to the French translation of Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian.16 The periodical was created by Aubin-Louis Millin de Grandmaison (1759–1818), whose political interests were akin to those of the Girondists, a group of moderate republicans during the French Revolution. In his review of The Italian, Millin de Grandmaison, who had been imprisoned during the Terror, for his hostility towards the Jacobins, drew a parallel between the horrors found in Radcliffe’s The Italian and those committed under the reign of the Terror: While reading these seven volumes, we regret that they have not been published during the reign of Robespierre […]; the accounts that are told, the atrocities that are depicted, the horrors that are revealed, were worthy of that time of our history.17

By linking Radcliffe’s novel with the Jacobin terrorists, the review portrayed The Italian as a purveyor of extreme revolutionary and republican sentiment. Radcliffe’s own liberal and radical political opinions,18 which transpired in her

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publications, are not only confirmed by the political orientation of the English Chronicle, the Whig journal co-owned and edited by William Radcliffe (1763– 1830), Ann Radcliffe’s husband, but also by family acquaintances, notably Unitarian political activist John Jebb (1836–1786). In Radcliffe’s works, as in any other female gothic novels, the atrocities, horrors and terrors are not those arising from phantom superstitions, such as ghosts, revenants and other apparitions. On the contrary, they stem from real situations, such as the threat of confinement, authority abuse, tyrannical forces and other themes associated with a pejorative depiction of an outdated ‘Ancien Régime’, the social and political system in place in France until the Revolution. The female gothic subgenre, with its modern, revolutionary and radical ideology, was therefore the type of gothic fiction authorised to cross the Channel and to penetrate revolutionary France as translations. The latter were welcomed into the newly formed French First Republic, at a time when the role of censorship was to participate in the dissemination of a new ideology under the veil of fiction,19 to ensure the respect of the new national identity, as well as to crush any references or allusions that could have been seen as a criticism of the new government. The chapter will now demonstrate how these novels in French translation contributed in strengthening the new republican identity. In late eighteenth century France, the dominant school of translation was that of the fidelity to the readership, which consisted in adapting the texts to the values and aesthetics of the host culture, and lead to the ‘naturalisation’ of the original works. Indeed, during the translation process, the novels were first and foremost adapted to contemporary French taste, mainly regarding the lengthy descriptions of nature, typical of ‘Radcliffean’ novels, which were modelled on the conventions of the picturesque defined by William Gilpin (1724–1804), and of the Sublime by Edmund Burke (1729–1797), and which were regarded as tedious for a French readership. Thus, the translator’s mission was to prune out passages deemed too long. The spurious descriptions of nature found in French translations are indeed succinct compared to those in Radcliffe’s novels. In the preface of his 1797 translation of Radcliffe’s Sicilian Romance, Moylin-Fleury explained his approach in adapting the source text to French taste, which was often defined in opposition to British taste, as well as his reasons for taking the liberty of deleting some of the lengthy descriptions: We allowed ourselves to prune a few episodes, to shorten some descriptions […]. The meticulous details, on which the British gloominess might like to dwell, displease the French liveliness, exhaust its patience and quickly lead to disgust. This is what we wanted to avoid.20

In addition to the testimony of translators themselves, literary reviews published in contemporary periodicals also testify to the adaptation of English novels not only to French taste but also to political ideology. One of the recurring themes within critical discourses regarding the French translation of

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British gothic fiction is that of the explained supernatural technique, a trend which started around 1797, following the success of Radcliffe’s novels. In 1797, the year The Italian was published in French translation, Amaury Duval (1760–1838), a reviewer for the Décade philosophique, a periodical admittedly produced ‘by a society of republicans’, wrote the following about Ann Radcliffe: [S]he [Ann Radcliffe] likes to tell of events that seem to be of marvellous nature; but when the time for explanations arrives, we see with pleasure that there was nothing supernatural about these events: the ghosts vanish. Very different from other modern novelists, she does not insult his reader’s reason in order to astonish his soul […].21

Created during the Terror, the Décade philosophique celebrates the antiCatholic philosophy of the French Revolution and its dechristianisation project. The appreciative tone in Amaury Duval’s review of Radcliffe’s novel can be explained in light of the revolutionary ideology of the new political regime, which strove, for instance, to tackle superstitious Catholic beliefs in the supernatural. Thus, the figure of Ann Radcliffe seems to have been coopted into revolutionary and republican ideology. This hypothesis is confirmed by another literary review from the same year and published in the periodical Mercure de France, which praised Ann Radcliffe for her pejorative depiction of clergymen and use of inquisitional imagery: Blessed be Mrs Radcliffe for having depicted with such vivid and striking colours some of the crimes of this reign of priests, who […] pours in torrents the blood of nations with relentless wars or on the scaffold of a cold and iniquitous tribunal […].22

The appreciation of the anti-Catholic tone in Ann Radcliffe’s novels persists through time, as evidenced by a review written by Marie-Joseph Chénier (1764–1811), a man of letters politically engaged who voted in favour of the death of King Louis XVI (1754–1793) at the time of the French Revolution: […] one believes to be surrounded by ghosts, spectres, celestial or infernal spirits; terror grows, the wonders are piled up, appearance almost becomes certainty, and, when the ending is near, everything is explained by natural causes. To deliver the gullible minds from the need to believe in miracles is a very philosophical goal.23

As Chénier suggested, it is thanks to their rationalising nature that Radcliffe’s novels fit well with the existing French revolutionary anti-Catholicism. Ann Radcliffe, who excelled at writing supernatural novels without supernatural, was therefore the most popular gothic novelist in revolutionary and postrevolutionary France. Following her success, the majority of gothic novels translated in French at the time featured either explained supernatural

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elements or no supernatural at all. The main purpose of Radcliffe’s novels and her imitators was to exorcise the ghosts of past oppressions and to show that these aristocratic ‘haunted houses’ were in fact devoid of ghosts, and that, since they were not to be feared, one could resist the oppressive order they represent. Feeding on the will to exorcise the ghosts of the past, the gothic novels translated into French at the turn-of-the nineteenth century agreed with the revolutionary and republican project of dechristianisation, secularisation, and rationalisation. A close reading of the novels sheds light on the types of modifications made in regards to source texts during the process of translation. These alterations can be understood in the context of the revolutionary and republican society. The two translations of The Italian, Radcliffe’s most anti-Catholic novel, testify to these alterations. A passage in particular, which relates to the collapse of a structure once inhabited by an aristocratic tyrant, could have been read from a revolutionary point of view as a metaphor for the ending of the Ancien Régime, as an ‘outdated’, i.e. ‘gothic’, social and political system: Ann Radcliffe, The Italian; or, the confessional of the black penitents, a romance, London: T. Cadell, 1797, vol. 3, p. 4: [T]hey discovered the extensive remains of what seemed to have been a villa […]

André Morellet, L’Italien, ou le confessionnal des pénitens noirs, Paris: Maradan & Denné, 1797, vol. 3, p. 4: [I]ls reconnurent des ruines considérables qui leur parurent être celles d’un ancien château […] [They recognised considerable ruins which appeared to them seem to be those of an ancient castle.]

Mary Gay, Eléonore de Rosalba, ou le confessionnal des pénitens noirs, Paris: Lepetit, 1797, vol. 5, p. 106: Alors ils distinguèrent une étendue immense de ruines qui semblaient être les restes d’un château [Suddently, they noticed a vast expanse of ruins that looked like the remains of a castle.]

Both French translations emphasised this metaphor in replacing the word ‘villa’ with that of ‘château’—‘castle’ in English—which could suggest the destruction of the French awe-inspiring, yet frightening, gothic castles during the revolutionary events. André Morellet’s translation is particularly interesting, for it added the adjective ‘ancien’, which translates as ‘old’ or ‘ancient’, of which ‘gothic’ was a synonym, therefore reinforcing the association with gothic architecture as a symbol of the Ancien Régime that was being eradicated by the French Revolution. However, the most noticeable method of naturalisation which occurred during the translation process consisted in stripping source texts from their poetic intertexts. Indeed, Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novels, as well as her contemporaries’, often contained a voluminous poetic intertext, which either took the form of epigraphs, or that of poems inserted in between prose passages, the presence of which was signalled from the title. Indeed, both The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho were advertised from the title page as being ‘Interspersed with some pieces of poetry’. This poetic intertext contributes to the originality of the novels, not only by inscribing them

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in a British literary and aesthetic tradition but also by showcasing the poetical talent and literary knowledge of the writer in question. Ann Radcliffe herself was nicknamed ‘the first poetess of romantic fiction24 ’ by Sir Walter Scott. However, during the process of translation into French, these poetic interludes are not systematically translated or indeed even reproduced. The suppression of the poetic intertext in gothic novels, akin to a form of censorship, is twofold. Firstly, this removal stripped the text from its literary anchoring, thus contributing to the image of the gothic novel in French translation as a genre destined to mass consumption and devoid of literary value. In doing so, it also protected both novelists and translators from potential accusations of pedantry, a form of criticism which novelists—and female novelists in particular—were cautious of, at a time when novel-writing was not always considered a serious literary occupation. Secondly, from its origins, the gothic novel was rooted in a strong national British literary and historical tradition. Therefore, the neutralisation or censorship of elements contributing not only to the originality of the genre but also to their national character would be seen as an attempt at minimising cultural borrowings originating from an ‘enemy’ nation, with which France was frequently at war, and especially at a time when French institutions were working towards the creation and the diffusion of a new national identity. Although stripped from their ‘Englishness’, Ann Radcliffe’s ‘naturalised’ novels were so successful that there was naturally no shortage of stage adaptations and imitations. Due to a rather loose definition of copyrights and of literary property, the vogue of translation lead to that of pseudo-translation, and French writers did not hesitate to take advantage of Radcliffe’s fame to publish under her name. Moreover, following the Revolution, the abolition of a society based on privileges meant that many aristocrats and members of the clergy had to take up writing in order to earn a living, and Radcliffe’s name in itself was enough to guarantee good sales. Most of Radcliffe’s novels, once in French translation, were quickly adapted to the stage and were usually made available to the audience the same year (Table 1). Stage adaptations, like imitations and forgeries, did not have much in common with the original work. This is evidenced in Alexandre Duval’s introduction to his 1797 stage adaptation of The Mysteries of Udolpho, titled Montoni, ou le Château d’Udolphe, drame en cinq actes et en prose, imité du roman Les mystères d’Udolphe, in which Duval explained how he gave a theatrical potential to the plot of Radcliffe’s bestseller novel: I perceived, in Montoni’s character, a well-made personality which could be successful in the terrifying genre. By further emphasising Orsino’s supporting role, and by adding a few other wonderful horrors of my own imagination, I created an enormous theatrical monster.25

As a figurehead of the British Gothic, Ann Radcliffe is the novelist that has been the most subjected to literary piracy in France.26 The publication dates of

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Table 1

French stage adaptations of Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novels, 1797–1799

Novelist

Title of gothic novels

French translations

Stage adaptations

Ann Radcliffe

A Sicilian Romance (1790)

Moylin-Fleury, Julia, ou les Souterrains de Mazzini (1798)

The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)

Louise-Marie-Victorine de Chastenay, Les Mystères d’Udolphe (1797)

The Italian; or, the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797)

Mary Gay Allard, Rosalba, ou le Confessionnal des pénitents noirs (1797)

Charles-Augustin Sewrin, Julia, ou les Souterrains du château de Mazzini, mélo-drame en trois actes et en prose (1798) Alexandre Duval, Montoni, ou le Château d’Udolphe, drame en 5 actes et en prose, imité du roman Les Mystères d’Udolphe (1797) René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt, Le Château des Apennins, ou le Fantôme vivant, drame en 5 actes, en prose, et à grand spectacles, imité du roman anglais Les Mytsères d’Udolphe (1797) Jean-Henri-Ferdinand La Martellière, Le Testament, ou les Mystères d’Udolphe, drame en 5 actes en prose (1798) François-Benoît Hoffman; Dalayrac, Léon, ou le Château de Montenero, drame en 3 actes (1798) Pujos; Dabaytua, Eléonore de Rosalba, ou le Confessional des pénitens noirs, drame nouveau en 4 actes (1798)

(continued)

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Table 1 Novelist

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(continued) Title of gothic novels

French translations

Stage adaptations

André Morellet, L’Italien, ou le Confessionnal des pénitents noirs (1797)

these spurious attributions and literary forgeries coincide with the time when Radcliffe stopped publishing, after The Italian in 1797, and when rumours about her premature death were circulating, in an attempt to provide an explanation as to her sudden and mysterious literary silence. Le Tombeau [The Grave], self-professed posthumous work of Ann Radcliffe was the first spurious attribution to the ‘Mistress of Udolpho’ to be published in France, in 1799—while Radcliffe was still alive. It has been republished no less than five times during the nineteenth century. The tales about Ann Radcliffe’s death persisted, and in 1810, an ‘Ode to Terror’ was published in England by a clergyman claiming that Ann Radcliffe had died from dementia.27 According to contemporary reviews, these rumours seemed to have crossed the Channel. For in France, the same year as the publication of this ode, was published a French gothic novel titled Le Fantôme blanc, ou le Protecteur mystérieux [The White Ghost, or the Mysterious Guardian], in which the author grieved the loss of Ann Radcliffe and gave herself the mission of replacing her: The bard of mysteries and tombstones is no more: moved by a noble ardour, I aspire to succeed her. May I pass down to my Motherland the tragic and sombre conceptions that have charmed hers!28

The same year, Caroline Wuiet published the forgery Le Couvent de Sainte Catherine, ou les Mœurs du XIII e siècle [The Convent of Saint-Catherine, or the Traditions of the 13th Century], which she attributed to Radcliffe by pretending to be the translator. Six years later, in 1816, the rumours concerning Ann Radcliffe’s death were renewed in England,29 as well as in France, for the same year, Etienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon produced a forgery titled L’Hermite de la tombe mystérieuse [The Hermit of the Mysterious Grave, or the Ghost of the Old Castle], that he also attributed to Radcliffe by pretending to be the translator. In 1820, Louis Jullian published in Galerie historique des contemporains (1817–1820) an anecdote relating to Radcliffe’s death and which consisted in a rather original critique of gothic fiction: Mistress Radcliffe died in 1800 at an advanced age. Her death is however attributed to a remarkable cause: it has been said that one of the most dreadful scenes of her novel The Visions of the Pyrenees Castle recurred to her in

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a dream at night in such a frightful way that her vividly impressed imagination recoiled before her very own work and that a fever ensued, to which she succumbed after a few days.30

Les Visions du château des Pyrénées [The Visions of the Pyrenees Castle] (1809), supposedly translated from one of Ann Radcliffe’s novels, was in fact a translation of Catherine Cuthbertson’s Romance of the Pyrenees (1803). Finally, Le Panache Rouge, ou le Spectre de Feu [The Red Panache, or the Spectre of Fire] imitated from Ann Radcliffe, was published in 1824, the year following Ann Radcliffe’s actual death. As Dale Townshend and Angela Wright suggested in regards to British forgeries of Ann Radcliffe, ‘[…] the authors of these […] texts were among the many hack writers of the early nineteenth century who self-consciously attempted to copy and emulate the Radcliffean mode in the face of what seemed to be the writer’s permanent disappearance’.31 It seems that on the one hand, the publication of such works aimed at compensating Radcliffe’s literary absence, in order to satisfy the impatient readership, and on the other hand, the authors and/or publishers used Radcliffe’s name as a commercial argument in order to guarantee good sales. In any case, these works testify to the ‘hacking’ of a trademark, that is, Radcliffe’s famous name. For Radcliffe’s contemporaries, the secluded novelist must necessarily have been the victim of the disturbing images she evoked in her novels; and thus she became the symbol of a mystery worthy of her own works, and that of a very gothic, inescapable madness, leading the queen of terror fiction to her death. In the tales and anecdotes that circulated about her alleged madness or untimely and premature death, Ann Radcliffe took on the colours of the gothic heroines of her own novels. According to Dale Townshend and Angela Wright, if Ann Radcliffe was indeed regarded as the figurehead of the gothic school, she was also, due to her international fame, ‘to be held responsible for the monstrous proliferation of Gothic romances that transpired in her fiction’s wake’.32 Indeed, this ‘invasion’ of bad imitations of the ‘Radcliffean’ style was regarded as flooding the literary market and ‘corrupting’ French literature, thereby contributing to the degradation of the gothic genre itself. As soon as 1799, publication date of Le Tombeau, a reviewer for the periodical Mercure de France wrote a comment which sums up the reception of these imitations, forgeries and spurious attributions to the famous novelist: ‘This is not Ann Radcliffe’s fault’.33 The reviewer stands up for the British novelist and regrets that the model was blamed for the invasion of ‘second-rate’ gothic novels, instead of her mediocre imitators. Decades later, the biographical record dedicated to Ann Radcliffe in Louis-Gabriel Michaud’s Biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne (1823) stated that these inferior imitations, combined with vehement criticism, ended up disheartening Radcliffe and eventually convinced her to stop publishing:

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The influence of these books filled with imaginary horrors caused several writers to forcefully speak out against a literary genre that was increasingly degenerating in the hands of imitators without genius. These criticisms hurt Ann Radcliffe’s self-esteem as much as the poor copies that mediocre writers dared to attribute to her. Temerity was carried to the point of supposing her dead, and to the publishing of her alleged novel titled The Grave. These vexations, combined to a delicate health, disgusted her with a literary career.34

Indeed, as Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795–1854), Ann Radcliffe’s first biographer, explained, her last novel was never intended for publication35 : Gaston de Blondeville was published posthumously in 1826. Another explanation for Ann Radcliffe’s literary silence is that it would have resulted from a certain financial ease, which allowed her to be able to do without writing and publishing in order to earn a living, and which would have come from the sums received for the sale of her manuscripts, or from an inheritance received following the death of her aunt, Elizabeth Oates.36 Whatever they may be, the exact reasons for Ann Radcliffe’s literary silence will remain a mystery which fills the imagination, and which arguably deserves to feature in a gothic novel. To conclude, the appropriation of Ann Radcliffe’s name by French hack writers enabled them to cash in on the novelist’s literary reputation and benefit from different forms of publicity. Hiding behind the identity of a renowned author was indeed a safe and easy way for a novice to publish. Ann Radcliffe’s famous name, a trademark in itself, constituted sufficient publicity in itself to guarantee the attention of the readership. In addition, any attribution to such a renowned writer was guaranteed to arouse the critics’ curiosity. The forgery was usually promptly unmasked, and the literary ‘scandal’ associated with the guessing game relating to the authorship, ensured certain popularity to the work in question. The usurpation of Radcliffe’s name was more important than that of the other gothic novelists. Indeed, Matthew Gregory Lewis’ equally popular name has not been exploited as much. In addition to the success of Radcliffe’s novels in France, and the fact that they fit perfectly within the revolutionary ideology—which was also the case with The Monk, except for its abundant supernatural elements—one of the reasons behind the appropriation of her name is that she was not a public figure, contrary to Lewis, who was a Member of Parliament. Ann Radcliffe’s disinclination towards publication, coupled with a rather discreet life, which contrasted to the success of her novels and the popularity of her name, attracted biographers who failed in their enterprise, due to insufficient information. The British gothic novelist thus became a blank page to be filled with rumours and anecdotes, each more whimsical than the other, inventing a life she had not lived, and shaping her into a fictional character resembling her own gothic heroines. Ann Radcliffe’s reputation and legacy persisted through generations, as evidenced by her significant influence on French writers of the Romantic period. In 1804, Stendhal (1783–1842), author of Le Rouge et le noir [The

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Red and the Black] (1830), mentioned his own reading of The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, and recommended his sister Pauline to ‘[d]o everything in the world to […] read Roland the Furious, the Illiad, the Mysteries of Udolpho, Cleveland, the Pharosal of Lucan… But above all, the Illiad of Jerusalem, Roland and the Confessional of the Black Penitents ’.37 In 1841, another French writer, Arsène Houssaye (1815–1896), presented himself as the editor of an ‘unpublished tale by Ann Radcliffe’ titled La Trépassée, ou le Château de Nebelstein [The Deceased, or, Nebelstein Castle]. This example was by no means an isolated case. And 1860 was the publication year of an anonymous sequel to Les Visions du château des Pyrénées [The Visions of the Pyrenees Castle] titled Le Chevalier noir [The Black Knight], and unabashedly subtitled ‘Second series of The Visions of the Pyrenees Castle, by Anne [sic] Radcliffe’. Finally, Paul Féval (1816–1887) staged Ann Radcliffe as the main protagonist in his 1875 novella titled La Ville Vampire [Vampire City], a forgery in which Féval recounted how he acquired knowledge of Radcliffe’s gothic adventures as a vampire hunter. Such form of literary recognition proves the enthusiasm Ann Radcliffe and her novels caused in late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries France. The British novelist was, in a sense, an international superstar, and continued to fascinate long after her actual death, as her name echoed in the imagination of French readers for decades through texts that bore her name but were not hers. Echoing Stendhal’s recommendation, all we have left to say in order to bring this chapter to a close is that, please, ‘do everything in the world’, to keep reading, studying translating and editing Ann Radcliffe’s novels.

Notes 1. Review for the French translation of Norman Banditti; or, the Fortress of Coutance (1799) in Courrier des spectacles, 9 Fructidor, an VIII [27 August 1800], pp. 3–4: ‘Il semble que la plume d’Anne Radcliff [sic] ait passé dans les mains de tous les romanciers de fraîche date: vols, assassinats, ruines de châteaux, souterrains, spectres et phantômes […].’ 2. Les Châteaux d’Athlin et de Dunbayne, histoire arrivée dans les Montagnes d’Ecosse (Paris: Testu, 1797) by François Soulès; Julia, ou les Souterrains de Mazzini (Paris: Forget, 1798) by Moylin-Fleury; La Forêt, ou l’Abbaye de Saint Clair (Paris: Denné, 1794) by François Soulès; Les Mystères d’Udolphe (Paris: Maradan, 1798) by Louise-MarieVictorine de Chastenay; Éléonore de Rosalba, ou le Confessionnal des pénitens noirs (Paris & Genève: Lepetit & Paschoud, 1797) by Mary Gay Allard, and L’Italien, ou le Confessionnal des pénitens noirs (Paris: Denné & Maradan, 1797) by André Morellet. 3. Le Moine, Paris: Maradan, 1797, translated by Jacques-Marie Deschamps, Jean-Baptiste-Denis Despres, Pierre-Vincent Benoist and Pierre-Bernard Lamarre, and the anonymous Le Jacobin espagnol, ou

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Histoire du moine Ambrosio, et de la belle Antonia, sa sœur, Paris: Favre, 1797. 4. Mercure de France, 20 Pluviôse, an VI [8 February 1798], p. 105: ‘[…] dans ce genre, les Mystères d’Udolphe sont, jusqu’à présent, le premier ouvrage, et je n’ai pas vu qu’aucun Français ait encore fait une copie passable du modèle anglais.’ 5. Nicolas-Alexandre Pigoreau, Petite bibliographie biographicoromancière, ou dictionnaire des romanciers, Paris: Pigoreau, 1821, p. 292: ‘[…] en son genre, personne n’a pu encore égaler mad. Radcliffe’. 6. Rictor Norton, Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe, London: Leicester University Press, 1999. 7. Ellen Moers, Literary Women, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. 8. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1794, vol. 1, pp. 211–212. 9. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1794, vol. 3, p. 110. 10. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1794, vol. 3, pp. 108–109. 11. Katherine Astbury, ‘Du gothique anglais au gothique français: le roman noir et la Révolution française’, in Imaginaires gothiques: aux sources du roman noir français, dir. by Catriona Seth, Paris: Desjonquères, 2010, (pp. 131–145), p. 136. 12. Katherine Astbury, ‘Du gothique anglais au gothique français: le roman noir et la Révolution française’, in Imaginaires gothiques: aux sources du roman noir français, dir. by Catriona Seth, Paris: Desjonquères, 2010 (pp. 131–145), p. 135. 13. Thomas James Mathias, The Pursuit of Literature, a Satirical Poem, London: T. Becket, 1798, p. 238. 14. Thomas James Mathias, The Pursuit of Literature, a Satirical Poem, London: T. Becket, 1798, p. 57. 15. See, notably two anonymous press reviews, respectively titled ‘The Terrorist System of Novel-Writing’ (1797), signed by a Jacobin novelist, and ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’ (1798). 16. Mary Gay Allard, Eléonore de Rosalba, ou le Confessionnal des pénitens noirs, Paris: Lepetit; Genève: J. J. Paschoud, 1797. 17. Magasin encyclopédique, Paris: Fuchs, 1797, pp. 105–113: ‘En lisant ces sept volumes on regrette qu’ils n’aient pas paru sous le règne de Robespierre […]; les faits qu’on y lit, les atrocités qu’on y raconte, les horreurs qu’on y révèle étoient dignes de cette époque de notre histoire.’ 18. On this topic, see, Rictor Norton, Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe, London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1999, p. xi; Robert Miles, ‘Radcliffe, Ann (1764–1824)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2005; Robert Miles, Ann

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Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995, p. 4, and James Watt, ‘Ann Radcliffe and Politics’, in Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, dir. by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 67– 82. 19. See on this topic Angela Wright, Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764– 1820: The Import of Terror, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 35. 20. Moylin-Fleury, Julia ou les souterrains du château de Mazzini, Paris: A. Cl. Forget, 1797, pp. iii–iv: ‘Nous nous sommes permis d’élaguer quelques épisodes, de raccourcir quelques descriptions […]. [L]es détails minutieux sur lesquels aime peut-être à s’appesantir la morosité britannique, déplaisent à la vivacité française, épuisent sa patience, et l’amènent promptement au dégoût. C’est ce que nous avons voulu éviter.’ 21. Décade Philosophique, littéraire et politique, Germinal, Floréal, Prairial, an V [March–May 1797], p. 542: ‘[E]lle [Ann Radcliffe] se plaît à raconter des événemens qui semblent tenir du merveilleux; mais lorsque le moment de l’explication est arrivé, on voit avec plaisir qu[e] […] les fantômes s’évanouissent. Bien différente de quelques romanciers modernes, pour étonner l’ame du lecteur elle n’insulte pas à sa raison […].’ 22. Mercure de France, 10 Thermidor, an V [28 July 1797], p. 15: ‘Grâces soient rendues à Mme Radcliffe pour nous avoir retracé avec des couleurs si vives et si frappantes une partie des crimes de ce règne de prêtres qui […] fait […] verser à grands flots le sang des nations dans des guerres implacables ou sur les échafauds d’un tribunal froidement inique […].’ 23. Marie-Joseph de Chénier, Tableau historique de l’état et des progrès de la littérature française depuis 1789, Paris: Maradan, [1816] 1818, p. 245: ‘Partout le merveilleux domine; dans les bois, dans les châteaux, dans les cloîtres, on se croit environné de revenants, de spectres, d’esprits célestes ou infernaux; la terreur croît, les prestiges s’entassent, l’apparence acquiert presque de la certitude, et, quand le dénoûment arrive, tout s’explique par des causes naturelles. Délivrer les esprits crédules du besoin de croire aux prodiges, est un but très-philosophiques […].’ 24. Sir Walter Scott, ‘Mrs Ann Radcliffe’, in Lives of the Novelists, London: Dent, [1825] 1910, pp. 213–214. 25. Alexandre Duval, Montoni, ou le Château d’Udolphe, Paris: Bureau dramatique, 1797, p. 392: ‘[J]’aperçus, dans le personnage de Montoni, un caractère bien fait, et qui pouvait avoir quelques succès dans le genre terrible. En donnant plus de développement au rôle secondaire d’Orsino, et en ajoutant de mon propre fonds quelques autres merveilleuses horreurs, je fis de tout cela un énorme monstre dramatique […].’

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26. As the father of the gothic novel, Horace Walpole himself has not been spared, and 1797 novel titled Roséide et Valmor, ou les Victimes de l’Orgueil [Roséide and Valmore; or, the Victims of Pride] was presented as a translation of a novel by ‘Sir Horace Walpole’. Other popular gothic novelists have also been subjected to imitations, spurious attributions and forgeries. Among them featured Matthew Gregory Lewis, with Les Mystères de la Tour Saint-Jean, ou les Chevaliers du Temple (1819) [The Mysteries of St. Jean Tower; or, the Knights of the Temple], presented as a translation of Lewis’s novel translated by Etienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon. Charlotte Smith also featured in the list of ‘hacked’ writers, with the 1817 translation of a novel attributed to Smith and titled Barozzi ou les Sorciers Vénitiens, chronique du quinzième siècle [Barozzi; or, the Venetian Sorcerers, a Chronicle from the Fifteenth Century], which was in fact by Catharine Smith, a lesser known novelist. Finally, John William Polidori’s famous Vampyre (1819), was the inspiration for Cyprien Bérard’s 1820 novel titled Lord Ruthwen, ou Les vampires [Lord Ruthwen; or, the Vampires]. 27. Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, ‘Memoir of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Radcliffe’, in Gaston de Blondeville; or, the Court of Henri III Keeping Festival in Ardenne, a Romance, London: H. Colburn, 1826, vol. 1, pp. 94–95. 28. Désirée de Castéra, Le fantôme blanc, ou le Protecteur mystérieux, Paris: Béchet, 1810, p. vi: ‘Le chantre des mystères et des tombeaux n’est plus: animé d’une noble ardeur, j’aspire à lui succéder. Puissè-je transmettre à ma Patrie les conceptions tragiques et sombres qui charmaient la sienne!’ 29. See Rictor Norton, Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe, London: Leicester University Press, p. 232. 30. Louis Jullian, Galerie historique des contemporains, Third edition, Mons: Leroux, [1817–1820] 1827, vol. 8, p. 10: ‘Mistriss Radcliffe est morte en 1800, dans un âge avancé. On attribue toutefois cette mort à une cause remarquable: on a prétendu qu’une des scènes les plus terribles de son roman intitulé: Les Visions du château des Pyrénées, se reproduisit à elle une nuit en songe d’une manière si effrayante, que son imagination vivement frappée recula devant son propre ouvrage, et qu’il en résulta une fièvre à laquelle elle succomba au bout de quelques jours.’ 31. Dale Townshend and Angela Wright, ‘Gothic and Romantic Engagements: The Critical Reception of Ann Radcliffe, 1789–1850’, in Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, dir. by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, (pp. 3– 32), p. 14. 32. Dale Townshend and Angela Wright, ‘Gothic and Romantic Engagements: The Critical Reception of Ann Radcliffe, 1789–1850’, in Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, dir. by Dale Townshend and

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Angela Wright, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014 (pp. 3– 32), p. 14. 33. Mercure de France, 10 Pluviôse, an VII [29 January 1799], pp. 16–17: ‘Ce n’est pas la faute d’Anne Radcliffe’. 34. Louis-Gabriel Michaud, Biographie universelle, Paris: L. G. Michaud, 1823, vol. 36, p. 526: ‘[L]’influence de ces livres remplis d’horreurs romanesques engagea quelques écrivains à s’élever avec force contre un genre qui dégénérait de plus en plus entre les mains d’imitateurs sans génie. Ces critiques ne blessèrent pas moins l’amour- propre d’Anne Radcliffe que les faibles copies que de plats écrivains osèrent lui attribuer. On poussa la témérité jusqu’à la supposer morte et publier comme un ouvrage posthume d’elle un roman intitulé Le Tombeau […]. Ces contrariétés, jointes à une santé délicate, la dégoûtèrent de la carrière d’auteur […].’ Dale Townshend and Angela Wright address British criticism, reviews, and spurious attributions which allegedly contributed to Ann Radcliffe’s decision to withdraw from the literary market. See Dale Townshend and Angela Wright, ‘Gothic and Romantic Engagements: The Critical Reception of Ann Radcliffe, 1789–1850’, in Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, dir. by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014 (pp. 3– 32), pp. 12–13. 35. Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, ‘Memoir of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Radcliffe’, in Gaston de Blondeville; or, the Court of Henri III Keeping Festival in Ardenne, a Romance, London: H. Colburn, 1826, vol. 1, p. 57. 36. Pierre Arnaud, Ann Radcliffe et le fantastique: essai de psychobiographie, Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1976, p. 256. 37. Stendhal, Correspondance, Paris, 1908, vol. 1, p. 126, quoted in Alice M. Killen, Le Roman terrifiant ou roman noir: de Walpole à Anne Radcliffe, et son influence sur la littérature française jusqu’en 1884, Paris: Librairie ancienne Édouard Champion, 1924, p. 123: ‘Fais tout au monde pour […] lire […] Roland le Furieux, l’Illiade, les Mystères d’Udolphe, Cleveland, la Pharsale de Lucain… Mais surtout l’Illiade de Jérusalem, Roland et le Confessionnal des Pénitents noirs.’

Bibliography French Translations Allard, Mary Gay. Éléonore de Rosalba, ou le Confessionnal des pénitens noirs (Paris & Genève: Lepetit & Paschoud, 1797). Anonymous. Le Jacobin espagnol, ou Histoire du moine Ambrosio, et de la belle Antonia, sa sœur (Paris: Favre, 1797).

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de Chastenay, Louise-Marie-Victorine. Les Mystères d’Udolphe (Paris: Maradan, 1798). Deschamps, Jacques-Marie; Despres, Jean-Baptiste-Denis; Benoist, Pierre-Vincent; Lamarre, Pierre-Bernard, Le Moine (Paris: Maradan, 1797). Morellet, André. L’Italien, ou le Confessionnal des pénitens noirs (Paris: Denné & Maradan, 1797). Moylin-Fleury. Julia, ou les Souterrains de Mazzini (Paris: Forget, 1798). Soulès, François. La Forêt, ou l’Abbaye de Saint Clair (Paris: Denné, 1794). Soulès, François. Les Châteaux d’Athlin et de Dunbayne, histoire arrivée dans les Montagnes d’Ecosse (Paris: Testu, 1797).

Contemporary Press Reviews Courrier des spectacles (9 Fructidor, an VIII [27 August 1800]). Décade Philosophique, littéraire et politique (Germinal, Floréal, Prairial, an V [March– May 1797]). Magasin encyclopédique (Paris: Fuchs, 1797). Mercure de France (10 Pluviôse, an VII [29 January 1799]). Mercure de France (10 Thermidor, an V [28 July 1797]). Mercure de France (20 Pluviôse, an VI [8 February 1798]).

References Angela Wright, Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820: The Import of Terror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Anonymous. ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’ (1798), Spirit of the Public Journals for 1797 (vol. 1, London, 1798, pp. 223–225; reprinted in Emma Clery and Robert Miles, Gothic Documents, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Anonymous. ‘The Terrorist System of Novel-Writing’ (1797), Monthly Magazine (August 1797, pp. 102–104). Arnaud, Pierre. Ann Radcliffe et le fantastique: essai de psychobiographie (Paris: Aubier). Astbury, Katherine. ‘Du gothique anglais au gothique français: le roman noir et la Révolution française’, in Imaginaires gothiques: aux sources du roman noir français, dir. by Catriona Seth (Paris: Desjonquères, 2010, pp. 131–145). de Castéra, Désirée. Le fantôme blanc, ou le Protecteur mystérieux (Paris: Béchet, 1810). de Chénier, Marie-Joseph. Tableau historique de l’état et des progrès de la littérature française depuis 1789 (Paris: Maradan, [1816] 1818). Duval, Alexandre. Montoni, ou le Château d’Udolphe (Paris: Bureau dramatique, 1797). Jullian, Louis. Galerie historique des contemporains (Third edition, Mons: Leroux, [1817–1820] 1827). Killen, Alice M. Le Roman terrifiant ou roman noir: de Walpole à Anne Radcliffe, et son influence sur la littérature française jusqu’en 1884 (Paris: Librairie ancienne Édouard Champion, 1924). Mathias, Thomas James. The Pursuit of Literature, a Satirical Poem (London: T. Becket, 1798). Michaud, Louis-Gabriel. Biographie universelle (Paris: L. G. Michaud, 1823).

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Miles, Robert. Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Miles, Robert. ‘Radcliffe, Ann (1764–1824)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2005). Moers, Ellen. Literary Women (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976). Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe (London: Leicester University Press, 1999). Pigoreau, Nicolas-Alexandre. Petite bibliographie biographico-romancière, ou dictionnaire des romanciers (Paris: Pigoreau, 1821). Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1794). Scott, Walter. ‘Mrs Ann Radcliffe’, in Lives of the Novelists (London: Dent, [1825] 1910). Talfourd, Sir Thomas Noon. ‘Memoir of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Radcliffe’, in Gaston de Blondeville; or, the Court of Henri III Keeping Festival in Ardenne, a Romance (London: H. Colburn, 1826). Townshend, Dale; Wright, Angela. ‘Gothic and Romantic Engagements: The Critical Reception of Ann Radcliffe, 1789–1850’, in Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, dir. by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 3–32). Watt, James. ‘Ann Radcliffe and Politics’, in Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, dir. by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 67–82).

Forms and Feeling in the Genre Kaley Kramer

To paraphrase Anne Williams, regarding that ‘quintessentially Gothic issue— legitimate descent and rightful inheritance’—‘sensibility’ and ‘Gothic’ are not two, but one.1 In both, form modulates feeling in ways that illuminate how discourses of ownership, autonomy, and identity that coalesce in particular ways around female subjectivity. While scholarship on the Gothic—and ‘Female Gothic’—has tended to focus on the final decades of the century, earlier texts demonstrate the presence of ‘Gothic’ forms emerging from and through novels of sensibility. Over a decade before Ellen Moers noted that ‘property seems to loom larger than love’ in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Leslie Fielder suggested that the ‘basic fable of the Gothic … seems actually derived from such books as Clarissa’.2 Richardson’s genredefining novel also focusses on property and ownership as organising systems that determine the (female) protagonist’s expectations, opportunities, and eventual fate. These thematic obsessions trace a line through both form and feeling in novels of sensibility and the Gothic. Frances Sheridan’s The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761), Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783–5), and Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791) demonstrate an intense interest in women’s roles in inheritance and ownership, as well as the ways in which these systems were part of broader ideological formations of citizenship, belonging, and identity. These issues are necessarily worked out through K. Kramer (B) Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_8

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discourses of gender, the dominant paradigm that determined an individual’s social, cultural, and political opportunities throughout the century. Gothic criticism, particularly that focussing on ‘Female Gothic’, is equally obsessed with property and claims of ownership. Lauren Fitzgerald notes that ‘feminist criticism in 1970s and 1980s is marked by a series of proprietary metaphors including “maps”, “territories”, “breaking ground”, “space”, and “landmarks”’.3 Critical narratives about the role of the Gothic in literary studies and, especially, about the role of women in the Gothic genre reflect the ‘property plot’.4 Ellen Moers’ original definition drew an ‘easily defined’ connection between the sex of the author (‘the work that women have done’5 ) and the text, suggesting that what distinguished the Female Gothic began and ended with the same biologically determined characteristics that distinguished the subjects from the objects of law in the eighteenth century. ‘Female’ qualifies ‘Gothic’ in Moers’ formulation, but that qualification loses its function as an interpretive tool given the vagueness that defines ‘Gothic’ (which was ‘not so easily stated except that it has to do with fear’6 ). Moers’s definition points to the persistent tension between corporeal and incorporeal property. By yoking together an ‘easily definable’, apparently solid concept (‘Female’) with an ambiguous and intangible one (‘the Gothic’), her definition recalls eighteenth-century debates over the nature of literary property. The role of gender in the current debates about Female Gothic echo the ways in which gender provided women in the eighteenth century with a lens through which to negotiate ownership and belonging.7 Elements of the Female Gothic are apparent in women’s writing before Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1777). Since Moers’ definition, Ann Radcliffe has been taken (and contested) as the originator of this subgenre. Robert Miles posits ‘four necessary and sufficient conditions’ for Radcliffe’s ‘Female Gothic’: [T]here must be figurations of female genius; the possible expression of genius is tied to property, both through its presence and its threatening alienation; the threat is explicitly tied to the patriarchal principle …; and finally, the mother’s absence is not a token of her irrelevance but of her supreme importance as a deferred object of the heroine’s unconscious search’.8

Radcliffe is, however, not the originator of these conditions; she is the inheritor of a tradition of women’s writing through which she develops a ‘narrative grammar’.9 Miles argues that Radcliffe’s ‘conditions’ have ‘deep roots in the ideological circumstances of her time’, but these circumstances, and the fictional strategies women used to articulate these, do not begin in the 1790s. The metaphor of ‘deep roots’ suggests a chronological synchronicity, with Radcliffe’s work able to ‘tap’ into layers of discourse, ideology, and opinions of her time. The questions of materiality, embodiment, and property that Radcliffe’s work explores suggest a broad network of influences that reaches

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well before her time. Miles’s felicity conditions for the Female Gothic prefigure women’s writing before the emergence of the ‘Gothic’. A broader set of conditions would acknowledge not only women’s writing but the social, cultural, and political debates from which such writing emerges and in which it participates. Such conditions, evident in novels of sensibility as well as women’s Gothic novels centre the narrative form and expression around the ontological uncertainty of women’s legal and civic position. These conditions are the female protagonist’s awareness of legal and civic precarity; the expression of this precarity is made manifest through property—both in its dominant form of real estate and in other forms such as moveable property and money; the threat depends on women’s lack of autonomy and civil status; and the narrative reveals ‘feeling’ as an insufficient substitution for effective action in the world. These conditions coalesce around a female protagonist. As Carol Margaret Davison notes in her discussion of Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806), identifying a female protagonist does not ‘preclude historicizing readings by underscoring how the socio-cultural sex/gender system is a shifting, but key, issue’ but recognizes that ‘woman’ is both a crucial imaginative construct in the eighteenth century and a category that materially ‘affects the protagonist’s life experiences and possibilities’.10 By emphasising property, these conditions make explicit connections between gender and foundational discourses of belonging(s) and ownership. Throughout the eighteenth century, land continued to dominate the cultural imaginary and legal discourse, functioning as the basic paradigm for all property law. This greatly affected women’s ability to claim ownership over other forms of property, including chattel (moveable) property and intellectual property, and added to the restrictions women faced in claiming their belonging, as full subjects, to political and national communities.11 Ownership of land persisted as the requirement for political representation and property owners benefited from the fact that ‘parliamentary representation and public office were tied to the favourite safeguard of the age, the property qualification’.12 While the law could not forbid women from owning property, gendered constructions of political and civil subjects were reinforced by women’s explicit exclusion, regardless of property or married status, from public office; women could not sit in Council, or either parliamentary house, they could not serve on juries, and they could not vote.13 Women with property—or with claims to property—nonetheless feature prominently in sentimental and Gothic novels: their ‘fitness’ for ownership and their extreme vulnerability, the common interests in both. Spectres of the woman-as-property-owner haunt both sentimental and Gothic literature: Clarissa is an early and important example, her tragic circumstances the result of familial discord after she inherits her grandfather’s dairy. Sidney Bidulph is harried from estate to estate, finding security only in divesting herself of property, thus repeating women’s essential role as conduits for property rather than acquirers of property. Madam Montoni, dying in the tower of Udolpho for refusing to sign away her property in The Mysteries of

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Udolpho (1794), and Mrs. Rayland, the matriarchal relic of Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House (1793), are poignant examples. While neither are heroines, their presence in these novels challenges ‘the fundamental principles of liberal ideology, namely that ownership of property serves as the basis for political freedom and individual autonomy’.14 Whether married (feme covert ) or single (feme sole), women fare poorly: Matilda, the primary narrator of Sophia Lee’s The Recess who is single, married, and widowed in the long course of her narrative, desperately tries to negotiate her impossible inheritance; Radcliffe’s heroines suffer persecution in spite of their repeated attempts to avoid inheriting property. Sidney Bidulph, the acme of ‘virtue in distress’ and protoGothic heroine, struggles through marriage and widowhood with questions of belonging—both where she belongs and what she might claim as her own. In both sentimental and Gothic novels women can neither avoid nor fully claim property. In the eighteenth century, women, according to Samuel Johnson, were simply never the ‘right’ owners; their relationship with property detectable only as an effect of their sexuality. For Johnson, the extremity of women’s viciousness is expressed through a negation of their most desirable quality: chastity, on which depends ‘all the property in the world’: ‘We hang a thief for stealing a sheep; but the unchastity of women transfers sheep, and farm and all, from the right owner’.15 Comparing ‘unchastity’ to thievery emphasises the apparently similar stakes of the ‘crimes’: fornication in young (single) women is likened to ‘stealing a shilling’ or a ‘man’s purse’; ‘unchastity’ in married women, however, is akin to taking a thousand pounds, or to ‘murdering him first, and then taking’ his purse. Furthermore, it is the concealment of the crime that particularly disturbs Johnson, who has, he claims, ‘more reverence for a common prostitute than for a woman who conceals her guilt’.16 Johnson’s casting of women as thieves supplanting ‘right’ owners (legitimate heirs) through their unrestrained sexual desire betrays deep anxiety about the precariousness of property in the very act of not acknowledging women’s roles in ownership. Despite being deprived of agency, women’s role in reproduction and their (from Johnson’s perspective) secret knowledge of the lineage of their offspring direct the flow of landed property (‘the farm and all’). Mary Wollstonecraft carries this point further in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1797). For Wollstonecraft, the entire project of a ‘revolution of female manners’ depends on economic independence and civil recognition: ‘to render her really virtuous and useful, she must not, if she discharge civil duties, want, individually, the protection of civil laws; she must not be dependent on her husband’s bounty for her subsistence during his life, or support after his death—for how can a being be generous who has nothing of its own?’17 As Lena Halldenius argues, Wollstonecraft privileges the ability to earn self-sufficiency through exertion over ownership of property.18 However, as Halldenius acknowledges, ‘being enabled to support yourself implies … that you are regarded as someone to whom things are due by law and contract’.19 Women were barred from full personhood before the law, owning neither

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themselves nor the results of their labour. Marriage, through which women could attain (conditional) support, allowed them to claim earnings from their work—but only through their husbands.20 Circumscribed by marriage, regardless of whether they were actually married or not, women occupy an ontologically unstable position in both sentimental and Gothic novels. While Sheridan’s Sidney Bidulph is the clearest example of a novel of sensibility, Lee and Radcliffe’s novels modulate rather than wholly separate themselves from the form of sensibility in their more clearly ‘Gothic’ works. The difference exists in the ways in which the forms reflect states of property as conduits of feeling. Sheridan’s sentimental world is comfortingly realistic, creating a connection that both guarantees and is underscored by the epistolary form of the novel. While Sidney’s situation should provoke emotional discomfort, it is not due to any occurrence of the fantastic or marvellous. Sheridan’s fictional world reflects stable and reliable models of property, kinship, inheritance, and the benevolent action of law, reaffirming progressivist history and the ultimate objectivity and benevolence of legal and legislative systems in their protection of women. Insisting that she is ‘without a will of my own’,21 Sidney’s relationship to real estate and landed property is kept appropriately—but constantly—in the background of her narrative. Nonetheless, Sheridan foregrounds these issues through the complicated presentation of Sidney’s narrative: her dedication announces the influence of Samuel Richardson’s fictional models; the ‘editor’s preface’ situates the text as an authentic record; the narrative itself is Sidney’s own journal, a departure from Richardson’s epistolary model. However, the journal is written for the ‘perusal’ of Cecilia, an ‘intimate friend, of her own sex’ (SB 49) who is directly addressed throughout the dated entries and who picks up the narrative near the conclusion. The form of the text thus calls up the spectre of property: the journal is Sidney’s most constant and inalienable property, conveying to the reader her ‘authentic’ experiences, perceptions, and feelings while circulating independently of Sidney herself. The illusion persists in the editor’s framing comments at the beginning and end of the text, which serve to preserve the illusion of reality and protect Sidney from explicit public exposure. The novel in English is traditionally cast as the synthesis of proto-realist non-fictional forms (memoirs, periodicals, early journalism, broadsheets, and conduct manuals) and the intangible quality of fictionality. While the novel of sensibility is, historically, closer to several posited ‘origins’ of the novel itself, the Gothic is usually treated as a response to the novel. Both genres, however, participate in what Catharine Gallagher identifies as ‘an explicit and ongoing discourse of fictionality’, which included the development of the novel as defined against the scandalous libel and against ‘true’ (nonfictional) forms as ‘believable stories that did not solicit belief’.22 The novel of sensibility, with its ‘truth claims’ located in the authenticity of ‘personal’ letters, developed alongside discourses of the individual as an irreducible— and unassailable—authority on subjective experience. The epistolary form was ‘indisputably’ the predominant one for early eighteenth-century novels and

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one that persisted throughout the century in novels of sensibility especially.23 Commenting on the world from within an acknowledged ‘personal’ perspective, the epistolary novel already relied on a gap between the real world and the affective experience of that world: the transfer of feeling took the place of objective information about the world. This was, for Adam Smith, a radically new and human accounting of experience, opening up the ‘possibility of history registered in the eyes of spectators, a sentimental history concerned less with outward acts and public occasions than with the private passions and experiences of individuals’.24 Epistolary fictions thus reproduced a believable form that carried with it the obligation of sympathetic response from the reader and was connected to the ‘real world’ in crucial ways. The conventions of form in an example like Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, particularly the preface, advertisement, dedication, and editor’s notes, establish a conduit through which the real world is simultaneously reaffirmed and distanced. Sophia Lee and Ann Radcliffe’s novels develop clearly out of the productive space that the novel of sensibility opened for articulating women’s experiences in a believable and affecting literary form. The novel of sensibility adapts non-fictional forms to create effect; the Gothic novel scrambles those forms, fracturing and exposing the limitations of sympathy. Both novels of sensibility and the Gothic threaten the coherence and continuity of ‘the novel’ by adding innovation, by creating new forms: the ‘feeling’ form of the novel of sensibility and the ‘monstrous’ form of the Gothic.25 Understanding the Gothic as a response to novel and challenge to ‘realism’ positions the form as an outgrowth—a growing out—of earlier prose writing that privileged versimilitude. Susanne Becker, for example, suggests that ‘excess’ is the key narrative strategy deployed by the Gothic in its ‘attack on classic realism’.26 The claim that the Gothic has ‘from the first proudly celebrated its anti-realism’ presumes that ‘realism’ was a stable and understood quality of prose fiction by 1764.27 Histories of the novel, however, demonstrate that this was far from the case. Novels of sensibility equally challenged versimilitude by focussing closely on unverifiable, individual emotional responses and experiences, privileging the subjective perception of the world. The semblance of the real exists most strongly in the foundations of the narrative, the familiar practices of writing and reading correspondence. In Sheridan’s novel, for example, the letters are presented as authentic, whole, and unedited. Thus, Sidney’s emotional authenticity is carried through the form, the materiality of which is stable and unquestioned. Lee’s shift to the Gothic makes use of a less dependable materiality: the ‘found’ document, existing as fragile fragments, must be translated and edited in order to communicate with readers.28 There is no question of authenticity in the text—it is not the original. In both Lee and Radcliffe, the radical instability of text is represented through the physical decay of original documents: wills, letters, and deeds are presented in their ‘original’ fragments, from which the reader (both inside and outside of the text) must distil meaning.

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Forms of property in these examples of sensibility and the Gothic reflect, and are reflected by, the forms these novels take. For different reasons, the Gothic and sensibility both were considered excessive by the end of the eighteenth century, whether that was framed in terms of ‘extremely refined emotion’29 (sensibility) or form (the Gothic). While both remained popular throughout the 1780s and 1790s, they were increasingly associated with women (as readers and writers) and ‘lost ground as literature was elevated’.30 Literature itself was a contested concept throughout the century. The specific ownership that an author might claim over their writing was the subject of intense debates in courts of law, Parliament, and the relatively new public medium of newspapers and journals in the eighteenth century. Legislation to regulate the competing rights of writers and publishers treated the first edition as the ‘original’, from which property and rights could be decided. The Statute of Anne (1712), however, did not comment on private correspondence or unpublished writing.31 Alexander Pope’s 1741 suit against Edmund Curl concerned the publication of Pope’s private letters, an issue not included in the Copyright Act. Pope’s suit was successful in establishing writers’ property in their written expression and, crucially, set up an ongoing debate about the complexity of literary property as both material (the paper on which the words were printed) and intangible (the expression conveyed through those words)—in other words, the particular properties that belonged to form and to feeling. Sidney Bidulph offers a productive example of the ways in which novels of sensibility contain the motifs of the Gothic in an already gendered form. Sidney’s ‘memoirs’ hover exactly between these questions of form and feeling in terms of property and ownership. Her experiences narrative are extreme by any measure of the sentimental heroine: without a will of her own, she is repeatedly caught up in circumstances through no fault of her own. At the outset, Sidney’s sprightly letters to Celia portray a character that, like Austen’s Catherine Moreland, should lead few readers to suspect she had been ‘born a heroine’.32 Indeed, the letters might initially be understood as a cheerful, if quite strict, moral lesson in filial obedience. Sidney spars with her brother George over his coarse language, pokes fun at her own moralising tendencies, and insists to her ‘intimate friend’, Celia, that she is ‘not a prude’ in reporting the gallant language of courtship (SB 60). What is remarkable, for a novel that Samuel Johnson insisted had made readers ‘suffer so much’ is the relative lack of feeling that Sidney displays.33 The letters—regardless of content—remain remarkably coherent and Sidney is more often ‘astonished’ or ‘left wondering’ by her experiences than left without words. When her first suitor, Orlando Faulkland, runs off with another woman, Sidney is ‘astonished’ by the event, admitting that it has ‘sunk the man considerably in my opinion’ (SB 195). After reading (and copying out) Faulkland’s explanatory letter for Celia, Sidney’s merely wonders ‘what knight-errantry is this? What a madcap!’ (SB 214). People around Sidney display strong emotional responses; Sidney writes with a clear detachment, often bringing her correspondence up to the

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present but never writing in the present moment. Thus, the excessive suffering that Johnson complains of cannot be found in Sidney’s performance of feeling. Even the wildly dramatic conclusion is met with relatively calm writing. Celia, who picks up the narratives after arriving on the scene in the aftermath of Faulkland’s tragic end, is equally ‘astonished’ to find her ‘so calm under so trying an affliction’ (SB 460). Johnson’s high praise for the novel illustrates the ways in which the form carries ‘something more’ than words on paper. The moment of Gothic excess comes at the conclusion of the text, by which point, the narrative has been taken over by Celia, Sidney’s intended reader. By emerging in the novel, Celia breaks the illusion of intimacy established for the extra-diegetical reader; Celia can act, where the reader can only feel —or ‘suffer so much’. There is a pointed criticism here of the limits of sympathy: while the reader (qua Johnson) may ‘suffer’, Celia immediately journeys to ‘the dear friend of my heart’, having been ‘terrified’ by the ‘melancholy close’ of Sidney’s final letter: ‘Adieu, my Cecilia, adieu; nothing but my death should close such a scene as this’ (SB 459). The ‘scene’ Sidney refers to is the revelation of Faulkland’s bigamy, his wife having survived and recovered from Faulkland’s passionate attack on her and her adulterous lover (SB 458). Celia’s ‘narrative’, which the editor ‘offers to the pubick, as he received them, without any alteration or addition’, summarise Sidney’s survival and the first ten years of her ‘retirement’ (SB 459–467). The novel is on the brink of a distinctly Richardsonian moral conclusion, with Sidney offering the lessons of her experience as guides for her own daughters, when Celia interrupts: Gracious Heaven! How inscrutable are thy ways! Her affluent fortune, the very circumstance which seemed to promise her, in the eve of life, some compensation for the miseries she had endured in her early days now proved the source of new and dreadful calamities to her, which, by invoking the unhappy daughter of an unhappy mother in scenes of the most exquisite distress, cut off from her even the last resource of hope in this life, and rendered the close of her history still more................ (SB 467)

This invitation to the Gothic functions as a formal bridge between the epistolary narratives of sensibility and the omniscient perspective of Radcliffe’s Gothic. In between, Sophia Lee’s quasi-epistolary novel recalls the direct address of Sheridan and the coherence of novel conventions. These three examples suggest a transition from personal reflection and expression to ‘public’ narratives, not explicitly tied to an identifiable character or named perspective. The property described by each undergoes a similar transformation from the abstract ownership of expression in Sidney’s letters, to affective ownership that cannot be recognised in Lee’s novel, to the struggles over real property and legal recognition in The Romance of the Forest. As Sue Chaplin notes, even William Blackstone must admit that property, the fundamental right of Englishmen and the origin of the social contract, is ‘comprehensible only as a textual phenomenon … transferable

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only by words on parchment’.34 Yet, Blackstone also insists that ‘something more substantial’ than a written contract should guarantee ownership of land and this ‘something more’ animates the connection between property and ownership in women’s sentimental and Gothic fictions.35 Horace Walpole’s inaugural Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764) brings to monstrous life Blackstone’s convergence of national constitution and architectural space. The eponymous castle, which throughout the novel has manifested the dis(re)membering of its proper owner, suddenly re-members itself, appearing as a supernatural figure of authority to ‘correct’ the historical crime of usurpation and realign history and property. Radcliffe and Lee’s subtler handling of this convention is apparent in the seeming autonomy of the properties and the connection between the heroine and her role in ‘correcting’ wandering properties. Locke’s presupposition of an intimacy between people and things reaches a climax in the ‘possessive self’, whose power is such that ‘the thing itself bears the imprint of its possesion’.36 The Lockean idea of property as a (dis)embodied extension of the self finds Gothic expression in Radcliffe’s mysteriously communicative abbey that is, somehow, recognizably the property of Phillipe de Montalt. The original Marquis de Montalt, Adeline’s father, discovers the identity of his persecutor and understands the ‘horrid scheme’ when he sees the abbey, which not only indicates its owner but also stands in for him, communicating in absentia Phillipe’s plans to his ill-fated brother. The Gothic property thus effaces the boundary between absence and presence, possessing a supernatural power to conjure up its owner. Sentimental properties remain self-contained and singular in The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, reflecting the sentimental construction of identity as (at least externally) consistent and individually distinct. Sidney Bidulph pares family down to a few intimate and established relationships, making external claims a violation of both narrative and affective coherence. Gothic properties, on the other hand, reflect the Gothic impulse to dissipation, disintegration, and plurality. Exploring the Gothic ruin in The Romance of the Forest, one character opens a series of doors, with the attendant increase in tension and reader anticipation, only to reveal further doors. Matilda and Ellinor’s titular recess in Sophia Lee’s novel is likewise a sprawling structure, continuous with its natural surroundings but distinct because of the evidence of ‘labor’ in the construction of its various rooms.37 While the same labyrinthine nature of the properties allows the heroines to escape nefarious plots against them, it also implies the nature of female identity and the legal and historical processes that determine that identity. Like William Blackstone’s description of English common law, the properties in Lee, Smith, and Radcliffe recall the ‘days of chivalry’ but are fitted for ‘modern inhabitant[s]’.38 The relationship between women and property exposes the extent to which Blackstone’s insistence on the importance of maintaining historical and legal continuity negatively affects the same people it should protect. Even in Blackstone, the law demonstrates its own romantic origins: he locates the ‘days of chivalry’ in ‘moated ramparts, embattled towers, and trophied halls’, the same elements that Samuel Johnson

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claims disfigure romantic writing.39 Johnson and Blackstone both attempt to delineate ‘legitimate’ interpretations of text. Neither, however, offers their work as representative of the discourse in question. Blackstone’s commentaries on the laws do not constitute the laws of England; to do this would be ‘to deny [the law’s] origin in a source beyond contingencies of history and textuality’.40 Thus, romance becomes the perfect vehicle with which to conceal the origins of law while asserting its transcendent authority. By comparison, Johnson grounds the authority of proper fiction on the taste and preference of ‘the present generation’ and furthermore locates the origin for good writing in ‘general converse and accurate observation of the living world’.41 Without this foundation in the observable world, romance floats dangerously free; it has no applicability, no relevance to the reader because it exists beyond ‘his sphere of activity’.42 To bring Johnson’s criticisms to bear on Blackstone’s Commentaries must rely on the common ground both share in their policing of written texts. Johnson dismisses romance for the same reason that Blackstone employs it: it points to an origin that is constantly deferred and, therefore, that cannot be proven or disproved. Both Radcliffe and Lee use this instability in the Gothic, as a genre that draws on novels of sensibility and romances, to challenge women’s position as belongings rather than belonging: Radcliffe’s novels demonstrate the place of romance in history and destabilize the connection between women and romance while Lee’s The Recess uses the Gothic to charge both history and romance for their inability to offer women identity or include them in common, national cultural and material inheritance. The romance is part of the generic inheritance of both the Gothic and the novel of sensibility. Again, while the Gothic may seem more obviously connected to romance, novels of sensibility also reflect careful attention to personal relationships and the surveillance of emotion. The formal device of the letter—transformed to everyday communication rather than over-determined plot point—carries over the deeply subjective world of the romance in both. The delineation of the passions in seventeenth-century French romances finds domestic expression in novels of sensibility; extravagant passions become refinements of feeling, a transformation also echoed in the form—from ten volumes (for The Princess of Cleves [1678]) to Sheridan’s three-volume novel. Sidney Bidulph is not a romance heroine, but her demands on Faulkland demonstrate a level of moral rigidity and adherence to form that are not unlike the conventions of romance. Gothic literature inherits not only the romance’s popular appeal and cavalier attitude towards historical, geographical, and temporal continuity but also its negative association with women as readers and writers. The development of the romance from seventeenth-century French tradition to the late eighteenth-century English Gothic demonstrates an increasing awareness of the illusion of passion or feeling as a source of social or cultural authority for women. By focussing on the extreme vulnerability of women, regardless of their ‘sensibility’, Sheridan, Radcliffe, and Lee offer narratives that denude ‘feeling’ as a source of power

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and relocate women in the real world of subjects (owners) and objects (property). Women in these novels are connected variously to landed estates (‘real’ property) and chattel (‘moveable’ property). These related forms of property correlate with a similar split in the heroine’s personal identities: while articles of chattel property—miniatures, letters, and mementos—support their private constructions of self, the contested estates in the novels—family homes, the recess, and the abbey—epresent wider historical, public, and legal identities. Neither is more or less ‘true’, but the presentation of identity in these novels as subject to different surveillance and verification offers an illuminating picture of women’s complex connection to property and ownership. What the novels struggle to establish is a ‘natural’ connection between fetishised objects of sentimental ownership and the role of ‘owner’ demanded by real property. Regardless of their superior sensibility or moral worth, female protagonists face the irreducible fact of their exclusion from law based on their sex. Landed property constitutes the position of ‘owner’ in ways that may be affectively filled by women, but in the final accounting, women fall short of the legal and political qualifications for ownership. Wolfram Schmidgen argues that the rights of property in the eighteenth century ‘create the owner’, not the reverse.43 The legal reality of being constituted through the law, rather than before the law, is familiar to the appearance of women in fiction and in legal discourse.44 Thus the terrifying form of law that demands an individual’s complete annihilation before being ‘properly’ constituted as a legal subject finds fictional analogies in female protagonists’ experiences with landed property. Sidney can make no claims on her consanguineal family’s estate except as a ‘guest’ after her husband abandons her. Matilda, in Lee’s The Recess, marries in order to secure her identity, a move that strips her of that identity. In The Romance of the Forest, Adeline’s discovery of her connection to the Abbey makes her into a representative of her family, of which she has virtually no knowledge or affective association. As the plot makes it more and more difficult for her to physically leave the abbey, the narrative moves closer and closer to tying her, by title, to the land that imprisons her. The ambiguity of women’s public identities also provides moments of potential escape. Sheridan’s novel—The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph—is actually the story of Mrs. Arnold (Sidney’s marriage occurs in the first volume); yet her status as a married woman is secure in name only. Mr. Arnold abandons her, bankrupts the family, returns a broken and impoverished man, and dies, leaving her a widow. She then becomes ‘Mrs. Faulkland’ briefly—a marriage revealed to be bigamous when Faulkland’s wife turns out to have survived Faulkland’s frenzied attack on her and her adulterous lover. Sidney’s single stroke of luck comes from an episode belonging to a romance in the form of a long-lost cousin, Mr. Warner, on her mother’s side, who reappears to bequeath his considerable fortune with Sidney. Her good fortune, however, is nearly missed since Warner, returning to London, can only discover that Sidney ‘had been married and was a widow’ but he could ‘learn no more

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about’ her (SB 375). Thus the title of the novel, combined with the epistolary form, produces the illusion of a stable identity that is antecedent to the law but available only privately. Sidney’s public identity is changeable; her private self is not. In Radcliffe and Lee, the fluidity of women’s public identities also enables the protagonists to escape various traps. In The Recess, while the narrative is technically an epistolary form, the single address and durational structure immerse the reader fully, without repeatedly drawing attention to a shared ‘present’. These are letters outside of time, written to a recipient in the future. The form preserves the subjective authority necessary for a narrative that positions itself in the shadows of official histories. Everything is possible, but little is probable. Women’s identities change radically throughout the novel through various marriages, moving Matilda and Elinor further from and tantalisingly closer to their ‘true’ selves. Matilda’s letter also makes space for other writers—her twin sister, Elinor, their lovers, Essex and Leicester all appear as writers of their own personal experiences, inserted into Matilda’s writing but allowed to remain individual. Radcliffe’s omniscient third-person narrator positions Adeline differently—as the object of narrative interest as much as she is the object of competing individual and institutional desires in the novel. The use of free indirect discourse nonetheless suggests that she is knowable, a blurring of interior and exterior in the form that resonates with the instability of objects and subjects in the text. Radcliffe’s abbey and Lee’s recess represent the property as both monumental and transient. The structures offer evidence of their original grandeur and purpose but also irrefutable proof of their passing. Nonetheless, the created spaces continue to exert and enact the force of the laws that brought them into being and rely on their continued (ideological, if not actual) importance. The entrances, which are concealed but functional in both the abbey and the recess, are critical details in these novels and both authors spend time and description on the intricate process of entry and exit from the properties. In The Romance of the Forest, the entrance to the abbey—a ‘Gothic gate’—is the only feature that ‘remained entire’, though now ‘obstructed by brush-wood’ (ROTF 15). Despite its ruined state, La Motte, the protagonist’s reluctant saviour and unreliable guardian, ‘thinking it possible it might yet shelter some human being’, knocks first before ‘forc[ing]’ open the gate (ROTF 15). Figuratively, Adeline’s ‘access point’ to her true identity and history—the mysterious ‘manuscript’ that she finds in the abbey—is equally functional; that is, she is not too late to claim her inheritance and family property. Lee’s protagonists, Ellinor and Matilda, who are on the other side of a locked door, find an exit from the recess leading to a ‘pile of ruins’ (Lee 37). Upon turning back to ‘observe how the entrance was hid’, they find that the tomb that shelters the entry conceals it entirely: ‘[t]he little door, which dropt after us, was one stone, lined with wood, and so neatly fitted, that even when unfastened, it was not to be discerned’ (Lee 37). The intricate and secret doors to Gothic spaces contain the essence of the law as a discourse that demarcates spaces but does not inhabit any space completely.45 Property laws are figured

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most powerfully at the margins of property (doors, walls, and gardens) and it is these liminal spaces that trap and befuddle the heroines, who struggle to pass through without capture or notice. These invisible boundaries of property also mark the limits of genre and the transgressive places of generic play that confuses the associations between women and romance, and romance and resistance. In The Romance of the Forest, Adeline’s mysterious persistence in her ‘reject[ion] of the advantages … offered her [by the Marquis]’ is attributed to her ‘infatuation [for the] heroism of romance’ (ROTF 136). Given Adeline’s natural sensibility and moral superiority, her guardian’s only recourse is to reshape her perception. La Motte has no legal right to Adeline’s obedience but relies on sentimental notions of duty and Adeline’s assumption of his benevolence to manipulate her behaviour. His treatment of Adeline is effectively an attempt to ‘re-educate’ her into ignorance, instructing her to ignore the evidence of her own senses and understanding in order to accept ‘reality’. His invocation of ‘romance’ as opposite to the female behaviour desired by men is important considering his own arbitrary use of fictions where and when they suit his purposes. The description of the Marquis’s first abduction of Adeline to his villa demonstrates the intertwined nature of romance, Gothic, and sentimental styles. The complete blackness of the night is augmented by rainstorm and no details of her direction or destination are given. ‘After two hours’ Adeline and her captor reach the edge of the forest and, seemingly quite suddenly, come upon a ‘high and lonely wall’ (ROTF 156). Though the interior of the villa is a riot of romantic imagery, its external appearance rivals the abbey in its obscurity and threatening sublimity. Adeline can ‘just distinguish [the villa wall] by the moonlight’ and, though superficially romantic, she discovers it to be an extensive labyrinth of hidden doors and hallways (ROTF 156, 164–165). The entrance, concealed in a ‘high lonely wall’, is barely visible by moonlight and, like the dimly lit passageway that follows, implies the need for secrecy. Inside, it is not the splendid frescos, silver lamps, silk sofas, impressive busts, perfume receptacles, or Etruscan vases that enchant Adeline. Instead, left briefly on her own, she naturally gravitates to the windows. It is overlooking the Marquis’s ‘extensive garden, where groves and lawns, and water glittering in the moonbeam, composed a scenery of varied and romantic beauty’ that Adeline is closest to accepting him (ROTF 157, my emphasis). ‘Insensibly soothed and interested’ by a melody she hears from her prison, Adeline’s ability to act is momentarily paralysed (ROTF 157). She rejects the Marquis’s artificial palace of delights by reacting to them as she does to the supernatural events at the abbey. Both are ‘charms to lure [her] to destruction’ and both require her to reassert her reason to regain control of the situation (ROTF 157). The rhetoric of romance that describes the Marquis’s actions implicitly comments on the power dynamics in operation behind the ideology of romantic love. While superficially emancipating women by placing them in a position of power over their male suitors, romance traps women as effectively as the Gothic castle. The Marquis represents the potential for male aggression

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to be disguised as love or desire in the context of romance. The end result of male aggression or love is the same for women: ‘Every luxury is at your command … [E]very pleasure possible to be enjoyed within these walls you shall partake, but beyond them you shall not go’ (ROTF 160). Adeline’s only remaining power is to choose to acquiesce before she is forced to do so. In her attempted escape from the villa, Adeline is trapped by the gardens that ‘charmed’ her previously, and as though to prove her suspicions correct, they do nearly lead to her destruction. As in her previous attempt to escape the Gothic forest, Adeline cannot bridge the worlds. When she is a captive or when incapacitated, Adeline crosses easily from Gothic forest to romantic villa to sensible Savoy. When she attempts action, however, she becomes further enmeshed in each world, unable to affect her environment. Her hesitation during her escapes clearly illustrates the impossibility of ‘real’ escape for women. Caught halfway between the ruined abbey and the tomb in the forest, Adeline freezes in fear, realising that the Marquis is directly in front of her. At this moment, she understands the impossibility of both flight and return: ‘to proceed was to run into the hands of the Marquis; to return was to fall into the power of La Motte’ (ROTF 153). Father or husband? Adeline chooses the tomb, perhaps manifesting an unconscious desire to suspend the decision entirely. Again when she escapes through the window of the Marquis’s voluptuous prison she is drawn back by a light that she hopes will lead her to someone who might ‘be won to favour her escape’ (ROTF 165). The light leads her directly to the Marquis, who as her closest blood family should be the character most willing to assist Adeline. His Gothic identity as family and stranger, protector and persecutor, stems from his original crime. Fratricide calls up allusions to the Genesis story of Cain and Abel—thus, an ‘original’ crime—as well as to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, an allusion strengthened by the repeated invocations to ‘unfold a story’. Retreating in horror she subsequently flees from Theodore, her would-be suitor, whom she mistakes for the Marquis. Both attempts at escape force Adeline to examine her involvement in the worlds she is fleeing and question the assurance of laws designed for women’s protection. Orphaned and therefore uninscribed by the name of the father (the name of the law) that would ensure her safe travel over boundaries demarcated by law, Adeline is incapable of crossing these barriers unassisted and she is equally lost in the romantic world as she is in the Gothic world. Adeline’s manuscript evidences a similar generic instability between history and romance. Found in the ‘ancient foundation’ of the Abbey, the manuscript is at the centre of Radcliffe’s narrative, yet, as Robert Miles points out, the discovery of the manuscript defamiliarizes a typical device of disclosure in romances by remaining marginal to the plot: ‘everything that needs to be known emerges in court independently of the testimony offered by Adeline’s elliptical script’.46 The importance of the script, like the recess itself, is that it ‘stands in’ for writing by women.47 The plot of Romance reveals that ‘romantic’ things, dismissed by most characters, have a tendency to accurately describe reality. Radcliffe uses the manuscript to comment on the relevance of romances

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to her contemporary audience: Adeline’s manuscript is found in the ‘ancient foundation’ of the abbey and ‘is so much obscured by time that it can scarcely be decyphered’ (ROTF 115, 144). Lee’s work is also presented in ‘an obsolete stile’ which she has ‘alter[ed to] the language of the present age’ to avoid the same kind of ‘unintelligible’ text Adeline discovers (Recess 5). For Adeline, however, the unfolding of events makes clear that the manuscript is not, in fact, ancient and, in spite of Adeline’s confidence that she ‘shall not be punished for the crimes of another’, the crimes related in the manuscript have a direct effect on her current and future state (ROTF 142). History in Lee’s narrative, however malleable, still retains a tragic sense of completion; Matilda’s tragedy is that she is never recognised that she remains figuratively in the recess but can no longer claim its protection and obscurity. The insular, self-sustaining nature of the recess as it first appears in the text coincides with a positive view of women’s omission from history since women’s participation in history leads only to madness and despair. Adeline does achieve public recognition of her identity, but the damaging potential of this acknowledgement is immediately forestalled by her marriage to Theodore La Luc and her automatic transformation into Adeline La Luc. Adeline’s identity involves the realignment of property and inheritance along proper and law-abiding channels. Matilda’s identity threatens property and stability because it suggests the extent to which one property (England) may have several, equally deserving owners. Property identity becomes as fragmented and confused as personal identity. The same qualities that make Matilda’s recess the perfect place for concealment also make it easily forgotten; like Adeline’s manuscript, Matilda cannot affect history except to teach women to become critical, active readers of both history and romance. The perfect reader of Gothic romances, Adeline feels the ‘wretched writer [of the manuscript] appeal[ing] directly to her heart’ and, activated by her reading, the manuscript telescopes time, making ‘his past sufferings … present’ (ROTF 132). Adeline’s increasing obsession with the manuscript suggests the ‘insidious and intimate relationship between the reader and text’ that disgusted eighteenth-century literary critics, who believed that an ‘unlicenced indulgence of the imagination’ was corruptive to family values and could render young (female) readers ‘unfit’ for real life.48 In both Lee and Radcliffe, however, the heroines are ‘rendered unfit’ for real life by family, not through their reading of ‘romances’. The ‘insidious and intimate’ relationship between Adeline and her father-uncle, Phillipe Marquis de Montalt, for example, is a manifestation of the effects of unrestrained male ambition and corruption, not of romance reading. Already an aside in authoritative history, Adeline occupies a similar position to Matilda and Ellinor. The difference between the two texts is one of direction. The Romance of the Forest begins as the ‘striking story of Pierre de la Motte, and the Marquis Phillipe de Montalt’ (ROTF 1) and Adeline’s ignominious entry four pages later should be part of the story of La Motte. Yet it is Adeline’s story that instigates and completes the relationship between La

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Motte and Montalt. This encroachment of a marginal character on the centre is pivotal to The Romance of the Forest and echoes in the structure and narrative of the text. Embedded firmly in a tradition of authoritative, historically verifiable, male writing, Radcliffe’s novel adopts the value given to male writing in eighteenth-century literary criticism the same way that Lee’s writing takes on the mantle of history. In both texts, the central property represents history: indeed, as sites of monastic worship, both properties refer back to Catholic England. Both properties belong to the heroines by use and experience rather than by proclaimed legal right, thus connecting ownership to personal history. Problematically, both ‘belong’ to the heroine only while she remains secreted there, ‘belonging’ to the property. Property in the Gothic novel changes dramatically when no longer associated directly with the heroine. Like the manuscript, the abbey in The Romance of the Forest simply disappears: a metonym for Adeline herself, who ‘disappears’ first from the Marquis’ reach and then from her old identity when she marries Theodore La Luc. Before marrying Theodore, Adeline has her father’s remains removed from the abbey as her ‘last duty’ as a daughter after which ‘she became more tranquil and resigned’ (ROTF 355). Her marriage transforms her from Adeline de Montalt to Adeline La Luc, severing her connection to the abbey by altering her name and identity from daughter to wife. Similarly, Matilda’s clandestine marriage to Lord Leicester marks the twins’ departure from the recess. In Lee’s world, property left ‘ready to accommodate any future unfortunates’ has the potential to warp into a perverse reflection of its original purpose (Recess 67). Seeking the ‘piety and innocence’ of the recess, re-imagined as a space that ‘bounded all our wishes … contained all necessary to existence’, Matilda and Leicester discover it to be perverted into ‘the shelter of rapine [and] murder’ (Recess 99, 97). Lee’s text reveals property to be, like History, essentially amoral, reflecting the author/owner over any objective fact or truth. While Radcliffe introduces the past as a threat to the present, her narratives wrest property from the (male) villain long enough to allow the heroine to correct past mistakes and direct proper channels of inheritance into the future. Gothic conventions obscure the ‘natural’ gender privilege under the law; men in these texts are inadequate to their sentimental duty of protecting women’s best interests. Property law is similar to a negligent parent, willing to ignore how property moves provided it continues to move along family lines. By focussing on estrangement, on the separation of women from consanguineal male kin, Radcliffe and Lee develop the problems inherent in sentimental models of familial duty. Ultimately, the texts conform to a type that Jacqueline Labbe has described as ‘property romances’: texts that ‘question the traditional certainties represented by both the morality of love and the necessity of ownership’.49 Cleansed of its Gothic past and returned to its ‘proper’ owner, property can continue to function as an ordering social principle. In spite of the attempts to correct the feudal privilege of birthright through the use of sentimental ideology, in which property is the reward of virtue not high birth, Radcliffe and Lee’s novels insist on the primacy

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of property as the indicator of belonging. Law, for both authors, remains an amorphous and amoral institution: not only vulnerable to corruption by individual evil men but also capable of being restored to its position as a benevolent system through which good men act in women’s interests. Sentimental conventions in these Gothic texts underscore this gendered relationship to ‘good’ legal practice. Far from being passive, oppressed receptables for patriarchy, the ideology of sensibility understands women as an opportunity for men to demonstrate their best characteristics. The epistolary form of Sheridan’s novel reflects this limited feminine agency. The illusory documents—both Sidney’s letters and the narrative ‘authenticity’ of deeds, wills, and records in Lee and Radcliffe—establish a textual economy in which the materiality of the text exists in a coextensive relationship with the ‘Real’. The shift from sensibility to the Gothic is the shift from depending on the form (the letter) as uncomplicatedly authentic, with a clear and equally uncomplicated message, to a deep suspicion of the validity of texts themselves. Lee’s reader must confront the unreliable nature of writing, illustrated in the decaying, fragmentary substrate that Matilda’s history is written upon. Radcliffe’s reader must further suspect the appearance of ‘authentic’ documents, such as confessions, letters, and wills, but to a revolutionary end. By creating a space that enables the sharing of women’s experiences and points out the frailty of these forms to convey subjectivity, sensibility and the Gothic trace the articulation of women’s awareness of their irreducible individuality, regardless of how they are constructed in legal or historical discourses.

Notes 1. Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: The Poetics of Gothic (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995), 329. Williams asserts that ‘“Gothic” and “Romantic” are not two but one’ (1). 2. Ellen Moers, Literary Women: The Great Writers (New York, Doubleday, 1976), 126; Leslie Fiedler, [1960] Love and Death in the American Novel (Champaign, IL, Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), 130. 3. Lauren Fitzgerald, ‘Female Gothic and the Institutionalisation of Gothic Studies’, Gothic Studies 6:1 (2004), 8–18 (10). 4. Ibid., 10. 5. Moers, Literary Women, 90. 6. Ibid., 90. 7. See Andrew Smith and Diana Wallace, The Female Gothic: New Directions (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Diana Wallace, Female Gothic Histories (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2013); Ellen Ledoux, ‘Was There Ever a “Female Gothic”?’, Palgrave Communications 3:17042 (2017), 7 pp. https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.201 7.42. 8. Robert Miles, ‘“Mother Radcliff”: Ann Radcliffe and the Female Gothic’ in The Female Gothic, eds. Smith and Wallace, 42–59 (54).

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9. Miles, 56; a wider and more productive model is offered by Diana Wallace, who considers the Female Gothic as a ‘series of interconnected metaphors’. See ‘“The Haunting Idea”: Female Gothic Metaphors and Feminist Theory’ in The Female Gothic, 26–41 (27). 10. Carol Margaret Davison, ‘“Getting Their Knickers in a Twist”: Contesting the Female Gothic in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya’, Gothic Studies 11:1 (2009), 32–45 (34). 11. Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660– 1833 (Harvard University Press, 1990), 7. 12. Wolfram Schmidgen, Eighteenth−Century Fiction and the Law of Property (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), 9. 13. Janelle Greenberg, ‘The Legal Status of the English Woman in Early Eighteenth−Century Common Law and Equity’, 4 (1975), 171–179 (172). 14. Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property, 84. 15. James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (London, printed for Henry Baldwin, 1786), 206. 16. Ibid., 206–7. 17. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), 236. 18. Lena Halldenius, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Feminist Critique of Property: On Becoming a Thief from Principle’, Hypatia 29:4 (2019), 942–957 (947). 19. Ibid., 947. 20. Ledoux, ‘Was There Ever a “Female Gothic”?’, 4. 21. Frances Sheridan, The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1762) in eds. Heidi Hutner and Nicole Garret (Peterborough, Broadview Press, 2011), 117. All further references are to this edition and will be noted by ‘SB’ and the page number in parentheses. 22. Catharine Gallagher, ‘The Rise of Fictionality’ in The Novel, vol. 1, History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006), 336–363 (340). 23. Joe Bray, The Epistolary Novel: Representations of Consciousness (London, Routledge, 2003), 1. 24. Mark Salber Philips, ‘Adam Smith and the History of Private Life: Social and Sentimental Narratives in Eighteenth−Century Historiography’, The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500–1800, ed. Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997), 318–342 (325). 25. John Locke, ‘Of Property’ in Two Treatises of Government (1690), ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988), 285– 302. 26. Susanne Becker, Gothic Forms of Feminine Fiction (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017), 1. 27. Ibid., 1.

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28. Sophia Lee, The Recess, or, A Tale of Other Times (1783–5), ed. April Alliston (Lexington, The University Press of Kentucky, 2000), ‘Advertisement’. All further references are to this edition and will be noted in parenthesis by ‘Recess’ and the page number. 29. Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London, Methuen, 1986), 7. 30. Melissa Soderman, Sentimental Memorials: Women and the Novel in Literary History (Redwood, CA, Stanford University Press, 2014), 4. 31. Ronan Deazley, ‘Commentary on Pope v. Curl (1741)’ in Primary Sources on Copyright (1450–1900), eds. L. Bently and M. Kretschmer, 2008, www.copyrighthistory.org. 32. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, eds. James Kinsley and John Davie (Oxford, Oxford World’s Classics, 2003), 5. 33. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 2 vols. (London: H. Baldwin, for C. Dilly, 1791), vol. 1, 210. 34. Sue Chaplin, The Gothic and the Rule of Law, 1764–1820 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 44. 35. Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1764–9), vol. 2, 2. 36. Schmidgen, Eighteenth−Century Fiction, 55. 37. Lee, The Recess, or, A Tale of Other Times (1783–5), ed. April Alliston (Lexington, The University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 6. 38. Blackstone, Commentaries, vol. 3, 268. 39. Blackstone, Commentaries, vol. 3, 268; see Johnson, The Rambler (No. 4, 31 March 1750) in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. W.J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, 16 vols (London, Yale University Press, 1969), vol. 3, 19–25 (19). 40. Chaplin, The Gothic and the Rule of Law, 45. 41. Johnson, The Rambler, 19, 20. 42. Ibid., 21. 43. Schmidgen, Eighteenth−Century Fiction, 1–6. 44. Even where women were awarded ownership of property in the eighteenth century, these cases did not set a legal precedent. Women lived in the space between the law and everyday practices. As Alexandra Shepard demonstrates in the 1720s case of Elizabeth Carter and Elizabeth Hatchett, the connection between chattel property and women could be used by women for significant personal gain through informal networks of lending and borrowing. ‘Minding their own business: married women and credit in early eighteenth−century London’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 25 (2015), 53–74. https:// doi.org/10.1017/S008044011500002X. 45. Chaplin, The Gothic and the Rule of Law, 22. 46. Robert Miles, Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995), 114. 47. Ibid., 114.

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48. Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (London, Routledge, 1995), 7. 49. Jacqueline Labbe, ‘Metaphoricity and the Romance of Property in the Old Manor House’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 34.2 (2001), 216–231 (217).

Bibliography Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Eds. James Kinsley and John Davie. Oxford, Oxford World’s Classics, 2003. Bate, W.J. and Albrecht B. Strauss. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. London, Yale University Press, 1969. Becker, Susanne. Gothic Forms of Feminine Fiction. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017. Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. 4 vols. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1764–9. Boswell, James. The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., London, printed for Henry Baldwin, 1786. Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. 2 vols. London, printed by H. Baldwin for C. Dilly, 1791. Bray, Joe. The Epistolary Novel: Representations of Consciousness. London, Routledge, 2003. Chaplin, Sue. The Gothic and the Rule of Law, 1764–1820. Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2007. Davison, Carol Margaret. ‘“Getting Their Knickers in a Twist”: Contesting the Female Gothic in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya’. Gothic Studies 11.1, 2009, 32–45. Deazley, Ronan. ‘Commentary on Pope v. Curl (1741)’. Primary Sources on Copyright (1450–1900). Eds. L. Bently and M. Kretschmer, 2008. www.copyrighthistory.org. Accessed 20 October 2020. Fiedler, Leslie. (1960) Love and Death in the American Novel. Champaign, IL, Dalkey Archive Press, 2003. Fitzgerald, Lauren. ‘Female Gothic and the Institutionalisation of Gothic Studies’. Gothic Studies 6.1, 2004, 8–18. Gallagher, Catharine. ‘The Rise of Fictionality’. The Novel: Vol. 1, History, Geography, and Culture. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006, 336– 363. Greenberg, Janelle. ‘The Legal Status of the English Woman in Early EighteenthCentury Common Law and Equity’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 4, 1975, 171–179. Halldenius, Lena. ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Feminist Critique of Property: On Becoming a Thief from Principle’, Hypatia 29.4, 2019, 942–957. Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. London, Routledge, 1995. Labbe, Jacqueline. ‘Metaphoricity and the Romance of Property in The Old Manor House’. Novel: A Forum on Fiction 34.2, 2001, 216–231. Lee, Sophia. (1783–5) The Recess, or, A Tale of Other Times. Ed. April Alliston. Lexington, The University Press of Kentucky, 2000.

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Ledoux, Ellen, ‘Was There Ever a “Female Gothic”?’ Palgrave Communications 3.17042, 2017, 7pp. https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2017.42. Locke, John. ‘Of Property’. Two Treatises of Government (1690). Ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988. Miles, Robert. Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1995. Miles, Robert. ‘“Mother Radcliff”: Ann Radcliffe and the Female Gothic’. The Female Gothic: New Directions. Ed. Smith and Wallace. 42–59. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women: The Great Writers. New York, Doubleday, 1976. Philips, Mark Salber. ‘Adam Smith and the History of Private Life: Social and Sentimental Narratives in Eighteenth-Century Historiography’. The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500–1800. Eds. Donald R. Kelly and David Harris Sacks. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Schmidgen, Wolfram. Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003. Shepard, Alexandra. ‘Minding Their Own Business: Married Women and Credit in Early Eighteenth-Century London’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 25, 2015, 53–74. https://doi.org/10.1017/S008044011500002X. Sheridan, Frances. (1762) The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph. Eds. Heidi Hutner and Nicole Garret. Peterborough, ON, Broadview Press, 2011. Smith, Andrew and Diana Wallace. The Female Gothic: New Directions. Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2009. Soderman, Melissa. Sentimental Memorials: Women and the Novel in Literary History. London, Stanford University Press, 2014. Staves, Susan. Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833. London, Harvard University Press, 1990. Todd, Janet. Sensibility: An Introduction. London, Methuen, 1986. Wallace, Diana. Female Gothic Histories. Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2013. Williams, Anne. Arts of Darkness: The Poetics of the Gothic. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1797). Ed. Sylvana Tomaselli. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995.

The Re-Discovery of Eleanor Sleath J. S. Mackley

Despite being the author of six novels published between 1798 and 1815, Eleanor Sleath barely gets a mention in contemporary overviews of gothic literature. She does not appear in Dorothy Blakey’s 1939 study of the Minerva Press publications except in the lists in the appendices1 ; and a 2002 entry concerning the Northanger novelists in Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographical Guide has limited details about her.2 Arguably, her work might have been forgotten altogether if the first of her novels, The Orphan of the Rhine, had not been included among the seven ‘horrid’ novels listed in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, the novels Isabella Thorpe suggests Catherine Morland should read after Radcliffe’s The Italian. This list highlights Catherine’s interest in gothic and macabre literature for, at the end of the list of titles, Cathine seeks Isabella’s assurances they are ‘all horrid’.3 Austen wrote Northanger Abbey in 1803 but it was published posthumously in 1817. It was initially believed Austen had invented the novels the women discuss; however, in 1901 John Louis Haney recognised that these romances had been published between 1793 and 1798.4 Even so, when Michael Sadleir, Austen’s biographer, presented a paper about the Northanger Novels in 1927, he admitted to not having a ‘reader’s knowledge’ of the text.5 Without any textual evidence, Sadleir assumed Sleath’s work, like those by authors of the other ‘horrid novels’, ‘pretend—for fashion’s sake—to be translated from the J. S. Mackley (B) University of Northampton, Northampton, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_9

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German, but are in fact British-made goods in German fancy dress’.6 Sadleir’s factual information for Sleath was limited to a list of her novels, with Glenowen omitted from his list. When Sadleir’s article was being published, a book collector from America loaned him a copy of The Orphan of the Rhine, so he could include a textual analysis as a postscript to his paper.7 Sadleir suggests Sleath was a Catholic because of her sympathetic portrayal of monks and nuns who had a ‘wise and spiritual disposition’.8 This idea may be reinforced when, in The Orphan of the Rhine, Julie de Rubin’s dying mother entreats her ‘never to unite yourself with a man, however estimable, … who does not agree with you in all the articles of the Catholic Faith … that nothing shall prevail you to marry a Protestant’.9 Yet, Julie’s stalwart faith is mocked shortly afterwards when she is rebuked for declining ‘a connexion with one of the first families of Italy … because the person who addresses you, happens not to be so bigoted and so ridiculous as yourself’.10 Sadleir argues Sleath’s pastoral landscape descriptions are due to her spending time on an ‘agreeable foreign tour’, returning to England and ‘releasing all manner of villainy and tempest to rage over the hills and forests of Germany’. He concludes The Orphan of the Rhine could be ‘judged artificial and tawdry and absurd; but it is nevertheless pleasant and one lays down the fourth volume grateful to Mrs. Sleath for her entertainment’.12 Forty years after Sadleir had sight of the novel, Montague Summers listed The Orphan of the Rhine among the ‘sentimental Gothic’ novels.13 A few years later, Devindra P. Varma advertised for biographical details about Sleath in Notes and Queries.14 This request bore little fruition although he records that J.M.S. Tompkins responded ‘Some tombs are just empty, mere names and nothing more’.15 Lacking any biographical evidence for his introductions to The Orphan of the Rhine (1968) and The Nocturnal Minstrel (1972), Varma describes Sleath as ‘one of a number of minor “gothic” writers whose works were animated by the last flicker of enthusiasm for gothic fiction’, which, he argues, had been a decline since Radcliffe ‘laid down her pen’ after the publication of The Italian in 1797.16 He follows Sadleir in placing Sleath’s work between that of Regina Maria Roche, author of Clermont , and Eliza Parsons, author of The Castle of Wolfenbach and The Mysterious Warning , which are listed by Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey.17 He agrees with Sadleir and Summers’s surmise that Sleath was a Catholic, noting her ‘references to the Catholic faith are warm … her works suggest that, to her, peace could be felt only in the solitude of a cloister, in holy retirement, and an air of solemnity hangs about her descriptions of rites such as Baptism or the Requiem Mass’. Sleath’s representation of Catholicism contrasts with the diabolical priests in Francis Lathom’s The Midnight Bell , for example, and is, Varma argues, unlike the more traditional setting ‘for hypocrisy, intrigue, and dark Satanic schemes’.18 All commentators were wrong in their assumptions of Sleath’s religious propensity: she was married to a Protestant vicar for 24 years

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(after she set aside writing fiction) and so her attitude to religion was to draw sympathetic figures, irrespective of their denomination. Rebecca Czlapinski and Eric C. Wheeler undertook a thorough search of the Leicestershire archives and published their article, ‘The Real Eleanor Sleath’ in 2011 which contained detailed biographical information. Eleanor Sleath was born Eleanor Carter and baptised in the Loughborough Parish Church on 15 October 1770, the youngest child of Thomas Carter, a gentleman, and Elizabeth, his wife. Eleanor’s father died when she was three years old. There are no records of Eleanor’s upbringing, although arguably she was well-educated in literature because of the numerous epigraphs to her chapters, which feature quotations from English authors including Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton and Pope and from Italian authors including Petrarch and Aristo.19 In 1792, Eleanor married Joseph Barnabas Sleath, an officer cadet for the artillery of the Bengal Establishment; he became a surgeon and apothecary in Nuneaton, Warwickshire.20 Sadly, Eleanor and John lost their only child in September 1794, and John died four weeks later, leaving Eleanor a widow and deeply in debt at the age of 24. These debts were discharged over the next years by her brother, mother and brother-in-law. After a period of illness in 1795, Eleanor began to meet with a group of literary-minded neighbours which included the Reverend John Dudley, vicar of Humberstone. During this time, Eleanor wrote The Orphan of the Rhine and, having moved with her brother to Scraptoft Hall, not far from Humberstone, she completed her second novel Who’s the Murderer? in 1802. The various families socialised and travelled together including a visit to Bath and then to North Wales with Dudley and his wife, Ann. However, in 1808, Dudley noted in a letter that his wife’s jealousy had been enflamed by sarcastic comments by Eleanor’s sister-in-law, resulting in a ‘slanderous scandal, a strained marriage, and shattered friendships’.21 Attempts to reconcile the two women were in vain: Ann ‘became hostile to Mrs. S. and injured her indiscreetly and secretly in various ways’, including circulating a rumour Eleanor had given birth to John Dudley’s child. Her actions forced Dudley to charge some of his former circle of friends with slander and defamation.22 Ann Dudley was clearly suffering from delusions, believing, for example, her sister-in-law was planning to murder her. This resulted in the Dudleys separating. Over the next few years, Eleanor completed three of her novels, The Bristol Heiress , The Nocturnal Minstrel and Pyrenean Banditti. In 1811, Ann Dudley obtained a Deed of Separation from her husband. Eleanor’s brother died in 1813, and his estate was divided between his wife and sisters, giving Eleanor a comfortable income. She moved to Loughborough in 1816 after the publication of Glenowen and, although there are few records from this period, it is assumed she and John Dudley continued to see each other. Ann Dudley died in February 1823 and Eleanor and John were married just weeks later on 1 April. Eleanor assumed the role of a vicar’s wife at Sileby until her death on 5 May 1847.23

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It is not known whether Eleanor Sleath began writing for her own interest, at the encouragement of her literary circle, or as a means of discharging her debts. Clearly her early works are influenced by Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho and Regina Maria Roche’s Clermont and The Children of the Abbey. This influence is apparent both in terms of plot devices and the wild sensationalised landscapes which Sleath uses to convey the mood, along with the pathetic fallacy of the tempestuous weather, brooding ruinous castles. However, this was, perhaps, to appeal to late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury sensibility, rather than introducing scenes of Radcliffean terror or horror. Sadleir notes this ‘sensibility with sensation’ is ‘more terrific than Clermont but more melodious and picturesque than the horror-novel pure and simple’.25 Sleath’s narrative forms are usually linear, although there may be pauses in the story for a character to explain their history and circumstances: La Roque’s backstory is explained in the second volume of The Orphan of the Rhine. These intermissions are not overly complicated compared to the structure of Karl Kahlert’s The Necromancer, for example, which relies on the device of miseen-abyme to convey the stories within the stories. In Sleath’s writings, the past is explained through more plausible devices such as the discovery of letters or a diary. While most of Sleath’s novels have the mood integral to the plot, this is not true of them all. The Bristol Heiress , for example, is a contemporary story which focusses on the ‘errors’ of educating a woman for a fashionable society rather than living a moral life. However, the female characters in The Bristol Heiress , in common with Sleath’s other adult-focussed novels, are generally strong. They discover unknown reserves of courage and maintain their dignity in the face of adversity and male oppression, and are unlike the pathetic protagonists Ellen Moers criticises as the product of male authors of gothic fiction.26 As such, they are the kinds of characters to appeal to Catherine and Isabella in Northanger Abbey, and even to Austen herself. As Tenille Nowak observes, Austen references subtly The Orphan of the Rhine on two occasions in Northanger Abbey: the references to Laurentina and St. Aubin are both found in Sleath’s novel and are not, as is often believed, mistaken references to Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, especially since the list of ‘horrid’ novels is included amid the three references to ‘Laurentina’s skeleton’.27 Nowak points out similarities between The Orphan of the Rhine and Northanger Abbey, suggesting that Austen was influenced by Sleath’s work and was not parodying the penchant for gothic fiction. Clearly Sadleir is incorrect in his surmise that Austen is making ‘courteous fun of Mrs. Radcliffe herself’ nor is she ‘most bitterly derid[ing] that lady’s profit-seeking followers’.29 In all of Sleath’s novels the protagonist loses their principal protector (parent, guardian or husband) early in the narrative and is left vulnerable and often isolated from both their home and their social class. Moers describes this as ‘a young woman who is simultaneously persecuted victim and courageous heroine’.30 This might not be a case of employing tropes from other

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novels such as Emily in Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho or even Laurina abandoning Victoria in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya: Sleath lost her own father when she was young and could be projecting her own experiences onto her characters. In Glenowen, the children’s mother dies in the opening pages; however, this novel focusses on the spiritual and educational maxims the children learn. While Glenowen has descriptions of apparently supernatural events, they are diluted when describing the ‘fairy’ Peribanou and her palace so they are suitable for the youthful audience: this contrasts with the terrifying hauntings of midnight music emanating from the forest and the sinister apparitions in The Nocturnal Minstrel . Yet, despite the fears generated by the characters’ superstitious beliefs, neither The Orphan of the Rhine nor Who’s the Murderer? rely on the supernatural to drive forward their plots: the machinations of evil men are more terrifying than the supernatural. In all cases, the narratives conclude with satisfying, rational explanations. Tompkins lists themes used by Ann Radcliffe and borrowed by other authors, although she barely mentions Sleath in this study.31 Yet, Sleath employs many of these devices (and sometimes on multiple occasions) including: the pastoral family home at the beginning; the portrait of a mysterious woman; the mystery surrounding the protagonist’s birth and the package of papers which may solve this mystery; the discovery of a partially ruined building in which a persecuted family take refuge and which is the dwelling of numerous banditti; jewellery which helps to identify the protagonist and the return of a character who is previously assumed to be dead. A principal element employed by both Radcliffe and (often) by Sleath is to locate the action on the Continent or in the past, a trope seen in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). This distances the reader from the narrative’s events and positions them in a time containing, as David Punter observes, ‘excess and exaggeration, the product of the wild and uncivilised’.32 It allows a chronological and physical space between the readers and the events: while the maxims employed in the texts may be relevant to the contemporary readership, they are not as sermonising if they are applied to ‘distant’ characters. It allows the authors to engage with the themes of the Sturmund-Drang novels being written in Germany which explored the extremes of emotions. Characters could explore these emotions without their being applied to the sensibility of their contemporary literature. Additionally, the protagonist is often distanced from their family home and sent into unknown lands; this further isolates them not only physically and psychologically from their familiar environment but also from their familiar society and class. This often positions the protagonist in the dubious custody of a family member who does not prioritise her well-being and may pressurise her towards marriage with the intent of defrauding her of her inheritance. However, the ‘armchair travels’ appealed to the general readership being, as Moers notes, ‘a device to send maidens on distant and exciting journeys without offending the proprieties’.33

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Sleath’s first novel, The Orphan of the Rhine, employs many devices described above, most notably locating the story in the sublime European landscapes, and presenting a strong, but vulnerable, protagonist who has mysteries surrounding her parentage and is subject to the machinations of a manipulative male oppressor. Sadleir describes The Orphan of the Rhine as a ‘genuine product of the influence of Mrs Radcliffe’.34 His opinion is generous compared with the Critical Review’s description that the story is a ‘vapid and servile imitation’ of Ann Radcliffe’s ‘creative genius’.35 In the first half of The Orphan of the Rhine, the protagonist is Julie de Rubine, who, being orphaned at a young age, lived with her aunt who forced her into a marriage with the Marchese de Monteferrat. Julie gave birth to a son, Enrico, before the Marchese claimed the marriage was invalid, because a ‘fake’ priest performed the ceremony. The ‘bogus’ marriage also appears in Sleath’s third novel, The Bristol Heiress , which will be discussed below. Julie is approached by the Marchese’s representative who tells her to take care of a baby girl who Julie christens Laurette; she is told to leave her home in the Swiss Jura mountains and take up residence in the Castle of Elfinbach, a name that translates as ‘Elfin stream’, evoking a suggestion of supernatural elements surrounding the castle. On the journey to Elfinbach, Julie aids a man named La Roche who claims he was travelling to a monastery, but, when Julie later finds that he is Marchese’s prisoner in Elfinbach Castle and subsequently frees him, he reveals he is the Conte de la Croisse. It transpires their fates are linked: the Conte had married the Marchese’s daughter, Helena; Julie had been courted by a man called the Conte’s son who had been killed on the Marchese’s orders. Unfortunately, in helping the Conte to escape, Julie loses her bracelet, which is later found by Paoli, who arranges for Julie to be abducted by banditti and thus removed from the narrative, and so Laurette is alone in the castle under the protection of the Marchese. Julie believed Enrico and Laurette were half-siblings and raised them as such. Enrico leaves to join the army; when he returns, he asks Laurette to marry him. Her rejection is only because he is unable to support a family at this time. A monk gives Laurette a portrait of her mother and, although he promises more information, he is prevented by Paoli, who then removes Laurette to the Marchese’s castle in Salzburg. The Marchese tries to persuade Laurette to marry him, but she refuses and Paoli confines her in a hunting lodge to starve to death. Enrico is able to find the lodge, frees Laurette and then meets the Conte who has located Julie in a convent, as well as obtaining a dying confession from Paoli that Enrico is the Marchese’s lawful son. Although the Marchese had attempted to organise a mock marriage with Julie, Paoli had arranged for a genuine priest to perform the ceremony, thinking he might coerce the Marchese in the future. The monk who had given Laurette her mother’s portrait was her own grandfather and she discovers she is a Contessa in her own right and is free to marry Enrico. The style of The Orphan of the Rhine may have been considered ‘imitative’ of Radcliffe’s works, but the Critical Review’s opinion that it is a ‘penance’

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for those who ‘have sinned in suffering’ themselves ‘to be seduced by the blandishments of elegant fiction’ is perhaps more focussed on the general distaste for gothic fiction than for the actual novel itself.36 The novel allowed Sleath to engage with a plot that was shrouded in mystery and was founded on the complex relationships between the characters, and most particularly when the protagonist hopes to form a relationship with a young man, a situation which is beset with almost insurmountable obstacles. In particular, Sleath’s protagonists face up to the often-terrifying challenges they face, unlike Radcliffe’s characters who often faint when facing oppression. The novel also allowed Sleath to engage with the vivid descriptions of the landscapes; as Montague Summers notes, she was ‘personal acquainted’ with the area around Salzburg.37 This experience is employed once more in Sleath’s second novel, Who’s the Murderer? when she delivers a wider range of both humble and affluent characters in rural and urban locations across France and Italy, and the plot surrounding the identity of the child is significantly more complex: she is given into the care of a Gascon widow, who in turn gives her to Mme de Villeneuve and her brother M. de Sevignac who then die themselves, thus Cecilia’s origins are shrouded in a seemingly impenetrable mystery. The title of Who’s the Murder? suggests it contains the most horrific elements of Sleath’s novels, but it is, sadly, misleading. The murder is not an integral part of the novel. It is alluded towards the end of the first volume: a body is discovered while the characters shelter in a dilapidated mansion occupied by banditti. It is not until the novel’s conclusion that the significance becomes apparent. As with The Orphan of the Rhine and the later Pyrenean Banditti, this novel is set in Europe, beginning in Provence and their travels take the characters to Genoa, Pisa, Venice and Florence; it is in the early 1760s, a few years before Sleath’s own birth. As noted above, Cecilia is given into the care of elderly aristocrats, Mme de Villeneuve and M. de Sevignac, and Cecilia is reminded throughout the novel that although her birth is genteel, it is not noble, a situation which is most notable when she attracts the attention of Varàno, a young noble, who, as the only son of an ancient family, is not free to follow his heart towards marriage, but must adhere to the commands of his family.38 Mme de Villeneuve dies at the beginning of the novel, and M de Sevignac ails shortly afterwards. Consequently, it is decided he should travel to Italy for his health. The first volume focusses on the journey through Radcliffean landscapes. Notably, the travellers shelter in the banditti’s mansion where Varàno finds the ‘warm and yet bleeding body of the murdered traveller’.39 However, de Sevignac’s health deteriorates and he dies shortly after arriving in Pisa, although not before telling Cecilia that details of her parents are in a package to be released to her after his death. At the start of the second volume, Cecilia wishes to see de Sevignac one last time, but the only occasion is at midnight in the middle of a thunderstorm creating a truly horrific episode.40 Discovering she has apparently not been included in De Sevignac’s will, Cecilia’s assumes the role of a heroine

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as her well-being comes under the dubious charge of her uncle, Boraccio. He initially restricts Cecilia’s movements and attempts to force her into a marriage with Count Morsino to defraud her of her inheritance. When Cecilia refuses, his petitions become more aggressive and attempting to force her into marriage, he incarcerates Cecilia in a remote castle where she suffers hallucinatory episodes and nightmares, finding letters and blood-stained clothes presumably from decades before. Jane Spencer discusses how ‘the focus of the Gothic novel is on the heroine’s mind: it is not only what happens to her but how she reacts to it. Her travels and her adventures can be seen as journeys into the self … The mysterious castles that imprison her and the sublime landscapes on which she gazes can be interpreted as projections of herself’.41 Cecilia’s escape is facilitated by the doctor who restores her back to health. As the complications of Cecilia’s background are unravelled, she realises she is connected to an acquaintance she met earlier, but Varàno, seeing the characters together, believes he has a rival for Cecilia’s affections and his jealousy causes him to act impulsively, leaving Cecilia vulnerable to Morsino’s scheming. The final volume concerns the murdered man discovered by Varàro, and the trial of his accused killer. Cecilia is placed in a dilemma apparently willing to submit to Morsino’s proposals of marriage to purchase the accused murderer’s freedom; this is again, misinterpreted by Varàno as he does not understand Cecilia’s loyalty to the accused. This conflict of loyalty is seen again in Pyrenean Banditti as Adelaide remains loyal to De Launé. However, a critical piece of information (which appears almost out of nowhere like deus ex machina) ensures the murderer is convicted and executed that Cecilia’s heritage is explained by a character believed dead for the whole novel, and thus the complications preventing Cecilia’s marriage to Varàno are removed. Although Sleath received a scathing review for The Orphan of the Rhine, the Monthly Magazine (1803) praised ‘considerable talents’ in Who’s the Murderer? which demonstrates ‘a richness of language which does not often issue from the Minerva press’.42 While the press was considered to be publishing novels ‘to sate the appetite of the public for novels and romances’,43 and, publishing a genre that was distained,44 Rictor Norton observes this popular literature appealed to ‘all classes of readers’ rather than just a literary élite.45 As such, it could be used to edify a wide audience, and Sleath’s narrators often intrude to deliver a maxim directly to the audience. The Critical Review (1810) praised The Bristol Heiress for offering ‘that class of readers, who take up a book merely for the most indolent exercise of the attention, [and who] would often be betrayed into instruction, and pass their hour with at least the possibility of receiving some benefit’. Along with the protagonist, the reader observes ‘the rational exercise of the benevolent affections’ through which they learn ‘rightly to appretiate the worth of all human enjoyments, and to be convinced of the force of the moral truth stated above’.46 The review concludes ‘upon the whole we are inclined to give much praise to this work, and to say, that if people will read modern novels, let them read the Bristol Heiress’.47

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Sleath’s third novel, The Bristol Heiress , or The Errors of Education, contains the fewest gothic elements of her novels, although some of the tropes parallel those of conventional gothic novels but in a contemporary setting. Caroline Percival is the only daughter of a well-established, but widowed Bristol banker, she is promised ‘a fine fortune’ and has beauty to ‘command the affections of any man’.48 Her aunt, Lady Harcourt, takes Caroline under her tutelage to teach her how to conduct herself in ‘polite’ society. Consequently, Caroline’s father, her only protector, relinquishes her upbringing to her aunt. Influenced by her Aunt’s desires for her aggrandisement, Caroline enters an unfamiliar and unforgiving environment as she seeks a potential husband with a fortune and title to better herself. In Caroline’s case, even though her father is alive, Caroline is distanced from him and her contact with him is manipulated by other characters’ interests. She faces a psychological immurement as she becomes conditioned to conform to what is ‘acceptable’ behaviour. However, the apparent aristocratic respectability is only a veneer, and there is deep immorality lurking beneath the excesses. Caroline is brought into a world so different from her own as she becomes bound up in the societal requirements, and this claustrophobia leads her into a moral quagmire. As it is, her father dies penniless, and so Caroline ceases to be of interest to her Aunt and society and, following an event which is misinterpreted (or deliberately twisted) into a scandal, Caroline loses her aunt’s patronage and is forced to rely on the support of less-affluent relatives. Caroline’s situation mirrors that of Cecilia in Who’s the Murderer as she is placed in the care of her aunt following the death of her foster parents. Thus, although she is not held captive in the same way as Cecilia: Caroline’s dress, social activities and thoughts are all dictated to her. While Caroline is ‘free’ to marry within the constraints of society, as noted above, The Bristol Heiress shares a plot device with The Orphan of the Rhine regarding the ‘sham’ marriage as the tragic heroine is deceived into surrendering her virtue. In The Bristol Heiress , Matilda Cecil, a poor woman befriended by Caroline, believed she was marrying the son of a gentleman called Walsingham. It is later revealed ‘Walsingham’ is the assumed name of a baronet’s son named Sydney Hervey (the man to whom Caroline is betrothed, leading her to believe she is the intended victim of deception). As Sleath herself discovered, one can easily fall from favour with a few wellplaced words and assertions based on the opinions of the social ‘elite’, the characters’ fates may reflect the malicious and hurtful gossip circulating about her and John Dudley. Caroline witnesses how an acquaintance becomes a social pariah and is hounded out of fashionable circles, and, as he is ‘no longer seen, [he] was soon no longer remembered … as if the grave had already closed over him’.49 This incident foreshadows Caroline’s own, inevitable, ignominy as she turns from the path of Christian morality and instead falls into the temptation of gambling and trying to conceal her losses. This disreputation is compounded when Caroline marries Lord Castleton, but her husband is deceived into believing that she is having an affair. Caroline’s reputation is

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ruined by a handful of insinuations leading Castleton to view his wife’s activities with suspicion. Fearing the worst, Castleton removes his wife to one of his seats in Cumberland. Ostracised by her husband, her protector, pregnant and vulnerable, Caroline spends three physically and mentally exhausting days travelling. There is a Radcliffean description of scenery, reminiscent of Emily’s description of the Apennines as she approaches the castle of Udolpho. Instead of admiring them, Caroline sees the mountains as ‘dreadful barriers destined to separate her for ever from civilised society’.50 The landscapes are filled with negative imagery: it is an ‘awful wildness’, the route is ‘terrible’, the woods ‘conceal’, the waters ‘gleamed darkly’ and the cliff are ‘giants threatening their approach’. A ‘violent’ storm ‘burst upon them and drenched them with cold melting snow’. It is ironic that the castle gate’s ‘dark turrets’, which might fill the travellers with dread, are instead met with ‘desire and joy’ as the travellers conclude their arduous journey.51 But even at the castle, Caroline is troubled by nightmares in which her husband appears covered in blood. Caroline’s environment may be comfortable, but it is still a prison, confirmed by a letter ‘From the most injured of husbands ’ describing her recent conduct.52 While she is guilty of many issues raised in the letter, she has often been manipulated, or Castleton has misinterpreted the circumstances, either because of his own insecurities, or because of malicious comments. As a result, Castleton arranges Caroline should be kept in the castle, with no contact with the outside world. The castle descriptions are then ominous: behind doors locked with ‘rusty bolts’, there is a ‘dreary passage’, a ‘broken’ staircase is ‘wide, but gloomy’, and ‘time-worn’ portraits of ‘ancient inhabitants of the castle’ are ‘discolouring with unwholesome dews’. The domestics recount the story of a previous mistress who was sequestered in the castle like Caroline. Rumours circulating for nearly two centuries are unclear whether she was murdered for infidelity, or because her husband had taken another woman, but the domestics claim she haunts the castle.Caroline realises the earlier Countess’s circumstances match her own and she fears she might share her fate. Consequently, her time in the castle, and the religious guidance she receives from the local vicar, actually a former potential love interest from when she lived in Bristol, forces her to reflect on her own conduct. Caroline’s fortunes are resolved when ‘The Errors of Education’ are revealed to be concerned with etiquette and establishing oneself in genteel society. While incarcerated in the castle, Caroline learns to recognise the corruption and moral degradation that corrodes ‘polite’ society beneath the surface of respectability: ‘people of that description … may, for a time, allure, but they command esteem; and every kind of connexion that has not esteem for its basis, must be transient and unsatisfactory’.53 The deathbed confession from a character who had manipulated both Caroline and her husband, along with the entreaties of Caroline’s loyal friends (repaying a kindness she did), convinces Lord Castleton of his own errors and reunites him with his wife as they both admit their mistakes and beg forgiveness. Finally, it is revealed the

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former countess’s murder or suicide was founded ‘upon error or superstition’, and the Countess was detained for her safety because of her insanity. The haunted castle in The Bristol Heiress became the focus of Sleath’s fourth novel, The Nocturnal Minstrel , which contains more gothic elements than any of her other works. The novel’s language feels Shakespearean and there are allusions to Touchstone, the jester from As You Like It and the Ghost in Hamlet. Like Castleton’s seat in The Bristol Heiress , the Fitzwalter castle is located near to the Scottish border. The story is set in the early sixteenth century shortly after the appearance of Perkin Warbeck as pretender to the Throne. The Baron, Geoffrey Fitzwalter, had died in Flanders just over a year before and because his allegiances were to the House of York and, his estates were forfeited to the Crown, although the Baroness’s father shrewdly negotiated for his daughter to hold onto the estates until her death. The Baroness, Gertrude Fitzwalter, like Sleath herself, is widowed in her early 20s. She hears spectral music from a ‘spirit of the wood’54 and despite great efforts from her courtiers, no one is able to identify the invisible musician. Yet, while Gertrude is intrigued by the music, finding it ‘pleasing and painful to her soul’ the other courtiers fear that the forest is haunted, and even the priest avoids it.55 The mysterious music is first heard when Gertrude is approached by a suitor, Sir Reginald Harcland. Despite the rejection of his suit, Harcland remains in the castle until Gertrude is commanded by royal authority to receive the Earl of Ormond with a view to being married. Thus, without a male protector, Gertrude is vulnerable, and her future is dependent on the decisions of others.56 This circumstance does allows Gertrude to ask Harcland to leave, although he takes offence at this and refuses to depart, eventually claiming to have seen the ghost of Baron Fitzwalter in a dream. Although a young maid is chastised for claiming to have seen the spectral figure, and Winifred witnesses: ‘a tall white figure’ herself.57 The ghost’s presence becomes more apparent; however, the Earl of Ormond stresses he is only interested in Gertrude’s welfare, not her title and fortune and he volunteers to stay in the haunted chamber to discern the restless spirit’s purpose. Ormond falls asleep, but is woken by the ghost which leads him through subterranean passages, trapping him in the family tombs.58 Gertrude believes a malignant spirit has carried him away and there is a truly unsettling moment where the priest performs an apparently unsuccessful mass for the dead: the priest realises ‘our prayers … are not accepted. The spirits of the dead are abroad’ and the assembly flees in terror.59 Winifred observes that the apparition never appeared when Harcland was present, and suggests his return might dispel the spirit. At the same time, a mysterious wanderer claims to be able to lay the spirit. The traveller, it transpires, is none other than the ‘dead’ baron, and the ‘spirit’ he has come to exorcise has been created by the machinations of Reginald Harcland, who has conspired with Winifred to exploit Gertrude’s grief and to remove Ormond as a potential rival, first by claiming he had dreamed of the Baron, and then appearing in the form of a spectre to lead Ormond into the crypt. Ormond is released and honoured as a

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family friend for his attempts to protect Gertrude. Baron Fitzwalter, the apparently spectral musician of the forest, has had his reputation restored by the king and is able to restore himself to his family, while Harcland and Winifred are dealt with accordingly for the perfidy. Varma describes The Nocturnal Minstrel as Sleath’s ‘best work’ and an ‘elaborate pageant of chivalry’.60 Although The Nocturnal Minstrel hearkens back to the traditions of gothic literature, to place the narrative in a distant, unrefined era, and Sleath maintains complicated character motivations, this feels very distant from Sleath’s other novels. The action is confined to the Fitzwalter Castle, so she is unable to engage in the dramatic descriptions of Romantic landscapes. Likewise, with it being a considerably shorter novel, Sleath is unable to bring in the vast casts of characters and to hide among them plot devices which will become integral to the ending. Critically, although there are scenes that focus on the presence of the spirit, and some of them are terrifying, it remains that Gertrude has never truly faced any danger and the nocturnal music and apparent hauntings have been staged by her husband and a suitor. She clearly prefers her protagonists to be challenged, firstly in terms of having their protection and identity eroded from them, and then placing them in real danger, from the machinations of evil men, so that they may show both their vulnerability, and in doing so, discover their strengths to bring them to a satisfying conclusion. This she achieves in her final major novel, Pyrenean Banditti. Set in Gascony in 1653, this story explains how the Count of St. Angouléme loved a young heiress, but she rejected his suit and instead married his brother, the Chevalier. The Count marries and as they have no children of their own, the Countess dotes on her orphan nephew, Theodore. Animosity remains between the two brothers; but after a decade (and the death of his wife) the Chevalier contracts his brother and wife to manage his estate jointly after his death, and most particularly to be the guardians of his daughter Adelaide. Consequently, when he dies shortly after, Adelaide is forced to rely on her Guardians. She is comforted by the Countess, who reveals she is a virtual prisoner in the castle as she has set aside a half of her wealth to Theodore, and refuses to sign it over to her husband. Once Theodore leaves with a commission in the army, the Count tells him never to return to the castle. The Count’s attempts to take the greatest advantage of the situation and shortly afterwards, he receives a letter challenging Adelaide’s legitimacy and therefore her right to inheritance. According to the letter, Adelaide’s mother was called De Launé, a woman who committed her daughter to the Chevalier before she died. Gaspard De Launé arrives shortly afterwards claiming he is Adelaide’s father; thus Adelaide has not only lost her parents and guardians as her protectors, but also her own identity, no longer certain of her parentage, her family, her status or even her name. When walking around her own castle’s grounds, Adelaide is abducted by two ‘ruffians’ and held prisoner in a remote tower in a castle owned by the

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Marquis de Ponteville, which is reputed to be haunted. This is the nexus where the gothic elements meet, and the adjectives are sinister and oppressive. Adelaide herself witnesses an apparition: ‘pale, ghastly, and smeared with blood’.61 While incarcerated in this tower, Adelaide receives assistance from another prisoner named Perouse and has been able to slip out of his cell, unseen by his captors. Adelaide is told the Count has ‘betrayed [her] into the hands of a villain’ being the Marquis upon whose orders she was seized, and warned that she must escape with him to flee the Marquis’s villainy.62 Facing physical, moral and supernatural threats, Adelaide escapes with Perouse and he hides her with Madame St. Clair, one of his relatives, and Adelaide assumes her name. Thus, she loses more of her identity, no longer having the name of the Chevalier St. Angouléme or Gaspard De Launé and instead becomes Mademoiselle St. Clair. Adelaide initially feels secure in this new environment, but she becomes aware of new challenges: following Adelaide’s casual comment that Perouse has done her a service she cannot repay, Madame. St. Clair tells her ‘There are ways of returning obligations’ and Adelaide realises, to her horror, that there is a price to be paid for her rescue.63 Adelaide is also told of people, presumably the Marquis’s henchmen, who are enquiring after her. Madame St. Clair warns her ‘We cannot be too cautious; for should the Marquis once discover you in this place, we, your protectors, as well as yourself, have every thing to dread’.64 In addition, De Launé appears. He has been searching for Adelaide, and while he describes himself as ‘friend and deliverer’ to his daughter, she is told that he consents to Perouse’s proposals for marriage.65 He places an expensive ring on Adelaide’s finger as a ‘gift’, and although Adelaide’s fear that this is a ploy to place Perouse’s ring on her finger is unfounded, she is reproached for her decision and warned she would be vulnerable to the Marquis without Perouse’s protection. It is revealed that the Marquis’s reported actions are a ‘flam’ to make Adelaide fear for her safety and keep herself concealed; a ploy orchestrated by De Launé to make Adelaide marry Perouse. With the help of a loyal servant, Jacques, Adelaide discovers that Madame St. Clair has worked alongside De Launé and Perouse to maintain this deception. Adelaide is given refuge in a castle and its owner, Montroi, stays with Adelaide and protects her until the narrative’s conclusion, although Adelaide does not reveal her name to him. Despite De Launé duplicity, Adelaide still acknowledges him as her father who deserves her loyalty. Consequently, when it is revealed the ring he gave her was stolen from the Marquis de Ponteville, Adelaide refuses to give up his name, even though she is accused of being an accomplice and threatened with torture if she gives no evidence. The loyalty and defence of someone accused, despite physical threats to the heroine, is a device used in Who’s the Murderer? The Inquisitorial interrogations seen in other texts are replaced by the Court of Law, but, like Cecilia, Adelaide is placed in the moral position of concealing evidence in order to protect her family. Towards the end of the court hearing, the Countess arrives to give evidence (again a dea ex machina as seen in Who’s

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the Murderer?). She recognises Montroi as her beloved nephew Theodore: she realises the jealous Count had spread the rumour of Theodore’s death, while Theodore had been told the Countess was insane. The Count has now died, and his final confession was that Adelaide is the daughter of his brother, the Chevalier, and not the daughter of De Launé, a robber and murderer who was employed as part of a conspiracy to defraud Adelaide of her inheritance. It had been the Count’s intention to kill Adelaide in the haunted tower, but De Launé instead planned for her to marry his son, who assumed the name of Perouse. Finally, it transpires that the rumours surrounding the haunted Castle de Ponteville were perpetuated to keep the curious away from the banditti’s machinations. Sleath’s final novel, Glenowen, is in a different style from her previous works. It is a gentle story or morality tale focussing on childish imaginations, superstition and morality. The story describes how Charles and Rosa are orphaned as children. Unlike many gothic narratives, their mother’s death does not leave them vulnerable: they are cared for by their nurse, Goodwoman Morgan. Charles’s education is provided by the new curate. The children’s integrity is shown by Rosa wanting to learn to knit to make stockings for a poor girl at her school, Jessy, and then befriending her when she sees other children tormenting her; meanwhile, Charles rescues a dying sailor with money he received as a reward for good work in his studies. The children’s virtuous behaviour is initially rewarded with a box of gifts. However, the children are soon invited to a ‘fairy palace’ in the hills, where a ‘majestic’ woman lives. The children are fervent followers of their Christian faith, but there are hints of superstition throughout the novel: Rosa believes the woman is the incarnation of the fairy Peribanou from the Arabian Nights.66 The sense of superstition continues as the narrator describes how ‘Wales may … be termed the present scene of fairy land’ noting ‘a druidic stone, where the fairies were reported by the villagers to make rings and perform their midnight revels’ and Rosa’s belief in fairies is due to their being interwoven into Welsh traditions.67 Despite the focus on scripture and didactic lessons, there remains a strong emphasis on the fairy, noting there are both benevolent and malignant fairies and ‘rewards and punishments were awarded by them to the merits or demerits of those with whom they interfered’.68 Rosa experiences a ‘sort of superstitious terror’ when she realises she is the focus of a fairy’s interest.69 When the children are in Peribanou’s ‘palace’ in the mountains, they note her uncanny ability to ‘know everything’ including their good deeds. The fairy’s kindness creates a moral conflict, as the children are reminded their actions are accountable to God, rather than to the fairy. Rosa manages to separate the ‘superstitious veneration’ for the Fairy and her duty to God, recognising it was ‘naughty to think more of the Fairy than of God Almighty’.70 Charles, on the other hand, loses focus when he forgets his duty and chooses to watch other children flying a kite, instead of watching for Rosa who falls and hurts herself. Overwhelmed with self-recrimination, Charles walks to Peribanou’s palace on his own to return her gifts, believing

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he is undeserving, although his actions lead the Fairy to praise his actions. When Peribanou brings Charles back to Glenowen, Nurse Morgan has moved to a more spacious property and as with Sleath’s other novels, the apparently supernatural elements are revealed to have been performed by a natural agency: Peribanou reveals she is not a fairy, but a woman who was attached to the children’s father, but her own father, who disapproved of such a match, took her away to India where she was married, widowed and inherited a large fortune. When she returned to Glenowen, she vowed to look after her former companion’s orphans. There is a strong moral at the conclusion: even if you suffer hardship if you do good things, then good things will happen to you. In a time which represented, as Varma argues, ‘the last flicker of enthusiasm for gothic fiction’ it is understandable that Sleath’s works fell away from the public spotlight. Sleath had suffered a great deal, and it is hoped that she found the same happiness as the wife of John Dudley as the children in Glenowen did with their benefactor. As the vicar’s wife, Sleath had no interest in furthering her literary career, and we can only speculate what works may have been created during Sleath’s 24-year ‘retirement’ from writing. Despite suggestions that Sleath’s works were ‘derivative’ and even ‘vapid’, they are complex, character-driven and cleverly constructed stories. Seemingly innocent events and discussions may be exaggerated to the detriment of the protagonist and apparently innocuous characters from the early parts of the story come to play a pivotal part at the novel’s conclusion. The characters are well-drawn, and the protagonists are depicted as both sensitive and vulnerable, but still discovering their inner resolve to strengthen them in the face of oppression. Situations such as those depicted in The Bristol Heiress present a scathing portrayal of London Society and the hypocrisy beneath the façade of respectability, while others such as The Nocturnal Minstrel present a chilling story of ghosts, betrayal, and enduring love. The Orphan of the Rhine, Who’s the Murderer? and Pyrenean Banditti take the readers through vividly described landscapes and distant European cities where the protagonists flee from male oppression, facing terrifying circumstances but discovering their inner strength and ultimately finding happiness. Finally, in each novel, but particularly, Glenowen, Sleath presents a gentle maxim to benefit the readers. Sleath’s novels do not deserve to be categorised as ‘horrid’ when considering the horrifying content of others on the list in Northanger Abbey, particularly The Necromancer and The Midnight Bell . However, the characters in The Orphan of the Rhine are placed in ‘horrid’ situations where they face both physical and psychological terror, and any depictions of horror are used sparingly, so that when they come, they are shocking and effective. As characters who overcome adversity, they would have appealed to Isabella and Catherine as they made their way through each of the novels. Clearly Austen had found value in Sleath’s works for her to ‘recommend’ it to her readers in her lists of contemporary and Romantic, sensibility gothic fiction.

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Notes 1. Dorothy Blakey, The Minerva Press, 1790–1820 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1939). 2. Douglass H. Thomson and Frederick S. Frank, ‘Jane Austen and the Northanger Novelists’, Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographical Guide, ed. Douglass H. Thomson, Jack G. Voller and Frederick S. Frank (Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 2002), 41–2. 3. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008), 25. 4. John Louis Haney, ‘Northanger Abbey’, Modern Language Notes, 16 (1901), 446. 5. Michael Sadleir, ‘The Northanger Novels: A Footnote to Jane Austen’, English Association Pamphlets, No. 68 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1927), 15. 6. Sadleir, 1927, 10. 7. Sadleir, 1927, 22. 8. Sadlier, 1927, 22; Michael Sadleir, Things Past (London, Constable, 1944), 186. 9. Eleanor Sleath, The Orphan of the Rhine, ed. and Introduction by Ellen Moody (Richmond, VA, Valancourt Press, 2014), 41. 10. Sleath, The Orphan of the Rhine, 54. 11. Sadleir, 1944, 187. 12. Sadleir, 1944, 187. 13. Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest (New York, Russell & Russell Inc., 1964), 29. 14. Devindra P. Varma, ‘Eleanor Sleath’, Notes and Queries, Vol. 14, Issue 5 (May 1967), 193. 15. Devindra P. Varma, ‘Introduction’, The Orphan of the Rhine by Eleanor Sleath (London, Folio Press, 1968), vii. 16. Devindra, P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (Metuchen, NJ and London, The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1987), 173. 17. Varma, 1968, viii. 18. Varma, 1968, ix. 19. Rebecca Czlapinski and Eric C. Wheeler, ‘The Real Eleanor Sleath’, Studies in Gothic Fiction, Vol. 2, Issue 1 (2011), 5. 20. Czlapinski and Wheeler, 6. 21. Czlapinski and Wheeler, 7. 22. Czlapinski and Wheeler, 8. 23. Leicester Journal, 7 May 1847, 3; Czlapinski and Wheeler, 9. 24. Ann Radcliffe, ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, The New Monthly Magazine 7 (1826), 145–52. 25. Sadleir, 1944, 180. 26. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (London, The Women’s Press Ltd, 1986), 137.

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27. Tenille Nowak, ‘The Orphan in the Abbey: Eleanor Sleath’s Influence on Jane Austen’s Composition of Northanger Abbey’, Studies in Gothic Fiction, Vol. 2, Issue 1 (2011), 42; Austen, 25–6, 59. 28. Nowak, 44, 46. 29. Sadleir, 1944, 172. 30. Moers, 91. 31. J.M.S. Tompkins, Ann Radcliffe and Her Influence on Later Writers (New York, Arno Press, 1980), 117–8. 32. David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fiction from 1765 to the Edwardian Age, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (London, Routledge, 1996), 5. 33. Moers, 126. 34. Sadleir, 1944, 80. 35. Thomas Jewett Hallowell, T. Smollett, and Laurence Hutton, The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature, series 2, vol. 27 (London, W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, September 1799), 356. 36. The Critical Review, series 2, vol. 27 (1799), 356. 37. Summers, 146. 38. Sleath, Who’s the Murderer? 35–36. 39. Sleath, Who’s the Murderer? 68. 40. Sleath, Who’s the Murderer? 129. 41. Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist : from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (London, Blackwell, 1986), 193. 42. The Monthly Magazine; or, British Register, vol. 15 (London, Richard Phillips, July 1803), 639. 43. The Monthly Magazine, 639. 44. Blakey, 115. 45. Rictor Norton, Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764–1840 (London, Leicester University Press, 2000), p. vii. 46. Thomas Jewett Hallowell, T. Smollett, and Laurence Hutton, The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature, series 3, vol. 19 (London, W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, January 1810), 97. 47. The Critical Review, series 3, vol. 19, 97. The authorship of this novel is erroneously ascribed to ‘Mrs. Heath’. 48. Eleanor Sleath, The Bristol Heiress; or, The Errors of Education, 5. vols. (London, Minerva Press for Lane, Newman and Co., 1809), I. 123–4. 49. Sleath, The Bristol Heiress, II. 258. 50. Sleath, The Bristol Heiress, V. 100. 51. Sleath, The Bristol Heiress, V. 104–6. 52. Sleath, The Bristol Heiress, V. 116. 53. Sleath, The Bristol Heiress, V. 221. 54. Eleanor Sleath, The Nocturnal Minstrel; or, The Spirit of the Wood, ed. and introduction by Devendra Varma (New York, Arno Press, 1972), I. 1. 55. Sleath, The Nocturnal Minstrel, I. 32.

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56. Sleath, The Nocturnal Minstrel, I. 66. 57. Sleath, The Nocturnal Minstrel, I. 167. 58. Sleath, The Nocturnal Minstrel, II. 26. 59. Sleath, The Nocturnal Minstrel, II. 48–9. 60. Devindra, P. Varma, ‘Introduction’, The Nocturnal Minstrel (New York: Arno Press, 1972), x–xi. 61. Sleath, Pyrenean Banditti, 63. 62. Sleath, Pyrenean Banditti, 70. 63. Sleath, Pyrenean Banditti, 95. 64. Sleath, Pyrenean Banditti, 103. 65. Sleath, Pyrenean Banditti, 113, 118. 66. ‘The Story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Peribanou’. 67. Eleanor Sleath, Glenowen; or, The Fairy Palace (London, Black and Co and J. Harris, 1815), 65–6. 68. Sleath, Glenowen, 66. 69. Sleath, Glenowen, 94. 70. Sleath, Glenowen, 149–50.

Bibliography Works by Eleanor Sleath Sleath, Eleanor. Glenowen; or, The Fairy Palace. London: Black and Co and J. Harris, 1815. Sleath, Eleanor. The Bristol Heiress; or, The Errors of Education. 5 vols. London: Minerva Press for Lane, Newman and Co., 1809. Sleath, Eleanor. The Nocturnal Minstrel; or, The Spirit of the Wood. Ed. and Introduction by Devendra Varma. New York: Arno Press, 1972. Sleath, Eleanor. The Orphan of the Rhine. Ed. and Introduction by Ellen Moody. Richmond, VA: Valancourt Press, 2014. Sleath, Eleanor. Pyrenean Banditti. Ed. and Introduction by Rebecca Czlapinski and Eric C. Wheeler. Kansas City, MO: Valancourt Books, 2011. Sleath, Eleanor. Who’s the Murderer? or, The Mystery of the Forest. Ed. and Introduction by J.S. Mackley. Richmond, VA: Valancourt Books, 2017.

Works Cited Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Blakey, Dorothy. The Minerva Press, 1790–1820. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939. Czlapinski, Rebecca and Eric C. Wheeler. ‘The Real Eleanor Sleath’. Studies in Gothic Fiction. Vol. 2, Issue 1 (2011): 5–12. Republished in Pyrenean Banditti. Haney, John Louis. ‘Northanger Abbey’. Modern Language Notes 16 (1901): 446–47. Hallowell, Thomas Jewett, T. Smollett, and Laurence Hutton. The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature. Series 2, Volume 27. London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, September 1799.

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Hallowell, Thomas Jewett, T. Smollett, and Laurence Hutton. The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature. Series 3, Volume 19. London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, January 1810. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. London: The Women’s Press Ltd, 1986. The Monthly Magazine; or, British Register, vol. 15. London: Richard Phillips, July 1803. Moody, Ellen. ‘Introduction’. The Orphan of the Rhine, by Eleanor Sleath. Richmond, VA: Valancourt Press, 2014. Norton, Rictor. Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764–1840. London: Leicester University Press, 2000. Nowak, Tenille. ‘The Orphan in the Abbey: Eleanor Sleath’s Influence on Jane Austen’s Composition of Northanger Abbey’. Studies in Gothic Fiction. Vol. 2, Issue 1 (2011): 38–54. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fiction from 1765 to the Edwardian Age. Vol. 1. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1996. Radcliffe, Ann. ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’. The New Monthly Magazine 7, 1826: 145–52. Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Ed. Bonamy Dobrée. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2008. Sadleir, Michael. ‘The Northanger Novels: A Footnote to Jane Austen’. English Association Pamphlets. No. 68. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927. Sadleir, Michael. Things Past. London: Constable, 1944. Spencer, Jane. The Rise of the Woman Novelist: from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. London: Blackwell, 1986. Summers, Montague. The Gothic Quest. New York: Russell & Russell Inc., 1964. Thomson, Douglass H. and Frederick S. Frank. ‘Jane Austen and the Northanger Novelists’ in Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographical Guide. Ed Douglass H. Thomson, Jack G. Voller and Frederick S. Frank. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Varma, Devindra P. ‘Eleanor Sleath’. Notes and Queries, Vol. 14, Issue 5, May 1967, 193. Varma, Devindra P. ‘Introduction’. The Orphan of the Rhine, by Eleanor Sleath. London: Folio Press, 1968. Varma, Devindra P. ‘Introduction’. The Nocturnal Minstrel; or, The Spirit of the Wood., by Eleanor Sleath. New York: Arno Press, 1972. Varma, Devindra P. The Gothic Flame. Metuchen, NJ and London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1987.

Gothic Science

Victor Frankenstein Sullies The Book of Splendour Robert K. Shepherd

The full Prometheus myth as we know it was pulled together in written form between around 750 and 550 B.C., the end of the story first. This concluding part—the trick played on Zeus, theft of fire and punishment by crucifixion—is Boeotian and Hesiodic,1 while the first references to the creation of Man from clay are Aesopian-Sapphic.2 It was the trickery-punishment narrative that most fascinated the Greeks up until around 450–410 B.C. when the “Aeschylean” Prometheia appeared (Prometheus Bound/Unbound/the Fire-Bringer).3 The dramas probably rekindled interest in the story as a whole, meaning that it is no accident that those Platonic dialogues on the subject of Man’s creation, its nature and purpose appear shortly afterwards.4 We shall be concentrating on the Symposium,5 written in the 380s but actually set some 30 years before, certain passages of which were reworked by Percy Bysshe and Mary Wolstonecraft Shelley (PBS, MWS), particularly the speeches of Aristophanes and that of Socrates himself (mediated through the voice of the prophetess Diotima of Mantinea) in Symposium 189c–I93d and 201a–212c, respectively. These deal with Man’s continual search for love, unity and balance with his “better half” (Aristophanes) and his path—again via Love—to an experience of divinity (Diotima). PBS and MWS,6 Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Thomas Love Peacock—both Shelley’s biographers—and the critic, essayist and poet Leigh Hunt formed a society of devotees to the study of Greek literature—the Athenians—between R. K. Shepherd (B) Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_10

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1815 and 1817. We are told7 that the Symposium, on PBS’ insistence, was more often the subject of study and debate than any other text; Shelley himself translated it in August 1817. He had also read aloud/translated Prometheus Bound for Mary around 13 July as she was working on the first completed version of Frankenstein.8 So three accounts of the creation of Man and its final cause as posited by Plato’s Aristophanes/Diotima and Aeschylus come together in Frankenstein. A somewhat unexpected fusion of didacticism and autobiographical detail relates Plato to the novel, a fact which highlights a remarkable feature of the Symposium. For the very first time in his career Socrates is driven out of his comfort zone and is forced to admit to himself that there may be a way for certain humans to actually experience the εδoς—pure Form—for themselves. There is more than a tincture of what was to become Neoplatonic thinking9 in the concept of the Ladder of Love which enables what amounts to oneness with the divine. The fact that it is a woman who makes Socrates think again about a philosophy of love based upon an exclusively homosexual model is in itself startling. A good deal of latent commentary upon PBS’ inability to put the theory of transcendent affection into practice underpins Frankenstein. The fact that an ideologist on this very theme deserted the mother of his child to elope with her obviously gave Mary much food for thought. His simultaneous graveside seduction, marriage proposal and outpourings on free love, science and occult mysticism provided the indigestion.10 That Mary was definitely headover-heels in love and still only an inexperienced 17-year-old does not mean to say that she was deluded. My belief is that she deployed Victor as a means of showing her future spouse exactly what self-centred absorption in an idea might do to a Platonic/Christian-Kabbalistic holy (marital) union—“hieros gamos”.11 Compare and contrast Victor, Diotima and Shelley. The former, I shall argue, has smashed the rungs of the Diotimic Ladder of Love—deviated from the path between creator and created and lover and loved one, as represented in so many cultures—notably in the Hebrew Kabbalah) by the Tree of Life and Knowledge. Frankenstein’s vision of himself as a Promethean benefactor is shattered even before he has it—just as soon as he witnesses the destruction of an oak tree by lightning as a teenager. Now one of the young Shelley’s most noteworthy escapades at Eton (where he was infamous for his interest in the “natural sciences” from Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa right through to that most famous of Kabbalists Isaac Newton and beyond) was the destruction of just such a tree with the aid of gunpowder and a magnifying glass.12 My argument here is that MWS knew enough about her husband’s hobbyhorses and reputation to use the reversal of this central arboreal symbol in Frankenstein as a warning to him about how such obsessions might blind one to simple human affection. The fact that PBS really grapples with the problems of shared love, knowledge and creation in Prometheus Unbound (1819–1820)—this as

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opposed to effectively sidestepping them in “Alastor” (1815)—shows just how seriously he took her warning. Let us return with the Shelleys to the classical sources and via those to esoteric Judaic texts. Aristophanes’ speech on the creation of mankind in the Symposium may well resemble simple tomfoolery, but there is a deal more to it. It is actually a reworking of Aesop fable 517. This features Prometheus as drunken demiurge who “stuck the female genitalia on male bodies and male members on the ladies”.13 In Plato’s Aristophanic account Zeus redesigns two botch-jobs on mankind. The original progenitors of three human sexes were pre-Olympian deities the sun (Helios-man) the earth (Gea-woman) and the moon (Selene-hermaphrodite). Their children were completely round like their parents, equipped with two sets of genitalia. Having repulsed their attack on Olympus, Zeus sliced them in half vertically and then had Apollo twist the faces to the front, genitals still at the back with an end-stitch at the navel to remind them of their sins. When they began to die out because the male/male, male/female and female/female parts pined away in longing for their “significant other halves”, the genitals were twisted to the front. Thus Aristophanes, a homosexual male in a society which privileged same sex behaviour (though preferably between males) could visualize the ex-hermaphrodites coupling as man and woman (usually bigamously) while those who had been doubled men or women to begin with could create noble and lasting homosexual relationships. When the laughter stops we begin to consider the serious side of parodic myth alteration. Now there do exist more obvious templates than this for Frankenstein’s creation of his monster-in Horace Odes 1.16,14 say, or Spenser The Faerie Queene II.x.vv.70–1.15 Frankenstein constructs a jigsaw puzzle rather than a duality. Aristophanes’ speech, then, is not terribly important as a construction manual, but as an essay in “creature and/or creator psychology” it speaks volumes. Mary P. Nichols (2004) points out that neither in their original spherical form nor as one-dimensional sexual “cut-outs” are humans capable of orientating themselves in the world, let alone the universe.16 As “roly-polies”, literally bowling around with the heavens and the earth rotating before their two-directional gaze, they know neither quite where they are nor where they have come from heaven or earth. Once sliced, they are further discouraged from answering these questions. Plato’s Aristophanes makes exactly the opposite point to that of Pico della Mirandola in the Oratio de hominis dignitate (1486), which is that whereas animals only look down at the ground, Man can look upward to God and consider the nature of his relationship with the divine.17 Zeus, on the other hand, turned (divided) Men and Women into navel-gazers. They are so redesigned physically and mentally as to be always looking forwards and, more importantly, downwards. Vague awareness of their former spherical state turns looking backwards or sideways difficult for fear of turning dizzy and falling over. And because their natural tendency is to look down, they are continually haunted by their own bellybuttons: indelibly etched into their collective memory is, first, the notion of

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some form of original sin, and, second, a vague recollection that they once had another shape which, although far from perfect, was at least a unity of two halves and not a continual sensation of the “better half’s” absence. Only the possibility of enjoying sex in greater comfort is advantageous, although Zeus has only facilitated this in order that they should keep their minds off their woes and his injustice, however fleetingly.18 It is this brevity and ultimate dissatisfaction with the short-lived ecstasy of orgasm that we find in Shakespeare Sonnet 129—“Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight”.19 It is to be noted that Aristophanes’ speech is followed by that of Agathon, a professional tragedian, who basically extols the inevitable conquest of Love and Beauty over suffering. What Plato seems to be implying by juxtaposing these two presentations is that Aristophanes, a writer of comedies, has just shown that sympathy for afflicted mankind may be evoked even in a bawdy speech slotted into an extra-theatrical setting. If the readers sneak a glance at their own umbilici tragicomic catharsis is achieved, with no end to the negatively liminal state of being insight for anyone. In comparison, Agathon’s opinion that suffering and acceptance are one of the true beautifies of love, seem to be somewhat unrealistic and pretentious at best, fit only for the performative arts and having relatively little to do with the real world.20 It is Aristophanes who is best able to evoke the tragic element of the human comedy. Now PBS does at least attempt to snatch victory from defeat for man in his fallen (two-legged) state. We see this in Prometheus Unbound. Yet MWS’ depiction of the creative process and its results is irredeemably bleak, the result of her insistence in stripping away the comic façade from the Platonic/Aristophanean creation myth and leaving only the tragic element exposed. What does any kind of union amount to if it is not that of twinned souls? The first version of Frankenstein was published on 1 January 1818. Although PBS did not begin writing his actual translation of the Symposium until 9 July of that year (when he and MWS were settled in Italy), Mary had had access to the Symposium since Peacock brought it to Marlow in August 1817.21 Since PBS was congenitally incapable of keeping his enthusiasms to himself,22 it is hard to believe that MWS was unacquainted with Plato’s account of the after-dinner drinking party while she was completing her first novel. Like Aristophanes’ original three spherical sexes, the monster experiences some difficulty (though temporary) in distinguishing between the up and the down, the physical and incorporeal; “I walked, and, I believe, descended; … dark bodies had surrounded me, impervious to my touch or sight”.23 More importantly, Frankenstein himself falls prey to his own version of this sense of imbalance. While still conscious of where he is, a combination of obsession, self-disgust struggling with ambition and sleeplessness causes him to fuse the earth (the graves he robs for body parts) with the artificial sky of his attic in which he pieces his creation together by moon-and candle-light; he begins to think of himself as a nocturnal scavenger, part vampirical in his

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unawareness of sun and seasonal change. He works in dimness under a bad and maddening sign—the moon; {T}he moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places. {Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? …. In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion. The summer months passed while I was thus engaged, heart and soul, in one pursuit. It was a most beautiful season; never did the fields bestow a more plentiful harvest or the vines yield a more luxuriant vintage, but my eyes were insensible to the charms of nature.24

Furthermore, this must amount to the first instance in the aeons-long history of creation myths in which the demiurge runs away in horror from the result of any loving (pro) creative act-his “son”; “He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and rushed down stairs”.25 He becomes increasingly aware that a creative endeavour which has separated him from Elizabeth, with whom his dying mother has already joined him in anticipation of holy matrimony, is bereft of the mutual affection which might have created a “son of his loins”. The suspicion that he is incapable of such affection begins to loom large. While his love for Elizabeth seems to be fairly strong (“No word, no expression could body forth the kind of relation in which she stood to me—my more than sister, since till death she was to be mine only.”26 ) he never actually refers to her as his fiancée. When a momentary withdrawal from his compulsive activity induces guilt about his neglect of family, he fails even to mention her by name; “And the same feelings which made me neglect the scenes around me caused me also to forget those friends who were so many miles absent, and whom I had not seen for so long a time”.27 Moreover, the retreat into his own laboratory reminds us a great deal of Jekyll-Hyde. Although Victor manages to drag himself back from this selfinflicted Aristophanic “halving” on several occasions, remember that while engaged in the first and optimistically inspired stage of creation, a kind of megalomania underpins his desire to “pour a torrent of light into our dark world”-presumably by re-animating the dead. Scientist he may well be, but it is Victor the necromancer talking here, and his lines recall those of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, the most selfishly ambitious and thoughtless version of that figure;

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Could’st thou make men to live eternally, Or being dead, raise them to life again, Then this profession were to be esteemed.

Faustus even wishes spirits that he has summoned to be his lackeys; Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please, Resolve me of all ambiguities, Perform what desperate enterprise I will?28

While this simply demonstrates how mentally and physically lazy Faustus is, how much a prey to whimsy and outright foolishness, Frankenstein’s desires and expectations of his “children” are altogether more ambitious and sinister. While he says nothing about his duty towards them, they certainly owe one to him-adoration; “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.”29 The major creative by-product of this perverse fatherhood is his own selfesteem. This is why Aristophanes has Zeus slice up rather than anihilate “fully rounded” humans: he relishes their offer of sacrifices in his honour.30 For Victor the monster will never be a real man, much less the kind of man he might consider his equal, the “perfect companion” envisioned by both Socrates and Robert Walton—“I have no friend. no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans.”31 He may believe that he has found such a companion in Frankenstein, but one feels that he is doomed to eventual disappointment. Victor has no friends of this sort nor feels that he wants any. It may be objected that both Clerval and, more importantly, cousin/stepsister/ future bride Elizabeth fulfil such a role. Yet theirs is the kind of bond for which familiarity has bred a species of affectionate superciliousness. Both are far too involved in what he considers unworldly pursuits: Elizabeth in poetry and fancy in general, Clerval in “so to speak, the moral relations of things”.32 His own obsession with “facts relative to the actual world”33 and their secret causes are of little interest to either, he says, neglecting to consider that a modicum of philosophy to temper his own headlong passions would be beneficial. When he tries to interest her in the works of the necromancers Elizabeth shows little enthusiasm, meaning that when he says that she became “the beautiful and adored companion of all my occupations and my pleasures”34 he is not entirely sincere. Once installed at Ingoldstadt the nearest he comes to making his kind of friend is the working and passing social relationship with M. Waldman. Even their emphasis is placed on the Professor’s qualified acknowledgement of the Renaissance necromaners, and one feels that Victor does not even follow his tutor’s advice to read “natural philosophy” to the letter, given that this would involve engagement with the religious convictions as well as the necromantic bent of

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Agrippa, Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. Once he has outstripped Waldman as a researcher, the relationship is all but over. From that moment forth Victor returns to the original Genevese circle of family and one close acquaintance (Clerval). As for Walton, circumstances have simply thrown them together, and the explorer makes a handy secretary. It follows from this that if even the four individuals referred to fall short, the monster falls further. This is true, if not for the obvious reasons. Frankenstein rejects him, will give him no name that is not a curse, because the being he has created (creature) represents all his own failures and failings. Long before he turned on the current he obviously saw just how ugly his biological jigsaw had turned out and must have been waiting for a transformative miracle. When none occurs he simply turns tail, already painfully aware that he is not “good” enough to be God, who would, and does, stand aside in dignified and gracious decorum from the image of His own beauty. This latter is the Lurian kabbalistic act of tzimzum, of the type of divine withdrawal which allows Man to develop and flourish. Before moving on to it, however, and placing it in context with the Platonic/Neoplatonic version of the creator/creature relationship suggested by Diotima in the Symposium, let us return to Prometheus, his clay-based humans and the Frankensteinian monster equivalent. Even in those stories in which Prometheus as creator does end up with a botched job, it is never really the Titan’s fault. Either his less intelligent brother Epimetheus (Hindsight personified as opposed to Promethean Foresight) makes a mess of distributing animal and human qualities, the Demiurge is called away from his work at an innoportune moment or a “sourcerer’s apprentice” in the form of the daemon Dolus (trickery) engages in unauthorized experiments of his own when his master is out.35 He is either drunk (Frankenstein is delerious) or the demiurge in the gnostic sense of the word— a secondary divinity who completes God’s work clumsily—has taken over. When Man tries to ape God, however, the results will be ape-like. The creature is thus placed beyond the pale of all-natural human love (bar, of course, Love in its most refined Platonic state as formalized by the ugly Socrates).36 The decidedly a philosophical, solipsistic and largely antisocial Victor does not let such considerations get in the way of his scientific/biological ambitions until the damage is already done. Prometheus steals fire from Hephaestus to ensure the survival of the race he loves, while the monster is left to stumble across (not even filch) the remains of a campfire and then figure out how to use and rekindle, burning himself in the process. The Aeschylan Prometheus showers his creation with the rudiments of sciences, arts and social skills.37 Without anyone to help him master language, let alone literature, the creature experiences all the disadvantages of self-education. His inability to distinguish between myth, history and the dialogical element in poetry leads him to treat Paradise Lost not just as a chronicle of historical events but even as a very confusing textbook on manners and behaviour. If he is no Adam (beloved of his Maker) then he must be satanic, a notion which seems to justify revenge not only upon his creator—he has read his own construction manual—but

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also upon all his family, friends and loved ones, dwellers in an Eden which he will never be able to enter. Moreover, the sight of Felix’s contentment with Saphy and the fact that her beauty must reflect the erotic charge which pervades Milton’s descriptions of the first Woman make him painfully aware that “no Eve soothed my sorrows nor shared my thoughts”.38 MWS actually plays Miltonic eroticism down here and not out of simple prudishness. What she wished to make clear, I think, was that the creature shares neither Victor’s obsessive self-reliance nor Walton’s yearning for wholly male platonic friendship. In this sense he is more sexually and emotionally mature than either; his mate would be his best friend. In the figure of Frankenstein we may see what the Marlovian Faust would have done had Lucifer permitted him to create life: ignore it if he could, attempt to rid himself of it should the thing either threaten him or what he believed he held dear. Frankenstein may well love Elizabeth in his way, but surely the fact that he experiences precognition of holding her corpse in his arms, coupled with the dire warning “I will be with you on your weddingnight”39 just after destroying the female monster, would have caused anyone else to guard his own bride very closely. Not Frankenstein, however. On the one hand, he is too self-obsessed to think that the creature would wish to harm anyone but himself. On the other hand, he may well believe the monster to be too like him to wish to destroy the nearest thing his creator has to a good angel, to someone who at least attempts to correct his wayward temperament. There may even be a more sinister reason for his ultimate failure to protect his bride. Assuming the central role in the Symposium, Diotima teaches Socrates what the real nature of Love is: the love of Love’s essence—that which the Neoplatonists Ficino and Castiglione, following Pico, called oneness with the creative force.40 Summarizing, she insists that the space between this world and that of the Forms was bridgeable—by a ladder. On the first rung is physical attraction pure but not so simple. This is because in order to truly love someone you must love some inherent quality in him/her that you sense the lack of in your own life: love is therefore always bound up with need. Since the most perfect form of love is that of the good and the beautiful, one must find these qualities in one’s partner—or at least that aspect of them which both complements and in a way augments your own; here Diotima develops Aristophanes’ notion of the sundered being’s desire for physical rejointure by taking it to a “whole” other level. Once you have appreciated the spiritual beauty of a partner, you are bound to do so in others, no matter their physical appearance. Beauty dwells not in good looks but in the “beautiful and magnificent discourses and ideas” the individual is capable of producing. Furthermore, if you love someone for his/her thoughts then both Love and Beauty transcend the individual altogether, all the more so since i(I)deas, as is the case with the Symposium itself, are created by the discourse between individuals, the Shakespearean the “marriage of true minds”.41 In effect, this particular synthesis between Aristophanic unresolved desire for unity and Agathon’s insistence

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upon the primacy of love and beauty as the professional tragedian’s cliché has been resolved by Socrates, but Socrates acting as Diotima’s mouthpiece. The Beauty of Love is revealed as nothing other than the result of various (steadily more refined) forms of union: lover with loved one, loved ones with the mortal world, the mortal world with the world of ideas—and almost, if not perhaps in so many words, of Mankind with the Divine. Summarizing her speech, Diotima says; τεκ´oντι δ ¢ρετη` ν ¢ληθÁ κα`ι θρεψαμšν Øπα´ ρχει θεoϕιλε‹ γενšσθαι, κα`ι ε‡πšρ ´ κα`ι ™κε´ιν42 ; τ ¥λλ ¢νθρωπων ´ ¢θανατ When he has given birth to and provided nourishment for true virtue, does there exist the possibility of his being especially favoured by the gods and of becoming, if any human can, immortal himself? (My translation).

In other words, here lies the groundwork for the Neoplatonic- and kabbalisticbelief that Man might rise to become one with God. While one can see that Diotima is still a little tentative (that final “;” is a “?”) she is almost at the point of bridging the gap between earth and heaven. And Plato believed that it was absolutely essential that a woman say these things, given that as both female and philosopher she would know exactly what it meant to become pregnant with an idea of love and beauty. This is implicit in the use of the aorist participle θρεψαμšν, from the verb meaning to bring up or breastfeed, the culmination of her argument that Love and (pro)creation are spiritual, of the soul, yet ungendered. Thus homosexual males are also capable of bringing forth life from the type of relationship which begins with, yet transcends, sexual communion. And in this sense the body of a sexual partner, like a ladder or a tree should be a bridge that you “climb upon” to reach a higher spiritual plain. As noted, Victor’s desire to “pour a torrent of light into this dark world” is by no means as open-hearted and benevolent as it may seem. If we associate the light with his creature, as we are obviously bound to, then he wishes to bask in the glow of its adoration. Remember that the phrase is itself a perversion of New Testament scripture. In Matthew 5 (verse 14) Jesus calls His followers “the light of the world”, modified in John 8:12 to “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life”.43 Like it or not, Frankenstein does set himself up as the more cynically Gnostic version of the deity, following John, not Matthew: a typically Faustian half-reading. His is the lowest form of demiurge who first creates an imperfect world and then washes his hands of it. On the heterosexual level he fights shy of Elizabeth too. Now the way in which the divine creative light enters the world has been a central Kabbalistic concern since—and probably before—the first real written formulation of that philosophy appeared somewhere between the second

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centuries before and after Christ. This was the Sefer Yetzirah / Book of Formation in which the Genesis creation story was submitted to several levels of exegetic analysis. Most importantly for our purposes, it contains the first properly formalized, if primitive, description of the Sephirotic Tree of Life and Wisdom (sephiroth plural, sephirah singular). The root meaning of this word is simply “counting” or “ennumeration”; what it really signifies in this context, however, is “emanation”. What one enumerates are ten stages via which the infinite power of the “procreative” Love of God, in its purest form infinite and indescribable (known as Ein Sof , “that which has no boundaries”) becomes visible and active in the mortal world. What follows is a simplified description of the sephirotic tree, known to PBS from Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim’s De occulta philosophia libri tres (1510–33),44 a work so compendious as to contain descriptions of natural and ceremonial (i.e. black) magic as well as a synopsis of Hebrew and Christian Kabbalah. What one is not quite sure of is the form in which PBS transmitted such knowledge to MWS. Knowing Shelley’s evangelical fervour for his own “enthusiasms”, however, it is very difficult to believe that he did not, and MWS’ pointed negation of the value of key kabbalistic symbolism tenets in the wrong hands (in Frankenstein) seems to me to speak for itself. We return to lightning in its Frankensteinian as opposed to kabbalistic manifestation. The Sefer Yetsirah,45 chapter 1 verse 8 uses lightning as a metaphor for the divine creative process quoting from Ezekiel 1:14; “As it was said, ‘And the living creatures ran and returned as the appearance of a flash of lightning,’ in such a manner was the Covenant created”.46 The exegitical kabbalistic reading of this is that the creation of all living things, but of Man especially, may be envisioned as a forked lightning strike which momentarily connects the heavens and the earth in a two-directional zig-zag flash of illumination.47 The jagged points of the forked line symbolize the stages via which God makes himself manifest in the world, indescribable essence penetrating the sphere of the material and fleshly: the inverted upward reflection are those stages reversed, a route by which the soul of man may return to God. Diotima’s Ladder of Love is thus twinned-one way up, another down. The diagrammatical representation of this takes the form of an inverted conceptual tree, roots in Heaven, branches spreading equidistantly and symmetrically from each side and with the crown of the tree resting upon earth (De occulta, I.5). The first thing to be noted, then, is that the lightning and the tree are synonymous: the first is the second, not its destroyer. This is to be compared with Frankenstein’s reaction to the destruction of the oak in an electric storm. Granted, Agrippa’s lightning symbology is somewhat vague and diffuse, but Victor—obviously a “skimmer” like the Marlovian Faustus—has not understood the connection between the following phrase from the De occulta on Heavenly Fire (I.5) as “the first matter of our Creation, and the truest Medicine that can restore, and preserve us”48 and the interpretation of Eziekel 1:14 in the Sefer Yetsirah. Lightning, like all types of fire, is a manifestation

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of God, potentially destructive “yet also secretly increasing of itself, and manifesting its greatness to things that receive it.”49 If, that is, one views it in the right way, and Victor should see it as a warning, as does his “son”. Touch any form of fire and you get burned; it will do no good whatsoever simply to ignore the negative aspects of nature. Yet this, initially, is exactly what Victor attempts to do. As a 15-year-old dazzled by the Agrippan account of heavenly and chthonic powers, he is fascinated by the storm, but observe the mistake he makes about the point of the lightning’s emission; “on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared” (italics mine).50 So lightning either comes up from the ground (we shall see how this is important) or the tree self-combusts. When his father uses a version of Benjamin Franklin’s balloon experiment to set him right on that score he retreats into denial and, though (temporarily, note) deserting his necromancers, also reacts against contemporary scientific discoveries. As observed, by the late eighteenth century both were studied under the aegis of “natural philosophy” but with an emphasis upon empirical research, especially chemical research, a subject which Victor initially rejects after his very first pre-Ingolstadt lecture in an unspecified city. The boy is still sulking. He will have it that the believers in hermetic magic were right about something, and until he stumbles upon a way, in Waldman’s words to “command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.”51 (that is, to do as the necromancers yet out do them at their own game) he will simply behave like a spoiled, disappointed brat. What he really wants is power—to be as a God to other scientists, friends and whatever he creates. Electricity—I am here presuming that he has discovered galvanism—has foiled him once, but it will not do so again. Lightning is a harnessable source of power and not the symbolic map to enlightenment, as it is in kabbalah. There is a description of the sephiroth in the De occulta Book III chapters 10–30, but let us simplify and clarify. We are describing Christian Kabbalah here, adapted from the first really detailed templates developed by Moses ben Jacob Cordovero (1522–70), a Cordoban Jew forced to cross the border into Portugal, and Isaac (ben Solomon) Luria Ashkenazi (1534–72), born in Jerusalem, and choosing to end his life among exiled Iberian Jews in Galilean Safed. They are most famous for their commentaries on the Séfer ha-Zohar (Book of Splendour)52 ascribed to Moses de León (c. 1240–1305) which gathers up and develops kabbalistic beliefs from the time of the Sefer Yetsirah onwards. The fact that both Cordovero and Luria were writing during the era of the expulsion of the Jewish race from Spain, Germany and Italy is important. This is because their work tends to centre around the theme of exile while yet retaining marked traces of the christianization of kabbalistic beliefs which had begun as early as the twelfth century and was drawn decisively into Renaissance thinking by della Mirandola, Ficino and Catiglione in the late fifteenth/early sixteenth, as noted.

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To make what follows more intelligible by way of comparison, Milton’s concept of God the creator was Christian-Kabbalistic in that “He” encapsulated both the male and female principles. By punning usage of the verb “to brood” in lines 20–1 of Paradise Lost Book 1 (Proem) the poet makes God both the omnipotent Father who creates the world by concentrated and projected serious thought (brooding over) and the Great Mother who hatches eggs like the hen bird sitting on them (brooding on)—“Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss/ And mad’st it pregnant.”53 Again, everyone is aware that Leonarardo’s “Vitruvian Man” is a metaphor for the microcosmos and macrocosmos combined, the head as both Godhead and the element of the divine mind situated in the human brain as seat of reason, while the lower members represent both potency/potential and chaos which the rational element may or may not change into form and essence. It is, in effect, the corporeal version of Diotima’s ladder. Take these two images together and you have an elementary idea of what the Sephirotic Tree represents. On each branch is a Sephirot or emanation of God as he reveals himself in descending stages to the world. Think of light-containing eggs nested on each branch (we shall see how Luria causes them to break, the “yolks” to spill downward). The inverted root (the whole thing is upside down, growing downward from God), from which all elements spiritual and material emanate, is called Kefer or Crown. It represents the mind of Ain Sof (the nameless and limitless entity from which the universe is derived) drawn into a concentrated point of divine light before spreading outwards and downwards into visible form. It is actually indivisibly tripartite, unified with the first two Sephirot immediately below it in the form of an equilateral triangle, the two lower points of which are named, from left to right, Binah and Chokomah, literally Intellect (or Understanding) and Wisdom. The root is the Crown, capitalized. The kabbalist, then, is required to make a spiritual ascent of the tree from its biological crown (uncapitalized) of leaves represented by the lower sephira Malkuth) to the Crown (Kefer) as its divine source of existence. This is obviously a spiritual journey within the self too, given that the Sephirotic Tree is a model for Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, though the latter is an unequivocally vertical construction, head at the top, feet at the bottom. Now partly because Jewish society is intensely patriarchal, partly because even the earliest kabbalists realized that male–female labelling made the whole symbolic structure much easier to grasp, Chokomah (divine Wisdom) is active and masculine, Binah (the reception and understanding of this Wisdom as Knowledge) passive and feminine. Once the two combine in a species of communion within the mind of what we shall describe as “the Miltonic androgynous deity as unadulterated truth accepted and comprehended”, the resulting enlightenment flows down through the rest of the sephiroth in two zig-zag routes. These pass right to left and left to right (masculine to feminine and feminine to masculine) down the branches of the three-columned tree until they reach the inverted crown (uncapitalized, note, hence fundamentally if not entirely organic) of Malkuth (Kingdom) meaning the sphere of human existence established by God on

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earth. The latter occupies the lowest place on the central column, the last in order emanating from the core of the trunk (the midpoint of the rings within the trunk of a normal tree, if you like) yet hanging from it. It is not twinned with anyone sephira in the left or right column but is the final extension of the middle column where the masculine and feminine (right and left) sephiroth meet and coalesce on various levels. Imagine a straight line drawn right down the middle of a flash of forked lightning: this central “flashline” links it directly to Keter, which is wisdom and intellect, masculine and feminine, co-existent. I have avoided detailing the rest of the sephiroth for simplicity’s sake: suffice to say that they represent masculine and feminine associated values which should balance each other out. The possession of wisdom amounts to nothing if it is not communicated and understood, perhaps even modified to suit particular circumstances, by understanding (Binah balancing Chokomah). On the other hand Kindness (Chased which, on the next sephirotic level is masculine) must be tempered by a sense of Justice (Gevurah, feminine) which itself would become tyranny if abused. The symbols for the need for this kind of mediation are also modified by their connections (in the form of diagonal lines) with those above and below in the three divisions (columns) of the trunk. The great (probably accidental) contribution of the Cordovan and Lurianic systems was undoubtedly the heightened feminization of the notion of Ain Sof and the potential it created for fusion with Christian Marianism. The stark reality of oppression death and exile caused European Jews to emhasize the desire for the renewal of divine love and protection, of salvation. They paid a great deal of attention to Malkuth, the lowest sephirah, the humble earthly existence of the Hebrew community yet with the blessings of all the other sephiroth poured into her, because readings of the Song of Solomon in which the loved one/bride, searching desperately for her lover and protector—husband seemed as relevant then as they had during the Babylonian exile and Roman persecution.54 Malkuth became almost synonymous with the figure of Shekinah, originally a symbol of God’s presence on earth, but now female link in the lower world with Binah in the Crown (Kefer) as the benevolent representation of understanding in its broadest sense-that is, divine empathy. Malkuth in her role of Shekinah became the daughter of Binah and Chokomah, originally personifications of the dual nature of God. Understanding had borne a child by Wisdom who became an intercessor between mortals and the male–female God. Arthur Green (2002) sees such a radical change as the result of the influence of the Cult of the Virgin Mary Intercessor (spearheaded by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux in the mid twelfth century) as mortal mother of God and, as the Holy Catholic Church, Bride of Christ. There was now room in Kabbalistic thinking for a link between Malkuth, in one sense the female representative of the Hebrew religion and people, and Binah the consort of Chokomah, one of the first two manifestations of Kether, the mind of God.55 The synthesis between both extremes of the Sephirotic

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Tree was now complete, placing crown in contact with Crown, root with (top most) branch. The whole structure is fully diametrical. Nevertheless, only God can transport Himself down the Tree in the flash of lightning which not only creates but effectively embodies it. In so doing He installs a network of crooked pathways by which Man may struggle to the top again. The ascent may be compared to the criss-cross route any sensible hillwalker might take on an ascent: only the inexperienced and foolhardy try to go up in a straight line. The psycho-spiritual equivalent of the latter would be the desire to set one’s microcosmic rational mind at the same level as that of the macrocosmic God without taking the steps suggested by Diotima. While Frankenstein is by no means as mentally lazy as Marlowe’s clod of a Faustus in this respect—he does the hackwork of biological research himself as opposed to wishing it to be done for him- he is still too arrogant to wish to start at the bottom and make a spiritual ascent. He is more interested in “the end of every art”56 than the means of achieving it; this fact explains a very odd statement he makes after his discovery of galvanism; it “was so overwhelming, that all the steps by which I had been progressively led to it were obliterated, and I beheld only the result.”57 One may speculate that he has no wish to remember his father’s demonstration of the Franklin experiment, trying to believe that he alone created the electric shock. He may wish to entertain two spurious, “directional” beliefs simultaneously: that he reached the top of the Tree of Knowledge alone and that he was right about the earthbound origins of lightning all along. In kabbalistic terms he likes to think that he has ascended to the roots of godhead—Kefer—in an upward flash; that he should be venerated for it will be the next phase of his thought process. Yet he would doubtless have been equally delighted to read at the very end of Rabelais’ Fifth Book of Pantraguel (1564) that Babuc, subterranean Oracle of the Divine Bottle and pontiff of all mysteries, insists that the “summoning of thunder and fire down from the heavens … discovered of old by Prometheus … has abandoned your hemisphere and is practised here below”.58 This topsy-turviness, of course, is a variant of the Aristophanean element in the Symposium. Of the two great sixteenth century kabbalists it was Cordovero who synthesized the sephirotic system into the form we have outlined above, Luria who introduced two new concepts which, however accidentally, facilitated the fusion of kabbalah with Marian devotions. The first was tzimzum or divine contraction, whereby the Ain Sof actually cleared a space within Himself— withdrew from it—to make way for the creation of a Mankind given partial liberation from his influence in the form of free will. This did not amount to desertion, however, since into the resultant void He sent a concentrated ray of light which initiated the creation of the ten sephiroth, the last being Malkuth, the abode of Man. The important adaptation of this in Frankenstein should by now be obvious: Luria posits an act of trust by which Mankind, showered with divine gifts (note the Promethean parallelism) is given the liberty to use them judiciously or not. Tzimzum neither creates a spiritual vacuum nor amounts

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to a desertion, as is the case with Victor’s hasty retreat from his laboratory and the eventual psycho-spiritual damage wrought upon the monster. It does, however, result in a species of premeditated laboratory accident in which the upper sephirot (which remember we compared to eggs and Luria calls vessels) crack under the pressure of the light (shevirat ha-kelim, the shattering of the vessels). Miraculously, their function of passing spiritual enlightenment down the Tree is retained—the Tree, after all, is a archetype, a symbol—and it is Malkuth, the “earthen/earthly vessel” which catches most of the mingled outpouring of divine love. The continual overspill, however also creates disharmony, bringing the threat evil—viewed as a potential imbalance between the sephirotic arrangement –– into the world. One sees this reflected in say, the Elizabethan sonnet where the lower animalistic urges threaten to dominate the mind as the seat of reason.59 In Frankenstein, of course, it is the monster’s universe that is deliberately ripped apart on the pretext of obliterating a threat to humanity. Catching a glimpse of his daemon spying on him through the window of the island laboratory in which the latter’s female companion is under construction, Victor tears the “Bride” to pieces, sealing Elizabeth’s fate. His act, and wilful blindness to its consequences, shows just how little he knows, or cares to know, about the nature of human affections. Can he be sure that the monster’s face “expressed the utmost extent of malice and treachery”60 upon first glimpsing him? That face is hideous enough to be unreadable at the best of times, and Frankenstein is especially prone to misinterpretation here: the monster, in his mind the lowest life form possible, is actually giving him a task to carry out, as if he were Zeus/ God, Victor the Prometheus/ Dolus demiurge or apprentice. This vessel and covenant, recipient of a creator’s love for his creature (as Eve was God’s gift to Adam) will be smashed to smithereens retaining, unlike those of Luria, no potential for life or love whatsoever. Victor knows nothing about human love bar, its negative aspects of jealousy. It should have been easy enough for him to love Elizabeth—she is wholly beautiful and good. While her lack of complexity could be blamed on MWS’ shortcomings as a novelist, there may well be extenuating circumstances in this case. She is impossibly forgiving and understanding because she represents the Shekinah in the Christian guise of Mary Intercessor. Mediation and bringing peace are Elizabeth’s main activities in Frankenstein; “If the sevants had any request to make it was always through her intercession”61 ; she attempts to intercede with the jury on Justine’s behalf. Believing, after the deaths of William and Justine, that Victor seeks revenge on an unknown murderer, she calms him with a reminder of their own mutual love and—with black dramatic irony—mutual trust in a faithless world; “{W}hile we are true to each other here in this land of peace and beauty… what can disturb our peace?”62 Even that part of divine Wisdom that manifests anger may be mediated by Chokomah’s “better half”, Binah (Understanding) under Christian and even Lurianic influence. But how may one mediate with a “creator” who lies (albeit unsuccessfully) to himself ? It is true that

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Frankenstein admits responsibility for making the monster—to himself, to Walton—but never once does he truly admit that it was his rejection and desertion of that creation, his twisted version of tzimzum, which, in turn, created the whole tragic chain of events “in the beginning”. How may a Mary, a Malkuth, a Binah, a Shekinah, an Elizabeth ever forgive a husband—part and parcel of the twain made one flesh or spirit—who waits until after the supposedly “holy marriage”, or perhaps envisioned consummation of it, to confess? And even if he did so, the idea of the Man Who Would Be God asking a mortal woman to intercede with a Creator he has blatantly ignored, even attempted to displace, is simply perverse. Equally so is the fact that (puns intended) Frankenstein “withdraws himself” from the bride’s presence on the nuptial “eve”. Use of the word “consummate” in this text is minimal yet pivotal. Mulling over the monster’s “wedding night” threat he says “On that night he had determined to consummate his crimes by my death”,63 this is directly after reading Elizabeth’s letter in which she asks if he is in love with someone else. Having evaded her presence for a good deal of the narrative, fearing questions that he would find it impossible to answer, having a preferred obsession with his creation to dedication to her, is he now, however subconsciously, simply “handing her over” like the (sacrificial) lamb as pet animal to which he compares her?64 Could we even call his standing guard outside a repeated tzimzum, since he must know where the monster will really be? In leaving Elizabeth to fend for herself is he Solomon/ God deserting humanity as the Bride in The Song of Songs ?Is he the quester on the lightning ladder to God who forks away from the path that Diotima first pioneered? Or can it be that, having begun life with a deliberate misconception of what electric-stricken trees symbolize, there is now nothing more to do than go in erratic search of his created other half like an aristophanic Man/Monster? Never having wished to do anything bar start at the top of the Tree of Life to begin with, is he now rolling downwards then away from the entire structure, and from what is left of his own spiritual/psychological balance in the process? One can find little real excuse for Victor’s behaviour, and I do not believe that Mary Shelley wished us to. It is not that the novel lacks a strong didactic element—“The modern Promethean scientist/ necromancer may destroy himself and his creation in the process, darken the world” to put it in a nutshell. This is a moral tale, yes, but also a highly personal one. She had seen Percy Shelley use a hysterical form of sophism as an excuse to abandon wife and child, insisting that only Mary Wolstonecraft could be his true soulmate; this from a man who still professed to believe in free love. He had just published “Alastor” which, according to Shelley’s own introduction a poem, demonstrated how “self-centred seclusion” from imperfect human love leaves the poet-hero “morally dead”.65 All well and good, but the message hardly seems to be borne out by the poem. Alastor certainly dies, and at the mouth of a cave overlooking a precipice at that, which he has reached by a waterway hemmed in by suggestive narcissi. Yet the mode of his demise “at peace and faintly smiling” beneath “the rugged trunk of an old pine”66 rather suggests

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fulfilment and a final coming to terms with the Tree of Life and Knowledge than anything else. Compare this to Frankenstein’s last speech, a recasting of that of Ulysses in Inferno Canto 29,67 but one in which the moribund and frustrated hero is about to be carried back by Walton to civilization, home and a family burial against what is left of his will. Ulysses will not turn back and, in Dante, is proud to be damned for adventurous daring. Victor cannot turn back because he has nowhere else to go but a hell of merited revenge on a perverse extension of himself; he has to be “shipped”. It all turns PBS’ finale into fumbling ambiguity. What was the poem celebrating but a (granted, Pyrrhic) victory of Love without any form of spiritual engagement with the “significant other?” Shelley was to make heroic attempts to re-invent himself as Poet of Love, of course: the triumphal reunion of Prometheus with his Blakean female emanation Africa in Act III of his version of the Aeschylan drama gives artistic proof of that, although he was never shy of liaisons and affairs. At least Mary had set him on the right track aesthetically, however, which was more than Elizabeth ever managed with her own monstrous husband.

Notes 1. Dorothea Wender (ed.), Hesiod and Theognis (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976), 39–40. 2. Robert Temple et al. (eds.), Aesop: The Complete Fables (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1998), principally Fables 28, 247, 517. The Sappho fragment in question is 207 and reads “After creating men, Prometheus is said to have stolen fire and revealed it to them”. No author cited, “Theoi Greek Mythology-Prometheus”. Retrieved from https://www.theoi.com/Titan/TitanPrometheus.html. Last visited 13/12/ 2020. 3. Now ascribed to Aeschylus’ son, Euphorion. 4. Principally in the Protagoras c.399–90 and Timaeus, c.360–348. Note that the dating of the individual dialogues tends to fluctuate wildly as commentators debate the question of authorship. Plato is supposed to have lived between 428 and 348, but it is still unclear in the cases of certain Works as to whether they are directly attributable to his followers. 5. Geoffrey D. Steadman, Plato’s Symposium (2019) used throughout for quotations in Greek. Retrieved from https://geoffreysteadman. com/platos-symposium/. Last visited 13/12/2020. All summaries, commentaries and translations are my own, however. 6. The latter as as a learner of Greek and her lover/husband’s amanuensis. 7. See James A. Notopoulos, ‘Shelley and the Symposum of Plato’, The Classical Weekly, Jan. 10, 1949, Vol. 42, No. 7, 98–102. 8. See Florence A. Thomas Marshall, The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Volume I (London, Richard

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Bentley & Son, 1889), 156–7. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg. org/files/37955/37955-h/37955-h.htm. Last visited 13/12/2020. 9. Fort he main tenets of Neoplationism from Saccas and Iamblichus to the early nineteenth century see “Neoplatonism”. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoplatonism and W. R. Inge, ‘The Permanent Influence of Neoplatonism upon Christianity’, The American Journal of Theology, Apr., 1900, Vol. 4, No. 2, 328–34. 10. See Miranda Seymour, Mary Shelley (London, Picador, 2000), 92–3. 11. Depending on context, a term describing the marriage union between a god and a godess, the Church and Christ and, most importantly for our purposes, defined by Emanuel Swedenborg in Delitae Sapientiae de Amore Conjugali / The Delights of Widom Relating to Conjugal Love (1768) as the perfect spiritual and holy love between a married couple which, like Platonic love, embraced sexual attraction yet transcended it. 12. This story may well have been apocryphal: it would seem, according to acquaintance and biographer Thomas Medwin, that it was a picket fence that was blown up in the Shelley family home at Horsham, West Sussex. PBS may have recounted the more spectacular version of the tescapade to Mary, however. 13. Theoi Greek Mythology-Prometheus (no page numbers). 14. ‘They say that Prometheus was forced to mix with his primordial clay some part of every wild beast’ Translation mine. 15. Prometheus did create A man, of many parts from beasts deryv’d

C. Hamilton (ed.), Spenser, The Faerie Queene (London, Routledge, 2007), 259. 16. Mary P. Nichols, ‘Socrates’ Contest with the Poets in Plato’s Symposium’, Political Theory, Apr., 2004, Vol. 32, No. 2, 186–206. 17. Pico puts the following words in the mouth of God: “I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine”. Retrieved from http://bactra. org/Mirandola/. Last visited 14/12 /2020. 18. Thus sex is removed entirely from the aegis of ‘hieros gamos’. 19. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 129. Retrieved from https://etc.usf.edu/ lit2go/179/the-sonnets/4193/sonnet-129/. Last visited 14/12/ 2020. 20. For commentary on this speech see Nichols, ‘Socrates’ Contest’, 191–5.

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21. See Notopoulos, 99. 22. On Shelley’s habit of converting others to his own interests, see Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Shelley at Oxford (London, Methuen, 1904) 2– 24.Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34525/34525h/34525-h.htm. Last visited 14/12/2020. 23. J. Paul Hunter (ed.), Mary Shelley Frankenstein: The 1818 Text , Contexts, Criticism (New York, W.W. Norton, 2012), 70. All citations from this text except where noted. 24. J. Paul Hunter, 33–4. 25. Ibid., 36. 26. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein 1831 edition, end of last paragraph, Chapter 1. No page numbers included. Retrieved from http://www. gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84-h.htm#chap01. Last visited 14/12 2020. 27. J. Paul Hunter, Frankenstein, 34. 28. The two quotations are from Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. See David Scott Kastan (ed.), Christopher Marlowe Dr. Faustus (New York, W.W. Norton, 2005), I.i.22–4 and 76–8. I am obviously not in agreement with Chris Baldick that ‘..we have to eliminate the Faust myth from our {i.e. MWS’} list of sources’ (Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow [Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996]), 41.True, there is no ‘demonic tempter’ involved here – he exists in Victor’s psyche, as the Marlovian Faustus’ Bad Angel presumably does, an Elizabethan manifestatation of the allegorical Morality Play figure of psychomachia. This aside, it is the wilful spiritual blindness of the sixteenth century figure (not Goethe’s Romantic variant) that is important here. 29. J. Paul Hunter, Frankenstein, 33. 30. Steadman, Symposium, 19c αƒ τιμα`ι γα` ρ αÙτo‹ς κα`ι ƒερα` τα` παρα` τîν ´ ºϕαν´ιζετo. ¢νθρωπων (if the gods killed the round men) the honours and sacrifices dedicated to the gods would vanish (my translation). I believe that this sentence was particularly important to MWS when sketching Victor’s mindset. 31. J. Paul Hunter, Frankenstein, 10. 32. Mary Shelley Frankenstein, 1831, Chapter 2, paragraph 5. 33. J. Paul Hunter, Frankensein, 20. 34. Mary Shelley Frankenstein, 1831, last paragraph, Chapter 1. 35. Theoi Greek Mythology-Prometheus. 36. In the penultimate section of the Symposium-212d-222b- Alcibiades compares Socrates to a battered statue of the oldest and most drunken of the satyrs Silenus which, when cracked open, is found to contain hundreds of statuettes made of gold. 37. In the his spech of the play Prometheus lists the skills he has taught to Manknd. 38. J. Paul Hunter, Frankenstein, 91. 39. Ibid., 121.

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40. See note 16. 41. Wiliam Shakespeare, Sonnet 116. Retrieved from https://www.spa rknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/sonnets/sonnet_116/. Last visited 14/12/2020. 42. Steadman, 112. 43. Matthew 5.14 and John 8.12, King James Version Reference Bible (Zondervan, Grand Rapids, MI, 1994). 44. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, De occulta philosophia libri tres / Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1510–33) Retrieved from http://esotericarchives.com/agrippa/agrippa1.htm. Last visited 15/12/ 2020. 45. No autor/ translator specified, Sefer Yetzirah: Book of Formation (No place of publication specified, Work of the Chariot, 2002). Retrieved from http://www.workofthechariot.com/PDF/SeferYetzirah.pdf. Last visited 15/12/2020. 46. For a detailed commentary on the kabbalistic interpretation of this passage see Scott J. Thompson (tr.) ‘Leo Baeck:Sefer Yetzirah’ (Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate, no date, pages innumbered) translated from: J. C .B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck),‘Tübingen’, Aus Drei Jahrtausenden, 1958), 256–71; Part One originally appeared in Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums (MGWJ) LXX (1926), 371 ff. and Part Two appeared in MGWJ, LXXVIII (1934), 448–55. Retrieved from http://docshare04.doc share.tips/files/9080/90802107.pdf. Last visited 15/12/2020. 47. For lightning symbology in the kabbalah see Colin Low, ‘Chapter3: the Pillars and the Lightning Flash’ Notes on Kabbalah (No place of origin specified, The Hermetic Library, 1992). Retrieved from https://gruntose.com/Info/Magick/Qabalah/chapter_3.txt. Last visited 15/12/2020. 48. Agrippa, De occullta,1.5. 49. Ibid. 50. J. Paul Hunter, Frankenstein, 23. 51. Ibid., 29. 52. Zironá Librajá et al. (eds.), El Zohar/Sefer ha-Zohar (Barcelona, Ediciones Obelisco, 2006, 26 vols). 53. Alison G. Moe and Thomas H. Luxon (eds.), The John Milton Reading Room Paradise Lost (no date), ll.21–2. Retrieved from https://www. dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/book_1/text.shtml. Last visited 15/2/ 2020. 54. See, for example, KJV, The Song of Solomon, 5, vv.6–8 I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer.

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The watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me. I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him, that I am sick of love.

55. See Arthur Green, ‘Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs: Reflections on a Kabbalistic Symbol in Its Historical Context’, AJS Review, Apr., 2002, Vol. 26, No. 1, 1–52. My comments on the relatioship between the Virgin Mary, Binah, Malkuth and Shekinah are largely based upon this truly illuminating paper. 56. See David Scott Kastan (ed.), Christopher Marlowe Dr. Faustus I.i.4. 57. J. Paul Hunter, Frankenstein, 32. 58. M. A. Screech (ed.), Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2006), 1020. 59. For example, Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella 49 ‘I on my horse, and Love on me, doth try/ Our horsemanships.’ Retrieved from https:// www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50079/astrophil-and-stella-49-ion-my-horse-and-love-on-me-doth-try. Last visited 15/12/2020. 60. J. Paul Hunter, Frankenstein, 119. 61. Ibid., 20. 62. Ibid., 63. 63. Ibid., 136. 64. Ibid., 30. 65. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (eds.), Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New York, W.W. Norton, 2002), 73. 66. Ibid., 88, ll.633–4. 67. Dante, Inferno Canto 26. Retrieved from https://www.owleyes. org/text/dantes-inferno/read/canto-26#root-422385-1. Last visited 15/12/2020. “O brothers!” I began, “who to the west. Through perils without number now have reach’d, To this the short remaining watch, that yet. Our senses have to wake, refuse not proof. Of the unpeopled world, following the track. Of Phoebus. Call to mind from whence we sprang: Ye were not form’d to live the life of brutes. But virtue to pursue and knowledge high.”

Compare with Victor’s speech to the sailors, which begins;”What do you mean? What do you demand of your captain?” in J. Paul Hnter, Frankenstein, 154–5.

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Bibliography Agrippa von Nettesheim, H. C., De occulta philosophia libri tres / Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1510–33). Retrieved from http://esotericarchives.com/agrippa/ agrippa1.htm. Last visited 15/12/ 2020 Baldick, C., In Frankenstein’s Shadow (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996). Dante, Inferno Canto 26. Retrieved from https://www.owleyes.org/text/dantes-inf erno/read/canto-26#root-422385-1. Last visited 15/12/2020 Della Mirandola, P., Oratio de hominis dignitate (1486). Retrieved from http://bac tra.org/Mirandola/. Last visited 14/12 /2020 Green, A., ‘Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs: Reflections on a Kabbalistic Symbol in Its Historical Context’, AJS Review, Apr., 2002, Vol. 26, No. 1. Hamilton, A. C. (ed.). Spenser, The Faerie Queene (London, Routledge, 2007). Hogg, T. J., Shelley at Oxford (London, Methuen, 1904). Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34525/34525-h/34525-h.htm. Last visited 14/12/2020. Hunter, J. P. (ed.). Mary Shelley Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Criticism (New York, W.W. Norton, 2012). Inge, W. R., ‘The Permanent Influence of Neoplatonism upon Christianity’, The American Journal of Theology, Apr., 1900, Vol. 4, No. 2. Kastan, D. S. (ed.). Christopher Marlowe Dr. Faustus (New York, W.W. Norton, 2005) King James Version Reference Bible (Zondervan, Grand Rapids Michigan, 1994). Librajá, Z. et al (eds.), El Zohar (Barcelona, Ediciones Obelisco, 2006, 26 vols). Low, C., ‘Chapter3: the Pillars and the Lightning Flash’ Notes on Kabbalah (No place of origin specified, The Hermetic Library, 1992). Retrieved from https://gruntose. com/Info/Magick/Qabalah/chapter_3.txt. Last visited 15/12/2020. Moe, A. G. and Luxon, T. H. (eds.). The John Milton Reading Room Paradise Lost (no date). Retrieved from https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/ pl/book_1/text.shtml. Last visited 15/2/ 2020 Nichols, M. P. ‘Socrates’ Contest with the Poets in Plato’s Symposium’, Political Theory, Apr., 2004, Vol. 32, No. 2. No author/translator specified, Sefer Yetzirah: Book of Formation (No place of publication specified, Work of the Chariot, 2002). Retrieved from http://www.workof thechariot.com/PDF/SeferYetzirah.pdf. Last visited 15/12/2020. Reiman, D. H. and Fraistat, N. (eds.). Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New York, W.W. Norton, 2002). Screech, M. A. (ed.), Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2006). Seymour, M. Mary Shelley (London, Picador, 2000) Shakespeare, W., Sonnet 116. Retrieved from https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/ shakespeare/sonnets/sonnet_116/. Last visited 14/12/2020. Shakespeare, W., Sonnet 129. Retrieved from https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/179/thesonnets/4193/sonnet-129/. Last visited 14/12/ 2020 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein 1831 edition, end of last paragraph Chapter1. No page numbers included. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84h.htm#chap01. Last visited 14/12 2020. Steadman, G. D. Plato’s Symposium (2019). Retrieved from https://geoffreysteadman. com/platos-symposium/. Last visited 13/12/2020.

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Swedenborg, E. Delitae Sapientiae de Amore Conjugali / The Delights of Wisdom Relating to Conjugal Love (1768). Retrieved from https://swedenborg.com/wpcontent/uploads/2015/05/SF_LoveinMarriage.pdf. Last visited 14/12/2020. Temple, R. et al. (eds.). Aesop: the Complete Fables (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1998) Thomas Marshall, F. A. The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Volume I (London, Richard Bentley & Son, 1889). Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/37955/37955-h/37955-h.htm. Last visited 13/12/2020 Thompson, S. J. (tr.). ‘Leo Baeck:Sefer Yetzirah’ (Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate, no date, pages in numbered) translated from: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck ), ‘Tübingen’, Aus Drei Jahrtausenden,), 1958. Retrieved from http://docshare04. docshare.tips/files/9080/90802107.pdf Last visited 15/12/2020 Wender, D. (ed.). Hesiod and Theognis (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976).

The Myth of Frankenstein Marta Vega Trijueque

Numerous scholars and critics have touched upon, or at least referred to, the Frankenstein myth. The first academic I encountered during my research was Chris Baldick and his book In Frankenstein’s Shadow (1987), in which he tackles the issue surrounding modern mythology, a concept that is generally rejected by traditional literary critics. In said work, he directly classifies Frankenstein (meaning the whole complex of works) as a modern myth and primarily surveys the novel’s—and more specifically the Monster’s—impact on the nineteenth-century politics and literature. Even though he argues that modern myths greatly differ from those of traditional mythology “in terms of importance, origin and nature”,1 he makes emphasis on the undeniable impact and “lasting significance” stories such as Faust, Don Quixote, Dracula, or Frankenstein have in Western culture.2 Susan Tyler Hitchcock further surveys the novel’s cultural chronology since its conception in the summer of 1816 up to the twenty-first century in Frankenstein: A Cultural History (2007). Hitchcock does not offer an in-depth analysis of the meanings behind the myth’s evolution, but her rundown of Frankenstein’s appearances through the decades is quite enlightening. One can also encounter specific studies on the cinematographic adaptations, like Caroline Joan S. Picart’s The Cinematic Rebirths of Frankenstein: Universal, Hammer and Beyond (2002) and Remaking the Frankenstein Myth on Film: Between Laughter and Horror

M. Vega Trijueque (B) Madrid, España

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(2003). Her works centre on what she refers to as the “Frankensteinian cinemyth”3 ; that is, Frankenstein’s film adaptations. In them, she covers all sorts of productions, such as the Universal Pictures’ films, parodies like Young Frankenstein (1974), and even films that are loosely based or partially influenced by the novel, like Terminator (1984). Other scholars have tackled the Frankenstein myth with approaches that escape the literary and cultural realm. Scholar Peter Nagy, for instance, explores the impact the novel and its legacy have had on science and scientists, where he concludes that Frankenstein is one of the most popular and “influential modern myths”4 because of its power to shape and transform people’s beliefs about science, which are predominantly of aversion and fear. I could go on mentioning the numerous essays and studies that, in some way or another, allude and deal with the Frankenstein myth. Most of them centre on its evolving nature or its cultural impact and, whilst being essential elements of any myth, I want to detail and delve into its intricacies and mythic quality. In doing this, I will hopefully also shed light on the novel’s development within the Gothic tradition. Two main reasons have motivated this study: the trivial classification of something as myth, with no clear justification or arguments that prove and explain its mythic status; and my previous study of the impact the early theatrical adaptations have had on the development of Victor and the Creature in the Frankenstein (cinematographic) universe. In order to avoid the first issue, I will be examining three different approaches and definitions of myth that will help me layer and develop my arguments. First, I will briefly explore the basic, short, and not fully developed definitions given by dictionaries. Then, I will expand on the traditional and popular approach to mythographies. Lastly, I will focus on a more comprehensive definition. The analysis of said definitions and interpretations will allow me to determine the suitability of Mary Shelley’s novel and its legacy to be regarded as a myth. The simplest—albeit most basic—way to find a definition is to search in a dictionary. Even though these definitions do not provide much content, they comprise and highlight the most relevant aspects of the defined term. For this reason, I started by examining the entry for “myth” given by the twenty volumes of The Oxford English Dictionary: Second Edition, as it is the most complete. The dictionary offers several entries, like the negative and colloquial usage of the word, meaning “an untrue or popular tale, a rumour”.5 For the purposes of this essay, I chose the definition of myth as a “purely fictitious narrative” that normally includes “supernatural persons, actions, or events” and embodies “some popular idea concerning natural or historical phenomena”.6 The definition is vague, and it could fit other types of narratives, such as fantasy. It is not very constrictive either, and thus Frankenstein would almost perfectly fit the description, although with some caveats. To begin with, the novel is a fictitious narrative, but it does not involve or contain supernatural elements. Within the characters’ world, the Creature would not be considered a supernatural being, as he was not created by a

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supernatural force but by a scientific method. In any case, he would be deemed a numinous and unnatural creature due to his physique and origin; an origin that departs from the prototypical use of magic or witchcraft in gothic texts. Shelley’s novel, however, displays the Gothic’s interest for the growing sense of alienation and disruption of traditional notions of human identity, prompted by new scientific advances of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.7 Victor’s experiment is the embodiment of “a popular idea”8 of Mary Shelley’s time, since some Galvanists in the eighteenth century believed in the possibility of restoring life. Galvanism—that is, the contraction of muscles due to stimulation by an electric current—would theoretically “resurrect” clinically dead beings. The introduction of electricity and technological developments led scholars and scientists of the time to believe in the possibility of bringing the dead back to life and, amongst those more ambitious, of creating life itself. Experiments were carried out, like the one by Luigi Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, who used electricity to try to reanimate the body of the hanged convict George Foster.9 Doctor Andrew Ure repeated a similar procedure on the executed criminal Clydesdale, whose body was convoluted with every electric shock.10 Both aims were fruitless, and the only visible physical reactions were the anticipated bodily quivering and convulsions. Despite the failed attempts, ideas on the creation of life persisted and evolved, and nowadays—thanks to the advances in the scientific and technological department—humans have managed to create “life” in the form of robots, androids, and cyborgs, which primarily differ from Victor Frankenstein’s creation in the materials used, being synthetic ones. Overall, it seems that Frankenstein would fit the OED definition with the exception of the absent supernatural component. I will now move onto specialized dictionaries, selecting Chris Baldick’s The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (2008), where he offers a more detailed and specific definition. Baldick takes traditional mythology as a basis for the entry, detailing how myths usually have a religious foundation—hence the appearance of gods and goddesses in the stories—, and some of them explain how life came to be or why something exists, normally by using supernatural elements. Frankenstein is a story written by Mary Shelley—therefore it is not traditional or anonymous, as myths generally are—, and, as mentioned before, supernatural phenomena do not appear. Furthermore, religion is never mentioned in the novel even if there are religious references—Prometheus and Paradise Lost —; instead, science is the predominant feature in the story. Frankenstein does not “account for the origins of human life”11 either; on the contrary, Victor Frankenstein transcends the laws of nature by creating life with scientific means. Nevertheless, it could be said that Frankenstein is a fictional story “containing deeper truths”12 : it dwells on the importance of nurture, love, and human relationships and it examines (our) humanity and behavioural roles. If we take into consideration these dictionary definitions, it appears that two problematic aspects arise when categorizing Frankenstein as myth. First, the story does not contain supernatural occurrences; and second,

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its form and origin—authorship, social context—are not those of traditional mythology. Now, I will proceed to examine works that are more exhaustive to study these matters further. For the sake of coherence, I deemed appropriate to start by discussing a folklorist’s approach to mythology, for which I will be using Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth (1984). As stated by the editor Alan Dundes in the introduction, the chosen essays share the understanding of myths as sacred narratives that manifest “how the world and man came to be in their present form”.13 In using the word “sacred”, Dundes is not only ruling out narratives such as folktales, which are “secular and fictional”, but also implying that myths are sacred narratives in the sense that “all forms of religion incorporate myths of some kind”.14 This idea already puts a halt to the consideration of Shelley’s fiction as a myth; nevertheless, a review of the different perspectives is needed, beginning with the traditional one. Therefore, I will continue to review this perspective by analysing William Bascom’s “The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives”, an essay in which he makes a distinction between myth, legend, and folktale. Bascom details the series of common characteristics that myths share: these prose narratives, considered sacred, were taken as fact; they are set in a remote past, in an earlier world or a different one (“such as the sky or the underworld”); and the figures involved are normally non-human (deities, culture heroes, animals).15 Bascom also specifies myths’ purpose of accounting “for the origin of the world, of mankind, of death”16 and any other beings or phenomena. In short, his definition would only apply to bodies of myth already in existence, and very specific mythologies at that, such as the classical Greek or Roman. Nevertheless, whilst it is true that new myths emerge from the collective or culture, the parameters are rather constrictive and leave no space for the formation or recognition of modern mythology, as is the case of the Frankenstein myth. To begin with, Frankenstein’s story and its characters are not set in a remote past—there are mentions of Galvani, Newton, and even Coleridge (quotes from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner appear)—; therefore, the narrative is set around the eighteenth century at the earliest. It is not a different world either, as the settings are those from our known world: Geneva, Ingolstadt (Germany), the Swiss Alps, or Scotland. Moreover, the text is secular—science replaces religion—, and the characters are human (although the humanity of Victor Frankenstein’s creation is open for debate). Lastly, in spite of some people believing in the notion of bringing the dead back to life, the story itself was not taken as true or fact, for people did not believe the characters existed or that the story’s events actually occurred. Since the American folklorist further comments and makes a distinction between myth, legend, and folktale—there is confusion in the correct use of the terms and they are employed arbitrarily—, I have chosen to examine whether Frankenstein might be categorized as either of the last two. According to Bascom, legends are verbally recounted and are taken as true by the narrator and his audience; the setting, unlike in myths, is less remote; they tend to be

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more secular than sacred; and they have human protagonists.17 Furthermore, their plots are normally about war, past heroes or monarchs, and they usually include “local tales of buried treasure, ghosts, fairies, and saints”.18 Frankenstein appears to be a suitable candidate: it is set in a recent past within our world (the eighteenth century), it is secular, and its characters are human. As to whether the story is seen as true, as mentioned before, readers probably do not take the story as real, but as possible. Nevertheless, even though these characteristics can be applied to Frankenstein, Shelley’s story does not match the most significant aspect of legends, which is that they tend to have “some sort of historical basis”.19 Folktales, on the other hand, are “prose narratives which are regarded as fiction”,20 as opposed to myths and legends. They can be set in any place at any time; the characters that appear may be human or non-human; and the tone is secular. They are thought to be mere entertaining stories, usually aimed at children (nursery tales), but they are not restricted to children only as folktales can have other functions, like moralizing (moral folktales).21 Frankenstein shares some common aspects, as it is a fiction, the tone is secular, and it has been taken as a moralizing story. We cannot claim that Frankenstein is an actual folktale, though, as it is neither “spaceless” nor “timeless”,22 and it was not passed down orally. Since none of the mentioned conceptions (myth, legend, and folktale) can be applied accurately to the novel, I would have to state that Frankenstein would not be considered a myth from a folklorist perspective. My research continued, and it led me to William Doty and his Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals (1986), which I will be taking as a theoretical basis for the better part of the following analysis. His study of myths is quite extensive, and he has managed to compile a series of characteristics and elements that are not usually included in other, more basic, definitions. His definition is not restrictive—not all elements have to appear, some variations on the tradition are also accepted—and it challenges, in some ways, the more traditional perspectives. Doty argues that, in his understanding of mythographies, “primary, foundational materials” are included, meaning that a myth comprises information on a specific society (its structure or traditions), it is considered true and essential, and the narrative is set in a foundational period that includes “the times when new patterns are established and old ones reformulated”.23 Frankenstein, regarding this last respect, can be considered to be set in a foundational period: old patterns were reformulated with scientific patterns of thought and culture. This point will also be especially relevant in my discussion of Doty, for the novel does not perfectly match certain features because it has reformulated them: we cannot understand and regard the Frankenstein myth as traditional mythology. In Doty’s thorough definition24 we encounter numerous numbered factors he later develops at length. I will be examining the ones that I have considered the most relevant for my thesis. The scholar—taking ideas expounded by the literary critic William Righter as a basis—makes clear that myths are, first and

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foremost, accounts that contain a narrative.25 The stories told are not insubstantial, though: they deal with important issues of and for the whole society. Frankenstein depicts many significant and fundamental themes that contain experiences and meanings shared by humankind: the quest and acquisition of knowledge (in addition to the subsequent potential consequences); the importance of human relationships; or the questioning of our humanity. These notions are outlined in a gothic frame story where a young scientist creates a living being out of different corpses in a bleak, rainy night; abandons it in fear; and eventually said being takes revenge on his creator. A sinister atmosphere engulfs the tale, achieved with classic, gothic motifs such as encounters in dark forests or sublime glaciers, and the haunting of a creature that horrifies and moves in equal measure. Those are the story and the framework in which meanings are created and through which significance is conveyed. Still, the intended and inferred meanings and significances are bound to change, for myths and their narratives are not static: they are considered “a form of future”.26 They go beyond their narrative frameworks and, within them, they “code” both past and future.27 At a narrative level, the figure of Victor Frankenstein merges past influences with future ambitions, which lead to the emergence of a fictional pioneer in the scientific creation of life along with his famous (monstrous) living experiment. The subsequent enduring impact of the story and its protagonists accounts for their cultural importance. Mythologies are “culturally important” in that they are narratives that “uniquely represent particular societies”, as opposed to “private” fictions.28 Private fictions are neither essential nor meaningful to a society or a culture, whereas a myth is a “quintessential story”.29 Frankenstein could have been just another private fiction had it not been for the compelling plot, its controversial aspects, the ingenious characters Mary Shelley created, and its social and cultural impact. It is important to note too that, as primary stories, the novel appeared around a time of political fragmentation and new scientific developments. The novel reflects such issues, being the scientific creation of life the story’s famous key element. The transgressive experiment arose all sorts of criticism and, through the years, the text continued to be associated with modern technology. Frankenstein’s scope slowly broadened and left the merely literary realm and the margins of the Gothic, reaching different disciplines and the mainstream popular culture. As culturally important myths, which tend to reappear regularly through “oral [or] written literature”,30 the novel has inspired the production of numerous films, television series, plays, novels, comics, music, video games, costumes, and toys. I have selected some examples to illustrate the variety of these (mainly artistic) works. Some of the most famous cinematographic adaptations are the Universal Pictures 1931 version with Boris Karloff and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), by Kenneth Branagh. We can also find “spinoffs” such as Frankenstein Resuturado (2018), which is compilation of short stories that follow the Creature through the decades. Amongst other miscellanea, we have Alice Cooper’s song “Teenage Frankenstein” (1986); The Simpsons 2003 instalment of the

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Treehouse of Horror series that includes the segment “Frinkenstein”; or Doc Frankenstein comic book series, written by the Wachowski Sisters. These and every other retelling and Frankensteinian piece of work would be part of the myth’s secondary elaborations. Generally, myths provide “material for secondary elaborations”.31 Classical mythology has inspired countless artistic productions, and Shelley’s novel is no different. Its obvious mythic basis is the myth of Prometheus, given the narration and its title Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The Greek myth recounts the story of Prometheus, a Titan that disobeyed Zeus’ orders and helped mankind by giving them fire. After unleashing Zeus’ wrath, he was chained to a rock where an eagle would daily come to eat his liver, which was regenerated by night. The straightforward comparison, and the one Mary Shelley seemingly suggests, would be that of Prometheus and Victor. For starters, they share their disregard of limits: Prometheus disobeys those imposed by the God of Gods whereas Victor crosses moral and scientific bounds. Prometheus aided mankind by teaching them part of his own knowledge, helping them fight against Zeus and survive. The Titan was also known for having created man clay-figures to whom Athena breathed life.32 In a similar fashion, Victor Frankenstein attempted to bestow animation to an inanimate body and give life to “an animal as complex and wonderful as man”.33 His musings went beyond creating a new whole species, wanting to renew life “where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption”34 ; in other words, he wanted to give humanity the boon of immortality. For both their defiance, they were punished and isolated, although the forces that intervened are different, as are the actions that led them to their damnation. In the Promethean myth, a suprahuman entity intervenes, whilst in Frankenstein Victor is persecuted by his own “offspring” and his own guilt. Unlike the Titan god, who was a mentor, teacher, and father to mankind, the scientist dooms his family and friends after he fails to perform his role as creator and father. The lack of deities in Shelley’s novel further differentiates the myths: the pursuit of knowledge and science are the story’s equivalent of religion and God. Given the parallelisms and the mythic influence and grounding, Victor can truly be considered a modern “Prometheus”. Like a Russian doll, we can place the myth of Prometheus right at its core and the Frankenstein myth in an outer section, considering every aspect and related work that the myths encompass. In this light, we find that both myths belong to the same set, in the sense that the Frankenstein complex is an enlargement of Prometheus, although at the same time they are separated, as they constitute myths of their own. What I propose is that Frankenstein and all its versions constitute a secondary elaboration in the network of the myth of Prometheus and that the Frankenstein chain has a mythic value of its own, for there is no denying that every Frankensteinian work is part of one expansive circle that keeps on changing and evolving. Part of that mythic circle is Frankenstein’s incursion into the vernacular. There are several words and idioms with a mythic origin through which

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we “interpret reality” that have become so internalized that the original “inventiveness” has been somewhat lost.35 Some examples from Greek and Roman mythology are the nouns narcissism, adonis, Achilles’ heel, or Oedipus Syndrome. In a similar fashion, “Frankenstein” and “Frankenstein’s Monster” have become idiomatic terms when referring to a frightening and dangerous thing that becomes destructive to its creator.36 We further encounter the prefix “Franken-”, commonly employed when implying “artificial monstrosity” and indicating that something is made of different parts in an unnatural manner, which makes it dangerous. In this way, almost anyone can come up with new Frankensteinian word combinations. There are various mash-up examples, some of which are more established, like calling genetically modified food “frankenfoods”.37 The negative connotations these terms carry are a result of the story’s divergence from myths and their “ideas of wholeness”, which is why Frankenstein’s Monster was widely employed to encourage the idea of “chaos replacing order”, especially in the political sphere.38 There are many instances of political allegories from all over the world at different times in history. In the late eighteenth century, the “Irish Frankenstein Monster” was pictured in anti-Irish propaganda posters by the Victorian press,39 and during the Second World War cartoons of Hitler as Frankenstein’s Monster were published. In due course, visual caricatures of American presidents materialized, such as “Frankenbush”40 or the more recent “Frankentrump”.41 In Spain, 2017 headlines in newspapers addressed the social-democratic party PSOE’s attempt to create a left-wing coalition as a “Frankenstein Government”.42 These examples are related to the point Doty makes when saying “living myths are marked by social consensus as to their importance and often their implications”.43 Such implications find their roots in the character of the Creature and its deformation and persisting depiction as a gruesome, fearful monster; a notion that leads me to the next features Doty mentions: the “imaginal” and “graphic imagery”. Doty explains the imaginal as images in which social meanings are created and expressed.44 The imaginal world where the fictional images appear accepts those figures—deities, for example—as real and visible.45 Since myths are culturally important, we can differentiate mythic imaginings from those of other non-mythic narratives, as their imaginal significance and relevance are accepted, widespread, and long-lasting. Graphic imagery is another device by which meanings are conveyed: for instance, in many mythologies illustrations of the human body are employed recurrently “as a master symbol for spirituality”.46 Applied to Frankenstein, the imaginal world presented in the tale is seemingly the same as ours, but fictional images materialize in the form of Frankenstein’s Monster. The Creature is the unknown and unexpected figure, non-existent in the reader’s world; a novum in Darko Suvin’s terminology.47 For this very reason, the Creature has become so interesting and popular in opposition to Victor and the other characters. His popularity is such that we are able to recognize a wide variety of Frankenstein’s Monsters, for the different versions developed a Monster of their own. The films, in particular,

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thanks to their visual representations, had a considerable role in our mental pictures. Accordingly, the most notable (shared) features would be: his scarring and physical deformation (to evince he is made from different body parts); his tall stature; perhaps his jerky movements with his arms extended (as portrayed by Lon Chaney Jr. in The Ghost of Frankenstein in 1942); and probably— thanks to Karloff’s portrayal—bolts coming out of his neck. A mixture of these graphic images (and any additional others) would sum up the mental construct of our own Frankenstein Monster. The story’s images are not simply merely graphic constructs, though: they have a substantial significance that highlights “polarities of human physical and social existence”.48 In Frankenstein, such polarities come up in reverse. For starters, “light” and “darkness” appear both literally—fire as light and De Lacey’s blindness as darkness—, and figuratively—knowledge as both light and darkness: its acquisition can either set us free or imprison us. Likewise, the protagonists—according to the Western and Confucian usage of the contrast between light and darkness—would not be classified as purely good (light) or evil (dark), given their ambiguous moralities. There is “disorder” in the natural process of reproduction, too. The line between the “living” and “dead” is blurred when Victor creates a living being out of dead bodies, thus disrupting, in true gothic fashion, the laws of conventional reality and nature and playing with the possibilities of science (in replacement of the supernatural). In this light, Shelley’s story gives an unexpected perspective on human nature and development by depicting the growth of a liminal individual that is not considered human, challenging yet again the conventions of traditional mythology. Another characteristic of myths is the use of “metaphoric” and “symbolic diction” through which our views on reality are expressed. In Frankenstein, metaphors and symbolism appear, although with a bit of a twist. Myths usually have grand imaginal scenery, with supernatural figures embodying metaphors and symbols of great relevance to humanity, whereas in Shelley’s novel, we have humanly flawed characters that are driven by their obsessions and emotions in a setting we recognize as our world. The Creature is the distinct striking figure and, owing to his depiction and development, he could be considered a metaphor for humanity. Despite not undergoing physical change, he develops cognitive functions like any other human. At first, he resembles and acts as a newborn, seeking his father’s attention and affection and communicating by gestures because, like babies, he does not know how to speak. Once he finds the De Lacey’s he learns to communicate verbally, gaining one of the main abilities that distinguishes humans from other beings. The Creature seeks the comfort, acceptance and love of the De Lacey family— social inclusion, in essence—, but he is once again repudiated because of his appearance. The constant rejections are what arguably turn him into a spiteful being and, most importantly, an “outcast”.49 Paralleling the genre he inhabits, the Gothic—whose fiction was relegated to the margins of literature and that was very much concerned, in turn, with marginal characters—, the Creature

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becomes a symbol due to his liminal condition for those whom society has neglected, may it be because of their race, gender, religion, physical, or mental disabilities, etc. In this sense, we can interpret “the individual experience with universal perspective”,50 making distinctions between the group we belong to and the others. Adopting a common precept of that time’s gothic literature, Frankenstein notably highlights the differences between us and the Other; yet the line becomes blurry once the Creature tells his story. Readers come to an understanding with this protagonist, almost forgetting that Victor and the rest of the characters—and even the readership itself—are supposedly different from him. The importance of speech in the perception and humanization of the character is essential, since his eloquence and power of moving come from his language. Without his speech, we would only have Victor’s perspective, losing the Creature’s complexity and ambiguity. His anomalies, which do alarm and frighten readers, are transferred to a background position when we start to sympathize with him, subsequently questioning the qualities that make us human and our social roles. Myths perpetuate gender behaviour roles and stereotypical models that reinforce “patterns of behavior that are no longer adequate to contemporary social realities”.51 Mary Shelley’s novel subverts these roles: she gives Victor the capacity to produce and birth a living individual, usurping women’s role and God’s power of creation. In this fashion, the story—infused with creation myth undertones—portrays atypical role models that diverge from the norm, thus partially failing to provide readers with a sense of their own “roles in the universe”.52 Unlike creation myths, which explain how the world and the people within it came to be, in Frankenstein we have a protagonist who does not hold that knowledge but seeks to find it. What is more, the novel would be collapsing both myths of creation and myths of transgression as Chris Baldick points out in his book In Frankenstein’s Shadow, for “creation and transgression appear to be the same thing”.53 Victor’s transgression comes from his curiosity and thirst for knowledge, which are ruled by science—“natural philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate”54 —rather than religion. The early alchemists Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus were the influential figures in the scientist’s life, as were electricity and galvanism. Thanks to them he succeeds in his attempt to create “a new species [that] would bless [him] as its creator and source”,55 but the story does not explain the origins of human life or the world. In fact, it offers little detail on the exact procedures of his transgressive experiment. The tale further fails to answer moral and behaviour questions by displaying questionable options for “acting ethically”.56 Victor seemingly tells Walton his story to moralize and warn about the hazards of ambition and excessive knowledge, but he weakens his stance by contradicting himself, claiming that others may succeed “in science and discoveries”.57 In short, rather than providing answers and establishing human behavioural patterns, the story explores human nature and makes us question our roles in the universe and our differences with others. The interpretations that consequently

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form depend on the “emotional conviction” and “participation” that takes place in the readings and retellings of the myth. Believers engage with and indirectly participate in the readings and retellings by discovering mythemes in their own and others’ lives and by reflecting upon what was recounted.58 The complex of Frankenstein works, and specifically the novel, raise several questions, and perhaps the most illuminating one for my discussion is whether the Creature can be considered human or not. The character is never considered as such neither in the novel nor in the vast majority of adaptations. In Shelley’s text, he is described as physically resembling a man but being frightfully hideous and exceptionally tall. He also learns to speak and, with great eloquence, manifests his feelings and emotions. Just like any human, he is scared at times, he feels pain and pleasure, and he seeks to love and be loved in return. So, if we take into account the anatomical and psychic aspects that are generally deemed as “human”, we would conclude that, amongst the relatively few characteristics that distinguish the Creature from us, the one that stands out is that he has been artificially created. The early stage adaptations, however, crucially denied him the capacity of speech, creating a completely different character that has been redefined as a “soulless monster”. Baldick calls attention to this particular “soulless” aspect and its appearances in literary and journalistic texts from the eighteenth century, mentioning some examples. Similar to the aforementioned anti-Irish propaganda, Thomas Carlyle wrote a piece for the radical Tories Fraser’s Magazine where he established a parallelism between “the Frankenstein monster” and a secular state, in that they both are a body without a soul.59 Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1948) is also singled out: the Creature is mistakenly called “Frankenstein” in the novel, and he comes closer to the version portrayed in the stage versions than the book’s original character.60 The influence of the early nineteenth-century plays prevailed and affected subsequent, more modern adaptations, along with our perception and visualization of the character. Richard B Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein (1823) and Henry M. Milner’s Frankenstein; or, the Man and the Monster! (1823) reconfigured several features of Mary Shelley’s 1818 original text, some of which potentially influenced the expanded and altered 1831 edition. I will briefly enumerate some of those changes to illustrate the myth’s evolving nature, which starts with the novels themselves. Firstly, we find the significant alteration of Victor and Elizabeth’s relationship: in the first version they are lovers and cousins, whereas in the second edition, whilst they still marry, Elizabeth is presented as an adopted stranger. The 1831’s narrative more conservative tone also lead to the introduction of: the concept of “presumption”, likely taken after Peake’s title; Henry Clerval’s colonial ambitions; the shift towards a personal interest in science rather than a family tradition; and the family’s “improved health” in order to avoid suggesting “that the aristocracy was diseased or degenerative”.61 Concerning the characters, the plays somewhat “radicalized” them, giving Victor more heroic and courageous traits whilst the

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Monster was completely vilified. Mary Shelley did not adopt these alterations and her characters remained on an ambiguous moral ground. Regardless of the depiction in the novel(s), the repercussions these modified versions have had on the Frankenstein myth are enormous,62 and such deformations of character have continued to materialize because, even though both Victor and the Creature embody “possible human behavioural roles”, they are not prototypical mythic figures. Myths usually follow the story of a hero or heroine that should be a representation “of human behavior on behalf of the collective”, going “beyond the expected social norms in order to return to confirm the norms or to reshape them”.63 Victor Frankenstein could be considered a hero since he tried to become the benefactor of humanity in that, like Prometheus, he sought a new fire that would give humans a new status. Nonetheless, he exhibits dubious ethics and repeatedly shies away from the consequences of his actions. He abandoned the being he had created and, later on, he did not immediately intervene to stop his offspring’s murders, nor did he speak up when Justine Moritz was unjustly accused and executed after confessing a crime she did not commit. Victor remained silent in fear of being “abhorred” and “haunted”,64 just as the Creature had been. He did not even confront the Creature, as a hero would and should, resulting in a journey that is anything but heroic. He fails to complete the hero’s journey and, in this sense, he would be categorized more fittingly as an anti-hero. Concerning the Creature, although his actions and murders are heinous and morally indefensible, we can understand he is driven by vengeance and spite after being emotionally and physically hurt. Victor had failed in his duty as creator and nurturing father; the scientist even acknowledges this fact at one point—“for the first time, also, I felt what the duties of a creator towards his creature were, and that I ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness”.65 The novel suggests that the Creature is not inherently evil and that his villainous ways are a result of Victor’s abandonment, the lack of nurture in his “upbringing”, and the constant neglect he endured by a prejudiced society. As a result, Frankenstein reformulates the figures of hero and heroine, who no longer have to be superhuman or exemplar figures—they can be morally ambiguous individuals. Victor and the Creature stand in a grey area in which we recognize our fears, mistakes, and suffering. We realize they are not gods or beings above us like prototypical mythic heroes. They are our equals and, by noticing our similarities, we are able to acknowledge our own human behavioural roles. The dualities that form after reading the protagonists’ journey, which were consciously crafted by the author—are we to cheer for one and loathe the other? What are we to do with the contradictory feelings that emerge when assessing such ethically flawed individuals?—left space for endless reinterpretations that shape the protagonists and plot in new, unique ways. Of course, some variations have been more popular than others, the most notorious being the shifting battle between depicting the Creature as a grotesque monster, a

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comical oaf and a misunderstood victim,66 and Victor as either a mad scientist, flawed anti-hero, or valiant hero.67 Given my commentary on Doty, there is no denying that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein contains strong mythical grounding, which laid the basis to what we now call the Frankenstein myth. First, its story and characters have become culturally important, being an intrinsic and relevant part of (especially) Western cultures. For this reason, the novel’s narrative motivated the production of adaptations, reinterpretations, and other science fiction, gothic, and horror stories. Moreover, the character of the Creature—popularly called “Frankenstein” or “Frankenstein’s Monster”—has almost turned into a mythical figure that is recognized by his distinct physical appearance, characterized by its deformity, scarring, height, and extraordinary strength and agility. I have also argued how the story diverges from traditional paradigms of mythography, especially those that concern religion and supernatural and suprahuman elements, which are replaced by science—a science that nevertheless produces its own “suprahuman” being. The story and the reaction received make Frankenstein a reformulation of mythology and what we understand by myth. All the chosen aspects of Doty’s definition appear in the Frankenstein myth, but many have been reconfigured, which is why we must regard and analyse it as a modern myth. The discussed features suggest how and why Frankenstein (as in the whole complex of works) has become a myth, especially those concerned with its cultural impact and evolution. Yet, if its own mythic value were to be challenged, there is no denying that the story contains a heavy mythic influence and intertextuality—Prometheus, Faust, Paradise Lost —, and for that matter it would, at the very least, be considered a secondary elaboration of the myth of Prometheus. In relation to this, as I pointed out, the novel has its very own “secondary elaborations”, which include theatrical and film adaptations as well as other fictional and nonfictional elements and works that present some sort of Frankensteinian influence. These productions “have actually come to constitute a story and a ‘Frankenstein’ of their own”,68 becoming pieces of the Frankenstein puzzle. We do not have just one Frankenstein; we have many Frankensteins that build up to what we call the Frankenstein myth.69 Overall, this essay has been devoted to the analysis of various perspectives regarding mythology and how Frankenstein fits in them. Traditional approaches, like Bascom’s, are so constrictive that they do not leave room for the creation of new myths, and thereby considering Frankenstein a myth would be an inaccuracy. Nevertheless, as I tried to argue when examining William Doty, the set of Frankenstein works—and especially the novel—seem to match almost every feature of his definition of myth, save some peculiarities that make Frankenstein a modern myth rather than simply a myth. Indeed, those peculiarities—science, Victor and the Creature, the gothic atmosphere— were the ones that, as Chris Baldick indicates, “created a living myth”70 as opposed to contemporaneous texts such as Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound or William Blake’s Vala. The “fruitful possibilities”71 Frankenstein

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contained have provided the myth with a malleable quality, hence the twisting and endless transformations and readaptations, which make “other ‘Frankensteins’ display more dissimilarities than shared features with the original text”.72 Of course, every myth changes and evolves and is “altered through time and space”,73 and because of this we should not “lament the corruption and distortion of an authentic literary original, nor […] correct erroneous departures”.74 On the contrary, as claimed by Baldick and Lévi-Strauss, since a myth “is not to be established by authorizing its earliest version”, we should consider “all its versions”.75 In this light, and because myths “also open toward the future”,76 new mythologies can be created. Amongst the relatively recent and new narratives that could potentially contain “mythic dimensions”, science fiction stands out. Myths, considered a “primitive science”, structured the universe and accounted for the origins of life; science fiction, on the other hand, is more concerned with the universe’s fate.77 Due to the speculative nature of these last stories, where the full potential of science and technology is explored, the new mythology created would be taken as plausible and even as a foreshadowing of future events. Because of this, Frankenstein has been categorized as an early precedent of the science fiction genre.78 Throughout the years, the messages evoked from the story were the dangers of science and its fatal, monstrous consequences, hence the fervent opposition against genetic engineering and other scientific developments. The narrative certainly served as an inspiration to other science-focused stories, parallelisms being dragged between Victor and his creation, and other (mad) scientists and machines like robots or cyborgs. The novel, however, is more appropriately classified as a gothic story. Mary Shelley herself in the 1831 introduction speaks of the novel as a ghost tale, detailing how the creation scene came to her in a dream and expressing her intention to inspire readers the same horror she felt when she woke up.79 She succeeded, playing with gothic modes and creating a sublime setting. As a result, the novel and its characters flourished within the Gothic. The versions and reinterpretations widely maintained the sublime atmosphere and characteristic gothic devices; some even added more that have become staples within the myth, like Castle Frankenstein (attributed to James Whale’s 1931 production). The Creature’s depiction as a horrifying monster in the stage versions and first film adaptations further propelled the inclusion of the character into the horror sphere, becoming an indispensable figure along with others such as the vampire, witch, or werewolf. In this way, the story and Frankenstein’s Monster have become essential elements of horror, gothic-centred franchises (Hammer Productions), works, and western traditions, such as the celebration of Halloween, where children commonly dress up as spooky figures amongst which “Frankenstein” (understood as the Monster) makes an appearance. Nonetheless, the ambivalent quality the story has—criss-crossing genres and modes (gothic, horror, science fiction, spoofs)—in addition to the cultural impact and the myriad of (re)interpretations and adaptations are a statement of the plot and characters’ long-lasting relevance, compelling quality, and mythic

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value. The Frankenstein myth has been constituted little by little; first with the 1818 novel’s publication, and then by surpassing literary boundaries, entering our popular culture through theatrical adaptations, films, television, music, comics, popular traditions, and our language. There are many factors that have made Frankenstein become so popular and culturally important, and much of it relies on its reinterpretations and the modifications made, creating different stories and characters within the Frankenstein universe. All these alterations and reassembling signify an evolution and an enrichment and enlargement of the myth. Mary Shelley may have been the one to create the novel, but her story and characters have long escaped its textual frame, entering others and living on, as immortal entities.80

Notes 1. Marta Vega Trijueque, “The Evolving ‘Frankenstein’ Myth: The Assistant Character in Theatrical and Film Adaptations”, in Frankenstein Revisited: The Legacy of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2018), 22. 2. Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-century Writing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 2. 3. Caroline Joan S. Picart, Remaking the Frankenstein Myth on Film (State University of New York Press, Albany, 2003), 1. 4. Peter Nagy, “The Enduring Influence of a Dangerous Narrative: How Scientists Can Mitigate the Frankenstein Myth”, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry (December 2017), 9. 5. Simpson, J. A., and E. S. C. Weiner, The Oxford English Dictionary: Second Edition—Volume X (Moul - Ovum) ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 177. 6. Ibid., 177. 7. David Punter and Glennis Byron, The Gothic (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 20. 8. Simpson and Weiner, OED, 177. 9. Camden Pelham, The Chronicles of Crime; or, The New Newgate Calendar Vol. 1. (London: T. Tegg, 1841), 381. 10. Iwan Rhys Morus, “A Grand and Universal Panacea: Death, Resurrection and the Electric Chair”, in Bodies/Machines (United Kingdom: Berg, 2002), 98. 11. Chris Baldick, Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms Third Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 217. 12. Ibid., 217. 13. Alan Dundes “Introduction”, in Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1984), 1. 14. Ibid., 1.

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15. William Bascom, “The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives”, in Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1984), 9. 16. Ibid., 9. 17. Ibid., 9. 18. Ibid., 10. 19. Ibid., 10. 20. Ibid., 8. 21. Ibid., 8. 22. Ibid., 8. 23. William Doty, Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals Second Edition (Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 2000), 14. 24. Ibid., 33. 25. Ibid., 42. 26. Ibid., 47. 27. Ibid., 92. 28. Ibid., 37. 29. Ibid., 37. 30. Ibid., 38. 31. Ibid., 33. 32. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: Complete Edition (London: Penguin, 1992), 34. 33. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1999), 42. 34. Ibid., 43. 35. Doty, Mythography, 52. 36. “Frankenstein”, dictionary.cambridge.org (Cambridge Dictionary, 2020). 37. Paul Lewis, “Mutant Foods Create Risks We Can’t Yet Guess; Since Mary Shelley”, The New York Times (June 16, 1992). 38. Doty, Mythography, 60. 39. Leslie S. Klinger, “Appendix 6: Frankenstein in Popular Culture”, in The New Annotated Frankenstein (New York: Liveright, 2017), 337. 40. Susan T. Hitchcock, Frankenstein: A Cultural History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 197. 41. Fred Barbash, “‘Frankentrump’: Is It Unfair — to Frankenstein?” The Washington Post (September 21, 2016). 42. Ignacio Camacho, “El retorno de Frankenstein”, ABC (March 09 2017). 43. Doty, Mythography, 38. 44. Ibid., 39. 45. Ibid., 40. 46. Ibid., 54. 47. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987), 59.

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48. Doty, Mythography, 55. 49. Shelley, Frankenstein, 101. 50. Doty, Mythography, 71. 51. Ibid., 72. 52. Ibid., 73. 53. Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow, 40. 54. Shelley, Frankenstein, 31. 55. Ibid., 43. 56. Doty, Mythography, 73. 57. Shelley, Frankenstein, 166. 58. Doty, Mythography, 56. 59. Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow, 60. 60. Ibid., 87. 61. Siv Jansson, “A Note on the Text”, in Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1999), XXIV. 62. On how the plays, with the introduction of the assistant character (Fritz and Strutt), have contributed in the shaping and evolution of Victor and the Creature see my “The Evolving ‘Frankenstein’ Myth: The Assistant Character in Theatrical and Film Adaptations”, in Frankenstein Revisited: The Legacy of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2018), pp. 21–32. 63. Doty, Mythography, 64. 64. Shelley, Frankenstein, 141. 65. Ibid., 79. 66. Hitchcock, Frankenstein: A Cultural History, 210. 67. Vega, “The Evolving ‘Frankenstein’ Myth”, 31. 68. Ibid., 23. 69. Paul O’Flinn, “Production and Reproduction: the Case of Frankenstein”, in The Horror Reader (Routledge: Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002), 114. 70. Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow, 3. 71. Ibid., 3. 72. Vega, “The Evolving ‘Frankenstein’ Myth”, 22. 73. Ibid., 22. 74. Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow, 4. 75. Ibid., 4. 76. Doty, Mythography, 47. 77. Thomas C. Sutton and Marilyn Sutton, “Science Fiction as Mythology”, in Western Folklore (Western States Folklore Society: Vol. 28, No. 4, Oct., 1969), p. 231. 78. Baldick, Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 301. 79. Shelley, “Author’s Introduction”, Frankenstein, 5. 80. Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow, 30.

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Bibliography Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound, translated by Deborah H. Roberts. Indiana: Hackett Classics, 2012. Aldini, John. General Views on the Application of Galvanism to Medical Purposes, Principally in Cases of Suspended Animation. London, 1819. Baldick, Chris. In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-century Writing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Baldick, Chris. Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms Third Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 217–218. Barbash, Fred. “‘Frankentrump’: Is It Unfair—To Frankenstein?,” The Washington Post. September 21, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/ wp/2016/09/21/the-frankentrump-meme-unfair-to-frankenstein/ Date accessed: 13/08/2020 Bascom, William. “The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives,” in Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth, ed. Alan Dundes. Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1984, pp. 5–29. Camacho, Ignacio. “El retorno de Frankenstein.” ABC. March 09, 2017. http:// www.abc.es/opinion/abci-retorno-frankenstein-201703090602_noticia.html Date accessed: 08/07/2020 Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon Books, 1953. Doty, William. Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals Second Edition. Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 2000. Dundes, Alan. “Introduction,” in Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth, ed. Alan Dundes. Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1984, pp. 1–5 “Franken-.” dictionary.cambridge.org. Cambridge Dictionary, 2020. https://dictio nary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/franken Date accessed: 17/09/2020 “Frankenstein.” dictionary.cambridge.org. Cambridge Dictionary, 2020. http://dictio nary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/frankenstein Date accessed: 17/09/2020. Gelder, Ken. “Introduction to Part Four,” in The Horror Reader, ed. Ken Gelder. Routledge: Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002, pp. 111–113. Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths: Complete Edition. London: Penguin, 1992. Hitchcock, Susan T. Frankenstein: A Cultural History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. Janson, Siv. “A Note on the Text,” in Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1999. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, Inc. Publishers, 1963. Lipking, Lawrence. “Frankenstein, the True Story; or, Rousseau Judges Jean-Jacques,” in Frankenstein (the 1818 text), ed. J. Paul Hunter. Norton Critical Editions. New York: Norton, 1996, pp. 313–331. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Methuen, 1987. Milner, Henry M. Frankenstein; or, The Man and The Monster. Blackmask Online: 2001. Morus, Iwan Rhys. “A Grand and Universal Panacea: Death, Resurrection and the Electric Chair,” in Bodies/Machines, ed. Iwan Rhys Morus. United Kingdom: Berg, 2002, p. 98. Nagy, Peter. “The Enduring Influence of a Dangerous Narrative: How Scientists Can Mitigate the Frankenstein Myth.” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry. December 2017.

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O’Flinn, Paul. “Production and Reproduction: The Case of Frankenstein,” in The Horror Reader, ed. Ken Gelder. Routledge: Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002, pp. 114–127. Peake, Richard B. Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein in ‘Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789–1825’. Ohio: University Press, 1992. Pelham, Camden. The Chronicles of Crime; or, The New Newgate Calendar VOL. 1. London: T. Tegg, 1841, pp. 380–382. Punter, David and Glennis Byron. The Gothic. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein (the 1818 text), ed. J. Paul Hunter. Norton Critical Editions. New York: Norton, 1996, pp. 7–156. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1999. Shelley, Mary W., Leslie S. Klinger, Guillermo del Toro, and Anne K. Mellor. The New Annotated Frankenstein, ed. Leslie S. Klinger. New York: Liveright, 2017. Simpson, J. A., and E. S. C. Weiner. The Oxford English Dictionary: Second Edition— Volume X (Moul - Ovum). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 177. Sutton, Thomas C. and Marilyn Sutton. “Science Fiction as Mythology,” in Western Folklore. Western States Folklore Society: Vol. 28, No. 4 (Oct., 1969), pp. 230–237. Vega Trijueque, Marta. “The Evolving ‘Frankenstein’ Myth: The Assistant Character in Theatrical and Film Adaptations,” in Frankenstein Revisited: The Legacy of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2018, pp. 21– 32.

Graveyard Gothic

Graveyard Poetry and the Aesthetics of Horror Eric Parisot

When surveying the Gothic, Horace Walpole’s self-professed gothic story, The Castle of Otranto (1764), is often cited as the originating moment of the Gothic Revival. But in recent years, growing attention has been paid to a small body of early to mid-eighteenth-century religious poetry typically known by its rather limited name: ‘graveyard poetry’.1 This designation brings the superficial elements of the poetic mode to the fore, which typically includes a poetic narrator seated or wandering in a graveyard setting, drawing the reader’s attention to the gloomy and macabre elements of the locale: the sober yew trees; the screeching owls and croaking ravens; the mouldy tombstones inscribed with mournful epitaphs; the bones and skulls; the feeding worms; and sometimes, the bodies of the disinterred. These tropes are invoked, however, for a higher purpose than aesthetic thrills. They function as memento mori, used to encourage serious contemplation of the most fundamental aspects of Christian religious life: the transience of earthly existence, our inevitable death, and the preparation of one’s soul in readiness for salvation. The label ‘graveyard poetry’ also tends to overlook the mode’s emphasis on elegiac sentimentalism. The affective imagination is often spurred to produce sombre notes of nostalgia and melancholy, and sometimes, more severe states of dread and fear better suited to religious edification. It is the combination of these extreme

E. Parisot (B) Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_12

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affective states and the stylised literary artifice by which they are elicited— often to the neglect of the mode’s primarily devotional purpose—that lends graveyard poetry to comparison with, and occasionally inclusion within, the Gothic literary tradition. With this growing attention to graveyard poetry as a pre-Gothic poetic mode, its precise relation to the Gothic has been incrementally re-evaluated. Just how does graveyard poetry fit into a Gothic literary tradition, if at all? A number of scholars have contributed to a broad consensus. Vincent Quinn rightly points to both commonalities and differences, suggesting that graveyard poetry and the Gothic occupy mutual literary terrain, intersecting in aspects, diverging in others.2 Serena Trowbridge is more pointed in positing that both graveyard poetry and the Gothic explore, aesthetically and metaphysically, deep anxieties about death and the existence of an afterlife.3 Admittedly, this might be a matter of emphasis. The nocturnal churchyard scene of Thomas Parnell’s ‘A Night-Piece on Death’ (1721), for instance, is adorned with epitaphs, bones, supernatural visions of the dead. Even Death himself is summoned, but only to rebuke humanity for such unnecessary embellishments, undercutting any sense of dread with a cold dose of religious reason: ‘Death’s but a path that must be trod / If man wou’d ever pass to God’ (67–68).4 Similarly, Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742–45)—a celebrated graveyard poem that, over almost 10,000 lines, is rarely situated within the graveyard—wields reason to purge the night of any gothic content, and with it any sense of frisson. As Andrew Smith justifiably claims, Young’s contemplative vision is decidedly anti-Gothic, despite its reputation.5 But as we shall see in this chapter, other poems like Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743) attempt to exploit all that Parnell and Young disclaim, to full gothic effect. Yael Shapira refines the relation between graveyard poetry and the Gothic further still in her exploration of the eighteenth-century Gothic corpse, arguing that while the dead body is often exploited in both as a source of fear, this affective potential is obscured in graveyard poetry by the persistence of older discourses that privilege other, instructive aims.6 One such discourse is the elegiac; as Jerrold E. Hogle proposes, where the elegy tries to lay the past to rest and console the bereaved, the Gothic instead revives the past, where it often irrupts and lingers to discomfit the living.7 Another older tradition that potentially marks a distinction between graveyard poetics and the Gothic is the former’s emphasis on religious didacticism: as I, and others, have argued elsewhere, in this regard the didactic graveyard poem has more in common with the traditional funeral sermon than the Gothic, to remind the living of their Christian duty to prepare their souls for their own death and—God willing—subsequent salvation.8 While graveyard poetry might sometimes employ gothic aesthetic means, that these means remain tied to primarily religious ends can be read as a crucial distinction between graveyard poetics and the Gothic Revival that swiftly ensued.9 Perhaps we can be a little bolder by asking: can graveyard poetry be read as Gothic literature? David Punter believes so: examples of graveyard poetry,

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particularly Blair’s The Grave, feature in his critical work on gothic poetry; Caroline Franklin, too, includes graveyard poetry in The Longman Anthology of Gothic Verse (2011).10 This may well be a reductive question, one that allows less room for the nuanced critical consensus outlined above. It is a question, though, that might serve a purpose in opening up new ways of thinking about graveyard poetry through a distinctly gothic lens, one that forces us to privilege the proto-Gothic aesthetics often employed over elegiac or religiously didactic objectives. And this is precisely the kind of examination that ensues here, one that reads Blair’s The Grave as an intricate example of the gothic horror that we might more typically associate with Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796) and German Schauerromantik. Blair’s The Grave has been well identified as the example of graveyard poetry that most closely approaches the Gothic. Some claim that Blair’s deliberate pursuit of gothic frisson seems detached from any religious or moral lesson.11 This is not entirely accurate; Blair was a Scottish Presbyterian minister, and his poem is deeply imbued with a Calvinist rejection of all earthly things, wholly directing its reader to salvation by faith alone.12 But it is certainly true to claim that Blair also fully invests in the reforming capacity of fear to fulfil his pious office. It is an affective strategy endorsed by Calvinist theology. Blair follows the lead of Isaac Watts, a prominent non-conformist preacher and poet whom Blair greatly admired, who once claimed some ‘are more easily susceptive of Religion in a grave Discourse and sedate Reasoning’, while others ‘are best frighted from Sin and Ruin by Terror, Threatening and Amazement; their Fear is the properest Passion to which we can address our selves, and begin the Divine Work’.13 Furthermore, Watts imitates John Calvin himself when coupling an emphasis on fear and trembling with a graveyard setting. For Calvin, it is only when ‘some corpse is being buried, or we walk among graves’, and ‘the likeness of death then meets our eyes’, that we ‘philosophize brilliantly concerning the vanity of this life’.14 Watts reinforces this tenet in his own short prose meditation, ‘The Church-Yard’, to ‘converse with the dead’ where ‘the Hillocks of Mortality arise all around me, each of them a Monument of Death’, where ‘a Thousand or Ten Thousand Pieces of Human Nature, Heaps upon Heaps, lie buried’, to teach the ‘sinful and thoughtless mortal’ of death.15 As we shall see, Blair also speaks with the dead in The Grave. But while Watts invokes a vision of sublime terror built upon the vast multitude and succession of the dead, Blair takes a distinctly different aesthetic approach. Blair’s vision is immediate, arresting, and seemingly tangible: it is a nightmarish fantasy of religious horror. In fact, Blair’s poem precedes the eighteenth-century differentiation between terror and horror. The two terms were largely interchangeable in the first half of the century, but critical divergences emerged in the latter half, leading to (and creatively embellished by) the seminal novels of Ann Radcliffe as the epitome of literary terror, and the scandalous horrors of Lewis’ The Monk.17 Anna Laetitia Aikin (later Barbauld) implicitly marks the beginnings

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of this critical and aesthetic divergence in her critical reflection, ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror’ (1773).18 While Aikin focuses on the mechanics of artificial terror, an affect seemingly devoid of moral engagement, she acknowledges another possibility, one where the engagement of our moral senses produces too painful a sensation, resulting in disgust, repulsion, and horror. For Aikin, then, moral abhorrence is a distinguishing feature of horror. She also helps to reinforce proximity—both spatial and experiential—as a significant factor; that is, the closer a fearful object, or the more it resembles our reality and experience, the more painful impression it creates from which we recoil. Aikin’s important critical intervention helps to establish horror as an aversive emotion, one triggered by moral disgust and/or the source of fear being too close for comfort. James Beattie advances the critical divergence between terror and horror by highlighting the corporeal nature of horror, as not just an emotional state but as a momentary experience of physical mortification, a fleeting impression of death. For Beattie, horror is rooted in the sensory and visceral, both in cause and effect.19 Nathan Drake, writing after Radcliffe’s The Italian (1796–97), privileges Radcliffe’s literary terror as a sensation produced by artful moderation, and one that lures the curious reader. Horror, although stemming from the same source, is quite the opposite in Drake’s classification: artless, extreme, and repulsive.20 But arguably the most significant critical differences between terror and horror were established by Radcliffe herself, in her essay ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ (c.1802/p.1826). One distinction reinforces the temporal dimension of both terror and horror: while both sensations rush upon us, Radcliffe suggests terror diminishes slowly, creating a lingering experience of unease; horror, however, is transient, a quick, cheap thrill. Radcliffe also invests heavily in Edmund Burke’s conception of the sublime when positing terror as an almost quasi-religious, quickening experience, one that transcends the physical world and approaches the apprehension of an unfathomable, intangible power; horror, however, seizes the faculties, and forcibly grounds us in the mundane, never beyond. Likewise, while terror provokes the imagination to expansion, to embellish what has only been implied, the explicit nature of horror constricts imaginative play, usurping the mind just as it does the body.21 In all, by the end of the eighteenth century, horror was firmly established as a discrete gothic affect with a recognisable set of aesthetics. Horror presents objects of fear with immediacy, and often unnervingly resembles our own experiences. It is explicit and firmly grounded in the mundane, appealing strongly to our physical senses and lacking in imaginative moderation. It often manifests as a shock, a fleeting impression that produces a seizing, somatic response. It is also a sensation that triggers instinctive aversive responses, whether emotionally in the form of disgust or physically in the form of flight. Armed with these aesthetic criteria, it is possible to read Blair’s The Grave as an example of a graveyard poem that isn’t merely a precursor to the Gothic Revival, but an example of gothic horror itself, as an early creative articulation of a gothic affect that only came to be critically defined later in the century.

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The poem begins with an immediate declaration of Blair’s artistic (rather than clerical) duty—‘To paint the gloomy horrors of the tomb’—before an invocation to the ‘Eternal King! … / … The Grave, dread thing!’22 These opening lines stress the literary artifice of the meditation that follows. The early sections of the poem, in particular, are replete with familiar gothic paraphernalia: the ‘sickly taper’ (l.16), the pallid moon, ‘sculls and coffins, epitaphs and worms’ (l.23), and visions of ‘light-heel’d ghosts’ (l.24). Whereas darkness and silence reign within the grave itself, above ground, the graveyard abounds with sensory stimuli, forcefully engaging our imaginary senses: the ‘low-browed misty Vaults’ are ‘Furr’d round with mouldy Damps, and ropy Slime’ (ll.17–18) to invite touch; ‘See yonder hallow’d fane!’ (l.28), our guide exclaims, commanding our visionary sight; ‘Doors creak, and windows clap’ (l.34), while ‘night’s foul bird / … screams loud’ (ll.34–35) to arrest the imaginary ear; and later, we are even reminded of the putrefying ‘Carcase / That’s fall’n into disgrace, and in the nostril / Smells horrible’ (ll.169–71). This is not the sensory privation and obscurity we find in Young’s Night Thoughts and later endorsed by Radcliffean terror; it is vivid, sensory, and explicit, all that Radcliffe associates, instead, with the chaos and confusion of horror.23 As the poem itself declares, this is an atmosphere of ‘supernumerary horror’ (19), reprising the phrase used by Addison to describe the excessive sensory stimulation that overwhelms Mr. Spectator during a nocturnal stroll through an old churchyard.24 And it is an atmosphere crafted by Blair ‘to make thy night more irksome’ (l.20). Irksome indeed! This is most unpoetic diction, a dissonant phrase that purposely grates to discomfit the reader. Blair uses an imaginary soundscape to frightful effect, consistent with horror’s emphasis on the sensory. Sound—especially the sudden kind—has long been tied to horror. Burke’s Enquiry describes the terrifying potential of sudden and unexpected sounds at which we are apt to start, what in modern parlance we might call a ‘jump scare’.25 (It is little surprise, then, that the inception and rise of the modern horror film has been tied by critics to the advent of cinematic sound.26 ) The Grave, too, exploits the horrifying potential of alarming sounds. Blair marks the crying wind, for instance, by directly addressing the reader: ‘The wind is up: hark! how it howls!’ (l.32). While the gusting wind bewails forebodingly, it is Blair’s sudden directive to listen— ‘hark!’—that is the surprising element. The poem’s typically iambic rhythm is disturbed by this monosyllabic intrusion, creating an emphasis where none is expected. Blair may well claim that he had ‘never heard a sound so dreary’ (l.33), but it is his sudden call to attention that startles. The sounds of the locale remain the focus of the following lines; as well as the aforementioned creaking doors and clapping windows, we are to imagine the shrill cries of the owl resounding in the chapel’s spire, sent back to us ‘Laden with heavier airs’ (l.38). This soundscape is, however, replaced with an imagined supernatural vision, as ‘grizly spectres rise’, ‘hushed as the foot of night’ (ll.40–42). An unnerving silence is restored, reinforced by the caesura closing the line and sentence. But this is a momentary diversion: ‘Again! the screech-owl shrieks:

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ungracious sound! / I’ll hear no more, it makes one’s blood run chill’ (ll.43– 44). This time, Blair assaults our imaginary ear with two sudden starts. Just as before he employs an unexpected exclamation to shock us to attention. But the exclamation itself—‘Again!’—implies that the preternatural silence has already been broken. The interjection we read is itself a startled reaction to the shrieking owl, a sound so abrupt and unexpected that it is heard, imaginarily, in between poetic lines. Blair has created a double ‘jump scare’—we are jolted not only by the squawking bird, but also by Blair’s surprised verbal response. The graveyard is very much alive in Blair’s poem. Noisy nocturnal creatures are accompanied by seemingly unconscious objects and beings that are bestowed with unnerving latent sentience. The ‘misty vaults’ into which we descend are, for instance, ‘low-brow’d’ (l.17); the sepulchral architecture is figuratively endowed with human physiognomy, and more pointedly, a stern, foreboding countenance. Shortly afterwards, the yew tree is addressed as a constant but ‘Chearless, unsocial plant!’, one that dwells secluded from the social commerce of the living, and offers no comfort to the passer-by (ll.21– 22). Likewise, the ‘reverend elms’ are personified as aged, venerable beings, ‘Long lash’d by the rude winds’, resilient witnesses to the spectral hauntings that the ‘neighbours say’ have occurred within their view (ll.45, 47, 50). The cumulative effect of this anthropomorphism is a growing unease about the potential—and perhaps malignant—agency of the non-human. This potential is arguably realised in the following stanza depicting: The school-boy with his satchel in his hand, Whistling aloud to bear his courage up, And lightly tripping o’er the long flat stones. (With nettles skirted, and with moss o’ergrown,) That tell in homely phrase who lie below. (ll.58–62)

Most, I suggest, would interpret ‘tripping’ to describe the boy lightly skipping unimpeded across the gravestones. But these lines also lend themselves to a misinterpretation—of which, I must confess, to have been guilty. It is an instructive misreading, however, enabled by the suggestions of botanical sentience in previous lines. Blair’s earlier cues arguably encourage the reader to endow the jagged leaves of the nettles and the slippery wild moss with a subtle but sinister agency, tripping up the boy and causing him to fall flat, face to face with the interred below. A speculative misreading this may be, but it is one that speaks volumes of the dread and paranoia expertly cultivated by Blair’s judicious use of anthropomorphism, to hint at non-human agency that is only ever imagined and never quite realised. Supernatural beings, imagined or otherwise, also flourish in Blair’s graveyard. This is problematic for Blair, as the supernatural represents a potential conflict between Blair’s poetic and clerical office. It is a difficulty also faced by his predecessor Parnell, who conjures a supernatural vision of Death in his ‘Night-Piece on Death’ to exploit its affective potential, only to rebuke

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his readers for such foolish fancy. Blair negotiates this quandary in a different way, embellishing his mournful meditation with several spectral visions only to insert clauses to establish his own critical distance from such beliefs, and to preserve ecclesiastical decorum.27 Supernatural elements are first introduced amidst a litany of gothic tropes, and the graveyard is depicted as a site alive with the spectral dead: Where light-heel’d ghosts, and visionary shades, Beneath the wan cold moon (as fame reports ) Embody’d thick, perform their mystic rounds. (ll.24–26; emphasis mine)

This strategy of invoking the ghostly dead only to cast doubt on their veracity is one adopted on several occasions, as seen again here: Strange things, the neighbours say, have happen’d here: Wild shrieks have issu’d from the hollow tombs, Dead men have come again, and walk’d about, And the great bell has toll’d, unrung, untouch’d. (Such tales their chear, at wake or gossiping, When it draws near to witching time of night). (ll.50–55; emphasis mine)

Attributing these dubious beliefs to local custom affords Blair the freedom to embellish the scene and heighten its horror. The imagination is again activated acoustically with cries from the graves and the clanging bell—tolling, perhaps, for thee. The allusion to Shakespeare’s Hamlet —‘’Tis now the very witching time of night, / When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out / Contagion to this world’—also serves to remind the reader of its imagined proximity to the gates of hell and its hordes of restless sinners.28 In a further example of Blair’s sceptical presentation of supernaturalism, the aforementioned schoolboy’s active imagination is given full play: ‘Sudden! he starts’ at what ‘he thinks he hears’, before he and his friends ponder local tales of some ‘horrid apparition, tall and ghastly’ that prowls the demesne before vanishing at dawn (ll.63 [emphasis mine], 67). So while spectral visions are denounced in these examples as the febrile fancies of local superstition, Blair’s disclaimers paradoxically give him full license to explore their frightful potential without fear of reproach. Yet, one supernatural intrusion is left unchecked by Blair in The Grave. In the crypt beneath the chapel, the dead are said to wake from their slumber as ‘grizly spectres’ move in ‘grim array’ and preternatural silence, their fleshless ‘grin’ belying their ‘obstinately sullen’ nature (ll.40–43). This is a vision left unattributed to any external party—this is a vision owned by Blair. Perhaps this is an oversight, one that serves to expose Blair’s literary priorities, but more significantly, one that carries aesthetic and metaphysical implications for the rest of the poem. While these restless phantoms that perform their nightly rounds are invalidated elsewhere in the poem, here, their presence is enabled

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and legitimised by Blair’s authority as poet and preacher. Thus, when Blair later cajoles the warmongering conqueror in his grave, reminding him of the suffering populations he displaced and murdered, and the scorn he must now posthumously endure ‘That haunts and dogs [him] like an injur’d ghost / Implacable’ (ll.217–18), it’s a simile that invites slippage between the figurative and the literal. In this imagined graveyard, where troubled spectres may well roam, this simile is more than a rhetorical device; it is also a prospect of posthumous supernatural horrors reserved for the wicked, one that suits Blair’s literary and clerical agenda of moral reform. The reader is assailed with much of these horrors in the opening stanzas before the poem takes an elegiac turn, signalled by the evocation of pity. This is a familiar contemplative strain in graveyard poetry and the funeral elegy, where terror and pity are elicited and later relieved by the solace of a Christian afterlife.29 The Grave invites the reader to sympathise with the sad sight of the grieving widow, adorned in black and weeping prostrate on her late husband’s grave. Contrarily, the ‘senseless turf’ that separates husband and wife is indifferent to the widow’s plight, a cold impenetrable barrier between life and death (l.83). The image prompts Blair’s own nostalgic reverie of youthful pleasures and friendship, before they are halted again by the seemingly inviolable ‘dumb… green turf’ that conceals the departed (l.122). Pathos is heightened by the irrevocable separation of love ones above and below the turf, but in this poem’s scheme it is also presented as an emotional dead end. Sentimentalism is abandoned in favour of the reforming capacities of horror as the poem’s vision moves from the graveyard above to the carcases below. The dead abound in Blair’s graveyard, as the many scattered corpses are imaginatively exhumed for the reader’s instruction. The youthful jester, the mighty conqueror, the proud noble, the artist, the vain beauty, the scholar, the orator, the physic, the miser—all are summoned from their dank graves and castigated in heavy strains of ubi sunt. The conqueror of lands far and wide is now vanquished, ‘cramm’d into a space we blush to name’ (l.131); the ‘surfeited’, ‘high-fed worm in lazy volumes roll’d, / Riots unscar’d’ on the rouged cheek of the pretty belle (ll.245–47); the ‘tongue-warrior’ is now ‘gagg’d’, chop-fallen and devoid of his organ of speech (ll.297–98). Their putrid, decaying bodies, offensive to the eye and other senses, are said to be wisely concealed by the funerary arts of the undertaker: ‘What would offend the eye in a good picture / The painter casts discreetly into shades’ (ll.175–76). But this conceit also serves to remind the reader of Blair’s self-professed, opposing duty: ‘To paint the gloomy horrors of the tomb’ (l.5). Blair unapologetically disinters the dead for full view, affronting the senses in order to petrify the reader with disgust and horror.30 As Victorian critic George Gilfillan testifies, the poem ‘daguerrotypes its dreadful theme’, a description that aptly evokes the poem’s forensic examination of the gruesome scene.31 In this manner, the reader is brought within close proximity of the dead, crowding the reader’s imaginative sphere like a horde of inanimate zombies, their immediacy and multitude heightening the horror. As Punter observes, gothic poetry not

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only dwells upon the irruption of death into life, but is well placed—perhaps more so than prose fiction—to capture the immediacy of such intrusion. This is especially pertinent to The Grave, which stifles the consolatory paradigm of graveyard poetics that typically seeks life in death with a relentless and morbid fascination with death itself. Like the non-sentient elements of the locale, these corpses are sometimes imbued with a latent potential for reanimation. Consider Blair’s imagined figure of ‘Beauty’, whose once pretty charms have withered in the grave. Her corpse is brought into our immediate vicinity as the poem details the alluring living qualities that are now lost in death, her ‘faded’ roses and ‘soil’d’ lilies combining to symbolise both a fleeting life and innocence lost (l.241). Her soft flesh is then reimagined as carrion for worms, focusing instead not on what has been lost, but what remains. Blair mercilessly castigates the corpse for her former vanities, to the point of rousing her back into semi-consciousness: Look! how the fair one weeps! the conscious tears Stand thick as dew-drops on the bells of flow’rs: Honest effusion! The swoln heart in vain Works hard to put a gloss on its distress. (ll.253–56)

The corpse remains motionless but not unmoved, restored momentarily as a sentient, emotional being. Similarly, the orator is reminded of the eloquent arts that have now disappeared with his fleshly tongue. He is mercilessly mocked, ‘Enough to rouse a dead man into rage, / And warm with red resentment the wan cheek’ (ll.317–18). Indignant reanimation is hinted here, but ultimately unrealised, as Blair, once again, artfully teeters on the brink of ecclesiastical indecorum. Blair’s insistence on maximising horror in his treatment of death and the dead presents an aesthetic and metaphysical bind. On one hand, Blair aims to emphasise the existential horror of death as a nihilist state, ‘Where nought but silence’ and ‘night, dark night’ reign (l.130). But this is a vision that does not lend well to sympathetic horror. Instead—as Adam Smith recognises in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)—it is the imaginary illusion that we as living beings can insert our consciousness into the inanimate bodies of the dead, to feel what they are simply no longer able, that carries the greatest potential for sympathetic dread. In Smith’s terms, we fancy circumstances which ‘undoubtedly can give us no pain when we are dead’, but ‘makes us miserable when we are alive’.32 This illusory dread, exploited by Blair and his seemingly cognisant corpses, is antithetical to the conception of death as simply a temporary state of non-existence (which, as we will see later, carries a different kind of horrific potential when excised from the consolations of resurrection). It is telling that Blair appears willing to overlook this eschatological inconsistency in favour of accentuating the affective potential of horror in each possibility.

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The poem reserves its most dramatic scenes of horror for the moment of death. The most forceful example of Blair’s acoustic and cadaverous blend of horror is found in his visceral, climactic imagining of a virile man’s death bed: What Groan was that I heard? Deep groan indeed! With anguish heavy-laden! Let me trace it: From yonder bed it comes, where the strong man, By stronger arm belabour’d, gasps for breath Like a hard-hunted beast. How his great heart Beats thick! his roomy chest by far too scant To give the lungs full play! What now avail The strong-built sinewy limbs, and well-spread shoulders? See! how he tugs for life, and lays about him, Mad with his Pain! Eager he catches hold Of what comes next to hand, and grasps it hard, Just like a creature drowning! Hideous sight! Oh! how his eyes stand out, and stare full ghastly! Whilst the Distemper’s rank and deadly Venom Shoots like a burning arrow cross his bowels, And drinks his Marrow up. Heard you that groan? It was his last. (ll.262–78)

The imagination is aurally activated once again, and the groan soon embellished into a horrid, sensory barrage detailing the violent transformation that is death. Despite being described as ‘yonder’, the vicinity of the anguish is unmistakably close. The moment of the strong man’s death is imaginarily revived for instructional benefit: to teach the reader how not to die. The physical anguish of the quintessential ‘bad death’ is designed to generate spiritual unease, to frighten the reader from sin and into a state of devout preparedness. If the death of the strong man warrants a visceral horror show to utterly reject human virility as any sort of defence against death, then the death of one ‘at ease with his possessions’ and ‘unfurnish’d for that world to come’ draws attention to the harrowing departure of the unprepared soul (ll.351, 353). To do so, Blair materialises the intangible, reimagining the metaphysical separation of body and soul as a scene that readers of gothic fiction would be most familiar: of a terrified heroine being pursued by a murderous villain. The feminised soul raves frantically within ‘her clay tenement’, searching for a place to hide and shrieking wildly for help (l.355). She yearns unavailingly for more time ‘to wash away her stains’, as her ‘eyes weep blood; and every groan / She heaves is big with horror’ (ll.360–63). But like a ‘stanch murth’rer’, Death is unrelenting, pursuing his victim ‘through ev’ry lane of life’ until she is ‘forc’d at last to the tremendous verge’, and to sink into ‘everlasting ruin’ (ll.364– 68). The characteristic traits of Blair’s aesthetics are all here once again, this time to transform metaphysical horror into a decidedly corporeal one. Spiritual anguish is made audible, and magnified into a somatic experience of panicked horror. Emotional distress is rendered into bloody display. And to complete

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the vision, death’s dominion is conveyed as an abyss—later described as ‘That awful gulf’ (l.372)—whose precipice induces a corporeal terror at the prospect of a metaphysical fall from grace. The aesthetic rendering of metaphysical horror into tangible form is emblematic of Blair’s method. Sin, for instance, the parent of all earthly ills, is on one hand portrayed as ineffable: ‘Oh, where shall fancy find / A proper name to call thee by, expressive / Of all thy horrors?’ (ll.621–23). Blair appears to concede the limited capacity of his craft, and indeed, of human language, to capture the essence of something so ‘transcendently malign’ (l.624). Nevertheless, he attempts the task. Sin is simultaneously personified as a ‘Foul monster’ that ‘belches molten stone and globes of fire’ from his ‘burning entrails’, laying waste to the world (ll.600, 606–7). (Note the parallel with the burning bowels of the strong man on his deathbed, further confirmation of his sinful soul.) But if the abstract concept of sin ultimately remains beyond human description, then the creatures of its train do not, such as ‘deep-mouth’d slaughter bellowing at her heels / Wad[ing] in blood new-split’ (ll.630–31). Despite the challenges posed by the inexpressible, Blair finds a way back to disgusting images of carnal horror. The Grave, however, is a devotional poem, and despite Blair’s insistence upon the corporeal, it is the existential dread of death that Blair ultimately wishes to underscore. The fleshly horrors of the poem are only an artificial means to a metaphysical ultimatum, and in turn, to a pious end. The Grave typically insists upon the irrevocable split of the living and the dead, and although this reading of the poem exposes instances where the boundary separating life from death is relaxed for aesthetic and affective gain, it is a divide that remains central to Blair’s religious purpose. In exasperation, Blair beseeches: ‘Tell us! Ye dead! Will none of you in pity / To those you left behind, disclose the secret?’ (ll.431–32). But he does so unavailingly—for all their latent agency, the dead never speak. As Clymer observes, this ultimate erasure of unrealised animation maintains the lifeless, decaying body as the locus of memento mori, that we too are destined for the same horrific fate.33 Moreover, the withholding of revelation also heralds our inevitable death as a metaphysical nullity. The sublime void that the panicked soul stood before earlier in the poem, one where—as Blair declares almost from the outset— nothing but the utter silence and darkness of pre-Creation exists, is one ‘no mortal e’er repass’d / To tell what’s doing on the other side!’ (ll.372–73). Taking its cue from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, death is an ‘undiscovered country’ from which no one returns, a truth that ‘puzzles the will’.34 This ontological crisis is compounded by Blair’s Calvinist denunciation of all earthly things. In his reading of The Grave, James Means declares that ‘Blair utterly rejects anything’ of the mundane world.35 All human endeavour is rendered void, cast aside as mere tokens of human vanity and our futile endeavours to escape the utter certainty of mortality. Humanity lives in a fallen state at once rejected and inescapable. The poem’s insistence upon corporeal horror, therefore, can be read as a radical aesthetic expression of our inability

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to escape the mundane existence in which we are mired. It is a condition from which we need to be saved. Enter Christ the Redeemer. At least, this is the point at which graveyard poets typically turn to the consoling promise of salvation and eternal resurrection won by Christ’s sacrifice. But this consolation is largely muted in The Grave, beyond the view of both poet and reader. It is the logical corollary of Blair’s unrelenting emphasis upon our limited human condition. If the soul ‘wings its way’ to heaven to meet its judge at death, while the body is discarded into the grave ‘Like a disabled pitched of no use’, then The Grave is a poem whose imaginative focus remains intently fixed upon the obsolete body, even at the expense of the beatific solace of salvation and the resurrection to come (ll.378, 381).36 The angelic trumpet blasts that will usher the end of days and the resurrection of the dead cannot be imagined with any certainty in this poem; it is, instead, a sound projected into the long, distant future. Unlike the ominous sounds of the graveyard, this is a sound we cannot yet heed, and as a result our imaginary visions of rapture remain acoustically inactivated (ll.658–61). Likewise, Christ’s ascension into ‘the aerial heights’ is one we cannot trace with human senses or fathom with our ‘faint’ mind’s eye, as we are ‘Flung backwards in the chase’ (ll.679–81). Time and again we a reminded of our utterly fallen state, one both poet and reader are unable to transcend. Thus, the poem concludes with a well-worn image of a bird, symbolic of a human soul, awakening to a new day before bearing ‘away’ (l.767). Blair’s final word here is instructive: it reminds the reader that we are bound by our mundane, terrestrial perspective, and that consolation is to be won somewhere else from here, not of this earth. The withholding of consolation and revelation in The Grave, as well as the emphasis upon death and the fallen state of humanity, is crucial to Blair’s fideist message. The poem’s stress upon the reader’s condemned and horrific state of existence exacerbates the desire for consolation and divine revelation. Their absence, both within the poem and within earthly life, therefore creates a powerful yet paradoxical yearning that cannot be fulfilled by human means. This lacuna is where faith may enter. Blair calls upon his readers to trust in Christ as the only path to salvation. The poem’s morbidly sceptical view of humanity’s predicament not only demonstrates that meaning and consolation cannot be obtained in this world, but also renders the darkness of death a present reality, bringing the reader to a point of ultimatum: to be receptive to God’s grace by way of faith, or to wallow unsaved in a horrific state of desolation. Blair’s brand of physical horror is one that is familiar to readers of the Gothic literary tradition that succeeded mid-eighteenth-century graveyard poetry. It is, for one, oppressively explicit, seizing the reader’s fancy by way of the imaginary senses; sight, sound, touch, and smell are all invoked abruptly at the poet’s will, leaving little room for the imaginative play of suspenseful terror. Objects of fear—namely corpses—are brought within close vicinity to heighten our sense of horror and disgust. Meanwhile, the state of horror

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itself is portrayed within the poem as a distinctly somatic, and sometimes violent, experience, a fleeting, mortifying sensation that presages our future death and embodies the metaphysical dread of our own mortality. Like his predecessor Parnell and his contemporary Young, Blair too rebukes humanity for its distorted view of death, rendered unnecessarily gloomy by our fearfulness. ‘Fools that we are!’ (l.695). So deep is his scepticism of humanity that he eagerly exploits our error, mobilising our ‘coward fears’ to school us like ‘ill-conditioned children’, and to spur his reader into piety by way of fear. The relation between Blair’s mode of horror and later gothic fiction, then, is deceptively elaborate. Blair’s poetic and aesthetic style has been labelled by nineteenth-century critics as ‘hirsute’ and ‘masculine’, a perception that lends itself to the similarly gendered violent and cadaverous horrors of Lewis’ The Monk.37 Blair, however, employs these aesthetic strategies not exclusively for the pursuit of frisson, but also for their capacity to reform. By association, Radcliffe’s decorous treatment of dead bodies in her seminal novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and in particular the infamous waxen corpse central to the novel’s mystery, is often cited as an illustrative ‘feminine’ counterpoint to the gruesome corpses of Blair and Lewis. But removing Lewis from this triangular relationship enables a direct comparison of Blair’s corpses with the counterfeit body central to Radcliffe’s mystery of the black veil, one that foregrounds aesthetic continuance rather than divergence. Recalling Emily St. Aubert’s first glimpse behind the black veil in Udolpho, we read that she immediately ‘dropped senseless to the floor’, and that ‘Horror occupied her mind’ upon recovery.38 Although the suspense generated by Radcliffe over hundreds of pages is often cited as the epitome of eighteenth-century literary terror, it is easy to forget that Emily’s experience of horror within the novel—unutterable and corporeally possessive—was very real. The horrible image which seizes her frame, we learn much later, is an artificial corpse, ‘a human figure of ghastly paleness… dressed in the habiliments of the grave’, its face ‘partly decayed and disfigured by worms’. We also learn it is a penitential prop designed to inculcate the ‘humiliating moral’ of our own mortality.39 Notwithstanding the nuanced differences between the ‘monkish superstition’ of the house of Udolpho and Blair’s Calvinist theology, the Christian imperative behind this memento mori and the disinterred corpses of The Grave are largely the same: to prepare the soul for imminent death. In a way, Emily’s complete shock at the waxen body is made possible by her inability to recognise the corpse as a locus of religiously didactic meaning. Emily’s encounter, therefore, can be situated as an intermediary point between Blair’s zealous and cadaverous moral didacticism, and Lewis’s irreligious exploitation of the dead body for horrific delight. Emily’s momentary forgetting of the instructional value of the dead body is indicative of the transition from the religious horror of Blair’s graveyard poem to the secular pleasures of Lewis’ gothic horror and beyond. But Blair’s corpses in The Grave are no less artificial than the penitential decor in Radcliffe’s Udolpho, nor less stylised than the highly rendered bodies of Lewis’s The Monk. Irrespective of the poem’s pious objectives, The Grave is a poem deeply

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invested in the artifice of gothic horror, one that creatively anticipates the critical definitions of the term that emerged later in the century. Elsewhere—as mentioned earlier—I have remarked that, taxonomically speaking, the point at which the theological is excised from psychological marks the distinction between graveyard poetics and the Gothic, but this is a critical position that needs some refinement.40 As evinced by this reading of The Grave, the religious paradigm of graveyard poetry and the aesthetics of gothic horror are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The poem is a rare example that successfully straddles the divide.

Notes 1. For key examples, see Eric Parisot, Graveyard Poetry: Religion, Aesthetics and the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Poetic Condition (Farnham, Ashgate, 2013); Andrew Smith, Gothic Death 1740–1914: A Literary History (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016), 11–43; Vincent Quinn, ‘Graveyard Writing and the Rise of the Gothic’, Romantic Gothic, ed. Angela Wright and Dale Townshend (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 37–54; Serena Trowbridge, ‘Past, Present, and Future in the Gothic Graveyard’, The Gothic and Death, ed. Carol Margaret Davison (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017), 21–33; and Eric Parisot, ‘Gothic and Graveyard Poetry: Imagining the Dead (of Night)’, The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts, ed. David Punter (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 245–58. 2. Quinn, ‘Graveyard Writing’, 37. 3. Trowbridge, ‘Past, Present, and Future’, 22. 4. Thomas Parnell, ‘A Night-Piece on Death’, The Graveyard School: An Anthology, ed. Jack G. Voller (Richmond, Valancourt, 2015), 19–24 (ll.67–68). 5. Smith, Gothic Death, 21. 6. Yael Shapira, Inventing the Gothic Corpse: The Thrill of Human Remains in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 2–3. 7. Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘Elegy and the Gothic: The Common Grounds’, The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, ed. Karen Weisman (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010), 565–84 (565–66). 8. Parisot, Graveyard Poetry, 16–18; Evert Jan Van Leeuwen, ‘Funeral Sermons and Graveyard Poetry: The Ecstasy of Death and Bodily Resurrection’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.3 (2009), 353–72. 9. Parisot, ‘Gothic and Graveyard Poetry’, 256. 10. David Punter, ‘Gothic Poetry, 1700–1900’, The Gothic World, ed. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (Abingdon, Routledge, 2010),

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210–20 (211–12); Caroline Franklin, ed., The Longman Anthology of Gothic Verse (Abingdon, Routledge, 2011). 11. Shaun Irlam, Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999), 82. 12. Parisot, Graveyard Poetry, 64–74. 13. Isaac Watts, preface to Horae Lyricae, 2nd ed. (London, Printed for N. Cliff, 1709), xvii–xviii. 14. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1960), 1:714. 15. Isaac Watts, ‘The Church-Yard’, Reliquiae Juveniles: Miscellaneous Thoughts in Prose and Verse (London, Printed for R. Ford and R. Hett, 1734), 107–8. 16. Vastness and succession are cited as aspects of the sublime in: Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London and New York, Routledge, 2008), 71–72, 74–75. 17. For an extended survey of conceptions of terror and horror in eighteenth-century criticism, see Eric Parisot, ‘The Aesthetics of Terror and Horror: A Genealogy’, The Cambridge History of the Gothic, ed. Angela Wright and Dale Townshend (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 1:284–303. 18. Anna Laetitia Aikin, ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror’, Gothic Documents, A Sourcebook: 1700–1820, ed. E. J. Clery and Robert Miles (Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 2000), 127–29. 19. James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (London and Edinburgh, Printed for W. Strahan, T. Cadell and W. Creech, 1783), 623–24. 20. Nathan Drake, ‘On Objects of Terror’, Gothic Documents, ed. Clery and Miles, 160–63. 21. Ann Radcliffe, ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, Gothic Documents, ed. Clery and Miles, 163–72. 22. Robert Blair, The Grave, The Graveyard School, 44–69 (ll.5, 9–10). All subsequent references to this poem are cited parenthetically. 23. Radcliffe, ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, Gothic Documents, 169. 24. Joseph Addison, ‘Essay no. 110 (6 July 1711)’, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1965), 1:453–54. 25. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 83. 26. Robert Spadoni, Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007), 2–3. 27. For details of Blair’s drafting process around this issue, see Parisot, Graveyard Poetry, 61–63.

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28. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008), 269 (3.2.371–73). 29. Lorna Clymer, ‘The Funeral Elegy in Early Modern Britain: A Brief History’, Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, 170–186 (172). 30. Cf. Shapira’s argument that the distinction between Radcliffe’s terror and Lewis’ horror pivots on the portrayal of the corpse, and that the graphic detail of Lewis’ rendition clearly falls on the side of horror; Inventing the Gothic Corpse, 137–41. 31. George Gilfillan, ed., The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair and Falconer (Edinburgh, James Nichol, 1854), 124. 32. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 1976), 13 (1.1.1.13). 33. Lorna Clymer, ‘Graved in Tropes: The Figural Logic of Epitaphs and Elegies in Blair, Gray, Cowper and Wordsworth’, ELH 62.2 (1995), 347–86 (366, 368). 34. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 241 (3.1.80–81). 35. James Means, ‘A Reading of the Grave’, SSL 12 (1975), 276. See also Parisot (Graveyard Poetry, 71–74) for the implications of this religious scepticism for Blair’s own poetic endeavours. 36. Cf. Gilfillan: ‘Many have objected to [The Grave’s] conclusion as lame and impotent, and would have wished for a loftier swell of hopeful anticipation of the Resurrection at the close; but this, in fact, would have started the subject of another poem. Blair was writing of the power and triumphs of the tomb… Surely he expects too much who requires the painter of “Night” to introduce “Morning” into the same picture’ (Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair and Falconer, 124). 37. Ibid., 125; Thomas Campbell, Specimens of the British Poets (London, J. Murray, 1819), 5:204. 38. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée, intro. Terry Castle (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008), 249. 39. Ibid., 662. 40. See n. 8.

Bibliography Aikin, Anna Laetitia, ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror’, Gothic Documents, A Sourcebook: 1700–1820, ed. E. J. Clery and Robert Miles (Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 2000), 127–29. Beattie, James, Dissertations Moral and Critical (London and Edinburgh, Printed for W. Strahan, T. Cadell and W. Creech, 1783). Bond, Donald F. ed., The Spectator, 5 vols. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1965). Blair, Robert, The Grave, The Graveyard School: An Anthology, ed. Jack G. Voller (Richmond, Valancourt, 2015), 44–69.

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Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London and New York, Routledge, 2008). Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1960). Campbell, Thomas, Specimens of the British Poets, 7 vols. (London, J. Murray, 1819). Clymer, Lorna, ‘Graved in Tropes: The Figural Logic of Epitaphs and Elegies in Blair, Gray, Cowper and Wordsworth’, ELH 62.2 (1995), 347–86. ————, ‘The Funeral Elegy in Early Modern Britain: A Brief History’, The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, ed. Karen Weisman (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010), 170–86. Drake, Nathan, ‘On Objects of Terror’, Gothic Documents, A Sourcebook: 1700–1820, ed. E. J. Clery and Robert Miles (Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 2000), 160–63. Franklin, Caroline, ed., The Longman Anthology of Gothic Verse (Abingdon, Routledge, 2011). Gilfillan, George, ed., The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair and Falconer (Edinburgh, James Nichol, 1854). Hogle, Jerrold, E., ‘Elegy and the Gothic: The Common Grounds’, The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, ed. Karen Weisman (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010), 565–84. Irlam, Shaun, Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999). Means, James, ‘A Reading of the Grave’, SSL 12 (1975), 270–78. Parisot, Eric, Graveyard Poetry: Religion, Aesthetics and the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Poetic Condition (Farnham, Ashgate, 2013). ———, ‘Gothic and Graveyard Poetry: Imagining the Dead (of Night)’, The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts, ed. David Punter (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 245–58. ———, ‘The Aesthetics of Terror and Horror: A Genealogy’, The Cambridge History of the Gothic, Volume 1: The Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Angela Wright and Dale Townshend (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Parnell, Thomas, ‘A Night-Piece on Death’, The Graveyard School: An Anthology, ed. Jack G. Voller (Richmond, Valancourt, 2015), 19–24. Punter, David, ‘Gothic Poetry, 1700–1900’, The Gothic World, ed. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (Abingdon, Routledge, 2010), 210–20. Radcliffe, Ann, ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, Gothic Documents, A Sourcebook: 1700–1820, ed. E. J. Clery and Robert Miles (Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 2000), 163–72. ————, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée, intro. Terry Castle (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008). Quinn, Vincent, ‘Graveyard Writing and the Rise of the Gothic’, Romantic Gothic, ed. Angela Wright and Dale Townshend (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 37–54. Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008). Shapira, Yael, Inventing the Gothic Corpse: The Thrill of Human Remains in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 1976).

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Smith, Andrew, Gothic Death 1740–1914: A Literary History (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016). Spadoni, Robert, Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007). Trowbridge, Serena, ‘Past, Present, and Future in the Gothic Graveyard’, The Gothic and Death, ed. Carol Margaret Davison (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017), 21–33. Van Leeuwen, Evert Jan, ‘Funeral Sermons and Graveyard Poetry: The Ecstasy of Death and Bodily Resurrection’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.3 (2009), 353–72. Watts, Isaac, Horae Lyricae, 2nd ed. (London, Printed for N. Cliff, 1709). ———, ‘The Church-Yard’, Reliquiae Juveniles: Miscellaneous Thoughts in Prose and Verse (London, Printed for R. Ford and R. Hett, 1734), 107–8.

The Necropolitan Gothic Roger Luckhurst

What is this world? What? but a spacious burial-field unwall’d. Strew’d with Death’s spoils, the spoils of animals. Savage and tame, and full of dead men’s bones? (Robert Blair, The Grave, l.483–6).

This essay investigates the relationship of the English Gothic to the significant cultural shift from the churchyard and urban burial ground to the rise of the suburban garden cemetery in the 1830s. From the emergence of the ‘Graveyard School’ of poetry in the 1740s to the death of Lady Dedlock at the gates of a ghastly inner city pauper graveyard in Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–3)—serialised in the year that the Burial Act closed city grounds to new burials—the Gothic both registers and helps formulate this crucial shift. This is because, as Yael Shapira argues, the genre emerges in the eighteenth century around ‘an image of the dead body rendered with deliberate graphic bluntness in order to excite and entertain’.1 The passage of that body from graveyard to cemetery also traces a history of the stations the Gothic takes from solitary melancholic reflection in neoclassical poetic forms to the mass forms of the ‘terror novel’ in the 1790s and the ‘penny bloods’ of the 1840s. As the Gothic proliferates through mass cultural channels, so it becomes an ideal vehicle to R. Luckhurst (B) Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_13

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confront a specific problem of modernity: the overwhelming number of the urban dead. As London and other major cities become ‘one giant grave’, the Gothic becomes the privileged mode for registering the cultural tremors of this new necropolitics that must try to confront the pressing concern of the numberless dead.2 In 1743, the Scottish minister Robert Blair published the poem ‘The Grave’, which proved an enduring success, selling through fifty editions over the next fifty years. In sonorous iambic pentameters, the poem promises ‘To paint the gloomy horrors of the tomb;/Th’appointed place of rendezvous, where all/These travellers meet’.3 Blair might end with the traditional rhetorical and pietistic conventions of Death the great leveller and enemy of the vainglorious, but there is something newly abject and strikingly earth-bound in the description of the grave (‘Furr’d round with mouldy damps and ropy slime’), the body decaying in its ‘dark noisome’ pit, and the environs of the graveyard, at night, in the dark, with ‘screech-owl shrieks’ to jangle the nerves. The resurrection, when it comes after the ‘dread trumpet sounds’, promises to raise the dead from ‘the Grave our bed’, but this cannot quite shake off the early grounding of the poem in the physical decay of the corpse and the ‘cank’ring hand’ of Time. The stock tropology of the Gothic, fixed in the 1760s and 1770s, is already beginning to stir among Blair’s headstones. We owe the publication of Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751), one of the most celebrated poems in the English language, to the intervention of that proto-Goth Horace Walpole, who would open the inaugural ‘Gothic Story’, The Castle of Otranto, with the scene of a body crushed to death. Walpole helped Gray’s manuscript, which had circulated privately among friends since 1746, into print somewhat against the author’s wishes. Here, the neoclassical Penseroso figure of solitary melancholic reflection, shifts into abstract reflections of Death the leveller in a quintessentially English rural churchyard setting, as blurred and gentle about the physiology of death as the gently eroded rustic gravestones. Yet critics have noted that this scene is an almost deliberate act of displacement on Gray’s part, who had just before attended the trials of the last Scottish Stuart rebels in court in London and left in disgust before the public executions were carried out. The judgement on the rebels graphically ordered: ‘you must be hanged by the neck, but not till you are dead; for you must be cut down alive; then your bowels must be taken out, and burnt before your face; then your heads must be severed from your bodies, and your bodies must be divided into quarters; and these must be at the King’s disposal’.4 This gruesome exercise of deadly sovereign power over the body—to follow Foucault’s formulation in Discipline and Punish—is covered over by Gray’s churchyard pastoral. The poetic topos of death’s levelling power leaves behind the ‘moping owl’, the ‘yew-tree’s shade’ and the ‘mould’ring heap’ for a series of more abstracted reflections that explicitly displace England’s political struggles to move ‘Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife’. Even as it praises ‘the short and simple annals of the poor’ in the gravestone markings, Gray’s solitude and the

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absence of the living poor in this pastoral scene might be related to the intensification of land enclosures and the depopulation of villages that marked the timing of writing.5 The soft-focus of this pastoral idyll is a double evasion. The most successful of these works was Edmund Young’s long poem, The Complaint; or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality, which appeared in nine parts over six volumes (1742–5). Night Thoughts, as it became known, was widely admired and translated across Europe, becoming an influence on the sepulchral tinges that coloured the work of the German and French Romantics (Goethe acknowledged Young’s influence). But Young’s solemn trajectory towards religious affirmation (he was a priest) over the nine nights of melancholic insomniac reflection was often derailed by enthusiastic followers known as Youngists, who edited down and rebalanced the poem, often choosing to emphasise the Gothic tenor of ‘Night III’. This contains the episode of the burial of Nausicaa—an account of the death of Young’s daughter-in-law, who died of consumption in France in 1736, aged only eighteen. The Protestant Youngs were horrified to be ‘denied a grave’ by the Roman Catholic authorities in their ‘cursed ungodliness of zeal’.6 The opaque lines that follow read: With pious sacrilege a grave I stole; With impious piety, that grave I wrong’d … More like her murderer than friend, I crept, With soft suspended step, and muffled deep In midnight darkness, whispher’d my last sigh. (III, l. 172–3, 175–7)

This prompted Youngists to envision a Gothic scene of night-time graverobbing, and fantastical accounts about a secret dash from Lyons with the dead body to a secret grave dug in Montpellier (a monument was even erected in Montpellier by ardent readers).7 In Young’s instance, the transgressive spectacle of the dead body becomes excised from the theological arc of the poem, and takes on an (undead) life of its own. Once more, the path of the avowedly commercial Gothic later in the century is signposted in Young’s late neoclassical poem. The individual mausoleum, located in a dramatically landscaped Arcadian scene, was integrated into another Gothic precursor, the cult of built ruins. Ruinlust in Britain began in aristocratic parklands in the 1720s, when follies and ruins began to be built as sometimes ambiguous statements about either the Protestant triumph over a superstitious past or a deep continuity with that past.8 The mausoleum added the sentiment et in Arcdia ego (‘even in Arcadia, I [Death] am’), recreating the classical pastoral scene of shepherds posed discovering a tomb in Nicolas Poussin’s 1627 painting known by the Latin tag, in the collection of Chatsworth House where many of these trends were pioneered. Grand mausolea, some designs borrowed from the family tombs seen in Mughal India by travellers with the East India Company, began to feed into the idea of the ‘garden cemetery’ in the Arcadian bower or Elysian

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field. You can still see the grand (and fake) tombs in the Parc de Monceau in Paris, laid out as a ‘bois des Tombeaux’ in 1773–8. The grave of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, buried on a small island at Ermonville in 1778, became a pilgrimage site (until his body was moved to the secularised Panthéon during the Revolution). The extension of this idea to the garden cemetery arrived with the opening of Père Lachaise in Paris in 1804, always the model evoked by British campaigners who realised landscaped suburban cemeteries, first in Glasgow and Liverpool in the 1820s, and then in London’s ‘Magnificent Seven’, that opened between 1832 and 1840.9 There is a line here from graveyard to garden that might concur with Philippe Ariès’s famous thesis in The Hour of Our Death that there is a progressive bracketing away of the corpse from the centre of mourning rituals in modernity. Intimacy with the dead—the death bed, the laying out of the dead, the viewings and watchings and wakes held with the body—are progressively eclipsed, particularly among the Victorian middle classes (a Catholic conservative, Ariès blames Protestant scepticism for much of this). The graveyard foregrounds bodily death and resurrection; the shift to the language of the cemetery (from Greek for ‘dormitory’) already signals a world of evasive metaphor. By the end of the Second World War, Geoffrey Gorer argued in the equally influential essay ‘The Pornography of Death’, that death was becoming softened, abstracted and public displays of mourning frowned upon or actively pathologised. This may be true enough, but this trajectory misses out a crucial stage of transition from the rural churchyard of Gray’s ‘Elegy’ to the Victorian Valhallas of the surburban cemetery. It is no coincidence that this period of transition coincides with the first wave of the Gothic romance from the 1790s to the 1830s.10 In the peak of the frenzy around Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic terrors in the 1790s, it is still the encounter with the individual corpse that produced the shrillest notes of the Gothic: Emily’s horror at the corpse/waxwork in the labyrinths of Montoni’s castle in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); the abject vision of Agnes in the vaults below the convent in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), where she is entombed alive surrounded by rotting bodies; Victor Frankenstein’s rootling around in graveyards for body parts to build his creature and its fearful partner (the one he tells us he ‘tore to pieces’ rather than complete).11 But perhaps a more indicative work is William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres, published in 1809. Godwin, informed by his own private griefs, argued that the ‘calamity of death’ could be countered by a new national policy: to erect memorials over the graves of the illustrious dead.12 ‘Let us seize on what we can’, Godwin suggested. ‘Let us mark the spot, wherever it can be ascertained …; let us erect a shrine to their memory; let us visit their tombs; let us indulge all the reality we can now have, of a sort of conference with these men, by repairing to the scene which, as far as they are at all on earth, they still inhabit ’.13 Persistently what most concerns Godwin is the erasure of memory,

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and his proposal for a national policy of memorials aims to ‘paralyse the hand of Oblivion’.14 ‘I am not contented to visit the house in Bread-Street where Milton was born’, Godwin says, ‘or that in Bunhill-Row where he died; I want to repair to the place where he now dwells. Some spirit shall escape from his ashes and whisper to me things unfelt before’.15 Godwin articulates a distinctly modern fetish for the grave, no longer tied to religious pilgrimage but for new kinds of secular special dead.16 This anxious reassertion of community with the illustrious dead is an answer, David McAllister suggests, to the problem of the vast ‘unwieldy majority’ of the anonymous dead and their oppressive weight on the living.17 While the conservative Edmund Burke called on that dead weight to resist reform and embody tradition (an appeal that made the young William Wordsworth feel ‘entombed’), Godwin wanted a new ethical relation to the special dead as a much more open archive, a lively afterlife of ideas that survived physical death. Another way of reading Godwin’s essay is to see it as the registration of an emergent problem of the newly dead that had become pressing by the beginning of the nineteenth century. The larger social context of enclosure and displacement, industrialisation and the marked concentration of populations into urban centres makes the pressure of the dead a very practical problem of public hygiene. Christian tradition had for centuries enclosed the dead around churches (ending the classical tradition of burial outside the city walls). Bodies were inhumed in church walls or vaults, or clustered around church buildings as close to the walls as possible in ground sanctified for burial. There had already been concerns expressed in the 1720s that this was becoming an unsanitary practice that required a break with tradition. The concentration of the poor into cities brought an extra pressure on this model of Christian burial in Britain. City churchyards were filled to capacity (the raised ground from over-burial is still visible around many old city churches) and many parishes purchased extra grounds, further away from the church, to maintain their income from burial fees. There was also a proliferation of private grounds set up by speculators who could undercut expensive church fees for the urban poor, or for dissenting groups that were either barred from burial in Church of England ground, or refused burial there. Around Bunhill Fields on the edge of the City of London, for instance, a Quaker ground had opened in 1665, but there developed a whole necropolis of dissenting grounds for Baptists, Wesleyans, Methodists, Catholics and other ‘independents’.18 The acres and acres of ground required for these vast unremembered dead surely helped prompt, dialectically, Godwin’s anxious hope for a counter-memorial project that would remember and hold onto the names of the special dead. This new context prompted two interlocking crises that would have enduring effects on the imagination of the Gothic. First, due to city overcrowding and the rise of pauper grounds, fear ran rampant among the urban poor of bodysnatching from graveyards, which ran from the 1770s up to the 1832 Anatomy Act and beyond, when new uses of the pauper dead were

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provided by the new poor laws. In the later period, a second horror was associated with the appalling treatment of the dead in cramped urban burial grounds that followed, reaching a crisis in the 1840s. This was the catalogue of horrors that eventually led to extensive reform and the closure of city burial grounds, with only rare exceptions, after 1850. Michel Foucault proposed that these reform movements that defined the modern state invented a new kind of biopolitics that controlled and disciplined living bodies, but which bracketed the question of the dead because ‘Power has no control over death’.19 Yet this phase of manoeuvring the dead out of city graves and into suburban cemeteries suggests that we do need an accompanying necropolitics that involves the burdensome administration of this growing class of (un)persons.20 Utilitarian reformers would make the dead useful to the living yet. In 1540, Henry VIII granted a Royal Charter to the lowly company of Barbers and Surgeons, and provided them with precisely four human bodies a year for dissection and anatomical study, to be taken from those executed by hanging. They had to come from this abjected class as dissection was considered an impious and sacrilegious act. Two hundred years later, this provision had only increased to six bodies. The rise of the surgeon as a profession of slightly better social status, more open as a profession to gentlemen from the late seventeenth century onwards, came up against a logistical problem as anatomical study was intrinsic to medical training. In the more secular and enlightened centres of study on the continent and in Edinburgh there was greater latitude in the law: Edinburgh anatomy schools could also dissect the bodies of suicides, orphans and foundlings, as well as executed criminals. But there remained an association of dissection with legal punishment: a fate worse than death, since it destroyed the integrity of the corpse and thus the possibility of bodily resurrection. From about 1675, dead bodies therefore became commodified, precious items to be provided to the burgeoning anatomy school sector. The shadow black market trade of the ‘resurrection men’ arose to meet this demand, gangs who robbed fresh graves of bodies to supply the anatomy schools. They exploited the legal anomaly that since a corpse was neither property nor person it could not be ‘stolen’—hence prosecutions were often on the grounds of offending public morals, and carried lighter sentences than, for example, poaching animals. In her classic account of this context, Ruth Richardson points to early cases of bodysnatching around Edinburgh in 1678, and a warning to students and surgeons not to be involved directly in exhumations in 1721.21 Throughout this era, most surgeons kept their suppliers at arm’s length to maintain plausible deniability. As the profession grew in the eighteenth century, a fresh corpse could fetch two guineas in the 1790s; an 1828 inquiry heard that it could be as much as eight guineas. The informant, the prominent surgeon Sir Astley Cooper, called the resurrection men the ‘lowest dregs of degradation’, but also regularly paid them for bodies for his private anatomical museum and even underwrote their legal expenses when caught.22

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Rare anatomical specimens were worth considerably more. Teratology, the study of anatomical deformations and abnormalities, was a new science that defined norms via the study of pathological deviations. The term was coined by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1830 in a paper dedicated to creating a rational nomenclature ‘pour les Monstres’. Rare deformities were highly commodified. The famous Irish Giant, Charles Byrne, who died in 1783 after being a public sensation in London and Edinburgh, had gone to great lengths to avoid his body ending up on display in an anatomical museum, asking to be buried at sea. His careful plans were foiled by the leading London anatomist John Hunter, who is thought to have paid as much as £500 for the body to be snatched and added to his collection. Byrne’s skeleton remains on display in the Hunterian at the Royal College of Surgeons, despite repeated campaigns to provide him his proper burial.23 From the surviving testimony of resurrection men, it is obvious that pauper burial grounds were favoured terrain for the night-time activities. They had become detached from churches as city populations grew, without watchhouses or mortuaries to store bodies, and pauper grave pits were often left open until the deep holes were filled with stacked coffins, sometimes up to twelve deep. The cheaper coffins were easy to break open to extract the bodies. Many of the poor were only buried in shrouds. Meanwhile, the fearful middle classes spent money on lead coffins, iron grids over recently inhumed bodies and various other ‘mortsafe’ or ‘mortstone’ devices to foil bodysnatchers. Here is the decisive context for some of Edgar Allan Poe’s most memorable short tales, including his 1844 tale, ‘The Premature Burial’. The community-wide reverence for the dead body in the rituals around burial among the working classes, and their revulsion at the desecration of graves, is evident in the repeated instances of public disorder and riot around arrests of resurrection men. There were riots in Great Yarmouth in 1827, when it was discovered that a gang had rented a house next to a graveyard and were caught ferrying exhumed bodies by coach to London. In 1832, an anatomy school in Aberdeen was razed to the ground by an angry crowd. There were more disturbances in Cambridge, Greenwich and elsewhere in the same years, where arrested bodysnatchers and anatomists had to be protected from instant mob justice by special constables.24 These scenarios intensified undoubtedly due to the notorious (if atypical) case of William Burke and William Hare. Burke and Hare chose to murder an estimated sixteen people in Edinburgh over ten months in 1827–8. They sold their first body for just over £7 to the eminent Edinburgh anatomist Robert Knox, who offered dissection lecture-demonstrations at his extra-mural anatomy school. Burke and Hare cut out the laborious and risky process of graveyard exhumation by simply suffocating their victims after plying them with drink. Their last victim, Mary Paterson, had been recognised by one of Knox’s assistants when preparing the body for class. Although only initially suspected of murder of the sixteenth victim when arrested, Hare quickly turned king’s evidence for a pardon and revealed their deadly business model.

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In January 1829, Burke was tried, found guilty of one murder, executed and— inevitably—dissected. It was said that over forty thousand people queued to see his ruined corpse. His body was then displayed in the Anatomical Museum of the Edinburgh Medical School, where the skeleton can still be viewed.25 There was much dissatisfaction that his female associate, Helen McDougal, survived with the verdict ‘not proven’ (crucially different from ‘not guilty’). Hare narrowly escaped mob justice when he was recognised on a fast mail coach that was trying to smuggle him to England, and he had to be given protection from large crowds by special constables. He died in penury in London. Often the surgeons escaped any complicity, but Knox was forced to resign his membership of the Royal College of Surgeons and soon moved away from Edinburgh (he later became a prominent advocate of racial science, based on anatomical differences theorised from his collection of skeletons).26 This case inevitably poured into the popular imagination, first through a wave of popular broadsides, ballads, lurid retellings in the Newgate Calendar mode, and melodramatic illustrated prints and etchings.27 After the case of another set of murders by a gang of London ‘Burkers’ became a sensation in 1831, the pressure to resolve the artificial situation creating the high value of fresh corpses resulted in the eventual passing of the Anatomy Act in 1832. The expansion of the pool of bodies available to anatomy schools was made by allowing ‘unclaimed’ pauper bodies to be used for dissection, one of the earliest stringent results of the era of reform heralded by the new Poor Laws. If this ended the illicit bodysnatching trade, these provisions hardly dispersed the enduring fear about the violation of bodily integrity after death among the urban poor, but in many cases exacerbated it. Workhouse shame could extend beyond death and into a now legal dismemberment of the body in medical dissection. It is particular classes of bodies that are opened to the medical gaze in this moment. Anna Gasperini has explored how the popular disgust at bodysnatching fed into the new mass literature of the ‘penny bloods’, cheap magazines with open-ended serial melodramas that were often suffused with popular radical sentiment.28 George W. M. Reynolds’s Mysteries of London serial (1844– 56) contained the recurrent character of a monstrous Resurrection Man, a demonic emanation of the slums whose gang ‘burks’ his victims. Thomas Rymer’s Manuscripts from the Diary of a Physician (started in 1844) opens with the melodramatic ‘The Dead Restored; or, The Young Student’, which recalls an incident where the narrator is caught up in an act of graverobbing. The nefarious attempt of a senior doctor to steal away the body of a young girl from her recent grave is foiled by the actual resurrection of the buried girl, who turns out to be one of those sensational cases of premature burial. The young student doctor steps in to save the day, foiling the morbid monomania of the doctor he accompanies.29 As Gasperini suggests, this ambiguously splits the figure of the doctor for its readers between roles as both potential saviour and desecrator simultaneously.

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The story rewrites an earlier episode in Blackwood’s Magazine from Samuel Warren’s serial, Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician (1830–7). In ‘Grave Doings’, a senior physician with an inhuman fixation on determining an enigmatic cause of death by dissection in defiance of the family’s wishes, pays a student £50 to play a RESURRECTIONIST. ‘Let not this appalling word’, the episode begins, ‘conjure up in your fancy a throng of vampire-like images and associations’.30 In this tale (for a more middle-class readership) the adventure is framed as morally dubious but also a useful pedagogical exercise. Despite near discovery in their gruesome night of digging, they succeed in getting the body away. It becomes an affirmation of the regrettable necessity of dissecting the dead, and the slightly too gleeful last footnote of the story adds: ‘her bleached skeleton adorns -----’s surgery; and a preparation of her heart enriches -----’s museum’.31 The long cultural memory of bodysnatching and the Burke and Hare case in particular was renewed again in the late Victorian period, following Robert Louis Stevenson’s dramatisation of the case in his 1884 Christmas shocker, ‘The Body Snatcher’. The volume was advertised in London with ‘six pairs of coffin lids, painted dead black, with white skulls and cross-bones in the centre for relief’ carried by six men in ‘long white surplices’ purchased from a funeral establishment, an ad campaign halted by the Metropolitan Police on decency grounds.32 The sensational tale was retold in early true crime collections, such as Joseph Forster’s Studies in Black and Red (1896) or Arthur Griffiths’s Mysteries of Police and Crime (1899). The case also featured in Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives (1895), a direct result of Schwob’s translation of Stevenson’s tale. It casts such a deep shadow that the Universal film of Frankenstein (1932) makes Victor Frankenstein little more than a graveyard bodysnatcher in the opening scenes, and the figures of Burke and Hare have continued to return in horror films as a potent source of horror built on the sensational crime of the desecration of the corpse. Bodysnatching was only a symptom of a larger problem in the 1820s and 1830s, however. It was the chaotic and largely unregulated process of burial in city burial grounds of a mass urbanised population that led to the second abiding horror associated with graves in this era: the unholy abuses of the dead in unhallowed, overcrowded city grounds. You cannot fault the earnest commitment of the British reformers of the early nineteenth century, perhaps particularly when it came to an application of Utilitarianism to the problem of the corpse. Jeremy Bentham, the central ideological figure of reform, famously offered his own corpse to be ‘useful’ by ordering that on his death it be dissected, the head preserved separately and the skeleton to be boiled, treated and displayed in public as what he called an ‘auto-icon’. When he died in June 1832, the year of the Anatomy Act, his close friend Thomas Southwood Smith of the Webb Street Anatomy School, gave a lecture-demonstration of dissection using Bentham’s body. It was then published as a pamphlet, with a frontispiece sketch of Bentham’s opened body. This fulfilled Bentham’s wish in his directions ‘to show that

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the primitive horror at dissection originates in ignorance and is kept up by misconception and that the human body when dissected instead of being an object of disgust is much more beautiful than any other piece of mechanism’.33 Smith had himself written an article in 1824 for the Westminster Review called ‘The Use of the Dead to the Living’. Both Bentham and Smith were part of the campaign to reform anatomy laws, although they were mocked for their dismissal of the sentimental attachment to ‘useless’ bodily remains. Bentham’s body, arranged in a seated position in a specially built glass box, was initially displayed in Southwood Smith’s rooms before passing to that secular institution Bentham was most associated with, University College (known at the time as the ‘godless college’). It resided in the college’s anatomical museum for years, was examined and restored in the 1890s by Egyptologists who were experts in processes of mummification, and then after the Second World War could be seen by thousands of passers-by in the main cloisters of the college. Bentham’s posthumous act was a decidedly anti-Gothic gesture, trying to strip the corpse of irrational and superstitious fears (our gruesome fascination with the fate of his body and particularly the preserved head rather undermines this ambition). However, in order to push for larger reforms concerning burial, the key figures in the years after Bentham’s death continually resorted to truly Gothic descriptions of the desperate condition of city churchyards and burial grounds to further their aims, finally grasping the value of emotion. It would be Edwin Chadwick, Bentham’s loyal follower, who would eventually help to realise the closure of these grounds twenty years later. In the 1820s, attempts to foster the garden cemetery model met with only limited success. From the 1830s, though, reformers began to push for replacing the urban burial ground with the suburban cemetery principally on public health grounds, problems accelerated by the growth of inner city populations. In the abiding ‘miasmatic’ theory of disease, it was held that the stench from putrefying animal matter carried ‘pestilential effluvia’ that could cause illness, outbreaks of disease, or even death. It was the London doctor George A. Walker, who had a medical practice on Drury Lane, in the midst of some of the worst slums and rookeries of the metropolis, who exposed the appalling state of inner city burial grounds to a horrified public. He became known as ‘Graveyard Walker’ for his dedication to the cause of eliminating urban burial grounds. In his 1839 book, Gatherings from Graveyards, he warned that ‘THE ABODES OF THE DEAD ARE INSECURE’ because they were ‘crowded to excess’ and continually causing outbreaks of fatal diseases among the living forced to coexist with the unnumbered city dead.34 In the immediate vicinity of his London rooms at 101 Drury Lane, Walker had rich pickings for some of the worst pauper burial grounds in London. He was close to the Drury Lane Burial Ground, an overlooked overspill ground for St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, a tiny space so saturated with the dead that the level of the ground reached up to the first floor of adjoining tenements, and was so saturated with bodies that it had to be periodically closed. In the nearby rookery Russell Court,

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off Drury Lane, another overused pauper ground emitted a pestilential stench through the neighbouring houses. The multiple scandals associated with four burial grounds crowded onto Clement’s Lane off the Strand really made Walker’s case. The narrow alley fed out onto Clement’s Dane Church (still standing, although isolated in the middle of the traffic). The burial ground of the church and its vaults were crammed to overflowing. Its extra ground off Portugal Street was a tiny space yet filled with over 5000 dead. ‘The soil of this ground is saturated, absolutely saturated, with human putrescence’, Walker reported.35 He had treated an old sick man whose window opened onto an open grave a few feet away. It had been dug for an upstairs neighbour who had died of typhus, but whose body had remained in the building for twelve days while the family tried to scrape together the burial fee. Here, Walker reported that unscrupulous gravediggers were often seen testing the ground for new burial spots, or digging and breaking up coffin wood, which was taken to burn, to make more space. This was a common practice to solve over-burial, and this ‘desecration’ of often very recent graves Walker used very effectively in his campaigns. Clement’s Lane fed into Clare Market, which included several slaughter houses and bone-boiling businesses. Walker left the implications of the proximity of these meat markets and graveyards to do their work on the imagination. No wonder London districts were occasionally disturbed by rumours that human remains were being used to make cheap food for workhouses. One of the most famous penny bloods, the story of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, who turns his victims into meat pies, was located in the streets adjoining these burial grounds. One of the worst cases was only a little further up Clement’s Lane: the Enon Chapel. This dissenting chapel had been opened in 1823 and immediately offered very cheap burial rates compared to surrounding churches. There were no vaults or burial grounds attached, only a basement, separated from the chapel by a wooden floor. Below, Walker estimated twelve thousand bodies were crammed into a space barely sixty by twelve feet. The congregation and the Sunday School children had to put up with the stench of rot, and watched swarms of flies climb out through the floorboards. In miasmatic theory, this was deathly effluvia. When a sewer pipe needed to traverse the basement area, cartloads of bones were taken out during the works (they were used as landfill to shore up the building of Waterloo Road leading to the bridge over the Thames nearby); still nothing was done. The Chapel eventually ceased functioning, and a public inquiry was held in 1842. In 1847, Walker himself acquired the building and paid personally for 6000 bodies to be transferred from the basement to the new Norbury Cemetery. Walker underwrote this explicit move from urban ground to suburban cemetery. There is something pleasing in discovering that this notorious building was lost under buildings of that beacon of progressive reform, the London School of Economics. Walker continued to campaign, highlighting a few years later the scandal at Spa Fields burial ground in Clerkenwell (now a public park with a mildly

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alarming undulating ground). This was a private speculation opened in 1777 and built on just two acres of ground. Again, it succeeded because it undercut the burial fees of nearby churches. A large fire inside the ground’s bone-house, started from the nefarious practice of burning coffin wood and bodies to make more space, eventually revealed that an estimated eighty thousand bodies had been crammed into the ground. Walker issued a thunderously titled pamphlet about this incident, Burial Ground Incendiarism: The Last Fire at the BoneHouse in the Spa Fields Golgotha in 1846. Burial reformers built on public health concerns about miasma spreading fatal disease, the dead consuming the living, particularly in the wake of the cholera pandemic that reached London in 1832. There was a significant Report from the Select Committee on Improvement of the Health in Towns, subtitled Effect of Interment of Bodies in Towns, that was published ten years later in 1842. In the framing of the witness testimony collected, it is evident that burial reformers have found their vehicle to effect the legislative change demanded by figures like Graveyard Walker. The report concluded that their witnesses had revealed ‘a loathsome picture of the unseemly and demoralising practices which result from the crowded condition of existing graveyards’.36 The committee heard from sextons and gravediggers, who reported on a job that ruined their health labouring in such environs (but also from the alcohol they drank to cope with the work). Graphic evidence from a part-time gravedigger in Drury Lane talked about scooping out shallow graves; any digging sliced through and mutilated the corpses beneath the shovels (‘At one time I saw them bring up intestines in a bucket’, he said).37 Others were paid per grave dug, and allowed to take home coffin wood to burn on their home fires as a perk. When George Walker himself appeared before the committee, he declared Clement’s Lane, which was the focus of the majority of the committee sittings, ‘an infected district’ and ‘a disgrace to the metropolis’. It is the sheer materiality and density of the numberless dead that accumulates through this testimony and Walker’s perambulations of the city. Indeed, any part of inner city London can reveal many varieties of ground hemmedin alongside the living. Moving West from the dissenting grounds of Bunhill Fields on the edge of the old City of London boundary, there were many overspill churchyards in the neighbouring streets, private grounds that buried local paupers (like Thomas’s and Cupid’s Court), a small asylum ground that buried lunatics from the St Luke’s asylum on Old Street, special grounds for unclaimed pauper bodies from St Bartholomew’s Hospital, let alone the plague pits and pest-house grounds long built over since they were described in their mass horror in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). The ground in this area of Clerkenwell makes it clear how much of the inner city is a necro-metropolitan zone.38 The public health reformer Edwin Chadwick followed this report with his own Supplementary Report on the Practice of Interment in Towns in 1843. This pushed for a complete removal of the corpse from the public life of the city. He advocated the enforced closure of all city burial grounds, strict public

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health guidelines about the inspection of corpses and laws that banned much of the ritual practices of laying out bodies at home or even funeral processions taking routes through city streets. For the scholar Mary Elizabeth Hotz, this constituted a war on working-class practices that Chadwick considered demoralising in their worrying proximity of the living and the dead, where ‘respect disappears’ and ‘from familiarity it is a short step to desecration’.39 The eclipse of the corpse from a respectable and moral life was being outlined here amid Chadwick’s grander public health projects. In the same year, the virtues of the landscaped garden cemetery were outlined in John Claudius Loudon’s influential guide, On the Laying Out, Planting and Managing of Cemeteries. A cultural shift was beginning to occur. Nevertheless, it still took ten years to sort out the financial interests invested in city graveyards (many perfectly respectable Church of England inner city churches survived only on burial fees, for starters). The first Burial Act took effect in 1852, and this marks the date of most city grounds started to close to new burials. In 1851, Charles Dickens addressed the first anniversary celebration of the Metropolitan Sanitary Association, proclaiming ‘That no one can estimate the amount of mischief which is grown in dirt; that no one can say, here it stops, or there it stops, either in its physical or moral results, when both begin in the cradle and are not at rest in the obscene grave’.40 In the urban Gothic of his Bleak House, which Dickens began to compose in October 1851, Dickens uses the pestilential inner city pauper burial ground as the central device that connects all his characters together. Dickens identified the model for his burial ground in a letter in 1868 as the Drury Lane burial ground, so damned by George Walker in his Gatherings from Graveyards. Dickens recalled ‘when I was a boy it was to be got at by a low covered passage under a house, and was guarded by a rusty gate’.41 It is here that Nemo is buried in Bleak House, ‘into a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk would reject as a savage abomination’. Here a travesty of Christian burial will ‘sow him in corruption, to be raised in corruption: an avenging ghost at many a sick-bedside’.42 In accord with miasmatic theory, smallpox will rise out of this ground and infect Jo who in turn infects Esther. And it is at the rusty gate of the ground where Lady Dedlock dies. Bleak House was, Trevor Blount suggests, ‘propaganda for civic sanitary reform’ in a crucial moment of reformist pressure on government.43 It is striking that by 1860, City Churchyards have become for Dickens places merely of morbid curiosity. In ‘The City of the Absent’ in The Uncommercial Traveller, the restless nightwalking narrator visits them as ‘retired spots that I loved to haunt’. This is where he evokes the gates of Saint Ghastly Grim, its locked gates replete with ‘stone skulls, as though they were impaled’.44 They already have become places of gentle melancholic frisson rather than undead biopolitical menaces to social order. By the time that Isabella Holmes began her work to catalogue all of London’s burial grounds for the new Metropolitan Public Gardens Association

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in 1895 (she catalogued 362), she found that many had been lost to a new building, or were in a precarious state, being used as storage yards or left to rack and ruin, where they might soon be lost to development. Her campaign to rescue these sites was backed by legislation that forbid new buildings on old graveyards, turning many of the survivals into pocket parks and gardens. If this was driven by the discourse of public health, it was also suffused with a kind of melancholy nostalgia to preserve something of the traces of the unnumbered mass ranks of the city’s dead. While there are eminent societies that have been formed to rescue the Magnificent Seven garden cemeteries of London, which had fallen into disrepair by the 1970s, these revived urban gardens now feel carefully manicured in their performance of a very specific middle-class ‘Victorian Gothic’ funerary aesthetic. They are wonderfully evocative spaces, for sure, but there are other urban explorers who seek out the strange blasted playgrounds or pocket parks with only a broken headstone or two left and who know the devastating secret histories of these almost entirely erased dissenting and pauper grounds. Their histories undoubtedly feed into a Gothicised psychogeographical sensibility that maps the city via its forgotten yet recalcitrant dead, most obviously in the work of novelist and urban walker Iain Sinclair. The Gothic history of the necropolitan city can still run interference on the city of surveillance, of transparent real-time information flows or big-data number-crunching. Don’t look up, as you’re always told, in the city: look down at the grave dust on which the city is built.

Notes 1. Yael Shapira, Inventing the Gothic Corpse: The Thrill of Human Remains in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018), 1. 2. Catharine Arnold, Necropolis: London and its Dead (London: Pocket, 2007), 1. 3. Robert Blair, ‘The Grave’, in The Graveyard School: An Anthology, ed. Jack G. Voller (Richmond, VA: Valancourt, 2015), lines 5–7. 4. Judgment cited in Frank H. Ellis, ‘Gray’s Elegy: The Biographical Problem in Literary Criticism’, PMLA 66: 6 (1951): 971–1008, 975. 5. Thomas Gray, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, in The Graveyard School, ed. Voller, lines 10, 13, 14, 73, and 32. On representations of the rural poor, see John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 6. Edward Young, Night Thoughts (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1853), III, lines 162 and 165. 7. For details on this incident, see James Stevens Curl, The Victorian Celebration of Death (Strand: Sutton, 2000), 7ff. 8. See Brian Dillon, Ruin Lust: Artists’ Fascination with Ruins from Turner to the Present Day (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), or David

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Stewart, ‘Political Ruins: Gothic Sham Ruins and the ’45’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 55: 4 (1996): 400–11. 9. See Stephen Sowerby, ‘Victorian Gardens of Death’, in The Palgrave Gothic Handbook Volume 2: The Steam Age, ed. C. Bloom (London: Palgrave, 2020), 467–508. 10. See Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. H. Weaver (London: Allen Lane, 1981); Geoffrey Gorer, ‘The Pornography of Death’ (1955), reprinted in his Death, Grief and Mourning (NY: Doubleday, 1965), 192–9. For a similar melancholy account of the decline of mourning ritual, see also Julian Litten, The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral since 1450 (London: Robert Hale, 1991). 11. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus—The 1818 Text, ed. M. Butler (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), 139. 12. William Godwin, ‘Essay on Sepulchres’, in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, vol. 6, ed. M. Philp (London: Pickering, 1993), 8. 13. Godwin, ‘Essay’, 12. 14. Godwin, ‘Essay’, 22. 15. Godwin, ‘Essay’, 22. 16. On Godwin and the special dead, see Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 49–54. On the ‘very special dead’ of the Christian Saints, see Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Late Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 17. David McAllister, Imagining the Dead in British Literature and Culture, 1790–1848 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018), 3. 18. See the survey by Mrs Basil (Isabella) Holmes, ‘The Dissenters’ Burial Grounds’ in her classic The London Burial Grounds: Notes on Their History from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: Fisher Unwin, 1896), 133–52. 19. Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’: The Collège de France Lectures 1975–6, trans. D. Macey (London: Penguin, 2004), 248. Foucault accepts the Ariès thesis, called here ‘the famous gradual disqualification of death’, but subsequent critics have traced the multiform ways in which power continues to mobilise the dead. 20. I adopt this term, albeit used in a different context, from Achille Mbembe, who defines necropolitics as ‘the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of the living dead’. ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture 15: 1 (2003): 11–40, 40. 21. Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London: Penguin, 1988). 22. Richards, Death, 71.

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23. See, for instance, the novelist Hilary Mantel’s campaign, revived in 2020 during renovations to the Hunterian. Darragh Peter Murphy, ‘Hilary Mantel Calls for Skeleton of Irish “Giant” to be Repatriated’, Guardian (15 October 2020), www.guardian.com. (accessed 4 November 2020). 24. For details, see Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute, and also Elizabeth Hurren, Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and Its Trade in the Dead Poor, c. 1834–1929 (London: Palgrave, 2012). 25. See Caroline McCracken-Fletcher, The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Murders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 26. Isobel Rae, Knox The Anatomist (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1964). 27. See the detailed listings of this outpouring in William Roughead, Burke and Hare (Edinburgh: William Hodge, 1921), including over twenty separate pamphlets and books in 1829 alone. 28. Anna Gasperini, Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Medicine and Anatomy: The Victorian Penny Blood and the 1832 Anatomy Act (London: Palgrave, 2019). 29. See Manuscripts from the Diary of a Physician (London: Lloyd, 1844). Penny bloods were published anonymously, leading to some disputes over attribution of authorship. Subsequent scholars have ascribed this work to James Malcolm Rymer. 30. Samuel Warren, Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1874), 133. 31. Warren, Passages, 140. 32. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Body Snatcher’, in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales, ed. R. Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2006), 67–84. A report on the advertising campaign is cited in J. A. Hammerton, ed., Stevensoniana: An Anecdotal Life and Appreciation of Robert Louis Stevenson (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1907), 318. 33. Bentham’s directions for his body, quoted in C. F. A. Marmoy, ‘The “Auto-Icon” of Jeremy Bentham at University College, London’, Medical History 2 (1958): 77–86, 80–1. 34. George A. Walker, Gatherings from Graveyards, Particularly Those of London; with a Concise History of the Modes of Interment among Different Nations (London: Longman, 1839), iv. 35. George Walker, Gatherings, 150. 36. Report from the Select Committee, Parliamentary Papers (1842), iii. 37. Report from the Select Committee, 26. 38. For accounts of this area, see Isabella Holmes, The London Burial Grounds, and entries in Bard, Graveyard London.

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39. Chadwick, cited Mary Elizabeth Hotz, Literary Remains: Representations of Death and Burial in Victorian England (New York: SUNY Press, 2008), 18. 40. Charles Dickens, ‘Metropolitan Sanitary Association’, in The Speeches of Charles Dickens, ed. K. J. Fielding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 127–32, 128. 41. Charles Dickens, Letter (4 April 1868), cited in Trevor Blount, ‘The Graveyard Satire of Bleak House in the Context of 1850’, Review of English Studies 56 (November 1963), 370–8, 370. 42. Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. J. Hillis Miller (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 202. 43. Blount, ‘Graveyard Satire’, 374. 44. Charles Dickens, The Uncommercial Traveller, ed. D. Tyler (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2015), 228 and 229.

Bibliography Ariès, Philippe, The Hour of Our Death, trans. H. Weaver (London: Allen Lane, 1981). Arnold, Catharine, Necropolis: London and its Dead (London: Pocket, 2007). Blount, Trevor, ‘The Graveyard Satire of Bleak House in the Context of 1850’, Review of English Studies 56 (November 1963): 370–8. Curl, James Stevens, The Victorian Celebration of Death (Strand: Sutton, 2000). Dickens, Charles, Bleak House, ed. J. Hillis Miller (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). ———. ‘Metropolitan Sanitary Association’, in The Speeches of Charles Dickens, ed. K. J. Fielding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 127–32. ———. The Uncommercial Traveller, ed. D. Tyler (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2015). Ellis, Frank H., ‘Gray’s Elegy: The Biographical Problem in Literary Criticism’, PMLA 66: 6 (1951): 971–1008. Foucault, Michel, ‘Society Must Be Defended’: The Collège de France Lectures 1975–6, trans. D. Macey (London: Penguin, 2004). Gasperini, Anna, Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Medicine and Anatomy: The Victorian Penny Blood and the 1832 Anatomy Act (London: Palgrave, 2019). Godwin, William, ‘Essay on Sepulchres’, in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, vol. 6, ed. M. Philp (London: Pickering, 1993). Gorer, Geoffrey, ‘The Pornography of Death’ (1955), reprinted in his Death, Grief and Mourning (NY: Doubleday, 1965), 192–9. Holmes, Mrs Basil (Isabella), The London Burial Grounds: Notes on Their History from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: Fisher Unwin, 1896). Hotz, Mary Elizabeth, Literary Remains: Representations of Death and Burial in Victorian England (New York: SUNY Press, 2008). Hurren, Elizabeth, Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and its Trade in the Dead Poor, c. 1834–1929 (London: Palgrave, 2012). Laqueur, Thomas W., The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

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Litten, Julian, The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral since 1450 (London: Robert Hale, 1991). Marmoy, C. F. A., ‘The “Auto-Icon” of Jeremy Bentham at University College, London’, Medical History 2 (1958): 77–86. Mbembe, Achille, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture 15: 1 (2003): 11–40. McAllister, David, Imagining the Dead in British Literature and Culture, 1790–1848 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018). Rae, Isobel, Knox The Anatomist (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1964). Richardson, Ruth, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London: Penguin, 1988). Roughead, William, Burke and Hare (Edinburgh: William Hodge, 1921). Shapira, Yael, Inventing the Gothic Corpse: The Thrill of Human Remains in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018). Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus—The 1818 Text, ed. M. Butler (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008). Stevenson, Robert Louis, ‘The Body Snatcher’, in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales, ed. R. Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2006), 67–84. Voller, Jack G (ed.), The Graveyard School: An Anthology (Richmond, VA: Valancourt, 2015). Walker, George A., Gatherings from Graveyards, Particularly those of London; with a Concise History of the Modes of Interment Among Different Nations (London: Longman, 1839). Warren, Samuel, Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1874). Young, Edward, Night Thoughts (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1853).

Writing the City and Loss in the Work of Thomas De Quincey Nicola Bowring

The writings of Thomas De Quincey include essays, novels, autobiographical writings, letters, and span at least thirty years, from 1821 (Confessions of an English Opium-Eater) to 1852 (Autobiographic Sketches ). This was a period which saw much change in Britain, not least of which was the advancing metropolis, which De Quincey engages with particularly in his autobiographical writings. London, as the political centre of Britain and thus the British Empire, represented a major world power and centre for trade during this era. When we talk or write of the Urban Gothic, there is often a tendency to jump to the late Victorian period, to the writings of Stevenson and Stoker, though Dickens is frequently afforded mention as earlier work. De Quincey, though, gives evidence of a gothic writing that engages specifically with the city, the metropolis, even prior to this. His engagement with the city and with progress is variable in its attitude, at times positive towards development, at times seeming to mourn something that has apparently been lost by this. This essay focuses on the ways in which De Quincey engages with the city in fiction, essays and autobiographical writings, particularly through ideas around loss and community. In his autobiographical writing, this is the city of London, where De Quincey lived and worked for some years. In his gothic novels and tales, two of which, Klosterheim: Or, The Masque (1832) and The Avenger (1838), are read alongside these writings, fictional cities are created to N. Bowring (B) Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_14

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explore these questions of community, individualism and the past. This essay focuses on De Quincey’s autobiographical pieces, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) and Suspiria de Profundis (1845), along with these two fictional narratives. I also take here as a point of reference two of De Quincey’s essays, ‘On the Knocking at the gate in Macbeth’ (1823) and ‘The English Mail-Coach’ (1849). This essay will also consider the writing of De Quincey in manuscript form, from online archives, where De Quincey’s alterations and rewrites seem to mirror the rewriting of the city, in and re-inscription of London itself. Reading the essays, gothic narratives and autobiographical texts alongside one another allows for a picture of De Quincey’s oeuvre which highlights his preoccupation with loss in two respects: first, in the passing of space and time, through missed opportunities and encounters and fleeting figures, and second with the question of community as a kind of lost ideal or sanctuary. For De Quincey, the city is an inherently haunted space. It is a space which is constantly shifting and developing, and therefore always bears witness to the ghosts of what, and who, was there previously. London during the early nineteenth century was regularly under revision, buildings being pulled down and rebuilt, and streets redirected. The geography of the city then was unstable, spaces were open to re-appropriation and where new buildings or places were created, of course, something must then be lost to make way. There is then a pervasive sense of loss that runs throughout De Quincey’s narratives, both fictional and non-fictional; an image of fleeting presences, of opportunities slipped by and encounters missed. As a person and a writer, De Quincey is deeply concerned with loss. In Suspiria de Profundis, De Quincey tells of the death of his elder sisters, the second of which in particular had a profound effect on him.1 Much is made by critics, too, of his attachment to Wordsworth’s young daughter Kate, and his intense grief upon her death at the age of three. This loss, in particular relating to a vulnerable female figure, recurs throughout his narratives both autobiographical and fictional. De Quincey’s gothic narratives are marked by this same sense of female loss. Margaret Liebenheim in The Avenger and Adeline, the Landgrave’s daughter in Klosterheim, both become victims in the texts—Margaret dying in a manner that, despite being due to trauma and premature childbirth, still has echoes of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, and Adeline, much like Walpole’s Matilda in The Castle of Otranto, murdered mistakenly at the hands of her own father. De Quincey’s influences are clear here, as an avid reader of gothic novels during his youth. Maximilian Wyndham, the avenging anti-hero in The Avenger, notably, has also lost two sisters, whose death along with that of his mother he seeks retribution for from the townspeople. The recurrent sense of loss that pervades De Quincey’s narratives is related to tensions between individual and community, and along with this the sense of the loss of the latter. Thus community, for De Quincey, is a problematic concept like that of progress—indeed the two are seen in tension with one another at times. Though some of his writing expresses an ideal of community and solidarity, much of it highlights his contemporary social issues, along

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with imagined ones of his fictional cities. De Quincey’s work is about seeking connections, seeking secure community, but all too frequently it is about the failure to find this, and the fractured nature of the city. Communities, for De Quincey, are often haunted by secrets from the past as well as by current issues. Concealed secrets are inherent to the Gothic, particularly in relation to families and inheritance. Whilst in much Romantic-era Gothic this usually centred on a castle, house or monastery, and a family secret, De Quincey extends this outward more after (or before) the fashion of Victorian urban gothic—rather than a castle, house, monastery, the setting is a whole urban space, and it is the community itself, rather than an individual, which is haunted by secrets from the past. Cities in particular, as urban communities, in De Quincey’s writing become inherently gothicised spaces, shifting, eluding identity, haunted by the secrets of the past. This essay focuses on De Quincey’s interest in the passing moment as well as in passing in space. Questions relating to community and the individual are highly prevalent in Romantic-era writing. This is the era in which the concept of the individual takes on a new significance, and which Jean-Luc Nancy, considering community in The Inoperative Community, identifies as central in developing ideas in this field.2 This essay argues that anxieties about a sense of community are central to the gothic mode at this time, and that De Quincey represents a key example of this, and of the fraught tension between individual experience and communal feeling. This is De Quincey’s notion of modernity, of the changing city that disorientates the individual, of an idealised sense of community problematised and dislocated through spatial and temporal disruption. This interest though remains bound up in an interest in buildings and space, which bring about the connections as well as the missed opportunities for such. Before looking at the city in more depth, this essay begins by considering a link between time and space in a piece of literary criticism, exploring Shakespeare’s Scottish play. In his critical essay, ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, De Quincey questions what it is that produces such tension, such an ‘awfulness’ and ‘depth of solemnity’, in the knock on the door taking place after the murder of Duncan.3 Such a moment, following rather than during the act itself, should not be filled with tension. It is simply because, he argues, Shakespeare has taken us seemingly out of reality, into a world of darkness in which Macbeth and his wife have become murderers, and in identifying with Macbeth as anti-hero, we are simultaneously pulled into that shifted world. It is at the moment of shifting back, where reality crashes back in, that the awfulness is felt; that actions become ‘real’ and consequential. De Quincey praises Shakespeare’s ability to see into these moments, that seem coincidental, and to twist them for aesthetic effect; to destabilise them. For as he notes, ‘the farther we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident’.4 De Quincey is interested in what lies behind coincidence and accident in his own work, and this forms a part of his interest in passing in space and in time, in missed opportunities and the lost figure. It is in the example of

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a ‘real life’ parallel that De Quincey offers to his reader in connection with Shakespeare that we come to the city and the individual, in relation to space and community: [I]f the reader has ever been present in a vast metropolis on the day when some great national idol was carried in funeral pomp to his grave, and chancing to walk near the course through which it passed, has felt powerfully in the silence and desertion of the streets, and in the stagnation of ordinary business, the deep interest which at that moment was possessing the heart of man—if all at once he should hear the death-like stillness broken up by the sound of wheels rattling away from the scene, and making known that the transitory vision was dissolved, he will be aware that at no moment was his sense of the complete suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns so full and affecting as at that moment when the suspension ceases, and the goings-on of human life are suddenly resumed. (p. 6)

This is a notably spatial disruption as well as a temporal one; it is the space itself that is briefly moved out of ‘real life’ and its goings-on, but as the wheels rattle away it becomes transformed into an everyday space once more. This moment of return comes here after a moment of communal feeling, a ‘deep interest’ which possesses ‘the heart of man’. For De Quincey, for this to be fully appreciated, one must seek to observe rather than to understand. In this it could be said to relate Kant’s notion of the sublime, which requires a response outside of reason, and is also deeply concerned with size and space.5 Again, the example that De Quincey uses to emphasise the importance of observing rather than understanding is a spatial one, one of buildings and architecture. He notes the difficulty of drawing three-dimensional spaces/buildings, such as a street.6 De Quincey again, then, shows himself deeply concerned with the spatial metaphor, with dimensions and angles, as well as with the urban. That De Quincey’s writing, both fictional and autobiographical, displays such an interest in the spatial, particularly in terms of buildings and the city, is perhaps not surprising when we consider that he has grown up in an architecturally minded family—his mother had a great interest in this field, partly planning the alterations to the house in Chester she purchased as a part ruin.7 De Quincey’s Klosterheim: Or, The Masque, published in 1832, is set in the fictional city of Klosterheim in Germany during the Thirty Years War in the early seventeenth century, a time when the country was facing the threat of invasion from Swedish forces. The text builds on concerns around the city as space, particularly as a safe space. The Landgrave holding power—illegally—in the town, dealing with both the King and the Swedes, is revealed to be fraudulent and is deposed in true gothic style by the rightful heir Maximilian. This heirship, of course, is to the care and protection of a city rather than an aristocratic family, to a more urban community. Prior to the events of the narrative, the city has been seen for some time as a safe haven in disrupted times, largely due to its location surrounded by forest. The interest in location and journeying is likely inspired by De Quincey’s love of Radcliffe, whose work, along

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with that of Walpole and Coleridge, he admired greatly.8 The action of the text takes place in two separate locations, the city itself and the surrounding forest, through which a travelling party—including Paulina, Maximilian’s lover—is attempting to reach Klosterheim and safety. The narrative, then, concerns the bringing together of the two groups of people, Klosterheim’s citizens and the travellers (many of whom are relatives of those in the city), and thus becomes a narrative focused around journeys space and distance, which it maps closely and in detail. This comes to the point of the final days of the journey, in which the citizens can actually view the progress of the travellers from the city walls: On each side there were the same violent yearnings on each side the same dismal and overpowering fears. Each party arose with palpitating hearts: the one looked out from Falkenberg with longing eyes, to discover the towers of Klosterheim; the other, from the upper windows or roofs of Klosterheim, seemed as if they could consume the distance between themselves and Falkenberg. But a little tract of forest ground was interposed between friends and friends, parents and children, lovers and their beloved.9

The party of spectators in Klosterheim can only watch the advance of the party of travellers, helpless to affect anything, as they view the last nine miles or so of their journey in segments in between wooded areas. The watchers in the city can see the travellers, but also the parties of bandits pocketed in the forest who are invisible to them: ‘Every heart upon the walls of Klosterheim palpitated with emotion, as the two parties [travellers and thieves] neared each other. Many almost feared to draw their breath […] as they saw the moment approach when the two parties would shock together’ (p. 261). They watch as the travelling party encounter one armed group who unexpectedly ‘swept by, without halting’ (ibid.), in a close encounter, a moment of tension then avoided. The tracking of the party is interrupted too, which adds further to the tension through the frustration of not being able to see—for, in true gothic style, ‘[e]xactly at this point of time arose a dense mist, which wrapped the whole forest in darkness’ (p. 263), preventing the spectators from following the progress of the travellers. The party make it to Klosterheim, but much depleted and in a severe state. Maximilian, only days after being reunited with his lover Paulina, is taken captive by the enemy, following a desperate and heroic charge which saves much of the party. In contrast to Klosterheim, which is titled after the name of the city, in The Avenger ‘our quiet city and university in the north-eastern quarter of Germany’ is never actually named.10 The narrative here is based around revenge murders, which at first appear to be random murders of older inhabitants of the town by an unknown group of assassins present in the city. The murders committed by the avenger, Maximilian Wyndham, and his accomplices, are based in style on those of John Williams, a notorious murderer allegedly responsible for the deaths of seven people in London in the early nineteenth century, though De Quincey transposes these to Germany and

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gives his anti-hero the motive of revenge for the deaths of his family years before at the hands of the then town magistrates. De Quincey’s strong fascination with these murders is reflected in his taking inspiration from this for his essay, ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, and this novel picks up on the concept of the aesthetics of murder, where questions of method and technique are seemingly held above those of ethics. In The Avenger, De Quincey shows himself an early forerunner of another form of narrative that would take a hold in later centuries, the serial killer (or perhaps more technically ‘spree killer’) narrative. Though we might see something of the tragic hero in Wyndham, the killer figure on a mission to avenge the death of his mother and sisters, there is still closer attention paid to aesthetics than ethics in the narrative; the tension is created by the seeming randomness of the killings, and the seemingly impossible methods of the killers. The mystery of the avenger lies in his and his accomplices’ ability to evade the volunteers who patrol the town by night—‘as if in mockery of all our anxious consultations and elaborate devices, three fresh murders took place […] and in one case, as nearly as time could be noted, the mounted patrol must have been within call at the very moment when the awful work was going on’ (pp. 52–53). The closeness of the parties and missed encounter is again a driving force behind the narrative. The murderer and his accomplices enter peoples’ homes to commit sometimes multiple murders, constantly frustrating the efforts of those seeking to protect the townspeople. One particular incident, in which two young girls at a boarding school are witnesses, reveals their method of hiding in the houses in advance, and De Quincey dwells on this narrative and the spatial. One of the young girls, going to retrieve a heavy cloak from a closet, accidentally reveals a man’s leg hiding in the closet. There follows a brief cat-and-mouse game of deception, in which the girl attempts to pretend not to have seen the leg, but to leave the room with her sister undetected (pp. 56–57). They are nonetheless followed. Other fleeting images haunt the texts, such as the apparition of the ‘white lady’ in the Schloss at Klosterheim, a portent of supposed approaching change in the dominant family, and hence regarded here as a positive omen by the people who do not support the Landgrave (p. 276). De Quincey maintains the sense of fleeting visions and missed encounters in his autobiographical writing. In Ann, the young prostitute whom he befriends in London, but later loses after a missed meeting and fails to ever locate again, the young girl who lives in the house with him during his earlier times there, the disappearing chemist who first provides him with opium, and even to an extent the figure of the Malay, who De Quincey himself supplies with opium, whose fate he never discovers and who ‘fastened afterwards upon my dreams’.11 De Quincey ponders over the nature of London, both anonymous and maze-like, through his inability to re-find Ann: ‘If she lived, doubtless we must have been sometimes in search of each other, at the very same moment, through the mighty labyrinths of London; perhaps, even within a few feet of each other – a barrier no wider in a London street, often amounting in the end

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to a separation for eternity!’ (p. 38). Time and space here come together, the ‘same moment’ and ‘within a few feet’, in a frustrating form of do-si-do dance motion whereby the two pass around but never quite make contact, much like the parties in Klosterheim but on a closer scale and here to frustration rather than relief. The experience of both space and time are, for De Quincey, affected by his opium-taking. ‘The sense of space, and in the end, the sense of time, were both powerfully affected […] Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time […] The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived’ (p. 76). This folding and contortion of time and space allows for revisitings in memory, and a particularly uncanny sense of haunting. ‘For all this, however, I paid a heavy price in distant years, when the human face tyrannised over my dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London came back and haunted my sleep’ (pp. 53– 54). Reading De Quincey’s autobiographical work is rather like taking a walk through a strange city; broken down into episodes, as though one is looking in windows, through which they are often taken back to an earlier window and reminded of one space in another. Turning down a strange road in the narrative, the reader may find themselves suddenly at a crossroads with a street previously traversed, a story already told which, approached from a different angle, becomes oddly uncanny. The 1821 MS of Confessions, held by the Wordsworth Trust and online in the Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape archive, shows the deletions and revisions of De Quincey in his writing, his manuscript edited and amended much like the landscape of London itself. The text in the manuscript is marked by crossings-out and rewriting. De Quincey frequently crosses out work in blocks, rather than line by line; these blocks are often shaded in with further crosses and lines. This makes the reading of the manuscript itself an oddly spatial experience, as visible ‘areas’ of the page are crossed out, rather than simply lines. On page thirty-seven of his written manuscript, for example, De Quincey deletes almost an entire paragraph by way of drawing a box around it which is then crossed through diagonally, rather than crossing through horizontally line by line.12 To this end, then, the pages appear a palimpsestic space much like London itself; lines and phrases being lost from the published manuscript, replace by others with notes to the side. De Quincey in fact discusses the concept of the palimpsest in Suspiria, and the process of revealing writing previously removed: ‘The traces of each successive handwriting, regularly effaced, as had been imagined, have, in the inverse order, been regularly called back: the footsteps of the game pursued, wolf or stag, in each several chase, have been unlinked, and hunted back through all their doubles […] so, but our modern conjurations of science, secrets of ages remote from each other have been exorcised from the accumulated shadows of centuries’ (p. 149). Again, there is a sense of haunting, of bringing back, here, just as there is in all of De Quincey’s work, a concern with loss and recovery. The

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manuscript as it develops though becomes more flowing, more organised than London itself, which is to some extent seen as unmappable due to the constant changes, as De Quincey wanders the city: Some of these rambles led me to great distances […] I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphynx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares […] I could almost have believed, at times, that I must be the first discoverer of some of the terrae incognitae, and doubted, whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London. (Confessions, p. 53)

The sense of loss is also reflected in the changing topography of London and the areas which disappear to make way for new structures and layouts. The city is represented as transient, ever-changing: ‘Our course lay through a part of the town which has now all disappeared, so that I can no longer retrace its ancient boundaries’ (pp. 30–31). There is a sense here that the ‘ancient boundaries’ refers also to something cultural, something of community and something that De Quincey feels has been lost to society. The changes and revolutions taking place in England and Europe at the time instigate anxiety and a wish to reclaim an imaginary ideal of community, which in itself is something imaginary, as identified by Nancy: Nothing, therefore, has been lost, and for this reason nothing is lost. We alone are lost, we upon whom the “social bond” (relations, communication), our own invention, now descends heavily like the net of an economic, technical, political, and cultural snare. Entangled in its meshes, we have wrung for ourselves the phantasms of a lost community.13

The concept of loss in De Quincey’s work is also prevalent in his writing on community, explored in his essays, novels and autobiographical writing. De Quincey, though radical in some respects, was a Tory in politics, deeply unsure about political reform and concerned about the abolishment of old institutions and systems. His allegiance in the question of progress and political change remains, as Cian Duffy points out in relation particularly to the growing power of the middle-class reading public, ‘self-consciously and uncomfortably ambiguous’.14 This ambiguity is reflected strongly in his work, where we can see a deep sense of anxiety about the stability of society, and a concern around questions of inheritance. I begin here again in thinking about community through one of De Quincey’s essays, ‘The English Mail-Coach, or The Glory of Motion’, primarily because this at first appears at odds with much of his fictional and autobiographical work. Contrary to the gothic novels and haunted psychogeographic dreamscapes of other essays and collections, this appears at first glance a cheerful celebration of modernity, the ‘glory of motion’ combined with ‘grand effects for the eye’ of the mail-coach as a mode of transport.15 De Quincey describes the excitement of travelling via the mailcoach, a popular choice for students of the day, mentioned by him also as

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an experience in Confessions (p. 32), and thus travelling alongside the latest news. What he is celebrating, of course, is the effective transfer of information. He writes particularly of being able to travel to London bringing news of victory in recent battles during the Napoleonic wars. There is a highly idealised image of the people of England upon such news, whereby the usual class and rank distinctions appear to melt away in the light of nationalist enthusiasm: ‘That great national sentiment surmounts and quells all sense of ordinary distinctions. […] One heart, one pride, one glory, connects every man by the transcendent bond of his national blood’ (‘The English Mail-Coach’, p. 213). In the mail-coach London, though large, is mappable, easily traversed via a known and regular route. This organised and efficient route differs vastly from the opium-induced wanderings of De Quincey himself. However, despite this celebration, there is the undertone of death and dark visions—we move from section one, ‘The Glory of Motion’ to two, ‘The Vision of Sudden Death’ and three, ‘Dream Fugue’, inspired by the collision of the mail-coach into a small equipage. The mail-coach drives away, ‘the turn of the road carried the scene out of my eyes in an instant, and swept it into my dreams forever’ (p. 236). This forward motion, the excited advance, followed swiftly on its heels by death and dream fugues, along with the singular moment which returns to haunt in spectral nightmares is more typical of De Quincey. In almost direct contrast with the celebration of communication in ‘The English Mail-Coach’, De Quincey’s novel Klosterheim begins with the arrival of eagerly anticipated news, swiftly undermined by threat as the news of the danger to the travelling party seeking refuge at the city is revealed. The action then moving to the forest, what is stolen from the party is also mail, communications—the papers revealing Max’s true identity as the rightful Landgrave of the city (p. 241). Both this novel and The Avenger take a city community as their focal point for the narrative—a city that becomes terrorised by a mysterious killer/‘kidnapper’, both sharing the name Maximilian. Both of these novels, then, focus on a city originally represented as safe or communal in some way, that is later to be haunted by secrets of its own past, to be threatened by something within, the mysterious avenger and the equally mysterious ‘masque’ both clearly being already present in the cities themselves rather than a threat from outside. The narrator of The Avenger—the professor at the university who takes in Wyndham as a lodger—holds with pride his position of being known to almost everybody involved; indeed to almost all in the city, ‘I knew familiarly all the parties who were concerned in it […] I was present from first to last’ (p. 35). This is, of course, part ‘gothic conceit’—the declaration of one’s authenticity and privileged position in respect to the narrative, but is also an assertion of that sense of community. This sense is something that De Quincey seems to feel has been lost to the world. Yet the community of the unnamed town in Germany has its collective secret, the crimes of the past that come back to haunt, and a fear that spreads through the community. The narrator relates

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this anxiety in a personal and connected manner. ‘Our situation was no ordinary one. Had there been some mysterious robbers amongst us […] such a state of expectation would have sent pulses of pleasurable anxiety amongst the nerves. But murderers! Exterminating murderers! – clothed in mystery and utter darkness – these were objects too terrific for any family to contemplate with fortitude’ (p. 49). The question of what is within and what is without becomes important to the text. Wyndham appears an outsider, which he is— yet no stranger. The revelation that he has returned to the city in which he was held captive as a child to avenge the miscarriage of justice suffered by his family at the hands of the town magistrates reveals him as precisely the dark secret from the city community’s past. In Klosterheim the concept of the stranger within and the dark secret differs somewhat. Here, the crime has not been committed by the residents themselves, and thus the ‘kidnappings’ committed by the Masque are revealed to be staged as the only true subject for punishment is the Landgrove himself. The kidnappings are staged purely to undermine the power that the Landgrove holds over the city. However, this sense of a formerly safe space being placed under threat from a position already within is prevalent in this text too. Klosterheim, like the city in The Avenger, is originally presented as a safe and known space, holding itself as a kind of sanctuary against the broader conflict pervading Germany at the time between local Landgroves and the Crown, particularly sheltered by its surrounding woods: ‘The great storm had whistled and raved around them; but hitherto none had penetrated the silvan sanctuary, which on every side invested this privileged city’ (p. 258). Whilst nature creates a form of haven here, however, it is later to be penetrated by dark forces, and as a hidden space can hold evil as well as good. The followers of Holkerstein, a famous bandit and the threat posed to the travellers, are able to hide in and attack from the forest, so the environment which provides a level of political safety hides also a physical threat. Corruption in these novels lies in the seat of falsely claimed or abused power, of the Landgrove in Klosterheim and those in the corrupt court in the unnamed town of The Avenger. Another notable connection is that both cities hold their University, the pillar of learning, as a place of reassurance and to some extent sanctuary. Max in each novel is a student, and the University houses those most liberal, progressive and humanitarian in ethics. This in some respects seems odd in relation to the Tory politics of De Quincey himself, though it is very much in keeping with the ideology of the majority of gothic novels of the era. De Quincey’s faith in the educational establishment, likewise, comes as no surprise. For one who subtitled his Confessions as ‘Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar’, and who placed a great value in learning and education, it seems reasonable that this is where his faith will lie. The Masque in Klosterheim, Maximilian, like the avenger, penetrates the private spaces of those whom he intends to ‘kidnap’, in order to bring about justice. The story is considered an inspiration behind its more famous descendent, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’.16 Although it

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is revealed that the kidnappings are effectively staged, this undermines the authority and hold of the Landgrave on the city and its safety. There are two forms of communication in contest with one another here. The Landgrave has been used to knowing what was occurring in the city. ‘Among the students and among the citizens he had many spies, who communicated to him whatsoever they could learn […] But now he was met by a terrific antagonist, who moved in darkness, careless of his power, inaccessible to his threats’ (p. 282). The city’s sub-communities—family homes—become subject to invasion and subversion as safe spaces, by the stranger who ‘glide[s]’ in (p. 280) undetected and abducts members of the household. Again it is missed encounters that participate in the sense of threat here, as with The Avenger. In that novel he explores the sense of a communal experience from an event such as a murder, that imbues the whole city with a pervasive fear, which is regarded by him as approaching a kind of sublimity of experience: Agencies of fear, as of any other passion, and above all, of passion felt in communion with thousands, and in which the heart beats in conscious sympathy with an entire city, through all its regions of high and low, young and old, strong and weak; such agencies avail to raise and transfigure the natures of men; mean minds become elevated; dull men become eloquent.17

It has the power, like Radcliffe’s terror, to open and awaken the spirits— here of all, including those usually ‘mean’ and ‘dull’. However, this sublime moment carries this undercurrent of threat, just as the sublime ‘pleasures’ of opium are accompanied by its ‘pains’. There is an imagined sublime community, a wholeness, that is undermined by fracture. De Quincey’s autobiographical works also explore a sense of fracture in community. In Confessions he remarks on charity in London which ‘flows in a channel which, though deep and mighty, is yet noiseless and underground; not obvious or readily accessible to poor houseless wanderers; and it cannot be denied that the outside air and framework of London society is harsh, cruel, and repulsive’ (p. 25). De Quincey explores in his autobiographical narratives the secret sins of his own society, in particular those whom he feels it has failed. Though he himself is not in fact forced into his situation, but is living in this manner to escape contact with his guardians, his experiences give him the opportunity in his narrative to explore these sociological issues around legal systems and the poor in London, and the inaccessibility of help to those in situations like Ann’s. He notes later, ‘[s]uccessors too many, to myself and Ann, have doubtless since then trodden in our footsteps, inheritors of our calamities; other orphans than Ann have sighed; tears have been shed by other children; and thou, Oxford Street, hast since doubtless echoed to the groans of innumerable hearts’ (p. 39). De Quincey shows an awareness of injustice as something that will continue through the generations, despite his uncertainty about questions of political reform.

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The sense of undermining of the ‘wholeness’ of community is a reflection in many respects of De Quincey himself, and the undermining of narrative structure. The fracture that De Quincey feels in his community is mirrored by a fracturing in himself and his own mind, and thus in his autobiographical narrative. Emily Stanback draws attention to a key distinction between the confident tones of ‘The English Mail-Coach’ and the pervasive anxieties of Confessions: Unlike Ann of Oxford Street, one would trust that ‘‘sweet Fanny of the Bath Road,’’ from De Quincey’s ‘The English Mail-Coach’ (195), could be found again. In the labyrinthine city, however, details are so various that it becomes impossible to keep hold of them; people, streets, shops, and houses can – and often do – get lost in the London crowd. Ann’s lack of a surname helps to explain her untraceability, but in her namelessness, Ann comes to represent the instability of urban identity, the loss of self in the swarming, anonymous crowd.18

This instability is something De Quincey appears to struggle with on, as Stanback goes on to note, a perhaps more ‘personal’ level than other writers of his era, such as Wordsworth, who assesses this in a more philosophical light (ibid.). De Quincey lived in a London that was rapidly changing and growing; maps of the city from around this era show a fast developing metropolis.19 I mentioned earlier that De Quincey’s mourning of the disappearance of ‘ancient boundaries’ also seems to speak to a sense of the loss of cultural boundaries and norms, and something of community. This wholeness is imagined both through narrative structure and a vision of community, and both of these for De Quincey are related to his addiction to opium. For whilst opium gives the impression of finding harmony, this is a temporary effect. The De Quincey of ‘The Pleasures of Opium’ proclaims: [W]hereas wine disorders the mental faculties, opium, on the contrary (if taken in a proper manner), introduces amongst them the most exquisite order, legislation, and harmony. Wine robs a man of his self-possession: opium greatly invigorates it. Wine unsettles and clouds the judgment […] opium, on the contrary, communicates serenity and equipoise to all the faculties, active or passive. (p. 46)

Yet the later De Quincey, of ‘The Pains of Opium’, acknowledges the eventual sense of fracturing that haunts his mind: ‘For several reasons, I have not been able to compose the notes for this part of my narrative into any regular and connected shape. I give the notes disjointed as I find them, or have now drawn them up from memory’ (p. 69). Curtis Perry notes the relationship between narcotics and narrative structuring in De Quincey’s autobiographical writing: Even as the text invites the reader to see all of these events as parts of a larger structure, the status of that structure is made problematic. For example, we

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learn in “The Pleasures Of Opium” that the drug itself allows De Quincey to order temporal events within a larger, harmonious framework. If this synchronic, ordering vision is a symptom of the author’s drug-addled mind, are we not asked to wonder about the overarching structures that order De Quincey’s narrations of his own life? What do we make of narrative structure in a text which consistently undermines the validity of interpretative ordering?20

It is, in fact, the lack of a linear structure as such to the narrative that reviewers took issue with upon publication of the work: A brain morbidly affected by long excess of indulgence in opium cannot reasonably be expected to display a very consistent or connected series of thoughts and impressions. The work before us is accordingly a performance without any intelligible drift or design. It is, however, a sort of caleidoscope [sic], presenting to the eye a great variety of dazzling forms and colours, symmetrically and harmoniously disposed and blended, and yet expressing nothing, and resembling nothing.21

Thus laments the anonymous reviewer in The British Review. Despite claiming to have no idea of the intentions of the author, however, he inadvertently identifies a key element of De Quincey’s work: a kaleidoscope of colours, this is a spatial rather than a linear text. It is an exploration through a mind rather than through time. Time, in the text, comes back around in a circular fashion. Later, in Suspiria de Profundis, De Quincey says of Confessions, ‘the object of that work was to reveal something of the grandeur which belongs potentially to human dreams’ (p. 89), highlighting this idea of dreamscape rather than necessarily storytelling. Though he does begin both texts at his childhood, stylistically this is more after (or in fact before) the manner of a psychoanalyst looking at the unconscious in a dream. It is presented as more of a background to the ‘interesting’ episode of his life in Confessions and the essays presented in Suspiria. Nowhere, perhaps, is the concern with architecture and space more for in the foreground than in De Quincey’s recollection of seeing Piranesi’s ‘Antiquities of Rome’ with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who told him of a set of plates from by Piranesi entitled ‘Dreams’. Some of them (I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge’s account) represented vast Gothic halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, &c. &c., expressive of enormous power put forth and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: […] Again elevate your eye, and a still more aërial flight of stairs is beheld, and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours; and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall. With the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams. In the early stage of my malady the splendours of my dreams were indeed chiefly architectural. (Confessions, p. 78)

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He goes on to quote Wordsworth’s The Excursion, which refers to ‘a mighty city […] A wilderness of building’ (p. 79). De Quincey’s preoccupation with architecture, space and perspective is clear here, and this speaks back to his comments in ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’ about the difficulty of trying to draw in three dimensions, how to follow lines and represent space. Before the childhood remembrances in both autobiographical narratives comes the address to the reader, a common opening but one which appears to give De Quincey in particular a sense of anxiety, potentially tied up to his anxieties noted earlier about the power of the emerging middle-class reading public. It is the first section of the text, the part addressed most directly to the reader, that is the most highly edited, as though De Quincey were less decisive about how to frame this part.22 This is very much in keeping with his claims at the beginning of the narrative, that he has ‘hesitated at the propriety of allowing this, or any part of my narrative, to come before the public eye, until after my death’ (Confessions, p. 3). As the narrative develops, De Quincey reveals himself a surprisingly neat, flowing writer—though the MS is broken down and on different sized sheets, in each one there are surprisingly few changes, and not much to interrupt the flow of narrative in the neatly spaced lines and consistent handwriting. There is the sense of a desire for order of some kind in what is for the most part an architecturally neat manuscript, demonstrating De Quincey’s attention to detail and precision in his writing. The form of De Quincey’s writing reflects the sense of fractioning. Much of his writing is broken down into episodes, or exists in shorter, essay form. Confessions is divided into three parts, and Suspiria, though presented as a kind of sequel to it, is in fact a collection of shorter essays rather than a straight narrative. In describing his third descent into opium addiction in Suspiria de Profundis, when De Quincey realises how dangerous his symptoms are becoming, he notes how ‘I endeavoured, with some feeling of panic, for a third time to retrace my steps’ (p. 92). Again, he uses a spatial metaphor for going back over time also, to pull himself back out of the addiction. The title of the work even, ‘sighs from the depths’, invokes the spatial, as does his description of opium-taking in Confessions: ‘I seemed every night to descend, not metaphorically, but literally to descend, into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I could ever re-ascend’ (p. 76). Here he invokes the spatial in a more than metaphorical sense, describing how real this physical movement of descent felt during the experience. We can of course read drugs as monstrous in themselves, a form of gothic villain. Like the vampire, opium appears as a temptation, offers sublime experience, freedom from pain. Like the vampire, it must be invited in (ingested/inhaled), and like the vampire it invades the body, coursing through the blood with powerful effect. What results, though, is the decimation of the ‘victim’, the gradual dependency, until, as one magazine of the time notes, ‘worn out with debility and intemperance, he at last sinks like a shadow into the grave’.23

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Romantic writing and music were closely related, and the sense of the spatial is something picked up by composers also. In his Symphonie Fantastique, purportedly inspired by a French translation of Confessions, Hector Berlioz wanted to write a ‘descriptive symphony’.24 Much of De Quincey’s writing is orchestral in some sense. It evokes a particular mood and feeling rather than necessarily following a linear plot. The narratives are about revisiting, about moving around in space as much as in time, and chiefly about loss and remembrance. This brings to his work a strong sense of the ghostly and of the uncanny. As Crawford remarks, ‘[t]here is something ghostly about the act of remembering, in that it brings before the mind’s eye things that have passed away. A memory repeats something that has gone before, even if only in the mind: and as Freud reminds us, it is always somewhat uncanny when the same thing happens more than once’.25 De Quincey’s works show a preoccupation with the developing city, with its anonymity and with those who escape the care of the social structures. More than this, though, they show a preoccupation also with the borders between fiction and reality, and with the concept of storytelling itself in the search for identity. How does one ‘tell’ the self, in a world which defies narrative structure? For De Quincey, this is only in abandoning the linear for a spatial vision, in making the narrative reflect the structures of life with its uncanny repetitions, revisitings and haunted progress. The ‘glory of motion’ towards the future will always be followed by the spectral, the ‘vision of sudden death’ and ‘fugue’ state that follows only steps behind. It is by engaging with this, by going back, retracing one’s steps, that one is able to explore identity in writing, both of the individual and the community.

Notes 1. Thomas De Quincey, ‘Suspiria de Profundis’, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Barry Milligan (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 89–190, p. 103. 2. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 3. 3. Thomas De Quincey, ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in MacBeth’ [1823], in On Murder, ed. Robert Morrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press [1838], 2006), pp. 3–7, p. 3. 4. Thomas De Quincey, ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, p. 7. 5. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [2000], online edn. 2013), p. 132. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridgecore/content/view/68FA5488B652301A3ADE08B0899B423F/978 0511804656c2_p128-159_CBO.pdf/first_section_second_book_anal ytic_of_the_sublime.pdf [accessed 13.11.20]. 6. Thomas De Quincey, ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, p. 3.

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7. Frances Wilson, Guilty Thing: A life of Thomas De Quincey (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 73. 8. Robert Morrison, Introduction to ‘Klosterheim: Or, The Masque’ [1832], in The Works of Thomas De Quincey, vol. 8, ed. Robert Morrison (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001), pp. 223–227, p. 225. 9. Thomas De Quincey, ‘Klosterheim’, in The Works of Thomas De Quincey, pp. 221–340, p. 260. 10. Thomas De Quincey, ‘The Avenger’ [1838], in On Murder, pp. 35–80, p. 35. 11. Thomas De Quincey, ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, pp. 3–88, p. 64. 12. The Wordsworth Trust/Andrew Matthew Digital, ‘Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape’, MS Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, p. 37. http://www.romanticism.amdigital. co.uk/Search/DocumentDetailsSearch.aspx?documentid=60651&pre vPos=60651&vpath=SearchResults [accessed 10.12.20]. 13. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, pp. 11–12. 14. Cian Duffy, ‘“His ‘Canaille’ of an Audience”: Thomas De Quincey and the Revolution in Reading’, Studies in Romanticism 44.1 (2005), 7–22, 8. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25601715 [accessed 29.11.20]. 15. Thomas De Quincey, ‘The English Mail-Coach’, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, pp. 191–245, p. 191. 16. Robert Morrison, Introduction to ‘Klosterheim’, p. 226. 17. Thomas De Quincey, ‘The Avenger’, in On Murder, p. 37. 18. Emily B. Stanback, ‘Peripatetic in the City: De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and the Birth of the Flâneur’, Literature Compass 10.2 (2013), 146–161, 151. 19. ‘Old Maps Online’, at https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en/London,_ United_Kingdom#bbox=-0.3833330000000001,51.366667000000 01,0.30000000000000016,51.66666699999999&q=&date_from= 0&date_to=9999&scale_from=&scale_to= [accessed 11.12.20]. 20. Curtis Perry, ‘Piranesi’s Prison: Thomas De Quincey and the Failure of Autobiography’, Studies in English Literature 33.4 (1993), 809–824, 809. 21. Taylor and Hessey, ‘Review of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’, The British Review, and London Critical Journal 20.40 (Dec. 1822), 474–489, 474. https://search-proquest-com.ntu.idm.oclc.org/britis hperiodicals/docview/4317545/E75C736D2EE24380PQ/6?accoun tid=14693&imgSeq=16 [accessed 12.12.20]. 22. MS Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, pp. 1– 6. 23. Anon., ‘Opium—Opium-Eaters—The Opium Trade with China’, The Saturday Magazine 15.474 (Nov. 23rd, 1839), 197–199. https://sea

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rch.proquest.com/docview/2906932/619E4AB109B84EA2PQ/1? accountid=14693&imgSeq=3 [accessed 04.01.21]. 24. J.-G. Prod’homme and Abram Loft, ‘Berlioz, Musset, and Thomas De Quincey’, The Musical Quarterly 32.1 (Jan. 1946), 98–106, 100. 25. Joseph Crawford, ‘The Haunting of Thomas De Quincey’, Cambridge Quarterly 40.3 (2011), 224–242, 225.

Bibliography Anon., ‘Opium—Opium-Eaters—The Opium Trade with China’, The Saturday Magazine 15.474 (Nov. 23rd, 1839), 197–199. https://search.proquest.com/ docview/2906932/619E4AB109B84EA2PQ/1?accountid=14693&imgSeq=3 [accessed 04.01.21]. Crawford, Joseph, ‘The Haunting of Thomas De Quincey’, Cambridge Quarterly 40.3 (2011), 224–242. De Quincey, Thomas, ‘The Avenger’, in On Murder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 35–80. De Quincey, Thomas, ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 3–88. De Quincey, Thomas, ‘Klosterheim’, in The Works of Thomas De Quincey, vol. 8, ed. Robert Morrison (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001), pp. 221–340. De Quincey, Thomas, ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in MacBeth’, in On Murder, ed. Robert Morrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 3–7. De Quincey, Thomas, ‘Suspiria de Profundis’, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Barry Milligan (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 89–190. Duffy, Cian, ‘“His ‘Canaille’ of an Audience”: Thomas De Quincey and the Revolution in Reading’, Studies in Romanticism 44.1 (2005), 7–22. https://www.jstor. org/stable/25601715 [accessed 29.11.20]. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [2000], online edn. 2013). https://www.cambri dge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/68FA5488B652301 A3ADE08B0899B423F/9780511804656c2_p128-159_CBO.pdf/first_section_s econd_book_analytic_of_the_sublime.pdf [accessed 13.11.20]. Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Inoperative Community (Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). ‘Old Maps Online’, at https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en/London,_United_Kin gdom#bbox=-0.3833330000000001,51.36666700000001,0.300000000000000 16,51.66666699999999&q=&date_from=0&date_to=9999&scale_from=&sca le_to= [accessed 11.12.20]. Perry, Curtis, ‘Piranesi’s Prison: Thomas De Quincey and the Failure of Autobiography’, Studies in English Literature 33.4 (1993), 809–824. Prod’homme, J. G., and Abram Loft, ‘Berlioz, Musset, and Thomas De Quincey’, The Musical Quarterly 32.1 (Jan. 1946), 98–106. Stanback, Emily B., ‘Peripatetic in the City: De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and the Birth of the Flâneur’, Literature Compass 10.2 (2013), 146– 161.

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Taylor and Hessey, ‘Review of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’, The British Review, and London Critical Journal 20.40 (Dec. 1822), 474–489, 474. https:// search-proquest-com.ntu.idm.oclc.org/britishperiodicals/docview/4317545/E75 C736D2EE24380PQ/6?accountid=14693&imgSeq=16 [accessed 12.12.20]. The Wordsworth Trust/Andrew Matthew Digital, ‘Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape’, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, ed. M. S. Thomas De Quincey, p. 37. http://www.romanticism.amdigital.co.uk/Search/DocumentDeta ilsSearch.aspx?documentid=60651&prevPos=60651&vpath=SearchResults [accessed 10.12.20]. Wilson, Frances, Guilty Thing: A life of Thomas De Quincey (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

Gothic Poetry

The Dark Poetry of Charlotte Dacre Maria Giakaniki

The gothic novel of the late eighteenth century, a literary genre marked by lyrical exaltation, thrilling imagery, excess of emotion and vivid depictions of danger, violence, lust and desire, not only had a particular appeal on female readers—despite the fact that there were social concerns regarding moral corruption of young women due to their reading gothic fiction1 —but also attracted the talents of many women authors: indeed, the contributions of the female sex to early gothic fiction are quite numerous. Perhaps one of the reasons for the preference of women readers to the genre could be that the plots of many gothic novels focused on female characters—persecuted maidens, vicious aunts, lost mothers and mysterious nuns—while quite often, the female authors of these sinister imaginative narratives also adopted a proto-feminist point of view. Women authors of early Gothic are considered to have attempted to render female stories and their heroines more visible in the history of literature2 and criticize, usually through the pretext of fiction, the subordinate status of women. After all, this was an era when Ann Radcliffe’s female gothic novels knew tremendous success at the same time when Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist works were widely read. Apart from Radcliffe, there were many other authoresses who generously contributed to the genre, mainly in Great Britain, Ireland and France. However, the names of Clara Reeve, Sophia Lee, Charlotte Dacre, Charlotte Smith, Regina Maria Roche, M. Giakaniki (B) Athens, Greece e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_15

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Madame de Genlis, Eliza Parsons, Joanna Baillie, Eleanor Sleath and several others might not be vastly known to contemporary readers of gothic fiction, in spite of their being rather popular in their time. The end of the eighteenth century was also the era when romantic poetry flourished and it is notable that poets of that period often employed motifs and settings that were very familiar to the readers of gothic novels. Much has been written on the close thematic affiliations between romantic poetry and the Gothic3 ; from the concept of the sublime—cherished by both romantic poets and authors of early gothic fiction—and the funereal landscapes of the pre-romantic Graveyard Poets, to the supernaturalism of Goethe and the other figures of German Romanticism, as well as the dark uncanny tropes of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and, subsequently, Byron, Keats and Shelley (with the latter one having written a handful of gothic novelas), it is rather evident that in spite of the contempt that several Romantic poets often exhibited towards the Gothic, many of their works were closely intertwined with gothic aesthetics and motifs.4 Moreover, despite the fact that the most prominent British poets of the late eighteenth century were male, there were actually many romantic female poets that were highly regarded by their contemporaries, such as Susanna Blamire, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Felicia Hemans. Furthermore, female poets’ use of the Gothic and the supernatural in the broader spectrum of romantic poetry, was not something rare—after all this was an era (1790–1805) when the ‘gothic ballad’ genre flourished with such representatives as Matthew Lewis and translations of Burger’s ‘Lenore’5 —and it served as to further establish associations between the Gothic and Romanticism, but from a female perspective. From Charlotte Smith, who participated in an English sonnet revival, while she also made considerable use of sepulchral and gloomy motifs in her ‘graveyardish’ poems, to Mary Robinson, an author and poet loosely belonging to the Della Cruscans—a group of late eighteenth-century authors of sentimental poetry whose influence on romanticism has often been underestimated6 —who also employed dark uncanny tropes in her poetry, there are several instances of female writers of that era who reproduced the gothic element in their poems to various degrees; besides this was the tendency of major English poets such as Coleridge and Wordsworth, apart from the authors of the less ‘serious’ gothic ballad genre. Yet, perhaps the female author of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century who made the most systematic use of uncanny gothic themes and dark supernatural motifs in her poetry, also in order to explore major themes of the broader romantic movement such as love and death, was Charlotte Dacre, the creative mind behind several subversive gothic (or semigothic) novels of that period, such as the renown and influential Zofloya, or the Moor, published in 1806. Moreover, Dacre may have been, along with the Scottish poet Anne Bannerman, who was the author of Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802), the most prominent female writer of gothic ballads, though not all of her supernatural poems fall into this specific category.

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Very little is verified about Charlotte Dacre’s life and much that has been considered biographical information is based on (usually well-grounded) speculation. Charlotte Dacre must have been the pseudonym of Charlotte King, daughter of Jonathan King, while her sister Sophia King also became a poet and author of gothic novels. Apart from the famous Zofloya, and under the pseudonym ‘Rosa Matilda’ (a pen name allegedly inspired from ‘Matilda’, the demon in Lewis’s ‘The Monk’ or by the Della Cruscans typical pen names), Charlotte penned some lesser known, almost forgotten today, novels such as The Passions (1811), The Confession of the Nun of St. Omer (1805) and The Libertine (1807). In general, Dacre’s fiction was notorious for depicting intense emotions and violent actions by female characters, marked by ‘impropriety’ to say the least, and the creation of some very unconventional, for her time, literary heroines. Her supernatural gothic horror novel Zofloya provoked a small literary scandal when it was first published in 1806, due to the gross portrayal of Victoria de Loredani, a young noble consumed with erotic passion and lust, who gradually became an adulteress and murderess, adopting what was then considered ‘masculine behaviour’. Dacre’s other gothic novels are also distinguished by unconventional female characters: in The Passions, Apollonia, absorbed from feelings of uncontrollable desire and revenge, succeeds to weaken moral restrictions regarding conjugal fidelity within the mind of her rival, virtuous Julia; Gabrielle in The Libertine challenges gender stereotypes by disguising as a man and inspiring desire to both men and women; even the more feminine Cazire in Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer attempts to maintain her own identity, showing resistance to the ‘shaping’ of her character by male authority.7 In all these cases, the author seems to openly condemn transgressive female behaviour and moralize against the ‘dangers’ of female sexual desire; yet by exposing in a convincing manner a darker, almost masculine, thus socially unacceptable, side of female mentality, which she nevertheless seems to disapprove, she inevitably subverts established gender roles and notions and reinforces female subjectivity. Though the figure of Charlotte Dacre is veiled with uncertainty and obscurity, from the little that is known, it seems that her own life was unconventional to a considerable degree, and also marked by at least one remarkably unusual incident. In 1811, she most possibly married the editor of The Morning Post, Nicholas Byrne, after having already three children with him, being ‘a fallen woman’ herself similar to the heroines in her novels and poems, while subsequently her husband was mysteriously murdered in his home by an unknown man and the incident was concealed by his staff and family, possibly under his own bid before he perished.8 Notwithstanding the little information regarding her life, it is a fact that Dacre was a successful author in her era, widely read, while Zofloya had been translated in German and French. She inspired both Lord Byron and Percy Shelley; the first in his collection Hours of Idleness (1807), a title which was a direct allusion to Dacre’s Hours of Solitude 9 while the latter was enthusiastic about Zofloya, whose influence is manifested on his juvenile gothic novela Zastrozzi (1810).

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Dacre’s poetry collection Hours of Solitude, published in 1805, reflected, to a considerable extent, gothic motifs and themes also examined in her fiction. Furthermore, such poetry sometimes was also included in specific scenes in the plot of her novels, highlighting the distressing experiences and emotional anguish of the protagonists. Ann Radcliffe herself had often employed this literary device in such seminal works as The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), her longest novel, which was interspersed with extended or shorter poems echoing the events and the feelings that dominate the story, while this was a technique employed by other authors of the Gothic as well. Hours of Solitude includes several poems from Dacre’s previously published poetic collection Trifles of Helicon (1798), co-written with her sister Sophia. It is comprised of dreary poetic narratives written in Charlotte’s teenage years, echoing, as it is already mentioned, many of the dusky, somber themes and notions that were also featured in her novels, such as sin, murder, death and the misfortunes of romantic love, very often through a female perspective. In Hours of Solitude, Dacre is exclusively preoccupied with the dark or, rather, gloomy side of human nature but, due to poetic musicality and the ballad form, the result is naturally more lyrical than in her fiction. Moreover, the heroines in her poems are mostly romantic maidens who experience some sort of grave misfortune due to love, and not so much femmes fatales who manifest masculine/transgressive behaviour and immoral conduct, as is often the case in her novels. Nevertheless, and despite their emotional susceptibility, women in Dacre’s poems often defy traditional femininity connected with the sense of moral duty and the notions of virtue and prudence, and expose their own strong will regarding the way they wish to experience love and desire, even if this conduct can prove to be calamitous and fatal. Apart from the emotional vulnerability and the, usually, dark fate of women, the central topics of Dacre’s poetry, are certainly death and the ephemerality of life, themes reinforced by her poetic imagery since sometimes she pictures death even literally. Thus, many of the poems of the first volume of Hours of Solitude explore the subjects of death and mortality in their various forms and representations, as well as the hopelessness of life with its frailty and grave afflictions suffered by humanity. In this respect, ‘The Mother to her Dying Infant’, deals with the uncomfortable topic of a child’s death; in this poem the desperate mother of an unfortunate infant who is approximating the moment of departure from earthly life, ends up holding its cold corpse, anticipating her beloved offspring’s physical decomposition in the grave, in a particularly dismal and macabre ending of the poem: ‘Little corpse, of spotless beauty/Soon corruption shall thee taint’ (37–8).10 Motherhood here is depicted as bringing severe emotional suffering to women, who are often blasted by the loss of their children due to strenuous circumstances. Nevertheless a mother, in the pessimistic literary universe of Charlotte Dacre, will console herself that it is better for her child to die rather than encounter all the griefs that the future holds, since the opening lines of the poem state:

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Die my love–I’ll not regret thee– Die, and me of hope bereave: If thou liv’st, what ills beset thee! Die, and never know to grieve. (1–4)11

Moreover, the mother of the poem, in a burst of sentimentality and celebration of maternal devotion, will subsequently yearn for her own entombment along with her child, so as to become dust and be reborn together with her offspring. The death of a child, but the theme of revenge as well, is also the main subject in ‘The Orphan’s Curse’, a poem which, as Dacre claims at its beginning, was initially written for a romance entitled The Fatal Secret (1801), written by another author, whose name she does not reveal. In this poem, the ghost of a murdered child haunts the man who took its life, extorting passionate curses of hatred and despair, to the point of attempting to send the perpetrator to the fires of Hell: ‘The orphan’s ghost thy soul shall scare/And bar the gates of heaven’ (23–4).12 Eternal misery is the fate of children as weak, defenseless beings, easily victimized by the society of men. Dacre here seems to manifest her feelings of sympathy to children, vulnerable and prone to be harmed, as women are, in a social environment made by inequality and injustice. The motif of the vengeful ghost of a murdered victim is also prevalent in ‘Julia’s Murder or the Song of Woe’, yet in this case, the deed is even more horrible than in the previous poem, since it concerns a young girl’s death caused by her own sister. This piece is possibly inspired by the seventeenthcentury English folk ballad ‘The Twa Sisters’ (The Two Sisters) collected by Francis J. Child, which concerns the drowning of a young woman by her elder sister due to jealousy and sexual rivalry. Dacre’s poem does not offer a description of the two girls’ external appearance as does the folk ballad; in the latter the young victim is fair while the murderess is dark, recalling the same exact colour contrast between thirteen-year-old innocent Lilla and Victoria, her relentless murderer, in Zofloya. In Dacre’s poem, the narrator throws the most dreadful curses on the guilty sister considering her crime nonredeemable: Thy breath empoisons the sweet air; Where’er thou step’st a blight is found; Thine eyes the birds of Heaven scare– Thou spread’st a pestilence around. (22–25)13

The theme of murder and guilt also appears in the poem entitled ‘The Murderer’, in which Dacre portrays a man who has committed homicide and is subsequently experiencing his own hell on earth by having deep remorse: the latter take the external form of his dead friend who was his victim, as well as the shape of horrific visions of an almost divine source, emblems of his guilt: ‘The King of terrors rose. Awful he rose/And wan as the pale moon-beam o’re the tomb’ (58–9).14 Vile instincts and passions take over humans, this is

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what Charlotte Dacre claims, condemning sin but also presenting it as natural and unavoidable part of human experience. Faithful to her exploration of the most infernal corners of the human psyche and human behaviour in its extremest forms, in the first volume of Hours of Solitude, apart from the theme of murder, Dacre also explores the theme of madness. The poem ‘The Musing Maniac’ appears—slightly altered—in the author’s debut novel Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer under the title ‘The Spectres’ Jubilee’.15 The poem depicts a mind bordering the delirium of madness while it also pictures very vividly the macabre dreariness of the tomb, and could well be a source of inspiration for grim and grotesque E.A. Poe tales some decades later. In ‘The Musing Maniac’, the speaker wonders whether she is possessed by demons and also yearns to find joyful relief in death: she fantasizes about living with the dead and becoming a ghost who will merrily haunt the earth. In this case, death is not equated with extinction but with an alternative existence. The heroine also pictures death as a skull: ‘From the sockets of his eyes/Bid me the grim worm obtain’ (13–4).16 Moreover, ‘The Exile’, another poem which also appears in the novel Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer, features a dejected female, who, feeling entrapped by fate, ends up welcoming death and the tomb: ‘O welcome, tomb! I fondly look to thee/as wearied mariners a port from sea’ (28–9).17 The most distinct feature of ‘The Musing Maniac’ and ‘Exile’, apart from the feeling of extreme melancholy, despair and inner turmoil verging on insanity, is strong female subjectivity. The female madness motif also appears in other poems of the first volume of Hours of Solitude, always closely entwined with that of romantic passion and desire. In ‘The Maniac’, about which Dacre herself notes it was set to music ‘for the piano forte’, she explores the theme of mental imbalance due to love despair: a lady flees into the midnight wood and is prone to committing suicide believing her lover is dead. The love delirium of the heroine is very eloquently described and the author manages to transmit to the reader her peculiar mental state and feelings of anguish and utter despair expressed through the selfdestructive urges of a desolate, afflicted mind: Wild thro’ the desert woods Alzira flew! Her robe disorder’d hung; Wet were her locks from midnight’s chilly dew, Her snowy arms were bare; Her bosom fair With blood was stain’d. (1–6)18

This is one more vivid ‘woman on the edge’ literary portrait created by Dacre; furthermore, female insanity in Dacre’s fiction but also in her poetry can be a displaced representation of extreme emotional distress.19 In another ill-boding poem from the first volume of Hours of Solitude, entitled ‘Love and Madness’, which also deals with female romantic despondency, the emotionally troubled protagonist is going to meet her death after

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a dreadful treachery made to her by her lover and her own sister, somehow echoing the previously discussed poem ‘Julia’s Murder’ with the sexual rivalry between female siblings. In ‘Love and Madness’, the sorrowful heroine is waiting to hear the warning bell of her perishing; indeed death in this case takes the form of a ‘Shadowy figure bending/O’er a small spot meant for me/Round pale ghosts attending’ (26–8).20 The forlorn maiden resembles a ghost with her pallor and mourning demeanor as if she is already an apparition among those of her kind or as if she has lost her own self and sanity due to dolorous emotions that bring to her mind visions of death. Dacre’s theme of love that brings (self) destruction to women is recurrent in both her poetry and novels. Female susceptibility to the feelings of passion and desire, associated with immoral conduct and actions of violence, are motifs manifested in Dacre’s novels such as Zofloya and The Passions, where love and sexual desire become an obsession, wreathing havoc; in general, Dacre’s works are distinguished by a profoundly bleak and fatalistic perception of life and love, in particular, regarding females—partly justified due to harsh realities and social limitations of women of her era. ‘The Skeleton Priest or the Marriage of Death’, also appearing in the romance Fatal Secret, and possibly inspired by Lewis’s ballad ‘Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogene’ appearing in The Monk (1796),21 is one of the most distinctive poems of Hours of Solitude dealing with the theme of female obsessive love that leads to self-destruction, also featuring the demon lover motif, initially employed in old English folk ballads. A young maiden named Irene, who is ardently amorous of a man named Orlando, is warned in vain by the spectre of the previous wife of her lover, who indeed tried to protect her from a fatal union. The appearance of this ghostly woman is resembling a harbinger of death: ‘A moldering skull in her hand was display’d/While a lamp the red blood on her bosom betray’d’ (46–7).22 Irene defies all warnings and forebodings since her passion for Orlando is totally unbridled, having diminished her reasoning.23 Nevertheless, in the end, without her realizing it, she symbolically weds Death, who is the evil entity behind her criminal lover—a man who murdered his own wife—a man who would most possibly cause her own ruin as well in case she became his: ‘Thy nuptial rejoicing must be a death knell/ For thou art the wife of the tomb’ (143–4).24 Moreover, on a second reading, the poem can be regarded as a grim allegory of marriage: the legal bond that is equated to the extinction of a woman as a person, due to the restrictions and control imposed on her by her legal husband.25 A lady at the mercy of romantic and sexual seduction is also portrayed in ‘The Aireal Chorus or The Warning’, one more of the poems from the first volume of Hours of Solitude that are included in Fatal Secret. This is another instance of supernatural female warning against a male predator who, in this case, is vampirically preying, both literally and figuratively, on vulnerable unsuspected women26 :

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Lo! they rush—they seize you now— In your bosom dart their fangs; Now your blood begins to flow— Wild they suck amid your pangs. (33–36)27

The dark forest is, metaphorically, a dangerous field of seduction similar to the one in Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ (1862), while Morven, the vampire in ‘Aireal Chorus’, is the equivalent monstrous sexual predator of the Big Bad Wolf in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. Females in Dacre’s poetry are mostly passionate and fearless, yet they are almost always victimized in one way or another, either being seduced or deceived; however, and though they mostly fail to become self-conscious and active agents of their own fate while being still alive, they sometimes achieve a kind of empowerment posthumously, like in the case of the female revenants-messengers in ‘The Skeleton Priest’ and ‘The Aireal Chorus’.28 A woman confronted with death and the supernatural is once more the theme of Dacre’s poetry in ‘Death and the Lady’, a long poetic narrative which is described by the author herself as an attempt to imitate the old English ballads. The heroine in this ballad initially refrains from Death—who is visually depicted as a skeleton, bringing to mind both the ‘death and the maiden’ and ‘the demon lover’ motifs—as he attempts to persuade her to succumb to him. His arguments are in favour of abandoning this world as a field of sorrow and despair, developing a nihilistic view of mortal life: Life is a bitter, bitter hour, A bleak, a dreary wild, Where blooms no shrub, where blows no flow’r. For nature’s wretched child. (105–108)29

This is another reflective Dacre poem on the futility of life and the sepulchral ‘refuge’ that death can offer; indeed Death is invincible once more, since the heroine of the ballad becomes his bride in the end, in a stoic acceptance of sweeping natural forces. In this case, the protagonist is not deceived by Death, like in ‘The Skeleton Priest’, but convinced by his arguments. In contrast with ‘Death and the Lady’, ‘The Dying Lover’ is a lyrical, melancholy poetic synthesis upon the frailty of human life which might have even influenced Emily Brontë, in such mournful poems as ‘Remembrance’—‘The Dying Lover’ is somehow similar in content to ‘The Mother to her Dying Infant’, apart from the macabre element: But, like th’anemony, most frail and fair, With the last beam his fainting form expiring, His spotless soul escap’d this world of care, And seem’d, methought, upon that beam retiring! (29–32)30

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In both poems, the person who remains alive witnesses and bemoans the gradual physical deterioration and, finally, the decease of a beloved one due to illness. In the case of ‘The Dying Lover’, there is a reversion of stereotypical gender roles that we come across in most poetry of that era: in the present case the female is the subject and the male is the object of love who perishes, mirroring once again Dacre’s tendency to offer women a voice to express their own romantic feelings, sorrow and desire. In a similar elegiac vein but much less extended is “Logan’s Grave”, an almost mystical metaphysical poem, one stanza long, about the abandoned grave of a man and the solitary existence of his spirit when the night comes: Lone in the desert rose his peaceful tomb; No sorrowing friend at morn or eve pass’d by; but when a pitying moon-beam chas’d the gloom, Forth came his spirit sad, and linger’d nigh. (1–4)31

Spectrality is then considered at more length in ‘The Lover’s Vision’, where Dacre reproduces a stereotypical masculine romantic encounter with the supernatural: in this case, it is not a menacing demon lover that haunts a woman, like in ‘The Skeleton Priest’ or ‘Death and the Lady’, but a female apparition, an idealized lady in white, with whom the hero is enamored: I knew my love; Her face was snowy white, Her garments streams of undulating light; Her hair did rove Loose o’er her slim, irradiant form; Her look, methought, was freezing and forlorn. No more did lustre in her eyes abound. (10–16)32

In this poem, the female supernatural agent is harmless and benevolent, not willing to take her lover with her, her visitation being mostly a reassurance of love beyond the grave—in contrast with such demon lover poems as ‘The Skeleton Priest’ and ‘The Aireal Chorus’, in which the male agent of the supernatural deceives or preys on the female victim. ‘The Elfin King or The Scoffer Punished’ introduces the reader to a different mood: In this almost comic ballad, a parody of ‘some modern poets’ as Dacre claims at its beginning, perhaps alluding to Lewis or Coleridge,33 the dejected narrator is lost in the wilderness and encounters strange preternatural creatures, whom the author possibly derived from folklore sources; elves and goblins, monstrous and grotesque, sometimes having hoofs instead of hands, alluding to devilish origin. The most obvious gothic element in this light horror poem is the setting: As I cross’d the desert wild,

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Not a star amid the gloom, Loud and harsh the tempest howl’d, Driving vapours o’re the moon. (1–4)34

With the poem ‘Moorish Combat’, which is considered to have influenced Lord Byron in the composition of his ‘Giaour’, Dacre delivers one more horrific poetic narrative in the first volume of Hours of Solitude. In this exotic gothic poem, two lovers are doomed because of the jealousy of a male rival. A series of gory killings take place as the rival stabs the maiden’s lover only to be subsequently stabbed by her, in a chain of passion and revenge: A dagger, in her vest till now conceal’d, She buried in the gloomy rival’s breast. He fell, in death majestic-withering rage And stern contempt his features still exprest. (73–76)35

The female, in this case the object of desire, becomes an active agent of retribution, having of course a tragic fate, which she inflicts on her own self; thus, Ora, the African heroine in ‘Moorish Combat’ is one more instance of female empowerment in Dacre’s gothic literature. The same sense of gloom and fierceness but mingled with the supernatural element also pervades ‘The Visions of Fancy’: the notions of Poverty, Disease, Misery, Madness and Suicide are represented by certain mysterious shadowy figures who have destroyed a young man, while Death is once again portrayed as relief and salvation from the afflictions of mortal earthly life. Dacre’s descriptions are indeed bloody and savage: ‘With blood-stained dagger, heaving broken sighs/A gory vision swims before my sight’ (25–6)36 in a dark almost depressive poetic exploration of human destiny. The poems of the second volume of Hours of Solitude are similar in content and tropes but possibly more bizarre and slightly less macabre than those of the first. ‘The Mistress to the Spirit of her Lover’, which according to Dacre herself is written as an imitation of Ossian poetic prose, is also presented in her own versified version. The poem refers to a woman who is ‘haunted’ by the phantom of her dead lover, in a disembodied wandering of souls in eternal love, evoking certain scenes of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, written many years later—the element of horror is absent and in its place, there is a deeply romantic metaphysical perception of life and death. Vision of beauty, vision of love, Follow me, follow me over the earth; Ne’er leave me, bright shadow, wherever I rove, For dead is my soul to the accents of mirth. (5–8)37

The heroine herself invokes the spirit of her deceased lover, yet she expresses doubt as to his spectral existence, though in the end she ‘submits to fantasy,

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madness and death’.38 This poem can be regarded, as to gender, a reversed version of ‘The Lover’s Vision’ from the first volume of the collection; in both cases romantic yearning prevails upon the fear of the ghostly presence. However, in ‘Lover’s Vision’, there is visual representation of the spectral element, namely the maiden in white, whereas in ‘The Mistress to the Spirit of her Lover’ the ghostly element is much more abstract and ambiguous, perhaps a product of the heroine’s imagination. Moreover, it is her who willingly follows the male revenant in the otherworld, without the hint of any form of force or pressure from the realm of the supernatural, as is the case with other demon lover poems by the author: in this case, the female actively shapes her own destiny even if this will bring her perishing, either through madness or death. In a similar vein, the spectral poem ‘The Power of Love’ also refers to the female experience of romantic haunting. In this piece, the heroine goes to her death extorted by the ghost of her lover, who asks her to follow him to the sea as a confirmation of her devotion and with the hint of their (sexual) union in another world: And now a sterner look assum’d his face; “Thou dost not love me, or thou wouldst not stay, Come plunge, my love!—soon, soon shall we embrace! Midnight has past:—haste, haste, I must away!” (29–32)39

Similarly, to ‘The Mistress to the Spirit of her Lover’, ‘The Power of Love’ signifies for female susceptibility and the demon lover as a sovereign agent of the supernatural; yet, at the same time, it also underlines female fearlessness and the power of female desire. If in both cases, the supernatural vision is assumed to be a projection of the heroine’s wishes and fantasies, then these fallen women choose to relive through the power of the imagination the romantic erotic encounters with their lovers,40 exposing the often coveted reality of female sexual pleasure.41 Also revolving around the theme of romantic yearning but endowed with a grislier atmosphere, is the poem ‘To Laura’ (Laura was also the pseudonym of the poet Mary Robinson whom Dacre admired); it concerns a young solitary maiden who frequents the forest at night, while also making nocturnal visits to the graveyard: Why frequent wanders in the dead of night, The pensive Laura thro’ the forest’s gloom? Why dares, regardless, the terrific sprite? Why fearless paces by the dreary tomb? (1–4)42

The narrator attributes the melancholy of the maiden to (unrequited) love— once more in Dacre’s poetry, love is associated with death and abandonment. Laura probably responds to a mysterious demon lover’s call, since she finds ‘strange enjoyment’ (6) in her nightly sepulchral roaming.

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Despair brought about by love is also the central theme of ‘Edmund and Anna, a Legendary Tale’, a gothic ballad about a doomed romance, imprisonment and death, and the unfortunate lovers’ decision for mutual perishing in an almost Shakespearean tragic manner and surrounded by typically gothic scenery. Once more through the wild woods she swift took her way To the castle, and flew to her room; There watch’d the slow minutes, and curs’d their delay, For retarding her sorrowful doom. (105–108)43

Dacre, in the face of young Anna, portrays one more female character distinguished by strong will and impulse, ready to sacrifice herself for love. In a different vein, and devoid of the trope of romantic love, the prose poem ‘Song of Melancholy’ depicts the narrator’s yearning for death due to feelings of depression and utter hopelessness, while the natural landscape participates in this sense of existential doom: ‘Bitter shrieks the North wind over the mountains; the night-bird screams dismal from the dark green yew. Oh! let me be laid in the grave, and let the spirits of the air bend over my tomb!’44 Death in this particularly somber poetic narrative, is presented as salvation from the terrible misfortunes of life as it also is the case with several poems of the first volume. In the poem ‘Madness’ the poetess once more dives into the mind of a depressed person with suicidal attempts, associating melancholy with mental instability leading to self-destruction and death: Deep Melancholy rules by fits, Then gloomy Madness moping sits, Or straw, unmeaning, ties. When oft, to shun the fancied lash, From dizzying heights they fearless dash, And thus the victim dies. (19–24)45

Desperation and melancholy are also the thematic focus of the poem entitled ‘To Oblivion’, which depicts the desire to escape from tortuous memory connected with the feelings of guilt and remorse; the narrator is the perpetrator of a crime, from the memory of which he or she cannot escape, recalling the central thematic preoccupation of several poems of the first volume. Guilt, in this case, leads almost to madness: Or shrieking Agony, with writhing brow, Convulsive sending forth the hollow groan? Or raving Lunacy, with harrowing moan, Beseeching useless Pity for its woe? (21–24)46

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According to Dacre, madness and depression are unavoidably and inextricably linked in the course of life, which is abundant with unfortunate incidents and it most often ends in a deplorable manner. The consequences of seduction are once more examined in the poem ‘The Lass of Fair Wone’, an adaptation of a Bürger ballad referring to the case of a peasant maid who committed infanticide and thus was executed. Dacre herself explains in the small preface of the quite lengthy ballad the reasons why she altered it at some points. The young maiden’s tragic fate takes place due to her being seduced and abandoned by a noble lord, leading her to infanticide and suicide, according to Dacre’s version. The ballad is a critique of the social discard of ‘fallen women’ even by their own parents when being in that desperate, ‘shameful’ state: Then drove her forth forlorn to wail Amid the dreary wild, Forgets that mortals all are frail, But more—forgets his child! (105–108)47

The ending of the heroine is altered by Dacre, since the ruined maid does not end up in the gallows, but decides to take her own life in a final act of self-definition; furthermore, at the conclusion of the poem, Dacre offers an evocative atmospheric scene, by picturing the spectre of the heroine and not her skull, as it is the case in the original text, by allowing her to mourn her child beyond earthly existence: There, too, its blood-stain’d hand to wave, Her mournful ghost is seen, Or dimly o’er her infant’s grave, Three spans in length, to lean. (189–192)48

The series of poems of the second volume of Hours of Solitude presented next, are all distinguished by the element of the weird to various degrees and forms. In ‘The Apparition’, the ghost in question which suddenly appears in front of the sorrowful protagonist who is wandering in the wilderness, is portrayed as a miserable creature, a deformed ‘imp’; the reader cannot be sure of its otherworldly origin except in the end: Loud blew the wind, and shook the slender wight; With long, thin hand he grasp’d his stick, and rais’d On me his tearful eyes; sadly I gaz’d, When swift he vanish’d from my troubl’d sight! (13–16)49

The strange apparition can also be viewed as the narrator’s reflected image, a projection of his own miserable self who wanders despondently and isolated from other human beings.

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The theme of exile either in the realm of the living or the dead is also considered in ‘Mildew’, a poem referring to a strange man hiding in a cavern almost resembling a living dead—the true nature of this being remains undefined yet, in the end, the reader realizes this might not be a mortal man. Likewise, the poem ‘Frost’ refers to a hermit of indefinite origin and nature, a man that seeks the wintry mountains. This poetic text, along with ‘Mildew’ discussed above, according to Adriana Craciun, depicts ‘anthropomorphic natural forces’,50 which are given certain emotional traits.51 In ‘The Giant’s Burial Ground’, the description of an almost mythical landscape abounds in gloomy, macabre details: And caverns dark as Acheron between, Vast pits for graves that newly op’d had been, While on their edge the moon’s pale light reveal’d Huge sculls, but late within the earth conceal’d; (3–6)52

Moreover, in this poem, there is an association with orientalism through the reference to Genii, supernatural creatures from the Arabian mythology. The ballad parody ‘Grimalkin’s Ghost; or, The Water Spirits’, brings the second volume of Hours of Solitude to its closure. In her short preface of this piece, Dacre characteristically claims that she tried to imitate some ‘famous yet pathetic writing’ of her time. Indeed, ‘Grimalkin’s Ghost’ implicitly refers to a poem from Tales of Wonder,53 the famous collection of gothic horror ballads usually attributed to Matthew Lewis: A Cat, with five kits in her train! “Oh! monster!”she cried, ‘twixt a scream and a mew, “ou thought you had drown’d us, but woe unto you, Our spirits have risen again. “We shall haunt you by day, we shall haunt you by night, Behind and before, at your left and your right” (9–14)54

This exaggerated almost satiric story about the avenging spirit of a cat, with its grotesqueness and grim moments of horror, cannot but bring to mind Poe’s ‘Black Cat’ written many years later. Dacre’s poetic narratives, mostly written in ballad stanzas, are certainly distinguished by certain stereotypical themes and tropes of the poetry of the romantic era, namely emotional exaggeration, the subjective point of view, the obsessive preoccupation with the themes of love and death, the employment of the Gothic and the uncanny; though according to Lord Byron, her poetry was mostly closer to the Della Cruscan school, with its oversentimental content and exaggerated style which were regarded as inferior to the refinement and sophistication of the Romantic poets. It is true that Dacre admired Mary Robinson, who had made some poetic contributions to the Della Cruscans; this admiration also took the shape of a tribute poem by Dacre, entitled ‘To the Shade of Mary Robinson’, which is also included in

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Hours of Solitude; indeed, the influence of Mary Robinson, who also explored female erotic passion and its complications, seems to be dispersed within Hours of Solitude.55 Furthermore, many of the poems included in the latter were written as imitations of the style of other poets usually with the intention of parody—something to which Dacre herself often refers. Yet, apart from different influences that can be traced in her poetry, Dacre’s almost sensationalist poetic narratives and gothic ballads were also distinguished by her own personal perspective which can be considered as moralistic, pessimistic but also distinguished by (proto)feminist tendencies. Dacre’s poetic dealing with Death is expressed through a desperate revolt against the doom of the grave—yet salvation, or rather, catharsis, seems to come not from a shift to a positive life attitude but from the embracing of the invincible forces that bring life to its inevitable end. In Hours of Solitude, there is very close proximity between the notions and states of life and death and the latter is pictured not only as a dreadful possibility that one should refrain from but also as a(n) inevitable refuge from life’s afflictions. Dacre often depicts life as a dolorous, calamitous experience much more sorrowful than the eternal dwelling in a tomb. Often, due to misfortune brought about by human vice, weakness and sin, her heroes and heroines are condemned to physical or emotional death, to feelings of abandonment and/or guilt leading to madness. In the vast majority of Charlotte Dacre’s gothic and supernatural poems, there is not the slightest ray of hope for her heroes and heroines: Fate driven by the most degrading and vile passions renders mortal life a realm of gloom and despair, and the author presents humanity as doomed to misery due to its depraved and frail nature. Thus, the poetess expresses a natural propensity of humans to intense negative emotional states, such as depression, madness and self-destruction, usually brought about by impulsive or villainous actions. Victims and victimizers in Hours of Solitude seem to have a similar destiny and the punishment of crimes comes from the spectres and apparitions of the deceased victims, bringing the worst kind of nemesis. Yet, amid all this atmosphere of dismay and misfortune, there sparkle fading timbres of lyricism and ethereal beauty. Another very significant theme in Dacre’s gothic and uncanny poetry is the proximity between love and death, and how the former inescapably leads to the latter, in a repetitive almost obsessive motif. This dark trope almost exclusively refers to Dacre’s female protagonists, who, being mostly young, innocent and, initially, virtuous are driven by powerful romantic and erotic desire, being inevitably consumed by love and passion, emotions which usually prevail over their reason and survival instincts. In many cases, they are either deceived or ‘haunted’ by a demon lover, who represents Death itself, or they are willing to risk or offer their own lives so as not to betray their idealized love or because they do not care to live without it. Dacre incessantly warns against the dangers of seduction, in a mostly dramatic tone; yet, despite their being victims of love, at the same time, these heroines are given the chance to become more visible

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and to present their own tales. Sometimes they even become active agents of their own fate, while their complex subjectivity is depicted through a range of intense emotions and psychical states: from yearning, fear, sorrow and despair to fearlessness, madness, resistance and self-destruction. In her attempt to warn against the dangers of excessive female sentimentality and romantic attraction, Dacre sounds conservative and moralistic for the standards of the modern reader, almost demonizing female sexual desire; nevertheless, this concern of hers may be better considered in the context of the era she lived, contributing, in her own manner, to the critique of eighteenth-century notion of ‘sensibility’. In this respect, Dacre attempted, through her writings, to ‘protect’ women from emotional suffering and from being compromised in a society where they were suspended between idealization and objectification, and where due to social limitations imposed on them, they did not have much space for self-definition in the sphere of love. Thus, she sympathizes with her heroines even when she does not approve of their impulsive, inappropriate actions, and has the boldness to present the (harsh) reality of the female experience even without hinting at a radical alternative. Dacre’s use of the supernatural in Hours of Solitude takes various forms and shapes, either familiar or foreign to the readers of gothic literature. Most of the gothic/uncanny poems of this collection feature a ghostly presence of some sort, usually, a beloved deceased one or an avenging spirit, which haunts the protagonist, thus following the tradition of old folk ballads. Dacre also employs the demon lover motif, so as to further examine female subjectivity and the (supposed) harmful impact on women excessive romantic passion and sexual desire can have, a motif often used in the Female Gothic subgenre in general.56 The demon lover figure assumes different forms in Hours of Solitude, as he can be either the incarnation of death itself, which is a horrible experience for the heroine, or a wandering revenant with whom she is hopelessly and eternally enamored, or in some cases both. Furthermore, in Dacre’s collection, the reader also encounters supernatural creatures of the folklore which are recognizable, such as goblins and elves, while other times she portrays bizarre (supernatural) beings of undefined nature. Moreover, the settings in Hours of Solitude are typically gothic with remote castles, tombs, caverns, moon-lit forests and desolate spots in wintry weather, surrounding the morbid thoughts and (nocturnal) uncanny experiences of the central characters. The feeling of gothic awe within nature’s realm, verging on the notion of the sublime is manifested in most of the supernatural poems of the collection through vigorous and imposing visual descriptions and almost graphic macabre elements. Charlotte Dacre contributed to both the gothic novel and the gothic ballad genre of her time, in her own idiosyncratic manner, while her pessimistic tendencies and profound preoccupation with the dark side of human nature are depicted in both her fiction and poetry. The uncanny and supernatural elements in her poems exhibit a literary fascination with the themes of death, love and sin, while portraying strong female subjectivity; she most thoroughly

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presented the female perspective regarding the experience of love and desire and their complications. In an era when gothic literature in all its versions was looked down upon by the established literary circles or considered as dangerous for the education of women, Dacre was an author who dared to tread on sensitive ground by touching on ‘uncomfortable’ topics not only in her novels but also her gothic ballads. In this respect, she left her own indelible mark on the history of gothic literature, and thus deserves to be reevaluated by recent scholarship and (re)discovered by contemporary readers, as an intriguing author who had an impact on her contemporaries and a unique place in the history of gothic fiction.

Notes 1. Anne Mellor, “Feminism”, in Romanticism, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 183. 2. Diana Wallace, Female Gothic Histories; Gender, History and the Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 1–5. 3. Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception and Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 27. 4. Ibid., 11. 5. Douglas H. Thomson, “The Gothic Ballad”, in A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Chichester: Blackwell, 2015), 77. 6. Judith Pascoe, “‘That Fluttering, Tinselled Crew’: Women Poets and Della Cruscanism”, in Romanticism: Romanticism and the Margins, eds. Michael O’Neill and Mark Sandy (Abington: Routledge, 2006), 43. 7. James A. Dunn, “Charlotte Dacre and the Feminization of Violence”, in Nineteenth-Century Literature, 53, no. 3 (December 1998): 316. 8. Kim Ian Michasiw, “Introduction”, in Zofloya, or The Moor, by Charlotte Dacre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), xiii. 9. Jerome McGann, Byron and Romanticism, ed. James Soderholm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 54. 10. Charlotte Dacre, “The Mother to Her Dying Infant”, in Hours of Solitude: A Collection of Original Poems, 2 vols. (London: Hughes and Ridgeway, 1805), vol. I, 41. 11. Ibid., 39. 12. Ibid., “The Orphan’s Curse”, Hours of Solitude, I, 66. 13. Ibid., “Julia’s Murder; Or, the Song of Woe”, Hours of Solitude, I, 77. 14. Ibid., “The Murderer”, Hours of Solitude, I, 63. 15. Lucy Cogan, “Notes”, in Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer, by Charlotte Dacre (New York: Routledge, 2016), 120. 16. Dacre, “The Musing Maniac”, Hours of Solitude, I, 42. 17. Ibid., “The Exile”, Hours of Solitude, I, 12. 18. Ibid., “The Maniac”, Hours of Solitude, I, 113.

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19. Helen Small, Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 89. 20. Dacre, “Love and Madness”, Hours of Solitude, I, 31. 21. E. J. Clery, Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley (Devon: Northcote House Publishers, 2000), 104. 22. Dacre, “The Skeleton Priest; Or, The Marriage of Death”, Hours of Solitude, I, 69. 23. Melissa Edmundson Makala, Women’s Ghost Literature in NineteenthCentury Britain (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 35–38. 24. Dacre, “The Skeleton Priest”, Hours of Solitude, I, 75. 25. Adriana Craciun, Fatal Women of Romanticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 268. 26. Edmundson Makala, Women’s Ghost Literature, 33–34. 27. Dacre, “The Aireal Chorus; Or, The Warning”, Hours of Solitude, I, 81. 28. Edmundson Makala, Women’s Ghost Literature, 35. 29. Dacre, “Death and the Lady”, Hours of Solitude, I, 88. 30. Ibid., “The Dying Lover”, Hours of Solitude, I, 125. 31. Ibid., “Logan’s Grave”, Hours of Solitude, I, 104. 32. Ibid., “The Lover’s Vision”, Hours of Solitude, I, 51. 33. Craciun, Fatal Women, 267. 34. Dacre, “The Elfin King; Or, The Scoffer Punished”, Hours of Solitude, I, 92. 35. Ibid., “Moorish Combat”, Hours of Solitude, I, 112. 36. Ibid., “Visions of Fancy”, Hours of Solitude, I, 57. 37. Ibid., “The Mistress to the Spirit of Her Lover”, Hours of Solitude, II, 34. 38. Clery, Women’s Gothic, 104. 39. Dacre, “The Power of Love”, Hours of Solitude, II, 131. 40. Thomson, “The Gothic Ballad”, in A New Companion to the Gothic, 85. 41. Craciun, Fatal Women, 126. 42. Dacre, “To Laura”, Hours of Solitude, II, 105. 43. Ibid., “Edmund and Anna: A Legendary Tale”, Hours of Solitude, II, 138. 44. Ibid., “Song of Melancholy”, Hours of Solitude, II, 65. 45. Ibid., “Madness”, Hours of Solitude, II, 108. 46. Ibid., “To Oblivion”, Hours of Solitude, II, 127. 47. Ibid., “The Lass of Fair Wone”, Hours of Solitude, II, 91. 48. Ibid., 96. 49. Ibid., “The Apparition”, Hours of Solitude, II, 70. 50. Craciun, Fatal Women, 117. 51. Ibid. 52. Dacre, “The Giant’s Burial Ground”, Hours of Solitude, II, 49. 53. Thomson, “The Gothic Ballad”, A New Companion to the Gothic, 85.

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54. Dacre, “Grimalkin’s Ghost; Or, The Water Spirits”, Hours of Solitude, II, 61. 55. Judith Pascoe, “Introduction”, in Mary Robinson: Selected Poems (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002), 46–47. 56. Edmundson Makala, Women’s Ghost Literature, 48.

Bibliography Clery, E.J., Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley (Devon: Northcote House Publishers, 2000). Cogan, Lucy, “Notes”, in Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer, by Charlotte Dacre (New York: Routledge, 2016), 120. Craciun, Adriana, Fatal Women of Romanticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Dacre, Charlotte, Hours of Solitude: A Collection of Original Poems, 2 vols. (London: Hugues and Ridgeway, 1805). Dunn, James A., “Charlotte Dacre and the Feminization of Violence”, in NineteenthCentury Literature 53, no. 3 (December 1998): 307–327. Edmundson Makala, Melissa, Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013). Gamer, Michael, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception and Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). McGann, Jerome, Byron and Romanticism, ed. James Soderholm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Mellor, Anne, “Feminism”, in Romanticism, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 182-197. Michasiw, Kin Ian, “Introduction”, in Zofloya or the Moor by Charlotte Dacre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), vii–xxx. Pascoe, Judith, “‘The Fluttering, Tinselled Crew’: Women Poets and Dellacruscanism”, in Romanticism: Romanticism and the Margins, eds. Michael O’Neill and Mark Sandy (Abington: Routledge, 2006), 41–65. _____________, “Introduction”, in Mary Robinson: Selected Poems (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002), 19–61. Small, Helen, Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel and Female Insanity, 1800–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Thomson, Douglas H., “The Gothic Ballad”, in A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Chichester: Blackwell, 2015), 77–91. Wallace, Diana, Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013).

The Poetics of Space, the Mind, and the Supernatural in S. T. Coleridge Kirstin A. Mills

As one of the major first-generation Romantic poets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge has occupied a somewhat liminal position in Gothic criticism, where his significant engagement with the Gothic—and thus his status as a Gothic writer—is complicated by his more extensive forays into other areas of Romantic poetry and his canonical status in that domain. The boundaries and overlaps between the Gothic and Romanticism have been the subject of much illuminating scholarship that often focuses on the ways that Romantic writers took up the Gothic at the same time that they critically rejected it.1 Coleridge is a case in point: his negative reviews of Gothic novels like The Monk paint him as a Romantic poet ‘wearied with fiends, incomprehensible characters, with shrieks, murders, and subterraneous dungeons’ that ‘betray a low and vulgar taste’.2 Yet despite his critical resistance to these novels of the ‘horrible and preternatural’, marked by their repetitive use of what were by then stock Gothic tropes, Coleridge returned repeatedly to the Gothic in some of his most important and influential texts. Two of his best-remembered poems— The Ancient Mariner (1798) and Christabel (1816)—are unreservedly Gothic texts, while perhaps even more significantly, Coleridge resurrects the ghost of the literary and architectural Gothic ruin within his most important critical moment—his theory of the imagination in Biographia Literaria (1817).

K. A. Mills (B) Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_16

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Each of these texts was profoundly influential for the Gothic tradition, effectively marking its shift from the early Gothic of Walpole, Radcliffe and Lewis towards the more psychologically oriented Gothic of the Victorian period. This chapter suggests that the depth and significance of Coleridge’s developments upon the Gothic tradition mean that we should consider him not merely as a Romantic poet dabbling in the Gothic, but instead as one of the most important and influential writers within this Gothic tradition. Further, I argue that the explanations for both Coleridge’s engagement with and innovations upon the Gothic involve his spatial theories of the mind and supernatural, which anticipate later nineteenth-century notions of higher-dimensional space. For Coleridge, liminal, imaginative states of consciousness like dreams, trance, and nightmare allowed the mind to enter higher-dimensional spaces that were at once cognitive and supernatural. In these regions, the spaces of the mind intersected with the supernatural realm, leaving it disturbingly vulnerable to supernatural influence and, more terrifyingly, demonic possession. In this way, I argue, Coleridge’s theories of the mind, imagination, and dreaming are inherently Gothic; an affinity that Coleridge recognised when he turned to the language and style of Gothic in order to model these theories in his poetry and criticism. In the Gothic, Coleridge found a ready language and form through which to explore and express his ideas about the supernatural and its spatial relationship to the mind. From its arguable inception in Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), itself inspired by Walpole’s dream of supernatural phenomena within the architectural space of his mock Gothic castle Strawberry Hill, the Gothic has always been centrally concerned with place and space, and with questions of perception—particularly of the supernatural— within it. In building his Gothic castles (both real and imagined), which both work in different ways to suggest the potential supernatural within infinite realms of space, Walpole drew explicitly on Edmund Burke’s popular theories of the sublime, which emphasised the sense of terror and suspension of the soul experienced under conditions of extreme vastness of space, obscurity (where flickering light ‘is even more terrible than total darkness’), and incomprehensibility.3 Walpole’s novel is filled with careful evocations of space, and Isabella’s flight through subterranean passages, which became a stock Gothic scene, turns especially on the Burkean sublime. In this scene, Walpole emphasises the obscure darkness of the castle’s ‘intricate cloisters’, ‘subterraneous regions’, and ‘long labyrinth of darkness’ in which the ‘awful silence’ is broken only by echoing sighs and ‘[e]very murmur struck her with new terror’.4 Space in Walpole’s Gothic is filled with thresholds that create a sense of infinite space unfolding ever outwards; a sublime, incomprehensible, imperceptible realm of obscure darkness wherein lurks the supernatural. Such architecture of sublimity continued to heavily influence the Gothic, reaching its peak in Ann Radcliffe’s best-selling novels such as The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). In these novels, Radcliffe masters the eerie, obscure suspense of the Gothic ruin, with its dim spaces flickering with light and shadows,

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conjuring suggestions of the supernatural to haunt the mind without ever entirely achieving material realisation. Importantly, one of her most exemplary scenes was also one particularly admired by Coleridge: The castle was perfectly still, and the great hall, […] now returned only the whispering footsteps of the two solitary figures gliding fearfully between the pillars, and gleamed only to the feeble lamp they carried. Emily, deceived by the long shadows of the pillars and by the catching lights between, often stopped, imagining she saw some person, moving in the distant obscurity of the perspective; and, as she passed these pillars, she feared to turn her eyes toward them, almost expecting to see a figure start out from behind their broad shaft. […] Emily saw, by uncertain flashes of light, the vaults beyond, and, near her […] an open grave.5

Haunted by a spectral sense of supernatural potential hovering just out of sight, this Gothic ruin is marked by the vast, expansive space, obscurity, shadows, and terror of Burke’s sublime. ‘[G]liding fearfully’ with ‘whispering footsteps’ within this space unfolding ever outwards (‘the vaults beyond’) and associated with death (‘an open grave’), Emily becomes almost like a ghost herself, and the scene turns upon a thrilling sense of terror in the face of the potential—though not fully realised—supernatural. Coleridge quotes this passage at length in his 1794 review of Radcliffe’s novel, noting also her ‘powers of description’, her ‘predilection […] for the wonderful and the gloomy’, and the ‘mysterious terrors’ that ‘are continually exciting in the mind the idea of a supernatural appearance, keeping us, as it were, upon the very edge and confines of the world of spirits’.6 Coleridge here praises Radcliffe for adhering to what he later describes in his negative review of The Monk as ‘the work’ of the Gothic writer: ‘To trace the nice boundaries, beyond which terror and sympathy are deserted by the pleasurable emotions,—to reach those limits, yet never to pass them’.7 Radcliffe’s evocations of supernatural space continued to haunt Coleridge. Years later, despite his disavowal of the Gothic’s endlessly reproduced ‘ruined castles, the dungeons, the trap-doors, the skeletons, and flesh-and-blood ghosts, and perpetual moonshine’, Coleridge resurrects Radcliffe’s Gothic ruin during, perhaps, his most important and influential philosophical moment: his theory of imagination in Biographia Literaria (1817). Chapter Thirteen of this work treats Coleridge’s theory of imagination, but it is effectively absent from the text. Instead, taking its place is a letter ‘from a friend’ describing the emotional effects of reading this invisible chapter. This letter, like many Gothic novels, is a forgery, written by Coleridge himself—a device intended to evoke and perform the imaginative powers rather than linguistically capture them within the confines of language. Significantly, in order to communicate the effect of reading about the imagination, the letter evokes the sublime architecture of the Gothic castle:

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The effect on my feelings, on the other hand, I cannot better represent, than by supposing myself […] left alone, in one of our largest Gothic cathedrals in a gusty moonlight night of autumn. ‘Now in glimmer, and now in gloom;’ often in palpable darkness not without a chilly sensation of terror; […] In short, what I had supposed substances were thinned away into shadows, while everywhere shadows were deepened into substances.8

This literary effect turns upon several layers of Gothic space in which Coleridge moves beyond the traditional three dimensions to evoke a powerful—and implicitly supernatural—sense of infinite space beyond. As Mudge notes, the absence of the chapter creates a sense of its invisible, ghostly presence; a gap implies that which will fill it.9 The chapter is then spectrally conjured in the reader’s imagination, creating a sense of extended, invisible space beyond the material text while also modelling its own theory. Within this invisible space, the extended metaphor of the cathedral represents a further spatial extension. In his ‘General Character of the Gothic Mind in the Middle Ages’ Coleridge associated Gothic cathedrals with expansion ‘into the infinite’.10 The uncanny resemblance between the letter’s cathedral, Radcliffe’s Udolpho, and Burke’s sublime cathedrals, however, renders this a literary—and a particularly Gothic literary—experience of infinite space, marked by obscurity, unnatural laws (‘shadows were deepened into substances’), and ‘a chilly sense of terror’. By uniting Gothic architecture with Gothic literature, Coleridge makes full use of the Gothic’s potential. Instead of reading Coleridge’s theory of imagination, the reader is taken on a Gothic journey in which the mind operates according to the same principles which John and Anna Laetitia Aikin had earlier applied to Gothic fiction: presented with this ‘strange and unexpected’ Gothic space, ‘the imagination, darting forth, explores with rapture the new world which is laid open to its view, and rejoices in the expansion of its powers’.11 Coleridge’s philosophy of the mind and imagination, then, is inherently Gothic at its core. Moreover, this Gothic architecture is then applied to the invisible chapter itself: ‘You have been obliged to omit so many links’, writes the ‘friend’, ‘that what remains, looks (if I may recur to my former illustration) like the fragments of the winding steps of an old ruined tower’.12 While the effect of reading the chapter is like standing within a Gothic cathedral, the chapter itself is now also a Gothic ruin. So vast is its territory (the imagination) that material text cannot contain it; the chapter is marked by gaps which once more signal the invisible presence of vast, immaterial, and ultimately incomprehensible realms beyond it. Coleridge’s spatial unfolding has come full circle and uncannily doubles its host text: both Biographia Literaria and its missing, imagined chapter are incomplete, littered with gaps that point to that invisible territory which they cannot condense and make material in language. His chapter on imagination—spectrally but not materially present, lurking in the invisible corners of the mind—is the Gothic buried chamber, the invisible

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ghost, the fragmented text hidden beyond the veil. Significantly, the end of this fragment also points to another missing, invisible text existing still further within the invisible realms of imagination: his ‘critical essay on the uses of the Supernatural in poetry […] which the reader will find prefixed to the poem of The Ancient Mariner’.13 No such essay exists, and the reference to it within the Gothic ruin that is Chapter Thirteen therefore creates yet another spectral presence haunting the text, this time one that remains—as befits its supernatural subject matter—entirely out of reach, an invisible ghost in the layered dimensions even beyond the imagined cathedral of the letter and its enclosing chapter. These multiple, concentric dimensions of space, tinged with the supernatural, suggest the importance of space—and particularly space in higher dimensions—for Coleridge’s thinking on the powers of the mind. Coleridge’s theories of the haunted, higher-dimensional, Gothic spaces of the imagination are intimately linked with his theories of the similarly Gothic spaces of dreams and nightmares, which he developed extensively in his private writings as well as his most important poetry. Throughout his life, Coleridge was haunted by nightmares and he spent most of his life attempting to devise a theory of dreams and dreaming.14 While his thinking ranged between several competing dream theories drawn from contemporary brain sciences, philosophies of the mind and consciousness, superstition and folklore, he repeatedly returned to the unsettling notion that in dreams the mind became susceptible to the supernatural.15 One of Coleridge’s most unique and important developments in his theories of dreaming was his notion of ‘Somnial or Morphean Space’, which was the unique, liminal space opened up by dreams and nightmares.16 This space existed simultaneously within the mind (and the physical space of the brain) and yet also, paradoxically, extended beyond it to overlap with the similarly invisible realm of the supernatural. In this ambiguously physical-imagined, cognitive-supernatural extension of space beyond its traditional three dimensions, Coleridge’s theory of dream space importantly anticipates Victorian notions of the fourth dimension, which were enthusiastically embraced by Spiritualists towards the end of the nineteenth century as scientific explanations for the supernatural realm.17 Appropriately, the terms Coleridge often felt most appropriate for describing the qualities of ‘Morphean Space’ were taken directly from the prevailing Gothic and folkloric constructions of the supernatural ‘other world’. In 1802, Coleridge’s poem ‘The Picture; or the Lover’s Resolution’, described the dream space as a ‘phantomworld’. Likewise, in The Friend Coleridge describes the liminal states between waking and sleeping as ‘the true witching time’ in which ‘spirits hold their wont to walk’.18 These supernatural qualities were more than just poetic indulgences. ‘One of the most influential dream texts’ for Coleridge was Andrew Baxter’s An Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul; Wherein the Immateriality of the Soul Is Evinced from the Principles of Reason and Philosophy (1733), in which Baxter proposed that dreams were external to the soul and were ‘forced’ upon it during sleep by supernatural ‘Beings’ outside the body.19 A key idea in his

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thinking about ‘Morphean Space’, Coleridge may have been drawn to this concept because of his long-held notion that in dreams the will was suspended; a state that essentially left ‘control’ of the mind open to the kind of mysterious forces that inspired the terrifying nightmares Coleridge experienced over the course of his life.20 More concerningly, however, Coleridge also felt that in nightmares, the will—though powerless—was not altogether absent, and the dreamer could thus become conscious of the fact that they were immersed in nightmares, a helpless victim under the trance-like thrall of supernatural influence. Nightmare, then, was for Coleridge a kind of conscious unconsciousness; a liminal ‘Life-in-Death’, as he would explore most fully in his poetry.21 Moreover, while Baxter proposed that the soul could be ‘relieved’ from such supernatural ‘possession in sleep’ by waking into full consciousness, a more terrifying aspect of Baxter’s theory was that ‘dreaming may degenerate into possession’, in which the supernatural being retains control of the soul even during waking hours.22 The potential for the dream to descend into nightmares under supernatural influence, and for the nightmare to continue beyond the realm of dream and into waking life (the waking nightmare of demonic possession) was one of the most terrifying possibilities for Coleridge as he sought to explore and explain his own nightmares.23 In this way, Coleridge’s proto-higher dimensional ‘Morphean Space’ of dreams and nightmares is also—like the ruined castle in his spectral theory of imagination—a haunted, Gothic space—the mind’s own Gothic cathedral.24 These ideas of the Gothic spaces of the mind—both the imagination and the spaces of dream, nightmare and trance, where the imagination was set free from the bounds of reason—found their most important and influential expression in two of Coleridge’s best-known poems: The Ancient Mariner (1798, revised in 1834) and Christabel (1816). Initially, drafted around the same period between 1797 and 1800 for the Lyrical Ballads (1798), but continuing to haunt Coleridge throughout his life, both poems turn upon the evocation of proto-higher-dimensional spaces—at once physical and psychological—in which the protagonists enter states of dream, trance, and nightmare through the mesmeric influence of demonic supernatural entities who seek to possess the dreamers’ minds and souls. In preparing poems for Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge was to direct his ‘endeavours’ to ‘persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of the imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’.25 In order to give shape and ‘dramatic truth’ to these ‘shadows of the imagination’, Coleridge turned to the Gothic, and while his first poem The Ancient Mariner appeared in Lyrical Ballads (albeit reluctantly by a Wordsworth now even more vehemently criticising the Gothic), Christabel was rejected. Arguably a more serious and personal exploration of the nightmares that haunted Coleridge, in Christabel Coleridge felt he ‘should have more nearly realized my ideal, than I had done in my first attempt’.26 However, the difficulty of rendering the sublime in concrete language, which

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later lent his theory of imagination its Gothic quality, was here encountered: the poem was never finished. Almost uncanny doubles (and for many, manifestations of the male and female gothic), The Ancient Mariner and Christabel can be read as companion poetic explorations of Coleridge’s spatial theories of the mind and dreaming, where they expand on the supernatural and spatial tropes of earlier Gothic, putting them to new use to explore a unique construction of the overlapping proto-higher-dimensional spaces of the mind and the supernatural.27 The potential for supernatural influence while in a dream or trance haunted Coleridge, and both The Ancient Mariner and Christabel turn on this notion to evoke their Gothic horror. Coleridge himself was explicit about the link between his poetry, dreams, and his Gothic theory of imagination. Variously referring to poetry as a ‘rationalised dream’ or a ‘waking dream’, he was also careful to link the Gothic ruin at the heart of his theory of imagination explicitly back to his poetry (thus contributing another layer of the implied supernatural to his evocation of Gothic mental space).28 By quoting Christabel ’s line ‘Now in glimmer, and now in gloom’ to describe the sublime ruin that symbolises the experience of reading Coleridge’s theories of imagination, Coleridge makes clear the link he saw between the ruined castles of Radcliffean Gothic, the vast, vaulted spaces of Burke’s theory of the sublime, the expansive spaces of the mind, and his own poetic realisation of these ideas.29 Additionally, Coleridge’s claim to extend these spectral theories of imagination in a likewise spectrally absent ‘essay on the uses of the Supernatural in poetry […] which the reader will find prefixed to the poem of The Ancient Mariner’ further extends the ghostly nature of Coleridge’s Gothic imagination while also explicitly connecting these theories to his poetry.30 The first of these poems to indulge in these Gothic spaces of the mind and supernatural was The Ancient Mariner.31 Participating in the 1790s vogue for Gothic ballads, the poem indulges heavily in stock Gothic tropes such as dead bodies, skeletons and ghosts by moonlight, and is propelled by a fast-paced rhythm that conveys the ‘force’ of the Mariner’s mesmeric compulsion to tell his ‘ghastly tale’ (580–584).32 Through its narrative, imagery, and ballad form, the poem conveys multiple dimensions of blended cognitive and supernatural space, repeatedly shifting between dream and waking, imagination and reality, life and death, and natural and supernatural in a way that destabilises the possibility of the Mariner’s and the reader’s clear orientation in relation to these states. At the centre of the poem’s multiple dimensions of space is the preternatural space beyond the equatorial limit, which forms the boundary of waking rationality, consciousness, and the natural world, and beyond which lies the misty, vast, uncharted space of dreams, nightmare, death and the supernatural. Coleridge is particularly concerned to draw clear borders around this space in order to emphasise its existence within a separate dimension from the everyday. Several stages of liminality mark this borderland: the equatorial ‘Line’ dividing the hemispheres also exists at the axis of sea and sky, associated with the directional ‘up’ and ‘down’:

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The sun came up upon the left, Out of the sea came he! And he shone bright, and on the right Went down into the sea. (25–29)

With the sun ‘over the mast at noon’—a dual spatial and temporal borderland—the ship passes the limit into the space beyond, a transgression heralded by the first of many abrupt changes in the weather; a Gothic ‘storm-blast’ characterised as a shadowy ‘foe’, ‘tyrannous and strong’, chases the ship ‘with o’ertaking wings’ deeper into the ‘southward’ beyond-land (30–50). The demonic energy of this storm is emphasised by the inhuman ‘land of ice, and of fearful sounds where no living thing was to be seen’: ‘Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken— / The ice was all between’, which ‘cracked and growled, and roared and howled’ like a beast of Gothic nightmare (57–61). The Mariner’s further transgression within this strange realm—killing the albatross, which the crew variously interpret as a good or bad omen, and a guiding spirit—triggers another change in the weather, plummeting the ship into even more inhospitable regions; once more at the equatorial limit—‘the first that ever burst / Into that silent sea’ (105–106)—the crew find themselves in a liminal space that quickly approaches nightmarish horror, where time seems to stand still, and day and night merge: The bloody Sun, at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon. (112–114)

Now blood-tinged, linguistically linked with the Moon, the Sun becomes a source of torture, where ‘[w]ith throats unslaked, with black lips baked’, the crew must resort to the vampiric act of sucking their own blood in order to speak (157–160). The sea too becomes a temporally and spatially remote space of supernatural horror; vast and ‘silent’, ‘without a breeze, without a tide’, its death-like stillness is compounded by decay: ‘the very deep did rot’ as unnamed ‘slimy things […] crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea’ (123–126). At first, only suggesting the implied horror of death and the supernatural, Coleridge quickly cements the image with the ‘death-fires’ which ‘danced at night’ and burnt ‘The water, like a witch’s oils’, beneath which, ‘nine fathom deep’, a spirit ‘From the land of mist and snow’ ‘plagued’ and ‘followed’ the ship (128–134). Significantly, this spirit—the first major confirmation of the supernatural in this beyond realm—is intimated ‘in dreams’, and from this point, the Mariner’s experience—both at the limit and beyond it—is increasingly characterised by various states of dream and trance as he traverses the life-in-death limit between the waking and sleeping, and natural and supernatural worlds.33 Slipping in and out of dream, trance, and waking, the Mariner is never certainly returned to consciousness: the ‘sleep’ that ‘slid into [his] soul’ and brought

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‘dreams’ of rain blurs uncomfortably into his waking reality, as ‘still [his] body drank’ (295–304), while even his eventual return to harbour is uncertainly positioned as a ‘dream of joy’ when the Mariner prays ‘let me be awake, my God! / Or let me sleep alway’ (464–471). The Mariner’s dream-state is also linked repeatedly with death and the supernatural: ‘I thought that I had died in sleep, / And was a blessed ghost’ (307–308), and later, when the corpses of his crew are reanimated by supernatural beings, groaning and raising ‘their limbs like lifeless tools’ the Mariner notes that ‘It had been strange, even in a dream, / To have seen those dead men rise’ at the same time that he includes himself in the collective description, ‘We were a ghastly crew’ (333–340). Importantly for Coleridge’s purpose, the liminal space within which the ship is suspended is not merely a supernatural realm, or a dream realm, but specifically a realm of nightmare, described increasingly in terms of Gothic horror. The Mariner’s descent into this ghastly nightmare space of imprisonment, alone on ‘the rotting deck’ of his ship with ‘dead men’ at his feet (242–243), is first made clear by the sudden apparition of a skeletal ‘spectrebark’, unnaturally moving—much like the reanimated corpses of the ‘ghastly crew’—through the still and silent sea (202). Likened to a decaying body, the ship’s ‘ribs through which the Sun / Did peer, as through’ a ‘dungeongrate’, render this silent, supernatural realm a confining, imprisoning, dungeon (179–186). This sense of a submerged, Gothic dimension of space, separate from the natural world and haunted by supernatural ‘foe’, accentuates Coleridge’s proto-higher-dimensional theories of the overlapping ‘beyond’ spaces of dreams and the supernatural, creating a strange, unearthly space beyond the limits of the natural world that is opened up both within and yet beyond the liminal borderland of the equatorial limit, and which is experienced through dreams and trance. Coleridge carries his thinking about the potential of such ‘Morphean Space’ to its fullest extent, introducing the possibility of demonic possession and its resulting nightmare state. The ‘spectre-bark’ carries ‘Death’ and ‘The Night-mare Life-in-Death’ who introduces the first element of pure Gothic terror to the narrative: the ‘Night-mare Life-in-Death’ ‘thicks man’s blood with cold’ and in a vampiric act that doubles the Mariner drinking his own blood, it is now ‘Fear’ that sips the Mariner’s ‘life-blood’ (193–205). These supernatural beings of Death and Nightmare throw dice for the Mariner’s soul (a kind of possession), and when the Nightmare Lifein-death wins, the Mariner is plunged suddenly into a ‘cursed’ trance-state (a literal nightmare life-in-death), in which he will remain for the rest of the poem: ‘at one stride comes the dark’ and his ship-mates drop down dead after ‘Each turned his face with a ghastly pang, / And cursed me with his eye’ (200; 214–215). A spectre haunting the Gothic dungeon-space of the nightmarish sea, the Nightmare-life-in-death acts through the ‘curse in a dead man’s eye’ to enact a kind of mesmeric possession over the Mariner’s mind and body in a way that accords with Coleridge’s theories of the suspended volition in dreams, and the mind’s resulting vulnerability to supernatural influence and demonic possession (260). The Mariner, mesmerised by the ‘stony eyes, / That in the

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Moon did glitter’ finds that he ‘could not draw [his] eyes from theirs / nor turn them up to pray’ (436–441). Under the power of this mesmeric impulse, and endowed by it with ‘strange power of speech’, the Mariner is eventually ‘forced’ to ‘pass, like night, from land to land’ and tell his ‘ghastly tale’ (586–587). A wandering, ghost-like figure living a nightmare life-in-death, the Mariner appears to the wedding guest as one ‘plague[d]’ by ‘fiends’ (80). Still further, the terrifying potential of supernatural possession within these spaces creeps outwards from the initial nightmarish space of the ship and extends to the spaces occupied by the wedding guest and the reader. Compelled and controlled by the supernatural entity that possesses his soul, the Mariner becomes a ‘tool’ through which the supernatural can mesmerically influence and possess others; a state that further links him with the reanimated corpses of his ‘ghastly crew’. Indeed, compelled by this curse to narrate his tale to the wedding guest, the Mariner is repeatedly referred to by his ‘glittering eye’, reinforcing the links between Mariner and ghastly crew through the mesmeric powers of their (dead and life-in-death) eyes. Transfixed by these ‘glittering eyes’, the wedding guest loses his bodily volition; instead, ‘the Mariner hath his will’ and he ‘cannot choose but hear’ the tale (13–18). The supernatural thus slips beyond the limits of the confined, nightmarish space in which the dead crew mesmerised the Mariner, and now infiltrates the natural space of the wedding guest, plunging him, too, into a dream-like trance as he is forced to imagine the Mariner’s own experience of this nightmarish trance-state. Coleridge, then, creates multiple layers of narrative dream space by nesting the Mariner’s account of the supernatural nightmare realm within the trance-space of the wedding guest’s forced imagining of it. Dream space is enfolded within a higher level of dream space, creating a nested narrative experience that doubles the narrative framing of the recounted tale. Importantly, this double layering of dream spaces is extended to yet another layer of space as the fast, regular rhythm of the ballad, which already conveys the force of the Mariner’s mesmeric compulsion to tell his tale, extends this mesmeric possession to the reader, who, like the wedding guest, is compelled to keep pace with the poem. The reader, then, experiences a similar dream-like trance state, and the reader’s imagined space encloses within it the already layered dream spaces of the wedding guest and Mariner. The poem, then, becomes one extended dream, and its folding and layering of multiple dimensions of space retrospectively problematises any clear divisions between dream and reality; a quality that leaves the reader suspended in the space of nightmare. If The Ancient Mariner moves from the vast spaces of the external, sublime world towards the psychological, mesmeric spaces of dream, trance, and nightmare, Christabel takes this interest even further, taking place almost entirely within explicitly enclosed, confined Gothic quarters that represent the inner chambers of the mind, and within which the repeated shifts between waking and dreaming open up the disturbing potential for the supernatural to enter, and take possession of, the mind. In this way, Christabel most fully engages

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with Coleridge’s theories of ‘Morphean Space’ as a kind of proto-higherdimensional space through which the supernatural world might be accessed, but which, conversely, also renders the mind permeable and vulnerable to supernatural influence. Coleridge achieves this aim by continuously emphasising temporal and spatial thresholds, separating the narrative world into multiple dimensions.34 Driven to pray in the woods beyond ‘the castle gate’ by dreams of her absent lover, Christabel encounters the ‘scarce alive’ ‘lady strange’ Geraldine under a full moon at midnight (25–30; 69; 93). The inward journey as Christabel leads Geraldine into the castle similarly passes multiple thresholds: after crossing a moat, Christabel must lift Geraldine, ‘a weary weight, / over the threshold of the gate’ (126–127). Geraldine’s inability to cross the threshold unaided emphasises her spectral, supernatural quality. However, despite her weakness, the ease with which she manipulates her entry into the ‘sleeping’ castle, passing through the ‘iron’d’ gate ‘Where an army in battle array had march’d out’, signals the disturbing power of the supernatural to undermine even the strongest physical defences by slipping, undetected, into the vulnerable, sleeping mind (122–123). Indeed, even within the castle, Christabel and Geraldine continue to cross thresholds, moving ever inwards until ‘as still as death with stifled breath’ they cross Christabel’s ‘chamber door’ (165–166). Coleridge emphasises, then, this enclosed space-within-aspace—the ‘Morphean Space’ within the mind, within the brain, within the body—and accordingly, the chamber itself is associated with the psychological states of dreams, trance, and nightmare. As previously mentioned, Coleridge resurrects this inwards journey, ‘now in glimmer, now in gloom’, which itself recalls Emily’s trepidatious creeping through Udolpho, within his Gothic theory of imagination (163).35 For Coleridge, then, the chamber is a kind of proto-higher-dimensional space of imagination, dream, and trance that is inherently Gothic in its vulnerability to the supernatural. Indeed, once within this space, Geraldine not only reveals her demonic nature, but also exerts mesmeric power, plunging Christabel into a dreamtrance where her volition is suspended, and through which Geraldine possesses her mind. The references to the ‘ghastly ride’ and her eyes that ‘glitter bright’ link Christabel with the mesmeric powers of the Ancient Mariner and the supernaturally animated corpses through which his own possession is enacted. Indeed, in some of Coleridge’s revisions to the poem, he plays with the idea that Geraldine is herself one struggling with demonic possession: in November 1816, Coleridge added the lines ‘Deep from within she seems half-way / To lift some weight, with sick assay, / And eyes the Maid, and seeks delay’.36 Suspended over a liminal threshold ‘deep within’, Geraldine mimics Christabel’s lifting of some ‘weight’, signalling that she too has borne a demonic entity across the threshold into her mind, where it now possess her, and acts through her to entrance and possess Christabel in turn. This reading is supported by the effects of Geraldine’s possession of Christabel, where the further she sinks under Geraldine’s influence, the more she exhibits Geraldine’s own demonic, serpentine qualities. Christabel is first mesmerised by Christabel

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upon seeing Geraldine’s unutterable, serpentine ‘bosom and half her side— / A sight to dream of, not to tell!’ (246–247). ‘In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell’ which removes Christabel’s volition and suspends her in ‘trance’: ‘With open eyes […] Asleep, and dreaming fearfully’, Christabel’s ‘trance’ is a ‘prison’ (255; 292–300). This mesmeric power of touch is combined with Geraldine’s entrancing, serpentine eyes: A snake’s small eye blinks dull and shy, And the lady’s eyes they shrunk in her head, Each shrunk up to a serpent’s eye, And with somewhat of malice, and more of dread At Christabel she look’d askance! (571–575)

Imprisoned within ‘dizzy trance’, ‘O’er-master’d by the mighty spell’, Christabel begins to ‘passively […] imitate’ Geraldine’s serpentine demonic nature: ‘With forc’d unconscious sympathy’ Christabel recoils ‘with a hissing sound’ and ‘all her features were resign’d’ to the ‘sole image in her mind’ of Geraldine’s serpentine ‘treacherous hate’ (577–608). ‘In dizzy trance’, ‘passively’ imitating Geraldine’s literally mesmerising expression, Christabel has fallen prey, through the liminal space of dreams, to the kind of dark, possessing creature that haunted Coleridge’s nightmares, and of which, for Coleridge, Geraldine represents the most fully realised and terrifying form.37 The terrifying, Gothic power of this demonic possession is also likely the reason Coleridge left Christabel unfinished. Just as the Mariner remains in a trance state, compelled to tell his ‘ghastly tale’ within the ambiguous dream space of the narrative, so too does Coleridge leave Christabel suspended in her trance state of demonic possession. A brief and terrifying vision, the poetic fragment is, like The Ancient Mariner, experienced by the reader almost as a dream—or nightmare—itself.38 In 1804, Coleridge referred to Geraldine as a ‘ghost by day time’, and by 1833 claimed, ‘the reason of my not finishing Christabel is [that…] I fear I could not carry on with equal success the execution of the Idea—the most difficult […] that can be attempted to Romantic Poetry—I mean witchery by daylight’.39 The point at which the supernatural, ghostly character of Geraldine is to be represented in the daylight, as opposed to the shadowy moonlight or a dim lamp, poses a problem for Coleridge, who has not yet consolidated a theory for such apparitions in the waking world. Geraldine has crossed the liminal space between light and dark, night and day, sleep and waking that she had occupied without trouble for Coleridge, and now awakes in the full light of day: a theoretical impossibility as far as Coleridge’s theories on dreaming and the supernatural were concerned. Indeed, the poem’s Gothic terror lies in its evocation and exploration of the threshold state—between waking and sleeping, natural and supernatural, self and other.40 The incomplete ending thus compounds the terror by allowing Geraldine, having crossed the borders into the collective imaginations of Christabel, the narrator and the reader, to remain unchecked, forever haunting

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these inner spaces much like the Ancient Mariner’s perpetual cursed haunting. Coleridge’s fragment, therefore, like Radcliffe’s Gothic castle, performs ‘the work’ that he censures The Monk for failing to do: ‘To trace the nice boundaries’ and ‘to reach those limits, yet never to pass them’.41 Despite receiving mixed reviews that often themselves noted the similarities between the poems and the Gothic novels that Coleridge had negatively reviewed, the influence of The Ancient Mariner and Christabel on later Gothic texts was profound and long-lasting.42 Most sensationally, Christabel was recited at the famous Villa Diodati gathering which produced both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1818); at the image of Geraldine undressing, Percy Shelley ran ‘shrieking’ from the room.43 Several critics note the importance of Coleridge’s poetry in the developing Gothic vampire tradition, beginning with Polidori’s tale.44 However, his influence also extends throughout the century to iconic Victorian Gothic vampire tales like Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), both of which combine the Mariner’s revenant blood-sucking with Geraldine’s feminine seduction and focus particularly on disordered, liminal, dreamlike states of mind and mesmeric possession by a demonic force.45 Stoker also resurrects The Ancient Mariner’s revenant voyage with the Demeter, aboard which the demonic vampire sails from his supernatural origins towards the natural, modern world he seeks to possess, and which arrives in port strewn with dead bodies, its log marked by mad ravings. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein perhaps bears the heaviest signs of Coleridge’s influence; her wandering protagonist pursues his own supernatural demon well beyond the limits of the natural, known world into the polar regions associated with the vast supernatural, increasingly entering a dreamlike trance, haunted by ghosts, as he ventures further beyond the natural limit.46 Shelley’s novel also turns on several complex layerings of cognitive, supernatural, and narrative space that continue Coleridge’s poetic and philosophical protohigher-dimensional experiments.47 This development of Coleridge’s higherspatial thinking continued throughout the nineteenth century. Taken up in Thomas De Quincey’s Gothic explorations of the dreaming, opium-fuelled mind in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, by the century’s end, when theories of the fourth dimension were posited by spiritualists as an explanation for the spiritual world, popular writers like Lucas Malet overtly referred back to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner in their Gothic explorations of the supernatural fourth dimension: Malet’s The Gateless Barrier (1900) is an overtly Gothic romance which uses a marine voyage across the equator to signal the shift from natural to supernatural domains that prefigures the protagonist’s higher-dimensional ghostly experience.48 More broadly, however, Coleridge’s profound influence can be felt in the general shift in the Gothic’s focus, towards the end of the Romantic period and in the centuries following, from supernatural ‘trickery’ and external horrors (though these would still remain present) to the supernaturalised, inner spaces of the psyche: what Terry Castle

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refers to as the ‘spectralisation’ of the mind; the ‘absorption of ghosts into the world of thought’.49 Often ambiguously hovering between supernatural and psychological explanations, or blending both through explorations of mesmeric and trance-state phenomena, the Victorian Gothic treads in the territory mapped out by Coleridge’s iconic supernatural poems. In Coleridge’s employment of the Gothic as a lens through which to explore, and a conceptual framework with which to construct, his notions of blended supernatural and cognitive space, we might find an answer to the perennial question of why Coleridge so voraciously attacked the Gothic in his reviews at the same time that he was producing some of his most overtly Gothic poetry. Employed in the service of mere entertainment, a veneer designed to shock and thrill but take the reader no deeper, the Gothic was, for Coleridge, cheap and idle trickery. However, employed in the service of exploring the deeper questions about the supernatural and the mind that its well-trodden tropes implied, the Gothic could provide a worthy avenue for extending human knowledge, developing philosophies, and probing some of Coleridge’s most haunting, persistent, and deeply personal concerns. Just as the ‘horrible and preternatural’ would continue to haunt Coleridge throughout his life, the Gothic ruin is the ghost buried at the centre of Coleridge’s theories of the mind. By uniting the early Gothic’s exploration and evocation of supernatural spaces with his own proto-higher dimensional theories of the mind, dreams, and the unconscious, Coleridge’s work both legitimised and ensured the survival of Gothic well beyond its initial phase of popularity in the Romantic period. The fact that Coleridge not only employs the Gothic within his most important and influential texts, but also expands upon it, extending its capacity and potential, both reveals the interconnectedness of the Gothic and Romantic as shared impulses, and signals Coleridge’s central importance as a Gothic writer.

Notes 1. The work of David Punter, Anne Williams, and Michael Gamer has been particularly important in rethinking—and occasionally removing— critical and cultural distinctions between Gothic and Romantic. See especially David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, Longman, 1996); Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception and Canon Formation (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000). 2. S. T. Coleridge, ‘Review of The Monk’, Critical Review, 19 (1797), 194–200. 3. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), II.xix. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu. au/b/burke/edmund/sublime/index.html. For an exploration of the

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ways in which these gothic castles evoke supernatural space, see Manuel Aguirre, ‘Geometries of Terror: Numinous Spaces in Gothic, Horror and Science Fiction’, Gothic Studies, 10.2 (2008), 1–17; and Kirstin A. Mills, ‘At the Limits of Perception: Liminal Space and the Interrelation of Word and Image in Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother’, Image [&] Narrative, 18.3 (2017), 5–17. 4. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008), 27–28. 5. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (London, Penguin, 2001), 325– 326. 6. S. T. Coleridge, ‘Review of Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho’, The Critical Review (August 1794), 361–372. 7. Coleridge, ‘Review of The Monk’. 8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2 vols. (Menston, The Scolar Press, 1971), 1.292. 9. Bradford K. Mudge, ‘“Excited by Trick”: Coleridge and the Gothic Imagination’, The Wordsworth Circle 22.3 (1991), 179–184, 183. 10. S. T. Coleridge, ‘General Character of the Gothic Literature and Art’ (1818), Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (London, Constable, 1936), 11–13. 11. John and Anna Laetitia Aikin, ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror; with Sir Bertrand, a Fragment’, in Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (London, Joseph Johnson, 1773), 119–137. 12. Coleridge, Biographia, 1.293. 13. Ibid., 296. 14. Kathleen Coburn has called the ‘richness and variety of Coleridge’s notes on sleep and dreaming’ a ‘subject in itself’ (Experience into Thought: Perspectives in the Coleridge Notebooks [Toronto, Toronto University Press, 1979], 20), and Coleridge’s engagement with the many different approaches to dreams have been treated in detail particularly by Jennifer Ford, Coleridge on Dreaming (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001). Elsewhere I argue that Coleridge’s private writings about his nightmares can also be read as gothic texts: see Kirstin A. Mills, ‘Morphean Space and the Metaphysics of Nightmare: Gothic Theories of Dreaming in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Notebooks’, in Gothic Dreams and Nightmares, ed. Carol Margaret Davison (Manchester, Manchester University Press, forthcoming in 2022). 15. Ford asserts that ‘in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there was no consensus on the origin and meaning of dreams’ and ‘modern explanations of dreams […] nestled uneasily with persistent traditions of superstition and folklore’ (Dreaming, 9, 14).

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16. S. T. Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 5 vols., ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen (London, Routledge, 1990), 4.5360. 17. I argue elsewhere that Coleridge’s ‘Morphean Space’ influenced the development of spatial thinking in the nineteenth century, and profoundly impacted the literary explorations of supernatural fourdimensional space. See Kirstin A. Mills, ‘Dreaming into Hyperspace: The Victorian Spatial Imagination and the Origins of Modern Fantasy in MacDonald and Carroll’, in Informing the Inklings: George MacDonald and the Victorian Roots of Modern Fantasy, ed. M. J. Partridge and Kirstin Jeffrey-Johnson (Winged Lion Press, 2018), 129–147. 18. S. T. Coleridge, The Friend: A Series of Essays (London, 1812), 122. 19. Coleridge, who had read Baxter’s work by 1795, wrote in 1827, ‘I should not wonder if I found that Andrew had thought more on the subject of Dreams than any other of our Psychologists, Scotch or English’ (Notebooks, 5.5640). See also John Beer, ‘Coleridge and Andrew Baxter on Dreaming’, Dreaming, 7.2 (1997), 157–169. 20. In this notion of external influence while in the dream-state, Coleridge’s theories overlap with Franz Anton Mesmer’s notions of Animal Magnetism and its resulting ‘mesmeric’ trance, which also suspended volition and allowed the mind and body to be influenced by another (see Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain [Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1998]). Coleridge draws heavily on these ideas in his poetry (see below). 21. For further discussion of Coleridge’s battle with nightmare and his imagination, see Alexander Shultz, ‘The Dangers of Imagination: Coleridge’s Dreams and Nightmares’, The Coleridge Bulletin, 25 (2005), 46–53. 22. Andrew Baxter, An Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul; Wherein the Immateriality of the Soul Is Evinced from the Principles of Reason and Philosophy, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1737). 23. Coleridge was not alone in this interest in the connections between dreams and spiritual possession: the notion that spiritual possession caused madness persisted well into the Romantic period and remained a popular topic for Romantic and Gothic writers. Other writers working with the idea of dreams as possession include Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, George Crabbe, Thomas De Quincey, and William Wordsworth, to name but a few. According to Ronald R. Thomas, ‘accounts of dreams and dreaming’ in Romantic writing ‘characteristically assume the shape of a possession’ (Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious [Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1990], 21). 24. Mills, ‘Morphean Space’. 25. Coleridge, Biographia, 2.2.

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26. Ibid., 2.3. 27. On reading the poems as male and female Gothic, see, for example, Anya Taylor, ‘Coleridge’s “Christabel” and the Phantom Soul’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 42.4 (2002), 707–730. 28. Coleridge, Notebooks, 2.2086. Ford argues that Coleridge’s poetry, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ‘Kubla Khan’, Christabel and Remorse, should be considered ‘part of a wider contemporary debate on dreaming’ (2). 29. S. T. Coleridge, ‘Christabel’ (1816), Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, and Raimonda Modiano (New York: Norton, 2004), 162–179. All references are to this edition, cited by line numbers within the text. 30. Coleridge, Biographia, 1.489. 31. S. T. Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1834), Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, and Raimonda Modiano (New York: Norton, 2004), 59–99. All references are to this edition, cited by line numbers within the text. 32. Coleridge explicitly references one of the most popular gothic ballads, Gottfried August Burger’s Lenore, which appeared in several English translations in 1796 (lines 5–6). Some critics have read Coleridge’s poem against Lenore and the gothic ballad tradition more broadly. See, for example, Douglass H. Thomson and Diane Long Hoeveler, ‘Shorter Gothic Fictions: Ballads and Chapbooks, Tales and Fragments’, in Romantic Gothic, ed. Angela Wright and Dale Townshend (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 147–166. 33. Kiran Toor notes that the Mariner’s traversal between the waking and sleeping, or conscious and unconscious worlds, are characterised according to Coleridge’s concepts of the separate and opposing forces of the ‘Ego Diurnus’ and ‘Ego Nocturnus’: as the Mariner’s ship is ‘dropped…Below the kirk, Below the hill, Below the lighthouse top’, it marks a ‘descent’ in which ‘the mariner (or the dreamer as the case may be) moves away from the established structures of the waking world to an extracted and separated state that exists below consciousness’ (‘Dream Weaver: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Prefiguring of Jungian Dream Theory’, The Coleridge Bulletin, 24 [2004], 83–90, 87). 34. Several critics have noted the poem’s particular focus on liminality and have pointed out its emphasis on physical border-crossing, thresholds, and the meeting-point between the natural and supernatural worlds, as well as the transitional processes that Christabel endures as a result of her meeting with the supernatural Geraldine. As Mark M. Hennelly Jr. argues, ‘the text of Christabel – from the framing announcement that even its sprung rhythm…performs transformatively “in correspondence with some transition in the nature of the imagery

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or passion” to its compulsive repetition of both literally and figuratively crossing or passing through “the space between” – maintains a much more profound focus on liminally transitional processes than has been previously noticed’ (‘“As Well Fill Up the Space Between”: A Liminal Reading of “Christabel”’, Studies in Romanticism, 38.2 [1999], 203–222, 205). 35. For similar comparisons of Christabel with this and other gothic texts, see Jerold E. Hogle, ‘“Christabel” as Gothic: The Abjection of Instability’, Gothic Studies, 7.1 (2005), 18–28. 36. Cited in Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, and Raimonda Modiano (eds.), Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose (New York: Norton, 2004), 169 n.3. 37. A. H. Nethercot likens this possession to a vampiric transformation (The Road to Tryermaine [New York, Russell and Russell, 1962], 69). See the discussion of Christabel ’s influence below. 38. Stephen Prickett argues that Christabel’s visionary quality, working ‘by flashes that haunt the waking mind like the images of dreams’ makes it ‘the purest exercise in the Gothic mode ever attempted’ (Victorian Fantasy [Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1975], 79). 39. Cited in Halmi et al., Coleridge’s Poetry, 160. 40. Angus Fletcher emphasises the importance of liminality in the poem when he suggests that Coleridge hesitated to finish the poem for so many years ‘not because no story could be machined to follow upon Parts I and II, but because the two parts had already adequately set forth their real terror, the threshold phenomenon itself, and to move along from their unfinished liminality would have been to destroy their perfect readiness by a useful, but merely conventional, narrative ending’ (‘“Positive Negation”: Threshold, Sequence, and Personification in Coleridge’, in New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth, ed. Geoffrey Hartman [New York and London, Columbia University Press, 1972], 153). 41. Coleridge, ‘Review of The Monk’. 42. One of the more positive reviews of Christabel argued that ‘Mr Coleridge has perhaps the finest superstitious vein of any person alive. The poem of Christabel is the best model extant of the language fit to be employed for such subjects…Indeed Christabel may be considered as a test by which to try men’s feeling of superstition, and whoever does not perceive the beauty of it, may rest assured that the world of spectres is shut against him, and that he will never see “any thing worse than himself”’ (‘Some Remarks on the Use of the Preternatural in Works of Fiction’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine [September 1818], 648–650). 43. John Polidori, The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori, 1816: Relating to Byron, Shelley, etc., ed. William Michael Rossetti (London, Elkin Matthews, 1911), 127–128.

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44. John Polidori, The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre (Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2008). See, for example: James Twitchell, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Durham, Duke University Press, 1981); and Nick Groom, The Vampire: A New History (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2018). 45. Sheridan Le Fanu, ‘Carmilla’, in In a Glass Darkly (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993), 243–319; and Bram Stoker, Dracula (London, Vintage, 2007). 46. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (London, Penguin Books, 2003). 47. Kirstin A. Mills, ‘Frankenstein in Hyperspace: The Gothic Return of Digital Technologies to the Origins of Virtual Space in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’, in Global Frankenstein, ed. Carol Margaret Davison and Marie Mulvey-Roberts (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 265– 281. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78142-6_15. 48. Lucas Malet, The Gateless Barrier (London, Eveleigh Nash and Grayson, 1922). On Malet’s use of Coleridge in relation to the fourth dimension, see Kirstin A. Mills, ‘The Supernatural Fourth Dimension in Lucas Malet’s The Carissima and The Gateless Barrier’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, ed. Clive Bloom (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 613–629. https://doi.org/10.1007/9783-030-40866-4_33. Prickett notes the growing Victorian interest in The Ancient Mariner, which, ‘in addition to re-issues and combinations, went through no less than ten different illustrated editions between 1850 and 1900 – the rate of publication climbing steeply towards the end of the century’ (Victorian Fantasy, 26). 49. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995), 142. On Coleridge’s importance for Victorian Gothic, see Clive Bloom, ‘Introduction: The Black Shadow of Doom’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic (Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 1–24, and many of the other essays contained in that volume.

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Beer, John. ‘Coleridge and Andrew Baxter on Dreaming’, Dreaming, 7.2 (1997), 157–169. Bloom, Clive. ‘Introduction: The Black Shadow of Doom’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic. Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, pp. 1–24. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), II.xix. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/burke/edmund/ sublime/index.html. Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995. Coburn, Kathleen. Experience into Thought: Perspectives in the Coleridge Notebooks. Toronto, Toronto University Press, 1979. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria, 2 vols. Menston, The Scolar Press, 1971. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. ‘Christabel’, in Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, and Raimonda Modiano. New York, Norton, 2004, pp. 162–179. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor. London, Constable, 1936. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 5 vols., ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen. London, Routledge, 1990. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. ‘Review of Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho’, The Critical Review, 11 (August 1794), 361–372. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. ‘Review of The Monk’, Critical Review, 19 (1797), 194– 200. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Friend: A Series of Essays. London, 1812. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, in Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, and Raimonda Modiano. New York: Norton, 2004, pp. 59–99. Fletcher, Angus. ‘“Positive Negation”: Threshold, Sequence, and Personification in Coleridge’, in New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth, ed. Geoffrey Hartman. New York and London, Columbia University Press, 1972. Ford, Jennifer. Coleridge on Dreaming. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Gamer, Michael. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception and Canon Formation. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000. Groom, Nick. The Vampire: A New History. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2018. Hennelly Jr., Mark M. ‘“As Well Fill Up the Space Between”: A Liminal Reading of “Christabel”’, Studies in Romanticism, 38.2 (1999), 203–222. Hogle, Jerold E. ‘“Christabel” as Gothic: The Abjection of Instability’, Gothic Studies, 7.1 (2005), 18–28. Le Fanu, Sheridan. In a Glass Darkly. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993. Malet, Lucas. The Gateless Barrier. London, Eveleigh Nash and Grayson, 1922. Mills, Kirstin A. ‘At the Limits of Perception: Liminal Space and the Interrelation of Word and Image in Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother’, Image [&] Narrative, 18.3 (2017), 5–17. Mills, Kirstin A. ‘Dreaming into Hyperspace: The Victorian Spatial Imagination and the Origins of Modern Fantasy in MacDonald and Carroll’, in Informing the Inklings: George MacDonald and the Victorian Roots of Modern Fantasy, ed. M. J. Partridge and Kirstin Jeffrey-Johnson. Winged Lion Press, 2018a, pp. 129–147.

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Mills, Kirstin A. ‘Frankenstein in Hyperspace: The Gothic Return of Digital Technologies to the Origins of Virtual Space in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’, in Global Frankenstein, ed. Carol Margaret Davison and Marie Mulvey-Roberts. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018b, pp. 265–281. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-31978142-6_15. Mills, Kirstin A. ‘Morphean Space and the Metaphysics of Nightmare: Gothic Theories of Dreaming in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Notebooks’, in Gothic Dreams and Nightmares, ed. Carol Margaret Davison. Manchester, Manchester University Press, forthcoming in 2022. Mills, Kirstin A. ‘The Supernatural Fourth Dimension in Lucas Malet’s The Carissima and The Gateless Barrier’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, ed. Clive Bloom. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, pp. 613–629, https://doi.org/10. 1007/978-3-030-40866-4_33. Mudge, Bradford K. ‘“Excited by Trick”: Coleridge and the Gothic Imagination’, The Wordsworth Circle, 22.3 (1991), 179–184. Nethercott, A. H. The Road to Tryermaine. New York, Russell and Russell, 1962. Polidori, John. The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori, 1816: Relating to Byron, Shelley, etc., ed. William Michael Rossetti. London, Elkin Matthews, 1911. Polidori, John. The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2008. Prickett, Stephen, Victorian Fantasy. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1975. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, 2nd ed., 2 vols. London, Longman, 1996. Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. London, Penguin, 2001. Richardson, Alan. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. London, Penguin Books, 2003. Shultz, Alexander. ‘The Dangers of Imagination: Coleridge’s Dreams and Nightmares’, The Coleridge Bulletin, 25 (2005), 46–53. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London, Vintage, 2007. Taylor, Anya. ‘Coleridge’s “Christabel” and the Phantom Soul’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 42.4 (2002), 707–730. Thomas, Ronald R. Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1990. Thomson, Douglass H., and Diane Long Hoeveler. ‘Shorter Gothic Fictions: Ballads and Chapbooks, Tales and Fragments’, in Romantic Gothic, ed. Angela Wright and Dale Townshend. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2015, pp. 147–166. Toor, Kieran. ‘Dream Weaver: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Prefiguring of Jungian Dream Theory’, The Coleridge Bulletin, 24 (2004), 83–90. Twitchell, James. The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature. Durham, Duke University Press, 1981. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008. Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995. Winter, Alison. Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain. Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1998.

Visual Gothic

Gardens and Designed Landscapes James Rattue

The role of designed landscape in the development of the Gothic imagination has received next to no attention hitherto. The one writer who touches on the subject is Richard Davenport-Hines whose popular account from 1998, Gothic, draws together the familiar strands of romantic tourism, garden design, folly-building and Gothic Revival architecture, tracing a line from Alexander Pope’s design of the fake Gothic ruin of Arthur’s Hall for Lord Bathurst’s garden at Cirencester in 1724, through the theatrical garden-making of William Kent, to the Gothic ‘power-houses’ of late eighteenth-century aristocrats.1 However, Davenport-Hines’s chief interest is in describing how these developments created the conditions for the axial moment when The Castle of Otranto was published, not in designed landscapes as such. Emma McEvoy’s Gothic Tourism also takes Horace Walpole’s fantasy-house Strawberry Hill as the historic epitome of Gothic sightseeing, and doesn’t discuss landscape at all. Tom Stoppard gets the motif right in his 1993 play Arcadia, in which a meditation on history and memory is set against a much-remodelled country house garden in Derbyshire, described by the play’s garden historian Hannah Jarvis as ‘untamed nature in the style of Salvator Rosa. It’s the Gothic novel expressed in landscape. Everything but vampires’.2 (What Stoppard gets wrong is the date—1809 is a little late for recasting a garden in this direction— and the balance, as timing suggests that the set-dressing of Gothic literature owes more to Gothic designed landscapes than vice versa.) J. Rattue (B) Godalming, UK

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Some of these dramatic landscapes are well-known from the history of garden design, or the history of taste more generally. They have been identified (and occasionally were identified by their makers) as expressions of the theory of the picturesque which was much-debated through the eighteenth century; however, several predated those discussions and, in contrast to other gardens, they strove to provoke feelings of melancholy, unease, and reflection on human smallness and the ruin of civilisation. ‘Gothic Gardens’ thus reflected and affected Gothic taste every bit as much as books or buildings, and were as legitimate an expression of the Gothic as literature or art; some were considerable tourist attractions, while others represented more personal, private visions. This essay discusses twelve such landscapes; two can be found in Wales, one in Scotland and the rest in England, and they mainly date to the second half of the eighteenth century. Given the fragmentary state of some, more may be awaiting identification. Davenport-Hines deftly traces the way Alpine scenery and the paintings of Salvator Rosa became, for the British literary classes, a shorthand way of describing controlled experiences of horror.3 Famously, the Earl of Shaftesbury concluded that ‘the rude Rocks, the mossy Caves, the irregular unwrought Grotto’s and broken Falls of Waters, with all the horrid Graces of the Wilderness’ could reveal more of nature, and therefore of God’s intentions, than polite formal gardens,4 but such experiences could be found closer to home and with the materials to hand. Travellers knew that, thanks to the Reformation, the British Isles abounded in thought-provoking ruins to a degree other countries could not match.5 Charles Cotton’s 1681 guidebook The Wonders of the Peak called attention to North Derbyshire’s ‘buildings both beautiful and ruinous … Temples, Castles and Monuments’,6 and there were other wonders to savour too. When James Brome visited Wookey Hole in 1700 he and his friends were overwhelmed by ‘dreadful apprehension’ in the ‘Sibylline grotto’ beneath the Mendip Hills, and he found ‘this place of Horrour and Darkness’ filled his mind with thoughts of hell: his account of Wookey occupies more of his book, Travels Over England, Scotland & Wales, than any other place apart from Cambridge. The locals were clearly already very used to guiding travellers around the caves and pointing out their gruesome associations as well as their natural wonders. Brome repeated the experience at the splendidly named cavern called the Devil’s Arse in Derbyshire, with similar responses.7 By mid-century and the publication of Edmund Burke’s Essay on the Sublime in 1755, it was a commonplace that such modest brushes with terror could be both entertaining and instructive, and there was clearly a market for them. The pioneers who generated the first landscapes consciously designed to cater for these tastes did not theorise, so their gardens must speak for them. The earliest site where Gothic themes emerge is Radway (Warwickshire), the estate of Sanderson Miller. Miller was the son of a prosperous wool merchant, and became a jobbing architect and designer of follies; yet his work at Radway predates the better-known ruined Gothic towers or mock-castles he built or designed elsewhere. Miller, who had been interested in antiquities since his

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youth, inherited the estate in 1737 at the age of 21: the fact that the steep hill above his home overlooked the site of the Battle of Edgehill captured his imagination. Within a year or two he had built a cascade with three ‘rustick arches’ and water running through ‘broken stone work’, and above it a platform allowing a better view of the battlefield. In 1743–1744 Miller constructed Edge Cottage on the hilltop, with round corner bastions and Gothic windows creating the impression that the building was assembled from the ruins of a fortress. Over subsequent years he made Gothic additions to his own house, and bought a wall and arched gateway which was all that survived of the medieval Ratley Grange, further along the hilltop. Between 1745 and 1750 Miller built the folly which binds the landscape together as a composition, the Octagonal Tower, on the site where King Charles was supposed to have raised his standard before the battle a century earlier; the Grange ruins were converted into the Tower’s stable. The tower, modelled on Guy’s Tower at Warwick Castle, crowns the hill as seen from the village at its foot: it gathers the historical associations of the area and accentuates the steep incline of Edge Hill. Once the parish had undergone Enclosure in 1756 and Miller could consolidate his landholdings, he laid out a series of paths and walks across the grounds, enabling his many visitors to view them. His friend Revd Richard Jago’s poem ‘Edge Hill’, written after a visit to Radway in 1767, expressed typical reactions: it praised him for creating the ‘paths/That ease our winding steps’ and described ‘the stately towers, that overtop/The rising wood, and oft the broken arch/Or mould’ring wall, well taught to counterfeit/The waste of time, to solemn thought excite’.8 Here, for the first time, the Gothic imagination engaged with the melancholy potential of the local landscape, and all the elements of what was to come were presented, albeit in an embryonic form. Topographically Radway boasts only a steep hillside, but other Gothic landscapes offered far more scope for excitement. The commonest pattern, evident at Hafod (Powys), Piercefield (Gwent), Hackfall (Yorkshire), Yester (East Lothian), Downton (Herefordshire) and Busbridge (Surrey), was for the garden to be composed around a steep river gorge, and, where the flow was strong enough, the swirling waters could provoke feelings of thrill and threat. At Hawkstone (Shropshire) there is no river, but the landscape paths wind around two precipitous peaks on either side of a central valley, while the comparatively modest garden of Portland (Dorset) includes a steep inland gorge and a sea cliff. At several sites, paths led visitors to surprise views of the rivers. From 1750, Valentine Morris began to lay out the garden at Piercefield around a huge meander in the River Wye, which had hollowed out a steep bluff on the western side facing the hilly Forest of Dean on the east across a circular meadow basin some miles wide. He employed William Knowles, the Chepstow builder who had cleared the ruins of Tintern Abbey for the Duke of Beaufort, to open ten views along the river including the precipitous Lover’s Leap; it was here that Morris almost fell to his death while supervising the works, his life only saved by the shrubbery on the slope from which he was rescued.

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‘We cannot call these views picturesque’ commented the travel writer William Gilpin tellingly after his visit to Piercefield in 1770, ‘but they are extremely romantic’.9 At Downton, Richard Payne Knight designed paths which wound up and down the banks of the River Teme, planted some trees to obscure the view, and cut others down to open it up where required. His relative Thomas Jhones planted over three million trees on the estate at Hafod (though with a high failure rate), partly for economic purposes, partly for artistic ones, to create cover and interest for his own system of walks, which, again, were opened up at crucial points to provide dramatic views.10 To traverse a narrow bridge across a torrent provided an additional thrill. Where they were not actually rickety and unstable, such bridges were often apparently constructed to look as though they were, the association with danger and drama intensified by describing them as ‘Swiss’ or ‘Alpine Bridges’. Visitors to the garden would have known they were approaching an ‘Alpine Bridge’ (at Hawkstone a fingerpost told them so) and would have some idea of the experience in store. Hafod had such a bridge (as well as a more substantial but still cascade-spanning Chain Bridge) and Downton more than one, though they were repeatedly washed away during floods. Payne Knight’s machicolated stone Forge Bridge at Downton was too firm to worry anyone crossing it, but it spanned a huge horseshoe-shaped weir created for no other purpose than to make the water roar beneath. The Swiss Bridge at Hawkstone traverses not a river but The Cleft, a deep stone rift in the top of Grotto Hill: the effect is the same. ‘To the enjoyment of this wild scene’, warned the updated guidebook of 1840 titillatingly, ‘a steady head and a steady foot are both equally necessary, especially when you cross the bridge … a downward glance … is majestic and tremendous’. Yet the author went on, ‘there is, however, not the slightest danger in the passage … Fear not to pass then the awful gulf’.11 Hawkstone’s Cleft is a reminder that other landscape effects featured in these gardens. It was only discovered by the owner and designer, Sir Richard Hill, after about 1784 (the Grotto at Hawkstone was already under construction some twenty years earlier). Once it was cleared, visitors could squeeze through a narrow gap between towering walls of rock in places barely two feet wide, imagining, as the guidebook speculated, the ‘violent convulsion of the earth’ that had formed it, before plunging into the tunnel which after 1799 led through two hundred feet of pitch dark to the Grotto. Not far away was the Awful Precipice, a positively Alpine viewpoint so named by Dr. Johnson.12 Other designers tweaked and accentuated the terrific effects of landscape with follies and similar trickery. Piercefield and Downton both included artificial caves through which visitors had to pass (Downton in fact had two on opposite banks of the river). As the visitor to Downton approached the Hermit’s Cave, they would find ‘Payne Knight has now lured one to a test of nerve … there are only two options, turn back or enter the unknown’. Valentine Morris was not content with the appearance of nature at Piercefield and added to his Giant’s Cave ‘a Herculean figure’ in the act of throwing a rock at visitors: it stood above the path until it was attacked by frost and

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the arms fell off.13 At Hackfall William Aislaby’s guests would approach the garden on the road to Ripon unaware quite how elevated was the ground they were traversing. Once they were welcomed into the tree-shrouded Banqueting House at Mowbray Point, a strange folly which appears like a Roman bathhouse on one side and a Cyclopean ruin on the other, the far doors would be flung open and a view across nearly thirty miles of Yorkshire landscape would be revealed: just below the terrace outside was a sheer drop.14 At Busbridge Philip Webb turned a small dry gorge running southward from the main valley of the River Wey into the unique Ghost Walk. Visitors entered via a huge gateway of five Gothic arches in rough stone and found themselves surrounded by eerie statues in niches set into the walls of the cleft; a small cave and a miniature ruined turret on the top of the bank completed the effect. Most dramatic of all is the Cavern Cascade at Hafod. This sits at the top of the wildest and roughest part of the walks. After some time ascending an increasingly difficult and rocky path through the woods accompanied by the crashing water of the Nant Gau stream, a side path leads to a hollow in the rock: visitors must clamber in and enter the darkness. For some yards there is no light, only the increasing sound of thundering water. A sudden left turn reveals the Cascade, a daylit sheet of water pouring from a gap in the roof into a rock basin. This is an entirely artificial feature: the cave was blown out by Thomas Jhones to divert the flow of two converging streams.15 In comparison with these effects, John Penn’s efforts in his garden at Portland were trivial, yet perfectly typical: dissatisfied with the neat and tidy appearance of the ruined Rufus Castle, he heaped earth around it to encourage the regrowth of ivy.16 One of the latest of these Gothic gardens provides the ultimate form of landscape manipulation, the creation of something which previously did not exist at all. There were Gothic follies on the Monck estate at Belsay (Northumberland) long before Sir Charles Monck decided to move his family out of the medieval castle and into a new house in 1817, but the quarrying of the stone for the latter gave him the chance to create an entirely different experience. ‘The quarry was excavated with great care’ to form ‘a dramatic canyon, rather than just a hole in the ground’17 : winding paths, clefts and alcoves, an artificial rock arch, and yews and pines planted along the top of the stone walls to increase their apparent height created a sublime landscape without parallel, seemingly inspired by quarries Monck had seen at Siracusa in Sicily. The darkest, gloomiest part of the composition is a claustrophobic enclosure of towering rock walls known as The Grotto. The garden hardly needs any further enhancement to achieve its effect. The pure aesthetic reaction provoked by landscape forms was one source of melancholy and thrilling thoughts and reflections; another was the associative response drawn from encountering remnants of the past. We have seen this very clearly at Radway, whose whole raison d’etre was Sanderson Miller’s awareness of the area’s bloody past (his first landscape manipulation, before he built a single thing, was to plant King’s Ley Copse on the site where Charles I had spent the night after the Battle of Edgehill18 ). Other relics provided

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a point of contact with eras of Gothic barbarity, just as capable of filling visitors’ imaginations with fantasies of violence and threat as a print of Salvatorian banditti on a wall. Thus, Hawkstone had its Red Castle, a medieval fortress brought into the parkland and laid out with walks as early as 1748 by Sir Rowland Hill, father of the Richard who did the main work on the garden. The 1840 guidebook pointed out that although ‘this seat of warriors’ was ‘remarkable for its strength and the prodigious thickness of its walls’ it was ‘now a heap of ruins, and inhabited only by birds of prey: whilst its martial sons are all buried in promiscuous oblivion, and nothing is left to perpetuate their memories but these fragments of desolation’. The ‘profound and fearful gulph’ called the Giant’s Well was a specific impressive feature, possibly—so the guidebooks speculated—an oubliette or a place to throw prisoners, while at the foot of the ruins visitors could encounter a stone lion (‘the most timid may without danger take him by the tooth’). It isn’t completely clear which are medieval features and which have been altered to make them more affecting: the Lion’s Den (definitely an eighteenth-century creation) is at the base of a cut through the rock which divides the Castle in two and makes ‘no archaeological sense’. By the 1830s stories were being told about Red Castle which linked it not only to a pair of legendary giants but also the Knights of the Round Table.19 The castle was the culmination of the tour of Hawkstone’s grounds, a final brush with sublime excitement before visitors retired for refreshment at the Hawkstone Inn. The garden at Yester does not seem to have been designed as a tourist destination in any way, and so has never been considered along with more famous sites; it also survives only in mutilated form, which mitigates full discussion of its features. But it exhibits the same character as several other landscapes. In the mid-1750s Lord Hay commissioned the Musselburgh gardener and designer James Bowie to remodel Yester’s existing formal garden into something more Picturesque with lawns and follies. One element Bowie suggested retaining, and indeed enhancing, was the ancient Chapel of St. Bathan yards from Yester House itself; his Lordship decided to make it his family mausoleum, and adorned it with an elaborate Rococo-Gothic frontage. Bowie wanted to separate it from the rest of the grounds by ‘a fence rudely formed’ so that it ‘may be a piece with the antiquity of the place’ (‘rude’ was Bowie’s favourite descriptive word: he advocated facing over a set of stone arches with ‘rude stones naturally disposed of, the lower ones to form a Grotto, the upper ones a rude Cavern’). But outside the immediate grounds of the house, the Gifford Water carved a typically steep gorge running eastwards along which walks seem to have been laid and rustic bridges constructed around the same time as Bowie’s work near the mansion; their destination, a couple of miles away, was the wooded ruin of Yester Castle, a thirteenthcentury fortress finally abandoned by the Hays in 1557. Yester boasted a unique feature: the elaborate subterranean Goblin Ha, so-called because it was believed to have been constructed in 1267 by the warlock Sir Hugh de Giffard

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with the aid of supernatural creatures. Visiting it is still one of the spookiest experiences one can have north of the Scottish border (although until 1737 Lord Hay’s falconer actually lived in it).20 John Penn’s small landscape composition at Portland was also a personal pleasure. Penn, the grandson of William, the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania, had in 1789 returned to Britain with his share of the compensation paid by the State authorities to the Penn family, and seven years later constructed a small castellated Gothic mansion, which he called Pennsylvania Castle, on ‘barren rock’ at the eastern edge of the Isle of Portland in Dorset. The architect was James Wyatt, the doyen of Georgian Gothic-Revivalists. Below the house were the remains of the small twelfth-century Rufus Castle, and St Andrew’s Church, abandoned as unsafe in the mid-1700s. These might be interpreted as separate monuments, were it not for the facts that Rufus Castle is accessible only from the Pennsylvania Castle grounds, and that, as Newman and Pevsner laconically comment, the church ruin ‘has been tidied up’ with gravestones now occupying the interior of the building. At its southern end, there is a Gothic arch sometimes interpreted as part of the church; however it was reset in an old wall, and forms an evocative gateway to the path that leads through a small but dramatic gorge running up to the grounds of Penn’s house: the turrets of Pennsylvania Castle can be seen glowering at the top of the cliff among the trees. The land on which the house is built was Crown property sold to Penn by George III, and it was only several years later that Penn bought the undercliff including the historic monuments, with a clear intention to make them into a single composition in which the keynotes are the familiar ones of topographical drama, power, and ruin.21 Lack of genuine historical remains presented no insuperable problem for Gothic gardeners, as fair approximations could be built or purchased. William Aislabie had grown up at Studley Royal where his father John benefited from the availability of the biggest garden ornament in Britain, Fountains Abbey, but at his own garden, Hackfall, there was nothing, so he had to provide it. He erected various follies in different styles (we have already mentioned the extraordinary Banqueting House), but the one which alluded most to the area’s history was Mowbray Castle. Constructed some time between 1750 and 1767, the castle stood at the top of the gorge of the River Ure around which the Hackfall landscape was composed, and was named to commemorate the de Mowbray family who had had lordship of the area for several centuries. It was, so William Gilpin said, ‘a paltry thing’, and was probably not intended to be seen close up, but to exert a suggestive influence on the affections of visitors from a distance.22 Some gardeners reached back beyond the Middle Ages to reference even hazier periods of history: a Druid’s Temple and a megalithic monument called the Trilithon were part of the assemblage at the Banwell Bone Caves (Somerset), while several suspicious groups of arranged stones survive at Busbridge Lakes. Thomas Jhones apparently never got round to building his Druid’s Temple at Hafod, although one appears just downhill from the

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Cascade Cavern on the estate map included in George Cumberland’s guidebook of 1796; and there was one at Piercefield too, ‘a seemingly random placing of square boulders and a standing stone’. To us these follies may seem faintly ludicrous, but at the time ‘Druids’ were a shorthand for bloodshed and barbarity, and even fake Druidic monuments carried a frisson of horror. Bishop Law helpfully pointed this out for his visitors at Banwell in one of his didactic inscriptions: ‘Here, where once Druids trod in times of yore/And stain’d their altars with a victim’s gore’.23 Of course they did no such thing, either at Banwell’s sham Temple or anywhere else, but that wasn’t the point. Philip Webb of Busbridge was obviously more enthused by the idea of Romans than of Druids, their legendary foes. Built into the archway of the grotto he constructed in the grounds to form his wife’s mausoleum is a stone carved with the name of the Twentieth Legion, which had been stationed at various times at Chester and Hadrian’s Wall. Another Roman inscribed stone was inserted into the walls of the Ghost Walk, while in 1973 during the dredging of the Lower Lake (now outside the boundaries of the garden) five Roman altars arranged in a semicircle were discovered sunk in the silt—they were presumably above the water when originally placed! Several of the antiquities can be proved to have come from a collection gathered at Scaleby Castle in Cumbria which was dispersed in 1741: Philip Webb must have bought them after that date. These relocated fragments of ‘the grandeur that was Rome’ allowed another sort of meditation on the ruin of civilisations and the depredations of time.24 The Banwell Bone Caves was the latest landscape in this sequence and relied for its effect (and existence) on different factors. In 1824 workmen trying to uncover a lost cavern, which had been broken into nearly seventy years before, with the aim of turning it into a tourist attraction, found instead a cave system packed with animal bones in tens of thousands. The landowner, the new Bishop of Bath & Wells, George Law, saw a different opportunity: the discovery at Banwell of evidence, as he believed, of the Biblical Flood, gave a literally God-sent chance to oppose the burgeoning speculations of geological science in favour of the more traditionalist view of the antiquity of the earth. The Bishop was not content to leave the bones to tell their own story, though. He gradually surrounded the caves with Gothic follies, planted the hillside with a wood and decorated the structures with carved stone verses to guide the meditations of visitors: ‘Here let the scoffer of God’s holy word/Behold the traces of a deluged world;/Here let him learn in Banwell Cave t’adore/The Lord of heaven, then go and scoff no more’.25 Although the Caves were sited on a steep hill with views across the Severn into Wales, it was far from promising topography; but soon the woods grew gloomier and the melancholy tone of this Creationist theme park was reflected in the landscape itself. As already mentioned, Gothic landscapes have usually been considered in relation to the aesthetic debates of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially with regard to the ‘picturesque’. Briefly put, beauty was readily understood in terms of order, regularity and perfection of form; the

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sorts of pleasure that could be derived from disorder, irregularity and threat, of which theorists became more sensible as the eighteenth century wore on, came to be described as sublime; while soon a third aesthetic category, the picturesque—‘suitable for a picture’, in other words—was coined to account for a type of experience that was not quite one or the other, but incorporated aspects of both. Given the English bias for moderation it was no surprise that the Picturesque was elevated to an ideal, regardless of its nebulous and unsatisfactory quality which gave rise to no end of discussion as to what it actually meant. One of the key texts is Richard Payne Knight of Downton’s Landscape: A Poem (1794), which champions environmental compositions that embody shifts of mood between terror and comfort, as opposed to the comparatively uninstructive, monotonous arrangements of Capability Brown; this is clearly what Knight was aiming at in his own garden. In several Gothic Gardens the thrills and sublime dramatics contrast with milder effects, often around the house of the owner which might be islanded in gentle lawns (this was the case at Piercefield, Hafod, Busbridge, Yester and Hawkstone as well as Downton itself). However, several gardens show no interest in combining contrasting experiences into a potentially harmonious whole, while most were begun before the idea of the Picturesque came into common aesthetic parlance; and, in any case, it was terror that impressed itself most strongly on visitors’ minds. William Gilpin travelled Britain strictly in search of the Picturesque, but decided that, at Piercefield and Hackfall, ‘sublimity is the reigning idea of each’; and in fact Charles Heath found fault with Piercefield on precisely the ground that its dramatic walks provided no variety of mood. Garden designer Humphrey Repton was aware of the contrasting effects Payne Knight had striven for at Downton, but described with most enthusiasm the ‘beetling rock’ and ‘awful precipice’, ‘the foaming waters heard roaring in the dark abyss below’, and, in summary, ‘the wild but pleasing horrors of the scene’.26 Visiting Hackfall in 1779, William Beckford was almost overcome by his imagination, discovering ‘a vast theatre of woods crowned by ruined arches and the remains of an awful temple … To the left a venerable cell, mantled with ivy, probably the abode of an anchoret who often meditates upon the mossy stones … A spot … so strangely hemmed in by mis-shapen roots that I could not help thinking I was entering the domain of a wizard’. Beckford was an excitable soul, but he was far from alone. Even so stolid a personality as Dr. Johnson was impressed by what he found at Hawkstone, ‘the awfulness of its shades, the horrors of its precipices … The ideas which it forces upon the mind are the sublime, the dreadful, and the vast. Above is inaccessible altitude, below is horrible profundity’. Benjamin Malkin came to Hafod in 1804 and was shaken by his experience: when he got back to the inn where he was staying with friends, ‘horror was so strongly marked upon my countenance, that my companions, for a few moments, scarcely recollected their brother tourist’.27 In fact Malkin—a good friend of Hafod’s master Thomas Jhones—denied that its scenery was ‘picturesque’ at all, though it might be ‘eccentric and

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wonderful … nothing but rock and water’, while Jhones himself was well aware of the sort of thrills his visitors might be seeking. He wrote to a friend about having installed the ‘swing bridge of chains from Rock to Rock, so do not be surprised if you read in some Tourist of my having caused the death of several by fear or drowning’.28 The entire concept of the Picturesque was too indeterminate to allow consensus; but people knew what they felt at these places, regardless of the terms they used to categorise them. Terrifying though prospects and precipices were, however, we might not be wrong to detect a slight element of camp in visitors’ reactions to Gothic gardens. They knew that they were safe on the Alpine Bridges and in the Hermits’ Caves, traversing the Clefts and plunging into the infernal darkness of stygian Grottos, and there was a distance between their terror and their awareness. Benjamin Malkin’s transfiguration of fear, after all, was produced by nothing more threatening than a waterfall in a cave, some rocky streams, and a couple of follies, and he knew it. Gothic tourists were, in a way, watching themselves being scared. They could happily, and complacently, enjoy these experiences: ‘terror without danger’, stated Dr. Johnson, ‘is only one of the sports of fancy, a voluntary agitation of the mind, that is permitted no longer than it pleases’.29 This was no different from the excitement derived from reading thrilling literature; but while many visitors to these sublime worlds might have disdained reading a Gothic novel, they would still seek out a Gothic landscape without too much embarrassment. Some of the gardens were intended mainly for their designers and their picked guests to enjoy, but at others the visitors sometimes came, and were intended to come, in considerable numbers. Valentine Morris admitted tourists to the Piercefield walks on Tuesdays and Fridays: at other times trippers could take in the site from the river as part of a journey down the Wye from Tintern Abbey. The landscape ‘was created with an almost entrepreneurial eye for tourism’.30 Richard Hill promoted the wonders of Hawkstone in a guide book first distributed locally in 1783; its second edition the following year, as the title page informs us, was also sold in London, and by 1809 it had reached its ninth. Thomas Jhones’ friend George Cumberland first visited the landscape at Hafod in 1784 and in 1796 produced An Attempt to Describe Hafod, complete with a map apparently drawn by William Blake. Jhones’ efforts to promote Hafod as a tourist destination prompted him to seek out William Gilpin: Gilpin’s first edition of Observations on the River Wye and Several Parts of South Wales had failed to mention the Devil’s Bridge, which had long been a stopping point on the itinerary of more adventurous tourists and was now on the edge of the Hafod estate, and Jhones invited him to come and see for himself. Sure enough, when the new version of the guidebook came out in 1789, it included a glowing account of the Bridge and of Hafod itself. In later years, in fact, Jhones could be found complaining about the ignorant behaviour of the visitors he had himself encouraged. Dr. Randolph, the vicar of Banwell and first promoter of the Bone Caves, intended to draw sightseers from Weston-Super-Mare and use the revenue to fund a new school in the

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parish, before Bishop Law turned the Caves into a very different sort of attraction.31 At Banwell, Hawkstone and Hafod alike, visitors were provided with purpose-built accommodation. Richard Hill was first off the mark, erecting the Hawkstone Inn, ‘genteelly fitted out for the reception of the company who resort thither to see the park’; by 1799 it had become ‘the Hawkstone Inn and Hotel ’. Thomas Jhones bought a parcel of land near Devil’s Bridge and at the junction of two turnpike roads in 1790 where a former farmhouse became a lodge for visitors; he enlarged it five years later and renamed it ‘the Hafod Arms’. The building was augmented in 1814 and yet again in 1839 by the Duke of Newcastle, the subsequent owner of the estate. Bishop Law’s cottage for his overnight guests at Banwell, built in 1827, was more modest, but business there justified its expansion in 1833 too.32 Visitors could provide their own souvenirs of a trip to one of the major Gothic landscapes in the form of sketches and paintings, but they might find the efforts of other artists just as good. One of the most reproduced views was the Weeping Rock at Hackfall, painted by Francis Nicholson and engraved by Letitia Byrne in 1809, copies of which regularly come up for sale. Nicholson’s original watercolour is considerably more mild than Byrne’s monochrome engraving whose tiny foreground figures look as though they have broken into a previously unexplored landscape—truly ‘American’ as Thomas Pennant had described it. A generation earlier the landscape artist Anthony Devis had depicted almost exactly the same scene in a painting now held by the Harris Art Gallery in Lancaster. Both views include not just the cascade of the Weeping Rock itself, but also the folly called Fisher’s Hall and the crags of Mowbray Castle in the distance, a composition which reality does not quite replicate.33 There was similar exaggeration in the images produced for Sir James Edward Smith’s A Tour of Hafod, published in 1810 but written in the 1790s: the eight dramatic pictures in the book, which were also sold separately, were engraved by John Stadler based on an earlier set of watercolours by John ‘Warwick’ Smith. In all of them, the rocks are craggier, the bridges ricketier, and the streams more torrential than visitors might actually find.34 The most unusual medium for promoting the great Gothic landscapes was ceramics. In 1774 Catherine the Great of Russia commissioned a dinner service from Wedgwood, specifying that it should depict a variety of English landscape gardens, but leaving what would actually appear up to the company itself; it became known as the ‘Frog Service’ after the device bearing that creature which appeared on each piece. Most of the views were taken from existing topographical works, but landowners were also invited to send in pictures of their own properties to be copied. Various well-known Rococo landscapes were eventually depicted on the Frog Service, including West Wycombe, Stowe, Painshill and the Leasowes, but there were also several views of Hackfall. Before being shipped off to St. Petersburg the service went on display at Wedgwood’s London showrooms, bringing Hackfall to a new audience: adverts for the exhibition appeared in newspapers informing ‘the nobility and gentry’ where they could buy tickets (images of Hackfall also featured on other

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Wedgwood products). The example of the Frog Service was perhaps what inspired Thomas Jhones in 1790 to commission a Derby dinner service entirely devoted to the Hafod walks, which was then presented to Lord Chancellor Thurlow; what Jhones hoped to gain by this gift is far from clear.35 Not all Gothic landscapes were visited by members of the public at large in this way, but they would always have been shown off to friends and acquaintances of their owners, and acquired a fame within those circles, as we have seen at Radway, for instance; Bishop Richard Pococke went to both Radway and Yester.36 The visitors of Downton Gorge were at first limited to the guests of Richard Payne Knight, but later in the nineteenth century—as other Gothic gardens were declining in popularity—groups such as the Herefordshire-based Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club came in some numbers. As far as Portlanders were concerned, John Penn was an irascible and antisocial character, but he also held ‘lavish dinners, déjeuners, parties and other entertainment events’ which gave guests an opportunity to view the grounds of Pennsylvania Castle.37 As an example of how Gothic landscape could work on an individual imagination we could do no better than consider Elizabeth Smith (1776– 1806). Smith not only visited a Gothic garden, she inhabited one—and it, her. Daughter of George Smith who in 1784 purchased Piercefield from the bankrupt Valentine Morris, this intelligent young woman (who was later to be praised by female writers including Harriet Martineau and Hannah More) spent formative years in the Piercefield landscape. She discovered ruins in the parkland and, after consulting William Warrington’s 1786 History of Wales and a local antiquarian, she became convinced that they were the remains of the castle of ‘Buillt’ where the last Prince of Wales, Llewelyn ap Gruffydd, had been killed. Having failed to persuade a friend who she believed more talented than herself to write ‘a poem on his death, and set it in our wood. You must say that it is translated from an old Welsh bard’, Smith took on the task herself. In 1792 the sixteen-year-old produced ‘A supposed translation from a Welsh poem, lately dug up at PIERCEFIELD, in the same spot where Llewellyn ap Gryffyd was slain, 10 December 1281’. Smith had found herself frustrated at the ‘confusion’ of the historical works she’d consulted, and so determined to ‘make history just as I please … and upon that principle, I intend to put the places I have mentioned at or near Piercefield’. The poem begins ‘Round Snowdon’s shaggy brows grim darkness hung’ and before long we have ringing thunder, shaking billows, the spirits of the dead shrieking with woe, and then Merlin predicting that the site will one day be called Piercefield. Smith was a great fan of the Gaelic fake Ossian (‘who I support against all other poets’) and her Piercefield ballad clearly follows the Ossianic model as well as the found-manuscript trope of The Castle of Otranto. She persuaded her father to construct a turreted dwelling on the site of the ruins, called Grove House, where she could go to write, and it is probably due to her influence that ‘Llewellyn’s Bridge’ appears downstream of Piercefield House on Coxe’s

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1801 map of the area. Unfortunately George Smith, too, hit financial difficulties and had to leave Piercefield only two years after Elizabeth had composed her poem; she ended up living near Lake Windermere and succumbing to the sublime possibilities of that landscape, long and strenuous walking probably contributing to her early death.38 Elizabeth Smith’s Gothic imagination was self-aware but still a kind of obsessiveness, and we can glimpse this too in some landscape designers whose personal circumstances affected their approach. There is an element of desperation in Bishop Law’s effort to combat modern science through folly-building and melancholy verse; and Charles Monck’s remodelling of Belsay seems to have been driven by an ‘obsessional neurosis’ arising from a disturbed upbringing and which was eventually focused through his Grecian enthusiasms.39 The garden at Busbridge has its origin in the request of Susannah Lodington, Philip Webb’s wife, that she be buried in a ‘cave in the grounds’ on her death in 1756, eight years after Webb acquired the estate. There wasn’t a cave, so he hollowed one out and laid there to rest not only Susannah but also their two stillborn children. Susannah’s mausoleum became the first of the follies, and Webb would often take visitors to see it. The next owner of Busbridge, General Barker, understandably found this rather creepy and had the bodies moved to the parish church.40 The most personal Gothic landscape of all is one we have not yet mentioned, Bindon Abbey in Dorset. Here, the site of a Cistercian monastery went through an incarnation as a Tudor water garden and then passed into the ownership of the Catholic Weld family in 1641. Although the dwelling house at Bindon had been demolished within a few years, the Welds, in common with many pious landowners in similar situations, felt the ambiguities of occupying what had been monastic land, and continually returned to Bindon in their imaginations, toying with but never quite achieving the restoration of the Abbey ruins. Then between 1793 and 1798 Thomas Weld constructed a Gothick dwelling house and chapel, a gatehouse, and, within an artificial mound in the water gardens, what Timothy Mowl calls ‘the most depressingly dank brick-vaulted garden room in Dorset’—a lightless tunnel ending in three Gothic arched niches. It sits in a bewildering labyrinth of paths amid the canals and sluices, the remains of the Tudor garden. The whole arrangement simultaneously reminded the Welds of the age of faith to which they dreamt of returning and the fact that they, in a manner of speaking, occupied its grave.41 Apart from William Shenstone’s statement that Valentine Morris’s wife Mary Mordaunt had more than a hand in the design of Piercefield,42 the Gothic landscape-makers were all men, but, that aside, little connected them. Several were MPs, but of all shades of politics; Philip Carteret Webb was a Tory Treasury Solicitor who led the prosecution of the radical John Wilkes (‘that dirty wretch’, Horace Walpole called him), and Charles Monck a ‘wayward’ independent who drifted Tory-ward with age, while Richard Payne Knight was considered a dangerous radical in Tory quarters. Richard Hill of Hawkstone was an extremely eccentric Methodist with a bizarre sense of humour

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that was often remarked on; George Law, an Anglican bishop. There were successful landowners and spendthrift bankrupts among them. The only two individuals in direct contact with one another were the cousins, Payne Knight and Thomas Jhones. The great Gothic garden landscapes were in decline by the middle of the nineteenth century, apparently in tandem with the ebbing initial tide of Gothic literature; their offer of tamed and guarded fear had less appeal for a public whose tastes went in different directions. At Banwell, the custodian of the Bone Caves, William Beard, led his last group of visitors around in 1865 at the age of 93, by which date Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was already six years old. Hawkstone’s final burst of glory came in an Illustrated London News report of its heir-apparent’s 21st birthday in 1854; the composition of Piercefield was interrupted by a new road in 1821 which cut the Wyndcliff off from the rest of the walks, and, although locals campaigned successfully to force the tenant to reopen them in 1858, fewer and fewer visitors came to collect the key from the Piercefield Hotel. Again and again, the estates that supported the gardens fell onto hard times, accelerating their decline. The 3rd Viscount Hill, whose birthday drew the Illustrated London News to Hawkstone, was bankrupt in 1894 and the house was sold in 1906. Busbridge Hall was demolished the same year; Piercefield, designed by Sir John Soane, fell into disuse and finally ruin in the 1920s; and Hafod was demolished by the Forestry Commission in 1958 having been empty for eleven years.43 Some gardens maintained a phantom existence over subsequent decades, literally at Busbridge where the story grew up that the ghost of Susannah Webb would rise from the Lower Lake on stormy nights, wailing and holding the bodies of her two dead children. One 1930s guidebook writer went to Hackfall and noted ‘the coo of the wild dove from the leafy gloom sounds like a wail of distress … These shady woods were once frequented by parties of young schoolchildren on holiday trips, but it is now hardly safe for them’.44 Increasing interest in heritage and specifically garden history eventually led to a number of rescue projects. The Woodland Trust acquired Hackfall in 1987 and the Hackfall Trust was formed the following year, receiving in 2007 a £1 M Heritage Lottery grant which has permitted the restoration of a number of follies and features, most recently the great Fountain. The Hawkstone Hotel was acquired by new owners in 1990, who reopened the Park in 1993, a year before the Hafod Trust was inaugurated: there, the latest restoration, in 2016, has been the Gothic Arcade, ruined for decades.45 Mr. and Mrs. Douetil, owners of Busbridge Lakes since the 1960s, have battled to restore the landscape there. What is yet to develop is the recognition that these ‘Gothic gardens’ form a definite category of their own and made a distinct contribution to the formation of the Gothic imagination in Britain.

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Notes 1. R Davenport-Hines, Gothic, Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil & Ruin, 4th Estate: London (1998), chs. 2 & 3. 2. E McEvoy, Gothic Tourism, Palgrave: London (2016); T Stoppard, Arcadia, Faber & Faber: London (1993), 1, 34. I am indebted for this reference to the Revd Dr. Michael Lloyd of Wycliffe Hall. 3. Davenport-Hines op.cit., 17–26, 29. 4. A Ashley Cooper, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions & Times, vol. 2, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue & Merit. The Moralists: A Philosophical Rhapsody (1773 [1709]), 393–4. 5. M Aston, ‘English Ruins and English History: The Dissolution and the Sense of the Past’, Journal of the Warburg & Secker Institute 36 (1973), 231–55; W Gilpin, Observations on Several Parts of England, Particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland … (1786), in M Andrews ed., The Picturesque: Literary Sources & Documents, Helm: Robertsbridge (1994), 325. 6. C Hussey, The Picturesque, GP Putnam: London (1927), 25–7. 7. Ibid., 89–90; J Brome, Travels Over England, Scotland & Wales, London (1700), 32–7, 90–1. 8. www.sandersonmiller.com/architectural-catalogue2.pdf (thesis by William Hawkes), accessed 31.12.2018; www.ourwarwickshire.org. uk/content/catalogue_now/edgehill, accessed 31.12.2018; J Meir, Sanderson Miller and His Landscapes, Phillimore: Chichester (2006), 67–9, 75–9. 9. Andrews, op.cit., 257; M Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque, Scholar Press: Aldershot (1989), 106. 10. B Rolfe-Smith, Downton Gorge: Richard Payne Knight’s Secret Garden, Stonebrook: Ludlow (2016), 23; J Macve, The Hafod Landscape, Hafod Trust: Hafod (2004), 23. 11. JD Hunt, The Picturesque Garden in Europe, Thames & Hudson: London (2004), 84; Rolfe-Smith op.cit., 27, 28, 35, 82–90; Walding Associates, Hawkstone, a Short History & Guide, Hawkstone Park Leisure: Hawkstone (1993), 29; T Rodenhurst (?), Guide to Hawkstone, Shrewsbury (1840), 13. 12. Walding Assocs., op.cit., 30, 32. 13. Rolfe-Smith, 24; Andrews (1989), 106. 14. W Gilpin, Observations … on Mountains and Lakes, Cadell & Davies: London (1808 ed.), ii, 187. 15. http://www.coflein.gov.uk/en/site/23026/details/hafod-uchtrydcavern-cascade, accessed 31.12.2018. 16. T Westcott, The Historic Mansions and Buildings of Philadelphia, Porter & Coates: Philadelphia (1877), 443. 17. R White, Belsay Hall, Castle and Gardens, English Heritage: London (2005), 42.

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18. Meir op.cit., 61. 19. Rodenhurst op.cit., 28, 33, 35; Walding Assocs., op.cit., 36–8. 20. AA Tait, The Landscape Garden in Scotland 1735–1835, Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh (1980), 65; https://canmore. org.uk/site/56062/yester-castle-and-goblin-ha, accessed 31.12.2018; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yester_Castle, accessed 31.12.2018; C McMillan & C Wilson, The Buildings of Scotland: Lothian Except Edinburgh, Penguin: Harmondsworth (1980), 211–5. 21. Westcott, op.cit., 442–3; J Newman & N Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Dorset, Penguin: Harmondsworth (1972), 341– 2; historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1790-1820/member/pennjohn-1760-1834, accessed 31.12.2018; portlandhistory.co.uk/Pennsy lvania-castle.html, accessed 31.12.2018; S Morris, Portland, an Illustrated History, Dovecote: Dorchester (1985), 46–8; Royal Commission on Historic Monuments, An Inventory of the Historic Monuments in Dorset, HMSO: London (1970), ii, 249. 22. Hackfall.org.uk/buildings/Mowbray-castle, accessed 31.12.2018. 23. J Chapman, A Short History of Banwell Bone Caves, Banwell Caves Heritage Group: Cheddar (2007), 6, 14; Macve op.cit., 20; K Murphy, The Piercefield Walks and Associated Picturesque Landscape Features: An Archaeological Survey, Cambria Archaeology: Carmarthen (2005), 13. 24. RP Wright, ‘Discovery of Roman Altars at Busbridge’, Transactions of the Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society, N.S. 75 (1975), 91–5. 25. Chapman op.cit., passim. 26. Gilpin (1808), ii, 194; Andrews (1989), 105; A Ballantyne, Architecture, Landscape and Liberty: Richard Payne Knight & the Picturesque, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge (1997), 276. 27. http://www.hackfall.org.uk/History/william-beckford-1779, accessed 31.12.2018; Walding Assocs. op.cit., 10; Andrews (1989), 150. 28. A Pavord, Landskipping: Painters, Ploughmen and Places, Bloomsbury: London (2016), 81; Hunt op.cit., 83. 29. Hussey op.cit., 112–3. 30. Andrews (1989), 105; Hunt op.cit., 84. 31. Walding Assocs. op.cit., 11–2; Macve op.cit., 24–5; Chapman op.cit., 5. 32. Walding Assocs. op.cit., 15; Macve op.cit., 24–6; Chapman op.cit., 6, 12. 33. https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-weeping-rock-a-waterf all-at-hackfall-near-ripon-west-riding-of-yorkshire-152015, accessed 31.12.2018; http://www.artnet.com/artists/francis-nicholson/hac kfall-near-ripon-yorkshire-_MHBl8CoYp0B65amIHKyIA2, accessed 31.12.2018; Hunt op.cit., 82. 34. Ibid., 86; Macve op.cit., 18, 20, 37, 44. 35. https://thegardenstrustblog.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/wed gwood-frogs-and-a-hedgehog/, accessed 31.12.2018.

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36. C Nettlefold, The Lords of Yester, Pewsey Press: Pewsey (2014), 302–3. 37. Rolfe-Smith op.cit., 29; Morris op.cit., 48. 38. I Waters, Piercefield on the Banks of the Wye, FG Comber: Chepstow (1975), 21; K Garner, Romantic Women Writers and Arthurian Legend, Palgrave Macmillan: London (2017), 78–81; H Bowdler, Fragments of Prose and Verse, Cruttwell: Bath (1809), 20–1; https:// womenshistorynetwork.org/elizabeth-smith-no-ivory-tower/, accessed 31.12.2018. One of the literary figures who endorsed Elizabeth Smith’s genius in a testimonial for Harriet Bowdler’s biography was Dr. Randolph, the vicar of Banwell. 39. R Hewlings, ‘Belsay Hall and the Personality of Charles Monck’, in R White & C Lightburn, Late Georgian Classicism, V&A Museum: London (1988), 23. 40. C Bradburn, P & G Porter, A History of Busbridge Hall, MS in Godalming Museum (2013), 14–5. 41. T Mowl, Historic Gardens of Dorset, Tempus: Stroud (2003), 15–24. 42. I Waters, The Unfortunate Valentine Morris, Chepstow Society: Chepstow (1964), 17. 43. Chapman op.cit., 6, 22; Walding Associates op.cit., 22–3; Waters (1964), 78–9; Macve op.cit., 29–31. 44. Bradburn & Porter op.cit., 40; T Thirkell, Rambles with a Rambler, Harrison & Son: Ripon (1932), 62–3, 65. 45. Hackfall.org.uk/organisations, accessed 27.8.18; Macve, Hafod, 31; Cambrian-news.co.uk/article.cfm?id=110303, accessed 27.8.18.

Bibliography Andrews, M, ed., The Picturesque: Literary Sources & Documents, Helm: Robertsbridge (1994). Andrews, M, The Search for the Picturesque, Scholar Press: Aldershot (1989). Ashley Cooper, A, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions & Times, vol. 2, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue & Merit. The Moralists: A Philosophical Rhapsody (1773 [1709]). Aston, M, ‘English Ruins and English History: The Dissolution and the Sense of the Past’, Journal of the Warburg & Secker Institute 36 (1973). Ballantyne, A, Architecture, Landscape and Liberty: Richard Payne Knight & the Picturesque, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge (1997). Bowdler, H, Fragments of Prose and Verse, Cruttwell: Bath (1809). Bradburn, C, Porter, P & Porter, G, A History of Busbridge Hall, MS in Godalming Museum (2013). Brome, J, Travels Over England, Scotland & Wales, London (1700). Chapman, J, A Short History of Banwell Bone Caves, Banwell Caves Heritage Group: Cheddar (2007). Davenport-Hines, R, Gothic, Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil & Ruin, 4th Estate: London (1998).

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Garner, K, Romantic Women Writers and Arthurian Legend, Palgrave Macmillan: London (2017). Gilpin, W, Observations … on Mountains and Lakes, Cadell & Davies: London (1808 ed.). Hewlings, R, ‘Belsay Hall and the Personality of Charles Monck’, in R White & C Lightburn, Late Georgian Classicism, V&A Museum: London (1988). Hunt, JD, The Picturesque Garden in Europe, Thames & Hudson: London (2004). Hussey, C, The Picturesque, GP Putnam: London (1927). Macve, J, The Hafod Landscape, Hafod Trust: Hafod (2004). McEvoy, E, Gothic Tourism, Palgrave: London (2016). McMillan, C, & Wilson, C, The Buildings of Scotland: Lothian Except Edinburgh, Penguin: Harmondsworth (1980). Meir, J, Sanderson Miller and His Landscapes, Phillimore: Chichester (2006). Morris, S, Portland, an Illustrated History, Dovecote: Dorchester (1985). Mowl, T, Historic Gardens of Dorset, Tempus: Stroud (2003). Murphy, K, The Piercefield Walks and Associated Picturesque Landscape Features: An Archaeological Survey, Cambria Archaeology: Carmarthen (2005). Nettlefold, C, The Lords of Yester, Pewsey Press: Pewsey (2014). Newman, J, & Pevsner, N, The Buildings of England: Dorset, Penguin: Harmondsworth (1972). Pavord, A, Landskipping: Painters, Ploughmen and Places, Bloomsbury: London (2016). Rodenhurst, T (?), Guide to Hawkstone, Shrewsbury (1840). Rolfe-Smith, B, Downton Gorge: Richard Payne Knight’s Secret Garden, Stonebrook: Ludlow (2016). Royal Commission on Historic Monuments, An Inventory of the Historic Monuments in Dorset, HMSO: London (1970). Stoppard, T, Arcadia, Faber & Faber: London (1993). Tait, AA, The Landscape Garden in Scotland 1735–1835, Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh (1980). Thirkell, T, Rambles with a Rambler, Harrison & Son: Ripon (1932). Walding Associates, Hawkstone, a Short History & Guide, Hawkstone Park Leisure: Hawkstone (1993). Waters, I, Piercefield on the Banks of the Wye, FG Comber: Chepstow (1975). Waters, I, The Unfortunate Valentine Morris, Chepstow Society: Chepstow (1964). Westcott, T, The Historic Mansions and Buildings of Philadelphia, Porter & Coates: Philadelphia (1877). White, R, Belsay Hall, Castle and Gardens, English Heritage: London (2005). Wright, RP, ‘Discovery of Roman Altars at Busbridge’, Transactions of the Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society, N.S. 75 (1975).

Metaphor and Revivalist Architecture at Strawberry Hill Peter N. Lindfield and Dale Townshend

In a lengthy letter that he wrote to Sir Horace Mann (1706–86) on Tuesday 12 June 1753, Horace Walpole (1717–97) took up the challenge of communicating in detail to his absent friend, a long-time resident of Florence, the exciting architectural developments that were afoot at his home at Strawberry Hill, Twickenham. ‘I could not rest any longer with the thought of your having no idea of a place of which you hear so much’, the letter hurriedly begins, ‘and therefore desired Mr Bentley to draw you as much idea of it, as the post would be persuaded to carry from Twickenham to Florence’.1 As its opening lines suggest, Walpole’s letter is self-consciously fashioned around an extended conceit, one that figures Strawberry Hill, its visual representation and his linguistic account thereof as structures and gestures that are wholly dependent upon paper, from the description of his house to his distant correspondent in the pages of the letter, through his frank disclosure of the role that paper played in its construction and decoration, to his enclosing in the letter Richard Bentley’s now-lost ‘enchanted little landscape’ of the house as viewed from the south side towards the north-east. Of course, Richard Bentley’s drawing of the exteriors of Strawberry Hill could never possibly have

P. N. Lindfield (B) · D. Townshend Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] D. Townshend e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_18

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afforded Mann a glimpse of the villa’s rooms, and registering the limitations of two-dimensional visual representation as an immersive mode, Walpole invites his correspondent to join him in a virtual tour of the property’s interiors, engaging his imagination through the vivid and detailed description that comprises the body of the letter. As Walpole sets about describing its rooms, so further references to paper, its uses and its limitations in the construction and adornment of Strawberry Hill proliferate. The Little Parlour, he writes, ‘is hung with a stone-colour Gothic paper and Jackson’s Venetian prints’, the latter a reference to the renowned eighteenth-century printmaker John Baptist Jackson (born c.1700; died in or after 1773) and the elaborate wallpaper designs that he printed from wood-blocks.2 ‘Imagine the walls covered with (I call it paper, but it is really paper printed in perspective to represent) Gothic fretwork’, he playfully exhorts Mann as he describes the Hall into which claims imaginatively to be leading him, thus foregrounding on the paper of the letter the further role that paper plays in generating the illusion that Mann and other visitors alike have, indeed, entered into an ancient Gothic castle. The Yellow Bedchamber, he continues, is ‘hung with yellow paper and prints, framed in a new manner invented by Lord Cardigan, that is, with black and white borders printed’, while Mr Chute’s bedchamber (or the Red Bedchamber) is ‘hung with red in the same manner’.3 For its part, the ‘charming closet’ from which Walpole currently writes—a room more familiarly known as the China or Green Closet—is ‘hung with green paper and water colour pictures’.4 And so the letter continues, repeatedly drawing attention to the role that paper plays in the construction, decoration and ‘transmission’ of Strawberry Hill, including ‘the room where we always live’ (or the Breakfast Room) that is ‘hung with a blue and white paper in stripes adorned with festoons’, and the ‘cool little hall’ (or Waiting Room) that is ‘hung with paper to imitate Dutch tiles’.5 Just as the simple present tense in which Walpole writes is intended to furnish Mann with a sense of imaginative transport and immediacy, so paper, these details repeatedly confirm, was crucial to the larger Gothic architectural illusions that Walpole at Strawberry Hill was seeking to stage. It was also the material out of which much of the house’s contents was constituted, including, at the time of Walpole’s letter in 1753 and prior to the completion of the Library, ‘two presses with books of heraldry and antiquities, Madame Sévigné’s letters, and any French Books that relate to her and her acquaintance’.6 So animated is Walpole’s description that he soon runs out of space on the page on which he is writing: ‘I begin a new sheet to you’, he abruptly breaks off, ‘for I have no more of the same paper here’.7 Fallible though paper is, Walpole still maintains the fantasy that he might fold up those parts of the ‘small’ and ‘diminutive’ Strawberry Hill that his already long letter has not been able to describe and dispatch them to Mann abroad—‘only’, he humorously quips, ‘that I should have nowhere to live till the return of the post’.8 Still, he remains surprised by his own loquaciousness, and drawing attention again to the epistolary mode in which he now communicates, Walpole ends the

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Fig. 1 J.H. Müntz, East view of Strawberry Hill near Twickenham in Middlesex, 1758. SH Views M92 no. 5 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT)

missive with a modest yet self-congratulatory remark: ‘Adieu! my dear Child; I think this is a very tolerable letter for summer!’.9 This is by no means the only reference to Strawberry Hill (Fig. 1) as a ‘paper house’ across Walpole’s extensive correspondence, and nor is it a metaphor that has entirely escaped scholarly attention. Anna Chalcraft’s A Paper House: Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill (1998), for instance, has explored the importance of paper at Walpole’s villa, including the use of papier-mâché in aspects of its construction, and the role that Walpole’s ‘papers’—his letters, his fictions, and the two editions of his A Description of the Villa of Mr Horace Walpole, Youngest Son of Sir Robert Walpole Earl of Orford, at Strawberry Hill, Near Twickenham, Middlesex (1774, 1784)—played in publicising and, indeed, linguistically ‘constructing’ the house as a ‘little Gothic castle’.10 More recently, Ruth Mack has appropriated Walpole’s metaphor as a means of accounting for Strawberry Hill’s rich visual afterlife, most particularly in the form of the extra-illustrated copies of the second edition of A Description of the Villa of Mr Horace Walpole (1784).11 Nonetheless, it is our contention in this chapter that the implications of Walpole’s enduring sense of Strawberry Hill as a ‘paper fabric’ have not been fully explored and appreciated. In addition to tracing other instances of the metaphor throughout Walpole’s oeuvre, we also attempt here to subject it to critical pressure and interrogation, extracting

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from it what it reveals about Walpole’s practices, desires, ambitions and even fears in the design and construction of his extraordinary Gothic Revival house. In May 1747, Walpole leased Chopp’d-Straw Hall, Twickenham, from Mrs Elizabeth Chenevix (died 1755) of Charing Cross, London, for a period of seven years, but a year later he purchased the property outright as the basis for his country villa and summer retreat.12 In itself, the fashionable Thamesside suburb of Twickenham held considerable appeal for an eighteenth-century man of social, literary and political ambitions such as Walpole. As he would later record in his light-hearted poem The Parish Register of Twickenham (c.1758), the area had long been associated with an illustrious group of writers, scientists and statesmen, among them the redoubtable wit and man of letters Alexander Pope (1688–1744); the Tory politician Henry St John (1678–1751), first Viscount Bolingbroke; John Fielding (1721–80), the social reformer and half-brother of the better-known novelist Henry (1707–54); the sixteenth-century philosopher, politician and scientist Francis Bacon (1561– 1626); and the seventeenth-century royalist politician and historiographer Edward Hyde (1609–74), first Earl of Clarendon.13 As Martin Postle puts it, Twickenham and nearby Richmond in the mid-to-late eighteenth century constituted a ‘modern Arcadia’ of sorts, the home of several illustrious artists, writers, engravers and topographers, many of whom took to recording and illustrating the area in topographical drawings and illustrations.14 Described in Walpole’s poem as ‘the Muse’s favourite seat’ and ‘the Grace’s lov’d retreat’, Twickenham was the geographical realisation of many of Walpole’s social and literary aspirations, its appeal as much historical, literary and textual as it was geographical.15 More immediately, Chopp’d-Straw Hall itself had been home to a succession of distinguished inhabitants, including the actor and Poet Laureate Colley Cibber (1671–1757); William Talbot (1659–1730), a one-time Bishop of Durham; James Brydges (1674–1744), first Duke of Chandos; and the fashionable Mrs Chenevix, owner of a chic London toy shop, herself.16 Having this as one of his addresses, Walpole found himself in particularly good company; subsequently, he would commemorate Strawberry Hill’s earlier tenants by designing a chimneypiece for the China Room that displayed the coats of arms of ‘Talbot, Bridges, Sackville, and Walpole, the principal persons who have inhabited Strawberry-hill’.17 From the moment at which he took the lease on the property, paper would be crucial to Walpole’s sense of the place, for as he wrote to Henry Seymour Conway (1719–95) in early June of 1747, the house was a paper cut-out, bauble or trinket akin to the other wares sold in Mrs Chenevix’s toy shop: ‘It is a little play-thing house that I got out of Mrs Chenevix’s shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw’.18 Over the next two-and-a-half decades and more, the modest collection of asymmetric seventeenth-century tenements that comprised the original building was transformed through ‘great additions and improvements’ in the Gothic style and eventually renamed as ‘Strawberry Hill’, a name that Walpole, in the fashion of a document-obsessed antiquary, claimed to have uncovered in the original title-deeds for the property.19 In a drawing that he inserted into

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Fig. 2 Horace Walpole, Front of Strawberry Hill to the Garden as it was in 1747, before it was altered, and as altered. 49 2523, f. 121,11 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT)

his copy of the 1774 edition of A Description, Walpole records the house’s transformation from three distinct tenements into a coherent, Gothic structure on its south (garden) façade (Fig. 2).20 As articulated by this drawing, his motives for what he termed his ‘Gothicizing’ architectural endeavours were as much sentimental as they were aesthetic: Strawberry Hill, as he wrote to George Montagu (c.1713–80) in 1753, was to be conceived as the ‘castle [I am building] of my ancestors’,21 the site of noble familial and genealogical origins that, ever since Houghton Hall, his father’s Palladian-style home in Norfolk, had passed into the ownership of his eldest brother, Horace thought to be lacking.22 The gesture was thus as much one of ancestral myth-making as it was an experiment in stylistic architectural remodelling and rebuilding. Walpole’s decision to remodel Chopp’d-Straw Hall in the Gothic rather than the then-fashionable Palladian style, however, did require some justification. In a letter to George Montagu on 28 September 1749, he wrote the following: Did I tell you that I have found a text in Deuteronomy, to authorize my future battlements? When thou buildest a new house, then shalt though make a battlement for thy roof, that thou bring not blood upon thy house, if any man fall from thence.23

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There is, of course, something playful in these lines, not least of all their preempting of Walpole’s equally ironic reliance upon biblical precedent in the Preface to the first edition of The Castle of Otranto (published late 1764; dated 1765): ‘I could wish [the author] had grounded his plan on a more useful moral than this’, Walpole in the guise of William Marshal, the editor and ‘translator’ of the piece, claims, ‘that the sins of fathers are visited on their children to the third and fourth generation’.24 Nonetheless, the levity of Walpole’s earlier letter to Montagu belies a deeper purpose: divine textual and biblical ‘authorisation’ was, in some senses, necessary in order to legitimise his working in what the eighteenth century almost routinely maligned as the tasteless and barbaric Gothic style. Of such stylistic biases, Walpole was poignantly aware. Writing to Mann on 27 April 1753, he recorded the deep sense of satisfaction to be derived from ‘imprinting the gloomth of abbeys and cathedrals on one’s house’, even if this amounted to an exercise in ‘venerable barbarism’.25 A compound of the words ‘gloom’ and ‘warmth’, ‘gloomth’ encapsulated well the paradoxical coupling of familiarity and strangeness that Walpole discovered at the heart of the Gothic style: as the oxymoronic ‘venerable barbarism’ suggests, Gothic architecture, even for one of its most enthusiastic champions in the period, was a complex amalgamation of the ancient and the shameful, the noble and the uncivilised. Indeed, a fuller consideration of what eighteenth-century commentators on Gothic architecture routinely described as its ‘barbarous’ qualities provides some insight into the sheer magnitude of the aesthetic risks that Walpole was taking in his architectural ventures at Strawberry Hill. Though loosely defined as a style and aesthetic concept in the eighteenth century, ‘Gothic’ as a term, even for its most ardent supporters, could not escape associations with the ‘dark’ ages of medieval Catholicism, nor, as troublingly, with the acts of architectural demolition and lawless rebuilding that ensued in the wake of the Gothic tribe’s sacking of Rome in the fifth century.26 In his posthumously published memoir Parentalia (1750), Sir Christopher Wren (1632–1723) echoed the views of John Evelyn (1620–1706) when he dismissed the Gothic as an oppressive conglomeration of ‘monkish Piles’,27 uncouth buildings, he claimed, that were altogether inferior in form, ornament and structure to the order and symmetry of the Classical architecture of ancient Greece and Rome: The ancient Greek and Roman Architecture answer all the Perfections required in a faultless and accomplished Building; such as for so many Ages were so renowned and reputed by the universal Suffrages of the Civilized World, and would doubtless have still subsisted, and made good their Claim, and what is recorded of them; had not the Goths, Vandals, and other barbarous Nations, subverted and demolished them, together with that glorious Empire where those stately and pompous Monuments stood; introducing in their stead, a certain fantastical and licentious Manner of Building, which we have since called Modern or Gothick. Congestions of heavy, dark, melancholy, and monkish Piles, without any just Proportion, Use of Beauty, compared with the truly ancient.28

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Similarly, the arch Classical architect Isaac Ware (1704–66) in his A Complete Body of Architecture (1756) defined Gothic as a ‘wild and irregular manner of building’ that had usurped the place of ‘the regular antique method’ of architecture at a time when ‘it was in a state of decline’; ‘The Gothick’, he continued, ought to be ‘distinguished from the antique architecture [of Greece and Rome]’ by ‘its ornaments being whimsical, and its profiles incorrect’.29 Alexander Gerard (1728–95), the Church of Scotland minister, philosopher and author of the influential aesthetic treatise An Essay on Taste (1759), went so far as to claim that those who approved of, and appreciated, the Gothic architectural style lacked all sense of taste and intellectual sophistication: The profusion of ornament, bestowed on the parts, in Gothic structures, may please one who has not acquired enlargement of mind, sufficient for conceiving at one view their relation to the whole; but no sooner is this acquired, than he perceives superior elegance in the more simple symmetry and proportion of Grecian architecture.30

Based upon a seemingly unbreachable distinction between the Classical and the Gothic, much eighteenth-century aesthetic theory routinely denounced the latter in favour of the former, privileging Classicism as the exemplum of legitimate taste and good moral and aesthetic judgement. It is little wonder, then, that Walpole resorted to scriptural and textual precedent in attempting to justify his use of the Gothic at Strawberry Hill. As always, though, he remained keen to stress the suitability of ancient Gothic architecture to the ends of modern domestic living, tellingly confessing in the Preface to the second edition of his Description (1784) that, ‘In truth, I did not mean to make my house so Gothic as to exclude convenience, and modern refinements in luxury. The designs of the inside and outside are strictly ancient, but the decorations are modern’.31 Both inside and out, Strawberry Hill was certainly Gothic, but it made several concessions to polite Georgian taste and comfort too (Fig. 3). Conversely, however, Gothic could also serve, for some, as a symbolic representation of Gothic liberty, a powerful aspect of the eighteenth-century ‘myth’ of Gothic origins that became particularly important to Whig politicians in Britain from around the time of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 onwards. Such an interweaving of Whig political ideology and the Gothic architectural style was perhaps most directly articulated in the design and construction of the Temple of Liberty in the gardens of Stowe, Buckinghamshire (Fig. 4). The building’s entry in The Beauties of Stow (1750) by George Bickham (1683/84–1758) clearly indicates how what was often myopically taken to be the ‘native’ English style could be appropriated for nationalistic political agendas:

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Fig. 3 John Carter, The Great North Bedchamber. 33 30 Copy 11 Folio, f. 204 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT)

We Come to a Gothic building, call’d The TEMPLE of LIBERTY. Librati Majorum. To the Liberty of our Ancestors. It is in Imitation of a large antique Building […] It is impossible to make a better Imitation of the antient Taste of Architecture. This is a Kind of Castle, several stories high which command the whole Garden.32

By the same token, however, High Church Tory antiquaries such as John Carter (1748–1817) would nostalgically appropriate the Gothic style as the quasi-sacred, relic-like testament to a faded, golden age of English culture and politics.33 Though he was born into a prominent Whig family—his father Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745) was a Whig statesman, Britain’s first and still the longest-serving British Prime Minister today—Horace Walpole’s interests in the Gothic, it is fair to say, were more aesthetic than political, and only indirectly aligned themselves with the emphasis upon the aesthetic and political liberties of the Gothic as they had been celebrated by earlier Whig aestheticians such as William Temple, John Dennis and Anthony Ashley Cooper,

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Fig. 4 James Gibbs, The Temple of Liberty, Stowe, Buckinghamshire. 1741 (© Peter N. Lindfield)

third Earl of Shaftesbury. Similarly, he deliberately sought to court all of the style’s Catholic associations without ever wishing to import its attendant theological significance: as he famously put it in a letter to Mann in 1759, the Cabinet or Tribune at Strawberry Hill was to have about it ‘all the air of a Catholic chapel—bar consecration!’34 However, despite the positive political meanings, both liberal and conservative, that it assumed in a few particular instances, Gothic as an architectural aesthetic was overwhelmingly the subject of criticism and aesthetic censure in the eighteenth century, a cultural tide of vitriol against which its advocates were often forced defensively to react. Accordingly, Classical design principles dominated architectural practices of the Georgian period35 ; while architects such as William Kent (c.1686–1748), Robert Adam (1728–92), and James Wyatt (1746–1813) certainly undertook Gothic work, these commissions were dwarfed by the sheer volume of their Classical buildings and interiors.36 Despite the criticism aimed at medieval architecture and its ‘modern’ revival, Walpole by 1762 optimistically believed that this prejudice had begun to recede, sanguinely observing that ‘the term Gothic Architecture, inflicted as a reproach on our ancient building in general by our ancestors who revived the Grecian taste, is now considered but as a species of modern elegance, by those who wish to distinguish the Saxon style from it’.37 There is certainly some merit in this observation, and a reflection, perhaps, of the impact of the work of contemporary antiquaries such as Thomas Gray, Thomas Percy, Thomas

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Warton and Richard Hurd, all of whom had variously sought to reassess the art, literature and architecture of the Gothic past on its own, non-Classical terms. However, recent scholarship has shown that, though they were certainly incorporated into mainstream fashion and promoted by prominent designers such as Thomas Chippendale (1718–79) in his pattern book, The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director (1754, 1755, 1762), Gothic motifs were, for the most part, restricted to furniture design, and did not inform many major Gothic buildings at this time.38 Though by no means entirely unique in the eighteenth century, Walpole’s decision to create at Strawberry Hill a villa that was Gothic both in its interior furnishings and in its external elevations was, at the very least, highly irregular.39 Indeed, it is fair to say that, despite its modern conveniences, such as a pair of serpentine-backed sofas in the Parlour and Classical objects in the Gallery and Tribune, Strawberry Hill was one of the most thoroughly Gothic houses in the mid-Georgian period, its interiors and exteriors frequently captured and recorded on paper in the numerous sketches, paintings and illustrations that Walpole commissioned. One of the primary reasons for the predominance of the Gothic at Strawberry Hill was Walpole’s sustained interest in the associative powers of the style, that is, its ability to provoke in those who perceived it vivid and complex chains of imaginative reverie, architecture-inspired mental equivalents to the period’s renewed interest in the imaginative richness of ancient ‘Gothic’ romance. In the first volume of his Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762), Walpole directly confronted the views of Joseph Addison (1672–1719), William Chambers (1722–96), Alexander Gerard and other eighteenth-century theorists of architectural association in order to argue that, contrary to their claims to the imaginative superiority of Classical forms over the Gothic, it was the Gothic that bore far greater imaginative and associative potential: It is difficult for the noblest Grecian temple to convey half so many impressions to the mind, as a cathedral does to the best Gothic taste—a proof of skill in the architects and of address in the priests who erected them. The latter exhausted their knowledge of the passions in composing edifices whose pomp, mechanism, vaults, tombs, painted windows, gloom and perspectives infused such sensations of romantic devotion; and they were happy in finding artists capable of executing such machinery. One must have taste to be sensible of the beauties of Grecian architecture; one only wants passions to feel Gothic.40

The strong imaginative power that the relics of Gothic antiquity held over Walpole is consistently attested to in his two ‘Gothic’ literary productions, The Castle of Otranto (1764), which was subtitled ‘A Gothic Story’ in its second edition of 1765, and his Gothic tragedy The Mysterious Mother (1768); throughout his letters and journals; in his literary, antiquarian and historical publications; as well as in a number of manuscript sources. Most significantly, perhaps, the appeal that Gothic architecture held for Walpole is demonstrated

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Fig. 5 John Carter, The Library at Strawberry Hill. 49 3582. f. 74 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT)

by the phases of building and remodelling through which Strawberry Hill passed, from the initial 1747/48 restructuring of its tenement fabric through to such late additions as the Beauclerk Closet of 1774.41 Between 1747/48 and 1774 Walpole and group of male friends and designers—including Richard Bentley (c.1708–82), who was dismissed ultimately for being unreliable and producing overtly whimsical designs; John Chute (1701–76), Walpole’s so-called ‘oracle of taste’42 ; and a number of workmen—transformed the modest Chopp’d-Straw Hall into the renowned Georgian Gothic dwelling that, thanks to its ongoing restoration since 2004, it is today.43 Paper, the material on which the group’s numerous executed and unexecuted drawings and designs were generated, was central to this process. The house’s initial Gothic form, recorded in a 1758 water colour by Johann Heinrich Müntz (1727–98), was an agglomeration of embattled bays, towers, oriels and a crow-step gable punctuated by ornate, ogee-headed fenestrations and quatrefoils (see Fig. 1).44 This phase of its construction included the creation of several important rooms, including the Parlour; the Library (Fig. 5); the Staircase Hall; the Breakfast Room; and a selection of bedrooms. In 1760, Walpole’s villa expanded dramatically westward (Fig. 6) to include the Cloister; the Gallery; the Tribune; the Great North Bedchamber; and the Round Room (originally the State Bedchamber). Chute’s design for the

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Fig. 6 Paul Sandby, Strawberry Hill. c.1769. SH Views Sa5 no. 2 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT)

Gallery and Cloisters projecting west from the earlier fabric demonstrates a distinct change in the building’s form and ornament, notable for its reduced emphasis upon the curvilinear ornament that dominated Bentley’s work.45 This change from overtly curvilinear, ogee-Gothic—that is, Gothic arches formed at the point of intersection of two S-shaped curves—to a more sober, collegiate style reflects a shift in the house’s design cues and the printed ‘paper sources’ employed as guides to its interior fixtures and fittings (Fig. 7). It is here, indeed, that paper in the form so many carefully selected antiquarian prints, topographies and elevations played a particularly determining role. As was congruent with his interest in medieval architecture, Walpole had accumulated several antiquarian treatises on the subject, including John Dart’s Westmonasterium; or, the History and Antiquities of the Abbey Church of St Peters Westminster (1723), and William Dugdale’s The History of St Paul’s Cathedral in London (1658); despite later elsewhere denouncing the early Gothic-revivalist architecture of Batty Langley (c.1696–1751), he also subscribed to Langley’s Ancient Architecture: Restored and Improved (1741– 42), as well as to John Vardy’s Some Designs of Mr Inigo Jones & Mr W m Kent (1744).46 These latter two volumes had a direct influence upon his work at Strawberry Hill. William Robinson (c.1720–75) designed the Breakfast Room’s chimneypiece in direct imitation of Plate 36 in Vardy’s Some Designs, save the introduction of ogee-quatrefoils in the entablature and the

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Fig. 7 John Chute, Design for the Gallery & Round Tower at Strawberry-Hill. c.1759. 49 3490 Folio, f. 17 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT)

Walpole Saracen’s head family crest beneath the central ogee arch, while John Chute’s drawing of the first, eastern portion of the house is found on the rear fly-leaf of Langley’s Ancient Architecture.47 Paper sources were crucial to other aspects of the building, too. For the villa’s Staircase Hall, Walpole had the wallpaper made in imitation of the screen of Prince Arthur’s tomb in Winchester Cathedral as depicted in Francis Sandford’s A Genealogical History of The Kings of England (1677) (Figs. 8 and 9).48 The Library’s presses, after two rejected proposals by Richard Bentley, were fashioned by John Chute with ‘with no variations from the little doorcase of [Old] St Paul’s [Cathedral] but widening the larger arches’ (Figs. 10 and 11).49 Old St. Paul’s Cathedral similarly informed the Round Room’s blind tracery ceiling, while its chimneypiece was based upon the shrine of St Edward the Confessor at Westminster Abbey.50 On occasion, however, the designs recorded in these prints and records had to be supplemented by professional architectural expertise. Referring to the genesis of the chimneypiece in September 1768, Walpole explained how his ‘antiquarian’ attempt to reproduce the shrine on a domestic scale for the State Bedchamber had failed, and that he had instead resorted to enlisting the help of the fashionable neoclassical architect, Robert Adam, to complete it:

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Fig. 8 Screen of Prince Arthur’s tomb in Winchester Cathedral, in Francis Sandford, A Genealogical History of The Kings of England (1677), p. 447. Quarto 49 581 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT)

For this year past I have been projecting a chimney in imitation of the tomb of Edward the Confessor, and had partly given it up, on finding how enormously expensive it would be. Mr Adam had drawn me a design a little in that style, prettier it is true, and at half the price. I had actually agreed to have it executed in scagliola, but have just heard that the man complained he could not perform his compact for the money settled.51

The sources for the Round Room’s decoration similarly derived from paper sources in Walpole’s extensive collection of books and prints, although the chimneypiece only loosely relates to its purported origins in the shrine of Edward the Confessor at Westminster.52 A series of four 1766–67 drawings by Adam for the chimneypiece indicate how he transformed the Cosmati surface decoration and form of the pedestal at the final design.53 Chimneypieces throughout the house likewise repurposed published images of tombs, such as that of Thomas Ruthall, Bishop of Durham, in Westminster Abbey for the Little Parlour; Archbishop Warham at Canterbury Cathedral for the Holbein Chamber (Figs. 12 and 13); John of Eltham, Earl of Cornwall, in Westminster Abbey, for the Library (Figs. 14 and 15); and William Dudley,

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Fig. 9 John Carter, View in Red Hall, at Strawberry Hill. 33 30 Copy 11 Folio, f. 24 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT)

Fig. 10 John Chute, Design for the Library Presses at Strawberry Hill. 1753. 49 3490 Folio, f. 5 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT)

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Fig. 11 Wenceslaus Hollar, Detail of the Screen at Old St Paul’s Cathedral, London, in William Dugdale, The History of St Paul’s Cathedral in London (1658), p. 168. DA687 S14 D8 1658 + Oversize. Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art

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Fig. 12 Chimney Piece of the Holbein Chamber at Strawberry Hill, in Horace Walpole, A Description of the Villa of Mr Horace Walpole (1784). 49 3582 Folio (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT)

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Fig. 13 Tomb of Archbishop Warham, in John Dart, The History and Antiquities of the Cathedral Church of Canterbury (1726). From 49 3582, f. 201 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT)

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Fig. 14 Tomb of John of Eltham, Earl of Cornwall, in John Dart Westmonasterium. Or the History and Antiquities of the Abbey Church of St. Peters Westminster (1723), p. 106. Folio 646 742 D25 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT)

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Fig. 15 Richard Bentley, Library Chimneypiece at Strawberry Hill. 1754 (© Peter N. Lindfield)

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Bishop of Durham, in Westminster Abbey, for the Great North Bedchamber. If these sources suggest that Strawberry Hill was fashioned more as an abbey, cathedral or monastery than a castle or crenelated fortification, it is important to remember that Walpole at his villa aimed at a fusion of both Gothic varieties. As he put it in a letter to Mann in 1759, the house was both castle and abbey, fortified and ecclesiastical in design: ‘I […] am going to make great additions to my castle; a gallery, a round tower, and a cabinet, that is to have all the air of a Catholic chapel—bar consecration!’54 In the end, however, creative and imaginative architectural reconstruction seemed to prevail over a strict fidelity to antiquarian sources, and writing to Mary Berry (1763–1852) about his house’s rooms and fixtures in October 1794, the aged Walpole famously conceded that ‘every true Goth must perceive that they are more the works of fancy than of imitation’.55 Though prints, both of modern or ‘revivalist’ Georgian Gothic fabrications and genuine medieval architecture, were essential to Strawberry Hill’s design and evolution, they were not, as the above account suggests, unwaveringly useful or helpful. A reliance upon paper, in other words, brought with its own perils. Writing about the chimneypiece and windows in the Breakfast Room, for example, Walpole opined that they were ‘not truly gothic, but designed by Mr. W. Robinson of the Board of Works, before there was any design of any farther improvements to the house’.56 The examples offered by some antiquarian prints even led to some egregious architectural errors. The Staircase Hall’s Gothic wallpaper was found wanting when Walpole visited Winchester Cathedral and inspected Prince Arthur’s tomb first hand: ‘Prince Arthur’s tomb, from whence we took the paper for the hall and staircase, to my great surprise, is on a less scale than the paper and is not of brass but stone, and that wretchedly whitewashed’.57 Walpole’s print of John of Eltham’s tomb canopy was also misread by the Strawberry Committee when it was transformed into the Library chimneypiece: the transverse gables on the tomb’s central canopy were pivoted ninety degrees and rendered parallel to the wall. This representation of the transverse gables creates uncomfortable canted triangular projections on either side of the main gable, fixtures that seem more akin to sheered pinnacles than the actual forms depicted in the plate. Such inconsistencies, albeit not in relation to the Library chimneypiece, led Walpole subsequently to criticise much of the house’s early construction in an appropriately paper-based idiom: ‘neither Mr. Bentley nor my workmen’, he wrote towards the end of his life, ‘has studied the science [of Gothic], and […] My house therefore is but a sketch by beginners’.58 Despite these antiquarian ‘failures’, the reliance upon engraved views of medieval fabrics was ultimately based upon sound reasoning: Walpole and his designers would have had to make numerous visits to churches and cathedrals throughout England in order to acquire their source material; paper prints, by contrast, brought the sources directly to them and facilitated easy copying and comparison between different design cues. Prints also played an important preservationist role, and were crucial to the recording of Gothic buildings and monuments that no

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longer existed, such as Old St. Paul’s Cathedral, destroyed almost entirely in the 1666 Great Fire of London. As Walpole put it in the Preface to his 1784 Description, ‘the general disuse of Gothic architecture, and the decay and alterations so frequently made in churches, give prints a chance of being the sole preservatives of that style’.59 Its ‘foundations’ thus lying in the printed engravings of antiquarian elevations and topographies of neglected, ruined or no longer extant Gothic castles, abbeys, cathedrals and monasteries, Strawberry Hill remained, for Walpole, a house of paper, and this well beyond the conceit that he employed in the letter to Mann in 1753. References to what the 1784 edition of the Description referred to as a ‘paper fabric’ became ever more pronounced in Walpole’s letters as the Gothicizing of Strawberry Hill progressed. ‘My buildings are paper, like my writings’, he observed in 1771, ‘and both will be blown away in ten years after I am dead’.60 He gave expression to a similarly poignant vision of the eventual obliteration of his person, his legacy and his ‘paper house’ in a letter to Anne Fitzpatrick (1737/38–1804), Countess of Upper Ossory, in August 1778, writing that ‘my castle is of paper, and my castle and my attachment and I shall soon vanish and be forgotten altogether!’61 Though paper was crucial to the building’s design and construction, it was also, by nature, impermanent and ephemeral, and lacking in the endurance that Walpole admired in the venerable masonry of Netley Abbey, Hampshire, and at several other Gothic ruins around the country. Accordingly, references to the impermanence of paper proliferate throughout his writings, often resulting in the moving articulation of Walpole’s fears concerning his own death and the complete obliteration of his literary and architectural legacy from memory. In 1754, when the Gothicizing of Strawberry Hill was well underway, Walpole was asked whether he intended to ‘entail’ or bequeath his villa to his family, he responded with the verse ‘The Entail, A Fable’. A butterfly lands on the ‘rich bosom’ of a rose in this short poem and presumes to make of this a splendid ‘palace’ or ‘castle’: The palace pleas’d the lordly guest: What insect own’d a prouder nest? The dewy leaves luxurious shed Their balmy odours o’er his head, And with their silken tapestry fold, His limbs, enthron’d on central gold; He thinks the thorns embattled round To guard his castle’s lovely mound, And all the bush’s wild domain Subservient to his fancied reign.62

Even as the haughty butterfly confidently reflects on the security of his embowered existence, so he begins to entertain ominous presentiments of impermanence and change:

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Yet in his mind’s capacious eye He roll’d the change of mortal things, The common fate of flies and Kings. With grief he saw how lands and honours Are apt to slide to various owners; Where Mowbrays dwelt, how grocers dwell, And how cits buy what barons sell.

His response to such intimations of transience is one of urgent defence: ‘“If law can rivet down entails, / These manors ne’er shall pass to snails, / I swear’—and then he smote his ermin— / ‘These towers were never built for vermin”’. The butterfly has no sooner uttered this wish for permanence, though, than a caterpillar approaches the rose, threatening to populate the spot with its eggs. As if this were not enough to remind him of the inevitability of change and the implacable march of time, a ‘wanton boy’ passes by, and seizing the butterfly, destroys the insect and his glorious abode in one fell swoop: ‘But, too impetuous in his play, / Crush’d the proud tenant of an hour, / And swept away the mansion-flow’r’. Far from wishing to entail it to posterity, then, Walpole feared that his gorgeous mansion at Strawberry Hill was not invulnerable to obliteration; to think otherwise would be to participate in the butterfly’s overweening hubris. Indeed, as his bitter experience of the fate of his father’s home and collection of paintings at Houghton, the original ‘House of Walpole’, would subsequently teach him, houses and their priceless contents were anything but fixed and inalienable structures. So as to defray the debts incurred by the profligate lifestyle of Horace’s nephew George (1730– 91), third Earl of Orford, a significant part of Sir Robert’s collection of art had been sold off in 1779 to Catherine the Great of Russia, and moved to the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg.63 Five years later, Walpole was still bitter about this act of disrespect towards his father’s collection, and in the second edition of the Description (1784), he reads in the event another troubling premonition concerning the future of his own ‘paper fabric’, painfully acknowledging that it would be ‘a total insensibility to the pride of family’ to expect the work of so ‘insignificant’ a man as himself to ‘last or be treated with more veneration and respect than the trophies of a palace deposited in it by one of the best and wisest Ministers that this country has enjoyed’.64 If paper had an important role to play at Strawberry Hill, it was thus to provide a record in the 1784 Description of precisely those paper structures that Walpole feared would be inevitably subject to dispersal: ‘Far from such visions of self-love’, the Preface claimed, ‘the following account of pictures and rarities is given with a view to their future dispersion’.65 Bittersweet it thus surely was when George James Williams, Esq. (1719–1805), Walpole’s friend and correspondent, claimed towards the end of Walpole’s life that, for all his anxieties, the architect, author and indefatigable correspondent ‘had outlived three sets of his own battlements’.66 The implications of Walpole’s ‘house-as-paper’ metaphor encompassed considerably more than the prints of Gothic buildings that he and the other

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members of the Strawberry Committee consulted in the execution of their designs. It also implied the printing press that Walpole established at Strawberry Hill in 1757, an operation that, together with his collection of rare manuscripts and letters and the vast number of books kept in the Library and elsewhere, lent to the house a thoroughly textual air.67 A cultural centre of sorts, Strawberry was the site of intense literary and antiquarian textual production. Furthermore, Walpole continuously commissioned views and visual representations of Strawberry Hill by John Carter, Paul Sandby, George ‘Perfect’ Harding, Edward Edwards and other leading artists and architects of his day, and some of the many ‘paper houses’ that ensued were subsequently bound into extra-illustrated editions of the Description that he had initially produced for a select group of his friends.68 Its interiors and exteriors frequently painted, etched and sketched, Strawberry Hill in Walpole’s day enjoyed a thoroughly paper-based existence, one rendered all the more so, as Chalcraft has observed, by the ‘vitality’ the house assumed in Walpole’s frequent references to it across his letters.69 In a more literal sense, Strawberry Hill, as the 1753 letter to Mann with which we began this chapter playfully disclosed, was also a house of ‘paper’ insofar as paper and paper products were used extensively in its construction and furnishings, including the Gothic paper by one ‘Tudor’ in the staircase; the vivid coloured wallpapers of the Breakfast Room, the Red and Blue Bedchambers, the Tea Room and Holbein Chamber; the prints, paintings, silhouettes and drawings displayed on the walls throughout the house; and Thomas Bromwich’s moulded papier mâché fan-vaulting in the State Apartment (Fig. 16). An elaborately staged trompe-l’oeil, Strawberry Hill depended heavily on paper for the generation of its imaginative effects. Paper, of course, was also the stuff of literature and literary composition, and in describing his house as a paper fabric, Walpole was also cannily foregrounding some of the literary connections and associations that had drawn him to Twickenham and Chopp’d-Straw Hall in the first place. As Emma McEvoy has argued, literature was key to the genesis of Strawberry Hill from the earliest phases of its construction.70 Alexander Pope, for example, the ghost of whom Walpole in 1747 famously claimed to have seen ‘skimming’ beneath his windowsill in ‘a most poetical moonlight’, provided inspiration for Strawberry Hill’s Paraclete, the conventual setting of Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ (1717).71 Walpole’s annotations in his personal copy of the text, now held at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, indicate the closeness with which he read, and engaged with, Pope’s celebrated and influential poem about prohibited young love, enforced Catholic celibacy and stifling monastic existence, all set in the ‘deep solitudes and awful cells’ of Gothic architectural space.72 As he wrote of it in his second Book of Materials (c.1771), ‘Pope’s Epistle of Eloisa is one continued strain of poetic Love, Laboured & polished to the highest perfection’.73 Other writers to whom Strawberry Hill and its collections referred included Colley Cibber, John Dryden, Thomas Gray, Voltaire and Homer.74 After Walpole’s disclosure of the authorship of

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Fig. 16 Thomas and Paul Sandby, The Gallery at Strawberry Hill. 1781. D.1837– 1904 (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

The Castle of Otranto in the second edition of 1765, the house also came to court strong connections with Walpole’s own fiction: as the Preface to the 1784 edition of his Description famously claimed, Strawberry Hill was to be considered as the ‘very proper habitation of’ the author of The Castle of Otranto since it was the scene that ‘inspired’ the novel.75 Visitors to the house after this point often claimed to see in the house and the curiosities that it contained references to both Otranto and to Walpole’s incestuous verse-drama, The Mysterious Mother; as the increasing references to Otranto perceivable across the 1774 and 1784 editions of the Description indicate, Walpole himself came to encourage these correspondences between actual and imaginary architectural space. Yet, as the notion of the ‘fantastic fabric’ that Walpole revealingly refers to in the second edition of his Description implies, Strawberry Hill also turned for inspiration to the world of fiction, particularly to what eighteenth-century literary antiquarians such as Warton, Percy, Hurd and Walpole himself referred to as ‘Gothic romance’: the sixteenth-century poetic romances of Torquato Tasso and Ludovico Ariosto in the European tradition, and the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare and John Milton in the English. As countless responses to the house reveal, Strawberry Hill was an ‘enchanted castle’ set upon the ‘enchanted ground’, just like the enchanted piles so frequently to be found in the annals of ‘ancient’ or ‘Gothic’—that

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is, medieval and renaissance—drama, poetry and romance.76 Such correspondences, however, brought with them further intimations of obliteration and loss, for if there is one thing that is consistent in the romances of Tasso, Ariosto and Spenser, it is that the enchanted castles that they depict all vanish and disappear without leaving so much as a ruin behind. Walpole feared a similar traceless vanishing of his own home. Other texts from the ‘Gothic’ past were equally significant to the construction and reception of Strawberry Hill. In his A Collection of Landscapes (1777), a series of engravings of picturesque ruins and architectural scenes taken from his own drawings, Paul Sandby accompanied his two views of Walpole’s house with lines from Milton’s evocative description of a Gothic cathedral in ‘Il Penseroso’ (1654): ‘You are struck with an awe at entering it’, Sandby writes, proceeding from ‘The high embowed roof, / And antique pillars’ massy proof, / And storied windows richly dight, / Casting a dim, religious light’.77 Later, a correspondent in the Penny Magazine claimed that Walpole’s ‘pasteboard villa’ brought to mind nothing so vividly as the House of Tidings from Chaucer’s The House of Fame (c.1379–80).78 Continuously compared with, and interpreted through, the architectural structures of ‘Gothic’ poetry and romance, Walpole’s home, in turn, inspired further poetic effusions. In his poem ‘On Mr Walpole’s House at Twickenham’ that was published in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1756, the Earl of Bath described the enchantments of Strawberry Hill as far surpassing those of all other houses in the country, comparing it favourably even to Sir John Denham’s influential description of his estate and its surrounds in his well-known poem Cooper’s Hill (1642): Since Denham sung of Cowpers, There’s scarce a hill around, But what in song or ditty, Is compar’d to fairy ground, Oh peace be with their memories, I wish them wond’rous well; Yet Strawberry-hill, yet Strawberry-hill, Must bear away the bell.79

The anonymous poem ‘On Seeing Strawberry-Hill, the Seat of Horace Walpole, Esq.’ that was published in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1778 went so far as to claim that Walpole, more than having succeeded in his plans to create at Strawberry a House of Walpolean ancestry, had far surpassed in Gothic ‘delight’ the Palladianism ‘grandeur’ of his father’s house at Houghton: Here may you view whate’er was wont of old To grace the mansion of the Baron bold,

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Ot at religion’s altars zeal inspire, When pealing anthems sounded thro’ the choir. A Houghton’s grandeur strikes the wond’ring sight, But Strawberry-hill is seen with pure delight; With rapture we the sweet retreat survey, Abode of soft content, inspirer of the lay.80

Just as Walpole had argued in Anecdotes of Painting and elsewhere, Gothic architecture was more inspiring of associative, imaginative responses than the ordered façades of Classicism. Derived from romances, poems and printed engravings; filled with countless books, paintings, drawings, and prints; and generative of several poems, descriptions, visitor accounts and visual representations, Walpole’s Strawberry Hill was, indeed, a paper fabric, one that, as he feared, would be likely to disappear without even leaving so much as a picturesque Gothic ruin in its place. By second decade of the nineteenth century, Horace Walpole’s posthumous reputation was in sharp decline. In an unsigned review of Letters from the Hon. Horace Walpole, to George Montagu, Esq. (1818) that he published in The Edinburgh Review in 1818, William Hazlitt turned Walpole’s enduring paper metaphor against him, arguing that though he ‘has left us another volume of gay and graceful letters’, they ‘indicate no peculiar originality of mind, or depth of thought, and are continually at variance with good taste and right feeling’.81 Walpole, Hazlitt continued, was a man of small mind and ‘little’ physical stature who inhabited an equally diminutive house at Strawberry Hill, the consciousness behind the published letters stuffed with ‘all the frippery and folly of the last two centuries’ or an untidy ‘cabinet of curiosities’ comprising ‘chests, cabinets, commodes, tables, boxes, turrets, stands, old printing, and old china’.82 In his excoriating review of Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, to Sir Horace Mann (1833), Thomas Babington Macaulay argued much the same, making of Walpole an overly fastidious, small-minded gossip and dilettante and describing his beloved paper fabric at Strawberry Hill as ‘a grotesque house with pie-crust battlements’.83 The posterity to which Walpole had bequeathed his cherished paper legacy, both architectural and epistolary, was anything but appreciated. It was thus especially poignant when, in 1842, the year of George Robins’s renowned sale of the contents of Strawberry Hill, a commentator in Ainsworth Magazine, citing a line from the Order for the Burial of the Dead from the Book of Common Prayer, wrote that Walpole’s house, ‘with all its treasures, like many a place of older renown, is destined to illustrate the sad truth, that “Nothing on earth continueth in one stay,” and to this contingency the noble collector of its wealth of art appears to have been fully alive’.84 A mass of accumulated papers and documents, Strawberry Hill, as its maker had feared, had eventually been dispersed to the wind. By the time of Charles Locke Eastlake’s A History of the Gothic Revival in 1872, Walpole and his little Gothic castle had been metaphorically reduced to

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the trinket or toy that he had originally leased from Mrs Chenevix: a whimsical, somewhat inconsequential architectural fantasy that was expressive more of the imaginative tastes of a self-styled man of letters than of the mind of a sound and legitimate Gothic Revivalist architect. The Gothic Revival as it was self-consciously practiced and theorised by A.W.N. Pugin, John Ruskin, Charles Locke Eastlake and others in the mid-to-late decades of the nineteenth century set no store by Horace Walpole’s paper fabric at Strawberry Hill.

Notes 1. Horace Walpole, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W.S. Lewis, 48 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–83), vol. 20, 379. 2. Ibid., vol. 20, 380. 3. Ibid., vol. 20, 381. 4. Ibid., vol. 20, 381. 5. Ibid., vol. 20, 382. 6. Ibid., vol. 20, 382. 7. Ibid., vol. 20, 384. 8. Ibid., vol. 20, 382. 9. Ibid., vol. 20, 384. 10. Anna Chalcraft, A Paper House: Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill (Beverley: Highgate, 1990), 7. 11. Ruth Mack, ‘Paper Castle, Paper Collection: Walpole’s Extra-Illustrated Copy of the Description of Strawberry Hill’, in Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, ed. Michael Snodin, with the assistance of Cynthia Roman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 107–15. 12. Walpole, Correspondence, vols. 12, 17; Michael Snodin, ‘Going to Strawberry Hill’, in Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, ed. Michael Snodin, with the assistance of Cynthia Roman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 15–57. 13. Horace Walpole, The Parish Register of Twickenham, MSS. Vol. 150, Lewis Walpole Library (henceforth LWL). 14. Martin Postle, ‘Richmond and Twickehnahm: A Modern Arcadia’ < https://www.bl.uk/picturing-places/articles/richmond-and-twi ckenham-a-modern-arcadia > [last accessed 18 December 2019]. 15. Walpole, The Parish Register of Twickenham, lines 3–4. 16. W. S. Lewis, ‘The Genesis of Strawberry Hill’, Metropolitan Museum Studies 5, no. 1 (1934): 57–92 (58). 17. Horace Walpole, A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole, the Youngest Son of Sir Robert Walpole Earl of Orford, at StrawberryHill, near Twickenham. With an Inventory of the Furniture, Pictures, Curiosities, &c, 2nd edition (Strawberry Hill: Thomas Kirgate, 1784), 6. 18. Walpole, Correspondence, vol. 37, 269.

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19. Ibid., vol. 12, 17. This transformation is recorded in a drawing by Walpole pasted into a heavily annotated copy of Walpole’s 1774 Description of the Villa of Mr Horace Walpole, bound with 49 3641, LWL. 20. 49 2523, fol. 121,11, LWL. 21. Walpole, Correspondence, vol. 9, 149. 22. Peter N. Lindfield, ‘The Panelled Heraldic Apartment of Horace Walpole (1717–1797) at Strawberry Hill’, The British Art Journal 18, no. 3 (2018): 1–7. 23. Walpole, Correspondence, vol. 9, 102. 24. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. Nick Groom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 6. 25. Walpole, Correspondence, vol. 20, 371–72. 26. See, for example, Samuel Kliger, The Goths in England: A Study in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Thought (New York: Octagon Books, 1972); and Samuel Kliger, ‘The “Goths” in England: An Introduction to the Gothic Vogue in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Discussion’, Modern Philology 43, no. 2 (1945): 107–17. 27. John Evelyn, An Account of Architects and Architecture, Together, with an Historical, Etymological Explanation of Certain Terms, Particularly Affected by Architects (London, 1706), 9. 28. Christopher Wren, Parentalia: Or, Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens: Viz., of Matthew, Bishop of Ely, Christopher, Dean of Windsor, Etc. But Chiefly of Sir Christopher Wren in Which Is Contained, Besides His Works, a Great Number of Original Papers and Records (London: T. Osborn, 1750), 307–08. 29. Isaac Ware, A Complete Body of Architecture: Adorned with Plans and Elevations, from Original Designs (London: T. Osborne and J. Shipton, 1756), 19. 30. Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (London: A. Miller, 1759), 122– 23. 31. Walpole, A Description of the Villa, iii. 32. George Bickham, The Beauties of Stow: Or, a Description of the Pleasant Seat, and Noble Gardens, of the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Cobham (London: E. Owen, 1750), 46. 33. For a discussion of Gothic follies relative to politics, see David Stewart, ‘Political Ruins: Gothic Sham and the ’45’, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 55, no. 4 (1996): 400–11. For an account of the career of the antiquary John Carter, see J. Mordaunt Crook, John Carter and the Mind of the Gothic Revival (London: W.S. Maney & Son in Association with the Society of Antiquaries of London, 1995). 34. Walpole, Correspondence, vol. 21, 306. 35. See Giles Worsley, Classical Architecture in Britain: The Heroic Age (New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1995); Susan Weber (ed.), William Kent:

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Designing Georgian Britain (London: Published for the Bard Graduate Center for Studies by Yale University Press, 2013); Eileen Harris, The Genius of Robert Adam: His Interiors (London: Yale University Press, 2001); and John Martin Robinson, James Wyatt (1746–1813): Architect to George III (London: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2012). 36. See Peter N. Lindfield, Georgian Gothic: Medievalist Architecture, Furniture and Interiors, 1730–1840 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2016), 131–32. 37. Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England; with Some Account of the Principal Artists; and Notes on Other Arts; Collected by G. Vertue, and Now Digested from His MSS, 2nd edition, 4 vols (London: Strawberry-Hill, 1765), vol. 1, 114. 38. See Lindfield, Georgian Gothic, 81–130. 39. Esher Place, Surrey, predates Strawberry Hill and was created for Sir Henry Pelham by William Kent, c.1733. See Roger White, ‘William Kent and the Gothic Revival’, in William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain, ed. Susan Weber (London: Published for the Bard Graduate Center for Studies by Yale University Press, 2013), 252–57. 40. Walpole, Anecdotes, vol. 1, 107–08. 41. Peter Guillery and Michael Snodin, ‘Strawberry Hill: Building and Site’, Architectural History 38 (1995): 102–16. 42. Walpole, Correspondence, vol. 24, 209. 43. These men formed the Strawberry Committee, which has been deemed by some to be a homosexual or at least ‘queer’ conclave. See Timothy Mowl, William Kent: Architect, Designer, Opportunist (London: Pimlico, 2007), 194; Timothy Mowl, Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider (London: John Murray, 1996), 4, 7, 122. For an alternative reading, see George E. Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 152–74. 44. SH Views M92 no. 5, LWL. 45. 49 3490 Folio, fol. 30, LWL. Bentley designs are contained in 49 3585, LWL. 46. 49 630, LWL, and Folio 49 3784, LWL. 47. 49 630, fol. rear fly-leaf, LWL. 48. Quarto 49 581, fol. 447, LWL. 49. Walpole, Correspondence, 35:157–58, 164. 50. Walpole, Description of the Villa, 53. 51. Walpole, Correspondence, vol. 35, 406–7. 52. Ibid., vol. 41, 39. 53. Adam Volume 18:61, and Adam Volume 22:227–22:229. Sir John Soane Museum. 54. Walpole, Correspondence, vol. 21, 306. 55. Ibid., vol. 12, 137.

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56. Ibid., vol. 12, 17. 57. Ibid., vol. 35, 150. 58. Horace Walpole, The Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of Orford, 5 vols (London: Printed for G.G. and J. Robinson and J. Edwards, 1798), vol. 55, 668–69. 59. Walpole, Description of the Villa, i. 60. Walpole, Correspondence, vol. 39, 110. 61. Ibid., vol. 33, 43. 62. Horace Walpole, ‘The Ensign: A Fable’, Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, vol. 53, issue 366 (July 1773): 40. This poem was also published in volume 1 of Walpole’s posthumous The Works of Horatio Walpole. 63. See Horace Walpole, Ædes Walpolianæ: Or, a Description of the Collection of Pictures at Houghton-Hall in Norfolk, the Seat of the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford (London: Printed by John Hughes, 1747); and Thierry Morel, Andrew W. Moore, John Harris and Larisa Aleksandrovna DukelskaiÛa, Houghton Revisited: The Walpole Masterpieces from Catherine the Great’s Hermitage (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2013). 64. Walpole, Description of the Villa, i. 65. Ibid., ii. 66. George James Williams’s comment was anecdotally reported in George Agar Ellis Dover (Lord Dover’s) “Sketch of the Life of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford” in his edition of Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, to Sir Horace Mann, British Envoy at the Court of Tuscany, 3 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1833), vol. 1, xxxvi. 67. See Stephen Clarke, The Strawberry Hill Press & Its Printing House: An Account and Iconography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011). 68. A notable example is 33 30 copy 11 Folio, LWL. 69. Chalcraft, A Paper House, 7. 70. Emma McEvoy, Gothic Tourism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 29–35. 71. Walpole, Correspondence, vol. 37, 270. 72. See Walpole’s annotations to ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ in The Works of Alexander Pope, Vol. I (London: Printed for Henry Lintot, 1743), 175–190, 49 2453, LWL. 73. Horace Walpole, Book of Materials (1771), fol. 64, 49 2615, LWL. 74. See McEvoy, Gothic Tourism, 29–35. 75. Walpole, Description of the Villa, iv. 76. For a thorough treatment of this topic, see Dale Townshend, Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1764– 1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 89–130.

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77. Paul Sandby, A Collection of Landscapes, Drawn By Sandby, Esq. R. A. and Engraved by Mr Rooker, and Mr Watts, with Descriptions (London: Printed for G Kearsly, 1777), 16. 78. Anon., ‘Strawberry Hill’, in Penny Magazine for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, vol. II, Issue 648 (7 May 1842): 181–84. 79. ‘On Mr Wyatt’s House at Twickenham, By the Right Honourable Earl of B__th’, in The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle, vol. 26 (April 1756): 192. 80. Anon., ‘On Seeing Strawberry-Hill, the Seat of Horace Walpole, Esq.’, in The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle, vol. 48 (April 1778): 183. 81. [William Hazlitt], ‘Article IV’, The Edinburgh Review, vol. xxxi (December 1818): 80. 82. Ibid., 81. 83. [Thomas Babington Macaulay], ‘Art. XI’, The Edinburgh Review, no. 117 (October 1833): 228. 84. Anon., ‘Strawberry Hill’, Ainsworth’s Magazine, vol. 1 (Jan. 1842): 100–7.

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Walpole, Horace, Ædes Walpolianæ: Or, a Description of the Collection of Pictures at Houghton-Hall in Norfolk, the Seat of the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford (London: Printed by John Hughes, 1747). Walpole, Horace, Anecdotes of Painting in England; with Some Account of the Principal Artists; and Notes on Other Arts; Collected by G. Vertue, and Now Digested from His MSS, 2nd edition, 4 vols (London: Strawberry-Hill, 1765). Walpole, Horace, Book of Materials (1771), fol. 64, 49 2615, Lewis Walpole Library. Walpole, Horace, The Castle of Otranto, ed. Nick Groom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Walpole, Horace, A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole, the Youngest Son of Sir Robert Walpole Earl of Orford, at Strawberry-Hill, near Twickenham. With an Inventory of the Furniture, Pictures, Curiosities, &c, 2nd edition (Strawberry Hill: Thomas Kirgate, 1784). Walpole, Horace, ‘The Ensign: A Fable’, Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, vol. 53, issue 366 (July 1773): 40. Walpole, Horace, The Parish Register of Twickenham, MSS Vol. 150, Lewis Walpole Library. Walpole, Horace, The Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of Orford, 5 vols (London: Printed for G.G. and J. Robinson and J. Edwards, 1798). Walpole, Horace, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W.S. Lewis, 48 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–83). Ware, Isaac, A Complete Body of Architecture: Adorned with Plans and Elevations, from Original Designs (London: T. Osborne and J. Shipton, 1756). Weber, Susan (ed.), William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain (London: Published for the Bard Graduate Center for Studies by Yale University Press, 2013). White, Roger, ‘William Kent and the Gothic Revival’, in William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain, ed. Susan Weber (London: Published for the Bard Graduate Center for Studies by Yale University Press, 2013), 252–55. Worsley, Giles, Classical Architecture in Britain: The Heroic Age (New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1995). Wren, Christopher, Parentalia: Or, Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens: Viz., of Matthew, Bishop of Ely, Christopher, Dean of Windsor, Etc. But Chiefly of Sir Christopher Wren in Which Is Contained, Besides His Works, a Great Number of Original Papers and Records (London: T. Osborn, 1750).

The Art of Ghostly Projections David Annwn Jones

Sometime in the early 1670s, with an audience of local scientists and naturalists, Johann Franciscus Griendel, maker and supplier of optical instruments, exhibited the great marvel of his magic lantern in a Nuremberg salon. Griendel, had opened his shop in Nuremberg in 1670 and his displays prominently featured visions of hell, spirits and ghosts. It is not surprising that early examples of projected images had confronted their viewers with scenes of mortification and fear of the supernatural. In early modern Western societies, the very suggestion of a new technology was often associated with magic. An early drawing by Giovanni da Fontana, circa 1420, depicts a man holding a lantern which contains a miniature template and projects an image of a glowering nocturnal demon onto a wall. Memento mori items such as saints’ skulls and bones and also scenes of death and deathly encounters had persisted in church narrative frescoes for many centuries. The tale of the three young men who gallop out on a jaunt only to meet their own dead doubles was often depicted in these paintings accompanied by the legend: ‘Quod fuimus, estis; quod sumus, vos eritis’ (‘What we were, you are; what we are, you will be’). This tale was to prove particularly popular with lanternists. Engravings of the lantern shows of German Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) show the projection of a skeleton, and a soul burning in fire. An engraving of Van ‘sGravesande’s magic D. A. Jones (B) The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_19

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lantern show reveals a most impressive demon-faced monster with human shoulders looming from the screen. It is accordingly very clear that horror was the earliest aim and effect associated with lantern projection and that clerics were able to advance the lantern’s acceptance by foregrounding its role in moral instruction against the wiles of the devil. In 1671, another Jesuit priest, Kaspar Schott wrote of godless people being kept from vice by way of the fears associated with lantern shows. Three years earlier, Robert Hooke had stated in a report to the Royal Society that the very basis and purpose of magic lanterns was to delight or horrify the gullible with apparitions of Angels and Devils, its gloomy light on a white wall showing spectres and monsters. During the Gothic revival, motifs of death, hauntings and evil spirits in novels, plays, paintings, illustrations and lantern shows became inextricably linked. Over the 1720s, the magic lantern moved out of private salons and into public entertainments and fairs where crowds were entertained with images of Death personified, a seven-headed dragon and a woman cutting off her husband’s head. Horace Walpole certainly knew of magic lanterns and refers to them throughout his work and letters. When, in The Castle of Otranto (1764), Benedict encourages new images of horror in the Countess’s mind, his influence over her is conveyed in images of projection with obvious associations with magic lanterns. It was specifically in the milieu of Freemasonry and coffee house society of Leipzig that the earliest forms of the entertainment later called the Phantasmagoria began to converge. Georg Schropfer (1730–1777), an ex- Prussian Hussar and Freemason opened his coffee house around 1761 in the Klostergasse. A lack of funds drove Schropfer to devise a unique form of ghostly lantern show. His entertainment was advertised as a séance where clients could contact the spirits of famous individuals. Advised to fast before their appointment with the spectres, on their arrival at Schropfer’s premises, his guests were invited to drink hot punch and eat salad. Then, Schropfer, as master of ceremonies, gave a verbal introduction to his rite, a speech sprinkled with Masonic and Cabalistic references. The group was then led into the séance room, a chamber with an altar at one end surrounded by black hangings and lit by a single lamp. All visitors were then instructed to bow and pray, after which, Schropfer, clutching a cross, repeated the words of his rite. Using dramatic gestures and incantations, he commanded the spirits to appear before him, and suddenly a fog rose from the floor. Images of apparitions were projected by hidden magic lanterns onto this smoke, the movement of which gave them the appearance of life. These visions were accompanied by loud blows against the door of the room, ringings and infernal hisses, wheezes and whistles. In later shows, the piercing tones of the glass armonica (a musical instrument containing a glass spindle turned by a treadle and played with moistened fingers), were to join these sound effects. Schropfer went onto exhibit his ghosts in many other settings, including Dresden where, as a prelude to the main attraction, he led his guests down gloomy corridors to disorientate them.

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Subsequently, an individual variously known as Philidor or Philipsthal travelled Europe with a show called a Geisterscheinung or Ghost-shining. He introduced magical conjuring tricks, a physics demonstration and even an orchestra into the ghostly repertoire of his lantern show. He also used thunder, hail and wind effects that were heard by the audience as they sat in a room decorated like a black-draped temple. By 1792, he had taken his show to Paris and was calling it a ‘Phantasmagorie’, the French form of what was to be called the Phantasmagoria in the English-speaking world. During the early 1790s, Johann Carl Enslen was also travelling between Berlin, Vienna and St Petersburg with his very distinctive ghost show, using a room-sized camera obscura to mount elaborate evenings of ghost-raisings and the manifestation of historical figures. This method of situating the audience inside the darkened camera as it were, and the beaming of phantom figures into this space from an external source must have created a very distinctive spectacle and some very eerie, evanescent and grainy effects. It is out of these urban milieus of Phantasmagorias and the contemporaneous literary craze for German Geister-/Ghost and Räuberomane-/Bandit novels, influenced by chivalric tales of horror that Friedrich von Schiller’s most famous and influential novel of fear, Der Geisterseher/The Ghost-Seer (1787– 1789), emerged. This is a tale of a sinister Armenian and the efforts of the Italian Inquisition to manipulate a gullible prince by way of pseudo-magic and a necromantic séance, the latter of which is, significantly, exposed as a Phantasmagoria show. By the late 1790s, the intermedial links between these highly sophisticated lantern shows and gothic novels, dramas and paintings had become so numerous as to be obvious to most literate members of the public. The eminent showman Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, in mounting his Phantasmagoria in the Capuchin convent, Paris, featured the figure of the Bleeding Nun from Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) as one of his most notorious and frightening phantom projections. For his prologue to the show, he also lifted a whole passage from Schiller’s Geisterseher verbatim. Most of the prologue was spoken ostensibly to defend the showman’s entertainment against the charge of superstition, yet Schiller’s quoted words contained references to the veils surrounding existence, hinting both at human ignorance of supernatural powers and also supplying a coded reference to lantern screens and hidden projection. On witnessing Robertson’s entertainment for the first time, the fledgling writer Charles Nodier immediately associated it with Ann Radcliffe’s novels as did the poet, Henry Lemoine, Hester Piozzi and Citizen (formerly Marquis), de Sade. In scrutinising Robertson’s borrowings from Schiller, Lewis and a wide range of other literary sources, we become aware that the showman understood the Phantasmagoria’s positioning within a nexus of intense gothic intermediality. Robertson’s Phantasmagoria garnered immediate, spectacular and prolonged success. An audience’s reception of the show started with the sight Robertson’s poster showing the witch of Endor raising Samuel. The customers entered the building after previously assembling in the ‘garden of

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Apollyon’ or ‘courtyard of Charon’. Since it had been demolished in 1804, it was long assumed that we would never know the precise layout or location of Robertson’s show in the convent but, in 2005, I discovered the floor plans to the building in Albert Laprade’s book François d’Orbay (1960). This enabled the realisation that the refectory was the only cloister room to have the right dimensions for the salle de fantasmagorie. In the cloisters, the crowd would view dark, fantastical paintings and eventually, soon after, access Robertson’s well-lit laboratory where he amused them with sideshows and scientific displays. Spectators also saw electrical charges passed through frogs’-legs which twitched as if revivified. Robertson was again planting subliminal messages in the minds of his audience: his poster had promised that they would see apparitions of phantoms, spectres and revenants. Many who attended must have wondered if the showman could raise the dead. Following the icy tones of the glass harmonica, the audience then accessed the Phantasmagoria room through a door covered in Egyptian hieroglyphs. To the west, at what would seem to be the furthest wall (but which was actually a screen), Robertson, a thin, laconic man dressed unfashionably head-to-toe in black, would give his highly polished prologue. The lantern show which followed was rear-projected onto the screen partition by powerful Argand lamps which were pushed forwards and backwards by hidden lanternists so that the resultant images seemed to increase rapidly in size (approaching the audience), or decrease. The display included visions of Voltaire and Rousseau, a gothic panoply including Fuseli’s ‘Nightmare’ and Lewis’s Bleeding Nun, transformations of a bride into a skeleton, demons and devils, a whirl of hundreds of witches projected through a faceted prism and skeletons all accompanied by sounds of bells, gong, live actors and a ventriloquist’s cries. Robertson’s final shock of each night’s show was the unveiling of a female skeleton which pushed home the Quod fuimus , estis message derived from the early tale. Robertson’s form of the Phantasmagoria enjoyed considerable success, garnering international fame and notoriety and spawning many imitators. In 1811 Mary Godwin (the future Mary Shelley), attended, Jacques Garnerin’s lecture on electricity and gasses and also witnessed his Phantasmagoria. An ex-soldier and balloonist, Garnerin had been Robertson’s neighbour in the Capucine convent in 1799 and grew to be one of his bitterest rivals in mounting ghostly lantern spectacles and physics experiments. Both Mary Shelley’s and John Polidori’s work subsequently used ideas from the Frenchinspired tales translated from the German in the anthology: Frankenstein (1812), where a magic lantern plays a key role in one of the stories. Shelley’s Frankenstein (1817) cites enchanted scenes reminiscent of those in lantern shows and a character in her The Last Man (1826) likens the future to a vast tenebrous image that increases in size rapidly to swallow up the earth in an apocalyptic Phantasmagoria. It is important to realise how thoroughly, soon after 1810, each component of the lantern-of-fear shows permeated European and American cultural life

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and, hence, also the waves of gothic and neo-gothic expression. The malevolent Quilp in Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) is described as withdrawing and approaching his victim like a projected head in a Phantasmagoria show. Charles Nodier was so impressed by Robertson’s whirling cloud of witches that he included such effects in his novels Smarra ou les Démons de la Nuit (1821) and Trilby ou le Lutin d’Argail (1822). These works involving witches, in turn, inspired one of Victor Hugo’s most celebrated poems ‘La Ronde du Sabbat’ dedicated to Nodier and written in October 1825. This poem developed the idea of the witches’ midnight dance into a blasphemous frenzy and served, in its turn, to inspire Louis Boulanger in creating his own graphic version of the same scene, ‘La Ronde du Sabbat’ (1828), a tourde-force of the incipient art of lithography. Schropfer’s and Robertson’s use of chilling glass harmonica music found its way into many subsequent writings including a ‘ghost’ scene in Byron’s Don Juan (1819–1824) and also, into Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in descriptions of the female vampires’ laughter. Lewis Carroll used magic lantern imagery in his writing and particularly in his serio-comic poem which, like many other articles, memoirs and cartoons employed the title Phantasmagoria (1869). Dickens, Carroll, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Robert Louis Stevenson were each practicing lanternists and so acquired a keen working knowledge of the medium. Additionally, Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe both included references to J.C. Enslen’s Phantasmagorias in their work. Imagery in Lewis’s The Monk had already suggested the iconography of magic lanterns but, after the success of Robertson’s show, staged works which adapted Lewis’s subsequent creations such as Edward Loder and Edward Fitzball’s opera Raymond and Agnes (1809), based on The Castle Spectre (1797), featured an image of a ghostly scroll rear-projected from Argand lamps. Productions of the British stage transformed with the need to mount gothic spectacles: the appearance of looming ghosts, characters vanishing and monstrous presences passing through walls. Supernatural forms were seen flitting across the walls of a sepulchral building and a projected skeleton sitting on a tomb appeared in Colman the Younger’s Blue-Beard (1798). In Edward Fitzball’s drama, The Flying Dutchman (1826), a cursed sailor is trapped aboard a ghost ship with blood-red sails and is only allowed to leave the craft every seven years in quest of a bride. As the origin of the curse is related, an image of the phantom ship, actually a magic lantern projection, appears in the background. Sheridan Le Fanu’s macabre fiction employs the imagery, techniques and associations of early lantern technology more than that of any other neogothic English language writer of the period. For nearly thirty years, this author referenced an array of lantern effects including Phantasmagorias of different types, Ombres Chinoises shadow shows and travelling (often called ‘Gallantee’) lantern shows in at least 18 direct allusions and as many as a hundred uses of related tropes. His ‘Spalatro’ (1842), ‘The Cock and Anchor’ (1845), ‘The Spectre Lovers’ (1851) ‘The House by the Churchyard’ (1863)

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and Uncle Silas (1865) all openly reference the lantern shows. His novella Carmilla, describes how an attack by a female vampire on the eponymous heroine as a young girl casts her memories into the likeness of a Phantasmagoria show. His narrator supplies the most extraordinarily elaborate and grotesque description of a hunchbacked travelling lanternist and Carmilla, the revenant herself, seems to slip, slide, grow large and suddenly vanish with the malleability of a lantern projection. Over the 1820s, Phantasmagorias in England and America were extensively pirated and so appeared in truncated forms and with bowdlerised prologues at sideshows in fairgrounds. Yet the idea, generally current over the last two decades that large, public Phantasmagoria shows began to fade in the 1830s due to the popularity of these fairground lantern-of-fear shows on one hand and the availability of small, domestic Phantasmagoria lanterns and lantern toys on the other, has recently begun to change. Robertson’s 1821 ghost lantern show in Madrid clearly had considerable impact on Spanish visual entertainment, perhaps even influencing the paintings of Goya. It is clear that a celebrated showman: Juan Gonzalez Mantilla continued to mount large-scale ghost lantern entertainments regularly in that capital till 1836. Monsieur Adrien Senior gave an exhibition of nocturnal apparitions as part of his Phantascope show in selected American cities at least up to 1839. There have been other discoveries bearing out the survival of large urban Phantasmagorias beyond the 1830s. My own identification of a collection, of beautifully rendered and hand-painted Phantasmagoria slides from Filmoteca Española, Madrid featuring images of a devil-dance showing nude witches, demons, dizzily skewed, monstrous riders and strange archaic figures draped in snakes as copies of Louis Boulanger’s lithograph of ‘Ronde de Sabbat’ (1828), is a case in point. We can trace the chain of influence stretching back from this painted slide of Boulanger’s image through, Hugo’s source poem based on witch scenes in Nodier’s novellas to Nodier’s original encounter with the whirling witches projected in Robertson’s show at least 30 years previously. This remarkable circle of influence from Phantasmagoria through literary renditions to Boulanger’s image and passing, once again, into Phantasmagoria technology not only reveals the intensity of intermedial influence operative in gothic cultures in general but also and particularly, the porous borders between uncanny fiction, visual imagery and lanterns. Other slides in the Filmoteca collection were clearly copies of illustrations in Eugène Le Poitevin’s book of lithographs Les Diables de Lithographies (1832). In viewing these slides, it was possible for the first time to extrapolate the Phantasmagoria forwards into the age of popular French and, in particular, Parisian diableries after the July Revolution and, further, into Spanish salons, theatres and assembly rooms in the mid-1830s. At the time of identifying these slide images, I noticed that they lacked the head-on impact of Robertson’s show and, as composite scenes rather than slides designed for sudden shock, would be ideal for viewing in a large, communal setting.

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These impressions were substantiated with Cèlia Cuenca’s discovery of Francesco Dalmau’s Phantasmagoria which ran from 1844 for three years in his large, well-appointed optician’s premises in Barcelona and perhaps in another of his properties in Madrid. Though Dalmau’s programme for the show advertises many of the scenes associated with Robertson including the Medusa’s head, demonic monsters and a sorceress for example, apparently by this period, the need for Robertson’s explanatory prologue de-bunking superstition had vanished. The magic lantern, was by this time, a well-known device associated with entertainment. Dalmau had introduced other innovations: shows in 1844 were accompanied by piano which played waltzes by Strauss, organ arrangements and with singing and even dances in the intervals. Later his ghost show even featured scenes from popular opera such as Robert le Diable (first performed 1831). Some of Dalmau’s slides also share the crude humour of Le Poitevin’s diableries. In England, Henry Langdon Childe, a slide painter who had claimed to have assisted Philipstahl with his Phantasmagoria, pioneered the use of ‘dissolving views’ at the Theatre Royal. This technique by which the lantern illuminant behind the slide was turned down so that another slide could be inserted which was then revealed (as the illuminant was turned up again), gave a new sense of subtle and marvellous transitions to lantern shows and was ideal for the projection of ghostly scenes. Lanternists who projected imagery of horror from the 1670s to 1830s had been reliant either on static slides or the abrupt motions of ‘slipping slides’ (involving a static first and second moveable slide in the frame which could suddenly transform the first scene). Robertson’s projection of a beautiful woman who changes into a skeleton or Le Fanu’s description of Madame Rougierre suddenly transforming into a gaping reptile in Uncle Silas are good examples of ‘slipping slide’ shock effects. ‘Dissolving views’ introduced the possibility of gradual, layered and prolonged transitions and, like Dalmau, lanternists all over Europe were keen to use this new technology as part of their shows. In the 1850s, different strains of neo-gothic fiction, while retaining formative influences from earlier gothic writing, also evolved distinctive modes of development in modern urban settings and in an array of domestic environments. Many of these novels were instilled with lanternist iconography. It had also long been apparent that viewers of lantern shows had internalised the images and techniques of these entertainments and that the word ‘Phantasmagoria’ itself had widened to designate any disturbing or overwhelming flow of mental images. In his second novel, Basil (1852), a fore-runner of ‘sensation fiction’, Wilkie Collins describes how his eponymous anti-hero’s life and his perceptions of figures in his household have been turned into a horrifying Phantasmagoria of mistrust. The image of his rival: the horrifically disfigured Mannion, an update of the Frankenstein monster, flashes lividly on Basil’s imagination. So great is the trauma of his alienation that, subsequently, Basil sees each of his entourage as a series of lantern slides. In her landmark novel of the Domestic Gothic, Villette (1853), Charlotte Bronte creates the parodic

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versions of the ghostly nun and monastery garden from Lewis’s The Monk in the setting of an ancient convent modernised into Madame Beck’s educational Pensionnat. Lucy Snow, the English tutor’s, perceptions have been so imbued with the expectations and fears associated with ghostly lantern shows that she allows these to dramatise her growing awareness of a hidden conspiracy against her emotional fulfilment with Paul, her fellow teacher. Spiritualism had flourished since 1848 and, particularly, after the American Civil war and, though William Mumler’s ‘spirit photographs’ using double exposure for their uncanny effects had been exposed as fakes by 1869, the interest in trying to contact dead loved ones through the services of a medium still thrived afterwards in Europe and America. ‘Spirit photographs’ (actually double-exposures juxtaposing two scenes or figures), could, of course, be converted into lantern slides for projection and, as late as 1882, there were exhibitions and celebrations of modern Spiritualism involving magic lantern presentations given, for example, by one Mr. Middleton in Bloomsbury, London. The close association between Spiritualism, the neo-gothic novel and Phantasmagoria is emphasised by Nathaniel Hawthorne in the preface to his spiritualist novel The Blithedale Romance (1852). Hawthorne delineates his creation in theatrical terms where mental beings act out their own phantasmagorical games. The trope of a staged drama featuring projected phantoms not only suits Hawthorne’s tale of the clairvoyant ‘Veiled Lady’ which followed this statement but anticipates the famous technical breakthrough of the entertainment known as ‘Pepper’s Ghost’. Originally stemming from an idea by Henry Dircks and adapted by John Henry Pepper to feature in a dramatisation of Charles Dickens’s tale, ‘The Haunted Man’ (1848), this effect caused a great sensation in its appearance at London’s Royal Polytechnic in 1863. In the source story, we are introduced to Redlaw, a chemistry teacher, who lives in a kind of Gothic enclave, a haunted terrain in the middle of the city. He inhabits a crypt-like, archaic house with low passages and empty rooms. The teacher is revealed as a prisoner of an obsession with his past privations and failures, his grudging and corrosive memories of the hardships and denial in his life. This bitterness is so deep that it has paralysed the lecturer and has, over the years, become externalised into a palpable form, assuming a ghost life of its own. The illusion of Redlaw’s ghost-double involved installing a shrouded actor beneath the sight line of the audience and picked out by the beam of a powerful limelight magic lantern hidden under the stage. The actor’s bright image was then captured in a huge reflective pane of glass set at a 45 degree angle to the audience; the image was clearly reflected but the glass itself remained invisible against the black back-drop. In the case of Dickens’s story, where the phantom is the image of Redlaw, both actor and ghost had to resemble each other. In this way, a moving, gesturing phantom could appear to interact with live actors on the stage. The angle of the mirror’s tilt necessitated that the actor who played the ghost in the original shows was leaning on a sloping board and this made natural movement very difficult. Initially,

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this new attraction stunned contemporary audiences. Though the original exhibition only lasted a few minutes, the enthusiastic crowds who attended donated thousands of pounds to the treasury of the Polytechnic. By August the demonstration had extended to three scenes, some at a very wide tangent from Redlaw’s tale. Two months earlier, the introduction of a new mirror to augment the illusion, had meant that the ‘ghost’ actor could stand in his or her setting in his setting below the stage and move around quite naturally. Henry Childe, Pepper and others brought this new technology to bear on dramatic interpretations of seminal gothic texts. In 1870, Pepper and James Walker’s production of The Mysteries of Udolpho replete with Pepper’s ghost illusions, dissolving views and several phantoms emerging from one figure on the stage, was shown at the Polytechnic. By this stage, Phantasmagorias were often consigned to a single spot on the Polytechnic programme and there was a real tension evident between those showmen who wanted to preserve the mystery of lantern-of-fear effects and those who wished to explain their technical foundations and so dissipate any remaining spectral charge. Henri Robin developed similar lanternist effects in France, creating the impression of mobile phantoms and subsequently influencing the development of Gothic Science Fiction which, in novels like Villiers de L’Isle Adam’s l’Ève future/Tomorrow’s Eve and Jules Verne’s Le Château de Carpathes/The Carpathian Castle (1893), drew upon a complex inheritance of involving scientific fantasies and the Gothic. These hybrid narratives involved advanced visual technologies, Faustian pacts, Phantasmagoria and the apparent materialisation of moving ghosts. In bringing the imagery of pre-cinematic media to bear on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Robert Louis Stevenson revealed the exploitative nature of consumerism. There is no mistaking the impress of Marx’s theories of Surplus Value on Stevenson’s cool, disapproving analysis of street capitalism in his portrayal of Hyde’s neighbourhood. Out of this milieu, Stevenson’s hideously transforming monster emerges to destroy young urchins and ageing aristocrats the same. At one point, Hyde’s image is seen to multiply across every street corner in London in a manner similar to Robertson’s witches projected by a prismatic lens. A century of Phantasmagoria shows obviously influenced the first gothic films such as R.W. Paul’s Marley’s Scrooge or Marley’s Ghost (1901) and Alice Guy-Blaché and Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset’s Esmeralda (1905). It is notable then that, as late as 1908, crowds were attending Joseph Boggs Beale’s popular lantern show of Marley’s Ghost. Beale’s wonderfully detailed paintings depicting stages in Dickens’s story were photographed in black and white, turned into slides and then hand-coloured for projection. Though Paul’s version of Dickens’s tale featured the filmed actors’ animated performances and masterly use of early double-exposure special effects, it is clear that Beale had moved on from the disparate and often unconnected images of the Phantasmagoria shows, to offer the continuity of beautifully painted images connected by his sophisticated vocal accompaniment. If Paul’s film was closer to perceived life, Beale had the advantage of being able to pause on each

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particular image to convey its full resonance and also to stress the horror of the ghosts. Magic lanterns continued to occupy vital roles both in Science Fiction Gothic and in more traditional and psychological tales. In Garrett P. Serviss’s story The Moon Metal (1900), Dr. Syx’s hypnotic lantern show reveals the ways which a demonic lanternist destroyed lunar eco-systems while mining for precious ore. In Henry James’s unnerving story ‘The Jolly Corner’ (1908), Spencer Brydon finds that a vision of a stranger embodying the lost years of his youth looms up before him in an unoccupied ancestral home like a frightening vision from the magic lantern shows of his childhood. Three years later in M. R. James’s story ‘Casting of the Runes’ (1911), the sadistic Mr. Karswell’s magic lantern show is designed to terrify a group of village children out of their wits by showing them slides of dark monsters encroaching on their daily lives. It might be assumed that these tales were written during a brief period of transition before cinema properly took hold and magic lanterns began to fade from public consciousness. However, over seventy years later, Ben Mears, the protagonist of Stephen King’s novel of vampiric incursion Salem’s Lot (1975) is described as remembering how he ran screaming from magic lantern shows when he was nineteen. It is a most remarkable moment in a book appearing eighty years after the advent of cinema proper, that at a literary nexus of conflicting sexual tensions, neo-Gothic trauma involving murder, suicides and a cursed house, the magic lantern idiom re-emerges to haunt Mears’s mind. We can piece together from fictional biographical fragments that this character was born in 1941, and it is probably a viable scenario that a child brought up on the American eastern seaboard in the 1950s could, conceivably, witness magic lantern shows as late as 1960. Just as remarkable is the fact that Mears recalls the long-term potency of these archaic projection devices even as he rises to fight a brood of vampires in a novel which would help define a new age of literary and cinematic horror.

Bibliography Cèlia Cuenca, ‘The Magic Lantern in Barcelona. The Phantasmagoria Shows of the Optician Francisco Dalmau (1844–1848)’, The Magic Lantern in Barcelona: The Phantasmagoria Shows of the Optician Francisco Dalmau 1844–1848, https://www. academia.edu/36877082/, accessed 14.3.20. Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1986) The Blithedale Romance (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books). Jones, David J. (2011) Gothic Machine, Textualities, Pre-Cinematic Media and Film in Popular Visual Culture, 1670–1910 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press). Jones, David J. (2014) Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Le Fanu, Sheridan Joseph (2013) Carmilla (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press). Von Schiller, Friedrich (2003) The Ghost-Seer, trans. Andrew Brown (London: Hesperus).

The Nightmare and Proto-Vampires Simon Bacon

The Romantic period created two of the most well-known ‘Gothic’ images, Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781), and Francisco Goya’s ‘The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters’ (1799). Indeed, so striking are they now that one cannot help but conjecture that both were known to the vacationing party of Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron his travelling companion John Polidori on that fateful night in the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816 when Frankenstein and The Vampyre we reborn into the world—in fact visionary film maker Ken Russell envisioned such an idea in his film Gothic (1986). As shall be argued here both were highly influential on the burgeoning Gothic and Vampire genres exampling an entanglement between the two as they developed in the nineteenth century and beyond. Fuseli’s The Nightmare was something of an instant success. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1782 it sold for 20 guineas and the print of the painting sold up to 2000 copies (though it was Fuseli’s publisher and not the artist that largely profited from this). Fuseli, or rather Johann Heinrich Füssli, actually painted two further versions and was in the process of painting another at his death in 1825. The Nightmare was unusual as it had no text or narrative as its basis but was rather supposed to represent a dream—in this sense it bears much relation to the Surrealist movement in the twentieth century (Fig. 1). Consequently, it is worth looking at the painting itself and some of its later iterations in detail to not only begin to understand what kind of dream or S. Bacon (B) Poznan, ´ Poland

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_20

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Fig. 1 The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli painted in 1781

nightmare it might be representing, but also the kinds of tropes it created for the Gothic and Vampire genres. The picture itself, and maybe fitting for a dream, is highly sexually charged showing a woman stretched out upon her bed, in a white figure hugging shift, with her arms and head hanging over the side. The arrangement thrusts her breasts towards us, and she is either asleep or has possibly swooned. On her stomach sits a stocky, goblin-like creature, obviously restricting her breathing. It stares out at us, challenging us to do something, or questioning the nature of our own gaze at the prone woman. To the left of the picture a black horse pokes its head through the curtains that are pulled around the bed. It’s blank, uncanny eyes, staring at the creature sitting on the woman. In some ways it is difficult to know which part of the picture is the nightmare. The horse at the back is the literal nightmare, an interpretation that Jorge Luis Borges explores in terms of Shakespeare1 who also saw it as a literal ‘mare’ of the night, and even describes it as having nine foals (King Lear, III. iv. 117– 120)—Fuseli was an enthusiast for Shakespeare and painted many pictures inspired by his plays. While Fuseli might have used it as a visual whimsy, the

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word nightmare actually has its root in the word ‘mara’, which in old English means a spirit or creature that is sent to torment those that sleep and even suffocate them, this in turn has connected it to the figure of the incubus. The incubus is a mythological creature that dates back to 2400 BC and is demonic in nature and disturbs and seduces women while they sleep (the female version is a succubus). In this sense then it is the creature on the woman’s chest that is the nightmare, or even the cause of one which the woman is having but we are unable to see. If the creature is an incubus then any dream the woman might be having would be sexual in nature, something which her position and facial expression, or lack thereof, might suggest. If this is the case, then the scene we are looking at is a little different to what it seems. At first appearance it seems to be that the ‘real’ part of the image is the woman sprawled across the bed, and the nightmare she is having is the incubus and the horse. But as described above this cannot be the case. Perhaps then it is the stare of the incubus that gives an idea of what the nightmare is. It stares straight at us, challenging us as though we have interrupted something we are not meant to see. Andrei Pop comments that the painting ‘exposes the privacy of sex and dreaming’2 and suggests that maybe the woman is, at the very least, having a sexual dream—her position in bed laying on her back is one that is suggested to induce nightmares intimating she was inviting in such an experience, if not engaging in masturbation, with its successful completion shown in her swoon over the side of the bed—Fuseli privately produced many explicitly sexual and pornographic drawings. The incubus staring back at us might be intimating that the nightmare is our interrupting the woman during her sexual pleasure, or maybe even more likely, that such an interruption is our nightmare; the nightmare is then our own. In relation to this it is worth mentioning that on the reverse of the original painting is a sketch for another painting but this one is a portrait of a woman. It is suspected this might be a portrait of Anna Landholdt a woman Fuseli had met and fallen in love with but which was unrequited. It has been speculated then that the woman in The Nightmare is Anna and the incubus is Fuseli oddly making the image even more sexually violent and the nightmare is of our interruption of the artists dream of rape which he dares us to interrupt. As mentioned above The Nightmare was a subject that Fuseli returned to and it is worth looking at those first before considering how it was subsequently copied and adapted by others. Due to the paintings popularity a printed version was produced though not by Fuseli himself. He sold the rights to publisher John Raphael Smith who commissioned an engraving by Thomas Burke. Necessarily it is a fairly faithful reproduction of the painting though some points do differ, not least in the addition of a few lines of poetry by Erasmus Darwin: Night-Mare So on his Nightmare through the evening fog

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Flits the squab Fiend o’er fen, and lake, and bog; Seeks some love-wilder’d maid with sleep oppress’d, Alights, and grinning sits upon her breast.3

The poem certainly heightened the Romantic intent of the piece directing us to a supernatural interpretation of the work and ending with a flourish of the prerequisite titillation to encourage the dithering shopper of the risqué attractions of their perspective purchase. The engraving itself is also quite interesting as we can see much more detail in the folds of the sheets, the front edge of the bed and the bedside table to the left which holds some bottles. In this monochromatic image the focus of light is still the left thigh and breast of the fallen woman, with the folds of her shift more clearly pointing towards the area of her crutch. More interesting are the incubus and the nightmare. With the greater definition we can now clearly see the incubus is clothed and appears more like a caveman than a demonic apparition. He is less a creature of dreams but a real flesh and blood monster, leaving his looming shadow behind him as the focus of subconscious anxiety. The horse too appears more solid though strangely less real. It has the same blank staring eyes but now seems to have a flowing mane of curly hair which looks oddly anachronistic given it has pushed its head up from beneath the bed curtains. More than the original painting the print reminds us of the thin line between the comedic and the terrifying; how the odd or bizarre can quickly change to the scary and life-threatening—unlike the later Surrealists who used such devices to question the nature of reality, Fuseli then begins to probe what the reality is behind our dreams. Fuseli himself completed two more versions of the work though only one of these is widely known (or popularly used). This version is from 1790–1791 and is a dramatic reworking of the same three figures. No longer landscape the picture is in portrait orientation (ie taller than it is wide). This makes the image much less languid and more active, pushing the action towards us. The play of light and shade is even more striking and the figure of the woman, whose head is now to the left rather than the right, seems almost part of the bed itself, rising up out of its landscape of folds. The woman’s legs are no longer stretched out across the bed but her right leg is bent, with the light falling on her thigh making it the brightest point in the painting. Her arms and head now seem to be draping over the end of the bed, rather than the side, again forcing her breasts into the air. It makes for a very contorted figure on the bed with the top of the woman’s body turned towards us making for an almost impossible stretching of her left side. Oddly, her night shift is nowhere near as clinging as in the first version, and makes the image less sexualised, at least in terms of what is presented to us as the audience, for here this seems much more about the gaze of the incubus. The awkward positioning of the woman means that her raised right leg and stretched left leg push her crutch towards the incubus. Something it seems very appreciative of as rather than staring at

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us its eyes appeared to be lowered surveying the beauty and vulnerability of the woman beneath it. The incubus itself is far more demonic looking with sharp pointed ears and nose and sporting a large grin as it picks its teeth with a finger. We cannot see its eyes as its head is turned downwards and they are totally in shadow and seem to configure a black mask also signalling its evil intent. We can clearly see here that it is not clothed but covered in thick hair. In this version it also sits much higher on its victims body, just under the rib cage which would make breathing increasingly difficult. If the original painting showed a nightmare, this one shows a house invasion by a malignant monster with its violent intentions all too clear to see. The horse is much more prominent in this version, no longer a gloomy presence at the back of the image, but central and the peak of the triangle that frames the composition. It has changed from a black mare that is sneaking a view of what is occurring on the bed, into a huge apparition that dominates the picture. Its ghostly white head is almost skeletal in its brightness so that its eyes no longer stand out but are just part of its overwhelmingly spectral nature. The curtains around it are now clearly parted allowing its head to fully enter the space of the bed with its huge mane of white curly hair flowing out to the right of its neck, as if blown by a ghostly wind. Indeed, this is not so much a mare that brings you bad dreams, but a stead that carries you to the afterlife. Interestingly, the bed-table is now to the right and behind the bed, an awkward positioning that makes it almost part of the bed itself—it seems to have a white cloth on it which adds to that impression—or has been turned over and is about to tip its contents on to the woman’s feet. Above the table is a long mirror, a peculiar positioning for such a decoration which increases the feeling that it has been added to the picture purposely to say something about the nature of what is occurring and its possible meaning. The mirror appears to show nothing but bright light in it. Though its angle suggests it might reflect either the horse, or even the incubus, but it shows neither, reinforcing the idea that both are a dream and not really there—nor that the incubus is vampiric in some way. This work then is both more and less disturbing. The incubus is more malevolent but does not directly challenge our gaze. The sexual nature of the image is certainly less about self-pleasure and more about sexual violence—the incubus might not be staring at us but the image asks whether we want to witness sexual abuse, or more worryingly infers that we might find pleasure in the nightmares of others. Indeed, more than the original this version with its impossible angles and pronounced use of demons and ghosts suggests the image as a whole is a depiction of a nightmare, where one cannot move (sleep paralysis) and is trapped in a space of physical and sexual anxiety and where fantastical creatures abound. The second reworking of the theme is blurrier in almost every respect. It is far less written about than the other two and even finding a date for it even seems problematic. Unlike the reworking mentioned above it is more a straight copy of the original painting composition-wise. It looks far less finished and seen as far more sexually charged. The female figure dominates the picture

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with the bed looking more like a large shell within which the woman lays. Her body almost seems to flow out of the shell and down over the side of the bed. The blurry nature of the brush strokes makes it appear as though she is almost naked or covered with the most diaphanous of fabrics. The shell of the bed seems to flow out from her hips making it appear almost large an extended vagina—in similar fashion to the lilies painted by twentieth-century artist Georgia O’Keefe. The position infers ecstasy and spent sexual jouissance with the woman exhausted after her exertions slumped over the side of the bed. This is further reinforced by a statue on the bedside table. The bottles that were in the original have been replaced by a statue of two naked figures. One is kneeling but upright with their arms stretched out over the head of another who is kneeling figure in front of them and whose head is facing the first ones crutch. In fact the similar colouring and brushwork implies that this tableau is linked to the woman in the bed as if it represented the dream that has elicited such a strong sexual response in the sleeper. The erotic nature of the foreground in this last version of The Nightmare is such that the horse and the incubus seem almost incidental. In the other versions the demon was the size of a large ape, here it is a small monkey, and one that almost fades into the background. It even appears to be sitting to the side of the woman rather than on her and if it was not for the creatures slightly glowing eyes we might mistake it for part of the bed curtain. Similarly, the horse, which is definitely still of the ghostly variety, looks nowhere near as threatening. Its formerly glowing white eyes now seem to look askance towards the incubus, whose gaze can even be seen to be looking upwards at the ceiling, as though both seem rather out of place or even bored. The only nightmare here is of uninvited guests arriving at a party where they realise they are distinctly unwelcome, or even worse, unnoticed. Something of this feeling carries on in to the last work of Fuseli’s we will look at here the ‘sequel’ to The Nightmare, The Incubus Leaving Two Sleeping Women from 1793—there is also a later pencil and wash version of this painting from 1810 where both women are naked linking it to the artists more personal collection of such works. The subject of The Incubus Leaving suggests it follows the last version of The Nightmare just mentioned above, as we see the incubus sitting on the horse and fleeing the bedroom of the two women—one of the women could actually be the figure from the original painting as she has the same night shift on, curly blond hair and a dark bracket on her left wrist. In more detail the picture shows two women on a bed. The one nearest us and the one most brightly lit, is laying on pillows—no longer hanging over the side of the bed as in the original—but her shift has fallen or been torn revealing her breasts. The fabric is so fine that her tummy and lower abdomen look uncovered leaving the fabric to swirl around her back and hips. She looks towards us with a languid expression on her face and her eyes partially open; it shows exhaustion if not necessarily pleasure. The woman next to her is asleep and laying on the first woman’s shoulder. She is more obviously clothed but with bare feet, implying that she is more than likely sharing the

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bed with woman rather than having just ran into the room to save her. This would imply that the two women were engaged in whatever activity has left the blond woman so exhausted. The visit of the incubus and the nightmare would be unnecessary unless the former was the instigator of the desire that has fuelled the women’s sexual encounter and satiation. In many ways then this could be the summation of the final version of The Nightmare intimating the two naked figures in the statue were female and that the woman lying in bed was dreaming of an illicit sexual encounter with another woman. The Incubus Leaving shows the culmination of this dream with the desired lesbian erotic encounter completed. The sex demon’s work is then completed leaving him to flee the scene on his trusty steed, the nightmare. As already observed The Nightmare was something of a sensation when it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1782 and unsurprisingly inspired other artists to adapt the idea to their own ends. At the comic end of the scale both Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray created versions that lampooned politicians of the day. Rowlandson published The Covent Garden Night Mare in 1784 and replaced the main figure with the outstretched, naked and portly figure of Whig politician Charles James Fox, who was well known for his gambling debts, and which are shown troubling his dreams here—there are gambling dice on the night table. The incubus is wearing a white vest and looks somewhat exasperated while the horse is shown with google eyes. Gillray’s Duke Willams Ghost appeared in 1799 and featured a disheveled Prince of Wales, passed out drunk on a bed, his head and arms falling over the side. A naked Augustus William, Duke of York stands to one side warning the Prince of the dangers of his lascivious lifestyle. A more interesting and serious interpretation is Nightmare by the Danish court painter Nicolai Abildgaard from 1800. Here the artist would appear to have known not just of Fuseli’s original painting but also The Incubus Leaving as it shows two naked women in bed together, though for modesty’s sake one has her right leg covered in a sheet. The one nearest us has her arms stretched out over her head, though it is only her left leg that has fallen off the side of the bed. She is clearly satiated after her exertions and has fallen asleep as has her partner, who has turned away from us, but we see her naked rump and leg as evidence of what has occurred. Sitting on top of the foregrounded woman is the incubus. A large monkeylike creature covered completely in hair, with sharp pointed ears and its tail curled between the woman’s breasts. The creature has a very monkey-like face and even with its glowing red eyes has a very cheeky look to its face either because of what it has just witnessed or that it can see the naked woman’s crutch, towards which it is facing. As with a The Incubus Leaving, there is an open window but here we can only see a sickle moon—a symbol for Diana who was seen as a virgin goddess but only because she was unmarried and did not have sex with men. Overall, the picture is one of titillation, with the little imp manifesting our sexual excitement at being able to eavesdrop on such a transgressive act between two women.

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Indeed, it is the sexual nature of the scene that also resonates with the emerging Gothic and Vampire genres. As James B. Twitchell observes, ‘the nightmare of suffocation, the oppressive feeling of nocturnal violation, the fear of the demonic in the one place we cannot control—our subconscious world of sleep’ (29).4 Briefly returning to the Villa Diodati, Mary Shelly included such a scene in Frankenstein where the scientist’s bride to be, Elizabeth, is visited by the monster on the night before her wedding. She is left with her arms and head hanging over the side of the bed—a pose repeated in James Whales Frankenstein from 1931. However, the sexual nature of the invasion in Fuseli’s painting is far more the remit of vampires with the incubus being replaced by a demonic bloodsucker and the thrusting horses head by erect fangs to penetrate their victim. The vampire entering the bed chamber of a woman, often invited, has become a stalwart of the genre from Christobel by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1816), onwards. A hundred after Fuseli’s painting in 1872 Sheridan Le Fanu referenced Christobel and replicated the scene from The Nightmare in Carmilla, a story bursting with illicit sexuality, but also heightening the sense of twixtness in the tableau, where one is not sure whether it is a dream or reality. The female protagonist Laura recalls a dream from her youth where she remembers a creature coming towards her: I was terrified. Its pace was growing faster, and the room rapidly darker and darker, and at length so dark that I could no longer see anything of it but its eyes. I felt it spring lightly on the bed. The two broad eyes approached my face, and suddenly I felt a stinging pain as if two large needles darted, an inch or two apart, deep into my breast. I waked with a scream.5

Bram Stoker solidified the trope in his seminal vampire tale Dracula (1897), with the vampire intruding into the bedrooms of two different women. Firstly Lucy Westenra: ‘There on the bed, seemingly in a swoon, lay poor Lucy, more horribly white and wan-looking than ever’6 who he busts on three separate occasions. And then Mina Harker, who he abuses while her husband sleeps next to her. Here, the vampire and Fuseli’s incubus are curiously similar: As we burst into the room, the Count turned his face, and the hellish look that I had heard described seemed to leap into it. His eyes flamed red with devilish passion; the great nostrils of the white aquiline nose opened wide and quivered at the edges... With a wrench, which threw his victim back upon the bed as though hurled from a height, he turned and sprang at us.7

In fact, the vampire seems to embody both the incubus and the nightmare here, with his devilish demeanour and also the flaring nostrils. The vampire of course offers a nightmare from which one will never wake up, and the genre as a whole has remained in its demonic grip ever since. However, before the vampire, there was the vampyre who was more likely to be a bat rather than an ages old aristocrat, and to look at that we now turn to the other work in this study ‘The Sleep of Reason’ by Francisco Goya.

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Goya’s etching is a slightly more problematic work in that it was part of a much larger collection, ‘los caprichos’ [the whims or caprices] which consisted of 80 images created between 1797–1798 and published in 1799. In part an experiment in themes and technique they were produced alongside the artists normal commissioned work for the Spanish Court, the church, and wealthy patrons, seeing them as a far more personal expression of his art and mental state. In fact, not long before this, late 1792, Goya had been struck by a mysterious illness that left him deaf. This sudden assault on his senses, which has also been described as a breakdown of sorts, left him fearing for his sanity and necessarily had a profound effect upon him causing him to withdraw from society. His art became noticeably darker after this episode, indeed a self-portrait in ink undertaken between 1795–1797, shows the artist in serious mood with his face surrounded by a wild tangle of black hair. Unlike the flamboyance of Fuseli’s painting, Goya’s ‘los caprichos’ is a far more intimate collection, and more acerbic about the society around him. As noted by the artist himself the etchings show ‘the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance or self-interest have made usual’.8 The pictures are a commentary and critique of Spanish society and human nature but were withdrawn from public sale by the artist after selling only 27 copies—possibly due to the dangers of openly criticising the King or the church and indeed the artist himself later wrote that it was due to fear of the Inquisition.9 Belying its light sounding title the series covers much darker material and even bears some relation to Goya’s later set of etchings ‘The Disasters of War’, with its last section being titled ‘caprichos epháticos’ [emphatic caprices]— much of what the artist saw as the innate cruelty and in-humaneness of humanity and its institutions feature in both collections. Exampling the dark nature of ‘los carpachos’ a quarter of them feature witches. Witchcraft was a practice that was not unknown in Goya’s time, though as Robert Hughes observes, the artist often used them to symbolise the church as signifiers of superstition and cruelty10 that fed on the young (see Capricho No. 45: Mucho hay que chupar [There is plenty to suck]—the witches are often shown as old crones that seem to enjoy the suffering of others. Alongside this, and which is important to the discussion of ‘The Sleep of Reason’, is the inclusion of bats and bat-like creatures (often figures with large bat-like wings). This is not totally unexpected as in medieval Europe bats were often thought to be the familiars of witches and even carry messages from said witches to the devil.11 In fact the artist William Blake also used that connection in his picture Hecate [The Triple Hecate] or The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy from 1795. Blake’s picture features Hecate, a goddess of magic and the underworld—renamed Enitharmon in Blake’s personal mythology—who is flanked by two naked kneeling figures one male and one female with their faces hidden behind the witches back, while to the left of them is a donkey chewing a thistle, a snake (or possibly a frog), and a large owl—very much like Goya’s owls. Flying above

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the three figures is a large bat, with another further back in the distance. As sometimes the case with Goya the bat has an animalistic face, and in this case, it is more cat-like. As we shall see with ‘los caprichos’ the bat appears to emerge from the gloom of the distance possibly bringing the power of superstition from the past to the witch. However, before looking into the occurrences of bats in other images in the series, it is best to turn to ‘The Sleep of Reason’ itself (Fig. 2). The picture itself shows a man, possibly the artist judging by the paper and equipment in front of him, slumped over a table/column upon which is the inscription ‘El sueño de la razón produce monstruos’ [The sleep of reason produces monsters]. Directly behind the figure is a lynx and above that and streaming back into the distance are fantastical flying creatures consisting of owls, some with human-like faces, possibly another lynx-like creature, and lots of bats. It is instructive to compare this with Fuseli’s painting as both forefront dreaming figures. Fuseli’s version is far more sexual in nature. As mentioned above it features a young woman lying in bed with her head and left arm over the edge of the bed thrusting her breasts towards us, the viewer. On her stomach squats an ape-like incubus. Behind her hovers a horse head with white glowing eyes; a literal nightmare. The position of the woman on the bed makes this a sexually charged image. An impression that would only have been enhanced by the common conception of women at the time as irrational and soft-bodied; the easy victims of superstition, emotions and sensual pleasures. The pressure on the woman’s body not only intimating the idea of night paralysis, but also the little death of orgasm and her swoon of spent desire. Goya’s composition is very different. Firstly, it features a man, considered a far more rational creature in that period, more so in an age when The Enlightenment was yawing towards Romanticism. He is not in bed or undressed but has obviously been busy working—the tools of his trade scattered across the work surface and scribbles visible upon the paper. It could equally be the sleep of exhaustion, but this is after creative expenditure not ungodly pleasures. The inscription on the column would suggest also that the male artist embodies reason, and that while he sleeps the monsters of the past, superstition and ignorance appear to haunt his dreams. In this sense, this is also a nightmare symbolising the loss of rationality and control and the victory of the monsters from the past; of witchcraft and dark magic. The bats in particular that stretch out behind the figure and fade into the distance seem to be embodiments of the monstrous past. Bats are considered ungodly creatures—the last entry on the list of birds Gods chosen people are not allowed to eat (Leviticus 11:19 and Deuteronomy 14:18)—being neither bird nor animal, they are an afterthought caught between worlds. Interestingly in two preparatory sketches for the final work the bats are even more prominent. In the first, which is far more sketchy in character, the artist is dreaming of many faces and from below them looms a huge black bat which is by far the strongest part of the image as though appearing from the darkness of the sleepers mind. In the second, the top

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Fig. 2 ‘The sleep of reason produces monsters’ by Francisco Goya (1797)

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left-hand corner and taking up fully a third of the image space is part of the moon’s orb with the next biggest element of the picture being an enormous bat hovering over the sleeping artist. The owls, possibly symbolising knowledge or wisdom are minimal or absent in both these versions. The final version however, has many owls that almost seem to surround the artist which along with the lynx, symbolising clear vision, complete a protective aura around the dreaming figure; this is not a fully realised nightmare, although there is one on the edges of the subconscious mind. Something of this is confirmed in the inscription below the etching which reads ‘Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders’. This then more obviously calls for a balance between reason and superstition, logic and the emotions; the artist is not having a nightmare but receiving inspiration. One might even claim that the darkness, the impossible monsters of reason are his muse in someway. As it seems to be the bats that symbolise this, it is worth looking at what roles they play in other images in the series. ‘The Sleep of Reason’ is No. 43 in the series and it is the images closely following it, 45, 48, 51 and 71, which display the most obvious bat and bat-like creatures. Number 45, ‘There is much to suck’, mentioned above, is of particular interest, and features three old drones, witches, sitting around a basket of little children and behind them two large bats fly—Goya’s bats are always very large, more the size of flying cats or dogs, and a point to be returned to later. The women are obviously enjoying themselves and the dead babies in front of them would seem to be a source of sustenances to them. One cannot help but think of Dracula giving his brides a bag of babies to satiate them in his castle, though here the greedy woman has other possible interpretations. Rose-Marie Hagen correlates the image to another in the series featuring three monks (No. 19, ‘They’re hot’), with their mouths wide open symbolise the greed of the church.12 The witches, though replacing the church in other images, seem less so here with the bats hovering behind signifying something more superstitious in nature. Hagen further suggests that the image might refer to how women that performed abortions were renounced as witches—Goya was religious but that seems a little too ‘traditional’ as an interpretation— however, Albert Boime prefers to link it to the idea of witches feeding off the blood of prebaptised children, as proscribed in the Malleus maleficarum [the witches hammer] a known manual for the Inquisition.13 James B. Twitchell, who also cites the proto-vampire credentials of Goya’s bats, prefers to observe the artists notes, which say ‘Those who reach eighty suck little children; those under eighteen suck grown-ups. It seems man is born and lives to have the substance sucked out of him’.14 Goya would seem to be suggesting that the nature of life itself is vampiric, with the old sapping the life out of the young, and youth drawing energy out of the aged. Not that we see much of the latter in the image. Indeed, one could also infer, in relation to the earlier image of the monks that it is both the church and superstition that drain the life out of the babies, or the future of Spain. The two bats behind the witches could

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then form something of a background to the action taking place, in terms of constituting the superstitious past from which the old hags have emerged from. One might even continue the idea of bats as messengers, or as caught between two worlds and conveying the power of history, of the dark past of ignorance, into the witches. Though equally the bats might also be there for their share of the feast which bestows are far more modern or Romantic view on the creatures as bloodsuckers. This is certainly worth discussing here as the intention of this article is to suggest that bats in the popular imaginary of the time were slowly changing from the medieval view of them being disease carriers or signifiers of dark practices and magic—in 1332 in France Lady Jacaume of Bayonne was burned as a witch because bats were seen flying around her home15 —into blood-sucking fiends. As mentioned above James B. Twitchell in his work on vampires in Romantic Literature also cites numbers 64 and 72 in ‘los caprichos’ as possible examples of vampire bats, but the flying figures there have obviously feathered wings and one of the prime characteristics of bats is the leathery skin marking them out as different; not bird yet not animal. As such to discuss the idea of possible vampire bats, we will look at numbers 48, 51 and 71 next. No. 48, Soplones [Snitches] and No. 51, Se repulen [They spruce themselves up]. Both show partially humanoid creatures with large bat-like wings—curiously their ape-like appearance and clawed feet bear much resemblance to Fuseli’s incubus. In ‘snitches’ the bat-like creature has caught a lynx between its legs forcing it to look away from the three crones at the bottom right of the image. If the lynx symbolises clear sight then the bat creature is forcing ‘reason’ to look away while it breathes/speaks into the women’s ears. The toxic nature of whatever the bat is saying is emphasised by the arses at the lower left of the picture that are farting into the face of one of the women. The women who could be witches, mirroring the three crones mentioned in ‘There is plenty to suck’ are being told rumours and gossip, old wives tales reinforcing the ignorance and superstition of the past. Of note is the size of the bat which is easily as big as the women, a huge demonic creature—demons have been shown as winged creatures as early as Bede’s ‘Life of Saint Cuthbert’ (699–705), and Felix’s ‘Life of Saint Guthlac’ (730–740) and certainly by the fifteenth century these were not feathered but bat-like in appearance16 —suggesting not just the idea of the small fluttering bat of Europe but something much more sinister.17 This is corroborated in image No. 51 where we see three figures with a man in the foreground on the left-hand side, presumably a barber of some kind, with a large pair of scissors in his hand trimming the claw-like toe nails of the figure opposite him. This person is more like a large goblin, and again not that unlike Fuseli’s incubus, that is seated on the ground stretching out its legs so that the barber can trim its huge nails—these feet are very like the ones shown on the humans with bat-like wings noted in the previous picture. The creature is also thrusting it’s face forward with a large smile of content spread across its obviously powdered face—the skin of the goblin is oddly dark which is not necessarily significant of anything other than a device to highlight

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the whiteness of its face but it is curious. The figure then seems to represent someone who would be made up for the royal court, with its civilised and powdered exterior hiding its physical and moral corruption beneath. Behind these two figures looms an enormous bat creature, with one wing cradling the goblin while the other hovers behind the barber as though about to bring him into its embrace. The bats head is in the centre of the image, not quite human, nor like the goblin, but oddly not unlike the lynx seen earlier. This is partially enforced by the bats large eyes that do not look at us, as would be expected, but simultaneously look at the figures either side of it. The upward tilt of its head also suggests a mastery over what is happening and that it is not just familiar to the witches but is something far more malevolent and orchestrating what is going on. This feeling is reinforced in plate No. 71, ‘Si amanece, nos vamos’ [When day breaks we will be off] which features a large group of naked witches sitting on the ground under the night sky. The old crones are listening to their leader, who appears to have some naked children, possibly tied up, behind here. Stars fill the sky above except for a huge black shadow behind them. Indeed, it seems to have either consumed the sky behind it or is a negative space in the world itself; dark matter from which no light can escape or enter. This void is in the shape of a massive bat. Obviously, Goya could be increasing the size of his bats for dramatic effect and metaphorical significance. Certainly, his hybrid creatures combining bats, human, cats and demon/goblin/incubi lend themselves to increased size. European bats of course are relatively small, however by the end of the eighteenth century Europe had learned of bats from other countries, specifically the colonies across the oceans. These ungodly lands seem to spawn huge bats, and even more worryingly some that drank blood. In fact, as early as the sixteenth century reports from various adventurers returning from central and South America spoke of bats at least the size of pigeons. As the European mind tried to fit these new findings into their existing cultural frameworks of folklore, religion and bestiaries the tales almost took on a life of their own. In 1516 Peter Martyr d’Anghiera wrote that ‘[d]uring the night the men were tortured by bats, which bit them; and if one of these animals bit a man while he was asleep, he lost his blood, and was in danger of losing his life. It is even claimed that some people did die on account of these wounds’.18 Such reports were not just confined to the Americas and in 1599 Ulisse Aldrovandi reported of the savage bats in India that could knock a man to the ground with its wings.19 As the stories grew so the details changed being incorporated into lore and more recognisable to what we would think now of as attributes of the vampire. In 1731 Joseph Gumilla gave another use of the huge wings of the bat that just knocking its victims to the floor, now they were used to mesmerise and lull them into a state of deathly torpor, ‘their wings softly beat the air to cool and lull the sleeper, whose life, they intend to take’.20 By 1745 the pigeon sized bats had become monstrous, and in 1758 the Malayan flying fox was named vampyrus by Carl Linnaeus. This seemed to seal the name in the colonial psyche. As noted by Kevin Dodd, ‘John Gabriel Stedman in 1796

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gave one of the most quoted descriptions in the nineteenth century. Therein he spoke of being bitten by a “vampire or spectre of Guiana.’”21 While these huge bats became known as vampires in the nineteenth century—in popular culture at the time vampire denoted the bat rather than a revenant that drank blood—the idea of large bats that drank blood had already found a foothold into Old World folklore. As such, Goya, as a member of the Spanish Court might have been familiar with the tales returning from the Spanish colonies of huge bats, possessing wing-spans as big as a human and that drank blood. These creatures of the savage and unknown territories would seem the perfect symbol of the ungodly world, a land outside of time that did not know God and that could fire the dark powers of witches and magicians. Of course there is no way to know whether Goya was thinking of these creatures when he draw such large winged beats in ‘los caprichos’, and the bat that stretched across the page of the sketch for ‘The Sleep of Reason,’ or loomed large over the company of witches in ‘When day breaks we will be off’. However, the case for such knowledge seems more evident when we look at one of his images from the later series ‘The Disasters of War’. Goya worked on ‘The Disasters of War’ during and after the Peninsular War in which Spain fought for its independence from France. As with so much of Europe the hope of Enlightenment and a new order under Napoleon had quickly vanished and the ensuing battle to re-establish the Spanish monarchy was brutal and devastating. Goya was appalled by what he witnessed and draw up the sketches for ‘The Disasters of War’ between 1810–1814, but were printed later in two parts with the first 64 plates possibly before 1814 and the remainder between 1820–1823.22 If Goya had metaphorically pointed towards the savagery, callousness and vampirism of humanity in ‘los caprichos’, ‘The Disasters of War’ show it in its brutal reality. Even though the etchings themselves were not published until 1863, it is the time when they were executed that interests us here. The image we are looking at is No. 72 ‘las resultas’ [consequences] and it depicts Spain after the war has finished, and the monarchy has returned to power. The fight for independence had been led by the extreme nationalists who also brought back the excesses of the church in all its forms creating an air of suspicion and danger once home rule was restored. The image shows a figure of a man lying full stretch on the ground. It is unclear whether he is asleep and wound in sheet and bed clothes, or dead and wrapped in a shroud, but the looseness of it more likely suggests the former. If so, then one could almost imagine that this is the artist from ‘The Sleep of Reason’, who has given up artistic endeavour—an issue that Goya himself struggled with—and his dreams are now running rampant. However, this is a very different slumber than before. Whereas in the earlier etching owls and the lynx brought reason to the artists mind and kept the darkness and the irrational at bay, here the nightmare has full sway. There are no other fantastical creatures in this image other than a swarm of bats. Some commentators have called them vultures picking off the corpse of Spain, but they are clearly bats with their distinctive black, angular, non-feathered, skin covered

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wings. More than this, and importantly for this study, they are vampire bats. In the centre of the image is the lead bat. A huge creature, easily the size of the incubus seen in Fuseli’s The Nightmare, and equally muscular and hairy; its wingspan the width of the slumbering man. It has an animalistic face with large staring eyes and a long nose, and it uses its mouth to suck or pull the covering away from the man’s body revealing his naked chest beneath. One can almost imagine Joseph Gumilla’s observations being true in that this vampire has used its wings to lull its victim into slumber so that it might drain its body at its leisure. Indeed, one can read the image as showing the monsters of Spain’s colonial past, after victory against the French, are now given free reign to drain the life out of the Country—a common descriptor of the vampire in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century film is as a creature that sucks nations dry (see Son of Dracula [Siodmak: 1943], Dracula III: Legacy [Lussier: 2005], and Daybreakers [Spierig Brothers: 2009] amongst many). Here then, reason has not only fallen asleep but is on the cusp of death leaving the monsters, the vampire bats, to run wild. These two images while important in their own right have become seminal within the Gothic canon. Establishing and evolving tropes and tableaux have played a central role in many Gothic narratives that have followed in their wake. More interestingly perhaps they equally reveal the vampiric qualities of the Gothic, a genre that continually feeds off itself so that it can continue to evolve. Necessarily entangled with this is the Vampire genre itself, and not just the blood-sucking variety but the characteristics of transgression, sensuality, darkness, anxiety and interdependence see it inextricably, almost symbiotically, joined with the Gothic itself. As both Fuseli and Goya have shown us the vampire can express our darkest nightmares, of when all hope is gone and even the will to live has been sucked dry. Yet the desire of the vampire can also offer hope, of escaping tradition and creating new Gothic futures.

Notes 1. Jorge Luis Borges. Everything and Nothing, trans. Donald A. Yates, James E. Irby, John M. Fein and Elliot Weinberger (New York: New Directions, 1999). 2. Andrei Pop. Antiquity, Theatre, and the Painting of Henry Fuseli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 82. 3. Erasmus Darwin. The Botanic Garden, a Poem in Two Parts; The Economy of Vegetation and the Loves of the Plants (London: Jones & Company, 1825), 165. 4. Twitchell further notes the Sigmund Freud also possessed a copy of the painting in his Vienna apartment. James B. Twitchell. The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 1981). 5. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Carmilla [1872] (www.gutenberg.net, 2003), 104.

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6. Bram Stoker. Dracula [1897] (London: Signet Classics, 1996), 137. 7. Stoker, Dracula, 305. 8. Quoted in Scott Buketman. Hellboy’s World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins (Oakland: California University Press, 2006), 201. 9. Albert Boime. A Social History of Modern Art, Volume 2: Art in an Age of Bonapartism, 1800–1815 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 264. 10. Robert Hughes. Goya (New York: Knopf, 2006). 11. Patti Wigington. ‘Bat Magic and Folklore,’ Learn Religions. 22 August 2019. https://www.learnreligions.com/bat-magic-and-fol klore-2562685. Accessed 26 June 2020. 12. Rose-Marie Hagen and Rainer Hagen. Francisco Goya, 1746–1828 (Köln: Taschen, 2003), 36. 13. Boime, Modern Art, 264. 14. Twitchell, Living Dead, 29. 15. Icy Sedgwick. ‘Bats in Folklore: Vampires, Familiars and Death Omens,’ Icy Sedgwick. 11 January 2020. https://www.icysedgwick.com/bats-fol klore/. Accessed 26 June 2020. 16. For example, see Janiˇcek Zemiliy of Pisku. The Jensky Codex, ‘Satan prodává odpustky’ [The Devil Is Selling Indulgences] (1490–1510), and Martin Schongauer. ‘The Temptation of St. Anthony’ (1470– 1475). 17. The old English name for a bat was ‘flitter mouse’ or ‘flutter mouse,’ with the word bakke, from which bat is derived, meaning ‘flutter’. 18. Quoted in Kevin Dodd’s. ‘“Blood Suckers Most Cruel:” The Vampire and the Bat in and Before Dracula,’ Athens Journal of Humanities & Arts, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2019), 112. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Dodds, 113. 22. Jesusa Vega. ‘The Dating and Interpretation of Goya’s “Disasters of War,”’ Print Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 1 (March 1994), 3–17.

Bibliography Boime, Albert. A Social History of Modern Art (University of Chicago Press, 1991). Borges, Jorge Luis. Everything and Nothing, trans. Donald A. Yates, James E. Irby, John M. Fein and Elliot Weinberger (New York: New Directions, 1999). Buketman, Scott. Hellboy’s World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins (Oakland: California University Press, 2006). Darwin, Erasmus. The Botanic Garden, a Poem in Two Parts: The Economy of Vegetation and the Loves of the Plants (London: Jones & Company, 1825). Dodd, Kevin. ‘“Blood Suckers Most Cruel:” The Vampire and the Bat in and Before Dracula,’ Athens Journal of Humanities & Arts, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2019), 107–132.

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Hagen, Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen. Francisco Goya, 1746–1828 (Köln: Taschen, 2003). Hughes, Robert. Goya (New York: Knopf, 2006). Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. Carmilla [1872] (www.gutenberg.net, 2003). Pop, Andrei. Antiquity, Theatre, and the Painting of Henry Fuseli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Sedgwick, Icy. ‘Bats in Folklore: Vampires, Familiars and Death Omens,’ Icy Sedgwick. 11 January 2020. https://www.icysedgwick.com/bats-folklore/. Accessed 26 June 2020. Stoker, Bram. Dracula [1897] (London: Signet Classics, 1996). Twitchell, James B. The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 1981). Vega, Jesusa. ‘The Dating and Interpretation of Goya’s “Disasters of War,”’ Print Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 1 (March 1994), 3–17. Wigington, Patti. ‘Bat Magic and Folklore,’ Learn Religions. 22 August 2019. https://www.learnreligions.com/bat-magic-and-folklore-2562685. Accessed 26 June 2020.

Gothic Exoticism

John Polidori’s Mesmerising Vampire Martina Bartlett

The legacy of Dr. John William Polidori’s contribution to gothic literature, the aristocratic vampire known as Lord Ruthven in The Vampyre, has extended far beyond its young author’s hopes for his work. However, this particular novel was not one Polidori himself intended to publish as he had written it for a lady’s amusement when he was physician to Lord Byron during the summer of 1816. Polidori left the manuscript with the unnamed lady during his stay in Geneva, and no more was heard of it until 1819, when it was published, in London, by Henry Colburn under Lord Byron’s name. When Polidori claimed it as his own work, he endured a wave of derision and accusation for the seemingly deliberate act of the unscrupulous publisher, as it was thought that Polidori had himself sent it to Colburn with Byron’s name in order to get it published. And although the work was immensely successful, in Britain and across Europe, and re-printed several times, Polidori’s only benefit was the sum of thirty pounds and a further tarnished reputation. The novel became a horrible foreshadowing of Polidori’s own short life and demise. John William Polidori (1795–1821) was the oldest of eight children born to Italian emigré Gaetano Polidori and English governess, Anna Pierce. As a young child he was sent to the newly opened, but remote, Ampleforth College run by Benedictine monks, in Yorkshire, where he spent much a good deal of time away from his family. Aged fifteen, at his father Gaetano’s behest, M. Bartlett (B) University of Winchester, Winchester, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_21

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Polidori went up to Edinburgh to read for a medical doctorate, graduating four years later. Polidori’s time at the University was lonely, and he wrote to his father complaining that he found it difficult to communicate with the other students describing them as ‘automatons’ in comparison with his own more expressive nature.1 During his studies, Polidori wrestled with the life choices imposed upon him, and wrote again to his father with a variety of options for his future other than becoming a doctor, including taking up arms to fight for Italy. It seemed that anything was preferable to reading medicine. Gaetano was acerbic in his response and so Polidori finished his studies.2 However, he was, at nineteen, far too young to practice medicine in London. Eventually, in 1816, Polidori was introduced to Lord Byron, who was seeking a physician to accompany him abroad, into what would be Byron’s self-imposed exile. For Polidori this was an enormous opportunity to travel with the most acclaimed bard in the country. Polidori’s ambition was to be thought of as a writer, which he freely admitted in print; he especially admired poetry describing it as the ‘intoxicating draught’3 and ‘that more than heavenly lyre’.4 However, aside from his epic poem The Fall of the Angels published in 1821, the only collection of poems that Polidori produced was The Wreath and other poems, published in 1819, which contains an ode addressed to his collection, ‘To My Book’ in which he described his ambitions to be remembered for his writing, although he knew that it might not come to pass: ‘I know I dream, /Thinking thy form can gain immortal gleam /Of fame’.5 Gaetano Polidori voiced his doubts as to the wisdom of this; he himself had experience of travelling with an accomplished writer as he had been secretary to the tragedian Alfieri and knew the vagaries of such a character, but his warnings were to no avail. Polidori may have harboured ideas that his engagement by Lord Byron would elevate his status and that he may have been able to glean some useful advice from the infamous poet. However, his association with Byron only brought him ignominy, and the work for which he is most celebrated was still attributed to Byron well into the nineteenth century. Even in the twentieth century Polidori was criticised for what was to become his contribution to popular vampire literature,6 although now at least the work was attributed to him. For much of the twentieth century Polidori was mostly a footnote to studies of his former employer, Byron, and his influence on popular fictional vampires often viewed less a creative work by the physician scholar, and more a result of his animosity to the way Lord Byron treated him. However, in the latter three decades, Polidori’s work has been given more favourable analyses by scholars7 who are beginning to realise that Polidori was more than just ‘a vampire of an unacknowledged kind’8 who only produced poor imitations of another’s work and ideas. After The Vampyre was published in Henry Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine on 1 April 1819 under Byron’s name, Polidori wrote to Colburn and claimed it as his own.9 Polidori later edited some words and phrases of his story, and the most significant change he made was the name of the vampire from Lord Ruthven to Lord Strongmore. Polidori’s later version of his tale

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with a revised vampire name was never published in his lifetime, and remained largely forgotten. In 1966, Polidori’s edited version was presented in the PhD thesis of Robert Harson,10 but this was not published either, and so Polidori’s revised version remained unpublished until 1994 when David Lorne Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf produced and edited a collection of Polidori’s fiction which included Polidori’s contribution to Byron’s ghost writing challenge—Ernestus Berchtold or the Modern Oedipus (published 1819), and Polidori’s final version of The Vampyre. Subsequent scholarly analyses of The Vampyre continue to use the name Lord Ruthven, presumably because this has traction now as a known character. It also makes the connections to Lord Byron clear for those who recognise it as the character Clarence de Ruthven, the caricature of Lord Byron that Lady Caroline Lamb created in her own novel Glenarvon. However, this chapter will follow Macdonald and Scherf’s lead in reclaiming the text for Polidori; the version used in this study will be Polidori’s edited text and so the vampire will be referred to as Lord Strongmore. Polidori’s medical thesis had remained largely ignored until the work of Anne Stiles, David Petrain, Stanley Finger and John Bulevich in 2010. Stiles et al. enabled a new perspective on Polidori’s work when David Petrain translated Polidori’s medical thesis from Latin in 2010. The thesis, titled ‘Inaugural Medical Dissertation Concerning Certain Aspects of the Disease Called Oneirodynia’,11 examined cases of what Polidori identified as oneirodynia,12 which Petrain translated as somnambulism. In their 2010 paper, ‘Somnambulism and Trance States in the work of John William Polidori, Author of The Vampyre’. Stiles et al. argue that Polidori’s interest in trance states was evident in his fiction, particularly in the character of the vampire, Lord Strongmore. They posit that Strongmore’s characteristics depict the behaviours of the somnambulist and reflect the nineteenth-century fear that human beings are soulless automata, functioning without the guidance of soul or will. There is some textual support for the interpretation of Strongmore as a somnambulist in The Vampyre, for example, Strongmore’s ‘superhuman’ strength,13 and also the description of Strongmore at the beginning of the tale, in particular his gaze, which Polidori described as ‘that dead grey eye’14 which could be likened to the unfocused stare of the somnambulist. Similarly, the vampire’s dogged pursuit of victims, and his nefarious behaviours could add evidence to this point of view in that it is similar to the fixed track of the somnambulists while in a trance state. However, unlike the somnambulists, Strongmore is cognisant of what is actually happening around him, and is able to manipulate others. It is the behaviour of other characters which has more in common with those in a somnambulist trance. Polidori’s commentary on the case studies in his thesis, as well as character descriptions in his fictional work, placed the imagination as a vital means for the trance states or altered states of consciousness to occur. His work, both fictional and scholarly, presented the imagination as having paramount importance in constructing a perception of reality. The contention of this

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study is that Strongmore’s monstrosity is fluid and shifts according to those around him, becoming what they imagine him to be. It is his victims who are first mesmerised by Strongmore’s gaze and rhetoric into projecting their own fantasies onto him which defines his nature throughout the novel such as that of vicious seducer, and later, the vampire of folklore. Although he is the catalyst, it is their imaginations which confer meaning onto the vampire. Polidori had begun to consider the power of the imagination early in his writing career, and this interest was extended to the imaginations of characters in his fictional work, and to that of wider society and civilisations in his 1818 essay Upon the Source of Positive Pleasure.15 The starting point, in print at least, was in his medical thesis, specifically the conclusions he drew about the nature of the somnambulist condition. Trance states such as somnambulism were not specifically defined at this point in history, and had been problematic because of their implications for the immortal soul. However, many medical practitioners, such as William Cullen (1710–1790) and Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) had their own definitions and categorisations. In his thesis, Polidori gave a general definition of oneirodynia as, ‘the habit of doing something in sleep that is usually done by those who are awake’.16 Polidori described somnambulism as appearing to give the sufferer the semblance of a waking state, noting that they could perform activities they could not or would not do in a normal, waking state. Polidori wrote that they might ‘creep up onto lofty places and onto precipices—where no sane man would dare to follow them on any account’.17 Furthermore, Polidori noted that sufferers, retain in their memory all that happened in their last episode, and yet when awake they remember nothing about those occurrences, so that the track followed by the soul as it thinks and remembers appears to be doubled, with the intellect following one track when it is asleep, but the other when it is awake.18

This indicates a split consciousness, with the ability to recall a prior episode while in the state, and thereby experiencing a continuity, although not remembered when awake. Polidori’s comments pre-figured later nineteenthcentury classifications of psychological disturbance, such as that of Pierre Janet (1859– 1947)19 whose work examined split personalities and the condition of dissociation. Polidori used two existing case studies, one reported by his uncle, physician Aloysius Eustachius Polidori, and one documented in Diderot’s Encyclopédie.20 In the conclusion to his thesis Polidori determined that the sufferers were able to create a reality, or ‘track’ as he described it, furnished by a stimulus of their imagination and their memories. One of the major contemporary debates around somnambulism was the fact that the somnambulists seemed to be able to move around without the use of vision. Polidori concluded that they were in fact using their eyes, but only when the narrative formed by their imagination required them to do so. This was the same for the other senses. So, those in the state of somnambulism, according to Polidori, were operating within a construction of reality formed from their imaginations

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and memories which enabled them to carry out everyday tasks, and sometimes activities not normally undertaken in waking conditions, but that they were able to use their sensory faculties when triggered by the imagination. Trance states, such as somnambulism, were of immense interest within medical practices during the late eighteenth century, particularly in Continental Europe. Viennese physician, Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), had a theory that an invisible fluid existed both internally and externally and contended that sickness occurred as a result of obstruction of the fluid. By removing the obstruction, and inducing a crisis, then the person would be cured. Mesmer had originally used magnets to help the flow of the fluid, but then he discovered he could have the same effects without the magnets. This method he described as animal magnetism.21 Part of Mesmer’s process included a personal treatment in which he would fix the patient’s knees between his own and then stare into their eyes passing his hands over their body in an attempt to find the obstruction. Then Mesmer would project the fluid which emanated from his own eyes into those of the patient and this active gaze was supposed to remove the obstacles. Mesmer’s method was extremely popular and other practitioners developed it, for example the Marquis de Puységur, Armand Marie Jacques de Chastenet (1751–1825). So popular was Mesmer’s practice, that Louis XVI ordered an inquiry conducted by the physician Antoine Lavoisier, and the American Ambassador Benjamin Franklin among others. The findings of the inquiry did not cast doubt upon the efficacy of the practice, but on its causes. They concluded that the success of Mesmer’s treatment was caused, in part, by stimulated imagination.22 Therefore, the value of the imagination in such therapies was paramount, and was reflected in the more theatrical demonstrations held by practitioners in England in the late eighteenth century. Mesmer’s practices had initiated the setting up of Societies de l’Harmonie Universelle all over France which practised animal magnetism with great success, until the French Revolution. The Marquis de Puységur, and his brother, joined the Parisian Society of Harmony, when they were stationed in Paris. Once they retired they returned to the family home at Buzancy near Soissons, where they practised magnetism on the workers on their estate. Puységur had modified Mesmer’s practices and developed a therapy called artificial somnambulism, arguably a precursor to what was to become hypnosis.23 This rendered the subject into a highly suggestive trance, similar to that of natural somnambulism, and the subjects could perform feats they were usually unable to do. The French Revolution and its aftermath somewhat curbed the development of animal magnetism, and the branches of the Societé de L’Harmonie closed.24 Anyone practising animal magnetism in Britain during the nineteenth century could be subjected to ridicule and exposure as a charlatan. This attitude may have been exacerbated by the frequent showing of the farce Animal Magnetism (or the Doctor Outwitted), written by Elizabeth Inchbald, and first performed in England in 1788,25 which seems to have been in performance

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for most of the first decade of the nineteenth century. Despite the popularity of the play, John Benoit de Mainauduc’s History of Animal Magnetism was advertised for sale in The Morning Chronicle in 1801, suggesting that despite magnetism being prime material for farce, there was an interest in it. Disassociating himself from Mesmer, Mainauduc became popular among wealthy society ladies and held his practice in a house on Bloomsbury Square. The practice was lucrative and successful for some years, but it was not considered respectable enough for physicians, and although there was potential in it for medicine, the medical establishment did not overtly consider it until later in the nineteenth century. When Polidori was studying, it would not have been recognised as a reputable practice and he did not mention it in his thesis, or refer to it explicitly in his fiction. However, Lord Strongmore has a similar relationship with his (mostly female) victims as the animal magnetists did with their (mostly female) patients. Entranced by the vampire’s gaze, they plumb the depths of their imaginations and enact their fantasies, unable to perceive his true nature, and so they project their fantasies onto him and he becomes whatever they imagine him to be. This discrepancy between reality and imagination was a development of the conditions of the somnambulists Polidori had documented in his medical thesis. As has been outlined above, Polidori noticed that the imagination and memory were employed by the somnambulists to construct a dream reality which could supersede their sense faculties, unless those ordinary senses were activated.26 Polidori described how this had happened in the two cases he used in his thesis, and that in both cases the two sufferers (a young boy and a priest), both appeared able to function without apparent use of their sense of vision.27 However, Polidori posited that the sense faculties, including vision, were available to the sufferers, but only provoked into use if the imagination required it. Therefore, it was the power of the imagination that created an internal narrative, which controlled the senses. Polidori wrote of the young boy in the first case study that he ‘made use of his vision only when his imagination provided him with some idea that he needed vision in order to carry out’.28 The tightly focussed attention of the sufferers Polidori likened to a state of high emotion such as anger, wherein the person in this state often filtered out other senses, but as Polidori indicated, these can be activated by the imagination.29 So it would seem that the imagination of the sufferers was instrumental in their behaviours, not only for re-construction of their environment, but also to guide their physical responses. One of the perturbing issues around the study of somnambulists was that of will and volition. How much agency those in a natural or artificial somnambulist state actually had over their actions was problematic for what it suggested about the soul. According to his diary, kept during the summer he spent with Byron, Polidori records a conversation he had with Percy Bysshe Shelley, at the Villa Diodati, about ‘whether man was to be thought merely an instrument’,30 and it is likely that Polidori would have included conclusions drawn from his

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thesis, especially as he had a copy of it with him. Polidori’s ideas about how the imagination could over-ride the senses are demonstrated with the characters in The Vampyre. The narrator describes how the protagonist Aubrey has had little guidance in his reading and ‘[cultivates] more his imagination than his judgement’.31 The ill effect of reading upon the imagination, enables the downfall of the protagonists in both The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold. It affected their rational judgement, especially in relation to the company they kept. Some commentators on Polidori’s exploration of the imagination, and reading as a stimulus for the imagination, have often attributed these ideas as originating from Byron’s work.32 However, as has been outlined above, Polidori’s interest in the imagination was already documented in his medical thesis of 1815. Additionally, although there is not a comprehensive record of the lecturers who had tutored him, Polidori had written about one of the lecturers in a letter to his father—Dugald Stewart (Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University), who had been recommended to him by other students.33 Stewart’s possible influence on Polidori was twofold. Firstly, there were Stewart’s ideas about magnetism, and the findings by the commission into Mesmer’s work that it was caused by the imagination. Secondly, Stewart held strong opinions about the effect that reading novels had upon the imagination, and he wrote about how this could create an ‘ill-regulated imagination’.34 In the first instance, the imagination is closely bound to the trance states created by natural and artificial somnambulism as according to the findings of the 1784 Royal Commission into Mesmer’s methods, imagination and recall were the cause of Mesmer’s successes.35 Dugald Stewart wrote extensively about imagination in his three-volume work, The Elements of the Philosophy of Human Mind (1792, 1814, and 1827) and although Stewart did not write about the findings of the Royal Commission until the third volume of his work, published in 1827 and so after Polidori’s death, it is likely that the ideas contained therein could have been discussed with his students much earlier. The effect that novel reading could have on the imagination had been a topic for wider discussion as reading for pleasure became ubiquitous, and books accessible through circulating libraries. The mesmerising effect of reading has been explored in relation to ‘Byromania’ as Byron’s wife lady Anna Isabella Milbanke36 described it, wherein the person and poetry of Lord Byron were reported as having tangible effects on its (usually female) reader. In Simon Bainbridge’s essay on Polidori’s tale, and what he called the ‘Byronic imagination’, Bainbridge argued that Lord Strongmore’s seductive power was constructed from a study of Lord Byron’s poetic rhetoric, with which he was able to seduce all those he desired.37 Bainbridge argued that the vampire’s seductive talents were in his manipulation of rhetoric, which according to Bainbridge, Polidori based on the power of Byron’s rhetoric to seduce. Certainly, Polidori would have been able to see first-hand the effect of Byron’s work and person, upon his readers, and the way in which

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their imaginations constructed a character they thought to be Byron from his writing. So, reading and story-telling are ways in which the imagination can be cultivated; the imagination is key for interpreting sensory data and thereby constructing a perception of reality, therefore, if the imagination is skewed by the effects of injudicious reading, then so is the perception of reality including the self. This had been a concern commented on by many over the preceding decades.38 What Polidori had encountered, other than Dugald Stewart’s earlier work, is not known except for Rousseau’s Julie, or the new Heloise (1761) as he had recommended it to William Taylor of Norwich (1765–1836) who referred to it in his letter of 1815, stating ‘I am reading Julie as you told me to do’.39 In the ‘Conversation about Novels’ which acts as a preface, the speaker R, is in dialogue with another, N. In this dialogue R describes the effect novels have on readers’ minds, by endlessly setting before their readers’ eyes the pretended charms of an estate that is not their own they seduce them, lead them to view their own with contempt, and trade it in their imagination for the one they are induced to love.40

However, Polidori did not blame the reading material as Rousseau did; in both The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold it is the protagonists’ indulgent reading and education that causes a fanciful imagination and poor judgement. In The Vampyre, the narrator derides Aubrey’s lack of discernment, ‘[h]e thought in fine that the dreams of poets were the realities of life’41 and Aubrey’s lack of understanding of the world. Aubrey viewed the world through the filter of his imagination giving him a false perception of reality, because of his poor education. Polidori’s eponymous narrator states in Ernestus Berchtold that ‘this is not uncommon’.42 Because of this Ernestus is mesmerised and bewildered by Olivieri’s cunning rhetoric,43 which eventually leads him to a life of injurious indulgence. In The Vampyre, Strongmore, acts as the catalyst mesmerising those around him into enacting their own fantasies, in which he takes a main role, leading them to depravity and/or death depending on their own imagination. The behaviour of Strongmore is that of the magnetist, whose charismatic power can manipulate and control the imaginations of those around him, thereby encapsulating the worst fears about magnetism—that it can be used to control the actions of others. Lord Strongmore’s resemblance to an animal magnetist can be seen in the way Polidori presented him. Lord Strongmore is described as being the latest novelty in the salons of fashionable London, and through his aristocratic status is able to gain admittance to high society who eagerly accept him to alleviate their boredom. He is described as being very handsome, but his gaze does not seem to consciously acknowledge anyone. Strongmore has a tangible effect on those who see him, which Polidori describes,

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some attributed it to the dead grey eye, which, fixing upon the object’s face, did not seem to penetrate, and at one glance to pierce through to the inward workings of the heart; but fell upon the cheek with a leaden ray that weighed upon the skin it could not pass.44

Although Stiles et al. have pointed out that this description of Strongmore’s unseeing gaze is reminiscent of the somnambulist,45 the effect that it produces serves to beguile the onlookers. This weighty gaze is akin to that of the animal magnetist whose almost tangible gaze held those upon whom he looked, and such an effect on them that they could be driven to physical response.46 That Strongmore holds his onlookers’ attention through the peculiarity of his ‘dead grey eye’, and so exerts a hypnotic effect upon them is evident, but Polidori’s exploration of the nature of the gaze is not limited to just the vampire in the novel. Throughout, there are over a hundred references to eyes, vision, and seeing, both literal vision and cognitive processes. So the conclusion drawn here is that Polidori was making a comment about the nature of perception, which he described in some detail as being faulty in his protagonist, Aubrey, as mentioned above. Aubrey’s failure to choose his reading material more carefully, also extends to the way he reads others. In his short novel, Polidori uses the characters to point out the predatory nature of society which is not just limited to the vampire. Aubrey is flattered by the smiles and attentions of the women seeking a rich eligible bachelor for their daughters whose ‘sparkling eyes, when he opened his lips, soon led him into false notions of his talents and his merit’, and he does not realise they are predating upon him for his wealth.47 There is a necessity in this; without the protection of a wealthy man, a woman’s lot was precarious. So Polidori’s novel depicted how societal structure created a predatory nature, as well as demonstrating how the character could perceive himself through the reactions of others. As has also been pointed out by others, the protagonist position Aubrey holds within the terror novel is usually occupied by a female character. Simon Bainbridge’s excellent essay points out that by comparing Aubrey and his reading to ‘so many milliners’ apprentices’ who are ‘daily ruin[ed]’48 by their reading of certain types of novels, Polidori has feminised Aubrey. This, Bainbridge argues, makes Aubrey more susceptible to the irresistible powers of Lord Strongmore.49 That novel reading could cause immoral behaviour in young women was the subject of an essay published in The Monthly Mirror, 1797, ‘[a] girl with her intellectual powers enervated by such a course of reading, falls an easy prey to the first boy who assumes the languishing lover’.50 The article continues in full melodramatic vein adding illegitimate babies and parental deaths to the miseries incurred by novel reading. The protagonists in both The Vampyre, and Ernestus Berchtold are both cast in this mould. Aubrey falls prey to the influence of Lord Strongmore, and Ernestus is susceptible to his visions of Louisa. Like the somnambulists, the characters construct their reality from their own imaginations, and memories.

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The effect of Aubrey’s injudicious reading is presented in the narrative as the naive character who hoped for the ‘pleasing horrors’ of the supernatural to enter his life, but disappointed that the flickering candle indicated the wind and not ‘the presence of a ghost’.51 It is at this point that he encounters Strongmore, and projects onto him all of his imaginings about the characters he had been reading about, and Polidori wrote, ‘formed this person [Strongmore] into the hero of a romance, and determined to observe the offspring of his fancy, rather than the individual before him’.52 Thus, young Aubrey’s imagination creates the character he wants Strongmore to be. By highlighting this flaw in his characters, Polidori demonstrated how it is possible to filter reality through an imagination-enhanced perception, and so then become malleable to others in a waking state. While Aubrey is watching Strongmore, he is not actually seeing him, only the product of his own mind. Meanwhile, it is Strongmore’s gaze which is taking effect upon him. While Polidori’s vampire is credited with a gaze felt physically, it is the possessive gaze of society who demands his presence because of this and other peculiarities. Polidori wrote that, ‘all wished to see him’,53 and so, in turn, be seen by him. This included a certain society lady who behaved outrageously, ‘Lady Mercer, […] threw herself in his way, and did all but put on the dress of a mountebank, to attract his notice’, all to no avail.54 Lord Strongmore does not acknowledge her even when staring at her directly, ‘though his eyes were apparently fixed upon hers, still it seemed as if they were unperceived’.55 This lack of acknowledgement is the power Strongmore exerts, and their need for his perception of them is suggestive of George Berkeley’s dictum, esse est percipi.56 But this is the vampire’s guile. He ignores the fragile identities of those around him whose desire for him to notice them allows him total access to their society. It is from this inner position that he is able to exert his own will. In turn, their perception and expectation of him to be what they imagine him to be, allows him to exist, following Berkeley’s dictum, feeding on their need for his perception of them. Aubrey’s determination in gaining Lord Strongmore’s notice resulted in him always acknowledging Aubrey’s presence. Aubrey’s desire for this outweighs the fact that he would be travelling with and mentored by a man whose finances he knew to be embarrassed, and of whom he knew little more than that. Strongmore’s motives are obscure here. Despite being financially embarrassed he does not seem to want to predate on Aubrey’s wealth. So what is his need? Aubrey would seem to fulfil the vampire’s desire for an audience, someone to see him, and watch his every move. In short, an audience with the imagination to allow him to exist. Although Strongmore’s self-absorption seems similar to that of the somnambulist, he does not seem to be drawing upon his own imagination in his supposed trance-like state, as do the somnambulists described in Polidori’s thesis. Instead, his nature is constructed by the imaginations of others. In Polidori’s tale, the enigmatic Strongmore is presented as being very cautious when speaking to the ‘virtuous wife and innocent daughter’, to the extent that few

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knew he even spoke to women.57 This would appear to be another sleight-ofhand trick, as Lord Strongmore was later found to have seduced all women, the virtuous and the less virtuous alike, and reduced them to the depths of depravity, and his own desires appeared only to be gratified in hurling his victim from ‘the pinnacle of unsullied virtue, down to the lowest abyss of infamy and degradation’.58 After Strongmore’s departure they had, ‘thrown even the mask aside, and had not scrupled to expose the whole deformity of their vices to the public gaze’.59 But what is construed as depravity is a result of their own imaginations, and once their libertine fantasies are public, they are reluctant to hide them away. At this point, however, Strongmore seems less a supernatural creature and more a charismatic seducer with dubious morality. There is no reference to him being the vampire he transpired to be. The women imagined him to be a seducer in their fantasies of him, and so he was a seducer. It is later, when Aubrey’s gaze is scrutinising Strongmore’s behaviour, in his ‘exalted imagination’ Strongmore began to ‘assume the appearance of something supernatural’.60 Aubrey hears of Strongmore’s London seductions, and attempts to thwart similar behaviour in Rome. Aubrey then leaves Strongmore’s company and sets out for rural Greece. Rather than being guided by his enigmatic mentor, Aubrey turns again to reading, this time the works of the historian and travel writer, Pausanias, pursuing a route which created a narrative of history through the ruins of Greece. It is only when Aubrey reaches Greece that there is the first mention of vampires in the folktales of the beautiful peasant girl, Ianthe, and her family who insist the stories are true. On hearing them, Aubrey is reminded of Strongmore, and the narrator states that their tales excite ‘[Aubrey’s] belief in the supernatural power of Lord Strongmore’.61 However, Aubrey outwardly dismisses these tales, wishing to present himself as a rational man. The peasants tell him that the vampires are summoned by denial of their existence, and would visit a terrible vengeance upon non-believers. At this point Polidori draws upon gothic motifs of night falling suddenly, isolation, a storm raging, a ruined dwelling and horrific screams exactly where he has been told the vampires haunt. Polidori also uses moonlight, which has a resurrecting function for the vampire. The motifs of the terror novel throng at this point in Polidori’s tale, and the reality shifts. Aubrey’s imagination is fuelled by his reading, and the conviction of the peasants’ beliefs makes the vampire real, and Ianthe’s death a fact. Polidori’s narrative takes the reader through a fictional and temporal looking glass. The readers follow Aubrey from familiar, fashionable London, and into the ruins of Greece where superstitions abound, and where they become reality for malleable minds infused with terror tales. Stoker also did this with Harker’s crossing from London modernity to the ancient castle of Count Dracula, taking the readers into an obscure past of superstitions and monsters, and like Polidori, also used the figurative symbols of the terror

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novel—moonlight, ruins, storms etc. which act(ed) as cognitive markers for readers familiar with these narratives. In Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula, the vampire can only enter when he has been invited. In Polidori’s tale, attracting the vampire’s attention is an implicit invitation for the vampire to enter the psyche. Through his injudicious reading, Aubrey’s imagination has allowed Strongmore to be fully realised as a vampire, and his desire to be acknowledged by Strongmore has had fatal consequences. Aubrey is bound to the vampire not only through the oath he is forced to take upon Strongmore’s apparent death, but because of his subsequent belief in Strongmore as ‘something supernatural’62 which becomes more than just fancy when Strongmore reappears alive and well in London, but mysteriously unrecognisable to the other characters. The characters in the novel are beguiled by the vampire into projecting their own imagination onto him, and so they see what they want to see. Similarly, Polidori concluded that the sufferers of somnambulism were relying upon the imaginative process used to bring forth enhanced memories of their surroundings, which were then projected onto the external world. Hence they could not tell when there were differences in the real environment, sometime imagining themselves in completely different place (such as the priest who enacted the saving of another from drowning when he was still in bed but believed himself to be swimming in the canal). Polidori wrote of this second sufferer, ‘What a vivid imagination he had may be inferred from the fact that he, without the use of his eyes, held the things depicted in his mind by imagination alone’.63 So, rather than being like a somnambulist himself, Strongmore’s behaviour is more a catalyst to the fantasies of those around him, and it is the behaviour of his victims that is suggestive of a trance-like state. In The Vampyre, the victims were stimulated by their own imaginations, which were then manipulated by the magnetism of Lord Strongmore. That the novel shifts once the story reaches a place where folklore is a reality for people indicates that this vampire truly becomes what people believe him to be. This would appear to be the true power of the vampire, a creature that induces a hypnotic state in others so that they believe him to be whatever they desire him to be. Strongmore embodies the danger of unguarded imagination, and so Polidori has presented the reader with a monster that is created from the depths of human imagination, rather than a supernatural creature from a realm of Hell. Like Aubrey, Polidori also died young, possibly from suicide, although the evidence for that is thin, or possibly as a delayed result of a severe accident he had in 1818. Whichever it was, there is no doubt that the rising star that was Dr. John William Polidori was forever eclipsed by Byron’s moon, and it was that encounter from which he never recovered. Christopher Frayling dedicated his 1991 book Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula, to Polidori, and it is to him I shall give the final words; ‘For Dr John William Polidori, who came too close to a vampire’.

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Notes 1. Early December 1813. John Polidori’s Letter to Gaetano Polidori (only the first sheet). In Italian. Trans. William M. Rossetti with comments. Angelo-Dennis box 31, file 5. 2. ‘Indeed I will answer you immediately as you wished but only to tell you that you are a madman fit for a straight waistcoat’ 9 December 1813 Gaetano Polidori’s letter to John Polidori. In Italian. Trans. William M. Rossetti with comments. Angelo-Dennis box 31, file 5. 3. Polidori, John William. Essay Upon the Source of Positive Pleasure (London, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818), 21. Cited hereafter as Essay. 4. Polidori. Essay, 22. 5. Polidori, John William. ‘To My Book,’ In: Ximenes, The Wreath, and Other Poems (London, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1819), 3. 6. McDayter, Ghislaine. ‘Reviewed Work(s): “The Vampyre” and “Ernestus Berchtold; or the Modern Oedipus”: Collected Fiction of John William Polidori by John William Polidori, D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf,’ Keats-Shelley Journal, 45 (1996), 208–209. 7. For example: Anne Stiles, Stanley Finger and David E. Petrain. ‘A New Look at Polidori,’ European Romantic Review, Vol. 21, No. 6 (2010), 771–773. Gelder, Ken, Reading the Vampire (London, Routledge, 1994), 24–41. 8. Skarda, Patricia L. ‘Vampirism and Plagiarism: Byron’s Influence and Polidori’s Practice,’ Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Summer, 1989), 249–69, 265. 9. Letter from Polidori to Henry Colburn dated April 2, 1819. ‘[…]the tale of the Vampyre – which is not Lord Byron’s but was written entirely by me at the request of a lady […] saying that she thought it impossible to work up such materials, desired I would write it for her, which I did in two idle mornings by her side.’ Ms draft letter Angelo-Dennis box 31. Also in Rossetti, William (1911 [1816]) The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori (London, Elkin Matthews), 15–17. 10. Harson, Robert R. A Profile of John Polidori, with a New Edition of The Vampyre. Ohio University, PhD, 1966 (Ann Arbor, Michigan, University Microfilms, Inc). 11. Petrain, David E. ‘An English Translation of John William Polidori’s (1815) Medical Dissertation on Oneirodynia (Somnambulism),’ Trans. with notes by David E. Petrain. European Romantic Review, Vol. 21, No. 6 (2010), 775–788. Print. Trans. Of John William Polidori, Disputatio Medica Inauguralis, Quaedam de Morbo, Oneirodynia Dicto, Complectens (Edinburgh: Robertus Allen, 1815). Cited hereafter as Oneirodynia.

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12. As did William Cullen in his 1795 Synopsis of Medical Nosology, however according to Macdonald, Polidori had misapplied a translation into Greek. 13. Macdonald, D.L. and Scherf, K. (eds.). The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold or The Modern Oedipus, John William Polidori (Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2008), 48. 14. Ibid., 39. 15. Originally written as a lecture to the Norwich Philosophical Society, he later published it. Polidori claimed the ideas came from a dream he had after a carriage accident which rendered him comatose for several days. 16. Petrain. Oneirodynia, 776. 17. Ibid., 777. 18. Ibid. 19. Pierre Janet proposed the theory that two or more states of consciousness could be dissociated by a ‘cleft of amnesia’, Haule, John Ryan, ‘Pierre Janet and Dissociation: The First Transference Theory and its Origins in Hypnosis,’ The American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, Vol. 29, No. 2 (October, 1986), 86–94, 86. 20. Diderot, Denis and d’Alembert, Jean le Rond (eds.). Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc. Tome Quinzieme (A Neufchastel, Chez Samuel Faulche & Co. 1765 [1751]), 340–342. 21. Ellenberger, Henri. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970, 1981), 59. 22. See also: Darnton, Robert. Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968, 1976 edition), Fara, Patricia, ‘An Attractive Therapy: Animal Magnetism in 18th-Century England,’ History of Science, Vol. xxxiii, No. 2 (1995), 127–177. 23. Stiles, Anne, Finger, Stanley and Bulevich, John. ‘Somnambulism and Trance States in the Works of John William Polidori, Author of The Vampyre,’ European Romantic Review, Vol. 21, No. 6 (2010), 789– 807, 792. 24. Ellenberger. The Discovery of the Unconscious, 73. 25. Inchbald adapted the play from Le Medicin Malgre Tout le Monde by Antoine Jean Boulin-Dumaniant (1786). 26. Oneirodynia, 781, 784. 27. The first case was originally documented by Polidori’s uncle, Aloysius Polidori, the second was documented by Jean-Jacques Ménuret de Chambaud for ‘The French Encyclopedia’ (Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie). 28. Oneirodynia, 781. 29. Ibid., 784. 30. Rossetti, William (ed.). The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori (London: Elkin Matthews, 1911), 123.

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31. Polidori (Eds: Macdonald and Scherf). The Vampyre, 40. 32. Macdonald, David L. Poor Polidori! A Critical Biography of the Author of The Vampyre (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 157. 33. Letter in Italian from John Polidori to Gaetano Polidori, Sunday 5 December 1813, Box 30–31. Marked no. 3 packet 3. Angeli-Dennis collection, British Columbia University. Polidori also mentioned Dr. Brown—it is not known whether this was the creator of the Brunonian system which attributed illness to under or over stimulation, see Bynum, W.F. Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 17, but Polidori’s conclusion was that the somnambulists were suffering from ‘hyperexcitability of the brain and nerves’ (Oneirodynia, 781). 34. Stewart, Dugald (1792). Elements of the Philosophy of Human Mind Volume I (London, Strahan, and T. Cadell, Edinburgh, Creech), Section V—Inconveniences resulting from an ill-regulated Imagination (251– 257), 253. 35. Darnton. Mesmerism, 64; Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, 65. 36. Wilson, F. (ed.). Byromania: Portaits of the Artist in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Culture (Hampshire, London, New York: Macmillan Press Ltd. St. Martin’s Press INC, 1999), 3. 37. Bainbridge, Simon. ‘Lord Ruthven’s Power: Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” Doubles and the Byronic Imagination,’ The Byron Journal, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2006), 21–34. Bainbridge argued that the ‘irresistibility’ of Polidori’s vampire, Lord Ruthven, was ‘a product of his mastery of the rhetoric of Byronic poetics,’ 21. 38. See S.T. Coleridge. ‘Lecture on Education,’ in I. A. Richard (Ed.), The Portable Coleridge (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1978), 401– 403. Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile (1762), Dugald Stewart (1792, pp. 251–257). 39. Correspondence from William Taylor to John Polidori dated 12 March 1815 (Norwich) Box 30–31 (unsorted), Angeli-Dennis collection, British Columbia University. 40. Rousseau, J.-J. (trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vache). Julie, or the New Heloise (Lebanon: University Press of New England, 1997 [1761]), 15. 41. Polidori. Macdonald and Scherf (eds.) 2008. The Vampyre, 40. 42. Polidori. Macdonald and Scherf (eds.) 2008. Ernestus Berchtold or The Modern Oedipus, 68. 43. Olivieri has been described as a caricature of Byron (Macdonald and Scherf, 2008), 20. 44. Macdonald and Scherf 2008. The Vampyre, 39. 45. Stiles, Anne, Finger, Stanley and Bulevich, John. ‘Somnambulism and Trance States in the Works of John William Polidori, Author of The Vampyre,’ European Romantic Review, Vol. 21, No. 6 (2010), 789– 807.

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46. See Barbara Stafford’s description: ‘it was the contagious and extramissionist gaze of the beguiler, as much as the circulation of the animal electricity, that touched the participants and moved them to seizure and frenzy’. Stafford, Barbara, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA, London, England: MIT Press, 1993), 455. 47. Polidori. Macdonald and Scherf (eds.). The Vampyre, 40. 48. Ibid., 40. 49. Bainbridge. ‘Lord Ruthven’s Power,’ 27. 50. The Monthly Mirror, 1797, 278. 51. Polidori. Macdonald and Scherf (eds.). The Vampyre, 40. 52. Polidori. Macdonald and Scherf (eds.). The Vampyre, 41. 53. Polidori. Macdonald and Scherf (eds.). The Vampyre, 39. 54. Ibid., 39. Lady Mercer, often described as a caricature of Lady Caroline Lamb who sought Byron’s affection in such a manner. The character of Lord Ruthven in her novel, Glenarvon, is a parody of Lord Byron, and the coincidence suggests that Polidori drew upon these figures and their relationship for his characters. 55. Polidori. Macdonald and Scherf (eds.). The Vampyre, 40. 56. Esse est percipi (aut percipere). To be is to be perceived (or to perceive). Downing, Lisa, “George Berkeley,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2013 Edition) Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/ber keley/. Accessed May 2017. 57. Polidori. Macdonald and Scherf (eds.). The Vampyre, 40. 58. Polidori. Macdonald and Scherf (eds.). The Vampyre, 43. 59. Ibid., 43. 60. Polidori. Macdonald and Scherf (eds.). The Vampyre, 43. 61. Ibid., 46. 62. Ibid., 43. 63. Petrain. Oneirodynia, 783.

Bibliography Primary References: Macdonald, D.L. and Scherf, K. (eds.) (2008) The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold or The Modern Oedipus: Collected Fiction of John William Polidori (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Petrain, David E. (2010) ‘An English Translation of John William Polidori’s (1815) Medical Dissertation on Oneirodynia’ (Somnambulism). European Romantic Review, Vol. 21, No. 6, 775–788. Polidori, John William (1818) An Essay on the Source of Positive Pleasure (Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, London).

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Polidori, John, William (1819) Ximenes, The Wreath, and Other Poems (London, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown). Rossetti, William (1911 [1816]) The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori (London, Elkin Matthews).

Secondary References: Anonymous (1802) ‘Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity.’ The New England Quarterly Magazine, No. 2, 173 originally published in The Monthly Mirror, London, November 1797. Bainbridge, Simon. ‘Lord Ruthven’s Power: Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” Doubles and the Byronic Imagination.’ The Byron Journal, Vol. 34, No. 1. Darnton, Robert (1968, 1976 edition.) Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Diderot, Denis and d’Alembert, Jean le Rond (eds.) (1765 [1751]) Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc (Tome Quinzieme. A Neufchastel. Chez Samuel Faulche & Co). Downing, Lisa. ‘George Berkeley,’ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr 2013/entries/berkeley. Accessed 06:04:2017. Ellenberger, Henri (1981, 1970) The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books). Fara, Patricia (1995) ‘An Attractive Therapy: Animal Magnetism in Eighteenth Century England,’ The History of Science, Vol. 33, 127–177. Haule, John Ryan (1986) ‘Pierre Janet and Dissociation: The First Transference Theory and Its Origins in Hypnosis,’ The American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, Vol. 29, No. 2 (October), 86–94. McDayter, Ghislaine (1999) Literary Commodification and Celebrity in: Byronmania, Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Culture (Basingstoke, Hampshire, London, New York, USA: Macmillan Press Ltd. St Martin’s Press Inc). Macdonald, David, L. (1991) Poor Polidori! A Critical Biography of the Author of The Vampyre (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press). Rossetti, William (Ed.) (1911) The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori 1816, Relating to Byron, Shelley etc (London: EIkin Mathews). Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1997 [1761]) trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vache. Julie, or the New Heloise (Lebanon: University Press of New England). Skarda, Patricia, L. (1989) ‘Vampirism and Plagiarism: Byron’s Influence and Polidori’s Practice.’ Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Summer), 249–269, 265. Stafford, Barbara (1993) Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA, London, England: MIT Press). Stewart, Dugald (1792) Elements of the Philosophy of Human Mind. Volume I (London, Strahan, and T. Cadell, Edinburgh, Creech). Stiles, Anne, Finger, Stanley and Petrain, David E. (2010) ‘A New Look at Polidori,’ European Romantic Review, Vol. 21, No. 6, 771–773.

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Stiles, Anne, Finger, Stanley and Bulevich, John. ‘Somnambulism and Trance States in the Works of John William Polidori, Author of The Vampyre,’ European Romantic Review, Vol. 21, No. 6 (2010), 789–807. Wilson, F. (Ed.) (1999) Byromania: Portaits of the Artist in Nineteenth and TwentiethCentury Culture (Hampshire, London, New York: Macmillan Press Ltd. St. Martin’s Press Inc).

The Cabinet of Orientalisms Naomi Simone Borwein

Sepulchral arabesques in stone gargoyles and opulent far and near east ornamentation are synonymous with the origins of gothic orientalism rendered in gradations of facsimile within the plastic and written arts in the West. In describing the explicit and implicit material exchange that transmediates, such aesthetics flow between image, text, and context in the production of the monstrous, decadent, or exoticised oriental Other of early gothic forms. Theoretical approaches to this aesthetic in the canon inadvertently chart the movement of gothic orientalism from its picturesque and romantic origins (across pre-Romantic, Romantic, and early Victorian phases, 1740–1830s) to fractal, radical, and alternative forms produced as a critique and reappraisal of the elements of its antecedents, and equally its relationship to aesthetic permutations in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Excogitating on the material components or units of aesthetic exchange that function as ontological schemas of imaginary-visual interactions implies a Deleuzian reconstruction of the material-binary “logic of unholy mixtures”1 —which can be read alongside Baruch Spinoza, Félix Guattari, and more contemporarily scholars like Karen Barad. The spectrum of gothic orientalisms, as aesthetic or knowledge systems, are components of oriental gothic that can be understood through the cabinet of orientalisms as a process of abstraction within that materialist exchange.

N. S. Borwein (B) The University of Windsor, Windsor, ON, Canada

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_22

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Through cultural and theoretical systems, aesthetic and genre taxonomy, a portentous use of fragmentation, new, speculative, and multi-material readings of orientalisms, and transmediation of gothic aesthetics, simulation and readaptation of the narrative contours of William Beckford’s Vathek (1786) and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) together are an originating critical event, which moves backward to Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), situates Frances Sheridan’s History of Nourjahad (1767), and crystalises in the new materialist galvanisms of works like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Architectural images of Walpole’s Strawberry Hill and Beckford’s Fonthill Abby personify this aesthetic lens and its relationship to the oriental gothic content of Vathek and Otranto; both edifices suggest the gothic, mythic, fantastic, far and near east ornate, translocated, or entirely ersatz. Strawberry Hill’s façade and interior are an eclectic mixture of convenient materials and features ranging from paper mâché (e.g., cardboard battlements or paper groining and fretwork), to gothic, orientalising stonework; while, Fonthill Abby’s high opulence, infused with rare and lavish elements, resembled Salisbury Cathedral and owed a debt to Batalha Monastery in Portugal.2 Yet the structural stability of components was compromised in the name of “surface effects”.3 The materiality of these spaces, as high-mid-low components that create the grandeur of illusion, is also a manifestation of a high class vein of orientalism (as in Vathek/Beckford) and a diasporic, middle class, popular vein (as in Otranto/Walpole),4 which provides a spectrum of adaptive interpretations of the paradigmatic abstraction of aesthetics of orientalism. Together Fonthill and Strawberry Hill function as one early model that draws on the relationship between materiality and meaning, which implies the praxis between ontology, materialism, and agency, when addressing problems of objectivity in aesthetics alongside the process of re-formation—for example, architectural details that “provide objective points of reference”5 and come from oriental gothic features and tropes as embedded in concepts of genre. Alastair Fowler insists genre analysis provides, “instrument[s] not of classification or prescription, but of meaning”6 that underlie labels, groups, and displacement of movements and elements in genre taxonomy; yet, genre categories threaten to become “rusty implements of an antiquated taxonomy”.7 Genre theory relies on categorisation for assessing texts and images and the once post structural relational order between them, which are altered by post structural binaries and post humanist multi-material, fractal understandings of genre diaspora and formation. The pastiche of textures and features that give Strawberry Hill and Fonthill their oriental gothic atmospheres connote the curiosity cabinet,8 where elements and adornments of the building (of the facade), as much as the spectacle and exoticism within (and its interiority), are components of a working aesthetic. These plastic and visual aesthetic representations of the curiosity cabinet image underlie how orientalism is derived from many “oriental” Asiatic and Indo cultures, and how it too has spread both aesthetically and in critical analysis, for instance, with Edward Said, E. A. Poe, or the

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Japanese concept of orientals’ oriental. In the process of being transmediated, the components of this aesthetic praxis of pastiche both internal and external to these domiciles represent a fusion of oriental figures and artefacts from the cabinet of curiosities—or a ‘wonder room’ filled with extraordinary objects of marvel and oddity. Twenty-first century critiques together imply the patchwork of popular orientalisms that historically informed the aesthetic from around the world—as transgenesis. This is suggestive of what Ros Ballaster alludes to as shape-shifting oriental tales where the “[t]ales of the East shift their shape because of changing historical relations between occidental and oriental states…” over the fabular shape of the narrative9 that can be readily extended to the idea of shape-shifting aesthetics, which help develop a concept of early emergent forms of oriental gothic. Similarly, the diverse terms and scholarly re-inscriptions of orientalism in the contemporary period, act as a critical curiosity cabinet10 of theories—multifarious agencies and images of antiquities informing orientalism derived through Mexican, Egyptian, Chinese, or Indian specimens. These modern theoretic-aesthetic hybrids range from Radical Orientalism and Alternative Orientalisms, to Avant-Garde Orientalism, depicting the limits of Oriental fantasy, or situated in Decadent Orientalism, Romantic Orientalism, Picturesque Orientalism, or Fractal Orientalism (as the post binary part-post humanist, trans and cultural theory projected by the multicultural prism). The Interrogation of forms of orientalism that existed, before Said’s 1978 lens took hold of discourse, before Vathek as the supposed apogee of the oriental gothic, and before the gothic label found canonicity, reveals eighteenth and nineteenth-century genre elements without twentieth and twenty-first century postcolonial/imperial imperatives. These variants reflect the complex agency, ontology, materiality, and the nature of the aesthetic, as well as theoretical processes of globalising gothic orientalism between image and text. This chapter is divided thematically to explicate the material conditions of multi-orientalisms: firstly, exploring theory and aesthetics; secondly, through textual analysis extending the theory to the materiality of orientalisms that become directly correlative images of unfolding speculative forms. From Robert Southey’s 1801 poem “Thalaba the Destroyer” to Vathek, Otranto, and Frankenstein, as critically situated in the canon, the notion of orientalisms is further explicated beyond the gothic binary through Peter Fairclough’s and E. F. Bleiler’s edited volumes of the same name, Three Gothic Novels, in juxtaposition to Alan Richardson’s Three Oriental Tales. This is achieved through analysis of liminal gothic texts in these compendiums, as outliers: Sheridan’s History of Nourjahad, Lord Byron’s 1814 “The Giaour” and A Fragment of a Novel (1816/1819). Together these critical anthologies underscore a derivation of the gothic vortex as a “microcosm” or whirlpool of gothic image, and meaning, with “the haunted castle, the voyage into the forest, and the reflection”11 that become a gyre or maelstrom of imagistic and aesthetic fragments. The emergence of diverse orientalisms becomes a gothic theory of transformative matter that establishes a network of theories. The fragmentary nature of the discourse and its aesthetic

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evolution requires a more experimental (fractal) approach. Aesthetic processes that incorporate oriental objects, units, and components underscore abstract, metaphoric, and stylistic features of the written and plastic arts, as much as a theory of material exchange, where Orientalisms are showcased in a curiosity cabinet of theories. Aesthetics of orientalism can be superficially differentiated into three variants: orientalism, “Oriental component” in Western taste, or the “Orientalizing style”.12 The chinoiseries of gothic exemplifies a blending of these designations—a subset of that “strange mixture of chinoiserie, Arabism and Hinduism”.13 Such chinoiseries are excoriated in the “Introduction” to Alternative Orientalisms. It is described as a politicised aesthetic obfuscation, undergirding reprehensible “stereotypical ideas of oriental exoticism, corruption and despotism, the notion of cultural inferiority, endemic passivity and stagnancy, a libidinized Orient of sensual odalisques and harems, a homogenised Asian continent, multiple types of Chinoiseries and Japonaiseries…”.14 Elsewhere, the eroticised chinoiseries are tied to popular, decadent images of sexualisation and obscenity, sodomites and the sex and opium dens, where the “marvellous agency of” sensualised and opium-fuelled “oriental dreams” are part of a rich tapestry of Western revere.15 Such images resonate with nubile far eastern women of The Colonial Harem showcased by Malek Alloula and others.16 Chinoiseries are buried in a gothic negative (or reciprocal) in Mario Praz’s introductory essay to Three Gothic Novels that describes [t]he background of a bigoted, pompous and decadent society, with debauched and tobacco-snuffing ecclesiastics, weak and demented sovereigns, angelically singing castrati, fireworks, chinoiseries, interminable ceremonies, sweet-meats of nuns, and ulcerous beggars, well might have inspired an opera…17

This description underscores the impact of reproduction of aesthetics across class divisions, how high and low cultures cycle and recycle aesthetics in a space of exchange or dynamic mechanism. Between imagery and text, visual culture cycles of aesthetics create ontological-material systems, and those feed the theoretical knowledge systems of discourse and critique. Inge E. Boer notes that the “Eastern influences in Antiquity on objects and architectural styles” as well as “periodization, region of origin, and particular themes or imagery. … can be considered as part of a history of cross-cultural representations in texts and imagery produced in the West using Oriental(izing) elements”18 moving from the “ideological fabric of Orientalism” of Said’s three types or “in three interrelated and interdependent meanings” overused in gothic: (a) the academic “ism”, (b) a style of thought premised on “ontological and epistemological distinctions” between orient and occident. And the third meaning (c) is framed more historically, taking the late eighteenth century as a point of departure, in which orientalism is defined “as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient”,19

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where orientalism becomes “the power/knowledge nexus”.20 Elsewhere, Lisa Lowe “treats orientalism” as “not a single developmental tradition but [as one that] is profoundly heterogeneous”21 with loci on imperialist heterogeneity not aesthetic underpinnings. In an aesthetic reaction against Said, John M. MacKenzie notes that “Orient and imperial relations” generally read in the context of “elite, metropolitan and centrifugal format formations” might be “understood through the heterogeneity of its forms and in popular, intraimperial and centripetal terms” and that pertinently “a synoptic discipline” or critical vision is needed. This amounts to what is essentially aesthetic analysis of the “resultant” illusionary “artistic organism”, which is a synthesis of perceived stylistics as a “creative act” radically adapted to each age and its yens of innovation.22 If like Lowe points out, orientalism is “a nexus of various modes of representation”23 that exist at the “Limits of Orientalism”, this boundary space contains “sites and objects” that are constituted and reconstituted as “oriental” orientalisms.24 More theoretical categorisations are juxtaposed to the fluid, organic transition of aesthetic from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (as Beckford’s tutor), to the painterly styles of Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Léon Gérôme as “The imaginary Orient”.25 But this fantastical space, as an aesthetic lens, reflects the fact that “there is Orientalism and Orientalism” where Gérôme’s near east may have “existed as an actual place to be mystified with effect of realness”, or derived from “the imagination, a fantasy space or screen onto which strong desires—erotic, sadistic, or both—could be projected. … a stage for the playing out, from a suitable distance, of forbidden passions—the artists own fantasies”26 and underscores the simultaneous or synchronous trajectories of cultural reception and theories. Camille Paglia describes orientalism and the decadent arts in Sexual Personae with an evolving Romantic Orientalism, lacing a “Byronic Delacroix”, the Pre-Raphaelites, and John Keats while moving the aesthetic cycle from open to “fixation and closure”.27 There is a sense of homogenisation of movement and periodisation within the trajectories outlined in her assessment of oriental aesthetic: Gustave “Moreau’s static, lapidary Orientalism comes from [Gustave] Flaubert, who got it from [Théophile] Gautier”.28 In circumnavigating the aesthetics of plastic and written arts, in edifice, and privileging the decadence and opulence, the vitreous materiality of surfaces and particulate is trussed to decay: “The jewelled incrustations of his murky paintings are Paterian deposits of age and weary experience”,29 denoting Walter Pater’s aesthetic experience of “apprehension”; this moment of arrest and knowledge acquisition is a correlative for the subjective–objective relation. Like Spinoza’s critique, it is rooted in the aesthetic event. “The gangrenous surfaces are flecked with soul-particles, Decadent atomizations. Moreau’s substitution of inorganic for organic things illustrates aestheticism’s flight from liquidity”.30 And importantly, complicating in Paglia’s dimorphic atomised description of the aesthetic movement, its static nature underscores both the theoretical paradox of orientalism and an implicit trans or multi-material exchange system. Even the “ornate Byzantine style is like Honoré Balzac’s

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‘black diamond’”31 that becomes part of a vision of material exchange—in contrast to the electrified galvanic exchange of other fictional descriptions of orientalism. Crystalline Asiatic orientalism with “ornamental forms and fungible surfaces”,32 echo Paglia’s vision, where “an Apollonian crystal [is] clotted with chthonian darkness”—that chthonian darkness as a barbarous orientalised gothic Other traced through high decorativeness seen in the concrete expression of Beckford and Walpole. Orientalism in both Vathek and Otranto is inextricably linked to ornamentation and fragmentation of aesthetic units constructed through periodic absorption of far and near east elements in cycles of material exchange that connote the process of aesthetic transmediation in their texts and contexts. Vathek is known to be the marrying of orientalism and gothic by the exotic imaginary that he brought to a “basically dull genre” through Islamic and Turkish tales.33 Gothic elements, “the admixture of the marvellous, the repulsive, the cruel and the grotesque” were merged “with the idea of the Orient”, as trajectories of aesthetics, and “all these elements were known to the European tradition before Beckford”.34 As a concrete representation of Beckford’s orientalising style, Fonthill Abby is an ornate Gothic empire with a gothic ruin, created by a gothicised figure who is described as “emotionally unbalanced, passionate, haughty, vindictive, and a thoroughgoing hedonist” with an interest in “escapism” in the “magic world of medieval Islam”35 thereby evoking the fantastic “the wild fantasy of William Beckford”36 and patterns of flight suggestive of gothic horror. Much like the visualisation of aesthetic orientalism within Fonthill, Vathek uses a “striking polysemy” through visual, graphical orientalism37 imbued with all the excess of gothic lexicon and motif. Walpole’s Strawberry Hill is a ghastly hybrid of features both real and facsimile that mirror the castle in his novel, the European gothicism, medievalism, chinoiserie: he “enlarge[d] the cottage on the property and turn[ed] it into a “castellino” in the English Gothic style”38 ; with “Gothic fragments” and “medieval artifacts” that were “found cheaply”; “his interpretation of the form” “limited to surfaces and visibilities”; “plaster and lath” “wallpaper” “cardboard” “architectural monstrosity”.39 In 1784, Walpole’s A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole, Youngest Son of Sir Robert Walpole Earl of Orford, at Strawberry-Hill, the “paper fabric”40 of Otranto is a “gothic paper”41 that becomes a metaphor for the pastiche of secularised and eerie architectural features defined in “gothic pattern”.42 Indeed, certain elements are abstractions from their original “funerary function and complex … as an element of style [of] the gothic specimen”.43 In Word and Image, Luisa Calè notes Walpole’s “deliberate appropriations, resizing, and repurposing of gothic specimens, spell out an ironic visual history”, and “mediate the adaptation” of Strawberry Hill into a burgeoning “visual apparatus”.44 Such adaptation and transmediation of the displays and specimens of Walpole’s metafictive aesthetic space becomes a means of understanding the theoretical apparatus of orientalisms’ diaspora(s)—for instance, the juncture between visual and fungible surfaces tinctured by the Arabesque, Islamic, English, or

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supernatural reproduction in Otranto. Sir Walter Scott, whose work exhibits a style of picturesque orientalism, and is tied to romantic aesthetics, gothicised Strawberry Hill in his 1811 introduction to Otranto as an exhibition of curiosities through “gothic glass”, “a specimen of Gothic style”.45 He describes the aesthetic transformation of a cottage into a feudal castle where medievalism and orientalism meet: “to gaze on Gothic toys through Gothic glass; and the villa at Strawberry-Hill, which he [Walpole] chose for his abode, gradually swelled into a feudal castle … [with] all the panoply of chivalry”.46 Architecture, like Otranto, becomes an “ill-imagined species of composition”.47 The reproduction of aesthetics here gothicised and class stratified connotes a high-low cycle of aesthetics and a blurring of oriental styles and components. Orientalism(s) often sits in canonical definitions as diasporic Gothic imperialism, and is squarely placed in the legacy of Said’s theoretical lens on imperialism, and through the Middle East, in assessments by critics like Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy or William Hughes.48 In this context, the oriental lens reflects a binary between West and East and projected and filtered through Vathek, “an Orientalist fantasy replete with all the sensual apparatus of harems, eunuchs, incense, and Sherbet”49 as an eroticisation inherent in the “Othering process”.50 The movement of orientalisms suggests the relationship between cultures and those artistic and aesthetic forms “mediated by imperialism”.51 Yet, the “Muslem” fantasy of Beckford’s Vathek, the oriental medievalism and chinoiserie of Otranto as “Gothic Repudiation”52 and the Confucius’ morals in Ballaster’s Fabulous Orients, can be defined through gothicised genre terms as aesthetic elements of the fantastic and the orient: Ancient, antiquity, vulgar, barbaric/barbarism, primitive, mediaeval, mystic, magic, arabesque, sensual, eastern, far east, Sodom, hedonism/hedonist, chinoiserie, Arabian/Arab, moslem/muslim, Persian, Ottoman, harem, and on. Where, the tales of the far and near east become opulent moral fables as the offals of eighteenth-century Sentimentalism. Politicising an aesthetic, Vathek is an inception point for gothic orientalism through the “arabian tale”, and equally becomes an entry point for exploring empire as the politics of gothic genre, where “’synchronic discourses’ within orientalism such as law and economic[s]” represent powerful superstructures and epistemological systems and scaffoldings.53 Extending the notion of fluidity and percolation, in Radical Orientalism, Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud explores how “Gothic fiction and orientalism as fantasies of politic abjection and physical vulnerability that despotism did not need to be figured ethnically”54 based on Shelley and Byron, a facet of Romantic Orientalism. Before Vathek, consider the works important for a genre/aesthetic reading of orientalism—as oriental transgenesis. Some antecedents and influences suggest the force and movement of critical aesthetics and genre construction. Early texts include Antoine Galland’s Les Mille et une nuits (1704–1717)— which offered “a new world for cultural and aesthetic contemplation” where “Orientalism provided the discourse through which that sense of novelty and difference could be expressed”55 —as well as Bishop Robert Lowth’s De Sacra

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poesi Hebraeorum (1753), and Johnson’s Rasselas : Prince of Abissinia (1759). The straining of aesthetic components in Johnson’s oriental lens becomes a pejorative gothic veil. Sir William Jones (1772) Essay on the poetry of eastern nations and his 1782 Moallakât explores similarities not Gothic antitheses. In appraising fictions from the East in the period from 1662 to 1786, Ballaster describes an aesthetic approach to his subject matter, where oriental narratives are “instrumental” in constructing critical categories and the boundedness of orientalism, where oriental “narratives move” cross culturally (from China, India, Turkey to Persia) and are used to trace the often obscured and idiosyncratic trajectories of oriental elements over time. As a barometer of mass consumption, Johnson’s oriental tales were published in popular magazines like The Idler and The Rambler.56 J. P. Hardy (1978) notes in the “Introduction” to Rasselas that it “was intended to curb imagination rather than excite it”57 but by introducing ironic use of eastern settings, the world of Rasselas is not exotic romanticised escapism “but a searching and deliberately un-optimistic analysis of the human condition”58 where characters and the readership are forced to “the realization that no such happiness exists”.59 Aversion becomes a nihilistic gothicisation of orientalism. Romantic, gothic, and variously oriental imagery are used in the book An Oriental tale where characters travel “[f]rom Palestine … passed through many regions of Asia; in the more civilized regions as a trader, and among the Barbarians of the mountains…”.60 Between paradise and degradation, between ancient and modern, urban and rural, the story sits betwixt worlds, the outside world of Cairo and the pyramids where malevolence and melancholy thrives, and the pastoral palace, with echoes of the garden of good and evil, the eclogues of Virgil (the Bucolics) and Thucydides in rhetoric of a malignant pastoralism. Like the hanging garden of Babylon, where an ancient fortification hides secret and subterranean passages used for escape,61 in Johnson’s piece these architectural features become a labyrinthine feature. The urban is portrayed as “regions of calamity, where discord was always raging, and where man preyed upon man”.62 The opening passage of the work is gothicised: The outlet of the cavern was concealed by a thick wood, and the mouth which opened into the valley was closed with gates of iron, forged by the artificers of ancient days, so massy that no man could, without the help or engines, open or shut them.63

Tinctured by an aesthetic, the ornate ironwork cordons off the contents of a false utopia. This palace imagery is “almost Gothic”,64 and in the context of Johnson’s work foregrounds the ongoing praxis of oriental and gothic components. Discursive engagement with morality, materiality, agency, and freewill in the narrative is a facet of a heuristic approach to questions of ontology. Oriental elements in the description of Abissinia reflect the episodic quality of the book: “where the episodes exist solely for the story”65 and impact the aesthetic processes at its structural core. It is embedded therein as meaning,

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represented by eastern settings in order to be “moving beyond the constraints of a familiar, circumscribed society”.66 Symbolic connections to the east are ubiquitous—names, titles, the Nile, the Happy Valley, earthly paradise, Eden, Cairo, the pyramids to discuss human happiness: “The catacombs [that] become a memento morti”.67 In no way a binary or balanced distribution of aesthetics, it is Gothic as in “[t]he rest, whose minds have no impression but of the present moment, are either corroded by malignant passions, or sit stupid in the gloom of perpetual vacancy”.68 Oriental and imperial markers are visible in pursuit of Abissinia, “hastened into Egypt … From Cairo I travelled to Suez, and embarked on the Red sea”.69 With touches of Egyptomania70 and Gothic decadence in Happy Valley “[h]ere the sons and daughters of Abissinia lived only to know the soft vicissitudes of pleasure and repose, attended by all that were skilful to delight, and gratified with whatever the senses can enjoy”.71 The use of sensory metaphor, as well as signifiers of imperial gothic and oriental taxonomy suggest the theoretical vision of orientalism in Beckford’s text and edifice, which is a feature of the “particularization-to-excess” in a sensory approach.72 This is a function of the ontological praxis of aesthetics in Rasselas . Thus, Johnson’s piece is integral to a reassessment of models of gothic orientalism by realignment of often diffuse aesthetic components before Vathek—as one canonical genesis. Genre, aesthetic transformation, and forms of materiality constitute components of an ontological lens that allows for the increased fragmentation of orientalisms; this network of theories reflects a curiosity cabinet of orientalisms as a constellation of aesthetic motifs and elements, extant before Said’s work, which seemingly aided the movement of the dominant Gothic lens into a subset of orientalism. While the fictional scaffolding offers a “genrebound character of understanding” which in “its classical formulation has been described as the interdependence of part and whole…, clouds some of the processes of understanding in unnecessary paradox”.73 When considering the aesthetic moment as an event, artistic, experiential, or genre-based, which encapsulates the Paterian apprehension of the whole, it is essentially its intersubjective-subjectivity (in the hermeneutics vein of the neo-Kantians) that impacts issues of agency, autonomy, and interrelatedness. As oriental gothic hybridity, this functionality suggests an ontological approach, an “agential realist reworking of the nature of nature, matter/ing, and the cutting togetherapart of disparate parts”.74 Theories of matter like genre theories, rupture, and fragment part-whole models with aesthetic knowledge. Yet as Graham Harman notes in “4. Polypsychism, Not Panpsychism”,75 as a proposition, “objects can exist without any relation, in and of themselves”76 as the correlative to the speculative materialism embodied by Quentin Meillassoux and later termed Speculative Realism by Ray Bassier: it is a spectrum from dogmatic to weak and very strong correlationism to absolute idealism (flowing from Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger). This is an inversion of very strong correlationism as proposition 4 is speculative realism and depicts a dynamic of real/anti-real philosophy and the human-world relation

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that extend to Gilles Deleuze’s exploration of objectivity and subjectivity in ontological dimensions. Interred in this stance is a fluid exchange of material reality as explored by Barad, and as seen through the relation between plasticwritten arts in the merging of oriental gothic components in Strawberry Hill or Fonthill. Under the lens of textual object and its parts, here variously gothic and oriental, what follows is an analysis of two well-known volumes both entitled Three Gothic Novels 77 and a third Three Oriental Tales.78 Implying the interdependence of oriental tale and gothic novel, these volumes succour the development of a theoretical praxis; thus, they will be extended to forms and permutations of orientalisms that inform a theory of material exchange and impact this network of theories. Three Gothic Novels with an introductory essay by Praz (1968) includes Vathek, Otranto, and Frankenstein. Conversely, Three Gothic Novels with an introduction by E. F. Bleiler (1966) includes three texts and a literary fragment: Vathek, Otranto, John Polidori’s (1819) Vampyre, and Byron’s A fragment of a novel . Bleiler connects orientalisms to Sir Walter Scott’s picturesque orientalism and Samuel Johnson’s quasi-sentimental orientalism. Vathek ostensibly straddles orientalist and gothic modes, having “imbibed” the aesthetics of Moallakât, a “rugged exoticism” and the grotesques embodied by “dwarfs, giants, genii, eunuchs, mutes, and afrits”.79 As a text, Vathek blends two aesthetic lenses: oriental and gothic. The gothic lenses of Bleiler (1966) and Fairclough (1968) are the inverse of A. Frances Richardson’s edited volume Three Oriental Tales, which includes Vathek, Sheridan’s History of Nourjahad (1813), and Byron’s “The Giaour” (1814). Together they “exemplify three equally significant facets of literary Orientalism in the British tradition”,80 and equally they are relevant to analysing trajectories in the global tradition. Sources will be analysed in relation to two features: aesthetic movement and material exchange of gothic and oriental elements. In the volume, Three Gothic Novels edited by Bleiler, Pollidori’s “Introduction” to Vampyre places the tale of Lord Ruthven as “this singular character”, and his “scandalous intrigues”81 in relation to Byron’s “Giaour” (in Three Oriental Tales) and Southey’s “Thalaba”—which lies outside these volumes. But in the intertexuality, the agents to change and the material transition of bodies become an ontological and aesthetic system quite unlike the Marxist system Franco Moretti explores in Signs Taken for Wonders (1983).82 Symbolic of the fragmented oriental tales, “sketching or uncovering some fragment which had yet escaped the destructive hand of time”83 underscores the high decadence of the aesthetic processes explored in the movement or exchange of orientalisms by Paglia and others. The following passage suggests this exchange through the colour, the gaze, fixed like an aperture, and canvas as the gothic fabric of pastiche: “He then fixed his residence in the house of a Greek; and soon occupied himself in tracing the faded records of ancient glory … [that] had hidden themselves beneath the sheltering soil or many coloured lichen”.84 This geological shuffling of particles against the full blush

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of sensory metaphors, is accentuated by “a being” that “formed the model for a painter wishing to portray on canvass … for who would have exchanged her eye, apparently the eye of animated nature…”85 The gaze “gave few other signs of his observation of external objects, than the tacit assent to their existence, … imagination to picture everything that flattered its propensity to extravagant ideas, he soon formed this object into the hero of a romance”.86 The veil of sin in Georges Bataille’s gaze confines “evil” to an abject condition. The voyeurism of the act in Vampyre evinces a gothic gaze, which is initially pastoralised by Polidori in the above passage—and in contrast to the trajectory of his dark narrative. Bataille’s use of gaze reflects a full engagement with horror and the experience of horror—embodied and somatic dimensions of horror. Differentiation as a part of the act of analysing the gaze in Bataille produces a requisite iterative exchange of exteriority and interiority. The involvement with, a susceptibility to, or a compulsion for the albatross of the Other, is a tainted subjectivity or experience constituted partly by the continuity of “subjective terms” and “objective elements”.87 But through differentiation, disorder, “discontinuity, knowledge is possible”.88 As a subjective/objective event, an experience in ontological terms is an aesthetic moment, “[w]ith agential possibilities and responsibilities for reconfiguring material relations”89 ; disruption, divergence, and cessation are facets of this moment within the male gaze reflecting the movement of styles from the Orient(s) to the West.90 This moment becomes an offshoot of a system of aesthetic exchange through the integration of physical bodies and material schema, where their theoretical “incarnation, the limitation of mind by matter” becomes “an outrage to imagination”.91 But logically “by naming and categorizing”, it still encapsulates these darker elements.92 Through decadent orientalism, such incarnation and limitation of categorisation is understood as part of the theory and equally an offshoot of high Victorian Romantic orientalist components. Take the well-known example of Polidori to explore the material exchange of the vampiric body in “a particular case of vampirism” in Madreyga, Hungary: from the anointment of the body in florid blood, to the consumption of “earth out of the vampyre’s grave” to expunge evil.93 As they “become agents upon others who survived them”,94 the transformative nature of body, to grave, to ash where ontological thereness …[is/are] phenomena in the process of becoming”95 implies the monstrous adaptation needed “to illustrate the subject of the present observations [more] than any other instance which could be adduced”.96 An aesthetic of decadence embedded in the vampire tale burgeoning out of Turkey, the subject (its stylistics) is an object and agent of change, “tormenting” those “loved whilst in existence” is “[a] supposition alluded to in the “Giaour”. In Southey’s “Thalaba”, the vampyre course of the Arabian maid Oneiza conjurs “[m]any curious and interesting notices on this singularly horrible superstition” of the Vampyre and numerous other regional forms of vampires “synonymous with it”.97 The Vardoulacha, Goul, and Broucoloka are replicated—as a “universal belief”.98 In this way, the Subject-Object is an “agential realist” material exchange of particles.

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A “broken tale”99 of “disjointed fragments”,100 Byron’s epic (1334 line) poem “The Giaour: a fragment of a Turkish tale” has “some foundation on facts”101 : drawn diversely from the Bibliothèques d’Orient, near east yarns and tales. Replete with a “prying stranger” reading102 a panoply of exoticism from a female slave’s adventures, to gorgons, tombs, decay, the gaze and surcease, whirling dervishes of Sufism and images of Zoroastrian origins with Indo-Iranian geneses—“Though on Al-Sirat’s arch I stood, Which totters o’er the fiery flood”.103 Also visible is the impact of cultural exchanges, from the “Republic of Venice” to the “Russian invasion”,104 on orientalism. The poem is intertextually linked to Byron’s “The Bride of Abydos. A Turkish Tale”, Vathek, and a migration of orientalist images embedded in the vampire narrative from Turkish lore and Eblis, the oriental Prince of Darkness. As a “a tale of wonder”,105 the aesthetic process at play in Walpole and Beckford, reflects a pastiche, a gallimaufry of oriental features and gothic motifs, and the spectacle of this hybridity and display exhibited through Fonthill and Strawberry Hill. In Otranto, the “character of supernatural machinery”106 can be understood theoretically as the “abstract machine” of aesthetic processes of abstraction and transformation that is explicated by Guattari.107 Like the speculative mechanisms of material exchange, Walpole’s aesthetic has both a “powerful effect upon the reader’s mind” and through the use of terminology, “by referring those prodigies” to the operation of fulminating powder, combined mirror, magic lanthorns, trap-doors, speaking trumpets”, that punctuates the functionality of this gothic vision in the “apparatus of German phantasmagoria”.108 Recalling Tzvetan Todorov’s fantastic mechanisms, such “a tale of wonder” both expresses the apparatus of ontological systems and the thrill of the speculative (conjectural and gothic) oriental. Scott links Walpole’s style from speculative machinery to a “luxuriant, florid, and high varnished landscape painting with which Mrs. Radcliffe often adorned…”,109 recalling the aesthetic transmediation of orientalism as described by Boer and Paglia. While “The Giaour” is more gothic than Sheridan’s History of Nourjahad, Sheridan’s text highlights a network of oriental markers tinctured by darker motifs, elements of “delirium and intoxication”,110 “slumbers … disturbed by perplexing dreams”111 as overpowering “fatal slumbers”,112 a shining vision and sinister means113 to attain a “fatal boon” in the quest for eternal life114 and the black clouds that rain malignity.115 Figures “attired in robes such as the kings of Persia were used to wear, was feasted under a canopy of silver”,116 reminiscent of Beckford’s own European recreation of exoticism; “a pavilion of light brocade … amidst the noise of falling waters, and the wild notes of innumerable birds”117 where “the shades of every night descended”.118 A highly sensory expression through visual language,119 here the material exchange becomes a mystery bound to aesthetic events: the “mystery of all those extraordinary events” that “bewildered thy senses”.120 The division between supernatural, ersatz, and the real is a matter of folly and avarice121 : “a circle of flowers intermixed with precious stones”122 that were “fake gems…ingots of gold were all base metal…Nothing in short was real”.123 The sublime

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and grotesque are juxtaposed through beautiful Houris and “a train of wrinkled and deformed old hags!”124 Sheridan’s harem with its “detested walls” represents “the scene” of “unlawful pleasures” where figures bribe eunuchs to escape.125 Thus the interchange of aesthetics draws more profoundly on a Dark Romantic image of orientalism. Also included in Richardson’s volume of Oriental tales, “The Giaour” is a “snake of a poem, which has been lengthening its rattles every month”,126 “(a first draft of 407 lines (extant in MS.) to a seventh edition of 1334 lines)”.127 Interestingly, the final image of the poem is a centrifugal marrying of gothic and oriental elements that prominently features the snake and draws on Edenic iconography and through the transmediation of early Turkish tales, Islamic mythology of the serpent figure. Byron incorporates gorgons, serpentbraids, creeping and shuddering reptiles, the decomposition of sleep, and dungeon walls.128 Memory now is but the tomb linked to vultures, gloom, and the Nazarene. The image of a serpent, which wreaths the heart, shuddering implies gothic apprehension at “Nature’s face”, but equally theories of aestheticism.129 Fragments of the east invoke many orientalisms through the visual language of poetry. Byron’s poem moves in a cyclic, static state: from the Athenian’s grave (Greeks), punctuated by the lapping of waves. Such tomb imagery suggests orientalism from antiquity. This is accentuated by movement, a yawing back and forth, between markers of gothic and oriental objects/subjects: the Rose, the vale, the Sultana of the Nightingale, predatory night-prowlers, the Strange, the curse for Hassan’s sin, as well as fiends, seraphs, and harbingers of fate and gloom. Here, the gothic gaze is shrouded in death, and traced by “Decay’s effacing fingers”, which “[a]ppals the gazing mourner’s heart”.130 Gaze becomes “Folly’s gaze; metaphors of fragmentation in the poetry mode are pushed between forms of orientalism. This is achieved through multiple gazes that reflect radical, avant-garde, and fractal oriental models with rich visual metaphor that contains jarring juxtaposition of myriad oriental and gothic components”. Drawing on elements of Zoroastrianism and mania, geographical movement signifies aesthetic migration: from Istanbul (a border city straddling Asia and the west), Turkey, Thermopylæ from antiquity, to traces of Egyptomania in Cairo, where “Kings, in dusty darkness hid, Have left a nameless pyramid”, their “tomb”.131 These transitional moments suggest the aesthetic heuristic of Paglia’s decadent and fluid engagement with orientalisms. Take the following example of a fractal, gothic praxis: As springing high the silver dew In whirls fantastically flew, And flung luxurious coolness round The air, and verdure o’er the ground. ‘Twas sweet, when cloudless stars were bright, To view the wave of watery light, And hear its melody by night.132

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Where sensory elements, images, and colour-codified structures of the narrative landscape can be seen as fractals, or what Andrew Abbott calls “nested dichotomies”,133 that represent “geometric patterns that repeat themselves infinitely across multiple scales and contexts”.134 As an “alternative theoretical lens” Ghassan Moussawi notes that “Orientalist logics of these representations occur on multiple levels”, and that fractal orientalism might expose: “disruptions and precarity as normative conditions of everyday life” through Exceptionalism “horrors of civil war”135 and violent destabilisation recalling Theodor W. Adorno’s theories. In the gothic context, this model based in theoretical praxis suggests the vortex of fragments (as Irving Malin or Salman Rushdie envisioned), a fractal gothic praxis through the Dervish—a concept reflecting exoticism, magic, and mysticism: “Nor there the Fakir’s self will wait; Nor there will wandering Dervise stay, Since his turban was cleft by the infidel’s sabre”136 This imagery is part of the idea of “the boundless East”, where geography becomes topologies of delimited space. Byron’s nexus of oriental objects extends to the Turkish tale of the Oriental Prince of Darkness, Eblis the “’vampire-corpse”137 —as agency, ontology, and materiality. Part of vampire superstition, “Gouls and Afrits rave” and recede from the horrors of cursed wraiths and spectral forms.138 The vampire superstition reflects theological aestheticism of the enlightenment, as an aesthetic knowledge system in beauty and the sublime. Thus, vampires as aesthetic objects-subjects transgress the physical, as bodies of materialist agency. The paratext to Byron’s piece, built up over subsequent editions, trusses Southey’s use of the “Vroucolochas” to the “Vardoulacha”, a folkloric orientalist horror figure the “Devil” reanimates, and through Byron to the power structures of Christianity: He submitted to the Church of Rome, which made him so odious to the Greek schismatics that the Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated him; and the Greeks reported that Arsenius, after his death, was Broukolakas, that is, that the Devil hovered about his corps and re-animated him.139

Like Southey’s ““Thalaba the Destroyer”, Byron contrasts Eastern and Western referents and lenses, developing a homogenous gothicised orient through a cultural and aesthetic exchange system where the setting, characters, and the graphical quality of the style evoke Visual orientalism— through the metaphor-laden imagistic poetry mode itself. Elisa Beshero-Bonda notes “Within its Gothic Orientalist frames, Southey’s poem occupies a cosmopolitan space between East and West in a way that vividly foregrounds cultural forces at work upon physical bodies”.140 Bodies as exotic commodities—and a nexus point of agency, ontology, and materiality—are consumed, atomised, and hyper-distilled by the reiterative process of abstraction. BesheroBonda is building on materialism and galvanism, which inspired Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus who

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witnessed a most violent and terrible thunderstorm. . . . a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump…141

As a fictional application of “laws of electricity”, Shelley glommed to “a theory which he [Luigi Galvani] had formed on the subject of electricity and galvanism, which was at once new and astonishing to me”.142 Through Frankenstein and its protagonist, Barad explores “transmateriality” of the monstrous othering, with electrical re-animation experiments: “Materiality in its entangled psychic and physical manifestations is always already a patchwork, a suturing of disparate parts”.143 These become a material exchange of foreign particles in the vacuum of space and time, which connotes temporal spatial displacement. Contemporary theory projects Frankenstein’s monstrous gestalt onto the oriental subject. Such post humanist de-fragmentation and re-animation of parts is of use in the analysis of various orientalisms through Byron’s tales. And these stories, sketches, or vignettes reflect an aesthetic vision exemplified by Spinoza, Deleuze, and Guattari who delve into ontological and imperial systems. Texts that prefigure the sifting and reallocating components of orientalism exuded in the bodies of the myriad material interrelations are foregrounded by aesthetic exchanges: “imaginaries that entail superpositions of many beings and times, multiple im/possibilities that coexist and are iteratively intra-actively reconfigured; imaginaries that are material explorations of the mutual indeterminacies of being and time”.144 Extending Daniel E. White, works like Byron’s and Southey’s are part of a discourse on orientalism that suggest the “fragmented and unstable Europe” as much as the instability and variability of theories of orientalism.145 Through strange and salacious “broken tale[s]”146 “exotic belief systems” are examined “to allegorize divisive sectarian issues”.147 These commodified and exoticised cultures as exchange systems function in “transitional moment[s],”148 or fluid aesthetic moments. Consider the paratext of such strange and “sublime tale[s]” in Byron. The “Caliph Vathek” is described as a European imitation of the text Bibliothèque Orientale, a catalogue of the orient, for which the editors suggest as “an Eastern tale, even Rasselas must bow before it; his “Happy Valley” as a protogothic oriental fusion, “will not bear a comparison with the “Hall of Eblis”.149 As the plethora of editorial notes to the poem burgeoned over the years, the concluding note, like the poem, was built up sentence by sentence. Of interest, the connection between, “For the contents” and “Vathek”, was inserted in the third edition of Byron’s compendium. The palimpsestic paratext in editions and footnotes develop over the years, concomitant with additions to the poem by Byron himself. In binary opposition to the splintered structure of “Giaour”, A fragment of a novel by Byron is an entire scene encapsulated in A Fragment, and employs similar tropes, for instance, in the death scene imbued with gothic orientalism: “his appearance … had been for some time

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gradually giving away… wasting away” “at length so seriously altered” from Smyrna to Ephesus and Sardus.150 The materiality of bodies, as the exchange of matter and states, truncation of time and space, and monochromatism and the entropic “countenance in a few minutes became nearly black. … [T]he body was rapidly altering”151 suggesting the ontological system of aesthetic process tied to decaying far east architectural structures. Recalling the gothic pastiche of Strawberry Hill and Fonthill: “the broken columns of Diana—the roofless walls of expelled Christianity, and the still more recent but complete desolation of abandoned mosques”.152 This imagery of decay is juxtaposed to “the sudden and rapid” alteration of the material body in a “Turkish cemetery surrounded by the turbaned tombstones”.153 The caliginous, sepulture vision and the entropic process of matter sutured to the physical atomisation of the being or object are bound to markers of the east. Allegories about the nature of human interaction in A fragment prefigures a modernist lens, yet threads of the narrative are left hanging in the final passage. It connotes gothic failure. Many of the metaphors are fragments or shards themselves, such as the snake and stork, which are experimentally and stylistically connected; this resonates with effects in “Giaour”. Such elements imply Avant-Garde Orientalism, where Byron’s work uses the vortex or snake like segmentation of fragmentation to create after “shocks” as part of a reactionary and jarring choreography of movement evoking a visual and “virtual mythologization” or oriental culture(s) and trope(s).154 Avant-Garde, as part of a compound or hybrid genre/aesthetic mode functions as an alternate to the gothic of gothic orientalism, and to “postcolonial representation” in favour of “Experimental modernism”.155 Avant-Garde, radical, or advanced activity pervades both the artistic and social realms.156 When taken as a whole, volumes by Bleiler, Fairclough, and Richardson on gothic novels and oriental tales become an allegory for the clash of two critical terrains, and the dimorphic nature of the aesthetics underlying the gothic and orientalism between tale and text; the way translation of aesthetic and genre components emphasise, an at times, radical redistribution of unit parts; and the many orientalisms that move theoretically as much as the many “oriental” traditions being homogenised or rearticulated by genre. Theorising an aesthetic, in this chapter is an assessment of the movement of matter and its exchange systems—as ontological and epistemological systems— that allow for the extension of genre systems beyond proscribed models of orientalism. And, this translational materialism with a post humanist interpretation highlights the fractured manifestation of orientalism that draws from a diverse literary body, housed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With relevance to aesthetics, Deleuze and Guattari explore such dynamics in terms of the process of “abstract-real machines” and “the moment at which abstraction becomes real” through an imperial lens on ontological and epistemic strata within a space denoted by A Thousand Plateaus.157 The exegetical meaning of history and linguistics in Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is understood as the apprehension of imagination and can run parallel to

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Pater’s apprehension of the aesthetic moment. Guattari’s aesthetic paradigm is a generative schema or “abstract machine”,158 where theoretic projections (for instance, the utopian-dream over the nightmare-quotidian) are propelled by the forces, and processes, of abstraction; within which, they catalyse and propel abstraction into transformation. This along with agency and autonomy are inextricable from the action and place of critique. The resultant abstraction of a work in motion is then as Stephen Zepke notes “radically singular and separate, composed of a-signifying, a-temporal and invisible forces”, where “absolute deterritorialization of a material’s signification…”159 in contrast is amplified by “a local integration moving from part to part and constituting smooth space in an infinite succession of linkages”.160 These invisible forces are the same transformative agents that Barad and others inspect in terms of material exchange systems of particles, gothicised in orientalisms praxis. This “process of transformation” equally suggests the ‘incessant clash against established boundaries … its propensity to renew its materials of expression and the ontological texture of its percepts and affects “and through the de(re)composition of the body and its parts a direct contamination of other domains”.161 But through the “re-evaluation of the creative dimensions that traverse them all”.162 Orientalisms become a network of theories governed by this dynamic in critical topographies. Drawing on Paglia and Barard, such abstraction processes and ontological projections resonate with the atomisation and exchange of aesthetic parts at the limits of Deleuze and Spinoza. The analysis in this chapter is a negotiation of theory, visualisation, and genre. The cabinet of curiosities as a network of theories at this level connotes the units of matter that create an aesthetic exchange, for instance, between Strawberry Hill and the Otranto or Fonthill and Vathek—the opulent literature and artefacts of the orient that originate in different cultural settings and from multifarious ontological scaffoldings. These manifest theoretically in the geographical vortex of orientalisms, from Sufism as Islamic mysticism to Arabism as Christian exoticism in texts like “The Giaour”, which itself is in the abstractive aesthetic process of orientalist fragmentation or reflects its transgenesis—a fractal nesting of dichotomies with its photo-negative in A Fragment of a Novel , which implies elements of avant-garde orientalism. In contrast, Nourjahad recalls forms at work in Rasselas , but overlaid with a decadent orientalism. As a construct of morbid fascination, imperialism, and imagination, in essence the cabinet of curiosities, is an exhibition and a visualisation; gothic spectacle is an allegory for the displacement of artefacts and aesthetics and their reimaged meaning and materiality in diverse orientalisms. Magic of the curiosity cabinet display ranged from exotic and sexualised idols and sculptures to animatronics and toys to other artefacts, drawing on concepts of magic and mysticism, and conjure images from the far and near east. As an exhibition of orientalisms, a display of component parts, this panoply of theories reflects a larger synoptic lens of oriental revisions that have reinscribed eighteenth and

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nineteenth-century tradition. Orientalisms become a gothic theory of transformative matter, extending to many orientalisms from the cabinet of curiosities of theory within which Radical Orientalism, Fractal Orientalism, Alternative Orientalism, Avant-Garde Orientalism, or Decadent Orientalism exist along a spectrum as speculative models conceived with various aesthetic lenses. Ultimately, the gothic paper as the fabric of pastiche becomes an exegetical process of aesthetic transformation for oriental modes.

Notes 1. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Deleuze and Language (United Kingdom: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 54. 2. F. Bleiler, “Introductory Essay”, in Three Gothic Novels (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1966), xxv. 3. Bleiler, “Introductory Essay”, xxv. 4. Or the lower class signified by the poetics of Thomas Gray. 5. Cyril Barrett, Margaret Paton, and Harry Blocke, “Wittgenstein and Problems of Objectivity in Aesthetics”, The British Journal of Aesthetics 7, no. 2 (April 1967): 158–174, 158. 6. Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 22. 7. Michael Sinding, “The Mind’s Kinds: Cognitive Rhetoric, Literary Genre, and Menippean Satire” (PhD diss., McMaster University, 2003), 182. 8. Anne Nellis Richter, “Spectacle, Exoticism, and Display in the Gentleman’s House: The Fonthill Auction of 1822”, Eighteenth-Century Studies 41, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 543–563. 543. 9. Ros Ballaster, “Shape-Shifting: Oriental Tales”, in Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 57. 10. English Magazines, RECOLLECTIONS OF THE AUTHOR OF “VATHEK” Redding, Cyrus. The New World; a Weekly Family Journal of Popular Literature, Science, Art and News (1840–1845); New York, Vol. 9, Issue 2 (July 13, 1844): 38; An arabian tale [electronic resource]: from an unpublished manuscript: with notes critical and explanatory. Beckford, William, 1760–1844. MDCCLXXXVI (1786). 11. Irving Malin, New American Gothic (Carbondale, IL: South University Illinois Press, 1962), 5, 70; James Dersnah, The Gothic World of Tennessee Williams (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 13; J. Douglas Perry Jr., “Gothic as Vortex: The Form of Horror in Capote, Faulkner, and Styron.” Modern Fiction Studies 19, no. 2 (Summer 1973): 153–167.

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12. Inge Boer, “Orientalism”, in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. 2nd edition, ed. Michael Kelly (Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2014). 13. Clive Bloom, Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present (London, UK: A&C Black, 2010), 37–38. 14. Ignacio Lopez-Calvo, ed., “Introduction”, in Alternative Orientalisms in Latin America and Beyond (Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), viii–ix. 15. Eugenia Zuroski-Jenkins, “Tea and the Limits of Orientalism in De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater”, Essays and Studies 69 (2016): 107. 16. Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 17. Mario Praz, “Introductory Essay”, in Three Gothic Novels, ed. Peter Fairclough (London, England: Penguin, 1968), 25. 18. Boer, “Orientalism”, 2014. 19. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, NY: Vintage, Random House, 1978), 2–3. 20. Boer, “Orientalism”, 2014. 21. Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1991), ix. 22. John M. MacKenzie, “Preface”, in Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995), xi; MacKenzie, Orientalism, 210. 23. Lowe, Critical Terrains, 3. 24. Ibid., 5. 25. Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Societ (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1989), vii. 26. Ibid., 41–42. 27. Camila Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1990), 491. 28. Ibid., 498. 29. Ibid., 498. 30. Ibid., 498. 31. Ibid., 407. 32. Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019), 4. 33. E. F. Bleiler, ed., Three Gothic Novels (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1966), xxix. 34. Praz, Three Gothic Novels, 21. 35. Bleiler, “Introductory Essay”, xiv–xx. 36. D. P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (Great Britain: Russell & Russell, 1966), 132. 37. Eliza Bourque Dandridge, “William Beckford’s Comic Book, or Visualizing Orientalism with Vathek”, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 29, no. 3 (2017): 490.

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38. E. F. Bleiler, ed., “Introduction to Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto”, in Three Gothic Novels, ed. E. F. Bleiler (New York, NY: Penguin, 1968), viii. 39. Ibid., viii–ix. 40. Luisa Calè, “Historic Doubts, Conjectures, and the Wanderings of a Principal Curiosity: Henry VII in the Fabric of Strawberry Hill”, Word & Image 33, no. 3 (2017): 279. 41. Horace Walpole, A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole, Youngest Son of Sir Robert Walpole Earl of Orford, at Strawberry-Hill 1784 (Gregg Press, 1964), 4. 42. Walpole, A Description, 5; Kevin Rogers, “Walpole’s Gothic: Creating a Fictive History”, in Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, ed. Michael Snodin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 59– 73. 43. Calè, “Historic doubts”, 281. 44. Ibid., 279. 45. Sir Walter Scott, “Sir Walter Scott’s Introduction. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole”, in Three Gothic Novel s, ed. E. F. Bleiler (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 6. 46. Ibid., 5. 47. Ibid., 1. 48. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, eds., The Routledge Companion to Gothic, 1st Edition (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007). 49. William Hughes, ed., “Orientalism”, in Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2012), 194. 50. Ibid., 194–195. 51. John MacKenzie, “Preface”, in Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 1995), xi. 52. David Porter, “From Chinese to Gothic: Walpole and the of Chinoiserie”, in Eighteenth-Century Life 23, eds. Robert MacCubbin and Robert P. (Baltimore Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press and The College of William and Mary, 1999), 46. 53. Andrew Smith and William Hughes, eds., Empire and the Gothic. The Politics of Genre (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 131. 54. Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud, “Introduction: Radical Orientalism and the Rights of Man”, in Radical Orientalism: Rights, Reform, and Romanticism (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 18. 55. Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum, eds., The Arabian Nights in Historical Context Between East and West (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2008). 56. Elizabeth Pope Whately, The Second Part of the History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (London: John W Parker, 1835).

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57. J. P. Hardy, “Introduction”, in The History of Rasselas Prince of Abissinia (1759) by Samuel Johnson, ed. J. P. Hardy (Oxford, England: OUP, 1978), xix–x. 58. Ibid., x. 59. Ibid., x. 60. Samuel Johnson, Rasselas Prince of Abissinia (1759), ed. J. P. Hardy (Oxford, England: OUP, 1978), 34. 61. Ibid., 3 ln 26–32. 62. Ibid., 4 ln 12–18. 63. Ibid., 2 ln 5–9. 64. Hardy, “Introduction”, xi. 65. Ibid., xi. 66. Ibid., xii. 67. Ibid., xii–xiii, xxi. 68. Johnson, Rasselas, 34. 69. Ibid., 32. 70. Ibid., 79. 71. Ibid., 4. 72. Alan Liu, “Toward a Theory of Common Sense: Beckford’s Vathek and Johnson’s Rasselas”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 26, no. 2 (1984): 185. 73. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale UP, 1967), 76. 74. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007), 33, 175; Karen Barad, “Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings”, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2015): 417. 75. Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures (United Kingdom: John Hunt Publishing, 2010), 206–207. 76. Ibid., 206. 77. Bleiler, 1966; Peter Fairclough, Three Gothic Novels (New York, NY: Penguin, 1968). 78. Alan Richardson, Frances Chamberlaine Sheridan, and William Beckford, eds., Three Oriental Tales (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin: Riverside Press, 2002). 79. Michael Franklin, “Orientalism”, in Handbook of the Gothic, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts (New York, NY: NYUP, 1998), 170. 80. Richardson, Three Oriental Tales, 1. 81. John Polidori, “Introduction to The Vampyre”, in Three Gothic Novels, ed. E. F. Bleiler (New York, NY: Penguin, 1968), 267. 82. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders (London, UK: Verso, 1983). 83. John Polidori, “The Vampyre”, in Three Gothic Novels, ed. E. F. Bleiler (New York, NY: Penguin, 1968), 272. 84. Ibid., 270.

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85. Ibid., 270. 86. Ibid., 267. 87. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1986), 104. 88. Bataille, Erotism, 141–142. 89. Barad, Meeting the Universe, 224. 90. Joseph Libertson, Proximity Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication (Hingham, PA: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2012), 234. 91. Paglia, Sexual, 13. 92. Ibid. 14. 93. Polidori, “Introduction”, 261. 94. Ibid., 261–262. 95. Barad, Meeting, 210. 96. Polidori, Introduction”, 262. 97. Ibid., 263. 98. Ibid., 261. 99. Lord G. G. Byron, “The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) (1900)” by Lord Byron, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Project Gutenberg, 2007). 146, ln. 1333, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/ 21811/21811-h/21811-h.htm#FNanchor_123. 100. Byron, “Advertisement”, 85. 101. E. H. Coleridge, “Introduction to the Giaour in Works of Lord Byron 1900”, 76, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/21811/21811h/21811-h.htm. 102. Byron, “The Giaour”, 145, ln. 1327. 103. Ibid., 110, ln. 484. 104. Coleridge, “Advertisement,” Works of Lord Byron 1900, 83–85. 105. Bleiler, ed., “Sir Walter Scott’s Introduction”, 14. 106. Ibid., 12. 107. Feliux Guattari, Anti-Oedipus Papers (Los Angles, USA: Semiotext(e), 2006), 387. 108. Bleiler, “Sir Walter Scott’s Introduction”, 12. 109. Ibid., 14. 110. Frances Sheridan, History of Nourjahad (London, England: Harrison & Co, 1788), 4. 111. Ibid., 5. 112. Ibid., 5. 113. Ibid., 5, 10. 114. Ibid., 4. 115. Ibid., 29. 116. Ibid., 12. 117. Ibid., 17. 118. Ibid., 18.

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119. Eliza Bourque Dandridge, “William Beckford’s Comic Book, or Visualizing Orientalism with Vathek”, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 29, no. 3 (Spring 2017): 427–454. 120. Sheridan, History, 36. 121. Ibid., 36. 122. Ibid., 35. 123. Ibid., 36. 124. Ibid., 19. 125. Ibid., 25. 126. Coleridge, “Introduction to The Giaour”, 78. 127. Byron, “The Giaour”, Biographical Note”, 78. 128. Byron, “The Giaour”, 127, ln. 896, 131, ln. 991. 129. Ibid., 139, ln. 1197. 130. Ibid., 90, ln. 82, 131. Ibid., 92, ln. 129. 132. Ibid., 101, ln. 307. 133. Andrew Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 9. 134. Ghassan Moussawi, “While ‘The World Is Beiruting Again’”, in Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut (Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, 2020), 7. 135. Ibid., 3, 6–7. 136. Byron, “The Giaour”, 103, ln. 351. 137. Franklin, “Orientalism”, 170. 138. Byron, “The Giaour”, 123, ln. 784. 139. Coleridge, “The Giaour”, fn. 108; see Bayle’s Dictionary, 1724. 140. Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar, “Southey’s Gothic Science: Galvanism, Automata, and Heretical Sorcery in Thalaba the Destroyer”, Genre 42, nos. 1–2 (March 2009): 8. 141. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (New York, NY: Palala Press, 2016), 15. 142. Shelley, Frankenstein, 15. 143. Barad, “TransMaterialities”, 392–393. A queer lens ruptures and fractures the binary of orientalist imperial readings. 144. Ibid., 388. 145. Daniel E. White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 163; BesheroBondar, “Southey’s Gothic Science”, 7. 146. Byron, “The Giaour” 146, ln. 1333, 147. White, Early Romanticism, 163. 148. Beshero-Bondar, “Southey’s Gothic Science”, 7. 149. Coleridge, “Giaour”, 145, fn. 123; See Childe Harold, Canto II. stanza xxii. ln. 6, Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 37, note 1. 150. Byron, “A Fragment of a Novel”, in Three Gothic Novels, ed. E. F. Bleiler (New York, NY: Penguin, 1968), 288.

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151. Ibid., 289, 291. 152. Ibid., 289. 153. Ibid., 289. 154. David LeHardy Sweet, Avant-garde Orientalism (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 6. 155. Ibid., 7. 156. Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Societyi (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1989), 2. 157. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1980), 145. 158. Félix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus Papers, translated by Kélina Gotman (Los Angles, USA: Semiotext(e), 2006), 387. 159. Stephen Zepke, “Art as Abstract Machine: Guattari’s Modernist Aesthetics”, Deleuze Studies 6, no. 2 (2012): 224, 229. 160. Guattari, and Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus, 545. 161. Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 106. 162. Ibid., 106; Zepke, “Art as Abstract Machine”, 226.

Bibliography Abbott, Andrew. 2001. Chaos of Disciplines. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Alloula, Malek. 1986. The Colonial Harem. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ballaster, Ros. 2005. “Epilogue: Romantic Revisions of the Orient”. Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ———. 2005. Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in 1662–1786. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ———. 2015. “Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings”. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, nos. 2–3: 387–422. Barrett, Cyril, Margaret Paton, and Harry Blocke. 1967. “Wittgenstein and Problems of Objectivity in Aesthetics”. The British Journal of Aesthetics 7, no. 2 (April): 158– 174, 158. Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death and Sensuality. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1986. Beshero-Bondar, Elisa E. 2009. “Southey’s Gothic Science: Galvanism, Automata, and Heretical Sorcery in Thalaba the Destroyer”. Genre 42, nos. 1–2: 1–32. Bleiler, E. F. 1966. “Horace Walpole and ‘The Castle of Otranto’”. In Three Gothic Novels, viii–ix. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications.

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———, ed. 1966. Three Gothic Novels. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications. Bloom, Clive. 2010. Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present. London, UK: A&C Black. Boer, Inge. 2014. “Orientalism”. In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. 2nd edition, edited by Michael Kelly. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Byron, Lord George. 1900. The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7). Project Gutenberg. Retrieved August 2020. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/21811/21811-h/ 21811-h.htm#FNanchor_123. Calè, Luisa. 2017. “Historic Doubts, Conjectures, and the Wanderings of a Principal Curiosity: Henry VII in the Fabric of Strawberry Hill”. Word & Image 33, no. 3: 279–291. Cheng, Anne Anlin. 2019. Ornamentalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Cohen-Vrignaud, Gerard. 2015. Radical Orientalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Coleridge, E. H. 1900. “Introduction to the Giaour”. In The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7), Project Gutenberg, 75–78. Retrieved August 2020. https://www.gut enberg.org/files/21811/21811-h/21811-h.htm. Dandridge, Eliza Bourque. 2017. “William Beckford’s Comic Book, or Visualizing Orientalism with Vathek”. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 29, no. 3: 427–454. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing. Dersnah, James. 1984. The Gothic World of Tennessee Williams, 13. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin Press. Fairclough, Peter, ed. 1968. Three Gothic Novels. New York, NY: Penguin. Fieni, David. 2020. Decadent Orientalisms: The Decay of Colonial Modernity. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of literature: An introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Franklin, Michael. 1998. “Orientalism”. In Handbook of the Gothic edited by Marie Mulvey-Roberts, 168–171. New York, NY: New York UP. Guattari, Felix. 2006. Anti-Oedipus Papers. Translated by Kélina Gotman. Los Angles, USA: Semiotext(e). ———. 1995. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Translated by P. Baines and J. Pefanis. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hardy, J. P. 1978. “Introduction”. In The History of Rasselas Prince of Abissinia (1759) by Samuel Johnson, edited by J. P. Hardy, vii–xxiv. Oxford, England: OUP. Harman, Graham. 2010. Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures. United Kingdom: John Hunt Publishing. Hirsch, Jr., E. D. 1967. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven: Yale UP. Hughes, William. 2012. Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature, 37–38. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. Johnson, Samuel. 1978. Rasselas Prince of Abissinia (1759). Edited by J. P. Hardy. Oxford, England: OUP. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. 2002. Deleuze and Language. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan. LeHardy Sweet, David. 2017. Avant-garde Orientalism. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Libertson, Joseph. 2012. Proximity Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication. Hingham, PA: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

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Liu, Alan. 1984. “Toward a Theory of Common Sense: Beckford’s Vathek and Johnson’s Rasselas.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 26, no. 2: 183–217. Lopez-Calvo, Ignacio, ed. 2007. “Introduction”. In Alternative Orientalisms in Latin America and Beyond, viii–xiv. Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Lowe, Lisa. 1991. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. MacKenzie, John. 1995. M. Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. ———. 1995. “Preface”. In Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts, xi. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Makdisi, Saree, and Felicity Nussbaum, eds. 2008. The Arabian Nights in Historical Context Between East and West. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Malin, Irving. 1962. New American Gothic. Carbondale, IL: South University Illinois Press. Moretti, Franco. 1983. Signs Taken for Wonders. London, UK: Verso. Moussawi, Ghassan. 2020. “While ‘the World Is Beiruting Again’”. In Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut, 1–28. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Nochlin, Linda. 1989. The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Paglia, Camille. 1990. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Perry Jr., J. Douglas. 1973. “Gothic as Vortex: The Form of Horror in Capote, Faulkner, and Styron”. Modern Fiction Studies 19, no. 2 (Summer): 153–167. Polidori, John William. 1819. “Introduction”. In The Vampyre; a Tale. Project Gutenberg. Retrieved August 2020. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6087/6087h/6087-h.htm. Porter, David. 1999. “From Chinese to Gothic: Walpole and the of Chinoiserie”. In Eighteenth-Century Life 23, edited by Robert P. MacCubbin and Robert P., 46– 58. Baltimore Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press and The College of William and Mary. Praz, Mario. 1968. “Introductory Essay”. In Three Gothic Novels, edited by Peter Fairclough, 7–89. London, England: Penguin. Richter, Anne Nellis. 2008. “Spectacle, Exoticism, and Display in the Gentleman’s House: The Fonthill Auction of 1822”. Eighteenth-Century Studies 41, no. 4 (Summer): 543–563. Rogers, Kevin. 2009. “Walpole’s Gothic: Creating a Fictive History”. In Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, edited by Michael Snodin, 59–73. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Said, Edward W. 1979. Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage Books, Random House. Scott, Sir Walter. 1966. “Sir Walter Scott’s Introduction. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole”. In Three Gothic Novel s, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 3–15. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications. Shelley, Mary. 2016. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. New York, NY: Palala Press. Sheridan, Frances. 1788. The History of Nourjahad. London, England: Harrison & Co.

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Sheridan, Frances Chamberlaine, and George Gordon Byron, William Beckford. 2002. Three Oriental Tales: Complete Texts with Introduction, Historical Contexts, Critical Essays. Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin. Sinding, Michael. 2003. The Mind’s Kinds: Cognitive Rhetoric, Literary Genre, and Menippean Satire. PhD Thesis. Accessed August 2020. https://macsphere.mcm aster.ca/handle/11375/5981. Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes, eds. 2002. Empire and the Gothic. The Politics of Genre. UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Spooner, Catherine and Emma McEvoy, eds. 2007. The Routledge Companion to Gothic, 1st Edition. New York, NY: Routledge. Varma, D. P. 1966. The Gothic Flame. Russell & Russell. Walpole, Horace. 1784. Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole, Youngest Son of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford, at Strawberry-Hill Near Twickenham, Middlesex: With an Inventory of the Furniture, Pictures, Curiosities, &c. Strawberry-Hill. London: Gregg Press, 1964. ———. 1884. Horace Walpole and His World: Select Passages from His Letters by Horace Walpole. Project Gutenberg, 12–15. Retrieved September 2020. http:// www.gutenberg.org/files/53519/53519-h/53519-h.htm. Whately, Elizabeth Pope. 1835. The Second Part of the History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. London: John W Parker. White, Daniel E. 2006. Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Zepke, Stephen. 2012. “Art as Abstract Machine: Guattari’s Modernist Aesthetics”. Deleuze Studies 6, no. 2: 224–239. Zuroski-Jenkins, Eugenia. 2016. “Tea and the Limits of Orientalism in De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater”. In Essays and Studies 69: 105–132.

Gothic Theology and the Mystical

Gothic Theologies of the Supernatural Holly Hirst

The Gothic is frequently conceived of as broadly engaged in a secular or secularising project,1 demonstrating either a support of Enlightenment rationalist values by a rejection of supernatural possibilities in favour of the ‘explained supernatural’, or an equally secularising spectacularisation or aestheticisation of the supernatural.2 These readings, however, elide, in their focus on a linear progression of rational, secular and sceptical thought, the fact that Christianity, in various forms, continued to be in the period, a ‘lived religion’.3 The other tendency of this emphasis on the ‘decline of religion’ is its binary opposition between faith and reason or science. The Gothic, however, was written in a world containing not one monolithic Christianity in decline but rather a plethora of different theologies, both within Anglicanism itself and between different Dissenting groups in constant debate and competition with each other. These theologies were prominent in public discourse and private life, moulding the frameworks of interpretation with which people addressed the world and the supernatural. It is impossible to extract the Gothic novel from this wider context and many texts can be read as a form of what Colin Manlove calls ‘Christian Fantasy’, in which characters time and again are confronted with the ‘ultimately supernatural character of reality’, which is itself only an echo of extrafictional theologised understandings of the world.4

H. Hirst (B) University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_23

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To suggest that the Gothic was written against a background of competing and vibrant theologies is not to suggest that the Gothic novel is always essentially a form of anti-Enlightenment propaganda, a ‘literary Methodism’, attempting to reintroduce the transcendent and divine by medium of the supernatural. As Robert Geary notes, if so ‘the form’s semiotic procedures would have been quite different and its handling of the numinous far less indecisive.’5 However, rather than being ‘secular’ in the frequently applied sense of a ‘the separation of Church and state and the decline of religion’,6 the Gothic, in accordance with Charles Taylor’s definition of the secular, reflects and engages with an ever-increasing proliferation of different viewpoints: a ‘pluralism of outlooks, religious and non- and anti-religious’,7 where belief is experienced as a choice. This choice is not simply between belief and disbelief but also between competing theological frameworks of interpretation both reflected in and actively engaged with by Gothic texts. A single chapter cannot provide a thorough overview of the intersection between depictions of the supernatural and the theological in the Gothic. This chapter, therefore, aims to give an overview of two dominant forms of supernatural representation in the Gothic. The first section will deal with the supernatural dream, showing how Gothic texts frequently relied on the mechanism of the supernatural or prophetic dream as both narrative device and carrier of theological meaning. The second section will focus on the related but far more contemporarily contentious question of the ghostly by investigating the ways that the ghost continued to be both the subject of theological frameworks of interpretation and understood through theological paradigms of the eschatological and the nature of the soul/body relationship. This section will investigate how the Gothic’s representation of the ghostly often serves to elicit rather than allay questions around ghost belief, carries or critiques specific theological premises, and is underlined by theological presumptions. Investigations into the supernatural in Gothic fiction tend towards a focus on the sensational—the depiction of ghosts, demons and revenants. One of the most pervasive forms of the supernatural, however, is that of the somewhat more mundane supernatural dream, appearing in texts as diverse as Clara Reeve’s Old English Baron (1778), Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or The Moor (1806) and James Hogg’s The Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). Much criticism has been undertaken on the Gothic dream through the lens of psychoanalysis or emphasising the increasingly medicalised and protopsychological discourse of the eighteenth century. This criticism has usefully explored how Gothic dreams serve to discover the underlying psychodramas of Gothic texts, and how they function frequently as narrative spectacle, key to plot development or characterisation.8 However, they tend to minimise the extent to which theological conceptions of the dream were still widespread in the period: a fact echoed in the way that Gothic texts introduce overtly supernatural dreams, or offer supernatural explanations as of equal value alongside more prosaic explications to create a ‘fantastic’ indecision. To fully understand these depictions and the discourses with which they engage, it is necessary to

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give a brief theological history of dream beliefs as the Gothic engages with many of these different conceptions. The Early Modern period inherited from medieval theology a concept of the dream, and sleep more broadly, as ‘replete with earthly and spiritual dangers’.9 As Gabriel Klug explores, within much medieval theology ‘the need to sleep was a Divine punishment for the fall of man’ associated with ‘remoteness from God…loss of control over body and soul, and absence of rational regulation’.10 In Post-Reformation Britain, this conception of the danger of sleep and dreaming persisted. Thomas Nashe, in his influential Terrors of the Night (1594), argues that in sleep the rational faculty is absent and the sinful nature and the devil take over: the ‘night is the Divells Blacke booke…the table of our hart is turned to an index of iniquities, and all our thoughts are nothing but texts to condemn us’.11 The ‘sinful nature’ here is understood as the ‘flesh’ or ‘old self’, infected by original sin, and in constant battle with the spiritually redeemed element ‘the spirit’. Nashe portrays dreams as reflections of ourselves, but this self-reflection is theologically, rather than psychologically, understood as our sinful nature coming to the surface (often with demonic prompting) when reason sleeps. This conception of ‘dark dreaming’ is found within the Gothic but largely restricted to the ‘horror’ Gothic. Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or The Moor offers an example of the intersection of demonic temptation and sinful self-reflection in its depiction of the protagonist Victoria’s dreams. Victoria’s pivotal dream sequence in the garden reflects objects of her own sinful desires (Henriquez and, arguably, the exoticised and eroticised body of Zofloya himself). The novel, however, makes explicit that this is a supernatural dream in which the devil, in Zofloya’s skin, has appeared to Victoria. After her descent into kidnap, rape, murder and her self-surrender to the demonic Zofloya, the devil boasts: ‘I it was, that under semblance of the Moorish slave…appeared to thee first in thy dreams, luring thee to attempt the completion of thy wildest wishes’.12 As this boast suggests, these dreams are constructed as pivotal to Victoria’s fall. They demonstrate the various ways in which the free reign of sinful desires and demonic activity function and overlap in dreams to demonic purpose. In her dream sequence, Victoria is offered the possibility of avoiding a future she dreads, namely the marriage of the object of her desire Henriquez with Lila. The dream then allegorically plays out the events which take place later in the novel, including their disastrous consequences. The devil is revealed to have the ability to predict and display the future. The question of the devil’s prescience was one debated in the period. Dacre’s devil appears to fit Reverend Saalfeld’s characterisation of the devil as a ‘sagacious but yet a limited spirit’,13 only able to reveal a future predicated upon current realities: the probability of Henriquez’ marriage, Victoria’s desire to thwart it, and Victoria’s own passionate excess. As such, the future predicted is potentially avoidable and the dream prophecy, connected as it is to the devil’s offer— ‘Wilt thou be mine?’ exclaimed the Moor in a loud voice, ‘and the marriage shall not be’14 —suggests not an inevitable chain of predetermined events but

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a damning choice. The dreams function to intensify Victoria’s guilt by underlining her own complicity in the destruction attendant upon her crimes, which the dream sequence allegorically predicts, and which she ignores, showing ‘a most exquisite willingness’15 to make the pact the dream offers. The devil’s primary role in the dream is that of tempter and Victoria is simultaneously tempted in two directions: towards her later crimes and towards the devil himself in the form of Zofloya. The dream acts as a ‘weak’ space, easily entered by demonic forces who take advantage of the sinful desires of the dreamer but also introduce new sins. Another issue raised by this dream is that of ‘dream sin’; the supposition, as Daniel Defoe explains in his History of the Devil (1726), that ‘consent to the fact in sleep is indeed criminal’.16 The dark dreams of Zofloya leave open the possibility that Victoria’s fall begins not only as a result of her dream but within it with her willing consent to a ‘pact’ with the devil. The exclusively negative perception of the dream found in Nashe faded in the eighteenth century although its presence in Zofloya suggests the longevity of these interpretative frameworks. Thomas Tryon (1689) presents a next step in the evolution of dream discourse. For Tryon, sleep, as for Nashe, is a time in which reason and the body sleeps but Tryon’s emphasis is not on the entrapment of the soul, beset by demonic forces and the sinful self, but on the freedom of the soul while the body sleeps. Free from reason’s control, ‘there [is] scarce any thing that more discovers the secret bent of our minds and inclinations to Virtue or Vice…than these nocturnal sallies and reaches of the Soul’.17 Dreams reveal the spiritual state of the sleeper for good or ill. As the soul is free from the bodily at this time, the dream is also depicted by Tryon as a space of communication with ‘spirits’ and ‘the Divine goodness’18 pointing to multiple possible supernatural sources for dream content. While we may presume that a ghost appearing in a dream is less ‘real’, the idea persisted in the eighteenth century that the opposite was, in fact, the case. As Defoe notes in his The History and Reality of Apparitions (1727) ‘there may be Dreams without Apparitions, as there may be Apparitions without Dreams; but Apparitions in Dream may be as real an Apparition as if the Person who saw it was awake.’19 This conception of the dream space as one of ghostly visitation is found in Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron and Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1792). In both cases, ghosts appear in the protagonists’ dreams to provide information about their own demises, which are to be avenged by the dreamers. As the dreams form an integral part of the providential workings of the text, it is clear that these ‘dream ghosts’ are understood as no less real than those perceived by the waking eye. The possibility of different supernatural influences on the dream persists through the eighteenth century. In his Philosophical Discourse on the Nature of Dreams (first translated into English in 1764), the Reverend Saalfeld schematised the possible sources of dreams, creating three broad categories: the ‘divine dream’ (proceeding from God directly); the ‘natural’ dream (produced or influenced by either demons or angels) and the ‘domestick’ dream (that

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which was wholly natural). The necessity of learning to interpret between these forms of dreams was of primary importance both in dream discourse itself and in Gothic novels. In The Romance of the Forest, Radcliffe effectively lays out a model for dream interpretation in Adeline’s response to the four supernatural dreams which she experiences. It is a model which, as we will see, becomes a cornerstone of Radcliffe’s approach to the supernatural more broadly and echoes contemporary discourse around the interpretation or misinterpretation of potentially supernatural events. Adeline has four dreams in total. The first occurs when she is a prisoner of her supposed father. Her dream is a warning in which she sees herself bloodied in a mirror and a voice tells her to ‘Depart this house, destruction hovers here’.20 The other three dreams all occur in quick succession and provide clues to the demise of a man who turns out to be her murdered father. There are various markers which suggest, according to the criteria schematised by Saalfeld, that these dreams are supernatural in origin. First, they are found to contain prophetic warnings or information previously unknown to the dreamer, pointing to an origin outside the self. Second, they are all ‘significant’21 in the Saalfeldian sense, meaning a clear purpose exists for the dream. Third, they are repetitive, connected and urgent—all signs, according to Saalfeld, of an external source. Fourth, Radcliffe uses clear indicators that these are not ‘domestick’ dreams by nullifying potential ‘natural’ explanations, such as the associationist theory implicit in Saalfeld’s work when he argues that ‘domestick’ dreams ‘arise from antecedent thoughts’ and depend upon images witnessed that day or connected to them.22 Radcliffe, for example, stresses that Adeline ‘retired to rest’ ‘oppressed by her own cares and interested by those of Madame La Motte’.23 Adeline’s mind, we are told, has been occupied by anything but a ‘mystery’ of which she knew nothing before her dream, namely that of her father’s identity and fate. While the dreams are clearly presented in the novel as supernatural, the issue of appropriate interpretative strategies is also foregrounded by the text. Adeline’s reaction to her dreams proves a model of response: The longer she considered these dreams, the more she was surprised: they were so terrible, returned so often, and seemed to be so connected with each other, that she could scarcely think them accidental; yet, why they should be supernatural, she could not tell.24

Adeline avoids all the potential pitfalls of interpretative practice in relation not only to the dream but to the potentially supernatural more broadly: godlessness, enthusiasm and superstition. Recognising the ‘signs’ of the supernatural dream, she accepts the possibility of their supernatural origin and therefore avoids the problems of ‘fanatical scepticism’ associated with the ‘godlessness’ of those who ‘reject all dreams, as insignificant sallies of our imagination’.25 In her long contemplation of the dreams and decisions to wait for ‘verification from the event’, she also avoids both enthusiasm (the self-oriented belief

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in access to special revelation) and superstition (the credulous acceptance of all supernatural appearances, strongly connected to fear and open to external manipulation).26 The dangerous consequences of dream source misinterpretation are highlighted frequently within Gothic texts. In Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796), Elvira has a prophetic dream about her daughter’s danger and goes to save her. Unfortunately, as we later learn ‘it was I [the devil] who warned Elvira in dreams of your [Ambrosio’s] designs upon her daughter’.27 The devil in Elvira’s dream uses the truth to bring about destruction. Her failure to understand the dream as demonic leads to her interrupting Ambrosio in his plans to rape her daughter (his sister) but also leads to her death. Similarly, Lorenzo’s failure to engage with his own prophetic dream, which allegorically prefigures Antonia’s rape and murder, points to the disastrous consequences of ignoring all dreams as lacking significance. The dream also fulfils a demonic, rather than angelic function. By presenting an uncertain future (dependent on the success of demonic machinations) as an inescapable reality, it arguably supports, if not leads to, the apathy which prevents any outside intervention in Antonia’s fate. Thus far, we have looked at texts which make explicit the supernatural nature of their dreams. As the existence of the ‘domestick’ dream as a category indicates, however, the theological discourse did not exclude a conception of some dreams as wholly natural. In the eighteenth century, understandings of the mechanics by which dreams functioned changed significantly and ‘natural explanations’ expanded to explain more dream forms that had previously been presumed to be supernatural. Nashe and Tryon’s emphasis on dominant humours gave way to the ‘neurological turn’28 inspired by the work of Thomas Willis, William Cullen and George Cheyne. Association theory, arising from John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and developed in David Hartley’s Observations on Man (1749), became central to the understanding of dreams as articulated by the writer of an 1830 article in the Dublin Literary Gazette: ‘we dream more often of those old associations which have momentarily flitted across our imagination, called into brief but vivid existence by some of the countless circumstances’ of the day.29 Dreams previously considered to be indubitably of divine or demonic origin, were now understood by reference to theories of association and neurological function. An example of this trend is the discourse surrounding the murderer’s dream, earlier understand as produced by the workings of divine justice as either punishment or catalyst to confession. As associationist conceptions of the dream grew more prevalent, this idea of association provoking guilt became the standard explanation for such dreams. The increase in medicalised explanations coincided with an increase in sceptical discourse around ‘miracles’ (or supernatural events) more broadly. David Hume’s ‘On Miracles’ (1748) was an influential text which argued that a ‘miracle’ is a ‘violation of nature’ and as such ‘the proof against the miracle’ is the entirety of nature and experience.30 A similar scepticism is applied specifically to the dream in the anonymously authored Anti-Canidia

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which denounces ‘supernatural dreams’ as the ‘artful deceit of imposters’.31 However, these views, while influential, were far from universal and there continued to be a ‘persistent fusion of natural and supernatural explanations’32 of the dream. As Jonathan Glance notes, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries numerous books were published on the supernatural possibilities of dreams including Malcolm Macleod’s The Mystery of Dreams Revealed (1794) and Catherine Crowe’s The Night Side of Nature (1847).33 Increasingly, in the early nineteenth-century Gothic, texts foregrounded the possible multiplicity of interpretations for the dreams they contained, holding sceptical and believing approaches, and natural and supernatural explanations, in tension. Mary Shelley’s ‘The Dream’ (1831) exemplifies this tendency towards multiple explanations. The heroine Constance goes to St. Catherine’s shelf where it is rumoured that those who spend the night receive supernatural dreams. She wishes for an answer to the question of whether she should marry her Gaspar and we are told that ‘many a vision…she had that fearful night’,34 including a terrible vision of his future if she does not marry him. Her dreams can be read as significant, as they provide a real epiphany: the futility of ‘that false philosophy which placed virtue and good in hatred and unkindness’.35 They appear to be monitory and predict the future. However, alternative natural explanations are also offered. The king believes that those who sleep on the ledge ‘take the disturbed visions that such uneasy slumber might produce for the dictate of heaven’.36 The narrator appears in part to agree with this pronouncement, noting, when Constance decides to use the shelf, that ‘there is no feeling more awful than that which invades a weak human heart bent upon gratifying its ungovernable impulses in contradiction to the dictates of conscience’.37 These sceptical voices imply that Catherine may be induced into nightmares by the physical conditions or delude herself into visions. However, this polyphony of three voices or interpretations produces the fantastic rather than a negation of the dreams as supernaturally influenced. Two possible explanations are given: a supernatural dream in accordance with long-standing tradition, resulting in a theologically sound change of heart, or a self-deceptive natural dream in accordance with the dreamer’s pre-existing desires. The narrative forces us to weigh these options, acknowledging the difficulties involved in subjective testimony but avoiding a Humean total dismissal of it by prioritising the voice of the testifier to the supernatural as the last speaker. The text confronts us with the supernatural, asking whether we can believe or whether belief is only a trick with which we deceive ourselves. One reason for the longevity of theological frameworks of interpretation respecting the dream was its role in other theological discourses. One key idea was the dream’s ability to function as proof of the immateriality and immortality of the soul. In the work of theologians as denominationally diverse as Charles Drelincourt, in The Christian’s Consolation against the Fears of Death (1641, reprinted throughout the eighteenth century), and Andrew Baxter, in An Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul (1733), dreams are seen as evidence of the soul’s ability to function without the body, serving as proof

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of its immaterial (and by association immortal) nature. Dreams, as potential engines of divine communication, were frequently discussed as ‘proof’ of providence and represented as tools of providential action. Even such a sceptic as John Ferriar in his A Theory of Apparitions (1813), makes a (formulaic) exception to his overall emphasis on natural explanation to note that Providence functioned ‘on extraordinary occasions, to communicate with men’ through dreams in the past.38 There are also numerous theological complexities surrounding their categorisation as manifestations of ‘active’ or ‘natural’ providence. Natural providence assumes that everything functions according to natural laws set in motion by God and gives rise to questions about predeterminism and the reality of human agency. Active providence supposes direct intervention, leading to questions about divine omniscience and the divine’s role in contemporary life. Such considerations are sewn into the fabric of the dreams of Gothic novels like The Old English Baron. In The Old English Baron, Philip dreams that he is ‘hurried away by an invisible hand, and led into a wild heath, where the people were inclosing the ground, and making preparations for two combatants’ and he hears a voice say ‘Forbear! It is not permitted to be revealed till the time is ripe for the event: Wait with patience on the decrees of Heaven’.39 This dream provides an accurate vision of the future which provides Sir Philip with both purpose and comfort after the revelation of his friend’s murder. It further suggests an active divine engagement in mortal affairs, in keeping with conceptions of active providence, and points to a belief in divine knowledge as encompassing past, present and future. The ‘invisible hand’ mentioned in the dream suggests a broadly Calvinist conception of ‘total omniscience’: a future both known and unavoidable. However, the dream arguably does not provide a sense of unwilling determinism, but enforces the idea of divine justice. The murder has been witnessed and will be avenged with Philip being offered the role not of divine pawn but of willing agent. As this analysis of a short passage suggests, Gothic dreams, even when briefly depicted, were capable of producing or reflecting an array of theological meanings. There are many parities between the discourses surrounding dreams and ghosts in the eighteenth century, tying in to wider prevailing trends concerning the discussion of the supernatural. Ghosts, like dreams, were often interrogated in relation to questions about the immortality and immateriality of the soul, providence, life after death and the interpretation of the potentially ‘miraculous’. Whereas dreams, however, were an undisputed fact, liable to be read with a theological framework of interpretation, the very existence of ghosts was debated in a way that often hinged on the question of testimony. Within the Humean critique of supernatural belief, testimony can never be sufficient to create a belief in the miraculous or supernatural as it is ‘less than the evidence of our senses’40 and ‘the incredibility of the fact…invalidate[s]’ the testimony.41 Ghost tales were, moreover, as John Locke articulates in ‘Of Education’ (1698), associated with ‘unreliable’ witnesses: the ‘indiscretion of servants’, the lower classes, women and youth.42 Such considerations opened

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up discussions and depictions of the ghost revolving around unreliability, trickery, manipulation and fear, particularly in the context of religious manipulation of the ‘miraculous’ for theological gain. A brief history of the theology of ghost belief provides a background to the contested debates around the ghostly. As with the supernatural more broadly, there is no linear path from belief to disbelief but rather a variety of explanatory frameworks through which the ghostly was approached with different construals existing simultaneously and reflected in Gothic texts. The Reformation saw a virtual revolution in relation to ghost belief, which had previously been widespread (if not universal) and was ‘closely associated with the theology and devotional practice of the Catholic Church’,43 specifically the doctrine of purgatory: a non-permanent after-life state through which the dead must pass to be purified of their sins. As Shane McCorristine notes, with a doctrinal belief in Purgatory, ‘the world of ghosts was remarkably wellordered, secured and explainable both doctrinally and logically’.44 It provided a theological framework through which to justify the dead’s ability to return and to understand their purpose: to give warnings or ask for aid in facilitating their passage through purgatory. Purgatory, however, was widely criticised by Protestant theologians as an ingrafted doctrine that gave both spiritual and temporal power to the Catholic church through practices such as masses for the dead and indulgences. Ghost belief was associated with purgatorial theologies and in the post-Reformation landscape ‘ghost belief, at least among the elite, was divided strictly along confessional lines’.45 Ghost belief came to be associated with ‘superstition’, exploited by a church seeking to forward its own ends. This idea of Catholic manipulation and superstition surrounding ghost belief is, for example, codified in Radcliffe’s The Italian, in which Schedoni takes advantage of Vivaldi’s supernatural belief to confuse, terrify and mislead him. The post-Reformation rejection of the ghostly, however, was not a rejection of the supernatural, and was primarily theological rather than scientific. Without Purgatory, there was no doctrinal justification for ghostly return as the body and soul were, as Martin Luther articulated, ‘sundered and separated altogether from the world’ until the final resurrection.46 While ghosts (the spirits of the dead) were rejected, ‘apparitions’ (other spiritual entities) were not and the ‘demonological interpretation’ proliferated.47 As Martin Luther articulates, this is the idea that ‘all ghosts… are not men’s souls, but evidently devils that amuse themselves thus to deceive the people with false claims and lies, or unnecessarily to frighten and trouble them’.48 The demonological interpretation became less dominant in the eighteenth century but persisted, as we find, for example, in Defoe’s History and Reality of Apparitions, in which he adds that apparitions may be angelic as well as demonic. A pivotal aspect of ghostly manifestations (understood to incorporate both ghosts and apparitions) is suggested within Defoe’s essay, namely that ‘when any evil Spirit does appear, it is limited by a Superior power’.49 This conception of the ‘ghostly’ as subject to a Providential framing continued throughout the

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eighteenth century although not without critics. Anti-Canidia, for example, vehemently opposes the mixing of providential and ghostly discourse, asking whether ‘the sovereign Creator of the world [would] pervert the order and course of providence; disturb the souls of persons departed to their separate state’.50 The survival and popularity of providentially informed narratives of the ghostly, however, is evident in their predominance in Gothic fiction. In Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance, Madame Menon states that Such spirits, if indeed they have ever been seen, can have appeared only by the express permission of God, and for some very singular purposes; be assured that there are no beings who act unseen by him; and that, therefore, there are none from whom innocence can ever suffer harm.51

This pronouncement, from the mouth of one of the text’s most authoritative figures, suggests the continuance of a view of the ghostly or apparitional acting within a providential frame. The most common purposes of such visits were: ‘the discovery of truth; the exposition of some horrid crime, or as warnings to impious and guilty persons to avert, by a timely repentance, the vengeance of heaven’.52 In each case, the ghost/apparition acts as a secondary cause of divine providence. The polarisation of the ghost debate of the post-Reformation period into Catholic acceptance and Protestant rejection became tempered in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. An increasingly relevant perceived threat to Protestantism, both Anglican and Dissenting, was atheism and deism. ‘Fanatical scepticism’ regarding the supernatural became a charge increasingly levelled at those denying or critiquing the possibility of the ghostly, supernatural or miraculous. There was an increased market in ‘antiSadducean literature’ including the many collections of ghost texts such as Joseph Glanvil’s Saducismus Triumphatus ’ (1681) and the anonymous Life After Death (1758). In Gothic works like those of Radcliffe, outright denial of supernatural possibility is associated with villainy. As with the dream, enthusiasm, superstition and atheism all become interpretative frameworks to avoid. An overlapping discourse with that of the ghostly in the post-Reformation period, was the doctrine of the Cessation of Miracles (namely that miracles had occurred in biblical time but no longer occurred). In the seventeenth century, as Shaw notes, ‘some Protestants began to incorporate a belief in, and experience of, miracles into their religious practice and theology’53 as signs of authority, correct doctrine or apostolic succession. In the eighteenth century, this trend is most notably associated with Wesleyan Methodism. These claims existed in tension with the theological scepticism associated with the Cessation of Miracles and represented a battleground for competing denominational claims, leading to a change in the ways in which the miraculous and the supernatural were addressed. These interpretative trends were influenced by the growing field of empirical sciences. Often, criticism focuses on the rise

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of empirical sciences through the lens of a spreading deistical scepticism but, as Shaw notes, it also spread in symbiotic relationship with the growth of miracle claims. A ‘via media’ of supernatural interpretation arose in response to these claims: an openness to possibility and an emphasis on evidentiary proof in keeping with English experimentalism and its focus on setting up ‘matters of fact’ by observation and enquiry.54 This via media attempted to balance the demands of reason and revelation while avoiding atheism, enthusiasm and superstition. Just such an approach is both alluded to and supported by Madame Menon in A Sicilian Romance: Since, therefore, we are sure that nothing is impossible to God, and that such beings may exist, though we cannot tell how, we ought to consider by what evidence their existence is supported. I do not say that spirits have appeared; but if several discreet unprejudiced persons were to assure me that they had seen one, I should not be proud or bold enough to reply “it is impossible.”55

Menon discredits automatic disbelief, while pointing to the need for evidentiary proof for certain belief. She allows both for the worth of testimony and sense evidence but moves away from any suggestion of the superstitious and enthusiastic practices which would convert supernatural appearances (or miraculous occurrences) into truth claims. By the end of the eighteenth century, there was no one response to the question of the ghostly. Narratives of materialist scepticism intertwined with theological repudiations of ghost narratives. Scientific explanations of specific ghost sightings were often subordinated to the demands of theological frameworks that emphasised the possibility of ghosts or apparitions. Supernatural belief and empirical enquiry were often as symbiotic as they were contradictory. Condemnations of open-minded enquiry into ‘supernatural’ manifestations were answered with accusations of secular fanaticism. Suspicion of ghost belief as credulous, superstitious and enthusiastic remained in tension with a contradictory fear of the radical politics and theological heterodoxy of Rational Dissent and atheism. An admonition not to fear the supernatural was not necessarily an admonition not to believe in it. The rejection of ghosts is not necessarily the rejection of apparitions. There was a continuous and unresolved tension throughout the period, partly due to the lack of a coherent theological framework for ghost belief within Protestant theology. Current critical discourse frequently rests on the erroneous assumption that there was a linear decline in belief. Emma Clery suggests that during the eighteenth century, the depiction of the supernatural, removed from theological frameworks of belief, became increasingly ‘hedonistic and aestheticised’.56 She suggests that two dominant modes of representation arose: the ‘aesthetic’ (focused on affect and linked to contemplations of loss and mortality) and the ‘spectacular’, which requires a knowing and half-mocking suspension of disbelief. The increasing depiction of the ghostly in poetry, on stage and in Gothic fiction does point towards this growth of a spectacular and aesthetic

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interest in the ghostly. There were two broad categories of ghostly depiction in the Gothic: the negation of the ghost in the ‘explained supernatural’, and the ‘real ghost’. The latter category fits more closely into the ghost as spectacle and the first into the category of the aestheticized ghost. In both cases, however, the suggested absence of theological content and the disassociation from extra-fictional belief frameworks is not justified by an investigation of the texts. The ‘explained supernatural’ is often associated with the attempted imposition of anti-Catholic Enlightenment rationality. In such a rendering, the introduction of the potentially supernatural and particularly the prolonged hesitations before the revelation of a natural explanation enforce rationalist values while simultaneously investing in the emotional affect of the supernatural, a secular replacement of transcendent experience. If, however, we compare different examples of the supernatural explained it becomes clear, first, that it is impossible to speak of a single technique and a singular purpose and, second, that Gothic depictions of the ‘unreal’ ghosts of the explained supernatural are heavily inflected by continuing theological discourse. A brief comparison of three texts—Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, Eliza Parson’s The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) and The Necromancer by Karl Friedrich Kahlert (1794)—presents us with three different forms of the supernatural explained reflecting three distinct theological positions. The form seemingly most aligned with the idea of a rationalistic demystification is found in The Castle of Wolfenbach. In the novel, Mathilda is told that the castle is haunted by ‘strange noises, groans, and screams’57 which we later learn are produced by the imprisoned Countess whose jealous husband has forced her to ‘rattle a chain…groan, and make such kind of noises as may appal those who come here’.58 What is noteworthy is the absence of affective tension. We are told immediately that Mathilda ‘did not suffer her mind to dwell on the causes being supernatural, she conceived there must be some mystery… which she resolved, if possible, to explore’.59 Instead of a potentially supernatural event to interpret, we are presented with a natural mystery to solve. That is not, however, simply a rational secular rejection of the supernatural, it is a theological one. Mathilda relies throughout on a providential understanding of the world, noting that she has no fear as ‘Providence will always preserve us from evil’.60 She later reports that ‘I never had my mind occupied by any ghost and could not conceive any actions of my life had subjected me to the terror of supernatural visitations’.61 Here the providential frame is clear: supernatural visitations of any sort are bound by the providential order and divine will which she already views as the organising logic of her life. Her choice of language is important here; while she admits no possibility of the ‘ghost’, she allows for that of a ‘supernatural visitation’. In other words, she engages with the possibility of the demonological interpretation of apparitions within a providential frame but the ‘ghost’ itself (the returned spirit of the dead) is incompatible

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with this providence, suggesting an eschatology in which the dead cannot return. Peter Teuthold’s English translation of Kahlert’s The Necromancer offers an alternative version of the supernatural explained. It is as rooted in a rejection of the ghostly but its affective strategies, and therefore its use of the supernatural explained, are distinct. The Necromancer is a collection of tales with various narrators within a frame narrative of two friends discussing previous experiences of the potentially supernatural. Each of the instances described—a wild hunt, the appearance of a narrator’s dead mother, ghostly appearances, necromantic rituals, poltergeists and soul travel—is revealed at the end of the narrative to be the result of the trickery of the false ‘necromancer’ Volkert. Unlike Wolfenbach, there is no dismissal of fantastic hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations. Indeed, the explanations are unnaturally separated from the presentation of the originating incidents, forcing the reader to dwell in interpretative uncertainty from the beginning till almost the end of the novel. We are warned against belief. One narrator, the lieutenant, warns himself, his companions and the reader that the ‘supernatural events’ will be revealed to be ‘either deceit or the effects of a deluded fancy’.62 However, the reader is bombarded with phantasmagorical and seemingly inexplicable events which erode the defences of the rationalistic impulse. In this way, the reader is not only forced into a space of indecision but also made complicit in their own deception through their choice to continue reading, echoing the position of the Austrian narrator who, at the revelation of Volkert’s trickery, begs: ‘I will forgive thee, I will pronounce thee my benefactor, my saviour, only speak, tell me I am not deceived!’63 He begins with scepticism but follows a via media, putting to the ‘trial how far the common talk of his [Volkert’s] supernatural arts deserves to be credited’.64 This openness to possibility lays him open to deception, physical and mental torment and a subsequent inability to relinquish a framework of belief and interpretation which he deceived himself into. The text warns the reader about even the openness to possibility in a supernatural belief which could ‘drag into the gulf of perdition many of my fellow creatures’,65 classifying necromancy, ghosts and demonic powers functioning outside of a providential framework as not simply a rational but a theological error. The ‘ghostly’ of the text is repudiated in favour of a lightly sketched eschatological framework in which the dead ‘await the solemn morn of resurrection’66 and in which the reader learns by both example and experience the dangers and temptations of belief in the marvellous. In contrast to the two approaches above, the Radcliffean supernatural explained focuses on an openness to the possibility of belief and creates an authentic fantastic hesitation which uses aesthetic/affective uncertainty to force the reader into engaging with extra-fictional strategies of ghost interpretation. Critical discussions of Radcliffe’s engagement with the supernatural are often predicated upon Walter Scott’s idea of the ubiquity of rational explanation: ‘All the circumstances of her narrative, however mysterious, and

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apparently superhuman, were to be accounted for on natural principles’.67 Rational explanations are not, however, always forthcoming, as Radcliffe’s supernatural dreams demonstrate. Her stories are underpinned, moreover, by the ‘ultimately supernatural character’ of a providential reality.68 Even when rational explanations are offered, individual revelations of natural causes do not succeed in defeating the logic of Madame Menon’s emphasis on ghostly possibility (discussed above): a logic which recurs throughout Radcliffe’s work. As with the dream, Radcliffe sedulously traces a line between enthusiasm, superstition and atheism by allowing, or even insisting upon, the possibility of the supernatural while moving away from superstitious fear and specific inherited ghost beliefs, or the enthusiastic suggestion of privileged access to supernatural truth. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, Montoni’s contemptuous dismissal of the supernatural, Annette’s infectious superstitious terror based on a received law, and Emily’s ability to add ‘a thousand nameless terrors, which exist only in active imaginations, and which set reason and examination equally at defiance’ are rejected but the possibility of the supernatural is not.69 Radcliffe creates spaces of unnatural fantastic hesitation within her novels, arousing curiosity, wonder and awe to such a pitch that contemporary and modern critics have complained at her choice to ‘disown’ the affective resonances of her potentially supernatural with banal explanations. This return to a rational explanation, however, rather concretises than disavows the theological questions raised by her depictions of the potentially ghostly, by forcing us into engagement with extrafictional conceptions of the ghostly, rather than allowing a simple suspension of disbelief. The interpretative hesitations that Radcliffe produces are rarely centred on fear but rather on ‘congenial’70 doctrines regarding life after death and providential order and she uses the affective tools of the prolonged hesitation of her supernatural explained to produce engagement with these transcendent possibilities. As Emma Mason notes, a key tactic of both Dissenting preachers and religious poetry in the period was ‘to move the reasoning reader into the emotional experience of faith’.71 This tradition of an intersection between affective strategies and theological work is found in Radcliffe. An example of this ‘affective theology’ of the supernatural explained is found in the incident of the chair in The Mysteries of Udolpho. Here we have three potentially supernatural incidents in quick succession: Returning home after her father’s death, Emily ‘almost fancied’ she saw him in his favourite chair; she is startled by a noise which she first attributes to supernatural causes but quickly bathetically realises is her dog; and she once again sees her father in his chair as she looks up guiltily from a stolen glimpse of a forbidden letter. These incidents use a basic form of free indirect speech and modals of possibility (‘may’72 ) in relating these perceptions to make Emily’s possible ghost-sighting uncertain. Although natural alternatives are offered—nervous excitement, the association of her father with the chair, distempered imagination—we never attain an interpretation of the event outside of Emily’s perspective, leaving us in the same doubt as Emily herself, who in the sequence

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repeatedly returns to the possibility of her father’s appearance. Moreover, these events are framed by theological considerations of the ghostly. Between the first and second incidents, Emily’s ‘thoughts dwelt on the probable state of departed spirits, and she remembered the affecting conversation’73 of her father who wondered whether spirits are ‘permitted to return to the earth’.74 The interpretative hesitation related to the events which precede and follow this contemplation suggests the affective strategies at play, engaging the reader, through the manipulation of supernatural curiosity, fear and uncertainty, into the use of extrafictional strategies of interpretation to interrogate both the incident itself and the theological questions it poses. In contrast to the aestheticised ‘ghosts’ of the supernatural explained, ‘real’ ghosts of the Gothic are likely to function as ‘spectacle’. In some cases, the depiction of the ghost deliberately keeps within the ‘verge of the probable’75 as we find in Reeve’s The Old English Baron. These ghosts are not merely spectacular. As agents of divine justice, relating the information necessary to punish their murderer, they are an integral part of the providential framework of the tale. Reeve’s ghosts function as avatars of variously embedded theological meanings: the existence of an active providence, the continuance of life after death, the immortality of the soul, and divine justice. Similarly, in Ethelwina; or, The House of Fitz-Auburne (1799) by T. J. Horsely Curties an avenging ghost is presented as key to the action of a ‘gracious providence’.76 This ghost’s actions are less limited than Reeve’s—the ghost haunts the murderer while also prophesying the future, protecting his daughter and revealing the truth of his death—but are still maintained within a framework of providential ghost belief which, the authors tells us, ‘will not appear unnatural or improbable’.77 More prolific than these ‘probable’ ghosts, however, are the spectacular ghosts, which increasingly proliferate in texts of the horror Gothic. Such ghosts exist unquestioned within the world of the text and necessitate a readerly suspension of belief rather than the application of extrafictional interpretative strategies. An example of such ‘real’ or spectacular ghosts is found in Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, whose ghosts, Reeve complained, were entirely improbable and whose ‘machinery is so violent, that it destroys the effect it is intended to excite’.78 The exaggerated spectacular nature of his ghosts, which escape the boundaries of theological systems of belief, does not mean that his works escapes a theological register. Spectacular ghosts rely on the elicitation of fear and wonder for their effect. In The Castle of Otranto, ghostly apparitions throw us into a theological world of divine justice and revenge, inescapable providence, immortal consequences and a spirit world beyond human control or understanding. Both the affective responses of terror and horror rely on the possible reality of the feared object, its uncertain ‘ontological status’.79 This may refer to either the apparition itself or the theological understanding of the world which it represents. Walpole, a ‘proclaimed infidel’80 produces a form of spectacular supernatural rooted in theological critique. First, Walpole makes a ‘spectacle’ of the

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pre-Reformation Catholic beliefs surrounding the ghostly. The text’s supernatural incidents are not, however, contained by any real or coherent Catholic theological framing and become as Jerrald Hogle notes ‘floating signifiers, disconnected from their former meanings’.81 The root of the theological critique to be found in Walpole’s work, therefore, goes beyond a sceptical investigation of Catholic ghost belief. Robert Geary argues that Walpole ‘seeks to impose a conventional providential context’ on his supernatural elements— the animated portrait, the giant limbs, the vision of a saintly Alfonso ascending to heaven—but they ‘escape’ from it.82 While putatively serving providential purposes—the defence of the innocent, righting of usurpation and punishment of the guilty—the monstrous excess of his supernatural exceeds their narrative and theological purpose. Divine ‘justice’ becomes an excessive demonstration of wrath: the innocent die, the castle is destroyed and the rightful heir is miserable. However, this does not indicate, as Geary suggests, merely a failure to combine the providential coherently with the affective potential of the supernatural. The providential lesson is pronounced by Friar Jerome: ‘A tyrant’s race must be swept from the earth to the third and fourth generations’.83 It is a reference to the biblical promise to ‘visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation’ (Numbers 14:18) and is explicitly questioned by the text. In the preface to the first edition, the ‘translator’ doubts whether ‘ambition curbed its appetite of dominion from the dread of so remote a punishment’.84 This critique of an excessive and infective divine tool of control is also a critique of the inherited guilt which this verse codifies, thereby touching upon the common Christian doctrine of ‘original sin’ whereby all men inherit guilt because of Adam’s sin: ‘By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men’ (Romans 5:12). Walpole’s text mixes critique with aesthetic strategies of exaggeration and excess in the depiction of the supernatural to engage in a theological critique of total depravity as unjust and destructive. The monstrous excess of Walpole’s supernatural does not escape the providential context but rather becomes a fitting mirror for what Walpole obliquely critiques as a monstrous doctrine. Walpole’s are not the only real ghosts of the Gothic nor do all Gothic ghosts encode the same beliefs or critiques. However, Walpole’s ghosts usefully point to the theological potential of these portrayals, which should not be dismissed in favour of reductive conceptions of a detheologised Gothic. The Gothic depiction of the supernatural should not be understood monolithically, demonstrating a singular trend towards either enlightenment rationality and spectacular scepticism, or a quasi-Methodist attempt to resurrect the divine with the supernatural. The Gothic rather reflects and engages with a wide variety of discourses, navigating the dangers of enthusiasm, superstition and atheism or alternatively using the supernatural as a starting point for theological critique. Trends can be mapped, for example towards a secular proliferation of alternative interpretations in regard to the dream, or towards

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an increased spectatularisation of the ghostly in the horror Gothic’s emphasis on ‘real’ ghosts in texts like Matthew Lewis’ The Monk. However, these trends are far from universal and should not be read as a move towards secularisation understood as the absence of belief. Even those texts which most overtly reject supernatural explanations, such as The Necromancer, or most exaggeratedly spectacularise the supernatural, such as The Castle of Otranto, may engage with the ghostly, the demonic, the supernatural and the preternatural on theological terms. Understanding both the diversity of theological debates around the supernatural and their vibrance in the period offers opportunities to explore texts based on their individual engagement with theological paradigms, peeling back what appear to be purely aesthetic, affective or spectacular depictions of the supernatural to reveal a complex web of theological beliefs, debates, disagreements, critiques and assertions.

Notes 1. Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010), p. v. 2. E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 3. Jane Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 9. 4. Colin Manlove, Christian Fantasy: From 1200 to the Present (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), p. 77. 5. Robert Geary, The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction: Horror, Belief, and Literary Change (Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), p. 20. 6. Robert Miles, ‘Popular Romanticism and the Problem of Belief’, in Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, ed. by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 117– 134 (p. 121). 7. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: The Belkin Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 437. 8. See: Elisabeth Bronfen, The Knotted Subject (1995); Diane Long Hoeveler, ‘The Heroine, the Abbey and Popular Romantic Textuality: The Romance of the Forest (1791)’, in Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic (2014); Devandra Varma, The Gothic Flame; Ann Williams, Art of Darkness (1995). 9. Sasha Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), p. 62. 10. Gabrielle Klug, ‘Dangerous Doze: Sleep and Vulnerability in Medieval German Literature’, in Worlds of Sleep, ed. by LodeWijk Brunt and Brigitte Steger (Berlin: Frank and Timme, 2008), 31–53 (p. 33). 11. Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night (London: John Danter for William Jones, 1594), pp. 1–2.

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12. Charlotte Dacre, Zofloya, or The Moor, 2 vols, III (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1806), p. 233. 13. Reverend Saalfeld, A Philosophical Discourse on the Nature of Dreams, trans. from the German (London: T. Becket and P. A. de Hondt, 1764), p. 62. 14. Dacre, Zofloya, II, p. 113. 15. Ibid., III, p. 234. 16. Daniel Defoe, The History of the Devil (Durham: G. Walker, 1826), p. 809. 17. Thomas Tryon, A Treatise of Dreams and Visions ([n.p.]: [n. pub], 1689), p. 20. 18. Ibid., p. 3. 19. Daniel Defoe, An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (London: S. Roberts, 1727), p. 201. 20. Ann Radcliffe, Romance of the Forest, ed. with introduction and notes by Chloe Chard (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1998), p. 41. 21. Saalfeld, Philosophical Discourse, p. 56. 22. Ibid., p. 36. 23. Radcliffe, Romance of the Forest, p. 118. 24. Ibid., p. 110. 25. Saalfeld, Philosophical Discourse, p. 116. 26. I am drawing these understandings of ‘superstition’ and ‘enthusiasm’ from David Hume’s contrasting definitions of them as rooted in ‘weakness, fear, melancholy, together with ignorance’ and ‘hope, pride, presumption, a warm imagination, together with ignorance’ respectively. David Hume, ‘On Superstition and Enthusiasm’, in The Philosophical Works of David Hume, 4 vols (Edinburgh: Adam Black and William Tait, 1826), III, 77–85 (p. 81). 27. Matthew Lewis, The Monk, 2 vols (Dublin: W. Porter/N. Kelly, 1797), II, p. 264. 28. Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England, p. 20. 29. [Anon.], ‘Dreams’, in Dublin Literary Gazette, 23 (June 5, 1830), p. 363. 30. David Hume, ‘Of Miracles’, appended to Oliver Goldsmith, The Mystery of the Cock Lane Ghost Revealed (London: W. Bristow, 1742), p. 24. 31. [Anon.], Anti-Canidia (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1762), p. 44. 32. Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England, p. 28. 33. Jonathan Glance, ‘Ambiguity and the Dreams in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner’, in Studies in Scottish Literature, 28.1 (1993). 34. Mary Shelley, ‘The Dream’, in Mathilda and Other Stories (Ware: Wordsworth, 2013), 213–225 (p. 225). 35. Ibid., p. 225. 36. Ibid., p. 220. 37. Ibid., p. 221.

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38. John Ferriar, A Theory of Dreams (London: Cadell and Davies, 1813), pp. ix–x. 39. Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron, ed. by James Trainor (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2003), p. 11. 40. David Hume, ‘Of Miracles’ appended to An Enquiry into the Pretensions of Richard Brothers (London: J. Parsons, 1795), p. 17. 41. Ibid., p. 22. 42. John Locke, ‘Of Education’, in The Works of John Locke, 3 vols (London: Arthur Bettesworth, 1727), 1–98 (p. 61). 43. Sasha Handley, Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), p. 1. 44. Shane McCorristine, Spectres of the Self, Thinking About Ghosts and Ghost Seeing in England, 1750–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 27. 45. Jo Bath and John Newton, ‘“Sensible Proofs of Spirits”: Ghost Belief During the Later Seventeenth Century’, Folklore, 117.1 (April 2006). http://www-tandfonline-com.ezproxy.mmu.ac.uk/action/abo utThisJournal?show=aimsScope&journalCode=rfol20 [Last accessed 14.06.2019]. 46. Martin Luther, ‘Easter Sunday, or Third Easter Day’, in Church Postil 1544: Summer Postil, trans. by John Nicholas Lenker (1905), http:// www.lutherdansk.dk/1%20Web-AM%20-%20Introduction/Kirkepos. htm [Last accessed 17.06.2019]. 47. Bath and Newton, ‘Sensible Proof of Spirits’, n.p. 48. Luther, ‘Easter Sunday, or Third Easter Day’, n.p. 49. Defoe, History and Reality of Apparitions, p. 3. 50. [Anon.], Anti-Canidia: Or Superstition Detected and Exposed (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1762), p. 21. 51. Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance, 2 vols (London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1792), I, p. 84. 52. [Anon.], Life After Death (London: [n.pub.], 1758), p. iv. 53. Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England, p. 1. 54. Peter Dear, ‘Miracles, Experiments, and the Ordinary Course of Nature’, Isis, 81 (December 1990), 663–683. Dear differentiates between an English experimentalism and a French mathematical method. 55. Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance, pp. 83–84. 56. E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 24. 57. Eliza Parsons, Castle of Wolfenbach, 2 vols (London: William Lane, 1793), I, p. 8. 58. Ibid., I, p. 263. 59. Ibid., I, p. 15. 60. Ibid., I, pp. 38–39.

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61. Ibid., I, p. 48. 62. Carl Friedrich Kahlert, The Necromancer; Or, The Tale of the Black Forest, trans. by Peter Teuthold, 2 vols (London: William Lane, 1794), II, p. 87. 63. Ibid., II, p. 17. 64. Ibid., I, p. 130. 65. Ibid., I, p. 31. 66. Ibid., I, p. 112. 67. Walter Scott, ‘Lives of the Novelists: Ann Radcliffe’, in Prose Works of Walter Scott (Paris: A. and W. Galignani, 1827), p. 468. 68. Manlove, Christian Fantasy, p. 77. 69. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 4 vols (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1795), II, p. 250. 70. Thomas Noon Talfourd, ‘Memoirs of the Authoress’, in The Posthumous Works of Anne Radcliffe with A Memoir of the Authoress, 4 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1833), I, 1–132 (p. 115). 71. Emma Mason, ‘Poetry and Religion’, in A Companion to EighteenthCentury Poetry, ed. by Christine Gerrard (Chichester: Wiley and Sons, 2014), 53–69 (p. 53). 72. Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho, I, p. 273. 73. Ibid., I, p. 254. 74. Ibid., IV, p. 156. 75. Reeve, The Old English Baron, p. 3. 76. T. J. Horsley-Curies, Ethelwina; or, The House of Fitz-Auburne, 3 vols (London: Minerva Press, 1799), I, p. 217. 77. Ibid., I, p. ii. 78. Reeve, The Old English Baron, p. 3. 79. Handley, Visions of an Unseen World, p. 119. 80. Milbank, God and the Gothic, p. 71. 81. Hogle, ‘Recovering the Walpolean Gothic’, p. 164. 82. Geary, Supernatural in Gothic Fiction, p. 7. 83. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (London: [n. pub], 1793), p. 158. 84. Ibid., p. vii.

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Townshend and Angela Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 151–167. Hume, David, ‘Of Miracles’, appended to Oliver Goldsmith, The Mystery of the Cock Lane Ghost Revealed (London: W. Bristow, 1742). Hume, David, ‘On Superstition and Enthusiasm’, in The Philosophical Works of David Hume, 4 vols (Edinburgh: Adam Black and William Tait, 1826). Kahlert, Carl Friedrich, The Necromancer; Or, The Tale of the Black Forest, trans. by Peter Teuthold, 2 vols (London: William Lane, 1794), II, p. 87. Lewis, Matthew, The Monk, 2 vols (Dublin: W. Porter/N. Kelly, 1797). Locke, John, ‘Of Education’, in The Works of John Locke, 3 vols (London: Arthur Bettesworth, 1727), 1–98. Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 4 vols (Dublin: H. Saunders, W. Sleater and others, 1777). Macleod, Malcolm, The Mystery of Dreams Discovered (London: J. Roach, 1794). Manlove, Colin, Christian Fantasy: From 1200 to the Present (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992). Mason, Emma, ‘Poetry and Religion’, in A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry, ed. by Christine Gerrard (Chichester: Wiley and Sons, 2014), 53–69 (p. 53). McCorristine, Shane, Spectres of the Self, Thinking About Ghosts and Ghost Seeing in England, 1750–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 27. Milbank, Alison, God and the Gothic: Religion, Romance, and Reality in the English Literary Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) Miles, Robert, ‘Popular Romanticism and the Problem of Belief’, in Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, ed. by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 117–134. Nashe, Thomas, The Terrors of the Night: or, A Discourse of Apparitions (London: John Danter for William Jones, 1594). Parsons, Eliza, Castle of Wolfenbach, 2 vols (London: William Lane, 1793), I, p. 8. Priestley, Joseph, Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Birmingham: J. Johnson, 1782). Radcliffe, Ann, The Romance of the Forest, 2 vols (Dublin: [n.pub.], 1792). Radcliffe, Ann, Romance of the Forest, ed. with introduction and notes by Chloe Chard (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1998), 41. Reeve, Clara, The Old English Baron, ed. by James Trainer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Saalfeld, Reverend Mr., A Philosophical Discourse on the Nature of Dreams, trans. from the German (London: T. Becket and P. A. de Hondt, 1764). Scott, Walter, ‘Lives of the Novelists: Ann Radcliffe’, in Prose Works of Walter Scott (Paris: A. and W. Galignani, 1827), 468. Shelley, Mary, ‘The Dream’, in Mathilda and Other Stories (Ware: Wordsworth, 2013), 213–225 (p. 225). Talfourd, Thomas Noon, ‘Memoirs of the Authoress’, in The Posthumous Works of Anne Radcliffe with A Memoir of the Authoress, 4 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1833), I, 1–132 (p. 115). Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: The Belkin Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). Tryon, Thomas, A Treatise of Dreams and Visions ([n.p.]: [n. pub], 1689). Varma, Devendra P., The Gothic Flame (London: Arthur Barker Ltd, 1957).

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Imagining the Occult in the Age of Enlightenment Miranda Corcoran

The relationship between Enlightenment thought and the occult was deeply complex, culturally contingent and often highly unstable. That the two should coexist at all appears, at least on first glance, like an essential contradiction. The occult, while referring to the supernatural and mystical, also has notions of secrecy and concealment at its heart. The verb “to occult” means “to shut off from view or exposure”. As an adjective, it refers to that which is “not revealed”, “hidden from view” or not easily detectible. Conversely, the Enlightenment connotes progress, revelation and the sharing of knowledge. Frances Yates describes the middle decades of the eighteenth century as characterised by “the emergence into the light of reason from the darkness of superstition” (xi). For Immanuel Kant, a key thinker of the German Enlightenment, or die Aufklärung, the experience of enlightenment was contingent upon the dissemination of information and intimately bound up with notions of public scholarship. In his 1784 essay “What is Enlightenment?” Kant explains that enlightenment depends upon “the public use of one’s reason”, the laying bare of one’s intellect “before the reading world” (19). Likewise, the mystical aspects of the occult also appear fundamentally incompatible with the ideals of the Enlightenment. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, describe the Enlightenment programme as “the disenchantment of the world”, noting that “it wanted to dispel myths, to M. Corcoran (B) University College Cork, Cork, Ireland e-mail: [email protected]

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overthrow fantasy with knowledge” (1). Although ultimately demonstrating that reason gives way to rationalisation, Horkheimer and Adorno show that Enlightenment thinkers championed empirical enquiry into nature in hopes of establishing “man as the master of nature” (1). In doing so, the rational mind would triumph over superstition and “rule over disenchanted nature” (2). Such an evacuation of enchantment would appear to leave little room for the esoteric or the magical. Colin Wilson argues that the enchanted world had passed away even before the advent of the Enlightenment proper: “By 1600, the age of magic was over. The voice of scepticism was making itself heard: In Rabelais, in Montaigne, in Ben Jonson” (Loc. 5196). Despite this apparent tension, the idea that the Enlightenment existed in eternal opposition to waning occultism is reductive, eliding the multifaceted relationship that existed between the two. This chapter therefore explicates the many ways in which Enlightenment thought intersected with, challenged and even ultilised the occult. Here, I focus on complex figures such as the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and the German pioneer of animal magnetism, Franz Anton Mesmer. In their works, Swedenborg and Mesmer regularly combined the numinous and the scientific, uniting rationalism and mysticism in an attempt to advance humanity. These men and their teachings were received in diverse ways by contemporary audiences, their ideas debated and reimagined in scientific literature, public discourse and fiction. As such, this chapter also explores how the dialogue between the rational and the mystical played out in literature, particularly in the gothic novel. In these creative spaces, the fluctuating relationship between Enlightenment thought and occultism was not only replicated, but scrutinised, challenged and reinvented. This chapter contends that the occult had an essentially ambivalent relationship to the Enlightenment. At once a part of it, the occult was in some ways inimical to many of the Enlightenment’s central precepts. At the same time, many of the Enlightenment’s key thinkers engaged with the occult, while various strands of mysticism borrowed heavily from both the philosophical and scientific language of the period. As Paul Kléber Monod explains in his comprehensive history of Enlightenment-era occultism, From one perspective, the occult might be seen as an alternative to the Enlightenment, because it was founded on sentiment and personal revelation rather than the application of pure reason […] On the other hand, the occult could be imagined as part of a “Super-Enlightenment” that elevated human potential and wisdom beyond the limits of rational understanding. (263)

In this way, the occult can be read as existing in opposition to the Enlightenment, as easily assimilable into the Enlightenment programme of advancement and illumination or as occupying both positions simultaneously. Broadly conceived, the Enlightenment refers to the acceleration of intellectual and scientific progress during the eighteenth century. Born out of the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the

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Enlightenment was defined by an enthusiastic faith in the power of knowledge to transform humanity, improve society and give birth to new political systems. The Enlightenment, although often associated with eighteenthcentury French thinkers like Diderot and Voltaire, also blossomed in England, Scotland, Germany, British North America and Eastern Europe, as well in Spain and its colonies. Under the banner of the Enlightenment, both science and philosophy, closely interconnected disciplines at the time, embraced rationalism and empiricism. Many influential thinkers of the period, such as John Locke, posited information gleaned through experience and the senses as the foundation of human knowledge. The Enlightenment also witnessed a revitalisation of political philosophy, as traditional beliefs in the divine right of monarchs were challenged by thinkers who espoused democracy, human rights and broad notions of equality. The social contract, as conceived by philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, proffers a political system in which leaders rule not through tyranny or God-given authority, but through the consent of the people. The Enlightenment thus witnessed a number of attempts—namely, the French (1789–1799) and the American Revolutions (1775–1783)—to dismantle existing political structures and replace them with systems more in keeping with Enlightenment conceptions of justice, equality and freedom. This rapid recalibration of human understanding and political organisation was not necessarily opposed to occult thought. As noted above, many eighteenthcentury thinkers enfolded the mystical within the larger Enlightenment project of exploration, philosophical enquiry and human advancement. Immanuel Kant, the philosopher who succinctly defined enlightenment as the “human being’s emancipation from its self-incurred immaturity” and the concomitant ability to think for one’s self (17), also expressed interest in decidedly occult phenomena. In a letter from 1763, Kant meditates at length on the visionary Emanuel Swedenborg’s reputed clairvoyance and his capacity to commune with spirits (Andriopoulos 74). Later, in 1766, Kant published Dreams of a Spirit Seer, a commentary on Swedenborg’s Heavenly Secrets (Thorpe 52). At the same time, it is worth noting that alongside his roles as a mystic and theologian, Swedenborg was himself a scientist and philosopher. The boundary between science, or reason, and the occult was not always clearly delineated, even in the Age of Enlightenment. Moreover, the term “occultism” is applied only retroactively to many of these beliefs and practices. During the period under discussion, what we now consider occult may have been viewed as magic, hermeticism, philosophy or even science. Indeed, the term “occult”, as it is commonly used today, was originated by the author Eliphas Lévi in the nineteenth century. He borrowed it from Henricus Cornelius Agrippa’s De Occulta philosophia (1533), which uses the phrase “philosophia occulta” to describe “sciences” such as alchemy, magic, astrology and the Kabbalah (Faivre 34). The sweeping epistemological changes inaugurated by the Enlightenment are generally viewed as having their origins in the Scientific Revolution of the

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previous two centuries. Bookended by Copernicus’s theorisation of a heliocentric solar system in 1543 and Newton’s explication of the laws of gravity and motion in 1687, the Scientific Revolution depended on an understanding of “science” that left ample room for the mystical and the esoteric. During this period, science was generally still defined as “natural philosophy”, and as such, there was significant scope for intellectual enquiries that transcended modern conceptions of legitimate science. As Barbara M. Benedict explains, “since no clear rules had yet developed to differentiate superstition from science, or legitimate from prurient inquiry, curiosity was considered an ambiguous quality” (351). The Royal Society, founded in 1660 as a learned collective of thinkers, was devoted to advancing the so-called “New Science”. No longer dependent on a priori classifications, the society espoused experimental empiricism, employing observation and replicable experimentation in an attempt to discover natural laws (Benedict 352). At the same time, many influential members of the Royal Society were avid students of what might now be considered the occult. Robert Boyle, one of the founders of the society and a pioneer in modern chemistry, was famously intrigued by the science of alchemy and the possibility of transmutation. However, as Benedict explains, this did not necessarily pose a contradiction: “In Boyle’s day, the difference between chemistry and alchemy, the ‘Egyptian’ art associated with dubious medieval attempts to transform base metals into gold and silver, remained far from clear” (352). In a biographical note dictated in the last years of his life, Boyle expresses a profound curiosity about the supernatural, relaying tales of individuals he was aware of who had psychic experiences or communed with spirits (Hunter 388). Boyle apparently drew a connection between spirit communication and alchemical knowledge (Hunter 388). Likewise, Newton, another member of the Royal Society and a key figure of the Scientific Revolution, was fascinated by alchemy and the philosophers’ stone. His personal papers abound with writings on alchemy, the Kabbalah and magic. Even the strain of physics he introduced to the world was far from mechanistic. Jason A. Josephson-Storm observes that “Newtonian physics was not the strippeddown mechanism he is associated with, but a dynamical cosmos inclined toward apocalypse and dissolution, which required active intervention by God and angels” (43). Attempting to account for the esoteric, occult influences on early modern scientific thought, Frances Yates has shown that a significant number of the Royal Society’s early members were inducted in Masonic Lodges (277). Because the symbolic and philosophical content of Freemasonry preserved Renaissance esotericism and Hebraic or “Egyptian” wisdom, these intellectual currents undoubtedly circulated among many of the key figures of the Scientific Revolution (Yates 277). Out of this dialogue between esotericism and natural philosophy, there arose a dynamic intellectual exchange in which occult thinkers borrowed heavily from the language of empirical science, while ostensibly supernatural instances were investigated using tools and techniques borrowed from the experimental sciences.

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One of the most dynamic intersections of the occult and the scientific appears in the work of Emanuel Swedenborg. Born in 1688, Swedenborg was the son of a Lutheran pastor (later, bishop), who spent much of his early life studying astronomy, botany, geology, zoology and mechanics. During this period, he published on topics including chemistry, physics, anatomy, metallurgy and algebra. Like Newton, Swedenborg’s theories of the universe combined the empirical sciences with a potent spirituality. In his Oeconomia Regni animalis in transactiones divisa (The economy of the animal kingdom in a transaction divided, 1740–1741), he argues that all life is animated by pervasive energic force whose ultimate source is God. In the mid-1740s, Swedenborg’s engagement with the numinous became more pronounced. Between 1743 and 1744, he underwent a spiritual crisis that culminated in a series of religious visions. These began with a dream in which a powerful wind picked him up and flung him to the ground. After he started to pray, Jesus Christ materialised before him and spoke with him. In 1745, Swedenborg began to experience intense spiritual visions during his waking hours. In the course of these transcendent experiences, he visited both heaven and hell, conversing with angels, devils and the spirits of the deceased. Swedenborg also displayed astounding clairvoyant abilities. In 1759, he stunned fellow party guests in Gothenburg when he relayed information about a great fire which was, at that very moment, burning in Stockholm, three hundred miles away. In the late 1740s, Swedenborg resigned from a lucrative position he held on the Swedish Board of Mines in order to dedicate himself to theology. He published his debut work of theological thought, Arcana Coelestia (Heavenly Secrets ) in 1756. Over the course of his career as a mystic, Swedenborg composed eighteen different texts, many of which encompassed several volumes (Williams-Hogan 147). His substantial oeuvre includes detailed accounts of his conversations with spiritual beings, his thoughts on the organisation of the spiritual realm and reflections on the inhabitants of other planets. Swedenborg also maintained that distinct from its literal content, the Christian Bible is possessed of a hidden spiritual meaning revealed through “correspondences”. It was possible to employ this correspondence to access the spiritual realm. Swedenborg also outlined a new Christian doctrine that deviated from conventional dogma in a number of key ways. Principally, Swedenborg contended that God is one both in essence and person, and that the nature of this essence is love and wisdom (Williams-Hogan 148). He also rejected the notion that Jesus died to expiate the sins of Adam, explaining that God has no need for such atonement (Wilson Loc.5294). Yet, while Swedenborg’s theology was unique in its break from the rhetoric of damnation preached by many contemporary religious movements, it was also distinguished by its reliance on scientific thought. According to Swedenborg, the spiritual realm can be explored, understood and classified in much the same way as the natural world. Just as nature has an order that can be explicated through observation and experimentation, so too is the order of the spiritual world discoverable through empirical experience. Jane Williams-Hogan states that

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while some see the realm of the spirit as incomprehensible or inscrutable, Swedenborg wrote about and revealed the orderliness of the supernatural world. He portrays a world that we can know and understand, as well as provides the tools that show us the relationship between the choices we make, here and now, and the place and nature of the eternal home we are constructing for ourselves there. (151)

Like the archetypal scientist or natural philosopher, Swedenborg deploys the tools of observation and experimentation to apprehend and map the order of the heavens. In De Caelo et Eius Mirabilibus et de inferno, ex Auditis et Visis (or On Heaven and Its Wonders and hell, from what I have seen and heard, 1758), he describes a taxonomy of heaven and its inhabitants. Here, he explains that “The general division [of heaven] is into two kingdoms, the specific into three heavens, and the particular into innumerable societies” (22). Swedenborg also outlines the laws of time and space that govern heaven, noting that angels have no conception of either and that “All changes of place in the spiritual world are effected by changes of state of the interiors, which means that change of place is nothing else than change of state” (143). Swedenborg’s conception of an ordered, discoverable heaven not only rests on an empiricist approach to knowledge, but it also reflects a broader Enlightenment faith in enquiry and a belief in the importance of public scholarship. Not only does he systematise the spiritual world and its inhabitants, but he works assiduously to make that knowledge available to wider world in hopes of improving humanity as a whole. In this way, Swedenborg’s theological ambitions recall one of the key intellectual projects of the Enlightenment, Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Initially published between 1751 and 1772, the Encyclopédie was originally planned as a translation of Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopedia (1728). The project quickly outpaced these foundational ambitions, growing to encompass twenty-eight folio volumes containing 71,818 articles and 2885 plates (Brewer 13). The articles themselves covered topics as diverse as science, literature, philosophy, art, politics, religion, natural history, music and medicine. In bringing together and disseminate such an array of knowledge, the Encyclopedie is, in the words of Daniel Brewer, “the text most representative of the French Enlightenment, providing massive testimony to the Enlightenment belief in the value of unfettered inquiry into all sectors of human knowledge” (13). Moreover, the Encyclopedie, which was prefaced by a tree, or figurative system, of human knowledge, represented an attempt to rationalise and systematise extant knowledge. As co-editor d’Alembert explains, a central aim of the Encyclopedie “is to set forth as well as possible the order and connection of the parts of human knowledge”. In doing so, the Encyclopedie’s editors and contributors hoped not only to dispel unreason, but to bring about a rational “reordering of values and institutions” (Brewer 14). An analogous spirit of rationality and reform pervades Swedenborg’s excavations of the spiritual world. In his writings, the mystic puts forth an ordered,

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comprehensible taxonomy of the heavens, presenting the numinous in wholly rational, scientific terms. At the same time, he disseminates these taxonomies, in multiple publications, in hopes that the information will improve humanity and its institutions. Although the decades immediately following his death witnessed the establishment of an organised Swedenborgian church, which is still in existence, Swedenborg’s greatest legacy is perhaps his deft marriage of Enlightenment rationalism and occult thought. A similar union of the mystical and the scientific characterises the work of Franz Anton Mesmer. Born in the Swabian village of Iznang (modern-day Germany) in 1734, Mesmer—like Swedenborg—had a scientific background. He graduated with a medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1766. During this time, Mesmer produced a dissertation which combined astrology and Newtonian physics to account for the influence of celestial bodies on the earth and its inhabitants. He argued that the moon and planets control a fluid that permeates and animates all matter. Disturbances in this fluid could result in nervous disorders as well as physical pain and other ailments. Mesmer also conducted experiments in hopes of discovering the exact nature of this animating fluid, initially assuming that it was electrical in character. The theories of mesmerism and animal magnetism with which he is now synonymous emerged out of these early hypotheses and were further stimulated by Mesmer’s collaborations with the astronomer Maximilian Hell at the University of Vienna. Hell was intrigued by the possible medicinal uses of magnetism, though it would be Mesmer who would fully develop these theories and create a wildly popular treatment based on them. Mesmer believed that magnetism could be employed to enable the body’s animating fluid to flow more freely. At this point, he reconfigured the theories printed in his dissertation to account for what he termed “animal”—as opposed to “mineral”—magnetism, which he framed as an intrinsic feature of organic matter. Health, Mesmer claimed, depended on the unimpeded flow of animal magnetism which, while not directly stemming from them, was nevertheless influenced by planetary motions. Originally, Mesmer believed that the strategic application of magnets could rid the body of obstructions that prevented the free flow of magnetic fluids. However, he soon eliminated magnets entirely, claiming that these fluids could be manipulated through hand movements or “magnetic passes”. For a time, Mesmer’s theories were both fashionable and popular. When he moved to Paris in the late 1770s, his mesmeric therapies drew large crowds to his apartment/clinic at 16 Place Vendome. The atmosphere there was one of mystical theatricality: Mesmer would dress in silk robes and carry a wand, the lighting was subdued and the sound of a glass harmonica filled the air. Yet, despite this air of otherworldliness, Mesmer’s practices were, at least partially, based on contemporary scientific discourse. Emily Ogden explains that the manipulation of animal magnetism “mixed Bavarian exorcism, a practice Mesmer had claimed to explain with his own principles, with a view of matter that seemed vaguely drawn from Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751)” (26). Like Swedenborg’s taxonomy of the

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spirit world, Mesmer’s ideas fused the rational and the magical in intriguing ways. One of Mesmer’s most renowned creations was his baquet, a device used for the treatment of large groups. The baquet was a large, covered tub. Inside the tub, an oak case was filled with a layer of powdered glass and iron fillings in which a number of “mesmerised” water bottles were arranged. Jointed iron rods with magnets at their bases passed through the lid of the tub and were held by the thirty or so patients who were thus connected to the mesmerised liquid inside (Lopez 326). Despite the strangeness of the apparatus, the baquet was based on the same principle as the recently discovered Leyden Jar. Just as the Leyden Jar could be used to contain an electrical charge, so too was the baquet employed to contain mesmeric energy. Consequently, while some historians view Mesmer’s popularity as a reaction against the Enlightenment—with Robert Darnton quipping that eighteenth-century Parisians “buried Voltaire and flocked to Mesmer” (qtd. In Lopez 325)—it can also be viewed as an extension of the era’s preoccupation with new discoveries. Mesmer even attempted to confer scientific legitimacy upon his practices by petitioning both the Académie nationale de médecine and the Académie des sciences for official recognition. In 1784, a commission was established to investigate mesmerism, with members drawn from both of these institutions. Unfortunately for Mesmer, their subsequent report dismissed mesmerism as a hoax, one which successfully manipulates the essential credulity of the weakminded and uneducated. The report dispelled much of the aura of legitimacy that Mesmer had initially cultivated, as “the commissioners’ aim was not only to show that animal magnetism was false but also to show how it had appeared to be true” (Ogden 36). The popularity of mesmerism waned in France during the turbulent years following the Revolution. However, its ubiquity before this led many thinkers to associate animal magnetism with sedition. For some, mesmerism was associated with the irrational, emotive rhetoric of revolutionary ferment, while others were threatened by the movement’s apparent disregard for class boundaries and its appeal to workers (Fulford 59, 66). Indeed, Monod explains, “by the 1790s, occult philosophy had established a strong link with reformist and even radical thought, which would engender suspicion and hostility from those in power” (228). Mesmerism did spread beyond France, becoming popular in the United Kingdom, Germany and, from the 1830s onward, the US. In the nineteenth century, Mesmer’s practices were transformed into what we now know as “hypnotism” by the Scottish physician James Braid. After magnetising a young shepherd on his estate, Braid observed that the young boy fell into a trance-like state during which he was responsive to Braid’s commands, but later emerged from the trance with no memory of the event. It is perhaps due to transformation of mesmerism into hypnotism that commentators like Maria Tatar view Mesmer as the connecting link between “primitive” magical rites and twentieth-century therapeutic practices like psychoanalysis (3). The theories and methodologies of key eighteenth-century occult figures like Swedenborg and Mesmer are indicative of the complex ways in which

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Enlightenment rationality intersected with the mystical. These two thinkers are emblematic of the vital interconnections that existed between the eighteenthcentury proclivity towards empirical experimentation and the concomitant desire to explore the otherworldly. Yet, Enlightenment ideals abutted the occult in host of other intriguing encounters during this period. Paul Kléber Monod demonstrates that the acceleration of public literacy and the related appetite for reading material facilitated the widespread dissemination of occult texts. Indeed, Monod notes that a significant occult revival took place in England between 1760 and 1800, largely stimulated by the expansion of commercial presses and a surge of interest among middle-class readers in the more pragmatic aspects of occult thought (227). Various strands of Enlightenment philosophy, particularly in France, debated the value of universal education. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, French legalisation advocated equal access to primary education, though the results of this were limited. Later, the publication of works like Rosseau’s Émile (1762) and Le Mercier de la Riviere’s De I’instruction publique (On Public Education, 1775) asserted the individual and social value of education. Whether or not such calls were heeded, the eighteenth century witnessed the expansion of literacy across all social classes in north-eastern France, northern Germany, Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia (Munck viii). This growth in basic literacy included both men and women, and the Enlightenment period was defined by “a rapid shift in some parts of Europe towards mass reading skills” (Munck 46). Although a person’s level of literacy was usually dependent on factors such as class, gender, economic status and profession—writing was usually taught after reading and often reserved for more advanced pupils—the eighteenth century was nevertheless marked by a notable upsurge in literacy skills. As Thomas Munck shows, average male literacy (measured by the ability to sign one’s name) in France grew from 29% in 1690 to 47% in 1790, while literacy rates among women rose from 14 to 27% (48). Analogously, in England, male literacy increased from 30% in the mid-seventeenth century to 60% in the late eighteenth century (Munck 48). Yet, rather than dispelling belief in the supernatural or inculcating widespread faith in what we now term “legitimate science”, the growth of literacy during the Enlightenment created a new market for books on occult topics like astrology, alchemy and magic. Bookselling became an increasingly lucrative endeavour throughout the eighteenth century, with some of the larger companies operating out of immense warehouses and advertising their products through catalogues. Significantly, these catalogues dedicated entire sections to occult subjects, often listing them alongside medical and scientific publications (Monod 229). In doing so, these companies conferred a degree of intellectual legitimacy on the various occult disciplines, suggesting that they held the same intellectual status as the works on law, religion, history or medicine listed alongside them (Monod 230). Monod describes how this legitimacy, combined with the increased commercialisation of the press, resulted in the creation of a new readership for occult works (228). Rather than being

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limited to scholars and the well-educated, interest in the occult quickly spread to the newly ascendent middle classes. The primary audience for texts dealing with the occult was now made up of shopkeepers, small business owners, artisans and tradespeople who were less interested in the rigors of occult philosophy and more concerned with its practical applications (Monod 228). It is perhaps for this reason that almanacs such as Vox Stellarum remained popular in rural areas well into the nineteenth century. Filled with astrological predictions, planetary directions, a table illustrating “The Dominion of the Moon in Man’s Body”, and brief accounts of the coming year’s main events (sometimes featuring quotations from the astrologer Nostradamus) (Monod 236), it is easy to see how this text might have proved useful in the everyday lives of tradespeople and small business owners. Consequently, while the occult revival of the late Enlightenment was driven by a host of distinct factors, including the evangelical awakening and the waning influence of the mainstream Anglican Church, both rising literacy rates and the commercialisation of the press were instrumental in stimulating broad public interest in occultism. Public fascination with the occult and its appearance in popular print media also coincided with the first wave of gothic fiction, which began with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764 and continued until around 1820. Consequently, the gothic novel became one of the many creative spaces in which contemporary occultism was referenced and debated. Indeed, the gothic novel arises out of the same circumstances that engendered the late eighteenth-century occult revival in England: a change in English social structure and the concomitant expansion of the reading public (Punter 20). In a similar manner, the birth of the gothic novel was, like the explosion of occult literature, contingent upon the commercialisation of print during the eighteenth century. The gothic has often been conceptualised as a response to the Enlightenment valorisation of reason, an expression of the limits of rationality. David Punter writes that According to such an interpretation, fear is both the root and the product of the attempt to bring all things under rational control, and rationalism will be a self-defeating system because that which cannot be thus assimilated will therefore become all the more taboo; reason will create its own enemies. To consider the passions and the emotions as mere subject faculties to be brought under the sway of an all-dominant reason, as the Enlightenment thinkers did, will render those faculties all the more incomprehensible, and in some ways eighteenth-century fiction shows an increasing awareness of this problem. (24)

The terrors that stalk the gothic novel can therefore be understood as the inevitable result of the Enlightenment desire to exert rational control over all aspects of existence. As those emotions, desires and anxieties that are seen as incompatible with reason are pushed to the edges of consciousness, they return in ever more unsettling forms. However, just as the occult did not exist in opposition to Enlightenment, the gothic also engaged with and utilised

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Enlightenment discourse. The supernatural events that define this mode of fiction are generally depicted using psychological realism (Benedict 367). Similarly, James P. Carson comments on the propensity of gothic novelists to preface their novels with claims “to have undertaken a quasi-scientific investigation into natural human responses when characters are confronted with situations of apparently supernatural stress” (257). In the preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole explains that his intention in composing the novel was “to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern” (9). Walpole goes on to note that in older forms of romance “all was imagination and improbability”, while in the modern “nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success” (9). Consequently, Walpole’s novel, like many eighteenth-century gothic texts, unites Enlightenment faith in empirical observation with fantastic scenarios. The manner in which the occult is represented in gothic works is also complex and multifaceted, combining the era’s interest in the mystical with an often-rational interrogation of ostensibly supernatural phenomena. Occult iconography permeates the gothic; sometimes serving as a sincere meditation on the veracity of the otherworldly, other times merely providing a lurid backdrop to sensational narratives. One of the most salacious gothic texts of the first wave, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), abounds in ritual magic and esoteric practices. Matilda, the beautiful young woman who seduces the titular Monk, Ambrosio, claims to have learned occult rituals from her a guardian, a “man of uncommon knowledge”, who instilled in her young mind knowledge “esteemed impious” and related “to the world of spirits” (197). Matilda raises demons and spirits, including Lucifer himself to do her bidding. In one passage, she is described in terms that align her with the figure of the sorcerer or high magician: She was now clothed in a long sable robe, on which was traced in gold embroidery a variety of unknown characters: it was fastened by a girdle of precious stones, in which was fixed a poignard [a long knife]. Her neck and arms were uncovered. In her hand she bore a golden wand. (202)

The rituals she performs also reflect popular images of occult practice: she chants incantations, draws protective circles, desecrates communion wafers and uses her own blood in her satanic ceremonies. Although Lewis’s literary engagement with the occult appears largely superficial, intended only to shock and titillate, he does appear to have some genuine interest in the topic. Based on the scenes in which Matilda summons forth demonic entities, Monod ascertains that Lewis must have read manuals of ritual magic or been familiar grimoires like the Lesser Key of Solomon (243). Other works from the eighteenth-century subject occultism to more rigorous analysis, using the imaginative space of the gothic to challenge and interrogate the mystical. Friedrich Schiller’s unfinished novel The Ghost-Seer (Der Geisterseher, 1787–1789) engages with questions of belief, illusion and

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the supernatural. The Ghost-Seer is an example of the Schauerroman, a German correlative of the English gothic novel. The Schauerroman can, however, be distinguished from its anglophone counterpart through its generic fluidity. Although Schauerroman translates as “shudder novel”, this mode of writing also encompasses short stories, novellas and poetry (Crawford and Worley 2). Like his contemporaries Swedenborg and Mesmer, Schiller is a figure who straddles the scientific and the philosophical. He practised medicine alongside writing philosophical and literary works. Schiller was particularly interested in the relationship between the bodily and spiritual realms (Andriopoulos 77). In his Philosophie der Physiologie (Philosophy of Physiology, 1779), Schiller argued for the existence of a mediating force that enables the corporeal to interact with the spiritual. Moreover, he claimed that while this force contradicts existent theoretical models associated with both science and philosophy, it nevertheless constitutes “an empirical fact” (Andriopoulos 77). His novel The Ghost-Seer scrutinises both the occult itself and the credulity of those who seek to engage with the preternatural. One character, a German prince, wishes to commune with the spiritual realm. Yet, despite this ardent desire, the prince nevertheless maintains a rational attitude towards the supernatural. In the course of a conversation with friends, the prince asserts that it is wiser to “refrain from a judgement in these matters” (qtd in Andriopoulos 85). When confronted with a Sicilian necromancer who claims to possess the power to raise the dead, the prince is enthusiastic about the possibility of encountering empirical proof of spirit communication. The ritual performed by the Sicilian has all the trappings of popular occultism, with the necromancer draped in robes adorned with Kabbalistic characters. Ultimately, however, the ritual and the ghost it produces are revealed to be little more than an elaborate theatrical spectacle achieved through the use of a magic lantern. As Stefan Andriopoulos elucidates, in demystifying the apparition, “the novel appropriates numerous late eighteenth-century treatises on how optical tricks and an enthusiastic imagination may deceive credulous or superstitious observers” (87). While The Ghost-Seer does dispel the aura of otherworldliness associated with ghosts and spirits, it nevertheless opens up a space for the preternatural to exist in the form of an esoteric conspiracy. Early in the novel, the prince and his companion encounter a mysterious Armenian, who later disrupts the ritual and exposes the necromancer’s illusions. The Armenian, it seems, is part of some vaguely delineated conspiratorial organisation, though the unfinished nature of the novel ensures that his associations and intentions are never fully explained. The manner in which Schiller frames the Armenian as imbricated within a larger, potentially international conspiracy suggests an investment in the broader eighteenth-century fascination with secret societies and esoteric fraternities. There was considerable interest throughout the Enlightenment period in the activities of real and imagined organisations like the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians and the Illuminati. The Illumanati were founded in 1776 with the hope of bringing about an egalitarian Europe and were initially

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opposed to occultism. Yet, in the wake of the French Revolution, the Illuminati (along with the Masons) were outlawed in their native Bavaria. In the case of both the Freemasons and Rosicrucians, it is difficult to extract fact from myth. The Freemasons, for instance, espouse a legendary history that stretches back to Solomon’s building of the First Temple in Jerusalem and the medieval masonry guilds who constructed Europe’s great cathedrals. Frances Yates explains that at some point, “operative masonry, or the actual craft of building, turned into speculative masonry, or the moral and mystical interpretation of building, into a secret society with esoteric rites and teaching” (266). However, because of the Masons’ proclivity for self-mythologisation, it is difficult to know when these transformations took place. One of the earliest historical references to Freemasonry concerns the induction of Robert Moray, a key figure in the foundation of the Royal Society, into an Edinburgh lodge in 1641. There is also a later account of the initiation of antiquarian and alchemist Elias Ashmole into a Masonic lodge on 16 October 1646, an event he recorded in his diary. Though the history of Freemasonry remains obscure, it is clear that key members of learned organisations like the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries were inducted into Masonic Lodges. With the founding of the Grand Lodge of England in 1717, the increased social status afforded to Freemasonry lured more influential figures to the fraternity. It is perhaps due to the large number of major intellectuals drawn to the organisation that in many parts of Europe historians link Freemasonry to the development of Enlightenment thought (Monod 17). In 1725, the publication of James Anderson’s Constitutions of Freemasonry provided the organisation with an authoritative document containing the order’s mystical history and mythology (Yates 270). Freemasonry thus grew in status and solidified its own mythology during the eighteenth century. Considering the diversity of Masonic lodges in both Britain and on the continent, the organisation had no single overarching agenda. Monod observes that “Freemasonry was about many things in the early eighteenth century” (180). As well as providing a forum in which members of the aristocracy and gentry could mingle with the newly ascendent professional classes, Masonic lodges inculcated decidedly enlightened values such as civility and religious tolerance. Most intriguingly, however, Freemasonry provided its members with a thrilling exposure to esoteric rites. Initiations and other ceremonies frequently utilised the iconography of the occult: the zodiac, skulls and pentacles (Monod 180). The aura of occult attraction that accrued around Freemasonry may also be connected to its reputed connection to another secret society, the Rosicrucians. In a letter from 1750, there is an acknowledgement that “English Freemasons have copied some ceremonies from Rosicrucians and say they are derived from them and are the same with them” (qtd in Yates 268). References to the Rosicrucians, or the Rosie/Rose Cross, also appear in literature purporting to describe Freemasonry and in a new grade, or series of rituals, introduced into French Masonry during the eighteenth century, the Rose

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Cross grade (Yates 168). The Rosicrucians have their origins in the “Rosicrucian manifestos”, a series of manuscripts published in Germany in the early 1600s. The term “Rosicrucian” derives from “Christian Rosencreutz” (Rose Cross) and refers to a figure described in the manifestos. The three manuscripts—Fama Fraternitatis RC (1614), Confessio Fraternitatis (1615), The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosicross anno 1459 (1617)—purport to contain the biography and philosophies of a figure known as “Brother CR”, or Christian Rosencreutz, a mystic who apparently founded an esoteric order in the fifteenth century. According to the manifestos, Rosencreutz was born in 1378 and lived to be 106 years old. His longevity, it is implied, resulted from his possession of the mythical Philosophers’ Stone (Tilton 128). The documents themselves appear to espouse both spiritual and intellectual reform. The first manifesto, the Fama Fraternitatis RC (Fame of the Brotherhood of RC ), asserts that God has revealed a higher knowledge of both nature and the divine. In the early part of the manifesto, its author(s) suggests that if men of learning united, these new truths might be spread to all corners of the globe. The document then goes on to describe the activities of Brother Rosencreutz, an “illuminated man” conversant in “Magia and Cabala” (Yates 60). Rosencreutz established the Fraternity of the Holy Cross in order to reform and perfect human knowledge. To this end, the brotherhood produced a magical language that enabled them to predict celestial and planetary events. As a whole, the order combined magic, the Kabbalah and alchemy, not as a means of attaining worldly wealth, but rather as a means of achieving greater spiritual understanding. Consequently, the Rosicrucian were said to employ the alchemical sciences in accordance with the scientific method, using them to explore new worlds of discovery (Yates 284). Although Rosicrucian doctrines were viewed as increasingly outmoded by the end of the eighteenth century, some historians such as Frances Yates view the Rosicrucian manifestos and their reception as a sort of “protoEnlightenment” (Tilton 141). The manifestos themselves and the story of their discovery in the tomb of Brother CR have largely been interpreted allegorically, but this has not prevented broad public engagement with the order. Rosicrucians have appeared in novels, political propaganda, the fantasies of real-world believers in fictional secret societies and in the writings of extant secret societies, such as the Freemasons (Tilton 128). In gothic fiction, such esoteric societies serve a wide range of imaginative purposes. In some instances, they are alluring, furnishing characters with valuable knowledge or esoteric powers; in others, they pose a sinister threat to the social order. Schiller’s The Ghost-Seer presents an elaborate conspiracy in which a shadowy organisation, possibly the Holy Inquisition, manipulates a young prince into converting to Roman Catholicism in hopes that his people will soon follow. In the novel, the figure most associated with conspiratorial manoeuvrings is the strange, masked Armenian. Despite ostensibly working to expose fraudulent occult practices, the Armenian is, according to Carol Margaret Davidson,

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inextricably linked to supernatural (91). Indeed, the novel suggests that Armenian is blessed not only with eternal youth, but also with the ability exists in multiple locations simultaneously. Davidson connects the Armenian with the figure of Apollonius of Tyana, a reputed master of the Rosicrucians and a necromancer with the ability to appear in numerous locations at once (94). Schiller himself does not allude to Rosicrucians directly, but the Armenian is nevertheless bound with the notion of secret societies, as The Ghost-Seer frames the Catholic Church as “yet another demonic secret society obsessed with power mongering and engaged with the occult sciences” (Davidson 92). William Godwin’s St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1799) also engages with the subject of secret societies. Detailing the corruption of the eponymous aristocrat, St. Leon employs alchemical knowledge—the power of longevity and the ability to produce gold—in order to critique of capitalism, materialistic desire and greed. Like The Ghost-Seer, St. Leon references esoteric orders in vague terms. The title character learns the secrets of alchemy from a supernatural wanderer, and the primary source for the novel, Hermippus Redivivus: Or, The Sage’s Triumph Over Old Age and the Grave (1744), features a fourteenth-century Rosicrucian (Davidson 111). Godwin’s novel itself inspired Percy Bysshe Shelley’s St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance (1811), a gothic novel in which the protagonist, Wolfstein, is offered the secret of immortality by the Rosicrucian Ginotti. In all of these works, the representation of esoteric orders is complex. They often signify greed, hubris or sinister agendas. Likewise, in contemporary political rhetoric, such orders were frequently associated with the revolutionary fervour and conspiratorial machinations that deposed the Ancien Régime in France. As Lachman observes, “By 1789, for the popular mind, secret societies were behind the convulsions rocking France” (52). At the same time, however, Laurie Ruth Johnson observes that in many novels from this period, secret societies “reveal, or bring to light, hidden knowledge. The labyrinthine and conspiratorial self-deceptions practiced by secret societies are simulations of reality whose deceptive character is known to all” (179). In this way, while the secret societies that populate gothic novels of this period facilitate a thrilling engagement with subversion, they call attention to that most enduring of Enlightenment projects, the desire to know the true nature of reality and the demystification of those delusive structures that inhibit free thought. Mesmerism, too, was interrogated and reimagined in the realm of fiction. Indeed, Maria Tatar explains that on a more mundane, everyday level, the vocabulary of mesmerism has permeated our speech: we speak of mesmerising stares and magnetic personalities (x). Tim Fulford finds numerous references to the practice in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Notably, in Christabel (1816), the titular character’s manipulation by the vampiric Geraldine can be understood as an expression of “Coleridge’s interests in superstition and magnetism” (Fulford 76). A more extensive encounter with the mesmeric arts appears in ETA Hoffman’s novella “Der Magnetiseur” (“The Magnetizer”, 1814). In this tale, Hoffmann explores what he terms the “night side” of

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animal magnetism (qtd in Andriopoulos 112). Across layers of embedded and intersecting narratives, Hoffman presents disturbing scenarios in which mesmerism is employed to control unwilling or unwitting subjects. In a story within the story, we meet a young woman named Auguste who is mesmerised by both a mysterious Italian officer and by her fiancé Theobald; while in the framing narrative, a girl named Maria is manipulated mesmerically by a family friend. The first section of the novella also sees Maria’s father discussing a Danish major who used his own mesmeric gaze to control those around. Hoffmann seems to suggest that mesmerism, an unknown and still mysterious force, may be put to sinister uses. In other contemporary texts, mesmerism and its public reception are explored more indirectly. As noted above, the year 1784 witnessed the establishment of a commission to investigate the scientific veracity of Mesmer’s techniques. The committee was drawn from France’s premier academic institutions and also included such leading intellectuals as Benjamin Franklin, chemist Antoine Lavoisier and astronomer Jean-Sylvian Bailly. The commission’s methodology involved performing magnetic passes on a cross-section of the public, with participants drawn from a range of diverse socio-economic backgrounds. The commissioners tested the response of individuals grouped around a baquet, noting that some felt nothing while others fell into convulsions. They performed magnetic passes on subjects while hidden behind a paper panel. The subjects, even those who ardently believed in mesmerism, felt nothing when they were magnetised by unseen investigators. One woman, whose name was recorded as Mlle B., remained unaffected when magnetised by a hidden commissioner. However, once the commissioner revealed himself and began to magnetise her in full view, her teeth began to chatter, she stamped on the floor and moved her arms erratically (Ogden 43). Ultimately, the commissioners concluded that the responses of “magnetised” individuals were merely the “fruits of anticipated persuasion, and might be operated by the mere force of imagination” (qtd in Ogden 38). The commissioners’ report found that not only did mesmerism distort an individual’s perspectives, it could—through the power of imagination—influence the body itself (Ogden 38). Responding to the commission’s report, diplomat and US Founding Father John Adams speculated that if “this faculty of the mind can produce [such] terrible effects upon the body, I think […] physicians ought to study and teach us some method of managing and controuling it” (qtd in Ogden 40). In this way, even where the report managed to dispel belief in mesmerism, it also succeeded in conjuring up new trepidations about the power of the imagination. Questions about the chimerical capacity of the imagination were raised and debated in many venues during this period. The works of Ann Radcliffe, with their now-iconic demystifications of ostensibly supernatural events, often contain meditations on the dangers of unrestrained imagination that parallel some late eighteenth-century public responses to mesmerism. Radcliffe’s essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry” opens with an anecdote centred on the “illusions of the imagination”, noting how “an object often flatters and charms at a

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distance, which vanishes into nothing as we approach it; and ‘tis well if it leave only disappointment in our hearts. Sometimes a severer monitor is left there” (41, 42). The imagination and the dangers of unchecked fantasy also appear as central concerns in her work. Nelson C. Smith describes how Radcliffe’s fiction, as well as her critical writings, frequently interrogate contemporary ideals surrounding “sensibility”, or the capacity to respond to emotional or aesthetic stimuli. Smith argues that Radcliffe presents sensibility as something that “reduces the mind, leading the imagination astray, away from reason” (577). In many of Radcliffe’s most well-known novels, her heroines are confronted with seemingly supernatural terrors that are eventually revealed to be products of their overactive imaginations. Emily, the heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), is described as a young woman who “discovered in her early years uncommon delicacy of mind, warm affections, and ready benevolence; but with these was observable a degree of susceptibility too exquisite to admit of lasting peace” (8). The ostensibly otherworldly events that occur throughout the novel are, in keeping with Radcliffe’s rationalism, exposed as products of this susceptibility. The spectral figures and black veils that abound in the novel emanate from or are enlivened by Emily’s accute imaginative powers. As Smith explains, “Emily’s sensibility, imagination and self-delusion combine, throughout the book, to produce the mysteries and terrors that confront her” (583). Similarly, in The Italian (1797), the villainous Schedoni manipulates hero Vivaldi’s “prevailing weakness” (376), his imagination and superstitious nature, to frighten him away from the home of his lover Ellena. Moreover, in many of Radcliffe’s novels, the destructive power of unrestrained imagination is most acutely associated with women and the lower classes. Just as the results of the 1784 report on mesmerism showed that magnetism was particularly effective on those who were “poor, uneducated, or female” (Ogden 36), so too are excessive imaginative tendencies disproportionately linked with women and the poor in Radcliffe’s novels. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, servants such as Annette and Dorothee readily imagine supernatural beings to real, as does Paulo in The Italian (Smith 586). Educated or upper-class characters, however, are far less susceptible to imaginative flights of fantasy. In this way, although Radcliffe’s novels participate in a general demystification of the supernatural, they do engage in a broader, contemporary conversation about the power of the imagination to produce occult phenomena. The relationship between the occult and Enlightenment thought is ultimately a complex and highly unstable one. Existing as we do now in a world where the mystical and the scientific are divided by a vast conceptual chasm, it is easy to imagine that the rationalism of the Enlightenment would suppress or wash away belief in the supernatural. Yet, the Enlightenment was a period of transition, an epoch in which older modes of apprehension were only starting to be supplanted by empiricism and reason. Consequently, the boundaries that separated science from superstition, chemistry from alchemy, philosophy from spirituality were not firmly established. There was in fact a vital exchange

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between these seemly oppositional mindsets. Scientific figures that we now view as paragons of reason—Boyle and Newton, for instance—were imbricated in practices that we might define as occult. Similarly, mystics like Mesmer and Swedenborg applied scientific language and principles to their explications of the preternatural. The fiction of this period, the newly born gothic novel, reflects this intellectual uncertainty: spirits, both real and imagined, are conjured, unmasked and demystified; while esoteric orders hold the secrets to eternal life, threaten political stability and signify epistemological change. They do these things all at once—they are multifaceted and multivalent in their meaning. The ambiguity inherent to gothic fiction can therefore be said to reflect the broader instability and uncertainty of the Enlightenment era, the intersection of the natural and the supernatural echoing the contemporary overlapping of the rational and the occult.

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Josephson-Storm, J.A. (2017) The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kant, I. (2006) What Is Enlightenment? in Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 17–23. Lachman, G. (2003) A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press. Lewis, M. (2009) The Monk. London: Wordsworth Editions. Lopez, C.A. (1994) Franklin and Mesmer: An Encounter, Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 66, 325–331. Monod, P.K. (2013) Solomon’s Secrets: The Occult in the Age of Enlightenment. New Haven: Yale University Press. Munck, T. (2000) The Enlightenment: A Comparative Social History, 1721–1794. London: Arnold. Ogden, E. (2018) Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Punter, D. (2013) The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions, from 1765 to the Present Day (Volume 1). London: Routledge. Radcliffe, A. (2001) The Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance. London: Penguin. ———. (2004) “On the Supernatural in Poetry” in Sander, D. (ed.), Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader. Westport, CT: Praeger, 41–50. ———. (2017) The Italian; or, the Confessional of the Black Penitents: A Romance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, N.C. (1973) Sense, Sensibility and Ann Radcliffe, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 13(4), 577–590. Swedenborg, E. (2009) On Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell, from What I Have Seen and Heard. West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation. Tatar, M. (1978) Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Thorpe, L. (2011) The Realm of Ends as a Community of Spirits: Kant and Swedenborg on the Kingdom of Heaven and the Cleansing of the Doors of Perception, Heythrop Journal 52, 52–75. Tilton, H. (2015) “The Rosicrucian Manifestos and the Early Rosicrucians” in Partridge, C. (ed.), The Occult World. Abingdon: Routledge, 128–144. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams-Hogan, J. (2015) “Emanuel Swedenborg” in Partridge, C. (ed.), The Occult World. Abingdon: Routledge, 145–156. Wilson, C. (2015) The Occult. London: Watkins Media (Kindle edition). Yates, F. (2002) The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. London: Routledge Classics.

Materialism and The Monk Cleo Cameron

Erupting upon literary sensibilities in the 1790s, the eighteenth-century Gothic was a reaction to enlightened rationalism and the Enlightenment’s tendency to present experience as purely explanatory. The Enlightenment’s foregrounding of reason over superstition as opposed to the Gothic’s focus on the irrational and supernatural, intimates that the Gothic can be viewed as a distinctly anti-Enlightenment mode of critique. Certainly, this inclination is implicit in Matthew Lewis’s scandalous novel The Monk [1796]. Critic Andrew Smith (2007) suggests that the Gothic’s explicit concentration on evil behaviour and deeds, and the demonising of individuals who perpetuate such acts, was a profound retort against the horror and violence witnessed in the Terror of revolutionary France.1 He argues that this focus counters the legacy of enthusiasm for social, political and religious reform championed by Enlightenment thinkers and advocates.2 Gothic scholar Fred Botting (2001) observes, it is the very rise of enlightenment reason and its associated tenets, empiricism, scientism and objectivity, that necessitated an oppositional reaction. Thus, superstition, the supernatural, sublime natural force, darkness and violent passions—where human fear and uncertainty materialise through transgressive taboos and prohibited behaviours, became intrinsic to the Gothic genre.3

C. Cameron (B) University of Northampton, Northampton, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_25

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Hence, the principal focus of the Gothic was to express anxieties about the status quo. By utilising an extreme oppositional stance to the hegemonic currency of Enlightenment ideas, the Gothic exposed the inherent difficulties generated by Enlightenment thought. Matthew Lewis in The Monk employs this eighteenth-century Gothic schema; the supernatural, unreason, desire and taboo are essential devices in his critique of a so-called Enlightened Europe. However, there are also instances where Lewis deconstructs this schema. At times, during the narrative, he utilises contradictory juxtaposition which draws attention to the logical extremes of Enlightenment materialism. In doing so, he emphasises an absolute freedom of human action through which all moral order collapses. Indeed, during the eighteenth century, materialism was beginning to take a disquieting hold in philosophical quarters. Thus paradoxically, Gothic horror in The Monk can be seen as a testimonial for an anti-dualist, monist materialism, but also synonymously as a distinct warning of the consequences that such positioning elicits. It is this conceptualisation of Lewis’s Gothic materialism that will be explored later in this essay. The freedoms afforded by Lewis’ literary imaginings reveal freedom in its absolute, nihilistic form, where constraints of moral and social rectitude become nullified. Echoing John Cleland, who was responsible for the equally scandalous novella Fanny Hill [1748], Lewis appropriates the tendencies of contemporary French philosophic and politicised pornographic materialist discourse. Lewis goes further than Cleland, however, and posits a deliberate juxtapositional and oppositional stance by situating Catholicism and the clergy within a distinctly anti-dualist materialist framework. Romanticism scholar Clara Tuite (1997) suggests that the monastic setting of The Monk positions the narrative within a libertine ‘pornotopic’ context; a space where enlightenment is characterised by sexual freedom, and realised within a wholly materialist framework.4 While this observation bears out under scrutiny, the implicit anti-dualist critique that this materialist positioning engenders is neglected within Tuite’s exposition. The diametric antagonism of religion and philosophic posturing within Lewis’s narrative exposes the problematics at the core of Enlightenment reasoning, and the consequences for its tendency towards moral universalism. This essay will illustrate how Lewis undermines his own Gothic narrative through employing a lexical materialism, as well as destabilising the Enlightenment standard code of moral virtue championed by philosophes who focused on a fixed conception of human nature; one naturally sociable, infinitely perfectible and determined by man’s natural reasoning capabilities. Not neglected, but criticised beyond all conscience; thus are the sentiments of Matthew G. Lewis writing in a prefatory footnote to the fourth edition, four years after The Monk (March 1796), was first published.5 Indeed, the scathing critical response by the likes of Coleridge and the public outcry against Lewis’ blasphemous, violent and lascivious Gothic literary endeavour, ensured certain infamy for the author who, when first publishing the novel at the age of nineteen, perhaps did not quite realise the impact such a visceral portrayal of lust,

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vice, sex, incest and murder would have on the sensibilities of late eighteenthcentury polite society. It is telling that one staunch advocate of Lewis’ novel was the Marquis de Sade. The similarities between Lewis’ doomed heroine Antonia and Justine, de Sade’s abject victim, are too pronounced to be readily dismissed. In Paris 1791, the second edition of Justine, or Good Conduct Well Chastised (Justine, ou les Malheurs de la vertu) was published. During the summer months of the same year, Lewis himself was visiting Paris on a summer break from his studies. One can surmise that Lewis was potentially exposed to, read, and was influenced by de Sade’s scandalous work.6 In real life, Lewis himself was no stranger to scandal, or at least scandal that was perpetrated by his parents—his mother more specifically. Matthew Lewis senior met and married Frances Maria Sewell (daughter to Sir Thomas Sewell, Master of the Rolls) and they had four children; Matthew Gregory (the eldest), was born in 1775. Lewis senior was a serious, stern, inflexible and well-to-do political personage. Chief Clerk in the War Office, as well as Deputy-Secretary of War he seemed quite the opposite to Frances Maria who had wowed suitors with her musical and dancing prowess before marrying Matthew senior at a young age. With a penchant for the frivolous society of literati, thespians and musicians, Frances Maria introduced her son, whom she was very close to, into such circles, and he himself developed a love of theatre and literature.7 At the age of six, Lewis attended Westminster School; it was at this time his parents separated. Frances Maria, prone to indiscretion, finally left her husband to embark upon an affair with a music master called Harrison, and spent much of Lewis’ early childhood changing addresses so that her husband could not locate her. Although Frances Maria received a substantial allowance from her estranged husband, her extravagance meant she was often in need of money. Much of Lewis junior’s initial literary endeavours were written with earning potential in mind so that he could help support his mother. His soiree in Paris in 1791, saw an escalation in his literary output and, at the mere age of fourteen, he completed his first farce The Epistolary Intrigue.8 By 1792, Lewis was immersing himself in his writing. His comedy, The East Indian was finished (although not performed at Drury lane until some seven years later). He also penned the satire Village Virtues. Satire and comedy were not Lewis’ literary strengths. A visit to Germany introduced him to the Sturm and Drang literary movement. He met the eponymous Goethe, and lodged in haunted quarters (he would awake to the rustling of papers in empty adjoining apartment). Such influences may explain his shift towards the Gothic. Its focus on the contrary aspects of supernatural horror, and naturalistic sublime sensibility, seemed a style more suited to Lewis. In Weimar, Lewis became acquainted with German high society; it was Lewis senior’s intention to ensure that his son learned the language with a view to becoming a diplomat after completing his studies. However, these excursions did more to provoke Lewis’ literary imaginings, and ambitions towards a literary career, rather than a diplomatic one.9

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This became evident when, after he finished his degree at Oxford, his father secured Lewis a position as a diplomat at The Hague, a place and a people that Lewis found interminably boring. Indeed, by the end of Lewis’ sojourn in December 1794, The Monk had been written.10 However, it was not until March 1796 that the novel was published anonymously. Initially, it was well-received, avoiding critical censure. As critic Lauren Fitzgerald (2003) notes Lewis, by the time of publication, had been appointed a member of parliament. It was only when he put his name and occupation to the novel, that a public outcry ensued.11 Coleridge in The Critical Review (1797) was comprehensively scathing about the novel and what he considered its lack of ‘moral truth’ and ‘libidinous minuteness’, whilst excoriating Lewis, at whom we should ‘stare and tremble’ given his role of ‘Legislator!’ Indeed, how could an arbiter of religious and moral standards, such as a member of parliament, produce, let alone publish, a work of such moral disapprobation?12 Thomas James Mathias’ in The Pursuits of Literature (July, 1797), censured The Monk as being a work of pornography akin to John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1748) and stated the explicit blasphemy in the narrative should see Lewis hauled before a court of law to face indictment.13 Fitzgerald observes that Lewis the man, began to be viewed interchangeably with his terrible creation the monk Ambrosio. As an individual who had assumed a position of authority, Lewis, like Ambrosio, had inadvertently unmasked himself, (although not via an orgy of lust, incest and murder), through owning his own publication.14 While the critics may have viewed The Monk censoriously, the public voraciously consumed the novel. So decisively did they want to test their moral virtue that by 1800 The Monk was on its fifth edition. By the fourth edition, however, Lewis had capitulated to the scathing reviews and moral uproar. Adhering to Mathias’ advice he edited the novel and omitted the blasphemous, offensive and lusty passages that had caused such consternation.15 Although Lewis may have abandoned his original narrative, the remainder of this chapter will focus on the full and unabridged edition, leaving supposedly scurrilous material intact for consideration and analysis. Firstly, before moving on to the analysis of The Monk, insight into the contemporary eighteenthcentury philosophical accents that permeate the text, particularly that of materialism, is required. Understanding this materialist context will help illustrate how elements of the Gothic supernatural are undermined, and lexically deconstructed, by Lewis. As already mentioned, Lewis’ The Monk was considered by Malthias analogously with John Cleland’s Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748). However, when reading Cleland alongside Lewis, Malthias was overstating the issue somewhat. Lewis’ novel is considerably less prurient than Cleland’s graphic descriptions of Fanny’s sexual exploits, education, and socialisation as a fledgling woman of the night. Nevertheless, lexical equivalences are apparent. In both texts, language becomes a conduit for a materialist ontology. Materialism as a philosophical movement had re-emerged during

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the European Renaissance within the philosophy of Rene Descartes [1596– 1650], Baruch Spinoza [1632–1677] and Thomas Hobbes [1588–1679]. Each philosopher forwarded a slightly different form of materialist thought, but each deliberation resulted in similar conundrums for faith-based belief and religion—echoes which reverberated throughout eighteenth-century thinking. Indeed, burgeoning materialism and the Enlightenment were consorts. The major precepts of the Enlightenment project were progress and perfectibility and were achieved through reason and empirical-based learning, and importantly, the rejection of superstition. Life, and existence itself, were positioned firmly in the territory of objective reality. When we consider the fundamental tenets of materialism, then the parallels between the wider Enlightenment, and materialist ontology, become apparent. Philosophical Materialism, initially conceived in the Ancient Greek writings of Democritus, and subsequently refined by Epicurus, can be described through its insistence on substance-based metaphysics, discoverable through an empirical epistemological process. Expanding on Democritus’ theory of atoms, Epicurus maintained that all life in the observable universe consists of indivisible atoms which, when moving through the void, combine to constitute the differing forms that life and matter take. Contrary to Plato’s teachings, he contends that there are no immutable forms or an immaterial soul, and if the Gods are in existence then they have no dealings with material life forms. Indeed, notions of an afterlife, are fallacious. Just as atoms come together to create matter in all its forms, when matter ceases to exist in its current vital form, the atoms dissipate into the void, and transmutationally reform to create new instances of matter. Such circumscribed mechanical processes suggest a rigid fixity in human nature, and more importantly, a determinism, where humans cannot act in any way beyond what their physical constitution suggests.16 Although Epicureanism dissipated due to Aristotle’s rejection of atomism it remerged as a basis for new Renaissance scientific theories, and was adopted by individuals such Galileo Galilei, Pierre Gassendi, as well as informing corpuscular theory advanced by scientific thinkers such as Renee Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. Indeed, the seeds of eighteenthcentury monist materialism were paradoxically found in Descartes’ mind–body dualism. In Meditations: Meditations in First Philosophy in which are demonstrated the existence of God and the distinction between the human soul and the body (1641), starting from a position of doubt, and using the application of practical reasoning, Descartes asserts the irrefutable truth that he knows that he exists, i.e. he has a mind; however, he also knows that he is dependent on his corporeal, material, extended body and his senses for his existence. These cogitations lead him to predicate that the mind and body are two separate substances.17 As critic John Heil (2004) observes, the difficulty of Descartes’ dualism was evident to his contemporaries. Descartes creates an absolute demarcation in separating the mind/soul and body into two distinct substances.18 The aporia of how causal interaction is possible between

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the extended material corporeal body (res extensia) and the non-extended, non-material, incorporeal mind (res cogitans) is unsuccessfully rationalised by Descartes, instead, he invokes divine interference as the mitigating agent in the exceptional fusion of the incommensurable substances of soul and body. For materialists, such a position could not be verified rationally or empirically. Thus, much of materialist thought in the eighteenth century, is an anti-dualist rejection of soul, in favour of one substance, the body. Epicurean materialism found its eventual resting place in the controversial writings of Julien Offray de la Mettrie who, in 1747, published his philosophical treatise L’Homme Machine (Machine Man). La Mettrie rejected any notion of a supernatural, immaterial soul directly contravening Descartes’ dual substance theory, i.e. how can the incorporeal soul be considered a substance in and of itself? In expanding on Descartes’ assertion that animals are fleshy automations without souls, La Mettrie applied this thinking to human beings stating their physical constitution is entirely mechanical. He argued that even the workings of the mind and conscience can be attributable to mechanistic principles, and involve the nervous system becoming inflamed through sensory stimulation. While Epicurus had preserved a semblance of theism, La Mettrie presents the probability of there being a supreme being, only to satirically undermine this probability through Pyrrhonic subterfuge and a Spinozist insistence on Nature as the only authentic religion that humans should accredit.19 In Fanny Hill, Memoirs of a Lady of Pleasure [1748] which was published a year after La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine, mechanistic and naturalistic materialism is palpable and illustrated through graphic narratorial representation of the physical body, and the sexual act. Fanny’s desire, sexuality, pleasure and pain are explicitly and seductively described through a lexical framework that magnifies materialism; indeed, such writings were considered dangerous to the readership. Although written almost fifty years after Fanny Hill, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk provoked a furore akin to Cleland’s. Obscene libel became legally defined in 1727; subsequently, obscene writings were described as corrupting to the populace’s morals and manners, and therefore required suppression and prosecution.20 As scholar Michael Gamer (2000) observes, the law had little to do with actual content, subject matter or generic convention, more the writing’s perceived undesirable effects on society and readers.21 While initially focused on pornographic literary outputs such as Cleland’s Memoirs, this legal sanction, by the end of the eighteenth century, became applicable to the Gothic horror genre. Thus Lewis, and later Dacre, and Maturin were subject to investigation and censure by clerics, reviewers and literati alike, who continually compared these outputs with Cleland’s controversial novella.22 It is important to note that these legal strictures concentrated on the potential reader response, rather than the material itself, and anticipated incendiary, subversive possibilities that literary works could achieve through radical

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discourse. The disruptive capacity of Lewis’s writing was, as Dale Townshend (2005) illustrates, recognised by Coleridge who protested that for readers, The Monk incorporated a range of ‘powerful stimulants’ and ‘meretricious attractions’.23 Coleridge identified a significant sensual and emotional register within the text, thus highlighting the dangerous potentiality for moral (and social?) corruption that Lewis’ novel could precipitate. Like Cleland before him, Lewis adopts the conventions of genre, and infuses his narrative with philosophical underpinnings. Aligning himself with standard Gothic tropes and suggestive implicit pornographic tableaus, Lewis advances a materialist ontology which brutally depicts the logical extension that such positioning affords. Lewis situates the monk Ambrosio as a metaphorical locus for this antagonism which is revealed in the conflict between his physical and psychological manoeuvrings. The tortuous interiority of Ambrosio’s reflections manifests in a brutal exteriority of destructive behavioural tendencies, and illustrates the fundamental crisis of freedom that exists within the boundaries of material reality and moral agency. Ambrosio’s descent into murderous madness, while framed within a supernatural Gothic schema, is illustrative of the diagnostic discourses that emerged within medical literature of eighteenth-century Britain and Europe. These were at odds with the demonological explanations for man’s (and woman’s) propensity for derangement and delusion that had dominated within preceding Medieval and Early Modern thinking.24 Roy Porter (2004) observes how Hobbes in Leviathan, arguably Britain’s first vocal proponent of a materialist philosophical worldview, exposes the irrational fanatical expostulations of the religiously devout, who base their suppositions concerning madness on preternatural determinations. Hobbes, along with men of medicine, began to draw correlations between religious manifestations and hallucinations, convulsions, violence and seizures as experienced by lunatics.25 The pathologising and rationalisation of mental illness as concomitant with neurological dysfunction increased as the eighteenth century progressed. Enlightened scientific inquiry, fundamental to the materialist’s position, informed diagnoses of mental disorders. Thus, mental illness and madness were explained in explicitly material terms. The Cartesian distinction between mind and body was eroded through recourse to empirical scientific observation of both the physiological and behavioural effects, of disorders of the mind on the human subject. Nicholas Robinson in A New System of the Spleen, Vapours and Hypochondriack Melancholy, Wherein all the decays of the Nerves, and Lownesses of the Spirits are Mechanically Accounted for (1729), contends that madness and delusion are not attributable to metaphysical fancy, arising from inflamed imagination, but are entirely bodily in their inception. Indeed madness or ‘lunacy’ occurs when, ‘the Patient appears with a fierce, grim and rough Aspect, his Reason is disturb’d, his Judgement confus’d, and the Exercise of his Intellectuals is lost and bewilder’d in a bottomless Gulph of most absurd cogitations’.26 Although Robinson is drawing on pre-Enlightenment humoural theories (which are subsequently replaced by

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theories about the nervous system as the eighteenth century progresses), the inseparable connection between mind and body is apparent. Indeed, William Battie, writing in 1758, observes that dysfunction within the mind can be ascribed to both internal and external factors, each material in origin. Thus, in his Treatise on Madness, he identifies two forms of madness, ‘original’ and ‘consequential madness’. ‘Original’ madness or delusion occurs when the sensory internal function of the nerves and fibres in the brain are disturbed; whereas, ‘consequential madness’ is induced through external ‘pressure’ which causes malfunction within the sensory fibres.27 Thomas Arnold’s insight into conditions of insanity is most pertinent when considering representations of madness within The Monk. In Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes, and Prevention of Insanity (1782–1786), Arnold determines that, ‘[s]ome of the most powerful causes of... Insanity are– religion–love–commerce, and the various passions which attend the desire, pursuit and acquisition of riches–every species of luxury,–and all violent and permanent attachments whatsoever’.28 Arnold formulates specific distinctions between various types and characteristics of madness. Expanding on Battie’s dual differentiation, Arnold classifies insanity under five different headings, ‘ideal’, ‘incoherent’, ‘sensitive’, ‘hypochondriacal’ and ‘maniacal’, each relating to specific diagnostic behavioural symptoms. The maniacal patient exists predominately in a state of rational lucidity and: and consequently knows… the true appearance, and situation of surrounding objects; knows what kind of place he is in, what persons, and what objects, are about him, and what he says, and does; but yet has at times… ideas, or images, in the mind, of things existing externally, which do not… could not possibly so exist...29

The maniacal madness described by Arnold evokes Lewis’s monk Ambrosio’s deterioration into delusional insanity, a man who oscillates between cold reason and irrational fancy. William Pargeter, writing in 1792, supplements Arnold’s maniacal assessments and gives credence to a medical elucidation of Ambrosio’s supposedly supernatural experiences when he observes that, ‘Most of the maniacal cases that ever came under my observation, proceeded from religious enthusiasm’.30 Initially, in The Monk, Lewis appears partially to adopt Anne Radcliffe’s propensity to explain the supernatural.31 The supernatural experience of the Bleeding Nun for Raymond is intensely real, physically so as he clutches the spectre to his ‘bosom’ when he has mistaken her for Agnes; this is further supported by Theodore’s presence who also witnesses the inexplicable spectral encounter. However, both are functioning in a heightened state of sublime arousal, one of fear, anticipation and additionally for Raymond, desire. Raymond is ‘sensible of a sad and reverential horror’, his ‘bosom beat high’.32 Both he and Theodore have appropriated the supernatural tale of the Bleeding Nun to effect Agnes’s escape. Raymond’s superstition is evident as he looks

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up at the ‘haunted chamber’ [my italics]. Therefore, the potential existence of a supernatural realm is already internally, and unconsciously, validated for Raymond and, paradoxically, materially validated as he physically conveys the apparition (one would usually assume a phantom to be insubstantial), to the carriage.33 However, Raymond’s mental and physical collapse following Agnes’ failed elopement and his subsequent encounters with the spectral Bleeding Nun post-accident, is rationalised through narratorial reference to the fact that it is Raymond alone who is subject to this haunting: ‘The ghost was not even visible to any eye but mine’.34 Preceding this statement, a distinct, physiological explanatory narrative accounts for Raymond’s disturbed and delusive mental state. On fleeing Lindenberg Castle, with whom he thinks is Agnes dressed as the bleeding nun, the resultant coach accident ends with Raymond striking his ‘temple against a flint’, the attending physician explains his ravings and terrifying visions thus: ‘The gentleman is not quite in his right senses...’tis the natural consequence of his fall’.35 The insinuation here suggests a medical, and therefore rational, explanation for Raymond’s spectral visions in line with Battie’s categorisation of consequential madness. Indeed, Lewis litters the narrative with lexical indicators which evoke a sceptical response in the reader to Raymond’s supernatural plight. Hence, words and phrases such as ‘delirious’, ‘malady’, ‘fancy’, ‘over-heated brain’, ‘restless’, ‘agitation’, ‘fever’, contradict and essentially deconstruct, the supernatural overtones. A distinctly materialist convergence of mind and body manifests via the physiological consequences of Raymond’s psychological instability: Agnes and the bleeding nun presented themselves by turns to my fancy, and combined to harass and torment me. I woke fatigued and unrefreshed. My fever seemed rather augmented than diminished; the agitation of my mind impeded my fractured bones from knitting [my italics].36

This pathologising of Raymond’s ghostly encounters post-accident destabilises Raymond’s narrative, making it intrinsically unreliable, and thus calls into question the validity of his rapid psychological rehabilitation at the hands of the (supposed) Wandering Jew. He alone talks with Raymond and offers him deliverance through exorcism, and provides the historical narrative of Beatrice, the Bleeding Nun. Whether the Wandering Jew is a supernatural entity, or merely a charlatan with knowledge of Beatrice’s story, and whose ritualistic exorcism subdues Raymond’s psychological perturbations, is left unexplored. Given that Raymond has been subject to debilitating injury both physical, and psychological, and has been in a maniacal state where (echoing Pargeter), ‘in certain respects, ideas, or images, in the mind, of things existing externally, which do not, and which in many cases, could not possibly so exist ’, these post-accident supernatural occurrences are called into doubt.37 Lewis has utilised a Gothic schema, while at the same time undermining this schema. The lexical eruptions of materialist language illustrate a connective unity between the suffering mind

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and body, and evokes a distinctly anti-dualist perspective. Thus, when considering Lewis’ supernatural deconstruction in this instance, could Ambrosio’s exposure to the metaphysical and supernatural realm also be interpreted and explained within a fundamentally materialist framework? Gothic scholar Jacqueline Howard (1994) observes that The Monk has been critically assessed as a study on repression, conflict and the unconscious.38 Barry Doyle (2000) goes further and emphasises the notion of repressed desire in Lewis’s novel illustrating that Ambrosio’s desire resists firm analyses or diagnoses; desire functions as both familiar and unfamiliar.39 Doyle articulates the fluid, fragmented nature of his desire which oscillates from dream state, to the physical, emotional and psychological realms. Although insightful, Doyle fails to address the actualisation of Ambrosio’s projected desire. Ambrosio’s desire erupts from the repressive constraints of his dualistic Catholic monastic asceticism, and results in delusional (Arnoldian) maniacal insanity. Expanding on Ed Cameron’s (2010) analysis of obsessional neurosis and the absent mother in The Monk it can also be demonstrated that Ambrosio’s neurosis emerges from a dualistic, split subjectivity.40 In Draft K, ‘The Neuroses of Defence’ (1896) Sigmund Freud states that obsessional neurosis is a condition where certain uncontrollable visualisations, ideational thoughts and words interfere with normal patterns of thought so that the subject’s ability to think and act freely is compromised. At a heightened level, this develops into paranoiac episodes which, in its most extreme form, elicits delusional hallucinatory instances, primarily in the form of voices. The returning images and voices of repressed memories are: distorted by being replaced by analogous images from the present day…[A]t this point, with the return of the repressed in distorted form, the defence has at once failed; and the assimilatory delusions cannot be interpreted as a symptom of secondary defence but as a beginning of an alteration of the ego…The process reaches its conclusion…in protective delusions (megalomania), till the ego has been completely remodelled.41

Freud asserts that once the ego has been refashioned then the ‘determining element of paranoia is the mechanism of projection involving the refusal of belief in the self-reproach’42 Lewis’ characterisation of Ambrosio’s mental decline appears to prefigure Freud’s psychoanalytical analyses while drawing on contemporary accounts of madness as seen in Arnold and Pargeter. Hence, Lewis foregrounds the problematics of a dualist conception of what it means to be a human when subject to a fundamentally material existence. Although it is more challenging to rationalise Ambrosio’s encounters with demon spirits and the devil himself as ‘natural’, rather than supernatural, if one places Ambrosio in the previously mentioned Freudian theoretical framework, this can become the locus for an alternative interpretation, one that focuses on Ambrosio’s dissolution, and subsequent split subjectivity, in materialist terms.

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Ambrosio, subject to ascetic conditioning by the Capuchin monastic order throughout his pre-pubescent formative years, has been forced to repress all libidinal desires. The dual conception of soul and body, intrinsic to his religious belief and undertakings, necessitates a rejection of material flesh in favour of the veneration of metaphysical spirit. Abandoned and orphaned as an infant, he is cloistered in the monastery until adulthood, away from the physical reality of material woman. Ambrosio’s memories of womanhood, in the form of his mother, remain latent and repressed within his unconscious. When the reader is first introduced to Ambrosio’s personal meditations in the privacy of his cell, if drawing on Freud’s theory of obsessional neurosis, it is no surprise to observe the monk’s obsession with the painting of the ‘Madona’. We learn that the ‘Madona’ has ‘been the object’ of Ambrosio’s ‘increasing wonder and adoration’ for ‘two years’.43 His fervent idolatry of the intangible representation of the untainted, and perfect, maternal conception of the feminine has provoked a burgeoning internal desire. This desire is expressed in phrasing that demonstrates the material physicality of object possession, undermining the metaphysical connotation of the ‘Madona’: ‘What beauty in that countenance!’ he continued after a silence… ‘Oh! If such a creature existed, and existed but for me! Were I permitted to twine round my fingers those golden ringlets, and press with my lips the treasures of that snowy bosom! gracious God, should I then resist the temptation?... Away, impure ideas… What charms me, when ideal and considered as a superior being, would disgust me, become woman and tainted with all the failings of mortality’.44

Through the obsessional nature of Ambrosio’s desire, one can already see his refusal of self-reproach given his focus on tainted female mortality. The seeds of his megalomaniacal and delusional denial are apparent in his expostulatory certitude, ‘Ambrosio is proof against temptation. Temptation, did I say? To me it would be none’.45 Temptation arrives in the form of Matilda, a woman disguised as the novice monk Rosario. However, if one studies Lewis’ narrative and applies Freud’s ‘Neurosis of Defence’ paranoiac theory, there is a distinct suggestion that Matilda does not in fact exist in female form at all, but is a projection of Ambrosio’s repressed memory and desire of, and for, the ideal mother figure. This is compounded by his active guilt and conditioned internal moral abhorrence at the homosexual sensibilities which Rosario evokes within the monk. Lewis ironically alludes to Ambrosio’s tunnel vision with Don Christovel’s assertion that he, ‘is reported to be so strict an observer of chastity, that he knows not in what consists the difference of man and woman’.46 Clara Tuite (1997) and Max Fincher (2006) have both identified the homoerotic subtext that informs the relationship between Ambrosio and Rosario/Matilda although both accept Matilda exists in female form.47 The obsessional neurosis that has escalated in Ambrosio’s psyche through his

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continued infatuation with the ‘Madona’, has awoken repressed libidinal motivations which can be readily satisfied through relations with one he has already formed an emotional bond with: ‘Ambrosio on his side did not feel less attracted towards the youth; with him alone did he lay aside his habitual severity. When he spoke to him, he insensibly assumed a tone milder than was usual to him; and no voice sounded so sweet to him as did Rosario’s’.48 The censure of such relations in society, and before the eyes of God, would render Ambrosio socially and spiritually damned. To fulfil his desire, it can be argued, that Ambrosio unconsciously projects the ideal ‘Madona’ onto Rosario which, in turn, because of his devout religious habituation, causes him to disintegrate psychologically into paranoiac delusion and hallucinatory insanity. Through the consummation of his desires, Ambrosio becomes subject to the Freudian alteration of the ego and thus plummets from the pious, reverent monk, to libidinous libertine, until his ego is completely remodelled in the form of heinous rapist and murderer—almost akin to the devil himself. At no point in the text do we witness any character other than Ambrosio conversing with Matilda in female form. All the supernatural episodes and visitations by spirits, demons and the devil himself, are observed by Ambrosio and Matilda alone. Thus, if we consider Ambrosio is subject to psychological conditions of neurosis and paranoia, then what he appears to experience can be rationalised within the diagnostic framework of hallucinatory madness. Indeed, Ambrosio himself rationalises the ghostly return of Antonia’s murdered mother Elvira: The abbot strove to re-assure her and convince her that the whole had been a deception of her over-heated fancy. The solitude in which she had passed the evening, the gloom of the night, the book which she had been reading, and the room in which she sat, were all calculated to place before her such a vision. He treated the idea of ghosts with ridicule, and produced strong arguments to prove the fallacy of such a system.49

Ambrosio exhibits aspects of Arnold’s description of maniacal insanity where the subject oscillates between cold reason, and irrational fancy. The day previously, the frenzied Ambrosio had cast a supernatural enchantment to enable him to ravish the unsuspecting Antonia in her sleep, and had murdered her mother when caught in the attempted act. Yet, he attends to Antonia, and her abject distress, in a state of measured calm and cold reasoning. It is in Ambrosio’s final scenes that a distinct narratorial allusion to his delusional and hallucinatory madness emerges and supports rational interpretation outside of The Monk’s supernatural schema. When Ambrosio is eventually imprisoned by his Inquisitors, the full extent of his ego remodelling is realised. Gone is the devout man of absolute restraint and moral integrity; the man who, ‘has never been known to transgress a single rule of his order; the smallest stain is not to be discovered on his character…[t]he common people therefore esteem him to be a saint’.50 In its place is a creature who

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has ‘abandoned himself to the transports of desperate rage: he sorrowed for the punishment of his crimes, not their commission; and exhaled his bosom’s anguish in idle sighs, in vain lamentations, in blasphemy and despair’.51 His tormented ravings are accompanied by ‘dreadful visions…[h]e found himself in sulphurous realms and burning caverns, surrounded by fiends appointed his tormentors, and who drove him through a variety of tortures, each of which was more dreadful than the former…[H]is terrors were so violent as nearly to annihilate his mental powers’.52 While in the depths of this psychological malaise Ambrosio is visited by Matilda who has escaped the inquisition and materialised before Ambrosio. In this final psychological projection, Matilda implores Ambrosio to seek freedom, and abandon God, through selling his soul as she has done. Ambrosio at last resists Matilda’s temptations and, rather than face further excruciating torture at the hands of the Grand Inquisitor, makes a complete confession of his crimes. It is perhaps here, more than at any time throughout the novel, that the reader witnesses the dualistic splitting, and subsequent projection, of the split subject that is Ambrosio. Matilda represents the absolute nihilistic rejection of all that is good in Ambrosio; in resisting Matilda at this final juncture, Ambrosio wrests back what little is left of his original ego position. Unyielding to absolute ego remodelling, which entails the absolute loss of self and descent into consummate madness, Ambrosio finally foregoes the refusal of self-reproach, and accepts culpability for his actions. Feminist scholar Karen F. Stein (1983) analyses female madness in Gothic narratives, illustrating the tension between acceptable femininity and the monstrous feminine. She suggests female madness arises through behaviours which are condemned as personally and socially irredeemable. In later Gothic narratives, these subjective aberrations are circumvented through acceptance of what was once deemed monstrous. However, the unredeemed (female) monster, Stein argues, is a firm feature of the genre in its infancy.53 Although Stein suggests this is indicative of the female Gothic, this can be equally applied to Ambrosio’s state. He exhibits both a monstrous hidden self, and the ‘subjective aberration’ of madness. Ambrosio can never be accepted back into society, such are the nature of his awful crimes; in this regard, he is unredeemable. Indeed, Ambrosio’s victory of self is short-lived. His split subjectivity can no longer be socially reintegrated. His identity cannot be restored; its absolute fragmentation leads to insanity.54 Sentenced to execution, and thus the possibility of meeting his maker whom he has turned so heinously against, Ambrosio with ‘terrors increased’ and raving in ‘delirious passion’, succumbs to the final temptation. He summons the daemon to save him from his impending doom.55 In juxtaposition to the intense physicality of Ambrosio’s psychological sufferings, Lewis invokes the supernatural, but this invocation enhances the materiality of Ambrosio’s situation rather than situating it as a metaphysical experience. The Daemon is lexically depicted using tangible, Gothic materiality. With ‘blasted limbs’, ‘long talons’, ‘enormous sable wings’ and hair of ‘living snakes’ emitting ‘frightful hissings’, the Daemon is materially manifest.56

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When Ambrosio’s psyche is confronted by the Devil incarnate, he comes face to face with the projected ‘ugliness’ of his own being which has been infused with the enormity of his crimes and absolute self-loathing.57 In relinquishing his soul to the daemon, he also relinquishes it to his daemon self . Thus, Ambrosio sacrifices the last traces of his original ego position. His ego remodelling becomes absolute as he is mutilated and dashed upon the rocks. Once again, the supernatural is juxtaposed with extreme Gothic materialist lexical detail: ‘darting his talons into the monk’s shaven crown, he sprang from the rock…[t]he daemon continued to soar aloft, till reaching a dreadful height, he released the sufferer’. Ambrosio ‘bruised and mangled’, with ‘broken and dislocated limbs’ and eagles that ‘tore his flesh piecemeal and dug out his eyeballs’, suffers a complete physical and psychological annihilation of self; all that is Ambrosio is gone.58 Gothic scholar Robert Miles (2000), drawing on Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime (1756), states that the inherent difference between Lewis’s and Radcliffe’s Gothic narratives is Radcliffe’s reliance on ‘terror’, which is ‘the basis of the sublime’, and purely an ‘affair of the mind’. However, he argues, Lewis focuses on ‘horror’ which is fundamentally material in approach.59 It is this very physicality of Lewis’s work that suggests a material interpretation and undermines aspects of the supernatural elements in The Monk. Human beings are material in nature, they are motivated by instincts and physical desires that need to be explored; it is only in doing so that they can be contained. Through Ambrosio, Lewis implies that the mind and the body are not separate entities. Separating the two and negating one in favour of the other leads to both psychological and physical malaise where unconscious eruptions take place, and the ego is severely compromised. If one adopts an atheist materialist position, these internal conflicts are nullified. There is no demarcated soul, and therefore no eternal damnation, only human-made laws and morals to contend with. Although materialism may negate psychological eruptions caused by strict religious dualism, Lewis also illustrates the problematics of materialism. The abject slaughter of St Ursula at the hands of the mob explicitly foregrounds the ambivalence towards the human subject that objectified materialism, taken to its extreme, suggests. Ultimately, humans are easily expendable masses of flesh, ‘unsightly’, ‘shapeless’ and ‘disgusting’.60 While materialism proposes freedom from moral strictures imposed by revealed religion, law or philosophy, it also poses questions for individual agency and responsibility. Ultimately, if humans are no more than material objects, behaviourally determined by their internal drives, passions, desires and proclivities, and not answerable to divine laws or divine retribution, then what is the need for virtue? By adopting a Gothic materialist narrative, Lewis implicitly critiques both dualism and materialism and demonstrates that extreme Enlightenment philosophical positioning, fails to explain the complexities of real, lived human experience.

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Notes 1. Andrew Smith, Gothic Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007): 3. 2. Fred Botting, The Gothic (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001): 1. The term eighteenth-century gothic is utilised here in concurrence with Fred Botting’s assertion that the term gothic cannot be spoken of with an “assurance”; the gothic genre has itself split into numerous distinctions “Victorian Gothic, modern Gothic, postmodern Gothic... female Gothic, queer Gothic, Gothic science-fiction, urban Gothic” which all carry their own definitive weight (1). 3. Ibid., “It is as explorations of mysterious supernatural energies, immense natural forces, and deep, dark human fears and desires that gothic texts apparently found their appeal. Emerging at a time when enlightenment reason, science and empiricism were in the ascendancy, the attraction of Gothic darkness, passion, superstition or violence came from prohibition and taboos, and was not the positive expression of hidden natural instincts and wishes” (2–3). 4. Clara Tuite, “Cloistered Closets: Enlightenment Pornography, The Confessional State, Homosexual Persecution and The Monk,” Romanticism on the Net 8 (Nov 1997). Accessed 22 October 2020. https:// id.erudit.org/iderudit/005766ar. 5. Louis F. Peck, A Life of Matthew G. Lewis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961): 19. 6. Angela Wright, “European Disruptions of the Idealized Woman: Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and the Marquis de Sade’s La Nouvelle Justine,” in European Gothic a Spirited Exchange, 1760–1960, ed. Avril Horner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017): 40. 7. Peck, 1–4. 8. Ibid., 4–9. 9. Ibid., 10–14. 10. Ibid., 15–16. 11. Lauren Fitzgerald, “Crime, Punishment, Criticism: The Monk as Prolepsis,” Gothic Studies, vol. 5, no. 1 (2003): 43–54. 12. Ibid., 47. 13. Ibid., 47. 14. Ibid., 46–48. 15. Peck, 34–35. 16. Epicurus. Letters, Principal Doctrines and Vatican Sayings, trans. Russel M. Geer (New York: Macmillan, 1964). Epicurus overcomes rigid determinism through invoking the void as a space in which atoms can swerve from a seemingly determined path. In proposing potential divergence, Epicurus negotiates a somewhat tenuous space for individual free-will in Lucretius. On the Nature of the Universe, trans. Ronald Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997): 253–257.

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17. Renee Descartes, Descartes: Key Philosophical Writings (Ware: Wordsworth, 1997): 140. 18. John Heil, Philosophy of Mind: A Contemporary Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2004): 22. 19. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, “Machine Man,” in Machine Man and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 11–23. 20. Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception and Canon Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 80. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Dale Townshend, “Gothic Visions, Romantic Acoustics,” Gothic Technologies: Visuality in the Romantic Era: Romantic Circles Praxis Series (Dec 2005). Accessed 22 October 2020. https://romantic-circles.org/ praxis/gothic/townshend/townshend.html. 24. Jeremy Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007): Chapters 6 and 7. 25. Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason: How the Enlightenment Transformed the Way We See Our Bodies and Souls (London: Penguin, 2004). Porter states there were ‘clear affinities between the manifestations of the religious lunatic fringe and lunatics proper: convulsions, seizures, glossolalia, visions and hallucinations, psychopathic violence (as with regicides), weepings and wailings’ (305–306). 26. Nicholas Robinson, “A New System of the Spleen, Vapours and Hypochondriack Melancholy, Wherein all the Decays of the Nerves, and the Lowness of the Spirits are Mechanically Accounted for… [1729],” in Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader, ed. Allan Ingram (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998): 80. 27. William Battie, “A Treatise on Madness [1758],” in Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader, ed. Allan Ingram (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998): 43–45. 28. Thomas Arnold, “Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes and Prevention of Insanity [1782–86],” in Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader, ed. Allan Ingram (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998): 165. 29. Ibid., 170. 30. William Pargeter, “Observations on Maniacal Disorders [1792],” in Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader, ed. Allan Ingram (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998): 180–181. 31. Jacqueline Howard, Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994): 209. 32. Matthew Lewis, The Monk-A Romance [1796] (London: Penguin, 1998): 135–136. 33. Ibid., 136.

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34. Ibid., 143. 35. Ibid., 137, 139. 36. Lewis, 141. 37. Arnold qut. in Ingram, 170. 38. Howard, The Monk “has been read as an exploration of the workings of repressed and conflicting fears and desires, of the unconscious, or of what lies outside of direct representation” (223–224). 39. Barry Doyle, “Freud and the Schizoid in Ambrosio: Determining Desire in The Monk,” Gothic Studies 2. 1 (May 2000), “The Monk, obviously is about desire, but it is about a desire that can in no way be comfortably diagnosed and analysed. The Monk’s desire is disruptive, manic, strangely familiar and foreign” (61). 40. See Ed Cameron, “Matthew Lewis and the Gothic Horror of Obsessional Neurosis,” in The Psychopathology of the Gothic Romance: Perversion, Neuroses and Psychosis in the Early Works of the Genre (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2010): 133–155. 41. Sigmund Freud, “Draft K-The Neuroses of Defence,” in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (London: Vintage, 1995): 95. 42. Ibid. 43. Lewis, 39. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Lewis, 19. 47. Max Fincher, “The Gothic as Camp: Queer Aesthetics in The Monk,” The Gothic, from Ann Radcliffe to Anne Rice, n.p. Fincher, Max. “The Gothic as Camp: Queer Aesthetics in The Monk,” The Gothic, from Ann Radcliffe to Anne Rice, Romanticism on the Net, 44 (Nov 2006). Accessed 22 October 2020. https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/013997ar. 48. Lewis, 41. 49. Lewis, 282. 50. Lewis, 19. 51. Lewis, 364. 52. Ibid. 53. Karen F. Stein, “Monsters and Madwomen: Changing Female Gothic,” The Female Gothic, ed. Julean E. Fleenor (Montreal: Eden, 1983): 123. 54. Ibid., 124. 55. Lewis, 368. 56. Ibid., 369. 57. Ibid. 58. Lewis, 376. 59. Robert Miles, “Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis,” in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000): 41. See also Edmund Burke, “Part One, Section VII: Of the Sublime,” in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful [1756] (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2008), whose theory

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of the sublime influenced the Gothic movement towards the latter part of the eighteenth century, defines the sublime thus: “[w]hatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (111). He expands on this in ‘Part Two, Section I: Of the Passion Caused by the Sublime’: “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment: and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it” (130). Thus, for Burke, the emotion elicited by instances of the sublime impact comprehensively on the mind itself, so much so that the sublime object itself becomes all-encompassing and beyond reason. Whilst Lewis’s text focuses on the material aspects of horror, this aspect of the sublime, contrary to Miles’s assertion, is certainly present within the novel and is evidenced by both Raymond’s and Ambrosio’s supposedly supernatural experiences. 60. Lewis, 306.

Bibliography Arnold, Thomas, “Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes and Prevention of Insanity [1782–86]” in Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader, ed. Allan Ingram (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998): 164–174. Battie, William, “A Treatise on Madness [1758]” in Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader, ed. Allan Ingram (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998): 112–119. Botting, Fred, The Gothic (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001). Cameron, Ed, “Matthew Lewis and the Gothic Horror of Obsessional Neurosis” in The Psychopathology of the Gothic Romance: Perversion, Neuroses and Psychosis in the Early Works of the Genre (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2010): 133–155. Descartes, Renee, Descartes: Key Philosophical Writings (Ware: Wordsworth, 1997). Doyle, Barry, “Freud and the Schizoid in Ambrosio: Determining Desire in The Monk.” Gothic Studies 2. 1 (May 2000): 61–69. Epicurus, Letters, Principal Doctrines and Vatican Sayings, trans. Russel M. Geer (New York: Macmillan, 1964). Fincher, Max, “The Gothic as Camp: Queer Aesthetics in The Monk.” The Gothic, from Ann Radcliffe to Anne Rice, The Gothic, from Ann Radcliffe to Anne Rice, Romanticism on the Net, 44 (Nov 2006). Accessed 22 October 2020. https://id. erudit.org/iderudit/013997ar.

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Fitzgerald, Lauren, “Crime, Punishment, Criticism: The Monk as Prolepsis.” Gothic Studies 5. 1 (2003): 43–54. Gamer, Michael, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception and Canon Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Heil, John, Philosophy of Mind: A Contemporary Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2004). Howard, Jacqueline, Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Lewis, Matthew G., The Monk—A Romance [1796] (London: Penguin, 1998). Mettrie, Julien Offray de La, “Machine Man” in Machine Man and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Miles, Robert, “Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis” in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000): 41–57. Pargeter, William, “Observations on Maniacal Disorders [1792]” in Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader, ed. Allan Ingram (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998): 179–186. Peck, Louis, F., A Life of Matthew G. Lewis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961). Porter, Roy, Flesh in the Age of Reason: How the Enlightenment Transformed the Way We See Our Bodies and Souls (London: Penguin, 2004). Robinson, Nicholas, “A New System of the Spleen, Vapours and Hypochondriack Melancholy, Wherein All the Decays of the Nerves, and the Lowness of the Spirits are Mechanically Accounted for... [1729]” in Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader, ed. Allan Ingram (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998): 76–82. Schmidt, Jeremy, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2007). Smith, Andrew, Gothic Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). Stein, Karen F., “Monsters and Madwomen: Changing Female Gothic” in The Female Gothic, ed. Julean E. Fleenor (Montreal: Eden, 1983): 123–137. Townshend, Dale, “Gothic Visions, Romantic Acoustics,” Gothic Technologies: Visuality in the Romantic Era: Romantic Circles Praxis Series (Dec 2005). Accessed 22 October 2020. https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/gothic/townshend/townsh end.html. Tuite, Clara, “Cloistered Closets: Enlightenment Pornography, The Confessional State, Homosexual Persecution and The Monk.” Romanticism on the Net 8 (Nov 1997). Accessed 22 October 2020. https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/005766ar. Wright, Angela, “European Disruptions of the Idealized Woman: Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and the Marquis de Sade’s La Nouvelle Justine” in European Gothic a Spirited Exchange, 1760–1960, ed. Avril Horner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017): 39–54.

Between the Nation and the Dark Recesses of the Soul in Charles Maturin Charlie Jorge

Born in a comfortable home and with a promising future ahead, Charles Robert Maturin’s life poses an example of the fall of a misunderstood author who, despite numberless drawbacks and obstacles, fought tirelessly to make a career in the literary world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Widely known for his eccentricities, some claim that, if Maturin had belonged to the upper class or the nobility, these eccentricities would have only been mere peculiarities,1 just like those of his famous grand-nephew Oscar Wilde, almost a century later. However, fate had bad cards in store for Maturin, who died in complete poverty, leaving behind him a big family who had to pay off his numerous debts. All his literary production, which was wide and varied, shows plots and themes that could be categorised as far from Christian orthodoxy. These themes were the ones behind the multiple obstacles set in his way to advancement and promotion in the Anglican Church. However serious these accusations for a minister of the Church could be, it is true that there was another reason why Maturin was denied access to any high rank within clerical circles, which was his own temperament.2 As will be seen later, the Dublin curate entered the Church to gain economic stability and security, and not due to a high vocational feeling, which would cause him some trouble in more than one occasion. This lack of vocation towards a religious life was what made him not assume that mask of conformity and orthodoxy very often required C. Jorge (B) Universidad Camilo José Cela, Madrid, Spain

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_26

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in those circles. On the contrary, Maturin kept alive the flame of that passion that had been fuelled by his doting parents from an early age, a passion for the stage and the written word. However, destiny had a setback in store for him, and economical reasons made Maturin enter the Anglican Church three years after he had graduated from Trinity College, being his first destination the Parish of Loughrea, Co. Galway, in the west of Ireland,3 where he met his future wife, Henrietta Kingsbury. Maturin at first saw this destination as his exile in the west of Ireland, and a place far away from civilisation and “intolerable to a man of literary interests and social habits”.4 However, little by little, and not without some reluctance, the Dublin curate became acquainted with a more real and tangible Ireland, as he got to know the inhabitants of that part of the country some nicknamed the “wild west”. His experience in Loughrea would serve him later to portray both the sceneries and the people with an impartiality and a graphic realism unseen before in Irish fiction,5 at the same time that he fed his passion as an antiquarian when he discovered the rich Irish culture and the fascinating history and myths of ancient Ireland in his frequent visits to Cloghan Castle, built by an old Milesian chief, Eoghan Ó Madadhain, and later in the hands of the influential O’Moore family. Some years later, in 1806, through his connections with his wife’s family, Maturin acquired the curacy of St. Peter, in one of the richest and most prestigious areas in Dublin, where he would live until his death in 1824.6 Despite being an Anglican minister in an area such as that, Maturin’s income was not very high, which meant that he had to live with his parents and his wife and his already growing big family. Even amidst all these changes in his lifestyle and economic difficulties, Maturin managed to publish his first novel, Fatal Revenge; or, the Family of Montorio, in 1807, everything paid from his own pocket. But misfortunes started to ravage the Maturins barely two years after the publication of the novel, when old Maturin, the writer’s father, lost favour with the authorities, and society in general, as well as his job as a civil servant, when he was unfairly accused of malversation.7 This setback meant a heavy load to add to the others young Maturin already had on his shoulders, as “[t]rue poverty, from which he was never to rise, descended upon him”.8 As Niilo Idman reminds us in his canonical work on the Dublin author, Charles Robert Maturin, His Life and Works (1923), some members of the social circles Maturin would attend commented that his behaviour in public presented some contradictions, perhaps the same ambiguities that one can find in his novels. On the one hand, they expected to meet a melancholic, gloomy character keeping himself to himself, away from society, a kind of carbon copy of those characters inhabiting his novels. Instead, they found a cheerful person, a sort of eccentric dandy craving for an active social life. In other words, they met somebody who could change completely when he left his home life aside and came into a social meeting, becoming “a lion of reception-rooms … to play the part of a dandy and a grand seigneur”.9 However, all these eccentricities and his unusual attire when he was seen in public was nothing else but

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a conscious defensive system to protect himself from the destructive effects of poverty and the disparity of his circumstances. One could say that Maturin had created a literature and a style to soften the discord present in his daily life. There is the common believe that Maturin started writing gothic novels following the popularity of the genre, and only due to economic reasons. However, the truth is that Maturin was an avid reader and he had already devoured volumes of gothic novels written the previous decades, especially those of the novelists he most admired: Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis.10 Apart from that, he had already written and published two gothic novels before his father became bankrupt due to the accusation of malversation and money was an issue around the dinner table in the house of the Maturins. As Dale Kramer says, Maturin had probably chosen the Gothic as the genre for most of his novels, if not a gothic style in the others, because it was the genre that adapted and shared most features with his literary interests.11 The Gothic let Maturin explore some parts of the human soul and existence that any other genre would not have. In his first novel, Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio (1807), his style and technique still lack the originality he would show in later works, such as Melmoth the Wanderer (1824), and for which he will be known. Fatal Revenge follows the same patterns drawn by previous gothic authors, moreover those Maturin admired, like Radcliffe and Lewis, but it is noticeable how the Dublin author starts discovering and playing with those themes he will explore throughout his literary life: terror, guilt, and what has been called “the midnight darkness of the soul”.12 For Fatal Revenge, Maturin chose a setting that provided him with a rich background to develop the plot, at the same time that he starts entering the literary world of gothic fiction. The novel revolves around the family of Montorio and the fall of their House, in late-sixteenth-century Italy. The plot line is one of the most complex ones Maturin created, including Count Orazio’s sly and twisted manoeuvres to get revenge against his brother, who betrayed him more than twenty years before, leaving him for dead, without family and possessions. Totally devoted to his revenge, the Count travels to the Far East, where he acquires the ancient knowledge of the occult and supernatural. After some years of study, he finally decides to return to Italy under the pretence of being a monk called Father Schemoli. With this false guise, he becomes the confessor of his own brother, who, after all these years, and corroded by guilt, has turned into religion for solace. To achieve his revenge, he plans exploiting the fascination with the supernatural that his brother’s family have and, in this way, obtain a powerful influence over his brother’s sons, Annibal and Ippolito, and make them kill their own father. The rest of the novel, full of vanished corpses, subterranean passages, ghosts that wander around winding corridors and old churches and graveyards, and all the gothic props of the time, reveals little by little the methods that Father Schemoli will use to achieve his desired revenge. However, this revenge turns sour when his brother, at the moment of his death, confesses that Annibal and Ippolito

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are, in fact, Orazio’s sons, who he believed had been murdered by his brother at the time of his treason. The agony caused by such a revelation kills the hero-villain, as the two brothers, Annibal and Ippolito, run away from Castle Montorio to join the army and die at the siege of Barcelona, ending the novel with a moral: ‘Such,’ said the narrator, ‘was the fall of the Montorio family, in whose fall the dispensation of a higher hand is visible to the most weak [sic] and limited eye. He who sought his own elevation, and the agrandizement of his children, was defeated and destroyed by him whom he had sacrificed to his ambitious wickedness. He who sought vengeance as atrocious as the crime that provoked it, found it poured out on his own children; and they who desired the knowledge of things concealed from man, found their pursuit accompanied by guilt, and terminated by misery and punishment.’13

The plot is considered by some as one of the novel’s weaknesses, as Maturin takes two of the three volumes of the novel to develop the figure of father Schemoli, presenting him as a supernatural being, in contact with the Devil’s agents and able to transcend time and escape at will. After all that, in the third volume, Maturin tries to explain all the supernatural occurrences, much like Radcliffe does in her novels. When reading the first two volumes of the novel, the reader accepts the supernatural character of Schemoli, as “it is inconceivable that a mere man could be in so many places at exactly the right time and wield such psychological power as Father Schemoli”.14 However, when the reader reaches the third volume, they cannot avoid feeling disappointed, and in a way betrayed, when Maturin tries to explain and destroy all of Schemoli’s superhuman features. Maturin was well aware of his mistake at debunking the supernatural and trying to explain it, imitating Mrs. Radcliffe’s style, and in later works, like Bertram (1816) or Melmoth the Wanderer, he will give free rein to the supernatural without trying to explain it through quasi-scientific evidence. As the young clergyman and inexperienced writer that Maturin was at the time of the publication of Fatal Revenge, it can be understood that he did not want to tighten the thumbscrews on heterodoxy further, lest he should compromise his future hopes in the Anglican Church and the literary world. This timid approach to the Gothic he takes will not be seen in future works, where he will reveal all his powers until reaching the summit with his masterpiece Melmoth the Wanderer. When Fatal Revenge is compared with some of his later novels, such as Women; or, Pour et Contre (1818) or Melmoth the Wanderer, it can be perceived that it is of a lower quality in terms of character design and conception, as characterisation “yields place to adventure, for under the exceptional circumstances in which the principal personages find themselves, they act by necessity rather than by choice”.15 On the other hand, it is undeniably true that the novel contains a powerful and imaginative writing style, which shows a latent genius and the themes that will occupy both Maturin’s mind and

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numberless pages of his novels and dramas for the rest of his literary career. It can also be seen how Maturin is familiar with gothic nature and landscape, where nothing occurs gratuitously, there is always some raison d’être. All along every gothic novel, especially when reaching the denouement, one can clearly notice that its characters do not function as free and independent units, but more like the objects of a higher and more powerful force that could be either evil or fair and benign at the very end, as the narrator in Fatal Revenge reveals when he mentions “the dispensation of a higher hand […] visible to the most weak [sic] and limited eye”.16 What the narrator of Fatal Revenge tells the reader at the end of the novel is closely related to one of the most recurrent worries in Maturin’s fiction: the extent and power of humankind’s free will. This latent combination of the motif of freewill and the Gothic is a characteristic that Maturin shares with his contemporary Lord Byron, whose Werner (1822), published after most of Maturin’s production, shows it to its full potential. This concern could be portrayed as much in the resistance to the external forces of evil, personified by such figures as Father Schemoli or Melmoth, in Melmoth the Wanderer, as in the resistance these forces of evil in the inner self of each human being. As could be seen in more than one occasion in Melmoth the Wanderer, these forces can be stronger than reason and represent a latent power, inside the soul of human beings, to commit certain deeds humans believe themselves incapable of. Maturin describes this aspect of human beings in a metaphoric way. When a man exhibits his mind, he shows you a city, whose public walks and palaces are ostentatiously displayed, while its prisons, its cages of unclean birds, its hold of foul and hidden evil are concealed; or he exhibits it as he would the sovereign of that city, when he stands on the pinnacle of his pride, and looks round on the ample prospect of his own magnificence, not as when he flies from the resort of men, and herds with the beasts; when his power is lost in degradation, and his form buried in brutality.17

The landscape the reader comes across with in Fatal Revenge is mainly psychological,18 used mainly to enhance the sensation of terror, fear and suspense, with the mere intention of describing a topographic reality. One could say that, mostly, Maturin’s descriptions of remote places, very likely extracted from other novels and travel books, tend to give vent to the internal emotions and conflicts of his characters. In the same way, he uses topographic descriptions, almost mechanically, to forward and boost the plot. As Robert Lougy (1975) says, “oceans exist for the purpose of creating tidal waves and storms, mountains for showing the disastrous consequences of earthquakes, and rivers for flooding and for carrying the characters from one place to another”.19 In the same way, as in the case of the physical landscape, the psychological landscape also has a circumscribed nature, in which certain emotions, like laughter, light wit, tranquillity and mere content, are outside the circle.

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Emotions, just like the violent natural elements that the reader comes across with Maturin’s work, must be strong and heartrending. Dialogue, therefore, becomes their vehicle, where fear, hatred and passionate love can break the heart. Maturin’s characters do not just speak, they plead, coerce, bribe, threaten, adore, whisper and intimidate. It is in his use of the language where Maturin shows the full potential of his genius; his language is strong in rapid and imaginative movements and twists when it describes feelings unleashed by horror, fear and the domain of the unknown and supernatural. As Maturin himself admitted in the preface to his second novel, The Milesian Chief (1812), if he possessed any talent, that was that of “darkening the gloomy, and of deepening the sad; of painting life in extreme, and representing those struggles of passion when the soul trembles on the verge of the unlawful and the unhallowed”.20 One of the most vividly described passages in Fatal Revenge is where Father Schemoli tells Annibal that he, Schemoli, is the spirit of a man dead for 20 years. During the description of his “death” and his descent to hell, Maturin shows clear evidence of his genius, unequalled by other canonical authors of the Gothic: In the heart of the fire, lay a human body, unconsumed for two thousand years; for they had but partially raised it for some magic purpose, when they were destroyed. […] But now they were compelled by a stronger power than their own […] to waken from that sleep of horrid existence, to renew the unfinished spell, and to raise the corpse that lay in the flames. It was a sight of horror, even for an unblessed soul to see them. Rent from the smoking rocks, that they wished might fall on them, and hide them; their forms of metallic and rocky cinder, where the human feature horribly struggled through burnt and blackening masses, discoloured with the calcined and dingy hues of fire, purple, and red, and green; their stony eyes rolling with strange life; their sealed jaws rent open by sounds, that were like the rush of subterrene [sic] winds.21

Irish literature would have to wait almost one hundred years, until James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), before any other writer could equal Maturin at the time of transmitting the horrors of hell with such a vivid and grotesque imagination as his. And, even if Walter Scott did not totally approve of the style Maturin had chosen to convey his literary powers, he had to admit that, in passages such as the one just mentioned, the young author possessed a unique skill. In Fatal Revenge, Maturin already starts developing several motifs that will become the focal point of his next works. One of the main ones will be the theme of the Wandering Jew, the man cast out from the rest of humankind either for a big crime or great guilt. Even if it is not until 1820, with Melmoth the Wanderer, that Maturin raises that figure to a mythic and symbolic level, in Fatal Revenge one can already see with all clarity all the possibilities that a character of this type could have. Father Schemoli is a good example of this type of outcast; he is a predecessor of Melmoth. In the same manner

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as Melmoth will be years later, Schemoli shows that union of two legends: the one of the Wandering Jew and the one of Faust; almost as if it was a Satanic marriage. To these, Maturin gives an ironic twist, as both Schemoli and Melmoth are destroyed as much by ignorance as by excessive knowledge, a recurrent theme in all his extensive production.22 Anyhow, the central theme in Fatal Revenge seems to be that of sexual repression and sublimation manifested in a religious and erotic fanaticism, and also in a concept of love excessively idealised. This kind of fanaticism, seen from Maturin’s point of view, can lead to a cruelty and an aggression aimed at the others as well as at oneself. It is noteworthy that Maturin would use this motif some years later again in his novel Women; or Pour et Contre (1818). As other members of the Anglican Church, Maturin could not avoid being suspicious about the Catholic Church and all that it represented, even more as a member of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy in Ireland, as it was seen as the flagship of reactionary political forces at the time. This is partially the reason why in his incursions in the realm of religious fanaticism he often centred his attention on Catholicism. It is inevitable to see his intentions to explore a rich niche in the literary market, even more, the gothic literary market, that could run along deeper, critical ones. His works also contain a hard critique on other confessions apart from the Catholic one, even Protestant ones such as Evangelism, Calvinism or Puritanism, as can be seen, most strongly reflected in Women; or Pour et Contre, or in Melmoth the Wanderer. In great part of Maturin’s production, women are specially the victims of a religious and social code that demands sexual repression, as they, unlike men, “did not have access to harlots and brothels for release of sexual passions”.23 Many chapters and sections of Fatal Revenge revolve around the experiences of a young girl, Rosolia di Valozzi, who shows a fascinating study of the agonies of a young girl who discovers that the cravings of her body and the nature of her dreams do not correspond to the idea of love that she had been taught. In her wish to deny and repress these “unruly” feelings, she tries to lead her passions towards a love for God and nature, and thus her religious poetry and her descriptions of nature take on an erotic flavour. As has been seen, in Fatal Revenge Maturin starts exploring the Gothic, and discovering that this literary style is the one that is more akin to his literary interests. Here is where he feels more at ease to pour over pages those terrors he had read in Ann Radcliffe’s and Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis’ novels, among many others. We have also seen that Fatal Revenge still lacks that originality that his later works are known for. Besides all this, Maturin already starts playing with the themes he will use the rest of his literary career: fear, guilt, the darkest recesses of the human soul or this psychological terror that issues from the use of landscape and language he is known for. In this novel, he also begins developing a type of hero-villain with demonic and supernatural connotations, Father Schemoli, that will evolve in later works to become John Melmoth, as will be seen later in Melmoth the Wanderer.

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The romance in which Maturin was already working was none other than Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), for which he would have already received an advance of £500 sometime in 1819. Melmoth the Wanderer was published in August 1820, and even today this is the work for which Maturin is most recognised in most literary spheres. Honoré de Balzac himself praised the genius of the Irishman and the greatness of his work on more than one occasion by placing its eponymous hero, Melmoth, alongside Molière’s Don Juan, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust and Byron’s Manfred, as one of the four supreme allegorical figures of modern European literature. After reading Melmoth the Wanderer, one has the feeling that it is a work that was always within Maturin, waiting for the appropriate conjunction of time and circumstances to appear. There is no doubt that many of the characteristics of his character were delineated from numerous earlier literary sources, especially John Milton’s Lucifer or Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, whose work The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (c. 1588) elucidates the scene where Melmoth, who is already feeling his near end, warns his young descendant and Alonzo de Monçada that they do not enter the room they are in, despite what they may hear from within, once they have left it. Many of those characters can even be related to the gothic works of his contemporaries Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis, whose horror genius, according to Scholten, he manages to surpass in this work, or William Godwin.24 Still, Melmoth the Wanderer is a unique creation of Maturin—his genius and style are indelibly marked throughout the entire work. Using both the Wandering Jew and Faust legends, Maturin creates a unique work of art that shares only the broadest and most general similarities with his other sources. Although thematically linked to works by both Maturin himself and those of other authors, Melmoth the Wanderer resists any type of comparison and demands that we take it into account by itself. And, like the fourth book in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), or much of the Marquis de Sade’s work, Melmoth the Wanderer’s proposals are not easy or pleasant to accept. There is no evidence of any kind to indicate that Maturin suffered from dementia at the time of writing Melmoth the Wanderer. On the contrary, the different letters that the Irish author wrote during this period show a lucidity and coherence worthy of a sane person, and his latest novel, The Albigenses (1824), does not appear to be the work of a madman. Despite this, it is true that one has the feeling that Maturin, when writing Melmoth the Wanderer, evokes a reality that turns out to be so powerful, at the same time grotesque and cruel, that the dividing line between genius and madness is very fine. On some occasion, even Maturin himself participated in the game and fuelled suspicions when he referred to his creativity as witchcraft, explaining how he would like his reader to sit around his magic cauldron and see the spirits emerging from it: “sit down by my magic Cauldron, mix my dark ingredients, see the bubbles work, and the spirits rise”.25 When writing a novel like Melmoth the Wanderer, Maturin had to explore highly demanding areas of knowledge, such as “the visions of another world”,

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or the darkest corners of the human psyche.26 These corners, and what is in them, exert great pressure on the integrity of the mind and, with them, he was able to cross, perhaps irrevocably, forbidden borders. The writer, then, isolates himself from the world around him, since he has used the spell of the word to give birth to an irrational and crazy reality. This writer is, at the same time, the possessor of secrets that he will share with those readers who dare to sit around his “magic Cauldron”, and he will be himself possessed by those demons whose presence reveal his art. It is also possible that Maturin himself perceived some latent signs of madness or, at least, certain concerns that went beyond what many would call normal, referring to them in Melmoth the Wanderer. In his preface to the 1820 edition, Maturin says that the original upon which Walberg’s wife is based, a family man whom the Wanderer tries to tempt in “Tale of Guzman’s Family”, is a real and living woman and, as Maturin himself emphasises, may she live many years: “the original from which the Wife of Walberg is imperfectly sketched is a living woman, and long may she live”.27 This “living woman” is, almost without a doubt, Maturin’s own wife, whom he compares to Ines, Walberg’s wife in “The Tale of Guzman’s Family”. The account itself is one of the softest we find in Melmoth the Wanderer, and Melmoth’s role is minimal in it. The story revolves around Guzmán, a wealthy merchant from Seville, whose sister provoked his wrath long ago by running away and marrying a Protestant German musician named Walberg. When Guzmán thinks that he is going to die, he invites his sister and his family to Seville, accommodating them amongst luxuries and riches, despite his refusal to see them. Later on, Walberg even invites his parents to come and live with them from Germany and, at least for some time, they all live happily and in lavish comfort. However, on Guzmán’s death it is discovered that, under the influence and coercion of his confessors, he has left his entire fortune to the Church, which is why the Walbergs are left in utter misery. In the midst of poverty and despair, his son sells his blood to a surgeon, his daughter is close to falling into the temptation of prostitution, and Walberg is virtually mad with concern as his family falls apart all around him. During all this time, Melmoth visits the poor wretch frequently but, as with the other victims that Melmoth stalks, Walberg categorically rejects the terms that Melmoth demands in order to receive his help. Finally, the original will, in which it is written that Guzmán left his entire fortune to his sister, appears thanks to the mediation of a good Samaritan, the local parish priest, but not before Walberg is about to commit murder, by attempting against the life of his wife and father. Eventually, Walberg recovers from his mental illness and the whole family returns to Germany to live prosperously. The “Tale of Guzman’s Family” is important because of the origin and background it gives us about Melmoth, but also because of the emotional vehemence with which Maturin deals again with the theme of poverty, so recurrent in his work. This part of Melmoth the Wanderer is written with such force and intensity that Maturin’s life can be seen on every page. There are

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many examples within this story of clear parallels with Maturin’s own experiences in his life: the protagonist’s feelings of guilt for not being able to support his family, or to give them the necessary food, or to squander the little money they had, and his fears of going crazy from the obsessions that continually assail him. What is most fascinating in this story, and intimately linked with Maturin’s own life, is the relationship that Maturin presents between Walberg and his father. During those times when he himself did not know where the next meal was going to come from, Maturin had, much to his regret, held some kind of resentment towards his father, whom he had previously respected and loved deeply, but who had dragged him, along with his entire family, into financial ruin. It seems that he wanted to atone for this guilt, which undoubtedly had to arouse in the Irish author, in an artistic way through this story. In a scene where the family is sitting at the table having dinner with hardly anything to eat, Walberg snatches some food from his father’s hands and gives it to his children: Walberg had always felt and expressed the strongest feelings of tender respect towards his parents – his father particularly, whose age far exceeded that of his mother. At the division of their meal that day, he shewed a kind of wolfish and greedy jealousy that made Ines tremble. He whispered to her – ‘How much my father eats – how heartily he feeds while we have scarce a morsel!’ – ‘And let us want that morsel, before your father wants one!’ said Ines in a whisper – ‘I have scarce tasted anything myself.’ – ‘Father – father,’ cried Walberg, shouting in the ear of the doting old man, ‘you are eating heartily, while Ines and her children are starving!’ And he snatched the food from his father’s hand, who gazed at him vacantly, and resigned the contested morsel without a struggle.28

Later, when the sufferings of his children caused resentment to take hold of Walberg—“the sufferings of his children seemed to inspire him with a kind of wild resentment”29 —, Walberg raised his hand to his father with a gesture of hitting him, calling him a deaf old man and degrading him to a being that, indolently, devours his filthy food: “the deaf old man, who was sluggishly devouring his sordid meal”.30 After his recovery and finding his father by his side, Walberg, full of remorse, begs him to forgive him: All that night his wife and family struggled with his despair. At last recollection seemed to burst on him at once. He shed some tears; – then, with a minuteness of reminiscence that was equally singular and affecting, he flung himself before the old man, who, speechless and exhausted, sat passively in his chair, and exclaiming, ‘Father, forgive me!’ buried his head between his father’s knees.31

In this way, we see Maturin expressing the agony of his own sufferings, venting his hostility towards his own father, and simultaneously atoning for his guilt

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and creating for his story an ending with which he would have liked to have parallel in his own life. From a point of view in which we combine the life of the Irish author and his work, and seeing, as we have done in the previous paragraphs, how fascinating the autobiographical implications of the story are, this is but a small part of the novel. Melmoth the Wanderer consists of five stories in total, the second of which, “Tale of the Spaniard”, encompasses the last three. In turn, the five stories are integrated into a much larger framework around John Melmoth, a descendant of Melmoth the Wanderer. When he was caring for his sick uncle in 1818, the John Melmoth discovered a portrait with the inscription “John Melmoth, anno 1646”. After inquiring about such a coincidence, he finds out that the character in the portrait is none other than his ancestor who, according to legend, is still alive. Later, John discovers a manuscript whose content forms the basis of the first story, “Stanton’s Tale”. The next day, John, observing a shipwreck in the rocks near the coast, hears a horrible laugh issuing from a man who is also observing the disaster and, to his surprise, recognises him as the same character that is portrayed in the picture. Scared, John tries to climb the rocks, slips and falls into the water. Upon awakening, he finds himself back at his uncle’s house, discovering that he had been rescued from certain death by the sole survivor of the shipwreck, a Spaniard who goes by the name of Alonzo de Monçada. Finding out John Melmoth’s name makes Alonzo very nervous; that’s when he tells the story “Tale of the Spaniard”. This story forms, except for the last pages, the rest of the novel, containing in turn “Tale of the Indians”, “Tale of Guzman’s Family” and “The Lover’s Tale”. The structure of Melmoth the Wanderer is rigorously organised, exhibiting almost geometric symmetry. Its pattern of organisation, described by some critics as a set of toy boxes that fit one inside the other—in the manner of Russian matrioskas, or Chinese boxes—has different functions, being more complicated than the method used by more modern authors,32 such as that used by Jack London in his novel The Jacket (1915). First of all, this style endows Maturin with a means of exerting rigid aesthetic control over his material, and, given the nature of the world he creates in Melmoth the Wanderer, filled with cruelty, madness, torture and death, such control is imperative. In many ways, Melmoth the Wanderer resembles a nightmare within a structure whose function is to impose order within chaos and obtain a strange and evocative beauty of subjects that are not beautiful at all. Secondly, the organisation makes it possible for Maturin to explore his themes through the techniques of analogy and juxtaposition. This is clearly seen when Maturin explores the nature of religious persecution in “Tale of the Spaniard” and “Tale of the Indians”, the nature of love in “Tale of the Indians” and “The Lover’s Tale” and the different aspects of cruelty and insanity in “Stanton’s Tale”, in “Tale of the Spaniard” and in “Tale of the Indians”. Melmoth’s presence in all these stories creates continuity by establishing a broader plot structure that unites them and by proposing those common bonds of

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humanity that exist between the characters, without which they would be separated by both chronology and nationality. Melmoth’s personal history and character are gradually revealed throughout the novel through people who have known or heard of him, as well as the brief visits that the wanderer makes. It is in “Tale of the Indians” where Melmoth, due to his relationship with Immalee, assumes an independent role and importance of his own, without depending on anyone or other sources. Maturin’s technique of gradually revealing Melmoth not only intensifies the fear and mystery that surrounds him, but it is also appropriate for the reader to get to know Melmoth in this way, since in much of the novel he is nothing else but a mere observer, a man who periodically visits people who he thinks would be willing to exchange their fates for his. It is not until “The Lover’s Tale”, the last tale in the novel, that we finally discover the terrible nature of Melmoth’s fate. Attracted by astrology and occult sciences during a trip to Poland, where he was promised the knowledge and power of the world to come under unpronounceable conditions: “the knowledge and power of the future world - on conditions that are unutterable”.33 Like Faust, Melmoth agrees to hand over his soul to a diabolical power in exchange for profound and prophetic knowledge. He can only be relieved of this pact if, in the course of 150 years, he finds someone willing to exchange fates with him. The search lasts 150 years, and takes him to the darkest and most horrible corners of human suffering, but the Irishman is unsuccessful in his mission: It has been reported of me, that I obtained from the enemy of souls a range of existence beyond the period allotted to mortality – a power to pass over space without disturbance or delay, and visit remote regions with the swiftness of thought – to encounter tempests without the hope of their blasting me, and penetrate into dungeons, whose bolts were as flax and tow at my touch. It has been said that this power was accorded to me, that I might be enabled to tempt wretches in their fearful hour of extremity, with the promise of deliverance and immunity, on condition of exchanging situations with me. If this be true, it bears attestation to a truth uttered by the lips of one I may not name, and echoed by every human heart in the habitable world. ‘No one has ever exchanged destinies with Melmoth the Wanderer. I have traversed the world in the search, and no one, to gain that world, would lose his own soul! – Not Stanton in his cell – nor you, Monçada, in the prison of the Inquisition – nor Walberg, who saw his children perishing with want – nor – another.’34

Melmoth is never the immediate cause of suffering; the people he meets have not suffered because of any supernatural power, but because of the will of other human beings. From this point of view, Melmoth represents those dark truths that humans tend to grant to a demonic or diabolical world to mitigate their own feelings of guilt or inadequacy. At the same time, Melmoth is isolated and has knowledge of the deepest secrets and the most hidden acts of

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all human beings. He is a man with the power to roam the world and explore the fears and anxieties of others, but he is unable to learn the secrets of his own heart. What distinguishes Melmoth from previous characters out of Maturin’s imagination is the ambivalence of his emotions and the complex relationship that develops between him and Immalee. Although he initially sees her as more of an opportunity to escape his fate, Melmoth soon falls in love with her. As a consequence of this, his existence becomes stormier if possible, but more beautiful at the same time. Immalee, who has grown up on an island and knows only beauty and peace, is an Eve surrounded by depravity in the form of the tempter, an archetype of innocence and beauty in the midst of corruption and evil. By initiating her into the evils of this world, Melmoth buries her own heart deeper in cynicism and despair, thus isolating himself from any possible redemptive love. Maturin’s description of the way Immalee’s innocence and simple faith works on Melmoth contains some of his best passages, as it allows Melmoth to rediscover emotions that had long been buried within his soul. For a brief moment, when he pleads with Immalee to stay, Melmoth has his salvation at hand, but the moment of rebirth eludes him, and all that it implies escapes that intellect for which he sold his soul. However, Immalee does not stay, and the secret remains hidden. Love for Maturin is redemptive in that it opens the heart to emotions that transport the human being closer to other fellow human beings and God. Immalee tells Melmoth that he who does not have a God cannot have a heart either: “he who is without a God must be without a heart”,35 and the opposite of this, in some way, is also true: he whose heart is closed to love is also separated from God. Like Faust, Melmoth is always within the reach of God’s salvation, since his mercy and forgiveness are infinite and only an act of faith is required on the part of humankind to be granted. His pact with the Devil does not remove Melmoth from God’s grace, which his own cynicism and hardness of heart actually does; and this is where the tragedy of his destiny lies. For Maturin, most of the human race does not worship the Christian God of love and compassion, “the God of smiles and happiness”, but rather a harsh and sadistic deity, “the God of groans and blood”.36 By employing religion as a mask behind which the human being can represent his most ignoble and vile wishes, it corrupts the meaning of the cult in which he takes part and creates a religion of hatred and violence. Again in Melmoth the Wanderer, Maturin explores the different ways in which sadism and masochism arise from the imposition by man of a system of intolerant and unnatural repressions; the Inquisition is a symbol of the institutionalisation of such cruelty. In the first moments of their relationship, Melmoth shows Immalee two representative religions; in one of them flogging and asceticism are practiced, while in the second torture and persecution are practiced. For Maturin, these two expressions of “religion” are inextricably linked. The antithesis of Christianity in this novel is not represented by Melmoth, but by a parricide and lay brother among the ex-Jesuits, who in fact is the most fiendish being in Maturin’s production.

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The particular theology of this character represents Maturin’s final expression of anger and pain at the aberration that the religion embodied in the Sermon on the Mount has become: “Mine is the best theology - the theology of utter hostility to all beings whose sufferings may mitigate mine”.37 For authors such as Kathleen Fowler, Melmoth the Wanderer should be read as a religious work.38 One could also say that in Melmoth the Wanderer fear leaves the realm of the conventional to exalt it in a frightening cloud over the destiny of humanity. Dante’s Inferno has taken shape on earth, and the reader sees it through the eyes of its inhabitants rather than through those of a mere observer. In the end, at the same time that the demons are heard dragging Melmoth to Hell, the final consequences of cynicism and despair are dragged with them to the place from which they came, to bear those consequences. To present this terrifying vision, Maturin himself had to enter Hell itself, descend into the darkest depths of cruelty and horror, and there he must have found himself both terrified and fascinated by that curiosity. That experience led him to write, for example, a story about two lovers who were starved to death in an underground dungeon, or another about a man, locked in a madhouse, who continually dreamed that he was being burned alive in an auto-da-fé. And, although there are some signs of an abnormal imagination in Melmoth the Wanderer, an imagination such that led critics to speak of Maturin as a mad or diabolical genius, if we try to dismiss this way of writing too lightly, we have to remember, just as Maturin wanted it, the normal world in which we live, a world in which the auto-da-fé, wars, and other atrocities are a reality, a world presided over and ruled by normal kings, queens, politicians and generals. And that is perhaps when we have to reconsider our definition of insanity. In any case, Melmoth the Wanderer is a work that has transcended borders due to its thematic complexity and importance within gothic literature itself. This novel is the most important in the Maturian production, and, therefore, the one that has received the most attention from critics and academic study since its publication.

Notes 1. Robert Lougy, Charles Robert Maturin (Lewisburg, Bucknell University Press, 1975), 13. 2. Dale Kramer, Charles Robert Maturin (New York, Twayne Publishers, 1973), 11. 3. Willem Scholten, Charles Robert Maturin: The Terror Novelist (Amsterdam, H.J. Paris, 1933), 13. 4. Niilo Idman, Charles Robert Maturin: His Life and Works (London, Constable, 1923), 12. 5. Idman, Charles Robert Maturin, 12. 6. Idman, Charles Robert Maturin, 12–13. 7. Scholten, Charles Robert Maturin, 27. 8. Lougy, Charles Robert Maturin, 14.

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9. Idman, Charles Robert Maturin, 10. 10. Christina Morin, “Delightful Cannibal Feasts: Literary Consumption in Melmoth the Wanderer” (2008), 47. The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 5, pp. 46–59. 11. Kramer, Charles Robert Maturin, 13. 12. Lougy, Charles Robert Maturin, 16. 13. Charles Robert Maturin, Fatal Revenge (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994), 440. 14. Lougy, Charles Robert Maturin, 17. 15. Idman, Charles Robert Maturin, 36. 16. Maturin, Fatal Revenge, 440. 17. Maturin, Fatal Revenge, 280. 18. Jim Kelly, Charles Robert Maturin: Authorship, Authenticity and the Nation (Dublin, Four Courts, 2011), 57. 19. Lougy, Charles Robert Maturin, 19. 20. Charles Robert Maturin, The Milesian Chief (London, Colburn, 1812), iv–v. 21. Maturin, Fatal Revenge, 160. 22. Kelly, Charles Robert Maturin, 60. 23. Lougy, Charles Robert Maturin, 23. 24. Scholten, Charles Robert Maturin, 101. 25. Sir Walter Scott, The Correspondence of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Robert Maturin, with a Few Other Allied Letters (Austin, TX, The University of Texas Press, 1937), 60. 26. Scott, The Correspondence, 14. 27. Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (London, Oxford University Press, 1998), 5. 28. Maturin, Melmoth, 419–420. 29. Maturin, Melmoth, 424. 30. Maturin, Melmoth, 424. 31. Maturin, Melmoth, 433. 32. Kelly, Charles Robert Maturin, 33. 33. Maturin, Melmoth, 499. 34. Maturin, Melmoth, 537–538. 35. Maturin, Melmoth, 514. 36. Maturin, Melmoth, 380. 37. Maturin, Melmoth, 225. 38. Kathleen Fowler, “Hieroglyphics in Fire. Melmoth the Wanderer” (2004), 46, Fred Botting and Dale Townshend (eds.), Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. Volume III: Nineteenth Century: At Home with the Vampire (New York, Routledge, 2004), 45–61.

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Bibliography Fowler, Kathleen, “Hieroglyphics in Fire. Melmoth the Wanderer”, in: Fred Botting and Dale Townshend (eds.), Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. Volume III: Nineteenth Century: At Home with the Vampire, New York, Routledge, 2004, 45–61. Idman, Niilo, Charles Robert Maturin: His Life and Works, London, Constable, 1923. Kelly, Jim, Charles Robert Maturin: Authorship, Authenticity and the Nation, Dublin, Four Courts, 2011. Kramer, Dale, Charles Robert Maturin, New York, Twayne Publishers, 1973. Lougy, Robert, Charles Robert Maturin, Lewisburg, Bucknell University Press, 1975. Maturin, Charles Robert, Fatal Revenge, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994. Maturin, Charles Robert, The Milesian Chief , London, Colburn, 1812. Morin, Christina, “Delightful Cannibal Feasts: Literary Consumption in Melmoth the Wanderer” (2008), in: The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 5, pp. 46–59. Scholten, Willem, Charles Robert Maturin: The Terror Novelist, Amsterdam, H.J. Paris, 1933. Scott, Sir Walter, The Correspondence of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Robert Maturin, with a Few Other Allied Letters, Austin, Texas, The University of Texas Press, 1937.

Charles Maturin Revisited Joakim Wrethed

Charles Robert Maturin (1780–1824) resembles one of those gothic figures who seems to be something of a shadow or a mystery.1 How did an Irish clergyman come to write such exquisite horror saturated narratives? Out of which divine or satanic energy exactly did his nightmarish theological dilemmas in prose form spring forth? There are many possible answers to these questions. Maturin was born in Dublin and he was a descendant of French Huguenots. His grandfather had succeeded Jonathan Swift as the Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Already here contradictions and tensions seem to pile up. A proIrish Calvinist based in Dublin who produces anti-Catholic paranoia in prose form? Not least did he do so in his most successful novel Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), which alone has secured him a position in the global canon of gothic literature, even though this elevation happened gradually after his death. As Joseph W. Lew has claimed, on one level Maturin engaged in producing political allegory draped in the dark robes of the gothic tradition.2 The early part of Maturin’s career was an artistic and economic failure, as was actually most of his career with the exception of the play Bertram (1816). Under the pseudonym Dennis Jasper Murphy, he wrote the novels Fatal Revenge, or the Family of the Montorio, The Wild Irish Boy and The Milesian Chief . Through the attention and appreciation of Sir Walter Scott (for Fatal Revenge), Maturin J. Wrethed (B) Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_27

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was put into contact with Lord Byron who produced his play Bertram into a Drury Lane success in 1816. Ironically, this success would subsequently partly become his economic downfall, since to collect the earnings from the play, Maturin had to drop his nom de plume. The topics of his writing did not go well together with his profession as a curate of St. Peter’s Church in Dublin. In 1818, Maturin was deeply in debt and he died already in 1824 at the age of 44, four years after the publication of Melmoth the Wanderer. The novel never became an early success in Ireland and England, but instead, it gained an immense popularity in France. It even prompted the French giant of realism Honoré de Balzac to write a satirical sequel called Melmoth reconcilié in 1835. Later, Melmoth has been elevated as a literary work of major importance by other prominent authors such as Charles Baudelaire and Fyodor Dostoevsky. One of the attractions of Maturin’s work is obviously the outsider figure of Melmoth, who by means of his cynical and acerbic soothsaying energy blows humanity into so many sordid pieces. The focus will here be solely on Maturin’s masterpiece and the aim shall be to try to reveal as many elements as possible that contribute to Melmoth’s (and thereby Maturin’s) greatness. We will begin by having a look at the specifically Irish political and theological context, but then gradually we shall delve into the gothic aspects of the narrative that have fascinated ever-new audiences throughout the 200 years of its existence. The central claims are that Maturin relentlessly promotes a radical Calvinist theology, but that the novel’s gothic energy consists of a voyeuristic excess that both illustrates and produces total depravity. That aspect of the novel is fuelled by the anti-Catholic propaganda that aims to critique the capitalisation on suffering and fear, for instance, the selling of indulgences, which was one of the central propelling forces of the Reformation itself. An exiled Huguenot in Dublin seems almost like an anomaly. However, the French clampdown on the Huguenot minority in 1685 led to many of them fleeing mainly to Prussia, England and Ireland, and the fact is that there is no historical records of any conflicts or signs of persecution of the Huguenots in Ireland.3 For Maturin himself, this social state of affairs was not problematic on the surface. However, with his chosen combination of professions, he quickly came to sit on several chairs at once. This complex political situation may be best elucidated by the marriage metaphor. In outlining Maturin’s Unionist Gothic, Jim Hansen suggests that Maturin is neither an anti-Unionist Irish rebel nor a Unionist Irish Tory.4 Rather, through the invention of the Melmoth character, he reveals a political ambiguity or insecurity: “Ireland became the confined, threatened, terrorized female as England became—sometimes only potentially—her terrorizing, avaricious, and lustful captor-husband. From the perspective of an Irish political unconscious, the Gothic is born where the domestic-affection metaphor miscarries”.5 Indeed, in Melmoth, the child of Melmoth and Immalee cannot survive, which also becomes a symbol of the barren outcome of this unnatural wedlock. So partly, Maturin belongs to the Protestant minority in Ireland, which supposedly should support England and unionist ideas. However, in Maturin’s case, this

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was not clear. In fact, if one focuses more on his theological stance in Melmoth, it becomes obvious that he abhors any kind of mundane domination. Melmoth the character often takes on the blasphemous voice that condemns the whole of the worldly Christianity as a perverse assembly of hair-splitters and evildoers: [T]hey contrive to make matter of difference out of the various habits they wear; and they cut each other’s throats for the love of God, on the important subject, whether their jackets should be red or white–or whether their priests should be arrayed in silk ribbons, or white linen, or black household garments–or whether they should immerse their children in water, or sprinkle them with a few drops of it–or whether they should partake of the memorials of the death of him they all profess to love, standing or on their knees–or—But I weary you with this display of human wickedness and absurdity. One point is plain, they all agree that the language of the book is, ‘Love one another,’ while they all translate that language, ‘Hate one another.’ (307)6

Here we sense vibrant echoes of Jonathan Swift at his best. Protestants, Catholics and Dissenters all get their sharp critique for engaging with Christianity in the wrong way. The character of Melmoth actually gives Maturin access to a unique voice and position that adds a gothic quality that could not have been achieved in any other way. As we shall see, this enables the implementation of a radical Calvinist theology that to many Christians would potentially be the real horror of the narrative. The question may arise, why persist in also pumping out the anti-Catholic theology in a predominantly Catholic country? What were the motivating forces? One possible suggestion is that Maturin was allergic to political and religious turmoil, potentially an inheritance from his own family’s exiled history. Nevertheless, there is also a very sincere theological intent lurking here too. As proposed by Ashley Marshall: “Through his Wanderer, Maturin affirms the connection between the macro- and micro-cosmos; he wants, like Milton, to ‘Assert eternal Providence’ in theology and in history. We study the past, he suggests, not to memorize key dates, but to discover the ways of God to men”.7 Thus, the narrative is built with this theological aim in mind. By means of the metaphysical nature of Melmoth the character, Maturin is allowed to span a vaster historical space. As pointed out by Jack Null, the two major time nodes are the annus mirabilis of 1666–1667 and later the period 1799–1816.8 The time of the Restoration and the aftermath of the Civil War clearly relates to the ongoing religio-political struggles that, below the overarching brawl between crown and parliament, involve Catholics, Protestants and the Anglican church. Moreover, in both periods Maturin finds “similar conditions of political turbulence, bigotry, and the uncertainty of events on a grand scale, in both Maturin sees a turning-away from the doctrine of universal love”.9 Clearly, Maturin uses the figure of Melmoth as a transcendental idea that polemically incarnates the Calvinist theological position of Sola Fide. Even if the anti-Catholic propaganda may partly be seen as just following the logic of the Radcliffean mode or Monk-Lewis style, I claim that

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it has this more adamant theological urgency that cannot be explained away. As will become evident, Maturin’s work is not a novel project that seems to have gone out of hand structurally, with narrative upon narrative, within narrative within narrative.10 On the contrary, the novel by chance came out as a carefully crafted theological pamphlet that is undoubtedly a gothic magnum opus, which in historical hindsight opens dialogues with later works such as, for instance, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000).11 It is of course possible to argue here that the composition of the novel was accomplished as a collaboration—or actually an extended quarrel—between Maturin and the publisher Archibald Constable.12 In any case, the outcome was intellectually and aesthetically appealing, as has been confirmed by the test of time. The Irish schizophrenia I refer to is then something that may be regarded as politically cumbersome and problematic, but that is precisely simultaneously an artistically and culturally prolific breeding ground. There is a flipside to everything, which the Irish presumably would be quick to acknowledge. For Maturin himself, the schizophrenia takes on gothic proportions, since he himself was a representative of one of the institutions he so vehemently attacks. As put by Marshall: Maturin’s attack on religious institutions is not an attack on the devotional impulse. The virtuous protagonists suffer most at the hands of the families, communities, and nations that demand adherence to a particular doctrine as a social duty, but their experiences of persecution ultimately confirm the strength of genuine spiritual conviction. In fact, the real villains of the novel are far more treacherous in their perversions of religion than is the allegedly satanic Wanderer in any of his deeds. Maturin does not attack individual faith in his novel, but he does relentlessly expose the heavy-handed application of dogma as insidious and reprehensible. He defends liberty of conscience, implying a specifically Puritan sensibility—perhaps unsurprising given his Huguenot and Calvinist upbringing, but hardly the most orthodox position for an Anglican clergyman.13

Thus, the monomaniacally retained conflicts are to do with any type of formalisation of the expression of religious devotion and conviction.14 Traditional gothic paraphernalia is used with very specific theological aims in mind. The greatest parts of the longest tale, Monçada’s story, reiterate institutionalised incarceration as the most horrible aspect of mundanisation of religion. This physical incarceration concomitantly becomes the imprisonment of the soul and the withering of faith. Those who have been completely engulfed by this exegetic logic are the lost souls of the narratives, such as the Superior of the convent in which the Spaniard is confined. Maturin’s vehemence is fuelled by the thought of these men, supposedly serving the divine, while actually profiting from the institutionalised capitalisation on fear and suffering. The paradox and schizophrenia in the Irish context stem from Maturin’s position as a clergyman, obviously being paid for meddling between God and the people. Typically, Monçada’s escape from the monastery leads to the realisation that he

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is caged in the power of an even greater enemy of faith and the soul, the inquisition, further stressing the systemic aspects. All of Monçada’s escapes lead to further incarceration, which arguably is what makes up yet another true horror of this work. It is like waking up from a nightmare but immediately realising that you are in a new one, which is even worse than the one you exited. The chain of incarceration upon incarceration—on whatever level of human experience—runs through all of the tales. In Stanton’s story, it takes the mental form of obsession that ends up in both physical and psychological incarceration, truly as a captive in Blake’s “mind-forg’d manacles”.15 Moreover, the sense of the proto-Kafkaesque affectivity is not far-fetched. Even though the novel is only partly set in Ireland, that backdrop nevertheless contributes to, for instance, the English and French conceptions of the tales. This is so because of the simple reason that Ireland could be conveniently and stereotypically seen as “a kind of pre-Enlightenment wilderness which, when combined with the linguistic, religious and cultural ‘otherness’, provided a fertile territory for the growth of a literature which favoured the supernatural, the uncanny and the numerous features which unite to make up the genre or mode”.16 Overall, Maturin had a wealth of prolific conflicts and contradictions to work with when putting together the novel. Even though Melmoth the character can be seen as an intertextual palimpsest, combining the legends of “the Wandering Jew, Prometheus, Faust, Faustus and Mephistopheles along with Milton’s Satan”, he also has a very specific function in the novel.17 Clearly, the most innovative gothic element for Maturin is the use of the wanderer, who more than being solely a diabolic figure, becomes the catalyst of Maturin’s rhetorical implementation of his Calvinist doctrines. The darkness of the novel comes from several angles, but what may seem hard to take for any reader is the overarching feeling that the human being cannot do anything good on her own. The human experience appears as an immense, self-inflicted suffering, a paradise for sadists and masochists, but absolutely devoid of love and affection. There are occasions of hope, for instance, when monks in the convent try to alleviate the suffering of other monks, but the convent authorities immediately stifle such attempts. For Calvin, this overall affectivity stems from the adamantine character of original sin. In his debate with the Catholic theologian Albert Pighius, recorded in book form, Calvin expresses the absoluteness of this view in the following way: We say that man not only cannot do anything good but cannot even think it, so that he may learn to depend totally on God and, despairing of himself, to cast himself entirely upon him; and so that [man] may give the credit, if he has done anything good, to God and not to himself, and not render his praise to God for his good works in half measure only, but fully and wholly, leaving nothing for himself but the fact that he has received whatever he has from God.18

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The situation in all of the tales is that characters have been forced by external factors into extreme situations in which church power or other mundane circumstances or systems exploit human fear, suffering and herd behaviour. The central theme in Monçada’s story is that life has become totally externalised and sterile. By means of torture-like methods and various types of punishments—most prominently exclusion from the community and its posited God—individuals are coerced into obedience. In that way, what should be the house of God has become a nightmarish labyrinth, in which love cannot exist. An outstanding example of this coercive and autonomous force in the narratives is the tale of the two lovers in the convent. As yet another digression within Monçada’s tale, his despicable escape companion tells of “unnatural love” in the monastery. Not only did this evil character expose the love of the two individuals to the “Superior and his satellites”, he also takes pleasure in causing their suffering: “I was anxious to witness misery that might perhaps equal or exceed my own, and this is a curiosity not easily satisfied” (207). The crime of illicit love itself pales in the light of the cruel punishment of the imposed, institutionalised violence. The lovers are incarcerated in a room and the door is sealed. The escape companion, the wretched man, indulges in pleasure over the dying couple’s suffering. Voluntarily guarding the door, he mentally and physically feasts on their despair: “While I was eating, I actually lived on the famine that was devouring them…” (211). In the macabre resolution of this incident, the incarcerated pair revert to cannibalism: “[H]er lover, in the agony of hunger, had fastened his teeth in her shoulder;–that bosom on which he had so often luxuriated, became a meal to him now” (212–213). The crucial morbidity is actually not mainly situated on the sensationalist level. The more severe sickness is theological. Ultimately, for Maturin, this reveals the perversity of the lack of love and the institutionalised power that coerces individuals into impossible situations. This episode criticises not only Catholic Church tradition, but any mundane exercising of power that inevitably leads to further punishments and further perversion in never-ending concatenations of morbidity. Contradictory forces saturate this phenomenon too. It clearly draws attention to the proto-postmodern metafictional aspects of Maturin’s novel. The witness—sometimes the narrator, or the listener that something is narrated to, and always at any point the reader—will display the pivotal instance of attractive repulsion, which arguably is the foundation of the gothic genre and any other horror genre. When Monçada is incarcerated in the Jew’s house, he witnesses a lynching in the streets and he expresses the ambivalent affective dynamics that will accompany any moralising narration. One gets to see what one should not see, one gets a taste of the forbidden fruit, while being urged to spit it out. It is a fact, Sir, that while witnessing this horrible execution, I felt all the effects vulgarly ascribed to fascination. I shuddered at the first movement–the dull and deep whisper among the crowd. I shrieked involuntarily when the first decisive

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movements began among them; but when at last the human shapeless carrion was dashed against the door, I echoed the wild shouts of the multitude with a kind of savage instinct. I bounded–I clasped my hands for a moment–then I echoed the screams of the thing that seemed no longer to live, but still could scream; and I screamed aloud and wildly for life–life–and mercy!’ (256)

The attraction of the abject is here clearly displayed in the agony of the narrator. The scene highlights the aforementioned self-consciousness of the genre that Maturin wishes to expose in his own agony of seemingly having to write—for financial or whatever other reasons—within a genre that he despises. At the same time, it pushes through the Calvinist argument that human church institutions will produce anti-love structures that destroy Christianity from within. The obvious lynch mob affectivity goes completely against the Christian basic doctrine of Christ taking on the sin of humans with his own sacrifice, God sacrificing himself for the sake of humanity. This ritual is supposed to replace all other sacrificial rites, which it actually gradually did accomplish in Christened countries as Christianity spread across the world.19 However, the instinct of the crowd is to relieve its own Angst by the violence directed towards any scapegoat it can find. The literary argument that Maturin rhetorically pushes through is that humanity incarnates the pitch-dark autonomy of total depravity. Good works are useless. Human agency autonomously leads to further depravity. In the historical context, Keith M. C. O’Sullivan explains: Like The Monk, another overtly Protestant Gothic text, Roman Catholicism in Melmoth represents tyranny, a loathed abject. It is, as Miles puts it, ‘the convenient Other as foreign element’. As both cleric and as author, Maturin attacks Catholicism with a degree of ferocity unmatched even by Lewis or the Unitarian Radcliffe. In his sermon after Nelson’s death, Maturin professes his abhorrence for Italy: a people ‘among whom was raised and supported the colossal fabric of Antichrist’, and a place where ‘the cloister gave alternate shelter to the assassin and the devotee’. What is striking is the similarity, and undimmed zeal, of language in transference to Melmoth’s Iberian setting.20

What Maturin also makes sure to do is to link the episode explicitly to an Irish context in the footnotes, supposedly adding authenticity to the tales: “This circumstance occurred in Ireland 1797, after the murder of the unfortunate Dr. Hamilton. The officer was answered, on inquiring what was that heap of mud at his horse’s feet,–‘The man you came for.’” (Note, 256). Again, Maturin takes the opportunity to refer to a historical point of political and religious turmoil, zooming in on the year before the Irish Rebellion, which also contains some of the specifically Irish tensions, since the rebellion was initiated by a group of Presbyterians and then joined by big groups of Irish Catholics. Again, dichotomies seem to generate creative energy and will power that may even become a revolutionary force. Maturin’s own ambivalence in relation to such forces is all too clear in Melmoth. Moreover, the colonial aspects of Maturin’s work become even more complicated when adding the function of the

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Jew. According to Tony Wein, Maturin uses the Jew as a way of legitimising the Catholics: “The impossibility of converting the Jew makes the conversion of the Catholic possible. Accordingly, the Wanderer in this Romantic text symbolizes both more and less than universal mankind”.21 As forwarded by Katarzyna Bartoszynska, ´ “[w]ork on Irish literature often draws on history in order to explain form. This is particularly the case in studies of the Irish novel and, even more so, the nineteenth-century Irish novel”.22 Moreover, there seems to be a tendency to read Melmoth the Wanderer in two principally different ways. Either a more biographically oriented reading that most often stresses Maturin’s financial situation as the prime motivation for writing the novel, or a more philosophically, theologically and aesthetically preoccupied reading. Both of these strands are of course somewhat limiting if pursued individually in isolation. The concern here will be more what the actual form does, rather than anything else. As stated by Regina B. Oost: Often the novel’s critics account for readers’ discomfort by attributing Maturin with any number of philosophical and aesthetic motives; for David Morse and Mark Hennely, the novel is a nihilistic or existential work; for Leigh Ehlers, it dramatizes the breakdown of language and communication; for Kathleen Fowler, it recasts the Job story and thus forces a reader to rely on faith rather than reason to negotiate the narrative twists. It seems to me, though, that yet another account of the author’s seeming “malignance” might be offered: Maturin’s novel may be formally skewed because of its author’s determination to resist as much as possible the expectations of an audience from whom he needs money, yet whom he knows will stigmatize him.23

In terms of the textual lacunae that the novel manifestly displays, Oost’s set-up of the exegetic situation becomes urgent. What do these lost fragments mean? In order to try to answer this question, we cannot remain solely within the biographically engineered interpretative framework. A facile solution would perhaps be to suggest that Maturin just follows the conventions of the Radcliffean mode,24 but by doing that we have said nothing about what the textual aporias do in our theological reading. Fowler’s proposal that the reader would have to rely on faith to overlap the lacunae comes close to a possibility. As manifesting islands of unknowing, the reader’s patience is tested. These come as perpetual reminders of the fact that there is always more to know. Whatever judgement you need to make, there could always be more facts to base the decision on. This seems to be an epistemological universal. This level of (un)knowing invites the kind of Iago thinking that Monçada’s escape companion—who has a father murder on his CV as well—is wholly immersed in. It is ultimately a question of the critique of the bartering in suffering and fear, the clergy’s unabashed greed and scandalous behaviour, which arguably was the very igniting spark of the Reformation in the first place. In that way, the manuscriptural fragmentation points to another aspect of Maturin’s Calvinism, which is the theological assessment of false signs and false prophets, most palpably revealed through what a treacherous monk says

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on his deathbed, admitting that “I performed that miracle myself” (113). On Monçada’s question why he constructed this deception, he answers: ‘Because I was a monk, and wished for victims of my imposture to gratify my pride! and companions of my misery, to soothe its malignity!’ He was convulsed as he spoke, the natural mildness and calmness of his physiognomy were changed for something I cannot describe–something at once derisive, triumphant, and diabolical. (113)

This seemingly trivial little morsel of Monçada’s tale actually reveals something theologically profound. Perhaps it is possible to argue that the differences in the understanding of epistemological lacunae reveal the major Calvinist division of humanity into the elect and the non-elect. If one cannot let the realms of unknowing be, but compulsively has to pump them full with human substance or exploit them for selfish reasons and needs, one can probably not expect salvation within Calvinist exegesis.25 However, not even that can be stated with any absolute certainty, since these decisions rest in the hands of God, altogether beyond human knowledge. Monçada displays some understanding of this state of affairs, while the monk is completely depraved by convent life, which he himself reveals in his moment of soothsaying: “The repetition of religious duties, without the feeling or spirit of religion, produces an incurable callosity of heart” (112). If combining that statement with the following proposition, one gets Maturin’s Protestant critique in a nutshell: “The basis of all ecclesiastical power rests upon fear” (118). Thus, the true horror of Melmoth resides on a theological plane rather than somewhere else. The criticism of Catholic power also stretches into the basic controversy of the access to the Word of God, which draws attention to an even more ruthless exploitation of the lacunae of knowledge. In Monçada’s voice: “Must there not be something very wrong in the religion which thus substitutes external severities for internal amendment? I feel I am of an inquiring spirit, and if I could obtain a book they call the Bible, (which though they say it contains the words of Jesus Christ, they never permit us to see) I think—but no matter” (129). Withholding the words, that is, historically refusing to translate the Bible into the vernacular, of course, bears witness of a persistent refusal to relinquish any power at all; it indicates a dearth of faith and an unwillingness to allow any growth of faith whatsoever. In fact, this state of affairs calls for a direct comparison with the Bible. In the New Testament, we have the four canonical Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These are overlapping narratives and differences and similarities can be debated. However, the central theme is the same: The Gospel of love and the sacrifice of Christ. Similarly, the only thing carrying the reader through the excess of despair in Maturin’s variations on the theme of suffering would be Faith. The proximity to Truth in Melmoth ultimately comes from Melmoth the Wanderer “teaching” Immalee, and he unashamedly points out the pitch

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dark total depravity of mankind: “‘They come,’ said he, pointing to the European vessels, ‘from a world where the only study of the inhabitants is how to increase their own sufferings, and those of others, to the utmost possible degree; and considering they have only had 4000 years practice at the task, it must be allowed they are tolerable proficients.’” (300). The only possible hope is then the hope of Grace, which does not lie within the human power to effectuate. Calvin too repeatedly returns to the point of textual evidence as the only possible ground for Christianity, ecclesiastical tradition is nothing, Scripture is everything, Sola Scriptura: It is an essential first principle, [Pighius] says, that the rule of the orthodox belief be derived from the tradition of the church, because only that truth is to be believed which in no respect departs from it […] Behold the fellow’s splendid theology: whatever human beings have determined must be certain and genuine, but as for the word of God we shall have to see afterwards!26

Thus, the textual lacunae in Maturin’s gothic narrative illustrate the epistemological emptiness that necessarily is present universally. These gaps can only be bridged by Faith and by reading the words that are there, and leave the emptiness faithfully in the hands of God. A text is always greater than a summary of all its readings and definitely always larger than any author’s potential intentions, especially in the case of Melmoth. Explicit gaps only enhance this phenomenon. God speaks in the language of silence and revelation too. Christina Morin provides an adequate metaphor regarding the different tales’ connections thematically and affectively: [R]epetition and reflection construct[…] Melmoth’s various tales as, in effect, a house of mirrors – a convoluted maze of mirrors around which the fairgoercum-reader must navigate to find the exit / conclusion (or, as the case may be, the entrance / beginning). Myriad reflections of the subject, of course, make this a difficult feat, so that space and object, self and other become confused and confusing.27

This potential misperception may be felt by any reader of the novel, since quite often there arises a hesitation of who is actually narrating at certain given points (the tale within tale effect). In addition, the eye as such seems to be drawn towards its own destruction. Masochistically, the voyeuristic semiperpetrator may seem to witness her/himself as the victim at the same time. A narrative saturated with suffering eventually loses its bearing in terms of what actually is cause, and what is effect, in the overall maze or house of mirrors. As can be surmised, the driving forces of the novel are the numerous paradoxes and the ontological tensions on different levels.28 What ultimately makes it into a prominent gothic work is of course the impossibility of yoking desire. In craving the purity of God and the love of Christ—most clearly displayed in the character of Immalee—the world of the novel seems to endlessly produce additional morbidity. The protagonists of the tales

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inevitably “become uncannily attracted to the source of their own suffering”.29 Moreover, as Mark M. Hennely suggests, for some characters, as for instance Immalee, “dream and reality, the numinous and the phenomenological, have consequently become absurdly intermixed”.30 To translate the central paradox, we benefit from relating the novel’s violence and sensationalism to a more modern discourse. According to Amy Elizabeth Smith, the novel’s excesses of suffering seem to “produce a level of prurient, voyeuristic interest”.31 As mentioned, the crowd lynching that Monçada witnesses clearly exhibits this mechanism. The dying man that the horde slams on the door of the house where Monçada is hiding is described in gruesome detail: “Dragged from the mud and stones, they dashed a lump of mangled flesh right against the door of the house where I was. With his tongue hanging from the lacerated mouth, like that of a baited bull; with one eye torn from the socket, and dangling on his bloody cheek; with a fracture in every limb, and a wound for every pore, he still howled for ‘life–life–life–mercy!’ till a stone, aimed by some pitying hand struck him down” (255). The gaze of Monçada is inevitably drawn to the violence, which is attractive in its graphic repulsion. The focus on the dysfunctional eye of the victim is of pivotal importance. Since the gothic genre explores the subterranean networks of the human mind and culture, the eye gives us modern readers an entry-way into what I would claim is the transcendental strength of Maturin’s novel and potentially the gothic genre as such. All of the contextual paraphernalia could hypothetically be stripped away, but the paradoxical tensions of the horror-saturated voyeurism could not be extracted without the narrative losing its gothic energy. Eyes see and are seen and appear to carry some form of metaphysical energy. Early on in the frame narrative, the young Melmoth finds the portrait of his older relative Melmoth the Wanderer: Before he quitted [the room], he held up the dim light, and looked around him with a mixture of terror and curiosity. There was a great deal of decayed and useless lumber, such as might be supposed to be heaped up to rot in a miser’s closet; but John’s eyes were in a moment, and as if by magic, rivetted on a portrait that hung on the wall, and appeared, even to his untaught eye, far superior to the tribe of family pictures that are left to moulder on the walls of a family mansion. It represented a man of middle age. There was nothing remarkable in the costume, or in the countenance, but the eyes, John felt, were such as one feels they wish they had never seen, and feels they can never forget. Had he been acquainted with the poetry of Southey, he might have often exclaimed in his after-life, ‘Only the eyes had life, They gleamed with demon light.’—Thalaba. (17–18)

On the surface, there seems to be nothing remarkable about these eyes, more than that they potentially possess this demonic power. However, this whole scene reveals the phenomenology of eyes in terms of them incarnating the

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seeing and the seen and metonymically summarising the “mixture of terror and curiosity” that John Melmoth the younger expresses. His eyes are “rivetted” as if caught by “magic”. They are as yet innocent, “untaught”, which is what nails them to the eyes of experience and decadence. The link to Calvinism may seem distant, but in fact, the emphasis on total depravity produces what it aims to eradicate. The connection to Derrida’s deconstruction is here obvious, since the mutual contamination of the binary concepts pure-vs-tainted could fruitfully be analysed in terms of différance.32 Somehow, the end point of the voyeuristic impulse may seem to be constituted by the destruction of the eye, but that in itself is what propels desire even further. To inspect this phenomenon in stronger and more explicit light, we may turn to George Bataille, who has explored the eye through the grotesque lens of pornographic desire. In the novella Story of the Eye, the horrifically escalating desire eventually explodes in what could be seen as a philosophical and theological orgasm.33 Watching a bullfight becomes an intensification of arousal: Granero [the bullfighter] was thrown back by the bull and wedged against a ballustrade; the horns struck the balustrade three times at full speed; at the third blow, one horn plunged into the right eye and through the head. A shriek of unmeasured horror coincided with a brief orgasm for Simone, who was lifted up from the stone seat only to be flung back with a bleeding nose, under a blinding sun; men instantly rushed over to haul away Granero’s body, the right eye dangling from the head.34

The eyes continue to be a sexual obsession and in an orgy, the protagonists kill a Catholic priest in the act of sexual intercourse. The priest’s eye is cut out and given to Simone to play with: Simone gazed at the absurdity and finally took it in her hand, completely distraught; yet she had qualms, and instantly amused herself by fondling the depth of her thighs and inserting this apparently fluid object. The caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation is so bizarre that it has something of a rooster’s horrible crowing. Simone meanwhile amused herself by slipping the eye into the profound crevice of her arse, and after lying down on her back and raising her legs and bottom, she tried to keep the eye there simply by squeezing her buttocks together. But all at once, it spat out like a stone squeezed from a cherry, and dropped on the thin belly of the corpse, an inch or so from the cock.35

In Maturin’s novel, the underlying perversity of desire is shielded by a historically earlier and stricter decorum, but Melmoth clearly contains similar underlying structures. There is always more to see. The paradox here is that the destruction of the eye simultaneously establishes the limitlessness of seeing and implicitly the boundlessness of desire, as well as the paradoxical attraction to the abject. Any setting up of a border provokes imagination. This phenomenon also comments on the textual lacunae of the novel. Absences

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provoke epistemological desire that also contributes to the energy central in what makes up total depravity. In the example from Bataille, it becomes clear that this type of creative imagination can be pushed towards the limits of the (un)thinkable and also to the realms of the ridiculous and almost comically absurd, where the sacred has dissolved or merged with the violence of a cosmic climax, with a bang rather than a whimper. As we have seen, Maturin almost despite himself and his own ambivalences and doubts manages to compose a gothic gem that has stood the test of time. The energy stems mainly from the many tensions and paradoxes that seem to come together with the Irish context and Maturin’s peculiar theological position. The rhetoric of the Calvinist theology also provokes narratological energy. In the theological context mainly pursued here, gothic props and paraphernalia are endowed with a different glow. In any case, the gothic power becomes concentrated through autonomous voyeurism and the violence of human depravity. The ferocious eradication of the eye releases the boundless energy of desire. Maturin had the courage to mould it into an aesthetic object.

Notes 1. This has definitely been said about the Melmoth character itself: “Melmoth the Wanderer is a creature composed of conflicting elements” (Veronica M. S. Kennedy, “Myth and the Gothic Dream: C. R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer” (Pacific Coast Philology, 4, 1969), 41–47, 42. 2. Joseph W. Lew, “‘Unprepared for Sudden Transformations’: Identity and Politics in Melmoth the Wanderer (The Romantic Novel)” (Studies in the Novel, 26:2, 1994), 173–195, 175. 3. Ashley Marshall, “Melmoth Affirmed: Maturin’s Defense of Sacred History” (Studies in Romanticism, 47:2, 2008), 121–145, 131. 4. Jim Hansen, “The Wrong Marriage: Maturin and the Double-Logic of Masculinity in the Unionist Gothic” (Studies in Romanticism, 47:3, 2008), 351–369, 354. 5. Ibid., 356. 6. Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). All subsequent parenthetical references are to this edition of the novel. 7. Marshall, “Melmoth Affirmed”, 137. 8. Jack Null, “Structure and Theme in Melmoth the Wanderer” (Papers on Language & Literature, 13:2, 1977), 136–147, 144. 9. Ibid. 10. In fact, the structure is not particularly far-fetched and hard to follow when it is outlined. As pointed out by G. St. John Stott, the overall structure is rather clear: within the frame story we have the two tales of Stanton and the Spaniard. Within the Spaniard’s tale we have the Indian’s tale, which in turn contains the tales of the Guzman Family

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and the Lovers’ story. C.f. “The Structure of Melmoth the Wanderer” (Études Irlandaises, 12:1, 1987), 41–52, 42. There are in addition shorter digressions within some of the tales. 11. C.f. Joakim Wrethed, “The Postmodern Genre”, The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, Clive Bloom (ed) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_67. Especially noteworthy are the connections between the two works in terms of form, fragmentation, use of footnotes etc. 12. For a detailed outline of this process, see e.g. Sharon Ragaz, “Maturin, Archibald Constable, and the Publication of Melmoth the Wanderer” (Review of English Studies, 57:230, 2006), 359–373. 13. Marshall, 121–122. 14. This may be seen in Dermot A. Ryan’s argument that Maturin is attacking the Catholic church in its sprawling capacity as an international system. According to Ryan, this thinking comes mainly as an after-effect of the French Revolution, “‘This Vast Machine’: Catholicism as System in Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer” (Gothic Studies, 16:2, 2014), 20–32. 15. William Blake, “London”, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetry foundation.org/poems/43673/london-56d222777e969. Accessed 28 April 2021. 16. David Clark Mitchell, “A New ‘Rhetoric of Darkness’: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, John Connolly and the Irish Gothic” (Oceánide, 13, 2020), 95–102, 95. See also Jarlath Killeen, The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction—Histories, Origins, Theories (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Here Ireland is described as belonging to a long tradition in which it is described “as a zone of weirdness, the supernatural and the pathological” (2). 17. Keith M. C. O’Sullivan. “His Dark Ingredients: The Viscous Palimpsest of Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer” (Gothic Studies, 18:2), 74–85, 76. 18. John Calvin. The Bondage and Liberation of the Will: A Defence of the Orthodox Doctrine of Human Choice Against Pighius. Edited by A. N. S. Lane (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1996). 19. Christian A. Eberhart and Donald Schweitzer, “The Unique Sacrifice of Christ According to Hebrews 9: A Study in Theological Creativity” (Religions 10:1, 2019, 47), 1–14 (PDF), 12. 20. O’Sullivan, “His Dark Ingredients”, 79 [footnotes removed]. 21. Toni Wein, “Fixing Ireland/Fixing the Jew in Melmoth the Wanderer” (Patterns of Prejudice, 40:1, 2006), 1–24, 23. 22. Katarzyna Bartoszynska, ´ “Constructing a Case: Reflections on Comparative Studies, World Literature, and Theories of the Novel’s Emergence” (Comparative Literature, 69:3, 2017), 271–287, 275.

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23. Regina B. Oost, “‘Servility and Command’: Authorship in Melmoth the Wanderer” (Papers on Language & Literature, 31:3, 1995), 291–312, 306. 24. This was of course a standard well-known convention to the readership at the time. As Chris Baldick states in the introduction to the Oxford edition of Melmoth: “A significant part of the Gothic novel’s appeal to its first readers […] was that its claustrophobic evocation of scheming, idolatrious Spaniards and Italians allowed Protestant readers in Britain to congratulate themselves on their liberty and pious rectitude” (Maturin, xii). 25. This phenomenon may also be seen purely psychoanalytically in terms of loss: “salvation and loss are inextricably bound up with each other: there is no salvation without incurring a sense of loss, no loss without the hope of salvation” (Linda B. Jones, “‘The Terrors of a Guilty Sleep’” (Gothic Studies, 2:1, 2000), 50–60, 58). 26. Calvin, The Bondage, 65. 27. Christina Morin, Charles Robert Maturin and the Haunting of Irish Romantic Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 143, [footnote removed]. 28. Using Melmoth as the prime example Leven M. Dawson displays “the numerous ways in which paradox is a central part of Gothic fiction and […] it is just here, in the use of paradox, that Gothic fiction has its greatest philosophical depth and value, and makes contact with what is most valuable in romanticism”, “Melmoth the Wanderer: Paradox and the Gothic Novel” (Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 8:4, 1968), 621–632, 621. 29. Nathaniel Leach, “The Ethics of Excess in Melmoth the Wanderer” (Gothic Studies, 13:1, 2011), 21–37, 23. 30. Mark M., Jr. Hennelly, “Melmoth the Wanderer and Gothic Existentialism” (Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 21:4, 1981), 665–679, 671. 31. Amy Elizabeth Smith, “Experimentation and ‘Horrid Curiosity’ in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer” (English Studies, 74:6, 1993), 524– 535, 525. 32. C.f. Dale Townshend and his analysis of nature-vs-culture (that implies the pure-vs-tainted binary) in “Transgression, Writing and Violence in Romantic Gothic Fiction, 1794–1820” (Journal of Literary Studies, 13:1/2, 1997), 151–189, 178. 33. For a more thorough theoretical connection between Bataille and the gothic, see Giles Whiteley, “Three French Modernists”, The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, Clive Bloom (ed) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3030-33136-8_65. 34. Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye (London: Penguin Classics, 2001), 53. 35. Ibid., 66.

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Bibliography Bartoszynska, ´ Katarzyna, “Constructing a Case: Reflections on Comparative Studies, World Literature, and Theories of the Novel’s Emergence” (Comparative Literature, 69:3, 2017), 271–287. Bataille, Georges, Story of the Eye (London: Penguin Classics, 2001). Blake, William, “London”, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ poems/43673/london-56d222777e969. Accessed 28 April 2021. Calvin, John, The Bondage and Liberation of the Will: A Defence of the Orthodox Doctrine of Human Choice Against Pighius. Edited by A. N. S. Lane (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1996). Clark Mitchell, David, “A New ‘Rhetoric of Darkness’: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, John Connolly and the Irish Gothic” (Oceánide, 13, 2020), 95–102. Dawson, Leven, M., “Melmoth the Wanderer: Paradox and the Gothic Novel” (Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 8:4, 1968), 621–632. Eberhart, Christian A. and Donald Schweitzer, “The Unique Sacrifice of Christ According to Hebrews 9: A Study in Theological Creativity” (Religions, 10:1, 2019, 47), 1–14 (PDF). Hansen, Jim, “The Wrong Marriage: Maturin and the Double-Logic of Masculinity in the Unionist Gothic” (Studies in Romanticism, 47:3, 2008), 351–369. Hennelly, Mark M., Jr., “Melmoth the Wanderer and Gothic Existentialism” (Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 21:4, 1981), 665–679. Jones, Linda B., “‘The Terrors of a Guilty Sleep’” (Gothic Studies, 2:1, 2000), 50–60. Kennedy, Veronica M. S., “Myth and the Gothic Dream: C. R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer” (Pacific Coast Philology, 4, 1969), 41–47. Killeen, Jarlath, The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction—Histories, Origins, Theories (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Leach, Nathaniel, “The Ethics of Excess in Melmoth the Wanderer” (Gothic Studies, 13:1, 2011), 21–37. Lew, Joseph W., “‘Unprepared for Sudden Transformations’: Identity and Politics in Melmoth the Wanderer” (Studies in the Novel, 26:1/2, 1994), 173–195. Marshall, Ashley, “Melmoth Affirmed: Maturin’s Defense of Sacred History” (Studies in Romanticism, 47:2, 2008), 121–145. Morin Christina, Charles Robert Maturin and the Haunting of Irish Romantic Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). Null, Jack, “Structure and Theme in Melmoth the Wanderer” (Papers on Language & Literature, 13:2, 1977), 136–147. O’Sullivan, Keith M. C., “His Dark Ingredients: The Viscous Palimpsest of Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer” (Gothic Studies, 18:2, 2016), 74–85. Oost, Regina B., “‘Servility and Command’: Authorship in Melmoth the Wanderer” (Papers on Language & Literature, 31:3, 1995), 291–312. Ragaz, Sharon, “Maturin, Archibald Constable, and the Publication of Melmoth the Wanderer” (Review of English Studies, 57:230, 2006), 359–373. Ryan, Dermot A, “‘This Vast Machine’: Catholicism as System in Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer” (Gothic Studies, 16:2, 2014), 20–32. Smith, Amy Elizabeth, “Experimentation and ‘Horrid Curiosity’ in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer” (English Studies, 74:6, 1993), 524–535. Stott, G. St John, “The Structure of Melmoth the Wanderer” (Études Irlandaises, 12:1, 1987), 41–52.

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Townshend, Dale, “Transgression, Writing and Violence in Romantic Gothic Fiction, 1794–1820” (Journal of Literary Studies, 13:1/2, 1997), 151–189. Wein, Toni, “Fixing Ireland/Fixing the Jew in Melmoth the Wanderer” (Patterns of Prejudice, 40:1, 2006), 1–24. Whiteley, Giles, “Three French Modernists”, The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, Clive Bloom (ed) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Cham. https://doi.org/10. 1007/978-3-030-33136-8_65. Wrethed, Joakim, “The Postmodern Genre”, The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, Clive Bloom (ed) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Cham. https://doi.org/10. 1007/978-3-030-33136-8_67.

The Vrykolakas, the Wandering Jew, and the Flying Dutchman Simon Bacon

The Gothic is a palace built on subterranean vaults and a past that will not die. Its architecture, as with Gaston Bachelard’s Oneiric House is built upon a cellar of dark longings, repressed desires, and traumatic memories.1 Indeed, one might suggest that it is a structure that rises from the undead memory of the past. Whilst this often seems to involve entities that are more spectral in nature, there are many that are more physical in their unwillingness to rest in peace. For many of these undead memories, their return to the living is not of their own choosing but forced upon them. In this sense, the Gothicization of the house is because it is built on ground that will not allow the dead to rest in it. Well-known Gothic figures such as the vampire, who needs to sleep in home soil would seem to contradict this yet even Dracula was compelled to leave his Gothic ruin in search of a peace that was not allowed him where he was. The article then will look at the figures of the vrykolakas, the Wandering Jew, and the Flying Dutchman that were all cursed from finding peace in the ground and were forced to eternally roam the corridors and hallways of the Gothic edifice. The three figures all share common characteristics, some taken from their chronological predecessor in this group, and others from the wellspring we might call the Gothic Imagination or a cultural subconscious. They are all sources of inspiration for the Gothic trope of the eternal outsider or wanderer,

S. Bacon (B) Poznan, ´ Poland

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_28

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created under a curse and the harbinger of bad luck or worse. The three characters will be addressed chronologically, at least in terms of the content of the mythology or folklore that they were created from, and will be followed in their evolution up to the period of Gothic that emerged from the first decades of the nineteenth century. Of the three it is the vrykolakas that has the oldest history, and although often thought of as the Greek version of the Slavic vampire is something a little more complex. In fact, Greece has two types of entities that come under the term ‘vampire’; the first is wholly supernatural, demonic creatures not unlike the lamia that often feed on the blood of infants, young mothers, or virgins of either sex; the other is a revenant, someone who has died and returned from the dead—rejected from gaining peace in the ground to wander amongst the living. Interestingly the vrykolakas only moved more exclusively to human blood after the arrival of Slavic immigrants after 587—before that, they had a penchant for human livers. However, the birth of the vrykolakas goes much further back into Greek myth and the interruption of the passage between life and death, specifically in relation to a blood oath. Ancient Greece had very strict burial rites and any diversion from them could have serious consequences. John Cuthbert Lawson notes a theme in Greek literature and tragedy of oaths causing the speaker and others to be denied entry to Hades and spurned by the earth. Lawson goes on to list Euripides’ Hippolytus who gives an oath to his father that if he is lying that ‘neither sea nor earth receive my flesh’,2 and also Aeschylus’ Choephori where the victim is to die with none to honour him, disallowing entrance to the land of the dead and the corruption of his flesh.3 Hellenistic convention did not allow for anything but the slightest mentions of what this actually meant— talking of the undead was something of a cultural taboo—except for one case, that of Philinnion. The story is simultaneously apocryphal and real, in a way that reminds one of the stories both official and anecdotal that swirled around the events of the European vampire panic at the start of the eighteenth century. It centres on a letter written in the late Hellenistic period between two urban officials about an extraordinary event that took place in Amphipolis. The letter was later accepted as genuine by Phlegon of Tralles who copied it into his collection On Marvels under embodied ghost stories. The following version of the story was related by the philosopher Proklos and tells of the recently married Philinnion who dies and is placed in the family tomb. Around six months later, a young man Machates lodges with the deceased girls’ parents. Not long after he is visited at night by a young girl. They exchange gifts and the girl leaves. On the second night the housemaid catches glimpse of the pair and is convinced that the girl is Philinnion and alerts the parents, but they arrive too late to see her. They confront Machates who shows them the gifts the girl gave him, and the parents begin weeping recognizing their deceased daughters’ belongings. That night the parents are alerted when Philinnion appears and they confront her. However, it is the daughter who scolds them for begrudging her time with the young man—in

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some versions this, third visit would have guaranteed Philinnion rejoining the ranks of the living—and she vows to cause them to grieve anew and promptly drops dead on the bed. At this point, the writer of the original letter, Hipparchos, hears of the events and organizes an assembly to go to Philinnion’s tomb, where there is nothing to save the gifts given to her by Machates. They then go to the parent’s house and the girl’s body is spread upon the bed in the guest room. Alarmed by this, and under the advice of the local seers, the body is taken outside of the city, burned and purification rituals performed.4 The story is important for its key points that have remained part of vampire lore and influenced the Gothic genre; the nightly visits with the third being of particular importance—vampires often require three visits to turn victims; a redemption/breaking of a curse through love—several nineteenth century theatrical adaptations of Polidori’s The Vampyre saw the vampire breaking a curse if they were loved and see Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992); marriage to or love for an undead person—as seen in la Morte Amoureuse (The Dead In Love) from 1836 by Theophile Gautier, The Pale Lady (1849) by Alexandre Dumas, and The Vampire and the Devils Son (1852) by Ponsin du Terrail; the undead returning to their family house; and the need to perform rituals to destroy the undead. The last is of particular note as it highlights both the highly transgressive nature of the returned and also the fear they inspire. Lawson extends this to an almost existential dread in his reading of bloodguilt and vengeance which necessarily includes those who were murdered and/or not given the proper burial rites. This Lawson explains is why the victims’ bodies of such acts were often mutilated by the perpetrators, cutting off their hands and feet and binding them to the corpses’ chest, or tucking them under their armpits in an attempt to stop them digging their way out of the grave and wandering the earth in search of them—this makes an interesting addition to the more common tales of suspected vampires staked to the bottom of their graves, or purposely laid face down when buried.5 From Lawson’s discussion, it becomes apparent that those forced to wander the earth in search of vengeance are both highly violent and able to turn those they bite into vrykolakas as well. This also explains the differences, and similarities between these proto-vrykolakas and their later kith and kin, with the precursors being more ‘Avengers’ of wrongs done to them—Lawson sees the Furies or Erinyes in their pursuit of Orestes as an example of this—with the more modern versions indiscriminately taking out their revenge on any they encounter. Consequently, it is the ancient Greeks belief in the potential problems of passing between worlds and the possibility of one’s soul being rejected peace in the earth and entry to Hades that fueled their fear of being an eternal wanderer, or one of the restless dead; a liminal being adrift in the world. Lawson sums up this transition from the old to new forms of vrykolakas, the ‘unnatural’ selection process of the undead, as follows :

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all revenants were originally called, alastores, “Wanderers”; but subsequently that name was restricted only to the vengeful class of revenants, to which the names miastores and prostropaioi had always belonged; and for the more harmless and purely pitiable revenants no name remained, but men said of such an one simply, “He wanders”.6

Not withstanding that, Lawson still argues that the vrykolakas have beginnings that do not come from common lore but through shared literature and literary heritage. This in itself posits an interesting undead memory within the figure as it evolves so that even as the influences of other cultures and lores affect the construction of the creature there is still this origin memory ‘wandering’ within it. The name vrykolakas actually came later than the characteristics that defined it and the word itself finds its roots in the Slavic word varkolak, ˇ with the first part, which is also pronounced wilk in Polish and vilk in Lithuanian, meaning ‘wolf’ and second part meaning ‘covered in the hair/fur of, a wolf’. This tended to mean werewolf, which has a long history in central and Eastern Europe, though folklore in Croatia, Bosnia Herzegovina, and Montenegro used it in relation to the vampire—Bulgaria saw varkolak ˇ as a subspecies of ‘vampir’ [vampires]. It is not fully clear why Greece changed over so fully to the new name for creatures that already existed in their own folklore. Whilst some have noted the similarities between Slavic vampires and the Greek avenging undead, and that in Eastern Europe, it was believed that a werewolf that died would become a vampire, it sounds far from convincing why a new word for an existing entity would be adopted. That said, the vrykolakas did look much like their Slavic counterparts, being red in colour and bloated like a drum after drinking blood. They were generally malevolent roaming around the countryside, causing damage and starting epidemics. It was said that they would knock on someone’s door and call out to them to answer—oddly prefiguring Ben Cortman from Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954)—and if no one replied they would move on. If someone did answer they too would become a vrykolakas. Curiously it is also reported that they would suffocate the sleeping by sitting on them, not unlike the incubus in John Fuseli’s The Nightmare. If left alone, however, vrykolakas only become more powerful and so it needed to be destroyed when encountered. This is not as simple as one might think as many legends state they only sleep on a Saturday—as does the Bulgarian vampire—but once the body is found it can be exorcized, beheaded, impaled, or cut into pieces though the most successful is cremating, as seen in the unresting dead in Ancient Greece, which allows the soul to leave the animated corpse. Despite its activity in Greece, it was not until the seventeenth century that the vrykolakas began to get mentioned in Western Europe. Leo Allatius, the Greek librarian of the Vatican, wrote De quorundam Graecorum Opinationibus, in 1645 within which he notes the word vrykolakas comes from words meaning ‘cesspool’ and is an evil person, possibly excommunicated, who

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is bloated like a drum. Speaking to the monster during the day makes it disappear but to kill it you must find its distended body in the grave—Allatius claims to have witnessed this as a boy in Chios—and then cremate it. This was followed in 1657 by Father Francois Richard’s, Relation de l’Isle de Sant-erini where the vrykolakas are far more demonic in conception and by the Devils instruction can wander and satiate themselves with blood. Accordingly, if the bloated body of the creature is found it can be exorcised and will dissolve away to nothing. A curious tale also told by Father Richards was of a usurer who atoned in later life but died before paying off all his debts. Before his demise, he had asked his wife to make good on them after his death. But she did not, and it was not long before strange events began to occur in the town, even to the point of the returned husband harassing the local Mother Prioress. Although the body was disinterred and exorcised the disturbances continued. It was only once his wife had repaid the outstanding debts that peace was restored. This is of note as it bears some relation to the Medieval stories of the ‘grateful dead’ another wanderer that could not find peace in the ground. The grateful dead are those who have been denied a proper burial, and because of not completing the proper rites of passage between this world and the next are stuck here. In the tales, which occur across Europe, a stranger or traveler pays for the body to be properly buried but before the dead can move on, they must repay that debt.7 Interestingly these accounts of vrykolakas were published just as Eastern Europe was about to experience its own outbreak of the undead who similarly needed to be staked, decapitated, or burnt in their graves. Because vrykolakas were thought unable to cross, saltwater suspected bodies were sometimes taken out to and left on islands. An account that received much attention was that of French traveler Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, who published A Voyage Into the Levant, in 1718 and which told of his tour across Greece and Asia Minor at the turn of the century. On Mycone, he encountered a panic caused by a murdered local who had returned from the dead to annoy the locals. The body was disinterred, and the heart removed and reburied, but the disturbances only increased. At this point, the villagers decided to take the body to another island and cremate it, against canon of the Orthodox Church, though oddly reminiscent of the story of Philinnion. Although reports were fewer until the start of the nineteenth century, the vrykolakas was actually more widely known than its Slavic relations through its appearances in theological treatises, travel accounts, and books on occultism. So much so that, Álvaro García Marín has claimed that ‘that if we were to judge from the standpoint of a Western European of 1730 or 1820, Dracula without any doubt, should have been Greek’.8 This might seem an extravagant claim but we should remember that Polidori’s Lord Ruthven from The Vampyre (1819) chooses to reveal his vrykolakian tendencies in Greece and the action revolves around an oath—the one that Ruthven fools Aubrey into making. In fact, many of the theatrical adaptations of Polidori’s novel from Charles Nodiers le Vampire (1820) to Dion Boucicault’s The Phantom (1852)

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centred on the idea of a pledge or blood oath, and of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula involves something not dissimilar to a blood oath as the vampire recounts his connection to the land via blood, an undead memory that drives him on and will not let him rest. As this story necessarily stops at Ruthven’s journey to Greece, but it begins to lay out the trope of the restless dead that are forced to wander the world as the ground will not let them rest within its embrace. A similar figure which has roots potentially even further back in time but only appeared in later ‘folklore’ is the Wandering Jew. As with the vrykolakas, the figure of the Wandering Jew has ‘literary’ precursors rooted in blood and curses that prevent the ground from receiving him and so forcing him to wander the earth. The figure of the Wandering Jew arises from very specific interpretations of various biblical stories all of which involve a curse, devotion, or revenge. The first goes back to the Genesis story of Cain and Abel, where the former murders the latter, lies to God, and is subsequently forced to wander the earth, enacting a typical blood curse. The stories take place after the expulsion from Eden and Abel and Cain are part of the first settled community with the brothers representing animal farming and agriculture respectively. Cain’s connection to the land makes God’s curse on him particularly interesting as he tells him ‘Listen! your brother’s blood cries out to me from the soil. And so, cursed shall you be by the soil that gaped with its mouth to take your brother’s blood from your hand. If you till the soil, it will no longer give you strength. A restless wanderer shall you be on the earth’.9 God is commanding the soil to reject Cain, a man who depends on it for his life. He has no life and seemingly no death either, as the ground will reject him. It is never explicitly stated that Cain cannot die but God threatens to curse sevenfold anyone who kills him—characters in the early stages of biblical history lived very long lives (Methuselah lived until he was 969) meaning Cain would live for a considerable time, and in some versions indefinitely. The next possible version of the origin story of the Wandering Jew comes from Hosea 9:17. An Old Testament book of prophesies dated to around 760–720 BC speaks of a nation in decline and a people turning away from their traditional beliefs. As a prophet, Hosea then warns the Israelites that ‘My God will reject them because they have not listened to him; they shall be wanderers among the nations’. There is neither a sense of a curse or eternity here but the sense of being forced to ‘wander’ carries on from the story of Cain and is reinforced by the New Testament and later Christian Anti-Semitism. The New Testament itself contains two possible versions of the Wandering Jew with vastly different meanings, both of which have found purchase in later tales. The first one is that the Wandering Jew is Jesus’ most loved disciple. This comes from Matthew 16:23 when Jesus is quoted as saying ‘Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom’. This was seen to mean that whichever disciple Jesus loved most would remain alive until the second coming. However, in response to this, and suggesting that

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the belief was popular enough to need suppressing, in the later John 21:21– 23 this is rephrased ‘Jesus saith to him, If I will that he remain till I come, what is that to thee? follow thou Me. Then this saying went forth among the brethren, that that disciple would not die; yet Jesus had not said to him that he would not die; but, If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?’ This of course only means that one requires Jesus’ will to wander eternally. This would seem a rather redundant diversion except for later Medieval texts talking of the legend of the Wandering Jew. The Flores Historiarum [Flowers of History] (1228) by Roger of Wendover tells the story of a Jew named Cartaphilus who is awaiting Christ’s second coming—Cartaphilus the root of the name is ‘kartos’ and ‘philos’ meaning ‘dearly’ and ‘loved’—even though the culmination of the tale is less positive. The man was later baptized as Joseph giving rise to the name Joseph Cartaphilus and this name has also been attributed to the Wandering Jew. As noted by Mary Ellen Snodgrass, ‘Identified as Joseph Cartaphilus, a Porter to Pontius Pilot or an officer in the Sanhedrin, the Wandering Jew supposedly mocked Jesus on the way to execution on Golgotha…Jesus halted long enough to condemn Cartaphilus to an unending earthly journey until Judgement Day’.10 The other instance is equally ambiguous and cites two possible events as the root and both are in the gospel of John. In John 18:19–23, a nameless guard of the high priest slaps Jesus, making him a prime suspect for such a curse, though slightly earlier in John 18:10, Peter strikes the ear off a servant named Melchus, and this name seems to have stuck being attributed both to the earlier guard and subsequently the Wandering Jew. As with Cartaphilus, before Melchus would is a name that recurs within the development of the legend. Whilst the idea of the Wandering Jew continued as something of an urban legend, often in relation to the crusades, it was Roger of Wendover’s text mentioned above that solidified details that would stay with the legend ever afterwards. The story is about a Bishop from Armenia who visited the monks of St. Albans and they asked to hear about Joseph of Arimathea. It seems that he was a shoemaker who had berated Jesus on his way to crucifixion and was cursed to remain on earth until the second coming. Since then he had changed his name to Cartaphilus and converted to Christianity and now led a hermits life. Interestingly here every one hundred years the Wandering Jew returns to the physical age of 30, which can be oddly seen to link to Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’ (1400) where an old man, the Wandering Jew, looks for someone to exchange their youth for his old age.11 The legend found new impetuous in 1602 in the pamphlet Kurtze Beschreibung und Erzählung von einem Juden mit Namen Ahasverus [Short Description and Tale of a Jew with the Name Ahasuerus], both the name of the original printer and where it was printed have since proven erroneous, but it was so popular that eight editions were printed that year, and then a subsequent forty, see the story quickly travel around Western Europe. It retold the earlier story but with the Bishop of Hamburg meeting the Jewish shoemaker, a now dishevelled, distracted character who was thinking to soon move on. Here

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his name was now Ahasver, or Ahasuerus, which is ‘Xerxes’ and the Persian King from the Book of Esther whose name amongst medieval Jews exampled the idea of a fool, though also could relate to the persecution of the Jews during that period when they were scattered across the Persian Empire. In this sense, the Wandering Jew became an umbrella term to symbolize the man cursed by Jesus and the Israelites banishment from their homeland by God, both cited as reasons for continued Anti-Semitism in Europe. A vilification that saw the figure of the Wandering Jew become a bogeyman to scare children and the faithful and as justification for hatred, persecution, and expulsion across Europe. In fact, during the Reformation sightings of the Wandering Jew became a convenient way to prove the veracity of the crucifixion, as indeed did the scapegoating of the Jewish community in general, consequently, there was a steady stream of claimed appearances of him; Hamburg (1547), Spain (1575), Vienna (1599), Lübeck (1601), Prague (1602), Lübeck (1603), Bavaria (1604), Ypres (1623), Brussels (1640), Leipsic (1642), Paris (1644), Stamford (1658), Astrakhan (1672), Frankenstein (1676), Munich (1721), Altbach (1766), Brussels (1774), and Newcastle (1790). As such, he was the quintessential figure of alienation and otherness; never welcome and never able to rest; the never-ending wrath of God.12 In the Romantic period, the idea of the tragic, mysterious wanderer was extremely appealing with one of the first works of note to include the figure being Christian Frederich Daniel Schubart’s ‘Der ewige Jude’ (1783), the first of many German works to include the cursed Ahasuerus, and which would provide inspiration for Percy Bysshe Shelley. Following this was the comprehensive ‘der ewige Jude’ (1785) by Heinrich August Ottokar Reichard which chronicled the wanderer’s journey throughout history. Of special importance in establishing the Wandering Jew in both the popular and the Romantic/Gothic imagination was The Monk (1796) by Matthew Lewis. Marie Mulvey-Roberts goes as far to say that it launched the Wandering Jews career in English literature13 and there is argument for that given the ongoing influence of Lewis’s novel. The character appears only briefly and is mysterious enough that some have identified him as Doctor Faustus sent on nefarious business by the devil himself. His appearance is striking, and worth repeating from the novel as it is one that holds much resonance with later texts: His countenance was strongly marked, and his eyes were large, black, and sparkling: Yet there was something in his look, which the moment that I saw him, inspired me with a secret awe, not to say horror. ...a band of black velvet which circled his fore-head spread over his features an additional gloom. His countenance wore the marks of profound melancholy; his step was slow, and his manner grave, stately, and solemn.14

The character reveals his identity later in the narrative:

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Fate obliges me to be constantly in movement; I am not permitted to pass more than a fortnight in the same place... I envy those who enjoy the quiet of the grave; but death eludes me and flies from my embrace... God has set his seal up on me, and all his creatures respect this fatal mark.15

The ‘fatal mark’ is a burning cross upon his forehead and directly equates to the mark of Cain, as one cursed by God and whose penance and/or sacrifices are never enough to gain redemption. In Lewis’s story, he is not an evil figure, but more of a mysterious stranger who spurns the company of others—a trope that runs through much Romantic and Gothic literature— indeed he even helps Don Raymond in the tale by ridding him of the ghost of the Bleeding Nun that haunts him. The Wandering Jew reveals his mark to the ghost causing it such fear that the Bleeding Nun reveals her history and the location of her bones, which allows Raymond and the Jew to give her eternal rest. The Wandering Jew is then seen as a tragic hero, giving the ghost the means to find peace and rest that he can never enjoy. Although the scene is brief it created much interest in other authors of the time. One of these was Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798), which will only be mentioned briefly here as it will receive more attention in the next section on The Flying Dutchman. Of note is the description of the Mariner’s eyes that are taken from The Monk. Lewis’s Wandering Jew had ‘large, black, sparkling eyes’ that could inspire fear and horror, but Coleridge further describes them as causing a fear that was mesmeric. It was the hypnotic eyes that would cling to the figure of the Wanderer, even though the Mariner is never named as the infamous Jew, and would later influence Gothic tales such as Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin 1820), Trilby (du Maurier 1895), and Dracula (Stoker 1897). William Godwin was also taken with the figure of the Wandering Jew and had alluded to it in his first novel Caleb Williams (1794) where the main character disguises himself as a Jew to escape detection, subsequently and describing himself as cut off from ‘sympathy, kindness, and the goodwill of mankind’.16 However, in his second book St. Leon (1799), this connection is even more explicit. Set in the sixteenth century its hero, St. Leon, discovers the secrets of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life through Rosicrucian knowledge, which sets him at odds with the Spanish Catholic Church and the Inquisition. Forced to flee he becomes a Wanderer, persecuted by Christians and unable to linger anywhere, but able to rejuvenate himself with the elixir—this citing the earlier idea of the Wandering Jew rejuvenating every one hundred years. The connection between St. Leon and the Jewish community is established later in the narrative when he is taken in by the Jew Mordecai because they recognize each other’s outsider status— unusually for the period, Godwin gives a favourable description of the Jewish family and wider community. As noted earlier, Shelley was very taken with the idea of the Wandering Jew and it appears in Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (1809–1810) written by Shelley and his sister Elizabeth. In the poem, ‘Ghasta: or the

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Avenging Demon’ the main character is the Wandering Jew who is identified by his ‘flaming brow’ and ‘sparkling eye’—the ‘flaming’ due to the mark of Gods curse. Shelley returned to the Wandering Jew again in his poem of the same name written with his cousin Thomas Medwin. Probably written around the same time as ‘Ghasta’, it was not published until later with one version published in 1829 and a considerably different one in 1831. Along with the ‘Ahasaurus’ section of Queen Mab (1813), they all reference Shubart’s tale where the Wandering Jew is banished by an angel of death who dispatches a black demon to chase him forever. Two thousand years later, Ahasaurus recounts all those he has lost and his failed attempts to die even to the point of jumping into Mount Etna. This last point is one that appealed to Shelley and appears in his ‘Wandering Jew’—interestingly, this is also used in Varney the Vampire (Rhymer and Prest, 1845–1847) as the undead creatures means of final demise. Shelley’s ‘The Wandering Jew’ creates a confrontation between Ahasaurus and Christ so that the poet might find his own redemption. Such redemption is not found in the final novel looked at in relation to the Wandering Jew, Melmoth the Wanderer from 1820. The story is not specifically about the Wandering Jew, but as was common in the Romantic period mixed in something of a Faustian pact for eternal life. Melmoth the Wanderer is a scholar who sold his soul to the devil for extended life in 1646, but is now looking for someone to take over that debt before his soul is completely lost—as mentioned earlier this was equally a feature of vampirerelated theatre of the time that often required the undead to provide the life of a virgin or such to continue or get out of a demonic pact. The narrative covers the Wanderers life through a series of reminiscences and nesting stories to provide a critique of nineteenth-century England and Catholicism—in this sense it links to Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1814) which features many interlinked and nesting tales including ones on vampires and the Wandering Jew as a means to comment on contemporaneous society. Unlike Lewis’s Wandering Jew though, Melmoth is a wholly malignant character delighting in the misfortune of others and bringing bad luck and death wherever he travels. Interestingly those who try to track him down seem to live similarly long lives, bringing to mind something of the vampire and its nemesis, Count Dracula and Van Helsing, seen in later adaptations of Stoker’s novel. Melmoth also has an arresting gaze that can cause people to lose their sanity and even the portrait of him at which his descendant John Melmoth looks at, has eyes that follow and affect those beholding them. The story tells of John Melmoth discovering the history of his mysterious ancestor charting his progress up into the present at which moment the Wanderer bursts in on the young man. At this point, as with many Gothic wanderers, what occurs is uncertain. Melmoth, trapped in a room is seemingly removed from it by demons and thrown over a cliff. Although a handkerchief is found, no body is ever recovered; has Satan finally damned him to hell or does the wanderer’s journey continue into the future? A similarly uncertain future is seen in the final Wandering character to be looked at in this study the Flying Dutchman.

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The origins of the Flying Dutchman are more recent than either the vrykolakas or the Wandering Jew and contains little of the inherent Anti-Semitism of the latter. In many senses the Dutchman fills a void left by the other two wanderers with the vrykolakas unable to cross salt water and the Wandering Jew only being sighted on land. Whilst there are tales of ghost ships that vanished or sank at sea and mysteriously reappear without their crew—The Lady Lovibond that was shipwrecked of the coast of Kent in 1748, and the Marie Celeste that vanished without trace en route to Genoa in 1872 being two examples—the tale of the Flying Dutchman is unique amongst them, not least as it refers both to the ship and its cursed captain. The legend tells of Captain Hendrick van der Decken sailing his ship the Flying Dutchman to the Far East Indies from Holland.17 On the return journey in 1641, the ship reached the Cape of Good Hope and bad weather began, but rather than make port—the Dutch East India Company had established a settlement on the coast for such eventualities—van der Decken decided to push on. The situation was so bad that the crew mutinied, but the captain was so possessed in his madness that he killed the ringleader and threw him overboard. To make matters worse the Captain not only spilled innocent blood but then proceeded to curse God with a blasphemous oath—the first printed version of the tale in Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine (May 1821) relays the fateful moment as follows, ‘Van der Decken walked the deck, swearing at the wind. Just after sunset a vessel spoke him, asking him if he did not mean to go into the bay that night. Van der Decken replied: “May I be eternally damned if I do, though I should beat about here till the day of judgment”’. This seemed to so incense the Almighty that the captain and his crew were subsequently cursed to roam the sea forever, destined to never return home or be accepted by the land again. The reason why God should be so incensed by the Dutchman’s rush to return home seems odd though has been explained as something of an affront to Gods power as manifested in the storm, an affront that is then compacted by a blood sacrifice and an oath—purposefully echoing the blood oaths of Euripides and those fueling the Furies, but also Cain and his subsequent banishment. Both the vrykolakas and the Wandering Jew, with his mark of Cain, can be seen to be creations of the cultures that produced them, and this is just true for the Flying Dutchman. At the time when the story is set, the seventeenth century, the Dutch Navy was, arguably, the envy of Europe, with the Dutch East India Company in particular being highly influential in the waters around India and the East Indies. It was only after the 1720s that it began a decline particularly after the financially disastrous Anglo-Dutch War (1780– 1784). As such, the events around the legend of the Flying Dutchman took place during the height of the Dutch East India Company’s powers, when indeed it would have felt able to take on the powers of the elements themselves. It is of interest then that the story took hold in English reports of the events in the latter part of the eighteenth century just as the British were coming into the ascendency in those waters. Indeed, as noted by literature

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and cultural memory Professor Agnes Andeweg, there was no ship named the ‘Flying Dutchman’ or any notes, records, or otherwise of any sightings of such a vessel in any Dutch texts published up until 1800. Consequently, the lore of the Dutchman is British lore, which Andeweg sees as explaining the appearance of the ghost ship as embodying the past, a past that still haunted the now ascendant British East India Company.18 That said, the version of the ship, that existed in written and/or eyewitness reports seems very different from that of the legend. John MacDonald in his travelogue, Travels in various part of Europe, Asia and Africa during a series of thirty years and upward (1790) notes that during his trip when a storm began the ship’s crew mentioned seeing the Flying Dutchman citing the local tale of said ship not being able to make port rounding the Cape and being lost at sea. Thereafter, when a storm begins in that area the ship mysteriously appears again.19 The next report, and curiously in relation to Andeweg’s reading of the legend is A Voyage to Botany Bay (1795) by George Barrington. Here the author notes a tale of two Dutch ships rounding the Cape in bad weather and one sinks losing all hands. The other is refitted, but upon leaving port is caught in a great storm at the same spot and where they almost ran down by the ship they formerly sailed alongside. The story quickly spread far and wide of the phantom ship, the Flying Dutchman, with Barrington claiming it was the Dutch sailors that infected the English crews with this superstition. As the legend entered the 1800s it took a more recognizable form, and John Leyden in Scenes From Infancy (1803) told of a ghost vessel that ushered in hurricanes, the Flying Dutchman and whose crew ‘are supposed to have been guilty of some dreadful crime, in the infancy of navigation; and to have been stricken with pestilence … and are ordained still to traverse the ocean on which they perished, till the period of their penance expire’.20 Leyden was a friend of Sir Walter Scott, and Scott wrote in his notes to Rokeby (1812) about his own thoughts on the ghost ship, and that it was ‘originally a vessel loaded with great wealth, on board of which some horrid act of murder and piracy had been committed’ and how it ‘is considered by the mariners as the worst of all possible omens’.21 It is the increasingly Romantic spirit of these tales that were partly inspirational for Coleridge’s ‘The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798). It would be overstating to say that the ‘Mariner’ is solely the Dutch captain, for there is much of the Wandering Jew as well, but it is difficult to read the poem without a ghost of the phantom ship heaving into view. The portion of the story which sees the Mariner talking to the wedding guest is very like the Wandering Jew but once the action moves to the endless retelling of his earlier sea voyage then the Dutchman comes to the fore. The Mariners ship is in southern waters when it runs into bad weather and is forced further south so it gets stuck in the sea near the Antarctic. However, the albatross that had seemed to lead them out of trouble is killed by the Captain—a shedding of innocent blood comparable to van der Decken killing the ring leader of the mutineers, who too offered away out of danger—the crew at first rail against the murder, but

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them become complicit and are equally marked with the curse that will soon, quite literally hang around the Captains neck, as his ‘mark of Cain’. The ship then itself encounters a phantom ship aboard which are ‘Death’ and ‘Life in Death’ (literally the embodiment of the Undead) who then gamble for the souls of the crew. The souls of the sailors belong to Death whilst the Mariner, because of his blood curse, will be damned to live forever and tell his story over and over again. Here the Dutchman though cursed, is allowed to leave the oceans to wash up upon the sea of life itself and repeat his story until there is no one left to hear it. Within our time frame here there are two more tales that should be mentioned, not least as they are both considered as forerunners to the seminal text on the Dutchman, at least in terms of its wider recognition and popularity, which is a Richard Wagner’s opera Der fleigende Holländer [The Flying Dutchman] from 1843. The first of these is a story that appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, mentioned above, called ‘Vanderdecken’s Message Home: Or, the Tenacity of Natural Affection’ (1821). The story follows the standard plot of a ship caught in a storm and spotting a mysterious vessel. The crew discusses what it might be with one recounting the tale of the Dutchman from seventy years previously and its cursed captain Vanderdecken who ‘got his way in spite of the devil’.22 Hitting extremely bad weather rounding the Cape Vanderdecken swore at the wind, gambling his own damnation on being able to beat the weather, with the inevitable results. Back in the present, the ship is surrounded by distant storms and its crew are becoming increasingly anxious despite the assurances of their Captain and ship’s chaplain. The mysterious ship draws near and sends a rowboat over to ask if they are willing to take letters from Vanderdecken and the crew of the Dutchman back to their friends and loved ones in Amsterdam. The Captain explains that much time has passed and the recipients of the letters are likely dead, which astonishes the cursed sailors as they are unaware of how much time has passed. Although the Captain does not accept the letters, they are left onboard the ship anyway and before he can protest, the storm rises again, and the Dutchman vanishes. The crew has no idea what to do with the pile of letters left onboard their ship, whether to get rid of them, or nail them to the mast in case the Dutchman ever returns. But before they can do anything the ship violently pitches sending the letters overboard like ‘birds of evil omen whirring though the air’23 seemingly lifting the storm and the curse from the ship.24 The last tale considered here is The Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski (1833) by Heinrich Heine which significantly changes the characteristics of the narrative particularly in its dramatic and Romantic impact, and which subsequently made it perfect for Richard Wagner to use as the basis for his first major operatic success, Der fliegende Holländer. The ‘Fable of the Flying Dutchman’ is one of the tales recounted in the Memoir and in regard to a trip to the opera undertaken by the narrator in 1827.25 Heine begins by repeating the tale mentioned above regarding nailing letters to the mast, a detail he had

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already used in Reisebilder: Die Nordsee [Pictures of Travel: the North Sea] (1826), but it is during the recounting of the opera that significant changes occur. Every seven years, the Dutchman is allowed to make shore to find the true love of a woman to break his curse. This time it is on the coast of Scotland—the first adaptations of John Polidori’s The Vampyre moved the action to Scotland—and the Dutchman sells diamonds to a local nobleman at a hugely reduced rate and in return asks for his daughters hand in marriage. It transpires that the house of the nobleman contains a painting of the Dutchman which has bewitched the girl since childhood and she quickly ascertains who the stranger is and sacrifices herself to love him unto death. The Dutchman is unable to accept forcing her to suffer the same fate as his own, so boards his ship and leaves. His bride-to-be runs to the cliff top and calls to him. He explains why he is leaving, and she reaffirms she will love him unto death, and throws herself off the cliff. As she does so the ship sinks releasing the Dutchman from his curse—Frederick Marryat continued this idea in The Phantom Ship (1839) but replaced the love of a woman with kissing a relic of Christ’s cross. The Romaticizing of the Dutchman’s tale has ensured its continuance in both Gothic and Vampiric tales that require love or female sacrifice to break a curse—see F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) as an example. The three figures chosen here, the vrykolakas, the Wandering Jew, and the Flying Dutchman, whilst seeming very different share much in their creation stories not least their enforced banishment from finding rest or peace in death and their abject rejection by the land. And whilst at the beginning of the evolutionary trajectory of each such restless undeath was a ‘mark of Cain’ that identified them as dangerous, the cause of bad luck, illness, and even death, by the Romantic period this became a much more positive characteristic. In an age that saw being ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’ as the mark of creative genius and outsidership it became a way of confirming one’s artistic credentials. Indeed, this idea is represented in the aforementioned fateful meeting in the Villa Diodati, where Frankenstein’s Wandering monster first cursed its creator and the (Greek) vampire fed on the innocence of an age that has forgotten that there ‘really are such things’ as monsters. Consequently, the Wanderers left Switzerland and the holiday home of the Shelley’s and their friends carrying with them the weight of human frailty and the possibility for redemption and understanding, ensuring its place in the Gothic and Vampiric imaginations into the nineteenth century and beyond.

Notes 1. Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space [1958], trans. Maria Jolas (London: Penguin, 2014), 25–58. 2. John Cuthbert Lawson. Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1964), 442–3. 3. Ibid.

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4. William F. Hansen. Ariadne’s Thread: A Guide to International Tales Found in Classical Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 394–5. 5. When disinterred funeral shrouds were often seen to be in the corpses mouth, a natural result of decomposition, but seen as an attempt by the dead to chew their way out of the grave (shroud-eaters), hence placing them face down meant they would chew their way in the wrong direction. 6. Lawson, Greek Folklore, 484. 7. A well-known example of this is the English chivalric romance of Amadas or Sir Amadace dated to the late fifteenth century. 8. Marius-Mircea Cris, an. ‘“Welcome to My House: Enter Freely of Your Own Will”: Dracula in International Contexts,’ in Dracula: An International Perspective (New York: Springer, 2017), 4. 9. Genesis 4:11–13. 10. Mary Ellen Snodgrass. Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature (New York: Facts on File Inc., 2005), 356. 11. Tyler R. Tichelaar. The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption: Gothic Literature from 1794-present (Ann Arbor: Modern History Press, 2012), 45. 12. Within this then are the two essential aspects of the character, which are identified by his slightly different naming in German and the Romance speaking countries in Europe; in German speaking nations he is known as ‘Der Ewige Jude’, the eternal or immortal Jew, whereas in Romance speaking ones it is ‘Le Juif Errant’ and ‘L’Ebreo Errante’ which equates to the English form of the Wandering Jew. 13. Marie Mulvey-Roberts. Gothic Immortals: The Fiction of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross [1990] (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 75. 14. Matthew G. Lewis. The Monk: A Romance [1796] (Paris: Baudry’s Foreign Library, 1832), 150. 15. Lewis, The Monk, 151. 16. William Godwin. Caleb Williams [1794] (London: Colburn & Bentley, 1831), 341. 17. There has been another name put forward for the Captain of the mysterious vessel, that of Bernard Fokke who was renowned for the speed of his journeys between Amsterdam and Java in the seventeenth century, and was believed to be in league with the Devil. 18. Quoted in Isaac Schultz. ‘The World’s Most Famous Ghost Ship Is an Enduring Symbol of Empire,’ in Atlas Obscura. 24 October 2019. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-flying-dut chman-explained. Accessed 28 June 2020. 19. John MacDonald. Travels in Various Part of Europe, Asia and Africa During a Series of Thirty Years and Upward (London: Forbes, 1790), 276.

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20. John Leyden. Scenes from Infancy: Descriptive of Teviotdale (James Ballantyne: Edinburgh, 1803). 21. Barry Millington. ‘The Sources and Genesis of the Text,’ in Thomas Grey (ed.), Richard Wagner: Der fliegende Holländer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 25. 22. Anon. ‘Vanderdecken’s Message Home: Or, the Tenacity of Natural Affection,’ in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, No. L, Vol. IX, May 1821. 23. Ibid. 24. An interesting aside to the take of the Flying Dutchman at this time is that of Peter Rugg. A fictional character created by William Austin who wrote his story, as a supposed case of actual folklore, in 1824 and which appeared in both Boston and New England newspapers. It tells of a cantankerous man, Peter Rugg who insists on driving his carriage to Boston during a terrific storm in 1770 (possibly in relation to the Boston Massacre). Of course, he never arrived and can subsequently be spotted on the road during storms. Writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Rudyard Kipling publicized the tale or referenced it in their work. 25. Interestingly an early version of Dracula had Jonathan Harker stopping in Munich on his journey to Transylvania to watch a performance of The Flying Dutchman. See Tim Ashley. ‘Introduction to the Vampire,’ in The Guardian. 20 February 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/ music/2009/feb/20/wagner-flying-dutchman?CMP=Share_iOSApp_ Other. Accessed 28 June 2020.

Bibliography Ashley, Tim. ‘Introduction to the Vampire,’ in The Guardian. 20 February 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/feb/20/wagner-flying-dutchman? CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other. Accessed 28 June 2020. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space [1958], trans. Maria Jolas (London: Penguin, 2014) Cris, an, Marius-Mircea. ‘“Welcome to My House: Enter Freely of Your Own Will”: Dracula in International Contexts,’ pages 1–21 from Dracula: An International Perspective (New York: Springer, 2017). Godwin, William. Caleb Williams [1794] (London: Colburn & Bentley, 1831). Hansen, William F. Ariadne’s Thread: A Guide to International Tales Found in Classical Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). Lawson, John Cuthbert. Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1964). Lewis, Matthew G. The Monk: A Romance [1796] (Paris: Baudry’s Foreign Library, 1832). Leyden, John. Scenes from Infancy: Descriptive of Teviotdale (James Ballantyne: Edinburgh, 1803).

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MacDonald, John. Travels in Various Part of Europe, Asia and Africa During a Series of Thirty Years and Upward (London: Forbes, 1790). Millington, Barry. ‘The Sources and Genesis of the Text,’ in Thomas Grey (ed.), Richard Wagner: Der fliegende Holländer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. Gothic Immortals: The Fiction of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross [1990] (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). Schultz, Isaac. ‘The World’s Most Famous Ghost Ship Is an Enduring Symbol of Empire,’ in Atlas Obscura. 24 October 2019. https://www.atlasobscura.com/art icles/the-flying-dutchman-explained. Accessed 28 June 2020. Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature (New York: Facts on File Inc., 2005). Tichelaar, Tyler R. The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption: Gothic Literature from 1794-present (Ann Arbor: Modern History Press, 2012).

The Body, Materiality, and Damnation in Charles Maturin Madeline Potter

Charles Robert Maturin’s faith and his writing are deeply intertwined. An Irish clergyman, with a solidly Protestant worldview, and a writer, he has been dubbed ‘the last of the Goths’ on account of his magnum opus, Melmoth the Wanderer.1 Published in 1820 and broadly considered to be the last gothic romance, the novel is a palimpsest of framed narratives, woven together through the figure of Melmoth the Wanderer, a man who has struck a pact with the devil in exchange for an extra hundred and fifty years of life, and who wanders the world searching for someone to take over his pact and free him from what eventually proves to be his inevitable damnation. Throughout the framed narratives, readers encounter Melmoth in bodily form as a constant presence. Yet when John Melmoth—the Wanderer’s descendant—and his friend Monçada contemplate the Wanderer’s final scene of damnation, all that is left of him are mere traces of his existence: footsteps imprinted on the wet sand, suggesting a physical struggle, and a handkerchief, ‘which the Wanderer had worn about his neck the preceding night’.2 There is a sense of fading materiality when the Faustian antihero immaterialises, waning from his unquestionable, tangible physicality into vestiges of his former material existence. Melmoth’s unnatural life, then, is matched by a

M. Potter (B) University of York, York, UK e-mail: [email protected] Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, England

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_29

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similarly unnatural death, indeed an untraceable, bodiless one. This is indicative of Maturin’s exploration of the role played by the body in damnation, uncovering a theology fraught with anxiety and duality in relation to the material. This essay argues that Maturin uses the body and materiality to explore eschatological anxieties and to draw attention to the evil which has corrupted humanity and the world as a consequence of the Fall. When considering Maturin’s thought, it is impossible to extricate materiality from an underlying ever-threatening monstrosity. This relationship between all that is material and its inherent menace manifests itself in Maturin’s writing through gothic symbols and atmospherics which seek to make the implicit threat explicit, and direct the reader’s engagement with materiality towards the idea of damnation. It is a poignant exposition of Maturin’s faith, displaying his adherence to Protestantism and his criticism of what he believes to be Roman Catholicism’s errors. Indeed, the Roman Catholic Church is to Maturin ‘itself a Gothic monster’, akin to Mary Shelley’s creature in Frankenstein, Patrick O’Malley notes. This comparison is due to the fact that both Shelley’s creature and the threat of Catholicism in Ireland are ‘constructed out of the dead and moldering material of the past’.3 O’Malley draws on Maturin’s description, in a sermon preached in 1824, of demagogy as an attempt to instil ‘galvanic’ and ‘posthumous’ life into ‘the corse of superstition’.4 Both Maturin’s and O’Malley’s own critical language is infused with the gloss of the physical and of the monstrous. It might be tempting to dismiss Maturin’s reference to Catholic superstition in terms of death and decay as mere homiletic rhetoric, personifying superstition in order to emphasise its obsoleteness. Yet his obstinate focus on the material in this sermon, as well as in his literary works, reveals deeper theological considerations. The term ‘posthumous’ suggests a preoccupation with the material nature of death, with its intimation of earthiness and burial grounds, when considered from a literal and etymological perspective (it derives from the Latin post, ‘after’, and humus, meaning ‘earth’). That we are dealing with literal, corporeal decay is soon confirmed by his reference to superstition’s ‘corse’ (an archaic version of ‘corpse’), and his subsequent mention of attempts at resurrection. Catholic superstition, then, and the Catholic Church itself, is attacked through the lens of real, physical decay; and a look at Melmoth the Wanderer confirms that his preoccupation with the bodily is not merely linguistic artifice but betrays instead a theological vision of evil. Significantly, the Wanderer is unlike any other monstrous figure both before and after Maturin’s writing. Shelley’s monster is animated matter brought back to life; Matthew Lewis’ Matilda is a demon taking on human form. The later vampires of Le Fanu and Stoker entail an ontological metamorphosis whereby the body is both dead and yet continues to live, undead. Melmoth, singularly, remains a man—his original self—inhabiting his own body beyond its natural lifespan. A Faustian character, he nonetheless diverges from the Faustian myth itself. The original legend presents Faust agreeing with Mephistopheles on a period of twentyfour years—a plausible and natural timespan—during which the demon would

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bring to accomplishment all of Faust’s desires.5 Goethe’s Faust , published twelve years before Maturin’s novel, sees a witch making Faust thirty years younger, but there is no length of time written into the contract between him and the devil.6 Both the anonymous legend and Goethe’s interpretation concentrate heavily on the rewards bestowed upon Faust during his otherwise natural lifespan on earth. For Melmoth, the focus falls instead on his unnatural lifespan, extended by 150 years, a twist which brings the question of the body itself, as subject of existence rather than merely object of pleasure, to the forefront. Even before we run into Melmoth, his presence is anticipated in material terms, through a portrait, which his descendant, John Melmoth, comes across. At his uncle’s injunction, John decides to destroy the portrait, a process which is described in terms of raw physicality. The canvas is ‘mouldering’, suggesting material decay; there is an anticipatory contrast between the degradation of the canvas and the Wanderer’s own unchanging body. At the same time, ‘mouldering’ is also tied with the idea of symbolic degradation, the fabric of the canvas acting as a counterpart to Melmoth’s spiritual corruption.7 This scene can be read as providing the inspiration for the famous novel published seventy years later by Oscar Wilde, Maturin’s great-nephew, namely The Picture of Dorian Gray. What follows in Maturin’s novel is a description which clings closely to the same prominence of the material: as John tears the portrait, he expects to ‘hear some fearful sounds, some unimaginable breathings of prophetic horror’.8 Instead, the expectation of supernatural horror is replaced by the silent, obstinate persistence of natural laws, as the worn out canvas collapses to the floor. Tapping into the language of acoustics, the narrator draws attention back to the visual element of the portrait itself. And it is through its tangibility that the presence of the ‘prophetic horror’, which failed to make itself heard, does now indeed materialise: as the painting drops to the floor, the Wanderer’s face distorts into the hint of a devilish smile which appears to bring the picture to life, and fills John with horror. This fleeting alteration of the material drives John to undertake the frenzied destruction of the portrait: he ‘tore, cut, and hacked’ the canvas before burning it.9 The violence and physicality of the scene prophesies Melmoth’s damnation at the end of the novel, while also creating a discrepancy between the painting’s natural consumption by fire and Melmoth’s eventual disappearance into the sea. Materiality, then, and in particular the body, is a space which fosters destruction. In a sermon preached in 1812, Maturin warns of the dangers of allowing the spiritual to be displaced by the physical. Dwelling on hypocrisy, he turns to the violence of nature, comparing such falsity to ‘birds of prey’, circling through ‘ruins’ in order ‘to croak, to brood, and to devour’.10 It is once again through a metaphor of physicality, indeed of organic processes, such as digestion and the implied decomposition of the carrion which some birds of prey feed on, that the evil within human nature is framed. Maturin’s equation of evil with the gruesome yet natural hunting and feeding patterns of raptors instantiates a slippage between human and beastly nature, with

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humanity reduced to mere animal instincts once it has given into its fallen yet natural tendencies. On the opposite side, there is God, who, Maturin stresses, ‘is not an earthly sovereign’, and ‘should not be deluded with the homage of the body’.11 He elaborates this point in another sermon, ‘The Spirituality of Christianity’, where he emphasises that Christianity is a ‘spiritual system’, and that God is fundamentally removed from the world of man. Quoting John 18:36, he reminds his congregation of the Biblical proclamation uttered by Christ, professing that His ‘kingdom is not of this world’, and launches himself into a discussion of the divine as an essentially spiritual being and a source of love.12 The theological assumption underlying his statement is in agreement with the Protestant tradition, derived from neo-Platonism, which views the material as a space of corruption and imprisonment. As Lyndal Roper notes in a discussion on the role of the body in theology, Protestant thought rejects the possibility that holiness might manifest itself within the human body.13 Similarly, Carlos Eire in The War Against Idols construes Calvinism as given to dichotomous thought, which he argues is the reason for its doctrinal rejection of the belief that the supernatural can inhabit material objects.14 Maturin’s relationship to Calvinism was complex. His attacks on Calvinism predominantly focused on matters of practice rather than actual faith.15 An affinity towards Calvinism in matters of faith was expressed by Maturin himself, when, in a letter to Walter Scott in 1813, he described himself as a ‘high Calvinist’.16 In this vein, the influence of Calvinist duality in Melmoth the Wanderer has been noted by Alison Milbank, who argues that ‘a residual Calvinist frame’ underlies the mechanism of monstrous doubling and substitution in the novel.17 In contrast to God’s spiritual nature, Maturin remarks in the same sermon, a disposition towards the material corrupts Christianity. Although he does not explicitly mention Catholicism, his criticism refers to forms of practice highly reminiscent of Catholic worship, such as ‘multiplied ceremonies and external magnificence’.18 Maturin’s choice to imply what he deems the corruption of Catholicism without naming it allows him to blur the lines between Catholicism and non-Christian practices. His language remains obstinately vague as he uses the generic term ‘a religion’ to indict theological inclinations towards materially manifested worship. At this point, he abandons the term ‘God’, replacing it with the less specific and non-Christian ‘Deity’, in a move which further alienates the implied Catholicism from what he regards as legitimate Christian practice. Patrick O’Malley identifies this same method of separation between ‘Christianity’ and ‘Catholicism’ in Melmoth the Wanderer, in the description of the sacrifices to the Juggernaut.19 In addition, Immalee, now known as Isidora, tells Melmoth that she had expected to find Christians in Spain, but adds that she instead found ‘[o]nly Catholics’. Melmoth retorts that ‘in this country’, the two are not seen as distinct, and warns Isidora about the danger of her words.20 Melmoth’s insistence on the fact that only in the context of ‘this country’—Spain—are Catholicism and Christianity seen

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as one, and his emphasis on the cruel treatment awaiting anyone daring to suggest the contrary, indicates that Maturin is reinforcing the same separation by caricaturing what he views as the hypocrisy of Catholic belief and practice. In opposition to the sacramental nature of Catholicism, Maturin’s theological vision is marked by a distinction between the spiritual—associated with the divine and which should be cultivated through prayer—and the material, which is a medium for fallenness. True prayer, Maturin asserts, grows from an interior analysis of one’s spiritual needs, and a removal from the objects of the world. This is achieved not when we pray for mastery and control over our passions, but rather when all considerations of the ‘self for its end’ are excluded from the mind.21 This contrast between the passionate, bodily self, oriented towards its own motives and desires, and the higher, spiritually conscious mind, with a disposition towards God, can create fear of the body itself, and its potential for leading to sin. It is perhaps for this reason that Melmoth’s monstrosity resides not, as for Shelley’s monster, in the revival of dead matter, but, instead, in the living human body itself. What is monstrous about the Wanderer’s condition is the exaggeration of the bodily self: when we consider the extra century and a half granted to him, we experience a sense of defamiliarisation as regards physical existence, and therein lies the uncanniness of the Wanderer. Furthermore, Melmoth’s condition derives from his transaction with the devil. In this Faustian twist, the devil does not offer riches or pleasures; instead, it is the gift of life itself that he bestows upon Melmoth. However, this life is strictly bodily. This pact which bestows life on the body equally bestows death on the soul. In this sense, the devil’s gift is the body itself. There are uneasy Manichean undertones to the idea that evil’s power is capable of mirroring and countering that of the divine, and the same tension extends to Maturin’s exposition of the natural world in the novel. To Mark M. Hennelly Jr., the narrative of Stanton’s manuscript engages gothic visuals to embody ‘psychomachia, theomachia, and cosmomachia’ all within the image of a storm.22 The passage in question is marked by a duality characteristic of a terrible struggle between the forces of good and evil, encapsulated, through gothic metaphor, within the imagery of the natural. Like Melmoth’s lifespan, however, natural phenomena gain hyperbolic proportions. Stanton gazes at a scene which is both ‘glorious and awful’.23 The use of the connective conjunction ‘and’ introduces a symmetry between glory and awfulness, placing them on equal footing against each other, and anticipating the description which follows, and which sets light and darkness against each other in a cosmic struggle: light struggling with darkness, – and darkness menacing a light still more terrible, and announcing its menace in the blue and livid mass of cloud that hovered like a destroying angel in the air.24

Here Maturin blends the language of the natural with that of the theological, in an image describing primarily the stormy sky, but which allegorises the

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cosmic struggle between good and evil. As he poses light against darkness in the sky, it is impossible to ignore the theological connotations of the passage, especially as they grow increasingly explicit when the cloud is likened to ‘an angel in the air’. Yet the angel suggested by the cloud’s shape is qualified to be a ‘destroying’ one, just as darkness itself menaces ‘a light […] more terrible’, an uneasy blend of elements of good and evil threatening each other while at the same time appearing to share similar natures and comparable powers.25 Maturin’s theological metaphor here remains anchored in the Biblical account of Lucifer’s fall from grace. A foundational Christian myth, the story maintains that Lucifer was originally an angel who has given into the sin of pride and challenged God, only to be subsequently banished from heaven and become Satan. That the active force of darkness here is described as a ‘destroying’, menacing angel, is not coincidental, showing Maturin’s adherence to Scripture. Still, the image of an angel, albeit a dark one, accompanied by the idea that darkness itself poses the threat of a terrible light, paints a picture of theological and cosmographical anxiety. If light and darkness share similar natures, and if they mirror each other in their mythical struggle, how can we know that light will prevail? It is perhaps this focus on the reality of the threat to light posed by darkness that has often brought both Calvin and Luther accusations of Manichean heresies from Catholic critics, as S.J. Barnett points out.26 Indeed, as Barnett goes on to show, the Manichean undertones of the dualistic tradition in Protestant thought were acknowledged by John Wesley, who asserted a parallel between the Manicheans of the eleventh century and Protestantism, both showing a focus on an inner struggle.27 The idea of interiority is crucial here: it is not that Maturin views Satan as threatening God’s supremacy, but rather that within each person there is a battle between dangerous, sinful drives and the desire to do good in accordance with God’s will. Evil is not merely an external force commanded by the devil. Instead, it resides inside each individual, and it remains part of the self’s makeup over the course of postlapsarian existence. In this sense, it is as much part of the self as the physical body is, acting as an immutable reality against which one needs to struggle consistently, and hence Melmoth’s representation as a man, and a threat both to himself and to others, while the devil’s presence remains concealed and implied. There is a fluidity of signification inherent in the relationship between the internal struggle depicted and the mirroring mechanism which externalises it. It is a pivotal metaphor of the Gothic, and one which goes on to typify later works of gothic fiction, including what O’Malley calls ‘the logic of mirrored reversals’ in Stoker’s Dracula, whereby the self and the enemy—the victim and the aggressor—collapse into one another.28 In Melmoth the Wanderer, then, a dark metaphor of the material not as a threat to God, but as a real threat to humanity is shaped. Corruption takes on tangible forms, and horror arises from manifestly material sources. In the ‘Tale of the Spaniard’, we encounter a monstrous monk who, having committed parricide, has taken on the monastic habit to conceal his crime. As Monçada attempts to forge a plan to escape from the monastery, he finds himself in the

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company of the parricide monk. He expresses his dread at the idea of taking the passage in the vicinity of the vaults. Here, Monçada’s narrative falls upon an assortment of objects of horror, while a gothic sense of fearful anticipation intensifies: he thinks of ‘the sepulchral ruins’, and ‘the bones of the dead’. As Monçada continues to protest in fear against taking the passage, he turns to ‘the reliques of the dead’, and the ‘horror of being among those who are neither the living nor the dead’, which are ‘shadowless’.29 Monçada articulates his horror initially through the concreteness of bones and ruins, but as the sentiment of dread grows stronger, his language grows more diffuse, and the object of horror morphs into an intangible in-betweenness. At this point, despite the corporeal tokens of horror, horror itself has not materialised, and remains, instead, an anticipation drawn through Maturin’s use of gothic atmosphere and symbolism. However, as soon as the parricide monk mentions his murder, Monçada’s horror strikes him with full force. During his narrative before planning his escape, Monçada describes the parricide monk as a ‘monster’, adding that he had to ‘hide the stains of parricide, by casting over their bloody and ineffaceable traces the shroud of monasticism’.30 It is a bodily crime that appals Monçada, and he frames the grotesque through the gloss of materiality: the ‘stains’, their ‘bloody traces’, the ‘shroud’, and the parricide itself, a violently bodily act, all formulate an undeniably palpable sense of dread, rooted in real, physical objects. The brutal, bodily reality of murder itself is magnified by the fact that we are dealing with the monk’s murder of his own father, a horrific action both physically and spiritually. It contains, on the one hand, the suggestion of a crime against oneself—against one’s own lineage and in a sense against one’s body, considered in terms of genetic heritage. On the other hand, it contains the theological implication of a crime against the heavenly Father. If Catholicism seeks to instantiate a relationship between the human and the divine by asserting that God is materially present in the sacrament of the Eucharist and thus that the spiritual can be channelled materially, Maturin’s metaphor here is one of reversed correspondence. It is no longer a matter of apprehending the divine through the material medium; instead, it is only sin, in its most corporeal manifestation, that we can encounter. There is, in this sense, a monstrous satanic sacramentality at play here, while Maturin invites us to draw the eschatological implications of the human relationship with materiality from this immediate encounter with an awful crime. Through the striking bodily monstrosity of the monk’s murder of his earthly father, we can start to think about the simultaneous crime committed against the heavenly Father, and we derive a theological understanding of sin by facing it corporeally. Of course, it is impossible to kill God precisely because He is an omnipotent, spiritual being. The theological mirroring of the monk’s parricide, then, can only result in the same injury against oneself described above, condemning the perpetrator to eternal damnation. The spiritual and metaphorical crime of killing one’s soul takes place through the killing of one’s father. The same Manichean metaphor of an externalised internal struggle is relevant, but it is also amplified by the suggestion of violence in relation to

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one’s own heritage, which is, for all humans in this world, a heritage of sin following the Fall. The link between the body and sin and is picked up in the ‘Tale of the Indians’. The initial suggestion of a paradisical island removed from all external interference soon collapses into an engulfing illustration of human fallenness: it is, in fact, a place marred by ‘the terrors with which superstition had invested it’.31 The worship of the idol Juggernaut in India is depicted through the lens of a horror rooted in the bodily: the way to the idol’s temple is scattered with the ‘bones of a thousand skeletons, bleaching in the air’. Alongside these dead bodies, there are the equally shocking bodies of those still, albeit barely, alive, crawling ‘charred and blackened’. A ‘mass of putrefaction’, as the narrator describes it, is strewn across the shore.32 Maturin’s word choice is careful and precise: a ‘mass’ is in its essence material, while ‘putrefaction’, also unequivocally bodily, links to ‘mass’ to create a potent image of material decay. Adding to the construal of the body as the locus of sin is the fact that the innocent Immalee—later seduced by Melmoth—is described as holding her breath, ‘as if she inhaled’ the abhorrent ‘mass’.33 There is a focus on the role played by the senses in apprehending the abject, in a doubling of the body as both object and subject of horror, although Immalee views the scene from a distance, through a telescope. Alongside the desolate scenery of bodies on the shore, a parade for the Juggernaut is described, abhorrent in its opulence, and standing in contrast to the surrounding destruction. ‘Sparkling amid desolation, and triumphant amid death’, the parade is reminiscent of Roman Catholic processions, a device which Maturin uses, as Patrick O’Malley has argued, in order to efface the distinction between Catholicism and non-Christian worship, thus suggesting that Romanist practice does not have a place within Christian tradition.34 The contrast between the two types of objects—the abhorrent spectacle of rotting flesh and bones on the one hand, and the splendour of the parade on the other—reveals the extent to which sin has corrupted the material. Apart from the putrefaction associated with physical death, itself a consequence of the Fall, we are also presented, in this image, with the sins of hypocrisy and greed. That such focus on outer grandeur leads humanity away from God and towards sin is consistent with Maturin’s assertion, in his sermon, that God can only be reached through true, spiritually rich prayer.35 Such manifestations of physical corruption and decay abound in the novel, and there are far too many to consider in detail here. However, what links them all together is the image of the Wanderer. Indeed, the very reason we have this intricate patchwork of stories revealing the horror of materiality is the premise of Melmoth’s wanderings. His presence both bears witness to corruption and attempts, itself, to corrupt. Through all these instances, Melmoth absorbs the image of the devil into himself, becoming a ‘symbolic’ devil as Faxneld puts it.36 Yet symbolic as he may be, he retains his physical form, and indeed replaces the actual devil. If Melmoth is Faust, he is also Mephistopheles, both corrupted and corrupting, damned and attempting to damn. In her analysis of gothic doubling in Melmoth the Wanderer, Milbank

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turns to René Girard’s theory of sacrificial scapegoating to explain the protagonist’s attempted exchanges of his curse.37 To Girard, scapegoating is at the core of all religious structure; it is the only way to overcome the continual proliferation of mimetic desire, which is understood as a desire not for an object itself, but instead for the other’s desire. The specular metaphor is relevant again: to Milbank, this mirroring of desires is a ‘mimetic contagion’. Melmoth, she argues, is the ‘embodiment’ of such contagion, because he attempts to coax others into taking on his curse.38 Milbank uses the term ‘embodiment’, drawing attention to the subject of the body. As much as he is an embodiment, he is also an incarnation: his existence is all corporeality while, at the same time, recalling, in a monstrous manner, Christ’s Incarnation. To Girard, Christ became the ultimate scapegoat as He readily and willingly accepted the sacrifice of His own self. Christian theology views the crucifixion as the moment of atonement through the passing on of sins, from humankind onto Christ. There is, not unlike in Melmoth’s case, a strong element of transactional substitution involved in this process. Through Christ as a scapegoat, the process ends as He atones for humanity’s sins. With Melmoth too, however, the process ends as he fails to find a replacement. If Christ is the utmost scapegoat, Melmoth is the utmost scapegoater. In this sense, we can read the figure of Melmoth as an antichrist. Like Christ, he is the ‘embodiment’ of a spiritual power. There is an incarnation of sorts at play: one which mirrors Christ’s, as well as His sacrifice. Where Christ redeems, Melmoth corrupts. The gothic mechanism of mirroring is significant here, and we must bear in mind that a mirrored image entails symmetrical reversal. Describing the specular relationship between Christ and Melmoth, Milbank characterises the Wanderer as an ‘anti-type of Christ’ due to his parody and inversion of salvation. Christ, she points out, leaves behind the Scriptures, while Melmoth leaves his web of tales.39 But we see this flipped picture of symmetry between Christ and Melmoth not only in the textual realm; it also tests the balance between spirituality and materiality as embodied in both their figures. Christ, in His sacrifice, remains spiritually intact, but His body is maimed by the abuse suffered at the hands of fallen humanity. After His death, He is resurrected and ascends into heaven. His bodily presence, according to Protestant doctrine, can no longer be a part of this world. A similar yet reversed mechanism governs Melmoth’s condition. As with Christ’s sacrifice, there is a transference of sin. However, in this case, Melmoth attempts to pass his sin onto others, reversing Christ’s redemptive sacrifice. In an inversion of Christ’s image, who stood disfigured and mutilated on the Cross, Melmoth’s earthly body remains unchanging. However, as his scapegoating quest eventually fails, his body vanishes into the ocean, presumably having been dragged to hell. The physical descent to hell contrasts Christ’s ascension into heaven. Melmoth’s end seals his status as a reversing and mirroring antichrist: just as Christ leaves no bodily part of Himself in the world, Melmoth disappears completely, leaving only traces of his existence in the form of footsteps in the sand, and a handkerchief.

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Yet as the novel ends, we encounter John and Monçada contemplating the terrible scene, which tells of the Wanderer’s damnation: ‘Melmoth and Monçada exchanged looks of silent and unutterable horror’.40 This marks a shift from the beginning of the novel, when in the opening sentence of the narrative, Maturin introduces us to John Melmoth, further referred to simply as ‘John’. Joseph Lew notes how John Melmoth’s name joins up two distinct characters, in apparent contrast; on the one hand, there is John, and on the other, there is the Wanderer himself.41 When, by the novel’s end, Maturin switches from ‘John’ to ‘Melmoth’, it is not only the ‘silent and unutterable’ horror of the Wanderer’s damnation which instils a sense of ominousness, but his name as well. Although the threat of the Wanderer’s curse has disappeared and the young John and his friend Monçada ‘returned slowly home’, the overhanging sonority of the name ‘Melmoth’ and all its connotations persists.42 This takes us back to the question of genetic ancestry, and what its implications are in a theological sense. While both Christ and Melmoth disappear in their bodily form—one ascending directly to heaven and the other being dragged straight to hell—Melmoth’s lineage endures, in a physical manner, through his descendant. Although John is innocent, his inheritance is a terrible one, linking him with his ancestor’s satanic pact, in a physical affirmation of Adamic tradition. John’s image serves to show how all humanity is tied to Adam through Original Sin; his ancestral relationship with the Wanderer reinforces the ubiquitous linkage between human nature and sin itself, and accentuates the crucial role played by corporeality in the endurance of sin, for although John is not guilty of the Wanderer’s sin, its memory cannot be effaced so long as the name persists, and so long as his lineage continues genetically. A part of Melmoth lives through in John, just as, if we interpret the Scriptures literally, a part of Adam lives inside each human, interlocking sin with humanity’s continued physical existence. This is a further reversal of Christ’s condition: there is no material, genetic or bodily inheritance derived from His Incarnation. Instead, His legacy is of the spiritual kind. This divergence between the material provision of sin and the spiritual nature of Christian heritage distinguishes what Maturin views as true Christian practice from the materially engaged sacrifices to the Juggernaut, and, by association, the practices of the Catholic Church. Although Christ took on a human form, Maturin explains in a sermon preached in 1818, it is not Christ’s corporeality that is healing, but His godly spirituality. Referring to accounts about women taking their children to Jesus to be touched by Him, he clarifies that this gesture is rooted in ignorant, albeit ‘pardonable’, superstition, based on the belief that ‘corporeal touch’ can act as either a ‘medium’ or indeed a ‘substitute for spiritual influence’.43 It is noteworthy that Maturin views this particular superstition as ‘pardonable’, and qualifies that it was the manifestation of a righteous instinct. Given his inclination to strong indictment of superstition throughout his sermons as well as literary work, the benevolent tone here suggests that leniency is to be granted due to a desire, on the part of the women, to foster closeness between their

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children and Christ. This closeness, however, is here misunderstood as physical or spiritual. In uncovering this train of thought, it becomes clear that a focus on the body remains the locus of error and of superstition. The body, in the exchange between Jesus and the children is not a vehicle to channel His spiritual power, nor indeed a substitute for it. As already ascertained in the ‘Fast-Day Sermon’, it is not the body that can draw humanity closer to Christ, but prayer. Instead, the body drives away from holiness, plunging human beings into their own fallen instincts, deprivations and anxieties, and ultimately enacting a separation from Christ. The scene in Melmoth the Wanderer which sees Monçada in the company of the parricide monk prompts an exploration of the uneasy tension between body and spirit both in relation to the divine, and as perceived by one’s own consciousness. Advancing through the narrow vaults, Monçada is reminded of the tragic tale of an Egyptian explorer who crawled through the similarly constrictive vaults of a pyramid, and perished in unspeakable terror and agony. This, Monçada recounts, ‘rushed on [his] soul in a moment’. Yet the narrator immediately doubts and subsequently clarifies his previous affirmation: on my soul? – no, on my body. I was all physical feeling, – all intense corporeal agony, and God only knows, and man only can feel, how that agony can absorb and annihilate all other feeling within us,—how we could, in such a moment, feed on a parent, to gnaw out our passage into life and liberty, as sufferers in a wreck have been known to gnaw their own flesh, for the support of that existence which the unnatural morsel was diminishing at every agonizing bite.44

Monçada’s agony submerges him into the depths of corporeal existence. Although fear is understood as an emotion, and associated with a psychological state, Monçada is quick to contradict the idea that it affects the soul, highlighting instead the effect it has upon the body, and reducing human consciousness to the primeval, indeed beastly experience of corporeality. This is not unlike Maturin’s description of hypocrisy as ‘birds of prey’, only in this case the animalistic metaphor is subsumed into the human, understood in its primarily organic sense. In this state, there is little left of the higher human spirituality and disposition towards the divine. As our monk points out, he was ‘all physical feeling’ and ‘all […] corporeal agony’, the repetition of ‘all’ and the intensifying doubling between ‘physical’ and ‘corporeality’, reinforcing the body as a locus of agony. The language used to conjure up this beastly physicality derives from that of basic instincts, primordial fears and organic matter. The image of gnawing, for instance, is often associated with the world of beasts rather than humans. Gnawing at one’s own flesh in this instance emerges as a powerful depiction of sin’s manifestation and effects. It encompasses the suggestion of bodily desperation, driving a person to self-cannibalism in a primordial, subliminal act of material self-preservation

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through an attempt to stave off hunger. At the same time, the image is selfdestructive: it both consumes, and feeds the self, in a monstrous caricature of the Eucharistic symbol. In this consideration of the violence and depravity inherent in the act of withdrawal into the merely organic, Maturin revisits the question of injury against one’s father. As in the reflection on parricide, the theological horror against sinning against the one who gave life is transported into the materiality of the body and its associated horrors. However, this time, the act presented is even more corporeally shocking, and, Maturin would have us infer, more theologically detestable. This is because the feeding on a parent’s flesh is an oblique jab at the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, according to which the bread and wine become, literally, the body and blood of Christ during the ritual of consecration. Communion, understood in a Catholic sense, involves the actual consumption of Christ’s flesh, under the appearance of bread. This illuminates the theological undertones of Maturin’s illustration of bodilyderived horror as that of feeding on a parent. As one of the persons of the Trinity, through His association with God the Father, and through His role as a symbolic shepherd, Christ is viewed as a parent to Christians. Considering Maturin’s persistent emphasis on the spiritual nature of God, we can read his reference to the feeding on a parent as a criticism of the Catholic belief in the real corporeal presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Maturin’s attack on the Catholic doctrine of Real Presence, likened here to the abominable act of consuming the flesh of a parent, extends beyond mere doctrinal quarrel, and underlines what he views as the dangers of allowing oneself to fall back onto the material. Hell itself—the Wanderer is at the end dragged there—is intimated through the prism of materiality. In Melmoth’s dream, right before his inevitable damnation, Maturin uses the language of the natural ocean to frame infernal torment. As the protagonist stands high upon a rock overlooking an awful ocean of fire, he observes that the eternal punishment of souls does not consist in an agonising separation from God, but instead is enacted by the tormenting flames of this hellish, oneiric ocean. Damned souls, in their state of anguish, are each compared to a ‘putrid corse’.45 The language of bodily putrefaction is given free reign again to convey the ultimate failing from a theological perspective: damnationDamnation. Following his dream, Melmoth vanishes into the real ocean, as he leaves behind a handkerchief, the imprints of a terrible struggle which suggest that he has been dragged, and accounts of horrific cries during the night.46 Significantly, ‘hell never materialises’.47 The real, natural ocean into which he vanishes and the vision of hell as an ocean of fire create an image of geographical doubling, suggesting that both are facets of the same reality. Although hell only appears in the novel in this dream, we recognise it—its geography, its oceanic vastness and depth, its motion— in the description of the natural ocean. At the same time, we see the ocean mirrored in this image of hell. There is something instantly recognisable about the push-and-pull of the waves and the incessant movement of the waters. This

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boundless natural familiarity engulfs the supernatural, subsuming the metaphysical into the physical. Although hell is not an actual, tangible place in the novel, we can imagine it—indeed we can know it—through recourse to the world itself. It is a horrifying transfiguration of what we know on earth. It is, in Maturin’s narrative imagination, a metaphysical reconstruction of the material. The narrator is warning of the dangers of how turning to the natural and material can drive us away from God and towards damnation. It appears that Maturin had been pondering the question of materiality and the natural for a while prior to the publication of Melmoth the Wanderer. His early novel, The Fatal Revenge: Or, the Family of Montorio, a gothic romance published in 1807, offers an insight into his engagement with this matter. It is set in the region of Naples, in Italy, and the narrator zooms in on the landscape of a country which he paints as foreign and exotic. He sees the ‘climate and scenery’ as having a direct effect on the mind, concluding that ‘moral phenomena’ emerge as ‘reflected consequences of the natural’.48 Here, the narrator is less trenchant than in Melmoth the Wanderer, where the material and the natural are dangerous sources of corruption. However, the same threat is implied, especially since the natural landscape which foreshadows the morality of the characters is that of the Italian Campania, the region which to Maturin is ‘the most superstitious state of the country of superstition’, in a hint at what he sees as the dangers of Catholic worship, and suggesting a link between landscape and moral failings.49 In constructing this subtler view of the relationship between the natural world and morality, Maturin’s prose suggests the duality of Lutheran natural theology, and acts both as an affirmation of God’s glory in creation, and a warning of the inherent dangers of an overreliance on the natural. Although Lutheran thought acknowledges the status of the natural world as part of God’s act of creation, and hence as a reflection of God’s love, the natural is also inescapably tainted by sinfulness. We can infer that everything natural points towards the divine; but it is imperative to recognise that without reliance on Scriptural revelation, natural reason inevitably fails.50 The human psyche, Luther maintains, has been ineffably contaminated by the Fall, and mankind’s turn upon sin has obscured our capacity to understand natural law. Although a natural propensity towards ‘light’ was wrought into the human heart when God brought creation into being, this is exclusively associated with the prelapsarian condition and was irretrievably lost at the point of the Fall. For this reason, Luther points out, we must be ‘restrained and repelled by external laws and material books’.51 This echoes Maturin’s contention in his sermon on spirituality that the only way to God is spiritual, and it is the same suspicion of the material and the ‘external’ which permeates the narrative and symbolic structure of Melmoth the Wanderer. There is perhaps little difference between the subtlety of the correspondence between the natural world and human failings described at the beginning of The Fatal Revenge, and the powerful demonic image of the metaphysical doubling between ocean and hell at the end of Melmoth the Wanderer.

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Although different in degree and presentation, these images point in the same direction, namely one which moves away from God and towards the ‘natural’. It is a movement oriented towards the human, indeed a constant turn back into fallen human nature. The constant magnetism of humanity’s fallenness, emerging at times with careful subtlety and at times with jolting, shocking intensity, embodies the Lutheran definition of sinfulness as homo incurvatus in se, i.e. ‘man bent upon himself’. This doctrine was developed from the earlier thought of St. Augustine, and maintains that sinfulness is a bend upon the self, driving the individual away from God and even using God for its own ends. Instead of standing upright, aligned with divine will, humanity bows down under the burden of sin.52 This metaphor is physical as much as it is spiritual: it offers a compelling image of bent humanity, weighed down by the heaviness of the Fall. Homo incurvatus in se portrays a corrupt imperfect body as much as a fallen spiritual state. It stands in opposition to the image of Christ Triumphant, rising up vertically from His tomb and ascending directly into heaven, His body a profession of His perfect spirit. In contrast to such vertical rectitude, fallen humanity is all bends and twists, never ascending but stooping down towards its own fallenness. Remarkably, this theological image posits a relationship between divine and human wills; there is no mention of a third, satanic influence. Instead, it is the gravitational pull of the self that enacts the bend. When the body stoops so, the gaze is directed towards the ground, but also towards the body, instantiating a constant awareness of the corporeal. It is then not surprising that Maturin’s account of the Faustian legend plunges the devil into the domain of the symbolic, allowing him to be replaced by an exaggerated, monstrous figure of human corporeality itself. Reading Stanton’s manuscript, John comes across a passage in which a Roman Catholic priest, Father Olavida, is suddenly shocked at a feast by the Wanderer’s presence, whose demonic influence he instantly recognises as he finds himself unable to utter his prayers and is overtaken by terror. Just as Monçada’s whole self is narrowed down to mere physicality by his terror in the vaults, Father Olavida’s inner terror removes his control over his own body and reduces him to a bundle of physical tics and organic reactions: cold drops of sweat form on his forehead, and his hair stands up. The priest and Melmoth are caught in a physical symmetry, standing in front of each other, and in contrast to the rest of the guests, who remain in a sitting position. Yet as Father Olavida stands frozen in his recognition of Melmoth’s satanic presence, his pose mirrors Melmoth’s perfectly. The separation of the two entities melts into identity. So strong is the priest’s recognition of evil that we can read his terror as growing not from the recognition of an external threat but from the recognition of his own fallenness, mirrored back to him through the physical presence of the Wanderer. There is a forceful and illuminating realisation in Olavida’s reaction, akin to Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage, involving both self-identification and self-alienation.53 Facing his mirrored self, he is both recognising himself as other, and integrating this recognition into his self-image. He faces the other in the mirrored image of Melmoth, but the

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perfect symmetry of the two suggests that he simultaneously recognises his own sin, in the same physical manifestation of an interior Manichean struggle. While he gazes at the body of the Wanderer, it is his own body that freezes. His attempt to utter a benediction repeatedly fails; so does his endeavour to take the chalice to his lips. The physicality of the priest’s torment is staggering: attempting to escape the reality of evil’s presence, he closes his eyes, as if to efface the bodily image which prompted the terrible identification. Yet it is too late—the symbolic mirror has already revealed its secret, and the realisation has born its imprint on the priest’s body and mind. ‘But I know him’, he utters in desperation, unable to articulate the dreadful self-recognition, adding, ‘by these cold drops’, ‘by these convulsed joints’.54 He knows this evil not intellectually or abstractedly, but through his own being. It is a knowledge which concretises itself cellularly, encompassing every fibre of Olavida’s being, physical bit by physical bit. His death following this recognition hardly comes as a surprise if we consider both its personal and theological impact. He never voices the terrible knowledge, but instead drops to the floor with his finger pointing to the Wanderer, suspended in a grotesque gesture of self-revelation and self-indictment. The deictic act is both literal and metaphorical: he ‘points the finger’ to show a reality which remains unuttered, but also in a gesture of accusation. Priorly, ‘he bent forwards as he spoke’ his words of recognition and repudiation, acknowledging that he knew Melmoth and ordered him to disappear, only instead to disappear himself a few moments later, collapsing to his death in shock.55 This gesture takes us back to Luther’s definition of sinfulness as ‘man bent upon himself’. Only this time, while bending, Olavida bends not merely upon himself, but also upon his symbolic reflection, incarnate in the image of Melmoth. With one simple movement, he enacts an array of theological presumptions: man bends upon himself in a physical demonstration of Luther’s conceptualisation of sin, but in doing so, he also bends towards an external embodiment of sin, adding an extra layer of complexity. And, to make matters even worse, this external manifestation of human fallenness is, in this case, Melmoth himself, the novel’s symbolic devil.56 In bending upon himself, Father Olavida bends towards Satan. Yet at the end of the novel, through the signs of a struggle which suggests Melmoth has been dragged to hell through the ocean, we intimate the presence of an actual, non-human Satan, the one which Melmoth calls ‘his master’.57 This is a theological warning and affirmation that hell is indeed a real space and damnation an actual state. Maturin’s blurring of boundaries between the human and the demonic, and between the natural world and images of hell, is a doubling mechanism by which he uses the body and materiality to reflect evil. Employing the Gothic to illustrate these theological anxieties, he draws attention to the potential for sin and corruption residing within human beings, without denying the existence of an external, Satanic source of evil. This is, arguably, a nod to the ‘high Calvinism’ which he has described himself as espousing, positioning him in a transitional space where evil is both natural and supernatural.58 Through gothic metaphor, he subsumes human fallenness and external, satanic evil, into

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powerful images of materiality, and delineates the world inhabited by humans from the spiritual, ethereal nature of the divine, and warn of the eschatological dangers materiality poses. Acknolwedgement Research supported by EHU19 at Edge Hill University

Notes 1. ‘Melmoth the Wanderer’ in Saturday Review (March 19, 1892), 335. 2. Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (Oxford: OUP, 2008), 542. 3. Patrick O’Malley, Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 48. 4. Charles Maturin, Five Sermons, on the Errors of the Roman Catholic Church, Preached in St. Peter’s Church, Dublin, 2nd edition (Dublin: William Curry, Jr., 1826), 146–47, quoted in O’Malley Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 48. 5. Das Faustbuch des Christlich Meynenden (Stuttgart: G.J. Göschen’sche, 1891), 9. 6. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1992), 67. 7. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, 60. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Charles Maturin, ‘Fast-Day Sermon’ in Sermons (London: Archibald Constable, 1819), 308. 11. Ibid., 309. 12. Maturin, ‘The Spirituality of Christianity’ in Sermons (London: Archibald Constable, 1819), 414. 13. Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1994), 173. 14. Carlos Eire, War Against the Idols (Cambridge: CUP, 1986), 1–5. 15. Dale Kramer, Charles Robert Maturin (New York: Twayne, 1973), 91. 16. Letter to Scott, 11 January 1813, in The Correspondence of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Robert Maturin, eds. Fannie E. Ratchford and W. H. McCarthy, Jr. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1937), 10. 17. Alison Milbank, God and the Gothic (Oxford: OUP, 2018), 203. 18. Maturin, ‘The Spirituality of Christianity’ in Sermons, 416. 19. O’Malley, Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 54. 20. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, 344. 21. Maturin, ‘The Spirituality of Christianity’ in Sermons, 422. 22. Mark M. Hennelly, ‘Melmoth the Wanderer and Gothic Existentialism’ in Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, vol. 21, no. 4, 1981, 668. 23. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, 29.

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24. Ibid., 29–30. 25. Ibid. 26. S.J. Barnett, ‘Where Was Your Church Before Luther? Claims for the Antiquity of Protestantism Examined’ in Church History, vol. 68, no. 1, 1999, 14. 27. Ibid., 39. 28. O’Malley, Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture, 160. 29. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, 185. 30. Ibid., 181. 31. Ibid., 272. 32. Ibid., 292. 33. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, 292. 34. Ibid.; O’Malley, Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture, 101. 35. Maturin, ‘The Spirituality of Christianity’ in Sermons, 422. 36. Per Faxneld, Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Oxford: OUP, 2017), 256. 37. Alison Milbank, ‘Sacrificial Exchange and the Gothic Double in Melmoth the Wanderer and The Picture of Dorian Gray’ in Shaping Belief: Culture, Politics and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Writing, eds. Victoria Morgan, Clare Williams (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2008), 118. 38. Ibid., 117; see René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1989). 39. Milbank, God and the Gothic, 204. 40. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, 542. 41. Joseph Lew, ‘Unprepared for Sudden Transformations: Identity and Politics in Melmoth the Wanderer’ in Studies in the Novel, vol. 26, no. 1/2, 1994, 173. 42. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, 542. 43. Maturin, ‘Preached on the Death of My Dear Niece’ in Sermons, 154. 44. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, 192–93. 45. Ibid., 538. 46. Ibid., 540–42. 47. Ashley Marshall, ‘Melmoth Affirmed: Maturin’s Defense of Sacred History’ in Studies in Romanticism, vol. 47, no. 2, Summer, 2008, 144. 48. Charles Maturin, The Fatal Revenge, Vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1807), 2. 49. Ibid. 50. Martin Luther, ‘Sermon for the Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany, January 29, 1525’ in Weimarer Ausgabe, 17.1.2:88, 104. 51. Ibid. 52. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 25, eds. Jaroslav Pelikan, Helmut T. Lehmann (St. Louis: Concordia, 1955–86), 291.

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53. See Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function’ in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 98. 54. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, 34–5. 55. Ibid., 35. 56. Faxneld, Satanic Feminism, 256. 57. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (Oxford: OUP, 2008), 540. 58. Letter to Scott in The Correspondence of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Robert Maturin, eds. Fannie E. Ratchford and W.H. McCarthy, Jr., 10.

Bibliography ‘Melmoth the Wanderer’ in Saturday Review. March 19, 1892. Barnett, S.J. ‘Where Was Your Church Before Luther? Claims for the Antiquity of Protestantism Examined’. Church History, vol. 68, no. 1, 1999. 14–41. Das Faustbuch des Christlich Meynenden. Stuttgart: G.J. Göschen’sche, 1891. Eire, Carlos. War Against the Idols. Cambridge: CUP, 1986. Faxneld, Per. Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in NineteenthCentury Culture. Oxford: OUP, 2017. Girard, René. The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1989. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1992. Hennelly, Mark M. ‘Melmoth the Wanderer and Gothic Existentialism’. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, vol. 21, no. 4, 1981. 665–79. Kramer, Dale. Charles Robert Maturin. New York: Twayne, 1973. Lacan, Jacques. ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function’. Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. 93–101. Lew, Joseph. ‘Unprepared for Sudden Transformations: Identity and Politics in Melmoth the Wanderer’. Studies in the Novel, vol. 26, no. 1/2, 1994. 173–95. Luther, Martin. ‘Sermon for the Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany, January 29, 1525’. Weimarer Ausgabe, 17.1.2:88. Luther, Martin. Luther’s Works, Vol. 25, eds. Jaroslav Pelikan, Helmut T. Lehmann. St. Louis: Concordia, 1955–86. Marshall, Ashley. ‘Melmoth Affirmed: Maturin’s Defense of Sacred History’. Studies in Romanticism, vol. 47, no. 2, Summer, 2008. 121–45. Maturin, Charles. Five Sermons, on the Errors of the Roman Catholic Church, Preached in St. Peter’s Church, Dublin, 2nd edition. Dublin: William Curry, Jr., 1826. Maturin, Charles. Melmoth the Wanderer. Oxford: OUP, 2008. Maturin, Charles. Sermons. London: Archibald Constable, 1819. Maturin, Charles. The Fatal Revenge, Vol. 1. London: Longman, 1807. Milbank, Alison. ‘Sacrificial Exchange and the Gothic Double in Melmoth the Wanderer and The Picture of Dorian Gray’. Shaping Belief: Culture, Politics and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Writing, eds. Victoria Morgan, Clare Williams. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2008. 113–28. Milbank, Alison. God and the Gothic. Oxford: OUP, 2018. O’Malley, Patrick. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture. Cambridge: CUP, 2006.

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Roper, Lyndal. Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern Europe. New York: Routledge, 1994. The Correspondence of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Robert Maturin, eds. Fannie E. Ratchford and W.H. McCarthy, Jr. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1937.

Index

A Adaptation(s), 223, 224, 228, 233, 235–237, 450, 455 Aesthetic(s), 245–248, 251, 253–255, 257, 258, 445–462 Aguirre, Manuel, 82, 87 Aikin, Anna Laetitia (Barbauld), 112 Aislaby, William, 349 The Albigenses , 546 Alternative Orientalisms, 447, 462 Anachronism, 24, 28–31, 41 Anatomy theatres, 54, 62, 63 The Ancient Mariner, 321, 325–327, 330, 332, 333 Anderson, A., 112 Androgyne, 210 Animal magnetism, 431 Anon, 103 Anti-Catholicism, 141, 555–557 Anticlericalism, 136 Antiquarianism, 372, 374, 375, 383, 384, 386, 387 Anti-structure, 81 Antonio’s Revenge, 54, 55 Apparitions, 478, 483–486, 489 Appropriation, 24, 30, 36, 40, 41 Arabism, 448, 461 Arbuckle, James, 111 Ardoy, Eva, 112 Armour and Heraldry, 18 Artificial somnambulism, 431, 433 As You Like It , 23, 25

The Atheist’s Tragedy, 54, 63 Austen, Jane, 177, 180, 191 Autobiography, 281, 282, 284, 286–288, 291, 292, 294

B Baldick, Chris, 111 Ballad, 302, 304, 305, 307–309, 312–317 Banwell Bone Caves (Somerset), 351, 352 Barad, Karen, 445, 454, 459, 461 Baranger, Michael, 114 Baroque, 52, 53, 55, 57, 60, 63–65 Bassier, Ray, 453 Bat, 416, 418–422 Bataille, George, 566, 567 Bate, Jonathan, 28 Bayer-Berenbaum, Linda, 77 Beckford, William, 5, 16, 446, 450 Belsay (Northumberland), 349 Benito, Jesús, 113 Binah, 210, 211, 213, 214 Bindon Abbey (Dorset), 357 Blair, Robert, 246–257, 259, 260 Blood oath, 574, 578, 583 Bloom, Clive, 114 Body, 592–599, 601, 602, 604, 605 Bodysnatching, 267, 268, 270, 271 Bowie, James, 350 Boydell, John, 36

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9

611

612

INDEX

Brady, Patrick, 90 Braun, Theodore E.D., 90 The Bristol Heiress , 179, 180, 182, 184, 185, 187, 191 British gothic novel, 136, 137, 147 Brown, Lancelot, 353 Burial laws, 268 Burke, Edmund, 346 Busbridge (Surrey), 347 Byron, Lord, 36, 427–429, 432–434, 438, 447, 451, 454, 456–460

C Cabinet of curiosity, 446–448, 453, 461, 462 Calvinism, 562, 566, 594, 605 Cannibalism, 61, 62 Castle of Otranto, The (1765), 24, 26, 27, 41, 181, 345, 356, 446 The Castle of Wolfenbach, 178 Castles, 121, 123, 132, 346 Catholic/Catholicism, 26, 28, 30, 57, 58, 178, 592, 594, 595, 597, 598 Cawelti, John G., 90 Cemetery, 263, 266, 272, 273, 275 Chaos, 78, 80, 88 Characterisation, 73, 77, 78, 81, 82 Chettle, Henry, 54 Christabel , 321, 326, 327, 330, 332, 333 Christianity, 2, 18, 458, 460, 475, 551, 557, 561, 564, 579, 594 Cinema, 406 City, 281–285, 287–292, 295 Classicism, 369, 389 Claudius Tiberius Nero, 62 Clermont , 178, 180 Clery, Emma J., 90 Cohen, Michèle, 91 Colburn, Henry, 427, 428 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 321–334 Community, 281–284, 288–292, 295 Conrad, Joseph, 39 Consciousness, 322, 325–328 Consummation, 214 Coriolanus , 34 Corpse, 264, 266, 268, 270–272, 274, 275

Creationism, 349, 352 Curse, 574, 575, 578, 579, 582, 583, 585, 586

D D’Alton, John, 111 Damnation, 591–593, 597, 600, 602, 603, 605 Darwin, Charles, 358 Davenport-Hines, Richard, 345, 346, 359 Death, 245–248, 252–257, 302, 304–308, 310–312, 314–316 Deleuze, Gilles, 454, 459–461 Demon, 411–413, 419, 420 De Quincey, Thomas, 281–295 Derrida, Jacques, 41 De Sade, Marquis, 2, 14, 19 Dickens, Charles, 39, 401, 404, 405 Doctor Faustus , 25 Doty, William, 227, 230, 235 Downton (Herefordshire), 347 Dracula, 39 Dreams, 24, 33, 322, 325–332, 334, 476–482, 488 Drozdz, Stanislaw, 114 Druids, 352 Dualism, 523, 532 The Duchess of Malfi, 52–55, 57, 58, 60, 63, 65 Dudley, John, 179, 185, 191

E Ecogothic, 122 Eglington Tournament, 17 Eighteenth century, 520, 524–526 Eliade, Mircea, 91 Enlightenment, 24, 25, 27, 40, 499–501, 504–511, 513, 515, 516, 519, 520, 523, 532 Esoteric orders, 513, 516 An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear, 27 Eternal life, 582 Excess, 76, 81–84, 556, 563, 565 Explained supernatural, 141 The eye, 564–567

INDEX

F Fairclough, Peter, 112 Fatal Revenge, 543–545 Faust , 40, 593 Female, 301–304, 306–312, 315, 316 Female gothic, 122, 123, 131, 135, 137–140 Femme fatale, 32 Field, ‘fielding’, 79, 97, 98, 101, 102, 104, 105, 109 First French Republic, 135, 136 The Flying Dutchman, 573, 581–586 Follies, 346, 348–352, 354, 357, 358 Fonthill Abby, 16, 446, 450 Ford, John, 54 Formula, 95–100, 104, 107 Formulaicity, 73–75, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 84, 88 Formulaic pattern, 78–81, 83, 85, 97–107, 109 Fourth dimension, 325, 333 Fractality, 79, 110 Fractal Orientalism, 447, 458, 462 A Fragment of a Novel , 447, 454, 459, 461 France, 135–137, 139–141, 143, 145, 147, 148 Frankenstein, 31, 39, 223, 224, 226, 227, 229, 230, 233–237, 446, 447, 454, 458, 459, 592 Frayling, Christopher, 438 French gothic novel, 136, 145 French literature, 146 French Revolution, 135, 137, 139, 141, 142 Freud, Sigmund, 24, 66 Frog Service, 355, 356 Fuseli, Henry, 36, 407–410, 412–416, 419, 422

G Galvanism, 446, 458, 459 Garden design, 345, 346 Gender, 156, 157, 170 Genre, 446, 447, 451, 453, 460, 461 George, Sam, 42 German Gothic, 6–8

613

Ghosts, 23–26, 32, 33, 36, 38, 358, 476, 478, 482, 483, 485–487, 489–491 “The Giaour”, 447, 454, 456, 457, 461 Gilpin, William, 348, 351, 353, 354, 359, 360 Girard, René, 599 Glenowen, 178, 179, 181, 190, 191 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 593 Goldberger, Ary L., 114 Gothic Constitution, 18 Gothic novel, 454, 460 Gothic orientalism, 445, 447, 451, 453, 459, 460 Gothic poetics, 95, 103, 109, 110 Gothic poetry, 247, 252 Gothic Revival architecture, 374, 390 Gothic romance, 387, 591, 603 Gothic Villain-Hero, 542, 545 Gothic vortex, 447 Goths, 28–31 Goya, Francisco, 407, 414–418, 420–422 Grammar, 73, 75, 84, 88, 89 Graveyard, 263, 264, 266, 267, 269, 271, 273–276 Graveyard poetry, 245–247, 252, 256, 258 Grove, Allen W., 77, 78 Guattari, Félix, 445, 456, 459, 460

H Hackfall (Yorkshire), 347 Hafod (Powys), 347 Hamlet , 26, 27, 33, 35, 36, 40, 52, 54, 55 Harman, Graham, 453 Hawkstone (Shropshire), 347 Hayles, N. Katherine, 78 Heidegger, Martin, 453 Higher dimensional space, 322, 326, 327, 331 Hill, Richard, 348, 354, 355 Hinduism, 448 History, 24, 25, 28, 32, 159, 160, 162–164, 166, 168–171 The History of Nourjahad, 446, 447, 454, 456

614

INDEX

Horner, Avril, 74 Horror, 5, 6, 13, 123, 125, 129–132, 247–249, 251–258, 593, 596–598, 600, 602 Howells, Coral Ann, 89 Hugo, Victor, 31 Husserl, Edmund, 453 I Imagination, 321–327, 331, 332, 429–438 Imitation, 143, 146 Incest, 64 Incubus, 409–414, 416, 419, 422 Industrial and Agricultural changes, 17 Influence, 137, 147 Ireland, 540, 545 Irish Gothic, 568 Irish literature, 544 Irish novel, 562 Irish schizophrenia, 558 Islami, S.Y., 89 The Italian, 177, 178 Iteration, 75, 77, 78, 81, 82, 84, 85 J Jhones, Thomas, 348, 349, 351, 353–356, 358 Johnson, Samuel, 348, 353, 354, 446, 454 Julius Caesar, 32–36 K Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 89 Kant, Immanuel, 453 Keats, John, 449 King Henry VI, Part 1, 32 King Henry VI, Part 2, 32, 33 King Lear, 23, 35, 38 King Richard III , 31 Knight, Richard Payne, 111 Kyd, Thomas, 53 L Lacan, Jacques, 39, 604

Landscape design, 357 Lathom, Francis, 178 Law, 156–159, 161, 163–166, 168, 170, 171, 173 Law, William, Bishop, 352, 355, 357 Le Fanu, Sheridan, 592 Legacy, 137, 138, 147 Lewis, Matthew G., 82, 83, 105, 136, 147, 519–522, 524–529, 531, 532, 534–536, 592 Liminal, 321, 322, 325–329, 331–333 Liminality, 73, 76–78, 81, 88, 104, 110 Liminal poetics, 77, 89 Literary forgery, 137 Lord, Albert B., 96 Loss, 281, 282, 287, 288, 292, 295 Lutheran, 603, 604 Lüthi, Max, 91 Lycanthropy, 60, 61 Lynch, Deirdre Shauna, 114 Lynch, Jack, 114

M Macabre, 51–57, 59–66 MacAndrew, Elizabeth, 90 Macbeth, 25, 26, 31, 32, 34–36, 39–41 Madness, 24, 33, 35, 38, 59, 60, 66, 525, 526, 528, 530, 531 Manfred, 40 Manichean, 595–597, 605 Manzanas, Ana, 113 Marlowe, Christopher, 25 Marston, John, 54 Materialism, 446, 458, 460, 520, 522–524, 532 Materiality, 591–593, 597–599, 602, 603, 605, 606 Maturin, Charles, 539–552, 591–598, 600–605 McCarthy, John A., 90 Medieval, 1, 4, 16–18 Medievalism, 16, 17, 19 Meillassoux, Quentin, 453 Melmoth, John, 591, 593–596, 598–600, 602, 604, 605 Melmoth the Wanderer, 541–547, 549, 551, 552, 555, 556, 562

INDEX

Memento mori, 51, 53, 65 Mephistopheles, 592, 598 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 431–433, 500, 505, 506, 510, 516 Mesmerism, 433, 434 Metaphor, 365, 385, 389 Metatheatricality, 64 Middleton, Thomas, 55 The Midnight Bell , 178, 191 The Milesian Chief , 544 Miles, Robert, 109 Miller, Sanderson, 346, 347 Minerva Press, 177, 184 Modernity, 24, 25, 31, 40, 41 Monasteries, 57 Monck, Charles, 349, 357 The Monk, 519, 520, 522, 524–526, 528, 530, 532 Monsters, 398, 403, 406 Montagu, Elizabeth, 27 Mordaunt, Mary, 357 Morris, Valentine, 347, 348, 354, 356, 357 Multiform, 110 Murray, John, 19 The Mysterious Warning , 178 The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 39 Mysticism, 500 Myth, 223–237, 446

N Napier, Elizabeth, 89, 90 Narrative, 282, 284–287, 289, 291–295 Nationalism, 24, 30, 36 Nature, 132 The Necromancer, 180, 191 Nightmare, 2, 11, 24, 33, 184, 186,, 289, 322, 325–332, 335, 336, 400, 408–414, 416, 418, 421, 422, 461, 481, 449, 459 The Nightmare, 67, 407–409, 412–414, 422, 576 Nineteenth century, 539 The Nocturnal Minstrel , 178, 179, 181, 187, 188, 191 Nodier, Charles, 399, 401, 402, 577 Northanger Abbey, 177, 178, 180

615

Notre-Dame de Paris , 31 The Numinous, 75, 76, 80, 84, 88

O Occult, 499–503, 505–513, 515, 516 Olrik, Axel, 89 Ontology, 446, 447, 452, 458 Orientalisms, 445–451, 453, 454, 457, 459–462 Oriental tale, 447, 452, 454, 460 The Orphan of the Rhine, 177–185, 191 Ossian, 356

P Pact with the devil, 551, 591 Paglia, Camille, 449, 450, 454, 456, 457, 461 Paper house, 365, 384, 386 Parker, Jo Alyson, 78 Parks, Ward, 87 Parsons, Eliza, 84, 106, 178 Pastiche, 446, 447, 450, 454, 456, 460, 462 Payne Knight, Richard, 348, 353, 356–358 Penn, John, 349, 351, 356 ‘Penny Bloods’, 263, 270 Periodicals, 135, 139–141, 146 Perversity, 2, 13–15 Phantasmagoria, 14, 398–405 Phasing, 87 Philosophy, 453 Photography, 404 Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 39 Picturesque, 346, 348, 350, 352–354 Piercefield (Gwent), 347 Pitcher, E.W., 107 Plagiarism, 109 Pococke, Richard, Bishop, 356 Poetry, 302, 304, 306–309, 311, 314–316, 321, 322, 325–327, 333, 334 Polidori, Gaetano, 427, 428, 439, 441 Polidori, John William, 427–430, 432–442, 454, 455 Pope, Alexander, 345

616

INDEX

Portland (Dorset), 347 Potter, Franz J., 77 Press, 4, 17, 230, 386, 507, 508, 529 Prickett, Stephen, 112 Property, 155–159, 161–163, 165, 166, 169, 170, 173 Prophecy, 32, 35 Propp, Vladimir, 89 Protestantism, 28, 30, 592, 596 Psychology, 322, 326, 330, 331, 334 Puységur, Marquis de, 431 Pyrenean Banditti, 179, 183, 184, 188, 191

R Radcliffe, Ann, 2, 5, 8, 11, 13, 24, 82–86, 103–105, 121–132, 135–139, 141–148, 180–182, 322, 323, 333 Radical Orientalism, 447, 462 Radway (Warwickshire), 346 Rasselas , 446, 452, 453, 461 Rational, 123, 128, 132 ‘Raymond’, 96, 98, 103, 107–110 Reception, 137, 146 Recurrence, 80 Recursion, 98 Reeve, Clara, 106 Reformation, 346 Reputation, 136, 147 Revenge, 53–56, 60, 61, 63, 64 The Revenger’s Tragedy, 55 Rewriting, 107 Rhetoric of binaries, 74, 84–88 Robertson, Etienne-Gaspard, 399–403, 405 Roche, Regina Maria, 178, 180 Romance, 121, 123, 124, 128 Romans, 352 Romantic, 407, 410, 416, 419 Romanticism, 40, 41, 143, 147, 302, 321 Romantic Orientalism, 447, 449, 451 Rosa, Salvator, 345, 346 Rossetti, William, 439, 440 Ruins, 321–325, 327, 334, 346, 347, 350, 356, 357

Rules, 73, 75, 77, 88 Ruthven, Lord, 427–429, 454, 577

S Sadleir, Michael, 177, 178, 180, 182 Sage, Victor, 114 Sánchez-Santos, Beatriz, 110 Saxon, 17–19 Scapegoating, 599 Science Fiction, 405, 406 Scott, Walter, 544, 553, 594 Seascapes, 131, 132 Self-similarity, 97, 109, 110 Sensation, 124, 126, 127, 130, 131 Sensibility, 155, 157, 159–162, 164, 165, 167, 171 Sephiroth, 209–212 Sexual Personae, 449 Seymour, Robert, 112 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 346 Shakespeare, William, 23, 52 Shekinah, 211, 213, 214, 219 Shelley, Mary, 2, 5, 11, 13, 31, 214, 217, 224, 225, 228, 229, 232, 234–239, 333, 336, 339, 400, 446, 467, 481, 492, 592, 595 Shelley, Percy, 10, 214, 235, 333, 336 Sheridan, Frances, 446 A Sicilian Romance, 26, 27 Sinclair, John, 111 Sleath, Eleanor, 177–185, 187, 188, 190, 191 The Sleep of Reason, 414–416, 418, 421 Smith, Elizabeth, 356, 357 Somnambulism, 429–431, 438 Soto, Isabel, 114 Space, 322–330, 332–334 The Spanish Tragedy, 53, 54, 64 Spatiality, 283, 284, 286, 287, 293–295 Spectrality, 309 Spectres de Marx, 41 Speculative materialism, 453 Spiritual, 593–595, 597, 599–604, 606 Spiritualism, 404 Stewart, Dugald, 433 Stoker, Bram, 39, 592, 596 Stoppard, Tom, 345, 359

INDEX

Strawberry Hill, 345, 446, 450, 451, 454, 456, 460, 461 Strawberry Hill House, 1, 16 Strong forms, 74, 75, 77, 88 Sturm-und-Drang , 181 Sublime, 1, 13, 130–132, 322–324, 326, 327, 330, 346, 349, 350, 353, 354, 357 Subterranean, 125 Sufism, 456, 461 Summers, Montague, 178, 183 Supernatural, 23–26, 31, 32, 35, 41, 53, 57–59, 61, 141, 147, 322–334, 475–491 Supernatural explained, 486–489 Surface, 74, 75, 80–82, 84, 85, 88 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 500, 501, 503–506, 510, 516

T Tableau, 79, 80, 104, 106, 107 Techniques of the surface, 74, 75, 81 Terror, 11, 13, 123, 125, 127, 129–132 Teuthold, Peter, 79, 104 Textual lacunae, 562, 564, 566 Theology, 477, 483–485, 488, 592, 594, 599, 603 Theory, 446, 447, 454, 455, 459, 461, 462 Threshold, 74–77, 85–89 Tintern Abbey (Gwent), 347, 354 Tis a Pity She’s a Whore, 54, 56, 63 Titus Andronicus , 28–30, 34 Todd, Janet, 90 Total depravity, 556, 561, 564, 566, 567 Tourneur, Cyril, 54 Tower of London, 18 Traditional mythology, 223, 225–227, 231 Tragedy of Hoffman, The, 54 Translation, 135–137, 139, 140, 142–146 Transmediation, 446, 450, 456, 457 Turner, Victor, 74, 81 Type scene, 80, 84 Tzimzum, 205, 212, 214

617

U Uncanny, 24, 35, 36, 41 Unnatural, 24, 26, 33–36 Untimely, 33, 35

V Vampire, 407, 408, 414, 419–422, 455, 456, 458, 573–576, 578, 582, 586 The Vampyre, 4, 6, 7, 333, 407, 427–429, 433–435, 438, 454, 455, 575, 577, 586 Variation, 76–80 Varma, Devindra P., 178, 188, 191 Vathek, 446, 447, 450, 451, 453, 454, 456, 459, 461 Virginity, 59 Visibility, 84–86, 88 Visual Orientalism, 458 Voltaire, 27 Von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 40 Von Schiller, Friedrich, 399 Voyeurism, 565, 567 Vrykolakas, 573–578, 583, 586

W Walbran, John R., 112 Walkley, Arthur Bingham, 52 Wallpaper, 364, 375, 383, 386 Walpole, Horace, 1, 5, 23, 105, 106, 345, 357, 363, 370, 388–390, 446 Walpole, Robert, 27 The Wanderer, 581, 582, 586 The Wandering Jew, 573, 578–584, 586 Warwick Castle, 347 Waxworks, 59, 65, 66 Webb, Philip, 349, 352, 357 Webster, John, 52 Weld family, 357 Werewolf, 60 Westall, Richard, 36 Whigs, 27 Who’s the Murderer?, 179, 181, 183–185, 189, 191 Wilde, Oscar, 39, 593 The Wild Irish Boy, 555 Williams, Abigail, 89

618

INDEX

Witch(es), 23, 25, 26, 31, 34, 36, 400–402, 405, 415, 416, 418–421 Women; or, Pour et Contre, 542, 545 Wookey Hole (Somerset), 346 Wraxall, Sir Nathaniel William, 111 Wyatt, James, 351

Y Yester (Borders), 350

Z Zlosnik, Sue, 74