Hiermit erkläre ich an Eides statt, dass ich diese Masterarbeit selbstständig verfasst und keine anderen als die angegebenen Quellen und Hilfsmittel benutzt habe. Die Stellen meiner Arbeit, die dem Wortlaut oder dem Sinn nach anderen Werken und Quellen, einschließlich der Quellen aus dem Internet, entnommen sind, habe ich in jedem Fall unter Angabe der Quelle als Entlehnung kenntlich gemacht. Dasselbe gilt sinngemäß für Tabellen, Karten und Abbildungen. Diese Arbeit habe ich in gleicher oder ähnlicher Form oder auszugsweise nicht im Rahmen einer anderen Prüfung eingereicht. Ich versichere zudem, dass der Text der elektronischen Fassung mit dem Text der vorgelegten Druckfassung identisch ist. Köln, 12.01.2015 Friederike Danebrock Contents 1 Introduction....................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Outlining the project: A Penny Dreadful for the 21st century........................................... 1 1.2 The pleasures of story: A note on terminology................................................................ 5 2 “A taste in a certain kind of literature” – Penny Dreadful and 19th century’s “bad books”.............................................................................................................................. 9 2.1 Corruptive reading – penny fiction of the 19th century.................................................... 9 2.2 Seductive reading – the pleasures of serial fiction............................................................ 14 2.3 “You have to risk rejection” – seduction and transgression in Penny Dreadful............ 16 3 “Creatures of perpetual resurrection” – fiction, repetition, variation............................. 20 3.1 Frankenstein’s creature on stage – London’s Grand Guignol in Penny Dreadful.......... 21 3.2 Textual reiteration: intertextuality, adaptation, narrative narcissism.............................. 23 3.3 Fiction as resurrection: repetition and renewal.................................................................. 28 4 “In trouble with Dad” – Transgressive fathers, transgressive daughters in Penny Dreadful.......................................................................................................................... 31 4.1 “The season of Peter’s inadequate beard” – The sins of the father... ......................... 33 4.2 ...will be visited upon the daughter...................................................................................... 43 5 “A kind of fluctuating rhythm” – serial narration beyond the pleasure principle.......... 51 5.1 “Freud’s own masterplot” – Beyond the Pleasure Principle and (serial) narrative.............. 51 5.2 (Beyond) The pleasure principle: pleasure, repetition, (dis)comfort.............................. 59 5.3 To be continued: narrative, understanding, affect........................................................... 63 Works cited......................................................................................................................... 67 1 Introduction 1.1 Outlining the project: A Penny Dreadful for the 21st century Set in Victorian London of 1891, the series Penny Dreadful introduces in its first season central characters Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) and Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), who are fighting their way through a so-called demimonde of supernatural beings and events to rescue Mina, Sir Malcolm’s daughter and Vanessa’s best friend, from the grasp of a vampire. Mina Harker and the vampire, well-known from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, are not the only literary figures the audience meets along the way: in fact, Vanessa and Sir Malcom also encounter Van Helsing (from the same text), Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) and his creature (from Mary Shelley’s work), as well as Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney). Vanessa appears to have supernatural abilities, being in touch with the spirit world – a condition that frequently puts her in the position of psychiatric patient and hysteric, as her trances are regarded as a medical condition (or, alternatively, as a sensational social event). Only towards the end of season 1 and after Vanessa has undergone various facets of psychiatric treatment do her companions definitively settle on a supernatural explanation for her state, rather than considering her mentally ill or a clever actress. Over the course of the first season, the series follows Vanessa and Sir Malcolm as they recruit allies for their mission of rescuing Mina, Victor Frankenstein as he gets in trouble with his creature, the creature as he gets in trouble at London’s Grand Guignol theatre, Vanessa as she gets in trouble with Dorian Gray (and vice versa), and several other narrative strands concerning the hunt for the vampiric kidnapper and the embroilments the characters get involved in. Written by John Logan (also known for example for his screenplays for Gladiator, Aviator or the latest James Bond film, Skyfall), the first season, containing 8 episodes, ran on Showtime in May and June 2014; the second season, containing 10 episodes, is announced for 2015. Penny Dreadful is one – though certainly not the only – of the numerous widely watched, read, and discussed serial fictions to emerge during the past years which offers particularly productive links to a general discussion of the serial format itself. We find these links in the way in which the series negotiates its own genealogy as popular serial (horror or Gothic) fiction, a tendency that becomes apparent already in the series’ title Penny Dreadful, but which we can also detect in the narrative’s more general engagement with the art of fiction as such, through its employment of literary classics as well as the motif of the theatre. These characteristics clearly point to a self-conscious and self-reflective interest of the series.1 There 1 Frank Kelleter attests to “serial aesthetics” a distinct capacity for self-reflection (die “ausgeprägte[] Fähigkeit serieller Ästhetik, Variationen durch Autoreflexion zu erzeugen”; Kelleter 32) and talks about the “knowledge” the serial format 1 is also a strong psychoanalytic background and perspective detectable in Penny Dreadful. The series uses psychoanalysis – the concepts, issues and ways of reasoning it provides – as one of its main resources for characters, their background and relations to each other. The main aspects of Penny Dreadful to be discussed are thus: the purpose and effect of the label it uses (“penny dreadful”), its techniques of doubling and repetition, and its psychoanalytical perspective on individual character. By using the label “penny dreadful,” that is by naming itself after the lurid serial horror stories popular in the 19th century, the series styles itself as trashy, but hard to resist, and thus as a ‘guilty pleasure’ for its audience to give in to. As chapter 2 will discuss, this conceptual link between fiction and forbidden cravings is common in 19th century perspectives on the allure of penny fiction, but can also be detected in contemporary discussion of the appeal of serial narratives. Penny Dreadful presents itself as guilty pleasure not only by invoking a specific tradition of narrative fiction but also by casting all of its main characters as either giving in to illicit cravings or tempting others to do so, thus making the depiction of seduction and transgression its trademark. Penny Dreadful operates repetitively on several levels. It is a repetitive narrative in the sense that it adapts literary classics and thus repeats figures and other elements from its source materials. At the same time, it marks all fiction as repetitive by definition: in relation to the theatre performances at the Grand Guignol that we witness in the series, it emphasises the ability of fiction to continually ‘resurrect,’ that is, to repeat its figures. As chapter 3 will argue, we are dealing here not with repetition as exact replication, but with a form of repetition that allows similarity as well as difference. As it turns out, there is good reason to examine this kind of repetition more closely, as it is also characteristic of the serial format in general. The framework used in Penny Dreadful to explain the characters to us, in particular as their back stories are revealed, is decidedly psychoanalytic. Psychoanalysis is thus presented to us as a resource for understanding the development of human individuals. The idea of people’s “hidden depths” (which for example Vanessa claims Ethan to have, see PD 1 00:26:39) 2 pervades the series and is clearly related to the concept of the unconscious, yet there are also more specific parallels to particular psychoanalytic terms such as hysteria, which are discussed in more detail in chapter 4. It is, quite appropriately, a text by Sigmund Freud that has been claimed to contain the “masterplot” (Brooks 90) of all narrative. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud presents a has “of its own rules and conditions” (das “Wissen serieller Formen um ihre eigenen Regeln und Bedingungen”; 12). 2 All quotes from the series and the production blogs, which are added as special features to the DVD, are taken from: Penny Dreadful. Season 1. Created by John Logan. Produced by John Logan, Pippa Harris, and Sam Mendes. Perf. Eva Green, Timothy Dalton, Josh Hartnett, Harry Treadaway, Reeve Carney. DVD. Showtime, 2014. All text references to the series will be given in the text in the following format: (PD, episode number, time code) or (PD, production blog number and title, time code).