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. Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1 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 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1 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, 1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29891–1 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 under- standing 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’.