978–1–137–29891–1 Copyrighted Material – 978–1–137–29891–1

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

© David J. Jones 2014 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–1–137–29891–1 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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Contents

List of Illustrations viii Preface ix Acknowledgements x

Introduction 1 1 Sex and the Ghost Show: The Early Ghost Lanternists 32 2 Byron: Incest, Voyeurism and the Phantasmagoria 71 3 Brontë’s Villette: Desire and Lanternicity in the Domestic Gothic 109 4 Le Fanu’s Carmilla: Lesbian Desire in the Lanternist Novella 142 5 Lanternist Codes and Sexuality in Dracula and The Lady of the Shroud 169 Conclusion 203

Notes 212 Bibliography 237 Index 247

vii

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Introduction

Jonathan Harker’s encounter with the vampire ‘sisters’ in Dracula is one of the most famous and notorious scenes in horror fiction:

In the moonlight opposite me were three young women, ladies by their dress and manner. I thought at the time that I must be dream- ing when I saw them, they threw no shadow on the floor. They came close to me, and looked at me for some time, and then whispered together […] All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some day it should meet Mina’s eyes and cause her pain, but it is the truth. They whispered together, and then they all three laughed – such a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound never could have come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of water-glasses when played on by a cunning hand. The fair girl shook her head coquettishly, and the other two urged her on. One said, ‘Go on! You are first, and we shall follow. Yours is the right to begin.’1

These are amongst the most familiar and notorious lines relating to sexual longing, preternatural threat and bloodlust in literature, taut as they are with a mingling of intense sensual desire and forbidden urges: the temptation to kiss and receive kissing, to drink deep, to destroy and to revive. Harker is cast in the role of passive observer experienc- ing an alluring mixture of sweetness and offence; cast into a passive,

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2 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern traditionally feminine role, he awaits despoliation at the hands of female predators. The taboos summoned up here flex between arousal and disgust, the reader imaginatively complicit in the Englishman’s ‘delightful anticipation’ of unfaithful carnal abandon, despite his engagement to Mina, with several strange women.2

Gothic and the literature of sexuality

Sex and the threat of sexual violence are integral to Gothic writing. Without Ambrosio’s lustful excesses with Matilda, a demon disguised in female form, and his overpowering desire for the innocent Antonia in The Monk (1796), the plot would lack its aura of depravity and its inexo- rable descent to damnation. The erotic menace of Ann Radcliffe’s villains Phillippe de Montalt and the relentless Father Schedoni drives the powerful impetus of her novels. Harker’s nocturnal encounter with the she-vampires in Dracula’s castle evokes Freudian ideas regarding repressed instincts and the proximity of apparently conflicting urges; that which frightens and makes us shiver is simultaneously revealed to be sexually exciting. Ruth Bienstock Anolik, in adapting Simone de Beauvoir’s idea that ‘Eroticism is a movement towards the Other’, reminds us that ‘The Gothic text repeatedly reminds its readers that there is no escape from the sexual Other […] the Gothic text is haunted by sexual anxiety.’3 Philippe Ariès writes of the historical and cultural recurrence of ‘attraction to certain ill-defined things at the outer limits of life and death, sexuality and pain’, and traces the blending of these extremes to particular historical milieus:4

It was in the depths of the unconscious, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that the disturbing changes occurred. It was in the world of the imagination that love and death came together until their appearances merged.5

In many ways, modern cinema audiences take the close relations between such extreme passions for granted. In reviewing Dario Argento’s horror film Profundo Rosso (Deep Red) (1975), Gianluigi Bozza complains: ‘Decapitations, kitchen knives, broken glasses, scars, lulla- bies, reflections in mirrors, mummified corpses: everything is devoid of any eroticism.’6 Accordingly, if in Harker’s encounter here we find anxiety and ‘agony’, we also find ‘a wicked, burning desire’, a yearning to cross boundaries, even those as fundamental as taboos of blood and somatic autonomy. Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

Introduction 3

Erotic excess, transgender seduction and rape, secret desires and per- versity bordering on and including monstrosity are all qualities that have been associated with Gothic fiction. There is a great deal that is unremitting and predictable about the playing out of the newly awak- ened lusts of Lewis’s monk. Jealousy and dynastic ambitions are often the spurs to intended violation of women used as pawns by their older relatives in Radcliffe’s novels. The young characters involved in such trammels must struggle through disappointments, the course of their own romantic desires frequently blocked and opposed. As Cynthia Griffin Wolff writes: the ‘business’ of Radcliffean heroines is to ‘experi- ence difficulty, not to get out of it’, and that ‘difficulty’ always involves erotic conflict or deadlock.7 Confinement to the extent of forced incar- ceration is used to thwart and control particularly, but not exclusively, women in these fictions. The buildings and architecture in such literary explorations figure, in their closed involutions, the much sought-after, hidden terrain of women’s corporeality: the ‘complicated maze of underground vaults [or] dark passages’, the

‘sliding panels and trapdoors’, this endlessly enacted fantasy is always figured in terms of ‘inner space’. Thus the ‘Gothic’ building (whatever it may be) that gives the fiction its name may become in the treatment of the tradition a way of identifying a woman’s body (in imagination) of course, the reader’s own body.8

Wolff rightly argues that Radcliffe’s explicit subject is and was perceived as ‘courtship’ and that a primary aim in reading these novels was to indulge a taste for romantic fantasy: ‘They were titillating.’9 Yet in the reception of other authors writing within this milieu, horror rather than titillation was provoked. Long before the discoveries of Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, the writers of Gothic fiction revealed an understanding of the despotic and compulsive aspects of sex, its recurrent power to subvert the tenets of socialised morality and assert its ani- malistic, sometimes demonic-seeming rejection of rational constraint. In Lewis’s and Maturin’s Gothic, sacred love is mingled with profane, nuns and monks are tempted away from their vows and into carnality; taboos such as adulterous, homosexual and incestuous love are invoked and challenged. Death and destruction exist in close proximity to the abandonment of self into passion, subsequent despair breeding tales of madness and suicide. Such unhappy endings involving victimised and unfulfilled sexual expression are often followed with hauntings, real, faked or imagined. Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

4 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern

A missing link

To return to Stoker’s novel and that crucial scene of intended violation, critics have remarked on the Gothic role-reversal in Harker’s position as the potential victim/partner of Dracula’s brides. This scene is a key moment of late nineteenth-century Gothic, replete with masochistic and Sadean sexuality, gender ambiguities and fin-de-siècle lusting and loathing. It is a scene which has been filmed many times – in Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), Terence Fisher’s Horror of Dracula (1958), Philip Saville’s Dracula (1977), John Badham’s Dracula (1979) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), to name several adaptations – yet never in these versions are these uncanny women and their laughter accompanied with that ‘intolerable tingling’ of ‘water-glasses’. It is a detail that Stoker lingers over and to which he returns each time the ‘sisters’ and vampirised women are mentioned as if it is a hallmark, a kind of auditory cue, of the women’s condition, yet modern directors have never explored the connotations of the precise simile: ‘It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of water-glasses when played on by a cunning hand.’ Harker is a foreigner in Transylvania and a stranger to this setting; he has encountered these ‘sisters’ because he accepted Dracula’s invitation to enter his vast Gothic edifice and, ignoring the owner’s commands, has wandered through corridors and doorways at night. In a similar haunted topos described in a poem over 70 years earlier, another male protagonist, a foreigner and new to his Gothic surroundings, is drawn on by an ambiguous ghostly presence as he paces through moonlit galleries and doorways, and finds his blood curdled by an eerie sound:

A noise like to wet fingers drawn on glass, Which sets the teeth on edge; and a slight clatter, Like showers which on the midnight gusts will pass, Sounding like very supernatural water (16.114)10

He confronts a hooded figure whom he takes to be a spectral friar but, on closer examination, the moonlight reveals a ‘voluptuous’ form and the narrative focuses on a concealed noblewoman’s mouth:

A red lip, with two rows of pearls beneath, Gleam’d forth, as through the casement’s ivy shroud The moon peep’d, just escaped from a grey cloud. (16.121)11 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

Introduction 5

Erotic details are supplied of this disguised female’s fervid breath and neck. The young man is charmed but caught out in his reac- tions between ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’.12 His hot Spanish blood is of course roused and, next morning, the paleness and exhaustion of both parties involved in this nocturnal meeting are stressed. The hero in this case is Don Juan, from the eponymous mock-epic poem by Lord Byron, the founder of the vampire-tale in English. We note that, in the intervening time, Byron to Stoker, this spectral glassy music has transformed from a sound effect accompanying a young woman’s appearance in a supernatural masquerade to a sonic effect characterizing the laughter of the vampire sisters: the sound issues from their inner being. These are two of the most celebrated and alluring scenes of sexual temptation in literary Gothic settings. Yet why is the sound of fingers on glass evoked in texts at either end of the nineteenth century so readily or even at all in these dark evocations of transgressive sexual encounters? It is at this point that we, as readers, might wonder if we are missing out on something, perhaps a secret sig- nifier. Was there something in this unearthly, tantalising sound which contemporaries understood as a cue for fear and erotic frisson, part of a great submerged shared cultural heritage which readers in the twenty-first century have lost? If this is the case (as it is), what particular associations did these references evoke and why are they important for our understanding of the portrayal of sexuality in Gothic writing and visualisation?

The missing piece

Byron helpfully provides an explanatory note for ‘A noise like to wet fingers drawn on glass’ for his readers: ‘See the account of the ghost of the uncle of Prince Charles of Saxony, raised by Schroepfer – “Karl – Karl – was willst du mit mir?”’13 For a modern reader this dense and glancing explanation to a ghost story is hardly less cryptic than the original reference. We are left with the question: Why should this sound elicit such associations of nervy and erotic dread? Of course, all ghostly music and sound effects enjoy their heyday. It might have been very difficult to explain to readers of Gothic fiction and cinema audiences before the appearance of Rouben Mamoulian’s film Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931), exactly why Bach’s ‘Toccata and Fugue in D minor’ was to become synonymous with ‘sheer horror’ and ‘erotic unease’ in viewing for over 80 years in film.14 The auditory effect of fingers on glass was clearly one such unmistak- able sonic cue, an accompaniment to associations of dread for most of Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

6 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern the nineteenth century, but one which has passed out of common cur- rency. Yet even that statement is an oversimplification of the reality. In fact, if we take note of these references, and try to hear these eerie notes, these aural signifiers, again, we soon become conscious that that which they bear witness to in the texts by Stoker and Byron is not just a missing chain of spectral and sensual associations. These glassy tones act in a trans-medial way: they conjure up a device central to a whole zone of visual medial activity which has largely passed from public memory. I write ‘largely passed’ advisedly because there are lingering traces of this missing medium in some of our most familiar works of modern horror fiction. Along with Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and William P. Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971), Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1975) was one of the key texts of the new wave of horror and suspense which swept America during and just after the Vietnam war years.15 In Salem’s Lot, as the predatory revenants move in all over the Maine town to seduce and batten onto their victims, we hear the echoes of a ‘sweet’ and silvery, high music of the vampires’ laughter, that ‘intolerable’ ‘sweetness’ real- ised again.16 Two years before King’s novel was published, Jack Nitzsche provided the mesmeric and menacing sound of resonating crystal glass that sets our teeth on edge at the opening of William Friedkin’s film of The Exorcist (1973). George Crumb’s musicians also mimicked the sound of fingers ringing on glass later in this film.17 Extraordinarily, it is Stephen King who, early in Salem’s Lot, identifies the source for this sonic link between Byron, Stoker and these references in his own work. Ben Mears, the writer-protagonist, having returned after many years to a small rural community, starts an affair with a local girl, Susan Norton. In the wake of their first session of passionate lovemaking in the park, Susan persuades Ben to tell her about the novel he is currently researching. In the new physical intimacy which has sprung up between the two young people, Ben tells her about his own role in researching a book:

‘scary enough to make me a million dollars. But no matter what, I felt that I was in control of the situation, and that would make all the difference. I wasn’t any nine-year-old kid anymore, ready to run screaming from a magic-lantern show that maybe came out of my own mind and no place else. But now ...’18

It is a most remarkable moment in a book appearing 80 years after the advent of cinema proper, that at a literary nexus of conflicting sexual tensions, neo-Gothic trauma involving murder, suicides and a cursed Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

Introduction 7 house, the magic lantern idiom emerges to haunt Mears’s thoughts. We can piece together from fictional biographical fragments that Mears was born in 1941, and it is probably quite a realistic scenario that a child brought up on the American eastern seaboard in the 1950s would witness magic lantern shows and, indeed, that these displays would become part of his own subconscious repertoire. Mears’s adult resolu- tion asserts itself: ‘I wasn’t any nine-year-old kid anymore’,19 but the recurrence of real metaphysical threat has set the magic lantern show in his mind running again: ‘But now ...’, he resumes: ‘“Now it’s occupied!” he burst out, and beat a fist into his palm. “I’m not in control of the situation.”’20 We wonder whether he means it is the house or his mind that is occupied, haunted by the menace of these projections. For it is the magic lantern that is the link between King’s character feeling that he is not in control, Byron’s ‘wet fingers drawn on glass’ and the laughter of Stoker’s vampire sisters. Byron’s entry: ‘ghost of the uncle of Prince Charles of Saxony, raised by Schroepfer’ in the note to Don Juan refers to Georg Schröpfer (1730–74), ex-Hussar and coffee-house owner who branched out into providing a séance involving the summoning of ghosts. These sessions actually involved projections from a hidden lantern. Displays were accompanied by a clattering: blows against the door of the room, ringings and hellish ‘hisses, wheezes and whistles’.21 In later shows, the piercing tones of the glass harmonica (a musical instrument containing a glass spindle turned by a treadle and played with moistened fingers) were to join these sound effects.22 In time, this type of ‘lantern-of-fear’ show was called a phantasmagoria.

Sex, film and the phantasmagoria

In recent years there has been rapid proliferation of internet sites devoted to the 10 or 30 or 100 ‘sexiest horror films’. Frequently cited candidates for this inclusion are Roy Ward Baker’s The Vampire Lovers (1970) and Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness (1971), both based on Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla (1872). In Le Fanu’s book Carmilla, after Laura’s childhood nocturnal encounter with a ‘strange woman’ who caresses and bites her neck, the eponymous vampire lesbian, a minister is sent for to pray over the child, and, looking back from adulthood at that remembered scene, she comments as narrator:

I forget all my life preceding that event, and for some time after it is all obscure also, but the scenes I have just described stand out Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

8 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern

vivid as the isolated pictures of the phantasmagoria surrounded by darkness.23

The OED glosses phantasmagoria as:

A name invented for an exhibition of optical illusions produced chiefly by means of the magic lantern, first exhibited in London in 1802 [...] In Philipsthal’s ‘phantasmagoria’ the figures were made rap- idly to increase and decrease in size, to advance and retreat.24

Le Fanu’s Carmilla is a text rife with images of this kind of magic lantern horror show. Indeed, the teenage Laura will recount the details of her nocturnal ravishment and depredation at the hands of Carmilla in terms of this type of projection. Dennis Denisoff writes of how ‘Victorian Gothic [...] authors’ intense, sustained exploration of sexual visuality’ and its ‘extension into popular cinema’ are rooted ‘in a nineteenth-century aesthetic tradition’; magic lantern technology was one of the prime means that such traditions were transmitted.25 Remembering and reinstating the phantasmagoria shows, integral as they were for well over a century in the writing and reading of Gothic novels, provide a key to understanding the tantalising sexual mysteries and lacunae in these works. I would go considerably further in this contention. Just as it would be impossible to understand the true cultural resonance and erotic threat of the words: ‘I whisper “What did you say?” in slow motion’26 and ‘I [...] can almost hallucinate the camera panning low around us, fireworks bursting in slow motion’ in the Sadean satire of sexual depredation and serial-killing, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), if one didn’t understand these allusions to filmic technique, so many Gothic novels relied for interpretation on readers familiar with the repertoires and techniques of magic lantern shows.27 In Christopher Fowler’s neo-Gothic novel Hell Train (2012), during a villainous attack, the Brigadier, blood running between his teeth, slams Isabella ‘against the carriage wall’ and ‘clapped a hand over her mouth and tore at her blouse. As she tried to fight him off he licked at her breast.’28 The whole force, the sardonic wit of this violent scene of intended vampiric rape is missed if we don’t realise that Fowler is involved in a running parody of key moments in horror films made by the Hammer studios. In the same novel, an inn named ‘The Tormented Virgin’, with a sign depicting a young woman tied to a railroad track who has been cut in two Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

Introduction 9 by a speeding train, is a reference back to earlier films of suspense and horror. As in these cases, so key elements of the portrayal of sexuality in Gothic writing of the nineteenth century are blurred, reduced in scope and, in some cases, almost incomprehensible, unless one appreciates the rich field of signifiers that are referenced in allusions, both explicit and coded, to the magic lantern.

Literature: cinematicity and lanternicity

If such an assertion sounds exaggerated, let us not underestimate, because of our relative proximity to cinematic technologies, the closely meshed synergies and integration of visual media and novels in our own time. To select just a few from amongst the most promi- nent horror novels of the twentieth century, there are 18 references to film in William Blatty’s The Exorcist, 16 references in Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and 13 references in Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby. Of course, perhaps taking up these cues, all these novels were subsequently filmed. These works also reveal a close acquaintance with cinematic technique, a familiarity supported by at least 50 years of allusions to films in fiction before their publication. Of course many authors from 1897 onwards wrote ‘cinematically’, perhaps most noticeably H. G. Wells in The King who was a King: The Book of a Film (1929).29 Though, by that year, the magic lanterns’ technical limitations were apparent in comparison to those of film, these more venerable devices were, of course, still in frequent use internationally. Yet the fact that lanterns had been the dominant medium of visual entertainment for at least 180 years by that point also means that the general amnesia regarding their impact on writing and the other arts over that period is at best regrettable. The recent worldwide streaming and self-referentiality of modern films means that, short of a power outage of massive propor- tions, it is unlikely, whilst our media cultures are evolving as they are, that cinematic techniques will pass from memory almost completely, but this is exactly what has happened with the magic lantern and phantasmagoria shows.

Cinematicity

In 1907, Henri Bergson discussed the human mind and perceptions as a ‘cinématographe intérieur’ (an ‘interior cinematograph’) and in 1932 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

10 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern

Joseph Warren Beach wrote that he thought the most ‘enlightening analogy’ for contemporary writing was ‘the moving picture’:

especially the sort cultivated in Germany, France, and Russia, with its generous use of cut-back, of symbolic themes, of dissolving views, all meant to give the picture a wider and richer significance than that of a mere story told in chronological sequence. It is probable that the moving picture has had a very strong influence on the stream- of-consciousness technique.30

Certainly critics like Anthony Paraskeva have seen the importance of the early development of cinema to sexual motifs in Modernist literature. For example, in discussing James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) he describes the change from Leopold Bloom’s hand-in-the-pocket voyeurism on the beach in ‘Nausicaa’ to his sexual inclinations in ‘Circe’ as ‘explod- ing private Mutoscopic peepshow into public cinema projection’.31 Novelist Don DeLillo has commented that, for modern writers, cinema is ‘our second self, a major narrative force in the culture, an aspect of consciousness connected at some level to sleep and dreams’.32 Damon Smith comments on these words:

What is it we mean when we say that a novel is ‘cinematic’? Do we mean that it engages, on a thematic level, with film history and cinema culture? That it continually alludes to the movies, via quota- tions or other intertextual means? Or do we mean that it embodies techniques (zooms, jump cuts) or translates ideas (montage, etc.) from cinema into prose fiction? Do we mean that the author’s language and style mimic the dreamlike nature and stream-of-consciousness movement of screen images, or that the prose is punctuated and exacting, like a screenplay? Or do we mean simply that the narrative is ready-made for adaptation, that we can almost ‘see everything’? The answer, of course, is all of the above.33

The tendency to cinematise literature or infer a filmic consciousness underlying the creation of texts written much earlier than the 1890s has also been applied anachronistically avant la lettre as it were. A sort of intermedial retrospective colonisation of literature, an inferring of the agency of a proleptic cinematic sensibility, has been applied to the work of, amongst others, Dickens by Sergei Eisenstein and Grahame Smith, and to Robert Louis Stevenson’s writing by S. S. Prawer. In reply to such analyses, Kamilla Elliott writes that critics including Keith Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

Introduction 11

Cohen, Claude Edmonde Magny and Seymour Chatman assert that twentieth-century novelists adopt cinematic techniques such as ellipsis, temporal discontinuity, fragmented vision, cross-cutting and multiple viewpoints, but that ‘to accord cinematic properties to the novel before cinema existed forges a problematic and mythological anachronistic aesthetic history’.34 Any notion of historicism compels us to agree with Elliott’s words and I would argue that a corrective to such a problematic and anachronous version of history is both to acknowledge the multifarious synergies that existed between magic lanterns and novelists’ work and to study ways in which many of these influential ‘cinematic techniques’ actually derive from magic lanterns. Elliot continues:

While novel and film scholars protest that the novel engaged in a peculiar type of visuality unique to itself and to film, art historians have demonstrated repeatedly that any such ‘cinematic’ propensi- ties in Victorian novels can be more (chrono) logically traced to visual and dramatic media prior to and contemporaneous with these novels.35

Almost all of the above definitions which apply to the ‘cinematic’ quality of some novels (‘jump cuts’, ‘montage’, ‘close-ups’, etc.) can also be cited with reference to the lanternist quality of many literary works of the nineteenth century. The most basic displays often featured shortened, tableau-like adaptations of novels in the form of select famous scenes with a verbal accompaniment (and, sometimes, music) to supply bridging narrative. Images, visualised scenes and copies of illustrations from novels regularly appeared on the circuits of these shows. Lanternists used most of these so-called ‘cinematic’ techniques in their presentations. If, in a contemporary neo-Gothic thriller or work of dark fantasy, the laughter of a female demon lecherously encroaching on a helpless male was repeatedly described as sounding like a Stradivarius on a 1940s movie soundtrack; or, if a monstrous see-through vampire spooled into women’s rooms through a thin aperture and, subsequently, a character saw a mountain encircled by stars or a female statuette holding a flam- ing torch, even the most reluctant and cinemaphobic reader might begin to think that filmic tropes were being invoked. If, in a tale of vampiric lesbian depredation, we were told that a female protagonist’s earliest visualised memories of being battened upon resembled a home movie show and a travelling cinematographer arrived to identify this woman’s friend as the bloodsucking fiend, we might imagine that filmic Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

12 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern ideas were conceivably being applied to same-sex desire. If then, we were told of the ‘projection’ of this spectral parasite into her next life, we would certainly begin to suspect a cinematic imagination integral to the tale. This logic then should of course hold true in terms of lanternist motifs.

Fear and sex: medial links

Let me adapt Damon Smith’s question: ‘What is it we mean when we say that a Gothic novel exhibits lanternicity?’36 Further, what does it mean when we speak of the sexuality associated with lanternism in novels? So quick were writers, especially German authors, to take up the chal- lenge of Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller’s use of a concealed phantasmagoria show as a key motif in his Der Geisterseher (The Ghost- Seer) (1789) that, by around 1800, these types of books of frightening intrigue and conspiracies were thoroughly infused with lanternicity and vice versa. As we shall see, Schiller was far from the first writer to incorporate lantern imagery in his writing. By the time he inherited this intermedial complex of ideas, multifarious links between lanterns, sexuality and fear had been long established. Schiller’s innovation in his ghost story was that he revealed the potential of hidden lantern shows to imitate supernatural visitation, in service both to sexual and to political ends. The implication must have seemed cataclysmic and chilling: a couple of gifted lantern illusionists with their ghost show and acting in synch with female allure could undermine the state. In Schiller’s case, the dark arts of Catholic lanternicity embodying both homosexual and heterosexual temptation and erotic fixation could be used to overwhelm the Protestant succession. Lantern spectacles were to become a widespread industry touching most areas of life in the nineteenth century. As Joss Marsh has written of Charles Dickens’s novels:

His work is saturated in lantern reference: Miss Havisham’s ‘ghostly reflection’, for example, ‘thrown large by the fire upon the ceiling and the wall’, or Genoa’s ‘extravagant reality’ as phantasmagoria in the virtual-travel book Pictures from Italy [...] The lantern remained, throughout his career, a central image of transformation and multi- fariousness: ‘I can’t express how much I want [the London] streets’, he confessed to John Forster, as he struggled with Dombey and Son in dull, idyllic Switzerland, in 1846: ‘The toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic lantern [before me], is IMMENSE!’37 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

Introduction 13

And yet, up till the last decade, Gothic fiction and the expression of sexuality found in Gothic novels have largely been discussed without any recourse or reference to these visual media, even when the authors clearly utilised, indeed, sometimes emphasised, the appearance of these technologies in their work.

King lantern

It would be difficult to overemphasise the importance of the emergence of the magic lantern and its projections to the cultural life of Western Europe. Its foregrounding as a primary artefact of contemporary civili- sation rivals that of cinema in our day. In 2008, when NASA’s Phoenix Martian lander arrived on the surface of the red planet, it contained a copy of a ‘first interplanetary library’, a DVD made of silica glass featur- ing ‘Mars-themed artwork, including a poster from a Flash Gordon film, Mars Attacks the World (1938), and Orson Welles’s 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds’. Patrick Stewart, Captain Picard of the Star Trek series and films, also made an appearance on the disc.38 It is, of course, highly significant that American cinematic visualisations of encounters with inhabitants from other planets featured so prominently as vital artefacts of global societies. Today, all but the most rabid anti-American pundits acknowledge that the USA is not actually another planet, but, in the eighteenth century, these New World colonies must have seemed as remote as Mars to the majority of British subjects. In 1710, when a group of Mohawk and Mohican Sachims, dubbed ‘kings’ by the British, arrived at Portsmouth on the first leg of their return journey after their visit, they found a collection of lavish presents made to them by the English Queen, including gunpowder, pistols, razors and combs, as well as ‘a Magick Lanthorn with Pictures’.39 The subject matter of these lantern ‘Pictures’ is not recorded but the importance of the magic lantern to the British way of life, both as an example of cutting-edge technology and as a means of a nation envisaging itself in the eyes of others, is notable. Fifty years later, lanterns were becoming a routine export from Britain to the New World.

In 1768, Garrat Noel of New York announced the arrival of a magic lanthorn, ‘with sliders and objects,’ along with a wide variety of other goods and scientific instruments, ‘just imported in the Albany, Capt. Richards, from London.’ J. Carr of Baltimore announced the arrival in 1797 of the ships Nelly, Kitty, and Montezuma from London, with a cargo that included musical instruments, mirrors, and ‘a large Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

14 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern

size Magic Lanthorn, with lamp and reflectors complete, with 22 slides and one double one.’40

It had been during the decade 1700–10 that the first images of travelling lantern showmen in the major cities of Europe started to appear.41 From the outset, the capacity of these projection machines to frighten spectators, to inculcate fear of death and damnation and, therefore, instil a concomitant anxious respect for religious observance had been understood. In his book Ars Magna Lucis (1671), the Jesuit father Athanasius Kircher revealed images of magic-lantern-show skeletons and a soul consumed by hellish flames. Willem Storm van s’Gravesande’s descrip- tion of his physics experiments (1721) reveals a projection of a tousle-headed, scowling image of what is perhaps the first vampire in pre-cinematic media. The close association in the public imagination with these devices with forbidden magic and horror was a long-term phenomenon. In his Political History of the Devil (1726), Daniel Defoe identified the lanterns with ‘many Phantasms and terrible Appearances’, ‘the Effects of Magic’ and ‘projections of painted Figures’, ‘as are most capable of terrifying the Spectators’.42

Sex and the lantern

Yet, as anyone familiar with Sigmund Freud’s theories regarding the fundamental conflicting and convergent drives towards Thanatos (Death) and Eros (Sex), life drive (Libido) and death drive (Mordato), might imagine, the primal urge towards sexual graphic expression was also making itself felt in the young medium. Dr Tristan Mostert writes of a series of erotic slides which were created by the Musschenbroek family workshop in Leiden in the early years of the eighteenth century:

Perhaps the most intriguing slides in the collection are several erotic images – an indication that the magic lantern was used for showing erotica at a relatively early stage. Most spectacular among them are several moveable images [...] of a rather explicit erotic nature [...] Erotic subjects might not have been as rare as the very few surviving slides from this period now seem to indicate.43

These slides offer scenes of multivalent sexuality: in several, a man is exposed as well as women in various postures. One of these (a double slide with moveable image of the male’s left arm and hand) features a Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

Introduction 15 clothed worthy sitting on a bench and masturbating next to his partner (Figure 1), another two: a naked woman bathing and disrobing to wash, perhaps another exercise in auto-eroticism. A fourth reveals a male administering a clyster to a reclining woman. In another tableau, a smiling woman sleeps or daydreams under a tree as a man fondles her vagina. These slides evolved into the tableaux of women bathing and ‘scènes galantes’ of women with exposed lower bodies (often with a rural backdrop), so common in the second part of the eighteenth century. In a scene set in the garden of a tavern, a young man, viewed by a couple enjoying their drinks, throws up a woman’s dress and strips her to expose her genitals. There is accompanying text painted on this

Figure 1 Double slide, ‘Masturbating man with accompanying woman’ (c. 1720s) Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

16 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern slide. Someone, perhaps one of the watchers, shouts ‘Jou ondeugd als gij zijt’, meaning ‘You naughty/bad person that you are!’ (deugd = virtue, ondeugd signifies a person lacking in it).44 Does this text condemn the figures shown or the watching lantern audience or both? Dr Mostert feels this is ‘a bit of moralization’, perhaps seriously meant but, given the fact that these images were copied from bawdy books (probably in private collections), and there is a summery gaiety to some of the slides, perhaps analogous with the freer, less savage side of Carnival, might not these words have a certain humour closer to Macbeth’s bawdy porter?45 There is, however, a more sinister edge to another slide where horror and sex are combined in an image of a young gallant wearing yellow jacket and feathered hat pictured with his hand inside a young woman’s orange dress. A bizarre devil with bird’s feet and holding a trident hov- ers behind the man’s shoulder. The attention of all three participants seems to have been temporarily captured by the cry of ‘Foei jou!’, meaning ‘Shame on you!’, from an off-slide observer to the left. This slide provides an important link between moralising literature, pornographic books, magic lanterns and that type of Gothic diabolism which was to start to appear with Jacques Cazotte’s The Devil in Love (1772). It is notable that none of these slides shows a violent or forced act of coition or the kind of rampant athletic sexual positioning which grew to be the staple fare of pornographic slides from the mid 1820s to the 1890s. By the early decades of the eighteenth century, the magic lantern was already closely associated with voyeurism, sexuality and amorous gazing. It is very possible that the sexual slides from the Musschenbroek workshop were intended for a wealthy even noble clientele. Mostert writes:

As to the milieu: we know little. We know eight of the clients of the workshop by name, all of them being professors (mostly in physics, from Holland but also from Germany) and the odd collector. Czar Peter the Great might have ordered two lanterns with slides, but it’s not entirely certain.46

In 1720, the French Regent, Philippe d’Orleans, attended a magic lantern show organised by Charles de la Fare which consisted of the projection of erotic engravings based on Aretino’s Ragionamenti whilst couples engaged in amorous embraces in the shadows. In 1738 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) and Mme de Graffigny graphically mocked the debauchery of the Duc de Richelieu (who had been present at the Regent’s pornographic display) in another lantern show.47 Lanterns also Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

Introduction 17 figured in the Regent’s ‘plaisir de soir’ in his deer-park seraglio where ‘intoxification’ was multiple, induced by play, spices, wine and other beverages, perfumes, scenes from magic lanterns, and music to provoke animal pleasures.48 The Regent was the centre of intersecting circles of libertine noblemen and women and in this way the lantern became associated with libertinage and the libertine gaze, or as the Catholic catechism has it: ‘concupiscence: lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes’.49 A pattern was also beginning to take shape: erotic lantern shows were used to arouse the audience but also, subsequently, to mock that arousal in ways that sometimes led to outright laughter and also, because of the parodic images employed, further sexual curiosity. Delisle de Sales’s compendium of plays ‘théâtres d’amour’ (c. 1770) for the private theatres of great houses, ‘Les Théâtres clandestins’, often featured graphic depictions of sex for the delectation of noble folk. Robert M. Isherwood describes how, in one of these plays, Junon et Ganymède,

Juno awakens from sleep complaining she is still a virgin and longing for the adolescent charms of Ganymède [...] After he removes her clothes and sucks her breasts [...] But despite their passion [...] her virginity resists his various means of sexual attack. The exhausted Ganymède is finally revived by Juno’s flagellations and he achieves his conquest.50

There is a possibility that these were live sex shows, though Gaston Capon and R. Yve-Plessis hazard, seemingly rather ruefully, that these ‘erotic excesses’ were probably simulated by the actors because otherwise the plays would have proved too exhausting for the actors involved.51 This is important for this study as many of these Les Théâtres clandestins productions featured magic lanterns, devices which, by the time of these dramas, had been linked to libertine pornography for at least 50 years. The Comte de Caylus frequently used magic lanterns in his private plays. There are clear references to lanterns and perhaps cues for the operation of lanterns in the actors’ words: ‘Here is my enchantress, her imagination scatters light without cease, [...] she makes of all she sees a magic lantern.’52 The alternative, more public milieu of the opéra comique and vaudeville, with their more guarded yet earthy doubles entendres – the cheese too limp to eat, the extended phallic baton and the ironmonger whose wife has been ‘drilled’ too many times – were also associated with lanternism. Classical and pastoral motifs were the subject of mockery as much as urban settings. The links between unruly sexuality, prostitution Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

18 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern and, in some cases, the accusation of orgies, and the vaudeville theatres of the boulevards were strong and long-lived and magic lantern projections were frequent accompaniments to the action; some of the most notably disreputable actresses stemmed from Savoyard stock themselves and also married into the lanternist communities.53

The proto-Gothic

It is also important to remember that the burgeoning demand for magic lantern shows, like the gradual emergence of that taste for a genre of disturbing literature subsequently christened ‘Gothic’, occurred as the Baroque passed into the Rococo age on mainland Europe. The earliest strains of ‘proto-Gothic’ writing emerged in a context where tales of dark intrigue and forced flight from tyranny were produced in close proximity with explicit sexual writings. Over this period, works written by the Abbé Prévost and Madame Tencin established that taste for doomed affairs of lovers on the run in ruined castles and caves; these tales were adapted into an ecclesiastical context of cloisters and con- vents by François-Thomas-Marie de Baculard d’Arnaud in stories such as Coligni (1741). Romances and adventure tales which problematised the role of the clergy sometimes overlapped with pornography. It is no coincidence that Baculard d’Arnaud went on to write L’Art de foutre, ou Paris foutant (The Art of Fucking, or Paris Fucks) (an obscene ballet per- formed in a Parisian bordello in 1741). An infamous erotic text, Venus in the Cloister (three editions: 1683–1719), featured the sexual education of a younger nun, Angelica, at the hands of an older sister, Agnes, in the form of dialogues (and stemming from the older literary form of ‘whores’ dialogues’). By the time then of the publication of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), a risqué but highly potent cultural synergy had been established between Gothicism and sexuality in literary pro- duction and lantern shows. Additionally, by this time, the projection devices themselves had acquired a complex set of erotic associations. Dennis Denisoff argues that the moving portrait of an ‘ancient relative’ in The Castle of Otranto offers

a concise image of portraiture’s cultural powers – its ability to stand for the values of fixed traditions and inheritance, on one hand, and malleability, seduction and deviance, on the other. The gallery of unlike likenesses that followed Walpole’s image down the corridors of Gothic tradition, helped popularise the idea that identities were not fixed but could be challenged and re-fashioned.54 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

Introduction 19

Lynda Nead links ‘animated paintings and statues’ which prove particularly ‘compelling’ in their ‘effects that blended magic and science, the sacred and the secular, enchantment and technology’ with ‘the projected image’. This, she concludes, ‘was the art of the magic lantern’.55 Thus magic lanterns not only inherited the portrait’s power to seduce the eye and, therefore, the sympathetic faculties but also served to fulfil fantasies of mobile portrait-subjects which broke free of their picture frames; in doing so, these devices destabilised the conception of human identity itself.

Lanterns, sex and the Gothic: converging traditions

In 1800, the former Marquis but contemporaneously Citizen de Sade found himself reviewing a number of Gothic novels recently arrived from England. He wrote:

Perhaps at this point we ought to analyse these new novels in which sorcery and phantasmagoria constitute almost the entire merit: [...] foremost among which I would place The Monk, which is supe- rior in all respects to the strange flights of Mrs Radcliffe’s brilliant imagination.56

Sade, obviously aware of Lewis’s clear borrowings from his own work, readily associates The Monk’s brutal sexuality with ‘sorcery’ and also, paradoxically, with its fashionable cognate, that dark form of lantern illusionism which was then so en vogue in Paris. In doing so, he is also, perhaps unwittingly, sidelining or knowingly impugning Lewis’s supernatural framework for his tale by claiming a predominant role (‘almost the entire merit’) for the phantasmagoria. For, as in the case of Der Geisterseher, when a lantern-of-fear show is integral to the plot, one has no need of other kinds of sorcery. In contrast to Radcliffe’s modus, Lewis had made a strongly derivative, disturbed and violent sexuality intrinsic to his tale of demonic deception and damnation, but Sade, in his critique, had recognised the novel’s lanternist creden- tials and Lewis’s indebtedness to the phantasmagoria. The reasons for this may be complex. Sade knew that Etienne-Gaspard Robertson’s Phantasmagoria, in 1800 so successfully exerting its fascination on audiences in the Capuchin convent, Paris, had itself drawn powerfully upon Gothic literature and featured Lewis’s eerie spectre, ‘The Bleeding Nun’. Robertson’s prologue to his show reveals that he had read Schiller’s lanternist novel and there is no reason to suppose that Sade had been Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

20 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern oblivious to Der Geisterseher’s rapid success and so naturally recognised its impact on The Monk. Sade almost playfully advances the combination of ‘sorcery and phantasmagoria’. By the turn of the century there were myriad associations between the transgressive delights of visual horror shows, drama, painting and novels. The sexually provocative themes linked with Gothic writing had long passed into widespread intermedial exploitation.

Lantern as erotic object

Sally B. Palmer writes:

Gendered implications of the magic lantern mode of discourse seem to highlight the screen as the female representation of male visual desire, as well as the Irigarayan site of projection of the male’s mir- rored self-image. This would seem to invite viewers to assume, facing and focusing upon the same object as the phallic lens, the masculine role and viewpoint. The screen, enacting (i.e. ‘inacting’) the traditionally feminine functions of backdrop, support for masculine projections, and blank space, also enables the arousal of libidinal excitation in voyeuristic gazers finding pleasure in exercising this dominant mode of observation. If the ability to wield power over another is a male one, then the enjoyment of wielding it is a sexual one, and the enthralled magic lantern spectator is placed in both a hierarchal and sexualized position, seducing him- or herself with visual illusion.57

Male writers and artists in general were certainly to make the most of this idea of the lantern as phallic projection, the device’s barrel (housing the lenses) serving as graphic a metaphor for male arousal as, for example, cannons and telescopes do in the cartoons of Thomas Rowlandson. The twisting of the barrel to focus the lens, the rhythmical dropping of slides into the carrier, sliding of this through the body of the lantern, slotting in of new slides, and reverse pushing or pulling of the carrier back: in essence a kind of sawing motion with resting intervals in between, an alternating forwards and backwards movement in the case of the fantascope lanterns, all suggested analogies with sex. The association has not passed modern writers by either. In Michel Faber’s historical novel The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), set in the 1870s, we find the character William Rackham, his trousers unbuttoned, thinking of pornographic lantern slides and sitting ‘beside the magic lantern to Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

Introduction 21 feed the painted slides’ suggestively enough ‘into the brass slot’.58 This certainly captures the relative intimacy that the audience felt with the lanterns, which were usually positioned in their midst instead of in a cinematic projection booth at the rear. The proximity of these devices led to a tactile appreciation of the machine’s presence and, together with the darkness needed for projection, often led to close contact between the sexes and romantic intimacy. A coloured lithograph of the 1830s shows a couple and a child watching a lantern show, but when a paper flap on the print is lifted, a young soldier is seen hidden in the case beneath the lantern and kissing the wife’s hand. A pair of goats’ horns are superimposed on top of the unsuspecting husband’s head on the screen in a sign of cuckoldry. The Devil, cupids and satyrs are often depicted as lanternists in popular prints, and these projection devices were often associated with sexual as well as other types of delusion, and hence: adultery, auto-eroticism, libertinage and temptation. Howard Moss draws our attention to the links between the magic lantern in the early episodes of Marcel Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way) (1913) and male masturbation:

If a window is a transparency necessary to the voyeur, the ability to project images is necessary to the masturbator. The fact that crucial sexual scenes are witnessed in Proust through the window takes us back to the magic lantern. Like the window, it is a lens; unlike the window, it is held in the hand, it projects images and is manipulable.59

At other times, the magic lanterns were strongly associated with women and female power. In Karl Adolph von Wachsmann’s eerie tale, Ladika’s Lampe (Ladika’s Lamp) (c. 1848), whenever a mystical lamp, clearly a trope for the magic lantern, is lit, a light mist appears with the projected image of the young woman, Ladika, and her child. When the lamp is extinguished, the picture changes: the mother fixes her eye on the watcher accusingly and the child has become a small corpse. Modern artists such as Kara E. Walker, Susan Hiller and Guido Crepax identify the lanterns with female resistance and physicality. It is also clear that, in some of these early shows, the spectator was clearly female: perhaps drawn from the leisure classes, or those women and girls who were mobile in urban settings, shopping or working in the marketplace. As mentioned in Klammer Schmidt’s poetry, peepshow salesmen alluringly cried out the ‘sweet rarity’ of their displays to women customers: ‘Charming Katherine! Beautiful Margaret! Sweet entertainment!’60 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

22 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern

The link between visual amusements and images of a sexual nature became so widespread that such shows started to appear in stories, plays and poems. In Das Schattenspiel (The Shadow Play), Johann Georg Jacobi relates how an itinerant lantern-man provides a show for a young lady. The display includes ‘a god with tender eyes and beautiful cheeks, and a shepherd lying in a field of flowers wakened by the goddess Diana’.61 This is a well-known visual motif and probably represents the love of the female divinity for Endymion. This is a kind of gently amorous tableau for female consumption, perhaps close in feeling to viewing the heart-throb Colin Firth as Darcy emerging from the pool with shirt clinging in Simon Langton’s TV miniseries version of Pride and Prejudice (1995).62 Yet in Jacobi’s story, the slide-show’s associations of shepherd, sleeping and flowers might actually indicate a much more graphic display of sexuality. The tale of Endymion was often used by painters as an opportunity to show the effect of beautiful male nudity upon a mighty goddess. Throughout the eighteenth century, censorship laws in many European states meant that classical pastoral settings involving shepherds, roses and rose-trees, gardens and shepherds’ crooks were often used in diverse media as allegorical signifiers to hint at rustic fornica- tion and the deflowering of virgins. For example, the dramatist Alexis Piron wrote suggestively of his own opéra comique drama La Rose, ou les Jardins de l’Hymen (1744) that ‘the veil of allegory was so successfully woven that there was not the smallest hole through which one could see nudity’. Piron’s tongue appears to be lodged well and truly in his cheek here as he addresses the conservative censors as though they are eager customers at a peepshow, keyhole or similar orifice.63 Johann Benjamin Michaelis’s ‘operette’ Amors Gukkasten (Love’s Peepshow) (1772) depicts the lustful divinity Komus of the woods, who has stolen Cupid’s peepshow which depicts the erotic adventures of the gods as a means of seducing his intended audience. It is worth noting that it is as early as these works that we begin to find plays, poems and prose writings which not only appropriate the titles of visual entertain- ments but also employ the formal structure of optical shows. The subject of ‘Cupid’s’ Magic Lanterns are common in eighteenth- century depictions, hinting at the long-lived and wide dissemination of these shows. ‘Cupids Magick Lantern’ (c. 1800), a hand-coloured copper engraving by Thomas Rowlandson from designs by George Moutard Woodward, served as the frontispiece for a book of caricatures (Figure 2). Here the usual winged boy or putti lanternists are gone. The projectionist, a ruddy-faced clown, leers out of the picture space confronting the readers with his right eye, his left drifting upwards Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

Introduction 23

Figure 2 George Moutard Woodward, ‘Cupids Magick Lantern’ (c. 1800) (etched by Thomas Rowlandson)

suggestively. His red hat and lechery might link him to the commedia dell’arte figure Pantaloon (pierrots are often depicted watching lantern shows), but the crimson tapering cap with its testicular-shaped terminal reminds of the Phrygian cap, hinting at the unruly energies and sexual depravity identified with the French Revolution by some British artists of the 1790s. The fold in his tongue which extends out of his sensual, broad-lipped and smiling mouth, is a visual innuendo of the meatal groove in the glans penis. The message seems simple: his prick is, figu- ratively, his lanternist’s verbal spiel, and we, the readers, will see directly into his voyeur’s lens. The slide poised between his hands reveals two couples sitting together; in the tableau to the left, the pair sit closely facing each other, knees touching and with the man’s calves curving under the woman’s robe. It is an extraordinarily graphic and provocative image of the projectionist’s role in stimulating libidinal arousal. In discussing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s farce Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilern (The Carnival Festival of Plundersweilern), a Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

24 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern showing of ombres chinoises (1773), Eric Hadley Denton writes of the Schattenspielmann (shadow showman) exploiting the randy nature of the scenes he projects to an extraordinary degree: ‘in ways that range from the carnivalesque to the voyeuristic to the mildly pornographic’. In his commentary accompanying slides depicting the descent from the mythological Golden Age into ‘overt sexuality’, the projectionist ‘participates fully in the obscene and scatological language of the marketplace’.64 The ‘godless’ aristocrats are seen to cavort and mate openly in the woods and meadows.65 Challenging the idea that erotic lantern shows were mainly the preserve of small, wealthy male clubs, the audience seems to be a large, mixed and working-class one on this occasion, and, as Mikhail Bakhtin has written, special liberties and topsy-turvy crudities were allowed at carnival time. These years were obviously a high point in Goethe’s association of magic lanterns with amatory passion and sexuality. In Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) (1774) the chassis of the projector becomes an analogue for the human heart and its capacity to engage meaningfully with the world. His protagonist is asked: ‘What is the World to our heart without Love? What is a magic lantern without its lamp?’ (‘Was ist unserem Herzen die Welt ohne Liebe! Was eine Zauberlaterne ist ohne Licht!’)66 Love’s projections, like those of the lantern shows, are only temporary, but no less delightful for that:

As soon as the little lamp appears, the figures shine on the whitened walls; and if love only shews [sic] us shadows which pass away, yet still we are happy, when, like children, we are transported with the splendid happy phantoms.67

Denton further remarks on the extreme nature of some of the imagery in English forms of these spectacles: ‘the erotic, salacious, voyeuristic context in which and connotations with which these visualisation devices are utilized’ and what they imply for imagined audiences: ‘indeed, we can hardly refer to the older English form peepshow without feeling like peeping Tom ourselves’. Quite simply, for many, the lantern was an ‘aphrodisiac and seduction device’ and this reputation is long-lived.68 At the start of Bill Douglas’s film about the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Comrades (1986), we see the roving lanternist (Alex Norton) walking down the hillside between the nipples and alongside the huge phallus of the Cerne Abbas chalk figure after fleeing a violent scene of machine-wrecking. The opening titles then appear, again across the torso and crotch of the giant. The resurgent potency of the ordinary Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

Introduction 25 working man is thus linked to the gallantee man and his show. If we have missed the erotic implications of this display, the same actor is shown later as Sergeant Bell jokingly revealing a naked Eve to a curious minister as part of the traveller’s Royal Raree Show.

Gendered gazing

Klammer Schmidt’s roving lanternist crying out subjects for women’s amusement and Goethe’s depiction of a shadow-show with lewd scenes for a, presumably, mixed audience (a world away perhaps from de la Fare’s aristocratic pornography) certainly do caution us in exclusively applying Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze to this stage of optical display. Mulvey argues that women are objectified in film by men who control the camera for male gratification and female debasement.69 Jeanne-Françoise Quinault-Dufresne (1699–1783), the character actress most readily associated with the Comédie-Française, hosted one of the most celebrated salons (‘soupers fins’) dinners fea- turing magic lantern shows, a masked ball, satires and puppets. As the fashion for lanterns developed, more women bought these devices and created their own visual displays. There are depictions of female lanternists from the 1720s onwards: gallantee girls and older bourgeois women with lanterns held in their laps hosting shows in domestic interiors. There were also female tutors and lecturers using lanterns for instruction. Madame de Genlis was particularly keen on projection as a tool for teaching and used lanterns to show slides expressing her own vision of history:

The idea of my tapestries, or hangings, had given me another, of historical magic lanthorns. I have had four or five hundred glasses made to represent subjects taken from history; and we have the diversion of the magic lanthorn four times a week.70

This is a fictionalised account of Genlis’s teaching, but her words regarding the number of her slides are accurate. Images of female projectionists run the whole gamut of class, age and material condi- tions, from the heavily garbed women of Edmé Bouchardon’s ‘L’Orgue de Barbarie’ and numerous gallantee women posing dutifully with their families to Jacques Honoré Lelarge de Lourdoueix’s aquarelle, in Les Folies du siècle (1817), of a young scantily clad woman in skirt and with exposed midriff stepping down a range of clouds whilst extending a hand-held lantern which beams out its images. This Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

26 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern projectionist is tricked out in cap and bells like a jester but her bodice and relaxed attitude towards her exposed body make one think of funambulist rope-walkers and fairgrounds. In this image, Lourdoueix might have been parodying rope-dancers like Violente who used to dance the ‘Folies d’Espagne’ on high and, given the experiences of a notable actress like Quinault-Dufresne, there is no reason to believe that such women didn’t double up as comediennes and lanternists on occasion. An engraving of 1868 for the journal L’Illustration shows the lanternist (representing the incoming year) as a a glamorous, beautiful lady wearing expensive evening dress and jewelled earrings, the rays of her lantern expelling the spirit of the old year. Such illustrations, even if partly allegorical, certainly cast doubt upon the image of women solely as passive victims of masculine visual economies and male-centred scopophilia. Though, in Lucy D. Sale Barker’s Lily’s Magic Lantern (1888), an extraordinary book for adolescents with 120 picture-‘slides’, the projectionist is a father, it is a ‘show’ mounted expressly for his daughter and young women, with the first four slides showing girls at play. Perhaps the most dramatic example of an inde- pendent female artist using lanterns was Mlle Lotty, who painted her own slides to be projected over her own body clothed only in a white body stocking (fleshings). A variety of fashionable costumes were superimposed over Lotty’s figure in this way and the blazon of the crossed Stars and Stripes and Union Jack flags to indicate transatlantic unity.71 The dancer Loïe Fuller also employed magic lanterns to flash images over her swirling dresses. Even though it is probable that some, or indeed many, female projectionists and observers may have, even grudgingly, internalised the dominant modes of masculine scopophilia and the objectification of the female, we cannot assume that the earlier twentieth-century cinematic codes of spectatorship simply apply over this vast field of reception or to apply to every mode of female viewership of lanterns in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Given the female artists, educators, dancers and spectators mentioned above, we must con- clude that King Lantern was also Queen Lantern, some women decid- ing and even designing the variety, scope, nature and erotic codes of the slides which they themselves painted and projected. Women attended magic lantern shows throughout Western Europe and, as the lanterns developed in sophistication, they were certainly spectators at phantasmagoria and carnival lantern shows. Female audiences also took pleasure in the literary-themed shows and no doubt the complex sexual charge derived from lanterns was more subtle, diffuse Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

Introduction 27 and multifarious than has been previously supposed. We might also take into account depictions of mixed-gender viewing of sexually themed slides. Lanterns could also, of course, be used to warn against erotic depredation, so-called ‘loose’ moral-behaviour venereal dis- eases and the commodification of women. One such literary ‘lantern show’ which exposed the cruel sexual mistreatment of women was James Anthony Froude’s The Lieutenant’s Daughter (1847), where genie lanternists point out alternative endings to a young woman’s life depending on how she is treated. The idea of mixed-sex viewing is coded into some most salacious artefacts. Lanterne magique, pièce curieuse (1830), a folding-paper broadsheet with script and pictures in eau forte and aquarelle (leporello), depicts a young couple looking into a cylindrical peepshow to view (when the paper is unfolded) a tumbled group of two men and three women in assorted positions of intercourse.72 The leporello features exclamations in English and French perhaps hinting that this was meant as a naughty amusement for the tourist market and hence involved saucy consumption by both sexes.

Screens, venues and devilries

The varied screens and backdrops for magic lantern shows were themselves sites of erotic ambiguity. The screen for the projections of Goethe’s lantern of love comprised mere ‘whitened walls’, a site con- firmed in Erasmus Darwin’s poem The Temple of Nature where:

in some village-barn, or festive hall The spheric lens illumes the whiten’d wall (Canto III. 139–40)73

Yet Darwin also alludes to ‘motley shadows’ dancing ‘along the sheet’ (III. 142).74 Indeed, the screen could be as simple as a bed-sheet strung between hooks or poles or as sophisticated as Robertson’s tightly stretched cam- bric square coated with a varnish of white starch and gum arabic to aid a diaphanous effect.75 On fine, dark nights, a lantern-display could be shown on exterior walls and light-coloured eaves. A very wide range of venues was available for such spectacles, and even the more risqué slides could be exhibited at cigar divans, private theatres (the erotic ‘parades’ and ‘théâtre d’amour’), people’s homes, gentlemen’s salons called ‘smokers’, brothels, segregated ‘male attrac- tions’ at pleasure gardens, fairgrounds and stag evenings. Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

28 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern

Wanda Strauven has written convincingly of the haptic, sometimes sensuous, tactile nature, of many of the pre-cinematic screens:

there exists a centuries-long lineage of screen-based educational and entertainment forms where the screen is not only the projection surface, but also a physical, tangible element of the auditorium space: from the camera obscura horizontal screen/table to the portable paper screen for the solar microscope’s projections, from anamor- phic mirrors and panels to the simple cloth screen for magic lantern shows and the elegantly-framed screen for Emile Reynaud’s praxino- scope à projection.76

Engravings and prints show observers of all ages stretching out their hands towards these screens (but the whole point about the phantasmagoria screen was that it was supposed to be invisible, a fourth wall as it were). Under the rule of Louis Philippe, the titillating possibilities for lantern shows grew more multifarious. A spirit of gaiety and humorous play enters in the form of the ‘Diableries érotiques’ slides: odd little vignettes where penises detach from the body, clysters zoom around suggestively and testicles go dancing through the air by themselves. We can imagine these images, possibly derived from Eugène le Poitevin’s lithographs of the same name, causing laughter and very high spirits and shrieks as they seemed to move towards the audience through darkened space. Over the same period, the image of a plucky young devil, grinning widely and with his hands inside a woman’s dress, starts to become a familiar lantern motif. Such visions seem a world away from the serious business of over 5000 hard-core lantern slides produced by the Pimlico studio of Henry Hayler in the 1880s.77 Yet the nature of the images of coition contained in Lanterne magique, pièce curieuse, to which I’ve already referred, reminds us that a spirit of dull industry and hard-core representation had already entered the marketing of projections of sex much earlier in the century.

Chapter 1 of this study deals with the rise of Georg Schröpfer and Philipsthal, two major figures responsible for initiating and developing the lantern ghost shows, and also considers the presence of live women actors and projected images of scantily clad females in their work. The argument moves on to explore the painting of slides in order to ‘resurrect’ the images of deceased mothers and lovers. Schiller’s novel The Ghost-Seer is then discussed as the first literary work where magic Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

Introduction 29 lanterns are used comprehensively as structural elements of the plot and to convey complex codes of ambiguous sexuality in order to ensnare a German prince visiting Venice. My discussion of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk starts with a consideration of the novel’s intertextual links with The Ghost-Seer and then develops to describe how Lewis’s decision to suppress Schiller’s lanternist cues in fact led to an intense consolidation of related motifs in his work. This chapter closes with an appraisal of the often-ignored but complex erotic aspects of E.-G. Robertson’s show, including slides involving sexual temptation and ‘rapture’. Chapter 2 opens with noting Lord Byron’s notoriety as a sex symbol and the consequent appearance of his image in many lantern-slide repertoires and then discusses the controversies still raging over the poet’s sexuality and considers these erotic ambiguities, particularly themes of incestuous desire, in the poetic dramas Cain and Manfred. Byron’s fascination with optics is broached as well as his early attempts to suppress lanternist aspects of his work. The rich range of amorous innuendo and double entendre in Don Juan is considered and this discussion develops into a concentrated study of Oriental scenes resembling ‘risqué lantern- slides’. Finally, as Juan enters Norman Abbey, the most Gothic environ- ment in the poem, we find that exploring the phantasmagoria clearly staged in the nocturnal gallery helps us decipher the amatory mystery which complicates the unfinished final section of the extant poem. Chapter 3 opens with an exploration of the psychological reasons for Lucy Snowe’s disconnectedness from her surroundings and passivity in the opening chapters of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. The ill-defined trau- mas of her youth have conditioned Lucy to shy away from expressions of attraction or emotional needs. The spectral nun of the pensionnat garden, familiar also from the phantasmagoria shows, is examined in detail as a Gothic affront to Lucy’s sublimated desire. The extremity of Lucy’s libidinal repression in the face of the flagrant behaviour of her students is described. I then discuss Brontë’s extensive usage of lantern techniques such as ‘cross-cutting’ and ‘dissolving views’ to reflect the development of her characters. Lucy’s progress is followed through to her final confession of authentic desire in the phantasmagorical concert in the park near the end of the novel, the moon suggestively writing ‘on heaven and earth with a single pencil ray’.78 Early in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, the most celebrated story of vampiric lesbianism, his protagonist Laura tells that she has forgotten all of her youth apart from those scenes which ‘stand out vivid as the isolated pictures of the phantasmagoria surrounded by darkness’.79 In Chapter 4, I outline how Carmilla, the first fully integrated lanternist Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

30 Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern novella, where many vignettes resemble individual slide-projections, emerges as an artfully constructed exploration of interrelated sexual, visual and textual complexities. Carmilla’s characteristic blazon of playfulness and same-sex desire is related to the text’s deployment of verbal mirrorings, anagrams and puzzles. Nina Auerbach’s theory that vampirism in the book is unusual in ‘its kinship with the common- place’ is considered and adapted in my discussion of menstruation and blood imagery.80 Not only does this book present us with one of the most closely detailed descriptions of a demonic roving lanternist, but lantern technology is integral to Le Fanu’s depictions of Carmilla’s ever- accelerating assaults upon Laura and the lesbian revenant’s uncanny recurrence in memory. My final chapter opens with a discussion of the lanternist motifs evi- dent in the first encounter between Jonathan Harker and the vampire count in Dracula. Stoker often emphasises the types of ‘optical effect’ inherent in Dracula’s and the vampire ‘brides’’ appearances and these are examined in detail, as is the supernatural women’s glassy laughter.81 The novel’s links to pornography are explored and the ways in which Renfield’s speeches hint at both the operations of a magic lantern and homosexual desire. In Stoker’s The Lady of the Shroud, Rupert Sent Leger’s role as the dominant bearer of the phallic lantern into hidden female spaces is implicitly parodied by his inability to sustain that light. I argue that uneasy necrophiliac tensions and temptation underpin the action of the novel and that Teuta’s nightly wanderings in her shroud elicit dread and arousal, an emotional combination familiar from Robertson’s spectral shows. It is in his ordeal in the darkened church of St Sava’s before his nuptials that Rupert finally comes to terms with the phantasmagoria of his own mind. The Conclusion traces the appropriation of selected lanternist sexual motifs by cinema. I also briefly consider some ways in which authors of the twentieth century continued to employ and reference the erotic codes of the lantern shows. Given the relative paucity of media studies of lantern cultures, it is crucial to realise that the sense of erotic lantern shows has not passed from contemporary creative contexts but has been taken up and renewed in the work of neo-Gothic artists. My argument is generally historicist in emphasis, drawing upon the work of numerous critics of visual culture, and Freudian and Jungian notions of psychological and sexual behaviour where relevant. My examination of lanternist motifs runs the gamut from explicit, repeated and direct allusions in literary works to semi-submerged, discursive and solely implicit references. Joss Marsh writes of three levels of lantern Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

Introduction 31 references in selected works by Dickens and Froude, the third involving the narrator’s own implied state of mind and, as Marsh’s own study indicates, the repertoire of allusions is extremely varied and rich.82 Recent studies such as Linda Williams’s Screening Sex (2008) and Tanya Krzywinska’s Sex and the Cinema (2006) have described the advent of sexual iconography in film almost as though it comprised a series of spontaneously generated visual acts, and as if, to adapt Philip Larkin’s words, the visual projection of ‘Sexual intercourse began / In’ eighteen ninety-seven.83 It is partly as a corrective to such a sense of disjuncture, medial schism and spurious originality, that a study such as this is written. To explore literary expressions linked to such a common and popular medium as the magic lantern is also, of course, an exciting act of redis- covery. Kamilla Elliott’s perceptive words are as notable for that kind of scholarship which, implicitly, they invite as that with which they find fault. They also prove particularly revealing in a consideration of Gothic literature: ‘However, to accord cinematic properties to the novel before cinema existed forges a problematic and mythological anachronistic aesthetic history.’84 To recognise the multifarious lanternist properties embodied in the complex array of erotic expression in Gothic novels is to rediscover a vast repertoire of often forgotten visual systems and signs. Such a strat- egy not only corrects the tendency to forge a ‘problematic and mythological anachronistic history’ and reinstates the lantern’s importance for past generations in their visualisation and expression of diverse sexuali- ties, but also fundamentally changes our reading of Gothic literature. Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

Index

Abel, Richard, 205 Bartlett, Mackenzie, 177 Abelard and Eloise, 69, 83 Basic Instinct, dir. Paul Verhoeven, 56 Abercrombie, John Beach, Joseph Warren, 10 Intellectual Powers of Man, 67 Beauvoir, Simone de, 2 Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, dir. Beckford, William Timur Bekmambetov, 190 Vathek, 48 Addison, Joseph, 145 Bercenay, Monsieur François Babié Aikin, Anna Letitia, 220 De, 176 Aikin, John, 220 Bergson, Henri, 9 A L’Ecu d’Or ou la Bonne Auberge (film), Bernhardt, Sarah, 194 204 bestiality, 62–3 see also pornography Black Narcissus, dir. Michael Powell Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, 158 and Emeric Pressburger, 205 Andrews, Elizabeth, 35, 216 Blake, William, 109 Andriano, Joseph Blamires, Adrian, 43 Our Ladies of Darkness, 57, 219 Blatty, William Peter Anolik, Ruth Bienstock, 2 The Exorcist, 6, 9, 203 Après Le Bal, dir. Georges Méliès, 204 Bleeding Nun, 19, 36, 44–5, 52, 56–7, Aretino, Pietro, 16, 57, 206 62–3, 66, 69, 118, 126, 130, 159, Ragiomenti, 16 185–6, 189, 195, 204, 219 n 90 Ariès, Philippe, 19 Blessington, Margaret Auden, W. H., 75 The Magic Lantern, 22 Auerbach, Nina, 30, 151, 158–9, 166, The Blood Spattered Bride, dir. Vicente 168 Aranda, 205 Austen, Jane, 109, 139 The Blue Angel, dir. Josef von Northanger Abbey, 119 Sternberg, 56 Pride and Prejudice, 139 Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin Remediation, 210 Baba Yaga, dir. Corrado Farina, 209 Bonaparte, Joséphine, 66, 78 Bach, Johann Sebastian Bonaparte, Napoleon, 71 ‘Toccata and Fugue in D minor’, 5 Borges, Jorge Luis, 155 Baculard d’Arnaud, Bouchardon, Edmé, 25 François-Thomas-Marie de ‘L’Orgue de Barbarie’ (engraving), 25 Coligni, 18 Boucher, François, 97 L’Art de foutre, ou Paris foutant, 18 Boucicault, Dion Baird, John Logie, 122 The Corsican Brothers, 173–4 Baker, Roy Ward, 7 Bozza, Gianluigi, 2 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 24 Bram Stoker’s Dracula, dir. Francis Ford Bara, Theda, 20, 205 Coppola, 4, 190 Barker, Lucy D. Sale Brandon, Ruth, 194 Lily’s Magic Lantern, 26, 144 Brontë, Charlotte, 22, 29, 43, 109–42 Barrett, Francis Jane Eyre, 109–10 The Magus or Celestial Intelligencer, 66 Villette, 22, 29, 43, 109–42

247 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

248 Index

Brown, Andrew, 37, 39 Cat People, dir. Jacques Tourneur, 158 Brown, Bill, 206 cats and big cats, 63, 73, 157–8 Browne, Thomas, 145 Caylus, Comte Anne-Claude-Philippe Buffon, Comte de, 146 de, 17 Buganza, Gaetano, 188 Cazalès, Monsieur, 162 Bunyan, John Cazotte, Jacques Pilgrim’s Progress, 110 The Devil in Love, 16, 45 Bürger, Gottfried Charles of Saxony, 5, 7, 102–3, 105 ‘Lenore’, 169–70, 183 Chateaubriand, F. R. de, 66, 78, 83 Burne-Jones, Philip Chatman, Seymour, 11 The Vampire (painting), 205 Chaulnes, Duchesse de, 148 Burns, Paul, 52 Chekhov, Anton, 127 Burns, Sarah, 56 Christ, 68, 179 Byron, dir. Julian Farino, 72 Cochran, Peter, 88, 105, 212 n 13 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 5–7, 29, Cock Lane ghost, 67 57, 71–108, 148, 182 Coghen, Monika, 83 Cain, 29, 57, 84–8 Cohen, Keith, 10–11 ‘The castled crag of Drachenfels’, 72 Coleridge, E. H., 76 Childe Harold, 75–6, 92 Coleridge, S. T., 79–80, 146, 163 The Deformed Transformed, 73, 90–2 Christabel, 146, 163, 197 Don Juan, 5, 7, 29, 71, 74–6, 89, Osorio, 79 92–108, 204 Comédie-Française, 25–6 ‘The Dream’, 74 commedia dell’arte, 23, 155 ‘The Eve of Waterloo’, 72 Comrades, dir. Bill Douglas, 24 The Giaour, 74 Conrad, Joseph, 136 Manfred, 29, 57, 73, 80–4, 86–7, Count Dracula, dir. Philip Savile 89–90 Craft, Christopher, 188–9 ‘Oscar of Alva’, 77, 79 Crane, Stephen ‘Saul’, 82 ‘Death and the Child’, 206 The Vision of Judgement, 74, 87–90 Crepax, Guido, 21, 207–10 Baba Yaga, 208, 210 Callot, Jacques, 49 Lanterna Magica, 210 Campbell, Thomas, 78–9, 86 Crumb, George, 6 Capon, Gaston, 17 cunnilingus, 92 Capuchin convent/church, 19, 36, ‘Cupids Magick Lantern’, 22–3 44, 49, 56, 60, 69, 99, 115, 126, cuts, jump cuts and cross-cutting, 162 10–11, 29, 127, 158 Carlyle, Thomas, 216 n 29 carnival drama, 22, 23–4, 26, 37–8, Dabhoiwala, Faramerz 62, 155 The Origins of Sex, 210 Carroll, Lewis Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé, 150 Phantasmagoria, 144 daguerreotypes, 148, 154 Carter, Nathaniel Hazeltine, 112 Darwin, Charles (Darwinism), 3 Casanova, dir. Federico Fellini, 206 Darwin, Erasmus, 27, 127, 144 Cass, Jeffery, 39 The Temple of Nature, 27, 127 Castle, Terry, 53, 67, 94, 115, 149 Daughters of Darkness, dir. Harry Catholicism and anti-Catholicism, Kümel, 7 12, 17, 42, 53, 78, 101, 106, 117, Davids, Vanessa, 97, 207 136–7, 139 Deffand, Madame du, 148 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

Index 249

Defoe, Daniel Ellis, Brett Easton The Political History of the Devil, 14 American Psycho, 8 DeLillo, Don, 10 Ellis, Markman, 45 Delpy, Julie, 183 Endymion, 22 ‘Demon and skeleton fighting over a Ensler, J. C., 89 young woman’, 59 Ensor, James, 131 Denisoff, Dennis, 8, 18 Eros, 14, 65, 92 Denton, Eric Hadley, 24, 42 Etonensis Der müde Tod, dir. Fritz Lang, 206 Verbena House, 179 Dever, Carolyn Everett, Rupert, 72 Death and the Mother, 35 The Exorcist, dir. William Friedkin, ‘Diableries érotiques’ slides, 28 6, 9, 203 Dickens, Charles, 10, 12, 31, 35, 69, 144 Faber, Michael A Christmas Carol, 144 The Crimson Petal and the White, 20 Dombey and Son, 12 Fairclough, Victoria, 121 Great Expectations, 69 fantascopes, 20, 62, 125, 181 Pictures from Italy, 12 Faulkner, William Diderot, Denis The Town, 206–7 La Religieuse, 149 fellatio, 114 Dietrich, Marlene, 56 Firth, Colin, 22 Dijkstra, Bram, 67, 151, 154, 158, Fontana, Johannes de, 52 188, 194–5 A Fool There Was, dir. William Fox, diorama, 76, 150, 170, 185, 232 n 2 205 Dircks, Henry, 172, see also Pepper’s Forster, John, 12 Ghost Foucault, Michel, 203 Doane, Mary Anne, 64 Fowler, Christopher Donizetti, Gaetano, 173 Hell Train, 8 Lucia di Lammermoor, 173 Freemasonry, 32, 103 Dracula, dir. John Badham, 4 French Revolution, 23, 34, 48 Dracula, dir. Tod Browning, 4 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 14, 30, 35, 46, 53, Dracula, dir. Philip Saville, 4 55, 81, 88, 171 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, dir. Rouben Friedkin, William, 6 Mamoulian, 5 Froude, James Anthony, 31 Dyer, Amelia, 186 The Lieutenant’s Daughter, 27, 31, 141, 144 Eckhartshausen, Karl von Frye, Northrop, 92–3 Aufschlusse zur Magie, 33 Fuller, Loie, 26 Edgeworth, Maria, 149 Fuseli, Henry The Absentee, 149 The Nightmare, 62, 187 Helen, 149 Leonora,149 gallantees, 25, 141, 143, 155 Ormond, 149 Gautier, Théophile Eidouranion, 85–6 ‘The Opium Pipe’, 176 ‘Eine Schreckensnacht’, 157 Geisterscheinung, 34 Eisenstein, Sergei, 10 Genlis, Madame de, 25, 153 Eliot, George, 109 Alphonsine, 51 Eliot, T. S., 74 George III, King, 87–8, 90 Elliott, Kamilla, 10–11, 31, 210 Gibson, Matthew, 156 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

250 Index

Gibson, William Hogle, Jerrold E., 90 Neuromancer, 68 homosexuality (male), 3, 12, 30, 38–9, Gilbert, Martin, 58, 219 n 97 42–3, 45–6, 48, 73, 147, 182, Gilbert, Sandra M., 115 204 Gillray, James, 51 Hopkins, Lisa, 191 Girodet, Anne-Louis Horror of Dracula, dir. Terence Fisher, 4 Ossian (painting), 56 House of Tolerance, dir. Bertrand The Sleep of Endymion (painting), 55 Bonello, 158 Goethe, J. W. von, 23–5, 27, 42, 76, Hugo, Victor 83–4, 91, 144 Notre Dame de Paris, 173 Das Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilern, 23–4, 144 Irving, Henry, 174 Faust, 83–4, 91 Isherwood, Robert M., 17 The Sorrows of Young Werther, 24 Goya, Francisco, 131 Jacobi, Johann Georg, 42 Graffigny, Mme Françoise de, 16 Das Schattenspiel, 22 Grant, Harding, 65 James, Henry, 110, 145 Gray, May, 71 Jenkin, Len Grimm, W. and J. G., 110, 148, 193 Kraken, 207–8 ‘The Glass Coffin’, 193 Jewsbury, Geraldine ‘Snow White’, 110 The Half Sisters, 180 Grusin, Richard, 210 Johnson, Samuel Gubar, Susan, 115 The Adventures of Rasselas, 67 Gunning, Tom, 67 Jones, Wendy, 39–40 Joyce, James Hadlock, Heather, 176 Ulysses, 10 Haggarty, George E., 35 Jules et Jim, dir. François Truffaut, Halsey, Alan, 53 206 Hammer film studios, 8, 142 Jung, Carl Gustav, 30, 36, 57, 118 Haney, John Louis ‘Junius’, 88–9 Early Reviews of English Poets, 76 Hardy, Thomas, 230 n 31 Kahlert, Karl Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 207 The Necromancer (Der Geisterbanner), Hayler, Henry, 28 10, 39, 43 Heard, Mervyn, 61–2, 65, 207 kaleidoscope, 74 Heim, Michael, 68 Katerfelto, 79 Heiseler, Henry von Kill Bill, dir. Quentin Tarantino, 205 Die magische Laterne, 157 Killing Zoe, dir. Roger Avary, 183–4 Henry, M., 112 King, Stephen Herder, Joseph Gottfried von, 41 Salem’s Lot, 6–7, 9, 183, 190 Herenberg, Johann Christofer Kipling, Rudyard Philosophicae et Christianae Kim, 201 Cogitationes de Vampiris, 146 Kircher, Athanasius Hiller, Susan, 21 Ars Magna Lucis, 14 Hoeveler, Diane Long, 111, 115, 117, Klein, Melanie, 171 121–2, 125, 128, 130, 133, 135–7 Klinger, Leslie, 175, 187–8, 189 Hoffmann, E. T. A. Kölbing, Eugen, 73 ‘A New Year’s Eve Adventure’, 89 Krafft-Ebing, Richard Freiherr von ‘Kapellmeister Kreisler’,176 Psychopathia Sexualis, 188 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

Index 251

Krzywinska, Tanya MacCarthy, Fiona Sex and the Cinema, 31 Byron: Life and Legend, 72 Kümel, Harry, 7 Magny, Claude Edmonde, 11 Marat, Jean-Paul, 36 La Chambre verte, dir. François Mars Attacks the World, dir. Ford Beebe Truffaut, 206 and Robert F. Hill, 13 La Cruz, Sor Juana de Marsh, Joss, 30–1, 144, 160 ‘Primer Suenõ’, 52 ‘Masturbating man with accompany- La Fare, Charles de, 16, 25, 51, 206 ing woman’, 15 Langham Place group, 160 masturbation and onanism, 15, 21, Lanterne magique, pièce curieuse 49–51, 184, 210 (leporello or folded broadside), 27 Maturin, Charles, 3, 60 Larsson, Stieg, 56 Melmoth the Wanderer, 60 Lauritsen, John, 38, 72 The May Irwin Kiss, dir. William Heise Leatherdale, Clive, 188 for Thomas Edison, 204 Le Fanu, Sheridan, 7–8, 29–30, 43, McClintock, Anne, 97 142–68, 173, 198 McGann, Jerome, 103 Carmilla, 7–8, 29–30, 43, 142–68, McVeigh, Daniel, 84–5, 86 173 Medusa, 62, 64, 100–1, 184–6 The Cock and Anchor, 143 Mekler, L. Adam, 74 The House by the Churchyard, 143 Michaelis, Johann Benjamin, 22, 42, Spalatro, 143 144 ‘The Spectre Lovers’, 143 Amors Gukkasten, 22 ‘Ultor de Lacy: A Legend of Mighall, Robert, 178–9 Cappercullen’, 142–3, 158 Miles, Robert, 46, 53, 55 Uncle Silas, 143 Milton, John, 93 Leigh, Augusta, 72, 81 Mirepoix, Madame de, 148 Lemoine, Henry, 43 Molina, Tirso de, 92 lesbianism, 7, 11, 29–30, 127, 142–68, Moore, Doris Langley 189, 208, 210 Lord Byron: Accounts Rendered, 72 ‘Les Théâtres clandestins’, 17 Moore, Thomas, 93 Levin, Ira Mordato, 14 Rosemary’s Baby, 6, 9, 203 Moss, Howard, 21 Lewis, Matthew, 3, 19, 29, 36, 44–60, Mostert, Tristan, 14, 16 62–4, 66, 68, 78, 92, 109, 115–16, Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 137, 171, 189, 205 Don Giovanni, 92 The Monk, 29, 36, 44–60, 63, Mulvey, Laura, 25 115–16, 137, 189 Murnau, F. W., 183, 190, 205 Raymond and Agnes; Or, The Bleeding Murray, John, 74 Nun, 60 Musäus, Johann Karl August libido, 14, 92, 158, 171 Volksmärchen der Deutschen, 36 Lilith und Ly, dir. Erich Kober, 206 Musschenbroek workshop, 14, 16, 52, Lotty, Mlle Juliette, 26, 160–1 55, 204 Louis Philippe, King, 28 Lourdoueix, Jacques Honoré Lelarge de Nabokov, Vladimir, 155 Les Folies du siècle, 25 Ndalianis, Angela, 68 ‘Luxury or the Comforts of a Rum p Nead, Lynda, 19, 49, 94, 99, 128 ford’, 50 necrophilia, 30, 45, 47, 58, 137, 200 Lyell, Charles, 3 Negrut, Dan, 92 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

252 Index

Nightingale, Florence, 52 Pickersgill, Joshua Nitzsche, Jack, 6 The Three Brothers, 90–1 Nodier, Charles, 43, 60–2, 66, 83, 99, Pinetti, Giovanni, 34 198 Piozzi, Hester, 43, 108, 127, 144, 148 Smarra, 83 Piron, Alexis, 22, 65 Noel, Garrat, 13 La Rose, ou les Jardins de l’Hymen, 22 Norton, Alex, 24 Poe, Edgar Allan Norton, Susan, 6 ‘Annabel Lee’, 193 Nosferatu, dir. F. W. Murnau, 183, 190, Poitevin, Eugène, 28 205 Pope, Alexander nymphomania, 57, 92, 121 The Rape of the Lock, 95 pornography, 17–18, 25, 30, 36, 96, Oedipal desire, 36, 47, 53, 58 104, 179, 204 Olivet, Fabre d’, 85–6 Pratt, W. W., 103 Olowoyeye, Olufolahan, 127 Prawer, S. S., 10 ombres chinoises, 24, 143, 208 Praz, Mario Orleans, Philippe d’, 16 The Romantic Agony, 45, 83 Prévost, Abbé, 18, 83 Paglia, Camille, 46 Cleveland, 83 ‘Palemon’ and James Woodhouse, 76 priapism, 92 Pal-Lapinski, Piya, 157 Protestantism, 12, 37, 42, 117, 139 Palmer, Sally B., 20, 112, 115, 122, Proust, Marcel 129, 140 Swann’s Way, 21 Pantaloon, 23 Prud’hon, Pierre Paul Paraskeva, Anthony, 10 Winged Youth Leaning on a Herm Parsons, Eliza (drawing), 55 The Castle of Wolfenbach, 188 Punchinello, 85 Patmore, Coventry Punter, David, 45, 47, 57 ‘The Angel in the House’, 35 peepshows, 10, 21–2, 24, 27, 207 Que la fête commence!, dir. Bertrand Pepper, John, 172 Tavernier, 206 Pepper’s Ghost, 172, 173, 207 Quinault-Dufresne, Jeanne-Françoise, Perrault, Charles 25, 26 ‘Sleeping Beauty’, 193 Peter the Great, 16 Rackham, William, 20 Petroski, Karen, 144 Radcliffe, Ann, 2–3, 19, 45, 52, 62, 98, phantasmagoria, 7–9, 12, 19–20, 26, 109, 118, 130, 137 28–30, 33–4, 38, 41, 43–4, 47–9, The Italian, 35 52–3, 55–6, 58–71, 74–80, 82–91, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 57, 68 93–5, 97–109, 112, 115–17, A Sicilian Romance, 62 121–3, 125–31, 133, 135–6, rape, 3, 88, 44–5, 47, 57–9, 62–3, 65, 142–4, 147, 149–50, 152–4, 158, 67, 92, 95 160, 164, 166–7, 170, 173, 175–6, ‘rapture’ slides, 29, 48, 54, 66–9, 189, 178, 181–7, 189–90, 194–5, 204 197–8, 200–1, 204–6, 208–9 Redding, Cyrus, 78 Philipsthal/Philidor (Paul de Regnault, Jean-Baptiste Philipsthal), 8, 28, 32, 34, 36–7, Liberty or Death (painting), 55 48–9, 54, 60, 66, 78, 89, 99 Reynaud, Emile, 28 Pichot, Amédée, 99 Richelieu, Duc de, 16 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

Index 253

Robertson, E.-G., 36, 43, 48–9, 51, s’Gravesande, Willem Jacob Storm 56, 58, 60–71, 74, 78–80, 82, 86, van, 14 88–9, 93–4, 99–101, 103, 109, Shakespeare, William, 123, 145, 157 118, 121–2, 124–6, 131, 150–1, Hamlet, 51, 78 157, 162, 166, 170, 173, 175–6, Macbeth, 16, 62, 71, 77, 83, 99 181, 184–7, 198, 201, 205, 209 The Merchant of Venice, 145 Mémoires, 124 Shelley, Mary, 217 n 41 Röllig, Karl Leopold, 176 Showalter, Elaine, 121 Rosemary’s Baby, dir. Roman Polanski, Smith, Damon, 10, 12 6, 9, 203 Smith, Grahame, 10 Rother, Rainer, 210 Smith, Horace, 78 Rowlandson, Thomas, 20, 22–3 Smollett, Tobias Royal Raree Show, 25 The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, 41, 216 n 29 Sade, Marquis de, 4, 8, 19–20, 44, 57, Southey, Robert, 87–8, 90, 93 60, 62, 71, 108, 127, 217 n 39 A Vision of Judgment, 87–8, 90 Justine, 71, 44, 57, 71 Stahl, Jan M., 50 Sage, Victor, 177, 197, 200 Steffan, T. G. and E. Steffan, 103 St Clare’s convent, 48–9 stereopticons, 112, 151 Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Stevenson, Robert Louis, 10 Paul et Virginie, 137 Stewart, Patrick, 13 St Teresa, 68 Stoker, Bram, 4–7, 30, 169–203, 205 Sales, Delisle de, 17 Dracula, 4–7, 30, 169–90, 200–1, Junon et Ganymède, 17 204–5 Salvo, Marquis de, 91 The Lady of the Shroud, 30, 169, ‘Santon Barsisa’, 45, 49 190–203 Sarha, Jennifer, 96, 104 The Man, 193 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 203 The Watter’s Mou’, 173 Savoyards, 18, 91, 174, 214 n 53 Stoltz, Eric, 183 Scarborough, Terry, 172 Stradivarius, sound of, 11 Schiller, Friedrich von, 12, 19, 28, Strauven, Wanda, 28 36–45, 54, 62, 77–9, 91, 139, 204 Sturmey, Henry, 72 Der Geisterseher, 12, 19–20, 34, Sudendorf, Werner, 210 36–45, 77–9 Swift, Lindley Nolan, 127 Die Piccolomini, 139 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 179 Schmidt, Klammer, 21, 25 ‘Faustine’, 188–9 Schreck, Max, 183 Schröpfer, Georg (Schroepfer), 5, 7, Tahara, Mitsuhiro, 81 28, 32–4, 36–7, 54, 62, 102–3, Tencin, Madame, 18 105, 171 Thalia (journal), 36 Schulze, Friedrich and Johann Apel Thanatos, 14 Fantasmagoriana, 77 ‘théâtres d’amour’, 17 scopophilia, 26, 55, 196 Thomas, Sophie, 99–100, 184 Scott, Walter, 103, 152, 189, 195 The Thousand and One Nights, 123, The Antiquary, 103 146 The Heart of Midlothian, 152 Throsby, Corin, 73 Letters on Demonology and Tieck, Ludwig Witchcraft, 195 William Lovell, 39 Marmion, 189 ‘Timothy Toddle’, 71 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1

254 Index

Tolpuddle martyrs, 24 Welford, Walter D., 72 Traeger, Jörg, 56 Wells, H. G., 204 Trigo, Felipe The King who was a King: The Book Sed de amar, 206 of a Film, 9 Tropp, Martin, 179 Weston, Helen, 56 Trotter, David, 74 Willems, Philippe, 208 Tschink, Cajetan Williams, Anne, 46 Geschichte eines Geistersehers, 43 Williams, Charles, 50–1 Williams, Linda The Vampire Lovers, dir. Roy Ward Screening Sex, 31 Baker, 7 Williams, W. C., 75 Veeder, William, 145 Wills, W. G. Venus, 42, 44, 65, 161, 186 Vanderdecken, 174 Venus in the Cloister, 18 Winnicott, Douglas, 171 Violente, 26 Witch of Endor, 60, 63, 81, 93, 120, Voltaire, 16, 62, 129 130, 133, 185, 209 voyeurism, 10, 16, 20–1, 23–4, 33, 42, Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, 3, 188 44, 53, 59, 67, 71, 92, 94–8, 103, Woodward, George Moutard, 162, 179, 187, 196 22–3 Wordsworth, William, 78 Wachsmann, Karl Adolph von Wraxall, Nathaniel, 102–3 Ladika’s Lamp, 21 Wynd, Victor, 207 Waldie’s Select Circulating Library, 102 Walker, Kara E., 21, 207–8 Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, 96 Walpole, Horace, 18, 148 Young, Edward, 69 The Castle of Otranto, 18, 45 Yve-Plessis, R., 17 Wandering Jew, 45 The War of the Worlds (radio play), dir. Zeender, Marie-Noelle, 193 Orson Welles, 13 Zigmond, David, 171–2 Wasserman, Jack Gumpert, 38 Zohar, 179 Wein, Toni, 116 Zotti, Laura Minici, 207