University of Denver Digital Commons @ DU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate Studies 6-1-2015 Undead Empire: How Folklore Animates the Human Corpse in Nineteenth-Century British Literature Charles Hoge University of Denver Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Hoge, Charles, "Undead Empire: How Folklore Animates the Human Corpse in Nineteenth-Century British Literature" (2015). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 292. https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/292 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate Studies at Digital Commons @ DU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ DU. For more information, please contact [email protected],[email protected]. “Undead Empire: How Folklore Animates the Human Corpse in Nineteenth-Century British Literature” A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of Arts and Humanities University of Denver In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy By Charles Hoge June 2015 Advisor: Dr. Eleanor McNees Author: Charles Hoge Title: “Undead Empire: How Folklore Animates the Human Corpse in Nineteenth- Century British Literature” Advisor: Dr. Eleanor McNees Degree Date: June 2015 ABSTRACT This dissertation explores representations of the human corpse in nineteenth- century British literature and ephemeral culture as a dynamic, multidirectional vehicle used by writers and readers to help articulate emerging anxieties that were complicating the very idea of death. Using cultural criticism as its primary critical heuristic filter, this project analyzes how the lingering influence of folklore animates the human corpses that populate canonical and extra-canonical nineteenth-century British literature. The first chapter examines the treatment of the human corpse through burial and mourning rituals, as specific developments within these procedures provide interpretive windows into how the idea of death was quickly changing in nineteenth-century British culture. The second chapter engages representations of the human corpse as “subject” for study, especially as it figures within the contexts of body-snatching and human dissection. The third chapter explores specific nineteenth-century iterations of the ghost, as representing incorporeal extensions of the troublesome human corpse. The fourth chapter examines the uniquely Victorian literary and ephemeral figure of the ghost monkey; this entity, a reanimated, incorporeal specter of the human corpse from the “deep past,” occurs frequently in Victorian culture. Ultimately, this dissertation hopes to show how representations of the human corpse in nineteenth-century British culture demonstrate, the persistent presence and ii influence of older, “exploded” folkloric beliefs, powerfully extant within a culture that frequently fought to marginalize them. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Methodology 4 Definitions 8 1st Chapter 8 2nd Chapter 9 3rd Chapter 10 4th Chapter 10 Purpose 11 Chapter One: Death and Death Rituals in Nineteenth-Century Britain 13 Definition of the moment of death 14 The Victorian death-bed ritual 19 The Victorian funeral 21 The Victorian cemetery 25 Folklore of the cemetery 27 Victorian memento mori 34 Premature burial fears 38 The rise of cremation 48 Spontaneous human combustion and Bleak House 54 Chapter Two: Human Dissection and the Resurrection Trade 66 The medical gaze turns onto the human corpse 66 Visual analysis of Hogarth print 78 Dissection via the gaze 80 Horrors in the public mind 82 Rise of the resurrection man 84 The influence of Burke and Hare 86 The poor and the Anatomy Act 88 “The Body Snatcher” 95 “The Victim” 105 Mary Paterson 108 Robert Browning 111 Chapter Three: The Nineteenth-Century Ghost 115 The rise of Spiritualism 118 iv Skepticism 127 Shaping of the new ghost 132 Origins of the nineteenth-century ghost 134 Ghosts in the nineteenth century 136 Folklore feeds the “ghostly environment” 147 Victorian body-parts totems and spirit photography 155 The “Subject’s” gaze 160 “At the End of the Passage” 162 Chapter Four: The Victorian Ghost Monkey 166 Megalosaurus in Bleak House 170 The deep past emerges 175 Victorian fear of monkeys 180 Evolving image of the ancestor 181 Mister Hyde 188 Orientalism and Julia Pastrana 197 Morlocks 202 The “Scrap-Book” 208 “Green Tea” 210 Man-Monkey attack 218 Conclusion 223 Notes 229 Bibliography 240 v LIST OF FIGURES 1. Aubrey Beardsley’s “Remorse” (1896) 38 2. Patent for safety coffin (1891) 74 3. William Hogarth’s “The Reward of Cruelty” (1751) 77 4. “Nemesis of Neglect” from Punch (1888) 140 5. “Naturalists Dining inside the Model of a Dinosaur” (1853) 177 6. The Romance of History frontispiece (1876) 184 7. “Re-Appearance of the Idiot at Aldershot” from Punch (1878) 196 8. Embalmed corpse of Julia Pastrana (n.d.) 201 vi INTRODUCTION Much has been written about nineteenth-century Britain’s culture’s obsessive attraction to the idea of death and the imagery that accompanies it. The Victorian century is essentially book-ended by literary works that were immersed in concerns about death, opening with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818/1832) and closing with Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Tellingly, in both of these works the tensions regarding death were largely encoded onto the dead or the undead human body, as Frankenstein examined the actions of human ambition and technological advancements upon the dead human body, while Dracula worked with the supernatural reanimation and subsistence of the “un- dead” human body. 1 The human corpse in both these works was a restless entity, and in both cases death was represented as an unstable boundary, more malleable than it had been considered to be in previous eras. Also, in both cases the violations that blurred the boundary between life and death were specifically encoded in supernaturally modified human bodies. In Frankenstein this involved the regeneration of dead human bodily material, and in Dracula it involved the reanimation of human corpses by malignant spirits capable of turning the corpses into dehumanized vessels. Developing ideas in scientific and technological discourse found treatment in these texts through the implementation of older folkloric traditions, which allowed these authors to refine and embody the anxieties that flowed throughout nineteenth-century British culture. These 1 texts are emblematic of the larger cultural concerns about death that authors of nineteenth-century literary and ephemeral culture embodied in unquiet human corpses and intertwined into their work. And so following these influential and highly-critiqued literary leads, this project examines how the literary and ephemeral (or “popular”) treatment of the human corpse provides a productive vehicle toward understanding how nineteenth-century Britain processed its specific and unique concerns about death. This project considers any human corpse that transgresses its role as immobile dead material to be “undead” and analyzes the frequent appearances of these “undead” human corpses as active, multidirectional images. In other words, the corpse is examined in tandem with both the cultural contexts from which it was shaped and the influences it spilled forth into the culture that read and spoke about it. What, ultimately, can the widespread literary and ephemeral deployment of the undead human corpse tell us about nineteenth-century British culture? In investigating this question I hope to engage critically the longstanding assumption that for Britain the nineteenth century was the site of a simple, traceable progress from archaic patterns of life into the more modern world, of which we in the early twenty-first century consider ourselves an extension. In many ways this progress appears to be undeniably visible. Technological advances, for example, allowed the nation to lose its agrarian heart and become more industrial and urban-centric; advances in medical knowledge seemed to push aside folkloric philosophies of treatment of the human body and allowed for the proliferation of techniques and medicines which greatly 2 improved the quality and duration of life; and literary authors evolved new forms of expression that borrowed from earlier artistic traditions and blazed the trail for the birth of Modernism. Even spiritually, the nineteenth century is frequently seen, from the retrospective eye of the twenty-first century critic, as an era in which longstanding belief in conventional Christianity was compromised and eventually replaced by a view in which the emerging ideas of evolution and natural selection were considered crucial. In short, the nineteenth century has been easy to read as a period in which the Old was cast off in favor of the New. This vision of “forward-progress” is, however seductive to the critic, oversimplified. A clean progression from Old to New ideas, in which the archaic voluntarily vanishes in favor of the modern, is not possible, but the persistence of “outdated” influences is sometimes difficult to detect. Here is where literature is tremendously useful. Specifically, when the cultural deployment of the human corpse within literature and ephemera is considered, one does not see a bloodless evolution from the Old to the New. Instead, we see the tenacious power of the Old through the use of folklore, which refuses to abandon the culture of the nineteenth century and, in fact,