The Ill-Fated Women of Arthur Machen's Fictive

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UNFIT TO LIVE:

THE ILL-FATED WOMEN OF ARTHUR MACHEN’S FICTIVE UNIVERSE

A Thesis

Presented to the faculty of the Department of English

California State University, Sacramento

Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

English

(Literature)

Angela Elisa Schoch

SPRING 2020

Angela Elisa Schoch

UNFIT TO LIVE:

THE ILL-FATED WOMEN OF ARTHUR MACHEN’S FICTIVE UNIVERSE

A Thesis

Angela Elisa Schoch

Approved by:

______, Committee Chair Jason Gieger, Ph.D.

______, Second Reader Nancy Sweet, Ph.D.

______Date

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Student: Angela Elisa Schoch

I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and this thesis is suitable for electronic submission to the library and credit is to be awarded for the thesis.

______, Graduate Coordinator ______Doug Rice, Ph.D. Date

Department of English

Abstract

UNFIT TO LIVE:

THE ILL-FATED WOMEN OF ARTHUR MACHEN’S FICTIVE UNIVERSE

Angela Elisa Davidson

Welsh gothic writer Arthur Machen (1863-1947), born Arthur Llewellyn Jones, is undoubtedly best known for his 1894 novella The Great God Pan, a text that has received a fair amount of scholarly consideration. Conversely, many of Machen’s other fin de siècle era works have received little attention from scholars despite the fact that they often engage with similar themes as the Pan novella. “The White People,” written in the 1890s and published in 1906, makes a striking companion piece alongside The

Great God Pan: while both tales involve women who interact with supernatural forces, they are told from radically different points of view and betray Machen’s interest in engaging with a wide variety of moral and spiritual perspectives. More curiously though, both of these stories end with the destruction of their female occultists; in fact, many of Machen’s tales feature women who are made “unfit” to exist in the material world through their occult dabblings. The author himself spent much of the 1890s exploring the occult, and it has been said of Machen that he was “a longtime” seeker for a spirituality that satisfied his own burning certainties about the presence of wonder all around us” (Freeman 248). How do we understand Machen’s literary treatment of

female occultists in light of his own explorations? Engaging with a variety of frameworks, including Machen’s biography and non-fiction writing on occult topics, this thesis unpacks the narrative structures of these tales while also revealing a tapestry of influences that likely impacted Machen’s writing. This thesis looks to the conventions of Celtic folklore and gothic literature while also detailing contemporary interest in Roman antiquity and gender theory in the Victorian period. The inclusion of a wide variety of contexts helps provide a nuanced reading of the many tensions inherent in Machen’s work.

______, Committee Chair Jason Gieger, Ph.D.

______Date

DEDICATION

To Sam, my love, who chooses me every day. And to Radagast, who, although not ours, still chooses us every once in a while, when it is too cold to sleep in his flower bush.

Actually, he mostly chooses us in winter—which only highlights Sam’s constancy.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Here I would like to acknowledge my never-ending gratitude to my thesis advisors for their willingness to guide me through this oh-so-terrifying journey. To Dr. Jason Gieger, for inspiring me to go in this direction during his “Monstrous Britain” seminar; for his energy, unique expertise, and punctilious attention to my grammar. To Dr. Nancy Sweet who, in addition to advising my thesis, also acted as my faculty advisor for the California Pre-doctoral Program.

Her guidance during that program was invaluable and my ability to participate in that program provided me with a number of resources, both material and immaterial, that facilitated my completion of this thesis. I would also like to thank Dr. Sweet for her time and attention to academic rigor; time, as we all know, is a very finite resource. Dr. Doug Rice also deserves my gratitude for his tireless work in coordinating all of this, and for his attention to my perhaps-too- frequent emails. Also deserving of acknowledgement are Shaun Kirby and the staff of

Sacramento State’s English department for helping me navigate the horrors of bureaucracy.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

Dedication ...... vii

Acknowledgements ...... viii

Chapter

1. INTRODUCING ARTHUR MACHEN’S FEMALE OCCULTIST …………………… 1

2. ARTHUR MACHEN AND THE OCCULT: IN SEARCH OF WONDER ...... 15

3. THE GREAT GOD PAN: ON NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE, FIN DE SIECLE

ANXIETY AND THE TRAGIC(?) CASE OF HELEN VAUGHN ...... 31

4. PATRIARCHAL CONSTRAINT AND THE INFLUENCE OF FOLKLORE IN

MACHEN’S WORKS ...... 63

5. ON “THE WHITE PEOPLE”: FEMALE AGENCY, NARRATIVE STRUCTURE,

AND THE PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIC LAYERING OF LANDSCAPE ...... 76

6. CLOSING THOUGHTS AND UNBEARABLE TENSIONS: THE

“UNSTORYABLE” LIVES OF MACHEN’S WOMEN ...... 109

Works Cited ...... 118

I. Introducing Arthur Machen’s Female Occultist

Arthur Machen, author of gothic and supernatural fiction, was born Arthur

Llewellyn Jones in Caerleon in the Welsh county of Monmouthshire on March 3rd, 1863.

In 1883 Machen would leave Wales for London as he searched for writing work. It has been written of Machen that the London cityscape and the Welsh countryside constituted the “binary landscape of his imagination” (Worth xi). These two spaces dominate his supernatural tales and take on a variety of meanings based on Machen’s chosen narrative perspective. Over the years, Machen’s fiction would evolve and change, and he would keep writing almost until his death in 1947. However, it is the curious and sometimes confounding fiction he wrote in the 1890s which continues to fascinate both lay readers and gothic scholars alike. Despite praise from modern readers and scholars, it is interesting to note that his reception among other “supernatural” writers is much more mixed. M.R. James (1862-1936), Machen’s close contemporary, classified him as having

“rather a foul mind” (Aaron 71). Conversely, H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) highly praised

Machen’s works in his early study of the genre, a long essay entitled Supernatural

Horror in Literature (90). Literary merit and individual taste are, of course, open to interpretation though Lovecraft’s assessment is more in touch with current popular consensus. Both of these evaluations refer to Machen’s work of the fin de siècle, and I will likewise limit my scope to works written in that period. Machen’s ever-evolving interests, themes, and beliefs make for a fascinating though complex study. Nicholas

Freeman notes that while Machen’s 1890s fiction exhibits a willingness to engage with

“evocative paganism,” the author later becomes intensely interested in the Sangrail,

2 discarding much of his early interest in pagan mysteries; Freeman also refers to the author as both “radical and traditional,” “idiosyncratic and dogmatic” (243). This thesis will analyze two of the pieces he wrote while he was still engaging with pagan mysteries:

The Great God Pan (1894) and “The White People,” which was published in 1904 but written in the late 1890s.

Importantly, the works of Arthur Machen have seen something of a revival in the past few years; Gothic scholarship on Machen has swelled at the same time that Machen has increasingly been understood through the lens of Welsh writing in English1. 2019 saw the publication of a lovingly annotated collection focusing on Machen’s horror stories, edited by Aaron Worth. I’ll be using this edition throughout this thesis, not just for the context it provides but because of Worth’s choice to include a few harder-to-find short stories; due to their thematic similarities, I feel these shorter works will complement my analysis of The Great God Pan and “The White People.” In the past few years, quite a few texts have been released that also provide context for some of Machen’s more obscure publication ventures. This year, The Friends of Arthur Machen published Arthur

Machen’s Occult Catalogues. This compilation of Machen’s catalogue work illuminates a fascinating period in the author’s life while also offering some insight about the specific occult books Machen may have found influential in his writing. At the very least, this

1 Jane Aaron’s book-length study Welsh Gothic situates Machen’s writing within the realm of gothic fiction while at the same time highlighting issues related to Welsh writing in English. Kirsti Bohata’s article “Apes and Cannibals in Cambria: Images of the Racial and Gendered Other in Gothic Writing in Wales” analyzes Machen’s use of the Other in The Great God Pan and puts that in conversation with a number of other English-language texts by Welsh authors.

3 publication helps the modern reader understand the nature of fairly obscure nineteenth century occult texts. Assessing Machen’s relationship with the occult will prove important as I analyze themes present in his supernatural fiction. Last year, the Friends also published a hard-bound transcribed facsimile of the notebook kept by Machen during the 1890s, unanimously considered his most inventive decade2. The widening availability of these kinds of sources, along with new conceptual frameworks (i.e. Welsh writing in

English), all coalesce, making this a particularly exciting time to study Machen’s work.

In the past, Machen scholarship has been somewhat one-dimensional. One review of

“The White People” quoted in an early text on Machen describes it as a story “of unconscious sin where a little girl innocently becomes a devil worshipper because of her nurse who is a witch” (Sweetser 124). Sweetser, in this quote, sells Machen’s tale short by failing to mention the complex web of subjectivities created by the author’s juxtaposition of Ambrose’s introduction with the storytelling device of the Green Book.

The descriptor elides the layering of cautionary folklore, debates about good and evil and the fascinating gender issues in the tale. Finally, as I will emphasize further in my chapter on “The White People,” the young female protagonist encounters a staggering number of entities and is not simply a “Devil-Worshipper.” In addition to sometimes reductive readings of Machen’s stories, such as Sweetser’s, older works on the author tend to focus heavily on biography but rarely use that information to contextualize his writing. My

2 Referring to his 1922 biography, Susan Graf notes the “drastic change” between his later writings and those of the 1890s, which she refers to as his most prolific decade (63). Aaron, writing in Welsh Gothic notes the difference in the tone of his earlier works, stating that Machen’s fame rests squarely on the works he wrote before 1900 (71).

4 intention for this thesis is that it should effectively situate Arthur Machen’s supernatural works within folkloric and biographical contexts while also exploring the strange world of fin de siècle occultism.

The Great God Pan (1894) is inarguably Machen’s best-known work. The story centers around the reported deviance of Helen Vaughan, a girl born of esoteric experimentation; these “experiments,” really some sort of questionable brain surgery, were intended to allow her mother Mary to see Pan, an old Roman god of pagan times.

This episode is detailed in the opening section of the novella, and the rest of the story’s plot is revealed in pieces, partially through letters and documents. Notably, the audience is given very little direct information about Helen Vaughan; while this is not uncommon in fiction, the parade of (largely threatened) male characters framing our understanding of

Helen and her aberrance is worth noting. The threat of Helen Vaughan, who also uses the name Mrs. Beaumont at times, revolves around deviant acts which are supposed to have led to the mysterious suicides of a number of wealthy (and seemingly happy) men in

London society. During her absence from London, there are also rumours that she engaged in orgies in the Americas. The publication of Machen’s novel made the author somewhat infamous in his time, likely contributing heavily to the negative impressions of

M.R. James and others who thought Machen was possessed of a “foul mind.”3 Yet, there was a range of complaints about the work. As illustrated by Kirstin MacLeod’s

3 One of the more well-known complaints, from the Westminster Review, referred to The Great God Pan as “a nightmare of incoherence of sex and the supposed horrible mysteries behind it, such as might conceivably possess a man who was given to a morbid brooding over these matters, but which would soon lead to insanity if unrestrained” (Luckhurst xxix)

5 compilation and assessment of reviews, the reception of The Great God Pan was mixed, to say the least:

Despite his vagueness, the book was still too explicit for some who deplored the book’s ‘unclean...suggestions’ and the ‘glimpses’ it provided of things that were ‘singularly repulsive.’ For others, the vagueness made the book quite simply ‘absurd.’ It was an ‘impossible subject’ for treatment in popular form according to one reviewer, a sentiment shared by another who, on one hand, ‘congratulate[d] Machen on ‘having failed in the courage to make plain the mysterious horrors’ of a tale meant for popular readership while, on the other hand, criticized the ‘inchoate and confused’ story such reticence produced. For other, less faint-hearted reviewers, Machen had, however, not been courageous enough. His lack of courage undermined the potential ‘art’ of the work. (127-128)

Reading The Great God Pan with a modern understanding of gothic literary tendencies, it is difficult to fault Machen for his choice to suggestively imply horrors rather than explicitly showing them. Scholars of the Gothic who look to texts like

Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) as characteristic of the genre expect heavily veiled representations of evil. Though they are less “repulsive” (in part due to different narrative sensibilities and strategies), the transgressions of “The White People” are similarly opaque.

As previously mentioned, I’ll also be working with “The White People” (1904). It is also a frame story, and it opens with a hermit named Ambrose explaining his conception of “true evil” to a man he met through a mutual friend. As a way to illustrate

“true evil” (which has much more to do with boundary crossing than modern ideas of evil, or even ill-intent), he lends his companion, Cotgrave, a journal referred to as the

“Green Book.” The bulk of the narrative is then revealed through the journal, written in the hand of a young girl, our unnamed protagonist. The narrative describes the finding of

6 the Green Book and goes on to detail the young girl’s interactions with the realm of the supernatural, primarily represented by faeries, the titular “White People.” Along the way she also describes some of her more transcendent experiences (i.e. “The White Day”) as well as basic facts of her life, including her mother’s premature death. The girl also emphasizes the importance of the faery stories told to her by her nurse throughout her childhood. After the narrative of the Green Book ends, story gaps are filled in by

Ambrose, who goes on to tell Cotgrave that the girl’s father, with whom he had been acquainted, was largely absent in her life. We also learn that after the girl realized she had taken her occult explorations too far, she killed herself; speaking with solemnity,

Ambrose tells Cotgrave that he approves of her decision. Lovecraft, in his essay on the supernatural, praised “The White People” thusly: “less famous and less complex in plot than The Great God Pan, but definitely finer in atmosphere and general artistic value is the curious and simply disquieting chronicle called ‘The White People.’” While

Lovecraft’s instinct to compare the two tales is interesting enough, it is also a curious fact that Lovecraft assumed that the deity in both tales must be one and the same (90-91).

This possibility adds a unique layer to our reading, and perhaps further legitimizes comparison. Machen himself had an interesting relationship with the story; writing in A

Bibliography, Machen stated that the tale was “a single stone instead of a whole house

[and] naturally a disappointment. But it contains some of the most curious work that I have ever done, or will ever do” (Danielson 37). I feel Machen’s use of the word

“curious” is entirely appropriate: the story leaves the reader with far more questions than it answers, and for me, this is the mark of truly fine supernatural literature.

One of the questions I found myself grappling with after reading the tale for the first time revolved around the suicide of the young girl. Her mode of destruction is in keeping with a consistent motif that appears in many of Arthur Machen’s supernatural tales written in the 1890s: prominent female characters who encounter the occult (and the pagan forces of old) are seemingly made unfit to exist in the world by that contact. Many are driven to suicide, though suicide in Machen’s tales is often shrouded in ambiguity.

This pattern is present in The Great God Pan, and the suicide of Helen Vaughan is rooted in a dark ultimatum: she has fifteen minutes to kill herself with a hempen cord before

Villiers, a prominent character in the narrative, will call a police officer to collect her.

When Villiers describes his plans to his companion, Austin initially comes to the conclusion that Villiers intends to dispatch the woman himself, exclaiming “You would not do it...You would not have blood on your hands. My God!” (Machen The Great God

Pan…48). Austin’s initial misreading of Villiers’s intentions seem to issue from the coldly matter-of-fact manner with which Villiers considers the hempen chord (48). The suicide of the young girl in “The White People” is even more ambiguous. As Ambrose describes the young protagonist’s death he curiously tells us that “She had poisoned herself- in time” (Machen The Great God Pan…292). We have to wonder what “in time” means and whether this can be interpretable as a kind of coercion similar to that which

Helen experiences. This thesis will explore these ambiguities, as well as the ways in which female agency works in these tales. I am especially interested in the way that

Machen’s fiction frames female agency in regards to the supernatural. “The Inmost

Light,” published in the same volume as The Great God Pan, revolves around one Dr.

Black, whose occult experimentation on his wife traps her soul within a gem; this apparently allows the empty vessel of her body to be inhabited by something non-human, which is then seen through the windows of the Black home. “The Inmost Light,” while not the subject of my study, does offer an interesting counterpoint to the tales I am working with, and helps illustrate how Machen’s motif seems to operate even when the women involved do not instigate (or desire) supernatural contact. The sorrowful case of

Mrs. Black is also interesting in that it seems to work on the premise that women are more attuned to the supernatural world, no matter what their level of agency. Machen’s

“The White People” features a young girl who is remarkably talented at learning the languages of a variety of faery peoples. The girl’s childhood nurse is similarly skilled, and is also able to manipulate large objects, including houses. In “The White People,” the interposed narrative of the girl (from the Green Book) reveals a decidedly female- centered space where women are both agent and powerful, and their power largely seems to come from their occult knowledge; this contrasts starkly with “The Inmost Light,” in which Mrs. Black is used as a kind of portal to the supernatural. The Great God Pan is interesting in that it includes female characters of varying levels of agency; while Helen may be quite self-possessed (at least until shortly before her death), her mother Mary is used in much the same way as Mrs. Black.

What do we make of women’s supernatural prowess in Machen’s fiction? I am interested in how Machen’s texts treat these female occult practitioners; do the texts seem to indict them? Or perhaps, is Machen simply writing realistically: does he understand the danger of women using their supernatural gifts in a patriarchal society likely to either

9 harness them out of self-interest or to destroy them out of fear? All of this is particularly muddy when we consider the narrative style of both The Great God Pan and “The White

People”: women are often framed by male narrators, and narrative facts are often broken up by the interspersion of documents, letters, and varying POVs. As Lois Tyson writes in her chapter on feminist theory, perspective matters: “it is the one who looks who is in control, who holds the power to name things, the power to explain the world and so to rule the world” (Tyson 97). Poignantly, Helen of The Great God Pan never directly speaks to the reader and has to be understood through a series of male gazes (which are themselves usually filtered in some way). Jane Aaron has noted in her study of the Welsh gothic that much of Machen’s horror writing relies on the revulsion of a certain type of man: many of Machen’s protagonists are men of letters and men of science, and usually represent a London point of view (77). I would argue that Machen’s fiction operates on a complex spectrum of subjectivities (this is particularly well illustrated by “The White

People”) though Aaron’s assessment is largely accurate. The power to explain the world and the question of “gaze” operates in a really unique way in “The White People.” How do we interpret narrative power in the story: while the narrative of the young girl makes up the bulk of the tale, she is “sandwiched” on either side by Ambrose’s commentary. He possesses her journal, the Green Book, and introduces it to Cotgrave (and to us as readers); strictly speaking, she doesn’t choose to share her experiences with us, and the confusion of the narrative situation in the tale inspires a number of questions about agency. It is the murkiness of these queries which make for an engaging study. As a way to “unpack” the agency of the female characters and the way the texts treat their

10 transgressions, I will be looking to a variety of texts on feminist theory. There are a number of studies on women in gothic fiction which I have found useful. One study focuses explicitly on the figure of the “missing mother” in gothic fiction with female protagonists4; “missing mothers” figure in both of the stories I will be writing about. My interest in the fates of women in Machen’s tales makes the feminist lens a natural one; however, there are other important contexts I will consider in my exploration of

Machen’s supernatural fiction.

Arthur Machen is one of the only writers generally accepted as participating in a

“Welsh gothic” tradition (Aaron 71). This is one area I am eager to explore as there is a fascinating tension in Machen’s works between Welsh and English perspectives. There is also some evidence that Machen’s Welsh heritage influenced his awareness of folklore motifs, including those about women who have had contact with faeries. While it can be difficult to find information on late Victorian/Edwardian Welsh folklore study, folklorist

John Rhŷs was actively collecting around the end of the 19th century. Despite the scarcity of information on Welsh folklore, it is encouraging that Rhŷs’s collection methods exhibited a level of thoroughness uncharacteristic of the period and much more in line with current folklore methodology. When collecting stories, Rhŷs recorded the names of his informants, their family backgrounds, birthplaces, and their places of residence at the time of the telling (Wood, “Folk Narrative Research in Wales” 330). One

4 “A number of critics note that the figure of the mother exerts social control and order, providing the resistance to deviance that is beneficial to society but detrimental to narrative” (Anolick 22). Ruth Bienstock Anolick’s article on missing mothers examines both the narrative necessity of instability in gothic fiction while making connections to the legal erasure of women in marriage.

11 of the most demonstrable influences of Welsh folklore on Machen’s writing can be seen in “The White People” through his inclusion of “The Fairy Bride” story. This motif is introduced as one of the many faery stories told to the young protagonist by her nurse.

This particular constellation of legends is of strong interest due to the fact that many of the variants are associated with locations in Carmarthenshire where Machen’s family originated. Localities associated with the tale are very specific and include a lake called

Llyn y Fan Fach near the Black Mountains. This presents the interesting possibility that

Machen may have included a story his family had brought with them from another county. Juliette Wood’s article analyzing the “Faery Bride” as it manifests in Welsh lore is a particularly insightful study of the motif (“The Fairy Bride Legend in Wales”). In addition to Welsh tales, Machen appears to have been influenced by Irish folklore, and I will explore this in a later chapter. There is also evidence that Machen was interested in the folklore of many nations and was educated enough to discuss the topic academically; republished in Faunus, one article written in 1898 sees Machen responding to the theories of French folklorist Léon Pinneau (“Folklore and Legends of the North”).

Understanding how Machen may be integrating and responding to folklore sources is important, but I am also interested in how his own relationship with the occult might influence our readings of his texts. Machen’s supernatural texts have an ingrained ambiguity about them: the culpability of his female occultists is clouded by the author’s use of varying viewpoints and found documents to reveal story points. Though Ambrose the hermit in “The White People” does applaud the young girl for having killed herself, there is a level of sympathy which is apparent in his attempt to make her home life (dead

12 mother, absentee father) understood. The Great God Pan ends with a kind of abridged epitaph, as the reading audience is told that “now Helen is with her companions…” This ending treats Helen with a level of compassion uncommon to characters depicted as monstrous; this leads the reader to try and parse out the kinds of characters that villainize

Helen, and understanding these characters goes some way in explaining the level of indictment the text seems to heap on her. Machen’s ambiguities are partly the result of gothic conventions, which tend to revel in sin and boundary-crossing while taking care to put the “monster” in its place by the end of the text. The confusion created by interpolated narratives and multiple narrative points of view also fits squarely into the gothic tradition of storytelling, a point that will be explored throughout this thesis.

Gothic convention aside, it is also vital that we understand how Machen’s own occult explorations influence representation of the occult in his texts. The sympathy shown to these occult transgressors appears in part to be a product of Machen’s own fascination with hidden knowledge. As I’ve previously mentioned, parsing out Machen’s involvement with the occult will be important in my thesis, and I am particularly excited to work with recent publications on the subject. This research track also gave me the opportunity to sift through Machen’s correspondances for relevant information.

Interestingly, although he turned on him after the publication of The Terror (1917), infamous occultist Aleister Crowley often used Machen’s fiction as a kind of benchmark of quality while criticizing the fictions of others; apparently he also assumed that

Machen’s knowledge of the occult was genuine and must’ve been the product of long and careful study (Machin). While these biographical notes do not dominate my readings of

The Great God Pan and “The White People,” I feel that this context does aid the reader’s understanding of the sympathy Machen’s texts engender toward his occult transgressors.

Machen understood the urge that led Helen Vaughan, and the young author of the Green

Book to engage with occult mysteries, and his texts clearly exhibit a tension between wonder and horror which deserves exploration. Yet despite this tension, Machen’s apparent sympathy, and what some might see as a progressive streak, by the end of these narratives these women’s lives are ended. Their lives are no longer compatible with the material world, or, using John Clute ‘s terminology describing the narrative stages of gothic horror, their lives are no longer “storyable.” They abruptly end due to an incompatibility between the secrets revealed and ordinary life5. In addition to analyzing important contexts, this thesis will also explore the nature of these incompatibilities. In some ways, both Machen’s texts emphasize different aspects of the same issues. How does one negotiate the desire to explore occult mysteries with living in the banal, material world? How do strong, self-possessed women navigate life under patriarchy? As I will explore in further chapters, Machen’s texts operate through a series of tensions and negotiations and refuse to offer simple answers. As we think about the fates of Helen in The Great God Pan and of the young female protagonist in “The White

People,” it would be productive to consider their similarities at the same time that we

5 John Clute theorized four common stages for gothic and horror literature which are as follows: The first stage, “Sighting,” in which the terror to come is glimpsed. The second stage, “The Thickening,” realizes the omens of the first stage. The third stage, “Revel” exhibits that “the field of the world is reversed and the terrifying truth is made manifest” (Clute 17). The fourth and last stage, is “Aftermath”- this stage reveals a world that is “no longer storyable;” this unstoryable world directly leads to the end of the narrative (17).

14 recognize the narrative differences that exist between the two tales. And we must be ready to look for sympathy in the margins.

II. Arthur Machen and the Occult: In Search of Wonder

The women featured in Arthur Machen’s “The White People” and The Great God

Pan suffer steep consequences after their respective dabblings in the occult. The primary aim of this thesis is to try and untangle the constellation of literary, folkloric, and other influences that led Machen to write these tales the way he did; on the surface, it appears that both female characters die because they transgress a boundary and cannot come back. In a sense, the text appears to “punish” them for their transgressive occult practices.

However, my goal with this thesis is to complicate this reading. While other sections of this study will focus on literary influences, including the conservative “turn” demonstrated by many late-Victorian gothic works, this section will largely work to situate Machen’s tales within a biographical context dominated by the author’s study of the occult. For a time, Arthur Machen himself was deeply involved in occult matters, and while his interests, interactions, and beliefs changed throughout the years, I think it is important to note that Machen’s drive appears to have been something very like that of the unnamed protagonist of “The White People.” Writing about his early life up until the age of seventeen, Machen had this to say: “solitude and wood and deep lanes and wonder; these were the chief elements of my life” (Autobiography 40). This sense of wonder, I argue, is a consistent force in Machen’s life and work, despite the inconsistency of its expression; while autobiography should never stand-in for close- reading and literary analysis, I feel that understanding the pull of wonder in Machen’s life adds nuance to our reading of his characters’ occult explorations and of the steep consequences that issue from their individual practices.

First, however, it must be understood that Machen’s belief system underwent extreme evolutions, and he has, at times, been referred to as “idiosyncratic and dogmatic”

(Freeman 243). I have little desire to establish what Machen’s exact beliefs were during the fin de siècle, the period in which he wrote “The White People” and The Great God

Pan; such a project, I feel, would be impossible, as well as fruitless, in a study of

Machen’s literary works. Instead, what I hope to illustrate in this chapter is that Machen’s periodic interest in the occult was part of a lifelong quest to discover a belief system that accommodated his capacity for wonder. Machen’s drive, rather than the ritual specifics, are more important in illuminating the motivations of his female occult practitioners.

Some have asserted that Machen’s interest in the occult, and his involvement with The

Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn6, were transitory and of a period before he reconnected with his religious roots, “when his mind was unsettled” (Sewell 21). As I outline Machen’s interest in the occult during his purportedly “unsettled” period and detail his search for a belief system accommodating his deep desire for wonder, I will look in part to Machen’s autobiographical writings. However, as other scholars have noted, these are by no means a complete record of his life; tellingly, Machen’s alternate title for his two biographical works, Far Off Things (1922) and Things Near and Far

(1923), was Pictures, Memories, Impressions and Digressions (Graf 63). We should consider Machen’s autobiographical material to be just that, impressions, pictures, and

6 The Order of the Golden Dawn was an occult order whose membership’s primary goal was to access the imaginative faculty, or “Divine Spark” that would facilitate artistic expression. The Isis-Urania Temple was found in 1888, and the Order had a few well known artists and writers among its membership, most notably W.B. Yeats (Graf 7-8).

17 memories, rather than a cohesive way to understand the author’s life experience. Susan

Graf, in a section on Machen in Talking to the Gods, helps fill in the many gaps concerning Machen’s brief time with The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: much of

Machen’s early work with the occult remains somewhat mysterious, in part due to its association with his first wife, Amy Hogg, whose tragic death affected the author deeply.

This chapter will also look to Machen’s short publications on occult matters as they demonstrate how Machen’s nuanced attitudes toward the occult fed his scepticism while at the same time revealing his belief in wonder and true mysteries. These writings also go some way in explaining why Machen’s interests often shifted quickly. Born in 1863,

Machen’s life began in the middle of the Victorian era. The contemporary fascination with supernatural phenomena and occult knowledge meant that Victorians were inundated with claims that the mysteries of life were theirs for the taking if only they followed the correct teacher or movement.

The Victorian period has been referred to as a “haunted” and “hallucinatory age” which “len[t] itself to every type of illusion…nineteenth century man and woman were disposed to believe, not only theologically but in the day-to-day business of life, that things were not as they seemed” (Pearsall 139). While Machen was disposed to believe that things were not always as they appeared, he felt that many of the era’s supernatural marvels were not true wonders: chief among Machen’s irritations was Spiritualism.

Initially a popular entertainment with no more gravity than mesmerism, Spiritualism later developed into a religious movement based on the idea that communication with the dead was possible through trained mediums (Pearsall 29). “Spiritualism , as a religious

18 movement, insinuated itself [around 1850]...it bent to the prevailing wind” (32). While the prominence of mesmerism and animal magnetism had already conditioned Victorian audiences to accept cosmic miracles, scholars have identified additional factors that led to the rise of Spiritualism; these include the decline of the theatre as well as the declining draw of the church (Pearsall 30). Machen, who was profoundly interested in the mystical, the mysterious, and the miraculous, would have recognized a dearth of wonder in the contemporary religious landscape. In his article “Has Spiritualism Come To Stay,”

Machen laments how religious leaders have circumvented the mystic aspect of religion, instead choosing to focus on its ethical and philosophical dimensions: “And so far has the real meaning of mysticism - which I take to be the heart of religion - been lost” (49). It could, perhaps, be argued that what drew Victorian audiences to Spiritualism was their search for a sense of wonder and divine mystery that had long ago evacuated their own houses of worship7. While Machen’s search for wonder may have been similar to that which drew his contemporaries to Spiritualism, he himself found the movement frustrating; writing later, in 1919, Machen exclaims: “just as I cannot open a paper without reading how someone has died or almost died of drinking methylated spirits, of sniffing cocaine, so in another column of the same paper I shall most probably find a paragraph, an article, an interview, or a review dealing with communications, of various orders, which are supposed to have been received from ghosts of the dead” (Machen

“Spiritualism” 48). Significantly, even though Machen was highly suspect of purported

7 One notable exception to the Victorian tendency to forgo religious mysticism is the Oxford Movement, whose primary goal was “to revive the spirituality and the supernatural call to holiness that gives that belief its meaning” (Ramsey 333).

19 mediums, he did believe it was possible to reach supernatural entities, even if by accident. Writing about the only séance he ever attended, an informal affair, Machen recalled that during the event none of the common “raps” or other markers of spiritual activity materialized. Yet, after the séance was over, he had the opportunity of speaking with a woman who had experienced something of the other world during the affair:

The sitter whose face looked so strangely told me afterwards that she had at first experienced an acute sense of delight, which was succeeded by deep horror. Then she had felt as though an icy wind had blown upon her, and at the same time as though a dear friend, dead some three years, was present. And she told me that she had very steadfastly resolved never again to take part in such business…. (Machen “Spiritualism” 50-51)

Although Machen didn’t believe in the Spiritualist movement and thought mediums tended toward chicanery, he shared this story in print in order to emphasize his belief that there are forces out there that humans may stumble upon quite unintentionally; he likened the unintentional contact of humans with the otherworld to that of a child meddling in a clockworks. “Sitters, I am willing to believe, do, very occasionally, lay unskilled, blundering, ignorant hands on some concealed door in the house of life and produce queer results” (Machen “Spiritualism” 50-51). Importantly, Machen noted that he did not claim to understand the nature of the “something” that lie behind that concealed door. Machen was profoundly interested in the mysteries of life, and occasionally wrote articles like the one cited above in order to address his fellow seekers.

In these addresses he tended to focus on the dangers, as well as the wonders, of that search rather than claiming to know exactly what results might follow. This sense of innocent blundering, of course, is reminiscent of the activities of Machen’s unnamed

20 protagonist in “The White People,” and I feel that illuminating Machen’s understanding of the potential pitfalls of the occult is important to our understanding of his fiction.

Importantly, “The White People'' features a child whose guidance in occult boundaries is largely couched in folklore told to her by her nurse. The girl apparently transgresses and cannot come back afterward; Ambrose’s commentary on the matter helps affirm this.

However, it is still unclear to the reading audience when exactly she hit a hard boundary in her occult study, or whether she could have possibly forseen that boundary. Assessing

Helen’s innocence in The Great God Pan is more complicated, as we don’t get a detailed account of her occult practice. As I have noted, our understanding is also compromised because we do not have direct access to her subjectivity due to the heavy framing of that character through hostile male narrators. As I continue in further chapters, I will detail the tension between transgressive practice and innocent, understandable wonder. Here, I will end that train of thought by reiterating the fact that Machen’s fiction doesn’t seem to imply that ill-intent is necessarily a precursor to occult-based transgressions.

One of Machen’s initial experiences in occult reading involved the compilation of a number of catalogues of what he called “odd literature” for a publisher and book seller that published some of Machen’s early work. George Redway, the owner of the collection, had helped Machen bring his first commercial work, The Anatomy of Tobacco, to publication in 1884 (Gilbert v). The cornucopia of occult volumes were stored in an old garret on Catherine Street in London. Machen, describing the work, wrote that his

“main business [was] to write notes under the titles, notes describing the content of the books and setting that content in an alluring manner before the collector” (Machen

“Things Near and Far” 16). Machen’s experience as a cataloguer put him in contact with a shocking variety of texts that ran along a spectrum of occult and religious belief; while I will not here include an exhaustive list, some of these topics included: astrology,

“fascination,” Rosicrucianism, Gnosticism, divination, animal magnetism, mesmerism,

Swedeborgianism, psychic research, Kabbala, etc. (Machen “Things Near and Far” 16). I mainly present the details of Machen’s occult activities to demonstrate how his own search for wonder may have influenced the level of sympathy he conveyed toward his fictional female occultists. However, scholars have also presented the idea that Machen may well have taken inspiration from the material he read during his catalogue work.

Felix Taylor notes the similarity between the village Sabbats and sympathetic magic of the nurse in “The White People” and certain passages from the Malleus Maleficarum, a

15th century witch-hunting manual that Machen would have encountered in his catalogue work (Taylor 7). In his autobiography, Machen wrote about the solitude of his day-to-day experience with these texts in the garrett at Catherine Street; he also acknowledges that some of this material, these “striking sentences,” would later find their way into The

Great God Pan (Machen “Things Near and Far” 21). Pouring over occult literature in those solitudinous days in the garrett, Machen first encountered the work of alchemist

Oswald Crollius (whose real name he supposed to be Osvald Kroll) and later inserted that figure into the Pan novella. Speaking to his associate Clark before experimenting on

Mary, the mother of Helen Vaughan, Dr. Clark refers to a parchment written by Oswald

Crollius; telling Clark that Crollius was one of the first to show him the way, Dr.

Raymond quotes a “strange saying of his”: “In every grain of wheat there lies hidden the

22 soul of a star” (Machen, The Great God Pan, 12). Machen understood Crollius’s saying to mean that “all matter is one, manifested under many forms”; Machen believed in the sentiment, and noted that modern scientists were beginning to take it seriously as well

(Machen “Things Near and Far” 21). Machen’s catalogue work was one of his first forays into the realm of the occult, but his study would continue into the 1890s, in part due to the influence of the woman he would marry in 1887.

Amy Machen, née Hogg, is a curiously opaque personage in the life of Arthur

Machen. Fifteen years the author’s senior, Amy Machen was very much a “New

Woman,” and her strong interest in the occult is thought to have influenced her husband’s continued involvement (Graf 64)8. Unfortunately, there is very little material proof of

Machen’s relationship with his first wife. Upon the author’s death, his son, Hilary

Machen, happened upon a box full of letters and other ephemera connected with

Machen’s first wife; unfortunately, and to his sister Janet’s chagrin, Hilary promptly destroyed all of this material (Brangham 13). There are, however, other complications in establishing the influence of Amy Machen on the author’s writing and occult activities: although they were married from 1887 until her slow and tragic death from cancer in

1899, Machen never mentioned his first wife in his autobiography or in any other published works. Even in Machen’s substantial correspondence, he never once mentioned

8 While we often think of the “New Woman” as a product of the 1920s, women who balked at traditional gender roles were becoming more prominent during the fin de siècle as well: “‘Without warning," The Woman's Herald declared in August of 1893, "woman suddenly appears on the scene of man's activities, as a sort of new creation, and demands a share in the struggles, the responsibilities and the honours of the world, in which, until now, she has been a cipher.’" (Tusan 169).

Amy by name after her death, although he does refer obliquely to “the turmoil of the day” in a letter written about the date of her passing (Graf 61-61). The trauma of the event seemingly led Machen to strike the episode from his memory, and scholars have attempted to grapple with the figure of Amy Machen, the woman to whom the author was married during his most creative literary period.

A few possibilities for the authors' obfuscation concerning Amy Machen have been bandied about. He may simply have neglected to mention his life with Amy in autobiographical writings out of consideration for his second wife, Purefoy, and their two children. Scholars have also advanced the possibility that Amy Machen, sexually dark and spiritually dangerous, was a kind of muse for Machen’s works of the 1890s; this would, in part, explain some of the changes in Machen’s literary output after Amy’s death (Graf 62). While Machen continued to write and later became something of a literary luminary, his writing never again reached the precipitous heights of the tales he wrote in the 1890s. Though such assumptions can never be anything but speculative, it is fascinating to think that Amy Machen, an occultist herself, may have in some part inspired Machen in his characterization of “The White People”’s protagonist or Helen

Vaughan of The Great God Pan. The author’s later lack of mention of the first Mrs.

Machen in his autobiography seems to support the idea that he was operating with consideration for his new family. However, I would argue that Machen’s lack of allusion in personal correspondence, as well as the next steps he took in his occult journey, more strongly support the idea that his first wife’s death was deeply affecting, constituting one of the deep traumas of Arthur Machen’s life. While we can only speculate about the

24 influence of Amy Machen on his fin de siècle work, we do know that his first wife’s death did direct his future occult study.

The death of Amy Machen led to the author’s involvement with The Hermetic

Order of the Golden Dawn; Machen decided to undergo one of their rites, referred to inexplicitly as “The Process.” Intended to alter consciousness, Machen believed “The

Process” would help him deal with his grief (Graf 63), and the author was inducted into

The Order of the Golden Dawn in 1899 (57). One of the express goals of The Order was to increase access to the imaginative faculties and the “divine spark” that facilitated the creation of art (8). Despite the organization’s creative objectives, it must be noted that

The Order had a negligible impact on Machen’s writing: by 1899 Machen had written virtually all of the works he would become known for (Graf 75). In addition, Machen would not remain seriously engaged with The Order for very long. While there is no record of how effective “The Process” was in alleviating Machen’s grief, it did apparently take the edge off of his migraines (Graf 71). Machen’s openness to joining

The Order of the Golden Dawn in the wake of his wife’s death was a relief to close friend, A.E. Waite. A member since 1891, Waite had long been concerned about

Machen’s individual exploration of the occult (Graf 72). Echoing concerns that Machen himself later expressed regarding amateur Spiritualism, Waite worried that the author would blunder into dangerous territory. Like Machen, he believed that people were capable of accidentally encountering horrors, and Waite thought that Machen’s occult explorations would be safer with the guidance of the Order. Despite Waite’s enthusiasm for the Order of the Golden Dawn, he was discriminating enough to question the

25 authority of its organization. During Machen’s time with The Order, Waite and Machen would go on to explore the organizations’ alleged foundations, at one point debunking the

Order’s founding myth (58). Because of the extensive reading he had done in occult matters during his days as a cataloguer, it wasn’t difficult for Machen to realize that The

Order’s rites and rituals were not ancient (58). The author’s drive to expose “untruths” connected to The Order and its occult claims reveal the way in which Machen’s desire to find true sources of wonder fueled his scepticism. The author’s quick disappointment with The Order of the Golden Dawn was likely fueled by the extensive knowledge he had already acquired before joining: he knew that the secret “revelations” that took place behind the walls of The Order’s Isis-Urania Temple were available to just about anyone willing to do a little research (Graf 60). While Machen may have enjoyed some of the spectacle of the initiation rites, the creation of hierarchy based on access to supposed

“secret knowledge” was distasteful to him (59-60). As I will explore later in this chapter,

Machen’s critical writings make it clear that he saw the search for life’s mysterious truths to be endemic to the human condition, a defining feature in fact (Machen, “The Black

Art,” 20). The Order’s attempts to limit participation in that search by making their information appear ultra-rare, when in fact much of it was available in library collections, struck a false chord with Machen. While the author’s association with The Hermetic

Order of the Golden Dawn was brief, and largely inspired by his deep grief, the episode is worth noting in that it is in keeping with Machen’s pattern. Searching for a mysticism and wonder he found lacking in contemporary religious practice, the author continued to explore occult avenues until he found their “wonders” to be less than true.

While Machen quickly lost interest in occult organizations and material as he found them lacking, it is interesting to note that prominent occultists found that Machen’s portrayal of occult activities rang true. Chief among his occult admirers was Aleister

Crowley (1875-1947), who wrote that he had “always maintained that Arthur Machen was one of the most original and excellent minds of England. The distinction of his thought and style is one of the most unmistakable of contemporary literary phenomena...”

(Crowley 18-19). Fascinatingly, Crowley believed that imbedded in Machen’s fiction was useful occult information. In a reading list of (largely nonfiction) texts he compiled for aspiring magicians, Crowley even went so far as to include “The Works of Arthur

Machen” with the comment that “most of these stories are of great magical interest”

(Machin 14). “The White People” seemed to have been a particular favorite of Crowley’s as he maintained an annotated copy; his affinity for the tale is perhaps unsurprising as scholars have noted striking similarities between Crowley’s views on good and evil and those of Ambrose in “The White People” (Graf 76). Crowley’s approach to the literary was informed by a Kabbalistic worldview, and he saw a wealth of spiritual knowledge hidden in important texts, accessible, of course, only to those who were already educated enough in the esoteric to recognize its significance (Machin 15). The depth of Crowley’s esteem for the author is made apparent by the frequent mention of Machen in the occultist’s journal, The Equinox; often Crowley employed Machen’s fiction as a kind of yardstick, to be used during his criticisms of other author’s fictions (Machin 14). Not infrequently did Crowley’s references involve The Great God Pan and “The White

People” (14). Years later, during the Great War, Crowley would go on to decry Machen’s

The Terror as seditious, his last name as German, and his person as deserving execution by the British authorities (Crowley 18-19). Despite his later political ire, Crowley’s reception of Machen’s 1890s fiction as truly occult in nature betrays the depth of

Machen’s study of occult texts.

Machen would later decry much of the occult as so much rubbish, barely worthy of consideration (Machen “Things Near and Far” 17-18). While he would continue to comment on the occult in print throughout his life, by the early 1900s he would largely be finished with occult matters, at least in terms of his own personal practice. Letters dating from 1906 show that by that time period he was squarely engaged in another matter: the finding of the Grail (Machen et. al. 40-41). His spiritual journey, and his search for wonder, would continue. After his ordeal with The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,

Machen would return to the High Church Anglicanism that he had known in childhood, his father having been a vicar in the parish of Llandewi Fach; now, his search for wonder revolved around the legend of the Sangrail of Arthurian myth (Graf 62-63). This period of Machen’s life sees him a kind of “mystical Anglican” who anticipated a connection between a religious state of bliss and the return of the Holy Grail to Wales (71). This, of course, explains Machen’s deep interest in the Nanteos Cup (held in Aberystwyth) as a potential candidate for the Holy Grail; with A.E. Waite as his companion in the Quest,

Machen spent many years researching the legends and whereabouts of the Sangrail.

Machen and Waite kept extensive correspondence on the topic, and Machen kept many notebooks dedicated to his findings (Machen, Selected Letters, 40-41). It is interesting that as Machen’s interest in exploring Christian sources of wonder and mystery grew, he

28 still continued to address Spiritualism and other forms of occult practice9. I would argue that his continued attention stemmed from his interest in guiding others who similarly searched for the wondrous. Earlier in this chapter, I referenced Machen’s belief that there are forces beyond our understanding, and that those who walk blindly into occult practices are likely, once in a while, to blunder into dangerous contact with those forces.

However, Machen was also gravely concerned about the disillusionment of those who sought mystical wonders in the wrong places. Alluding to a variety of practices he deemed rubbish, Machen writes about one of his chief concerns regarding faux wonders:

The exhibition of these poisons may turn out in one of another two ways. One man tastes, and, having a strong palate of common sense, perceives that the draught offered him is rubbish and poisonous rubbish. He turns away, loathing; but in too many cases he confuses adulterated draught with the pure and true springs; perceiving that occultism is nauseous nonsense, he includes the veritable marvels in his sentence of disgust, and says in his heart that there is no God, that the world of vision has no real existence. This is bad enough; but the fate of him who swallows what is proffered and rejoices in it, and believes that he has found the truth is even more lamentable; he becomes an occultist; he joins the ranks of that dreary host who march to the land of everlasting nonsense. (Machen “Black Art” 21)

As the preceding paragraph illustrates, Machen’s beliefs regarding occult interactions are highly nuanced. While he is concerned about those who join movements spouting “everlasting nonsense,” he also worries about those who recognize the nonsense

9 Throughout my thesis I have cited Machen’s article “Has Spiritualism Come to Stay?” My works cited details the reprinted article in The Friends of Arthur Machen’s journal, Faunus, though it was originally published in John O’London’s Weekly on April 12th, 1919. Also reprinted in Faunus is “The Black Art,” a review of companion A.E. Waite’s The Book of Ceremonial Magic, which originally appeared in The Academy on May 20th, 1911. These are but a few of Machen’s writings on the occult published after his focus had shifted to mystical Anglicanism.

29 of movements like Spiritualism and declare that all the purported mysteries of life are nonsense. As I noted earlier, Machen’s writings post-1900 indicate that Spiritualism, and later occultism, were some of the primary irritations of the author’s later life; I also noted

Machen’s understanding of the pursuit of mysteries as endemic to the human condition

(Machen, “The Black Art,” 20). Reading the passage above with an understanding of these two facts of Machen’s life, we come to realize that the author was frustrated by erroneous occult practices precisely because they either entirely turned people from the path of mysteries, which he saw as unique to humankind, or led them on a false path. One of the more interesting aspects of the above-quoted passage is the fact that Machen never condemns the seeker for their desire to know: when given a public forum, Machen does not use it to scare people away from exploring the mysterious aspects of life.

Machen doesn’t chastise those who would cross boundaries in their search precisely because that search, the “aspiration of the mysterious” as he has called it, was, by his account, essential to the human animal. During a review of Waite’s The Book of

Ceremonial Magic, Machen asserts that it is this search that differentiates the human from “the wisest of pigs” and human society as “something infinitely above the best- regulated ant-hill or beehive” (Machen, “The Black Art,” 20). Biographer Mark

Valentine has referred to Machen as a longtime “seeker for a spirituality that satisfied his own burning certainties about the presence of wonder all around us” (Freeman 248).

Machen himself has alluded to this sense of wonder as one of the most important elements of his formative years: describing his experience of the world before he left school, Machen writes that “solitude and wood and deep lanes, and wonder; these were

30 the chief elements of my life” (Machen, Autobiography, 40). I hope this chapter has duly illustrated Machen’s clearly nuanced, if evolving attitudes toward occult activity in his search for life’s wonders. While he himself would later express deep concerns over occult activity, he was actively engaged with the occult during the period in which The Great

God Pan and “The White People” were written. In light of this, how are we to interpret the unfortunate ends of the female practitioners of Machen’s texts? I would argue that an understanding of Machen’s search, as well as his continued commitment to the advisement of mystery-seekers long after he had turned from occult study, betrays a deep sympathy for other like-minds. If this chapter leaves us with anything to consider it is this: despite the “conservative turns” of Machen’s stories, perhaps we should be close- reading in the cracks and interrogating narrative points of view to find areas of text that support empathy for the author’s female occult practitioners. Narrative perspective is especially important in our analysis of The Great God Pan, as the perspectives of the men who frame our understanding of Helen Vaughan are not a direct reflection of Machen’s perspective and life experience. While we as literary critics should generally separate the author and narrator in our analyses, The Great God Pan is written with a particularly thick framing that allows for a variety of perspectives. These perspectives, which at times vye for the reader’s attention, create a number of tensions in the work. My next chapter, revolving around the Pan novella, will deal with the complexity of Machen’s narrative perspectives and tensions as well as a number of other issues at play in the text.

III. The Great God Pan: On Narrative Perspective, Fin de Siècle Anxiety, and the

Tragic(?) Case of Helen Vaughn

After its 1894 publication by John Lane and his Bodley Head Press, The Great

God Pan was coined ‘un grand succes’ by none other than Oscar Wilde himself. At the time, Bodley Head Publishing House was infamous due to its publication of The Yellow

Book, a quarterly featuring both visual and literary productions of the Decadent period

(Camara 11). Interestingly, Machen’s novella had actually appeared four years earlier in a journal called The Whirlwind, however, on initial release “it was largely ignored by both readers and critics” (Navarette 188). The 1894 release was accompanied by a frontispiece illustration of a faun, rendered by leading Aesthete Aubrey Beardsley (188). Machen’s career had begun a few years earlier with a somewhat comedic ode to smoking entitled

The Anatomy of Tobacco (1884) and continued with works of translation, including the first English language version of Marguerite de Navarre’s The Heptameron, a collection of short stories after the style of Boccaccio (Camara 11). The 1894 publication of The

Great God Pan would bring Arthur Machen a level of notoriety far beyond the range of these earlier, more modest successes. The novella would also garner public outrage due to its many allusions to sexuality and moral corruption; while Oscar Wilde applauded

Machen’s foray into Decadence, others were disturbed. The Westminster Gazette, in its review of the tale, referred sensationally to Machen’s “nightmares of corruption”

(Navarrette 188). These “nightmares” center around the figure of Helen Vaughan, a woman whose (assumed) sexual relationships lead a number of well-to-do London gentlemen to kill themselves. Machen’s representation of Helen, and the narrative’s

32 seeming insistence on her destruction, are the primary subjects of this chapter. Helen, seemingly a monster when seen through the eyes of London society, functions as a kind of cipher in The Great God Pan. Because the reading audience seldom experiences her wrong-doing directly, we are hopelessly dependent on stories told about her, on sordid allusions to her travels in South America, and on interpolated narratives related by way of documents.

In light of the heavy framing of Helen Vaughan’s story, I argue that an interrogation of the novella’s narrative perspective is vital, as is an understanding of the paradigms that Machen is playing with. It is also important to look at contemporary conversations and anxieties. The Great God Pan showcases many characteristics of the gothic mode, including what has been referred to as its “cultural instrumentality” (Hurley

194). As a genre that emerges periodically and with particular force in times of cultural stress, the gothic often works to “negotiate anxieties for its readership by working through them in displaced (sometimes supernaturalized) form” (194). This negotiation of anxieties during societally stressful periods is what Hurley is referring to as the gothic genre’s “cultural instrumentality.” One fin de siècle preoccupation present in The Great

God Pan, which also resonates with the gothic genre’s broad interest in boundary crossing and “antagonistic otherness,” is “invasion anxiety” (Bulfin 16). There was a great deal of anxiety in the late nineteenth century about foreign peoples with foreign values compromising the cultural and moral integrity of Britain as they left the imperial reaches and descended on (or “invaded”) the Isles. The fear of the liminal body in the wake of Darwinism forcefully presents itself during Helen Vaughan’s exceptionally

33 horrific death scene; the potency of the scene is particularly extraordinary considering it is related to the reader secondhand via letters and translated manuscripts (Machen 48-49).

Importantly, Darwinian theory uncovered humanity’s evolutionary past and potential; the human body’s plasticity over time, and the possibility that its current form could be transitional, disturbed the imaginations of a populace who had previously believed that they were immutable, and made in the image of God. Anxiety related to human plasticity plays out in a number of nineteenth century British texts; referring to Machen’s novella in concert with Kipling’s “The Mark of the Beast” (1890) and H.G. Well’s The Island of Dr.

Moreau (1896), among others, Kelly Hurley writes that:

All of these texts describe human bodies that have lost their claim to a discrete and integral identity, a fully human existence. They are in contrast liminal bodies: bodies that occupy the threshold between the two terms of an opposition, like human/beast, male/female, civilized/primitive, by which cultures are able to meaningfully organize experience. By breaking down such oppositions the liminal entity confounds one’s ability to make sense of the World. (189)

As I shall analyze later in this chapter, as she dies Helen Vaughan shifts between woman, man, primordial slime and any number of things in-between- she is born of an unholy, yet immaculate union with the God Pan. Referring to Helen, Kirsti Bohata has written that

“her real danger lies in the invisibility of her hybridity”- additionally, her ability to blend may betray themes of racial impurity (125-126). I would argue that Helen’s invisible hybridity could be understood as analogous to the concept of “passing” in African

American history. Both in life and in death, Helen’s person represents many of late-

Victorian England’s deepest anxieties, including those surrounding gender. Even Queen

Victoria, for whom the era was named, dealt with uncertainties about her proper role as a

34 woman and wife, mother and monarch, and it has been written that “for all her simplicities, Victoria is representative of the conflictive era named after her’” (Beckson

132). Unpacking all of the varied anxieties that find voice in Machen’s text, we can begin to understand what Helen Vaughan represents to the upper-class London gentlemen who encounter her, and why she was doomed to die. We can also speculate that the fervor created by Machen’s text could only have increased had Machen allowed Helen

Vaughan’s life to continue.

The second goal of my analysis, however, is to showcase places where Machen’s representation of Helen evinces empathy. Once more I would like to reference Hurley’s assertion that gothic texts “negotiate anxieties”; it is the sense of negotiation, of tension in Helen’s representation, that I think makes the work particularly poignant. As modern readers we are especially well suited to finding these moments of empathy precisely because we tend to look differently at “monsters.” A prominent scholar of the Gothic,

Fred Botting, has noted the modern tendency (which admittedly goes back as far as Mary

Shelley’s representation of Frankenstein’s Monster) to empathize and even identify with the monsters that would’ve been condemned in previous eras: “Gothic texts and images no longer ring with the command to destroy all monsters and purge society of the figures destined to bear the brunt of intensely focused imagined afflictions, fears, and anxieties”

(3). Botting playfully continues, writing that the postmodern attitude toward monsters would best be phrased thusly: “love all monsters, love your monster as yourself” (4).

Later in this chapter I will make note of a recent stage adaptation of The Great God Pan which illustrates Botting’s assertion, but I will begin my analysis of Machen’s novella by

35 illuminating the novel’s intersection with prevalent gender anxieties during the British fin de siècle.

Fin de siècle Britain is commonly understood as reeling in the wake of the “New

Woman” and the increasingly plastic gender roles that necessarily accompanied her rise.

As I will explore in this section, Machen’s Helen Vaughan can be seen as a kind of “New

Woman” taken to extremes: for those who feared this new version of the feminine, Helen is the most terrifying possibility or imaginative extension that could be dreamt of. She is a monstrous version of the archetype, which as it was still stood in stark contrast when set against older ideals. While the older, idealized version of womanhood, “the Angel in the

House,” described a woman whose very identity was defined by her relation to the men in her life (she was “mother,” “daughter,” “wife,” etc.), this new paradigm of womanhood was marked by feminism and an independence and outspokenness that was shocking, and to some, downright horrifying (Hurley 199). While it is commonplace to talk about the crisis of gender during the late nineteenth century in Britain, some scholars have argued that this crisis did not originate due to external threats to the culture at large, but that the

“crisis” was somewhat staged by a dominant masculinist culture that felt threatened by women’s empowerment (Smith 1). It is important to note that nineteenth-century rhetoric often connected deviance from the gender norm to social degeneration, even going so far as to suggest that non-normativity was a threat to public health; non-normativity was

“identified both as a symptom and a cause of social degeneration, so that by posing a challenge to traditional gender roles, liminal subjects like the homosexual (since the

“sexual invert” was said to have a female soul entrapped within a man’s body) were seen

36 as causes of social unrest and potential threats to national health”(Hurley 199). Helen, marked by a level of self-possession considered masculine, is representative of this threat, and I would argue that the narrative suggests a kind of staging of threat in the upper-class sphere. While the story appears to point to Helen’s deviance, the Frankenstein-like interlocking of documents and letters, hearsay and assumptions that make up the body of

Machen’s narrative do make it difficult to ascertain Helen’s true nature. Yet, as understood by Villiers and Clarke, Helen is clearly a threat to public health, and they see to it themselves that the threat is neutralized. After a rash of suicides, contagion is explicitly referenced. Before Villiers and company concretely form their hypothesis about the cause of the deaths, Austin tells Villiers that “as for the theory of mania, that is very well, of course, for the coroner’s jury, but everyone knows that it’s all nonsense.

Suicidal mania is not smallpox” (Machen 39). It is important to note that like Helen, the threat of New-womanism was largely an upper (and upper-middle) class concern.

Working class women before and during the fin de siècle led lives so remote from the ideal of the “Angel in the House” that the revolt of the “New Woman” against the earlier archetype didn’t do much to improve their lives (Beckson 130). Mary, it should be noted, is much closer to the earlier ideal.

Here, I want to note the level of agency that Helen appears to have in her life. I qualify the statement with “appears,” of course, simply because the heavy framing of the narrative makes certainty nearly impossible. We do know, however, that even in her youth Helen enjoys a great deal more agency than her mother, of whose history we know little, save for the fact that she was allegedly “saved” from the gutter and from “almost

37 certain starvation” by Dr. Raymond (Machen 11-12). Of course, this assumption only works if we assume that Dr. Raymond is presenting those events accurately. At the time of Dr. Raymond’s experimentation on her, Mary is said to be about seventeen (14). These admittedly brief references to Mary’s situation imply a working or lower class background, and as I will explain later in this chapter, her class positioning is important in relation to Dr. Raymond’s assumption of his ownership of, and right to use, her body.

Writing in the 1860s, John Stuart Mill, who was one of the most influential thinkers and authors considering the “Woman Question,” outlines the perceived (and prescribed) differences between men and women. Mill outlines for us the roles, and the burdens, which nineteenth-century women were expected to take on:

All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others. All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for others; to make complete the abnegation of themselves, and to have no life but in their affections. (qtd. in Beckson 132)

This passage, with its reference to “yielding,” “submission,” and to having “no life but in their affections,” describes none so well as Mary, the ill-fated mother of Helen Vaughan.

Importantly, it is Mary’s apparent affection for Dr. Raymond which leads her to trust him with her life. Just before beginning the procedure (a kind of brain surgery) that allows

Mary to see the God Pan, Dr. Raymond states that she is free to choose whether or not “to trust [herself ] to [him] entirely”; she replies simplistically with a trusting and innocent

“yes, dear” (Machen 14). Though Mary is described in child-like terms, there are veiled implications that Mary’s relationship with Dr. Raymond is more romantic and/or sexual

38 than is explicitly revealed. Clarke, observing Mary and Dr. Raymond’s exchange, muses that “she was so beautiful that Clarke did not wonder at what the doctor had written to him” (14). Mary’s affections for Dr. Raymond, a figure who appears to function as both father and lover, condemn her to “hopeless idio[cy]” and eventual death (Machen 15).

Helen, of course, follows a different path and whether conscious of it or not, seems to be taking exactly the kind of control over her life and the lives of others that her mother, in her innocence, could not. While Mary’s willingness to give up her own life for her affections leads to her becoming a vegetable, Helen switches the script. Her husbands and lovers pay the ultimate price for having made the mistake of developing affection for

Helen. According to former husband, Charles Herbert, Helen both “corrupted [his] soul” and managed to get away with all of his wealth (Machen 22-23). Helen appears to live for no one but herself and her own pleasures. Again, I qualify with the term “appears,” due to the narrative fragmentation and our removal from Helen. However, she appears beholden to no one, and this is one of the reasons she inspires such great terror in the society of upper-class London men. These are just the sort of men who are used to having their way; in other words, they curry influence due to their class and connectedness. It is also important to note that contemporary gender theory assumed that by the nature of their sex men should be influencers, not the influenced. One prominent physician and intellect of the day, Havelock Ellis, wrote about the supposedly physiological differences at work in the two sexes in an unimaginatively titled work he called “Man and Woman” (1894):

A woman instinctively responds more easily than a man to influences from without, even in spite of herself. A young woman, especially if her nervous control is at all defective, involuntarily changes when an individual of the opposite sex approaches; however indifferent he may be

to her personally, she cannot prevent the instinctive response of her vasomotor and muscular systems, and becomes at once shyer and more alive. Again, a man’s rigid facial expression does not respond as a woman’s does to the faces it encounters...A large portion of the ‘tact’ of women has the same basis. This affectability has often been brought as a reproach against women, even by their own sex, but we must remember that to a large extent it is physiological...(22-23)

The assumption of women’s submission, or at least their physiological readiness to submission, makes the strength of Helen Vaughan’s power to influence the men of

London’s upper classes all the more disturbing. In effect, it feminizes them, and flips the expected gender power dynamics. I would argue that Helen’s power to emasculate provides much of the horror of the narrative, at least when told through the perspective that Machen provides us: that of the upper-class London male. I would also argue that the manner of their deaths further emasculates these men. Mr. Blank, whose death is central to “The Paul Street Case” is said to have died of fright, “of sheer, awful terror” (Machen

26). Charles Herbert, whose destitution in the wake of his marriage to Helen first alerts

Villiers to her person, is said to have died of starvation (29). Three other men hang themselves mysteriously, despite all being “rich, prosperous, and to all appearance in love with the world” (38). While dying of fright clearly implies a lack of masculine strength, so too does dying due to one’s inability to provide for oneself. And of course suicide betrays an inability to cope with life’s struggle, a “giving up” that is decidedly unmanly. Helen’s power to emasculate puts her in good company among fin de siècle literature’s most prominent female gothic “monsters.” Referring to the seductresses of

Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) and of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Kelly Hurley

40 writes that “their inappropriately aggressive femininity requires as object an effeminized version of masculinity” (203).

Fear surrounding an “increasingly” effeminized British male were tied not just to worries about changing gender roles but to what has been coined “invasion anxiety.”

Britain’s diminutive stature in relation to its colonial holdings is part of the root of invasion anxiety: in 1891 the Empire’s total square mileage was 11 million, while the

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland only covered 121,658 square miles

(Ferguson 195). The concern underlying invasion anxiety was the idea that Britain’s cultural and moral integrity was threatened by the arrival of foreign peoples with low moral character from the colonial reaches. Invasion anxiety has been referred to as “a kind of paranoid dopplegänger to the brash confidence of jingoism…[the] price to be paid for ceaseless imperial expansion” (Bulfin 3). In 1892, the President of the

International Congress of Orientalists summed up the jingoist zeitgeist, born of a three decade period in which the British Empire had quadrupled its landmass at the same time that its population had risen to 88 million: “It is simply dazzling to think of the few thousands of Englishmen ruling the millions of human beings in India, in Africa, in

America, and in Australia” (Bulfin 4-5). Fears that the representatives of these “millions” would descend on Britain were prevalent; the fairly diverse population of London, as well as its position of England’s capital, made it a prime location for these anxieties to play out.

The city of London has been understood as a particularly effective theatre in which to stage dramas of invasion anxiety or the “imperial gothic.” The imperial gothic

“describes dangerous encounters between [the] Englishman and the colonized subject,” and the anonymity of London's cityscape allows the deviant (perverts, foreigners, criminals, etc.) to “conceal and remake their identities at will” (Hurley 194-195). Machen himself lived out much of his life in London. It is interesting to note that while much of

The Great God Pan’s setting reflects Machen’s later life, he spent his formative years wandering the Welsh countryside and living a life largely parallel to that of the unnamed female protagonist of “The White People.” In 1883 Machen moved to London in order to take a job in journalism, and the author spent much of his early time in the city simply wandering its streets in a fashion reminiscent of his early ramblings in rural Wales. In

London, Machen found himself “shocked and morbidly compelled by the squalor and crudity of [his] surroundings” (Camara 11). Of course, Machen, being in a state of penury, did not experience the same London as Helen’s upper-class victims did. Machen represents London as a place of mystery and throughout the book this sense of possibility becomes increasingly terrible as the death toll increases. Early in the text Villiers, inspired by his chance meeting with Herbert, speaks of London as the “city of

Resurrections” and also references the city’s more popular reputation as “the city of encounters” (21). During the meeting a few pages later Herbert goes on to warn Villiers that “you may think you know life, and London, and what goes on, day and night, in this dreadful city; for all I can say you may have heard the talk of the vilest, but I tell you you have no conception of what I know…” (Machen 23). Descriptions of London intensify throughout the novella- while ‘encounters’ and ‘resurrections’ both hint at mystery,

Herbert’s reference to the ‘vilest’ implies horrors. Herbert’s assessment is particularly

42 ominous, and sets the reader up to understand that the subject of this novella, Helen, is capable of evils that are far beyond the normal level of criminality one would expect in any metropolitan city. A little later in the tale Austin reads a newspaper account of Mr.

Crashaw’s suicide, and after setting down the paper “in mute horror” he speaks of

London as the “a city of nightmares” (41). These increasingly terrifying allusions to the city underscore the heightening of Helen’s threat among the upper-class London gentlemen that frame the narrative perspective of The Great God Pan. By the narrative’s end, there is another reference, this time in newsprint, to “the West End Horror” (41), which also evokes earlier allusions to the Whitechapel killings (38). It’s important to note that The Great God Pan was written almost in the midst of those killings: Jack the Ripper and his work would still have been fresh in the public imagination. The Whitechapel murders invoked the issues of gender, class, and race (initially they fueled anti-semitism).

Historically speaking, fin de siècle London is a gendered space, as well as one fraught by the rhetoric of the “dangerous foreigner,” making it a particularly poignant playground for Helen Vaughan.

The rise of the woman shopper saw a kind of reimagining of London as “an increasingly female-controlled public sphere” (Smith 9). While the female shopper may have controlled the public sphere, women’s positions in the household meant that many of their activities would revolve around the procuring of goods, food, etc. for that household. Even if their activities did somewhat upset assumptions about public and private spheres, their activities aren’t as blatantly threatening as those of Helen Vaughan, which largely revolve around her own desires. We aren’t exactly privy to Helen’s desires,

43 but it is implied that they are at least partially sexual in nature; what’s more, we know that her movements in pursuit of that pleasure vacillate between the hangouts of London society and “one of the meanest and most disreputable streets in Soho” (Machen 44).

During the Victorian period Soho was best known for its prostitutes and music halls, the more upper class residents having departed after the cholera outbreak in 1854. This is one of the textual clues that alerts us to the likelihood that Helen’s crimes are sexual in nature. As I will detail later in this chapter, Helen is also associated with locations that lie within the “Sotadic Zone,” a geographical region whose latitudes were thought to predispose one to “pathological love” (Burton 204). Helen descends upon the city, bringing with her moral corruption and death. She is an invader, and her movements between the upper and lower echelons of the city imply the spreading of a kind of contagion; she spreads moral corruption like it was an STD.

While the extent to which Helen’s identity as a “colonized subject” will be debated a little later in this chapter, Helen is inarguably an invader who changes her identity and utilizes the anonymity of London to do so. After her ruination of Charles

Herbert, Helen, as Mrs. Beaumont, is later found to be living on Ashley Street in London

(Machen 33-34). Discussing the case of Helen Herbert nèe Vaughan, Villiers tells Austin in an ominous tone that “She will come back to London...depend upon it” (36). Of course, unbeknownst to them not only is Helen already back in London under the assumed name Mrs. Beaumont, but they have actually strolled by her house and have admired her draperies. As noted earlier, Helen’s ability to “pass” as something other than what she is, a morally corrupt invader (in the eyes of London society), marks her as

44 incredibly dangerous. Helen is not from that city, but was born in

Breconshire/Brecknockshire and raised in Caermaen, which are both in South Wales: she represents a kind of “marginal” or “peripheral” identity that is contrasted against that of those living in London, which to the imperial British mindset must’ve seemed the center of the world. In terms of gothic fiction, the conflict between metropolitan and regional identities has been present in the genre going back to its beginning with Horace

Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), and scholars have seen this binary as structurally important to the genre, much like the contrast of the past against the present

(Hughes 15) Helen, importantly, spends much of her young life in the Welsh countryside far from the “civilized” society of London. As I shall explore later in this chapter, young

Helen is basically left to her own devices in the Welsh forest and, unsupervised by human teachers, she is allowed to grow as wild as any tree in the wood. It has been written that

“[The] Gothic...arguably embodies a consistent but often understated commitment to the troubled coexistence of the regional and the metropolitan, to both margin and centre as a tense arena in which the relative values of each may be variously exposed, tested, and revalidated” (15). In terms of “relative” values, Helen’s identity is somewhat jumbled. I would argue that instead of trying to pin down her specific ethnicity and national allegiances, it is more useful to think of her in terms of her “associations.”

One of the more troubling for the men of London is her association with South

America. After the death of Charles Herbert, whose ruin initially draws Villiers’s attention to Helen’s crimes, Helen disappears, but later reappears as Mrs. Beaumont, who is said to have come from South America (Machen 34). Later of course, it is later

45 revealed to Villers and company that Helen and Mrs. Beaumont are the same woman.

While we know little about her time in Buenos Aires, we do find out that while there she

(apparently) infected another Englishman in their circle. Mr. Meyrick, a painter and friend to Austin (Machen 35). This is revealed after Austin received a packet of drawings sent by an English doctor who attended Meyrick shortly before his death. Depicting a bacchic orgy, the illustrations are scandalous, and Helen’s involvement is implicated by the inclusion of a sketched portrait bearing her resemblance (36). Importantly, the entire continent of South America lies in what contemporary geographer, cartographer, ethnologist and writer Sir Richard Burton called “The Sotadic Zone.” This “zone” was theorized to include all of South America, much of North American, the South Seas, the uppermost area of Africa as well as meridional France, Greece, and Italy. In his 1886 publication detailing his theory, Burton wrote that within this zone “vice is popular and endemic;” here, the masculine and feminine blended and men became passive while women became active (Burton 204). Burton argued that “the Sotadic zone” was

“necessary to explain the fact of this pathological love extending over the greater portion of the habitable world, without any apparent connection of race or media, from the polished Greek to the cannibal Tupi of the Brazil” (204). As we may see, Helen’s time in

South America automatically associates her not only with deviant sex but with over- active women who emasculate the men they encounter. The figure of Helen Vaughan and her association with South America and other “peripheral” spaces is an illustrative example of just how interrelated many of the late-Victorian theories about gender, race and deviance really were. As this chapter has explored, there is a lot of anxiety around the

46 idea of contact with people from other lands as well as with women whose masculine traits are sure to effeminize the British male. Helen has a number of connections to marginal places outside of London, the center of the British Empire. As I’ve noted, she grew up in Wales, peripheral to the Empire, and her travels to South America associate her with the dreaded and deviant Sotadic Zone. Her complexion is described as olive,

“pale, clear olive, and her features were strongly marked, and of a somewhat foreign character” (Machen 17). This is indicative of Helen’s mixed parentage, and a subtle reminder of her father, the God Pan of Greek mythology (his Roman equivalent is

Faunus). Because of her complexion, Helen has in the past claimed Italian as well as

English parentage (Machen 22). Incidentally, Greece (and Italy) are in the Sotadic zone.

Helen is associated with Wales, but even more interestingly, she is associated with areas of Wales that have Roman connections. She was raised in Caermaen which is

Machen’s fictionalized version of Caerleon. Caermaen appears in many of his fictions including The Hill of Dreams (1907), and like its real-life counterpart Caerleon, it is home to prominent Roman ruins. While Helen was born in Breconshire (or

Brecknockshire), one of the historic Welsh counties, she is sent to live in

Caermaen/Caerleon with instructions that she is largely to be left alone to wander the wood; Helen’s communication with supernatural forces had by that time become a

“constant, ...incarnate horror” to Dr. Raymond, prompting his action (54). In light of the location’s Roman ruins it is no wonder that Raymond would choose Caermaen for Helen.

Yet, there are also implications that Caermaen is, or was, home to another deity, Nodens, a Celtic god with a variety of associations (53). Clarke encounters a small square

47 monument of white stone which includes an inscription to the god. We never truly know,

I suppose, who or what it is that Helen communicates with; the most direct vision of

Helen interacting with an entity is in Dr. Phillips’s account of Helen’s girlhood in Wales.

Trevor saw “Helen V. playing on the grass with a ‘strange naked man’” (18). Later references to this monument adds a layer of ambiguity that aids in the story’s effect: Are

Pan and Nodens one and the same? And who was the “strange naked man?” It is also interesting to ponder, in light of Helen’s association with Wales, the extent to which she may be considered a “colonized” subject. It is important to note the level of difference that existed between Wales and England in the mid-late nineteenth century. From an

English perspective, much of the Welsh’s “otherness” hung on their language difference; this was especially strongly felt by the English capitalists who brought industry to Wales and found that almost none of their potential workforce spoke English (Aaron 5). By the time Machen wrote The Great God Pan it was largely accepted that Welsh culture and language would eventually die out; the influx of English speakers in industrialized areas, as well as education regulations which effectively suppressed the speaking of Welsh in schools, seemed insurmountable (5).

While theorizing Irish history and literature through the postcolonial lens is generally accepted, there is still some debate about the extent to which it is appropriate to categorize Welsh culture as ‘postcolonial’ (3). I argue that the temporality of Machen’s text with the slow die-off of Welsh language and culture, along with Helen’s other ethnic

“associations,” makes colonial frameworks appropriate. What’s more, invasion anxiety need not originate on another continent. Moriarty, one of the best known villains in

English literature is marked by an “invasive Irishness” (his name is an anglicanization of

O'Muircheartaigh) linked to a criminality that terrorizes London (Bulfin 105). It has been said of Moriarty that “the secret nature of Moriarty’s criminal organization mirrors that of

Fenian and Irish-American militant separatist organizations” (105). The terror Moriarty releases upon the dominant London upper-class is not altogether different than that which

Helen Vaughan is capable of provoking, even if their methods differ. Perhaps from a

London perspective it is more frightening to conceive of the possibility that colonial subjects who are both closer to home and less visibly marked as “Other” might be capable of infiltrating London society. The nineteenth century saw a fascination with the idea that one could define, scientifically, the various people of the British empire (Bohata

19). One need only peruse Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867) to understand that both the Irish and the Welsh were thought of as temperamentally and intellectually different from the English. The privileging of science post-Enlightenment as well as the emergence of a number of popular pseudosciences (chiefly craniology, phrenology, physiognomy, and physiological anthropology) meant that in the nineteenth century the construction and maintenance of racial and gendered Others would largely rest on “scientific” bases (Bohata 19). It is important to note, however, that while science helped differentiate and delineate certain categories, it also helped to dissolve others, to the discomfort of many Victorians.

Darwinian evolution changed the way Victorians thought about themselves; it altered their sense of divine origination. As Kelly Hurley puts it, Darwin’s theories

“destroyed a comfortably anthropocentric worldview: human beings were just a species

49 like any other, developed by chance rather than providential design, and given the mutability of species, humans might well devolve or otherwise metamorphose into some repulsive abhuman form” (195). The late-Victorian authors of gothic fiction became particularly interested in portraying the horrifying possibilities of such a metamorphosis.

It has been argued that this accounts for the emergence of fungus in certain tales of horror: its plasticity mirrors the “essential formlessness of life in the wake of Darwinism”

(Camara 9). It also undermines the idea that humankind emanated from God (10). So, too, did geological discovery and the concept of “deep time”; defined as “the emergent sense, in the wake of modern geological discovery, of "an almost incomprehensible

[temporal] immensity" which succeeded in “demolishing the idea of a young earth, ruled by human will within days of its origin” (Worth 225). Deep time and evolutionary ideas merge to undermine the very integrity of the human body. In many horror tales the undermining of the human body’s integrity, of its distinctness and ability to be easily categorized, is used to create monsters. In The Philosophy of Horror, Noël Carroll theorizes that gothic monsters are largely created either through spatial fission or temporal fusion. Temporal fusion, which is responsible for characters like Dr. Jekyll and

Mr. Hyde, “divides characters in time,” while dopplegängers are created through spatial fission, or the multiplication of characters in space (Carroll 47). Continuing, he writes that “the fantastic biologies of horrific monsters are, to a surprising extent, reducible to the symbolic structures of fusion and fission” (47). How might we describe the death scene of Helen Vaughan in The Great God Pan? In dying, she undergoes horrifying metamorphoses: temporal fusion might best describe it, though the speed with which she

50 changes from woman to man, from slime to whatsit, is infinitely faster than Dr. Jekyll’s ill-fated transformations. As Helen dies she turns dark like ink, and slowly her tissues begin to dissolve; the attending doctor’s account of the ordeal reads that “the skin, and the flesh, and the muscles, and the bones, and the firm structure of the human body that I had thought to be unchangeable, and permanent as adamant, began to melt and dissolve”

(Machen 50).

Continuing, it is written that Helen’s body “waver[ed] from sex to sex, dividing itself from itself, and then again reunited. Then I saw the body descend to the beasts whence it ascended…” (50). As Jane Aaron observes, the transformation and appearance of primeval slime is particularly grotesque to one who believes in the body’s immutability, permanence, and “firm structure” (77). In death, Helen’s structure is anything but “firm,” and the gelatinous horror of her dissolution mirrors primeval slime.

Helen’s swift transformation from woman to man, notably, echoes some of the points made so far about how she upsets gendered categories and the hierarchical thinking that largely assumed, based on biology, that men were more capable of leading the world.

Helen’s transformation also evokes the evolution of that thought process that was occuring in Machen’s time. A few years after the release of The Great God Pan poet, philosopher, and activist Edward Carpenter wrote “The Intermediate Sex,” and in that text he theorizes that the masculine and feminine of the human race represented opposing poles, rather than distinct categories. Referring anecdotally to “masculine” women and

“feminine” men, Carpenter writes that “nature, it might appear, in mixing the elements which go to compose each individual, does not always keep her two groups of

51 ingredients-- which represent the two sexes- properly apart, but often throws them crosswise in a somewhat baffling manner, now this way and that”; he continues on, writing that this mixture is not only natural but necessary, for “if a severe distinction of elements were always maintained the two sexes would soon drift into far latitudes and absolutely cease to understand each other” (Carpenter 48). Carpenter, in illuminating the many varieties of possible gender expression, undermines the discourse of separate spheres and of “women’s places” in much the same way that Helen Vaughan does. Even before her death and her many metamorphoses she exhibits a marked liminality, defying clear categorization at every turn. After the death of Charles Herbert, those who saw

Helen at the police court remarked that “she was at once the most beautiful woman and the most repulsive [woman] they had ever set eyes on” (Machen 26). Her ability to

“pass” for respectable also begets all sorts of fascinating contrasts. Speaking of Helen’s association with Soho, Villiers remarks that “I should think the worst den in London far too good for her” (44). Yet, as Mrs. Beaumont, both her interior and exterior decorating was extraordinary enough to earn Austin’s praise of “one of the pleasantest houses of the season” (34). She can pass for a lady, she can pass as a competent domestic. Referring again to Dr. Bohata’s assertion, it is the invisibility of Helen’s liminality that makes her so dangerous.

It is also important to observe that Helen is the daughter of another liminal figure,

Pan, whose physicality makes him “the very archetype of therianthropic blending”

(Worth 224). After Darwin, hybrid creatures like Pan, and other man-beasts, serve a function in evoking contemporary fears about atavism; it has also been argued that in this

52 novella Pan serves much the same function as “the little people” in Machen’s other fiction, troubling the discrete conceptual categories developed in the “shallow historiography of the period” (224-225). In a future chapter I will go into greater detail about Machen’s little people and their functional use as I discuss the fate of the unnamed female protagonist in “The White People.” But for now I return to the qualities that make

Helen monstrous in the eyes of London society. In death she displays an explicit liminality that is only revealed judiciously throughout the text; she flouts gender as well as the division between human and animal which had seemed so solid before the advent of Darwinian thought. Yet, despite her outrageousness, Helen is also an example of an archetype of womanhood that reveals quite a lot about common conceptions. In the late nineteenth century, the “bacchante,” or female follower of Bacchus, was having a moment in the arts, and I argue that Helen represents a kind of bacchante-figure.

Contemporary assumptions about women’s biology intersected with the representations of the bacchante. Patriarchal thinking that was responsible for limiting women’s opportunities in the nineteenth century was largely informed by biological essentialism, or the belief that women were born with particular characteristics, most of them inferior to those that men were graced with (Tyson 81-82). Victorian-era scientific thought saw women as “imperfectly human,” and they were marked by instability and a lack of intellectualism; more to the point, they were seen as “more animal.” (Hurley 202).

Conversely, “the man should...appear as a fully human subject, powerful...self-sufficient

[,and] capable of transcending the human body” (202). Again, I refer to Helen’s unnatural ability to influence the men around her; the veiled references to her influence imply

53 sexual involvement. While her male companions should be able to resist perverse animal urges, Helen is able to transcend their will and self-control. Female bodies, on the other hand, were considered “inherently pathological, as was female sexuality” (Bohata 120).

Of course, the animalism of the female body, and of female sexuality more specifically, is perfectly represented in the image of the bacchante. There is one particular scene in

The Great God Pan that explicitly connects Helen to the bacchante of art, though her connection to Pan would be enough of an indicator. During her youth in Caermaen, an incident occurs in which a village boy, Trevor, witnesses Helen “playing on the grass with a ‘strange naked man’” (Machen 18). This incident eventually leads to the loss of the boy’s reason. That bacchic scene resurfaces later in the sketches of Mr. Meyrick,

Helen’s ill-fated companion in Buenos Aires, discussed earlier in this chapter (35). The persistence of this image at the turn of the century has been linked explicitly to the contemporary assumptions of sexual science: “the omnipresent bacchante in the visual arts around 1900 was nothing but the graphic representation of the ‘bad’ woman’s facile renunciation of her maternal duties, which, as Lombroso and Ferrero has pointed out, were the only restraints holding back the release of woman’s natural tendency to criminality” (Dijkstra 277). Citing Lombroso’s theories, Dijkstra continues to reference contemporary assumptions about “the degenerative effect of the sexual impulse in women” also drawing connections between the bacchante, representations of the satyrs, degeneration theory, and racial othering (277).

Writing about the remarkable commonalities shared by a variety of gothic Others

(women, Africans, Jews, etc), Kirsti Bohata understands these similarities as the

54 inevitable product of their common origin “in the projection of the fears and fantasies of dominant patriarchal, white European society” (122). The works of German artist Arnold

Böcklin are particularly illustrative of the “Darwinian consciousness” that tended to project animalism onto women as well as racial and religious minorities: often his fauns were imbued with the grossly exaggerated features of Jewish and African caricature while also exhibiting posture more appropriate to monkeys and other assorted apes

(Dijkstra 280). While the satyrs of the visual arts blatantly exhibited these “backward” physical features, the bacchante who accompanied them were generally fully developed women. Their fraternization with primitive man in art betrays their atavism and inferiority to modern man: “whereas once they might have been considered more human than man’s ancestors, they had in the intervening centuries of male evolution proved to be incapable of evolving with him” (280). While the Victorian ideal of the “Angel in the

House” portrays a woman who has transcended the animalistic--- a woman who is seemingly without sexual desire, despite her having ushered children into the world.

Stereotypes of especially “othered” and “degenerate” classes of women reveal the depths to which women who don’t live up to the ideal were maligned. Scholars have noted that the similarities in the portrayal of the alleged hyper-sexualities of white witches and

African women betray the level to which mainstream society was horrified by female sexuality; while African women were charged with having intercourse with apes and gorillas, witches were believed to make their pact with the devil due to their desire for him and his two foot long, scaled penis (Bohata 122). Helen’s overt sexuality and her denial of motherhood, the only lifestyle (outside of nunhood) capable of saving the

55 female animal from a life of degeneration evokes the bacchante, and a host of earlier assumptions about female sexuality. The Malleus Maleficarum (1486), for instance, describes a (purportedly) common practice in which witches remove and keep captive a number of penises for their later pleasure, keeping them alive by feeding them oatmeal periodically (Bohata 122). As noted in a previous chapter, Machen would surely have encountered the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) in his catalogue work; there are also passages describing the practice of the young protagonist of Machen’s “The

White People” that bear striking similarities to those described in the Malleus (Taylor 7).

There is also a more explicit reference to the witch in The Great God Pan: shocked at the horror and degradation contained in Meyrick’s sketches, Villiers states that be became

“absorbed, in spite of himself, in the frightful Walpurgis Night of evil, strange monstrous evil, that the dead artist had set forth in hard black and white” (Machen 36). Worth’s endnotes on the subject refers to an altering of the term Walpurgisnacht, an unholy

Sabbath coinciding with May Day, during which the witch was at the apex of her power

(355) Later writings would seek to represent the conceptual links between female sexuality, ancient rites, and woman’s assumed closeness to the natural world more positively. In 1918 eugenicist and campaigner for women’s rights, Marie Stopes, wrote of women that “welling up in her are the wonderful tides, scented and enriched by the myriad experiences of the human race from its ancient days of leisure and flower- wreathed love-making, urging her to transports and to self -expressions, were the man but ready to take the first step in the initiative or to recognize and welcome it in her” (117).

In a slightly later age, Helen’s sexuality and her connections to the ancient world and the

56 earth might have been celebrated, not reviled or feared. Reading Helen in Marie Stopes’s description of the feminine underscores the potential tragedy of Helen Vaughan.

As we can see, the image of woman as bacchante is an evolving figure, but the image’s cultural instrumentality during the fin de siècle was largely related to fear of women’s sexuality and degeneration theory. In this chapter thus far we have explored the identities Helen is saddled with by the dominant culture of late nineteenth century

London: Helen as Bacchante, Helen as Gender Nonconformist, Helen as Foreign Invader.

Thus far this chapter has explored the acute threat posed by Helen to the dominant male society of London; in light of extreme apprehension about gender and female sexuality as well as invasion anxiety her death was seemingly necessary. It should be pointed out as well that Machen’s text, as published, elicited both shock and disgust (Navarette 188). It is not a stretch to assume that if Helen had lived, had she not been punished for her corruption, Machen’s tale would have been intolerable to the reading masses. I would like at this point to transition to a discussion of Helen’s humanity. There are sections in

(and outside of) the text in which Machen appears willing to make room for a more humane and well-rounded portrayal of Helen Vaughan.

Throughout this chapter I have often qualified my description of The Great God

Pan’s events with phrases like “it appears” due to the secondhand nature of the narrative.

Were it not for the horrifying death of Helen and the descriptions of her melting body, her “deviance” would largely be formed by what is essentially hearsay. In fact, that extraordinary death is seemingly the most “concrete” proof of her extraordinary parentage. Yet, we must note that Dr. Robert Matheson’s description is not an official

57 coroner’s report. In fact, it was written in much-abbreviate Latin and was terribly difficult to decipher and translate (Machen 49). I make note of this peculiarity primarily as a way to point out that in the “case” of Helen Vaughan, even the most concrete of “evidence” is obscured and filtered, in this case through language difference and a process of decryption that occurred some time after the author’s death. While Helen’s perverse crimes are largely detailed in fragmentary documents, it is important to note that Machen chooses to narrate the opening of the novella in third person; this imbues the opening, detailing the experiment leading to Helen’s unnatural birth, with a sense of neutrality that isn’t present in the many letters and documents that make up much of the text. Machen’s choice to “front-load” Helen’s birth story is in itself a way to pre-condition the reading audience to a level of sympathy. As I have written of in other sections of this chapter,

Machen’s incredibly sympathetic description of Mary underscores the cruelty of Dr.

Raymond’s experimentation. Then there are the veiled references to the possibility that

Raymond had sexual contact with Mary before the experimentation; conceivably, Helen could be Dr. Raymond’s child in a biological sense, even if the “unholy union” of Mary and Pan imbued the girl with supernatural qualities. Due to the narrative confusion of The

Great God Pan, the exact details of Helen’s parentage are, in some ways, impossible to ferret out; I’m also not convinced these details matter, at least in the sense that her parentage doesn’t change how Machen’s narrators view her and the threat she poses.

However, as I have stated, Machen made a choice to start his narrative with a focus on

Mary, an unimpeachably sympathetic character. Raymond’s exploitation, and some might argue murder, of Mary, a lower class woman, evokes the class issues of the Whitechapel

58 murders. Early press reports of the Whitechapel murders painted a picture of Jack the

Ripper as a “mad doctor” of the upper classes (Smith 7). Those murders, committed against lower-class East End prostitutes, lived and worked in “gutters” not dissimilar to those from which Mary was plucked. I would argue that by shedding doubt on the reliability and morality of Dr. Raymond so early in the text, Machen very subtly brings into doubt the characters of the other upper-class gentlemen who frame Helen’s story. As

I say, this is very subtle, but it works to add to the tension of the narrative.

Earlier, I invoked Fred Botting’s assessment of modern attitudes toward monstrosity, characterized as “love all monsters, love your monster as yourself” (4). As modern consumers of the Gothic we are more apt to question the motives of Dr.

Raymond and feel sympathetic toward Helen Vaughan; however, as I noted, Machen’s text itself may lead us in that direction. Ross Crean’s operatic adaptation of The Great

God Pan, which premiered at the Chicago Fringe Opera in the Spring of 2018, furthered

Machen’s sympathetic streak. In his review of the opera, Nicolas Granger-Taylor notes that Crean portrays Helen with sympathy; emphasizing Dr. Raymond’s cruel abuse of

Helen’s mother, Mary, Crean’s opera paints Helen as “a victim of man’s injustice to women and to Nature” who was “born out of the gross extremes of Science into a world where women, unless married themselves, are all but chattels to men” (47). Granger-

Taylor may be overstating the case a bit, especially in light of the very real chattel slavery that had only recently been abolished on the North American continent. Yet it is true that

Dr. Raymond’s use of Mary’s body is patently exploitative, and Machen portrays it as such. In writing his opera Crean didn’t invent Helen’s origin story; he merely emphasized

59 it as a way to get closer to Helen Vaughan, a character consistently obscured by other perspectives.

What Helen reveals to the men that drives them to suicide and other depths of degredation is never wholly disclosed, yet, we do get the sense that is related to sexuality.

It has been suggested by Dr. Fred Botting that Helen’s revelations are “secret forces at the heart of things, forces that should, the narrator moralizes, remain buried, no doubt because their sexual nature is linked to female desire” (Aaron 76). In terms of Helen’s fate, I think it is the strong drive of London society and masculinist culture to keep the force of female sexuality, as well as non-conforming gender expression, suppressed that necessitates Helen’s downfall. Yet, it must be noted that Machen is not unsympathetic, even if he is realistic about the kind of end a woman like Helen Vaughan would experience. As I have noted in a previous chapter, Machen himself was married to a

“New Woman,” Amy Hogg, who seems to have been a great influence on him. While any reading of Amy’s character in Helen would be highly speculative, Machen’s narrative does point to the fact that Helen, as a New Woman, is not wholly monstrous. The ending section of The Great God Pan has, accurately, been entitled “Fragments,” and consists of a manuscript written by the doctor present during Helen Vaughan’s death as well as letters exchanged between Clarke and Dr. Raymond. This section, followed by the tag

“THE END,” is then followed by a curious epitaph which reads, “NOTE.--Helen

Vaughan was born August 5th, 1865, at the Red House, Breconshire, and died on July

25th, 1888, in her house in a street off Piccadilly, called Ashley Street in the story”

(Machen 54). Machen’s choice to place Helen’s epitaph outside the narrative, on the

60 other side of “the end,” seems to indicate a more “unfiltered” assessment of Helen’s humanity. As mentioned previously, the narrative of The Great God Pan almost exclusively consists of the conversations and interpolated documents of London’s male upper-class: Villiers, Austin, Clarke, Dr. Raymond, and Dr. Matheson. Their assessment of Helen as non-human is reinforced throughout the main narrative. Referring to his purchase of hempen cord and his ultimatum to Helen, Villiers tells Austin that “I shall offer a choice, and leave the thing alone with this cord in a locked room for fifteen minutes. If when we go in it is not done, I shall call the nearest policeman” (Machen 48).

Villiers is willing to facilitate her death, but unlike Machen, he will not acknowledge her personhood. He has perhaps been influenced by an earlier statement made by Charles

Herbert. Upon inquiring as to his ex-wife’s name, Herbert tells Villiers that while he knew her as Helen Vaughan “[he] didn’t think she had a name...Only human beings have names” (23). The narrative of the novella is constructed by a series of subjectivities that see Helen as an inhuman monster, but Machen, through his inclusion of this “out of text” epitaph goes some way in reversing, or at least mitigating, the condemnation of the dominant narrative. Like his choice to include a third-person account of Helen’s birth at the opening of the story, their relative lack of filter imbues these sections with an air of authority missing from the interpolated documents.

Despite indications of Machen’s sympathy, The Great God Pan fits squarely within a gothic tradition noted for re-establishing moral or cultural norms before the final page. Helen Vaughan is no more, her unconventionality and threat extinguished by

61 representatives of the culture whose dominance she threatens. Referencing the tension inherent in the Gothic’s conservative “turn,” Botting writes:

Transgression enables limits and values to be reaffirmed, terror and horror eliciting rejection and disgust; on the other hand, it draws eyes and imaginations, in fascination, to peep behind the curtain of limitation in the hope of glimpsing illicit excitements made all the more alluring for bearing the stamp of mystery or prohibition.(2)

The structure of The Great God Pan, as well as the squeamishness of Machen’s narrators, often leads to an elision of detail, making Botting’s reference to the “glimpse” all the more appropriate. Some scholars have put forth the idea that Machen appears to be playing with the pruderies of both his characters and his audience (Aaron 77). I would argue that this is an astute observation. What’s more, the tension Machen creates through

The Great God Pan’s patchwork narrative makes narrative certainty regarding Helen’s depravity nearly impossible. The sympathetic gestures Machen sprinkles throughout the tale then increase this tension. In my analysis of “The White People” I will further explore how narrative perspective and interpolated documents affect our reading of a text. That narrative, I argue, reverses the The Great God Pan’s narrative perspective: while the reading audience is forced to understand Helen Vaughan through a series of secondhand conversations, letters, and documents, we come to know the unnamed protagonist of “The White People” through her journal entries. That character, inarguably, has an advantage unavailable to the ill-fated and hardly-known Helen

Vaughan. Despite differences in narrative proximity, the young female protagonist of

“The White People” appears to engage in occult practices similar to that of Helen

Vaughan. As I wrote about in the introduction to my thesis, H.P. Lovecraft even assumed

62 that both women were involved with the same deity (90-91). This presents the interesting possibility that the heightened level of horror in The Great God Pan, as compared to

“The White People,” is almost completely attributable to narrative framing. As I continue my analysis of Machen’s work I will remain attentive to the power of perspective in conditioning the reader’s understanding of narrative events.

IV. Patriarchal Constraint and the Influence of Folklore on Machen’s Works

The influence of folklore on the writings of Arthur Machen have not been particularly well studied. This is perhaps due to an overarching dearth of scholarship on

“The White People” as well as “The Red Hand” and a number of other tales which appear to take from folk and faery lore. Most scholars who introduce “The White People” note its apparent reliance on folklore, and Machen himself claims to have cobbled the tale together “from the odds and ends of folklore mixed with pure inventions” (Sweetser 28).

One striking description of “The White People” referred to it as “a conversation on the nature of evil filtered through a wild stream of consciousness narrative of Welsh folk tales and occult experience, the lore an inseparable blend of authenticity and fabrication”

(Taylor 2). In light of this thesis’s primary aim - to establish and interrogate the likely influences that led the author to end the lives of his female occultists - I feel it is appropriate to explore the role of folklore in Machen’s writing.

This chapter will largely concern “The White People” rather than The Great God

Pan simply because the influence of folklore is more explicit in the former; while this is partly due to the difference in perspective between the two tales, “The White People” also includes in-set folktales told by the nurse of the story’s unnamed protagonist. It is important to note that while The Great God Pan is a story told from “outside” the point of view of the female occultist, “The White People '' is largely told through the journal of the young practitioner. While there are indications that the young girl in “The White

People '' omits the more dangerous secrets from The Green Book, the audience largely

64 begins to understand the nature of the secret knowledge she explores, even if we aren’t privy to exact methods. As a literary device, the journal grants us access to her interiority; this makes the connection between folk knowledge and the occult much more explicit in

“The White People.'' It has been put forth by none other than H.P. Lovecraft that the deity of The Great God Pan and “The White People” is one and the same (91). Whether or not we come to this conclusion, I feel that these two tales make striking companion pieces because they seemingly tell a similar story from different vantage points. While other chapters focused on The Great God Pan and “The White People” will look to specific literary devices used by Machen and their significance, here I want to analyze the author’s interaction with folklore. First taking a broad view, this chapter will center on

Machen’s interest in folklore before plunging into specifics. My primary aim with this section is to establish the extent to which Machen was influenced by folklore and to examine how that folklore treats women who gain unusual knowledge and transgress boundaries between the human world and that of the fairies.

In terms of folklore’s influence, it is important to note that Machen is writing during a period commonly referred to as “The Celtic Dawn” or, alternately, “The Irish

Literary Revival”; this period saw a renewed interest in the culture, art, and folklore of the Celtic peoples. Due to the involvement of prominent writers like W.B. Yeats, focus was often squarely on the Irish. The movement is worth mentioning in this chapter due to its treatment of folklore. Luminaries like Lady Gregory and Yeats spent immense energy collecting folklore from across the Irish countryside, believing that those tales, which

Yeats saw as a kind of storehouse for inherited wisdom, could potentially provide a

65 sound foundation for a renewed sense of Irish national identity (Taylor 6). Wales, importantly, was not so visibly represented during the Celtic Dawn. However, there are important Welsh folklorists collecting during the fin de siécle, such as John Rhŷs. Rhŷs’s work was ahead of its time in its attention to detail. He anticipates the modern conventions of folklore collection, writing down the exact wording of his informant’s tales, the setting in which the informant originally heard it, and the informant’s personal information like place of birth, age, occupation, etc. (Wood, “Folk Narrative Research,”

30). Despite the work of Welsh folklorists like Rhŷs, Welsh folktales were not generally used with quite the same nationalist fervor as that of the Irish. Moreover, while Machen enjoyed the poetry of writers like Yeats and Fiona Macleod, another luminary of the movement, he didn’t go in for the goals of the Celtic Dawn, and he never sought consciously to capitalize on his Welsh ancestry as he wrote his works (Taylor 6-7).

In the past Machen’s critics have condemned him as a self-hating Celt who

“want[ed] to be English” but “fe[lt] contaminated by Welshness” (Valentine 138). If one held this perception of Machen, it would be simple to explain away his disapproval of the

Celtic Dawn, but I argue that this line lacks nuance. The possibility has been raised that it was the “fad” for Celtic matters that bothered Machen rather than the aims of the proponents of the Celtic Dawn themselves (Taylor 9). It is possible that, similar to his dislike of Spiritualism, Machen’s distaste came from his feeling that the vogue for

Celticism was wont to undermine true wonders related to Celtic mysticism. As I noted in a previous chapter, Machen would later become engrossed by the possibility that the holy grail, and its attendant mysteries, resided in Aberystwyth, mid-Wales in the form of the

Nanteos Cup (Cwpan Nanteos). While Machen didn’t choose to become involved in the

Celtic Dawn, and didn’t collect the folklore of his native Wales, he was well-versed in folklore study and convention, as evidenced by an article he wrote in 1898 for Literature.

This feature sees Machen taking issue with French folklorist Léon Pineau’s interpretations of Northern transformation stories and reveals Machen’s academic prowess in the arena of folk literature (Machen, “Folklore and Legends of the North,” 38-

45). While the author did demonstrate an academic interest in folklore, it is important to take note of the kinds of folktales he likely encountered early in his life as these appear to have been influential in his writing during the fin de siécle.

In his autobiography, Machen emphasized the inspirational qualities of his birthplace on his imagination. Writing of Twm Barlwm, a local hill in Monmouthshire,

Machen writes “I have lost my way and strayed in a very maze of unknown brooks and hills and woods and wild lands in the blackest hours after midnight” (Machen,

Autobiography, 19). The imaginatively fertile qualities of his native Wales have been elaborated on numerous times, and Machen himself asserted that anything he ever wrote that was worthwhile was in part due to the early influence of his native land: “the older I grow the more firmly am I convinced that anything which I may have accomplished in literature is due to the fact that when my eyes were first opened in earliest childhood they had before them the vision of that enchanted Land” (Machen, Autobiography, 18). In terms of folklore, Machen used a variety of British sources. However, it is fascinating to note the very Victorian assumptions the author had concerning the origins of these fairy stories. In one article Machen refers to his understanding of euhemerism and its utility in

67 helping to explain the old stories about fairies. Euhemerism, to put it simply, is the belief that mythology was inspired by real-world historical events; by the end of the nineteenth century, euhemerism was both well known and fairly readily-accepted (Fergus 3).

Machen thought that fairy stories hearkened to a time when an earlier, shorter race of people came into contact with those who now inhabit the British Isles: “much in the old legends may be explained by a reference to this primitive race. The stories of changelings, and captive women, become clear on the supposition that the “fairies” occasionally raided the houses of the invaders” (Machen, “Folklore,” 40-41).

While euhemerism certainly adds a different layer to Machen’s stories, this article also makes mention of an Irish fairy trope with which the author was familiar. As I stated earlier in this thesis, Irish fairy lore was widely disseminated, as folklore went in those days. Machen references the idea of malevolent Irish fairies who must always be referred to by a pleasant name, such as “the fair folk” or “the good people,” precisely because they are evil (Machen, “Folklore,” 40-41). While Machen, who wasn’t fluent in

Cymraeg/Welsh, may or may not have been aware, the Welsh name for the fairies is tylwyth teg, or “Fair Family.” Either way, I find Machen’s allusion to this trope fascinating in light of the plot of “The White People,” a tale in which the nature of fairy is so difficult to grasp. In his assessment of the tale, Wesley Sweetser writes that “the deliberate delicacy and finesse with which [Machen] draws the fine distinction between good and evil is the most remarkable attribute of the work” (Sweetser 25). Sweetser continues, asserting that it is the “uncanny beauty” of the magical interactions which give them the appearance of White Magic, although they are in reality examples of Black

Magic (24) It is important to note here that Sweetser appears to understand all of the magic of “The White People” to be “Black” or evil magic disguised as something benign through the power of its strange beauty. Because of Machen’s narrative strategy in the tale this is hard to confirm, but I’m not convinced the narrative completely disallows the possibility of “White” magic, even if it becomes clear by the story’s end that something has gone terribly wrong and that the young girl has had dealings with malevolent beings.

The Irish trope that sees an obfuscation of the fairy’s true nature as evil is fascinating: to the outsider, or one unlearned in the cultural context and convention, the nature of “the fair folk” could be taken at face value with disastrous results. In terms of Machen’s narrative in “The White People,” I am interested in the possibility that it is the girl’s inexperience that leads to her downfall. By the time she is 13 or 14 and experiences the mystical transcendence she refers to as “The White Day,” her nurse is no longer in her life (Machen, The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories, 270). Conceivably, she lacks guidance, though whether her nurse would have been capable of guiding her craft in a way that would have been safe is debatable. Yet, there is one passage wherein the young girl describes an experience in which her nurse took her to a pool in the wood and she saw the “White People.” This section of the text illustrates that the nurse has a sense of boundary and a sense of fear, even though many of the situational specifics are unclear. As the girl drifted into sleep, her nurse sang and danced around the pool with two fairy women; the girl writes that “Nurse woke me up when she came back, and she was looking something like the lady had looked, so I told her all about it, and asked her why she looked like that” (Machen, The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories, 269).

When the child asks this question, the older woman becomes very frightened, cries, and then threatens to throw the child into “the black pit” if she tells anyone. The true nature of the nurse remains this open question in the narrative: we’re not sure if she could be a fairy herself, or if she might have been granted the power to take on the strange beauty of the fairies by some sort of supreme deity, such as Pan, the Devil, or Gwyn ap Nudd who, as I shall discuss a little later, is associated with the black pit. Does the nurse fear retribution from a supernatural source if the girl lets loose the secret? Conversely, the nurse might have a completely rational fear of human society, and may dread the consequences of her practice becoming known. We never really know the truth of the nurse’s identity or of her exact anxieties, but we do know that in a sense the girl’s practice is “reined in” as long as she is present in her life. However, it is notable that many of the nurse’s folktales are cautionary in nature, and these tales appear to be another way of offering guidance. Who knows whether even a long-practiced witch (or fairy?) is truly capable of navigating the boundary between White and Black magic successfully.

Just as Machen has expressed his belief that euhemerism explains the bulk of old fairy stories, so he accepted that witchcraft existed in the modern era. Machen’s assumption is not very surprising, however, when we consider his own experiences with the occult; this experience was detailed in an earlier chapter. What is interesting, however, is that Machen seems to have modeled the nurse in “The White People” on the real-life practices of village women. Writing in an 1898 essay, Machen explains that “at present day, in quiet Somerset and Derbyshire villages, there are women who follow the

70 same arts, and, on some matters, think the same thoughts as the sorceresses of antique

Babylon” (Machen, “Folklore” 43). Continuing, Machen makes reference to the paraphernalia used by the village women, to “the horrible objects which have been found in the last ten years, hidden in the chimney-corners of witches’ cottages,” and to the “clay images” which have been “made as they have always been made, and here is a memory that goes back at least 6,000 years” (Machen, “Folklore,” 44). This reference to clay images is a parallel to the doll created by the nurse in “The White People”; making her young charge promise never to tell, the woman shows the girl the correct place to search for clay, the way to form the doll, and the place to hide the clay figure so it can dry. The nurse instructed thusly: “she said that if one loved very much, the clay man was very good, if one did certain things with it, and if one hated very much, it was just as good, only one had to do different things” (Machen, The Great God Pan and Other Horror

Stories, 282). This passage also recalls the tenuous line between good and evil in the tale and the challenge posed by the successful navigation of those forces.

It has been noted that, “the general tone of “The White People”, and of the folkloric pieces within, is more beguiling than the lore of tylwyth teg (Taylor 4). Tylwyth teg narratives often include the theft of human children and their replacement with

“changelings” (Rhŷs 82). I feel that the prominence of changeling narratives in Welsh fairy lore presents a fascinating possibility, which I will mention here, but will not interrogate in detail as I am not convinced the text offers enough proof. Writing about her early life in the Green Book, the young protagonist remembers overhearing her parents refer to her as having been quite “queer” a few years before. The overheard conversation

71 reveals that her nurse had called to her mother to her room to listen to her because she had been talking to herself in a strange language, which she now recognizes as Xu

(Machen, The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories, 269). While the girl’s affinity for the fairy languages could simply be interpreted as a function of her child-like openness, one could also speculate on the possibility that the unnamed girl could herself be a changeling. The changeling narratives also note the strange qualities of the fairy children left in exchange: “the principal mischief...was to carry away unbaptised infants, and place, in their stead their own wretched and peevish offspring” (Rhŷs 82). The persistence of descriptions of strange, or “abnormal” changelings has led folklorists to explore the possibility that changeling narratives were developed in response to medical or cognitive differences that were not well understood in the past (Schoon Eberly 58).

Though we enter speculative territory in considering that Machen’s protagonist may have been fairy-born, knowing something about changeling narratives helps explain the reactions of the girl’s parents in response to her non-standard behavior. As I mentioned before, the true nature of the nurse is also unknown, and if the girl was a changeling it might explain the presence of the strange caretaker.

Just as it is sometimes difficult to grasp the truth of “The White People”’s narrative events, it is also “admittedly difficult to disentangle true Welsh tradition from

Machen’s own imaginative flourishes” (Taylor 6-7). Despite this, scholars have identified other motifs that are likely connected to Welsh folklore. The earlier reference to

Machen’s belief in euhemerism, his idea that historical contact with an earlier, more

“primitive” race accounts for fairy stories, makes for a racialized and racist reading of the

“Black Man” in Machen’s tale. While I feel that this reading is valid in light of Machen’s apparent assumptions about primitivism, others have put forth the idea that Machen’s

“Black Man” may be inspired by Gwyn ap Nudd, a Cymric deity who acts as the king of the tylwyth teg and also guides the souls of the dead into the Underworld. In some ways this figure is analogous to the more mainstream Chistian devil. While Machen’s lack of specificity makes identification difficult, this reading is supported by the nurse’s threat that, should the girl tell her parents of their activities, she’ll be thrown into “the black pit with all the dead people”; if the “Black Man” of Machen’s tale is Gwyn ap Nudd, then this black pit would surely be the Welsh Underworld, Annwn (Taylor 8-9). The nurse, threatening to throw the girl in the pit, reinforces the use of folklore as a punishment for women. This idea is, of course, central to this thesis.

“The White People” includes a few variants of a tale type referred to as the

“Otherworld Bride” motif. This story, told to the young girl by her nurse, is another space where the older woman seems to embed warnings about interactions with the fairy people. The story begins as a poor girl enters a hollow pit despite many warnings that she should not. She emerges after adorning herself with grasses, flowers, and pebbles found in the pit, but to everyone else they appear to be bright and dazzling emerald earrings, a ruby pendant and a necklace of diamonds. She uses these enchanted items to win a prince, but on their wedding night the prince enters their room to find the aforementioned

“Black Man,” who issues the command: “Venture not upon your life, This is mine own wedded wife” (Machen, The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories, 274-275). The injunction, bound up as it is with marriage, promises a special layer of punishment for the

73 transgressive female, possibly a sexually violent one. It is important to note that the warning of the young protagonist’s nurse, embedded in folklore, was recalled by the girl years after the telling as she was standing in a pit very similar to the one in the tale. Many variants of the Otherworld Bride motif are embedded in “The White People” through the nurse’s storytelling (Taylor 8). Importantly, Welsh variants of the Otherworld Bride often revolve around locales whose folklore would likely have been familiar to Arthur Machen.

Machen’s family originated in Carmarthenshire, which is significant because there is a strain of Otherworld Bride narratives revolving around a fairy that is said to reside in a lake referred to as Llan Y Fan Fach, near the Black Mountain in South Wales; about three dozen variants of this tale have been identified by folklorists, and the tale has been around since at least the 10th century (Wood, “The Fairy Bride Legend in Wales” 56).

While Machen’s variants don’t revolve around water, this doesn’t rule out the possibility that he was inspired by one of the dozens of Otherworld Bride tales floating around

Wales. The heart of the Otherworld Bride story is often seen as a comment on the liminal status of the bride after marriage, especially historically: while she is no longer exactly a part of her birth family, she is not quite integrated into her husband’s kin-group either; the tale’s supernatural elements serve to emphasize the anxiety of the bride’s liminality

(Wood, “The Fairy Bride Legend in Wales,” 62). Perhaps, then, the nurse’s cautionary tales serve a dual-function: as she warns her young charge about the dangers of transgressing boundaries in regards to the fairies, her stories also allude to the dangers inherent for women in marriage. This is a topic I will be exploring in more detail in my chapter on “The White People.”

This study, which primarily revolves around the tragic deaths of Machen’s female occultists, forces us to ask questions about the presence of patriarchal constraint in folk narratives. In her study of Irish folktales, Kathleen Vejvoda noted that oftentimes fairy lore reinforced contemporary limitations placed on women; the “supernatural law” of some tales mirrors the real-life conventions that constrained contemporary women, effectively making gender hierarchy appear “natural” or traditional (43). While the previous section of this essay noted the Welsh folk material Machen appeared to have drawn on, it is important to note that, due in part to the efforts of W.B. Yeats, Lady

Gregory, and other Celtic Dawn revivalists, Irish folklore saw fairly wide dissemination by the fin de siécle. Yeats, in the introduction to Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish

Peasantry, notes, somewhat playfully, that his efforts at collection were often made more difficult due to folkloric convention that women were often punished by the creatures of the otherworld: “The old women are most learned, but will not so readily be got to talk, for the fairies are very secretive and much resent being talked of and are there not many stories of old women who were nearly pinched into their graves or numbed with fairy blasts?” (Yeats xix).

This threat of punishment for speaking about the Otherworld, again, recalls how the young protagonist of “The White People” was threatened: if she dared reveal the secrets she had learned, she would be promptly tossed in a pit full of dead bodies. It is fascinating that this theme of female punishment is embedded not only in folklore narrative, but that it should affect the collection of these fairy stories in the first place.

Reading “The White People” through this lens opens up interesting questions about

Machen’s motivation in writing the deaths of his own female characters. While folklore is only one of many influences, the presence of embedded folklore narratives draw attention to the hybridity of the “The White People”’s narrative structure. As I continue my thesis,

I will examine the tension created by these narrative layers of folklore, gothic convention, and connections to other genres such as the seduction novel. For now, I hope I have adequately demonstrated the ways that folk tales tend to uphold patriarchal injunctions against women who choose to “transgress.”

V. On “The White People”: Female Agency, Narrative Structure, and the

Psychogeographic Layering of Landscape

The Great God Pan, originally published in 1894, would later be compiled in a

1906 collection of Machen’s tales entitled The House of Souls; also in this compilation is a short and wondrous tale entitled “The White People” (Danielson and Machen 34). As I will argue in this chapter, these two works make fitting companion pieces: they explore similar subject matter from radically different perspectives and help demonstrate

Machen’s interest in interrogating complex moral dilemmas from a variety of vantage points. While the women in Machen’s early stories tend to suffer bad ends his tales do not condemn these women, or their occult interactions, as universally evil: his narratives often leave space for compassion, even where narrative agency is constrained. While

Helen Vaughan is unable to tell her story, the actions of “The White People” are largely revealed through the journal of a young unnamed female protagonist; both young women are seemingly involved in similar occult practices, even if the ritual specifics of Helen’s practice are not made clear to the reading audience. Perhaps, had she survived, the young protagonist of “The White People” would have ended up like Helen Vaughan, a despised woman seemingly involved in a number of sexual depravities and criminal acts including the corruption of souls and the separation of wealthy men from their money. But perhaps she might not have; her reported (and admittedly ambigous) suicide at the end of the tale leaves room for uncertainty. This chapter will explore issues relevant to the tale, such as the nature of Machen’s “little people,” contemporary interest in Roman antiquity, as well

77 as themes of female agency and narrative structure. These two issues are vital to any comparison of “The White People” and The Great God Pan. “The White People,” while not published until 1904, was written contemporaneously with the Pan novella during the period referred to as the fin de siècle. Preceding its 1906 compilation in The House of

Souls, “The White People” appeared in Horlick’s, which was published by A.E. Waite,

Machen’s long time friend, correspondent, and fellow Graal enthusiast. The magazine series, sponsored by the malted milk brand of the same name, specialized in mysteries.

Displaying his characteristically self-deprecating wit, Machen, in a 1923 bibliographic publication, wrote that: “I do not know that the sale of Malted Milk was unfavorably affected” (Danielson and Machen 36).

Here, I think it would be beneficial to include a short synopsis of Machen’s “The

White People.” The story’s prologue begins in “a mouldering house” in a northern suburb of London where a man named Cotgrave has been introduced to a hermit called

Ambrose, also the owner of the aforementioned house (Machen 261). Ambrose opens the tale by proclaiming: “Sorcery and sanctity, these are the only realities. Each is an

Ecstacy, a withdrawal from the common life” (261). As the conversation continues,

Ambrose discusses sinners and saints, before eventually coming to his main point, the definition of true evil and of sin. Rather than put forth a kind of moral definition,

Ambrose understands that evil is wrapped up in boundary crossings; by way of example,

Ambrose asks Cotgrave a series of questions:

what would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road

began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning? (263)

The conversation continues for a few more pages as Cotgrave struggles to grasp

Ambrose’s meaning. One of the more interesting points of Ambrose’s ideas on evil is that civilization and education have blinded the whole of man to the instinctual recognition of evil: “We should [recognize it] if we were natural: children and women feel this horror we speak of, even animals experience it” (264). To punctuate and illustrate his point about true evil, Ambrose loans Cotgrave a green leather bound journal, the young author of which he himself knew. This signals the end of the Prologue and the beginning of the second section, entitled “The Green Book,” which makes up the bulk of the narrative and is unmediated by commentary outside of the journal. We never find out the name of the journal's young author, and the Green Book is written in a continuous stream of consciousness style without dates or significant paragraph breaks.

The young narrator of “The White People” begins her writing by telling us how she found the faded and apparently old, yet unused, journal in an old bureau; she quickly turns from the everyday and explains her knowledge of secret languages and secret peoples. These include the Aklo letters, the Chian language, Circles, Mao Games, yet, she writes, she “must not say who the Nymphs are, or the Dôls, or the Jeelo, or what voolas mean. All these are the most secret secrets” (268). This sets up the idea that she has some idea her journal might someday see the light of day, and that she is censoring it accordingly; it also echoes Ambrose’s earlier statement that the Green Book has a sequel, which he will not lend to Cotgrave or even speak of. As the narrative of the Green Book continues, we are told about an experience the girl had around the age of 13 or 14 which

79 she refers to as “The White Day,” a kind of transcendental encounter in an amplified natural world of hills, woods, and rock in which great grey stones shaped like horrid grinning men and animals, and even dead bodies, appear to dance; they put “evil songs” into her heart, and even their perceived motion is confused by the girl’s narrative:

“things,” and the stones in particular, “seem” to move but often do not (269-274). The

White Day is a particularly difficult section in that the truth of the events is in places obscured by the sensual confusion of the events, the girl’s own uncertainties, and the conflation of the day’s occurences with a folktale told to the girl by her nurse many years ago. I will analyze the narrative of the Green Book in greater detail as I continue this chapter, but it is important to note that the story the girl tells goes back in forth in time as she remembers early rituals she participated in with her nurse as well as folk stories the nurse told her as a child. In an earlier chapter of this thesis I noted the similarities between some of these folk tales and variants of the “Otherworld” or “Fairy Bride” legends that have been collected in Carmarthenshire, the historic Welsh county where

Machen’s family originated.

The chronology of the young girl’s life is somewhat challenging to piece together due to the non-linear structure of the Green Book, and some of the piecemeal nature of the tale is captured in a comment Machen made about the story in 1923. He called it “a single stone instead of a whole house” and “naturally a disappointment”; “But,” he continues “it contains some of the most curious work that I have ever done, or will ever do” (Danielson and Machen 37). I feel that this is a very apt assessment of “The White

People” and in particular of the young girl’s narrative. The girl’s tale, at least as related in

80 the Green Book, ends as she describes her attempts to summon nymphs, something she was taught years ago by her nurse. Her last line refers to how “the dark nymph, Alanna, came, and she turned the pool of water into a pool of fire….” (291). In the epilogue,

Ambrose reveals that the girl went missing about a year after she discontinued writing in

Green Book, and was found dead in the nearby thicket. She had killed herself while facing a piece of Roman statuary and Ambrose describes it thusly: “She had poisoned herself--in time. No; there was not a word to be said against her in the ordinary sense”

(292). Poignantly, “--in time” presents the tragic possibility that the young girl was in some way coerced. Coercion cannot be textually proven with any amount of certainty.

However, coerced suicide also describes the death of Helen Vaughan and if we interpret

“--in time” thusly it would further connect the two women and their occult activities. In describing the statuary present at the site of the girl’s death, Ambrose also emphasizes the fact that it was not tarnished with age, but had taken on a shining luminosity, or whiteness (293).

Light and dark, white and black, play a key role in the tale, and there is often a conflation of the two as the true nature, and danger, of interaction with the fairy world is obscured. Of course, here we should also acknowledge how problematic the association of white with good and black with evil is when read with past racial ideologies in mind; usage of the white/good--black/evil convention, we should acknowledge, is still fairly widespread in modern writing. Be this as it may, I find Machen’s usage of the trope compelling. Machen often confuses the validity of the association, alternatingly reinforcing and undermining the white/good black/evil trope. I would argue that the very

81 title of the story “The White People” is related to the cliché in which white represents good (opposing the evil of black or darkness), but it also relies on another convention taken directly from fairy lore. In an earlier chapter I referred to an article Machen wrote called “Folklore and Legends of the North”; in it he talks about malevolent Irish fairies and the necessity of referring to them as “the good people,” or “fair folk,” lest they become angered (40-41). Our association of whiteness with purity and goodness means that Machen’s title “The White People” operates similarly. While condemnation of the fairy folk as “evil” is not yet an assessment I am willing to make, referring to them as

“the white people” belies the inherent dangers of interaction with them. As terminology,

“the good people” or the “fair folk” is widespread enough that it acts as a kind of safe

“code” for malevolent fairies, at least for those with some folk knowledge.

“The White People,” as a title, is so interesting because it operates similarly, while at the same time being too unfamiliar to provide an adequate warning. As we shall see throughout the text, there are literal white people, white fairies, as well as an ambiguous “Black Man.” He is ambiguous in the sense that we’re unsure whether he is analogous to a man born on the African continent (which would connect the text to late

19th century ideas of atavism and racial ideologies). As I wrote in a previous chapter, there is also a possibility that he is Gwyn ap Nudd, keeper of the Welsh underworld

Annwn, but the third possibility is that he is something else entirely beyond our understanding. Then there is the dark nymph Alanna. As I have pointed out, the Green

Book ended with reference to her, and the transformation of water to fire is highly significant. While both elements are important in the natural world, fire is generally

82 coded as more dangerous in human metaphor, and it is significant that the girl stops writing in this journal at this point. She may have continued in a “sequel,” mentioned by

Ambrose in the prologue, which is implied to be more dangerous by the fact that

Ambrose will not discuss it with Cotgrave. We don’t know exactly what it is about the sequel that heightens its danger; it could be that the revelations are more disturbing, or it could be that the journal reveals more specific details about the occult “processes” the girl engages in. There is also a sense of ambiguity about the extent to which the young author expects her journal to be read. At the very beginning of the girl’s narrative she writes that she “must not write down the real names of the days and months which [she] found out a year ago, nor the way to make the Aklo letters, or the Chian language, or the great beautiful Circles, nor the Mao games, nor the chief songs” (Machen 268). During the epilogue, Ambrose notes that she didn’t expect it to be read, instead attributing her discretion to “instinct” (292). Her caution does seem to imply that she at least acknowledges the possibility that others may read her writing at some point. Whether or not the girl explicitly expects an audience, her commentary throughout makes it clear that she is dealing with knowledge that must remain secreted. This “occult” knowledge appears to revolve around interaction with the fairy world, old Roman paganism, and a kind of witchery that allowed for the manipulation of the natural world. Here I would like to make a few notes about the ambiguous nature of Machen’s “little people,” as well as the Roman subtext.

Waves of interest in the classical world have recurred throughout history going back to the Early Modern period. In Machen’s time, interest in Roman antiquity

83 increased due to a bifurcation of factors both practical and socio-historical. Practically speaking, the early part of the century had seen an increase in archaeological discoveries due to widespread excavation connected with urbanization and industrialization. Before making these physical discoveries, antiquarian scholars were forced to rely on classical texts for knowledge regarding Roman Britain; this was skewed, however, by the fact that

“through Roman eyes Britain was a small and insignificant island on the edge of the empire, its inhabitants, the ancient Britons, were uncivilised and in servitude and the

Roman-Britains were totally absent” from these texts (Hoselitz 1). As we may well imagine, these discoveries, representing significant evidence of the Roman history in

Britain, would have been extremely exciting and led to a renewed interest in Roman antiquity. Another reason for this renewed interest was the height of the British empire under Queen Victoria; the dangers of worldwide empire to the fabric of society are expressed in gothic narratives involving “reverse colonization” and degeneration, and I have detailed many of those period concerns in an earlier chapter on Machen’s The Great

God Pan. It is important to note, however, that contemporary degeneration theory assumes that a high level of social evolution (cultural variety, urbanization, etc.) is required for degeneration to occur: as social evolution produced contaminants (aesthetic, social, chemical, etc.), “civilized” bodies were put at risk through exposure to those elements (Hurley Gothic Body 70). In a way then, the downfall of Rome was predicated on its successes, and Victorian Britons read themselves as a kind of parallel society. The discovery of antiquities and ancient sites during the Victorian period evoked the fall of

Rome and presented an earlier example of imperial decay. These dangers, which some

British citizens thought they could be bringing upon themselves through the expansion of empire and contact with other populations, were paired with decadence, another fault detected in Roman society. As Norman Vance phrases it in Roman Presences, “if the process of imperial decay could be properly understood perhaps it would be possible to stop the same sort of thing happening again...social and political moralists compulsively constructed narratives of Roman decadence, tracing a progressive falling away from earlier moral, physical, and cultural excellence which could be seen as both cause and consequence of political misjudgement and failure” (110).

While Roman decadence was put forth by some as the cause of their downfall, others looked to this “cultivated life of the senses” as a way around the problematic legacy of Rome, including its militarism and oppressive Caesarism (Vance 113). The extent to which Roman antiquity became both important and intimately connected to the historical moment in which the Victorians found themselves is hard to overstate; more to the point for our purposes, reading “The White People” with the Romans in mind clearly evokes both the dangerous and transformative qualities of decadence. The young girl’s lush sensual descriptors of the landscape are nothing if not indulgent, and are a clear example of the decadence of fin de siécle writing. Scholars have noted that in Machen’s writing the Welsh landscape often inspires a “tone of mystic transcendence” (Aaron 82).

Machen was certainly inspired by the Welsh landscape, but he found particular inspiration in his own local bit of Roman antiquity: Isca Silures, the Roman amphitheatre at Caerleon, where Machen grew up. A fictionalized version of the site would feature in and inspire the title of Machen’s semi-autobiographical work The Hill of Dreams, which,

85 although written in the late 1890s, was not published until 1907. Lucian Taylor, the protagonist of the novel, experiences a number of sensual and hallucinatory visions near the hill fort, and, were this a longer work of scholarship, I might compare the fate of

Lucian to that of the young narrator of “The White People”; their occult journeys are similar in a number of ways and such an analysis would surely be productive, though I only have space here to refer to The Hill of Dreams in passing. Notably, Isca Silures has been referred to by local people as “King Arthur’s Round Table,” which puts forth the possibility of a “Celtic inheritance” challenging the Roman history of the site (Hoselitz

82). While this “inheritance” is largely imaginative, it is poignant in the context of

Machen’s works: as I have noted in an earlier chapter, later in life Machen turned from occult study to the Sangrail and the early Celtic Church in his search for life’s deepest mysteries. The grail myths also influenced his fiction, and both The Secret Glory (1900) and The Great Return (1915) have been described as “Grail Quest fictions” (Aaron 82).

“The White People” and many of Machen’s other tales are interesting in the way they conflate and combine Celtic folklore about fairies and “little people” with Roman pagan religious practices. I would here invoke the Roman idea of the genus or genii, a kind of natural spirit that accompanies both living people and landscapes. In describing genii and the “rigorously hierarchical spiritual world” of the Romans, Phil Legard writes:

“if you could put it on a map, itemise it in an inventory or record it on a census then it had a genus” (381). Theoretical approaches to “folk horror,” a subset of gothic and horror literature in which Machen’s work is regularly placed, often refers to

“psychogeography,” a concept initially taken from the situationist art movement.

Psychogeography describes “the hidden landscape of atmospheres, histories, actions, and characters which charge environments” (Paciorek 14). The natural landscape of “The

White People” is apparently highly charged, if the young girl’s narrative is to be believed, and the psychogeography of that landscape seems to be layered with unknown creatures from both Roman and Celtic contexts. As I referenced earlier, the beginning of her narrative mentions a variety of distinct peoples, languages and (apparently) logographic writing systems. More deities and cultural components are alluded to later in the tale; though we never come to understand the relation or interaction of these people, deities, and entities to each other, the sheer variety she describes strongly implies the concept of psychogeographic layering. As I noted earlier in this chapter, the ambiguous nature of these entities is at the heart of the story’s meaning: it is difficult to judge the prudence of our protagonist’s practice, or to evaluate the way Machen intends the reading audience to understand that practice, without making some attempt to take stock of these odd beings.

The narrative of “The White People” clearly exhibits the tension between fascination with the beliefs and deities of the old times and an anxiety about that interaction. I would argue that part of this anxiety issues from the displacement of animism in Christian religious belief.

Referencing again the genus, or genii, Legard argues that changes in belief altered perceptions of the landscape and its spirits: “it may be suggested that by the Early

Modern period, we had inherited a diabolised, or at least desacralized, landscape in which significant features, although no longer deemed to be possessed of guardian spirits in themselves, were potentially haunted by devils or other entities'' (381). If we take this to

87 be true, the change would seem to issue from the shift away from belief systems influenced by the animism of earlier pagan religions. These forces are no longer a part of a larger spiritual scheme that makes sense to the human mind. The separation of humankind from nature, which makes the exploitation of its resources acceptable, also makes those forces or entities seem random and possibly hostile. In The Reenchanted

World, James William Gibson writes about the separation of humankind from the natural world in Western cognition. The author utilizes a quote from Carl Jung to illustrate the situation: “Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had symbolic meaning for him, Thunder is no longer the voice of God...No river contains a spirit”

(Gibson 10). I would argue that this sense of a world imbued with energies is not completely lost; we still have a psychogeographical imagination and sense that landscapes are charged with energies, entities, etc., but this sense is vague, and cut loose from any sort of scheme which we claim to understand. This vagueness and inability to understand the true nature of things, I argue, is directly applicable to Machen’s tale of

“The White People.” Understanding the entities described by the story’s young protagonist in the context of genii locorum and psychogeographical layering is useful because it frees us from trying to pinpoint the exact identities and histories of those entities. Scholars have at times attempted to explain the nature of Machen’s “little people” through the theory of euhemerism, the belief that mythological creatures once had a historical basis in fact, though as I shall explain, this lens has limits in regards to

“The White People.”

Arthur Machen believed in euhemerism; there is no getting past that. As I noted in a previous chapter, Machen’s folklore scholarship explicitly references changeling stories as probable examples of euhemerism (Machen, “Folklore,” 40-41). In 1924 Machen would go on to write “The Turanians,” a short story about an early race of smaller-than- average humans that were supposedly displaced by the Celts and other taller peoples in what was to become the British Isles. The fairy stories, it was thought, hailed from a time of transition in which both the Celts and Turanians lived in the same space, and in which the latter were forced to “hid[e] under the hills, appearing only at night”; they “danc[ed] by moonlight for exercise, and occasionally st[ole] food, and sometimes even women or babies, from their oppressors” (Fergus 4). It is important to note that belief in euhemerism was widespread in Machen’s time: by the 1880s it was “almost taken for granted that the dwarves, trolls, and fairies were folk memories of prehistoric races of small people” (3-4). It was also assumed that stories of dragons were based on ancient memory of pterodactyls and other air-born dinosaurs (4). Belief in euhemerism reflects both the Victorian interest in natural history and the period’s drive toward the scientification of many aspects of life. Particularly influential to Machen and other fin de siécle authors of weird fiction was David MacRitchie; one example of MacRitchie’s euhemeristic theories is his assertion that the Ainu, a people Indigenous to Japan, were analogous to Britain’s original population (Fergus 5).

This reference to the Ainu reflects the tendency of Victorian Brits to use non-

European bodies as stable points of reference; Kelley Hurley, writing about the connection between degeneration theory and gothic fiction, explains that “the European

89 body by contrast was a body in flux, a body upon which the forces of entropy worked most visibly” (Gothic Body 80). As I noted earlier, degeneration, at least in the eyes of

19th century Britons, required the presence of contaminants brought on by cultural variety and urbanization--the marks of social progress and advanced culture. Conversely, a “less civilized” people like the Ainu, the “Turanians” or whatever other race was assumed to be responsible for “fairy stories,” would have been considered unchanging forces of atavism. As I wrote about in an earlier chapter on The Great God Pan, Helen’s connection to the bacchante, and her fraternization with Pan, an animalistic and atavistic holdover, betrays her own atavism and inferiority to modern man. If we read “The White

People” in the context of euhemerism, the young girl’s transgression can be understood similarly. I argue that this reading would be somewhat simplistic in light of the variety and complexity of the entities encountered by the young author of the Green Book.

Scholars have attempted to push back against a reading of Machen’s “little people” as purely representative of degeneration theory. Emily Fergus, in her article on Machen and euhemerism, puts forth the idea that “Machen’s ‘little people’ are not degenerated, but re- generated, surfacing as material warnings”; according to Fergus, these warnings vary, but often revolve around modern failings such as “bourgeois complaisance” and “the lazy acceptance of superficial appearances” (7).

I argue that euhemerism has its limits in an analysis of “The White People” because the entities in that story are not of the “stone and flint” type found in other tales like “The Red Hand”; these entities are numerous, they are blindingly white, black and dark (The “Black Man,” Alanna), they appear to be Roman (note Roman statuary in the

90 tale’s denouement), they appear to be Celtic (see earlier note on the “Otherworld Bride” motif in Wales), and speak and write a multitude of tongues (Aklo letters, Chian language, Circles, Mao Games). While we have a general idea what nymphs are, we never understand the nature of the Dôls, or the Jeelo, “or what voolas mean.” Are voolas a people? We’re never sure but the girl includes them in her catalogue of entities. I introduce the euhemeristic perspective because it adds yet another layer to our understanding of Machen’s inspiration. Scholars have also noted that euhemerism has been an under-recognized influence on the “weird imagination” of late-Victorian Britain, characterized as it is by its blending of the creative spark and the scientific (Fergus 4).

The diversity of the creatures encountered by the girl makes it difficult for me to understand them as euhemeristic holdovers or as atavistic examples of an older race, even if Machen’s intention was to write them that way. I feel that the framework of the genii locorum, in which every feature of landscape is likely to be imbued with its own entity, more easily accounts for this diversity and layering of beings. The sense that human disconnection from the Earth further denies us access to understanding of this landscape, making it appear diabolized, also fits well with “The White People.” It becomes clear that while the girl is invested in learning about these beings she is in the end not equipped to properly understand them and their ordering. As readers, we become fascinated with the world she encounters, and this adds to the tension of elements within the story. While

Ambrose’s framing of her behavior as an example of “evil” preconditions the reader to understand the girl’s behavior thusly, the beings and rites she encounters are far too

91 interesting for us to condemn her wholly. I argue that this is due to the girl’s narrative style, which is highly immersive. She describes one of the rites as follows:

And the noise and the singing would go on and on for a long time, and the people who were in the ring swayed a little to and fro; and the song was in an old, old language that nobody knows now, and the tune was queer. Nurse said her great-grandmother had known some one who remembered a little of it, when she was quite a little girl, and nurse tried to sing some of it to me, and it was so strange a tune that I turned all cold and my flesh crept as if I had put my hand on something dead. Sometimes it was a man that sang and sometimes it was a woman, and sometimes the one who sang it did it so well that two or three of the people who were there fell to the ground shrieking and tearing with their hands. (280)

The sensual detail of the cold and creeping flesh draws us in viscerally, while the strangeness of the spoken language, long gone yet still present via a trail of long-dead relatives and friends, is highly compelling. In many ways the immediacy of the girl’s narrative overwhelms that of Ambrose. Yet we have still been conditioned to assume we’re going to read about evil, and without Ambrose’s framing the tale would be a much different read. Without the story’s narrative framing, we would likely read her tale much differently. Rather than focusing too heavily on the nature of individual beings, the more important enterprise, I argue, is to analyze the girl’s experience of these spirits and her own evolving understanding of the dangers. I am particularly interested in “the Turn.”

There is a point, at the end of the Green Book, where things start to become increasingly dangerous, yet never quite so dangerous as the narrative of The Great God

Pan--the interpolated folk tales and generally digressive style of the tale neutralize true horror. As I noted earlier, the sensual immersion of the child’s narrative draws the reader into the present and diverts our attention from the possible consequences of her practice.

Yet toward the end of “The White People” we do come to understand that things are

92 accelerating and this is marked both by the symbolism of the pool of water becoming fire as well as the girl’s subsequent choice to continue her narrative in another notebook, to which she apparently attributes an added layer of secrecy. Eventually, her further delving into the occult world of the fairy peoples leads her to discover something so horrifying that she chooses to committ suicide. I would like to remind the reader of an incident

Machen wrote about in an article which I mentioned in my chapter on his own occult explorations. Describing his participation in a séance, Machen recalls watching a female sitter with particular interest as she seemed to come up against something beyond the normal pale of human experience. Speaking with Machen after, she told him that she had seen a close friend, about three years dead, and that as she beheld him her emotions took on a state of “acute delight” only to end in a horror so deep that she was thoroughly convinced never to participate in anything like that for the rest of her life (Machen

“Spiritualism” 50-51). Sadly for our young protagonist she was, unlike Machen’s sitter, apparently too deeply involved to simply turn away from the occult, though we are unfortunately not privy to the details of her practice after she concludes her narrative in the Green Book. As I will explore later in this chapter, the revelations she discovered appear to have been too incompatible with life in the banal, material human world although we never discover the exact nature of those revelations. Notably the obfuscation of the girl’s practice is intentional, as our frame narrator has taken it upon himself to safeguard that information. Ambrose, who keeps her second notebook, likely knows what she encountered and he understands that the contents of that book are too dangerous to be revealed to Cotgrave or to any other member of the general public. But before I turn to

93 this innate incompatibility between occult knowledge and the material life, I want to focus on female agency in “The White People,” as well as narrative structure.

Both of these elements are vital to our comparison of Machen’s short story with

The Great God Pan, his acclaimed (and infamous) novella. Analyzing how female agency operates in the Gothic is always a productive exercise because the genre has historically been known for female constraint. Certain elements of the Gothic have been understood as particularly troublesome to feminist critics. Howevers, these elements have largely been identified as belonging to a “Male Gothic” tradition: while male-authored gothic tales often feature “the hopelessly incarcerated and emotionally/physically abused heroine,” woman-written narratives “typically insist on the significant reasoning abilities of women as the only escape from the seemingly unfathomable world of the villain”

(Szalay 184). Machen’s tales, while an example of the Male Gothic, confuse this figuration a bit. As I wrote about in a previous chapter, Helen Vaughan is seemingly the villain of The Great God Pan. Yet, for those reading between the lines and heeding

Machen’s subtle cues, including the epitaph at the end of the novella, she is also a victim of narrative constraint as her male narrators frame her in the worst light. While she is free to move and act throughout most of the tale, she suffers from a narrative constraint that makes her true motives and essence unknowable. This is not the case in “The White

People,” where the young girl’s narrative dominates the reader’s understanding of her life events and passions. While Ambrose’s frame guides the reader, he is not taking pains to cast the young girl in an awful light, and she is certainly not the “villain” of the tale.

What’s more, there is no clear villain in “The White People”, and Machen eschews many

94 elements and patterns of the Male Gothic tradition by writing a female protagonist that is neither physically or emotionally abused. While it is implied in Ambrose’s narrative that the unnamed girl in “The White People” eventually found herself overwhelmed by the forces she is dealing with, there is no questioning her intellectual capacity, curiosity, or earnestness. This is also a young woman who displays no overt interest in commonly accepted female preoccupations. When searching through the bureau, she pushes aside a number of dresses in order to get to the Green Book, showing a blatant disregard for the

“feminine” interest in fashion (Machen 268). Presumably, these old dresses belong to her dead mother, and her lack of interest in them also implies a kind of break with the maternal. However, it should also be noted that outside of her nurse, who has no interest in such frivolities, the young girl isn’t really exposed to female company. This is a small yet interesting point, as Machen’s tale subtly implies that the gender norms and preoccupations of ordinary society are more connected to socialization than they are to genetics; to put it colloquially “nurture” may influence gendered behavior more than

“nature.” While some of her experiences with the occult are sensual in nature, her journal doesn’t reflect an interest in men or boys as romantic interests, and this is particularly fascinating when we consider the fact that she is teenaged when she is writing in the

Green Book. Our unnamed protagonist is an unusual young woman in terms of male- authored gothic fiction, and, in writing her, Machen appears to take very seriously the idea that women have the same capacities as men. Additionally, her own quest in search of the world’s secret mysteries is not unlike Machen’s own, which I wrote about in an earlier chapter detailing his occult activities. Like Machen, she is motivated by her own

95 belief in the non-material elements of the world as well as by her own capacity for wonder. Her capacity for wonder and interest in the non-material is often expressed during her references to the many “secrets” that she knows: “I am glad when I remember what they are, and how many wonderful languages I know, but there are some things that

I call the secrets of the secrets of the secrets that I dare not think of unless I am quite alone….Then there are the Ceremonies which are all of them quite important, but some are more delightful than others…” (268).

Feminist theory has often dissected the tendency of authors to use male experience as the standard of universality (Tyson 80). Machen undermines this standard, instead implying in “The White People” that the search for true wonders is actually universal and not bound by gender. Machen does engage with some of the more standard gothic tropes, yet I feel we should still make note of Machen’s progressive streak in writing a female character who exhibits none of the frivolity often written into young girls but who does exhibit a number of the author’s own drives and interests. For instance, Machen was fascinated by language, an art in which his young protagonist is highly gifted; “secret” language in particular intrigued Machen. I have detailed Machen’s interaction with, and interest in, a variety of languages in an article recently published in the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (Schoch/Davidson 87-88). Here, however,

I will recount that Machen’s interest in Shelta, spoken by the Irish Travellers or Lucht

Siúil, was based on his perception of its secret nature, as documented in his correspondence (Machen Selected Letters 43). In a letter written to A.E. Waite, friend and publisher of Horlicks’, the magazine which first published “The White People,”

Machen revealed the pride he felt when his son, Arthur Hilary Blaize Machen, revealed that he preferred to study Hebrew instead of physics (Machen Selected Letters 48).

Machen’s conception of Hebrew as a “secretive” language is no doubt rooted in his encounters with Kabbalistic writing during his days compiling catalogues of occult literature. The idea that Machen saw the “search” for wonder as gender neutral is perhaps not so surprising when we recall that Amy Machen née Hogg encouraged him in his occult explorations, and scholars have put her forth as a possible muse for the fiction he wrote in the 1890s (Graf 62). It could be argued that “The White People” betrays a progressive streak as regards gender roles. The fact that the young girl’s narrative is

“bookmarked” on either end by male commentary could be said to undermine this progressivism a little. Still, Machen’s choice to use a female narrative perspective undermines the idea that male experience is the universal standard, or that it is a safer perspective to write from because audiences will more easily identify. Other gender issues worth noting in the text include Machen’s use of the trope of the “Missing Mother” in “The White People.” This motif is rampant in gothic fiction, especially that which features women in key roles. One critic writes that “Although all Gothic women are threatened, no woman is in greater peril in the world of the Gothic than is the mother.

The typical Gothic mother is absent: dead, imprisoned, or somehow abjected” (Anolik

25). In “The White People” we find out early on that the girl’s mother had been dead for a number of years, and often her references give us a sense of her life as occurring in two distinct periods: the time before her mother died and the time after. Early in the narrative she writes about “when {she} was very small, and mother was alive” (Machen 69). It has

97 been understood that the gothic need for instability necessitates the dead, or missing, mother; mothers repel deviance, which “is beneficial to society but detrimental to narrative” (Anolik 27). Throughout the story, it becomes clear that the girl’s father is incapable of repelling “deviance,” if that is how we choose to characterize the narrator’s occult exploits. He is barely present throughout the narrative, and the ending is particularly telling of his lack of involvement in his daughter’s life. He is profoundly wrapped up in the material world of “deeds and leases,” and news of his daughter’s death comes “as an awful surprise” (Machen 292). Also telling is just how few mentions of her father appear in the girl’s narrative, especially considering she was very young when her mother died, leaving her father her only biological parent. Conversely, the protagonist’s nurse is highly involved in the young girl’s life, and it is she that initiates her into the occult ways of the fairies. Writing about one early incident in which her nurse taught her to create clay dolls (possibly related to “poppets”) to use in magical rituals, the girl tells us that “she would show me what to do, and I must watch her all the time” (Machen 282).

This quote illustrates the instructive, nurturing element of their relationship, even while some may question the specific lessons chosen for the girl. In analyzing works of fiction, feminist critics are often concerned with the way the text presents “the possibilities of sisterhood as a mode of resisting the patriarchy” (Tyson 114). This is particularly relevant to this text because for a number of years the young girl and her nurse constitute a kind of insular female society of two; it is during this period that the young girl increases her occult knowledge. I would argue that there is a kind of battle for attention waged throughout “The White People”; the female-centered world resists the influence of the

98 male-centered frame narrative which seeks to contain the alluring richness of the young girl’s prose. The success of that resistance is admittedly debatable since the threat of the young girl’s occult activities is neutralized by the girl’s death at the end of the text; however, the tension between the narratives of Ambrose and the young girl are undeniably compelling. For a number of years the nurse acts as a surrogate mother providing a kind of security for the girl, but like her biological mother, the nurse eventually disappears, again leaving space for narrative instability. In a previous paper I brought up the possibility that it is the absence of her nurse, her early guide in the occult, that led to the girl “going too far” (Schoch/Davidson 85). Whether or not this is a correct assumption, at least from a narrative point of view, the nurse’s presence did prevent disaster in much the same way as the girl’s biological mother would have. Importantly, the nurse provides a number of warnings through the medium of the folk or fairy tale; often the girl recognizes parallels between her own occult activities and the nurse’s tales although she doesn’t appear to take heed after drawing those connections. Perhaps it is the girl’s inability to recognize the wisdom of the tales and the guidance they were meant to provide that leads to her downfall and ambiguous suicide. It is possible, however, that the nurse herself delved too deeply and disappeared due to her own occult dabblings, though there isn’t any textual proof of that. Besides the apparent creation of textual instability, which can be explained through the framework of the “missing mother,” the cause of the nurse’s disappearance and its effect on the young girl’s fate is largely speculative due to a dearth of textual evidence. Yet these questions and possibilities add layers of richness to the text and reward the reader who decides to return to it.

Additionally, both “The White People” and The Great God Pan offer complex narrative structures which benefit from multiple readings.

As I noted earlier, the narrative of the Green Book, written by our young protagonist, is “book-ended” by the commentary of Ambrose, who initially introduces the journal as a way to example his unique definition of evil; his insistence on the girl’s experience as an example of “true evil” preconditions the reader’s understanding of her practice. One could also make the argument that Ambrose’s commentary and framing constitutes a kind of “male gaze.” Writing about the male gaze, Tyson notes that “it is the one who looks who is in control, who holds the power to name things, the power to explain the world and so to rule the world” (97). There is a fascinating tension between mediation and direct access to the girl’s story in “The White People.” Ambrose introduces the journal certainly and introduces the idea that the young girl’s occult experimentations constitute a form of evil. Yet, he largely leaves Cotgrave, a kind of outsider stand-in for the reading audience, to interpret the specifics of the girl’s narrative.

Bernard Duyfhuizen invokes something of this tension as he describes the complexity introduced by hybrid narratives: “To engage a text of hybrid narrative transmission is to engage a narrative matrix that connects different voices and different acts of writing within what appears to be a unified whole, yet such hybrid texts also enact a competition for priority among the linked, enclosed, or alternated narrations” (123). As we read “The

White People,” we have to consider whose narrative is given priority, and I would argue that in some ways the different writing styles of Ambrose and the young protagonist are key: the highly academic and didactic style of Ambrose, while sometimes verging on the

100 poetic (ex. singing roses), does not arrest the audience like the sensual immediacy of the young girl’s narrative in the Green Book. Diaries, letters, and messages inserted into narration have been described as “the novelistic version of the deus ex machina,” and diaries and journals are particularly powerful in that they have the ability to reveal “more than even the most omniscient of narrators'' (Duyfhuizen 105). Ambrose, the narrator tasked with opposing this journalistic “deus ex machina,” is himself a fascinating character. He opens the “The White People” by speaking of “sorcery and sanctity” as

“withdrawal[s] from the common life” and his identity as a mad-genius hermit is solidified by Machen’s evocative choice to refer to him as a “recluse [who] dozed and dreamed over his books” (261). However, it has to be said that while Ambrose’s descriptions of good and evil are highly interesting, they are not immersive. This, I argue, is one of the primary reasons that the girl’s narrative wins the “competition for priority” enacted by all hybrid texts.

This sense of competition, however, is not necessarily one that Ambrose, as the initial introducer of the Green Book, is actively engaged in. He is our initial narrator, and it has been said the inserted documents allow the narrator to modulate the audience’s distance from that documentary narrative (Duyfhuizen 105). Yet, the structure of the story that Machen has chosen has Ambrose basically letting the girl’s narrative alone outside of some initial commentary, and an epilogue in which the circumstances of the girl’s death are revealed. As I have noted throughout my analysis there is a marked tension between the sensually pleasurable elements of the girl’s strange narrative and the more intellectually-grounded frame narrative of Ambrose the hermit. We may interpret

101 this tension in a number of ways. It is possible that this tension is the product of the strain

Machen himself felt between the pull of the safe, yet ordinary life and the wonders and dangers of forbidden knowledge. We can also understand this tension in terms of gothic literary convention. In his introduction to Late Victorian Gothic Tales Luckhurst writes that “the Gothic repeatedly stages moments of transgression because it is obsessed with establishing and policing borders, with delineating strict categories of being” (xiii). While the Gothic revels in scenes of transgression, societal boundaries are put back in place by the end of the text; while the death of the young girl can be read in this light, as a containment or neutralization of threat, I would argue that she still has considerable narrative power. While Ambrose’s initial commentary undeniably pre-conditions the audience’s response to the narrative of the Green Book, a comparison of the narrative structure of “The White People” and The Great God Pan reveals the extent to which the latter narrative is dominated by commentary that is both male and hostile. It has been understood that letters, diaries, and other inset documents “offer an alternative to the transmission processes of gossip that function in most novels” (Duyfhuizen 105). In my earlier chapter on The Great God Pan, I argued that much of the “evidence” of Helen’s deviance was little more than gossip and hearsay introduced through commentary on an assortment of introduced documents. I bring up this point again simply to note that while there may be some elements that problematize the young girl’s narrative agency, the commentary and mediation that shape our understanding of Helen in The Great God Pan is absolutely overwhelming by comparison. It is important to note that epistolary formats and those involving documents were generally out of vogue by the 19th century. The

102 gothic mode provided a notable exception; the genre’s fixation on suspense, secrets, and subversion lent itself to the use of interpolated documents (Brindle 22). Writing about the gothic tendency toward this narrative style, Kym Brindle writes that:

In fiction, as in life, documents subject to the whims and vagaries of careless inheritors and caretaking censors emanate an air of fragility, mystery, and secrecy. Letter communications can be hazardous: interrupted, misdirected, intercepted, or undelivered by mischance or design; like diaries, they may also be deliberately expurgated, defaced, burned or buried. Such perilous transmission fascinated nineteenth-century sensation and Gothic writers (25).

Ambrose, I argue, is nothing if not mindful of the Green Book and the dangers of the narrative contained within it as well as in its mysterious “sequel.” He acts as a kind of steward and makes a distinction between the two journals that is very similar to that of the young girl, who refers to another, more “secret'' journal. While Ambrose is possessed of two of her journals, the girl writes that she actually has a number of them: “I have a great many other books of secrets I have written, hidden in a safe place, and I am going to write here many of the old secrets and some new ones; but there are some I shall not put down at all” (Machen 268). In light of the danger of her revelations, it is actually concerning that there are a number that appear to be missing; however, Machen’s construction of Ambrose as a respectful steward of the two we are aware of betrays his own respect for the girl’s narrative. This is perhaps unsurprising in light of the fact that her talents, as well as her occult search for truth and wonder, are very close to Machen’s own. Yet, despite the apparent respect that the girl’s tale is given, she still suffers from an ill fate, and it is implied that she killed herself because of the strength and horror of her revelations. As readers, we are never privy to the nature of those revelations.

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As Hurley writes in The Gothic Body, “to assert that something is too horrible to be spoken of is the privileged utterance of the Gothic,” yet, scholars note that this is also the territory of the hysteric (48). If we are to believe Freud, hysteria requires the presence of a “disturbance in the sphere of sexuality so intolerable it must be repressed” (48-49).

Was the true transgression of the girl related to her uncovering of knowledge relating to female sexuality that is necessarily repressed for the good of society? If we agree with a reading that connects Ambrose’s censoring of the girl’s second journal and the girl’s inability to cope with uncovered secrets to hysteria and the sexual sphere, this also implies a strong connection between “The White People” and The Great God Pan. The men who interacted with Helen, those who were intimate with her, also killed themselves.

As I wrote about in a previous chapter, there is a strong implication that it was their sexual contact with Helen that ruined them; in light of the gender expectations and boundaries of upper class London society, they could not handle whatever was revealed about female sexuality during their encounter with Helen Vaughan. As Barbara Creed writes in her response to Kristeva’s theory of abjection, “the function of the monster....bring{s} about an encounter between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability” (Creed 49). Helen Vaughan acted as the monster which destabilized the symbolic order of the father, of male authority and patriarchy, and it is likely the young protagonist of “The White People” encountered similar secrets. I would note here that although we are not altogether aware of the nature of these revelations, we do know that they are connected to a female entity, the dark nymph Alanna; the Green

Book ends with a reference to Alanna having turned a pool of water into fire (291). We

104 are left to speculate on the reasons why this event ends the girl’s narrative of the Green

Book, but the obscure figure of Alanna presents interesting possibilities relating to female authority in the occult world of “The White People.” I argue that the many open questions in the text add to the depth of Machen’s narrative and encourage multiple readings. I also assert that certainty in defining “what” it was the girl encountered isn’t so important as trying to understand the ways in which Machen chooses to characterize the girl’s experience; there is a tension between the apparent curiosity and intellectual earnestness of the child and the danger she faces. She understands that what she is doing must remain secreted away. The first time she decides to undergo the rite of the clay man, which she had observed her nurse performing years ago, she writes that “I had to invent plans and stratagems, and to look about, and to think of things beforehand, because nobody must dream of things I was doing or going to do” (288). While Machen, and

Ambrose, don’t appear to fault her desire for dabblings with the occult, there is a line that is drawn when she commits suicide: whatever her revelations were, they appear to have made her “unfit” to exist in the material world. Existing between the material and non- material worlds is disallowed by Machen’s text, even though the first person “I” of the child’s narration draws us into sympathy with her. Noting the fact that many of the

Gothic’s most iconic monsters are liminal figures (existing somewhere “in-between” life and death or human and beast), Luckhurst writes that “ostensibly, conclusions reinstate fixed borders, re-secure autonomy, and destroy any intolerable occupants of these twilight zones” (xii). Though we as readers enjoy getting to live her experiences through

105 the first person “I” in which she writes the Green Book, gothic convention disallows the continuation of the young girl’s occult dalliance with the non-material world.

Writing about “The White People” in another venue, I have invoked John Clute’s

The Darkening Garden and his description of the four common stages of horror literature (Schoch/Davidson 92-93). Though hardly the only template for horror fiction, some scholars have found it to be the most provocative (Wolfe and Beamer 218). Beyond that, I have personally found it to be the most applicable to “The White People,” and more specifically, to its ending. Put briefly the stages are as follows: The first stage is referred to as the “Sighting,” in which the terror to come is glimpsed; this stage is also related to Freud’s Uncanny (Clute 17). The “Thickening,” the second stage of the plot, realizes the omens of the first stage. At the third stage (entitled “Revel”), “the field of the world is reversed and the terrifying truth is made manifest” (17). The fourth and last stage, which is the most important in terms of my analysis is “Aftermath”; this stage reveals a world that is “no longer storyable,” and this unstoryable world directly leads to the end of the narrative. As I had noted, the narrative of the Green Book ends with a reference to the dark nymph Alanna and her transformation of a pool of water to one of fire. The narrative also ends on an ellipsis. She cannot continue here, and we don’t know if she continues in the other journal. It is never made completely clear whether the split between the two journals occured after a certain point in time or whether the second journal was devoted to ritual specifics rather than a continuation of the girl’s narrative; it is possible the other book contained information about occult processes or linguistic information helpful in contacting the Voola, the “White People,” or any number of

106 beings. Speculation aside, it is clear that whatever came next in the Green Book was

“unstoryable.” Sadly, it also appears that the girl’s very life was unstoryable and also needed to end for the good of society, if not for her own. Ambrose’s reaction at the end of the text is interesting. He clearly agrees with her choice to commit suicide and is obviously sympathetic, which is surprising when we consider how much more controversial suicide would have been in the 1890s, a time when Christian faith and doctrine had a stronger sway. As I noted earlier, her “suicide” is problematized by the way Ambrose delivers that information: “She had poisoned herself--in time” (292). This ambiguity adds a richness of possibilities to Machen’s plot. I previously put forth the idea that “--in time” might imply a suicide that was coerced in a way similar to Helen

Vaughan’s, but if this is the case who might have coerced her? Because Ambrose himself found the child after her death, an alternate reading of the text could interpret the hermit as having forced her into suicide. Then there is the hanging question of the nurse’s disappearance. Could both the young girl and the nurse have been “punished” for some transgression by entities from the fairy world? In an earlier chapter on folklore I noted the tendency of folk and fairy stories to reinforce patriarchal constraint. Machen’s text disallows our knowing what exactly happened to the child, but Ambrose ends by telling

Cotgrave that “there was not a word to be said against her in the ordinary sense”; he clearly understands her choice, if we interpret it as a choice, and does not indict her for it

(292).

It has been written of Arthur Machen that it was an article of his faith “that the material and immaterial worlds are indivisible” (Fergus 5). I would argue that this belief

107 informed his own dabblings in the occult, and his own conviction that hidden in the material world were true wonders. While Machen’s personal belief system might have seen the two worlds as one and the same, his text seems to imply the need for boundaries, as per gothic convention.“The White People,” more obviously than The Great God Pan, negotiates Machen’s belief and interest in occult wonders with the intolerance of the society in which he lived. It was not lost on Machen that modern society was not conducive to an existence defined by wonderment: A Fragment of Life, written and published contemporaneously with “The White People” and the Pan novella, illustrates this sense of incompatibility, as well as Machen’s disdain for the banality of the ordinary life. Again, I invoke the “cultural instrumentality” of the gothic genre and “how it expresses something significant, or negotiates some salient problem, for its readership”

(Hurley British Gothic 194). I argue that both “The White People” and The Great God

Pan negotiate similar problems for their readers; they tackle issues of female agency in an aggressively patriarchal society and how one negotiates the material and immaterial worlds. In reading “The White People” I have often wondered whether the secrets revealed to the young girl would be as incompatible with survival now as they were in the

1890s, or were they only incompatible because she grew up with a certain flavor of social conditioning? As Botting has pointed out, studying gothic texts makes it clear that what is cast out by a society is just as telling as that which it admires (3). Machen is writing about the realistic consequences that both Helen and the young protagonist of “The White

People” would have faced in the culture that they, and he, were a part of. Yet, there is obvious sympathy in places; like Ambrose, he appears to lament their passing. It has been

108 noted that while Machen often sets “Saxon rationality” against older occult forces, “it is not always clear where his allegiances lie” (Aaron 71). It is in this ambiguity, I argue, that the complexity and joy of Machen’s supernatural narratives lie.

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VI. Closing Thoughts and Unbearable Tensions: The “Unstoryable” Lives of Machen’s

Women

In an article analyzing Arthur Machen and the concept of “Deep Time,” Aaron

Worth notes that during the 1890s the author’s use of the same conceptual material often generated wildly different effects (220). I think this is a compelling way to think about

The Great God Pan, “The White People,” and the connections between the two works which I have tried to develop throughout my thesis. The 1890s is widely considered

Machen’s most creative and innovative period, and with good reason. Yet, despite this creativity, a large number of the works written by Machen during this period used similar conceptual material: his stories often involved the occult, contrasts between rural and metropolitan spaces, women as vectors for supernatural forces, the existence of “little people” and clashes between the mysterious and ordinary elements of life. A longer analysis might’ve easily included a number of connections to A Fragment of Life (1904),

The Hill of Dreams (1907), and The Inmost Light (1894), all written during the fin de siècle, although published later. Machen would not pass on from the material world until

1947, and he continued to write almost until his death. His interests would evolve away from the “evocative paganism” of his fin de siècle fiction as he looked to the Sangrail and the Celtic Church for inspiration (Freeman 243). There is also speculation that the change in Machen’s fiction after the 1890s might be related to the death of his wife, Amy

Machen, who has been understood by some scholars as a “sexually dark and spiritually dangerous” muse (Graf 62). Despite the inconsistency of its expression, Machen’s drive

110 to discover the world’s true wonders would continue for the rest of his life in some form or another.

The central female characters of The Great God Pan and “The White People” are motivated by similar drives; like Machen, both women are driven to interact with occult forces, though “The White People” is much more thorough in illustrating the occult practices of its young protagonist. As Machen’s fiction gains in popularity, it is important that we as critics continue to interrogate the different effects generated by Machen’s use of similar themes and material: while “The White People” allows its readers to take part in the wonder of the young protagonist’s occult explorations, The Great God Pan squarely plunges the reader into the realm of upper-class paranoia and gothic horror.

These two works make fitting companion pieces precisely because they explore similar subject matter from different perspectives, and I hope that my thesis has conveyed

Machen’s interest in interrogating complex moral dilemmas from differing vantage points. As I’ve demonstrated, the drives of Machen’s “female occult offenders” are not too far off from his own. Machen always searched for something “beyond”; he was also willing to engage with secret knowledge and occult texts in his quest. Yet, the women in both The Great God Pan and “The White People” are “unfitted” for life in the material world through that exploration. A number of questions arise. Does Machen appear to favor the material world? Do these women’s deaths appear to represent a kind of moral indictment? Or, should we see these deaths as “realistic” in light of occult dangers and/or the patriarchal society in which the women operated? In her study of the Welsh gothic,

Jane Aaron observed that much of the horror of Machen’s writing “relies on the revulsion

111 of a certain type of man”; she refers of course, to men who represent an upper, or upper middle class London point of view (77). This point is especially applicable to the narrative in The Great God Pan, but I feel the gendering of occult knowledge and spaces in “The White People” also makes the point provocative. I argue that the questions stimulated by the deaths in the two stories cannot be decisively answered because

Machen’s texts operate around a series of “tensions” rather than absolutes. In concluding this work of analysis, I will outline a number of tensions that have been identified throughout my thesis. The first, and perhaps the most poignant, is the tension between reality in a patriarchal society and the way that Machen’s progressive streak asserts itself in his sympathetic representations of the female occultists featured in his works. Thus, even while Machen’s texts reinforce patriarchal constraint through their endings, Machen also explores the possibilities of female occult transgression from a variety of perspectives; this results in a rich body of work exhibiting a nuanced understanding of the issues generated by the occult. As I have noted, much of Machen’s fin de siècle fiction revolves around similar themes, and in a longer work of scholarship A Fragment of Life,

The Hill of Dreams, “The Red Hand,” “The Turanians,” and a number of other works might have entered into my analysis.

In an earlier chapter on The Great God Pan I noted the sheer number of anxieties the novella works with, including invasion anxiety and fears surrounding New

Womanism and changing gender roles as well as anxiety around degeneration, the liminal body, and human plasticity in the wake of Darwinism. The negotiation of these anxieties betrays the text’s “cultural instrumentality,” which is a function of the Gothic (Hurley

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194). Helen, through the response to her person, betrays all of these anxieties, and in the eyes of London society she is seemingly a monster. However, as Aaron noted, the horror that Helen elicits is dependent on the perspective of a certain kind of male, usually one of the London upper class. I would note that the indictment and end of Helen Vaughan is realistic in light of her gender positioning and the variety of abjected identities thrust upon her: the men who frame our understanding of her and facilitate her “punishment” are representative of British patriarchy itself. Once Helen began moving in their circle and threatening their population, her untimely end feels inevitable. Yet, despite Machen’s nod to patriarchal reality there is a sense of tension in the way he writes Helen Vaughan.

While a monster on one hand, the author makes a few narrative choices that evoke sympathy for the ill-fated woman. As I wrote in an earlier chapter, Machen’s choice to begin the narrative of The Great God Pan by “front-loading” Helen’s backstory and including details of her mother’s suffering at the hand of an upper-class doctor makes us more predisposed to understanding the tragedy of Helen Vaughan’s past and possible motivations. Then there is the epitaph for Helen, included outside the main text (and outside of the filtering viewpoints of London society), which reads “And now Helen is with her companions…” As I noted earlier, Machen’s choice to use Helen’s name counteracts the dehumanizing refusal of his male narrators to refer to her by name:

Charles Herbert and Villiers alternately refer to Helen as inhuman, as a “thing” or as an

“it.” This tension between Helen’s monstrousness and Helen’s humanity exists throughout The Great God Pan and demonstrates Machen’s keen ability to engage and alternate different sensibilities and moral outlooks. It is important to note here that

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Machen’s text, as written, elicited disgust and horror (Navarette 188). There is also an argument to be made that Machen needed to “punish” Helen; otherwise, his novella might have been completely intolerable to the reading public. While this point is speculative, it is important to consider the kinds of practical concerns that may have plagued Machen as he wrote his unconventional fiction. The unnamed female protagonist of “The White People,” on the other hand, does not threaten patriarchy in as direct a way as Helen, and Machen’s representation of the girl betrays a bit of a progressive streak. In my earlier chapter on “The White People,” I noted that in terms of male-authored Gothic fiction, the unnamed author of the Green Book is fairly unusual: she is not helplessly imprisoned and is possessed of a considerable intellect. What’s more, rather than exhibiting stereotypical female concerns, she actually shares a lot of Machen’s own motivations and interests (such as language learning); this points to the idea that the search for true wonders is actually a gender-neutral pursuit. Despite this progressive streak, however, the young girl still ends up dead by the end of the tale. I argue that her death is the product of another tension in Machen’s work: the draw of occult wonders in light of the very real possibility of encountering horrors.

As I documented extensively in the chapter on Machen’s occult explorations, the author understood the pull of the occult that draws the young female protagonist of “The

White People.” Helen, we presume, feels the same occult pull, and this could account for

Machen’s attempts to promote sympathy for the character. Despite his obvious sympathy,

Machen wrote into his works his own understanding of the occult’s dangers. There is a clear tension between wonder and horror in his fiction. Writing in a later article which

114 reviewed A.E. Waite’s The Book of Ceremonial Magic, Machen asserted that the search for something beyond the material world is what made human society “something infinitely above the best-regulated ant-hill or beehive” and differentiated us from “the wisest of pigs” (“The Black Art” 20). Importantly, he never chastises the seeker for seeking, nor for inadvertently crossing boundaries not meant to be crossed; there is almost a sense in Machen’s non-fiction writing about the occult that dangers are likely to be encountered. Machen has been characterized as “a longtime” seeker for a spirituality that satisfied his own burning certainties about the presence of wonder all around us”

(Freeman 248). When dealing with occult knowledge, the question becomes: can one go beyond normal human understanding to find wonders without the possibility of encountering horrors? I again refer to the connection between the unnamed female protagonist of “The White People” who went too far and Machen’s description of a sitter at a séance he once attended who, upon seeing a dead companion, experienced emotions which began with joy and ended in profound horror (Machen “Spiritualism” 50-51).

Machen has also referred to the possibility of accidental encounters related to human blundering as “a child meddling in a clockworks” (50-51). The otherworld, the occult, has the potential of being very dangerous, and this reality, as Machen understood it, is written into his texts, and does not imply a moral judgement of those who seek. While it is nearly impossible to ensure that we don’t step into dangerous territory in our occult explorations, this does not mean that the drive to discovery isn’t a noble one. The same danger related to the otherworld and occult knowledge also underscores much of the

British folklore related to fairies, as I explored in an earlier chapter. The inherent tension

115 caused by the human inability to tell the wondrous and good from the horrifying and malevolent is written into Machen’s title “The White People,” a title which references the convention of referring to fairies as “the fair folk” and “the good people,” precisely because they are evil. Machen was aware of this convention, especially prominent in Irish folklore (Machen, “Folklore,” 40-41). Whether consciously or not, Machen may also be reflecting the tendency of fairy lore to reinforce gendered limitations. It has been written that oftentimes fairy lore does tend to act as a kind of “supernatural law” which mirrors the real-life constraints faced by women in any given period (Vejvoda 43). I also argue that Machen’s writing points to the incompatibility of a life infused with the occult and one lived in the material world. Other works, such as A Fragment of Life, have demonstrated this incompatibility as well as Machen’s disdain for the banality of ordinary life. The “realism” that led Machen to destroy his female characters--the realism that unfits them for living--is both social and mystical in nature. While the author himself was involved in the occult, Machen’s gendering of occult knowledge in his fiction thematically draws clear parallels between patriarchal constraint and the ordinary, material world of society. It also allows the author to explore tensions related to gender expectations at the same time he focuses on the tension between the human capacity for wonder and the pitfalls that accompany it.

Machen’s women are coming up against the hammer of patriarchy at the same time that they encounter the reality of occult horrors: notably, The Great God Pan engages more closely with patriarchal constraint whereas “The White People” more explicitly illustrates the very real danger of encountering horrors in our search for

116 wonders. All of these tensions result in tales that are “unstoryable.” According to John

Clute’s model for gothic and horror fiction, the “unstoryable,” the fourth and final stage of a gothic tale, occurs when the new world revealed by the narrative disallows the continuation of the story and that narrative must abruptly end (17). Both narratives reveal worlds that are “unstoryable,” but in slightly different ways. Helen’s tale is unstoryable as she reveals secrets about female sexuality to her intimate partners that threaten male dominance in a patriarchal society. The young protagonist of “The White People” reveals a world that is incompatible with material living altogether, although we are never exactly privy to that world. Due to the tension created by the realities Machen is working with, the lives of both these women become “unstoryable,” and that is why they are unfit to live. While they are written from different vantage points and emphasize different aspects of the same problem, The Great God Pan and “The White People” negotiate similar issues for their readers: they tackle issues of female agency in an aggressively patriarchal society while at the same time exploring questions related to humankind’s navigation of material and immaterial worlds. Is there a way to safely encounter the world’s true wonders while avoiding its horrors? Despite his own experience with the occult, I’m not sure that Machen would believe such an undertaking can ever be completely safe. That is simply the nature of the mysterious. My hope is that through this thesis I have effectively incorporated elements of Arthur Machen’s biography, as well as his interests in the occult and folklore, to bring about a deeper understanding of the tensions operating in his texts. It is these tensions, and Machen’s unwillingness to offer easy answers, that compels fans of his fiction to reread these texts time and again. As we

117 sift through the variety of narrative perspectives in The Great God Pan and “The White

People” we are rewarded by tales that offer alternate moral positionings and wildly different versions of narrative events that depend upon the voice we choose to privilege.

Was Helen Vaughan truly a monster to be stopped at all costs, or does this reading depend upon the perspective of a threatened patriarchy? In reading “The White People” should we be considering the intellectual arguments of Ambrose the hermit, or are we permitted to simply revel in the sensual experience provided by the young occultist’s writings? Referencing the young girl’s narrative in the Green Book, Ambrose solemnly tells Cotgrave that “A child’s imagination always makes the heights higher and the depths deeper than they really are; and she had, unfortunately for herself, something more than imagination” (292). If the young girl’s narrative was not a realistic representation of her experiences, why did the narrative insist on her death? If the revelations she uncovered were not as intense as her narrative insisted they were in the Green Book, is it necessary that we as readers be protected by the contents of her other notebooks? These questions betray the complexity of Machen’s narrative and the narrative tensions we as readers are tasked with navigating as we analyze his fiction.

118

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