Through a Glass, Darkly

He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision―he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: “The horror! The horror!” ―Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)

These are the dying words of the legendary Mistah Kurtz, the enigma of which has haunted literary scholars since they were first shouted over a century ago. Most concur “the horror” is in reference to the seizure of exotic riches during the Scramble for Africa, the amorality thereof Kurtz ultimately recognizes. But the “horror” is not exclusive to Conrad’s tale of moral turpitude. Not twenty years later did T. S Eliot cite the same quote in his seminal poem

The Wasteland published just after the devastating Great War. Then fifty years later the film Apocalypse Now! (1979) contemporized Conrad’s colonized Congo and situated the new cast in the recently war-torn Vietnam. Since its first articulation one hundred and twenty-one years ago, authors have capitalized on its allegorical ambiguity and undertaken to answer the canonical question of what “the horror” is within their own milieux. By distorting the looking-glass of literature, Gothic authors allegorize the menaces of their society through monstrous simulacra to exhibit their respective contemporary issues.

If Conrad articulated the epigraphic phrase, Mary Shelley inspired the preverbal gasp.

The publication of the proto-science fiction novel Frankenstein; Or The Modern Prometheus (1818) explores Victor Frankenstein’s macabre ambitions that bear striking similarities to the contemporaneous undertakings of resurrection men who like Victor “collected bones from charnel-houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame” 2

(Shelley 49). As the necropolitan horrors of post-revolution France prompted the excavation of catacombs, these close encounters with the dead inspired morbid curiosity and thus, “[t]he study of anatomy in Europe was at an all-time high. Cadavers were in demand and hence, valuable.

Body snatching was common and ‘resurrection men’ such as William Burke and William Hare of Edinburgh (who became famous after their grave robbing after their 1828 trial) worked to provide the raw materials for the dissection theatres” (Baumann 58). Furthermore, the recent developments in galvanism, the science of reanimation, excited interest in corpse procurement.

Resurrection men would exhume bodies from fresh graves and transport them to morgues for anatomical observation and galvanic experimentation. These ghastly transactions had operated smoothly in London’s commercial underworld until the aforementioned Burke and Hare murders unveiled its grisly reality. Victor’s own experiments thrill him until he unveils the “horror of [the monster’s] countenance]” after which he “escape[s] … [takes] refuge” and regrets ever creating the Monster (Shelley 52). His hubris and the fatal extent to which it drives him demonstrates the horrific notion that science could open an avenue to such mad and transgressive studies. That not fifty years later would Charles Darwin publish his theory of evolution suggests Frankenstein is indeed not only horrifically realistic but dreadfully prophetic: Victor proclaims, “[a] new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me” (Shelley 48). Indeed, Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein would inspire a new species of monster created by new sciences that would be just as uncanny and terrific as the authoress foretold.

Seventy years later between 1880-1900 the Victorian triumvirate comprising Robert

Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker would compose the most monstrous and 3 immortal caricatures of an England plagued by murder, decadence, and perversity. Stevenson’s

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) launched the Victorian Gothic campaign, capitalizing on the panic elicited from the coincident Jack the Ripper murders that horrified East

End. Forensic observation concluded the precise evisceration of the prostitutes was performed by an individual with superior medical expertise; that such gruesome horror could be wrought by a man of a respectable profession confounded the morale of Victorian England. The moral dissymmetry thereof is represented by Dr. Jekyll who “signifies the rational, the socialized

Victorian who wants to know, to make sense of, the hidden side that is most unlike himself: the side that seems irrational and abnormal” the degeneration thereof Stevenson expresses problematically (Comitini 114-115). Stevenson describes, “Mr. Hyde [as] … a masked thing like a monkey … dwarfish … something troglodytic …” this grotesquely animalistic profile recalling the depictions of criminals of Stevenson’s day (Stevenson 18). Contemporary Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso had formulated these beliefs and posited criminality was hereditary and “features [such as Hyde’s] were all signs of a form of primitive existence which normal men and women had transcended but which the criminal was condemned to relive”

(Arata 234). Lombroso’s interpretation of atavism became heavily racialized and advanced social darwinism to which the narrative of Jekyll and Hyde alludes. The respectable bourgeoisie Jekyll is canonically superior to the degenerate Hyde but the implications of his alchemical mutation

“... is in fact a prime source of horror in the tale: not that the professional man is transformed into an atavistic criminal, but that the atavist learns to pass as a gentleman” (Arata 240). Hyde is practically groomed “to step into … Henry Jekyll’s shoes” this assimilation consummated by the doctor writing the former into his will as his sole benefactor (Stevenson 12). Hyde becomes 4

Jekyll’s protected son, “a mentor sheltering a promising disciple”, to maintain his gentlemanly reputation as “gentlemen may sin so long as appearances are preserved” (Arata 241). Jekyll’s transformation thus becomes the medium through which repressed high society gentlemen may relieve their immoral incontinence. Whereas Stevenson alchemizes his disassociation, Oscar

Wilde aestheticizes Dorian Gray’s in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) in which his illustrated self is the scapegoat.

Wilde duplicates the conscience of his eponymous protagonist through a Faustian bargain that immortalizes his boyish youth and “[w]hat the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image of the canvas”, rendering the picture a perpetual sepulchre in which his physique and morality putrefies (Wilde 122). Dorian’s displaced decomposition alludes to the

“discourse of waste [that] was central to late Victorian culture and its anxieties about decay and degeneration” informed by contemporary social critic Max Nordau’s essay Degeneration whose polemic impugned the entropy manifest in “social groups such as homosexuals who were seen as

‘a form of waste or ordure’” (Raitt 171). Evocative of this disease is the mephistophelean influence of Dorian’s pederastic mentor, Lord Henry Wotton, who coaxes him to indulge in the vices of the “grey, monstrous London, … its sordid sinners, and its splendid sinners” (Wilde 52).

The inducements of Lord Henry exaggerate the attempts of certain politicians to decriminalize and legitimize the “immoral” and “indecent” behaviors of London’s homosexual scene condemned in the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act in which “its Labouchère Amendment prohibited consensual adult homosexual interourcse and procuration, whether it public or private” (Cauti xxxi). Notwithstanding this legislation, the gay underworld present in the opium dens and backdoor brothels the dandyish Dorian haunts in the novel continued to operate and 5 even functioned as epicenters for drugs and as critic Patricia Comitini notes “[a]ccess to drugs and to alcohol was largely legal and unrestricted … and there was no real distinction between the medicinal and what we would now call the recreational use of opium” (116). Uninhibited, Dorian becomes like his forefathers, Victor Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll, and takes advantage of his arcane knowledge in order to live his profligate life. Dorian’s aestheticized transfiguration reinforces the deregulation of science undermining it as a discipline and recontextualizing it as a liberation by which he relinquishes his taboo desires and transfers them on a simulacrum of his monstrous self. Yet, if Stevenson exposed the hideous hypocrisy of this medium, Wilde varnished its transgressive allure, rendering the degenerate decadence “all cupids and cornucopias”, inspiring a voyeuristic impulse to acquaint the face of horror (Wilde 53).

Whereas Stevenson and Wilde obscured Hyde and Dorian’s deformities in the shadows of Soho, Bram Stoker ignites the blazing visage of Count Dracula to illuminate the “basilisk horror[s]” of London in his 1897 novel (Stoker 58). The apex of the unholy trinity of Victorian

Gothic literature, the Count transcends the transformative traditions of his predecessors, indulging in his deviancy without pretense; yet in his metamorphosis he shares Jekyll’s physical peculiarities and mimics Dorian’s immorality. Upon meeting the Count, Johnathan Harker remarks his inhuman qualities such as his “sharp canine teeth”, “pointed” tops of his earlobes,

“coarse—broad, with squat fingers”, the “hairs in the centre of [his] palm,” and his “long and fine” nails (Stoker 22-23, 37). This predatory assemblage echoes Hyde’s “troglodytic” features, which the aforementioned Lambroso suggested were attributed to criminality triggered by his atavism. Unlike the brutish Hyde, however, the debauched Dracula expresses his criminality through sexual deviancy. Yet, as if sex and sexually transmitted diseases had not been odious 6 enough, Stoker multiplies the horrific dimensions thereof as he highlights the intrinsic intersection between sex and vampirism through which he stokes Victorian England’s hypochondriac fears of syphilis and exaggerates the horrific implications of licentious sexual contact. For example, when Van Helsing & co. visit the grave of the deceased and vampirized

Lucy Westenra and stake her, “the Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions … and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam” (Stoker 231). The graphic kinesthetic imagery simulates sex in its wild, orgiastic explosion and that the assassination consummates in the phallic stake invaginating her body confirms the repulsive correlation between vampirism and sex. Furthermore, not only does Stoker horrify vaginal sex but also oral sex, which would have been especially unspeakable. Stoker depicts Dracula as he “forc[es]

[Mina’s] face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast which was shown by his torn-open dress” (Stoker

300). In this case, “[t]he Count is the indispensable catalyst for the alteration of blood and semen,” clinching the intrinsic sexualization of vampirism (Stevenson, J. 146). Blood has substituted semen and this imbibition imitates fellatio with Dracula’s chest being the life-source that slakes Mina’s erotic thirst. In a time when corsets restricted a lady’s bosom and anti-masturbation devices discouraged personal pleasure, Stoker not only made a cavalier move to compose erotica but that he coupled it with horror makes him Victorian England’s worst yet most intriguing nightmare.

The twentieth century, however, magnified the horrors of the post-industrial world and the outbreak of the World Wars hailed the dawn of the new atomic age. As post-revolution 7

France inspired a morbid curiosity, the post-war age experienced a revival in the Gothic. The necromantic authors Shirley Jackson and Toni Morrisson continued the tradition of allegory in post-war America by conjuring the ghosts of America’s present to construe its horrific crimes as the aforementioned British authors had in Victorian England. The former’s Haunting of Hill House (1959) invites the reader into the mimetically labyrinthine consciences of both the protagonist Eleanor Vance and the eponymous manor. The numinous agency of the house’s architecture operates in concert with Eleanor as the house’s corrugated and twisted construction reflects her “horrible and beastly and [invisible]” nature (Jackson 63). “The mansion is also haunted by a male counterpart—a sex crazed patriarch,” writes Richard Pascal, “who had fashioned himself in the image of his omnipotent, possessive, and inscrutably willful God” (471).

The toxic symbiotic relationship between the house and the impressionable Eleanor reflects post-war American gender roles within the nuclear family, which Hill House epitomizes. The house is the domineering patriarch subduing his breadmaking wife and “[l]ike the idealized family units often on popular display in the postwar era, Hill House appears secure against invasion, decay, or destruction … : ‘within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut …’” the domestic language evoking Victorian propriety

(Jackson 246, Pascal 482). This linguistic implication reinforces Eleanor’s subordinance to the house and that it is by the maniacal inducements of the house she meets her fateful end confirms the extent of the house’s nefarious influence. Her suicide purges her of the insanity afflicted by the house’s godlike dominion and her meditations hitherto her death illuminates the psychological consequences of this biblical dynamic. The 1940s and 50s stigmatized women’s mental health and doctors practiced lobotomies and hysterectomies to rehabilitate them of their 8 deviance, thus it is no coincidence Hill House elicits an eerily similar ambiance of asylum.

Whereas the psychotomimetic and patriarchal forces of Hill House drive Eleanor to take her own life, the racist systems in Beloved (1987) spur Sethe to commit infanticide. In this last novel, the eponymous revenant returns to Reconstruction-era Ohio to reincorporate herself into the family from which she was untimely removed. As gruesome and ruthless as her infanticide may have appeared, however, the horror lies not in this episodic carnage but the unseen systemic consequences incurred by the institution of slavery that forced such drastic actions. Sethe laments: “they took my milk … they took my milk” referring to her master whose menacing presence would deprive her of an ideal family unit among her children (Morrison 17). The deprivation of her “milk”, “the hydrating and postnatal life-giving essence affects her more profoundly than the beating that follows,” indicating the greater magnitude of the inhumanity intrinsic in depriving a mother of a child (Humann 68). That she could not engage an intimately symbiotic relationship with her baby comments on the consequences black mothers suffered during the slave era. Furthermore, that Morrison revisits the inhumanity of slavery amid the contemporary feminist movements indicates the cross-cultural issue of body autonomy in black women. The struggle to reclaim milk reflects the struggle for women to retain their bodily agency as even though written in a post-Roe V. Wade America, Sethe’s plea reiterates the importance for black women to have access to medical services of which they have been systemically bereft due to institutionalized and environmental racism. That Beloved’s posthumous return is the mode through which Sethe reconciles this lost relationship signifies the desperation for a mother to restore her estranged daughter, knowing that life is not yet a viable environment for a black woman. Beloved’s return signifies the futile attempts of America 9 burying their criminal shame deep in the past and her ghostly appearance reflects the shameful opacity with which it has tried to obscure the horrors of history.

Through allegory, the aforementioned novels have variably answered Conrad’s canonical question and in their disquisitions have revealed the uniqueness of their cultural milieux. Yet, these investigations persist today. Shelley’s scientific necromancy resonates with medical professionals and geneticists who struggle with the ethics of resuscitation, cloning, and moreover, artificial intelligence. Stevenson’s duplicitous demon resonates with an erratic political administration, Wilde’s opportunistic dandy reflects the digital age’s vain obsession with appearances and phenotypic enhancements, and Stoker’s blood-sucking fiend reminds the sexually active public in the age of HIV/AIDS about the reality of STDs. Jackson’s Eleanor

Vance represents every girl’s struggle with mental illness and Morrison’s Beloved every mother’s nightmarish loss. The allegories delineated in these novels have confirmed an ineluctable symbiotic relationship between reality and horror as the former begets the latter.

However, allegory sensitizes audiences to the disturbing realities of society and creates a medium through which authors can address society’s most pressing issues. But so long as humanity demonstrates its monstrous qualities, “The horror! The horror!” will continue to reverberate throughout the spine-chilling chronicles of history.

Works Cited

Arata, Stephen D. “The Sedulous Ape: Atavism, Professionalism, and Stevenson's ‘Jekyll and

Hyde.’” Criticism, vol. 37, no. 2, 1995, pp. 233–259. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23116549

Baumann, Rebecca & Mitchell, Jody. “Mad Science.” Frankenstein 200: The Birth, Life, and Resurrection of Mary Shelley's Monster. Indiana University Press, Bloomington; Indiana, 2018, pp. 56–64. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt22p7j32.11 Comitini, Patricia. “The Strange Case of Addiction in Robert Louis Stevenson's ‘Strange Case of

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.’” Victorian Review, vol. 38, no. 1, 2012, pp. 113–131. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23646857

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Dover Publications, 2012. Humann, Heather Duerre. “Bigotry, Breast Milk, Bric-a-Brac, a Baby, and a Bit in ‘Beloved’:

Toni Morrison's Portrayal of Racism and Hegemony.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2004, pp. 60–78. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41207038. Pascal, Richard. “Walking Alone Together: Family Monsters in ‘The Haunting of Hill House.’”

Studies in the Novel, vol. 46, no. 4, 2014, pp. 464–485. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43151007.

Raitt, Suzanne. “Immoral Science in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age, edited by Lara Karpenko and Shalyn Claggett, by Dame Gillian Beer, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2017,

pp. 164–178. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1qv5ncp.13. 11

Stevenson, John Allen. “A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula.” PMLA, vol. 103, no. 2, 1988, pp. 139–149. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/462430. Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Fine Creative Media, 2003.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Fine Creative Media, 2003. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Fine Creative Media, 2004. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Fine Creative Media, 2003.

Reflective Essay

“‘God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very semblance.’”

―Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) Thus in man’s own image is a monster created, but what exactly defines a monster other than its own mortal pedigree? This was the question that galvanized my research into the link between monster and man. The title of the class for which I wrote this research paper is Demons, the Undead, and the Monstrous Other, and thus for my assignment I wanted to explore what was this “Monstrous Other”. First, I needed to define what a monster was etymologically to identify an objective basis on which I may establish my research. “Monster” derives from the Latin monstrum, a divine omen or an abnormal shape indicating misfortune and is based on the root monere “to remind, to show”. Thus, this etymology coupled with the epigraph presents a monster as a portentous representative whose abnormality demonstrates man’s own deficiencies. Next, I had to determine these defects for which he was responsible and the medium I invoked to facilitate this discernment process was Gothic literature. This genre has codified the most legendary monsters whose significance I delineated by applying new historicism. This literary theory enabled me to engage the historical context in which these novels were written to illuminate the concord between which they functioned. Having assembled a clear goal, I outlined search terms respective to an aspect of each novel’s cultural milieu that each monstrous agent best represented. For example, with Frankenstein, I wanted to focus on the transgression of the resurrection men William Burke and William Hare and pioneer Luigi Galvani by whom Shelley was inspired. Thus, alternating between the MLA Bibliography database and JSTOR, which I accessed through the CPP Library Article’s page, I searched “Frankenstein Burke and Hare” “Frankenstein galvanism” “Frankenstein science fiction”. I followed the same formula for the other novels, searching “Jekyll and Hyde atavism” “Dorian Gray immorality” “Dracula sexuality” “Hill House family” and “Beloved Toni Morrison women”. Each article was chosen based on the journal from which it originated to ensure it was specific to the content which it was publishing. For example the sources used for my research on the Victorian novels were contained within reputable Victorian-specific publications. I allowed more latitude with the less period-centered novels, i.e Frankenstein, Hill House, and Beloved because they were chronological outliers. The themes within the Victorian triumvirate operated in concert with each other with degeneration being caused by atavism which was canonically linked to aestheticism and sexual deviancy. Nevertheless, I also made sure each source was specific to the issue I wanted to address and avoided any article in which the latter would have been merely marginal or secondary. Because of this, my highly concentrated criteria made it difficult to procure many sources but few content-specific articles focused and enriched my paper more than a multitude of those which would have only glanced at the topic I required. Ultimately, upon the completion of my research paper, I succeeded in identifying the symbiotic relationship between monsters and men. Despite Mary Shelley engineering the first monster two hundred years ago, audiences today owe literary monsters’ immortality in our popular culture to the very reality of the issues they so grotesquely replicate.