Soundscapes in Nineteenth-Century Gothic Short Stories Elena Glotova Department of Language Studies Umeå 2021 This work is protected by the Swedish Copyright Legislation (Act 1960:729) Dissertation for PhD © Elena Glotova ISBN: 978-91-7855-550-5 (print) ISBN: 978-91-7855-551-2 (pdf) Umeå Studies in Language and Literature 45 Cover image © Guillaume Sanrankune [email protected] Electronic version available at: http://umu.diva-portal.org/ Printed by: CityPrint i Norr AB Umeå, Sweden 2021 To my father, Yuri i Table of Contents Acknowledgments ............................................................................ iv Abstract .......................................................................................... viii Sammanfattning på svenska ............................................................ ix Introduction ....................................................................................... 1 Sound studies in literature: theoretical and methodological basis ................................3 Sonic Gothic ...................................................................................................................... 7 Uncanny spaces: the gradation of sonic confinement ................................................... 10 Gothic literature and medicine ...................................................................................... 13 The form: Gothic short story and sound ........................................................................ 16 The echoes of transatlantic Gothic ................................................................................. 19 Blackwood’s transatlantic connections ......................................................................... 21 The ambient presence of Edgar Allan Poe .................................................................... 23 Synopsis ......................................................................................................................... 25 1 – Un-homely Houses: Music, Medicine, and Noise from the Outside ........................................................................................................ 28 Introduction: Sound and Domestic Interiors ............................................................... 28 1.1. The Aural Environment of a Doctor’s Home Office in Samuel Warren’s “The Thunder-Struck and the Boxer” ..................................................................................... 31 1.1.1. The sound of threat and power ....................................................................... 31 1.1.2. Agnes and the soundscape composition ....................................................... 36 1.2 Multi-Layered Soundscapes in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and What Happened to Madeline? ................................................................................................ 45 1.2.1. The “soundlessness” of Usher’s surroundings .............................................. 46 1.2.2. Roderick as the afflicted auscultator ............................................................ 49 1.2.3. The soundscapes of imagination: “The Haunted Palace” ............................53 1.2.4. Acousmatic sound and “The Mad Trist” ........................................................ 57 1.3. Sounding the End of Time: Soundscape, the Labyrinth of the Ear and Uncanny Mechanics in “The House of Sounds” by M.P. Shiel .................................................... 64 1.3.1. Housing sound, channeling sound ................................................................ 64 1.3.2. Hearing “the sound of the world” ................................................................. 65 1.3.3. The sonic warfare of Harfager’s house ......................................................... 76 1.3.4. The house and sonus mortis ........................................................................... 79 Conclusion: hearing polyphonies .................................................................................. 86 2 – Murder Rooms and Echoes of the Heartbeat ............................. 89 Introduction: the Sonic Marks of a Bedroom ............................................................... 89 2.1. Sonic Possible Worlds in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” ....................... 91 2.1.1. Voegelin’s “sonic possible worlds”................................................................. 92 2.1.2. In the silent darkness of the murder room................................................... 94 2.1.3. Visual and aural disconnections ................................................................... 98 2.1.4. Sonic transpositions and echoic evidence of the crime ............................. 100 2.1.5. The union of sound and light .......................................................................104 2.2. Female Gothic Writing and Sound ....................................................................... 107 ii 2.2.1. Female Gothic writing .................................................................................. 107 2.2.2. Sounding the female Gothic ......................................................................... 110 2.3. Sonic Ambiguity in Edith Nesbit’s “From the Dead”: Identity and the Transgression of Spaces ............................................................................................... 113 2.3.1. Nesbit’s echo of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” ................................................ 114 2.3.2. Voice, Spatial Permeability and the alternative forms of identity .......... 120 2.4. The Heartbeat in the Death Chamber: The Ghost and the Machine in Phoebe Yates Pember’s “The Ghost of the Nineteenth Century” ...................................................... 125 2.4.1. The unacknowledged Gothic of Phoebe Pember ......................................... 126 2.4.2. The female auscultator: sound, identity and hermeneutical inequality . 129 2.4.3. Asphyxiating rooms: spectral heartbeat and aural imagination ............ 133 2.4.4. “Can you doubt the evidence...?”: sound and the machine in the ghost... 139 Conclusion: hearing the heartbeat ............................................................................... 144 3 – Torture Chambers: Between Sonority and Silence .................. 147 Introduction: Torture, Power, and Sound ................................................................... 147 Power struggle and the body in pain: bridging Foucault and Scarry ......................... 149 The attributes of torture chambers .............................................................................. 150 Torture chambers in literature ..................................................................................... 153 3.1. Torturous Sonority: Sound and Authority in “The Man in the Bell” by William Maginn .......................................................................................................................... 157 3.1.1. Sonorous transformations ........................................................................... 158 3.1.2. Resisting sonority ......................................................................................... 162 3.2. Torturous Assemblage: Silence and the Voice in William Mudford’s “The Iron Shroud” ......................................................................................................................... 166 3.2.1. Assemblage and torture ............................................................................... 167 3.2.2. The silent assemblage of torture in “The Iron Shroud” ............................. 169 3.2.3. The vocal soundmarks of torture ................................................................ 173 3.3. Torturous Vibrations: Acoustic Guides in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” .................................................................................................................... 178 3.3.1. Vibrations and the threshold of the (in)audible ......................................... 180 3.3.2. Acoustic guides in the chamber of torture .................................................. 181 Conclusion: hearing torment ...................................................................................... 188 4 – Live Burial: Overcoming the Confinement of the Body ............ 191 Introduction: Premature Burial from Medical Reports to Gothic Literature ........... 191 4.1. From Fragmented Perception to Auditory Phenomenology in John Galt’s “The Buried Alive” ................................................................................................................. 196 4.2. Calling from Under the Skin: Connecting Vibrations in Charles Lever’s “Post- Mortem Recollections of a Medical Lecturer” ............................................................ 202 4.3. The Voice and Generic Diversity in “The Premature Burial” by Edgar Allan Poe ...................................................................................................................................... 209 Conclusion: hearing the body....................................................................................... 216 CODA ............................................................................................. 219 Works Cited .................................................................................. 230 Index ............................................................................................. 250 iii Acknowledgments This book is full of sounds of support and insight, encouragement and contribution, love and faith! I am grateful