Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern The Palgrave Gothic Series

Series Editor: Clive Bloom Editorial Advisory Board: Dr Ian Conrich, University of Nottingham, UK, Barry Forshaw, author/journalist, UK. Professor Gregg Kucich, University of Notre Dame, USA, Professor Gina Wisker, University of Brighton, UK. This series of gothic is the first to treat the genre in its many inter-related, global and ‘extended’ cultural aspects to show how the taste for the medieval and the sublime gave rise to a perverse taste for terror and horror and how that taste became not only international (with a huge fan base in places such as South Korea and Japan) but also the sensibility of the modern age, changing our atti- tudes to such diverse areas as the nature of the artist, the meaning of drug abuse and the concept of the self. The series is accessible but scholarly, with referencing kept to a minimum and theory contextualised where possible. All the books are readable by an intelligent student or a knowledgeable general reader interested in the subject. Barry Forshaw BRITISH GOTHIC CINEMA Margarita Georgieva THE GOTHIC CHILD David J. Jones SEXUALITY AND THE GOTHIC MAGIC LANTERN Desire, Eroticism and Literary Visibilities from Byron to Bram Stoker Catherine Wynne BRAM STOKER, DRACULA AND THE VICTORIAN GOTHIC STAGE

The Palgrave Gothic Series Series Standing Order ISBN 978–1–137–27637–7 (hardback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern Desire, Eroticism and Literary Visibilities from Byron to Bram Stoker

David J. Jones Open University, UK © David J. Jones 2014 Softcover reprint of the 1st 2014 978-1-137-29891-1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-45252-1 ISBN 978-1-137-29892-8 () DOI 10.1057/9781137298928 This is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British . A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. For Lesley and my family Contents

List of Illustrations viii Preface ix Acknowledgements x

Introduction 1 1 Sex and the Ghost Show: The Early Ghost Lanternists 32 2 Byron: Incest, Voyeurism and the 71 3 Brontë’s Villette: Desire and Lanternicity in the Domestic Gothic 109 4 Le Fanu’s Carmilla: Lesbian Desire in the Lanternist Novella 142 5 Lanternist Codes and Sexuality in Dracula and The Lady of the Shroud 169 Conclusion 203

Notes 212 237 Index 247

vii List of Illustrations

1 Double slide, ‘Masturbating man with accompanying woman’ (c. 1720s), 3127 H 12 WIU2010, Museum De Lakenhal Leiden, The Netherlands 15 2 George Moutard Woodward, ‘Cupids Magick Lantern’ (c. 1800) (etched by Thomas Rowlandson). By kind permission: Coll. Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin 23 3 Engraving from Karl von Eckharthausen, Aufschlusse zur Magie (1788–91). Author’s 33 4 Charles Williams, ‘Luxury, or the Comforts of a Rum p ford’ (1801), AN1054132001. By permission of the British Museum Company 50 5 Demon and skeleton fighting over a young woman’ (c. 1780–1830). From the collection of Martin Gilbert, with kind permission 59 6 Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, engraved drawing of projection of woman on smoke. From Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques d’un physicien- aéronaute. Author’s collection 124 7 Mademoiselle Lotty, ‘The Modern Venus’ (c. 1902). Author’s collection 161 8 Skeletal ‘bride’ slip-slide, English (c. 1840s). By kind permission of Mervyn Heard 167 9 Pornographic slides depicting varied sexual positions (c. 1880s). By kind permission of Bonhams 180 10 Witch on broomstick slide (c. 1890–1920). From the collection of Gwen Sebus, with kind permission 209

viii Preface

This is the first study of the multifarious erotic themes associated with the popular magic lantern shows, which proved one of the most domi- nant visual media of the West for 250 years, and how these influenced portrayals of sexuality in major works of Gothic fiction. It consequently offers new of a range of works which draw on these visual . It is widely acknowledged that cinema has influenced literary evocations of sexuality, a set of intermedial relations so well known that it has been parodied in works such as Christopher Fowler’s Hammer Horror-inspired novel Hell Train (2012). Yet when Laura states that her first quasi-erotic encounter with the vampire in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) has cast her past life into a lantern-of-fear show or the uncannily transparent Dracula slips like a lantern slide through an inch-wide aperture to inflict unspeakable Sadean horrors on Renfield in Bram Stoker’s novel, these associations have been passed over by crit- ics and readers alike. I argue that an appreciation of such associations helps the reader to discover a forgotten intermedial world of allusion, clarifies our understanding of Gothic erotic themes and even helps us to decipher the meaning of the amorous entanglement evoked in the last extant stanzas of Byron’s Don Juan. Additionally, this groundbreaking exploration of Gothic sexuality reveals how, for example, the expres- sion of lesbianism in Carmilla, incestuous passion in Byron’s poetry and homosexual tensions in Dracula were all conveyed with visual cues inherited from the lantern shows. The book’s Introduction provides a detailed overview of ways in which the erotic and macabre associations of magic lantern shows converged with Gothic literature. As well as considering the work of later neo-Gothic artists, I reinstate the lanterns’ overwhelming importance for past generations in their visualisation and expression of diverse sexualities and argue that an understanding of these influences serves fundamentally to change our of Gothic literature.

ix Acknowledgements

I would like to express my thanks to Clive Bloom, Fabienne Broom, Dennis Crompton, Andrew Gill, Martin Gilbert, Beverley Green, Mervyn Heard, Len Jenkin, Monica Kendall, Dr Tristan Mostert, Sally E. Palmer, Donata Pesenti, Felicity Plester, Richard and Jan Rigby, David Robinson, Gwen Sebus and Howard Wood.

x Introduction

Jonathan Harker’s encounter with the vampire ‘sisters’ in Dracula is one of the most famous and notorious scenes in horror fiction:

In the moonlight opposite me were three young women, ladies by their dress and manner. I thought at the time that I must be dream- ing when I saw them, they threw no shadow on the floor. They came close to me, and looked at me for some time, and then whispered together […] All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some day it should meet Mina’s eyes and cause her pain, but it is the truth. They whispered together, and then they all three laughed – such a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound never could have come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of water-glasses when played on by a cunning hand. The fair girl shook her head coquettishly, and the other two urged her on. One said, ‘Go on! You are first, and we shall follow. Yours is the right to begin.’1

These are amongst the most familiar and notorious lines relating to sexual longing, preternatural threat and bloodlust in literature, taut as they are with a mingling of intense sensual desire and forbidden urges: the temptation to kiss and receive kissing, to drink deep, to destroy and to revive. Harker is cast in the role of passive observer experienc- ing an alluring mixture of sweetness and offence; cast into a passive,

1 2 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern traditionally feminine role, he awaits despoliation at the hands of female predators. The taboos summoned up here flex between arousal and disgust, the reader imaginatively complicit in the Englishman’s ‘delightful anticipation’ of unfaithful carnal abandon, despite his engagement to Mina, with several strange women.2

Gothic and the literature of sexuality

Sex and the threat of sexual violence are integral to Gothic writing. Without Ambrosio’s lustful excesses with Matilda, a demon disguised in female form, and his overpowering desire for the innocent Antonia in The Monk (1796), the plot would lack its aura of depravity and its inexo- rable descent to damnation. The erotic menace of Ann Radcliffe’s villains Phillippe de Montalt and the relentless Father Schedoni drives the powerful impetus of her novels. Harker’s nocturnal encounter with the she-vampires in Dracula’s castle evokes Freudian ideas regarding repressed instincts and the proximity of apparently conflicting urges; that which frightens and makes us shiver is simultaneously revealed to be sexually exciting. Ruth Bienstock Anolik, in adapting Simone de Beauvoir’s idea that ‘Eroticism is a movement towards the Other’, reminds us that ‘The Gothic text repeatedly reminds its readers that there is no escape from the sexual Other […] the Gothic text is haunted by sexual anxiety.’3 Philippe Ariès writes of the historical and cultural recurrence of ‘attraction to certain ill-defined things at the outer limits of life and death, sexuality and pain’, and traces the blending of these extremes to particular historical milieus:4

It was in the depths of the unconscious, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that the disturbing changes occurred. It was in the world of the imagination that love and death came together until their appearances merged.5

In many ways, modern cinema audiences take the close relations between such extreme passions for granted. In reviewing Dario Argento’s horror Profundo Rosso (Deep Red) (1975), Gianluigi Bozza complains: ‘Decapitations, kitchen knives, broken glasses, scars, lulla- bies, reflections in mirrors, mummified corpses: everything is devoid of any eroticism.’6 Accordingly, if in Harker’s encounter here we find anxiety and ‘agony’, we also find ‘a wicked, burning desire’, a yearning to cross boundaries, even those as fundamental as taboos of blood and somatic autonomy. Introduction 3

Erotic excess, transgender seduction and rape, secret desires and per- versity bordering on and including monstrosity are all qualities that have been associated with Gothic fiction. There is a great deal that is unremitting and predictable about the playing out of the newly awak- ened lusts of Lewis’s monk. Jealousy and dynastic ambitions are often the spurs to intended violation of women used as pawns by their older relatives in Radcliffe’s novels. The young characters involved in such trammels must struggle through disappointments, the course of their own romantic desires frequently blocked and opposed. As Cynthia Griffin Wolff writes: the ‘business’ of Radcliffean heroines is to ‘experi- ence difficulty, not to get out of it’, and that ‘difficulty’ always involves erotic conflict or deadlock.7 Confinement to the extent of forced incar- ceration is used to thwart and control particularly, but not exclusively, women in these fictions. The buildings and architecture in such literary explorations figure, in their closed involutions, the much sought-after, hidden terrain of women’s corporeality: the ‘complicated maze of underground vaults [or] dark passages’, the

‘sliding panels and trapdoors’, this endlessly enacted fantasy is always figured in terms of ‘inner space’. Thus the ‘Gothic’ building (whatever it may be) that gives the fiction its name may become in the treatment of the tradition a way of identifying a woman’s body (in imagination) of course, the reader’s own body.8

Wolff rightly argues that Radcliffe’s explicit subject is and was perceived as ‘courtship’ and that a primary aim in reading these novels was to indulge a taste for romantic fantasy: ‘They were titillating.’9 Yet in the reception of other authors writing within this milieu, horror rather than titillation was provoked. Long before the discoveries of Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, the writers of Gothic fiction revealed an under- standing of the despotic and compulsive aspects of sex, its recurrent power to subvert the tenets of socialised morality and assert its ani- malistic, sometimes demonic-seeming rejection of rational constraint. In Lewis’s and Maturin’s Gothic, sacred love is mingled with profane, nuns and monks are tempted away from their vows and into carnality; taboos such as adulterous, homosexual and incestuous love are invoked and challenged. Death and destruction exist in close proximity to the abandonment of self into passion, subsequent despair breeding tales of madness and suicide. Such unhappy endings involving victimised and unfulfilled sexual expression are often followed with hauntings, real, faked or imagined. 4 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern

A missing link

To return to Stoker’s novel and that crucial scene of intended violation, critics have remarked on the Gothic role-reversal in Harker’s position as the potential victim/partner of Dracula’s brides. This scene is a key moment of late nineteenth-century Gothic, replete with masochistic and Sadean sexuality, gender ambiguities and fin-de-siècle lusting and loathing. It is a scene which has been filmed many times – in Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), Terence Fisher’s Horror of Dracula (1958), Philip Saville’s Dracula (1977), John Badham’s Dracula (1979) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), to name several adaptations – yet never in these versions are these uncanny women and their laughter accompanied with that ‘intolerable tingling’ of ‘water-glasses’. It is a detail that Stoker lingers over and to which he returns each time the ‘sisters’ and vampirised women are mentioned as if it is a hallmark, a kind of auditory cue, of the women’s condition, yet modern directors have never explored the connotations of the precise simile: ‘It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of water-glasses when played on by a cunning hand.’ Harker is a foreigner in Transylvania and a stranger to this setting; he has encountered these ‘sisters’ because he accepted Dracula’s invitation to enter his vast Gothic edifice and, ignoring the owner’s commands, has wandered through corridors and doorways at night. In a similar haunted topos described in a poem over 70 years earlier, another male protagonist, a foreigner and new to his Gothic surroundings, is drawn on by an ambiguous ghostly presence as he paces through moonlit galleries and doorways, and finds his blood curdled by an eerie sound:

A noise like to wet fingers drawn on glass, Which sets the teeth on edge; and a slight clatter, Like showers which on the midnight gusts will pass, Sounding like very supernatural water (16.114)10

He confronts a hooded figure whom he takes to be a spectral friar but, on closer examination, the moonlight reveals a ‘voluptuous’ form and the narrative focuses on a concealed noblewoman’s mouth:

A red lip, with two rows of pearls beneath, Gleam’d forth, as through the casement’s ivy shroud The moon peep’d, just escaped from a grey cloud. (16.121)11 Introduction 5

Erotic details are supplied of this disguised female’s fervid breath and neck. The young man is charmed but caught out in his reac- tions between ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’.12 His hot Spanish blood is of course roused and, next morning, the paleness and exhaustion of both parties involved in this nocturnal meeting are stressed. The hero in this case is Don Juan, from the eponymous mock-epic poem by Lord Byron, the founder of the vampire-tale in English. We note that, in the intervening time, Byron to Stoker, this spectral glassy music has transformed from a sound effect accompanying a young woman’s appearance in a supernatural masquerade to a sonic effect characterizing the laughter of the vampire sisters: the sound issues from their inner being. These are two of the most celebrated and allur- ing scenes of sexual temptation in literary Gothic settings. Yet why is the sound of fingers on glass evoked in texts at either end of the nineteenth century so readily or even at all in these dark evocations of transgressive sexual encounters? It is at this point that we, as readers, might wonder if we are missing out on something, perhaps a secret sig- nifier. Was there something in this unearthly, tantalising sound which contemporaries understood as a cue for fear and erotic frisson, part of a great submerged shared cultural heritage which readers in the twenty-first century have lost? If this is the case (as it is), what particular associations did these references evoke and why are they important for our under- standing of the portrayal of sexuality in Gothic writing and visualisation?

The missing piece

Byron helpfully provides an explanatory note for ‘A noise like to wet fingers drawn on glass’ for his readers: ‘See the account of the ghost of the uncle of Prince Charles of Saxony, raised by Schroepfer – “Karl – Karl – was willst du mit mir?”’13 For a modern reader this dense and glancing explanation to a ghost story is hardly less cryptic than the original reference. We are left with the question: Why should this sound elicit such associations of nervy and erotic dread? Of course, all ghostly music and sound effects enjoy their heyday. It might have been very difficult to explain to readers of Gothic fiction and cinema audiences before the appearance of Rouben Mamoulian’s film Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931), exactly why Bach’s ‘Toccata and Fugue in D minor’ was to become synonymous with ‘sheer horror’ and ‘erotic unease’ in viewing for over 80 years in film.14 The auditory effect of fingers on glass was clearly one such unmistak- able sonic cue, an accompaniment to associations of dread for most of 6 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern the nineteenth century, but one which has passed out of common cur- rency. Yet even that statement is an oversimplification of the reality. In fact, if we take note of these references, and try to hear these eerie notes, these aural signifiers, again, we soon become conscious that that which they bear witness to in the texts by Stoker and Byron is not just a miss- ing chain of spectral and sensual associations. These glassy tones act in a trans-medial way: they conjure up a device central to a whole zone of visual medial activity which has largely passed from public memory. I write ‘largely passed’ advisedly because there are lingering traces of this missing medium in some of our most familiar works of modern hor- ror fiction. Along with Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and William P. Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971), Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1975) was one of the key texts of the new wave of horror and suspense which swept America during and just after the Vietnam war years.15 In Salem’s Lot, as the predatory revenants move in all over the Maine town to seduce and batten onto their victims, we hear the echoes of a ‘sweet’ and silvery, high music of the vampires’ laughter, that ‘intolerable’ ‘sweetness’ real- ised again.16 Two years before King’s novel was published, Jack Nitzsche provided the mesmeric and menacing sound of resonating crystal glass that sets our teeth on edge at the opening of William Friedkin’s film of The Exorcist (1973). George Crumb’s musicians also mimicked the sound of fingers ringing on glass later in this film.17 Extraordinarily, it is Stephen King who, early in Salem’s Lot, identifies the source for this sonic link between Byron, Stoker and these references in his own work. Ben Mears, the writer-protagonist, having returned after many years to a small rural community, starts an affair with a local girl, Susan Norton. In the wake of their first session of passionate lovemaking in the park, Susan persuades Ben to tell her about the novel he is currently researching. In the new physical intimacy which has sprung up between the two young people, Ben tells her about his own role in researching a book:

‘scary enough to make me a million dollars. But no matter what, I felt that I was in control of the situation, and that would make all the difference. I wasn’t any nine-year-old kid anymore, ready to run screaming from a magic-lantern show that maybe came out of my own mind and no place else. But now ...’18

It is a most remarkable moment in a book appearing 80 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 Introduction 7 house, the magic lantern idiom emerges to haunt Mears’s thoughts. We can piece together from fictional biographical fragments that Mears was born in 1941, and it is probably quite a realistic scenario that a child brought up on the American eastern seaboard in the 1950s would witness magic lantern shows and, indeed, that these displays would become part of his own subconscious repertoire. Mears’s adult resolu- tion asserts itself: ‘I wasn’t any nine-year-old kid anymore’,19 but the recurrence of real metaphysical threat has set the magic lantern show in his mind running again: ‘But now ...’, he resumes: ‘“Now it’s occu- pied!” he burst out, and beat a fist into his palm. “I’m not in control of the situation.”’20 We wonder whether he means it is the house or his mind that is occupied, haunted by the menace of these projections. For it is the magic lantern that is the link between King’s character feeling that he is not in control, Byron’s ‘wet fingers drawn on glass’ and the laughter of Stoker’s vampire sisters. Byron’s entry: ‘ghost of the uncle of Prince Charles of Saxony, raised by Schroepfer’ in the note to Don Juan refers to Georg Schröpfer (1730–74), ex-Hussar and coffee-house owner who branched out into providing a séance involving the summoning of ghosts. These sessions actually involved projections from a hidden lantern. Displays were accompanied by a clattering: blows against the door of the room, ringings and hellish ‘hisses, wheezes and whistles’.21 In later shows, the piercing tones of the glass harmonica (a musical instrument containing a glass spindle turned by a treadle and played with moistened fingers) were to join these sound effects.22 In time, this type of ‘lantern-of-fear’ show was called a phantasmagoria.

Sex, film and the phantasmagoria

In recent years there has been rapid proliferation of internet sites devoted to the 10 or 30 or 100 ‘sexiest horror ’. Frequently cited candidates for this inclusion are Roy Ward Baker’s The Vampire Lovers (1970) and Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness (1971), both based on Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla (1872). In Le Fanu’s book Carmilla, after Laura’s childhood nocturnal encoun- ter with a ‘strange woman’ who caresses and bites her neck, the epony- mous vampire lesbian, a minister is sent for to pray over the child, and, looking back from adulthood at that remembered scene, she comments as narrator:

I forget all my life preceding that event, and for some time after it is all obscure also, but the scenes I have just described stand out 8 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern

vivid as the isolated pictures of the phantasmagoria surrounded by darkness.23

The OED glosses phantasmagoria as:

A name invented for an exhibition of optical illusions produced chiefly by means of the magic lantern, first exhibited in London in 1802 [...] In Philipsthal’s ‘phantasmagoria’ the figures were made rap- idly to increase and decrease in size, to advance and retreat.24

Le Fanu’s Carmilla is a text rife with images of this kind of magic lantern horror show. Indeed, the teenage Laura will recount the details of her nocturnal ravishment and depredation at the hands of Carmilla in terms of this type of projection. Dennis Denisoff writes of how ‘Victorian Gothic [...] authors’ intense, sustained exploration of sexual visuality’ and its ‘extension into popular cinema’ are rooted ‘in a nineteenth-century aesthetic tradition’; magic lantern was one of the prime means that such traditions were transmitted.25 Remembering and reinstating the phantasmagoria shows, integral as they were for well over a century in the writing and reading of Gothic novels, provide a key to understanding the tantalising sexual mysteries and lacunae in these works. I would go considerably further in this contention. Just as it would be impossible to understand the true cultural resonance and erotic threat of the words: ‘I whisper “What did you say?” in slow motion’26 and ‘I [...] can almost hallucinate the camera panning low around us, fireworks bursting in slow motion’ in the Sadean satire of sexual dep- redation and serial-killing, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), if one didn’t understand these allusions to filmic technique, so many Gothic novels relied for interpretation on readers familiar with the repertoires and techniques of magic lantern shows.27 In Christopher Fowler’s neo-Gothic novel Hell Train (2012), during a villainous attack, the Brigadier, blood running between his teeth, slams Isabella ‘against the carriage wall’ and ‘clapped a hand over her mouth and tore at her blouse. As she tried to fight him off he licked at her breast.’28 The whole force, the sardonic wit of this violent scene of intended vampiric rape is missed if we don’t realise that Fowler is involved in a running parody of key moments in horror films made by the Hammer studios. In the same novel, an inn named ‘The Tormented Virgin’, with a sign depict- ing a young woman tied to a railroad track who has been cut in two Introduction 9 by a speeding train, is a reference back to earlier films of suspense and horror. As in these cases, so key elements of the portrayal of sexuality in Gothic writing of the nineteenth century are blurred, reduced in scope and, in some cases, almost incomprehensible, unless one appreciates the rich field of signifiers that are referenced in allusions, both explicit and coded, to the magic lantern.

Literature: cinematicity and lanternicity

If such an assertion sounds exaggerated, let us not underestimate, because of our relative proximity to cinematic technologies, the closely meshed synergies and integration of visual media and novels in our own time. To select just a few from amongst the most promi- nent horror novels of the twentieth century, there are 18 references to film in William Blatty’s The Exorcist, 16 references in Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and 13 references in Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby. Of course, perhaps taking up these cues, all these novels were subsequently filmed. These works also reveal a close acquaintance with cinematic tech- nique, a familiarity supported by at least 50 years of allusions to films in fiction before their publication. Of course many authors from 1897 onwards wrote ‘cinematically’, perhaps most noticeably H. G. Wells in The King who was a King: The Book of a Film (1929).29 Though, by that year, the magic lanterns’ technical limitations were apparent in comparison to those of film, these more venerable devices were, of course, still in frequent use internationally. Yet the fact that lanterns had been the dominant medium of visual entertainment for at least 180 years by that point also means that the general amnesia regard- ing their impact on writing and the other arts over that period is at best regrettable. The recent worldwide streaming and self-referentiality of modern films means that, short of a power outage of massive propor- tions, it is unlikely, whilst our media cultures are evolving as they are, that cinematic techniques will pass from memory almost completely, but this is exactly what has happened with the magic lantern and phan- tasmagoria shows.

Cinematicity

In 1907, Henri Bergson discussed the human mind and perceptions as a ‘cinématographe intérieur’ (an ‘interior cinematograph’) and in 1932 10 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern

Joseph Warren Beach wrote that he thought the most ‘enlightening analogy’ for contemporary writing was ‘the moving picture’:

especially the sort cultivated in Germany, France, and Russia, with its generous use of cut-back, of symbolic themes, of dissolving views, all meant to give the picture a wider and richer significance than that of a mere story told in chronological sequence. It is probable that the moving picture has had a very strong influence on the stream- of-consciousness technique.30

Certainly critics like Anthony Paraskeva have seen the importance of the early development of cinema to sexual motifs in Modernist litera- ture. For example, in discussing James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) he describes the change from Leopold Bloom’s hand-in-the-pocket voyeurism on the beach in ‘Nausicaa’ to his sexual inclinations in ‘Circe’ as ‘explod- ing private Mutoscopic peepshow into public cinema projection’.31 Novelist Don DeLillo has commented that, for modern writers, cinema is ‘our second self, a major narrative force in the culture, an aspect of consciousness connected at some level to sleep and dreams’.32 Damon Smith comments on these words:

What is it we mean when we say that a novel is ‘cinematic’? Do we mean that it engages, on a thematic level, with film history and cinema culture? That it continually alludes to the movies, via quota- tions or other intertextual means? Or do we mean that it embodies techniques (zooms, jump cuts) or translates ideas (montage, etc.) from cinema into prose fiction? Do we mean that the author’s language and style mimic the dreamlike nature and stream-of-consciousness movement of screen images, or that the prose is punctuated and exacting, like a screenplay? Or do we mean simply that the narrative is ready-made for adaptation, that we can almost ‘see everything’? The answer, of course, is all of the above.33

The tendency to cinematise literature or infer a filmic consciousness underlying the creation of texts written much earlier than the 1890s has also been applied anachronistically avant la lettre as it were. A sort of intermedial retrospective colonisation of literature, an inferring of the agency of a proleptic cinematic sensibility, has been applied to the work of, amongst others, Dickens by Sergei Eisenstein and Grahame Smith, and to Robert Louis Stevenson’s writing by S. S. Prawer. In reply to such analyses, Kamilla Elliott writes that critics including Keith Introduction 11

Cohen, Claude Edmonde Magny and Seymour Chatman assert that twentieth-century novelists adopt cinematic techniques such as ellipsis, temporal discontinuity, fragmented vision, cross-cutting and multiple viewpoints, but that ‘to accord cinematic properties to the novel before cinema existed forges a problematic and mythological anachronistic aesthetic history’.34 Any notion of historicism compels us to agree with Elliott’s words and I would argue that a corrective to such a problematic and anachronous version of history is both to acknowledge the mul- tifarious synergies that existed between magic lanterns and novelists’ work and to study ways in which many of these influential ‘cinematic techniques’ actually derive from magic lanterns. Elliot continues:

While novel and film scholars protest that the novel engaged in a peculiar type of visuality unique to itself and to film, art historians have demonstrated repeatedly that any such ‘cinematic’ propensi- ties in Victorian novels can be more (chrono) logically traced to visual and dramatic media prior to and contemporaneous with these novels.35

Almost all of the above definitions which apply to the ‘cinematic’ quality of some novels (‘jump cuts’, ‘montage’, ‘close-ups’, etc.) can also be cited with reference to the lanternist quality of many literary works of the nineteenth century. The most basic displays often fea- tured shortened, tableau-like adaptations of novels in the form of select famous scenes with a verbal accompaniment (and, sometimes, music) to supply bridging narrative. Images, visualised scenes and copies of illustrations from novels regularly appeared on the circuits of these shows. Lanternists used most of these so-called ‘cinematic’ techniques in their presentations. If, in a contemporary neo-Gothic thriller or work of dark fantasy, the laughter of a female demon lecherously encroaching on a helpless male was repeatedly described as sounding like a Stradivarius on a 1940s movie soundtrack; or, if a monstrous see-through vampire spooled into women’s rooms through a thin aperture and, subsequently, a character saw a mountain encircled by stars or a female statuette holding a flam- ing torch, even the most reluctant and cinemaphobic reader might begin to think that filmic tropes were being invoked. If, in a tale of vampiric lesbian depredation, we were told that a female protagonist’s earliest visualised memories of being battened upon resembled a home movie show and a travelling cinematographer arrived to identify this woman’s friend as the bloodsucking fiend, we might imagine that filmic 12 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern ideas were conceivably being applied to same-sex desire. If then, we were told of the ‘projection’ of this spectral parasite into her next life, we would certainly begin to suspect a cinematic imagination integral to the tale. This logic then should of course hold true in terms of lantern- ist motifs.

Fear and sex: medial links

Let me adapt Damon Smith’s question: ‘What is it we mean when we say that a Gothic novel exhibits lanternicity?’36 Further, what does it mean when we speak of the sexuality associated with lanternism in novels? So quick were writers, especially German authors, to take up the chal- lenge of Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller’s use of a concealed phantasmagoria show as a key motif in his Der Geisterseher (The Ghost- Seer) (1789) that, by around 1800, these types of books of frightening intrigue and conspiracies were thoroughly infused with lanternicity and vice versa. As we shall see, Schiller was far from the first writer to incorporate lantern imagery in his writing. By the time he inherited this intermedial complex of ideas, multifarious links between lanterns, sexuality and fear had been long established. Schiller’s innovation in his ghost story was that he revealed the potential of hidden lantern shows to imitate supernatural visitation, in service both to sexual and to political ends. The implication must have seemed cataclysmic and chilling: a couple of gifted lantern illusionists with their ghost show and acting in synch with female allure could undermine the state. In Schiller’s case, the dark arts of Catholic lanternicity embodying both homosexual and heterosexual temptation and erotic fixation could be used to overwhelm the Protestant succession. Lantern spectacles were to become a widespread industry touching most areas of life in the nineteenth century. As Joss Marsh has written of Charles Dickens’s novels:

His work is saturated in lantern reference: Miss Havisham’s ‘ghostly reflection’, for example, ‘thrown large by the fire upon the ceiling and the wall’, or Genoa’s ‘extravagant reality’ as phantasmagoria in the virtual-travel book Pictures from Italy [...] The lantern remained, throughout his career, a central image of transformation and multi- fariousness: ‘I can’t express how much I want [the London] streets’, he confessed to John Forster, as he struggled with Dombey and Son in dull, idyllic Switzerland, in 1846: ‘The toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic lantern [before me], is IMMENSE!’37 Introduction 13

And yet, up till the last decade, Gothic fiction and the expression of sexuality found in Gothic novels have largely been discussed without any recourse or reference to these visual media, even when the authors clearly utilised, indeed, sometimes emphasised, the appearance of these technologies in their work.

King lantern

It would be difficult to overemphasise the importance of the emergence of the magic lantern and its projections to the cultural life of Western Europe. Its foregrounding as a primary artefact of contemporary civili- sation rivals that of cinema in our day. In 2008, when NASA’s Phoenix Martian lander arrived on the surface of the red planet, it contained a copy of a ‘first interplanetary library’, a DVD made of silica glass featur- ing ‘Mars-themed artwork, including a poster from a Flash Gordon film, Mars Attacks the World (1938), and Orson Welles’s 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds’. Patrick Stewart, Captain Picard of the Star Trek series and films, also made an appearance on the disc.38 It is, of course, highly significant that American cinematic visualisations of encounters with inhabitants from other planets featured so prominently as vital artefacts of global societies. Today, all but the most rabid anti-American pundits acknowledge that the USA is not actually another planet, but, in the eighteenth century, these New World colonies must have seemed as remote as Mars to the majority of British subjects. In 1710, when a group of Mohawk and Mohican Sachims, dubbed ‘kings’ by the British, arrived at Portsmouth on the first leg of their return journey after their visit, they found a collection of lavish presents made to them by the English Queen, including gunpowder, pistols, razors and combs, as well as ‘a Magick Lanthorn with Pictures’.39 The subject matter of these lan- tern ‘Pictures’ is not recorded but the importance of the magic lantern to the British way of life, both as an example of cutting-edge technol- ogy and as a means of a nation envisaging itself in the eyes of others, is notable. Fifty years later, lanterns were becoming a routine export from Britain to the New World.

In 1768, Garrat Noel of New York announced the arrival of a magic lanthorn, ‘with sliders and objects,’ along with a wide variety of other goods and scientific instruments, ‘just imported in the Albany, Capt. Richards, from London.’ J. Carr of Baltimore announced the arrival in 1797 of the ships Nelly, Kitty, and Montezuma from London, with a cargo that included musical instruments, mirrors, and ‘a large 14 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern

size Magic Lanthorn, with lamp and reflectors complete, with 22 slides and one double one.’40

It had been during the decade 1700–10 that the first images of travelling lantern showmen in the major cities of Europe started to appear.41 From the outset, the capacity of these projection machines to frighten specta- tors, to inculcate fear of death and damnation and, therefore, instil a concomitant anxious respect for religious observance had been under- stood. In his book Ars Magna Lucis (1671), the Jesuit father revealed images of magic-lantern-show skeletons and a soul consumed by hellish flames. Willem Storm van s’Gravesande’s descrip- tion of his physics experiments (1721) reveals a projection of a tousle-headed, scowling image of what is perhaps the first vampire in pre-cinematic media. The close association in the public imagination with these devices with forbidden magic and horror was a long-term phenomenon. In his Political History of the Devil (1726), Daniel Defoe identified the lanterns with ‘many Phantasms and terrible Appearances’, ‘the Effects of Magic’ and ‘projections of painted Figures’, ‘as are most capable of terrifying the Spectators’.42

Sex and the lantern

Yet, as anyone familiar with Sigmund Freud’s theories regarding the fun- damental conflicting and convergent drives towards Thanatos (Death) and Eros (Sex), life drive (Libido) and death drive (Mordato), might imagine, the primal urge towards sexual graphic expression was also making itself felt in the young medium. Dr Tristan Mostert writes of a series of erotic slides which were created by the Musschenbroek family workshop in Leiden in the early years of the eighteenth century:

Perhaps the most intriguing slides in the collection are several erotic images – an indication that the magic lantern was used for showing erotica at a relatively early stage. Most spectacular among them are several moveable images [...] of a rather explicit erotic nature [...] Erotic subjects might not have been as rare as the very few surviving slides from this period now seem to indicate.43

These slides offer scenes of multivalent sexuality: in several, a man is exposed as well as women in various postures. One of these (a double slide with moveable image of the male’s left arm and hand) features a Introduction 15 clothed worthy sitting on a bench and masturbating next to his part- ner (Figure 1), another two: a naked woman bathing and disrobing to wash, perhaps another exercise in auto-eroticism. A fourth reveals a male administering a clyster to a reclining woman. In another tableau, a smiling woman sleeps or daydreams under a tree as a man fondles her vagina. These slides evolved into the tableaux of women bathing and ‘scènes galantes’ of women with exposed lower bodies (often with a rural backdrop), so common in the second part of the eighteenth century. In a scene set in the garden of a tavern, a young man, viewed by a couple enjoying their drinks, throws up a woman’s dress and strips her to expose her genitals. There is accompanying text painted on this

Figure 1 Double slide, ‘Masturbating man with accompanying woman’ (c. 1720s) 16 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern slide. Someone, perhaps one of the watchers, shouts ‘Jou ondeugd als gij zijt’, meaning ‘You naughty/bad person that you are!’ (deugd = virtue, ondeugd signifies a person lacking in it).44 Does this text condemn the figures shown or the watching lantern audience or both? Dr Mostert feels this is ‘a bit of moralization’, perhaps seriously meant but, given the fact that these images were copied from bawdy books (probably in private collections), and there is a summery gaiety to some of the slides, perhaps analogous with the freer, less savage side of Carnival, might not these words have a certain humour closer to Macbeth’s bawdy porter?45 There is, however, a more sinister edge to another slide where horror and sex are combined in an image of a young gallant wearing yellow jacket and feathered hat pictured with his hand inside a young woman’s orange dress. A bizarre devil with bird’s feet and holding a trident hov- ers behind the man’s shoulder. The attention of all three participants seems to have been temporarily captured by the cry of ‘Foei jou!’, mean- ing ‘Shame on you!’, from an off-slide observer to the left. This slide provides an important link between moralising literature, pornographic books, magic lanterns and that type of Gothic diabolism which was to start to appear with Jacques Cazotte’s The Devil in Love (1772). It is notable that none of these slides shows a violent or forced act of coition or the kind of rampant athletic sexual positioning which grew to be the staple fare of pornographic slides from the mid 1820s to the 1890s. By the early decades of the eighteenth century, the magic lantern was already closely associated with voyeurism, sexuality and amorous gaz- ing. It is very possible that the sexual slides from the Musschenbroek workshop were intended for a wealthy even noble clientele. Mostert writes:

As to the milieu: we know little. We know eight of the clients of the workshop by name, all of them being professors (mostly in physics, from Holland but also from Germany) and the odd collector. Czar Peter the Great might have ordered two lanterns with slides, but it’s not entirely certain.46

In 1720, the French Regent, Philippe d’Orleans, attended a magic lantern show organised by Charles de la Fare which consisted of the projection of erotic engravings based on Aretino’s Ragionamenti whilst couples engaged in amorous embraces in the shadows. In 1738 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) and Mme de Graffigny graphically mocked the debauchery of the Duc de Richelieu (who had been present at the Regent’s pornographic display) in another lantern show.47 Lanterns also Introduction 17 figured in the Regent’s ‘plaisir de soir’ in his deer-park seraglio where ‘intoxification’ was multiple, induced by play, spices, wine and other beverages, perfumes, scenes from magic lanterns, and music to provoke animal pleasures.48 The Regent was the centre of intersecting circles of libertine noblemen and women and in this way the lantern became associated with libertinage and the libertine gaze, or as the Catholic catechism has it: ‘concupiscence: lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes’.49 A pattern was also beginning to take shape: erotic lantern shows were used to arouse the audience but also, subsequently, to mock that arousal in ways that sometimes led to outright laughter and also, because of the parodic images employed, further sexual curiosity. Delisle de Sales’s compendium of plays ‘théâtres d’amour’ (c. 1770) for the private theatres of great houses, ‘Les Théâtres clandestins’, often fea- tured graphic depictions of sex for the delectation of noble folk. Robert M. Isherwood describes how, in one of these plays, Junon et Ganymède,

Juno awakens from sleep complaining she is still a virgin and long- ing for the adolescent charms of Ganymède [...] After he removes her clothes and sucks her breasts [...] But despite their passion [...] her virginity resists his various means of sexual attack. The exhausted Ganymède is finally revived by Juno’s flagellations and he achieves his conquest.50

There is a possibility that these were live sex shows, though Gaston Capon and R. Yve-Plessis hazard, seemingly rather ruefully, that these ‘erotic excesses’ were probably simulated by the actors because otherwise the plays would have proved too exhausting for the actors involved.51 This is important for this study as many of these Les Théâtres clandes- tins productions featured magic lanterns, devices which, by the time of these dramas, had been linked to libertine pornography for at least 50 years. The Comte de Caylus frequently used magic lanterns in his private plays. There are clear references to lanterns and perhaps cues for the operation of lanterns in the actors’ words: ‘Here is my enchantress, her imagination scatters without cease, [...] she makes of all she sees a magic lantern.’52 The alternative, more public milieu of the opéra comique and vaude- ville, with their more guarded yet earthy doubles entendres – the cheese too limp to eat, the extended phallic baton and the ironmonger whose wife has been ‘drilled’ too many times – were also associated with lan- ternism. Classical and pastoral motifs were the subject of mockery as much as urban settings. The links between unruly sexuality, prostitution