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the shape of an awe-inspiring agency of guilt, Abjection the repressed fi gure of maternal authority ELISABETH BRONFEN returns either as an embodiment of the Holy Mary’s sublime femininity or as a monstrous As an adjective, “abject” qualifi es contemptible body of procreation, out to devour us and actions (such as cowardice), wretched emo- transform us into the site for further grotesque tional states (such as grief or poverty), and self- breeding. By drawing attention to the manner abasing attitudes (such as apologies). Derived in which a cultural fear regarding the uncon- from the Latin past participle of abicere, the trollability of feminine reproduction has con- word has come into use within Gothic studies sistently served as a source of horror, abjection primarily to discuss processes by which some- has proven a particularly resonant term for a thing or someone belonging to the domain of study of Gothic culture. the degrading, miserable, or extremely submis- The abject is not to be thought of as a static sive is cast off. Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror concept, pertaining to something monstrous (1982) fi rst introduced abjection as a critical or unclean per se. Instead, it speaks to a thresh- term. Picking up on the anthropological study old situation, both horrifying and fascinating. of initiation rites discussed by Mary Douglas in It involves a tripartite process in the course of her book Purity and Danger (1966), Kristeva which forces that threaten stable identities addresses the acts of separation necessary for come again to be contained. For one, abjection setting up and preserving social identity. Her entails an exclusion of that which blurs the debt to Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo boundary between self and other, so that, by (1913), in turn, consists of drawing attention virtue of this separation, subject positions can to the psychic implications of such processes again be clearly drawn. At the same time, it is of differentiation, even though foregrounding also understood as a symptom drawing on that abjection involves both collective and indi- a cultural fear of the feminine reproductive vidual identity formations. Pointedly, Kristeva force, rendering the maternal body monstrous refi gures the murder ofCOPYRIGHTED the father, so seminal so that MATERIAL it can be cast off. Finally, abjection also to Freud’s notion of the Oedipus scenario, by involves the way in which a body that must foregrounding instead the manner in which be abjected – for the alleged health of the psychosocial identity is determined as much by individual or the community – is declared an act of separation from the maternal body. to be alien and can thus, in good conscience, While, according to Freud, mythic narratives be expelled. It is useful to recall: only once bring back the murdered primordial father in Frankenstein’s Creature is declared to be a

The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, paperback edition. Edited by William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith. © 2016 John Wiley and Sons Ltd. Published 2016 by John Wiley and Sons Ltd. 2 abjection monstrous body does it indeed become a stray ity. The paternal scientist, who clandestinely who will return to haunt the world of its cre- wants to import members of this alien culture ator with ruthless vengeance. In the process of so that his research might benefi t the war abjection, two attitudes thus come to be con- industry, is ironically on the side of the mon- joined. One the one hand, the bodies to be strous mother, whose reproductive facilities he abjected are declared horrifi c; on the other, the seeks to appropriate. Indeed, the abject Alien act of abjection is itself monstrous precisely mother, albeit unwittingly, blurs the boundary because it targets a fi gure that, by undermining between a masculine war industry and femi- clear boundaries, must be cast off. In other nine monstrous creation only to disclose their words, only because those foreign bodies that mutual implication. By resiliently giving battle are to be abjected are encoded as being a hor- to this monstrous progenitrix, although doing rifi c threat to the self or the community can we so against the covert intentions of her boss, overlook the fact that the agents of abjection, Captain Ripley, in turn, herself uncovers the working under the auspices of a regeneration blurring between the very terms that set up the of stable identity borders, are equally violent. process of abjection. In the decisive moment A resonant representation of abjection as we see her rising to the spaceship’s deck, in one a process by which the individual and society arm the phallic rifl e she has put together and come ceaselessly to redraw the boundaries in the other the little girl for whom she fondly between them (even while being forced to rec- cares. Over her warrior body, paternal war ognize the fragility of this enterprise) can be machinery again comes to be crossed with found in Alien3 (David Fincher, 1992). At the maternal love, rendering visible how the act of beginning of the fi lm, Captain Ripley wakes up abjection and its object can never be neatly to discover that the queen Alien, whom she separated. thought she had successfully vanquished in Such inability to distinguish between subject the previous episode, cannot fully be cast away. and object explains why abjection should not, The monstrous adversary has impregnated her according to Kristeva (1982), be thought of in so that she is herself now carrying a baby Alien terms of narcissism, and why it entails a differ- inside her body. Typically of the ambivalence ent libidinal economy than that of love. While contained in the concept of abjection, Ripley abjection may result in a transference of affec- fi nds herself on both sides of the battle. Even tive energies, it involves an object whose status though she acts under the auspices of a sym- is unclear, too close to be assimilated into an bolic system that designates those foreign to it object of desire. Instead, declared to be a radi- to be abjectable, she is herself a liminal fi gure, cally excluded object, the abject body contin- positioned between the Aliens and the inhabit- ues to challenge the authority that called for it ants of Earth. Indeed, the Alien trilogy is pre- to be cast off. Positioned on the edge of a reality mised on a key aporia built into the concept of that, were it to be fully acknowledged, would abjection. The pure and the impure can never be utterly destructive, the abject, as Kristeva be neatly severed because dangerous foreign notes, “takes the ego back to its source on the bodies that trouble neat identity categories are abominable limits from which, in order to written into the very fabric of all stable notions be, the ego has broken away.” Abjection, she of identity. The precursor to Alien3, Aliens adds, is “an alchemy that transforms death (James Cameron, 1986), sees Ripley so drawn drive into a start of life, a new signifi cance” by the Alien mother that in the fi nal show- (1982: 15). This dual move is perhaps rendered down, even though she could have safely nowhere as clearly in Gothic texts as in the escaped, she chooses instead to return to her fascinating horror a corpse inspires. To assert adversary’s lair. Her fascination with this individual and collective survival entails casting embodiment of horror places her in the cross- off death by drawing its force to the body of a fi re of two equally dangerous fi gures of author- deceased that can then be symbolically expelled abjection 3 with the help of codifi ed burial rituals. Yet, mark a reinsertion of control and with it a implicitly inscribed in such renewal is an redrawing of the boundary between affective acknowledgment of what threatens individual identifi cation with and self-conscious distanc- and collective self-assertion. Abjection thrives ing from the experience of abjection the fi c- on troubling the line that demarcates life tional text evokes. As a performance of the from death because, while the life of the subject fragility upon which individual and collective (as that of the community) is dependent on identity is based, abjection is sustained by its ability to cast off death, life is also measured a counter-directional move. Even while the by the fact that it is constantly threatened by abject confronts us with fascinating if trou- death. bling situations where psychic stability threat- Equally seminal for Gothic culture is the ens to dissolve and we risk falling back under manner in which abjection fi nds an articula- the sway of a stifl ing all-encompassing mater- tion in two forms of psychic transformation, nal power, it calls for a combat that inevitably namely the bodily symptom and sublimation. culminates in rejection. The fi nal battle in The former, Kristeva suggests, could be seen as Aliens has Ripley on the ship’s deck both touch- a “non-assimilable alien, a monster,” which “the ing and fi ghting off the mother Alien, coming listening devices of the unconscious do not ever closer in her embrace until she is able to hear, for its strayed subject is huddled outside jettison her ferocious enemy into the bottom- the paths of desire.” Monstrous bodies can less darkness of the sky. fruitfully be seen as symptoms of an anxiety Gothic texts that celebrate abjection as regarding the fragility of identity boundar- much play with a breakdown of identity ies because they embody a blurring between boundaries as they play to the authority of human and inhuman rather than representing redrawing these, even if in full knowledge in symbolic language the anxiety such destabi- of the fragility such recuperation entails. The lization of categories entails. Sublimation, in fascinating power of horror that Gothic sensi- turn, is “nothing else than the possibility of bility taps into is one that insists on revealing naming the pre-nominal, the pre-objectal, the mutual implication of the monstrosity which are in fact only a trans-nominal, a trans- aligned with the maternal and the strict law of objectal.” On the thematic level, Gothic texts ejection connected with paternal symbolic celebrate symptoms of abjection in their depic- laws. In the Alien trilogy, Ripley may be fi ght- tion of vampires, which undo the border ing in the name of a paternally structured war between life and death, as well as their interest industry but she is drawn by the maternal in the double, who troubles the notion of a excess that has already contaminated her, sus- cohesive self (see doubles; vampire fi ction). taining her fascination with the abject body she As aesthetic representations, however, Gothic is in the process of casting off. In a similar texts have recourse to poetic language and thus manner, the position of the audience of Gothic also belong to sublimation. Kristeva suggests: texts is equally liminal. Kristeva notes, “the “In the symptom, the abject permeates me, I writer, fascinated by the abject, imagines its become abject. Through sublimation, I keep it logic, projects himself into it, introjects it, and under control. The abject is edged with the as a consequence perverts language – style and sublime” (1982: 11). content.” Particularly Gothic writing, one In performing the unnameable that makes might say, thrives on what she calls a “crossing up the ground and vanishing point of all sym- over of the dichotomous categories of Pure bolic language, aesthetic texts allow us to have and Impure, Prohibition and Sin, Morality and our cake of horror and eat it. By virtue of the Immorality” (1982: 16). Regarding their fasci- affective force of the aesthetic text we can iden- nation with abjection, Gothic texts perform tify with an experience of abjection, yet we do an impossible catharsis. Acknowledging that so by proxy. The laws of narrative closure also sublimation will inevitably revert back to 4 abyss, the symptoms of abjection, they warn us that the remote and sublime landscapes in eighteenth- cycle of abjection as a dialectic of confronta- and early nineteenth-century novels. This is tion and combat is endless precisely because not to say that the literary trope of the abyss the pure and the dangerous feed on and per- has remained constant; it has been consistently petuate each other. Gothic texts call upon us reinterpreted, recreated, and rearranged. In to stay attuned to the unnameable force that Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), for instance, undercuts our sense of stable identity, inside the abyss conveys the Gothic aspects of the and outside, foreign and familiar. setting and refl ects the psychological distress of the characters (see radcliffe, ann). When SEE ALSO: Blood; Doubles; Liminality; Mon- the distraught Ellena is journeying through the strosity; Psychoanalysis; Vampire Fiction. wilderness to the monastery, she ascends “the cliffs of a mountain” and, on the brink of a precipice, she sees water “fretting and foaming” REFERENCES as it “fell with thundering strength to the Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and Danger. London: abyss.” As she continues along the dangerous Routledge & Kegan Paul. path, the narrator struggles to fi nd the words Freud, S. (1955 [1913]) Totem and Taboo. The Stan- to describe her treacherous journey: dard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol. XIII. London: Hogarth Press. Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on The road, therefore, was carried high among the Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. cliffs . . . and seemed as if suspended in air; while the gloom and vastness of the precipices, which towered above and sunk below it, together with the amazing force and uproar of the falling waters, combined to render the pass more terrifi c Abyss, The than the pencil could describe, or language can JUSTIN D. EDWARDS express.

In “This Abyss,” a song by The Gothic Archies, Attempting to articulate the sublime – the the haunting voice of Stephin Merritt drones bottomless chasm, the abyss – the narrator the lyrics, “This abyss, this lightless void / This describes Ellena’s “dreadful pleasure . . . height- abyss, of world destroyed . . . / This abyss, of ened with awe,” as she contemplates the great night unbound / This abyss, without a sound.” chasm: “The transition was as the passage Drawing on a fashionable Goth aesthetic (see through the vale of death to the bliss of eter- goth), this song attempts to convey a symbolic nity” (Radcliffe 1998: 63–4). and psychological state of darkness through The abyss, as this scene suggests, inspires the spatial terms of an abyss, an endless chasm. anxiety, terror, and awe. For the character “This abyss, of black increased / This abyss, experiences an ominous and irresistible force without surcease,” the song continues, gestur- associated with the immense power and in- ing toward the literary defi nition of the term: expressibility of the sublime (see sublime, a bottomless or unfathomed depth or gulf, a the). In this, the abyss is a source of imminent bottomless pit. The OED also defi nes the abyss danger, refl ecting the possibility of being as having the fi gurative meaning of a cata- headed toward destruction. Characters are, strophic situation seen as likely to occur, or the moreover, often attracted to and repulsed from term can be used to refer to intellectual, ethical, the abyss, embodying an ambiguity that is or moral depths. central to the Gothic. For the abyss compels us The trope of the abyss has been diffused to destruction – it is a reminder of death – and throughout the Gothic novel. The abyss became yet it also draws one toward it, attracting one a literary feature to convey anxiety and depict to peer down into the darkness. abyss, the 5

The trope of the abyss is present throughout a man so he will inherit his estate. Refl ecting the American Gothic, often fi guratively con- on his crimes, the narrator states: veying a threatening physical and psycho- logical wilderness. In a crucial moment in We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) (see peer into the abyss – we grow sick and dizzy. brown, charles brockden), for instance, the Our fi rst impulse is to shrink from the danger. main character, Clara, describes a “dark dream” Unaccountably we remain . . . . And because our about her brother Theodore: he tempts her to reason violently deters us from the brink, there- fore, do we the more impetuously approach it. the edge of an abyss, enticing her toward her There is no passion in nature so demoniacally own destruction: impatient, as that of him, who shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge. I at length imagined myself walking, in the To indulge for a moment, in any attempt at evening twilight, to my brother’s habitation. A thought, is to be inevitably lost; for refl ection but pit, methought, had been dug in the path I had urges us to forbear, and therefore it is, I say, that taken, of which I was not aware. As I carelessly we cannot. If there be no friendly arm to check pursued my walk, I thought I saw my brother, us, or if we fail in a sudden effort to prostrate standing at some distance before me, beckoning ourselves backward from the abyss, we plunge, and calling me to make haste. He stood on the and are destroyed. opposite edge of the gulf. I mended my pace and one step more would have plunged me into this Knowing he will never be caught, the narrator abyss, had not someone from behind caught suddenly my arm. (Brown 1994: 57–8) questions if he is capable of confession. He then fearfully runs through the streets and Here, the abyss is linked to sexual transgression reveals his secret; he is quickly tried and sen- and incest (see incest). For in this dream, tenced to death. Theodore tempts Clara into an abyss, beckon- ing her over the chasm. Sexual desire and the SEE ALSO: Brown, Charles Brockden; Goth; abyss are clearly linked throughout the text, Incest; Poe, Edgar Allan; Radcliffe, Ann; Sublime, illustrating Clara’s ambivalence concerning her The. brother: she loves him dearly, but fears his sexuality. Theodore’s desire for his sister, sym- bolically presented in his beckoning, out- REFERENCES stretched hand, entices and terrifi es Clara. She Brown, C. B. (1994 [1798]) Wieland. Oxford: Oxford cannot resist him, she is compelled to go to Classics. forward, but she is also repulsed by his incestu- Poe, E. A. (1845) The Imp of the Perverse. The Lit- ous, “unspeakable” desire. erature Network. www.online-literature.com/ The Gothic trope of the abyss is, then, poe/33, accessed March 15, 2012. sometimes used to represent transgression. In Radcliffe, A. (1998 [1797]) The Italian. Oxford: this, it gestures toward a terrible void of life or Oxford Classics. the symbolic fall into an indulgent passion or ruthless acts – physical or sexual violence – whereby an unethical world lays waste to FURTHER READING potential victims. This aspect of the trope is Pahl, D. (1989) Architects of the Abyss: The present in the Gothic writing of Edgar Allan Indeterminate Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and Poe (see poe, edgar allan). In “The Imp of Melville. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri the Perverse” (1845), for instance, Poe’s narra- Press. tor describes a spirit that tempts him toward Wilczynski, M. (1999) The Phantom and the Abyss: transgression and self-destruction. He explains Gothic Fiction in America and Aesthetics of how this force – this imp – leads him to murder Sublime, 1798–1856. New York: Peter Lang. 6 adultery Adultery Rochester rather than consummate an adulter- ous affair, only to be reunited with him at the ANDREW SCAHILL close of the novel after his wife commits suicide. Jean Rhys would reclaim the fi gure of Bertha in Though often believed to be derived from the her feminist novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), in word “adult” as a practice of those who have which Bertha’s madness is caused by Roches- attained chronological maturity, the term ter’s rejection of her West Indian heritage. “adultery” is actually a combination of the Flight from adultery also serves as the basis Latin ad (toward) and alter (other). Taken for Louisa May Alcott’s suspense novel A Long together, adultery literally means “to make Fatal Love Chase (1868), which she wrote two other,” a fi tting etymology for the place of years before her sentimental favorite Little adultery within the Gothic, a genre so funda- Women. In A Long Fatal Love Chase, Alcott’s mentally concerned with sexuality, corruption, Gothic heroine Rosamond is seduced and transformation, and otherness. Within litera- deceived by the aptly named Phillip Tempest, ture as a whole, adultery serves to illustrate the who already has a wife and child. After leaving confl ict between desire/libido and law/civiliza- him, Tempest begins a sadistic chase of Rosa- tion, or, more broadly, the personal and the mond across Europe that ends tragically in public. Gothic narratives involving adulterous both of their deaths. liaisons extend these themes and materialize The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel patriarchal anxieties around issues of power, Hawthorne in 1850, is another central text in surveillance, and an ambivalent polarity of the Gothic’s treatment of adultery. Infi delity pleasure/terror at the display of female sexual- takes a more central place in this novel, set in ity (see sex). a seventeenth-century Puritan village, as Hester Treatment of adultery in the Gothic tends to Prynne is forced to wear an embroidered letter be highly gendered, with male adultery forming “A” to signify her sin. Her husband, the aptly the basis of the Byronic hero’s dark and mysteri- named Roger Chillingsworth, torments both ous secret: an abandoned wife, an illicit love Prynne and her secret paramour, the minister affair, or an illegitimate child, for instance. Arthur Dimmesdale, eventually leading to the Female adultery tends to be more suspected minister’s death. The offspring of Hester and than actual (with the notable exception of The Dimmesdale’s affair, Pearl, functions as an Scarlet Letter). However, this belief in marital embodied extension of the scarlet letter, with indiscretion leads many beleaguered, spiteful Prynne even swathing the child in scarlet husbands in the Gothic to accuse, abuse, and clothing with gold embroidery. Described as even murder their wives over suspicion of adul- “impish” and at times “demonic” in the text, tery. Where comedic genres have long employed Pearl stands as a constant reminder of Hester cuckoldry as a site of farcical humor, the Gothic and Dimmesdale’s unsanctioned affair, and centralizes male paranoia (sometimes with an possesses the same mix of Romantic innocence explicit critique of the fragility of the male ego) and Victorian emptiness that would character- as an irrational abhorrence that transforms ize the Gothic child in Henry James, and later rational men into Hyde-like monstrosities. Stephen King. The Scarlet Letter, however, also Perhaps the ur-text of adulterous secrecy suggests the possibility of redemption from in the Gothic is Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane sin, as Hester’s sin is eventually forgotten or Eyre, published in 1847. In the novel, the epon- forgiven, and her scarlet letter is taken to mean ymous Gothic heroine falls in love and becomes “able” rather than “adulterer” by the towns- engaged to her mysterious employer, Mr. Roch- people (see hawthorne, nathaniel). ester. Jane discovers, however, that Rochester In American literature, African American already has a wife, Bertha – a mad woman authors used the conventions of the Gothic to whom he locks away in the attic. Jane abandons narrativize the actual lived horrors of chattel african american gothic 7 slavery and physical and sexual subjugation correlation between female sexuality, loss of under white rule. Teresa Goddu notes in Gothic self-control, and death: notable examples America: Narrative, History, and Nation (1997) include Fatal Attraction (1987), The Hand That that African American authors such as Fredrick Rocks the Cradle (1992), and Obsessed (2009). Douglass and Harriet Jacobs used the Gothic Further, fi lms such as Poison Ivy (1992) and mode to “haunt back” and reveal the horrors Crush (1993) take a Lolita-esque turn, as their of slavery. In Harriet Jacobs’ narrative Incidents female seductresses are emotionally disturbed in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), young slave young girls (see fi lm). These fi lms function as girl Linda Brent must fend off the sexual neoconservative cautionary tales to married advances of her master, Dr. Flint, and endure men to remain within the bounds of matri- the wrath of Mrs. Flint, who punishes the girl mony and family, and equate female sexuality for a perceived affair. As Jacobs illustrates, it is with overwrought hedonism and madness. the horror of slavery that transforms proper women into vengeful monsters (see slavery SEE ALSO: Female Gothic; Film; Hawthorne, and the gothic). More broadly, adulterous Nathaniel; Sex; Slavery and the Gothic; Southern miscegenation (consensual and not) forms the Gothic. basis of many a tragic secret within the genre as a whole, as the wealthy white slave owner REFERENCES must hide away his mixed-race children and Alcott, L. M. (1995 [1868]) A Long Fatal Love Chase. the “tragic mulatto” character lives in constant New York: Random House. fear of discovery. In The Bondwoman’s Narra- Brontë, C. (1847) Jane Eyre. Cornhill: Smith, Elder tive (believed to have been written between & Co. 1853 and 1861), for instance, Hannah Crafts Crafts, H. (2002 [1853–61]) The Bondwoman’s Nar- employs the tropes of the female Gothic as a rative. New York: Time-Warner. mulatto woman, passing for white, is pursued Goddu, T. (1997) Gothic America: Narrative, History, and blackmailed by the aptly named Mr. and Nation. New York: Columbia University Trappe, who threatens to reveal her secret (see Press. female gothic). It should be noted that Hawthorne, N. (1850) The Scarlet Letter. Boston, scholars such as Catherine Keyser have argued MA: Ticknor, Reed & Fields. that Crafts was heavily infl uenced by Brontë’s Jacobs, H. (2001 [1861]) Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Dover: Dover Publications. Jane Eyre in writing The Bondwoman’s Narra- Rhys, J. (1992 [1966]) Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: tive. Indeed, questions of true parental lineage W. W. Norton. and racial purity haunt much of American lit- erature, particularly in the work of Nathaniel FURTHER READING Hawthorne and Southern Gothic writers such as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor Rippon, M. R. (2002) Judgment and Justifi cation in (see southern gothic). the Nineteenth-Century Novel of Adultery. Santa In cinema, adultery frequently serves as a Barbara, CA: Greenwood. basis for the potboiler mystery and fi lm noir Segal, N. (1997) Scarlett Letters: Fictions of Adultery from Antiquity to the 1990s. Basingstoke: Palgrave genres; notable examples include The Letter Macmillan. (1940), Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946). In these fi lms, it is common for the married “femme fatale,” or deadly African American Gothic woman, to lure the weak-willed everyman into CAROL MARGARET DAVISON an increasingly labyrinthine plot to perform a heist or murder the seductress’ husband. Although the Gothic has been overlooked or Contemporary examples extend fi lm noir’s downplayed by critics of African American 8 african american gothic literature, and resisted by some of its writers and adapted established Gothic rhetoric and wary of the genre’s tendency to dematerialize motifs that subsequently spilled over into cul- the horrors of African American experience, it tural productions. has nonetheless pervaded that canon from the African American Gothic, like its white early slave narratives through to contemporary American counterpart, is preoccupied with writing. Although no sustained examination slavery and its formidable and multifaceted exists of African American investments in legacy, especially the issue of race relations. The the Gothic to date, certain observations have works of both groups attest to the veracity of been made. The Gothic’s popular use of the Richard Wright’s statement that “in the oppres- “sins of the fathers” theme that engages with sion of the Negro a shadow [lies] athwart our grievous historical transgressions and unspeak- national life dense and heavy” (1964: xxxiv). able trauma makes it an exceptionally suitable While admiring and marshaling the Gothic’s mode for taking up African American issues tremendous evocative powers, however, African and debates. Deploying Gothic strategies has American authors tend to desupernaturalize also enabled African American writers to that form and resist its Romantic effects. Their contest the rationalist discourses that under- strategy of naturalizing the Gothic, according gird racist ideology and to dialogue with the to critics, underscores the traumatic, terror- white American literary tradition that, accord- fi lled reality experienced by African Americans ing to Leslie Fiedler, is “bewilderingly and within a racist society. In his prefacing essay to embarrassingly [...] gothic” (1960: 9) in its Native Son (1940), Richard Wright claims that exposure of the hidden “blackness” of the African American reality is so rife with horrors American soul, especially in relation to that that no Hawthorne or Poe is required to invent nation’s two “special guilts” – “the slaughter of new ones (1964: xxxiv). Literary critic Theo- the Indians” and “the abominations of the slave dore L. Gross paraphrases Wright several trade” (Fiedler 1960: 130). decades later in his statement that “the night- Toni Morrison theorizes the white Ameri- mare world of Poe or Hawthorne has become can Gothic fascination with historical trans- the Monday morning of the Negro author” gressions as an effort to inoculate the nation (1971: 184). against repeating them. In such antebellum lit- Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave erary classics as Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narra- Girl (1861), a harrowing female slave narrative, tive of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), Nathaniel is usually identifi ed as marking the inception Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables of the African American Gothic tradition. Like (1851), and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; Or, other accounts of its kind, Incidents draws on The Whale (1851), the Gothic has been brought the female Gothic popularized by Britain’s to bear, in provocative and insightful ways, on Ann Radcliffe and forges parallels between the vexed question of race relations in Amer- African American female slaves and white ica. In both Gothic and non-Gothic works, women confi ned to the British domestic however, African Americans and Native Amer- sphere. Several critics have noted that the icans have been represented as abject Gothic female Gothic and the female slave narrative Others. Joseph Holt Ingraham’s Lafi tte (1836) similarly expose the terror, sexual politics, and and Henry Clay Lewis’ “A Struggle for Life” various dark, repressed, and often unconscious (1843), for example, feature bestialized, homi- truths about patriarchy, but they have espe- cidal, and physically distorted black men cially underscored the latter form’s resistance who ultimately die violent, ritualistic deaths. to Romantic conventions. Such exposure and These works also evidence the noteworthy resistance are evident in the recently discovered nineteenth-century phenomenon whereby The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts. race-focused studies and debates – medical, Edited by African American scholar Henry scientifi c, political, and otherwise – adopted Louis Gates, Jr., and published in 2002, this african american gothic 9

fi ctionalized, Dickensian-style slave narrative within the broader, white-dominated Ameri- dating from the 1850s exhibits an astonishing can society. knowledge of contemporary sentimental and Perhaps the most signifi cant Gothic- Gothic fi ction and may be the fi rst novel writ- infl ected concept wielded by Du Bois is that of ten by an African American woman. Its Gothic “double consciousness,” a paradoxical curse/ conventions include an original crime, a series gift that affects all African Americans who expe- of haunted houses, the theme of confi nement, rience the singular and intense sensation of a persecuted woman, and a fi gurative vampire “two-ness, – [being] an American, a Negro; two oppressor in the form of a blackmailing lawyer souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; named Mr. Trappe. two warring ideals in one dark body, whose Twentieth-century African American Gothic dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn has been most recognizable as a regional form asunder” (1968: 3). Subsequent authors of and often resists containment in literary pro- African American Gothic, among other writers, ductions. As works by such masters as William explore and adapt Du Bois’ concept of double Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor illustrate, consciousness, which involves the plaguing the South often functions as the repository for “sense of always looking at one’s self through America’s irrational impulses. W. E. B. Du the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a provoca- by the tape of a world that looks on in amused tive and poetic sociological commentary on contempt and pity” (1968: 3). Some connect African American reality in the post-Recon- it to the traditional Gothic concept of the structionist South, consistently presents race repressed, often transgressive fi gure of the relations through a Gothic lens. According to “double” or “shadow self” (see doubles). Du Bois, “the problem of the Twentieth In many of its Gothic motifs and atmo- Century is the problem of the color-line” spherics, Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), a much (1968: 13). Forty years after the Emancipation celebrated production of the Harlem Renais- Proclamation of 1863, the “Nation has not yet sance, takes a page out of Du Bois’ Souls. Gothic found peace from its sins”: “the swarthy spectre tropes punctuate several of the key vignettes in [of slavery] sits in its accustomed seat at the this avant-garde novel that poetically chroni- Nation’s feast” (1968: 6). Thus does Du Bois cles African American experience in the post- reiterate, in more Gothic terms, Frances E. W. Reconstruction era. Set in a quintessential Harper’s observation in her (1892) novel Iola Southern town with a cotton factory and cane Leroy that while “Slavery [...] is dead, [...] the fi elds, “Blood Burning Moon,” for example, spirit which animated it still lives” (1987: 217). recounts an ill-fated love triangle involving Du Bois yokes this compelling concept of an a black woman and two antagonistic suitors, un-dead slavery to the notion that the sins of one white (Bob Stone, son of the former plan- the fathers persist in the form of an economic tation owner), the other black (Tom Burwell, a slavery as “the shadow-hand of the master’s cane fi eldworker). Marked by a sensitivity and grand-nephew or cousin or creditor stretches attentiveness to the complexities of conscious- out of the gray distance to collect the rack-rent ness on both sides of the racial divide, “Blood remorselessly” (1968: 117). Du Bois’ portrait Burning Moon” concludes with the white man of a purgatorial, benighted region handcuffed dead and the black man brutally lynched by an to history is strikingly Gothic in nature, as is irate white mob, his fi nal articulation of agony the multivalent and prominent symbol of the channeling a multitude of ghostly brethren. veil that taps the joint themes of biblical Apoc- Toomer cannily uses the Gothic to elevate this alypse/Revelation. The veil of race that shadows and other haunting sequences in Cane into a Du Bois’ baby son and all African Americans cosmic struggle underpinned by historic forces in Souls serves as a barrier that grotesquely to which he suggests the characters are irrevo- obscures their proper and full recognition cably bound. 10 african american gothic

In keeping with the tradition of the slave horror-fi lm motifs, atmospherics, and tech- narrative, twentieth-century African American niques such as the ideas of a repressed family Gothic has been used primarily to articulate history and a secret, monstrous/hybrid identity profound social horrors, in the process recon- to expose ideological tensions relating to racial fi guring the popular American Gothic recipe issues, including anxieties about racial “purity.” wherein the myth of the national dream is Especially in the sequences tapping their pro- disrupted by the nightmares of history. In tagonists’ race-related fears, blackness is pre- Charles W. Chesnutt’s portrait of southern sented as a terrifying spectral force. In Lost society in The Conjure Woman (1899), the Boundaries, for example, Howard, the son of a Gothic is shown to inhere not in Uncle Julius’ black family that has passed for many years as supernatural conjure tales about antebellum white, experiences a nightmare in which he plantation life but in their oblique, coded watches horrifi ed as each of his family mem- commentary on racism and the arrogant and bers is transformed into an identifi ably black dehumanizing world of the slave masters that, person. due to its pressures and resulting distress, Recent examples of African American drives slaves to conjuring for relief. A unique Gothic suggest that women writers seem par- fusion of naturalism and the Gothic occurs ticularly adept with this form, often success- in various mid-twentieth century novels that fully combining the female Gothic with the serves to underscore the brutal and degrading political Gothic, which exposes and exorcises nature of African American social reality born crimes and repressions fostered by American of the pathology known as American racism. institutions and ideologies. Gloria Naylor’s Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ann Linden Hills (1985), for example, is a sinister, Petry’s The Street (1946), for example, conjure politically loaded novel set in a Dante-esque up Gothic atmospherics and a Frankenstein- black suburban community. In this compelling based dynamic to convey how their respective yet disturbing tale of a mortician with a deadly protagonists – one male (Bigger Thomas), secret, a truly Gothic fi gure who blurs the the other female (Lutie Johnson) – are ulti- traditional female Gothic boundary between mately and grotesquely transformed into hom- husband and prison-master, Naylor indicts the icidal outcasts. While Bigger experiences an repressive, self-loathing propensities of mid- increasing sense of imprisonment and entrap- dle-class African American society. ment in his social environment, Lutie experi- Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morri- ences a sense of live burial in the face of son could lay claim to being the most accom- the novel’s eponymous street, which she inhab- plished African American Gothic writer of her its in Harlem, and the dreaded prospect of generation. The Bluest Eye (1970), Morrison’s homelessness. fi rst published work, brilliantly explores the The mid-twentieth century also witnessed dark side of W. E. B. Du Bois’ signature concept the migration of the American race question of “double consciousness” through the gro- to the silver screen, particularly in the produc- tesque and tragic story of Pecola Breedlove, a tion of social problem fi lms dealing with the pubescent African American girl oppressed – joint topics of the tragic mulatto/mulatta and physically, mentally, and emotionally – by what racial passing wherein light-skinned African are depicted as grotesque gender and race American characters attempt to pass as white. ideals upheld by white America. All of Morri- In stark contradistinction to works by such son’s novels possess a signifi cant Gothic com- Harlem Renaissance writers as James Weldon ponent but Beloved (1987) has been singled out Johnson, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Fauset that as her Gothic masterpiece. In its chilling dec- often celebrate racial ambiguity, antimiscege- laration that “Not a house in the country ain’t nation fi lms like Elia Kazan’s Pinky (1949) and packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s Alfred Werker’s Lost Boundaries (1949) employ grief” (Morrison 2004: 5), Beloved offers up a aickman, robert 11 singular revision of the powerful and popular Gomez, J. (1991) The Gilda Stories. Ithaca, NY: Fire- haunted-house tradition in American Gothic. brand Books. This more modest descendant of the classic Hogle, J. E. (2003) Teaching the African American Gothic’s haunted, contested castle furnishes Gothic: From its multiple sources to Linden the setting for the invasion of pasts upon pres- Hills and Beloved. In D. Long Hoeveler and T. Heller (eds.), Gothic Fiction: The British ents. The house known as 123 becomes the site and American Traditions. New York: MLA, where a horrifying act of infanticide by a slave pp. 215–22. mother and the crimes of a nation’s fathers Jacobs, H. (1988 [1861]) Incidents in the Life of a who sanctioned the “peculiar institution” and Slave Girl. Oxford: Oxford University Press. the Fugitive Slave Bill are jointly explored Morrison, T. (2007 [1970]) The Bluest Eye. New and, following a community-based ritual exor- York: Vintage Books. cism, symbolically laid to rest. Morrison, T. (1992) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: SEE ALSO: American Gothic; Doubles; Race; Harvard University Press. Slavery and the Gothic: Vampire Fiction. Naylor, G. (1985) Linden Hills. London: Methuen. Petry, A. (1974 [1946]) The Street. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. REFERENCES Reed, I. (1976) Flight to Canada. New York: Avon Du Bois, W. E. B. (1968 [1903]) The Souls of Black Books. Folk. Chicago, IL: A. C. McClurg. Toomer, J. (1975 [1923]) Cane. New York: Fiedler, L. A. (1960) Love and Death in the American Liveright. Novel. New York: Dell. Winter, K. J. (1992) Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Gross, T. L. (1971) The Heroic Ideal in American Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Literature. New York: Free Press. Slave Narratives, 1790–1865. Athens, GA: Univer- Harper, F. (1987 [1892]) Iola Leroy, or Shadows sity of Georgia Press. Uplifted. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Morrison, T. (2004 [1987]) Beloved. New York: Vintage Books. Wright, R. (1964 [1940]) Native Son. New York: New American Library. Aickman, Robert NICK FREEMAN FURTHER READING Robert Aickman (1914–81), the grandson of Britton, W. (1995) The Puritan past and Black Gothic: The haunting of Toni Morrison’s Beloved the Victorian Gothic novelist Richard Marsh in light of Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven (see marsh, richard), described his fi ction as Gables. Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 21, 7–23. “strange stories.” In eight collections, from his Chesnutt, C. W. (1899) The Conjure Woman. Ridge- collaboration with Elizabeth Jane Howard, We wood, NJ: Gregg Press. Are For The Dark (1951), to the posthumous Crafts, H. (2002) The Bondwoman’s Narrative, ed. Night Voices (1985), he became an infl uential H. L. Gates, Jr. New York: Warner Books. presence in postwar British Gothic, linking Dudley, D. (2002) Toni Morrison. In D. H. Thomson, the subtle ambiguities of Walter de la Mare J. G. Voller, & F. S. Frank (eds.), Gothic Writers: A or Elizabeth Bowen with later writers such as Critical and Bibliographical Guide. Westport, CT: Ramsey Campbell (see campbell, ramsey) Greenwood Press, pp. 295–302. and M. John Harrison. While he could make Edwards, J. D. (2003) Gothic Passages: Racial Ambi- guity and the American Gothic. Iowa City, IA: Uni- striking use of “traditional” tropes – vampir- versity of Iowa Press. ism in “Pages from a Young Girl’s Diary” Goddu, T. A. (1997) Gothic America: Narrative, (1973), ghostly visitors in “The Waiting Room” History, and Nation. New York: Columbia Univer- (Dark Entries, 1964) – Aickman preferred to sity Press. mix psychological acuity (shown to good effect 12 aickman, robert in many of his fi rst-person narrators), with “ghost hunter” Harry Price, spending a night keen sociological observation and a strong in Borley Rectory with him in 1943, but he sense of the melancholy and elegiac, notably in was unconvinced by Price’s rationalist outlook, “The Stains” (1980), written during his lengthy and his own fi ction preferred more oblique struggle with cancer. engagements with the inexplicable, illogical, As the anthologist responsible for the fi rst and grotesque. Stories such as “The View” eight volumes of Fontana’s Great Ghost Stories (1951), a Jungian-infl ected meditation on (1964–72), Aickman argued that the ghost aging and sexual difference, or “The Wine- story, “an art form of altogether exceptional Dark Sea” (Powers of Darkness, 1966), in which delicacy and subtlety,” drew upon “the uncon- the infl uence of Robert Graves shapes a femi- scious mind in the manner of poetry” and nist fable concerning exiled female divinity needed “neither logic nor moral” (Aickman and the denunciation of “progress,” teeter on 1966: 7). His selections tended to favor those the brink of allegory, while “Into the Wood” works which shared the qualities of his own, (1968), set in a sanatorium in a Swedish forest, hence the inclusion of Bowen’s “The Demon also invites its cast of insomniac social exiles Lover” (1945), and Oliver Onions’ “The Beck- to be read in symbolic terms. Peter Straub oning Fair One” (1911) alongside his “The comments that it is, in part, “an extended met- Trains” (We Are For The Dark) and “The Cice- aphor for the separation, even estrangement, rones” (Sub Rosa, 1968). Aickman’s protago- between the artist and the conventional world” nists are often subtly complicit in the violation (Straub 1988: 10), but like Aickman’s other of themselves, and haunted as much by their explorations of alterity, it resists schematic own experiences and desires as by external equivalences. phantoms; his ghosts are, as John Clute ob - D. H. Lawrence maintained that fi ction serves, “a manifestation, a psychic portrait, of needs “an apparent formlessness, defi nite form their failure to understand their own lives” is mechanical.” “We need more easy transition (Clute 1997: 12). The virginal narrator of from mood to mood,” he continued, for “a “The Swords” (Cold Hand in Mine, 1975) is a good deal of the meaning of life and of art lies case in point. The nervous young salesman in the apparently dull spaces, the pauses, the chances upon a ramshackle fairground where unimportant passages” (Lawrence 1967: 289). he watches a sideshow in which audience Aickman’s stories apply a similar credo, forsak- members thrust swords into a woman. When ing the restrictions of plot to offer richly atmo- she emerges from her ordeal miraculously spheric accounts of a reality fraying at the unharmed, the narrator becomes drawn into edges. His leisurely and primarily realist style a sordid relationship with the fairground which, as Phil Baker says, “disregard[s] conven- manager, who offers him a private meeting tions of narrative economy and force” (quoted with the woman, one bizarre and disturbing in in Crawford 2003: 1), is perfectly suited to equal measure. In no sense a traditional ghost depicting events resistant to rational analysis, story (see ghost stories) despite its inclusion and privileges suggestion, allusion, and inde- in the fi fth Fontana collection (1969), “The terminacy over clear explanations. In “The Swords” is at once a meditation on sexuality Hospice” (1975), a stranded traveler seeks and male violence, a refl ection of Aickman’s sanctuary at an apparently welcoming private lifelong interest in theatrical performance, and care home, only to notice that the ankle of one a thoroughly unsettling account of a horrifi c of his fellow diners has been manacled to a experience. radiator. “The Inner Room” (1968) begins with Aickman was keen to distinguish between a young girl playing with a dolls’ house; it ends “the mere horror story” on the one hand with the now-grown up girl visiting the living and the rationalized “scientifi c extravaganza” dolls in a dark wood reminiscent of Dante’s. on the other (Aickman 1966: 7). He knew the “The Same Dog” (1975) mingles déjà vu with ainsworth, william harrison 13 the Jungian doctrine of eternal recurrence, Ainsworth, spicing the whole with an undercurrent of sexual symbolism. In “Ringing the Changes,” William Harrison fi rst published in Cynthia Asquith’s Third STEPHEN CARVER Ghost Book (1955) and perhaps Aickman’s most anthologized story, a honeymoon couple William Harrison Ainsworth (1805–82) was a stay at an inn on the Suffolk coast and encoun- journalist, novelist, and poet. A Victorian with ter the ghosts of drowned villagers when the a Romantic soul, his historical novels had a village bells chime midnight; again, the story violent, sexy mise-en-scène that transplanted forsakes “mere horror” to probe the psycho- the codes of the eighteenth-century Gothic logical complexity of the couple’s relationship. into an English setting (see victorian “A Roman Question” (1964) involves a bizarre gothic). His most signifi cant publications fall ritual in a Birmingham boarding house that between Rookwood (1834) and The Lancashire may (or may not) call up the spirit of a man Witches (1848). Although Ainsworth was a posted “missing” in World War II, while “The member of the early-Victorian literary elite, his Houses of the Russians” (1968), set in 1930s reputation was mortally wounded by contro- Finland, dramatizes an experience that may be versy, and his melodramatic style was often a haunting or a time-slip. “Never Visit Venice” criticized and satirized by his peers. (1968) is a wry nod to Thomas Mann which The son of a Manchester solicitor, Ain- fi nishes with its jaded protagonist heading out sworth was contributing to magazines from onto the lagoon in a gondola he shares with a the age of sixteen. He befriended Charles Lamb cowled skeleton, and “The Unsettled Dust” through the London Magazine and moved to (1968) has the inhabitants of a Bedfordshire London to study law in 1824. He was one of stately home succumbing to the emotional the original “Fraserians,” and counted among sclerosis seen in Katherine Mansfi eld’s “The his friends J. G. Lockhart, Henry Colburn, Daughters of the Late Colonel” (1922). As Leigh Hunt, Bulwer Lytton, Mary Shelley, John these outlines suggest, Aickman was an inge- Macrone, John Forster, George Cruikshank, nious and restless experimenter whose fi fty or Thackeray, and Dickens. His co-authorship of so stories maintain a remarkably consistent the Gothic novel Sir John Chiverton (1826) standard. brought him to the attention of his hero Sir Walter Scott (although Scott’s journals refer to SEE ALSO: Campbell, Ramsey; Ghost stories; Ainsworth as an “imitator”), but it was Rook- Marsh, Richard. wood that made his name (Carver 2003: 102). Rookwood was one of the most successful REFERENCES novels of the nineteenth century. It alchemi- cally blends different genres, Ainsworth later Aickman, R. (1966) Introduction. In The Second explaining that: Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories. Glasgow: Fontana Press, pp. 7–10. I resolved to attempt a story in the bygone style Clute, J. (1997) Robert (Fordyce) Aickman (1914– of Mrs. Radcliffe . . . substituting an old English 1981). In J. Clute & J. Grant (eds.), The Encyclo- squire, an old English manorial residence, and an pedia of Fantasy. London: Orbit, pp. 12–13. old English highwayman, for the Italian mar- Crawford, G. (2003) Robert Aickman: An Introduc- chese, the castle, and the brigand of the great tion. Baton Rouge, LA: Gothic Press. mistress of Romance. (Ainsworth 1881: I, 3) Lawrence, D. H. (1967) Selected Literary Criticism (ed. A. Beal). London: Heinemann. Straub, P. (1988) Introduction to Aickman’s The Striking gold, Ainsworth made the Georgian Wine-Dark Sea. New York: Arbor House, highwayman Dick Turpin a central character, pp. 7–10. inventing the “Ride to York” legend that endures 14 ainsworth, william harrison to this day (Ainsworth 1881: I, IV). Ainsworth The Lancashire Witches is the only of Ain- also superseded Maturin and brought the sworth’s forty-three novels to have remained Gothic to the mainland (see maturin, charles consistently in print, often shelved alongside robert). Rookwood represents a bridge be- Dennis Wheatley and Montague Summers tween the eighteenth-century Gothic and the (both of whom it undoubtedly infl uenced). contemporary urban nightmares of the penny In their role of Gothic Other to patriarchal dreadful and the literary novel, being sty- versions of femininity, Ainsworth’s powerful listically and historically liminal, somewhere Faustian protagonists know, like Eve, that they between Romantic and Victorian (see penny have a much better chance with Satan than dreadfuls; romanticism). with God. Although the primary plot offers a A craze for criminal romance ensued, and more moral interpretation, the possibility that Ainsworth returned to the Newgate Calendars it is good to be bad remains forever teasing and in 1839, serializing Jack Sheppard in Bentley’s present. At times the author appears on the Miscellany, which ran concurrently with Oliver threshold of more serious comment on per- Twist. As both stories were set in the London secution but chooses, instead, magic realism. underworld and illustrated by Cruikshank, The narrative therefore works according to the critical comparisons were common, much to logic of a fairy tale, which is really where Dickens’ annoyance (see dickens, charles). witches belong, and much of the story takes An editorial moral panic, the “Newgate contro- place in an enchanted wood. This anachronis- versy,” followed, originally led by the Examiner, tic synergy of history, folktale, romance, and Punch, and the Athenaeum, centering around melodrama is the last English novel that can the Newgate novels of Lytton, Ainsworth, and truly be said to belong to the original Gothic Dickens, and their potential to corrupt young, tradition. working-class males. When the valet François Ainsworth subsequently dropped from the Courvoisier murdered his master, Lord William literary mainstream, although the “Lancashire Russell, allegedly after reading Jack Sheppard, Novelist” was honored at a Lord Mayor’s the charge against Ainsworth seemed incon- banquet in Manchester in 1881 as “an expres- trovertible and his status as a good Victorian sion of the high esteem in which he is held by and a serious literary novelist never recovered. his Fellow townsmen and of his services to Lit- Dickens publicly and privately distanced erature.” An accompanying article in Punch himself from his friend, Thackeray criticized affectionately described him as “the greatest and lampooned, and Poe savaged Ainsworth axe-and-neck-romancer of our time” (Carver in Graham’s Magazine, later sending him up in 2003: 389, 402). Ainsworth died a few weeks “The Balloon-Hoax” (1844). later. Down but not out, Ainsworth took over the Although rejected by his contemporaries editorship of Bentley’s Miscellany from Dickens as a hack, and still often critically overlooked, in 1839, and began two historical romances, Ainsworth contributed signifi cantly to the Guy Fawkes and The Tower of London, transfer- development of the literary novel after Scott, ring his Gothic sensibilities from the under- and to the new urban Gothic of Dickens, Reyn- world to the kings and queens of England. A olds, and Stevenson (see reynolds, g. w. m. stream of popular romances followed; forty (george william macarthur); stevenson, years on Ainsworth was still turning national robert louis; urban gothic). His approach landmarks into sublime spaces, and populating to history, while fl ying in the face of Lukácsian them with ill omens, fated monarchs, paupers theory, can still be seen in popular narratives of noble birth, star-crossed lovers, Gothic vil- such as Rome, Titanic, and The Tudors. lains, hot gypsies, and plenty of ghosts. His last major work, however, was The Lancashire SEE ALSO: Dickens, Charles; Maturin, Charles Witches. Robert; Penny Dreadfuls; Poe, Edgar Allan; american gothic 15

Reynolds, G. W. M. (George William MacAr- to tell about itself. It has offered a voice to the thur); Stevenson, Robert Louis; Romanticism; repressed and oppressed, to those left out or Tales of Terror; Urban Gothic; Victorian Gothic. pushed into the shadows. The Gothic is a lit- erature of borderlands, suited to a country defi ned by its frontier. It also has patrolled REFERENCES other shifting and unstable boundaries, and Ainsworth, W. H. (1881) The Original Illustrated provides an index of American fears, anxieties, Edition of the Novels of William Harrison Ain- and self-doubt. sworth, 31 vols. London: Routledge. The sources of American Gothic go back Carver, S. (2003) The Life and Works of the Lan- much further, before the Revolution, to early cashire Novelist: William Harrison Ainsworth, colonial experience. When Puritans looked 1805–1882. New York: Edwin Mellen. from the deck of the Mayfl ower upon the inhospitable coast of New England, they saw a FURTHER READING wilderness fi lled with wild animals, savages, Axon, W. E. A. (1902) William Harrison Ainsworth: and devils. The story they told about them- A Memoir. London: Gibbings. selves in this wild land, and that their leader Ellis, S. M. (1911) William Harrison Ainsworth and William Bradford wrote in his history Of Plym- His Friends, 2 vols. London: John Lane. outh Plantation (1651), was based on the Book Elwin, M. (1934) Victorian Wallfl owers. London: of Exodus. The experience of these English Jonathan Cape. Christians paralleled that of the Israelites, Hollingsworth, K. (1963) The Newgate Novel 1830− fl eeing the Egyptians and seeking their Prom- 47. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. ised Land. Like them, the Puritans would have John, J. (ed.) (1998) Cult Criminals, The Newgate their faith tested in the wilderness. Such a test − Novels 1830 1847, 8 vols. London: Routledge. was experienced by Mary Rowlandson, wife of Meredith, M. (1992) A fi ne distancing: Browning’s a minister, whose account (1682) of being cap- debt to Harrison Ainsworth. Browning Society Notes 21. tured by Indians during the uprising known Schroeder, N. (1986) Jack Sheppard and Barnaby as King Phillip’s War was the fi rst best-selling Rudge: Yet more “humbug” from a “jolter head.” work of the English experience in New Eng- Studies in the Novel 18(1), 27–35. land. Narratives of Indian captivity, an innova- Worth, G. J. (1972) William Harrison Ainsworth. tion at the beginning of American literature in New York: Twayne. English, often containing proto-Gothic graphic descriptions of violence and the suffering of the captive, would remain a popular form for the next two hundred years. Eventually, Native American voices would begin to complicate American Gothic this story. CHARLES L. CROW In the New England master narrative, carried forward by later-seventeenth-century The United States and the Gothic have common Puritan intellectuals such as Cotton Mather, origins in the turmoil of European thought the success of the colonists was resisted by in the late eighteenth century. The cusp of the Satan and his allies. In this nearly Manichean Enlightenment and Romanticism produced vision, Satan ruled the wilderness and continu- early English Gothic novels, the Declaration of ally attempted to infi ltrate the settlements and Independence, and the United States Constitu- create a secret cadre of his followers. Thus, tion. Deeply entwined with American thought when a few girls began to exhibit strange hys- from the beginning, the Gothic has produced terical symptoms in Salem, Massachusetts, in a dark twin of the national narrative, a critique 1692, investigation into suspected witchcraft of the story the United States has been trying was begun, and a special court was appointed. 16 american gothic

Accusations and indictments multiplied, and this encounter with slavery in its most mon- ultimately nineteen men and women were strous form, a true Gothic moment, Crève- hanged and one man pressed to death with coeur exposed the irreconcilability of America’s heavy stones (see witchcraft). original sin with its dream of perfection and The Salem witch scare was traumatic for innocence. New England, and its implications for its nar- Thus, by the time the English colonies rative of place were debated even while the earned independence – despite Hawthorne’s trials were in progress. The witchcraft outbreak later, and probably ironic, assertion in the was proof of New England’s success, argued preface to The Marble Faun that America had Cotton Mather (1692), since the righteousness “no dark and gloomy wrong” (1930: 590) of its people enraged Satan and motivated his – there was ample material for Gothic jealous attacks against its communities. Yet, literature. others doubted Mather’s assurances and sus- The fi rst great American Gothic novelist, pected that a great injustice had been done, Charles Brockden Brown, originated most of implicating not only the Puritan leadership the interrelated Gothic subjects that would be but also the community, which had somehow explored by his successors: madness, the terror allowed itself to be brought to a collective of the wilderness, disease, political corruption, mania in which fear and suspicion subverted self-deception, and race. As for many American reason and law. The legacy of Salem witchcraft writers, Brown’s view of the world as essentially would continue, not only in the writings of the ambiguous and deceptive led him to experi- town’s most famous son, Nathaniel Haw- ment with unreliable narrators and confl icting thorne, but also in the popular imagination of points of view. Brown’s characters, as well as the nation. Washington Irving’s Ichabod Crane his readers, are often unable to distinguish retells witch stories from Cotton Mather to truth from illusion or dream. The eponymous frighten his listeners, and himself, in “The Wieland (1798) goes insane when deceived by Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820). Americans ventriloquism and slaughters his family. The still evoke Salem when they speak of an atmo- protagonist of the story “Somnambulism” sphere of suspicion and persecution as a “witch (1805) may (or may not) have run through the hunt,” and modern writers as different as forest while asleep and murdered his beloved Arthur Miller and H. P. Lovecraft have evoked while dreaming that he was trying to protect the old witch days (see lovecraft, h. p. her. Edgar Huntly (again eponymous; 1799), in (howard phillips)). a pattern that would endure in American lit- If the Salem witchcraft disrupted New Eng- erature, is horrifi ed by his emerging love of land’s narrative, other aspects of the American violence during a night of fl ight and combat in experience before the Revolution also had the the woods (see brown, charles brockden). power to shock and frighten. Hector St. Jean de In Arthur Mervyn (1799), Brown introduced Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer the metropolis (Philadelphia) as a Gothic were written to answer the question “what is subject, symbolically linking its corruption to an American?” and celebrate the emerging an epidemic of yellow fever. Brown’s younger society of the middle colonies as the most contemporary, George Lippard, would con- perfect in the world. Yet his optimism gave way tinue the city Gothic in The Quaker City: Or, to horror in South Carolina when he encoun- The Monks of Monk Hall (1844), the most tered a dying slave hung in an iron cage, his popular American novel of its era, and the eyes pecked out by birds. Crèvecoeur, “sud- most sexually explicit. The hall of the title is a denly arrested by the power of affright and vast, rambling structure, like the novel itself, terror” (1782: 164), bitterly concluded that “we a playground of both the city’s elite and its certainly are not that class of beings which criminal class. Presiding over this foul den is a we vainly think ourselves to be” (1782: 159). In one-eyed monster called “Devil Bug,” who, in american gothic 17 his sadism, energy, and obscene humor, antici- and Melville’s Captain Ahab and Pierre (see pates by some two hundred years the character hawthorne, nathaniel; melville, herman; of Al Swearengen in the television series Dead- poe, edgar allan). wood (2004–6). During the middle years of the nineteenth The cultural explosion called the “American century, one of the country’s greatest writers, Renaissance” (roughly from 1836, when Emer- as we now know, was a woman living a clois- son’s Nature was published, to the Civil War) tered and eccentric life in Amherst, Massachu- was the late fl owering of American Romanti- setts. Emily Dickinson published little during cism, and can be divided between Emerson and her lifetime, and well into the twentieth century his followers, and Poe, Hawthorne, and Mel- her writings were available only in altered ver- ville – the “dark Romantics,” whom we would sions that obscured her startling originality. now label Gothic writers. James Fenimore Dickinson, like the dark Romantics and unlike Cooper also included Gothic elements in his Emerson, found the gap between human spirit work, as in his Leatherstocking wilderness and nature unbridgeable. She possessed a true series, and introduced seafaring as an Ameri- Gothic imagination, exploring the haunted can subject, which would be extended by both regions of the mind and confronting the reality Poe and Melville. of death and dying, even in one startling poem The American Romantics, like their Euro- assuming the point of view of a dying person. pean counterparts, shared a vision of natural She wrote of the ways society enforces its defi - facts as symbols of spiritual facts, so that the nitions of normalcy and of madness, antic- world could be read as a text unfolding secrets ipating later writers such as Gilman and Plath. about ultimate truths. The ways in which they Dickinson is both a late writer of the Romantic read this text differed radically. Emerson saw tradition and an early example of the explora- nature as in essence good, and, in an inversion tion of small and private lives, especially in of the Puritan narrative, described the woods small and rural communities, that would char- (in Nature) as a wholesome place where reason acterize the age of realism after the Civil War. and faith were restored. The dark Romantics, It is only an apparent paradox that the years in contrast, found “the power of blackness” following the war were a period of major (Melville’s words in “Hawthorne and His Gothic literature in the United States. Realism’s Mosses,” 1850 (1943: 192)) a profound reality, investigations into ordinary life often will and in the woods, as Hawthorne demonstrated uncover uncanny secrets. Moreover, writers of in “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), faith realistic fi ction in this period, such as M. E. W. could still be lost. Poe’s poetry might acknowl- Freeman and realism’s champion, W. D. edge a realm of perfect beauty and truth (as in Howells, were accomplished writers of ghostly “Israfel,” 1831), but his work is usually located tales. Recent scholarship has stressed the com- in the sublunar world we inhabit, a place of patibility of the ghost story with the feminist mortality and decay. While Emerson’s world concerns of writers of women’s regional was sunlit and morally clear, that of the dark realism, a long list that would include Alice Romantics was fractured, multilayered, and Brown, Alice Carey, Freeman, Sarah Orne ambiguous. Developing techniques of ambigu- Jewett, Mary Noailles Murfee, and Elizabeth ous narration pioneered by Charles Brockden Stuart Phelps Ward, among others. The tradi- Brown and John Neal, Poe’s fi rst-person nar- tion would also include, at least peripherally, rators are often self-deluding psychopaths. For Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Madeline Yale all of the dark Romantics, pursuit of perfection Wynne, and continue into the twentieth with or ultimate truth, or perfect revenge, leads to the ghostly tales of Gertrude Atherton, Ellen destruction or madness. Thus, we meet such Glasgow, and Edith Wharton. deluded enthusiasts as Poe’s self-justifying The great master of Gothic fi ction in the last murderers, Hawthorne’s artists and scientists, half of the century was the architect and 18 american gothic theoretician of realism Henry James. In The race people who, in the literature of the plan- Turn of the Screw (1898), a novella that has tation school, were usually invisible (see generated a longer critical discussion than any southern gothic). other American work, James created an ambig- The African American writers who emerged uous disruption of the narrative of innocent in the period, such as Charles Chesnutt and childhood that was being created by the Victo- Alice Dunbar-Nelson, were of exactly this rian era (see james, henry). background, descendants of enslaved women James and other realists lived in a time when and of white men who did not acknowledge Western culture, and America especially, was their mulatto children. The secrets of white trying to reassert the rationality of the Enlight- families were their inheritance and literary enment, to join science and “common sense” material, as were the escaped slave narratives to a doctrine of social and moral progress. And and the folktales and music that coded the yet it had not quite stopped believing in ghosts, chronicles of black captivity. Realism and the even among scientists, as testifi ed by the So- Gothic are both in the roots of African Ameri- ciety for Psychical Research, of which James’ can literature. Chesnutt wrote in the mode of brother William was an important member Gothic realism in stories such as “The Sheriff’s (see psychical investigation). Everyone in Children” (1899), where the uncanny grows this era seems to have attended at least one steadily until the revelation of a black prison- séance, in part because of the many bereave- er’s identity as the son of the popular sheriff, a ments of the Civil War (see spiritualism). reversal that radically revises the previously In the postbellum South, another narrative upbeat tone of the story, which, in Chesnutt, is was being forged and disrupted. Writers of the associated with white self-deception. He uses “plantation school” produced a sentimental the black American tradition of magic in The view of the life of the period before the war, Conjure Woman (1899), a cycle of frame stories and especially of its slave-owning aristocracy. employing Black English. Several of these The reaction against this moonlight and mint- stories contain suppressed genealogies: secrets julep dream was a major impetus of American of parentage that the black characters of the literature of this period. Realism always has an stories understand but that the reader must antisentimental bias, and some of the most struggle to unlock. Similarly, in Alice Dunbar- distinctive achievements of this period, such Nelson’s “Sister Josepha” (1899), the key fact as Mark Twain’s exploration of the “Matter of of the title character’s racial heritage is never Hannibal,” exhibit a creative tension between stated, and can only be inferred from what is nostalgia and a savage debunking of the not quite said in an overheard conversation mythic South. Coming from widely differing (see african american gothic). backgrounds and with various agendas, South- In the last years of the nineteenth century, ern writers such as George Washington Cable, the relationship of scientifi c thought to litera- Grace King, Kate Chopin, Charles Chesnutt, ture was given new insistence in the literary and Alice Dunbar-Nelson produced realistic movement known as naturalism. With its insis- snapshots of Southern life, and often these tence on the powerlessness of the individual realistic pictures veered into the Gothic, when confronted with a universe of force, and exposing the buried secrets of families, espe- its willingness to confront taboo subjects such cially the families in the big plantation houses as sexuality, addiction, and disease, naturalism of the old South, which, if they survived into easily blended with the Gothic. Stephen Crane’s the postwar era, were often shabby shells “The Monster” (1899) is a good example of the inhabited by ghostly survivors of diminished Gothic–naturalism hybrid, depicting, in the families. The secrets of the old families became hysterical response of a community to a black a staple of Southern Gothic, and very often man whose face has been burned away, soci- involved the hidden genealogies of the mixed- ety’s construction of the monstrous from its american gothic 19 own prejudices and fears. Frank Norris’ natu- growing and often disturbing pattern of youth ralistic werewolf story, Vandover and the Brute culture. (1914), employs the forbidden subject of The South, still haunted by its past, pro- venereal disease, though the book was not duced some of the fi nest works of American published during Norris’ brief lifetime (see literature, and American Gothic, of the twenti- werewolves). The Gothic–naturalism hybrid eth century. Pre-eminently, William Faulkner’s was common in the early twentieth century, as Yoknapatawpha saga depicted decline, degen- in Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911) and eration, and racial guilt in his representative Summer (1917), and would provide one of the Southern county. His fi ction, including The strands woven into early modernism. Sound and the Fury (1929), Sanctuary (1931), In apparent (and only apparent) contrac- Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! tion of literary naturalism, American writers at (1936), the story cycle Go Down Moses (1942), the end of the nineteenth century also contin- and “A Rose for Emily” (1930), among others, ued to refi ne the tradition of the weird tale all show a land cursed by the sin of slavery and developed by Poe. The weird tale produces a the class structure based upon it. Faulkner powerful uncanny effect through a plot rever- created typically Gothic ambiguity through sal or twist, and often uses the supernatural, technical innovations in point of view (thus the though this may be revealed to be the result four narrative voices of The Sound and the of delusion or dream. Lafcadio Hearn was a Fury) and modernist fracturing of chronology. practitioner of the weird tale, as was Ambrose Faulkner was the dominant voice of a region Bierce, who in turn infl uenced Robert W. that produced many writers of Gothic in the Chambers and, in the twentieth century, H. P. twentieth century: Truman Capote, Carson Lovecraft. McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Entering a new century, American Gothic Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams, and, writers and their audiences shared many of more recently, John Dufresne, Peter Matthies- the same subjects that had been developed sen, Cormac McCarthy (in his early works), in earlier generations. New England and the and Donna Tartt, among others. While many South, the two regions with the greatest of these writers produced sympathetic African burdens of history, continued as reservoirs American characters, it was left to black authors of material. Though the frontier had disap- to make the obvious point (anticipated by peared and wilderness was dwindling, wild Chesnutt earlier) that the real haunted houses country existed in remote areas, and could be of the South were the cabins of the slaves, remembered as it had been, as a site for fright- not the mansions of the masters. Toni Morri- ening journeys and encounters. The city son’s Beloved (1987) is one of the great Gothic remained as a subject, joined by the new phe- works of the second half of the century, and it nomenon of the suburb. Race continued as a brings to a summation much of the American central issue, though increasingly articulated dialog of race that preceded it (see faulkner, by members of long-silenced minority groups. william; southern gothic). To these subjects would be joined the Euro- Another narrative awaiting its revision was pean import of the vampire, which would grow that of the Native Americans, whom white in importance through the twentieth and into writers had envisioned too often as savages and the twenty-fi rst century. While traditional demons. Indian voices had at times emerged, print media would continue as dominant and and by the early twentieth century writers such prestigious forms, new media would emerge to as Alexander Posey were beginning to draw compete and interact with them: radio, televi- upon their own oral traditions in stories they sion, graphic novels, and, especially, cinema. spun. Following N. Scott Momaday’s House In the late twentieth century, certain patterns Made of Dawn (1969), there were many Indian of the Gothic would be appropriated into a voices, including Leslie Silko, Gerald Vizenor, 20 american gothic and Louise Erdrich. Erdrich’s continuing series Tryon in Harvest Home (1973). The hugely of novels about interrelated families in Min- popular and prolifi c Stephen King, in many nesota and North Dakota, beginning with Love ways the successor of Lovecraft, sets most of Medicine (1984), rivals Faulkner’s Yoknapa- his fi ction in New England (see jackson, tawpha cycle for complexity and for the genea- shirley; king, stephen; lovecraft, h. p. logical challenge it presents readers, and often (howard phillips); new england gothic; blends Gothic techniques with Ojibway wharton, edith). folklore. As true wilderness has nearly disappeared New England in the early twentieth century, in the United States, Americans view the wild like the South, was a region in long decline, its land and its rough frontier interface with civi- population shrinking and its landscape dotted lization with varying proportions of fear, with abandoned farms. Edwin Arlington Rob- wonder, and nostalgia. Pockets of empty inson, who was a contemporary of naturalists country can still be imagined as sites of terror, such as Crane and Norris, wrote poetry about as in James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970), a the lives of New Englanders defeated by loneli- journey of adventure turned to nightmare. The ness and time. Thus, his poem “The Mill” lost frontier in the nineteenth century is revis- (1920), a virtual Gothic–naturalist novel in ited with profound Gothic effect in Cormac twenty-four lines, records the suicide of a McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) and in the miller and his wife, whose artisanal livelihood recent television series Deadwood. McCarthy’s has been destroyed by industrialization. Edith judge and Al Swearingen from Deadwood are Wharton, though dividing most of her life among the most compelling of recent Gothic between New York City, the Hudson River villains (see mccarthy, cormac). Valley, and France, wrote novellas and stories As wilderness was paved over with subdivi- set in New England. A cycle of ghost stories, set sions and shopping malls, suburbia became the most often in New England’s bitter winter, pays norm of American life. The largest American homage through its characters’ names and its generation, the baby boomers, grew up there. imagery to Nathaniel Hawthorne. H. P. Love- Celebrated in television programs such as Leave craft also draws on Hawthorne and the Matter it to Beaver (1957–63) and The Adventures of of Salem as well as Poe and other sources Ozzie and Harriet (1952–66), the idealization in creating his “Cthulhu Mythos,” in which of suburbia was a narrative waiting to be dis- New England is subject to a monstrous de- rupted by the Gothic. We see this counter- monic plot, as described in a mysterious book, narrative in the Poltergeist movies (1982–8) as The Necronomicon. Lovecraft’s considerable well as countless fi lms featuring babysitters achievement has become something of a cult, as the distressed Gothic maiden, or, reversed, and infl uenced later writers such as Stephen as the stalker of innocent children (the distant King. Shirley Jackson wrote both supernatural kin of James’ Miles and Flora), as well as televi- Gothic in The Haunting of Hill House (1959) sion programs such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and in the Gothic–naturalist tradition in We (1997–2003). Suburbia is also one of the favor- Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). Her ite settings for the major Gothic writer Joyce celebrated short story “The Lottery” (1948) Carol Oates. Her novel Zombie (1995), to draws obliquely on the Matter of Salem, and choose one example from her vast output, is a can be read, like Arthur Miller’s play about narrative from the point of view of a suburban Salem witchcraft, The Crucible (1953), as a serial murderer (see buffy the vampire slayer comment on the anticommunist scapegoating (1997–2003); oates, joyce carol). of the 1940s and 1950s. Jackson’s conceit of an Increasingly throughout the twentieth cen- ancient cult underlying the culture of a New tury, the narratives that Americans absorbed England village, anticipated in some of Whar- came from movies and electronic media. For ton’s stories, is developed further by Thomas decades Americans entertained and frightened american gothic 21 themselves with radio dramas that included products of civilization-ending plague. Vam- Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater dramatization pires have fl ourished in the Gothic regions of of The War of the Worlds, which panicked New England and the South in the popular much of the nation one night in 1938, and novels of Anne Rice and Stephen King (in weekly programs with titles such as The ‘Salem’s Lot, 1975), who both build on the con- Shadow, The Whistler, and Inner Sanctum that ventions established by Bram Stoker: vampires delightfully frightened generations of school are an ancient race who can reproduce by children. The most important new narrative infecting human victims. This pattern, with medium of the twentieth century, clearly, variations, is also followed by Poppy Z. Brite was fi lm, which has infl uenced the way we all and, recently, Elizabeth Kostova. Another camp think and dream and now exists in creative grafts the vampire story to the tradition of symbiosis with traditional novels, graphic postapocalypse narrative, a tradition begun in novels, television, and, recently, videogames. the United States by Jack London in his still The noir tradition of fi lm, coming out of underappreciated The Scarlet Plague (1912), German expressionism, has produced a long whose title suggests a link backward to Poe’s interaction between crime fi ction, science “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842) and fi ction, and movies that has produced a number extended by George Steward in Earth Abides of movies that can be classed as Gothic, includ- (1949) and continued by Cormac McCarthy in ing, in recent years, Chinatown (Roman Polan- The Road (2006). In this tradition, only a few ski, 1974), Sling Blade (Billy Bob Thornton, humans survive a nuclear war or devastating 1996), and Lone Star (John Sayles, 1996) and, plague. The vampire variant imagines a virus still more recently, Winter’s Bone (Debra that turns most humans into vampires. This Granik, 2010) (see fi lm; radio; television). premise was developed by Richard Matheson The interaction between movies and fi ction in I Am Legend (1954) and recently by Justin was essential to the vampire plague of the late Cronin in The Passage (2010), the fi rst novel twentieth century, an infestation that contin- of a projected trilogy (see brite, poppy z.; ues in our own time. Vampires constitute an matheson, richard; vampire fi ction). immensely complex subject, as objects of fear The Gothic, in various permutations (drawn and desire, and as coding for various issues from graphic novels, adolescent fi ction, and of gender, race, disease, and political paranoia music), has become absorbed into American (see vampire fi ction). As a specifi cally Amer- youth culture – understandably, considering ican phenomenon, there had been a distinct the Gothic’s position as a literature of the out- New England vampire tradition, probably sider and the repressed. Adolescents have their deriving from the region’s long history of own narratives to disrupt. Herded into high tuberculosis. Edith Wharton draws on this tra- schools that relentlessly sort boys and girls dition in some of her New England Gothic according to standards of attractiveness, ath- stories. But the later irruption of vampires letic success, and the elusive quality of “cool- was propelled by the British Hammer Studio ness,” the losers or those resistant to this movies and by the equivalent Hollywood fi lms. mandatory contest are often drawn to fantasies Seen fi rst by Americans at local theaters and of escape, power, or vindication. Stephen then by their children on black-and-white tele- King’s fi rst novel, Carrie (1974; fi lmed by Brian visions in suburban living rooms, these fi lms De Palma in 1976), captures both the environ- fi lled the creative nightmares of boys and girls ment and a lonely girl’s response perfectly. who would grow up to write of monsters and The vampire has been a particularly attractive vampires in the later years of the century (see fi gure for adolescents in recent years, since the hammer house). vampire offers sexual potency, glamour, and Vampires in America usually fall into two power. Stephenie Meyer’s wildly popular Twi- camps: the descendants of Dracula and the light series of novels (2005–8) and their fi lm 22 american gothic adaptations satisfy this adolescent need, and Faulkner, W. (1936) Absalom, Absalom! New York: suggest that the Gothic will remain in the Random House. national consciousness far into the present Faulkner, W. (1942) Go Down, Moses. New York: century. Random House. Faulkner, W. (1989) A rose for Emily. In The Col- lected Stories of William Faulkner. London: SEE ALSO: African American Gothic; Bierce, Penguin, pp. 119–30. Ambrose; Brite, Poppy Z.; Brown, Charles Brock- Hawthorne, N. (1930) The Complete Novels and den; Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003); Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York: Comics and Graphic Novels; Degeneration; Modern Library. Faulkner, William; Female Gothic; Film; Hammer Irving, W. (1983) History, Tales and Sketches (ed. House; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Jackson, Shirley; J. W. Tuttleton). New York: Library of America. James, Henry; King, Stephen; Lovecraft, H. P. Jackson, S. (1962 [1948]) The lottery. In D. Angus (Howard Phillips); Masks, Veils, and Disguises; (ed.), The Best Short Stories of the Modern Age. Matheson, Richard; McCarthy, Cormac; Melville, New York: Fawcett, pp. 308–17. Herman; New England Gothic; Oates, Joyce Jackson, S. (1962) We Have Always Lived in the Carol; Poe, Edgar Allan; Psychical Investigation; Castle. New York: Viking. Jackson, S. (2006) The Haunting of Hill House. New Radio; Rice, Anne; Slavery and the Gothic; South- York: Penguin. ern Gothic; Spiritualism; Suburban Gothic; James, H. (1908 [1898]) The Aspern Papers, The Turn Television; Urban Gothic; Vampire Fiction; Were- of the Screw, The Liar, The Two Faces. New York: wolves; Wharton, Edith; Witchcraft. Charles Scribner’s Sons. Lippard, G. (1995 [1844]) The Quaker City: Or, the Monks of Monk Hall (ed. D. S. Reynolds). REFERENCES Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Bradford, W. (19853 [1651]) Of Plymouth Planta- Press. tion 1620–1647 (ed. S. E. Morison). New York: London, J. (1915 [1912]) The Scarlet Plague. New Knopf. York: Macmillan. Brown, C. B. (1998) Charles Brockden Brown, Three Mather, C. (2005 [1692]) Wonders of the Invisible Gothic Novels: Wieland, Arthur Mervyn, Edgar World. Reprinted as On Witchcraft. Mineola, NY: Huntly. New York: Library of America. Dover. Chesnutt, C. W. (1992 [1899]) The Conjure Woman Matheson, R. (1975 [1954]) I Am Legend. New York: and Other Conjure Tales (ed. R. H. Broadhead). Tom Doherty Associates. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McCarthy, C. (1992 [1985]) Blood Meridian, Or Cooper, J. M. (1985) The Leatherstocking Tales the Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage (ed. B. Nevius), 2 vols. New York: Library of Books. America. McCarthy, C. (2006) The Road. New York: Knopf. Crane, S. (1999 [1898]) The monster. In C. Crow Melville, H. (1943) Hawthorne and his mosses. In E. (ed.), American Gothic: An Anthology 1787–1916. Wilson (ed.), The Shock of Recognition. New York: Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 373–407. Modern Library, p. 192. Crèvecoeur, J. H. S. J. (1997 [1782]) Letters from an Miller, A. (1953) The Crucible. New York: Viking American Farmer (ed. S. Manning). New York: Penguin. Oxford University Press. Momaday, N. S. (1969) House Made of Dawn. New Dickey, J. (1970) Deliverance. New York: Dell. York: Harper & Row. Emerson, R. W. (1982) Nature. In L. Ziff (ed.), Momaday, N. S. (1984) Love Medicine. New York: Selected Essays. New York: Penguin, pp. 35–82. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Erdrich, L. (1984) Love Medicine. New York: Holt, Morrison, T. (1987) Beloved. New York: Knopf. Rinehart and Winston. Norris, F. (1914) Vandover and the Brute. Garden Faulkner, W. (1931) Sanctuary. New York: Random City, NY: Doubleday. House. Oates, J. C. (1995) Zombie. New York: Dutton. Faulkner, W. (1932) Light in August. Norfolk, CT: Robinson, E. A. (1961) Collected Poems of Edwin New Directions. Arlington Robinson. New York: Macmillan. amityville horror, the 23

Rowlandson, M. (1997 [1682]) A True History of the Oates, J. C. (ed.) (1996) American Gothic Tales. New Captivity and Narrative of Mrs. Mary Rolandson. York: Plume. London: Arnold. Ringe, D. A. (1982) American Gothic. Lexington, KY: Steward, G. R. (1949) Earth Abides. New York: University Press of Kentucky. Random House. Siegel, C. (2005) Goth’s Dark Empire. Bloomington, Tryon, T. (1973) Harvest Home. New York: Knopf. IN: Indiana University Press. Wharton, E. (1917) Summer. New York: Appleton. Straub, P. (ed.) (2009) American Fantastic Tales, 2 Wharton, E. (1944 [1911]) Ethan Frome. New York: vols. New York: Library of America. Scribner’s. Truffi n, S. R. (2008) Schoolhouse Gothic: Haunted Wharton, E. (1975) The Ghost Stories of Edith Hallways and Predatory Pedagogues in Late Wharton. London: Constable. Twentieth-Century American Literature and Scholarship. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. FURTHER READING Wardrop, D. (1996) Emily Dickinson’s Gothic: Goblin Baker, D. Z. (2007) America’s Gothic Fiction: The with a Gauge. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Legacy of Magnalia Christi Americana. Columbus, Press. OH: Ohio State University Press. Weinstock, J. A. (2008) Scare Tactics: Supernatural Carpenter, L. & Kolmar, W. (eds.) (1991) Haunting Fiction by American Women. New York: Fordham the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost University Press. Stories by American Women. Knoxville, TN: Uni- versity of Tennessee Press. Crow, C. L. (ed.) (1999) American Gothic: An Anthol- ogy 1787–1916. Oxford: Blackwell. Amityville Horror, The Crow, C. L. (2009) American Gothic. Cardiff: Univer- sity of Wales Press. CONNY LIPPERT Lloyd-Smith, A. (2004) American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Continuum. On the night of November 13, 1974, 112 Ocean Lloyd-Smith, A. (2000) Nineteenth-century Ameri- Avenue, Long Island, New York – a Dutch colo- can Gothic. In D. Punter (ed.), A Companion to nial property named “High Hopes” – became the Gothic. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 109–21. the scene of a grisly mass murder. Ronald Goddu, T. A. (1997) Gothic America: Narrative, Joseph “Butch” DeFeo Jr., then twenty-three History and Nation. New York: Columbia Univer- years old, was convicted of killing his parents sity Press. and four siblings, who had all been shot in the Joshi, S. T. (2001) The Modern Weird Tale. Jefferson, NC; London: McFarland. back with a high-powered rifl e while they were Martin, R. K. & Savoy, E. (eds.) (1998) American sleeping in their beds. Butch, who had claimed Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. to have discovered the bodies of his slain family Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press. members upon his return to the house, was Matthiessen, P. (2008) Shadow Country. New York: initially brought in as a witness by the police. Modern Library. DeFeo’s story, which involved suspicions about Mogen, D., Sanders, S. P., & Karpinski, J. B. (eds.) a mob-related execution of his family, initiated (1993) Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the by a man called Louis Falini, was made some- Frontier in America. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh what believable by the sheer professionalism Dickinson University Press; London: Associated with which the murders were conducted, and University Presses. the fact that it was regarded as unlikely that one Monnet, A. S. (2010) The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic: Gender and Slavery in perpetrator had killed all six victims. Soon, Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Farnham however, DeFeo’s status changed from being a and Burlington: Ashgate. witness in protective custody to being a suspect. Morgen, J. (2002) The Biology of Horror: Gothic Lit- Empty cartridge boxes fi tting the murder erature and Film. Carbondale and Edwardsville: weapon had been found in his room and Southern Illinois University Press. DeFeo changed his statement slightly, now 24 amityville horror, the claiming that he had indeed been home – albeit in the novel not being entirely accurate, has held at gunpoint – when his family was exe- given numerous interviews, has helped to cuted (see family). create websites about the occurrences, and has DeFeo soon became entangled in contradic- appeared on various television shows, answer- tions and inconsistencies in his rapidly crum- ing questions about the myth that is Amityville. bling story and eventually confessed to the Although he has repeatedly had to defend murders. He later claimed that the police inves- himself and his family against allegations of tigators had used violence to force his confes- pursuing commercial goals, Lutz has always sion, and – while there might well have been maintained that he and Kathleen decided to go some truth to that – his claim set in motion a public with their experiences in order to help long chain of changing statements and accusa- others with similar supernatural problems. tions that soon discredited anything DeFeo The myriad lawsuits and fi ghts about money said. A forensic report (never offi cially acknowl- that followed the publication of the story did edged) indicating that Dawn DeFeo, Butch’s not, however, act in the Lutzes’ favor. younger sister, had had gunpowder residue on The events – as related and popularized by her nightdress indicated that she must have Anson’s book and adapted by the subsequent fi red a gun at least once before she died. This movie – that supposedly drove the Lutzes out prompted DeFeo to change his story yet again, of their home began with their move into 112 now incriminating his sister. Another – and Ocean Avenue only a few months after their perhaps the most controversial and notorious marriage. They had been informed about the of his statements – consisted of a long shot for DeFeo murders by the realtor before making an insanity plea. DeFeo now reported that he their decision and resolved that the house’s had heard voices urging him to commit the past was not going to be a problem for them. murders. He was declared sane and fi t to stand Nevertheless, a friend extracted a promise from trial, regardless of his allusions to demonic George to get the house blessed before moving possession, but this particular tale gave birth to in. Father Ralph Pecararo agreed to undertake what was to become the “Amityville Horror.” the task, and, upon its completion, enquired Roughly a year after the Amityville murders about the use the family intended to make were committed – on December 23, 1975 – of one of the rooms on the second fl oor. George and Kathleen Lutz, together with their Hearing that it was to become a sewing room three children, Chris, Dannie, and Melissa for Kathy, he acted relieved and explained that, “Missy” Lutz, moved into 112 Ocean Avenue. although he had had a bad feeling about that Their twenty-eight-day-long stay in the house particular room, it would be alright as long as and subsequent fl ight from it became one of nobody slept in it. the most controversial stories, or – depending The fi rst few days of the Lutzes’ stay in on one’s opinion – one of the best-documented “High Hopes” passed in a relatively unspec- cases of haunting, in recent US history. Sceptics tacular manner, with the exception of mysteri- claim that the Lutzes, together with DeFeo’s ous cold spots all over the house, the family attorney William Weber, came up with the dog, Harry, acting a bit out of sorts, and George story of supernatural occurrences in order to being unable to get warm anywhere in the make money and exploit the house’s sordid building. Missy began talking to an imaginary history (see the supernatural). Others friend who went by the name of Jodie. After a believe that Jay Anson’s book The Amityville few more days in the house it became apparent Horror (1977) was truly an account of what that the whole family had undergone subtle had happened at 112 Ocean Avenue, pieced changes in character and behavior. The parents together from tape recordings the Lutzes had were irritable, the boys were arguing more than made shortly after having fl ed the place. George usual, and Missy kept talking to her invisible Lutz, who later admitted to the events described friend, Jodie, who turned out to be a pig of angel (1999–2004) 25 variable size who claimed to be an angel. In the initial publications have put layer upon addition, the minor unexplained occurrences layer of claims and allegations on top of the that had plagued the family from day one existing entanglement of fact and fi ction. With became more frequent and distinguishable in Kathy and George Lutz both having passed their manifestations. Mysterious odors, sounds, away and with recent continuations of the and touches as well as strange compulsions Amityville franchise having increasingly wa- became a fi xed aspect of their lives. George, tered their story down, the iconic glare of the for instance, would awake shortly after three house’s front windows depicted on numerous o’clock each morning – supposedly the time of book and DVD covers seems to be all that the DeFeo murders – with the inexplicable remains. Thus, the real Amityville horror – the urge to check on the boathouse. These events DeFeo murders – will eternally be overshad- became increasingly worse and soon included owed by the “true story” of an American phenomena such as levitation, physical changes haunting. in Kathy, damage to the house, and a gelatinous substance appearing on various walls and SEE ALSO: Family; Psychical Investigation; surfaces. Eventually these events came to a Supernatural, The. disturbing climax and the whole family fl ed the house in terror, leaving behind all their REFERENCES belongings. After the Lutzes left, various psychic inves- Anson, J. (1977) The Amityville Horror. New York: tigators (see psychical investigation) Pocket Star Books. examined 112 Ocean Avenue, some of them Kaplan, S. & Kaplan, R. S. (1995) The Amityville concluding that there was an evil presence Horror Conspiracy. Laceyville, PA: Belfry Books. residing in the house that made it practically uninhabitable. It therefore seems strange that FURTHER READING a string of new owners, the fi rst being Barbara and Jim Cromarty, reported the house to be Amityville Files.com: America’s Most Famous Haunted House Controversy. (2012) www. absolutely free of extraordinary occurrences amityvillefi les.com/fi les, accessed April 10, 2012. of any sort, apart from the hordes of curious Berry-Dee, C. (2003) Talking with Serial Killers: The onlookers. Initially unaware of the book and Most Evil People in the World Tell Their Own movie, and thus of the situation they would be Stories. London: Blake Publishing. getting themselves into, the Cromartys ended up having to change the house’s address and appearance. After them, various other inhabit- ants of “High Hopes” had nothing unusual to Angel (1999–2004) report. Furthermore, every documented aspect CAROLINE RUDDELL of the supernatural events that had supposedly occurred in the house was being put under Angel is an American fantasy-based television vicious scrutiny by skeptics aiming to debunk series created by Joss Whedon. The series is a the Amityville Horror, and consequently whole “spin-off” of the popular Buffy the Vampire books were written on how easy this task ulti- Slayer, and ran from 1999 to 2004, totaling mately was (e.g., Stephen Kaplan’s The Ami- fi ve seasons (see buffy the vampire slayer tyville Horror Conspiracy, 1995). (1997–2003); vampire fi ction). Angel is As a result of Ronald DeFeo Jr.’s contradic- steeped in the Gothic in several ways: fi rst, the tory and constantly evolving versions of what series focuses on the supernatural in the form really happened on that night in 1974, the of vampires and demons; second, it makes use murders will probably remain a mystery. The of the macabre and the conventions of horror string of books and movies that followed (as well as those of fi lm noir and the detective 26 angel (1999–2004) story); and third, its representation of the city and potentially acceptance, in a society that is of Los Angeles as labyrinthine in nature con- largely unaware of his existence as a vampire. notes a distinctly Gothic aesthetic (see fi lm; As a series that embraces hybrid generic ten- urban gothic). In a more localized way, dencies, Angel also draws on horror; as a the long empty corridors, cracked walls, and vampire Angel has a fractured identity, both peeling wallpaper of the dilapidated hotel that monster and human (see doubles). In a forms the base for the central characters’ busi- Gothic tradition the monstrous here is polar- ness of private investigation, can be seen as a ized with Angel’s more vulnerable human stand-in for the more traditional Gothic castle identity that is subject to both his internal or house. struggle with his dark desires and the constant The eponymous protagonist, Angel, is a onslaught of demonic activity in Los Angeles, vampire who has been cursed by Gypsies and which he strives to defeat episodically. therefore has a soul. He has a sense of guilt over Visually, there is a movement toward a more his former actions as the evil vampire Angelus, realist aesthetic in the series, toward the gritty and since acquiring his soul attempts to make urban and away from the fantasy world of up for his past deeds by “helping the helpless” Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Upstone 2005: 102). in Los Angeles. Angel is initially a private inves- The series is shot, particularly early on, using tigator specializing in cases that involve the certain noir conventions such as lighting styles: supernatural, which is how he attempts to help dark shadows permeate the series, suggestive of as many people as possible with problems that the demon underworld infi ltrating the sunny the usual law enforcement agencies cannot Californian environment within which the cope with. The series therefore deals with par- series is set, yet largely negates. Much of ticularly Gothic themes of the supernatural the focus is often on the darker side of Los and the macabre, and is further embedded in Angeles, the shadow to the glossier Hollywood. a Gothic sensibility through its preoccupation As Benjamin Jacob notes, characters provide with Angel’s troubled and split identity as both commentary on the problematic temperament monster (vampire) and hero of the series. As of the city continually throughout the series Stacey Abbott notes, Angel is a fi gure of tragedy (Jacob 2005: 75). and despondency, haunted by his past as a As is the case with many Gothic texts, the vengeful and malicious killer (Abbott 2005: 1). monstrous is positioned as a means to inter- As Angel is a private investigator in earlier rogate contemporary anxieties and issues; in seasons the series draws on the conventions of Angel the macabre existence of the demon the detective story, which Nevitt and Smith population can be read as a metaphor for the (2003) suggest has its origins in the Gothic horror of contemporary urban living and tradition of the nineteenth century. The series the often unseen terrors of falling foul of the also draws on certain fi lm noir conventions, Hollywood machine. For example, out-of- largely in the characterization of Angel in work actresses are the targeted prey of one par- terms of troubled masculinity. Angel leaves ticularly malicious vampire in the episode Sunnydale, and his doomed relationship with “City O” in Season One, and in a wider sense Buffy, as he feels he cannot give Buffy a fulfi ll- there are many shots of poorly lit, rain- ing life; in Buffy the Vampire Slayer he tempo- drenched alleys illustrating that not all in Los rarily loses his soul after having sex with Buffy Angeles is reminiscent of the bright lights of and becomes villainous for a time thereafter. Hollywood. Angel is therefore unable to achieve true hap- Later in the series Angel takes over as the piness by having a mature sexual relationship head of Wolfram and Hart, a law fi rm that is with Buffy; if he does, his soul will be lost once renowned as the seat of all that is evil in the more. He is also uncertain of his place in the series. While Angel’s aim is to improve the fi rm human world and seeks to fi nd redemption, from within, a variety of monstrous fi gures anglo-caribbean gothic 27 associated with Wolfram and Hart can be Kaveney, R. (2003) Reading the “Vampire Slayer”: read as the evil nature of large-scale corporate The New, Updated, Unoffi cial Guide to Buffy and business. Here, Gothic monstrosity is mapped Angel. London: Tauris Parke. onto corruption often associated with such business practice, and is fi rmly located in the problematic urban environment of advanced capitalism. Anglo-Caribbean Gothic SEE ALSO: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997– CAROL MARGARET DAVISON 2003); Doubles; Film; Urban Gothic; Vampire Fiction. Since the eighteenth century, traditional Gothic tropes and conventions have been brought to REFERENCES bear on anxieties relating to colonial and impe- rial encounters and realities (see imperial Abbott, S. (2005) Kicking ass and singing Mandy: A vampire in LA.” In S. Abbott (ed.), Reading Angel. gothic), both pleasurable and traumatic, London: I. B. Tauris, pp. 1–13. and their far-reaching legacies. In the Anglo- Jacob, B. (2005) Los Angeles, CA: The city of Angel. Caribbean Gothic, these include various as - In S. Abbott (ed.), Reading Angel. London: I. B. pects of race relations (economic, ethical, Tauris, pp. 75–87. sexual, political) (see race), the slave/planta- Nevitt, L. & Smith, A. W. (2003) “Family blood is tion system (see slavery and the gothic), always the sweetest”: The Gothic transgressions of and little-understood African cultural prac- Angel/Angelus”. Refractory: Journal of Entertain- tices retained in the Caribbean. A compelling ment Media, 2. http://blogs.arts.unimelb.edu.au/ and signifi cant interfacing developed well into refractory/2003/03/18/family-blood-is-always- the nineteenth century that saw the radicaliza- the-sweetest-the-gothic-transgressions-of- tion of the Gothic alongside the Gothicization angelangelus-lucy-nevitt-andy-william-smith/, accessed July 30, 2010. of racial discourse: while racialized characters Upstone, S. (2005) “LA’s got it all”: Hybridity and and race questions were increasingly popular otherness in Angel’s postmodern city. In S. Abbott Gothic ingredients, race-focused studies and (ed.), Reading Angel. London: I. B. Tauris, debates – medical, scientifi c, political, and oth- pp. 101–13. erwise – adopted and adapted established Gothic rhetoric and motifs. FURTHER READING Cataclysmic and controversial historical Abbott, S. (2003) Walking the fi ne line between events also contributed to the fi guration of the Angel and Angelus. Slayage: The Online Interna- West Indies as a site of terror. These included tional Journal of Buffy Studies (August, 2003). numerous slave uprisings (e.g., Tacky’s Rebel- http://slayageonline.com/essays/slayage9/Abbott. lion, Jamaica, April–September 1760) and htm, accessed July 30, 2010. especially the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s, Battis, J. (2005) Blood Relations: Chosen Families in which culminated in widespread violence, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Jefferson, mutilation, rape, and death. Gothic motifs also NC: McFarland. punctuate the historical accounts of these Harrison, J. R. (2005) Gender politics in Angel: Tra- events, whose leaders, notably both male and ditional vs. non-traditional corporate climates. female, were often shamanistic practitioners In S. Abbott (ed.), Reading Angel. London: I. B. of Obeah and voodoo (or vaudou) – African Tauris, pp. 117–31. Hills, M. & Williams, R. (2005) Angel’s monstrous medico-religious systems (sometimes syncre- mothers and vampires with souls: Investigating tized with Western Christian religious belief the abject in “television horror.” In S. Abbott systems) that fuelled slave resistance. Nanny, (ed.), Reading Angel. London: I. B. Tauris, the Obeah leader of the Jamaican Maroons, pp. 203–17. was reported to have defi ed British weaponry 28 anglo-caribbean gothic and an enslaved Obeah woman named Cubah term he intriguingly employs as a verb in one led the resistance forces during Tacky’s Rebel- instance in association with a dreaded runaway lion, the most noteworthy slave revolt prior to slave. While representing blacks as extremely the Haitian Revolution. Tacky’s Rebellion also superstitious, Lewis both undermines and sup- purportedly involved an Obeah-based cere- ports the authenticity of Obeah, and under- mony whereby the blood of numerous butch- scores the cultural relativity of belief systems ered white overseers was mixed with rum and by comparing black Obeah to what he pro- grave dirt and imbibed by the rebels. The vocatively calls “white Obeah” (Christianity). Haitian rebellion was similarly ignited by a Lewis’ fi ctional portraits of blacks run the voodoo ceremony. Despite efforts to delegiti- gamut of stereotypes. In his 1797 play The mize voodoo by chronicling its adherents’ Castle Spectre, Hassan is a noble, deep-feeling ostensible acts of child sacrifi ce and cannibal- character whose enslavement and loss of family ism, and to demystify Obeah in historical and wife unman and embitter him, rendering accounts, fascination with their ability to rally him a vengeful misanthropist. Lewis’ The Isle of and empower slaves nonetheless prevailed. The Devils (a poem composed in 1816 during his gravity of British concerns about Obeah is evi- last voyage to Jamaica), however, features denced in the fact that prohibitive legislation a more Gothic creature in the fi gure of a su - followed the suppression of Tacky’s Rebellion. pernatural, ebony demon who violates and An act was passed in the Jamaican Assembly in impregnates a betrothed Portuguese virgin December of 1760 that made the practice of named Irza after she spies his beautiful, Obeah punishable by death. Notably, despite paradisal-looking island from onboard a vessel attempts to portray the Caribbean as a site of and is shipwrecked on it. In a fi nal fi t of agony terror, British colonial authority was upheld as he watches her depart, he destroys himself by way of various forms of spectacular terror, and their child. including mutilation, corporal punishment, In her representation of Jamaica and King- and executions performed on the bodies (both ston’s famous Blue Mountains as alien land- dead and alive) of rebel and runaway slaves. scapes inhabited by deadly wildlife and insects In the pages of Anglo-Caribbean Gothic lit- and the dreaded haunt of rebel slaves, British erature, Obeah is fi gured as a conduit for revo- author Charlotte Smith magnifi es the terrors lutionary passion and violence and serves as experienced by her besieged white heroine in an equivalent to various magical sciences prac- The Story of Henrietta one of fi ve tales that ticed by secret society adherents in traditional comprise her Letters of a Solitary Wanderer British Gothic fi ction (see secret societies). (1800). The joint specters of miscegenation Likewise, Obeah, whose practitioners were and sexual violation book-end the narrative. said to be able to raise the dead, galvanized The engaged Henrietta travels to Jamaica to traditional Gothic fears associated with su - visit her father and discovers numerous racially perstitious, pre-Enlightenment belief systems. mixed siblings and is apprised of her father’s By way of various cultural productions, par - intention to marry her off to one Mr. Sawkins, ticularly the theater, Obeah became a familiar a man of inferior rank to whom he has myste- icon of terror to Britons just prior to the aboli- riously endowed his estate. Her epistolary nar- tion of the slave trade. Matthew G. Lewis, one rative recounts her terrors, which culminate in of the early British Gothic masters, employed an encounter with a threatening Obeah woman the Gothic to recount tales of Obeah poison- and her attempted rape by Amponah, a black ings and the vengeful acts of fugitive slaves in slave she has known since childhood who his posthumously published Journal of a West secures her liberation from Sawkins only to India Proprietor, 1815–17 (1834) (see lewis, assert his rights over his own body and hers. matthew). In that work, Lewis assumes an Smith’s antislavery tract is ambivalent about ambivalent standpoint with regard to Obeah, a the subject of slave emancipation and uses it to anglo-caribbean gothic 29 underscore, albeit contentiously, the extent of aristocracy of plantation owners is described as women’s oppression. Marriage, Smith suggests, living in “a world of the narrowest mental and is “the most dreadful of all slavery” (1800–2: moral horizons” (2007: 192). In this ideologi- II 77). cally complicated novel about an uprising Obeah-related fears are paramount in during the fi nal days of Jamaican slavery, Cynric Williams’ two-volume Gothic novel de Lisser, a Jamaican journalist and writer, Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827), which is recounts a consummate Gothic tale involving haunted by the specter of “Hayti” and racial disinheritance, Obeah, the threat of miscege- insurrection, a threat to Britain’s economic nation, alcohol addiction, moral degeneration, dominance in the West Indies in the eighteenth and a femme fatale in the form of plantation century. Originally published anonymously, mistress Annie Palmer. Focusing on the three- Hamel is, in part, a work of antiabolitionist week working visit of Robert Rutherford, heir propaganda that recounts the story of a white to a Barbadian sugar estate, this cautionary tale preacher named Roland who wields what the about the evils of colonialism problematically author suggests is the white Obeah of mission- employs Palmer as emblematic of that system. aries and abolitionists as he leads a slave rebel- Portrayed as the novel’s greatest terror, the lion based on French Revolutionary principles. Obeah-wielding Palmer is possibly of mixed Roland’s desires for the daughter of a local blood and a native of Haiti, “the very strong- planter, however, lead to his grotesque descent hold of devil-craft” (de Lisser 2007: 129) in the into violence and desperation. Hamel, the tit- Caribbean. The novel culminates with her ular character, is an articulate black Obeah brutal murder during a slave revolt, an event man initially caught up by Roland’s message designed as a purgation ritual that is unset- who later denounces revolutionary freedom. tlingly misogynistic (see misogyny). A High The novel concludes with Hamel’s squashing Wind in Jamaica, a Gothic-infl ected loss-of- of the rebellion he had organized and his innocence story also published in 1929, and retreat to the mythical African homeland of written by a British author (Richard Hughes), Guinea, the exposure of Roland’s villainy, and also portrays that Caribbean island as the site the prophecy that slaves are not ready for of sexuality and violence. For this reason, autonomous government. Despite the novel’s several critics have argued that this is not conclusion, Hamel’s eloquent critique of the a children’s book. The initial description of slave system resonates. Jamaica as “a kind of paradise for English chil- As in the African American literary tradi- dren” (Hughes 1957: 5) is slowly and strategi- tion, Gothic tropes and conventions are cally stripped away by Hughes, who exposes employed in Anglo-Caribbean abolitionist some dark underlying realities about that novels and slave narratives. The History of country’s brutal colonial history. Mary Prince (1831), the fi rst account of a slave The Anglo-Caribbean Gothic’s dialogue woman’s life ever published in Britain, which with the British Gothic tradition has been helped to galvanize the antislavery movement, especially pre-eminent in the twentieth century. relates the brutality and terror of the slave Perhaps due both to their canonical status and system, whose victims pass their lives, as the narrative role (albeit marginal) played Prince’s life experiences in Bermuda and by the Caribbean in their pages, Victorian Antigua illustrate, in continual fear. As the Gothic classics (see victorian gothic) such planter society represented the worst excesses as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and of decadence and civil and national transgres- Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) have sion, it is also frequently portrayed through a frequently been revised in Anglo-Caribbean Gothic lens by Caribbean authors. In Herbert Gothic works wherein the Caribbean moves G. de Lisser’s classic early Jamaican novel The from the narrative periphery to the center. Jean White Witch of Rosehall (1929), the small Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), for example, 30 anglo-caribbean gothic furnishes a compelling prequel to Jane Eyre in Zombies, reanimated dead people who the form of Bertha Rochester’s pre-Thornfi eld thrive on human fl esh and brains and are gen- life history as Antoinette Cosway in Jamaica. erally controlled by a voodoo sorcerer, became Narrated from the perspective of the young staple cinematic fi gures alongside other mon- Antoinette, who is essentially raised by a black sters from the 1930s onward. White Zombie female servant, Rhys’ novel engages, with an (1932), directed by Victor Halperin, is a dark eye to the intersections of class, race, and romance set during the American occupation gender, with various complex questions relat- of Haiti (1915–34), a political arrangement ing to identity, hybridity, and politics. fi gured as a new imperialism involving a V. S. Naipaul’s Guerillas (1975) also rewrites revived slavery. A wealthy, love-obsessed plan- both Jane Eyre and the violent, triangulated tation owner who craves sexual control of relationship of Catherine, Heathcliff, and Edgar Madeline, a visiting American woman engaged Linton in Wuthering Heights in an unidentifi ed to be married to a white bank clerk stationed Caribbean country facing potential revolution. in the country, turns for assistance to a voodoo Through the fi gures of Roche, a former South master (played by Bela Lugosi) who owns a African activist who has experienced imprison- sugar-cane mill run entirely by zombie slaves. ment and torture; the radical Jimmy Ahmed, a The fi lm’s zombie motif possesses multiple wannabe hero and Caribbean Heathcliff; and meanings, serving as a dark mirror of both the Jane, Roche’s English girlfriend and Jimmy’s American occupation and colonial slave-based lover, Naipaul positions the novel’s colonial history, and signifying women’s zombifi cation and postcolonial realities as mirrors – worlds within marital and domestic situations. irreparably damaged by colonial exploitation. More contemporary works of Anglo- Guerillas culminates in a meaningless, useless Caribbean fi ction include Elizabeth Nunez’s revolt involving the brutal and senseless murder Bruised Hibiscus (2003) and Prospero’s Daughter of its female protagonist. Jamaica Kincaid’s (2006). Set in Nunez’s birthplace of Trinidad, female Gothic work (see female gothic), The the former is a tale of passion, repressed secrets, Autobiography of My Mother (1996), likewise and homicide that focuses on two women from rewrites Wuthering Heights in its focus on the different racial and class backgrounds. Nunez fi gure of Xuela, a female Heathcliff, who is astutely extends the motif of slavery to include haunted by her tragic motherlessness and the worldviews and ideals in this work, which may complex, grotesque, and brutal legacies of be classifi ed as female and/or feminist Gothic. imperialism, especially the collusion between Prospero’s Daughter is a dark romance focusing colonizer and colonized. These Brontë-related on a colonial encounter involving a doctor, his revisions have also occasionally been carried daughter, and a Caribbean leper colony that over into the cinematic domain. Jacques Tour- rewrites Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Mary neur’s I Walked With a Zombie (1943) incorpo- Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) (see shelley, rates such Gothic elements as a mysterious mary wollstonecraft) and is especially estate, voodoo, and a zombie (see zombies) – attentive to imperial power dynamics. a fi gure various critics have characterized as a Caribbean equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster SEE ALSO: Female Gothic; Imperial Gothic; – into a loose adaptation of Jane Eyre in the Lewis, Matthew; Misogyny; Race; Secret Societ- West Indies. The island’s political history ies; Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft; Slavery and the recedes into the background in favor of a more Gothic; Victorian Gothic; Zombies. titillating focus – namely, the dangerously erotic bodies of blacks and women, which are notably united during a compelling voodoo REFERENCES ritual wherein a black voodoo master assumes Brontë, C. (1985 [1847]) Jane Eyre. Harmonds- the role of a vampiric seducer. worth: Penguin. anti-semitism 31

Brontë, E. (2003 [1847]) Wuthering Heights. New Possessions: Voodoo, Santeria, Obeah, and the York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press. Caribbean. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univer- de Lisser, H. (2007 [1929]). The White Witch of Rose- sity Press, pp. 171–94. hall. Oxford: Macmillan. Sands-O’Connor, K. (2009) High winds and broken Hughes, R. (1957 [1929]) A High Wind in Jamaica. bridges: The Gothic and the West Indies in New York: Harper & Row. twentieth-century British children’s literature. Kincaid, J. (1997) The Autobiography of My Mother. In A. Jackson, K. Coats, & R. McGillis (eds.), New York: Penguin. The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Lewis, M. G. (1797) The Castle Spectre: A Romantic Borders. New York: Routledge, pp. 117–30. Drama in Three Acts. London: T. H. Lacy. Malchow, H. L. (1996) Gothic Images of Race in Lewis, M. G. (1969 [1816]) The Isle of Devils. Fol- Nineteenth-Century Britain. Stanford, CA: Stan- croft, PA: Folcroft Press. ford University Press. Lewis, M. G. (1999 [1834]) Journal of a West Indian Paravisini-Gebert, L. (2002) Colonial and postcolo- Proprietor, 1815–17. Oxford: Oxford University nial Gothic. In J. E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Press. Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge, UK: Naipaul, V. S. (1990 [1975]) Guerillas. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 229–58. Vintage Books. Nunez, E. (2003) Bruised Hibiscus. New York: Random House. Nunez, E. (2006) Prospero’s Daughter. New York: Ballantine Books. Anti-Semitism Prince, M. (1831) The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. London: F. Westley and A. H. Davis. CAROL MARGARET DAVISON Rhys, J. (1966) Wide Sargasso Sea. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Critical consideration of anti-Semitism in Shelley, M. (1994 [1818]) Frankenstein; Or, the Gothic literature in recent decades developed Modern Prometheus. Oxford: Oxford University out of scholarship examining the Gothic’s Press. engagement with religious/theological issues. Smith, C. (1800–2) The Letters of a Solitary Wan- Several exemplary essays focus on the fi gure of derer: Containing Narratives of Various Descrip- the Jew in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and tions, 5 vols. London: Sampson Low. Williams, C. (1827) Hamel, the Obeah Man, 2 vols. other Victorian fi n-de-siècle texts, and Davison London: Hunt and Clarke. (2004) presents a comprehensive overview of anti-Semitism in British Gothic literature and the terror fuelled by the “Jewish Question,” FURTHER READING issues and resolutions relating to the Jews, Brown, V. (2003) Spiritual terror and sacred author- primarily in Europe, who long occupied ity in Jamaican slave society. Slavery and Aboli- an unequal legal and civil status to non-Jews. tion, 24, 24–53. Several scholars have cogently argued that the Edwards, B. (1801) An Historical Survey of the Island atmospheric terror and rhetoric of Gothic lit- of Saint Domingo, together with an Account of the erature is theological at its core, and that these Maroon Negroes in the Island of Jamaica. London: works are essentially veiled cautionary-style John Stockdale. sermons. The critical commonplace, largely Long, E. (1774) The History of Jamaica; Or, General uncontested, is that British Gothic literature Survey of the Antient and Modern State of That is marked by a prevalent anti-Catholicism. In Island with Refl ections on its Situation, Settle- an attempt to assert the hegemony of Angli- ments, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government, 3 vols. London: T. canism/Protestantism, Catholicism, Britain’s Lowndes. former national religion, is generally repre- Richardson, A. (1997) Romantic voodoo: Obeah sented as corrupt, obscurantist, deviant, and and British culture, 1797–1807. In M. Fernandez grounded in superstition. In stark contrast, Olmos & L. Paravisini-Gebert (eds.), Sacred fanatical Protestant sects have been identifi ed 32 anti-semitism as the principal target in American and Scot- was readily imported into British Gothic litera- tish Gothic literature (see american gothic; ture. The long-standing representation of the scottish gothic). Despite this key difference, Jew as devil in the worldview of medieval both traditions were established by Protes- Christian Europe, a cornerstone of religious tants/Anglicans who, in the views of numerous anti-Semitism, was pressed into service in the critics, displaced their fears about their own Gothic genre in the eighteenth century and nature, condition, and fate onto various Others. adapted in the wake of racial anti-Semitism, Representations of Jews and Judaism in which conceptualized Jewishness as an incon- British Gothic literature in a fashion war- trovertible racial identity. Most of the taboos at ranting the label “anti-Semitic” date from the the core of the Gothic – such as incest, fratri- 1790s onwards, sometimes function in a coded cide, miscegenation, and castration – involve fashion, and have been explicated on the blood in either a literal or a fi gurative sense (as grounds of three major issues: aesthetic/poetic, in the concept of blood-money, or familial or religious/spiritual, and political/ideological. In “racial” blood-ties), and had long been associ- the fi rst instance, they serve as compelling and ated with the Jew, the primary anti-Christian exotic properties capable of a romantic treat- Other in the European worldview who was ment highly appealing to readers; in the second, regarded as spiritually and economically per- they tap long-standing anxieties about Chris- verse and socially disruptive. The Blood Libel tian Britain’s religious inheritance and the – sensationalist blood-related allegations of body/self/soul after death; and in the third, ritual murder and human sacrifi ce that demon- they serve as abject Others in the Gothic’s fi gu- ized Jews and Judaism – condensed these rative contests, return of the repressed epi- various anti-Christian associations. Jews were sodes, and exclusionary purifi cation rituals, accused of such crimes as desecrating the Host who help to create, consolidate, and even and of murdering non-Jews, usually children, contest an ideal British Protestant/Anglican to obtain their blood for use in the Passover national identity that is conceptualized as a Seder and rituals to prolong life. union of Reason and Religion. Notably, reli- The Blood Libel, with its emergent vampire gious belief was increasingly a matter of pri- motif, was further reinforced by the Jewish vate judgment during the Enlightenment, engagement with moneylending, an enterprise which took place in Britain within, rather than for which Jews were maligned as social parasites against, Protestantism. (see vampire fi ction). This adapted libel Just as Gothic literature’s preoccupation was readily brought to bear in British Gothic with Catholicism was, in part, tethered to such literature on questions of national belonging sociohistoric events as the establishment of and identity, sociopolitical propensities, and Anglicanism in 1534 and the Catholic Eman- the Enlightenment’s emancipatory project. In cipation campaign that ran from the 1770s that venue, the Jew, who was regarded as a through to the passing of the Catholic Eman- member of an ancient, exclusive, and uncanny cipation Act in 1829, anti-Semitism in the – because “undead” – faith that remained intact Gothic is grounded in historical phenomena in the modern world, raised various ancient and developments. These include the expul- and modern specters (see uncanny, the). The sion of the Jews from England in 1290 through established association between Jews and to the Jewish Naturalization Act of 1753 and medical and scientifi c pursuits became even subsequent concerns about Anglo-Jewish more threatening during the Enlightenment/ conversion and assimilation commencing at French Revolution when such engagements the end of the eighteenth century when the were connected to politically progressive ideas attempts of British missionaries to convert the and conspiratorial secret societies. Numerous Jews had reached a fever pitch. Out of this nonfi ction treatises written by respectable history was derived a complex semiotics that clerics and professionals, and the German anti-semitism 33 terror-novel, or Schauerroman, promoted the ible ideas as magic and science, superstition idea that secret societies and secret sciences and reason, religion and nationalism, and mer- were conspiracy-driven, politically subversive cantilism and speculative capitalism. While he forces operating in Europe in the 1790s (see forms part of a pantheon of accursed wander- european gothic; german gothic). ers popular in Romantic poetry in the early Notably, British Gothic works representing 1800s – especially in the works of Percy Bysshe Jews and Judaism are usually set during the Shelley – his religious identity is regularly sinister operation of the Spanish Inquisition downplayed by Romantic poets and overlooked that, as many readers were unaware, remained by Romantic critics (see romanticism; shel- intact until 1834. Anxieties relating to the ley, percy bysshe). In the new economy of French Revolution and Terror were displaced British Gothic literature, which was produced onto this institution in the pages of Gothic during an era of racial anti-Semitism, the Wan- literature. While the Inquisition’s titular object dering Jew was radically transformed. The tra- was the salvation of souls and the realization ditional yoking of Jews and the Blood Libel, of the religious unity of Spain, its true motive with its emergent vampire motif, assumed was an antipathy for progressive ideas and terrifying fl esh in the Wandering Jew’s repre- intense resentment of the social, political, sentation as a politically subversive and/or and economic successes of the Marranos, Jews abject magician-scientist. The Wandering Jew’s who had been forcibly converted to Christian- unnatural longevity not only served to endorse ity just a century earlier. In their depiction of the idea of the Jew as the ur-criminal worthy of treacherous (crypto-)Jews and the Spanish Christian punishment and to uphold funda- Inquisition during a period when British nar- mental Christian religious certainties about the ratives of conversion and conversionist societ- Crucifi xion and the Millennium, it took on a ies were advocating Jewish assimilation, Gothic supernatural, almost Faustian, aspect. He not novelists obliquely expressed their own deep- only grows increasingly nefarious and vampiric seated concerns about the prospects of Jewish by the fi n de siècle; he comes to exemplify the religious conversion and Jewish secular assimi- idea of secret identity, being neither explicitly lation in Britain. Thus, in keeping with the identifi ed by name or religion (see fi n-de- prevalent representation of the Spanish Inqui- siècle gothic). sition in British literature until the nineteenth The Wandering Jew makes his memorable century as an anti-Protestant tribunal with rare cameo debut in Matthew Lewis’ graphic por- mention of its principal Jewish and Moslem no-Gothic novel The Monk (1795) where victims, British Gothic literature treating the he assumes an ambivalent role (see lewis, same subjects was consistently anti-Catholic matthew). Although he forms part of a but not pro-Jewish. lengthy subplot wherein superstitious beliefs The transnational fi gure of the Wandering are legitimated and rationalism is challenged, Jew, whose legend was fi rst disseminated after this millenarian fi gure also helps to promote the expulsion of the Jews from Spain during the a moral Reformation that, albeit indirectly, Inquisition, emblematizes the Jewish Question affi rms Protestantism’s place as Britain’s ruling in many works of Gothic literature, his dreaded religion. In this Gothic allegory about Protes- role as anticitizen bringing British national tantism’s religious paternity, Roman Catholi- identity and the values that constitute it into cism is trounced as a Mammonistic pagan cult sharp relief. In the pages of the British Gothic, headed up by power-hungry deviants like the where contests are frequently staged between protagonist Ambrosio who readily succumbs pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment belief to sexual temptation and rapidly develops into systems, the Wandering Jew becomes a highly a homicidal rapist (see cults). An element charged character positioned at an anxious overlooked by most critics is that a Jewish mer- crossroads between such seemingly incompat- chant is actually identifi ed, in adherence to 34 anti-semitism medieval stereotypes, as assisting the devil in Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula marks the plotting Ambrosio’s entrapment. Likewise, apogee in the development of the vampiric although the Wandering Jew’s conversion testi- Wandering Jew in British Gothic literature (see fi es to Christian salvation and mercy, he is stoker, bram). Dracula (1897) serves as the rendered in his full supernatural aspect: he Gothic masterpiece that initiated the scholarly embodies fury, despair, and malevolence, and examination of anti-Semitism in the Gothic, horrifi es his viewers with the blood-red cross an ironic fact given that Count Dracula is inscribed on his forehead. nowhere explicitly identifi ed as Jewish. His Although set during the Religious Wars, haunt in the medieval Carfax estate that smells William Godwin’s St. Leon (1799) takes the of “ole Jerusalem,” coupled with his literaliza- secular world as its focus (see godwin, tion of the Blood Libel, however, serve as the william). In this cautionary tale about the most prominent indicators of his religious potential excesses of capitalism, Godwin’s identity. This crypto-Jew taps deep-seated fears eponymous protagonist is, effectively, a Wan- about assimilated Jews who are no longer dering crypto-Jew, an unchecked individualist/ readily identifi able or face social/legal restric- scientist who, vampire-like, threatens both his tions in British society, and renders manifest family and the nation. Godwin’s anti-Semitism fi n-de-siècle anxieties about various issues, is blatant in his portrait of St. Leon, a fi gurative including syphilis, homosexuality, proto- Wandering Jew, who is emblematic of the feminism, the advent of monopoly capitalism, modern age that is likewise fi gured as “Jewish” and national/imperial decline. “Jewishness” in its worship of “craft, dissimulation, corrup- functioned as the umbrella signifi er, both in tion, and commerce” (Godwin 2006: 74). In its Stoker’s Dracula and in scholarly works of his preoccupation with Christian religious pater- day like Max Nordau’s antimodernism polemic nity, Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Degeneration (1895), under which the diverse Wanderer (1820) follows in the tradition of fears of national degeneration stood united Lewis’ The Monk (see maturin, charles (see degeneration). Contemporary pseu- robert). Roman Catholics and Jews are posi- doscientifi c studies had traced the inception tioned on a par, both being equally engaged of syphilis to the Jewish community, psy- in what are described as “work[s] of blood” chopathologized the Wandering Jew as a peri- (Maturin 1992: 255, 391).The novel’s epony- patetic neurotic, and deemed Jews prone to mous hero, Melmoth, may be, as one critic mental illness. describes him, a kind of Wandering Jew com- In the form of the mesmerizing Wandering bined with Byronic vampire (Praz 1965: 76), Jew, an international, mammonistic, magician- but his two explicitly identifi ed Jewish doubles scientist, and accursed criminal whose coreli- – Solomon and Adonijah – evoke the greatest gionists had long been denounced as colonizers dread: Solomon conjures up an Oedipal castra- for progress, Britain actually projected its own tion nightmare as a knife-wielding circumcis- demonic self-image as an increasingly imperi- ing crypto-Jewish father who threatens to alist, scientifi cally industrial, and aggressively physically Judaize his son, while the elderly missionary nation. Dracula’s reverse imperial- patri arch Adonijah seems horrifyingly undead ist invasion targeting British women’s bodies in his subterranean apartment furnished with reveals the novel’s true national fears (see skulls and parchment scrolls inscribed with imperial gothic). His ritual murder at novel’s human blood. Maturin’s putative target may be end by the crusading Anglo-American broth- the brutality, idolatry, and avarice of the Cath- erhood renders Transylvania safe for tourism olic Church, but his Jewish characters are and Britain free of a Jewishness portrayed as graphically memorable, wolfi sh scapegoats sexually deviant and infectious. who remain irredeemably accursed for their Vampiric Jews – crypto and otherwise – betrayal and murder of Christ. assumed an even greater terror in their apparition 35 migration to celluloid. In some instances, their Halberstam, J. (1995) Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and Jewishness is thinly veiled. In his role as the the Technology of Monsters. Durham, NC: Duke Count in Tod Browning’s 1931 fi lm Dracula, University Press. Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi wears a medallion Kracauer, S. (1947) From Caligari to Hitler. Prince- that strongly resembles a Star of David (see ton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Malchow, H. L. (1996) Gothic Images of Race in lugosi, bela). The vampiric Wandering Jew Nineteenth-Century Britain. Stanford, CA: Stan- assumed the starring role in 1940 in two Nazi ford University Press. propaganda fi lms produced to incite violence McBride, W. T. (1990) Dracula and Mephistopheles: and prepare Germans for the Final Solution. Shyster vampires. Literature Film Quarterly 18, While Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda 116–21. minister, billed Veit Harlan’s Jud Süss as a real- Pick, D. (1998) Powers of suggestion: Svengali and istic historic portrait, Fritz Hippler’s venomous the fi n-de-siècle. In B. Cheyette & L. Marcus cinematic work The Eternal Jew (1940) was (eds.), Modernity, Culture and “the Jew.” Cam- described by at least one critic as a documen- bridge, UK: Polity Press, pp. 105–25. tary. Both expressed Nazi Germany’s völkisch Porter, R. (2000) Enlightenment: Britain and the Cre- ideology and its principal fear of assimilated ation of the Modern World. London: Penguin. O’Malley, P. R. (2006) Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, Crypto-Jews. and Victorian Gothic Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. SEE ALSO: American Gothic; Blood; Cults; Porte, J. (1974) In the hands of an angry god: Reli- Degeneration; European Gothic; Fin-de-Siècle gious terror in Gothic fi ction. In G. R. Thompson Gothic; German Gothic; Godwin, William; Impe- (ed.), The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark rial Gothic; Jewish Gothic; Lewis, Matthew; Romanticism. Washington, DC: Washington State Lugosi, Bela; Maturin, Charles Robert; Romanti- University Press, pp. 42–64. cism; Scottish Gothic; Shelley, Percy Bysshe; Purves, M. (2009) The Gothic and Catholicism. Stoker, Bram; Uncanny, The; Vampire Fiction. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Rentschler, E. (1996) The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. REFERENCES Sage, V. (1988) Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradi- Davison, C. M. (2004) Anti-Semitism and British tion. London: Macmillan. Gothic Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan. Tarr, M. M. (1946) Catholicism in Gothic Fiction in Godwin, W. (2006 [1799]) St. Leon (ed. W. Brewer). England: A Study of the Nature and Function of Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Catholic Materials in Gothic Fiction in England Lewis, Matthew G. (1980 [1795]) The Monk. Oxford: (1762–1820). Washington, DC: The Catholic Uni- Oxford University Press. versity of America Press. Maturin, C. R. (1992 [1820]) Melmoth the Wanderer. Trachtenberg, J. (1943) The Devil and the Jews: The Oxford: Oxford University Press. Medieval Conception of the Jew and its Relation to Nordau, M. (1993 [1895]) Degeneration. Lincoln, Modern Antisemitism. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni- NE: University of Nebraska Press. versity Press. Praz, M. (1965) The Romantic Agony (trans. A. Davidson). London: Oxford University Press. (Originally published in Italian 1930.) Stoker, B. (1992 [1897]) Dracula. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Apparition MACKENZIE BARTLETT

FURTHER READING An apparition is a sudden visual manifestation Bostrom, I. (1962) The novel and Catholic emanci- of an ethereal and transient fi gure, most often pation. Studies in Romanticism 2, 155–76. someone who is deceased, but also sometimes 36 apparition a living person, an animal, or an inanimate Blackwood’s “The Willows”) (see blackwood, object. The term is frequently used synony- algernon; dickens, charles; james, henry; mously with “ghost,” “spirit,” and “phantom,” king, stephen; lewis, matthew; poe, edgar and has been studied in terms of hallucination allan; stevenson, robert louis; walpole, (by psychologists), telepathy (by spiritualists), horace; wells, h. g. (herbert george)). and divine providence (by theologians) (see The ghost story, sometimes characterized as spiritualism). Apparitional encounters are a subgenre of Gothic literature, was a ubiqui- highly individualistic and subjective; as Vol- tous feature of periodical publications in the taire notes in his defi nition of the term, “The nineteenth century, and many of the most phantom exists to him who has the perception popular authors of the period – including Eliz- of it” (Voltaire 1824: 2, 232). abeth Gaskell, Rhoda Broughton, Rudyard In literature, apparitions predate what is Kipling, Richard Marsh, and M. R. James – traditionally identifi ed as Gothic fi ction. The produced apparitional tales (see james, m. r. vision – whether of angels, demons, or saints (montague rhodes); kipling, rudyard; – occurs frequently in the Bible, a text which marsh, richard). “teems and bristles with accounts of it from In modern literary and cultural history beginning to end,” as Florence Marryat points scholarship, apparitions are often read in terms out in her nineteenth-century defense of spiri- of Freud’s theory of the return of the repressed, tualism (Marryat 1891: 16). Apparitions also or more broadly as manifestations of “a spec- populate the plays of Shakespeare, such as the tral self – a subjectivity that was confl icted, pivotal scene in Hamlet when the dead king hemispheric and liable to hallucinations at reveals his murder to his son, and in Macbeth, any given moment,” as Shane McCorristine when the ghost of Banquo haunts the title has recently argued (McCorristine 2010: 3). character to remind him of his terrible deeds. The narrator of H. P. Lovecraft’s short story In the mid-eighteenth century apparitions “The Unnamable” voices the diffi culty of artic- became married to Gothic fi ction, where they ulating this haunted relationship between the performed a variety of functions: as heralds of self and apparition: “Molded by the dead brain ancient prophesies (the ghost of Alfonso in of a hybrid nightmare, would not such a vapor- Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto), cursed sub- ous terror constitute in all loathsome truth the jects of undying love (the Bleeding Nun in exquisitely, the shriekingly unnamable?” (Love- Lewis’ The Monk; Catherine Earnshaw’s ghost craft 1996: 162). Apparitions possessing this in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights), symbols of the “unnamable” quality therefore invite the expe- psychological distress or the secret desires of rience of the uncanny by exposing the psyche the protagonist (Miss Jessel and Peter Quint to that which haunts it: death, the past, the in James’ The Turn of the Screw; the woman in unconscious self. the wallpaper in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpa- Though they have remained a common lit- per”; the unnamed visitor in Stevenson’s erary trope, apparitions have not been con- “Markheim”), haunting reminders of crime fi ned to the realm of fi ction. Beginning in the and tyranny (the cat in Poe’s “The Black Cat”; early eighteenth century, “true” tales of ghost the two young girls in King’s The Shining; sightings arose partly in response to the ma - the title character of Toni Morrison’s Beloved), terialist philosophies of the Enlightenment, omens of death (the specters on the ghost offering a metaphysical counterargument to ship in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient demonstrate the existence of the human soul. Mariner; the inverted head of the Porroh One important early model for apparition nar- man in Wells’ “Pollock and the Porroh Man”), ratives was Daniel Defoe’s “A True Relation of and eerie portents of things to come (the the Apparition of One Mrs Veal” (1706), which Ghost of Christmas Future in Dickens’ A records the experiences of a woman who Christmas Carol; the shadows in the trees in claimed to have been visited by the ghost of her apparition 37 friend. There has been some debate, however, published in satirical magazines like Punch and over whether Defoe actually wrote “Mrs Veal” The Idler, as well as a host of new psychological (Starr 2003). As with many reports of ghost theories that characterized apparitions as prod- sightings that followed his essay, Defoe sets ucts of hallucinations, mental disorders, or “the out to provide an authoritative record even débris of dreams,” as James Sully suggested in as his embellished journalistic style also un- 1881 (Sully 1881: 184). Though members of the derscores his acute awareness of the market- Society for Psychical Research faithfully com- ability of his subject. In a period of scientifi c piled reports on apparitions in studies like rationalism and religious skepticism, such Phantasms of the Living (Gurney et al. 1886), by spiritualist documents engaged in epistemo- 1920 Lewis Spence could declare in the Encyclo- logical debates about the nature of death paedia of the Occult that “at the present time and the afterlife while simultaneously capital- apparitions are generally, though by no means izing on the public fascination with appari- universally, referred to hallucination” (Spence tions in literature, creating a link between 2006: 32). supposedly empirical fi rst-hand accounts of Nevertheless, apparitions continued to res- ghost sightings and fi ctionalized tales of the onate in the twentieth century, bolstered in spirit world. part by the devastation of the two world wars, In Britain, apparitions became more com- but also by the popularity of spiritualist trea- modifi ed with the arrival of spiritualism as tises such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s The History an organized movement in 1852, four years of Spiritualism (1926). Indeed, the fact that after the Fox sisters made a sensation in apparitions have remained a staple of Gothic America with their reported ability to commu- fi ction, horror movies, and television to the nicate with the dead. Soon séances were being present day suggests that we have not ceased to conducted across the country in darkened be thrilled by the dread specter of our histories, rooms where ghosts would make their presence our fi ctions, and our selves. known through table rappings, disembodied voices, the playing of musical instruments, or SEE ALSO: Blackwood, Algernon; Dickens, through direct physical contact with audience Charles; James, Henry; James, M. R. (Montague members. However, in the 1870s, spiritualists Rhodes); King, Stephen; Kipling, Rudyard; Lewis, developed an intensifi ed interest in visual phe- Matthew; Marsh, Richard; Poe, Edgar Allan; Spir- nomena like second sight, spirit photography, itualism; Stevenson, Robert Louis; Walpole, and clairvoyance, and this created new pressure Horace; Wells, H. G. (Herbert George). on mediums to generate a more spectacular form of spirit conjuring: namely, the full-form materialization of apparitions. The fi rst such REFERENCES materialization in Britain occurred in 1873 Doyle, A. C. (1926) The History of Spiritualism. when Florence Cook produced her “familiar” London: Cassell. – the young ghost Katie King – at a séance, an Gurney, E., Myers, F. W. H., & Podmore, F. (2011 achievement that made her one of the most [1886]) Phantasms of the Living. Cambridge, UK: famous mediums in the country (Owen 1989: Cambridge University Press. 42–9). William Crookes and others enthusiasti- Lovecraft, H. P. (1996) The unnamable. In The Tran- cally employed various scientifi c methods to sition of H. P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness. New York: Random House, pp. 157–63. lend legitimacy to these materializations; Marryat, F. (1891) There is No Death. London: Kean however, many mediums (including Cook) Paul, Trench, Turner. were later humiliatingly debunked by their McCorristine, S. (2010) Spectres of the Self: Thinking critics. Fueling public skepticism about spiritu- About Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750– alism at the end of the nineteenth century, also, 1920. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University were the relentless parodies of spirit-conjurers Press. 38 architecture, gothic

Owen, A. (1989) The Darkened Room: Women, diagonals (of wider span than the arches over Power and Spiritualism in Late-Victorian England. the sides of the square or rectangle compart- London: Virago. ment), if semicircular, necessitated the nar- Spence, L. (2006 [1920]) Apparitions. In An Ency- rower arches being raised on stilts to keep the clopaedia of Occultism. New York: Cosimo, 2006, tops of the arches aligned: the alternative was pp. 29–33. to place segmental arches over the diagonals Starr, G. (2003) Why Defoe probably did not write The Apparition of Mrs. Veal. Eighteenth-Century and semicircular arches over the narrower Fiction 15(3), 421–50. spans. However, if the arches, instead of being Sully, J. (1881) Illusions: A Psychological Study. New semicircular, stilted, or segmental, were point- York: D. Appleton. ed, the apex of each point could be at similar Voltaire (1824) A Philosophical Dictionary (ed. J. G. heights, and a more elegant solution found to Gorton), 2 vols. London: J. and H. L. Hunt. the problem of vaulting: the apex of each pointed arch, therefore, functioned rather like a hinge. The pointed form, it has been suggested, was observed in Islamic architecture during the Architecture, Gothic Crusades, and we know the pointed arch was JAMES STEVENS CURL used for Islamic buildings in the tenth and eleventh centuries, long before it appeared in “Gothic” is the unfortunate epithet given to an Western Europe. However, interlacing arcades architectural style, properly called “Pointed,” are found in Romanesque architecture, where which evolved in Europe (starting in France) semicircular arches overlap, and the result is from the latter part of the twelfth until the not only a series of interlacing semicircular sixteenth century, and continued in certain arches, but the formation of a series of point - geographical areas well into the eighteenth ed arches, so simple geometry may have played century (see architecture, gothic reviv- its part in suggesting the Pointed style. There al). Its geographical extent, from Ireland and has been much debate about where pointed rib Scandinavia to the Mediterranean and the vaults fi rst appeared: they had been used in Levant, and its longevity, made it a style (or Burgundy, Lombardy, and Durham, but several series of styles, for it evolved in different ways candidates have been proposed, and innova- in different countries and over time) that tion seems to have traveled remarkably quickly was enormously successful throughout Latin from place to place. Compared with columnar Christendom. As its correct name suggests, it is and trabeated architecture (as with Ancient the architecture of the pointed arch, pointed Egyptian and Greek architecture), Gothic was rib vaults, piers with clusters of shafts, deep arcuated, giving an impression of dynamic buttresses (some of the fl ying type), elaborate thrust and counterthrust. Half arches and half- window tracery, pinnacles, spires and spirelets, barrel vaults had been used as buttresses in crenellations, and a pronounced vertical em - Romanesque architecture, so certain principles phasis. The term “Gothic” was originally pejo- we associate with Gothic were already being rative, an invention of those who perceived exploited by earlier architects. Fully developed Pointed architecture as barbarous and north- Gothic was a remarkably coherent system of ern, and associated with those Germanic tribes arched forms in which forces were expressed that had invaded Italy and sacked Rome. and resisted, and nonstructural walls were sub- One of the problems with the semicircular divided with tracery to form huge glazed arch, which was a characteristic of the Roman- windows. esque style, was that when compartments of a First Pointed (known as Early English in the building, square or rectangular in plan, were British Isles) was a style used from the end covered with stone vaults with ribs, the of the twelfth century until the end of the architecture, gothic 39 thirteenth, although most of its characteristics evolved, and churches of great height were were present in the lower part of the east end erected with highly complex vaulting, notably of the Abbey-Church of St-Denis, near Paris in Germany and Bohemia, especially during (circa 1135–44), where something like fully the last phase, where Flamboyant forms were fl edged Gothic evolved. Windows were fi rst of widely used. This style, however, was short- all vertical holes in walls with pointed tops lived in England, and began to be superseded (lancets), but later contained tracery of the by so-called Perpendicular (or Third Pointed plate type, then got larger, divided into lights or Rectilinear) from around 1332, although the by means of geometrical bar tracery: they also two styles overlapped for some time. included circular windows of the wheel type. Perpendicular was a great English inven- Added verticality was achieved by means of tion, and was unknown elsewhere (though detached colonnettes or shafts of black or grey widely copied during the Gothic Revival): its marble secured to piers at vertical intervals by key characteristics were mullions extending stone bands. Common ornaments were nail- to the soffi ts of window-arches; extensive use heads and the larger dog-tooth pyramidal type. of the bowtell molding; developed employ- Outward thrusts of vaults had to be counter- ment of the double ogee; rolls, bells, and cush- acted by means of deep buttresses which ions over octagonal subbases of bell form; divided façades into bays, and were capped by four-centered arches with fl attened upper arcs; gablets or pinnacles. Roofs were steeply pitched. square-framed arches with cusped blind span- Once First Pointed evolved with geometrical drels; panel-like effects of panels carried over tracery it became known as Middle Pointed. wall surfaces and in tracery (where the tran- The next phase was Second Pointed (also soms are often ornamented with miniature known as Decorated) work of the fourteenth battlements, and each panel has an arched top, century, which saw an ever-increasing inven- often cusped); arches with fl atter tops of the tion in bar tracery of the Curvilinear, Flowing, four-centered type; and vaults which evolved and Reticulated types, where the possibilities of from the lierne type into the fan vaults which the ogee form were fully exploited in canopies, reached their most sophisticated realizations tracery, niches, and so on, culminating in the at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, and the Flamboyant (fl ame-like) style from around Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey (1503–19). 1375 on the Continent. The mouchette or Roofs got fl atter and disappeared behind cren- dagger forms of lights in traceries windows, ellations. Windows became huge, and some- and the net-like patterns of the bars were char- times fi lled entire walls between buttresses. acteristic of the style. The wheel window was Perpendicular was the longest-lived of all the transformed into the elaborate marigold or Gothic styles in England, surviving for more rose window, or into even more fanciful pat- than three centuries (the fan-vaulted hall stair- terns of tracery. Second Pointed had diaper- case at Christ Church, Oxford, is circa 1640), work often covering whole wall surfaces, and was the fi rst of them to be revived in the profuse crockets on pinnacles and canopies, eighteenth century. and naturalistic fl oral and foliate ornament The Gothic styles enjoyed a widespread (e.g., the leaves of the Chapter House of South- and scholarly revival in the nineteenth and well Minster, Nottinghamshire). Nail-head and twentieth centuries, and led to a remarkable dog-tooth were superseded by ballfl ower and development of materials, craftsmanship, and fl euron enrichment. Vaults acquired interme- inventiveness in design as well as an enormous diate or lierne ribs, enabling much more program of restoration of medieval buildings complex patterns (some star-shaped) than without which many great works of architec- those of the First Pointed style to be created on ture would not have survived. In particular, ceilings. Second Pointed continued on the the rediscovery of medieval color (which Continent, where lace-like patterns of tracery permeated the architecture) transformed our 40 architecture, gothic revival understanding of interiors, and informed of the Worshipful Company of Masons was nineteenth-century inventiveness and richness undermined, because many artisans not asso- of décor. ciated with that company had to be employed. These artisans worked under Christopher SEE ALSO: Architecture, Gothic Revival. Wren’s direction using the architectural lan- guage of Classicism from Europe, not the ancient language of the Pointed style, which, FURTHER READING however, was kept alive outside London by Cook, G. H. (1957) The English Cathedral Through masons working on repairs to churches or on the Centuries. London: Phoenix House. new ecclesiastical buildings. Gothic certainly Curl, J. S. (2006) A Dictionary of Architecture and survived as a living tradition well into the Landscape Architecture. Oxford: Oxford Univer- eighteenth century: Gothic began to pass into sity Press. history when masons lost ground to architects, Fletcher, Sir B. (1996) A History of Architecture on architects pushed the Classical style, and when the Comparative Method. Oxford: Architectural Press. architects consciously worked in the Gothic Grodecki, L. (1986) Gothic Architecture. London: style the results bore little resemblance to real Faber & Faber. medieval buildings. When the Gothic Revival Harvey, J. (1948) Gothic England: A Survey of proper got under way, the language had to National Culture 1300–1550. London: B. T. be relearned by both architects and artisans, Batsford. largely through painstaking scholarship such Harvey, J. (1978) The Perpendicular Style 1330–1585. as that of Thomas Rickman (1776–1841), London: B. T. Batsford. whose book of 1817 attempted to discriminate Pevsner, N. (1960) An Outline of European Architec- between the styles of English medieval archi- ture. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. tecture, and Matthew Holbeche Bloxam Toman, R. (ed.) (1999) The Art of Gothic: Architec- (1805–88), whose Principles of Gothic Ecclesias- ture, Sculpture, Painting. Cologne: Könemann. Watkin, D. (2005) A History of Western Architecture. tical Architecture of 1829 was a remarkable London: Laurence King. achievement for such a young man. Wilson, C. (1992) The Gothic Cathedral: The Archi- Good examples of seventeenth-century tecture of the Great Church 1130–1530. London: Gothic include Front Quad, Oriel College Thames & Hudson. (1620–42), Front Quad, University College (1657–66, probably designed by Richard Maude), and the Great Staircase, Christ Church College (circa 1640, by one Smith, an “artifi cer” of London), all in Oxford; the Hall, Trinity Architecture, Gothic College (1604–5, designed by Ralph Symons of Westminster), the Library, St. John’s College, Revival Cambridge (1623–4, probably designed by JAMES STEVENS CURL Henry Man), and the Chapel, Peterhouse (con- secrated 1632), all in Cambridge; the Cathedral The Gothic (more correctly Pointed) style of Church of St. Columb, Londonderry, Ireland architecture continued in use long after the (consecrated 1633, by William Parratt of medieval period, especially in areas where London); the Church of St. Saviour, Foremark, there was readily available freestone. It should Derbyshire (consecrated 1662); the Chapel of be remembered that Classicism was not indig- St. Peter, Steane Park, Farthingoe, Northamp- enous in Northern Europe, and had to be tonshire (1620); and the south transept (circa learned. The crucial event in substituting Clas- 1600–7), nave (1662–4, by John Orum), and sical architecture for Gothic was the Great Fire west tower (1677–8) of the Church of St. of London in 1666, after which the monopoly Andrew and St. Mary, Condover, Shropshire. architecture, gothic revival 41

There are many such examples of a surviving Walpole’s (1717–97) Strawberry Hill, Twicken- Gothic tradition in England, and in some cases ham (from the 1750s), and publications such Gothic was consciously employed for political as Batty Langley’s (1696–1751) Ancient Archi- reasons: a good example is the Church of Holy tecture Restored and Improved . . . (1741–2, Trinity, Staunton Harold, Leicestershire (1653– reissued as Gothic Architecture in 1747) that 65, erected by Sir Thomas Shirley, Bt 1629–56 helped to make Georgian (sometimes called as a protest against the Puritanism of the Com- “Sham,” “Carpenter’s,” or even “Cardboard”) monwealth). As late as 1730–3, the central Gothick fashionable, even though Langley’s tower of the Church of Holy Cross, Sherston, sources drew on inventions like those of Wil- Wiltshire, was built to the designs of Thomas liam Kent (circa 1685–1748), whose designs Sumsion (circa 1672–1744). were probably used for Shobdon Church, Her- That living tradition of building in Gothic efordshire, realized possibly by Henry Flitcroft was transformed when architects produced (1697–1769), and there was virtually nothing designs in the Gothic style. The most impor- of real Gothic in his book. The designs for tant early example is the Church of St. Mary Gothic garden buildings by Thomas Wright Aldermary in the City of London (1679–82), (1711–86) also seem to have had infl uence: which is entirely Third Pointed or Perpendicu- examples at Tollymore Park, County Down, lar in style, a choice probably dictated by the were built, but they do not look medieval, and reuse of substantial medieval remains after are thin, insubstantial, but amusing garden the Great Fire. It was supervised by Wren’s follies. Medieval architecture was associated offi ce, the mason being Edward Strong Senior with the “Gothick” novels of people like (1652–1724), who became a Freeman of The Walpole, “Monk” Lewis (1775–1818), and Masons’ Company in 1680. Another signifi cant others, and the “Graveyard Poets” Robert Blair seventeenth-century work in Gothic Revival is (1699–1746), Thomas Gray (1716–71), and the Church of St. Mary, Warwick, rebuilt Edward Young (1683–1765): this literary back- (1698–1704) to designs by Sir William Wilson ground helped to make Gothic fashionable. (1641–1710) by Francis (1672–1738) and The conscious movement to revive Gothic William (1661–1724) Smith after the Great began in the second half of the eighteenth Fire of Warwick in 1694. The earliest Georgian century and developed throughout the nine- examples of the Gothic Revival were All Souls’ teenth: it was, arguably, the most infl uential College, Oxford (1716–35) and the two west- artistic phenomenon ever to spring from ern towers (1734) of the Collegiate Church England, and from it grew the Domestic of St. Peter, Westminster (usually known as Revival, the Arts-and-Crafts and Aesthetic Westminster Abbey), designed by Nicholas Movements, and many more developments in Hawksmoor (1661–1736). These were followed art and architecture. What might be termed the by the Gothic Temple, Stowe, Buckingham- archeological phase of the Revival in which real shire (1741–4) by James Gibbs (1682–1754); medieval buildings provided the precedents for the infl uential work by Sanderson Miller design was triggered partly by the French Wars (1716–80), including the Gothic Tower, which made the customary Grand Tour impos- Edgehill (1745–7), embellishments at Radway sible, and led to a study of native historical Grange (1744–6), both in Warwickshire, and architecture (much of which, of course, was the sham castle “ruins” at Hagley, Worcester- Gothic) as part of a general revival of national shire (1747–8); and Arbury Hall, Warwickshire pride. The most important recorders of medi- (circa 1750–90), built by Sir Roger Newdi- eval buildings and details were John Britton gate, Bt (1719–1806), with Sanderson Miller, (1771–1857), Augustus Charles Pugin (1769– Henry Keene (1726–76), and Henry Couch- 1832), and, of course, Bloxam and Rickman, man (1738–1803) as consultants and executive but there were others, including Robert William draughtsmen. It was Arbury Hall, with Horace Billings (1813–74), whose publications helped 42 architecture, gothic revival to make Gothic familiar. Of huge importance England), but its associations with the Tudors were the books published and written by John and its supposed “decadence” led designers Henry Parker (1806–84): not only did he bring backward in time to Second Pointed of the out the works of numerous ecclesiologists, but early fourteenth century, epitomized in Pugin’s his own Glossary of Terms (1836) and Introduc- masterpiece, the Roman Catholic Church of St. tion to the Study of Gothic Architecture (1849) Giles, Cheadle, Staffordshire (1841–6): glowing were enormously infl uential. The religious with color, and beautifully furnished, it showed revival that was prompted by fear of the French how rich a Revival church could actually be. Revolution and its aftermath was also closely There followed numerous Gothic architects associated with the revival of Gothic, which infl uenced by Pugin, of whom the most prolifi c began to take on associations with tradition, were George Gilbert “Great” Scott (1811–78), order, and nationhood, and the very consid- who was to be knighted for his Albert Memo- erable programs of restoration of medieval rial, London (1852–72), a richly colored shrine buildings throughout Europe (especially in the in the Italian Gothic style; William Butterfi eld United Kingdom, France, and Germany) were (1814–1900), whose All Saints, Margaret Street, prompted partly by nationalism and partly as London (1849–59) demonstrated the possibili- a reaction against the spirit of Neo-Classicism ties offered by hard brick, glazed tiles, and that had uncomfortable associations with the materials calculated to add color as well as Revolutionaries. All this led to the produc- stand up to the fi lthy atmosphere of towns; tion of beautifully illustrated books, accurate George Edmund Street (1824–81), whose surveys of real medieval work, and archeologi- churches, such as All Saints, Boyne Hill, Maid- cal scholarship, increasing confi dence so that enhead, Berkshire (1854–65), often incorpo- experience gained in restoration work informed rated polychromy that was structural, and new designs in the Gothic style. The Cam- whose accomplished synthesis of Burgundian bridge Camden Society and the Oxford Society First Pointed with Italian and English Gothic for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architec- at the Royal Courts of Justice, The Strand, ture helped the evolution of ecclesiology, and London (1866–81) was one of the last great led to the formation of the Ecclesiological monuments of the Gothic Revival; and John Society which promoted studies not only of Loughborough Pearson (1817–97), whose artifacts and architecture, but traditional robust early French First Pointed at St. Peter’s, religion. Vauxhall (1859–65) was one of the most With the writings of Augustus Welby North- successful buildings infl uenced by a growing more Pugin (1812–52), starting with Contrasts interest in Continental Gothic. The Revival, (1836), Gothic became a moral crusade, and therefore, went “backwards” from Perpendic- the only style fi t for a Christian nation. After ular, to English Second Pointed, then to Con- the burning (1834) of the Palace of Westmin- tinental First Pointed, and, infl uenced by Street ster (an event that caused Pugin to rejoice), and John Ruskin (1819–1900), to Italian exem- Gothic came of age, for the terms of the archi- plars, before it turned forward (chronologi- tectural competition for its replacement speci- cally) again to English types. fi ed that either Elizabethan or the Gothic style Among the most inventive Gothic architects should be used, and the marvelous new Palace the fi gure of William Burges (1827–81) looms designed by Charles Barry (1795–1860) with large: one of the least restrained of Gothic details and furnishings largely by Pugin was Revivalists, he was responsible for three eccle- built by the Thames at Westminster (com- siastical masterpieces – Christ the Consoler, pleted 1860). Skelton-on-Ure (1870–6), St. Mary, Aldford- At fi rst the Revival was manifest in numer- cum-Studley (1870–8), both in Yorkshire, and ous buildings in the Perpendicular style (the the Cathedral of St. Finbar, Cork, Ireland last style of genuine medieval Gothic in (1863–1904) – all of which were of the architecture, gothic revival 43

“muscular” type of Gothic, infl uenced by First Pointed, Flemish motifs, and bits of Vene- tough Continental (especially Burgundian) tian Gothic, all piled together in a tour-de- exemplars, but no slavish copies. Burges also force of polychrome eclecticism treated with designed from 1866 inventive and colorful immense assurance. Similar in style is his alterations at Cardiff Castle, carried out won- Kelham Hall, Nottinghamshire (1858–61). derful works at Castell Coch, Glamorgan His work at Lichfi eld Cathedral, Stafford- (1872–91), and built his own Tower House, shire, is perhaps his best in terms of sensitive Kensington (1875–81), with all the furnishings restoration, and very convincing, while the also designed by him. superb chancel-screen he designed for the With the works of George Frederick Bodley same building (1859–63), made by Francis (1827–1907), the Revival took on a new deli- Alexander Skidmore (1816–96) of Coventry, cacy, turning away from Continental sources reached the heights of Victorian design and and giving the buildings a much more English craftsmanship. appearance, even introducing Perpendicular George Gilbert “Middle” Scott (1839–97) touches, as in the Church of St. John the was much infl uenced by Bodley and, with Baptist, Tue Brook, Liverpool (1868–71), the Garner, John Thomas Micklethwaite (1843– color-scheme of which was brilliantly restored 1906), and John Dando Sedding (1838–91), in the 1970s by Stephen Ernest Dykes Bower was responsible for altering the thrust of (1903–94). From 1869 to 1898 Bodley was in English ecclesiastical design from the 1870s by partnership with Thomas Garner (1839–1906), turning to English and late Gothic precedents and their fi rst great church drew on the plan- instead of the thirteenth-century and Conti- ning of buildings such as the Dominican nental models that earlier had been de rigueur. Church in Ghent, Belgium: this was St. Augus- Scott championed Perpendicular, and his mas- tine, Bolton Road, Pendlebury, South Lan- terpiece was the church, school, and vicarage cashire (1870–4), which, with its huge interior of St. Agnes, Kennington Park, London (1874– space, unbroken by any chancel arch, pointed 91, now destroyed), designed for the English the way forward to an architecture suitable for liturgy and Anglo-Catholic ritual, although his Anglican worship. Bodley and Garner’s exqui- exquisite little St. Mary Magdalene, East Moors, site Holy Angels, Hoar Cross, Staffordshire Yorkshire (1879–82), should be mentioned. (1872–6), is, apart from the tower, entirely Temple Lushington Moore (1856–1920), a English Second Pointed. Although there had pupil of “Middle” Scott, supervised the erec- been “Rogue Goths” such as Enoch Bassett tion of the last-mentioned building, and also Keeling (1837–86), whose works included the worked at St. Agnes, but he himself was respon- debauched, eccentric, and outrageous Strand sible for some very fi ne designs, including the Musick Hall (1864, demolished 1903), thereby sumptuous screen in St. Swithin’s Church, incurring the wrath of purists as too full of Littleham, near Bideford, Devon (1891–3), and “Go”), the main thrust of the Revival from the the churches of St. Mary, Sledmere, and St. time of Bodley’s fi rst works began to be toward Botolph, Carlton-in-Cleveland (1895–7), both a revival and development of English Gothic, in Yorkshire. Moore’s Pusey House, Oxford and a new refi nement wholly at odds with the (1911–14) is one of his best buildings. clashing and frantically restless architecture of There were other distinguished architects of the “Rogues.” the later Gothic Revival whose work has been “Great” Scott was responsible for many res- ignored or underrated (partly through the not torations, some more sensitive than others, but always benign infl uence of Nikolaus Bernhard he was also successful with larger secular build- Leon Pevsner, 1902–83). Giles Gilbert Scott’s ings, including the magnifi cent Midland Grand (1880–1960) glorious Liverpool Anglican Hotel in front of St. Pancras Station, London Cathedral (1903–80) is beginning to be recog- (1865–74), which mixes English and French nized as the marvel it is, a sublime monument 44 architecture, gothic revival with breathtaking internal volumes quite iron for staircases at the Midland Grand Hotel unlike any other work of the Gothic Revival, and at Kelham Hall was very advanced, and and the building as a whole is a scenic prodigy, indeed an architecture of iron and glass for a testament to the originality and inventiveness new building types was invented from scratch. of its architect, working in a great tradition. Demands made by architects encouraged a Most of the design drawings for the last parts revival of craftsmanship and invention of of the cathedral to be built were by Roger materials that were truly staggering, and the Arthur Philip Pinckney (1900–90). arts of making stained-glass windows, encaus- One of the most gifted pupils of Bodley and tic tiles, and elaborate metalwork were all Garner, John Ninian Comper (1864–1960), caused to fl ourish. designed some great works, including St. In due course, the Gothic Revival led to the Cyprian’s, Clarence Gate, London (from 1902), Domestic Revival, when architects discovered and his masterpiece, St. Mary’s, Wellingbor- in vernacular buildings much to admire and ough, Northamptonshire (1904–31), in which emulate, and the enormous advances in both English late Gothic was a major inspiration. knowledge and craftsmanship gave birth to the Dykes Bower designed distinguished additions Arts-and-Crafts and Aesthetic Movements. for the cathedral at Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, There is also no doubt that aspects of Gothic from 1956, work on which continued under Revival design were also transformed into the The Gothic Design Practice, headed by his sinuousness of what became Art Nouveau, and former assistant, Warwick Pethers (born 1959), that the Revival, which reached its apogee in culminating in the mighty crossing-tower, an the late-Victorian period, was of immeasurable indisputably fi ne essay in late English Gothic, importance in a great many ways. owing something to “Bell Harry” at Canter- bury, and completed in the early years of the SEE ALSO: Architecture, Gothic; Walpole, twenty-fi rst century. Dykes Bower completed Horace. (1979) the chapel at Lancing College, Sussex, originally designed by Richard Cromwell Car- penter (1812–55): it has the largest rose- FURTHER READING window to be built in England since the medieval examples in the transepts of West- Aldrich, M. (1994) Gothic Revival. London: Phaidon. minster Abbey (for which Dykes Bower was Clark, K. M. (1974) The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste. London: John Murray. Surveyor to the Fabric for 22 years from 1951). Clarke, B. F. L. (1969) Church Builders of the Nine- More recently there have been signs of a revival teenth Century: A Study of the Gothic Revival in of Gothick of the pre-ecclesiological type, England. Newton Abbot: David & Charles. notably with the Gothick Villa at Regent’s Park Crook, J. M. (1995) John Carter and the Mind of the (1988) by John Quinlan Terry (born 1937). Gothic Revival. London: Society of Antiquaries of The importance of the Revival proper was London. that fi rst of all it freed architects from the Curl, J. S. (2002) Piety Proclaimed: An Introduction tyranny of symmetry, enabling fenestration to to Places of Worship in Victorian England. London: be placed where it was needed, for example, Historical Publications. and not forced into a preconceived pattern. Curl, J. S. (2006) A Dictionary of Architecture and Plans, too, could be asymmetrical, designed Landscape Architecture. Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press. for convenience, what Pugin called “fi tness for Curl, J. S. (2007) Victorian Architecture: Diversity purpose.” It also encouraged the use of materi- and Invention. Reading: Spire Books. als that could be washed down, more suited to Curl, J. S. (2011) Georgian Architecture in the British the dirty atmosphere of cities than absorbent Isles 1714–1830. Swindon: English Heritage. stone, and colored materials allowed the evolu- Eastlake, C. L. (1970 [1872]) A History of The Gothic tion of structural polychromy. Scott’s use of Revival. Leicester: Leicester University Press. asian gothic 45

Germann, G. (1972) Gothic Revival in Europe and well-established cinematographies, which suc- Britain: Sources, Infl uences, and Ideas. London: cessfully narrows the continent down to India, Lund Humphries/Architectural Association. China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Macaulay, J. (1975) The Gothic Revival 1745–1845. and an occasional mention of South-East Asia, Glasgow: Blackie. as represented by either Thailand, Malaysia, McCarthy, M. (1987) The Origins of the Gothic Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, or Revival. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press/ Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Vietnam (but rarely by all at the same time). Middleton, R. & Watkin, D. (1980) Neoclassical and The second obstacle that Asian Gothic 19th Century Architecture 2. London: Faber & studies have to overcome is the fact that the Faber. linguistic term “Gothic” is not native to Asian Pugin, A. W. N. (2003) Contrasts and The True Prin- cultures and it has, therefore, rarely been used ciples of Pointed or Christian Architecture. Reading: for classifi catory purposes within the local lit- Spire Books/The Pugin Society. erary, cinematic, or cultural criticism, apart from, perhaps, referring to literary texts from the former British colonies and the Goth- infl uenced popular visual culture of Japan. In the remaining cases, the search for Asian Asian Gothic Gothic tends to take us into three very broadly KATARZYNA ANCUTA delineated directions: an exploration of the written and oral lore connected with the super- While Asia is a somewhat familiar territory for natural; a re-examination of the classic literary Gothic, Asian Gothic appears to be a category and cinematic works against the existing criti- in the making, or a label in search of content. A cal Gothic paradigm; and a recategorization of potential contributor has to face two major contemporary popular texts (fi lm, animation, issues to begin with. One signifi cant diffi culty music, fashion, lifestyles, and so on) as “Gothic,” is to agree upon what exactly is meant by “Asia” leading to the appropriation of the term by in Asian Gothic. If we defi ne Asia by its geo- various Asian cultures. Bearing in mind the graphical boundaries, we are immediately con- vastness of material to cover, all three areas are fronted with the virtually impossible task of still in great need of research and this short drawing parallels between radically different entry taking the countries of East, South-East, cultures, for one tends to forget that Asia and South Asia as a starting point should by no stretches through the vast territory of Russia means be treated as complete. and ex-Soviet republics, down to the Middle Regardless of the current religious and phil- East and then through the Indian subcontinent osophical systems, the links with the older ani- toward the Far East of China and Japan (see mistic beliefs are still strong in many Asian japanese gothic). There exists also a more cultures, which accounts for the existence of a convenient and culturally coherent Asia based very complex network of spirits, ghosts, lesser on defi nitions of Eastern philosophies and reli- and greater deities, and other supernatural gions derived from various forms and practices beings, whose presence exerts almost tangible of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism, which infl uence over the region. Fortune telling, once again can prove misleading, as it omits a astrology, spiritual healing, exorcisms, black signifi cant Islamic population that has been magic, or mediumistic practices are all forms present in the area for generations, as well as of common everyday encounters with the spir- Asian Christians. Needless to say, there is yet itual forces believed present in the universe. another Asia, popularized by infl uential critical Supernaturally themed magazines, paperback texts which focus on selected economically novels, and comic books fi ll up a signifi cant attractive regions, postcolonial literary heri- section of any Asian bookstore, demonstrating tage, and visual texts from countries with a steady demand for texts of this kind. The 46 asian gothic same can be said about fi lm, video, and TV easy to speak of them in terms of Gothic drama from the region, from big screen movies metaphors. For many Asian cultures, the to cheap straight-to-DVD productions that supernatural remains too real to allow for any frequently feature ghost-related narratives. metaphorization. This is not the end of the While some of the stories hark back to earlier problems. Glennis Byron argues that local vari- written and oral accounts of supernatural eties of Gothic are frequently identifi ed in the encounters, others are invented on a day-to- context of examining the production of cul- day basis to fi t the demands of the spirit- tural identities, seeing that they involve differ- hungry audience willing to accommodate the entiating between sameness and monstrosity supernatural within the contemporary world (Byron 2007: 33). This, however, requires mon- of Asian megacities, corporate banking, and sters to be seen as fundamentally different, information technologies. evoking fear and rejection, and this is not A great majority of Asian spirits had existed always the case in Asia. While it is possible in the imagination and belief of people long to view at least some Asian monstrosities as before they found their way onto the pages of embodying particular fears of a given culture, literary works and in front of the cameras. for example, the fear of premature death in While some of these spirits, particularly those childbirth, as represented by powerful female representing the forms taken by the dead in spirits like kuntilanak or pontianak (Malaysia), the afterlife, are easier to deal with, since they or phii tai thang klom (Thailand), Asian Gothic can be seen as resembling the ghosts familiar must also account for the fact that, on a par to Gothic, others appear more problematic to with fear, in Asia ghosts and spirits evoke rever- classify, for their form and purpose may evoke ence and this mode of relationship with the different responses from the critics than from supernatural remains relatively unexplored in the local populations, who still fi rmly believe Gothic. Asian “monsters” cannot remain fun- in their existence. For how is one to deal with damentally different from the living, for many ghosts, such as phii krasue (Thailand) or pen- of them (particularly ancestral spirits) have anggalang/manananggal (Malaysia) – depicted been conceived of to represent the living graphically as a shimmering fl oating head with and the linkage between generations past and entrails that separates itself from the body present. to feed on fi lth? How are we to categorize Regardless of that, Asian spirits have fre- toyol/tuyul (Malaysia, Indonesia), kuman tong quently been simplifi ed for the Western audi- (Thailand), or xiaogui (Taiwan, Singapore) – ence in an attempt to mold them to the familiar protective baby ghosts obtained from grilling forms of vampires, ghouls, or zombies, result- human fetuses and keeping them locked in a ing in imposing upon them a set of false expec- jar? What are we to make of jiang shi/kyonshi tations concerning their attributes, aims, and (China) – animated corpses popularly known behaviors. The Filipino aswang, Malaysian as the hopping vampires and frequently por- langsuir and pontianak, Thai krasue, and trayed as clad in uniforms of the Qing dynasty Chinese jiang shi have all been described as a offi cials? What are we to do with mischievous local variety of vampires, despite their obvious foxes, such as the Chinese huli jing, Korean uniqueness and lack of consistent blood- kumiho, or Japanese kitsune, plotting to steal drinking habits; even the kinnaree – an angelic human souls to become human themselves, or half-female half-bird Himmapan creature – with the Japanese tsukumogami – a group of has not escaped an occasional vampiric com- yōkai monsters consisting of everyday house- parison (see vampire fi ction). Ironically, it hold objects that received a soul on their hun- seems that the Anglo-American Other seems dredth birthday? reluctant to acknowledge the existence of dif- In the rational West, where ghosts have long ferent forms of otherness, opting for the safer, come to represent the repressed, it is relatively tamer, blood-drinking, brain-eating, friendly asian gothic 47

Gothic monster variety instead. If the Orient is the most important Asian languages for the already a monstrous territory for Gothic, the sake of research is a formidable task, if not acknowledgment of the existence of Oriental altogether impossible. Needless to say, Gothic monstrosities incompatible with the Western re-examinations of Asian literatures depend conception of the supernatural is bound to heavily on second-hand expertise, the existing complicate that relationship even more. translations, and texts originally written in In contrast to the overabundance of oral English, and are therefore destined to be rather accounts of the supernatural, a relatively easy perfunctory and incomplete. Even if, as Andrew entry into the disorganized world of Asian Hock Soon Ng asserts, “transgressing taboos, spirits leads through literature. Out of many complicity with evil, the dread of life, violence, Asian cultures, China and Japan seem to be and the return of the repressed . . . are not spe- exceptional here in that there do exist early cifi c to any culture or people” (Ng 2007: 1), we written tales of the supernatural in both cannot forget that much of the critical discus- Chinese and Japanese. In his Asian Horror sion of Gothic to date has been focused on Encyclopedia (2001), Laurence C. Bush dates language, and without access to language(s) written accounts of ghosts in China to the the study of Asian Gothic runs the risk of seventh century bce and mentions large collec- superfi ciality. It is therefore understandable tions of supernatural tales written in the fourth that much of Asian Gothic is discussed in and fi fth century ce (Bush 2001: 56). These terms of postcolonial Gothic, as represented by stories, known as zhiguai, literally translated as linguistic and stylistic textual hybrids resulting “accounts of the strange,” written in the period from the negotiation of identities and view- of Six Dynasties (220–589 bce), according points (see postcolonial gothic). And even to Robert F. Campany were meant to repre- if we agree with David Punter that to engage sent “creative models both of and for proper with postcolonial writing we need to confront relations between the living and the dead” the postcolonial with the literary (Punter 2000: (Campany 1991: 16) and prepare their readers 10), at the end of the day, “the literary” very for a change in attitude regarding the principle often remains limited to the texts written or of fi lial piety by extending it to include not just translated into English. one’s own ancestors but all the souls of the Needless to say, we hear signifi cantly more dead (Campany 1991: 18–19). Initially crude in of Indian, Malaysian, or Singaporean Gothic style, Chinese supernatural stories evolved into than Thai, Vietnamese, or Filipino ones, pre- a full-blown literary form during the Tang cisely because much of the English language dynasty period (618–907 ce), when a new literature from the former British colonies genre, known as chuangqi (or the tale of the stems from either following or questioning marvelous) was born. By far the most infl uen- English literary models, Gothic included. This tial collection of such tales remains Liaozhai, is certainly the case with Singaporean fi ction, written by Pu Songling in the seventeenth characterized, according to Tamara S. Wagner, century and comprising 431 “strange tales,” by “the haunting presence of literary legacies” many of which continue to inspire writers and and “colonial importations” (Wagner 2007: fi lmmakers, perhaps the most famous fi lm 46), something that can undoubtedly ring true adaptation to date being Ching Siu-Tung’s A also when addressing Indian or Malaysian Chinese Ghost Story (1987). writing in English. The Gothic tropes of Pu Songling’s tales remain among the most trauma, loss, privation, silence, melancholy, read Chinese ghost stories in the West chiefl y violence, otherness, the imaginary, abjection, thanks to the fact that, unlike many others, guilt, and shame (among many others) have they were translated into English. Linguistic been identifi ed in the texts of many Indian inadequacy is bound to remain the thorn in the authors whose works form the core of most side of Asian Gothic scholars, for mastering all textbooks on postcolonial writings, some more 48 asian gothic prominent fi gures being Rabindranath Tagore, fi lm genres in Asia. Currently, Asian horror Salman Rushdie, Vikram Chandra, Kiran fi lms rank among the most popular horror Desai, R. K. Narayan, Bharati Mukherjee, and productions worldwide, their success with Arundhati Roy. Malaysian writers, such as non-Asian audiences initiated by the sudden Tunku Halim and K. S. Maniam, and Singapor- boom of J-horror after the worldwide release ean authors, such as Damien Sin, Russell Lee, of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998). Beyond doubt, and Catherine Lim, whose stories engage with Japanese and Korean horror fi lms remain the local narratives of the supernatural while most successful and infl uential Asian horror remaining faithful to the literary models intro- fi lms today. A great majority of these fi lms are duced during Britain’s colonial presence, have tales of the supernatural focusing on the fi gure also been subjects of similar Gothically minded of a vengeful spirit, frequently a woman or a analyses. child, which seems to be a valid categorization One interesting alternative to the postcolo- for many Asian horror movies in general. nial Gothic paradigm, suggested by Byron, is At the risk of gross overgeneralization, “global Gothic,” addressing the emergence of major Asian horror productions can be classi- new Gothic forms, where “the effects of global- fi ed into a number of types, depending on local ization upon cultural production have also led thematic and structural preferences. And so to the literature and fi lm of different countries Japanese horror movies tend to be techno- feeding off each other to produce new cross- logically oriented, transferring supernatural cultural monstrosities” (Byron 2007: 33), with disturbances into the digitalized setting of a view to identifying the common ground for computers, satellites, virtual reality, and mobile all Gothic texts across cultures, discovering the phone technology: JuOn (Shimizu 2003), Kairo way these texts infl uence one another, and (Kurosawa 2001), One Missed Call (Miike assessing their cultural specifi city (Byron 2007: 2003). The central fi gure of fear can be seen as 33). Global Gothic allows us to bring under the impingement of chaos on the otherwise examination authors as diverse as Pramoedya highly ordered Japanese way of life. At the Ananta Toer (Indonesia), Nick Joaquin (the other extreme, we fi nd Japanese body horror, Philippines), or Chart Korbjitti (Thailand), beginning with the stories of bodily transfor- whose writings abound in Gothic depictions of mation, like Tetsuo (Tsukamoto 1989) and cul- mechanisms of marginalization, the primitive, minating in sadistically inclined gore movies of economic and political oppression; as well as the Guinea Pig series type (1985–9). In contrast S. P. Somtow – toying with the Gothic form to with J-horror productions that are frequently exorcise a concept of “Thainess” as a particu- fi lmed in basic video and digital formats and larly grotesque cultural identity. At the same may appear somewhat rough and experimen- time, the globalization of Gothic is primarily tal, Korean horror fi lms usually astound with evident in the sphere of the visual: in cinema the richness of the visuals. The great majority and television, art and photography, comic of Korean horror fi lms are classic ghost stories books and graphic novels, or fashion, where retold in modern urban settings: A Tale of Two local aesthetics and narrative techniques meet Sisters (Ji-woon Kim 2003), Into the Mirror with foreign forms of production and technol- (Seong-ho Kim); frequently inspired by folk- ogy, frequently involving the fl ow of interna- lore and European fairy tales: Cinderella (Man- tional capital and labor, and striving to meet dae Bong 2006), The Red Shoes (Yong-gyoon the demands of the global market. Kim 2005), Hansel and Gretel (Pil-seong Lim Although the critical response to Asian 2007). Like other Korean productions, K- cinema is still relatively marginal, this does not horror is often overtly political, bringing up change the fact that major Asian fi lm indus- the question of national traumas – the Korean tries are as old as cinema itself. And just as War, Korea’s past and present relationship with elsewhere, horror remains one of the staple Japan and the United States, hopes and dangers asian gothic 49 of reunifi cation: R-Point (Soo-chang Kong the kuntilanak and pocong; in Malaysia horror 2004), Epitaph (Beom-sik Jeong 2007). Korean tends to be dominated by the pontianak, while horror fi lms are also perhaps the only ones in in the Philippines we fi nd creatures such as Asia that consistently feature serial killer plots: the aswang. Thai horror fi lms tell stories of the Tell Me Something (Yoon-hyeon Jang 1999), vengeful phii tai hong, the violently dead: Say Yes (Seong-hong Kim 2001); also intro- Shutter (Wongpoom, Pisanthanakun 2004), ducing female psychotic criminals, as in Black The Victim (Arayangkoon 2006), The House House (Tae-ra Sin 2007), since usually in Asian (Arayangkoon 2007); and black magic, in Long movies killing is seen as motivated by personal Khong (The Ronin Team 2005; and resort to revenge, spiritual possession, or black magic. a whole variety of local monstrosities for an Hong Kong horror remains faithful to the additional comical effect: Body Jumper (Chate- Chinese ghost story tradition telling stories of mee 2001), Krasue Valentine (Sippapak 2006). supernatural romance: Rouge (Stanley Kwan Most of the fi lms carry an explicit message of 1988), Tiramisu (Dante Lam 2002), Painted karmic retribution: The Mother (Thongdee Skin (Gordon Chan 2008); or taking a light- 2003), Coming Soon (Sukdapisit 2008), Alone hearted approach to the supernatural through (Wongpoom, Pisanthanakun 2007). The martial arts comedy: Mr. Vampire (Ricky Lau Indian fi lm industry has its own share of 1985), The Twins Effect (Dante Lam, Donnie horror movies, whose plots predictably involve Yen 2003). Film plots involving cannibalism black magic, Phoonk (Varma 2008); vengeful are also common: The Untold Story (Herman spirits, Bhoot (Varma 2003), Darling (Varma Yau 1993), Ebola Syndrome (Herman Yau 2007), 13B (Kumar 2009); haunted mansions, 1996), Dumplings (Fruit Chan 2004). Ghosts 1920 (Bhatt 2008); reincarnation, Mahal are frequently depicted as seeking a replace- (Ramsay 1989). They may include occasional ment and inducing suicides, as in Ghost Offi ce songs and dances. (Kuk Kok-Leung, Law Wing-Cheong, Andy Ng There is no doubt that a penchant for 2001), and their appearance is an excuse for the macabre, grotesque, excess, violence, or the a supernatural showdown with a local Taoist erotic, characteristic of much Asian art, fi lm, exorcist: Troublesome Night series (1997–2003), and literature makes it possible to speak of The Park (Andrew Lau). In Taiwan, a local con- Asian Gothic as a legitimate category. At the tribution includes tales of xiaogui, or fetus same time, in order not to turn the “Gothiciz- ghosts: The Heirloom (Leste Chen 2005). Sin- ing” of Asian cultures into yet another episode gaporean horror offerings tend to stress the of colonialization, we should revisit some of cultural connection of Singapore to the Chinese the Western-centered concepts and terminol- horror lore, for example through celebrating ogy of Gothic and approach the vibrant mul- rituals such as the Hungry Ghost month: The tiplicity of Asian Gothics on their own terms. Maid (Kelvin Tong 2005), Where Got Ghost? (Jack Neo, Boris Boo 2009). Mainland Chinese SEE ALSO: Japanese Gothic; Postcolonial horror fi lms focus on the notion of ghostly Gothic; Vampire Fiction. love, as in Matrimony (Hua-Tao Teng 2007); but also, as a result of years of political repres- REFERENCES sion, explain the supernatural in terms of human action: Ghosts (Liu Xiaoguang 2002), Bush, L. C. (2001) Asian Horror Encyclopedia. Lincoln, NE: Writers Club Press. Seven Nights (Zhang Qian 2005); or mental Byron, G. (2007) “Where meaning collapses”: Tunku disease: Help (Zhang Qi 2008), Suffocation Halim’s Dark Demon Rising as global Gothic. In (Zhang Bingjian 2005). A. H. S. Ng (ed.), Asian Gothic. Jefferson, NC: Most South-East Asian fi lms tend to incor- McFarland, pp 19–31. porate local fi gures of fear. Indonesian fi lms Campany, R. F. (1991) Ghost matter: The culture of introduce the witch-like leak, or spirits, such as ghosts in six dynasties. Zhiguai. Chinese Literature: 50 asylums

Essays, Articles, Reviews 13, 15–34. www.jstor.org/ sexual machinations and threat of physical vio- stable/495051, accessed October 9, 2008. lence posed by a villainous male captor. Ng, A. H. S. (2007) Introduction. In A. H. S. Ng In later, nineteenth-century Gothic novels, (ed.), Asian Gothic. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, notably Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White pp. 1–15. (1859–60), the dungeon is superseded by the Punter, D. (2000) Postcolonial Imaginings. Edin- asylum as a locus of anxiety, redolent with burgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wagner, T. S. (2007) Ghosts of a demolished the potential for malign incarceration and mal- cityscape: Gothic experiments in Singaporean treatment (see collins, wilkie). As Roy Porter fi ction. In A. H. S. Ng (ed.), Asian Gothic. Jeffer- asserts, “Asylum abuse proved an endemic dis- son, NC: McFarland, pp. 46–60. order” and “scandals throughout the nine- teenth century leave no doubt that confi nement of those protesting sanity or malicious im- FURTHER READING prisonment remained common” (Porter 1997: Ng, A. H. S. (ed.) (2007) Asian Gothic. Jefferson, NC: 504). A woman could be confi ned on the rec- McFarland. ommendation of a husband or other male Heeren, K. van. (2009) Contemporary Indonesian relative(s) so long as they could get the support fi lm: Spirits of reform and ghosts from the past. of two doctors to confi rm that the woman in Doctoral thesis. Leiden University. https:// question was mentally (or morally) unsound. openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/13830, In these cases the (supposedly mad) woman accessed March 16, 2012. could readily fall “[victim] of a doctor’s preju- Fuhrmann, A. (2009) Nang Nak – ghost wife: Desire, embodiment, and Buddhist melancholia in a dice about what kind of behaviour constituted contemporary Thai ghost fi lm. Discourse 31(3), sanity” (Appignanesi 2008: 96). 220–47. The true case of Mary Huestis Pengilly, a Schneider, S. J. & Williams, T. (eds.) (2005) Horror sixty-two-year-old widow committed to the International. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Provincial Lunatic Asylum of Saint John, Mas- Press. sachusetts in 1883, on the recommendation of her sons, is a particular example of the way a woman’s conduct could be perceived as trans- gressive. In her 1885 work Diary Written in the Provincial Lunatic Asylum, Pengilly recalls the circumstances of her committal. She was Asylums living “alone” and “engaged in writing a book DIANE MASON on the laws of health,” eventually becoming “so absorbed” in her writing that she “forgot to In early Gothic novels such as Ann Radcliffe’s eat” for eight days (Pengilly 1885: 9). At this The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), imprison- point she heard angels’ voices counseling her ment in gloomy dungeons or impenetrable to “fast and pray” – a probable consequence of family piles is a pervasive fate that befalls many nutritional deprivation rather than an indica- an embattled heroine (see radcliffe, ann). In tor of mental derangement; but her sons, sup- Udolpho, Emily St. Aubert is struck with “mel- ported by Dr. Steeves at the asylum, thought ancholy awe” at the “gothic greatness” of the her “insane” and she was duly committed stronghold where she is to be held and is over- (Pengilly 1885: 7, 2). Although Pengilly’s sons’ come with “terrors” as to the dangers that lurk actions may have been motivated by good within at the hands of the evil Montoni (Rad- rather that ill intent, they were still swift to cliffe 2001: 216, 217). Here, the young, virginal conclude that she was mad rather than mal- woman is not only confi ned but also in immi- nourished. There is an undeniable moral ambi- nent peril of her virtue, if not her life, through guity in this form of female imprisonment, enforced marriage or, by implication, the as authoritarian, cheating, or abusive fathers, asylums 51 husbands, and heirs could claim that they had Leaving aside the travails of the viciously had the, supposedly maniacal, wife, daughter, confi ned female, one of the most vivid fi ctional or female relative confi ned for her own good/ examples of the way the Carpenterian system safety. In the eyes of wider society, ignorant of was open to intentional subversion in the name any ulterior motives, their actions could appear of medical experimentation can be found in to be entirely paternal, dutiful, or supportive, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) (see stoker, with the woman’s welfare at heart, until such bram). In Stoker’s novel, it is a male patient, time, if ever, that their evil designs were R. M. Renfi eld, who affords Dr. John Seward “a exposed. wonderfully interesting study” (Stoker 2007: Once put away in the asylum, the woman 160). From the outset, Seward assesses Ren- could be largely forgotten about. She could fi eld to be “dangerous,” even “homicidal,” on fi nd herself subject to force-feeding if the poor, account of the latter’s “zoophagous” appetite, institutional fare was not to her taste and to motivated by a “strange belief” that “by con- vicious restraint if her behavior was deemed suming a multitude of live things [...] one unacceptably excitable. Pengilly recalls a youth- might indefi nitely prolong life” (Stoker 2007: ful fellow patient bound in “leather hand- 102, 144, 114, 278). Given the apparent severity cuffs” fastened so tightly that they made her of Renfi eld’s affl iction, one might expect hands swell “purple with blood” (Pengilly Seward to employ Carpenter’s principals in 1885: 9). The same young woman was secured order to break his patient’s mental fi xation, and to a chair with a “canvas belt” so taut that, its congruent and progressive physical manifes- according to Pengilly, “it would have stopped tation of feasting on fl ies, spiders, and birds. my breath” (Pengilly 1885: 9). This harsh treat- Indeed, Seward explicitly cites Carpenter’s ment was meted out because the girl tore off model of “unconscious cerebration!” in his her dress and wailed grievously when she was diary entry for “8 July” (Stoker 2007: 112–13). not permitted to leave the asylum after a visit Paradoxically, though, Seward elects to use his from her father. knowledge to “keep” his “pet lunatic” to “the Further, less violent but nonetheless tangi- point of his madness,” something that, in the ble, threats to a maliciously incarcerated normal run of events, he would “avoid with woman’s health could come from the imposi- the patients as I would the mouth of hell” tion of experimental therapeutic regimes and/ (Stoker 2007: 102, 277, 102). The practitioner’s or the process of systematic habituation to treat treatment of Renfi eld is not only unethical but her nonexistent manias or delusions. The idea also potentially injurious given the man’s “mor- that the mind could be trained, or habituated, bidly excitable” condition (Stoker 2007: 102). to replace unhelpful thoughts or behaviors Seward’s reference to his patient as a “pet through the consistent reinforcement and rep- lunatic” further suggests that he regards Ren- etition of more acceptable ones, popularly the- fi eld as little more than a laboratory animal orized as “unconscious cerebration” by the to be tested to breaking point in the further- British physiologist William Carpenter (1813– ance of medical research. This is reinforced 85), was, as William Hughes asserts, “central to inasmuch as Seward specifi cally alludes to the management of the mentally ill in British “Burdon-Sanderson’s physiology” and “Ferri- public and private asylums from the mid- er’s brain knowledge” as he refl ects on his work nineteenth century” (Hughes 2007: 137). In with Renfi eld (Stoker 2007: 115). The English nineteenth-century Gothic fi ction, depictions physician Sir John Burdon-Sanderson (1828– of this predominant therapeutic regimen for 1905) and the Scottish practitioner James the governance of the mentally ill are unerringly Ferrier (1843–1928) both used vivisection in problematic, pregnant with the possibility of the course of their research and were in- deliberate, as well as accidental or misinformed, strumental in bringing the practice to public misuse by the unscrupulous practitioner. attention. Ferrier was even prosecuted in 1881 52 asylums under the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876 “imprisonment” than the dungeon, posing though later acquitted. Notably, “The British both a physical and psychological threat to the Union for the Abolition of Vivisection” was wellbeing of, effectively, sane female inmates. “founded in 1898,” the year after Dracula A sane woman subjected to a prolonged period was published, and the issue remains con- of psychological pressure could crack under troversial to this day (Lansbury 1985: 9). The the strain and become habituated to her insane suggestion of medical experimentation on role/identity. mentally ill human subjects in Dracula adds a Collins’ plot motif of malign imprisonment further layer of unease as to the outrages that and switched identities continues to exert a could potentially await the vulnerable patient fascination for the reader and has more recently behind closed asylum doors. been adapted, revised, and given a postmodern Returning here to the malignly incarcerated twist by Sarah Waters in her Victorian Gothic woman, in his novel The Woman in White, pastiche Fingersmith (2002) (see contempo- Wilkie Collins focuses on the dangers that rary gothic). In Waters’ novel, Sue Trinder, could attend the misinformed application of one of a company of thieves run by sinister therapeutic habituation rather than its deliber- baby-farmer Mrs. Sucksby, is enlisted as part of ate misuse. In the words of Lisa Appignanesi, an audacious plot to snare the fortune of an Collins “graphically evokes the diffi culty of an allegedly “half-simple” young heiress, Maud individual establishing a ‘sane’ identity once Lilly (Waters 2002: 27). In her role as Lilly’s medical and social forces have combined to put maid, it is Trinder’s job to encourage her the suspicion of insanity into play” (Appigna- mistress to marry Gentleman, a cultured but nesi 2008: 98). In Collins’ work, Laura, Lady vicious male associate of Mrs. Sucksby’s. After Glyde, is maliciously committed to an asylum the wedding, Sue is further required to “keep by her husband, Lord Percival Glyde, in the [Maud] simple” as Gentleman has arranged to guise of her half-sister, Anne Catherick, who have his wife put away in “a madhouse” (Waters had previously escaped from the institution. 2002: 27). Despite being, as she assumes, in full During Laura’s incarceration she is held “under knowledge of Maud’s proposed “fate,” Sue restraint; her identity with Anne Catherick [is] fi nds herself drawn to her mistress as if she systematically asserted” and “her sanity” is “love[d] her” (Waters 2002: 96, 136). The two “practically denied” (Collins 1998: 436). Laura routinely share a bed (Maud has troubling is not only at risk of the systematized de - dreams) and, eventually, mistress and maid struction of her own identity but also of the commence a clandestine sexual relationship imposition of another’s identity upon her. (see lesbian gothic). Unbeknown to Sue, The patient was effectively stripped of her/ though, Maud is herself in on the plot (which his rights as an individual by dint of his/ is far more complex than Sue imagines) and her psychological condition and subsumed the mistress systematically grooms her maid so within the homogenous label of “lunatic.” The that Sue can be committed to the asylum in her distressed inmate might remonstrate with any place. When she is led away by Dr. Graves and visitors that they had been wronged but Dr. Christie, and sees “the M, and the L” on the the medical staff could assure the concerned bag at her feet, Sue realizes that she is the one caller that the accusations were merely the who has been set up (Waters 2002: 174). deluded ramblings of an idiot. Refl ecting on Although Sue protests that “My name ain’t her time in the asylum, Mary Huestis Pengilly Maud,” a regime of brutal habituation is recalls that, “no matter . . . how earnestly” she enforced to convince her otherwise (Waters “plead[ed]” her sanity to her son, Lewis, he 2002: 409). always “believe[d] Dr. Steeves in preference to Waters’ richly intertextual novel, although [her]” (Pengilly 1885: 4). This was a potentially inspired by the classics of Victorian sensa- far more sinister – and legitimized – form of tion fi ction (see sensation fi ction), is a thor- atwood, margaret 53 oughly contemporary work that constantly REFERENCES obscures the binaries of innocence and corrup- Appignanesi, L. (2008) Mad, Bad and Sad: A History tion and predator and prey. Identities are con- of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1850 to the stantly in a state of fl ux and the characters Present. London: Virago. fl uidly transgress the bounds of class and even Collins, W. (1998 [1859–60]) The Woman in White. sexual orientation. The inclusion of explicit Oxford: Oxford University Press. lesbian sex scenes – a form of sexuality Queen Hughes, W. (2007) Habituation and incarceration: Victoria “could not imagine” – both fore- Mental physiology and asylum abuse in The grounds the relationship between Maud and Woman in White and Dracula. In A. Mangham Sue and playfully interrogates nineteenth- (ed.), Wilkie Collins: Interdisciplinary Essays. New- century medical notions associating female castle: Cambridge Scholars Press, pp. 136–48. Lansbury, C. (1985) The Old Brown Dog: Women, sexuality with reproduction (White 1999: 237). Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England. The fecundity of Maud and Sue’s eventual London: University of Wisconsin Press. union is to be measured not by the birth of Pengilly, M. H. (1885) Diary Written in the Provin- strong children but rather in the generation of cial Lunatic Asylum. New Brunswick. www. pornographic texts – a literature of hedonism gutenberg.org/etext/18398, accessed July 16, 2010. and excess – by which they “get [their] living” Porter, R. (1997) The Greatest Benefi t to Mankind: (Waters 2002: 546). The centrality of these A Medical History from Antiquity to the Present. female characters is refl ected in Fingersmith’s London: HarperCollins. narrative structure. The overlapping dual nar- Radcliffe, A. (2001 [1794]) The Mysteries of Udolpho. rative is focalized in the fi rst person by Sue and London: Penguin. Maud rather than constructed from a con- Stoker, B. (2007 [1897]) Dracula. Bath: Artswork. Waters, S. (2002) Fingersmith. London: Virago. glomeration of largely male-generated docu- White, C. (ed.) (1999) Nineteenth-Century Writings ments like The Woman in White. Unlike Laura on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook. London: Glyde, whose story of captivity and treatment Routledge. in the asylum is entombed in the narrative of Walter Hartright, Sue recalls the harsh institu- tional regime, torturous therapeutic methods, FURTHER READING and casual sadism of the doctors and nurses in Arnold, C. (2008) Bedlam: London and its Mad. harrowing and intimate detail. London: Pocket Books. In conclusion, to return briefl y to Mary Rutherford, S. (2008) The Victorian Asylum. Oxford: Huestis Pengilly’s true account of asylum life, Shire Publications. Pengilly’s residency in the Provincial Lunatic Scull, A. (2005) The Most Solitary of Affl ictions: Asylum of Saint John was relatively short and Madness and Society in Britain 1700–1900. New she was eventually discharged in April 1884. Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fittingly, though, there is more than an element Showalter, E. (1985) The Female Malady. London: Virago. of the Gothic in her perception of herself and her fellow inmates as “poor prisoners” and her rendering of the institution itself, in her writing after her release, as “this castle on the hill” (Pengilly 1885: 3, 10). Momentarily here, the Atwood, Margaret boundaries separating an authentic medical ELLEN MCWILLIAMS establishment and the fi ctional horrors of Udolpho become tantalizingly blurred. The Gothic dimensions of the work of Marga- ret Atwood (1939–) are most visible in her SEE ALSO: Collins, Wilkie; Contemporary interrogation of fi ctions of femininity, in Gothic; Lesbian Gothic; Radcliffe, Ann; Sensation her treatment of the fi gure of the woman Fiction; Stoker, Bram. writer, and in the recurring interest in the 54 atwood, margaret possibilities of dual or multiple identities in Ghosts and hauntings also have their place her writing (see doubles). In her early novel in Atwood’s later fi ction. The main character Lady Oracle (1976), a Gothic parody in the tra- of The Robber Bride (1993), Zenia, like Joan dition of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, the Foster in Lady Oracle, fakes her own death in a main character, Joan Foster, writes Gothic bid to escape the past but returns as a ghostly romances for the popular fi ction market but fi gure to haunt the women that she cheated in also imagines herself as the heroine of her own her former life (see apparition). Zenia is a life. Atwood responds to the sacrifi cial virgin shapeshifter, able to alter the story of her life to of seminal Gothic texts such as Horace Wal- win over and, more often than not, dupe her pole’s The Castle of Otranto and Matthew audience. This interest in storytelling and Lewis’ The Monk by charting her protagonist’s deception recurs in Alias Grace (1996), in quest for agency and self-determination which Atwood returns to the scene of colonial through a maze of Gothic conventions (see Canada, to the story of the “celebrated murder- lewis, matthew; walpole, horace). Sec- ess” Grace Marks, and reanimates a tale of tions of Joan’s Gothic romances are interpo- female malevolence that has troubled Cana- lated into the main body of the novel and serve dian literature since the nineteenth century. as all-important ancillary texts to the story of She alters Susanna Moodie’s account of Marks her coming of age in Canada and her later in her memoir Life in the Clearings Versus the escape to Europe (see canadian gothic). Bush (1853) but preserves Grace’s mystery in Joan Foster is a typical Atwoodian protagonist scenes that draw on Victorian practices of hyp- in that she leads more than one literary life; as notism and mesmerism (see hypnotism). well as writing popular romances (published Atwood’s collection of poetry, The Journals of under a pseudonym), she is also the author of Susanna Moodie (1970), takes up this concern an acclaimed collection of poetry that shares with literary hauntings and can be read as a its name with the title of Atwood’s novel and response to her formidable forebear. The is marketed as literary Gothic by her publish- poems in this collection are ventriloquized ers. The numerous strands of Joan’s Gothic in the voice of Moodie and she emerges as a writing overlap and interact with the plot of troubled fi gure who, in her more unsettled Joan’s life; for example, the men in her life are moments, sees the New World of Canada as imagined as villains or as rescuer fi gures at dif- hostile and marauding. ferent points in the text. In determining to take If the wilderness in Atwood’s work is at control of the fi ctions that have come to times found to have a dark, supernatural aspect impinge upon her life story, in the fi nal pages to it, then the short story “Death by Land- of the novel she abandons the fantasy of Gothic scape,” from the collection Wilderness Tips Romance for science fi ction. While Lady Oracle (1991), is one of the most vivid explorations of is perhaps Atwood’s most striking engagement the uncanniness of the wilderness. The death with the Gothic, a number of her short fi ction by landscape of the title relates to the mysteri- works, in particular the title story of her col- ous disappearance of a young girl in the Cana- lection Bluebeard’s Egg (1983), are explicit in dian bush. This interest in the uncanny in reworking fairytales and folktales with a dis- Canadian literature and culture and in the tinctly Gothic aspect to them (see folklore). menacing potential of the Canadian wilderness In these shorter works, as in her novels, extends to Atwood’s critical work. Her collec- Atwood’s revision of Gothic motifs is driven by tion Strange Things: The Malevolent North in a feminist interest in unraveling the original Canadian Literature is, in part, an exploration texts and generating new meanings from them of the grotesque and the monstrous in Cana- that force a reconsideration of the roles his- dian culture. Other hauntings can be observed torically assigned to women in the Gothic in Atwood’s work, from the ghostly image tradition. encountered in a lake by the main character of australian gothic 55

Surfacing (1972) through to the lingering pres- godforsaken as any ruined castle. As Roslyn ence of Laura Chase in The Blind Assassin Haynes has suggested, colonial explorers could (2000). Laura Chase provides a cover for the slide from an exhilarating sense of the interior real author of The Blind Assassin (the novel as an endless wide-open space to an often over- within the novel), Iris Chase Griffen, and whelming feeling of “enclosure and entrap- becomes a cult fi gure to her more devoted ment” expressed in Gothic terms (Haynes readers. The twinning that occurs in The Blind 1999: 77). The explorer’s psychological con- Assassin is also echoed in Atwood’s critical dition found its refl ection in the landscape, writing, particularly in her examination of especially when the early optimism of the interdependent literary selves in her study exploration began to wane. In his 1908 book, of the author through history, Negotiating The Explorers of Australia and Their Life-Work, with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002). the popular colonial adventure writer Ernest In her reworking of Gothic scripts, Atwood Favenc wrote about the early Surveyor-General reanimates Gothic motifs and histories but John Oxley (1785?–1828) along exactly these does so in a way that is distinctly underwritten lines: by her interests as a Canadian woman writer. The Gothic is key to the feminist and postco- He appears to have formed the idea that the inte- lonial subtexts of her work and to her con- rior tract he was approaching was nothing more ception of engaging with literary tradition as than a dead and stagnant marsh – a huge, dreary an ongoing process of “negotiating with the swamp, within whose bounds the inland rivers lost their individuality and merged into a lifeless dead.” morass. A more melancholy picture could not be imagined, and with such an awesome thought SEE ALSO: Apparition; Canadian Gothic; constantly haunting his mind there is no wonder Doubles; Folklore; Hypnotism; Lewis, Matthew; that he became morbid, and that the dominant Walpole, Horace. tone of his journal . . . is so hopelessly pessimis- tic. (Favenc 2006: 16) FURTHER READING Melancholy and morbidity came to defi ne Atwood, M. (2002) Negotiating with the Dead: A aspects of the colonial Australian sensibility, Writer on Writing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge underwriting a counternarrative to the opti- University Press. mism and ideals of discovery, expansion, and Atwood, M. (1995) Strange Things: The Malevolent nation-building. The theme of the explorer North in Canadian Literature. Oxford: Clarendon. who never returns – like the German explorer Moodie, S. (1853) Life in the Clearings Versus the Ludwig Leichhardt’s expedition, which disap- Bush. London: Bentley. peared in 1848 – soon became prevalent across a range of Australian fi ction and poetry, from J. F. Hogan’s The Lost Explorer (1890) and Ernest Favenc’s Secret of the Australian Desert Australian Gothic (1895) to Francis Webb’s Leichhardt in Theatre KEN GELDER (1952) and Patrick White’s novel, Voss (1957). “The very emptiness of the desert,” Haynes The Gothic came to Australia as an imported writes, “led the explorers to people it with literary genre that quickly adapted to local con- ghosts” (Haynes 1999: 82). ditions. Early colonial explorers evoked the There are certainly plenty of examples of foundational tropes of the Gothic as they made the spectralization of the desert – and the bush their way into the Australian interior, so that – by explorers given over to a melancholy the desert and the bush could seem – in an or morbid frame of mind (see spectrality). explorer’s gloomier moments – as ancient and The Adelaide-born best-selling novelist Guy 56 australian gothic

Boothby had himself traveled across Australia, ominous, even lethal. In Harpur’s best-known publishing his experiences in On the Wallaby long poem, “The Creek of the Four Graves” (1894). His story, “With Three Phantoms,” (1845), fi ve white settlers – colonial entrepre- from his collection Bushigrams (1897), tells of neurs full of promise – venture inland in search an exhausted explorer who appears like an of “new streams and wider pastures.” But as “apparition” from the desert, and has just four of them sleep, “painted Savages” burst into enough life left in him to tell his tale in a the campsite, full of “dread inherited hate and remote town in northern Queensland one deadly enmity” (Harpur 1984: 161). The fi fth “infernal” Christmas Eve. Going in search of explorer, Egremont, watches in horror as his the Leichhardt expedition, he loses his com- friends are massacred, and then he fl ees for panions one by one, and then encounters his life, able later on to tell his story to a public ghostly horsemen who lead him out of the eager for stories about “the wild old times.” The desert to his eventual death when his tale is poem is both a sensationalist rendering of fi nished. This “spectral explorer” tale presents colonial anxiety, and – even as it chronicles the the opening up of Australia’s interior not as failure of colonial promise – a melancholy a triumph of nation-building, but as a shatter- way of claiming the landscape in the name of ing experience involving the loss of faith and colonialism, the “four long grassy mounds” reason. As an early instance of the Australian of the dead explorers memorializing the act of Gothic it provides a counternarrative to the settlement. colonial project, as if nation-building must A bleaker sort of colonial Gothic narrative always be shadowed by the losses it incurs. can tend to treat settler death as a matter of Colonial Australian Gothic fi ction and banal routine, however. The anonymity of the poetry often intervenes directly in the process dead in the Australian interior is perhaps most of nation-building and settlement in Australia. strikingly rendered in one of Henry Lawson’s Stories such as Rosa Campbell Praed’s “The best-known stories, “The Bush Undertaker” Bunyip” (1891) and Hume Nisbet’s “The (1892), a Christmas tale that centers around a Haunted Station” (1894) – which echoes Edgar solitary fi gure who recognizes and then duti- Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” in fully buries a corpse in “the grand Australian its apocalyptic ending (see poe, edgar allan) bush – the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, – turn settlement and home-making in Austra- the home of the weird, and much that is dif- lia into a kind of traumatic event, producing ferent from things in other lands” (Lawson terrifying spectral outcomes. Even as it was 2007: 146). The “weirdness” of the Australian being settled, the Australian interior was imag- bush becomes a commonplace evocation for ined as a place of abandoned homesteads and the Australian Gothic, a way of expressing the obscured burial sites, as we can see in the landscape’s capacity for generating darker Gothic mystery and detection stories of Mary colonial sensibilities among settlers, like mel- Fortune from the 1860s to the 1890s, or in the ancholy, anxiety, and dread. An often-cited Australian-born colonial poet Henry Kendall’s comment by the London-born novelist Marcus “The Hut by the Black Swamp” (1868), a Clarke, a key fi gure in Australia’s colonial liter- Gothic eulogy to an abandoned homestead ary history, strikingly illustrates this point. In that turns the potential triumph of settlement 1876, Clarke wrote the preface to a new edition into its dark opposite, colonial violence and of a book of poetry by Adam Lindsay Gordon, desolation. Kendall and his contemporary a colonial writer, adventurer, and renowned Charles Harpur – the son of convict parents – horseman whose increasing debts had driven were Australia’s two most important colonial him to suicide six years earlier. He pays tribute poets, heavily infl uenced by Wordsworth and to Gordon’s “manly admiration for healthy the Romantics. But nature, for them, is ani- living,” as if the poet was once an ideal colonial mated in a different way, potentially more Australian type, masculine and full of promise. australian gothic 57

But the registering of Gordon’s suicide turns lost, ancient race in the Australian interior. But the preface into an act of mourning that other colonial Gothic writing turned to more somehow shifts in time to a moment before the recent past events. Marcus Clarke’s Gothic promise of colonialism can even begin to be convict melodrama, His Natural Life (1874), realized. Clarke drew on Edgar Allan Poe to recounted the convict experience of Port acknowledge Gordon’s dismal condition and Arthur and Van Diemen’s Land through its then transferred that sensibility – what he hero, Richard Devine, unjustly transported to famously called “Weird Melancholy” – onto an Australia to suffer all the brutalities of penal imaginary precolonial Australian landscape to life in the early colonies. By the time Clarke produce an escalating sequence of Gothic-hor- wrote his novel, Van Diemen’s Land had ror images: changed its name to Tasmania (in 1856) and the prisons at Port Arthur had begun to fall The Australian mountain forests are funereal, into disrepair. But the old penal colony contin- secret, stern. Their solitude is desolation. They ued to cast its shadow as one of Australia’s seem to stifl e, in their black gorges, a story of genuine Gothic ruins. For John Frow in his sullen despair. No tender sentiment is nourished essay “In the Penal Colony” (1999), Port Arthur in their shade . . . The sun suddenly sinks, and is not just a reminder of an otherwise sub- the mopokes burst out into horrible peals of merged history, it is nothing less than a Gothic semi-human laughter. The natives aver that, point of origin for Australia itself: “its ruined when night comes, from out of the bottomless depth of some lagoon the Bunyip rises, and, in traces bearing ambiguous witness to a whole form like monstrous sea-calf, drags his loath- system of punishment, involuntary exile, and some length from out the ooze. From a corner unfree labour which has come to represent of the silent forest rises a dismal chant, and the foundational moment of the Australian around the fi re dance natives painted like skele- nation.” Frow also writes about the mass mur- tons. All is fear – inspiring and gloomy. (Clarke derer, Martin Bryant, who on April 28, 1996 1976: 645–6) shot and killed 35 people at Port Arthur – which by this time had become a popular This lurid passage sees the Australian bush, tourist destination. For Frow, this terrible event Aborigines, and an image of monstrous birth returns Tasmanians to their earlier colonial – through that uniquely Australian mythical moment of repression, a point he inevitably fi gure of the Bunyip emerging from the “ooze” expresses through Gothic tropes: – all yoked together under the exaggerated sign of the Gothic. Gordon’s suicide is the trigger Nobody uses Bryant’s name, but his denied pres- that produces this bizarre slippage, enabling ence is everywhere. Nobody knows the forms Clarke to slide from the colonial project of set- which will lay the ghost. Nobody knows what tlement and nation-building to a nightmare kind of monument will insert this story into of presettlement as if colonialism had never the other story for which this site is known, into happened. that other past which is barely available for The colonial imagining of an ancient preco- understanding. (Frow 1999) lonial past is perhaps an example of what Tom Griffi ths has called the “antiquarian imagina- The “Tasmanian Gothic” has been a fl ourish- tion” in Australia (Griffi ths, 1996). A number ing genre in literature and fi lm, often turning of Gothic Lemurian fantasies were published back to the horrors of convict life on the island: around the end of the nineteenth century, for example, in Michael Rowland’s fi lm about including Favenc’s The Secret of the Australian Van Diemen’s Land’s most notorious convict- Desert (1896), George Firth Scott’s The Last cannibal, The Last Confession of Alexander Lemurian (1898), and Praed’s Fugitive Anne Pearce (2008) (see fi lm). The genre has also (1902), all of which involve the discovery of a dealt with the killings of Aboriginal men and 58 australian gothic women on the island, as in the writer Cave is globally recognized as a singer- Mudrooroo’s hallucinatory Master of the Ghost songwriter who has helped to shape and Dreaming series of novels which begins in embody a contemporary Goth identity. But he 1991. Aboriginal writers and artists have is also tied to the colonial Australian Gothic: responded to their colonial, and postcolonial, evoking the dark tradition of convict narratives predicaments in a way that we can perhaps in his song “Mercy Seat,” for example, or identity as “Indigenous Gothic.” Tracey Mof- through his role as a prisoner in the fi lm Ghosts fatt’s fi lms are a good example: Night Cries: A of the Civil Dead (1988). Cave’s work has Rural Tragedy (1989) looks at an Aboriginal turned to America and Europe for its infl u- woman who lives out her confi nement, nursing ences and its audiences, but like many other her dying white mother in an isolated home- practitioners of the Australian Gothic, he has stead amid a series of vividly baroque, trau- returned time and time again to infl uential matic recollections, while BeDevil (1993) tropes and themes already established during consists of three ghost stories built around the colonial period. locations haunted by different kinds of spirits (see ghost stories). The Australian Gothic SEE ALSO: Film; Ghost Stories; Poe, Edgar continues to build itself around haunted sites, Allan; Spectrality. spectral places that testify to some sort of trau- matic loss or disappearance. Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) is often taken as Aus- REFERENCES tralia’s fi rst modern Gothic fi lm, telling the Clarke, M. (1976) Adam Lindsay Gordon. In story of the disappearance of three girls and M. Wilding (ed.), Marcus Clarke. St. Lucia, QLD: their teacher in Victorian bushland on St. Val- University of Queensland Press, pp. 643–7. entine’s Day, 1900. But the best known exam- Favenc, E. (2006) The Explorers of Australia and ples of Australian Gothic cinema are George Their Life-Work. Teddington: Echo Library. Miller’s Mad Max fi lms, beginning in 1979, Frow, J. (1999) In the penal colony. Australian which return to the Australian interior, this Humanities Review, April. www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/ time as a place criss-crossed with straight, Issue-April-1999/frow3.html, accessed June 4, endless roads and inhabited by lawless gangs of 2010. bikers, carjackers, and petrolheads who con- Gibson, R. (2002) Seven Versions of an Australian stantly battle with the police. The remote Aus- Badland. St. Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland tralian road lends itself to Gothic representation, Press. as Ross Gibson has noted in his study of a Griffi ths, T. (1996) Hunters and Collectors: The Anti- “Horror Stretch” of road in northern Queens- quarian Imagination in Australia. Melbourne, land, where he links a series of murders in the VIC: Cambridge University Press. 1970s there to “the bloody past of Australia’s Harpur, C. (1984) The Poetical Works of Charles colonial frontier” and concludes, “history Harpur (ed. E. Perkins). Melbourne, VIC: Angus lives as a presence in the landscape” (Gibson & Robertson. Haynes, R. (1999) Seeking the Centre: The Australian 2002: 50). Desert in Literature, Art and Film. Cambridge, Colonial traumas do indeed live on in the UK: Cambridge University Press. Australian Gothic, as we see in John Hillcoat Lawson, H. (2007) The bush undertaker. In and Nick Cave’s fi lm, The Proposition (2006), K. Gelder & R. Weaver (eds.), The Anthology of a stark portrayal of the brutality of colonial Australian Gothic Fiction. Melbourne, VIC: Mel- justice and law-breaking. Melbourne-born bourne University Press, pp. 139–46.