Essay Examples - English Literature Essays
Comment on the degree to which Gothic texts can disturb the reader, with reference to two or more texts.
The Island of Doctor Moreau must be one of the most unpleasant books to read in world literature - (Michael Fried)
Michael Fried's reaction to H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) is an emphatic, but hardly unique response to a novel that may be considered to have been written in the Gothic tradition. A century before the publication of Wells' novel, Matthew Lewis' The Monk (1796) had attracted the opprobrium of a number of journals and reviews, not least The British Critic, which recoiled from the novel's depiction of lust, murder, incest and every atrocity that can disgrace human nature, brought together without the apology of probability, or even possibility for their introduction (cited in Lewis Introduction vii).
Evidently, there exists within Gothic literature something that has the potential to disturb, horrify and even outrage the reader. In order to examine precisely what it is that produces this reaction, and to what degree, it is necessary to briefly clarify what is meant by 'Gothic' literature, since the word has become, to some extent, a catch-all term applied to genres as diverse as science-fiction and Bildungsroman, as well as being pre-empted or appropriated by movements in music, architecture and youth culture.
Despite earlier emergences, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) is usually cited as the progenitor of the Gothic novel. It was a bloody and barbarous tale of villainy and the supernatural set in the medieval age, and written with the express purpose of terrifying its readership. It succeeded, due to its narrative of
dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlightof footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horsemen, swirling mists and sudden winds (Hill 19).
The fact that Susan Hill is able to recognisably cite all of Walpole's props and paraphernalia in The Woman in Black (1983), written over two hundred years later, points up one of the extraordinary paradoxes of Gothic fiction, germane to understanding the reaction it provokes in its readership: it is at once writing of the excessive, remote and outré, and a tradition with a highly conventional structure (more often than not involving a framing device, such as letters or interwoven narratives), mise-en-scène and cast of characters.
It is able to treat horrific, disturbing and unbearable human experience, whilst often having an air of the reassuringly predictable, even hackneyed: the whole apparatus, in fact, that has kept the cinema and much third-rate fiction going for years (Cuddon 382). The simple truth is that it is almost impossible to place parameters on the Gothic canon: it is not an isolated phenomenon but embraces traditional ballads and folklore, Jacobean tragedy, the Sturm und Drang movement, and even the sentimental novelists.
There is undoubtedly something profoundly disturbing to notions of conventional composition and originality in the Gothic's wilful drawing of attention to its own piecemeal construction. Reinforced by this is the notorious reconstruction and revision of their novels undertaken by early Gothic authors such as William Godwin in Caleb Williams (1794) and Mary Shelley in Frankenstein (1818), whose own novel takes on the qualities of the monster fashioned within it:
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded; it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. (Shelley 1831 Preface 8).
At its most extreme, this mass of 'substances' can appear as a series of framed, conventional tableaux, rather than a fluid narrative. Given this incoherence, and lack of aesthetic unity, the Gothic novel can seem contradictory and unsure as to its own direction, making it a reaction against reason, order and rationalism. These are the basis of civilised human existence; to remove them is to induce fear.
In the age of Walpole, the Gothic novel was worrisomely subversive, since it encouraged very close identification between reader and character, and critics perceived this as indulging an atavistic and amoral imagination with the potential to become a subversive social force. More so even than undermining reason, the Gothic novel can fragment identity: it aims not necessarily to portray a character but to generate a feeling in the reader by placing the character in a suspense-filled situation.
The fact that the characters inhabited an imaginary world detached, at least in part, from social order and morality, be that Caleb Williams' remote county of England (Godwin Volume I Chapter I p.3), Frankenstein's part of the world never before visiteda land never before imprinted by the foot of man (Shelley 1818 Volume I Letter I p.6) or even The Woman in Black's anonymous county of ---shire (Hill 29), made the genre even more threatening. Time and spatial dimensions - particularly in those novels that use epistolatory techniques - are distorted within the Gothic novel. Once these ultimate arbiters of human action become unreliable, the sense of unease and uncertainty are heightened.
The Monk, with which The British Critic took issue, was something of a radical Gothic novel in that it took the stereotypes of earlier Gothic literature and distorted them: its moral scheme is blatantly topsy-turvy, since virtuous women, for example, go largely unrewarded, whilst the parricide Marguerite is unpunished; the whole novel parades a code of morals absolutely antithetical to that expected by the reader, and to that found in other Gothic novels of the period where the normal moral and social order is finally reasserted, and the guilty or amoral punished, as in James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions Of A Justified Sinner (1824): Almighty God, what is this that I am about to do! The hour of repentance is past, and now my fate is inevitable (Hogg 230).
Such conventional morality should be anything but unsettling, but critics such as Jacqueline Howard rightly point out that here is another instance of subversion and disturbing of norms by Gothic novels like Hogg's, whose conclusion is far less enjoyable - satisfying, even - than the middle of the text. This so-called 'antiteleological' model for reading is radical in the extreme.
The eighteenth century Gothic is commonly envisaged as presenting the pervading intellectual temper of the Enlightenment and the rational enquiry of the Scientific Revolution seen through a glass darkly. The themes of superficiality, concealment and blind superstition found in many of the period's Gothic novels were therefore deeply disturbing to these schools of thought. A favourite image indicative of all these qualities is the veil, first made play with by Ann Radcliffe in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and developed by Matthew Lewis in The Monk.
Here the veil is a troubling and ambiguous image, both having overtones of marriage, and protecting chastity, but paradoxically indicative of the church's attempts to cover the hypocrisy within. Since the veil conceals dangerous sexuality, it comes, paradoxically, to represent it. Likewise, Caleb Williams uses the motif of Falkland's 'fatal trunk, from which all my misfortunes originated' (Godwin Volume III Chapter XV p.315); its exact contents are kept cunningly veiled, and Caleb's attempts to reveal them - unlike the pursuits of scientific truths for the enquiring minds of the Enlightenment - merely result in more ambiguity and mystery.
The writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau had a profound effect on the development of the Gothic; his school of primitivism was literally provided a method of reviving the long-lost past through the necromantic powers of Gothic, and his concept of the 'noble savage' meshed with the socially excluded individual often found as a Gothic protagonist. An ability to feed basic human fears is the stock-in-trade of much Gothic fiction.
The fear of the unknown, the intangible and the unseen is one of these. The fear of being alone, of being unable to forge human relationships is another. Caleb Williams is the archetypal outsider, a deserted, solitary wretch in the midst of my species (Godwin Volume III Chapter VIII p.255), in what amounts to an anti-Bildungsroman where development obliterates, rather than constructs, personal identity. Compare Victor Frankenstein who had ever been surrounded by amiable companionswas now alone (Shelley 1818 Volume I Chapter I p.28).
Works such as Godwin's and Lewis' may be remote enough in terms of historical context to have lost some of their disturbing impact for a present-day audience, but the principle of the unknown remained an important keystone in generating a disturbingly suspenseful atmosphere in later Gothic novels. Just as, in terms of comedy, superficial innuendo can suggest a more obscene implied meaning, so suggestiveness, and half-glimpsed, half-veiled images within Gothic tales of suspense allow the mind of the reader to imagine all manner of implied horror beyond.
Thus the image of the veil is linked to the power of sight; to deprive the body of this faculty is to leave it vulnerable and unable to place itself within its environment. In The Woman in Black, Susan Hill repeatedly places her protagonist, Kipps, in a fog or mist, depriving him of his ability to see and rationalise the world around him, and consequently providing the reader - through Kipps' half-blindness - with only fragments of sound and sense, designed to create the uncertainty and unease that push Kipps, and to a lesser extent the reader - into an agony of fear and frustration (Hill 74).
In Dracula (1897), Bram Stoker underlines the fact that the rational mind is disturbed by that it cannot literally perceive and explain: it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain (Stoker Chapter XIV p.246). The rationale of the scientific method is consistently undermined by the Gothic; it is no longer a means of man's empowerment over the tyranny of nature, but a form of tyranny itself, wilfully blind. Knowledge should empower, but all it affords the creature in Frankenstein, for example, is a view of the Christian pretensions of civilised society ruthlessly exposed: the literally blind de Lacey would instinctively embrace the creature, his sighted, but morally blind, children shun him. The net result is that sorrow only increased with knowledge (Shelley 1818 Volume I Chapter V p.96).
If the Gothic is a literature of confusing paradox, it is also a literature of perversion. The early Gothic saw to it that a moral code was preserved, the virtuous rewarded, and the guilty punished. Later novels such as The Monk and Frankenstein, which features the deaths of the largely innocent Elizabeth and Clerval, deliberately subverted this code. Lewis' novel in particular perverts morality and religion to an extraordinary degree, as Catholicism becomes synonymous with idolatrous blasphemy, the very icon of the Madonna is equated with luxuriance, sexuality and power, and spirituality is debased into materialism. The supreme perversion of faith comes in Elvira's censorship of Antonia's Bible, since
the annals of a brothel would scarcely furnish a greater choice of indecent expressions[she decided] that it should be copied out in her own hand, and all improper passages either altered or omitted. (Lewis Volume II Chapter IV pp.259-260)
Moral sensibilities are treated cynically in the novel; female figures who display them are treated little short of voyeuristically, and religious faith becomes corrupting or confining, rather than leading to freedom or salvation. To aim barbs at religious belief was, and to a lesser extent, still is a sure way of disturbing and unsettling a readership to a significant degree.
If the eighteenth century Gothic of Lewis, Godwin and Shelley perverted the spirit of the Enlightenment, the Gothic of the nineteenth century subverted the notoriously repressive milieu of the Victorian age. Dracula has remained the most enduringly popular Gothic novel of the period, both in its original form and its numerous filmic versions.
What is extraordinary is that the novel offers an apparently far more redemptive, restorative conclusion than those found in its eighteenth century precursors, and indeed the earlier vampire literature of the period, such as Sheridan Le Fanu's 'Carmilla' from In A Glass Darkly (1872). Not only is the vampiric Lucy, via van Helsing's exorcism, restored to holy calm (Stoker Chapter XVI p.278), but the Count himself seems to be afforded the possibility of redemptive salvation as, at the moment of his death, a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there (Stoker Chapter XXVII p.484) appears on his face. The scenes in the novel of things more miserable and sordid than could have been imagined (Stoker Chapter XV p.253) are tempered by humour, exemplified particularly in van Helsing's description of King Laugh (Stoker Chapter XIII p.226), delivered in his own comically fractured accent.
For all this tempering, however, Dracula has been perceived as a profoundly disturbing text, because of its ability to fracture the rigid boundaries laid down by Victorian society. These boundaries are both those that define what is taboo in terms of sexuality, and those that separate one emotional response from another. The novel's continual dwelling on terms of halfway states of consciousness - Renfield's lunacy, Mina's hypnotic trance, dreams, telepathy - as well as, primarily, the blurring of divisions between living and dead - are what give Dracula its ability to unsettle the reader on a deep-seated level.
In this it is not unique; The Woman in Black - seemingly as far removed from this tale of vampirism as is possible to be - unsettles its readers in the same way, because of its preoccupation with the edge of the horizon where life and death meet together (Hill 90) and the unanswerable questions about life and death and the borderlands between (Hill 150) that it raises. Nevertheless, Dracula penetrated deep into the Victorian psyche, conditioned by a proscriptive, patriarchal and imperialist culture with its sense of what Sigmund Freud labelled 'the uncanny', and ability to
mak[e] things uncertain: it has to do with the sense that things are not as they have come to appear through habit and familiarity, that they may challenge all rationality and logic. (Bennett and Royle 37)
This uncertainty, about death, about sexual identity, about waking and dreaming, deliberately worries away at the edges of Victorian middle-class ideologies, particularly those concerned with sexual identity, and specifically those that sought to constrain female sexuality. Maurice Richardson has labelled Dracula an incestuous, necrophilous, oral-anal-sadistic all-in wrestling match (cited in Frayling 418), whilst a number of feminist critics, notoriously Elaine Showalter, have been outraged by the novel as a thinly veiled fantasy of contaminating female sexuality, the unclean mouth - Freud's 'vagina dentata' - of the vampiric Lucy needing a phallic stake to neutralize it.
Such critical pyrotechnics veer on sensationalism. That said, there is undoubtedly a persistent erotic sexuality beneath some scenes; the hammering of the stake through the vampiric Lucy does bear comparison with a scene of deflowering as the body shook and quivered in its wild contortions (Stoker Chapter XVI); Dracula's attack on Mina is - out of context - ambiguous to say the least as he seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the - (Stoker Chapter XXI p.371).
More disturbing than this simplistic blood/semen equation, though, are the confused emotional responses they elicit from characters. Victorian society was one of repressed emotion, and even today mental illnesses that engender inappropriate emotional responses, such as schizophrenia and manic-depression, are stigmatised. This is where the novel's power to disturb emanates from: Richard von Krafft-Ebing's suggestion that lust and cruelty often occur together (cited in Frayling 390), or Freud's notion that one sentiment can turn readily into its opposite, or that morbid dread and repressed sexual desires are inextricably interlinked.
The notion that the same creature could be the object both of one's appalling cruelty and madly possessive love was, and is, a horrifying notion: witness Harker's oddly submissive capitulation to the trio of female vampires, whose decidedly unfeminine sexual advances he finds both thrilling and repulsive (Stoker Chapter III p.55). Even more so than these females, Lucy's nocturnal predations on children are the ultimate, most troubling perversion of motherhood and accepted female behaviour.
What also proves disturbing in Dracula is the fable of national insecurity (Davenport-Hines 260) that it embodies. Written at a time of Empire-building, the Count, himself an aggressive and foreign invader, is able to blend immaculately into nineteenth century English society. Again, the theme of the inability to trust one's own perception surfaces, as he is, to all appearances, perfectly anglicised, yet represents a threatening and insidious alien user of people, literally able to prey on the minds of others, even when corporeally absent.
This is his most terrifying aspect: he is a catalyst that awakes transgression within others, even those as borderline saintly as Mina Murray; he stirs up latent desires which have been conditioned to be repressed in order to maintain the delicate social status quo, not to mention psychic stability. More profoundly terrifying than any external threat is the realisation that evil is within everyone; Dracula himself may have his final look of peace (Stoker Chapter XXVII p.484), but the evil or 'dark other' that he represents has merely been repressed; not extinguished. As van Helsing notes it is not the least of its terrors that this evil is rooted deep in all good (Stoker Chapter XVIII p.310).
Dracula was not the first vampire novel; rather it came at the tail end of a tradition that had already generated John Polidori's The Vampyre (1819) and James Malcolm Rymer's Varney the Vampire (1847), both more fixated on gore, but less disquieting than Stoker's novel, since they lacked its sophisticated subtexts. Later writers have developed Dracula, creating further ambiguities that disturb to an even greater degree: Fred Saberhagen's The Dracula Tape (1975) demolished boundaries between human and vampire by having Dracula's tale narrated by the Count himself, whilst Lawrence Schimel's 'Haemo Homo' (1997) disturbingly drew AIDS and explicit homosexuality into the vampire topos.
Anne Rice's Interview With A Vampire (1976) accomplished sublime ambiguities by eliminating much of the mythology of the vampire solidified in Dracula. Not only is the reader actively encouraged to identify with Louis, there is no lupine or bat-like shape-shifting, garlic and crucifixes have no effect, and the vampires themselves do not appear damned in the way they explicitly are in Stoker's novel, all of which has the effect of wrong-footing the reader familiar with previous vampire novels, and asking the bothersome question of why the vampires exist at all. It is perhaps unsurprising that Stoker's novel has been so frequently revisited, both in literature and film.
For a Victorian audience, one of the most disturbing touches must have been that, unlike Godwin's, Lewis' or even Susan Hill's novel, it was set in a very immediate contemporary milieu, full of the latest technology from phonographs to recording machines. Such a milieu may need to be refreshed for the intrusion of the atavistic Dracula to have a more fully horrifying effect on the modern day reader, although the personal testaments and meticulous accuracy of Stoker's epistolatory novel still have the disquieting effect of de-fictionalising his subject, and presenting it as reality.
Concomitant with the vampire as a Gothic symbol are the spectre, which Lewis had already used in The Monk, and which would be taken up again by writers such as Susan Hill, and the creature/monster, used by Mary Shelley, and by Robert Louis Stevenson in Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). All occupy a liminal, twilight state outside of rational, civilised society. Though a full critique is beyond the scope of this essay, it is worth noting that Stevenson's novel fits into a broader canon of literature including Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890) Henrik Ibsen's play Ghosts (1881), and Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1893) with its fixation on the physical and mental collapse, not to mention social stigma, caused by syphilis.
Jekyll's metamorphosis into Hyde, his hardly humantroglodytic (Stevenson 'Search For Mr. Hyde' p.40) alter-ego has been viewed as a take on the dramatic personality changes brought about by the onset of syphilitic dementia. Even more explicitly than Dracula, Stevenson's novel draws attention to the fact that all human beings are commingled out of good and evil (Stevenson 'Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case' p.85): again, the most disturbing of the Gothic's dark forces comes from within; Hyde's ape-like fury (Stevenson 'The Carew Murder Case' p.47) literally bursts through the veneer of Victorian respectability Henry Jekyll sports.
Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde provides a useful analogue to Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau. Again, a full discussion of Wells' Gothic technique is not feasible in the space available here, but it may be worth considering it in this context, given the reactions of Michael Fried above. The thrust of Wells' novel seems to be along the lines of that of Stoker's and Stevenson's: the created Beast-Men are continually struggling against atavistic impulses from within, awkwardly restrained by the burlesque of human civilisation they have created. Again it harps on the themes of the outsider and loneliness, of a loss of uniqueness (in the sentient consciousness mankind assumes to be exclusively theirs being bestowed upon beasts), of a total disintegration of rational society, and of the dreadful ambiguities embodied in the passably human Beast People, animals half-wrought into the outward image of human souls (Wells Chapter XXII p.130). Perhaps what makes the novel one of the most unpleasant books is its blending of Gothic tradition with a satire of human hypocrisy and the flatly grotesque.
Whilst Wells has largely been claimed by the science-fiction canon, and Rice and others have built on the vampiric tale of Dracula, Susan Hill's The Woman In Black seems to have its roots in the older Gothic tradition of Walpole and Lewis, though much simpler and shorter in construction than either. Some of Hill's techniques and the disturbing effects they generate have already been noted, but The Woman in Black is truly extraordinary in drawing attention to its own cobbling together of various hackneyed motifs: it literally, in places, sound[s] like something from a Victorian novel (Hill 31), the house is like that of poor Miss Havisham (ibid 69) and Kipps' self-conscious perusal of The Heart of Midlothian (ibid 107) - with its own deranged madwoman, Madge Wildfire - overtly draws attention to itself. Even Hill's title seems to have been derived from Dracula, which cites 'The Woman in Black' (Stoker Chapter XIII p.229) as the sort of clichéd headline used by journalists to describe its own infanticide phantasm, the vampire Lucy.
The downbeat, spare conclusion of Hill's novel - I had seen the ghost of Jennet Humfrye and she had had her revengeEnough. (Hill 160) is all the more disturbing for its simplicity when set against the earlier intricate literary allusions. The sophisticated twenty-first century reader, keeping at the back of his mind the three hundred years of Gothic literary tradition is cleverly wrong-footed. Provision is made for a conventionally moral conclusion, as the innocent Stella and Kipps are married, only for this to be surmounted by the disturbing, and disturbingly inevitable, coda of the death of Kipps' son and wife. It is this inevitability that accounts for a great deal of the novel's unsettling effects on the reader.
nyone familiar with works such as Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898), M.R. James' Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) and even later work such as Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959) is constantly aware in reading The Woman in Black that, in this genre of novel something horrifically disturbing must happen. It is this continual suspense, rather than any of the excessive gore encountered in Lewis, that disturbs. Hill's subtlety and restrained prose style generate a tension infinitely more unbearable than that of Lewis' opulent excess. The throwaway comments I had been a widower for the past twelve years (Hill 11) and Bentley's blaming himself for what had happened to me (Hill 14) hang tantalisingly open-ended until the resolution of the book. The Woman in Black is the best example of Freud's arguments in The Uncanny: it is not the unknown, the external and the foreign that terrify the reader, it is a strange familiarity from which he cannot objectively separate himself.
Unease is provoked in a panoply of ways now familiar from the Gothic traditions of the preceding two centuries. Whilst the novel superficially seems to have little in common with Dracula, the Woman in Black herself seems to be a descendant of the vampiric Lucy, since, whenever she has been seena child has died (Hill 149). Again the trope of perverted motherhood appears, and again the reader is reminded of the ease with which an emotion can turn into its flip-side, as the devoted mother Jennet metamorphoses into the malevolent Woman in Black.
As much as the readers of the Enlightenment - if not more, given today's smug assurance of technical superiority - present-day readers are deeply perturbed by recognising their own ignorance. Kipps, and by extension the reader, is constantly doubting himself, constantly bewildered and amazed by things that are terrifying, because they were intangible and inexplicable (Hill 85).
More than a physical threat, it is his very mind and soul, his sense of rationale and identity that are threatened: things seemed to invade my own soul (Hill 125), he became another person (Hill 128). The rational and sensible (Hill 67) are continually called into question for Kipps and reader alike, as the truth of Jennet's story is agonisingly revealed, piecemeal. Here Hill appropriates the image of the veil from her eighteenth-century predecessors, literally in the bonnet-type hat that covered [the] head and shaded [the] face (Hill 49) of the spectre, but also in the way that Kipps has to work through the coastal frets, London peasoupers (Hill 25) and the wilful obfuscation of the inhabitants of Crythin Gifford in order to discover Jennet's story.
The Gothic, from Walpole to Hill, sets out to disturb. The nebulous label 'Gothic' itself includes much of Cuddon's pulp-literature and film, from the early Victorian 'penny dreadful' magazines with their tales of gory vampirism to the now familiar mystery nonsense (Hill 57) encountered in the derivative film sequels so beloved of Hollywood. Writers such as Lewis, Godwin and Shelley in the eighteenth century, Stoker and Stevenson in the nineteenth and Wells and Hill at either end of the twentieth create works that are deeply troubling to the reader precisely because their apparently clichéd settings and characters veil deeper and worrisome themes.
Ignorance, loneliness, blindness, violence and mortality are the unpleasant bugbears of human existence that civilisation and society try constantly to repress and surmount. The Gothic unleashes these, through the nyctophobia of Dracula's human protagonists, the harming of the innocent that forms the dénouement of The Woman in Black, the inability to hold on to or even create a valid identity of self encountered in Caleb Williams or Frankenstein, and so on. These things are troubling enough.
What the Gothic does however, to heighten their disturbing potential, is draw the reader in through blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, rational and dream-like, and between the experience of the character, and that of oneself, the reader, through the close identification encouraged between the two. Some novels, it is true, such as The Monk, with its baroque excess, may have less potential to shock today than at the time of publication.
The unusual foresight of Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau, in the current climate of genetic manipulation and its pushing of corporal disjunction and 'humanity' to the limits, may accord it the title of 'most unpleasant book'. What is more disturbing about the sparse simplicity of Hill's The Woman in Black, however, is its insidiousness: nothing is overt; the glimpsed half-hints and dark mutterings (Hill 57) are more disturbing than anything fully observed could ever be, and only after reading the book does the reader realise the dark power of one's own imagination to disturb and unsettle.
As Freud notes it is what is veiled, what is beneath, what is 'other' that is truly terrifying. For every rationalisation and civilisation there is a directly proportional inherent darkness, for, once again, as van Helsing notes 'evil is rooted deep in all good (Stoker Chapter XVIII p.310). And that is, ultimately, the most profoundly disturbing thought of all.
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