Gothic Pastoral Terrible Idylls in Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature

Gothic Pastoral Terrible Idylls in Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature Inauguraldissertation zur Erlangung des Grades eines Doktors der Philosophie an der Neuphilologischen Fakultät der Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg von Andreas Schardt Acknowledgements I would first of all like to thank my supervisor, Prof. Dr. Peter Paul Schnierer, for his continual advice and encouragement, as well as my second examiner, Prof. Dr. Vera Nünning. For their attentive and thorough proofreading, I am indebted to Daniela Kugler and Stefanie Mainitz. Many thanks also go to the ‘Gothic group’ and the participants of the Oberseminar at the English Department for their help and constructive feedback on various aspects of this thesis. Finally, I am grateful to those people who, having supported me beyond the scope of English literature throughout the last years, have played no minor role in the completion of this project: All my friends, Ivancho Spiroski and my parents. Heidelberg, June 2013 This dissertation was submitted with the title “Gothic Pastoral: Terrible Idylls in Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Gothic Fiction” at the Faculty of Modern Languages at Heidelberg University in October 2011. 2 Contents 1. Introduction 6 2. Theoretical Foundations 10 2.1. Gothic and Pastoral: A Seeming Incompatibility 10 2.2. Gothic-Pastoral Overlaps 10 2.2.1. Convention 10 2.2.1.1. Gothic and Pastoral as Conventional Forms 10 2.2.1.2. Convention I: Civilisation versus Nature 13 2.2.1.3. Convention II: Order versus Disturbance 15 2.2.1.4. Convention III: Opposition of Two Voices 20 2.2.2. Attitude: Representative Vulnerability 25 2.3. State of Research 29 2.4. Theses 34 2.5. Method 35 2.6. Corpus 37 3. From (Anti-)Pastoral to Gothic Pastoral: A Tradition 41 3.1. Ancient Origins 41 3.1.1. Ideal versus Reality: Virgil, Eclogues 41 3.1.2. Deceptive Idylls: Homer, Odyssey 48 3.2. Gothic-Pastoral Precursors 52 3.2.1. The Pastoral Romance 52 3.2.2. Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1596) 53 3.2.3. Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611) 57 3 3.2.4. Milton, Paradise Lost (1667) 60 3.2.5. Graveyard Poets 64 3.3. Early Gothic-Pastoral Occurrences 67 3.3.1. The Formation of the Gothic-Pastoral Mode 67 3.3.2. Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) 69 3.3.3. Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) 75 3.3.4. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) 79 3.3.5. Bront ё, Wuthering Heights (1847) 85 4. Gothic Pastoral in the Late Nineteenth Century 90 4.1. The Emergence of the Gothic-Pastoral Romance 90 4.2. The Country of Dreadful Night 93 4.2.1. London at the Fin de Siècle 93 4.2.2. Wells, The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) and The Time Machine (1895) 96 4.2.3. Stoker, Dracula (1897) 110 4.3. Dangerous Freedom: Africa as Gothic-Pastoral Space 123 4.3.1. The Dark Continent 123 4.3.2. Haggard, She (1887) 125 4.3.3. Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899) 136 5. Some Versions of Twentieth-Century Gothic Pastoral 150 5.1. Diffusion and Transformation 150 5.2. Gothic Pastoral and the Terror of the Unspeakable 152 5.2.1. The Country as a World Beyond 152 5.2.2. Machen, “The Great God Pan” (1894) 153 5.2.3. Blackwood, “The Willows” (1907) 156 5.2.4. Lovecraft, “The Colour out of Space” (1927) and “The Dunwich Horror” (1929) 163 5.3. Gothic-Pastoral Limits 178 4 5.3.1. The Country as a World Within 178 5.3.2. Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954) 179 5.3.3. King, “The Mist” (1980), Needful Things (1991) and “Children of the Corn” (1978) 192 6. Conclusion 211 7. Bibliography 225 5 1. Introduction The title of this study appears contradictory. At first sight, it seems to combine literary forms which are diametrically opposed to each other. In common usage, the pastoral is often associated with aspects like an idyllic nature, the Golden Age and nostalgia, whereas the Gothic is connected to a dark age of superstition and anarchy threatening any idyllic and enlightened order. In the recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary , for instance, the term pastoral is among other things defined as “a literary work portraying rural life or the life of shepherds, esp. in an idealized or romantic form” or “a rural and idyllic scene or picture” in general. 1 The dominant idea often related to this type of literature is a search for simplicity away from either a particular place (e.g. the city or the court) into the rural retreat of Arcadia, or from a particular period (e.g. adulthood) into the age of childhood. 2 The form originates in the Idylls of Theocritus, who wrote a collection of poems for the Alexandrian court in the third century BC. It was later taken up by the Roman writer Virgil, who, with his Eclogues , established the form which became influential in the European literary tradition. By contrast, the Gothic has, since its inception with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764, been frequently associated with the darker aspects of the world and human nature. The OED characterises the general term as designating anything “barbarous, rude, uncouth, unpolished, in bad taste” or “savage”; as a literary form, it is described as “a genre of fiction characterized by suspenseful, sensational plots involving supernatural or macabre elements and often (esp. in early use) having a medieval theme or setting”.3 Unlike the Gothic revival in architecture in the eighteenth century, which indeed revealed a kind of nostalgia for the past, in Gothic texts, the latter is not a Golden Age but rather a site of terror haunting the 1 John Simpson (ed.). O xford English Dictionary (OED) . OED Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, s.v. “Pastoral”. 24.09.2011. <http://www.oed.com>. Cf. also the definition in the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory : “For the most part pastoral tends to be an idealization of shepherd life, and, by so being, creates an image of a peaceful and uncorrupted existence; a kind of prelapsarian world”. J.A. Cuddon (ed.). Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory . 4 th ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, s.v. “Pastoral”. 2 This association of pastoral with the notion of childhood innocence has been particularly influential since Peter V. Marinelli’s famous treatise on pastoral writing. Cf. Peter V. Marinelli. Pastoral . The Critical Idiom, 15. London: Methuen, 1971. 3 Simpson, OED , s.v. “Gothic”. 6 present.4 This insistence on a more savage time stage is often regarded in connection with a whole range of other stock features, e.g. medieval castles, vampires, wicked tyrants and all kinds of supernatural or terrific occurrences. 5 Despite this seeming incompatibility of the Gothic and the pastoral, there are numerous instances in English literature where both forms co-occur. In H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), for example, the protagonist, after his journey to the London of the future, finds a landscape typically associated with the pastoral ideal. 6 In this locus amoenus , the Eloi live a seemingly innocent existence in harmony with an idyllic natural environment. However, the Time Traveller soon finds out that this bucolic idyll is merely a facade, behind which Gothic dangers lurk. Beneath the green pastures, there is a labyrinthine underworld, populated by the Morlocks, horrible half-beasts which come to the upper world at night to devour the helpless Eloi. What initially seemed an inviting setting quickly turns out to be a dangerous prison: After the stealing of his time machine, the protagonist must fight against the infernal beings, who threaten to take his life. Such an overlap between both modes, i.e. the paradoxical portrayal of a rural environment as both idyllic and a place of sinister dangers, can be found from the beginnings of the literary Gothic tradition. It is not before the late nineteenth century and after, however, that a proliferation of what will be termed a Gothic-pastoral mode occurs. Authors like H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, H.P. Lovecraft or Stephen King all include features assigned to the pastoral and the Gothic within their novels. The large number of texts exhibiting a closeness of these forms suggests that the assumed incompatibility as outlined initially results rather from an intuitive suggestion that equates pastoral with ‘idyllic country’ and Gothic with ‘darkness and chaos’ than from a precise definition of both concepts. Indeed, this problem of delimitation is not only widespread in common usage but even in many critical accounts on the two modes. Here, they often seem to have become vague concepts designating either all types of idealised rural environments or anything sinister and fearful. Brian Loughrey complains that pastoral has become a “contested term” in twentieth- century criticism, which includes any depiction of a rural retreat in combination with a kind 4 Chris Baldick therefore states that “literary Gothic is really anti-Gothic”. Chris Baldick (ed.). The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, xiii. 5 Cf. Cuddon, Penguin Dictionary , s.v. “Gothic novel/fiction”. 6 The term pastoral ideal subsumes the idealised features usually associated with pastoral writing, e.g. the Golden Age, innocence, nostalgia, locus amoenus , etc. Cf. Peter Lindenbaum. Changing Landscapes. Anti- pastoral Sentiment in the English Renaissance . Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1986, ix. 7 of simplification and idealisation; in his view, the result is a “bewildering variety of forms”. 7 Likewise, Alexandra Warwick argues that nowadays, every text containing gloomy elements or negotiating anxieties in a certain way is labelled as Gothic .8 The extreme transformation and diversification of both forms, particularly in postmodern times, has even led to considerations whether they have become obsolete or have developed into something else.

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