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). 2 comprehensive psychoanalytic understanding of life as such, prompted by the question of the psychical purposes of repetition and the link between repetition and the pleasure principle. We thus find that Freud’s text treats precisely those aspects that stand out so characteristically about Penny Dreadful: it is a psychoanalytic approach concerned with repetition and (guilty) pleasure (considering that pleasure and guilt are seldom far from each other in psychoanalytic thinking). It is the phenomenon of repetition that leads Freud to claim that life (psychic and organic) is determined both by the pleasure principle and by the death drive, and that it is through the opposing influences of libidinal or life drives on the one and the death drive on the other hand that the lengthy course of human life comes about: the life drives urging for prolongation, the death drive urging for closure, the living organism adhering to both by continually proceeding towards death – but on the longest route possible. These characteristics are what causes Peter Brooks to examine Beyond the Pleasure Principle as a “template for narrative plot” (Rickard and Schweizer 106), as he finds them to determine narrative just as they determine organic life according to Freud: narrative lives off the desire that its beginning initiates: the desire to go on reading (or watching) to see how events will turn out. Paradoxically, this forward-moving impulse is, ultimately, a desire for reaching the closure of the narrative – we want to go on reading (or watching) because we want to know how the story ends. We reach this ending, however, not on the shortest route possible, but on the longest, or at least on a route that delays our arrival substantially: every story demands at least some complications, twists and turns, or else there would be little to narrate. Our interest and investment in narrative thus stems from the desire for prolongation as well as the desire for closure, and the bulk of the narrative comes into being precisely because the interaction of the two motivates us to take a detour – to delay, but not to lose interest in the ending. Chapter 5 will examine this Freudian “masterplot” and its implications for serial narrative. It stands to reason that the dynamic force that narrative generates becomes particularly effective when we deal with serial stories, as they highlight precisely those functions that engender this force in the first place: serial narrative emphasises the delay, the postponement of the ending in its rhythm of interruption and return and thus leaves a lot of room for the opposed forces of continuance and closure to play out their ‘conflict.’ In the alternation between interruption and return, both the desire to proceed to the end and the desire to do part of it all over again come to the fore – at work in all narrative, but not always this obviously.3

3 Kelleter’s analysis makes clear that even though the opportunities for a careful dramaturgy of closure are limited for popular serial narratives – they have to continue as long as the audience is interested, and to end as soon as the audience loses interest – the ending still has an important role to play for the dynamics of the series: series conceptualise themselves in anticipation of an ending and thus a unity that is always one step ahead and out of reach (“Was … als Dynamik seriellen Erzählens bezeichnet wird, hat viel damit zu tun, wie jede Serie zwischen einer vermuteten 3 In Freud’s account, a return to death, to the equilibrium of the inanimate is a profound impulse that is part of the make-up of all living beings, death being “grounded in the very essence of organic life” – a notion that he refers to as “discomfiting,” opposed as it is to “people’s customary way of seeing things” (“Beyond the Pleasure Principle” 175-6). We might locate the appeal of serial narratives exclusively in their endlessness, the fact that they provide “an endless dream world in which we can keep losing ourselves” (Frye 169). If we adopt Brooks’ Freudian model for narrative, though, we have to conclude that the appeal of serial stories lies in their cessation as well as in their duration. A narrative death drive – is this a notion as “discomfiting” as Freud’s actual death drive? It certainly has disconcerting potential, as will be discussed in chapter 5, since it exposes the paradoxical demands that we make on narrative entertainment: it suggests that we want to immerse ourselves in narrative, but also, simultaneously, want to bereave ourselves of this source of enjoyment. There seems to be a kind of ‘gratification of loss’ provided by serial narrative that disturbs distinctions between ‘easy’ and ‘diffcult’ texts – those providing affirmation and gratification, and those challenging our demands by not fulfilling them or showing them to be unfulfillable. There might be many and more serial narratives around whose contents appear stereotyped and intellectually unchallenging to us but which nevertheless demand us to enter into a complex affective pattern of rushing-forward/pulling- back that can, if we look closely, reveal to us that many texts are able to fulfill functions only seemingly opposed: they can give us what we want and deny it at the same time; they can make us think and enjoy ourselves simultaneously. While more clearly needs to be said on the matter than can be included in this paper, the last parts of chapter 5 present, as an outlook, some preliminary suggestions concerning the consequences of assuming serial narratives to be such paradoxical ‘hybrids’: gratifying and disturbing, offering plenty and causing lack. One issue that definitely requires further discussion is the question of the transformation of the serial format in connection to current broadcasting trends. Do fictions like Netflix’s House of Cards (2013-present), of which complete seasons were released simultaneously, circumvent the pattern of interruption and return? Does this eliminate the “discomfiting” element from popular serial narrative? In the examination of Penny Dreadful as showcasing the workings of serial narrative, some aspects of the series have to be left aside, such as the issue of technological and scientific development of the late 19th century, an issue that resurfaces several times in the series, mainly but not only in connection to Frankenstein’s attempts to create human life from

Gesamtstruktur und ihren konkreten Einzelkomponenten oszilliert. Anders als werkästhetisch orientierte Produktions- und Rezeptionspraxen entwerfen sich populäre Serien auf ein stetig entlagertes Ganzes hin, das den Zusammenhang seiner Teile ermöglicht, ohne ihn zu dominieren”; Kelleter 27, emphasis in original). 4 technological means. Also, Vanessa’s condition will in this paper receive more attention as medical condition than as supernatural occurrence. Even though the audience will guess from very early on that we are actually dealing with the latter in Vanessa’s case – the supernatural is, after all, firmly established as part of Penny Dreadful’s fictional universe right from the beginning – the characters treat Vanessa as psychiatrical case for a very long time. As late as episode 7, the characters come up with psychological explanations for her state, and it is only towards the end of this second-to-last episode that we hear a character say that Vanessa is possessed. Even though in the specific case of Vanessa’s ‘hysteria,’ the psychological point of view turns out to be mistaken, it is nevertheless, due to the opinions of the characters, remarkably prominent. The particular narrative examined here is a television series, that is, a narrative told through an audio-visual medium and intended for commercial success. This is currently a highly successful and popular, probably the most popular, way to deliver serial narratives. The approach presented in this paper, however, gives more weight to the story than to the medial conditions under which it is conveyed. The desire to know how the story ends, the sudden impression of lack or disappointment when the narrative is interrupted: these occur for the written word just as well as for the moving picture. The following account therefore hopefully does not preclude productive applications and adjustments to other forms of serial narrative or artwork; it is, however, limited to those occurrences of seriality that narrate some kind of story – that is, to those that make us want to know ‘how things will continue’ in the next instalment and how they will turn out in the end.

1.2 The pleasures of story: A note on terminology

This analysis frequently relies on an intuitive, largely pretheoretical understanding of ‘story.’ While this leads to a somewhat fuzzy concept of the object of study, this need not be regarded as a disadvantage: a phenomenon as widespread, historically and culturally, as telling stories can easily suffer from hermetic definitions of its forms or purposes. In any case, however, it is clear that ‘story’ is closely related to ‘narrative’ and ‘plot,’ two terms at least as difficult to handle (as Marie-Laure Ryan puts it, “few words have enjoyed so much use and suffered so much abuse as narrative” in the past fifteen years; see 22). ‘Plot’ is understood by Peter Brooks as “an embracing concept for the design and intention of narrative [...] a structuring operation elicited by, and made necessary by, those meanings that develop through succession and time” (12), where the latter (“meanings that develop through succession and time”) corresponds to ‘narrative’: “narratives raison d’être [,] is of and in time [...] messages that are developed through temporal succession [...] a form of understanding and explanation” (10). This

5 corresponds to the Aristotelian understanding of plot, or mythos, as “the combination of the incidents, or things done in the story” (qtd. in Brooks 10). Plots, however, “are not simply organizing structures, they are also intentional structures, goal-oriented and forward-moving” (Brooks 12). Thus in Brooks’ account it is plot which incites our interest in the story, and narrative which enables us to understand it. This view is compatible with a common theoretical understanding of narrative as an account of individuated existents undergoing (at least some) non-habitual transformations, so that a sequence of events is established with a temporal dimension and a causal (or some other kind of) link between the single events.4 To some degree however, the use of the term ‘narrative’ is, in this context, also supposed to derive naturally from the consequences of understanding Freud’s model, as Brooks does, as a model of narrative texts: narrative is understood here as both the activity that forms and the artefact which emerges from the force field of interaction between the opposing forces of continuance and closure. Accordingly, serial narrative – this is the understanding that this paper would like to arrive at – would be an activity/artefact drawing particularly strongly on this force field, thus developing distinctive dynamics which determine the pace and shape of the plot (for instance plot twists, cliffhangers, and side-stories in tune with the structure of episodes and seasons) and exert a remarkable attraction on its audience. In order to be able to do so, a serial narrative text anticipates and facilitates, as Frank Kelleter puts it, its own simultaneous repetition and innovation in a text not yet existing (see 26). Seriality is less a matter of dividing a work into segments, but, as Sabine Sielke has argued, more a matter of evolution, as elements ‘grow’ out of preceding elements, so that seriality is a kind of “remembering forward” (Sielke 390) operating recursively.5 If we can “conceive of the reading of plot as a form of desire that carries us forward, onward, through the text” (Brooks 37), how are we to conceptualise this “desire” that motivates our reading (and viewing) activity? Brooks usefully sums up the spirit of the Freudian understanding of desire:

Freud’s concept of sexuality, and of libido […] is really based on the notion that human desire comes into being from its very origin predicated on lack, severance and prohibition. As determined by the “law” of “castration,” desire is always inhabited by lack, and by its very nature never fulfillable, always driven by

4 A similar definition can for example be found in Ryan (see 28-31). Then again, this kind of understanding calls for an explication of the category of ‘event,’ which is again no straightforward matter (see, for example, Hühn) and goes to show the complications entailed in definitions of terms such as ‘story’ which appear, intuitively and pretheoretically, easy to apply. 5 This concerns those serial narratives that present overarching plot lines from one instalment to the next more directly than those which close off their story lines in one episode (that is, it concerns serials more directly than series). However, as it appears that currently, most serial narratives have at least a few overarching lines of action, the distinction is of reduced importance. 6 unconscious scenarios of impossible fulfillment. (Rickard and Schweizer 109)6

To desire thus means to wish for a unity that one can never have (because ‘what we really want’ is both unknown and forbidden to us): desire is a state of lack. Serial narrative with its alternation of interruption and return, gratification and loss, and its emphasis on postponing the ending certainly manages particularly well the “narrative desire” (Brooks 37) evoked by plot, as it imposes upon its audience a particularly pronounced state of lack which it, as it were, ‘challenges’ us to endure in waiting for the next instalment, or waiting through all instalments for the final resolution. If chapter 5 claims an ‘affective challenge’ of this kind for serial narrative, then the term ‘affect’ is supposed to include visceral and emotional components alike.7 The final outlook of this paper further proposes that serial narrative supports the view that the effect of stories can transcend conceptual boundaries not only between bodily and emotional reaction, but also between emotional and intellectual engagement. Roland Barthes describes how frequently, “pleasure is championed against intellectuality … the old reactionary myth of heart against head, sensation against reasoning, (warm) ‘life’ against (cold) ‘abstraction” or how, in an opposite move, “knowledge, method, commitment, combat, are drawn up against ‘mere delectation’” (22-3) – in both cases, affect (heart, sensation, warmth, delectation) ending up as opposed to thought and aligned with pleasure. “On both sides” we find “this peculiar idea that pleasure is simple, which is why it is championed or disdained” (23; emphasis in original). The idea of ‘pleasure’ will in fact turn up repeatedly in the following account – in connection to seduction, transgression, guilt, and repetition, in connection to Freud’s pleasure principle (which is charged with keeping tension in the psyche as low as possible), and finally, as technical term from Barthes’ dichotomy of pleasure versus bliss (plaisir versus jouissance).8 Even for Barthes, however, ‘pleasure’ – as well as its counterpart bliss – as term and as concept stays slippery: “terminologically, there is

6 The interview that John S. Rickard and Harold Schweizer conduct with Peter Brooks is a very useful addition to Brooks’ Reading for the Plot, a work which will become of central concern in chapter 5. Among other things, Brooks is asked in this interview to comment on his psychoanalytical model of narrative and its supposed universality in the context of feminist and postcolonial studies. The questions that Brooks’ approach in Reading for the Plot provokes automatically become relevant for this paper’s approach as well: how universal can we assume this understanding of the ‘psychology of narrative’ to be, culturally, geographically, historically? As valid as these questions are, their scope is too broad to discuss them in this paper. Brooks’ interview is, however, a good starting point in this regard. 7 In fact, some approaches in affect theory insist on interlocking the two dimensions (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, for example, “records the intuition that a particular intimacy seems to subsist between textures and emotions ... [a] double meaning, tactile plus emotional”; 17) even while others insist on keeping emotion and affect separate (for a preliminary overview, see for example Burgess 290-7). It appears only appropriate to assume an interconnection of this kind for the effect of narrative fiction, given that it may provoke all kinds of engagement, from sharing a character’s grief or fear to having sweaty palms and biting one’s nails in suspense. 8 See Richard Howard’s “Note on the Text” of Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text, which highlights the pitfalls of translating Barthes’ terminology into English. 7 always a vacillation – I stumble, I err. In any case, there will always be a margin of indecision; […] the paradigm will falter, the meaning will be precarious, revocable, reversible” (4). In this paper, except where pleasure is used explicitly as technical term (as Freud’s ‘reduction of excitation’ or Barthes ‘text of pleasure’ as ‘comforting text avoiding disturbance’), it is supposed to denote that resolutely individual experience, familiar but hardly describable, that Barthes refers to when he employs pleasure as general term rather than as opposition to the discomfort of bliss – thus supporting Barthes’ view that pleasure is anything but ‘simple’ or ‘easy’:

Pleasure […] is not a naïve residue; it does not depend on a logic of understanding and on sensation; it is a drift, something both revolutionary and asocial, and it cannot be taken over by any collectivity, any mentality, any ideolect. Something neuter? It is obvious that the pleasure of the text is scandalous: not because it is immoral but because it is atopic. (23; emphasis in orginal)

8 2 “A taste in a certain kind of literature” – Penny Dreadful and 19th century’s “bad books” No sooner has a word been said, somewhere, about the pleasure of the text, than two policemen are ready to jump on you: the political policeman and the psychoanalytical policeman: futility and/or guilt, pleasure is either idle or vain, a class notion or an illusion.9

It’s fine it is, somebody’s killed every week, and it’s only a penny.10

Victor Frankenstein is animating dead bodies in a back room of his squalid apartment, driven by the desire for absolute knowledge; Ethan Chandler is haunted by a mysterious past; Malcolm Murray cannot quit the search for the source of the Nile, even at the price of the lives of his comrades; and Vanessa Ives lets down her guard with Dorian Gray and promptly falls under the spell of demonic forces. Everybody has their secret, Penny Dreadful seems to tell us, and somehow they are all dirty. Seduction and transgression are welded together conceptually by the series in order to seduce the audience to give in to the temptations of ‘forbidden’ fiction – fiction that is lurid in subject matter and low in moral standards, as the label “penny dreadful” signalises. Resonating with discourses past and present that discuss the attracting force fiction can exercise on its audience, Penny Dreadful characterises ‘seduction’ as the livelihood of serial entertainment.

2.1 Corruptive reading – penny fiction of the 19th century

Even though, as one reviewer points out, John Logan’s television series is a “million dollar” rather than a penny dreadful, given the “lavish budget and look of the show” (Lawson n.p.), there is good reason not to downplay the connection that the show’s title establishes. As source materials go, the series does in fact make use of what have become literary classics rather than actual 19th century penny instalments, inspiring one critic to call Penny Dreadful a “bookish thriller for the post-literate age” (Lawson n.p.). 11 These ‘highbrow’ tendencies, however, are complemented by a taste for the excessive and trashy. Even while citing the literary canon as inspiration, Logan also claims to present a contemporary version of 19th century’s popular horror fiction: “It was the first time that the mass media was able to bring horror into people’s living rooms,” Logan explains in answer to the question “What is a Penny Dreadful?” (PD Production blog #1). “And I thought, that’s exactly what I’m doing with

9 Barthes 57. 10 Wild Boys of London 1864-6, qtd. in Springhall 172. 11 In addition to Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, and Dracula, Logan lists as his literary inspiration texts such as The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The War of the Worlds (see PD Production blog #2 “Literary Roots” 00:00:00-20). 9 television. What I’m writing is a penny dreadful” (00:01:32-45). Reviews pick up on this combination of sophisticated aspirations and vulgarity: “it’s all excessive, and sometimes the excess becomes repellent” (Bianco n.p.); “as long as the show continues to balance the over- the-top with the subtle, it should be worth the ride” (Genzlinger n.p.); or, commenting on Brona’s obscure pornographic encounter with Dorian Gray in the second episode:

At times, the dialogue of Penny Dreadful crosses over into the Truly Dreadful. When Gray tells the drifter, ‘I’ve never fucked a dying creature,’ you can almost hear Oscar Wilde clawing his way out of his grave. Which may well be the plot of Episode 3. (Lidz n.p.)

By labelling itself ‘penny fiction,’ the series appears to announce in a quasi-warning the ‘lower’ parts in its mix of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, thus drawing legitimisation of its more sensationalist and effect-seeking moments from its connection to a tradition of narrative fiction that is known for its “highy stylized ‘sex and violence’” themes (see Springhall 161). The “mass market for cheap reading matter, created in the 1830s through weekly serial publication” and “accelerated by the new rotary printing presses, cheap manufactured paper, improved transport and rising literacy” saw the proliferation of stories which featured “an accessible version of gothic for the English common reader” (ibid. 160). George W.M. Reynolds’ highly successful works from the 1840s and 50s, for example, set in shady metropolitan milieus, exchange “city houses for Gothic castles, slum cellars for dungeons, and financial extortioners for the evil count or mad monk” (Springhall 162). Penny fictions such as The Wild Boys of London follow the adventures of a gang of street urchins while what Springhall calls ‘women-in-peril-dreadfuls’ depict lower-class damsels in distress harassed by aristocratic villains (see 163-6). Sentiments concerning these publications were strong, in particular as the texts were aimed at and read predominantly by young adults – not only by lower-class adolescents, moreover, but just as well by those of the middle and lower middle-classes (see Springhall 173). Journalist James Greenwood, in his 1869 collection The Seven Curses of London, which discusses what Greenwood regards as the main problem areas of the city’s social life (neglected children, juvenile thieves, and the like), includes a lengthy discussion of several penny fictions:

[...] I have before me half a dozen of these penny weekly numbers of “thrilling romance,” addressed to boys, and circulated entirely among them – and girls. [...] If I am asked, Is the poison each of these papers contains so cunningly disguised

10 and mixed with harmless-seeming ingredients, that a boy of shrewd intelligence and decent mind might be betrayed by its insidious seductiveness? (101-2)

And even though Greenwood concludes that those fictions are in fact not “subtle” (102) enough to ensnare this hypothetical adolescent, the case is not finished for him yet. He goes on to discuss in detail the contents of the examples he has collected, pointing out that the publisher’s “first and foremost reliance is on lewdness,” with the “glorification of robbers and cut-throats” being “subservient” to this focus (102), concluding:

Which of us can say that his children are safe from the contamination? [...] Let us for a moment picture to ourselves our fright and bewilderment if we discovered that our little boys were feasting off this deadly fruit in the secrecy of their chambers! [...] Granted, my dear sir, that your young Jack, or my twelve-years-old Robert, have minds too pure either to seek out or crave after literature of the sort in question, but not unfrequently it is found without seeking. It is a contagious disease, just as cholera and typhus and the plague are contagious [...]. (104-6).12

How much of Greenwood’s reasoning concerning penny fiction as an actual encourager of juvenile lower-class crime in Victorian London is accurate might be debatable – he is, however, not alone in his concerns: his contemporary Henry Mayhew (by some critics referred to as a “pioneer of city ethnography,” see the chapter of this title in Linder) in his London Labour and the London Poor investigations from the 1850s and 60s lists penny fiction as one of the causes of the “vagabondism of the young” (alongside rough treatment by parents and authoritative institutions):

The causes from which the vagabondism of the young indirectly proceeds are:– [...] 3. Bad books, which act like the bad companions in depraving the taste, and teaching the youth to consider that approvable which to all rightly constituted minds is morally loathsome. 4. Bad amusements – as penny-theatres, where the scenes and characters described in the bad books are represented in still more attractive form. Mr. Ainsworth’s “Bookwood,” with Dick Turpin “in his habit as he lived in,” is now in the course of being performed nightly at one of the East-

12 Greenwood does not only criticise the contents of the fictions and their effects, but also the various incentives publishers make use of to advance their publications on the market, such as promising daggers as prizes to those who buy the most numbers (“The daring length these open encouragers of boy highwaymen and Tyburn Dicks will go to serve their villainous ends is amazing”; 102).

11 end saloons. (379)

Examples such as these illustrate how the “pleasure press” (Mountjoy qtd. in Jacobs 325) was conceived of as both powerful and corruptive – Greenwood might claim that ‘decent’ adolescents are resistant to its lures but cannot help returning to the frightful scenario of them giving in to temptation, and while Mayhew’s words might be more sober, he refers to the same combination of attraction and corruption. The vogue of penny fiction constitutes an important aspect in the historical development of commercially successful serial fiction. The value of “macabre and exciting fair” (Springhall 160) ensured success on a market of fiction which had only recently begun to thrive on the combined effects of advancements in the printing industry13 and the discovery of the appeal of serial fiction proper.14 From the late 17th and early 18th centuries onwards, part- issue publication had served to reduce production costs and increase availability and thus been conditioned from its beginnings by economical considerations. Early serial forms of publication did not concern fiction exclusively but non-fiction content to at least the same degree. In the first half of the 19th century, however, notably with the publishing of Charles Dicken’s The Pickwick Papers in 1836, part-issue publication had become a method used specifically for the publishing of original fiction (see Hagedorn 29). Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris in the early 1840s was, according to Roger Hagedorn, a significant influence on British penny fiction and also the main initiator of an international heyday of serial fiction published in newspapers and magazines that lasted up until World War I (see 30-1; also Springhall 162). In the developments that followed throughout the 20th century (from newspaper instalments to comic strip serials to film, then radio, then television serials, as Hagedorn’s article describes in detail), serial fiction has always been intricately linked to economic considerations and has very often served as marketing instrument precisely because of its potential, feared by Mayhew and contemporaries, to exert such a remarkable pull on its audience (“when media industries decide to target a new sector of the population in order to expand their market share, they have consistently turned to serials as a solution”; Hagedorn 41). In recent years, there has been another turn in the development of serial fiction, in particular on television: “Since the turn of the century serial television drama has become increasingly associated with quality” as notable television shows “are used to entice an international ‘quality’ audience to invest in long- running serialized dramas, flattering their intelligence and distinctive taste codes” (Dhoest 1).

13 Such as the advent of machine presses to replace hand pressmen (see Jacobs 336). 14 London of the mid-19th century in particular stands out in this context due to its remarkably lively print culture (see Jabos 329). 12 Interestingly, Penny Dreadful in fact connects to both traditions: television as manipulative entertainment as well as television’s new role of providing intellectually stimulating fare (and reviving literary classics – Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Picture of Dorian Gray are available in Showtime’s online store in the “Penny Dreadful Collection Book Bundle”). A certain ‘clash of cultures’ is already detectable, however, in the context of 19th century penny entertainment – both in printed stories as well as equivalent theatrical productions (as mentioned for example by Mayhew, see above) – which frequently, as Edward Jacobs details, was understood as a form of satirical street culture by those who rejected industrial literacy and the associated institutions and ways of living. As “the historical coincidence in England between industrialism and popular education gave the English poor at large good reason” around the middle of the 19th century “to perceive industrial work and school knowledge as two parts of an inhumane, tyrannical culture that was being forced on them from above” and taught them lessons “ludicrously remote from the students’ culture, offering them such ‘useful’ facts as the subclasses of tropical birds,” literacy, associated with “‘disciplinary’ institutions, such as court, workhouse, police, and government,” became something to be mocked (Jacobs 327-8). Street culture thus “aggressively [...] transformed printed literature into a mockery of industrial literacy” (ibid. 334) by, for example, combining tragic and ‘slapstick’ moments in disregard of literary conventions: penny theatre audiences, says Jacobs, “demanded deepest tragedy and broadest farce, at the same time” so that “farce subvert[ed] the effects of the more serious, ‘literary’ mode, laying bare its rhetorical nature” (333; emphasis in original). Penny Dreadful clearly does not concern itself with matters of class struggle; however it does oscillate between, as reviews say, the “over-the-top and the subtle,” the sensationalist effect of scenes of exorcism and erotic encounters on the one and iconic moments of literary history such as Victor Frankenstein’s struggle with his creature on the other.15 If the penny dreadfuls of the 19th century contained “self-parodying dialogue” such as John Springhall gives us from Wild Boys of London (in which one character explains his preference for penny fiction because “somebody’s killed every week, and it’s only a penny” and is promptly rebuked by the hero because he does not read “proper books,” see Springhall 172), so a particular idea of certain traditions of fictional entertainment – a tradition in which the mixture of the flamboyant and the self-reflective is quite common – clearly informs Penny Dreadful, even if the content of the series is not explicitly modelled on concrete elements from actual 19th century

15 Many contemporary reactions to Wilde’s Dorian Gray, however, were in fact not unsimilar in tone to those concerning penny bloods, judging the novel as frivolous, morally corruptive and/or of little artistic value (see Drew ix-x). With this text in particular, Penny Dreadful has found source material which combines the air of ‘high literary art’ with that of ‘scandalous piece of writing,’ corresponding to the ambivalence between ludicrous and sophisticated that the series invests in. 13 penny fiction. When during one of his short appearances Van Helsing points to a shelf full of penny bloods – which he allegedly collects for the sake of the few grains of truth concerning supernatural beings that they supposedly contain – referring to the activities of “a small percentage of the reading public with a taste in a certain kind of literature” (PD 6 00:29:10-20), the remark is easily read as an ambiguous statement concerning not only historical penny fiction but also Penny Dreadful itself. With regard to its namesake, the series appears to take up a cultural formation rather than actual fictional content – it is the exploitation of the idea of ‘guilty pleasure’ that connects Penny Dreadful to its 19th century ancestors, rather than an adaptation of plots or characters from specific stories.

2.2 Seductive reading – the pleasures of serial fiction

When reviews greeted the television debut of Penny Dreadful by exclaiming, “Oh dear; another show to add to our ever-growing guilty-pleasure lists” (Genzlinger n.p.), they seamlessly inserted themselves into a general discourse surrounding serial narratives. Blogs, feature pages and pieces of advice for writers and journalists appear to capitalise on the idea of the seductive force of serial narrative, making generous use of an erotically charged vocabulary in their discussion of serial fiction, emphasising either the concept of anticipation or that of indulgence (depending, apparently, on their own opinion of trends in viewing habits). Some (claiming that “we sometimes choose delay over immediacy – and small portions over all-you- can-eat binges”) talk about “readers passionately demanding to learn how the story ends,” “the anticipatory pleasure that can come from the simple act of waiting” or “the agony of time-bound suspense, leaving you waiting and wanting” (Garber n.p.; emphasis added); they refer to the “delicious sense of enforced waiting” and deliver statements such as “to me, the three most beautiful words in the English language are not ‘I love you.’ They are ‘to be continued’” (French n.p.). Others employ the metaphor of ‘binge watching’ with all the allusions to cheerfully sinful gluttony that the expression implies: “It’s time to loosen your belt, open wide and gorge on episode after episode at one sitting, like competitive eaters downing hot dogs at the July 4 Nathan’s contest” or, alternatively, “you need to slow down and stop gobbling your TV” (Poniewozik n.p.; emphasis added). Some combine both concepts: “there is something wonderful about gluttonously devouring a novel in one sitting. But there is something just as special (or agonizing) as [sic] waiting for the next installment of a riveting story … Love it or hate it, the serial format enhances that awesome sense of anticipation” (Rodale n.p.; emphasis added). In all these passages, there is an erotic or sensual undertone that parallels the reactions to penny fictions in the 19th century which describe that particular kind of serial fiction as a

14 “deadly fruit” – with its “insidious seductiveness” and its “first and foremost ... reliance on lewdness” – that adolescents are “feasting off,” offered by publishers pursuing “villainous ends.” Even though in the contemporary examples, we do not find the same kind of open moralisation as we find in Mayhew’s or Greenwood’s words, there are still some residues of moral judgement to be detected: the concept of binge-watching, the impression that we “gorge” on serial fiction, is based on the idea that there is a ‘proper’ pattern of consumption which is transgressed in some kind of excess. Concepts of temptation and transgression, self- restrain and indulgence thus frequently pervade discussions of serial fiction even today, particularly in popular discourse outside the academia. From this viewpoint, the audience of serial fiction appears as governed alternately by urges and the control of those urges. We might therefore see expressed in the popular discourse16 concerning serial fiction the idea, as it were, of a ‘pleasure principle’ of serial narrative in the context of which serial fiction appears as an urge or a temptation (a “guilty pleasure”) that we either give in to or not. Following this logic, all serial fiction wants to ‘seduce’ its audience to ‘give in’ to its ‘temptations’ (be this in the anticipatory or in the ‘binge pattern’) – certainly an obvious claim in particular for fictions produced by an acquisitive industry, such as television. Penny Dreadful, however, signals this intention in a particularly direct way as it makes (immoral) seduction an explicit theme reflected in many plot aspects, character constellations, and pieces of dialogue as well as in the period atmosphere of the 1890s which saw, among other things, the beginnings of psychoanalysis. There are therefore two principal ways in which Penny Dreadful performs a self-stylisation as “guilty pleasure”: One consists in alluding to earlier forms of serial narration (the original penny dreadfuls) which were notorious for their (supposedly) corruptive lure and thus labeling itself as ‘addictive pulp fiction’ – the career of quality television notwithstanding, a series like Penny Dreadful does deal to a great degree in the same fare (“highly stylized ‘sex and violence’”) as its popular precursors. The other consists in depicting seduction on a plot level. This focus on seduction in Penny Dreadful consists in more than the obligatory romantic lines of plot or sex scenes (even though the age rating of the series is certainly part of it), as the series does not only depict seduction, but also reflect on it and casts all kinds of relations and processes as processes of seduction which are not necessarily so by definition. We find, therefore, the (intended) ‘external’ effect of the fiction on its audience paralleled in the (intended) ‘internal’ effect of the characters on each other.

16 The passages quoted in this chapter from contemporary and Victorian reactions to serial fiction are only snippets of this discourse – the fact, however, that they are quite alike in tone and vocabulary gives us good reason to assume that we might find many more representatives of their kind in a more comprehensive search. 15 2.3 “You have to risk rejection” – seduction and transgression in Penny Dreadful

The basic plot line of season one consists in Sir Malcom’s and Vanessa’s mission to rescue Mina from the grasp of the vampire who is keeping her prisoner, and their efforts to recruit allies to help them in this task. This recruitment is presented less as an act of negotiation but rather as one of seduction. The first candidate is Ethan Chandler, an American stranded in London and earning his keep as the gunslinger of a Wild West show, who is of interest to Malcolm and Vanessa due to his dexterity in handling weapons. When Vanessa teases him about the flaws in the dramatic composition of his show, he tells her: “You gotta leave them wanting more – as we say in show business” (PD 1 00:08:43-5). While this is certainly not a surprising insight concerning the entertainment industry, it is one of several utterances that specifically offer a double reading, both as dialogue between the characters and as a self- reflective statement indicating Penny Dreadful’s intention to, literally, ‘leave its audience wanting more,’ linking the “show business” that both the series and its character Ethan are involved in to the concept of erotic desire. Further interaction between Ethan and Vanessa continues to draw on the same metaphors. On the morning after the trio’s (Vanessa, Malcolm, and Ethan) first expedition into London’s demonic underworld and opium dens, Vanessa tries to persuade Ethan to permanently join their mission. “A wise man would walk away from this house and make a concerted effort to forget everything that occurred last night,” she tells Ethan, yet when he asks her whether this is supposed to be a warning, she corrects him: “It’s an invitation.” As he refuses to participate further, she points him to her tarot deck and asks him to pick a card. The one he picks promptly turns out to be “The Lovers.” After Ethan has left, Sir Malcolm asks Vanessa: “Was he tempted?” and she returns, “Intrigued, I would say” (see PD 1 00:26:17-29:01): joining the fight against supernatural forces is, in Penny Dreadful, not presented as a matter of, for example, heroics or necessity – it is a matter of seduction, of being “tempted,” “intrigued,” and “wanting more,” a tactic that supposedly works well on Ethan as he is, according to Vanessa, a man who “has given himself to excess” (PD 2 00:09:34), that is, who has a hard time resisting temptations of all kinds. The same principle operates on Sir Malcolm’s second desired ally – the scientifically ambitious yet poor doctor of medicine, Victor Frankenstein. Inviting him to his “Explorer’s Club,” Malcolm reacts to Frankenstein’s remark “I wasn’t going to come” by saying,

But you couldn’t resist... When you see a river you must follow it to its source – no matter the perils, no matter those comrades that fall along the way. You must know how things work, you must unlock... You are dissatisfied always... (PD 1 00:36:10-32)

16 The penniless doctor is of course offered payment by Sir Malcom, but Malcolm’s wording suggests that when Frankenstein joins the quest, it is out of the quasi-erotic desire (“you are dissatisfied always”) for knowledge rather than money.17 Malcolm takes no chances, though: Just in case knowledge is not the only thing Victor Frankenstein is interested in, he also orders Vanessa to “unbutton the top of [her] dress” when Victor first comes to call at their house (PD 2 00:12:16-8). Both Victor and Ethan also have practical reasons for joining the quest: they both need the money Sir Malcolm pays them, Victor for the supplies he needs to create a companion for his first creature, Ethan for his companion Brona’s medical treatment (which, however, we never really see her receiving). However, when Malcolm prompts the two to pledge themselves officially to the quest, it is mysteries (i.e., the desirable knowledge it promises) rather than money that he uses as incentive: “Give us your assent, Mr. Chandler, or leave this company and its mysteries behind” (see PD 3 00:41:22-42:45). ‘Seduction proper’ begins from the second episode onward, when Vanessa Ives and Dorian Gray meet for the first time at a party (see PD 2 00:25:45-28:07; Dorian, according to his own judgement, never says ‘no’ to an invitation). While at the beginning, the dialogue tends to the – rather stereotypical – suggestion that Vanessa is in need of ‘sexual liberation,’18 over the progress of the first season the roles of seducer and seduced become more flexible between the two (in particular as Vanessa’s past and her struggle against the forces of demonic possession are revealed). Their dialogue makes such blatant use of sexual innuendo that it verges on the ludicrous, yet in its blatancy it also serves to develop the tone and atmosphere of temptation into a trademark of the series – a temptation, moreover, into the forbidden and/or dangerous (and thus a “guilty pleasure”), as Dorian’s and Vanessa’s visit to Crermone Gardens in episode 4 suggests: as Dorian prompts Vanessa to let herself be absorbed by the sensual impressions of a flower he has shown her and describing them back to him, she appears to become lost as in an erotic encounter (with closed eyes describing the flower as “something of the jungle” which calls out to her, saying “touch me”) – only to be informed that the plant she has admired is called “deadly nightshade” and quite poisonous. “It’s the

17 Knowledge as irresistible, as addictive also appears in Sir Malcolm’s musings about the search for the source of the Nile, which has occupied him during his many expeditions: the “scientific value is negligible, of course, but it’s a sort of fever,” he explains (see PD 4 00:23:20-3). The desire behind the Nile quest is of course not for discovery alone, but to at least the same degree for the public acclaim. However this can hardly be an incentive for Frankenstein to join the quest for Mina, given that it is mostly a secret affair. Knowledge can obviously be attractive for its own sake, personal fame not included. 18 When Vanessa and Dorian meet for the first time, the two – rather anachronistically, given the Victorian setting – introduce themselves to each other and move into an intimate personal conversation without much ado. Dorian assesses Vanessa: “You are the only woman in this house not wearing gloves. Your hands want to touch, yet your head wants to appraise. Your heart is torn between the two.” The fact that he moves in close to take this ungloved hand into his own suggests that he does in fact regard the touching part as the more important one of the two options. 17 adder beneath the rose, isn’t it?” Dorian reflects. “All of this. They can seem so enticing and luxurious yet within, there’s a dark thing waiting” (PD 4 00:09:30-10:53). Much of this discourse of seduction – describing matters erotic as well as those not strictly speaking erotic (such as the pursuit of knowledge) alike in the same vocabulary of desire – is centred on the figure of Vanessa. Since, as Sir Malcolm explains with regard to Vanessa’s supernatural sensitivity, “her gifts make her vulnerable – they also make her...desirable” (PD 3 00:32:29-32), she serves as “bait” (PD 3 00:43:21) in the hunt for the captured Mina. Malcolm explains to Vanessa: “it’s possible the creature we seek doesn’t want her [Mina]. He wants you” (PD 3 00:43:02-7). Dorian toasts to her as “the most mysterious thing in London – Miss Vanessa Ives” (PD 4 00:49:35-40). In the context of the back story concerning Vanessa’s and Sir Malcolm’s shared past, Vanessa both exerts and experiences seductive forces: most importantly, it is suggested that Vanessa seducing Mina’s fiancé is the engine of the story, the crucial event without which none of the present events would take place.19 This is not the only fatal act of seduction, though, that Vanessa is involved in. Her sleeping with Dorian is depicted as an act of excessive and also transgressive passion (another tribute to the idea of “guilty pleasure”) which ends up triggering Vanessa’s demonic possession: it is depicted as excessive in the sense that it disables Vanessa’s control over her supernatural affliction; it is depicted as transgressive in the sense that it contains mild sadomasochistic elements which presumably are supposed to suggest that passion, here, borders on the violent (Dorian asks her beforehand what were to happen if she were to abandon her “poise” and Vanessa tells him: “there are things within us all that can never be unleashed ... it would consume us,” thus marking their encounter as forbidden and its outcome as harmful) (PD 6 00:32:00-30, 00:41:48-43:10, 00:43:55-45:15).20 In addition, the relation between Vanessa and Dorian also reflects on seduction’s reverse side. When Dorian asks for permission to kiss her, Vanessa tells him: “Don’t ask permission [...] You must risk rejection” (PD 6 00:32:38-50). This is another instance in which seduction is not merely depicted, but also commented on (similar to Ethan’s remark on the “show business”): Vanessa’s request appears generic rather than particular (indicating that ‘proper’ seduction in general includes the risk of being rejected). In the last episode of season one, the issue of rejection is linked to the theme of the transgressive and forbidden, on which the series capitalises.21 Vanessa refuses to see Dorian any longer, explaining: “It’s too dangerous [...] Between us there’s a rare connection, I won’t deny it. But that very intimacy

19 “But for my transgression, would any of this have occurred?” Vanessa asks Sir Malcolm, rhetorically (PD 1 00:42:50-2). 20 The explosiveness and thus danger of their encounter is emphasised by the fact that in between the scenes with Vanessa and Dorian we watch Malcolm, Ethan and Sembene fight and kill a ship full of vampires, which ends in the ship going up in a fire. 21 The slogan on the DVD is “These is some thing within us all.” 18 released something unhealthy in me, something I cannot allow [...] Poor Dorian, you’ve never known this feeling before have you [...] it’s rejection” (PD 8 00:21:24-22:10). After Vanessa’s “poise” has crumbled due to her affair with Dorian and she is taken over again by supernatural forces, she switches into the role of ‘seductive madwoman,’ teasing Sir Malcolm, who is watching over her as she recovers from an attack, on the ‘perverse’ erotic effect of her state:

To be beautiful is to be almost dead, isn’t it. The lassitude of the perfect woman. The languid ease [...] anaemic, pale as ivory and weak as a kitten. There’s a brisk trade for photographs of dead women, did you know that? (PD 7 00:02:27-53)

This connection of the seductive with the forbidden shows a clear parallel to 19th century penny fiction and the ‘deadly fruits,’ as Mayhew calls them, that it supposedly offers. Remarks such as these also foreground the extent to which constellations of seduction are marked as illicit and transgressive in Penny Dreadful. This shows itself most obviously in the figure of Dorian, who is presented as the incarnation of excess, decadence, and sexual transgression: arranging living pornographic tableaux in his home (see PD 4 00:02:00-30) or letting himself be photographed as he sleeps with a prostitute. This prostitute is Brona; when Dorian finds out that she is fatally ill, this only heightens his interest: “I’ve never fucked a dying creature,” is what he tells her, a scene quite obviously meant to scandalise the audience (see PD 2 00:18:00- 21:22). Dorian can fulfil this role particularly well as, in contrast to Oscar Wilde’s novel, no external influence is working on him (or at least, we have not met anyone like Lord Henry yet by the end of season 1): he is only seducer, never seduced. As these examples show – figuring the main quest of the series as something into which the characters are ‘tempted’; the mannered way in which the attraction between Vanessa and Dorian is staged; the concept of ‘temptation into the forbidden’ that is emphasised throughout the series – Penny Dreadful does not only depict, but purposefully foreground seduction (more specifically, fatal seduction). In doing so, it harks back to that tradition of popular serial fiction which is already named in the show’s title, and thus reveals a high degree of consciousness of its own genealogy and mechanisms as product of the entertainment industry (which ‘seduces’ its audience and ‘risks rejection’ on the crowded market of serial fiction). The focus on desire and (secret) transgressive impulses also licenses a psychoanalytic perspective which resonates with the period atmosphere of the 1890s and finds further expression in the back stories of the characters, which will be examined in more detail in chapter 4.

19 3 “Creatures of perpetual resurrection” – fiction, repetition, variation

I thought wouldn’t it be fun if I took the inspiration of these three classic books and started mixing, melding these stories into one sort of new narrative?22

Of course in our version, Caliban eats Prospero.23

Penny Dreadful engages in several forms of repetition: whether we want to call it revisiting, rereading, rewriting, or resurrecting, the series does in one way or the other re-present its literary sources as well as the period of the late 19th century. While some elements make it into the series as repetitions in a narrow sense, without being subjected to significant changes in comparison to earlier occurrences, others have clearly experienced greater variation, even though the link to earlier forms is still recognisable. ‘Elements’ here refers to characters, plot lines, and historical contexts alike: Penny Dreadful repeats and reworks figures from literary history just as well as, for instance, the origins of Freudian psychoanalysis in the treatment of hysteria. While generally, reading has come to mostly mean rereading anyway in the context of postmodern theory, as Christopher Canon points out (see 404), some texts are certainly more explicitly repetitive than others. Penny Dreadful is openly, even ostentatiously, recycling earlier texts and contexts and thus foregrounds repetition as its own characteristic mode of action. This ‘repetitive mode’ does not consist in simple copying, though, but rather in a form of “repetition with variation” – which is precisely what has been singled out as the typical modus operandi of serial narratives (see for example Kelleter’s term “variierende Wiederholung”; 11).24 Repetition also figures prominently in Freud’s account in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which libidinous urges to continue and prolong the course of life are in conflict with the pull towards closure and equilibrium that the death drive exerts, and in which repetition is the phenomenon that puts Freud on the track of the death drive in the first place. In much the same way as seduction, repetition is both an aspect of the content as well as trademark of the series Penny Dreadful as a whole. If the depiction of acts of seduction can be read as implicitly self-reflective, an allusion to the mechanisms of the series as a whole, so can the series’ depiction of fiction and/as entertainment: like the Grand Guignol, so Penny Dreadful, is a possible way of reading those parts of the series revolving around Caliban at the

22 John Logan, PD Production Blog #2 “Literary roots” 00:01:06-18. 23 Vincent Brand, director of the troupe at the Grand Guignol, PD 3 00:20:39-41. 24 Dominik Maeder points out “repetition with variation” (differente Wiederholung) as structural link between psychoanalytic treatment and serial narration, which serves to emphasise the relevance of psychoanalytic frameworks to understanding the structure of serial narrative (and vice versa; see Maeder 94-95). 20 infamous theatre of horror, which Penny Dreadful transports from Paris to 1890s London.25 And so Frankenstein’s creature is the figure that grants access to a specific aspect of the series’ structure which, just like the motif of seduction, strengthens the link to psychoanalysis and thus further supports attempts at mapping serial structure and psychoanalytic models onto each other.

3.1 Frankenstein’s creature on stage – London’s Grand Guignol in Penny Dreadful

Tellingly, Penny Dreadful names the theatre in which significant parts of the action take place “Grand Guignol,” the name of the infamous Parisian and later also London establishment. While “Montmartre’s theatre of horror and eroticism” (Hand and Wilson 7), the ‘original’ Parisian Grand Guignol, lasted longer and offered entertainment even a little more spectacular and gruesome than its more short-lived London offshoot, both theatres basically dealt in the same fare (which today would probably be referred to as ‘sex and crime’), so that the name “Grand Guignol” can well be employed as a signature term for ‘indecent but enjoyable’ entertainment. “Where disembowellings and throat-slittings were nightly events on the stage of the Parisian Grand Guignol, at the Little Theatre a poisoning or a strangulation was generally preferable,” Hand and Wilson claim (3), nicely characterising the sort of play audiences were confronted with at either of the two houses. Even the ‘tamer’ London version of the Grand Guignol was sufficient to both generate large success and scandalise the press and public – posters announcing plays, for example, were banned from the London Underground (see Hand and Wilson 3). Gripping, but a little offensive to good taste: this is a fitting tradition of entertainment for Penny Dreadful to set itself in. As Frankenstein’s creature is rescued from London’s gutter by theatrical director Vincent Brand, whose troupe is playing at the Grand Guignol, named “Caliban” and employed as a stage hand, the theatre business and this theatre in particular take up a central role in Penny Dreadful. The first scene we see that is set inside the theatre is a close shot on a screaming young woman who has her throat cut, an action that is interrupted by somebody complaining, “Oi, oi, oi! Who’s on the blood pump?” The camera zooms out and we find that we are in the middle of rehearsals for another one of the “little blood plays” that the theatre stages (PD 3 00:19:13-35). “Our fare is mayhem and malice with all the ingenious gore we can device” (PD 3 00:19:37-43), Brand explains to the newly employed Caliban (and to the audience of Penny Dreadful, presumably) a tradition of popular entertainment analogous

25 While the Grand Guignol was established in Paris in 1897 and lasted until 1962, its London offshoot was established only in 1920 to last until 1922 (see Hand and Wilson 16-7). 21 to that of printed penny literature.26 “Ingenious gore” is certainly also the fare of Penny Dreadful, or at least a significant part of it – the series is not shy in showing (aestheticised) blood and gore,27 and the production blogs accompanying the first season as published on DVD make clear the “ingenious” care with which the series created all of its sets, costumes, and props. Again, thus, we find here that the series situates itself in a specific tradition of fiction or of the entertainment business – not only implicitly, as most works of fiction do to at least a certain degree through the use of elements attributable to genres or traditions, but quite explicitly, as well, by thematising those traditions of fiction on content level. At the same time, the parts of Penny Dreadful which are situated at the theatre offer an opportunity for the series to explore the mechanisms of the making of fiction – both in its technicality and materiality and in its ‘metaphysical’ aspects. As Ethan and Brona visit one of the performances, and Caliban works his job as stage hand, the series can switch between showing scenes of the play in a mise-en-abyme-like28 structure, the reaction of the audience, and the backstage bustle necessary to stage the play with all its effects. For every effect on stage (thunder, explosions, a rising moon...) we see Caliban working the respective machinery behind the scenes (shaking an oversize tin sheet, for example, to create the sound of a storm). The acting on the Grand Guignol stage is wooden and mannered, the characters and puns ostentatiously stereotypical, so that the whole affair appears very much like a camp performance that the audience, and Brona in particular, is enjoying thoroughly. 29 We see Caliban clandestinely attaching the infamous “blood pump” to the main actress’s leg through a trap door so that she can be killed in an appropriately bloody way by a wolf-like beast as her older colleague leaves the stages, swearing as soon as he has stepped out of sight of the audience, “my knees can’t take this fucking play!” While the actress is still dying on stage, blood in ridiculous amounts flowing over her face, a backstage voice announces: “Ladies and

26 For more detail on the theatrical versions of penny fiction see Jacobs. 27 A good example would be the scenes in which Caliban is shown killing Victor’s second creature Proteus, threatening his creator, and then recapitulating the horrible circumstances of his own birth (PD 3 00:06:06-09:30). 28 While we find here a (visual) narrative embedded in another (visual) narrative where the two narratives are not the same but at least bear similarities to each other (in tone, tradition, and alignment, as is this paper’s central claim about Penny Dreadful and 19th century penny fiction), it is up to discussion whether this constitutes mise en abyme in a strict sense. The confusing and subversive effect of mixing diegetic levels, suggested by Genette and discussed in many recent attempts to grasp mise en abyme and metalepsis (see for example Pier; Cohn) is certainly not very strong in this case. For a differentiating discussion of metalepsis and mise en abyme see for example Cohn. For purposes here, suffice to say that including scenes from Grand Guignol performances in the television series achieves a doubling effect, not necessarily forcing, but inviting us to parallel the series and the plays, or to understand the latter as progenitor of the former. The creators of the series clearly support such a view – as John Logan puts it in one of the production blogs: “In 1891 in Victorian society, there was no television, there was no radio, there certainly wasn’t any cinema, so what did Victorians do? They read penny dreadfuls – or they went to the theatre” (PD Production blog # 6 “The Grand Guignol” 00:00:00-16). 29 Director Brand has earlier expressed his dislike for the ‘vogue of realism,’ mourning the demise of ‘proper’ theatricality: “Shakespeare […] That was my stock in trade when there was a value placed upon the ineffable and the exalted. […] Ah, but that was many seasons ago. Times have changed.” He adds, with a visible shudder: “Nowadays it’s all Ibsen” (PD 3 00:17:24-18:55). 22 gentlemen, the next act will begin in 15 minutes!” (see PD 4 00:28:45-36:12).30 The switches between onstage and offstage moments, perspectives ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the play (the bloody death of the young heroine of the play, for example, and the mechanical device that makes this stage event possible), foreground the artifice behind visual narratives; by combining several aspects of a visual narrative – production, performance, reception – Penny Dreadful hints at the conditions of existence of (visual, but by extension all) fiction as such. Caliban explicitly reflects on these processes: “Could there have been a more appropriate place for me?” he asks in a voiceover as his time at the theatre is recapitulated while he tells his creator about it. “Night after night, the players died gruesomely and then came back to life again for the next show. They were undying, like me – creatures of perpetual resurrection” (PD 3 00:21:35-52). To illustrate this claim, the same actress whose throat we already saw being cut is shown to be shot to excited squeals from the audience, only to moments later rise and receive her applause gracefully (PD 3 00:21:51-22:14). Caliban here singles out precisely the act of repetition as characteristic of fiction; a characteristic that is particularly relevant for serial fiction generally, and for Penny Dreadful specifically, as it is a series that follows the principle of “repetition with variation” on both the levels of structure and content.

3.2 Textual reiteration: intertextuality, adaptation, narrative narcissism

What the Grand Guignol does with its actors, or the plays staged do with their characters, Penny Dreadful – and many other fictions – does with its literary sources and the figures they contain: They “die gruesomely” only to come “back to life again” with the remaking that fictions like Penny Dreadful undertake of them; they and their stories are “resurrected” for the duration of the series – they are repeated and at the same time transformed. Victor Frankenstein, his creature, and Dorian Gray stand out most obviously as adapted figures; Dracula is clearly also a source, but the adaptation is less straightforward and the figures are less prominent.31 The series includes Frankenstein, the creature/Caliban, and Dorian as iconic literary figures; however, it both re-presents parts of the ‘original’ plots that those figures were included in, as well as involving them into new story lines. The Victor Frankenstein of the series, for example, flees from his creature after it has come to life and is pressed later on to create a female companion by the creature threatening to turn his happiest moment into

30 Edward Jacobs describes anticlimactic moments of precisely this kind – he discusses, for example, food vendors appearing on stage during death scenes – as frequent occurrences in penny theatre, and regards them as an aspect of the satirical potential of those plays (see Jacobs 333). 31 Van Helsing appears as an expert on vampires and advisor to Victor Frankenstein; Mina Harker is a young woman in the grasp of a vampire; but there is no clearly identifiable Count Dracula, and compared to Frankenstein and Dorian Gray, considerably fewer aspects of the content of the novel are taken over. 23 misery, just as in Shelley’s novel,32 but he also, unlike his literary predecessor, creates a second creature much more successfully than the first, who goes on to kill his predecessor. Just as unprecedented with regard to the original novel is the plot revolving around Caliban and the theatre (even though the general spirit of Frankenstein’s creature being unable to merge into society and suffering from that fact is retained). Similarly, many aspects of Dorian’s figure are clearly recognisable as elements from Wilde’s text – most prominently, Dorian’s interest in “extraordinary thing[s],” as the series calls it (PD 4 00:09:09), and his reflections on their aesthetics (the series recreates such aspects as Dorian’s interest in perfumes, for example; see PD 4 00:48:10-35; Wilde 107). On the other hand, there is (at least so far) no Lord Henry nor a Basil Hallward, and Dorian’s affair with Vanessa is a new addition, bearing little resemblance to, for example, Dorian’s involvement with Sibyl Vane in Wilde’s novel. Many theoretical frameworks are concerned with transitions from one text into the other. Julia Kristeva’s intertextuality comes to mind; she claims that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (66). Emphasising paradigmatic connections – “each word (text) is an intersection of word [sic] (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read” (66) – Kristeva’s analysis suggests that any given literary text does not only present itself, but simultaneously grants access to countless other texts. This holds true for all of literature – fictions like Penny Dreadful could thus be said to stand out not due to a difference in kind, but ‘only’ due to a difference in degree from other texts which are less obviously, less explicitly repetitive. “Absorption and transformation” is certainly a very plausible description of the way in which Penny Dreadful operates on its source materials. Neither would it be wrong to claim that the series adapts Shelley’s and Wilde’s texts – in particular if one takes into account that from the early 1980s onwards, more and more critics insisted that many of the texts regarded as literary classics were “generally circulated cultural memor[ies]” (Ellis qtd in Aragay 20)33 rather than stable, untouchable reference points. “The literary source” thus needed “no longer be conceived as a work/original holding within itself a timeless essence which the adaptation/copy must faithfully reproduce” but could be treated “as a text to be endlessly (re)read and appropriated in different contexts” (Aragay 22). Considering how Penny Dreadful is received as “a bookish thriller” (Lawson) and considering the emphasis that is put on the literary sources in the marketing of the show, it appears that Penny Dreadful depends alike on both the idea of “sacrosanct” (Aragay 21) original works, and the license to freely vary and copy. The concept

32 So far, there has been no female character identifiable as Elizabeth Lavenza, but considering Van Helsing’s fatherly advice to Victor that one day, he will finally fall in love ‘properly’ (see PD 6 00:17:00-43), we might just encounter a love interest of Frankenstein’s in season 2. 33 See Mireia Aragay’s whole essay for a detailed overview over critical approaches to adaptation from the mid- 20th century to the early 21st. 24 of ‘literary classics’ is not abandoned – rather the opposite – but those sources are transformed freely and without excuse: “Some of literature’s most terrifying characters, including Dr. Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, and iconic figures from the novel Dracula are lurking in the darkest corners of Victorian London,” Showtime’s website for the series announces to advertise the story. “Penny Dreadful is a frightening psychological thriller that weaves together these classic horror origin stories into a new adult drama” (Showtime). Such a statement clearly assumes Frankenstein, Dorian Gray and Dracula as “generally circulated cultural memories” which everybody recognises, while at the same time clearly regarding a rereading and appropriation to different contexts as an entirely legitimate operation. We can also refer to the concept of pastiche to describe Penny Dreadful’s approach to its source materials: while this term generally implies a strong emphasis on form, less on content – “a work of art that imitates the style, gestures, or forms of an older work” – pastiche “involves mixing available elements into a new” product (Bowen 1005), which is certainly what Penny Dreadful does. Just as the products of pastiche, Penny Dreadful does not exhibit any particular satiric, humorous, or ironic impulses towards its materials, as we would expect of parody (see Bowen 1005). It clearly does not aim to “unmask dead conventions” (Hutcheon 18) but rather confirms those conventions (of “classic horror origin stories,” as the website puts it) as very much alive, paying tribute to rather than unmasking them. What does connect Penny Dreadful’s tribute to the literary canon to parody, however, is its productiveness: in particular if we encounter parodic impulses in “quotational literature” (“litérature citationelle”) – and quotational Penny Dreadful certainly is, if not parodic – this “invites [...] a recognition of literary codes,” as Linda Hutcheon argues (24-5). “Quotations from one text, when inserted into the context of another, are the same and yet new and different [...] Parody is, therefore, an exploration of difference and similarity,” Hutcheon claims. “But it is wrong to see the end of this process as mockery, ridicule, or mere destruction” (25); rather, “forms and conventions become energizing and freedom-inducing in the light of parody” (50). While Penny Dreadful thus has no parodic relation to its sources in the sense that in confirms their conventions rather than challenging them, it does share with parody a relation of both similarity and difference to the materials it is working on. This relation is made possible in the first place through an act of repetition or doubling. It is Hutcheon’s more general concept of narrative narcissism which captures quite adequately what Penny Dreadful does when it repeats its source materials. This chapter, as well as the previous one, argues for a clearly discernible degree of self- consciousness in Penny Dreadful, apparent in the way in which the series makes explicit processes of seduction and of repetition. Self-consciousness has not only been attested to popular serial fiction, but to narrative in general, in particular to the novel, by Linda Hutcheon. What Hutcheon refers to as “narcissistic narrative” is “process made visible” (6) –

25 that is, the process of the making of narrative fiction becoming discernible in one way or the other in the product of narration, as it would for example whenever a narrator addresses a reader directly to comment on the progress of the narrative.34 Hutcheon is mostly concerned with the novel as the primary instance of narrative narcissism, but as her study progresses, she indicates that neither can we encounter self-consciousness only in the novel (even though the novel stays the main subject of her investigation), nor is it limited to a specific period. She points out the universality of the phenomenon: “Art has always been ‘illusion,’ and as one might surmise, it has often, if not always, been self-consciously aware of that ontological status. This formal narcissism is a broad cultural phenomenon, not limited by art form or even by period” (17). “Perhaps,” she speculates

in actual fact, it is narrative as a whole, and not just literary narrative, that has progressed to a process-oriented mode. [...] Perhaps it is even reductive to limit this formal narcissism to narrative genres alone, for the visual arts and music both have also shown signs of self-reflectiveness. (7-8)

The “more modern textual self-preoccupation” to be found in 20th century literature differs only in degree, in “explicitness” and “intensity” from earlier forms of self-consciousness, Hutcheon suggests (see 18), and it is “narrative in general that is narcissistic” (19). “Can one really make the distinction between older, more comfortable ‘textes de plaisir’ and modern difficult ‘textes de jouissance,’ as Roland Barthes suggests” Hutcheon asks.35 “Perhaps each novel has always had within itself the seeds of a ‘narcissistic’ reading, of an interpretation which would make it an allegorical or metaphoric exploration of the process of articulating a literary world” (23). Certainly, in including the Grand Guignol, an exploration of the process of articulating such a world takes place in Penny Dreadful – if not a literary in the narrow sense of the word, but generally, a fictional (as pointed out above, there is no need to limit the concept of narrative narcissism to the written word). Director Brand tells us about the theatre as business – about the influence of public taste, about financial aspects, about programme choices when he lets Caliban go in order to be able to keep the young actress who Caliban, overstepping his boundaries in an unfortunate attempt to win her affection, has assaulted: “Given half a chance I’d keep you and sack her, but the public demands the ingénue. I am a slave to the public” (PD 8 00:18:24-30). Caliban’s job tells us about the theatre as ‘factory’ in which the effect of

34 Hutcheon discusses various concrete examples of narrative narcissism – see chapter two of her Narcissistic Narrative, “Modes and Forms of Narrative Narcissism: Introduction of a Typology.” 35 The consequences of this idea will be taken up again, albeit shortly and speculatively, in the conclusion to this paper with specific regard to current developments in the distribution of serial narratives. 26 fiction is brought about, literally manufactured with the help of machinery and manpower.36 Caliban’s musings on immortality as well as the theatre audience’s reaction, in particular Brona’s,37 shows us precisely this effect brought about by the combined effort of directors, actors, and stage hands. It is here and elsewhere in Penny Dreadful not so much specifically the “process of narration” that “invade[s] the fiction’s content” (Hutcheon 11), but rather the general performance of fiction (as part of which we might count the act of written storytelling as well as a stage or other visual performance of a story) which is foregrounded – in a double sense: the effect it performs on its audience (temptation, seduction as discussed in chapter 2), and the performance of agents which effects the ‘existence’ of the fiction (theatrical stagings). The scenes at the theatre show what is necessary for and what is possible by virtue of fiction: the technical-material prerequisites and the performative acts that convey the fiction to the audience, resulting in ‘immortal’ “beings of fiction” (to borrow a term from Bruno Latour),38 which can in turn be revived, repeated by and for the audience at any time – the latter fact conveniently illustrated by Penny Dreadful’s own revival of literary protagonists. The “making of fictive worlds” (Hutcheon 30) is thus certainly thematised by the series. Following Hutcheon’s analysis, Penny Dreadful would not even have to include these reflections to qualify as narcissistic text, as Hutcheon includes the category of “covert narcissistic texts” into her typology. Simply by virtue of including the supernatural as fact does a text hint at its own status as fiction:

Covert narcissistic texts share with all fantasy literature the ability to force the reader (not overtly ask him) to create a fictive imaginative world separate from the empirical one in which he lives. Tolkien’s Middle Earth ... is as real to the reader as his own world, but it is different, other, a creation of his imagination. Whereas in overt narcissism the reader is explicitly told that what he is reading is imaginary, that the referents of the text’s language are fictive, in fantasy (and the covert forms of narcissism for which it acts as model) the fictiveness of the referents is axiomatic. (32)

Are we dealing here, then, with ‘normal’ intertextuality, ‘normal’ adaptation, or ‘normal’

36 The factory-analogy is also suggested by Brand mistaking Caliban for an industrial worker who has been maimed in a factory accident, who he then transfers from one place of physical labour to another, the theatre (“That must have been an accident operatic in scope, you poor lamb,” Brand says when he first meets Caliban. “Industrial, was it? One of those dreadful clanking machines with gears and cogs”; PD 3 00:16:30-48. Ironically, Brand is not even wrong in assuming Caliban’s appearance to be the result of an accident of technological manipulation, even though he is clearly not thinking of Victor Frankenstein’s workshop). 37 Brona visits the theatre for the first time. During the play that is staged during episode 4 of Penny Dreadful, we frequently see her in close shot, leaning forward in her chair, biting her thumb, or clinging to her neighbour (PD 4 00:27:38-28:43 and 00:33:45-35:45). 38 Compare his An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, in particular chapter 9 on “Situating the Beings of Fiction.” 27 narrative narcissicm? While this just might have to remain to some degree a question of critical preferences, it appears evident that in the relation between Penny Dreadful and its literary sources, we are dealing with some kind of repetition: we re-encounter elements that we have encountered before, we re-cognise39 those elements as parts of earlier fictions, while at the same time acknowledging that they have been subjected to some transformation. Because of this recognisability under transformation, we might also say that those elements are continued rather than ‘simply’ repeated.

3.3 Fiction as resurrection: repetition and renewal

Continuation rather than repetition, recognisability under transformation – these can be applied not only to the reworking of literary figures in Penny Dreadful, but also to the proceeding of serial narratives as such. Frank Kelleter emphasises as a definitive characteristic of serial stories that “the story at hand homes in on its simultaneous repetition and renewal in a story not yet available” (In jedem Fall ... richtet sich ein vorliegender Erzähltext auf seine simultane Wiederholung und Erneuerung in einem noch nicht vorliegenden Erzähltext aus; Kelleter 26): serial narratives strive to present their audience with new and exciting elements in each instalment, a vital task for commercially oriented fiction, yet they would not be serial narratives if they did not also connect back to earlier instalments in partial repetition – of cast and characters, of central conflicts, in recapitulations of previous events, or simply in the fact that we assume for serial stories the meaningfulness of details for later resolutions to a degree in which we otherwise do this maybe only for detective fiction.40 The new and exciting elements are frequently generated out of earlier elements, so that many of the decisive moments to propel the narrative forward will be repetitive and innovative at the same time. This “paradoxical force of innovation” (paradoxe Innovationskraft; Kelleter 26) is not necessarily paradoxical through and through, if approached from a certain theoretical vantage point. Sielke has pointed out that if we grasp the phenomenon of seriality in the light of Gilles Deleuze’s work on difference and repetition, then we are provided with a way of understanding relations between elements which need not be captured either as exclusively

39 Compare also Canon’s use of the term as an expression for “the recovery of a knowledge already possessed” in connection with acts of rereading texts (402-3). 40 A good example for the meaningfulness of details for later events in Penny Dreadful would be the Jack the Ripper theme that we encounter early in the series – in crime scenes that the characters pass by, newspaper headlines, and the very first scenes of the series, in which a woman is snatched away through an open window during a nightly visit to the privy (see for example PD 1 00:00:00-02:56, 00:22:35-23:13, 00:33:00-47; 2 00:01:30- 45). This reference looms ominously throughout the series, but whose relevance we can only begin to guess at the very end of season one, when Ethan turns out to be a werewolf who might just have committed those crimes without even knowing. Peter Brooks points out our habit of reading for significance with regard to the revelations of the ending: “we read only [...] those markers that, as in the detective story, appear to be clues to the underlying intentionality of event” (94). 28 expressions of identity or exclusively expressions of difference.41 Penny Dreadful is actually doubly relevant as an example in this regard: it stands to its source materials in precisely such a relation of similarity-and-difference (as Hutcheon attributes to ‘citational’ texts), and it expresses this relation in serial form, which itself is characterised by switching between similarity (or the more narrow concept, identity) and difference, thus again, as in the case of seduction, exposing its form through its content. Sielke argues for the relevance of Deleuze’s account because it manages to avoid the dichotomy of identity and difference, a dichotomy that is simply inadequate to grasp something that is characterised by its processuality and not by any state that is its outcome (see 389): serial narratives eventually end, finally arriving at a final state; they are however certainly not defined by this state, but only by this state in relation to the development through which it was reached in the first place. Gilles Deleuze’s work on Difference and Repetition advances an understanding in which repetition does not by definition mean ‘exact reproduction’ or ‘copy.’ Rather, repetition is distinguished from generality and implies a more ‘organic’ form of reiteration. While generality implies exchangeability, repetition in fact means non-exchangeability. This repetition is exemplified in the “apparent paradox of festivals,” which “repeats an ‘unrepeatable’”: the festival does not copy, it cannot be exchanged for the original event that it celebrates; rather, the original event “celebrates and repeats in advance” all its following festive returns (an analogous logic applies to artworks: it is “Monet’s first water lily which repeats all the others” – and, we might add, Wilde’s Dorian who repeats all future Dorians) (see Deleuze 1–2). In fact, sameness and variation are two sides of the same coin and inevitably go together: “the question ‘What difference is there?’ may always be transformed into: ‘What resemblance is there?’” (ibid. 12). In Deleuze’s analysis, repetition is “a power peculiar to the existent,” (13) to singularities not governable by the law (as the law can only deal with generalities and exchangeabilites),42 not a metanarrative category or model nor an analysis of narrative strategies. However, it is enlightening in the context of serial narrative as it presents us with an account of repetition that does not oppose repetition to variation and refuses to identify it with equality and exchangeability. We can actually detect a similar kind of anticipation of future repetitions in serial narratives as Deleuze posits for festivals and works of art – when Kelleter claims that serial stories “home[] in on [their] simultaneous repetition and renewal in a text not yet available,” this expresses precisely the kind of forward-looking anticipation of

41 “Besondere Bedeutung für die Theoretisierung von Serialität haben meiner Meinung nach die Überlegungen von Deleuze, der Serialität als eine Kategorie von ‘Wiederholung und Differenz’ gefasst hat. Deleuze versteht Wiederholung als eine Manifestation von Prozessen und Phänomenen, die sich nicht generalisieren oder subsumieren lassen, sondern durch ihre Insistenz das Moment einer irreduziblen Eigenheit behaupten. Damit wird Serialität zu einem Konzept, das Beziehungen beschreibbar macht, die nicht entweder auf Identität oder auf Differenz beruhen” (Sielke 389; emphasis in original). 42 “Repetition […] is by nature transgression or exception, always revealing a singularity opposed to the particulars subsumed under laws, a universal opposed to the generalities which give rise to laws” (5). 29 repetition, where the product of repetition is intimately connected to the ‘original’ yet nevertheless not exchangeable for it, that we find described by Deleuze.43 Penny Dreadful marks repetition – in the dynamic or organic rather than static sense described above – as the characteristic modus operandi of fiction. Watching Caliban do his work at the Grand Guignol exposes the workings of fiction generally. Caliban, when he reflects on “creatures of perpetual resurrection,” is not talking about a specific play, but rather reflecting on ‘what theatre does’ in general – and, by extension, all fiction: while Caliban’s remark might or might not imply a special status for physically tangible theatre performances in contrast to the text on a novel page, it holds true for any fiction that the “dying” of a character never precludes their “resurrection” for another viewer, another reader, or a second viewing, a second reading (or else, how could we reencounter Dorian Gray in the series?). Penny Dreadful is thus doubly repetitive: as serial narrative, which is always repetitive in a particular sense (it performs reiteration without copying, repetition which does not exclude difference); and as self-conscious, adaptive fiction (actively integrating its own genealogy and generic roots). In the end, repetition takes us (as it does both Deleuze and Hutcheon44) back to Freud – all the more so if seriality is, as Sielke argues, a principle of evolution and thus a matter of productive recursion rather than linear progress (see Sielke 394 – the series integrates old elements into new contexts rather than superseding old elements with new ones). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud analyses human drives precisely in terms of evolutionary recursion. Is there a particular affective dimension to repetition,45 and can it help to elucidate the appeal of serial fiction? Before approaching this question in chapter 5, a closer look at the relevance of psychoanalysis to the content of Penny Dreadful in chapter 4 will give us further reason to also make psychoanalysis the main point of reference in terms of structure.

43 This is only a snippet of Deleuze’s work on difference and repetition and hardly does its scope justice. The important point is, however, that Deleuze offers an analysis of repetition which provides more leeway, or is more complex, than the common-sense idea of repetition as the production of equivalent copies – an analysis in which, as Joe Hughes puts it, repetition is “a synthetic process” rather than “an equivalence or resemblance of two instances separated in time” (34). ‘Repetition as synthetic process’ is, read literally, quite a fitting description for the progress and growth through reiteration and variation which characterises serial narrative. 44 The term by which Hutcheon grasps self-conscious narrative is a psychoanalytical term (“narcissistic”) (see Hutcheon 1-2). One of the texts that Deleuze refers to is in fact Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He emphasises the centrality of repetition to Freud’s thought: “the death instinct is discovered, not in connection with the destructive tendencies, not in connection with aggressivity, but as a result of a direct consideration of repetition phenomena” (16). 45 Deleuze seems to suggest just that when he says that “[t]he head is the organ of exchange, but the heart is the amorous organ of repetition” (2). 30 4 “In trouble with Dad” – Transgressive fathers, transgressive daughters in Penny Dreadful

Who can tell about such things! Such hidden things. Such secrets we all have, don’t we, Doctor.46

Penny Dreadful is neither the first nor the only television series which can be attested self- consciousness or the use of a psychoanalytic frame of reference.47 One aspect that stands out about Penny Dreadful is the way in which the 1890s setting and the theme of hysteria recreate the historical roots of Freudian psychoanalysis. At the same time, the character constellations presented invite the application of concepts of a psychoanalytic background. While the history of hysteria48 in connection to the emergence of psychoanalysis is referred to quite concretely in its major aspects by the series, the incorporation of other psychoanalytical concepts happens more freely – the basis for association, however, is clearly given. How else are we to read Vanessa’s and Sir Malcolm’s back story but in terms of sexual trauma and incestuous energies? Involved more or less directly in all of the plot lines which make cases out of the respective characters is Sir Malcolm. Many of the psychoanalytic understandings that suggest themselves hinge on this overly present paternal figure. The central role of a (literal or symbolic) father is thus one of the links between the ‘worlds’ of Penny Dreadful and of psychoanalysis. Another notion, related to this figure, is that of a relation of desire between child and parent, a desire coded as illicit by the threat of castration and incest taboo during development; and also that of a ‘shocking’ discovery, of a sexual nature, in growing up, as well as the idea of a rivalry between father and son. The most direct reference is certainly to hysteria, the condition – if it can be called such – from which Vanessa initially appears to suffer and which served as one of the launch pads for psychoanalysis in the collaborative work of Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer. The links offered between psychoanalysis and the story presented by the series are convenient enough to suspect that character constellations are modelled on psychoanalytic concepts (be they accurate or approximations), rather than merely being interpretable in terms of them (even though the latter then follows trivially from the former). That Penny Dreadful

46 Vanessa to Victor Frankenstein (PD 7 00:10:33-38). 47 Think, with regard to the former, for example of the soap opera “Invitation to Love” that we see running on the television screens in people’s homes in Twin Peaks; or, with regard to the latter, of HBO’s series In Treatment, in which psychotherapy provides the content of the series – as only two of many possible examples. 48 The ‘history of hysteria’ is here supposed to refer to the history of hysteria as it has been written by critical and popular culture. It needs to be emphasised that the issue is not whether Penny Dreadful is historically accurate in its depiction of, for example, forms of psychiatric treatment, but rather that it capitalises on the thematic and visual repertoire that the preoccupation with hysteria provides – both primary: the preoccupation of doctors with hysteric patients, and secondary: the preoccupation of critics with this preoccupation. 31 describes itself as “psychological thriller” (Showtime’s Penny Dreadful website) or – even more to the point – that this label is repeated by reviewers as “psycho-sexual horror series” (Lidz) confirms the impression that the series uses psychoanalysis as a reservoir of associations.49 This and the 1890s historical setting make psychoanalysis, Freudian psychoanalysis in particular, a main frame of reference for the series. ‘1891’ appears as a suitable point in time to (more or less) plausibly throw together ingredients such as the beginnings of psychoanalysis, the ‘vogue’ of hysteria, the Grand Guignol, the Jack the Ripper murders, opium dens, colonialist exploration, galvanism, or body snatching, as well as the series’ literary sources. The goal is clearly not to accurately represent 1891, but to draw on potential general associations with the (late) Victorian age, or to speculate on and convey an idea of, in Logan’s words, “what was in the water in Victorian London.”50 Period film (and, it is unproblematic to add in this case, television) is always a matter of associative references, as Belén Vidal emphasises, as “a specific aesthetic takes shape through film’s absorption (or ‘cannibalisation’) of literary, painterly and photographic references, which have their own genealogy of representations in film history” (10). This does not only go for visual surface details, which Vidal examines, but also for assumptions about the ‘reality’ of a certain period (for which, arguably, surface details are carriers) – they, too, have circulated and developed their own tradition of signification which can be exploited.51 Considering the connections of Penny Dreadful to issues of psychoanalysis as well as the series’ self-marketing as being concerned with the unsettling ‘secrets of one’s inner life’ (as the DVD slogan says, “There is some thing within us all”), Penny Dreadful appears to first and foremost want to recreate the 1890s as the ‘era of the unconscious’: a period of both immense repression as well as outbursts of desire, of discovering a frightening inner life within oneself and others. The idea that most pleasures are guilty pleasures not only connects Penny Dreadful to its namesake, penny fiction, as discussed in chapter 2, it also incorporates the Freudian

49 It does not matter so much whether we find accurate depictions of psychoanalytic theory in the series. The point in question is rather that Penny Dreadful relies on the repercussions and popularisations of psychoanalysis pervading Western culture. The relation between Vanessa and Sir Malcolm, for example, certainly resonates with the idea of incestuous energies as source of conflict in parent-child-relations, without it being necessary for the audience to have precise knowledge about the oedipal complex as described by Freud. Stephen Frosh describes the diffusion of psychoanalysis in (Western) culture as follows: “the extent to which western culture is permeated by psychological assumptions, many with their roots in psychoanalysis, is very striking. The idea that childhood determines or at least strongly influences adulthood [...] The central psychoanalytic notion that we have unconscious motivations that drive our behaviour and are often not understood by us [...] When people ask of themselves why they did something [...] they are drawing on what can be called a psychoanalytic ‘discourse’ to make sense of their social environment. This suggests that culture is ‘saturated’ by psychoanalytic assumptions in ways that are not obvious because they are so taken-for-granted” (Frosh 5). 50 Within roughly a ten years’ span, Logan claims, so many of the “essential texts of the horror genre” were written (among which he counts Dracula, Dorian Gray, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The War of the Worlds) that he wondered, “what was in the water in Victorian London to make this happen?” (PD Production blog #2 “Literary Roots” 00:00:00-20). 51 Straightforward examples for such visual details would be props and costumes; but Vidal’s study actually captures far more aspects of mise-en-scène, as becomes clear in the book’s introductory chapter. 32 suggestion that “we come to be who we are as adults by way of a massive and intricate repression of those very early, very intense expressions of libidinal (sexual) desire” (Flitterman-Lewis 204). In the following, the connections mentioned above will be explored in further detail. They are the main analogies between psychoanalysis and Penny Dreadful in terms of content; as the next chapter (5) will then argue, to those have to be added fundamental analogies in terms of structure.

4.1 “The season of Peter’s inadequate beard” – The sins of the father...

We find in Penny Dreadful a father figure of, metaphorically speaking, overwhelming proportions. Malcolm Murray forms the decisive presence – and absence – not only in his wife’s and his children’s (Mina’s and Peter’s) life, but also in Vanessa’s, best friend and neighbour to Mina and Peter, as well as Vanessa’s mother’s.52 Centrality of ‘the paternal’ is something readily associated with Freudian teachings. However one wants to evaluate this status – whether one wants to ‘battle’ or ‘save’ psychoanalysis, and depending on one’s own interpretation of psychoanalysis’s view on ‘the maternal,’ for instance – the place of the father is certainly a remarkable and particular one in psychoanalysis.53 It is the site of rules, to which, however, desirous as well as aggressive tendencies also are attached. Freud sums up nicely his own ‘discovery’ of children’s oedipal struggles in Totem and Taboo, and the general principles which they are assumed to adhere to:

I reported the “Analysis of the Phobia of a five-year-old Boy” [the case of Little Hans] [...] After assurances had relieved the boy of his fear of his father, it proved that he was fighting against wishes whose content was the absence (departure or death) of the father. He indicated only too plainly that he felt the father to be his rival for the favour of the mother, upon whom his budding sexual wishes were by dark premonitions directed. He therefore had the typical attitude of the male child

52 We nicely find this role pictured for example in those scenes which show a dinner party between the Murray and the Ives family in celebration of Sir Malcolm’s return from one of his expeditions. Malcolm is clearly the centre of attention and admiration of every member of the two families as they are enthralled by his stories (see PD 5 00:07:35-08:47). 53 The relation of feminism and psychoanalysis is complex and notorious; Juliet Mitchell’s classic “Psychoanalysis and Feminism” is certainly a valuable resource which examines Freud’s (and others’) work in careful detail. She emphasises the “patriarchal prejudice within psychoanalytic theory, making patriarchy both timeless and necessary and keeping mothers and matriarchies as pre-Symbolic, pre-history.” Even later schools of psychoanalysis do not significantly diverge from this: They “consider the mother as important, but not within the framework of cultural laws. We have a great deal of rich work on mothering, but no place for the mother within the laws of human order” (xxxv-xxxvi). It should be mentioned, for the sake of completeness, that these points of critique are not meant as fatal blows to psychoanalysis. In fact, psychoanalysis is employed as a “source of understanding” for patriarchal circumstances, not as the instance prescribing them (see xxvi and all of Mitchell’s introduction to her book.) 33 to its parents which we call the ‘Oedipus complex’ […] But whoever looks attentively through the history of little John will also find there abundant proof that the father was admired as the possessor of large genitals and was feared as threatening the child’s own genitals. In the Oedipus as well as in the castration complex the father plays the same role of feared opponent to the infantile sexual interests. Castration and its substitute through blinding is the punishment he threatens. (“Totem and Taboo” 906-7)

Aggression and rivalry (wishing the father dead as he retains the mother’s favour for himself), incestuous desire (for one of the parents, here the mother),54 fear (of being castrated due to one’s intentions) and hence the establishment of a prohibition or law all turn up in this description; in addition, we find here and elsewhere mention of admiration and thus a certain ambivalence.55 These elements, some directly, some with a twist, all turn up in the relations that develop between Sir Malcolm and the other characters: aggression between Ethan, Victor, and Malcolm; incestuous impulses between Malcolm and Vanessa; threat of castration and ambivalent admiration between Malcolm and Peter. The central assumption from which all these conflicts derive is the special status of the father figure in psychoanalysis from which the threat of castration originates. There is, in Freud’s accounts of the Oedipus complex, “the crucial notion that castration bears the transmission of culture” (Mitchell 79) as it is the instance that can effect rules; what is more, the threat of castration is assumed to at some point be internalised and transformed so that each human being develops within themselves a prohibitive or at least judging instance – that of conscience. For as one “overcomes the libidinous demands by the processes of identification and sublimation,” – the solution to the Oedipal conflict – there is “the formation of the superego” which is “initially, largely the internalized father and the culture he represents” (Mitchell 80). “Fear of castration” thus “leads one to identify with the castrating agent and [...] incorporate him into one’s own personality as an internal authority-figure, a judging superego whose severe criticisms one is then endlessly anxious about” (ibid. 81). “As the ego once feared castration from the father, it now again feels an equivalent threat from the superego that was formed out of an identification with him” (ibid.) – Mitchell’s words make clear the cluster of ideas joining

54 This straightforward account becomes more complex and arguably more questionable if one abandons the focus on male subjects and heterosexuality. This is a decidedly important subject which this paper can unfortunately not do justice to. Again, Juliet Mitchell’s discussion in Psychoanalysis and Feminism is a useful resource in this regard (see in particular part I). The purpose here is not to evaluate psychoanalytical teachings but rather to better single out psychoanalytic concepts which we encounter in popularised form in Penny Dreadful. 55 One of Freud’s other famous cases, the ‘Wolfman,’ also mentions admiration alongside fear (the Wolfman’s father “had been a much-admired example to him, and […] when asked what he wanted to be he used to answer: ‘A gentleman like my father.’”; “History of an Infatile Neurosis” 215; there is however also “the fear of his father, which was to dominate his life” from a certain point in pre-school age onwards, “History of an Infantile Neurosis” 222). 34 prohibition, rules, and laws, or in any case, judgement, with a paternal instance. To this cluster, Jacques Lacan adds a linguistic component. The “primordial Law” – regulating marriage options, prohibiting incest – is “identical to a language order,” for without systems of naming, regulations of which partners are permissible are in fact not possible.56 It is therefore “in the name of the father that we must recognize the basis of the symbolic function” (emphasis in original).57 This father whose name is so decisive is not necessarily the actual father: there is the father’s person, and there is “the figure of the law”; the two are “identified,” but not necessarily identical. “This conception allows us to clearly distinguish […] the unconscious effects of this function from the narcissistic relations, or even real relations, that the subject has with the image and actions of the person who embodies this function” (“Function and Field” 230). Here as in Freud, the line of thought proceeds from fear of punishment for incest to symbolic existence – hinging, for Lacan, on the name of the father specifically as the basis of this social-cultural-moral life, this existence in interaction with others for which the “network” (“Function and Field” 231) of the symbolic provides regulations. Desire is assumed to be, in its ‘original’ occurrence in early childhood, incestuous in nature. Sexual formation for Freud really takes place in two shifts, one around three to five years of age, one in puberty; the latter of which partly repeats what happens in the former (see “Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex” 591). In the earlier phase, sexual impulse is directed towards the parents:

The intercourse between the child and its foster-parents is for the former an inexhaustible source of sexual excitation and gratification of erogenous zones, especially since the parents—or as a rule the mother—supplies the child with feelings which originate from her own sexual life; she pats him, kisses him, and rocks him [...] her tenderness awakens the sexual impulse of her child and prepares its future intensity. (“Three Contributions” 615)

56 “The primordial Law is therefore the Law which, in regulating marriage ties, superimposes the reign of culture over the reign of nature, the latter being subject to the law of mating. The prohibition of incest is merely the subjective pivot of that Law,” Lacan explains. Without “names for kinship relations, no power can institute the order of preferences and taboos that knot and braid the thread of lineage through the generations” (“Function and Field” 229-30). 57 It is in and by what Lacan calls the Symbolic that an individual’s life is determined – by naming and by giving laws that inform all ideas of proper conduct: “Symbols in fact envelop the life of man with a network so total that they join together those who are going to engender him ‘by bone and flesh’ before he comes into the world; so total that they bring to his birth … the shape of his destiny; so total that they provide the words that will make him faithful or renegade, the law of the acts that will follow him right to the very place where he is not yet and beyond his very death; and so total that through them his end finds its meaning in the last judgment, where the Word absolves his being or condemns it” (“Function and Field” 231). 35 Following on the latency period, puberty then takes up these impulses and transforms them:

It would, of course, be most natural for the child to select as the sexual object that person whom it has loved since childhood with, so to speak, a dampened libido. But owing to the delay of sexual maturity, time has been gained for the erection beside the sexual inhibitions of the incest barrier, that moral prescription which explicitly excludes from object selection the beloved person of infancy, or blood relations. […] In the phantasies of all persons, the infantile tendencies [...] reappear, and among them [...] the sexual feeling of the child for the parents. Usually, this has already been differentiated by sexual attraction, namely, the attraction of the son for the mother, and of the daughter for the father. (“Three Contributions” 616-7)

Puberty works towards “overcoming and rejection of these distinctly incestuous phantasies,” but the “significance of incestuous object-selection” for sexual development – or Freud’s account of it – is “evident” (“Three Contributions” 617-8). Significantly, the narrative of Penny Dreadful suggests that the events that set the ball rolling, as it were, take place precisely during puberty (Vanessa’s, Mina’s, and Peter’s early adolescence, that is). Early adolescence is the farthest back in time that the series goes, thus we are led to assume these occurrences as the earliest of real relevance and to establish a link of causality from the events in early puberty to those in young adulthood (both included in episode 5) to the narrative’s present. In Freudian spirit, the past occurrences pictured in episode 5 are all connected to sexuality and include persistent incestuous desires – so persistent, in fact, that they are still alluded to in the relation between grown-up Vanessa and Sir Malcolm. The processes described – incestuous desire and the conflict into which it enters with a paternal instance – is ascribed greater significance by Freud than ‘just’ the development of modern individuals. Rather, this conflict amounts to, as Lacan calls it, “the inaugural drama of humanity” (“Situation of Psychoanalysis” 393) in Freud’s account of the prehistoric prototype of all Oedipal struggles in Totem and Taboo. In the “primal horde” of “Darwinian conception,” Freud claims, there is “only a violent, jealous father who keeps all the females for himself and drives away the growing sons.”

One day […] the expelled brothers joined forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father horde […] [a] memorable, criminal act with which so many things began, social organization, moral restrictions and religion [...] we need only assume that the group of brothers banded together were dominated by

36 the same contradictory feelings towards the father which we can demonstrate as the content of ambivalence of the father complex in all our children and in neurotics. They hated the father who stood so powerfully in the way of their sexual demands and their desire for power, but they also loved and admired him. After they had satisfied their hate by his removal and had carried out their wish for identification with him, the suppressed tender impulses had to assert themselves. This took place in the form of remorse, a sense of guilt was formed [...]. (“Totem and Taboo” 915-7)

Out of this guilt, the base of social inhibition is formed, barring precisely those two most prominent wishes of the Oedipal complex (killing the father, possessing the mother):

What the fathers’ presence had formerly prevented they themselves now prohibited in the psychic situation of ‘subsequent obedience’ [...] They undid their deed by declaring that the killing of the father substitute, the totem, was not allowed, and renounced the fruits of their deed by denying themselves the liberated women. Thus they created the two fundamental taboos of totemism out of the sense of guilt of the son, and for this very reason these had to correspond with the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex. [...] Though the brothers had joined forces in order to overcome the father, each was the other’s rival among the women. Each one wanted to have them all to himself like the father […] Thus there was nothing left for the brothers, if they wanted to live together, but to erect the incest prohibition [...] through which they all equally renounced the women whom they desired, and on account of whom they had removed the father in the first place. (“Totem and Taboo” 917; emphasis in original)

Incidentally, we can detect in Freud’s account the suggestion that the mythological father – the prehistoric father of the “primal horde” – is in fact a transgressive father. Not only does he not adhere to what is to become the most fundamental prohibition of human social life (being rather the one who prompts the development of this institution by ‘negative example,’ so to speak), he is one who takes ‘everything’ (all women) as his own, leaves ‘nothing’ (no women) for the others and thus neglects to care for them and to, as it were, ‘keep his side of the bargain’ (a neglect that the totem will make good for in providing actual protection to its tribes in return for being honoured).

The totemic system was a kind of agreement with the father in which the latter

37 granted everything that the child’s phantasy could expect from him, protection, care, and forbearance, in return for which the pledge was given to honour his life, that is to say, not to repeat the act against the totem through which the real father had perished. Totemism also contained an attempt at justification, “If the father had treated us like the totem we should never have been tempted to kill him.” (“Totem and Taboo” 918)

Sir Malcolm, in Penny Dreadful, actually appears rather like this mythological father: claiming all women for his own, as well as generally everybody’s admiration and affection, until his ‘sons’ have had enough and rise up against him. He does not only claim his wife’s affection for his own, but also that of his neighbour’s wife – Vanessa’s mother, with whom, as we find out, he has an affair. He does not only claim his daughter’s affection for his own, but also that of his neighbours’ daughter – as we learn in episode 5, which shows scenes from Vanessa’s and Mina’s youth and makes clear that much of their everyday life is structured by either speculating about Malcolm’s adventures in Africa, or preparing for and celebrating his return (see PD 5 00:06:22-07:35). When Malcolm arrives back from his expedition in these scenes, he takes both Vanessa and Mina in his arms (one left, one right), yet his son Peter (of roughly the same age as the girls) receives a manly handshake instead of the embrace that he was obviously going in for. As Peter eagerly asks his father, “What have you brought me?”, he does receive a rather fine-looking big cat’s skin – but even while he tries to touch it, his father moves it out of his grasp to show it to the girls who are standing by. He does hand it back to Peter, but only to embrace both girls again, vanishing with the two of them and his wife from the room in search of a meal. Two things are established clearly in this exchange: Vanessa is as close as a daughter to Sir Malcolm; and things aren’t going smoothly between him and his son. Vanessa’s actual father stays a thoroughly pale figure throughout the entire series and does not contribute to the plot at all: it is as if he has to step back to allow room for Sir Malcolm’s overwhelming presence, who claims Mr. Ives’ daughter and wife for his own – we never see significant (sexual, affectionate, or otherwise) interaction between Vanessa’s father and his wife and daughter, but we do witness it between them and Malcolm. In a later episode, Vanessa voices precisely this tendency of Sir Malcolm in rather obscene terms. Her words characterise Malcolm as neglecting and at the same time, transgressive or excessive in his claim to other people, just as the father in Totem and Taboo. Her choice of topics brings up general sexual transgression (generally, necrophilia and pornography, with specific reference to Malcolm, infidelity and colonialist exploitation), incest (by speaking as Sir Malcolm’s daughter, with a childish voice, about matters decidedly sexual, suggesting flirtation by her intermittently teasing tone), and Malcolm’s neglect of his children.

38 As we can assume that Vanessa is here not quite speaking as herself (this happens in the middle of the period in which she fights demonic possession, and we often do not know which words are her own and which are that of a demonic instance speaking through her), we do not know how much of this is true; however, Sir Malcolm makes no move to contradict her and by the regrets he expresses later in connection to his conduct in Africa, we can at least assume that she is not entirely wrong:

Vanessa [musing as she is reclining on the couch]: “To be beautiful is to be almost dead, isn’t it. [...] There’s a brisk trade for photographs of dead women, did you know that? [...]The men circulate the pictures and pleasure themselves.” [...] Malcolm: [walking over and leaning over her] “ [...] Last evening you went into a– a spell or a fit of a kind, unlike previously. [...] You’ve been asleep since.” [...] Vanessa: “And you dressed me?” Sir Malcolm: “Yes.” Vanessa [with a child-like voice and bright smile]: “Like when I was a girl? – [sobering] Oh no, you didn’t dress me as a girl, how silly of me. You weren’t there to dress me, were you? You were away on some trek or other. [...] We tried to follow your progress on that map in the solarium with little red pins but you were in terra incognita. That’s where you said your were going [...] father?” Malcolm [hestitantly]: “Mina?” Vanessa: “Somewhat. [Casually taking up her cup of tea.] Fat mother wept, of course. [amused] [...] You loathed her fatness – unlike those other women. But fat mother wept because she missed you and feared for you. [...] [Changing into serious tone, challenging.] Tell me about the other women. Not Mrs. Ives, I know all about her. You might have attended the funeral at least. For decency’s sake!” Malcolm: “You stop this right now!” Vanessa [teasingly]: “Ooh, it’s that face, is it. The hard face for the niggers. [...] But we were speaking of the women. [Speaking up challengingly while Sir Malcolm towers over her.] They were as follows: the whores in Zanzibar when you landed, mostly North-African so almost white, then the native women along the way. They enjoyed you pawing at them – or you convinced yourself they did. You made Peter fuck them to prove he was a man. He didn’t enjoy it but he would do anything for you. Except make a proper off spin bowler like you wanted. So off you went, tribe to tribe, father and son, fucking the Masaai, the Mamohela, the Bangweulu, the Bantu, the Burundi!” (PD 7 00:02:12-06:15)

39 This “weak, foul, lustful, vainglorious man,” as Vanessa accuses him in a conscious moment (PD 5 00:49:21-4), clearly does cross the line of modesty in taking advantage of others. When Vanessa is attacked in earnest by the demonic forces trying to take over her mind and body and she is, as we are given to understand, fighting them with all her strength,58 Malcolm actually urges her to engage with those forces and thus further endanger herself in order to learn about Mina’s whereabouts (who is herself taken captive by supernatural forces, which are supposedly particularly accessible to Vanessa in her state). A severely weakened Vanessa pleads him not to ask this of her, but Malcolm insists. She starts crying – “How cruel you are” – yet Malcolm urges her on – “Find her!” – until he is called back by Ethan, who has entered the room unnoticed by Sir Malcolm (PD 7 00:39:30-41:17). Following this particular misconduct on the part of Sir Malcolm, we finally watch the ‘sons’ rise against the father. Ethan has in fact explicitly – if only jokingly – referred to himself and Victor Frankenstein as Malcolm’s sons earlier, while teaching Victor how to shoot in the basement of Sir Malcolm’s house, where the three of them are taking turns in watching over the struggling Vanessa. As the two are getting into their stride (“Whoo! What about a rifle. Do you have a rifle?” Frankenstein asks), Sembene steps in and says that “Sir Malcolm is inquiring about the noise.” “Uh-oh,” Ethan chuckles. “We’re in trouble with Dad” (see PD 7 00:34:14- 36). Now, after Ethan has witnessed Malcolm’s demands of Vanessa, they literally are, attacking Sir Malcolm for his course of action, who they say is utilising Vanessa instead of calling a priest and letting her go if need be. “You got a girl dying in there, not some monster with fangs. You want a daughter? There she is!” Ethan protests (PD 7 00:42:05-42:12), further condemning Malcolm’s behaviour as transgressive, as he is not only committing a crime against a “dying girl,” but against his “daughter” – a daughter, moreover, which he also desires, as Ethan has suggested earlier: “I’m not sure Sir Malcolm is being honest with us,” he remarks to Victor. “I know he doesn’t want her [Vanessa] to die, but I’m not sure why he wants her to live.” “He cares for her,” Victor suggests. “She’s like a daughter.” But Ethan contradicts him: “No she’s not. That’s the problem” (PD 7 00:32:14-35). Now Ethan threatens Malcom with death: “Sir Malcolm, I swear to Christ, if she’s right, if you let all this happen so that you could manipulate her, I’ll rip your throat out” (PD 7 00:42:28-40). In the end, Sir Malcolm does not end up like Freud’s mythological father – in his death enabling the establishment of culture.59 Rather, his life and paternal authority are

58 All through episode 7, we watch Vanessa engaged in a brutal struggle against this possession – her body twisting and bruised due to the demonic onslaught, starving as she cannot keep food, and her mental strength drained as she tries to keep on resisting demonic seduction. “You don’t know what it’s like having this thing inside me,” she says at some point. “Always…scratching. That’s an awful word but that’s what it feels like. An animal scratching to get out” (PD 7 00:22:01-14). 59 In fact, Sir Malcolm appears as both the prohibitive paternal instance of culture as well as the pre-cultural father for whom no prohibitions applied, who establishes cultural law precisely because he himself does not 40 narrowly saved in the conflict concerning Vanessa’s ‘illness’ until he, at a later point, relinquishes it of his own accord. Even though both Frankenstein and Ethan are severely attacking Malcolm for his course of action, they do not appear to be willing or able to call the priest without his consent (which is precisely why they put so much force into convincing him). He is still ‘master of the house’ and ultimate authority. Wisely, though, he finally agrees, thus both backing down and holding his own. In the season’s finale, Malcolm shoots Mina (who is, by that time, apparently lost to the demonic influence) to save Vanessa, telling ‘demon-Mina’: “I already have a daughter!” (PD 8 00:44:18-20). Afterwards, he is shown stowing away his expedition gear with which he had been preparing another trip to Africa. “I was never going to go to Africa,” he admits, asking his new found daughter if they should not get a Christmas tree in exchange for the gear he is going to clear out of the study. As he starts crying, Vanessa first comforts him, then joins in herself (PD 8 00:45:00-48). In declaring Vanessa his daughter, we might see him assuming a ‘healthy’ parental stance towards her – refuting, as it were, the erotic ambivalence between them by declaring them a family proper who will put up a tree for Christmas, and thus giving up the claim of the mythological father to ‘possess all women’ (not only his daughter, but also his potential sexual encounters in Africa, where he has now decided not to go anymore). At the same time – as the two comfort each other – he relinquishes a general authoritative stance in showing open emotion and thus vulnerability (we otherwise experience him almost exclusively as poised and collected). No such reconciliation is possible with Peter, who has died in Africa. Malcolm is both accused and accuses himself of killing his son. This is another instance where Malcolm appears as a transgressive father: In the Freudian Oedipal scenario, a threat (of castration and by extension, of death60) might be exuded from the position of the father – however the father is not expected to, so to speak, ‘make good on that promise.’ Malcolm, however, does. As we have learned from those initial scenes in episode 5 where Malcolm, upon returning from Africa, clearly chooses the two girls over Peter, there is an ongoing conflict between the two: Peter admires his father and wants to be like him – expressed in his wish to go with him to Africa – but Malcolm cannot see his equal in his child.61 Does Malcolm bar his son the way out of his Oedipal struggles, so to speak, as he denies him identification with himself? As regards own sexual impulses, Peter himself is either not interested in Vanessa, not interested in follow it. It might very well be this double function which makes him appear as a person of double standard, and makes Vanessa accuse him as “weak, foul, lustful, vainglorious.” 60 It is possible, Freud explains, “to regard the fear of death, like the fear of conscience, as a development of the fear of castration” (qtd. in Mitchell 81). 61 As a young adult – and shortly before he does eventually accompany his father to Africa – Peter reflects: “Everything time I talk with father about it [going with him to Africa], he shies away […] It’s all I ever dreamed about […] My father and I, off on an adventure, blazing some daring new trail. [...] perhaps then I wouldn’t be such a disappointment to him. I was never the son he wanted. Always ill, never good at games – a disappointment” (PD 5 00:14:44-15:30). 41 women, or not interested in sex at all. We actually might suppose the latter, assuming that Africa and his father take up the psychic energy that might otherwise have been directed to sexual interests. Does Malcolm actually deny Peter taking up his place, or does Peter shy away from taking it, if only as second in line or in imagination, because this would mean not only sharing the acclaim for Malcolm’s colonial conquests but also ‘sharing’ Vanessa, who Malcolm – as the monopolising mythological father – lays claim to? Does Malcolm finally ‘kill’ his son in Africa as a very ‘thorough’ form of castration, which does not only prevent Malcolm from having to share any of his existing claims but also all potential future ones? Something of the kind, at least, is suggested in several instances. Even in early adolescence, Peter tells Vanessa with regard to their future: “I shall not be here to marry you, Van.” As young Vanessa asks, “Where will you be?” he retorts: “In Africa, with father!” (PD 5 00:06:11-7). The expedition will take place instead of the marriage, he announces – and then in Africa he will die instead of completing the expedition. Peter might have imagined – rather like Freud’s little Hans imagined, to resolve his castration complex – “that he would one day be heir to his father’s rights” (see Mitchell 82), but such a succession is precluded. As the series fast-forwards a few years, from early adolescence to young adulthood and, as Vanessa calls it tellingly, “the season of Peter’s inadequate beard” (PD 5 00:13:08-13), we see Peter – literally – shying away from Vanessa’s attempts at seducing him into sexual contact (PD 5 00:15:38-16:27). Vanessa – possessed Vanessa – at one point hurls defiance at Malcolm: “Ah! Is the child killer back for more? No sons for you to kill here, Malcolm!” (PD 7 00:16:27-34) Similarly Ethan, when Malcolm tries to coax him into accompanying him on his next Africa trip, confronts him: “You know what, I have a father. I don’t need another one. And you had a son, and you killed him! Am I missing anything?!” (PD 7 00:27:40-9) Malcolm in fact submits to these accusations in his own accounts of Peter’s and his trip to Africa. “I buried my son, Peter, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika,” he tells Ethan.

He was like a skeleton. The insects had gotten to him. I carried him to the grave and put him in. He weighed practically nothing. And then I left, because I still had to survey the northern end of the lake to ascertain if any of the outlets might be the source of the Nile. (PD 7 00:28:06-33)

Malcolm buries his son and proceeds, without further ado – his fame still (or finally, now that his son can make no claim to it anymore?) unshared. A while later, he admits his most secret crime against his son to Victor: “I left him [Peter] at base camp and went off. When I returned, he was dead. – He asked me to name a mountain after him.” “The Murray Mountains in the Congo,” Frankenstein offers. But Malcolm explains: “When the time came

42 to claim the range – and affix a proper English name to it, I mean – I wasn’t thinking of him. I named it for myself. No, Doctor. I haven’t a shred of decency left” (PD 7 00:44:28-45:10). It is not only as if Malcolm is unwilling to share physical and sexual potency (the mountain appearing as rather obvious phallic symbol). It is the name of the father – the symbolic power of the parental position that Malcolm cannot release. It takes Vanessa and her relentless struggle, against who- or whatever means to possess her, to take him down.

4.2 ...will be visited upon the daughter

Episode 5 gives us the crucial details of Vanessa’s back story, a history of sexual transgression and psychiatric treatment. This history takes up both the idea of a ‘shocking’ sexual discovery that influences a child in its development, and the image of the hysteric patient. Vanessa’s discovery of Sir Malcolm and her mother engaged in sexual activity, hiding in the garden’s hedge-maze at dark, which effects severe psychological changes in the girl,62 reminds us of Freud’s ‘Wolfman’ case study. In the Wolfman’s case, Freud reconstructs the event, which the patient cannot remember, during analysis by interpreting one of the patient’s dreams, and presumes it to have taken place in early childhood (at about one and a half years of age). Freud assumes that the small child, sleeping in his parent’s bedroom, wakes up and watches his parents have sex; Freud refers to this as the “primal scene” (“History of an Infantile Neurosis” 226) and supposes it to disturb – a few years after its actual occurrence – the patient’s sexual development in decisive ways.63 Both Vanessa and Freud’s patient are unintentionally witnessing a sexual act and thus ‘committing’ an act of voyeurism that is to leave lasting psychological traces. Freud singles out the elements of the patient’s dream that direct his interpretation to the primal scene as follows: “an actual event – occurring at a very early age – watching – motionlessness – sexual problems – castration – the father – something terrible” (“History of an Infantile Neurosis” 222). Freud describes how in the dream – and in the original situation that causes it – the patient experiences a moment of discovery both unexpected and inadvertent, a sudden visual impression unprepared for: “my eyes are suddenly opened” (“History of an Infantile Neurosis” 223) are the words the patient uses in description of dream material which Freud will then decipher as representation of the primal scene. “He woke up ... and saw a scene of violent excitement,” Freud sums up, “which he

62 At least psychological is what they seem like at first and are understood as by her surroundings for a long time. 63 Witnessing the primal scene is not the only factor that Freud identifies as relevant during analysis; there are several aspects that lead to the patient’s “neurotic disorder” (“anxiety hysteria (animal phobia) and then … obsessive-compulsive neurosis”) between the ages of four and ten (see “History of an Infantile Neurosis” 196). With regard to the primal scene, it is specifically, as Freud repeatedly emphasises, the fact that the parents have sex a tergo that convinces the child of the reality of castration and causes him to repress his sexual desires of his father, which are replaced by animal phobia (see “History of an Infantile Neurosis” 230-2). It is less the details of this particular case history than the general spirit which links it to Vanessa’s story, as will be elaborated above. 43 watched with tense attentiveness” (“History of an Infantile Neurosis” 223). Much of this is also an apt description of Vanessa’s experience (see PD 5 00:09:30- 12:00). “On that terrible night, the night it happened,” wandering through the moonlit garden after the dinner on occasion of Sir Malcolm’s return from Africa, she walks into the hedge- maze and hears noises. “I honestly thought I was going to find you and Peter round the next corner, playing some trick on me,” Vanessa explains in retrospective voice-over. Who she actually finds is “my mother, your father” making love. The scene emphasises the sudden moment of seeing in much the same way as it is emphasised by Freud. Something that was hidden is dis-covered: whereas in the Wolfman’s dream, a window suddenly opens, we here see the corner of the hedge, around which Vanessa is going to find Malcolm and her mother, looming eerily into view on screen, and then, intercut with scenes of the ‘parent’s’ lovemaking, close-ups of the young girl’s face half-hidden by the hedge, thus stressing the position of the secret observer. The incident leaves Vanessa shaken in several regards – not only due to the unexpected discovery, but also due to her own feelings of pleasure: “More than the shock, the sinfulness, the forbidden act, there was this: I enjoyed it. Something whispered. I listened.”64 Vanessa – raised Catholic, as is emphasised repeatedly throughout the series – hurries to her room and kneels down in prayer, presumably in need of absolution for her experience of pleasure. “Perhaps I was just cherishing the secrecy of it, as a hidden sin,” Vanessa muses in retrospect. “But in me there was a change.” She begins to commit “hidden acts of wickedness” such as stealing small items, like a comb, from her friend Mina. “I told myself it was no more than mischief [...] but I knew it was more.” A strong sense of guilt and transgression is thus conveyed through Vanessa’s account of her experience, as is the sense that this event is decisive for her development (she starts her account, after all, by saying ominously, “on that terrible night, the night it happened,” the event apparently meaningful enough not to need a name) and at least partially responsible for her following transgressions and the ordeal she has to live through later. It is not hard to see in Freud’s words – “an actual event – occurring at a very early age – watching – the father – something terrible” – a description that can just as well be applied to Vanessa’s story. Many particulars, of course, are also different: the issue of guilt – which is relevant to both scenes, Vanessa’s and the Wolfman’s – includes different aspects as Vanessa and Freud’s patient are in different stages of development: whereas the Wolfman’s guilt is the ‘instinctive’

64 According to the story of Penny Dreadful, Vanessa’s history is actually one of supernatural influence rather than psychological disturbance; however the two do go closely together for most of the time, in particular as the other characters for a long time understand Vanessa’s condition as psychological. Incidents such as the one described above are plausible (as elements of a fictional narrative) both as psychological as well as as supernatural developments. Ultimately, the series seems to suggest an interconnection of the supernatural and the psychological: the demonic influence is a fact, but Vanessa’s predisposition and experiences have also made her susceptible to it (as is indicated in episode 5 already: the demonic is “whispering,” but she is also “listening”). 44 guilt of the child caught up in the Oedipal complex, who fears castration and will out of this fear of castration develop a fear of conscience, Vanessa’s guilt is the more ‘grown-up,’ conscious guilt of one who already has developed this judging internal instance (we can only guess her age but it might be around 12 years). It results from her reflection on rules of proper behaviour (such as marital fidelity and standards of modesty), and the knowledge that she does not adhere to them (by her little acts of mischief but also, ironically, by deriving pleasure from watching others not adhering to those rules).65 The episode moves from this event to Vanessa’s main act of (sexual) transgression which in turn leads directly to her (presumed) illness and psychiatric treatment, in other words, to her appearance as hysteric. Vanessa struggles with accepting the fact that Mina is going to be married while she herself is rejected by Peter and also otherwise not looking forward to any exciting prospects (“How was it possible that you [Mina], always so meek and obliging, were to have this greatest of adventures before me? [...] You would know a man’s touch while I, the courageous one, knew nothing of life”; PD 5 00:13:00-14:09). She looks unsuccessfully for religious comfort. Instead of God’s voice, however, she hears a demonic whisper: “I tried to pray that night. God didn’t answer me. But another did” (PD 5 00:17:00- 20). This reference to a malevolent influence thus directly links Vanessa’s betrayal of her best friend to her earlier experience in the hedge-maze, where she also heard an obscure force “whispering” to her. In those scenes (see PD 5 00:18:05-21:57) where Vanessa seduces Mina’s fiancé, Captain Branson (who clearly does not make too much of an effort at resisting), she styles herself as having magical powers, as witch or sorceress.66 Vanessa and Branson end up having sex between the stuffed animals on the table, a rather rough procedure where we cannot quite tell whether Vanessa does actually end up as victim of the situation she initiated, and being caught in the act by Mina in a quasi-repetition of Vanessa’s earlier experience. There is, again, a distinct ambivalence about the events – they appear to be half the result of psychological drama, half of demonic influence. Psychological disturbance, connected to sexuality, and possession appear to band together to push Vanessa into the transgression that will determine her further course of life. Considering the history of hysteria,

65 Arguably, Vanessa is disturbed by the events because they disturb her system of which rules to adhere to and which authorities to follow. What the child acquires in the Oedipal complex – broadly speaking, a sensitivity for instances of authority, both abstract and personified – is impaired in Vanessa’s case, as it is precisely the figure of paternal authority which breaches the social rules established by his own authority. 66 Taxidermy has apparently been a hobby for Vanessa, Mina, and Peter from childhood on. We have earlier seen the younger Vanessa discuss with Peter how to make the stuffed animals look alive. According to her, you have to give them names: “It’s like a witch’s spell” (PD 5 00:05:26-9). Vanessa repeats this idea now towards Brandon as she shows him the workroom full of stuffed animals. Explaining that in contrast to Mina, she does not favour peaceful animals at all, she elaborates techniques that will make the animals come to life – naming them, “like a witch’s spell,” and putting little mirrors behind their glass eyes to make them sparkle. “I would put mirrors behind the entire world if I could,” she tells Branson. Vanessa appears in this episode both as child and seductress – both hurt and defiant, as well as self-empowering. 45 it is rather appropriate that it is a mixture of sex, trauma, and bedevilment that causes her to end up in a psychiatric establishment. Hysteria was certainly, to use Logan’s words, “in the water” in 1891 – considering that Jean-Martin Charcot had at that point been gaining fame as neurologist at the Parisian Salpêtrière for many years, his “favourite neurosis” declared to be hysteria (see Bronfen 176) and that Freud, who had studied with Charcot in 1885-6, was to publish with Josef Breuer their Studien über die Hysterie in 1895, frequently referred to as the “inaugural text of psychoanalysis” (for example Belsey 33). Several of the crucial aspects that have characterised hysteria, or the idea of hysteria, throughout its long and complex history resonate in the figure of Vanessa: the strong visual impact, the vocabulary of body language, associated with the condition; the persistent association between hysteria and (a ‘dysfunction’ of) female sexuality; the efforts to find physiological cause of and treatment for hysteria; and the reorientation towards (sexual) trauma and a talking cure. Penny Dreadful does here not only connect to the contents of psychoanalytical teachings but also recreates the actual beginnings of psychoanalysis as discipline and method, as it reconstructs how fin de siècle science and culture constructed the complex of gynaecological condition, mental illness, and physical spectacle that made up hysteria as imagined, diagnosed and treated around the turn from the 18th to the 19th century. Vanessa’s first ‘performance’ as hysteric takes place in episode 2 (see PD 2 00:30:50- 36:37).67 At the séance that Vanessa and Sir Malcolm attend it is her, rather than the spiritualist Madame Kali who initiated the séance, who ends up speaking in the voice of the dead – that of Mina and Peter, specifically, confronting Malcolm with his own transgressions (his libertinage and neglect of his children). Her outbreaks end with her on the table around which the other participants are gathered, head thrown back, long hair falling, arms outstretched and body bent backwards. It is not hard to recognise in this posture the hysteric’s arc de cercle, the “circular curve in which the patient would bend completely in the back” (Bronfen 181) included by Charcot in what he identified as the regular sequence of a hysterical attack.68 Not only at the séance, but also during the attacks we witness later, Vanessa exhibits various kinds of “eccentric body turnings and bizarre and grotesque body postures, marked by an unusual flexibility, mobility, fluidity, and sheer physical force” (Bronfen 181) that make her appear as hysteric. This repertoire of body language, “the somatic alphabet Charcot and his collaborators were in the process of creating” (Bronfen 189), is an important element in late 19th century understandings of hysteria, as Charcot capitalised on the potential for visual impression that he found in his patients’ physical conditions: in particular in his (in)famous

67 A “riveting performance” is what Mr. Lyle, host of the party at which Vanessa’s attack happens, calls it (PD 2 00:41:29). 68 For a detailed description of this sequence see Bronfen 180-2. 46 Tuesday lectures, the hysterical attack was made into a spectacle for science and art alike. The “novelty of Charcot’s scientific method stems from his insisting on the theatricality and visuality of hysteria and in [sic] his insisting on rendering the hysterical body as a public spectacle” (Bronfen 174-5), a method of imaging in which Charcot drew, not least, on “the connection between demon possession, mystic visions, and hysteria” (Bronfen 178-9).69 The focus is on the female sexualised body: As “Charcot never fully relinquished the notion that an unsatisfied sexual desire was one of the causes of hysteria,” his “notion of hysteria knots together the vicissitudes of traumatic experience with the legacy of received cultural images of the feminine body contorted into fits of ecstasy, stigmatizing the presence of a foreign body within her” (Bronfen 179). Elisabeth Bronfen describes that although Charcot did consider psychic trauma as part of the cause of hysteric illness, his treatment remained symptomatic, and his primary interest nosological (see 177-9). What was “significantly absent in Charcot’s spectacle of the hysteric body [...] was the inversion of specularity, namely, the psychic topology hidden beneath the body surface, impenetrable to any investigation of body organs.” It is “this inverted site that Freud came to explore after he had studied with Charcot” (Bronfen 176). Freud and Breuer came to link hysteria firmly to psychical trauma and somatised memory traces. The symptoms of hysteric patients “enact memories that are residues of traumatic experiences, representing these as mnemic symbols, because a reaction to the wounding experience had initially been suppressed” (Bronfen 260-1). The hysteric’s condition can be undone “once the affect connected with the traumatic moment [...] is linked back to a narrative about this event” (260). Freud ultimately prefers to conceive of those traumatic moments as typically sexual in nature: “his own theorization has convinced him,” Bronfen explains in her examination of several of Freud’s case studies, “that an exhaustive explanation is possible only if it includes sexuality as the agent provocateur in the mental life of the hysteric” (267) – the sexual etiology of hysteria is a “theory romance [...] which Freud [...] desperately wanted to prove” (268). All of this – the twisting female body as spectacle, the links to possession as well as to sexual desire, the search for a traumatic experience as cause – finds its expression in Vanessa’s history. There is a certain ‘double approach’ to be detected in the series. On the one hand, the series makes itself use of the visual impressiveness of the “contorted” female body and the association between hysteria, sexual desire, and demonic possession; on the other it presents hysteria as condition that was treated and staged in one or the other way by late 19th century medical science: we see Vanessa being treated in a psychiatric establishment as well as, later,

69 Charcot published, together with Paul Richer, a work on Les demoniaques dans l’art (1887). On the sources, production, and distribution of Charcot’s ‘hysteric images’ see Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria. Charcot and the photographic iconography of the Salpêtrière. 47 diagnosed in a quasi-psychoanalytical manner by Victor. After the incident with Mina’s fiancé, and after she is banned from the Murray estate by Sir Malcolm, Vanessa falls dramatically ill, into a constant fever-like trance, suffering alternately from convulsive fits, paroxysms and states of apathy. Her parents finally commit her to a clinic that is well-known for, as Vanessa’s mother puts it, “treating women’s disorders” (PD 5 00:26:40). The attending physician assures Vanessa’s parents that “hysteria of a psychosexual nature can be treated,” explaining that “the treatments involve narcotics and escalating hydrotherapy. Cold water reduces circulation to the brain, thereby reducing the metabolism and motor activity. The agitation and mental trauma will slow and then cease” (PD 5 00:28:00-14). The psychiatrist’s confident manner begins to crack, though, as he is left alone with Vanessa and she addresses him with his complete name – Christopher Matthew Banning – even though he only introduced himself as “Christopher Banning” to her and the two have never met before. The impression that Vanessa is in fact supernaturally inflicted is strengthened when she does not react to being called by her name (“Who’s Vanessa?) and attacks Banning, speaking in an unkown tongue, snarling, going for his head and throat (PD 5 00:29:20-48). In the following, we see her going through an extended ordeal of psychiatric treatment – forced into iced-water baths in a straightjacket, restrained on a bed and sedated, chained to the wall as to a cross while a large water hose is being directed on her (the phallic imagery is anything but subtle), her hair shorn, and finally brain surgery, which leaves her vegetating unresponsively (PD 5 00:29:48-33:20). Pictures of mental illness, demonic possession, and sex continue to go together in the course of Vanessa’s story. Not only have we witnessed her strong language and frequent reference to sexual acts during the séance and seen her seduce a stranger in the streets after she has left the party (see PD 2 00:36:45-37:50). When we see for the first time one of Vanessa’s encounters with the devil,70 we find him to be, or appear as, Sir Malcolm (see PD 5 00:39:25-44:10). She initially resists him but he manages to – literally – seduce her with “the true knowledge of man’s virtue, as well as his sin. The power. The sight beyond this world.” We witness the finalisation of the pact between Vanessa and devil-Malcolm through sexual intercourse only from the perspective of Vanessa’s mother – who finds her daughter alone on the bed, naked and hips thrashing, her eyes rolled back to show only the whites, in what must appear as a particularly obscene hysteric attack. These images of intimate physical interaction between Vanessa and Sir Malcolm (we do not witness sexual intercourse, but we do see the two kissing) not only activate the impression of incestuous desires being at work between them (no matter who actually acts as Sir Malcolm in that moment, the body we see on screen is his). All these scenes (the images of Vanessa’s thrashing body viewed from her mother’s perspective included) also capitalise on the conceptual closeness between hysteric disease,

70 At least, that is what we assume him to be: when he prompts Vanessa to name him, she calls him “serpent.” 48 demonic influence, and sexual desire.71 It will also turn out that it is actually her sleeping with Dorian that brings about her final and strongest period of hysteria/possession some time later, after she has come to London and Sir Malcolm’s house. As she and Dorian are having sex, Vanessa is struck by hearing again those demonic voices which she apparently has been able to hold in check for some time (PD 6 00:44:22-45:00). She leaves abruptly and returns to Malcolm’s house, only to shock him by suddenly levitating (in precisely the hysteric’s classic posture discussed before: head tilted back, back arched; see PD 6 00:47:35-53). The next morning and the beginning of episode 7 finds her lying on the couch in the living room, talking to Sir Malcolm, a bearded fatherly figure sitting in an arm-chair in the background: the reference to a psychoanalytic therapeutical setting could hardly be more obvious. The exchange between them (discussed in 4.1 above) is hardly therapeutical; however, Victor Frankenstein later takes over, as it were, from Malcolm the position of doctor – according to his actual profession – and presents, in conversation with Malcolm, an interpretation of Vanessa’s condition truly Freudian in spirit:

Victor: “What brings on the fits?” Malcolm: “I don’t know. Emotion of some kind.” […] Victor: “I must ask you a difficult question. Has she experienced sexual trauma in her life? [...] Is she intact?” Malcolm: “I wouldn’t have thought so. I place no judgement on that.” Victor: “I have no interest in your judgement. Miss Ives is manifesting a deep psychosexual responsiveness. I would say the root of her condition lies there. In guilt. Something or someone has triggered it.” Malcolm: “Well, last night she went out with a young man.” Victor: “All right. Let’s imagine this: She has an erotic encounter with this man, perhaps her first, we don’t know, and it evolves into some sort of sexual extremity or perversity that produces feelings of guilt or shame that might stimulate a psychological break or dissociation which–”

Victor’s psychoanalytical explanation, linking desire, guilt, and hysteric condition, is negated by

71 There is no one imperative reading for these scenes. We can read all of this as a metaphor for a young woman being oppressed by a society which allows her little opportunity for exploration, sexually and otherwise; we might read this as a history of a traumatising event, initiated by Vanessa catching Sir Malcolm and her mother in the hedge-maze, an occurrence which distorts her moral compass; we can accept the supernatural as fact in Penny Dreadful’s fictional universe, and ascribe the devil’s seduction of Vanessa simply to his powers of temptation which override human resistance – him being the devil after all – or to a combination of his power and Vanessa’s ambivalent moral status. Plot and imagery are clearly related to the genealogy of concepts described above; but of course this relation can again be interpreted in different ways (Vanessa being caught in the ‘straightjacket’ of contemporary psychiatric misogyny and inflexible gender roles, for example). 49 the turn of events: out of nothing, a large spider appears on the tarot card which he has taken from the table to play with as he pieces together his theory. Soon the whole living room is crawling with spiders (PD 7 00:11:50-13:20).72 Sir Malcolm finally utters what the audience has long known,73 but what had not yet been established as common and accepted knowledge between the characters, who continued to put forward medical-psychological explanations: “She’s been possessed by the devil” (PD 7 00:17:25).

72 In a similar way, the earlier couch setting was turned from psychoanalytic into supernatural scene as Vanessa’s excitement raises a storm that wreaks havoc on the whole room (PD 7 00:06:15-07:00). 73 Such an explanation becomes more and more plausible as hints towards supernatural events accumulate: Vanessa flying, her improbable knowledge of details like Banning’s middle name, the spiders, the storm that tears up the interiors of the living room. 50 5 “A kind of fluctuating rhythm” – serial narration beyond the pleasure principle

5.1 “Freud’s own masterplot” – Beyond the Pleasure Principle and (serial) narrative

If the characters in Penny Dreadful fall prey to guilty pleasures, and if the series tells us that we also fall prey to guilty pleasures in watching them do so – why does this work so well, and what does it have to do with repetition?74 Reading (or following a story, as we can also substitute to allow a less media-specific application)75 is frequently discussed as an act of pleasure, not only in popular discourse, but also in theory. “All fictional texts attempt to tantalize, to seduce the reader,” Linda Hutcheon claims (33). “Only by forcing the act of reading to become one of imaginative possession, analogous in degree of involvement and active participation to the sexual act, can literature bring itself to life” (86). One who has paid detailed attention to what such an “imaginative possession” might actually look like is Peter Brooks. His Reading for the Plot. Design and Intention in Narrative is an immensely useful resource in the context at hand as it presents an understanding in psychoanalytic terms of the dynamics a story unfolds as it is produced and as it is received. The psychoanalytical model that Brooks bases his analysis on is Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, itself a ‘story’ of how organic life in general came to be as desire to move forward ‘clashed’ with the urge to stay put.76 We can “conceive of the reading of plot as a form of desire that carries us forward, onward, through the text,” Brooks explains. It is precisely this forward-moving impulse, striving to put together single elements into an ever-growing structure, which is identified by Brooks as the major force and motivation in following a story. He finds it expressed most clearly in Beyond the Pleasure Principle:

74 To recapitulate briefly: Chapter 4 has elaborated how Penny Dreadful casts its characters’ background in psychoanalytic terms and makes their present state appear as a result of the illicit desires they have given in to – illicit in the sense that desire, following Freudian teaching, in Oedipal constellations is prohibited by the threat of castration and later the ‘threat of conscience’; but also illicit in the sense that the characters commit real and not only symbolic or imagined transgression (Malcolm killing – or at least letting die – his own son and then even ‘overwriting’ his son’s name with his own). Chapter 2 has examined how the series captures almost all interpersonal relations specifically as processes of seduction, and seduction with corruptive consequences at that; by calling itself a ‘penny dreadful’, the series inserts itself into a tradition of cheap but addictive entertainment and thus marks its own reception by the audience as an act of giving in to the promise of a morally questionable experience. Chapter 3 has focused on how Penny Dreadful both exercises and reflects on repetition as the modus operandi of fiction (able to “resurrect” its entities without limitations); this repetition, however, turned out to be not ‘simple’ replication, but rather complex ‘repetition with variation,’ which in turn is particularly evident as mode of operation when we are confronted with serial fiction. 75 This substitution does not distort the claims put forward by theorists such as Barthes, Hutcheon or Brooks, which will be referenced in the following. Their studies might derive from an occupation with written texts, but their studies do not preclude an application to a visual narrative. 76 “Beyond the Pleasure Principle constitutes Freud’s own masterplot, the essay where he lays out most fully a total scheme of how life proceeds from beginning to end, and how each individual life in its own manner repeats the masterplot and confronts the question of whether the closure of an individual life is contingent or necessary” (Brooks 96-7). 51

Desire is in this view like Freud’s notion of Eros, a force including sexual desire but larger and more polymorphous, which (he writes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle) seeks “to combine organic substances into ever greater unities.” Desire as Eros, desire in its plastic and totalizing function, appears to me central to our experience of reading narrative, and if in what follows I evoke Freud […] it is because I find in Freud’s work the best model for a “textual erotics.” (37)

Freud is so useful a resource for Brooks because he employs an “energetic” and a “dynamic model” for mental life – the energetic “involves investments, movements, and discharges of energies, derived from physics and especially from thermodynamics”; the

dynamic model derives psychic processes from the interplay of forces, which are originally drives […] The unconscious is the place of drives or instincts in conflict, a basic dualism whence comes its permanent driving force [...] . (Brooks 42)

Both models are based on ideas of movements and forces, are thus models of dynamics rather than of situation or structure. Brooks’ interest in “motors and engines,” he says, results from his “dissatisfaction” with the rigidity of those approaches to narrative that can only capture static form and thereby neglect the fact that every narrative incites movement as it directs our thought to something that is not yet there and has to be reached – “what makes plot move us forward to the end” (47). With reference to Derrida, Brooks emphasises that we need an energetics rather than a mechanics of narrative text, that we need to put force before form, even though we are unable to grasp the former as well as we can grasp the latter: “I can make no claim to understanding force in itself,” Brooks admits. “But I think we can use such a concept to move beyond the static models of much formalism, toward a dynamics of reading and writing” to do justice to “the dynamics of the narrative text, connecting beginning and end across the middle and making of that middle – what we read through – a field of force” (47; emphasis in original). This dynamic relation between beginning, middle, and end decisively shapes Brooks’ approach to narrative plots and provides the link to Freud’s text:

Because it concerns ends in relation to beginnings and the forces that animate the middle in between, Freud’s model is suggestive of what a reader engages when he responds to plot. It images that engagement as essentially dynamic, an interaction with a system of energy which the reader activates. This in turn suggests why we can read Beyond the Pleasure Principle as a text concerning

52 textuality [...] It is [...] the superimposition of the functioning of the psychic apparatus on the functioning of the text that offers the possibility of a psychoanalytic criticism. (Brooks 112) 77

In Brooks’ account, beginning a narrative initiates desire (to move “forward, onward, through the text”),78 but both this beginning and the ‘appetite’ it awakens depend on an ending looming ahead, so that there is ultimately desire for continuance as well as for closure: the

concept of an ending is necessary to that of a beginning […] The very possibility of meaning plotted through sequence and through time depends on the anticipated structuring force of the ending: the interminable would be meaningless […] we read only those incidents and signs that can be construed as promise and annunciation, enchained toward a construction of significance79 […] To say ‘I have begun…’ (whatever it may be) acquires meaning only through postulation of a narrative begun, and that beginning depends on its ending. (Brooks 93-4)

In the interplay of contradictory forces, “both a drive towards the end and a resistance to ending” (Brooks 281) manifest themselves: “If the motor of narrative is desire, [...] building ever-larger units of meaning, the ultimate determinants of meaning lie at the end, and narrative desire is ultimately, inexorably, desire for the end” (Brooks 52) – the forward move of narrative

77 What does this “superimposition” mean – how does it understand the entity ‘text,’ and how does it position readers and writers? “We may conceive of the text as an as-if medium, fictional […] yet speaking of the investments of desire on the part of both addresser and addressee, author and reader, a place of rhetorical exchange or transaction,” Brooks explains (234). The text thus appears here as the site where desires take place. This actually proves itself to be quite an apt understanding in the present context, considering that serial fiction, Penny Dreadful specifically, understands itself and is understood as an attractive force that makes its readers ‘give in’ to its temptations (see chapter 2). If “narrative [is] a process of dynamic exchange” in which “shape and meaning are the product of the listening as of the telling” (236), if narrative is thus a matter of continuous development, it is only appropriate to apply a literally ‘organic’ model such as Freud’s – whose subject matter are ‘living organisms’ of all kind – to it. Roland Barthes similarly regards the text as opening up a site of interacting (demands for) pleasures, even though in contrast to Brooks, who understands this site to be the text itself, for Barthes this site is located in the reader’s position: “If I read this sentence, this story, or this word with pleasure, it is because they were written in pleasure […] Does writing in pleasure guarantee – guarantee me, the writer – my reader’s pleasure? Not at all. I must seek out this reader […] without knowing where he is. A site of bliss is then created. It is not the reader’s ‘person’ that is necessary to me, it is this site: the possibility of a dialectics of desire” (4; emphasis in original). 78 As does Hutcheon – and as does Penny Dreadful – Brooks also explicitly conceives of the fictional text as seductive: “it is important to consider not only what a narrative is, but what it is for, and what its stakes are […] There can be a range of reasons for telling a story, from the self-interested to the altruistic. Seduction appears as a predominant motive, be it specifically erotic and oriented toward the capture of the other, or more nearly narcissistic, even exhibitionistic, asking for admiration and attention.” (236). 79 This certainly applies to some genres or literary styles more than to others; however it is clearly true of many contemporary popular serial narratives (where generally all at least halfway prominent events in earlier episodes have, as we expect them to have, consequences in later episodes, if they do not have them already in the same episode). 53 is both result of the urge to go on as well as the urge to finish. Brooks identifies this mode of operating on beginnings and end points as characteristic dynamics of all narrative (the “authority of narrative derives from its capacity to speak of origins in relation to endpoints”; 276), yet there is good reason to emphasise the relevance of this characterisation to serial narrative in particular: as it multiplies beginnings and endings, it may also be assumed to multiply the dynamics that those two poles engender. The reasons for Brooks to turn to Freud for a model for narrative plot are thus good reasons to apply Freud’s suggestion to serial narrative, specifically:

If in the beginning stands desire, and this shows itself ultimately to be desire for the end, between beginning and end stands a middle that we feel to be necessary […] Here it is that Freud’s most ambitious investigation of ends in relation to beginnings may be of help, and may contribute to a properly dynamic model of plot. (Brooks 96)

Freud’s “metapsychological account” – as he himself terms it, which is employed by Brooks as ‘metatextual account’ – in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is concerned with the “evolution of psychic processes” (132) and the forces or principles which determine this evolution. One is assumed to be the pleasure principle – that is, the principle that aims at reducing unpleasurable tension of any kind and the “quantity of excitation”80 within the psyche (see 133-4).81 There are, however, phenomena which suggest the “prevalence of tendencies beyond the pleasure principle; tendencies, that is, that are arguably more primal than the pleasure principle, and quite independent of it” (143; emphasis in original). These phenomena have to do with repetition. The aim of therapy is making the patient remember, making conscious what is repressed; what the analyst encounters more often than not, however, is repetition instead of remembrance, as the repressed refuses to become conscious: “the patient is driven to repeat the repressed matter as an experience in the present, instead of remembering it as something belonging to the past, which is what the physician would much rather see happen” (145; emphasis in original). It is specifically this curious “compulsion to repeat” (145), to relive unpleasurable experiences that makes Freud “postulate that there really is a compulsion to

80 “The most abundant sources of such excitation from within,” Freud explains, “are the organism’s so-called drives, which represent all those manifestations of energy that originate in the inner depths of the body and are transmitted to the psychic apparatus” (“Beyond the Pleasure Principle” 162). 81 The pleasure principle is somewhat inhibited by the reality principle which ultimately, however, does not diverge too strongly from the pleasure principle (“Thanks to the influence of the ego’s self-preservation drive it [the pleasure principle] is displaced by the reality principle, which, without abandoning the aim of ultimately achieving pleasure, none the less demands and procures the postponement of gratification, the rejection of sundry opportunities for such gratification, and the temporary toleration of unpleasure on the long and circuitous road to pleasure”; “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” 135). 54 repeat that pays no heed to the pleasure principle” (149).82 Those “manifestations of a compulsion to repeat [...] plainly bear the stamp of drives” (163). Having thus established the fundamental status of this urge to repeat, Freud then lays out his account of the development of organic life as such, in which the compulsion to repeat figures prominently.

A drive might accordingly be seen as a powerful tendency inherent in every living organism to restore a prior state the organism was compelled to relinquish due to the disruptive influence of external forces [...] This conception of drives sounds strange, for we have become accustomed to seeing drives as the key factor pressing for change and development, and now we are supposed to see them as the direct opposite: as the expression of the conservative nature of organic life. (165; emphasis in original)

This “prior state” turns out to be death:

It would contradict the conservative nature of drives if it were the goal of life to achieve a state never previously attained to. Rather, it must aspire to an old state, a primordial state from which it once departed [...] we can only say that the goal of all life is death [...]. (166; emphasis in original)

Freud thus presents a story of universal scope – of which he has warned us that it is “speculation, often quite extravagant speculation” (151) – following the evolution of organic life from its first stirrings to its present-day form:

At some point or other, the attributes of life were aroused in non-living matter by the operation upon it of a force that we are still quite incapable of imagining. [...]

82 Freud elaborates: “the compulsion to repeat also brings back experiences from the past that contain no potential for pleasure whatever, and which even at the time cannot have constituted gratification, not even in respect of drive impulses that were only subsequently repressed” (147; emphasis in original). As an example, Freud names the repetition of the painful experiences included in the development of infantile sexuality, which must, due to its ‘inadequacy,’ result in feelings of rejection: “The early florescence of infantile sexuality is doomed to come to nothing because a child’s desires are incompatible with reality, and its physical development is insufficiently advanced. Its demise is brought about in the most harrowing circumstances, and accompanied by intensely painful emotions. […] All these unwelcome circumstances and painful layers of emotion are accordingly repeated by neurotic patients in the transference process, and are brought back to life with immense ingenuity […] the patient’s experience of the fact that then, too, they brought unpleasure instead of gratification makes not a scrap of difference: the action is repeated regardless. The patient is driven to this by a compulsion” (148). Freud also counts the phenomena of “accident-induced neurosis” (149) among the manifestations of this compulsion to repeat (that is, the tendency to relive traumatic experiences brought about by external circumstances, to which no gain of pleasure can possibly be attributed: the “dreams of patients with accident-induced neurosis can no longer be viewed in terms of wish-fulfilment, and nor can those dreams, familiar to us from psychoanalysis, that bring back memories of the psychic traumas of childhood”) (160). 55 The tension generated at that point in previously inanimate matter sought to achieve equilibrium; thus the first drive came into existence: the drive to return toward the inanimate. At that stage death was still easy for living matter; the course of life that had to be gone through was probably short, its direction determined by the newly created organism’s chemical structure. In this way living matter may have experienced a long period of continual re-creation and easy death, until decisive external factors changed in such a way that they compelled still-surviving matter to take ever greater diversions from its original course of life and ever more complex detours in achieving its death-goal. These detours on the path to death, all faithfully preserved by the conservative drives, may well be what gives us our present picture of the phenomena of life. (“Beyond the Pleasure Principle” 167)

Any self-preservation drives that we ascribe to organisms in this account turn out to be forces that work to keep the organism on the ‘proper’ road the death (that is the one intrinsic to the being in question): “safeguarding the organism’s own particular path to death and barring all possible means of return to the inorganic other than those already immanent” (167). Every living being has a particular detour that it is made to take in its ‘journey back’ to the inanimate: “the organism wants only to die in its own particular way” (167). On closer inspection, however, this, for Freud, turns out to be not be whole story (“if we really think about it, this cannot be true!”; 168). In fact, it is both the urge to go back and the urge to go forward, to reach death and to become immortal, as it were, that determine the actual course of an organism’s life:

[...] not all the individual organic elements that make up the complex body of a higher organism stay with it throughout the entire course of its development to the point of natural death. Some of them, the germ-cells, probably retain the original structure of living matter and after a certain period they separate off from the organism [...] they begin to develop, i.e. they repeat the game to which they owe their own existence, and the outcome of this is that one portion of their matter continues its development right through to the end, while another reverts once more to the beginnings of the development process as a new particle. These germ-cells thus work in opposition to the death of living matter, and succeed in giving it what in our eyes must seem like potential immortality ... The drives that take charge of the destiny of these organic elements [...] constitute the group termed ‘sexual drives’. (168-9)

56

These – which Freud in the course of his text comes to term alternatively ‘life drives,’ ‘sexual drives,’ or ‘libidinal drives,’ as opposed to ‘death drives’ or ‘ego drives’ (see in particular part VI of Beyond the Pleasure Principle) – are conservative as well in the sense that they act in a preserving manner; however, they are also the only drives to which “we can attribute an inner tendency towards ‘progress’ and higher development” (172 fn. 10). They counteract the move towards death that organic life otherwise undertakes. Ultimately, life in general, in Freud’s account, turns out to be determined by the interaction of the wish for continuance with the wish for closure:

It amounts to a kind of fluctuating rhythm within the life of organisms: one group of drives goes storming ahead in order to attain the ultimate goal of life at the earliest possible moment, another goes rushing back at certain point along the way in order to do part of it all over again and thus prolong the journey. (170)

If narrative desire is – following Brooks – desire for the end, and if – following Freud – desire for the end is always counteracted by the desire to go back and “do part of it all over again,” it is precisely the pattern of serial narrative that we end up with: as the narrative opens, it carries with it the promise of an ending which bestows meaning to the events (as described by Brooks), both those resolved at the end of an episode, and those resolved in later episodes or even at the end of the series. But the lure of the end is counteracted by the lure of ‘doing part of it all over again’ in the next episode, so that the serial narrative not only ends up on a particularly elaborate “detour” – to use Freud’s expression – towards its end, but that it also provides a chief example of the “fluctuating rhythm” that Freud postulates, a rhythm of going forward and drawing back that can be extended over considerable periods of time.83 Brooks applies Freud’s account to narrative fiction in general as “masterplot,” as the plot of all narrative plots. It is mainly Freud’s concept of the “detour” that prompts him to do so. “Plot is a kind of arabesque or squiggle toward the end,” Brooks explains, “the arbitrary, transgressive, gratuitous line of narrative, its deviance from [...] the shortest distance between beginning and end” (Brooks 104). This deviance from the shortest possible distance for Brooks makes for the main parallel to the life story of Freud’s organism which wants “only to die in its own particular way”:

83 These counteracting forces are maybe particularly evident in season finales. Penny Dreadful’s season 1 finale, for example, juxtaposes the emotional impact of closure (Brona dies, Vanessa calls off her affair with Dorian, who has obviously entertained hopes for their future) with the impatience to move on generated by cliffhangers (is Ethan’s wolfish alter ego actually Jack the Ripper? Will Victor really reanimate Brona’s body as companion for Caliban? Will Vanessa be willing and able to undergo a ‘proper’ exorcism?). 57

The complication of the detour is related to the danger of short-circuit: the danger [...] of achieving the im-proper death. The improper end lurks throughout narrative, frequently as the wrong choice: choice of the wrong casket, misapprehension of the magical agent, false erotic object choice. […] The desire of the text (the desire of reading) is hence desire for the end, but desire for the end reached only through the at least minimally complicated detour, the intentional deviance, in tension, which is the plot of narrative. (Brooks 103-4)

Brooks capitalises on this concept of digression: the arabesque of plot

is the longest possible line between two points [...] depending on the play of retardation, repetition, and return in the postponement and progressive unveiling of the end. As in the model of plot we derived from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the drive toward the end is matched by an ever more complex, deviant, transgressive, tension-filled resistance to the end: the space of plotted existence (155-6).

Somewhat surprisingly, Brooks is actually referring at this point to the arabesque as a metaphor for the content, and not a description of the form (or rather, as pointed out earlier, the energetics) of the serial narrative he is at that moment investigating (Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris). He points out that the socially deviant makes a good subject matter for narrative precisely because it is deviant and deviance is the trademark of the plot as such.84 It appears just as noteworthy, however, that if deviance is the trademark of plot, it is particularly so of the plot(s) of serial narrative. These live off the “postponement and progressive unveiling of the end” in a particularly striking way – frequently (still, we might say, in the light of recent developments in broadcasting) including forced delays not only through digression on content level, but by making the whole story unavailable for further consumption for a while.85 These caesuras make particularly obvious narrative’s gesture of return – a repetition (with variation) to a “prior state” which prevailed before (‘previously on ...’) and is now taken up again and prolonged by being subjected to change (the majority of aspects in which the narrative changes hinge, after all, on what happened ‘previously on ...’; ‘new developments’ are

84 Deviancy is what makes the subject matter interesting and thus suitable as material for a story: “I spoke earlier of narrative desire, the arousal that creates the narratable as a condition of tumescence, appetency, ambition, quest, and gives narrative a forward-looking intention. […] The ensuing narrative […] is maintained in a state of tension, as a prolonged deviance from the quiescence of the ‘normal’ – which is to say, the unnaratable – until it reaches the terminal quiescence of the end” (Brooks 103). 85 Even if a series is broadcast in whole seasons at a time – a gap between the seasons themselves remains even then. 58 therefore generally the extension rather than the replacement of this prior state).

5.2 (Beyond) The pleasure principle: pleasure, repetition, (dis)comfort

Repetition alerts Freud to the workings of the death drive; however repetition also to some extent remains the blind spot of his “metapsychological account”: “we still see it as a major drawback in our argument,” he complains in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “that in the case of the sexual drive, of all things, we remain unable to demonstrate a compulsion to repeat, the very attribute that put us on the trail of the death drive in the first place” (185); “in fact the problem of determining the relationship of the drives’ repetition processes to the dominion of the pleasure principle still remains unresolved” (192).86 In other words: beyond the pleasure principle, repetition works towards the equilibrium of the inanimate state, but how do repetition and pleasure go together? In the present case, the specific question probably is: how do pleasure and the repetitive text go together? The “claim to an act of repetition – ‘I sing of,’ ‘I tell of’ – appears to be initiatory of narrative,” Brooks argues (97). “An event gains meaning by its repetition, which is both the recall of an earlier moment and a variation of it: the concept of repetition hovers ambiguously between the idea of reproduction and that of change, forward and backward movement” (Brooks 99-100; emphasis added). He suggests repetition – repetition with variation, that is – as a form of organisation that enables the text to have an effect of pleasure in the first place:

Repetition in all its literary manifestations may in fact work as a ‘binding,’ a binding of textual energies that allows them to be mastered by putting them into serviceable form […] repetition, repeat, recall, symmetry, all these journeys back in the text […] that allow[...] us to bind one textual moment to another [...] Textual energy […] cannot otherwise be plotted in a course to significant discharge, which is what the pleasure principle is charged with doing. [...] As the word ‘binding’ itself suggests, these formalizations and the recognitions they provoke may in some sense be painful: they create a delay, a postponement in the discharge of energy, a turning back from immediate pleasure, to ensure that the ultimate pleasurable discharge will be more complete. The most effective or, at the least, the most challenging texts may be those that are most delayed, most

86 At some point, Freud even makes novelty an explicit precondition for enjoyment, at least in grown-ups: pointing out that while children enjoy hearing the same story over and over again with not a word changed, in adults the opposite effect occurs (“Beyond the Pleasure Principle” 163-4). However, Freud is here talking about exact replication, which is, as has been discussed in chapter 3 in particular, precisely not the kind of repetition that serial narrative is interested in. 59 highly bound, most painful. (Brooks 101-2)

Serial narrative, in its traditional form, includes forced breaks – like any fiction, the audience can abandon the narrative whenever they want to, but in contrast to non-serialised fiction, the serial narrative dictates when they have to do so. Return to the text is thus not arbitrary or contingent, but quasi-ritualised or scripted. The forcibly interrupted narrative emphasises the gesture of return, hence the repetitive moment in the text and in its reception, hence the organisation of the text for pleasure. What is ‘the pleasure’ of ‘the text’? Following Roland Barthes, there are in fact two, rather than one, ‘pleasures of the text’ – there is the text of pleasure and also that of bliss. Associated with fill and loss respectively, the former placates where the latter unsettles:

Texts of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts [...] unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories [...]. (Barthes 14)

Barthes associates bliss with novelty (“bliss may come only with the absolutely new, for only the new disturbs [...] consciousness”; 40, emphasis in original) and aligns, in opposition, pleasure, repetition, and stereotype:

encratic language (the language produced and spread under the protection of power) is statutorily a language of repetition; all official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology. [...] Whence the present configuration of forces: on the one hand, a mass banalization (linked to the repetition of language) [...] and on the other, a (marginal, eccentric) impulse toward the New – a desperate impulse that can reach the point of destroying discourse: an attempt to reproduce in historical terms the bliss repressed beneath the stereotype. (Barthes 40-1)

Even while not claiming absolute validity (“the distinction [between pleasure and bliss] will not be the source of absolute classification, the paradigm will falter, the meaning will be precarious” 4), this account firmly links together mass culture, pleasure, and comfort. Can we,

60 against this account, attribute unsettling potential to highly commercialised popular cultural products such as television series, by postulating that instincts towards death (as elaborated in Freud’s “discomfiting theory of ‘death drives’” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle; 176, emphasis added) inhabit these narratives just as instincts towards pleasure do? To make a case for the unsettling potential of or the affective challenge intrinsic to popular serial narratives87 is to make a case for abandoning the division of texts into the comforting and the discomforting ones and to argue that the text is attractive not because it is either pleasurable or blissful, but because it conjoins opposing impulses – which is what is expressed in Freud’s “masterplot” and what was argued above to stand out so characteristically about serial narrative. (Rather appropriately, the serial narrative combines gratification and loss as well as recapitulation and novelty, which were respectively located by Barthes on either side of the division.)88 After all, Brooks makes a case for those texts being the most “challenging” that are “the most delayed”; that make the greatest use of “repetition, repeat, recall, symmetry, all these journeys back in the text” that amount to a “turning back from immediate pleasure, to ensure that the ultimate pleasurable discharge will be more complete.” Challenging us both to abstain from and to indulge in pleasurable experience by the delay of plot: that is something that serial narrative can achieve particularly well. It is quite interesting to note, in this context, that contemporary discussions of television series are largely dominated by the extreme poles of ‘trash’ and ‘quality TV’ (see Frizzoni 339-40). The term ‘quality TV’, although coined already in the 1970ies, has gained currency in particular as reference to American television series of the late 1990s and early 21st century. Not only do these series slightly defer the commercial meaning of the term ‘popular’ – aiming not at a particularly large, but at a particularly well-educated and thus presumably well-to-do audience (see Frizzoni 340)89 – they also quite frequently derive their legitimacy as quality TV from their affiliation with literature (as watching television series and reading novels, or as the authors of the literary canon and the authors of popular series are equated; see Frizzoni 344-5). Another factor supports the impression that television series become more and more ‘like novels.’ Film editor Edgar Burcksen describes how new forms of

87 “Unsettling potential” as it emerges from the current analysis does not refer to unsettling effects of content (these are not negated, they are simply regarded as an additional issue), but to the unsettling effect of the form – or rather, the dynamics, as elaborated by Brooks – of the narrative. 88 As Frank Kelleter puts it, “each conclusion bears the impression of providence. […] Literary criticism has long been aware of the sensual, psychological, even epistemological satisfaction connected to the figure of closure. […] Yet this is only part of what narratives achieve. The other part, seemingly opposed, has to do with […] the postponement of a final ending, the promise of continuous renewal” (11-2) (“wohl aber birgt jeder Abschluss ein Versprechen glücklicher Fügung. […] Die Literaturwissenschaften wissen seit langem von der sinnlichen, psychologischen, sogar epistemologischen Befriedigung, die mit der Figur der Schließung einhergeht. […] Das ist aber nur ein Teil dessen, was Erzählungen leisten. Der andere Teil, scheinbar entgegengesetzt, hat mit […] dem Aufschub eines endgültigen Endes [zu tun], dem Versprechen ständiger Erneuerung”). 89 See also Thomas on the striking differences in the figures that make basic channel and premium channel television series, respectively, count as successful (tellingly entitled, “How much gold is Game of Thrones worth?”). 61 distribution might come to actually change the face of television drama:

With the advent of greater bandwidth on cable and internet new forms of distribution of content have also have been introduced. […] For TV drama […] we were dependent on the funding through the sale of advertising and the straitjacket of precise time slots for the drama. Each segment had to have a cliffhanger of some sort to make sure the viewer would stay on the same channel. […] erosion of the TV drama model was caused by TiVo and DVRs that could easily skip the advertising but the final blow came when Netflix started to make complete seasons of TV series available on its video streaming site on the same day. […] If this movement to put a whole season up on one date continues, it could have interesting repercussions for the way we tell our stories. Lines of drama can be more easily perpetuated over the boundaries of episodes and recaps or previews can be eliminated. In the end we might lose the whole notion of separate episodes and dividing lines might be constructed or inserted in totally new ways. (Burcksen 6)

The suggestion Burcksen makes is clear: the forced interruption, so characteristic for television series for a long time, might actually be replaced by the contingent and (largely) self- paced, individual interruptions characteristic to reading novels. Assuming for the moment that predictions like Burcksen’s are correct and that we will see, in the near future, an ever greater proliferation of ‘quality TV’ – television fictions, that is, which are more and more niche products, and less mass-audience oriented – which simultaneously, while becoming more and more ‘niched,’ also develops more and more into large-scale narratives rather than narratives of ritualised interruption and return: Does this amount to a ‘double consolidation’ as it reinstates, by its very terminology, the distinction between ‘placating’ and ‘interesting’, ‘easy’ and ‘difficult’ texts even while actually removing that element – the interruption – that highlighted most clearly the hybrid, “fluctuating” nature of narrative? Following the assumptions made so far – loss and gratification (and thus bliss and pleasure) interact in narrative and this interaction becomes particularly obvious in serial narrative – the logic behind the effort is flawed: if the overtly fluctuating rhythm of the interrupted narrative has been (re-)suppressed into covert “pulsation” (Brooks 102), the term ‘quality TV’ would be labelling as ‘challenging’ what has really been tamed. Yet the very attempt might testify to a tendency to preserve the distinction between ‘placating’ and ‘interesting’ – after all,

62 the subject who keeps the two texts90 in his field and in his hands the reins of pleasure and bliss is an anachronic subject, for he simultaneously and contradictorily participates in the profound hedonism of all culture [...] and in the destruction of that culture: he enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure) and seeks its loss (that is his bliss). He is a subject split twice over, doubly perverse. (Barthes 14; emphasis added)

Those who do not decide between hedonism and criticism come to be regarded as “perverse” with the particular disdain reserved for the illogical.91 Actually, Penny Dreadful appears as rather appropriate example of this hybridity, mixing together, as it does, narcissistic sensationalism and (self-)reflection. If the development of the serial narrative as analysed above really is a case in point, can we interpret this – itself ‘logically flawed’ – development as expression of the continued effort to preserve a distinction not only between ‘sophisticated’ and ‘cheap,’ but also between ‘understanding’ and ‘feeling’?

5.3 To be continued: narrative, understanding, affect

“Affectivity against or with or after Cognition? Enjoyment and/or Understanding?”, Meir Sternberg asks in a paper which discusses Universals of Narrative and their Cognitivist Fortunes (353), explaining that “‘affective’ has long stood opposed to ‘cognitive’ in the sense associated with knowing, perceiving or conceiving as a mental act or faculty distinct from emotion” (355). Is an encounter with narrative an undertaking of the emotional or of the intellectual kind? To see the only purpose of narrative and fiction in its emotional entertainment value results in an odd stance, as Sternberg rightly points out:

Is narrative experience reducible to emoting for pleasure, our mental activity there to affectivity, interest to sheer arousal and release – or, indeed, to their meaning- laden contraries? Such affect-bound reduction teems with oddities. We have already observed the irony of its echoing – only with the valuation reversed – a

90 Which, however, the current analysis does not regard as two texts, but as two impulses included in narrative in general, which can become more or less clearly visible in their interaction. 91 “Imagine someone,“ Barthes prompts right at the outset of his essay, “who abolishes within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions, not by syncretism, but by simple discard of that old specter: logical contradiction; […] who silently accepts every charge of illogicality, of incongruity; who remains passive in the face of Socratic irony (leading the interlocutor to the supreme disgrace: self-contradiction) and legal terrorism (how much penal evidence is based on a psychology of consistency!). Such a man would be the mockery of our society: court, school, asylum, polite conversation would cast him out: who endures contradiction without shame?” (Barthes 3). 63 chorus of literary Puritans old and new, who animadvert on the low thrills supplied at the expense of higher interests. (354-5)

What is more, such views imply that emotional engagement is simple, as opposed to the challenging task of intellectual evaluation. This whole paper, however, is based to a large degree on the premise that pleasure is in fact not a simple matter at all, that there is no such thing as “sheer arousal and release.” There are however also reasons to reject the alternative consequence of the “dichotomy between affect and comprehension, enjoyable feeling and humdrum understanding” (Sternberg 354), that is the association of narrative and fiction predominantly with understanding, so that all emotional involvement becomes secondary or a means to an end. To suggest, as Brian Boyd does in his On the Origin of Stories. Evolution Cognition, and Fiction, that art is “cognitive play” (80; emphasis added) for evolutionary purposes92 suppresses the possibility of purposeless pleasure (of binge-watching a penny dreadful in one lazy, excessive, wasteful sitting, say), which is a view that even while it does allow the emotional aspects of the narrative/fictional experience ultimately derives their raison d’être from usefulness, assuming that ‘understanding emotions’ is an evolutionary advantage.93 Assuming, as Boyd does, that “narrative reflects our mode of understanding events […] a generally mammalian mode of understanding” (131; emphasis added) puts an emphasis on comprehension that does not negate, but clearly subordinates feeling, which is included first and foremost because of its value as “social information” (130; emphasis added): “trying to understand why others do what they do matters so much in both human life and literature” because presumably, “higher intelligence emerged primarily as social intelligence, through a cognitive arms race to understand conspecifics and to reveal or conceal from others our own beliefs, desires, and intentions”, “desires” thus being a sub-aspect of a general “cognitive arms race” (Boyd 141) and “social information” being “strategic information” in a social context (167; emphasis added).

92 “An evolutionary adaptation […] is a feature of body, mind, or behavior that exists throughout a species and shows evidence of good design for a specific function or functions that will ultimately make a difference to the species’ survival and reproductive success. If art is a human adaptation, it has been established throughout the species because it has been selected as a behavior for the advantages it offers in terms of survival and reproduction” (Boyd 80-1). 93 As Terry Eagleton points out in his review of Boyd’s work: “Play, as we know, is a serious business, and art, so Boyd considers, springs out of it. So it is not surprising to find that, evolutionarily speaking, art is a serious business too. Part of its point, however, may lie in not having a point – a case that Boyd’s doggedly utilitarian cast of mind is loath to contemplate. If music, dance and story can educate our sensory skills, they can also permit those capacities pleasurably to freewheel, blessedly released from anything so dull as a direct function. It is just the same with power and desire, which have definite objects in view but which always overshoot them, delighting exultantly in themselves. In Boyd’s evolutionary world, however, nothing seems to be done just for the hell of it” (n.p.). (It must be remarked, however, that the dichotomy mentioned above is not quite absent from Eagleton’s remark, either: the “blessed” realm of fun and the “dull” realm of purpose.) 64 Arguing for refinement of social competences through experiencing narrative and fiction is an approach of long tradition (although this tradition does not typically rely, as Boyd does, on Darwinian arguments). It frequently involves, as Suzanne Keen points out, a sharpening of the dichotomy between the ‘challenging’ and the ‘easy’ text:

Among moral philosophers, the debate about the status of emotional responsiveness to narrative typically centers on the question of whether it should be cultivated (to encourage recognition of other minds, enhance comprehension, or form morality) or distrusted […] Ironically, the argument in favor of aesthetic emotions (cultivation through narrative) results in a more proscriptive, narrow list of valued narratives, while the suspicious argument […] is much more willing to admit the potentially deleterious impact of narrative as encouraging escapism, time-wasting, and vicious habits. This latter side admits a broader range of narrative, including comic books, video games, and romance novels, but does so to warn against the dangers of emotionally-engaged reading practices. (Keen 26)

Keen posits against both these views that “literariness ought not to mean worthiness […] : We have much to learn about emotion and narrative from a full range of texts […] unconstrained by value judgements” (40). It is, however, not only emotion that is relevant about this “range of texts.” Even “rudimentary tales” (if there is such a thing) work on the “manifold that we call the human mind” in such a way as to undermine a binary feeling/understanding ‘setup’:

emotion gets as unmistakably […] twinned with comprehension as in high art’s knottiest gaps. And so twinned that either dynamics of response enters into multiple relations with the other, shiftable relations at that. Affective and conceptual processing may join forces or join battle [...] The rhetoric of narrative thrives on such protean fact/feeling interdynamics. (Sternberg 364)

We do not either only understand or only feel stories – nor do we do one or the other only with regard to a certain ‘class’ of texts. To understand, as Brooks does, narrative text as a site of interacting desires allows all kinds of forces to be at work behind a story: instinctual, reflective, sentimental, erotic, as the initial impulse that is sparked by plot – to want to know – concerns the faculties of affect (visceral and emotional) as well as those of the intellect.94 In

94 According to the approach suggested above, wanting to know is complemented by not wanting to know – that is, wanting the end and wanting to avoid it – as the narrative proceeds, which makes for the complex appeal of (serial) narrative. 65 serial narrative, following the analysis above, these interactions become particularly salient. In addition, serial (television) narrative frequently hovers between the self-reflective and the hedonistic, between ‘quality’ and ‘trash’. Currently maybe the most prominent site of textual pleasure (both plaisir and jouissance), it can actually be conceived as a reply to the question posed by Roland Barthes (23; emphasis in original): “what if knowledge itself were delicious?”

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